Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  What in God’s name had happened in this place?

  Nothing that happened here was in God’s name, came a whisper in her head.

  She went back up the stairs. She had found a bottle. Whiskey, the cork still waxed. She set it in front of Micah. Her fingers trembled.

  “Don’t go down there” was all Minerva said.

  “Okay.”

  Micah slit the wax with his thumbnail and pulled the cork.

  “Drink,” he told her.

  The liquor scorched her throat. But Minerva swallowed it and drank some more and handed the bottle to Micah. He drank in turn and then disappeared upstairs and came down with the binoculars. It was nearly dark. He scanned the mess and sleeping quarters through the binoculars. He then went through the rifle cabinet. He inspected each one and threw it aside.

  “Cap and ball. Useless.”

  He found a bayonet and slid that into his sack. Minerva watched him make minute improvements to their lot, working with the situation as he found it. She wouldn’t want to face this with anyone but him.

  She grabbed stacks of plates from the cupboards and smashed them on the porch. The broken shards gritted under her boots as she walked back inside.

  “Anything comes, we’ll hear it.”

  They retired to the stove and drank. The whiskey kicked like a mule. Soon Minerva’s head was swimmy.

  “Your legs,” said Micah.

  “What about them?” Minerva said.

  “Squeezed pretty tight.”

  “Old habit,” she said. “I grew up in a religious area. In school, all the girls had to squeeze an aspirin between our knees for two hours a day. Y’know, to teach us to keep our legs shut until marriage.”

  Micah gave her a look.

  “I’m fucking with you, Shug. I got to piss like a racehorse.” Switching to a southern belle voice: “Mah eyeballs are plum doin’ the flutter kick, Ah do declare.”

  “Piss on his bed.”

  Micah did not seem to be joking. Okey dokey, then.

  She went up to Preston’s bedroom. A coldness wept from its walls and sent a wire of fear through her—the curdled presence of Augustus Preston. The mattress lay on the floor with its guts slashed open. She yanked down her pants and squatted over it. A stupid desecration, like a child pissing on a hated schoolmaster’s shoes. Her water was locked up inside her. She shut her eyes and exhaled. It began as a trickle and built to a stream that the mattress soaked up hungrily.

  She stepped off the mattress before a rill of piss hit her boots. Thunderheads gathered over the hills. Lightning forked down to illuminate the trees—

  She saw them then. Three shapes. Shaggy lumpen things. Staggered fifty yards apart in the field facing the house, two hundred yards away.

  She hurried downstairs. Micah was at the window with the binoculars.

  “You see them?” she asked.

  Micah nodded.

  “They coming closer?”

  Micah shook his head. “Just there. Waiting.”

  “For what?”

  Micah looked at her. How should he know?

  They retrieved their packs from the kitchen. The stove kicked warmth into the front room, where they sat watching the shapes in the field. Micah took another glug of whiskey.

  “You can never know the shape of the world, Minny,” he said. It always tickled her when he used the name her father used to call her by. “When you think you have it compassed, something breaks from that geometry to bedevil you.”

  It was not like Shug to make such pronouncements. Was he drunk?

  “What about Ebenezer?” he said, looking at her.

  “I’m still going to kill him, if that’s what you’re wondering. I would have done it earlier, but it’s been a busy stretch.”

  She rooted through her bag until her fingers closed around something. She pulled it out and tossed it to him. Micah turned it over in the finger of firelight falling from the kitchen. His gaze reflected puzzlement . . . until it clicked.

  It might have been the first honest-to-God smile she’d ever seen from him.

  He said, “You went back.”

  “Bet your ass I did. I was fourteen. Climbed the same tree and waited. Knife—two knives, actually. No gun. Wanted it to be a fair fight. It came the next day. It almost killed me. Got my one arm coiled up and squeezed. Busted that arm, crushed the air out of me. But I still had the other arm. I’d lashed the knives to my hands with baling twine so I couldn’t let go. Its skin was real durable—imagine trying to cut through a bike tire. But I hacked its head clean off. Didn’t come easy. Most creatures have got plenty of fight in them even when the battle’s long lost.”

  She watched Micah turn the snake’s head over. It was a foot long. Its eyes were dried-up peas in its sockets. Minerva had lost its lower jaw somewhere. The head would become drier and more brittle until all that remained was a fang or whatnot. She’d put that fang in a locket and string it round her neck.

  “You are certain this was the one?”

  She said, “How many fifteen-foot snakes you think there are? As soon as it was dead, I felt at peace. Like I’d set my brother’s soul free.”

  Micah handed it back. “You are a wonder.”

  She stuffed the snake’s head back into her pack. “There’s still room in here.”

  “For?”

  “The Englishman’s head.”

  “He will not go easily, Minny. He is good at what he does.”

  She sighed. “I was a bounty hunter. You and him are mercenaries. You’ve killed people. There’s a difference between us. I know that. But I want it more.”

  “He will want to live.”

  The storm had reached them. Rain began to pelt the windows.

  “Do you still dwell on them?” Micah asked her.

  “My brother and father? Not so much as I used to . . . You know, as time goes on they become less people in my memory and more, I don’t know, motivations. I don’t like that. Thinking of them that way. When the Englishman’s dead, they’ll come back to me the way they were.”

  “You think so?

  “I have to think so.”

  Micah nodded. “You sleep. I will keep watch.”

  “You sure?”

  When he didn’t answer, Minerva went into the kitchen and sat with her back to the wall. The warmth was narcotic. She fell into an uneasy doze.

  MICAH STAYED UP and watched the fields. Lightning cleaved the sky. He could still see them out there. Three unmoving shapes in the lashing rain.

  They wouldn’t attack. He was pretty sure of that. It was the same in Korea: the enemy would harass you, nipping at your flanks, funneling you to a choke point where they could kill you more easily. In this case, the choke point was Little Heaven. Except Micah wasn’t sure these things had killing in mind. What was going on at Little Heaven was a different sort of thing. Nobody was dead, not yet. They were all just sick. And it was either that none of them had the good sense to leave, or the Reverend and his men were preventing it—or something else, some terrible specific gravity, kept them all locked in place. That being the case, those shapes out there in the field were more like ranchers squiring cattle back to the feed pen, which lay in the shadow of the slaughterhouse.

  Micah had been thinking about it lately. Souls ascending. It wasn’t Little Heaven that turned his thoughts in that direction; the Reverend’s compound seemed about as divine as the Preston School. No, just the feeling a man gets when he senses the chain of his own life drawing tight around his throat. Micah felt the links of that chain cutting into his neck. And he wondered, idly but with as much feeling as he could summon, how thin a cut it was between a man like Augustus Preston and the man he himself had been at some earlier, rottener time in his existence.

  He had killed men for money, and less than money. There were times when an evil had invaded his soul. He felt it drop over him, black and suffocating. That same mantle seemed to hang over the Reverend’s shoulders, too—Micah sensed it to a certainty. And
so the question was: If you let a man like that indulge his nature and didn’t do anything about it, are you any better than him? A crazy dog bites, that being its nature. But if you let that dog go on biting, servicing its own ill-bred temperament—knowingly, and with an agency to stop it—then are you not whelps from the same litter? No, you are worse even. That dog cannot help but bite. You know better. Your inaction encouraged that evil to flourish. The blood was on your hands.

  Micah thought about things like that. All the time he thought.

  29

  CY . . . OOOHHH, Cy baby, I need you . . .

  Cyril Neeps started up from his sleep. He was kicked back in his chair against the side of the bunkhouse that housed Eli Rathbone. He snapped forward, the front feet of the chair stabbing into the dirt.

  Jesus. He’d fallen asleep with his head touching the wall of the bunkhouse with that thing shambling around inside. That fucking—

  —abomination—

  Yeah, okay, fucking-A right, that was the word. A bigger word than Cy was used to throwing around, but sure. A fucking abomination. Those curdled gray eyes and the grubs twisting around in his cored-out armpit. The bugs. Hard as he tried, Cy couldn’t drive that image out of his mind. The boy was just covered in bugs right up to his chest, the little fuckers scuttling all over while the boy stroked that dead fucking pigeon with his disgusting melted hand—Kee-rist, all the liquor in the world couldn’t wash that picture out of a man’s head.

  Not that Cy wouldn’t give that a go. Hey! The good ole college try. But the Reverend, the slant-heeled killjoy prick, ran a dry compound. Hell, he and Virg had even tried whipping up a batch of home brew out of spud peels, a bag of sugar, and a few weird-smelling herbs Virg hunted out of the woods—the same woods they had steered clear of lately. But the finished batch smelled of grim death, and when Virg took the tiniest sip, his tongue turned toad green. They agreed it would probably drive them both blind, and then they’d never find their way out of Little Heaven—and their departure was fixing to be sooner rather than later, if anyone wanted the God’s honest truth. Time to blow this pop stand, was Cy’s professional opinion.

  And the Reverend—that rat-assed, greasy snake oil salesman! Cyril kinda hated him. He couldn’t understand why all these bozos followed him out here, hanging off his every goddamn word—that was, until he’d seen him in action behind the pulpit. Oh, he changed then. Grew two feet taller, that big voice rumbling out of his pudgy body like a rainbow arching out of a dung pile. Cyril wasn’t a churchgoing man, but he could appreciate the power the Reverend had, and so far as Cy could tell, he’d earned it. The fucker paid good, too. He vacuumed every nickel out of his cow-eyed worshippers’ pockets and gave some of it to him and Virg.

  But in Cy’s not-so-humble opinion, no amount of cashola was enough for this. Nope. No way, no how. What good was money when you couldn’t buy the finest things in life: liquor off the top shelf, a pack of Colts wine-tipped cigarillos, and, after a drink and a smoke, maybe a nice slice of pussy? In fact, it didn’t have to be that nice a slice. Just willing. Or, if not willing, at least present. All the women around here had a broomstick up their asses, or else rode one. And they had prick-shot husbands and kids, too, and everyone knew that once a woman had a kid, her cooze flapped like a wind sock at the airport. Cy liked a tight fit. This one clam-faced bitch he’d nailed had told Cy that no fit would be tight enough for his Phillips-head screwdriver of a dick unless he took to fucking electrical sockets—but she had only said that once.

  Cy-by . . . where’s my handsome Cyyyyy-by . . .

  Cyril’s head snapped toward the voice. A blast from the past. An honest-to-Christ mind melter.

  “Carlene . . . ?”

  Jesus, didn’t that name feel weird in his mouth? Carlene Herlihy from Carbine, Alabama—the glue-trap town Cy had grown up in. Couldn’t be her, of course. But there it was, her voice calling from the heart of the woods just as sugary sweet as he remembered.

  My baby, my handsome honey-bunny . . .

  Carlene. Juicy Carlene. A box as sweet as canned peaches. Only you had to wrench the damned lid off her jar. Women! They learned or they got taught, and either way worked fine by Cy. Hell, the fight was half the fun.

  Honey-bunny, though? Carlene had never called him that. She wasn’t one for gooey phrasings—as a cashier at the Carbine Pinch N Save, she could scarcely be bothered to make eye contact, and had a way of snapping her gum that made a man feel about an inch tall. Christ, she had no clue Cy even existed until he made his move—which it must be said was a bit . . . what’s the shit-eatin’ word? Forward.

  He was twenty-five. Carlene, eighteen. Body tight as a snare drum. Dewy was the word to race through Cy’s mind looking at her. Just as slick and wet as the earth after a rainstorm. He wasn’t on her radar, so he made damn good and sure to put himself there.

  He’d been ready to roll out of town at the time, no forwarding address. But before he left, he had matters to attend to. He caught up with Carlene one night at a bush party. He shouldn’t have been there—he was too old, and with that jittery look he used to get when he was up to something. His eyes were hard these days, no matter what he was doing. He almost missed that old feeling.

  Anyway, Cy let Carlene know he’d come into some acid. That bug-fuck weirdo Leary had hipped him to it, Cy said. As if one soul in that scratch-ass town really had acid. But Carlene went with him, bold as a bull. He took her into the woods. She was pissed to the gills; he figured she wouldn’t be able to bat so much as a butterfly off her arm. But she had fight in her. Ooo-eee, what a hellion! Scratching and biting, all but clawing Cyril’s eyes out. She wore fake nails or some shit, took a nice chunk out of his cheek. But when she gave over to him, it was with a sigh. Her legs could have been oiled, the way they spread. Wide open, smooth as creamery butter—

  Cy . . . Cyril . . . Come over here, Cyril . . .

  Cyril was up off his chair without really thinking—as if he’d grown a second brain in his ass that was controlling his legs. Hey, ass brain, hold your horses! He almost laughed at how fucking silly it was . . . except the spit had gone sour in his mouth. He took a few hesitant steps away from his post by the bunkhouse door. Sweat trickled down his spine to soak his underwear. His rear end was clammy, and it itched in a place he was helpless to scratch.

  The fence shielding Little Heaven from the woods was twenty yards off. He lurched toward it.

  Stop.

  This was his conscious, direct thought.

  Stop moving, feet.

  It was strange to address a part of your body as if it had its own will, no different from telling your asshole not to let fly with a fart in a crowded elevator. But he was asking now—begging. His arms and legs had been disconnected, their controls rerouted.

  “Stop.” His breath came out in a harsh pop. “Goddamn it, stop.”

  But he kept on. Staggering more than walking, part of him putting on the brakes while the other part, the more powerful one now, continued to grind his body forward. You’d think the earth was lined with fucking ball bearings, the way he kept slip-sliding ahead.

  Oh, Cy . . . come on, baby, we’re gonna have us a time. A real screamer.

  He’d seen Carlene a few years ago, back in Carbine. Sitting outside the dairy bar with a couple of her runny-nosed, scabby-elbowed kids still shitting in diapers. A human trash pit, it must be said. Oh, how the mighty, y’know? Big flappetty tits hanging off the front of her like two gunnysacks kicked down a bad stretch of road. She didn’t look dewy then, not one bit. More like doody.

  He wasn’t surprised. She was nothing special. He remembered her ass had been dimpled with cellulite when he had finally seen it in the woodland moonlight. Like the cratered surface of the fucking moon! It had been like opening a really pretty box to find a dog turd inside. But the way she wore her jeans back then, you’d never know. Well, Cy knew. There had never been a damn thing special about her, which is what pissed Cy off the most—she’d sold him a bill of goods,
which had put him on the hunt in the first place. But she was the same ignorant, ditchwater-dull bitch that you’d find anyplace. She hadn’t been worth his time or interest, and he held his old obsession against her.

  He had sat down beside her kids, who were clearly the sort who would spend the rest of their bitter, useless lives in that tar pit town. Carlene’s eyes went wide with that old fear at the sight of him.

  You’re a shell of your former self, he’d said to her, then got up and sauntered off.

  It hadn’t even felt that good. Not like how he’d wanted. Life had already ripped the spine out of every dream she’d ever had. How much could the truth really hurt?

  “Virgil,” he moaned now as his feet propelled him helplessly toward the fence, hoping his partner might hear. But it was the dead of night and Virgil was probably asleep, the pudding brain. Cyril felt a little sorry for Virgil. Dumb as a box of hammers, that one. He’d be lost without Cyril. Then he had to ask himself: Where am I going?

  At the fence now. It ran fifteen feet up to the razor wire. Cy hooked his hands into the chain link. The sensation of his fingers clawing through that rough industrial metal washed a dry taste of horror through his mouth, as if he’d taken a big gulp of shitty wine.

  Come on now, baby. We’re gonna have such fun . . .

  He started to climb. The terror shot through him sharply, a bone-deep electricity radiating from every nerve center. He tried to jerk himself backward, hurl himself to the ground. He didn’t care if he broke a leg, or both legs plus an arm. Anything was better than being dragged toward that voice like a man chained to a winch.

  He saw something in the trees. Carlene Herlihy. The pride of Carbine, Alabama. Naked as a jaybird. Jesus please us. He’d never seen a woman so goddamn lovely. Creamy-dreamy red bikini. Breasts not all droopy and sucked out, but firm and high. A nice tanglebush. Boy howdy, Cy would walk twenty miles of busted glass to lay one kiss between those legs.

  Except her eyes. Yes indeedy, there was something a bit queer about those.