"Where's Jett?" she managed to whisper, breath like wet cement in her lungs.
"Can't reach her," Odus said. He slapped the horse on the thigh and said "Come on, Sister Mary, let's ride out of this stampede."
The horse whinnied and reared jostling Katy, and for a horrifying split second she thought she would be hurled from the horse and back among the milling goats. But she grabbed the horse's neck and held on as they waded through the herd which was thinning now as the stragglers made their way toward Alex.
Another shotgun blast sounded and two goats bleated squeals of pain. Katy saw Jett at the edge of the rock, climbing up, finding handholds on the mossy surface, gaining her footing.
Gordon let go of the Circuit Rider, who was still in the grip of Ray's corpse. He grabbed Jett by the hair and yanked her against his ragged clothing. "I'll teach you to leave me," he said.
"We have to save her," Katy said to Odus.
"These goats are crazy," Odus said. "Look. They're eating people."
He was right. Alex had reached a beech tree and scrambled up into the safety of the branches. Two goats butted the tree trunk, but its girth was several feet in diameter and the tree barely shook. A man screamed as another shot rang out, and Katy looked around to see the deputy, a goat latched onto his leg, another biting the hand that held his pistol. A wounded goat shivered at the officer's feet, thrown into spasms by a head wound.
The old lady who owned the store had dropped her shotgun and climbed onto the hood of the Jeep, and several goats tried to clamber up the bumper. An old man in a leather jacket, whom Katy didn't recognize, leveled his shotgun and blasted toward the Jeep, sending pellets scattering across the metal and driving the goats away. The old woman cursed and gripped her knee.
A woman and a younger man with pitchforks stood back to back, jabbing at the goats that had them encircled.
"We're all going crazy," Katy said.
"We were already at crazy," Odus said. "We've gone way past that now."
The goats had lost their communal goal and scattered into the night, chasing the people who had been summoned to the surreal revival. Their bleats became guttural cries of hunger. Katy saw one digging its teeth into the neck of one of its brethren that had fallen victim to a gunshot.
Odus guided Sister Mary toward the logging road urging the horse into a trot. But Katy kicked free, falling to the ground twisting her ankle as she rolled. She struggled to her feet in the rough, tilled soil where the goats had romped. Goat manure streaked the knees of her pants, and the smell was enough to make her vomit. But she blocked that out, along with the screams of the people and me unnerving cries of the goats. She focused on the rock, where Gordon stood holding Jett, the eerie scarecrow figure seemingly seven feet tall under me moldy straw planter's hat.
Katy limped toward the rock, passing the preacher's trampled hat. A goat trotted past her, a dripping chunk of what looked like potted meat clamped between its buckteeth. "Let her go, Gordon," she said, trying to summon her bitch voice, one she'd packed away in the wake of her divorce.
"Come here and I will," Gordon said. "It's you that I wanted anyway."
Katy's gaze shifted from me sackcloth head to the Circuit Rider's implacable, waxy face. "Is this why you won't die?" she said to the preacher. "Is this why you kept coming back all those years?"
"It's not what I want that matters," he answered through thin, bloodless lips.
Katy reached me edge of me rock and me Circuit Rider kneeled forward, reaching down a hand mat looked the color of rancid soap. She couldn't climb the rock with her injured ankle. She took me preacher's hand, a chill coursing through her as if a dozen icy needles had penetrated her palm. Despite his gaunt, slack flesh, the Circuit Rider pulled with the strength of a draft animal, and Katy found herself lying alongside Ray Tester's cooling body.
"You need to kill somebody," she said to the preacher, "then do it and get it over with. But that means Jett goes free, right?"
Gordon laughed a sound that somehow echoed the goats' ravenous bleats. "You're praying in me wrong direction, my dear. I'm the one who chooses the sacrifices now. I'm me child of God's favor."
Jett peered out from under her black bangs, eyes wide with fright. Gordon put me tip of the sickle against her neck.
"You killed Rebecca," Katy said, knowing it sounded dumb, as if one murder mattered in a mountain valley where dozens had come to wicked ends.
"She wanted me to kill her," Gordon said from inside his scarecrow mask. "She gave herself up for the greater good. Because she wanted to belong to me forever. To Solom forever."
"Then why did she bring us to… oh."
The clop of horse hooves sounded on the packed dirt, and Katy thought it was Odus, come to make a rescue attempt. Instead, she saw Rebecca, sitting sidesaddle on Old Saint. The vehicle headlights cut through both her and her mount's bodies as if they were gauze. Rebecca had no head, and Katy thought of Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
"Here's your horse, honey," Rebecca said, but the words didn't come from the body. Instead they came from the head, which floated just beyond the edge of the granite slab. It wore the preacher's black hat, angled to one side in a parody of fashion. Around her, the goats continued their hunt for human meat.
"I wasn't ready then," Gordon said. "I had to grow my power. More sacrifices, more goats killed, more tribute paid to those who bless this land."
Gordon moved the sickle away from Jett's throat and waved it at the Circuit Rider. "Just like you did," he said to the preacher. "Only you killed reluctantly."
"I just want to rest," the Circuit Rider said. "Put my three graves together and you can have Solom. And all my other stops."
Gordon kicked Ray's limp body. 'They're still willing to die for you. Use it."
The Circuit Rider shook his head. "My rounds are over."
"You weren't fit to carry the Smith name."
"None of us are worthy."
Katy eyed the distance between her and Gordon. Even with two good legs, she wouldn't have been able to reach him before he cut either her or Jett. And a man who could order goats to kill and ghosts to do his dark deeds probably had few limits, anyway. But she had to try. Damned if she would give herself up as Rebecca had.
Not to mention her daughter.
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 chasing 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 headlights.