The Farm

She thought of the promise she'd repeated to Jett so many times that it had become a mindless mantra: we'11 get through it together.

She just hoped it wouldn't be death's door that they would go through, side by side, hands held in fear of the waiting unknown.

*    *     *

The buck-toothed bastards had him treed like a lost coon.

Alex had dropped his Pearson bow when the flock started chas ing him. He'd had one decent shot at Weird Dude, but that other guy had gotten in the way. Alex figured if Weird Dude was some sort of secret government agent, there would be a cover-up and nobody would ever find out about this little gathering on the mountain or the existence of intelligent, mind-controlled killer goats. If only the government wouldn't have bred or genetically implanted in them a craving for marijuana, Alex would have figured 'Live and let live.' But that was just like them, to use their power to intrude on people's peace and property.

He looked down at the bleating, sneering creature closest to him, who was reared up on the tree trunk. The strange eyes with their boxy, oblate pupils glittered in the gloomy sweep of head lights.

'Yeah, you'd eat the original U.S. Constitution if it was right there in front of you, wouldn't you?' he taunted. 'The powder- heads wrote it on hemp paper, and I know how much you fuckers love hemp.'

The goat twitched its ears in fury, and another goat butted the tree, horns clacking against the bark.

Alex wasn't in position to work the submachine gun, but he undid the snap on his hip holster and drew out the Colt Python. The Circuit Rider and Gordon Smith, who was dressed in a freaky scare crow costume like an acidhead on Halloween, were still on the rock and were out of pistol range. Not that Alex had any personal grudge against his neighbor, besides the fact that Gordon's fence had failed. But the goats seemed to obey Gordon, not Weird Dude. And now Gordon was holding the little Goth girl, the one who had moved in along with the redhead last summer. A man's private business was a man's private business, but it didn't look like your typical Hallmark Special moment.

Alex aimed the pistol in a two-handed grip. The goat stared back along the length of the barrel.

'You are one ugly piece of work.' Alex squeezed the trigger and a brown dot appeared on the animal's forehead. He knew goats had thick skulls because of their bizarre mating rituals that sometimes caused them to butt heads until one of the males dropped from ex haustion. They weren't symbols of depraved lust for nothing. But a Python bullet was more than a match for the thick plate of bone, though the entry wound was a little messier than usual. The back of the goat's head exploded, raining bits of meat and bone on the half dozen goats surrounding the base of the tree.

The goat's lips peeled back in a grin.

Leave it to the government to build a goat that wouldn't die.

David had it all wrong.

He figured the Circuit Rider would claim a victim and then drift on into the night, continuing his eternal rounds. It was one of life's constants, and the people of Solom had adjusted to it over the years. People measured the course of their lives with his visits, along with the September frost and the May buttercups and the first cut of hay in June, the annual flock of tourists in their tinted-win dow sedans, the final snow in early April that was often the largest of the year. The Circuit Rider was evil, unholy, and murderous, but he was theirs.

So Ray's death should have ended it. Because Ray had died for the Circuit Rider, accidentally or not. David had made the offering of his own life, which would have spared the others who were now being attacked by crazed goats. But his own soul had been found wanting, his faith weak, his meat unworthy of the great banquet prepared by Harmon Smith.

Except...

David had climbed back into Ray's truck when the goats went wild, and three of them battered at the driver's- side door, taking turns launching their horns against the sheet metal. Ray's truck bed had no tailgate, and a shaggy-faced billy had climbed into the bed among the rusty chains, boards, and hand tools. One blow of those curving horns would shatter the rear windshield.

But that was okay.

David understood now.

It wasn't the Circuit Rider who was calling the shots. Gordon Smith had somehow usurped his ancestor. Gordon, a student of myth and ritual, had claimed whatever tilted pulpit granted the power of life and death in Solom.

But all actions had been set in motion long ago by that larger, unseen Hand that slept behind the stars.

The One who wielded that same Divine Hand, the One who hadn't found David a worthy sacrifice, triggered a blinding rage. He'd lost his brother, Gordon Smith had been granted some bizarre supernatural power, and goats were ravaging his neighbors and the members of his congregation. Sure, there was a satisfactory number of Free Willers and Southern Baptists among the victims, but God was filling up the good spaces in heaven with those who had spent life on their knees, not those who had accepted his grace without doubt or the craving for mortal intervention.

Hooves rattled in the metal bed of the truck, and the rear wind shield exploded behind him. Glass showered down the back of David's neck. The goat's horns caught in the gun rack, and David leaned toward the passenger side out of reach of the animal's frantic jaws. The goat's breath stank of bad blood and sulfur.

The sheriff's deputy had fallen and two goats were tugging him in different directions, like dogs fighting over a string of chitlins. The deputy's pistol lay just outside the glare of headlights, but each blue sweep of the patrol car's bubble lights reflected the sheen of the barrel. David wasn't sure God required His creatures to make such decisions, but the pistol was within his reach for a reason.

He flung open the truck door and dove for the gun. One of the goats dropped the deputy's arm, which flopped against the leaf- covered ground and lay still. The goat tossed his head and charged pointing its whorl of bony horns at David. David reached the gun, not knowing whether the safety was on or off, then remembered that the deputy had squeezed off at least one shot. He brought it to chest level and fired wildly, punching three holes in the goat's back and neck. It didn't slow at all, closing the ten feet between them be fore David could draw a breath, and then the stony head knocked him in the chest and he lay stunned in me damp leaves of the forest clearing. Above the strobing blue lights were the scatter of stars and the bloated eye of the moon.

And, above it all, the eye of God looking down.

He was dimly aware of hooves drumming, of large shapes hov ering around him. He was just regaining his breath when teeth latched onto his throat.

We are loaves and fishes feeding the multitude, he thought, the pain blending with the bruised ache in his chest. As other mouths set to work in the serious business of feeding, a final thought brought a crippled smile to his face:

I have been found worthy after all.

Gordo is nutso, plain and simple.

But worse than the nutso is, like, the power to make goats kill people.

Besides the fact that he wants to kill me and Mom.

Jett could smell Gordon's pompous aftershave beneath the musty, dusty scarecrow outfit, and that sickened her almost as much as her anger and fear. Her throat hurt where he'd stuck the point of his sickle against it, and a warm trickle descended the slope of her neck. The persistent wah of the police lights made her dizzy as screams and frantic bleats blended into a muddy music. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine she was at one of the industrial raves from her druggie days in Charlotte, with her heart providing the driving bass beat.

But this rave was the kind that killed.

She met her mom's eyes and could read the look. That sappy old 'We'll get through this together,' but for the first time, Jett wel comed it and needed it.

She didn't think it would work on a ghost, but it might on a guy who had more balls than sense. She stepped to the side while Gordon was focused on the Circuit Rider, then launched one of her feet, clad in a heavy black lace-up boot that Gordon had so often ridiculed, and planted it firmly in his crotch. The air left him like a pinpricked balloon and he folded up.