Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  Reggie and Nate came in last. Ellen’s heart lifted, then sank.

  She had not seen her nephew in years. But she recalled a ruddy-cheeked and, well, robust little fella. A stout bowling pin of a boy who had careened recklessly around her sister’s front room, shrieking merrily as Sherri chased him and tickled him under the armpits. The Nate she spied now was pallid and drained, as if there were leeches at work under his clothes. He had the look of a future telethon case: a boy propped up in a bed with tubes poking out of his arms while dewy-eyed viewers called in their pledges.

  His father didn’t look a hell of a lot better as he shuffled into the mess behind his son. The skin hung slack off Reggie’s neck, and the flesh under his eyes was the yellow of an old bruise.

  Reggie and Nate got in the chow line. Neither of them glanced in Ellen’s direction.

  Micah raised his eyebrows. That them? Ellen nodded.

  The Reverend Amos Flesher came in last. The sermon had evidently revivified him—it was as if he had stolen vitality from his worshippers and taken it for himself. He passed down the queue, offering that limp-fingered blessing until he reached the head of it.

  Great way to cut in line, Ellen thought sourly.

  He took his meal—it was served on a fine china plate, Ellen noted, while everyone else’s stew was plopped into green plastic bowls—to his table at the head of the mess. There was only one chair at it.

  When everyone was seated, the Reverend stood. The congregation followed suit.

  “Mighty Lord,” the Reverend intoned, “thank You for this bounty You have placed before us. Thank You for this bread, this meat, this wine.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Minerva whispered so low that only Ellen could hear. “I don’t see any wine.”

  “Your beneficence, dear Lord, is unending. Without You we are nothing. You nourish and sustain all things. You provide food for all Thy creatures. Blessed art Thou, Lord, who feeds and waters His children here at Little Heaven. And blessed is Your mouthpiece, who carries Your divine word to the ears of Your flock.”

  “Nifty,” said Minerva.

  “Amen,” said Reverend Amos Flesher.

  “Amen,” said the congregation.

  “Amen,” said Ellen, uncomfortably.

  Absolutely nothing, said Micah and Minerva.

  A strained silence prevailed during the meal. Few people spoke, and if so, they did so in whispers. Even fewer hazarded glances in the newcomers’ direction.

  Ellen watched the Reverend. He had an aggressive manner of eating: he held a slice of bread a few inches away from his face, and instead of bringing it to his mouth, he would dart forward like a predatory bird, snapping off bits of crust.

  “We have guests tonight,” said the Reverend once he’d finished pecking at his food.

  The congregation turned to them now, as if given permission. It was not unlike a single organism with a hundred eyes turning its concentrated gaze upon Ellen and her companions all at once.

  “The Lord has brought them to our doorstep,” the Reverend said. “They fell into the pit dug by Brother Langtree and Brother Fairweather.” He clapped his hands, a dry sound like wood planks spanked together. “Finally! They managed to catch something!”

  Laughter from the congregation. Ellen cast a sidelong glance at her nephew, Nate, sitting with Reggie. She caught no spark of recognition in their eyes. Good.

  “They will stay with us only as long as it takes the fourth member of their party to heal,” he said. “If that is more than a few days, we will arrange for transport to the outside. The Lord has put this hurdle before us and we must abide.”

  He’s speaking like we’re poison, Ellen thought. As though our presence is tainting his perfect utopia.

  Dessert was passed around next. Tapioca pudding, as tasteless as the stew. Perhaps the Reverend viewed flavor as a sin? They ate in silence as before.

  “Well, whoop-de-doo, what a fun bunch,” Minerva muttered. “What do they do on wild nights, watch paint dry?”

  Twilight gathered against the mess hall’s plastic-sheet windows. Wind hissed through gaps in the walls with a zippery note.

  Two men entered the mess. They had the look of brothers: the same sharp cheekbones and ferret-thin frames. One had a scoped rifle slung over his shoulder. The other had a revolver holstered at his hip like a Wild West gunslinger.

  They moved briskly to the Reverend. All three inclined their heads in conversation. The two men spoke animatedly yet in hushed tones; the gunslinger made a few wild flourishes with his hands. The Reverend nodded and signaled for them to depart.

  For a minute, the Reverend sat very still with his eyes closed. He opened one eye once, briefly, and his gaze was trained on Ellen’s table. His jaw worked side to side and his lips moved as if in silent prayer.

  In time, he stood. His eyes remained closed. His body trembled slightly. The congregation sat riveted. Ellen caught sight of Reggie out of the corner of her eye. His face was cheese white and twitchy as he stared at Amos Flesher, enrapt.

  “There come a test,” the Reverend said in a stagey kind of whisper. “In the life of every man there come a test . . .”

  Nods from the congregation. Yes, oh yes, Ellen could picture them all thinking. The Lord tests the faithful.

  “The son of Brother and Sister Rathbone has wandered into the woods.”

  A shocked group inhale from the congregation—it was as though they had taken a breath as a single unit.

  “Eli?” said a woman in a paisley frock. “Eli Rathbone’s missing?”

  The Reverend paused, as if unsure of the boy’s name.

  “He is safe,” Reverend Flesher said sharply. He cast a baleful eye upon the woman until she sat down again. “The Lord assures me of this. Brother Swicker and Brother Neeps have been looking for him, along with his parents. But now we all must gather. The light draws thin. The poor boy shall not spend the night outdoors.”

  Everybody rose. People were animated now—their bodies moved with the jerky-limbed mania that grips a group of people on the cusp of mass hysteria. The Reverend’s chin was tilted upward, his face set in a mask of forbearance—Ellen wondered: Did he envision the boy’s disappearance as a test for himself?

  Ellen, Minerva, and Micah filtered into the square, where the adults were gathering. The children had been sent off to the bunkhouses. A few people had flashlights. Ellen spotted Reggie carrying a lantern that gave off a weak glow, its glass blackened with kerosene smudges. Rags were tied to the tips of scrap two-by-twos and dipped into a bucket of creosote. The jury-rigged torches were lit with a Zippo passed from person to person. This all happened quickly and silently. The two-by-twos, rags, and creosote were all at the ready, as if waiting for this very eventuality.

  The armed men who looked like brothers addressed the throng.

  “Eli’s folks is out thataway,” the one with the rifle said, pointing at a general area past the fence. “They ain’t seen the boy in a few hours. They thought he was with the others in the play area.”

  The man with the holstered gun was smoking a home-rolled cigarette. He flicked the butt into the weeds and said, “A mother ought to keep mind of her kids.” He cast an eye on the group, picking out the mothers in its midst. “Ain’t that a pure fact?”

  Nobody spoke against him. The torches crackled, sending up plumes of stinking smoke. The flames flickered on the worshippers’ pale pinched faces.

  “We’ll fan out,” said the rifleman. “East, west, south, north. No telling whichaway the boy went, or how far afield.”

  “Better not be too far,” his partner said. “The woods are a dangerous place to be at night.”

  The rifleman grinned. “Lovely, dark and deep.”

  Ellen did not care for these two. They seemed to be taking delight in this. The rifleman then pointed at the outsiders.

  “You stay here. This is not your calling.”

  Minerva and Micah were already holding torches. Micah levered his torch back on h
is shoulder until his face grew dark. “Your call,” he said.

  “It is,” said the rifleman, and spat. His partner rested the heel of his palm against the butt of his revolver. “And I say sit.”

  The group exited through the main gate. The monolithic expanse of the woods dwarfed them; the flimsy light of their torches quickly dwindled under the brooding darkness of those trees. The worshippers paired off and began to sweep the woods. Voices called out from every direction.

  “Eli?”

  “Eli!”

  “Eli!”

  “Child, come home! God wants you to come home!”

  The light of their torches was swallowed by the night. Soon their voices were gone, too. Ellen, Minerva, and Micah stood in the parade square. There was not much else to do. It wasn’t like there was a horseshoe pit or a bingo game they were missing.

  A lone figure rounded back into the compound. Charlie Fairweather.

  “I don’t care what Cyril or Virgil says,” he said. “That boy needs all the help he can get.”

  “Okay,” said Micah.

  17

  DURING THE WAR, Micah used to drive trucks full of the dead.

  Between ten and fifteen bodies piled into the back of an old GMC Deuce-and-a-Half. The bodies of GIs and medics and radiomen and the odd noncombat pogue who had found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The bodies were intact, by and large, though sometimes the stray parts had to be zipped into canvas sacks. They were usually frozen—not strategically, just because the icy temperatures ensured that most of them were rock hard for transport.

  Micah and another marine, Eldon Tibbs, would drive them from the front line to Hamhung, a port town under US occupation. It was suspected that the Chinese would strip, loot, and debase the corpses otherwise.

  There was one night, winter of 1952. Micah was at the wheel for that haul. He was nineteen years old. The road wound through the pines, which were cottony-looking, with bluish moss hanging from their branches like seaweed. Tibbs didn’t talk much. He and Micah got on just fine. Tibbs smoked a pipe packed with cherry tobacco. He received it every month in a thick waxed envelope. One of his brothers sent it. He was smoking when it happened.

  Micah did not see or hear the shot that killed Tibbs. It was either perfect or just plain lucky—bad luck for Tibbs. A hole appeared in the passenger window, and the side of Micah’s face was plastered with wet warmth.

  Tibbs’s lit pipe fell into Micah’s lap. The road hit a bend. Tibbs’s body slumped heavily against Micah. A flap of skin from his blown-apart face slapped against Micah’s neck. He smelled the thick iron of Tibbs’s blood.

  Wind shrieked through the window hole as the truck veered into the trees. Micah tried to correct the fishtail, but the front end dipped over the edge of the road into a gully. Micah was thrown into the windshield, which splintered when he struck it.

  He grabbed the pistol from Tibbs’s holster and heaved himself from the cab. Blood flowed freely from his forehead. Whoever shot Tibbs couldn’t be far away.

  He staggered around the side of the truck, keeping low on the gully side. The truck’s rear doors had popped open. Bodies lay scattered over the road. Corpses rested at horrible broken-backed angles. A few of the zippered sacks had burst, spraying remains. The ragged edges of frozen flesh had a crystalized look, crusty red like freezer-burned steak.

  Micah crept to the bumper. Ice had formed to a webbing between the black bones of the trees across the road. A figure was approaching down the ditch across the road. Micah fired. The slug missed wide. The figure dropped out of sight.

  Next, a round struck the truck a few inches above Micah’s head. He spun away; his heels skidded out from under him and he went down hard on his ass. He pivoted onto his stomach, watching the road from under the truck chassis.

  A single Chinese soldier crept out of the ditch. What was he doing so far behind enemy lines? Either crazy or overconfident. He must have thought he’d hit Micah, that he was dead. The man drew nearer. His face was smeared in lampblack. Micah waited until he was so close that all he could see was his legs, then squeezed the trigger.

  The slug went through the man’s shin. The man cried out and awkwardly fell. Micah put another round into his head. The man’s flyaway corn-silk hair puffed up as the bullet drilled into his brain.

  Micah spent the next twenty minutes loading bodies into the truck. Some had spilled into the earth under the trees, which was weirdly spongy despite the night’s chill, carpeted by a strain of moss he had never encountered. It was hard work—dead bodies possessed an ornery, uncooperative weight. He put the dead Chinaman in with them.

  He backed out of the gully and drove on to Hamhung. He left Tibbs in the cab. His body was going stiff . . .

  This was the memory that blitzed through Micah’s mind—collecting frozen bodies under the pines—as he now entered the woods encircling Little Heaven with Charlie, Minerva, and Ellen. This earth had the same soft, rich, obliging, somehow cake-like quality. But there was no moss here. The ground simply felt mushy underfoot, as if it had been saturated with thick and fatty oil.

  It feels like flesh was Micah’s thought. The waterlogged flesh of a corpse coughed up from the bottom of a lake.

  What a stupid thought. But the inkling remained: they were walking on a huge carcass. If they were to dig, their fingernails would scrape its wormy skin. And if they dug into its hide, its black blood would surely gush out, syrupy as crude oil.

  They tried to chart a straight path, but the trees and blowdowns made it hard. Micah spotted the light of a torch burning to the east, a paling pinprick. Shouts rang out—“Eli! ELI!”—but those, too, began to soften as the searchers fanned out in ever-widening orbits.

  The light of Micah’s own torch illuminated a ten-foot radius; there was barely enough to navigate by, much less spot the boy. A night in these woods would feel like an eternity to a child. Why would he have taken off? Any number of reasons, Micah supposed. He’d chased an animal. Or his parents had scolded him and he had run away.

  Or else something lured him in.

  “Needle in a haystack,” Charlie said with a defeated grimace. “I can barely see the fingers at the end of my hand.”

  Micah said, “Tell me about those two.”

  “What two?” said Charlie.

  “The men giving orders.”

  Charlie cocked his torch on his shoulder and rubbed his elbow nervously. “The one’s Cyril Neeps. With the longish hair?”

  They both had long hair. They were practically identical.

  Micah said, “The one with the rifle?”

  “That’s the one,” Charlie confirmed. “The other fella is Virgil Swicker.”

  “So they’re not brothers?” Ellen said.

  “They look it, don’t they? But no. They weren’t part of the congregation back in San Francisco. To be honest, they don’t seem to have much faith at all. I haven’t ever seen their heads bent in prayer.”

  “What are they doing here?” said Micah.

  Charlie scratched his elbow in a nervous way, like a child called to the front of the class to finish an equation on the chalkboard.

  “The Reverend, he brought them on. Guess he figured with the camp being so isolated, and not too many of us having real survival skills, it would be good to have them.”

  “I thought the Lord would be your shepherd,” Minerva said.

  Charlie gave her a look. “The Reverend had his reasons. He is guided by the Lord.”

  Micah noticed that Charlie hadn’t referred to the men as Brother Neeps or Brother Swicker. They had the unmistakable whiff of hired guns. Why take on those two? Maybe, as Charlie said, simply to keep the flock safe . . . or else to keep the flock in line?

  The lights of Little Heaven were no longer visible. Micah’s eye swept the woods for any sign of the missing boy. The darkness rebounded at him, empty and dead.

  “We should split up,” he said.

  They had already drifted into two distinct partie
s. Micah and Ellen on one side. On the other, Charlie and Minerva.

  “Boy, girl, boy, girl—is that what you’re thinking, Shug?” Minerva said archly. “How orderly.”

  Minerva and Charlie moved off in a westerly direction. Micah and Ellen continued straight on.

  “Eli!” Ellen shouted. Then, lowering her voice: “Poor little guy.”

  They walked beside each other. Micah could have reached out and taken Ellen’s hand. He could smell her: campfire smoke and sweat and something sweet, too, that smelled a little like field berries.

  “Are you well?” he asked, just to say something. It was not like him at all.

  “I’m okay, considering. Nate and Reggie are here, at least. But they don’t look well, Micah. Nobody looks well. Is that just me thinking it?”

  “It is not just you.”

  “Right? Everyone looks . . . sick. The guts vacuumed out of them—the vim, the vitality. A bunch of shambling undead.”

  It wasn’t just the people in Little Heaven that set off Micah’s alarm bells. It was the thing or things that had chased them the night before, too. Things Micah assumed must have been bears or wolves. But they hadn’t moved like that, and when he caught a glimpse of their bodies in the flare’s sputtering light—that heart-stopping flicker of movement—in that split second he thought: These are like no creatures I have ever encountered. Those creatures, and the shower of dead birds, and the denizens of Little Heaven, and the soft give of the ground underfoot, and the way the darkness melted unpleasantly into his bones . . . everything was a bit skewed, a degree off center. None of it seemed odd enough to raise a panic over—you could convince yourself that it was just the weak-nelly dread that domesticated humans felt nowadays, after spending most of their lives in well-lit cities. This was life in the woods. It was dangerous, full of threats. And his experiences in Korea and afterward had enabled Micah to operate calmly under threat. He did not rattle, even when he should. But maybe that was the true danger: you were lulled into a false acceptance as what had once seemed odd came to feel perfectly natural, and by the time things really started to go south it was too late. You were trapped.