Homer gestured to Goat’s equipment. “Shouldn’t you be taping this shit?”
“Yes,” said Goat quickly, realizing that this was gold and that it was his lifeline. He unzipped his bag, removed the camera, plugged it into his laptop and adjusted the settings. He turned the dome light on because otherwise it was far too dark, but the yellow light chased only some of the shadows away. There still seemed to be too many bits of darkness hiding in the cab, waiting to pounce.
Goat found some small steadying comfort in the process of handling the tools of his trade. It returned to him a measure of personal power.
“Okay, we’re good to go.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I’ll do a quick introduction and then you could just talk,” suggested Goat. “Tell your side of it.”
“My ‘side’?”
“Tell the truth as you see it. Or would you rather I ask questions?”
“I don’t know. Set it up and let’s see what happens. But don’t say where we are, okay?”
“No problem.”
He hit Record, then turned the camera on himself, gave his name and his affiliation with Regional Satellite News. Then he pointed the camera at Homer and introduced him. Homer gave the camera a few glances that were almost shy.
People and cameras, thought Goat. Weird.
As Goat checked the feed on his laptop, he loaded Foursquare and tried to connect the locator app to a GPS app, but there was no Wi-Fi signal.
“You want this on the Net, right?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then once we tape some stuff, we have to get to someplace where I can pick up a signal. Anyplace with free Wi-Fi.”
Homer thought about that then nodded. “Sure.”
“Are you ready?” asked Goat. Part of his mind seemed to stand at a distance and watch all of this with slack-jawed amazement. They were both flash-burned, filthy, bloody, and on the run from murders and some kind of catastrophic military action, and here he was talking to a Homer like they were ready to talk about the Daffodil Festival or a Little League game. It worried Goat that he could sound so normal, act so normal, when normal was something as dead as yesterday’s news.
He heard his voice speak with every appearance of calm control as set up the video. “We’re on the road—I can’t say where. Stebbins County has been—or is in the process of being—destroyed. You’ve heard some of the field reports by Billy Trout about what happened. All of it is real. However I have a different part of the story to share and it’s one everyone is going to want to hear. This is a side of the story that will help everyone understand the man who stands at the center of this storm. A man most people in the world believe was executed two days ago at Rockview Prison here in Pennsylvania. A man who is now beyond death as anyone knows it—and that statement is neither an exaggeration nor a joke. The next voice you’ll hear, the next face you’ll see, is that of Homer Gibbon.”
He turned the camera and switched on the top-mounted light for extra effect. He wanted the image to transform from the murky yellow shadows to something brighter and harsher, something that would show the bright red blood. In the stark light Homer was every bit the true monster. All sharp angles and brutality, but with a bestial intelligence glittering in his dark eyes.
Homer did not speak immediately, and his lack of certainty and clear discomfort kept the dead silence from being empty. This was great theater, thought Goat. This was fucking great.
After a few thoughtful seconds, Homer said, “Everyone thinks I’m a monster.”
“What do you think?” asked Goat.
Nearly a mile passed before Homer answered. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe that’s what I am now. A monster. I guess now more than ever.”
Homer shook his head and Goat wondered if there was a flicker of regret in the killer’s voice, or was he filtering this through his filmmaker’s ear.
“People use that word,” Homer went on. “Monster. They like to throw words like that around the way a monkey tosses his shit, hoping it’ll stick to the walls. They don’t understand anything about what goes on in a person’s head, just like they don’t understand what it means to be something different. Something bigger.” He laughed. “It’s like witches.”
“I’m sorry … witches?”
“Sure. In prison you got nothing to do but read books, and I read this one book, Witch Hunts: A History of the Burning Times—it had a lot of pictures in it, like a comic book but it’s not superhero stuff. This was about real stuff that happened. What do you call a book like that?”
“A graphic novel?”
“Yeah, that was it. This one was about the history of witches and the things people used to do to them because everyone had some stupid idea that witches were giving blow jobs to the Devil or some shit. Goofy stuff like that. What it really was, was that people—men, mostly—were afraid of the witches because of what the witches knew. And what they called witches were just women who knew some important shit. Medicine and like that. Natural healing and all that sort of thing. Herbs and liniments and potions. There wasn’t anything with the Devil. It wasn’t about that. You know why those men killed those women?”