Desperate goat mouths ripped open Weird Dude Walking's coat, the bone buttons sparkling in the sun as they arced to the ground. The man had on a flannel long john shirt underneath, but it was shredded in places and deathly pale skin showed through the openings. The goats tugged on the man but he kept his balance. Alex wondered why Weird Dude didn't push the animals away.
Because this is only happening in your mind. Yeah. Okay.
The man's arms were pulled down, and one of the sleeves was yanked free. Two goats played tug-of-war with the wool coat, and then jerked it off the man's back. The coat settled on a patch of dried goldenrod. Weird Dude finally lifted his face and Alex expected either the awe-inspiring expression of a Mushroom God or else a Carlos Castaneda smirk. From fifty yards away, all Alex could tell was that Weird Dude looked sick, his skin unhealthy and sallow. But a smile creased his doughy face as he looked at the sky and endured the hircine assault.
The goats grew frantic, their teeth tearing the man's clothes, and Alex almost left his hidden vantage point and went to the rescue. If Weird Dude had acted in any way alarmed, Alex would have emptied his quiver of arrows into the goats. But his unnatural serenity caused Alex to watch and wait.
The stoner stereotype called for an indecisive and befuddled reaction. Alex was no fucking stereotype. He knew he was a stoner and that put him several rungs above the people who bought his dope. For all Alex knew, this was some elaborate trick of the Drug Enforcement Agency, because the spooks would spare no expense in bringing down a single freethinking, tax-exempt American. Because from such men revolutions were sparked.
The goats ripped until Weird Dude's flannel underwear gave way, and then one of the goats bit deep into the man's side. The man should have screamed, but the smile didn't waver as the goat worked its head back and forth, trying to pull the piece of flesh free. Another goat went for the soft portion of the stomach just below the navel and backed away, a string of meat dangling from its mouth.
Alex gripped the tree in front of him, the bark scraping his cheek and his breath so loud he was sure the goats could hear it above their own noise. A mantra came to him, in a dull throb that mirrored his accelerated pulse: Not Real, Not Real, Not Real. And then came the syncopated accent beat: Not-Fucking-Real.
Instead of blood spilling from Weird Dude's wounds, a milky substance oozed out, thick as cottage cheese. The goats bit into the man, and one butted him in the left thigh, causing him to lean to one side. A dirty brown goat grabbed the outstretched arm as the man tried to regain his balance. Its teeth clamped on the wrist and dragged the man toward the ground, the black hat flying from the man's head and landing in the trampled vegetation. Once the man was on his knees, the goats clambered over him, rending the flesh of his neck and back. Not once did the man cry out.
The goats' bleats grew muffled as their mouths filled. They fed on the clabbered juice that leaked from the man's torn flesh.
Weird Dude Walking ain't fucking walking anymore.
Alex broke from the trance that seemed to have fallen over him as he watched the bizarre spectacle. This was no psychedelic vision, this was an ass-end-up slab of reality. He gripped his bow and arrows and stepped from his cover. "Hey," he shouted.
The goats kept feeding. Weird Dude was buried beneath the goats, hidden by the mass of dirty, furry animals that were now in a feeding frenzy. The bearded billy backed out of the herd with a prize, a swinging slab of gristle that looked like the man's cheek. No blood leaked from the ripped skin, only a few dribbles of moon-white liquid. Another goat tottered away, dragging what looked to be the strip of a forearm. A third dipped its head into the downed man's belly and came up with a swollen rope of intestines decorating its blunt horns like a satanic Christmas trimming.
Alex fought an urge to vomit. The vestiges of the morning's bong hits faded, and even the high from the 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 realized that Weird Dude Walking, even while the goats were eviscerating 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 mixers 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 garden 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."