For some reason, seeing his dad’s body treated like garbage, Colson thought of his mother, of how she loved his dad, how his dad loved her, and grief slammed him at last, not as much for his own loss as for hers, for how devastated she would be when she got the news. His chest ached as if grief were a cancer in his ribs. He was hardly able to draw a breath, and with this anguish came a first inchoate spasm of rage, raw anger directed at the killer, but also at himself and at God.
Optime bent down and slipped the shotgun off the dead man’s shoulder. He checked the breach and chambered a round and checked the breach again.
“Slugs,” he said. He looked at Colson. “You know, boy, this would put a hole through you as big as a fist.”
Colson didn’t so much as glance at the muzzle. He’d had enough of looking down gun barrels.
Meeting his captive’s eyes, the killer kicked the corpse again, and then once more, with a contempt that clearly gave him pleasure.
Colson said, “You sick bastard,” but that weak rebellion was such a pathetic attempt at atonement for his failure to act that he felt smaller and more helpless than ever.
As though he could read his captive’s mind, Optime said, “Your daddy is nothing now. He never was anything. Neither are you. You’re pestilence and filth. You breathe out poison.” With the shotgun, he gestured past Colson. “Let’s go to church.”
The suggestion was so odd that Colson didn’t at first realize Optime literally meant what he said.
“Church,” the killer repeated. “At the end of the street.”
“You can’t just leave him laying there.”
“Your daddy isn’t a him anymore, boy. Your daddy’s just an it, a worm farm waiting to happen. Now get a move on. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
33
If they had not been announced by the thunder of their hooves, Wyatt Rider might have thought that the elk were a hallucination. The throng approaching wasn’t merely an antlered bull and its cows with a few spotted calves. More bulls than Wyatt could count galloped up the lane and through the meadows to both sides of the blacktop, and with them came several times more cows than bulls, as well as numerous calves. He estimated there were as many as two hundred, and though they were not in a stampede that might trample him, they were coming fast, with determination. Getting out of their way seemed to be wise.
Where they had come from, what drew them here, what purpose they had, he couldn’t imagine. They seemed otherworldly, especially the immense bulls with their velvet-covered antlers, heads held high and black nostrils flared. They issued no cries, came in silence but for the clopping of their hooves.
By the time he reached the main residence and climbed the steps onto the veranda, the herds arrived. They streamed past the west side of the house, as though heading to the forested hills beyond this grassy slope, but instead they circled the building, reappeared around the east side, and trotted back the way they’d come, along the lane and through the meadows that flanked it.
Although Liam O’Hara had not mentioned elk, this extraordinary spectacle was similar to another of a far more threatening nature, involving wolves and coyotes, which had frightened the billionaire and his family into departing the ranch.
A pickup or an SUV appeared in the distance, and at the sound of the engine, the herds moved faster and converged on the vehicle.
A white Ford Explorer. The driver slowed to a stop. After a hesitation, the SUV advanced slowly.
The elk surrounded the Ford and accompanied it as if they were an honor guard, as if the occupant were a royal personage to whom they had sworn an oath of fealty.
34
Asher Optime is living his manifesto, casting no shadow as he walks behind the boy at high noon.
Dr. Fielding, the self-important historian, lies dead in the street, a fitting end for him.
“History,” Asher tells the wretched boy, “is one of the instruments with which humankind deceive themselves into believing the story of their species is of consequence, a long and noble march during which they supposedly acquire ever more knowledge, leading to enlightenment, truth, transcendence. In fact, though they remember what they learn, they forget the meaning of it. Every period of enlightenment is followed by a new and more efficient barbarism. They preach the necessity of truth even as they flee from it. Some believe in immortality through technology, while others believe in the transcendence of the spirit. They cling to their faith on the way to death and the void, while fouling the world in their passing. The past is a lie, and the future is only the past that hasn’t yet happened. Your father, the historian, was a prince of liars. In a few days, in this church of the dead, in the rising stench of rotting flesh, as you become dehydrated for lack of water, you’ll grow restless and dizzy, endure excruciating abdominal cramps. And you’ll come to see all the ways that he lied to you. When you’ve lost all hope, when you’re ready to curse his name and piss on that picture of your parents, then I’ll relieve your suffering.”