The Farm

seedless, resin-sticky buds he'd crammed into the recent joint had deserted him. He grew kick-ass weed by any standard, but no buzz was deep enough to mask the insane scene that played out before him. Fuckers didn't just crawl out of the weeds and get eaten by goats. Didn't happen. Maybe in a video game, maybe in a shitty direct- to-video horror movie, but certainly not here on the slopes above Solom, where the Bible thumpers said God was closer than ever and the sky weighed three thousand pounds and the government didn't meddle too much and his girlfriend Meredith was sleeping off the effects of a bottle of wine and three orgasms and no fucking way in the world is Weird Dude getting reamed by goats!

Alex debated his options. He could charge into the midst of the herd and scatter them, but as much meat as they had stripped from Weird Dude, Alex didn't see any way the man could still be alive. Alex had four arrows, so he could thin the flock a little, except then they might turn their eye to fresh prey. And he knew how goats were— once they got a taste for something, they gobbled it until it was extinct. The third option made the most sense: back the hell away, get in the truck, and pretend this had all been a hallucination. Forget reporting the incident to the authorities, because authority equaled government equaled search warrants.

When he started the truck, one of the goats looked up from the corpse and stared in the direction of the noise. A couple of maggot- white fingers protruded between the twisting lips. The goat looked right through the windshield and met his eyes. Alex was probably just stoned—yeah, that had to be it— because mere was no way the goat could have been grinning. Either he was stoned or else he had cracked, and he was too rational to crack.

As the pickup bounced up the pitted mountain road, Alex real ized that Weird Dude Walking, even while the goats were eviscer ating him, had not uttered a single sound.

Chapter Fourteen

'The goats is riled,' Betsy Ward said. She dried her hands on her apron, wincing because her skin was chapped and the cool weather hadn't helped a bit. She had a sweet potato pie in the oven. It was a point of pride with her, because sweet potatoes didn't grow worth a darn in the mountains. Yet Arvel's crop always turned out fine. You'd think God was a tater man, judging how he blessed the Ward household.

'Goats?' Arvel was watching a reality show on TV Betsy couldn't tell the shows apart, but one thing most had in common was they got women into tank tops and tight shorts at some point. Which was all the reason Arvel needed, whether he admitted it or not. Betsy's tight-shorts days had passed some twenty years ago, but she didn't hold that against the skinny things that paraded around before the cameras. No, what she held against them was the makeup, the hairstyles, and all the nipping and tucking that went on these days. Any woman could look good with a little cheating.

'Goats,' Betsy said. 'Over at the Smiths. Except the new wife ain't named Smith.'

Arvel had put in a hard day at Drummond Construction, driving a concrete mixer over the twisting mountain roads. Concrete mix ers were the most contrary vehicles on earth, according to Arvel. The weight could shift in two directions without warning, and once in a while the slooshing mix of sand, gravel, and mortar coincided with the deepest cut of a sharp curve, and nothing had a mortality rate like the rump-over-clutch-pedal tumble of twenty tons' worth of cement and steel. Or so he said.

'What are you worrying about goats for?' Arvel didn't turn from the flickering light of the screen. 'They've not got in the gar den in two years or so. Leave them be.'

'They ain't right. They come down to the edge of the fence and stare at me when I'm hanging out laundry.'

'Maybe you ought to lose some of that fat ass of yourn and then they'd quit staring.'

Arvel had never made a mention of her weight until he'd taken up watching TV every weeknight, some five years back. Since then, he'd scarcely shut up about it. She wished she could shrink inside her gingham dress, but she was here and this was all of her. 'They started about time the new wife moved in. Been breeding like rabbits, too.'

'You know how them billy bucks are,' Arvel said. 'They'll stick it in anything that wiggles, and some that don't.'

A commercial came on for some kind of erectile dysfunction product, and a wattled old guy was in a hot tub with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Arvel thumbed down the sound with his remote. 'You keep going on about this new wife. If you want to know what I think, I bet you're mad as a pissant because she's skinnier than you.'

Betsy was double upset. Arvel had no business looking at the neighbor's wife. Even though Betsy did, every chance she got.

'She ain't no skinnier than Gordon's first wife, and you never said a thing about her,' Betsy said.

'Rebecca was different,' Arvel said, eyes flicking back to the TV to make sure the commercials were still going. 'She's from here.'

'She was,' Betsy corrected. 'Was.'

'Let's not get into that.'

'She drove too fast for these twisty roads. Heck, Arvel, I know she turned a few heads, probably even yours, but the stone truth of it is she got what was coming to her.'

'Like you know what happened to her?'

'I ain't saying a thing. The sheriff and the rescue team called it an accident, and they know better than me.'

'Solom's took more than a few through the years,' Arvel said. 'Forget it.'

'I can't forget it.'

'You think it was the Circuit Rider?'

'I don't know.'

The commercials were over and Arvel punched a button. The sound burst from the speaker, and a dark- skinned boy with greasy hair was explaining why somebody was kicked off the show. 'I smell something,' Arvel said.

The pie. The crust must have burned. Betsy had forgotten to set the timer. She was getting more absentminded every day, but she blamed it on worrying about the neighbors. With a possible wife- killer next door, not to mention his witchy-eyed stepdaughter, your train of thought was liable to get derailed now and then. When you threw the Circuit Rider into the mix, it's a wonder anybody in Solom ever got a wink of sleep.

She hurried from the living room and went into the kitchen, where the goat was waiting for her.

Shit. Jett couldn't take another second of reality. She probably should have hidden in the woods, but needed to be close to the house in case Mom called. Jett could always claim to be feeding the chickens or something. The barn door was nearly closed, allow ing just enough light to take care of business. Her back was against the wall, and from her sitting position, she could see the back door that led to the kitchen.

She laid out her world history book and pinched some of the pot from the plastic Baggie. In Charlotte, she'd owned an alabaster pipe carved in the shape of a lizard, but she'd left it with her best friend. It was time to improvise. She took the piece of aluminum foil from her pocket, twisted it into a narrow tube, and used her pinky to make a hollow depression in one end. A piece of baling wire hang ing on the wall of the barn served to prick three tiny holes in the curved end of the makeshift pipe.

Smoking in the barn was dangerous. During his Great Barn Tour of July, Gordon had made a big deal about how dry the place was. Apparently one of his grandparents' barns had burned to the ground in the 1940s, but that had been the fault of lightning. This barn had been built on the same foundation, and lightning never struck twice in the same place, did it?

She sprinkled some of the dark green leaves into the depression and set the pipe on her book. She'd taken some matches from the tin box on the mantelpiece. She snapped one of the sulfur-tipped stems free from its folded-over cardboard sleeve. Get a degree at home, the matchbox read, along with an 800 number, and beneath that, in smaller letters, Close cover before striking.

'Fuck it.' She scratched the match head across the rough strike pad and the flame bobbed to life. She tucked the pipe between her lips, applied the flame, and inhaled. The first hit tasted like hot metal, like braces, and she