Page 1 of Freak
Prologue
Summer
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Singing along withDolly Parton about her coat of many colors, Abigail Freeman turned her old truck onto the road that would bring her home. On the bench seat beside her sat Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, her collie-mix mutts, who were excellent herders and very good boys. They started fidgeting on the seat as she made the turn; they were just as glad to be home as she was.
They’d been away near a week, she and the dogs and the goats, and she always fretted about the chickens she left behind. She didn’t let them run loose when she wasn’t home, they stayed buttoned-up safely in the predator-proof yard attached to the coop, and they had food and water in big automatic feeders, so she didn’t worry about their safety. But they preferred to have run of the big yard during the day, and they got kitchen scraps when she was home. She worried they were lonely.
Her goats were her main income, and they had a varied portfolio. She made soaps and lotions from their milk, she sold or bartered with about half the kids each breeding season, and she hired them out as a brush herd. Brushers were natural lawnmowers hired by communities, businesses, and, sometimes, individuals with too much property to maintain on their own. The goats came in and spent their days eating up the overgrowth in vacant lots, side yards, and other places ‘weeds’ grew lush.
A weed was nothing more than a plant growing where it was supposed to grow; so far as Abigail was concerned, a weed wasn’t a thing at all. But most people thought the only plants that were supposed to grow were whatevertheywanted to grow, with no care about what the land wanted, so she hired out her goats to eat themselves happy for cash.
Cleaning out other people’s brush was the thing best keeping the lights on, so she needed to get the goats out where they made their best money. But she hated to be away from home. Not just for the chickens’ sake but for her own.
Abigail was a solitary soul. She enjoyed people, she thought humanity was fairly miraculous in all its variety and complexity, but she liked her own company best.
She’d known from an early age that she wasn’t like most people; Granny Kate always said Freeman women were witchy women. Abigail had never known another Freeman woman, so she couldn’t corroborate, but she’d learned everything Granny had cared to teach her. She supposed if Granny had been witchy, she was as well.
She preferred to think of it astraditional, however—she had an affinity for traditional ways of being and doing, a deep-seated awe for the natural world, and not much patience for all the complicated technological frippery of modern times. If knowing which herbs would help a cough just as well as, if not wholly better than, some fake-cherry slop from the pharmacy made her ‘witchy,’ so be it.
Just before she reached her gate, Bogie, the older and wiser of her boys, stopped his ‘Yay we’re home’ dance and went on alert, his ears high and his nose quivering. Picking up Boge’s cue, Mitch went still as well, and added a low rumble, like a whispered growl.
Abigail hit the brakes and slowed gently to a stop on the road a little ways back from her gate. Her boys were good protectors; they clearly sensed trouble, and she didn’t presume to have better senses for trouble than guardian dogs.
“What’s wrong, boys?” she asked, peering through the windshield and side window, trying to see anything out of sorts. But this was hill country, and her house was behind the knoll that made up her front yard. All she could see was her roof and chimney, and the big copper weather vane of the old lady’s shoe, from the nursery rhyme, that she’d made some twenty years earlier. The copper had aged into a beautiful patina.
“Bogie?” she said, and the dog swung his head quickly to her, huffed softly, and returned his attention to the gate, which was open, as usual. Nobody dangerous or crooked bothered coming all the way up here, where there weren’t many people and none who had much worth stealing.
There was Gary Prentiss, she supposed, a troubled and troublesome neighbor, but nobody much minded his transgressions overall. He was probably the poorest among the generally poor folk who lived on this lonely old road in the hills. Abigail, like everybody else up here, would have given him most of what he snuck in and stole, but Gary had a stubborn kind of pride about it. So they looked the other way except when he got too greedy and took enough to hurt.
It was possible he’d come up to her place, saw the trailer gone and knew she was away with the goats, and dug around for something he needed.
The dogs knew Gary and Leigh Prentiss, though. They wouldn’t alert like this if he were around.
“Okay, babies. Okay.” She reached behind her and grabbed the butt of the rifle she kept on a rack against the rear window. For a country person, she had an unusual distaste for firearms, but as a country person, she knew their value, and she knew how to use them. Granny had taught her that, too.
Bogie whined at the sight of the rifle in her hands, then returned to his duties as sentinel.
She checked the rack and laid the rifle across her lap, then eased her truck into as slow and quiet a roll as she could manage in a seventy-five-year-old manual transmission Ford pickup pulling a sixteen-foot livestock trailer. “Let’s see what we see.”
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~oOo~
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Abigail stood in herback yard. She could do nothing but stand there with her hands over her mouth, and she had no idea how long she’d been doing it. The rifle lay atop the picnic table; any need for it had lapsed well before she’d reached her gate.
In every direction she looked, she found destruction. Most of her chickens were dead, their bodies crushed into the earth by the tires of at least two vehicles. Feathers lay everywhere; each breeze cast them about like bloodied confetti. Buster, her young cockerel, just coming into his manhood, lay dead beside the strawberry tower, his head cruelly twisted.
Her babies had been safe in their coop, specially designed to keep them comfortable and secure while she was away. But whoever had done all this had torn a wall of the coop straight off, apparently by driving through a corner of the coop yard. Then they’d chased down her babies. Her mind kept trying to play the scene through, the chickens scurrying in confusion and terror, the metal monsters roaring after and over them.
Tire tracks made looping trails everywhere. Trucks had driven over her chickens, through her gardens, and mowed down dozens of her gizmos and gewgaws, her whirligigs and windchimes. Some of those had been made by ancestors long dead before she’d ever existed.
And the goat barn? A truck-size hole front and back; somebody had driven right through, and now each breeze made what was left of that building rattle dangerously.
As a finishing touch: scrawled across the side of her house, in which she’d been raised, in which Granny Kate had been born, raised, and died, in bright orange spray paint, the wordsFAT FREAK. Dried rivulets streaked down from the angry letters like tangerine tears.
