Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  Quite simply, you never really know what type of person you are. Micah understood that now. A man never can tell which side of the line he lives on. He will exist forever ignorant until that moment—ruinous and unflinching—when he is forced to confront his hidden inner self.

  “Did you get everything from the camp?” Ellen asked, snapping Micah back to the present. Off Micah’s nod, she said, “Any problems?”

  “We saw something.”

  “What?”

  “Some . . . creatures” was all Micah could say.

  “Animals?”

  “Not quite.”

  He could tell she was about to launch into a barrage of questions about their encounter. Tiredly, he held his hand up to stop her.

  “They could be dangerous,” he said. “That is the key point. They may have followed us back . . . or they have been here all along.”

  “Did they attack you?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  How could he frame it? That those things had seemed more like prison guards than attack dogs? He didn’t want to talk about it. Or about the Preston School, either—both he and Minerva felt it would sow deeper fear within a group that was already crippled with it.

  Ellen said, “I made something for you.”

  She reached into her pocket and came out with three small glass balls.

  “They’re eyes,” she said. “I made them in the glassworks.”

  “You did not have to do that.”

  “Nobody has to do anything, Micah. I did it because I wanted to. I tried to match the shade.” She peered into his eye. “I think I got pretty close. Go on. Try one.”

  He took one from her palm. It looked like a marble, except with a credible human eye structure at its center. He reached for his eye patch . . . then hesitated.

  “It is not pretty,” he said.

  “I don’t imagine so.” She feathered her burn scar with the fingers of her free hand. “At least yours can be covered up.”

  He took the patch off. His empty socket had some lint in it, same as what collects in a belly button. He swabbed it out and tried to pop the glass eye into his socket. It wouldn’t fit.

  “Wait a sec,” said Ellen.

  She went to the pump and returned with a bucket of water. She dipped the eye and handed it back. The wet eye still didn’t fit. It was too big.

  She handed him another one. “They’re slightly different sizes.”

  He dipped the second eye in the water. This one slipped past his eyelid and into his socket. He could feel it bumping around.

  “Too small.”

  “Aha, it’s like the three bears,” she said. “Porridge too hot, porridge too cold.” She held up the third and last eye. “Let’s hope this one’s just right.”

  Micah winked; the second eye popped out of his socket. He tried the last one. It fit pretty well.

  “Let’s take a look,” Ellen said. “It’s . . . hmmm, it’s drifting left. I’ll center it.”

  She put her finger on the eye. Micah felt it move.

  “There.” She clapped. “Perfect. You look like less of a desperado now. You can get a square john job after this. A cashier, a bank teller.”

  Now Micah smiled. “Those would suit me fine.”

  He could picture it. The little house in the burbs, the white picket fence. The nine-to-five. Ellen was part of it, too. A goofy fantasy, but still, he could see it.

  “Can I ask?” he said, touching his face—the spot where Ellen’s was burned.

  She faced away from him. Had he spoken out of turn?

  “A bold ask, Mr. Shughrue,” she said.

  She remained silent for a spell. Then she faced him and said, “When someone can no longer scare you into doing what they want you to do . . . well, let’s just say they resort to other tactics.”

  She pumped her legs and started to swing. Her eyes did not leave his own.

  “You don’t know how bad someone is sometimes,” she said. “Because at first, none of that badness is evident. It’s all goodness—or, if not outright goodness, then at least nothing especially cruel. That’s my problem. I like guys with an edge. But there’s edge and then there’s edge, and when I was younger, I couldn’t tell the difference. My sister’s the same way.”

  She pumped her legs harder. The swing carried her up and down. The hinges squeaked.

  “So when you finally see that badness, Micah, you’re kind of wed to it. That badness doesn’t want to let you go. And it gets angrier and angrier that you won’t bend to it the way it thinks you should. It’s pissed that you aren’t scared of it anymore. So it tries to make you scared again. Any old way it can.”

  “Uhhh . . . ,” said a voice behind them. “Hey.”

  Micah craned his neck to see Ellen’s nephew, Nate. Ellen dragged her feet through the dirt, bringing the swing to a stop.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. “Isn’t someone watching you kids?”

  “I snuck away.”

  Ellen said, “God, Nate. Someone has to know where you are at all times.”

  Nate sawed his forearm across his nose. “Sorry.”

  Ellen went over to him. Hugged him fiercely. The boy didn’t protest.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything this morning,” he said. “When . . . when they dragged you and the other man out of your house.”

  “Like what?” Ellen said. “What could you have said?”

  Nate breathed in and let it out in a shivering exhale. He mumbled something too garbled for Micah to understand.

  “What did you say?” said Ellen.

  “I said, I saw them last night. Eli and Elsa and the Redhills.”

  The story poured out of the boy. He told them that Eli had come back last night. Nate had seen the four children daisy-chained together, hand to hand. Something about flute music from the woods—that detail raised the short hairs on the back of Micah’s neck. Nate’s last sight of the children was of them dancing around some enormous shape that the boy could not name.

  “Do I sound crazy?” Nate asked when he was done.

  Ellen said, “No, you don’t sound crazy. Not at all.”

  Micah did not know how to take Nate’s story, though it was clear the boy believed it. But then the thing he had glimpsed at their old campsite the other night wasn’t believable, either—and it had been real enough.

  “Did you tell your father?” Micah asked.

  The boy’s chest hitched. “He didn’t see anything. Or . . . I don’t know, maybe he couldn’t. He said I was imagining it. That there was nuh-nuh-nothing.”

  Ellen hugged Nate again. “We believe you, Nate. Okay?”

  Nate sucked back snot. He had nearly cried, but then he hadn’t.

  “We’re going to get out of here,” Ellen said. “This place? Little Heaven? We’re done with it. We’ll take as many people as want to go with us. Your dad, too. Hike back, get in our car, and drive someplace for a burger and fries and a chocolate milkshake. A real pig-out. Sound like a plan?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How about it, Micah? Sound like a good plan to you?”

  Whether it was a good plan or not, Micah wasn’t sure she should promise the boy anything.

  Otis and Charlie appeared at the fence. Their faces were etched with defeat.

  “Good to see you back,” said Otis wearily. “No further troubles?”

  “No,” Micah told him.

  “Glad to hear it. Like the new eye, too. It humanizes you.”

  “Hey,” Ellen chided. “He looked plenty human before.”

  Otis’s shrug was noncommittal. “Charlie and I are leaving tonight with Terry Redhill. Time to get the police. Get some real help. We should have done it days ago, I guess.”

  “We’re taking the truck, Micah,” said Charlie. “Fastest way. Will you come with us?”

  33

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, they were set to depart.

  Darkness bled over the comp
ound. The search had been called off. Only the Rasmussens were still looking; they had broken away from their search party, moving deeper into the woods—just like the Rathbones had done. And the Rathbones had never come back.

  The remaining denizens of Little Heaven assembled to see the pickup truck off. They were worn and fearful, their faces showing little hope. The Reverend was nowhere in sight.

  Charlie and Otis sat in the cab of the truck, Terry Redhill in the bed. “We’ll drive to the river,” Otis told everybody, speaking over the idling engine. “If it’s running low enough to cross, we’ll take the truck over. If not, we hike the rest of the way.”

  Charlie spoke next. “We can make it down in three-odd hours in the truck. If we have to hike, maybe a day. We’ll tell the police. They’ll send helicopters and sniffer dogs. The whole shebang.”

  Charlie’s wife and son stood beside the truck. Both looked worried. Maude Redhill hopped up on the tailgate and gave her husband a kiss. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face blotchy, as if she had been crying nonstop for hours.

  “Please be careful,” she said. “I’ve already lost enough today.”

  “Not lost,” Terry said. “Just missing. We’ll find them. God will see to it.”

  “Are you sure you won’t come?” Charlie asked Micah.

  Micah approached the truck. He spoke low so nobody could hear. “Those things. They might have followed us back.”

  Otis bit his lip. “You think so?”

  Micah said, “There is a passing chance.”

  “How many?”

  “I could not tell you.”

  “Do you think they’ll attack?”

  Micah met Otis’s question with a shrug. Charlie and Otis conferred. The truck’s diesel engine ticked along, blurring out their voices.

  “Here’s the thing,” Otis said finally. “There may be more of those things out there.” He pointed down the road they would be driving. “And if we don’t get past them and down the hill—well then, everyone here is in real trouble.”

  “What about Minerva and the black fella you came with?” Charlie asked. “That one seems a pretty icy character.”

  Micah glanced over his shoulder. Minerva stood fifty yards back from the group. Ebenezer leaned against the door to their bunkhouse, much farther away.

  “Couldn’t they do something if those things tried to get past the gates—I mean, if you go with us now?” Charlie said.

  Micah figured they could, if compelled to. Minerva for sure; Ebenezer was a fifty-fifty proposition—but if those abominations invaded Little Heaven, Ebenezer would have to fight them as a matter of survival.

  “We need you,” Otis said simply.

  Micah glanced back at Ellen. She stood beside Nate, their shoulders nearly touching. She nodded as if to give permission.

  “Give me that scattergun,” he said to Charlie.

  Charlie handed an Ithaca pump-action through the window, along with a box of shells. Micah hopped up on the bed beside Terry Redhill. He distributed the shells between his pockets, then jammed two into his mouth, storing them in either cheek—he looked like a chipmunk hoarding nuts. He slapped his palm on the roof.

  “Go.”

  They set off down the dirt path. Dark lay heavy between the trees. Otis flicked on the high beams. The firs shone whitely under their light, as if they were composed of bone instead of wood. Terry Redhill crouched in the bed beside Micah. A big man with a thick red beard. Pinpricks of sweat stood out on his forehead.

  The truck prowled along at five miles an hour. The chassis juddered over rocks and stumps. Drool collected in Micah’s mouth; he removed one shell, spat, then jammed it back in. It was a trick he’d learned during the war; the company sniper always kept one cartridge in his mouth.

  It’s the quickest way to get at it, he’d told Micah. Always have one bullet in your mouth for when you really need it.

  Little Heaven receded. Otis flicked on the dome light as he nudged the truck down a steep slope; its knobby tires stuttered over the shale, differentials squealing. Micah and Terry leaned against the cab as the truck tilted downward. The headlights pointed directly at the road, throwing the fringing forest into inky blackness—

  Micah saw it before anyone else, but even he caught it too late. It flared from the left-hand side, his bad side, streaking out of the trees and hammering into the truck. A huge shape rocked the truck on its axles, the driver-side wheels temporarily leaving the ground. Micah tumbled into Terry Redhill, who barely managed to stay in the bed. Charlie let out a muffled shout; Otis hit the gas as the truck slewed sideways, fishtailing toward the pines. Micah cast a glance through the cab’s rear window and saw the driver-side door was dented inward. Otis’s femur was punched through the fabric of his Carhartts at midthigh, a spike of bone shining deliriously white in the dome light. Otis’s face was bleached and greasy with shock and—with the calm observation that always came to Micah in times like this—he could see that Otis’s foot was pinned to the gas pedal.

  The truck accelerated and struck a knotty pine. Micah was thrown against the cab. He ricocheted back, skidding across the bed until his head hit the tailgate. Terry Redhill fell over the side of the truck with a hoarse squawk. The engine cut out, its tick-tick dimming into the nothingness. Out of that enveloping silence came other sounds. Grunts and howls and brays and hisses.

  Terry Redhill stood up woozily. His face was bathed in blood from a cut running slantwise across his forehead.

  “Whuzzat?” he said dazedly. “Whuzz—?”

  Micah didn’t get a good look at the thing that killed Terry Redhill. There was some mercy in that. It darted down from the trees. Part snake, part bird or bat or some winged creature at any rate. It carried with it the ripe stink of death. Micah did catch a glimpse of eyes—a dozen or more bunched like grapes within the runneled ruin of its face, or one of its faces—all staring with bright, malignant hunger. It flapped down with a sort of breezy insouciance, not at all predatory, as if it had merely happened upon Terry Redhill by accident and decided to do what it did to him.

  It . . . it enfolded Terry. Somehow lovingly. Terry’s head, specifically. Those sheer, dark, bat-like wings wrapped around his skull in a suffocating embrace.

  “Whuzz—?”

  What happened next was hard to explain. The scene was chaotic, the light thin, the air swimmy with diesel fumes from the ruptured gas tank. Micah was aware of the smallest details—the oily taste of the shotgun shells in his mouth, the thin fingernail paring of the moon through the trees. He experienced the following events with senses that were superattuned in some ways and dulled in others. Later, he would suspect his mind had done so automatically, shielding him from things that would have driven him mad on sight.

  The thing that was wrapped around Terry Redhill’s head began to flex. To constrict. The whiplike cord upon which it had unfurled from the tree thinned with tension. Terry issued terrible choking sounds that were muffled by the stinking flesh draped over his face—flesh so sheer Micah could see the man’s pain-wrenched features. Those muffled chokes quickly became squeals.

  The thing tensed, every part of its awful musculature quivering; then it torqued spastically—it reminded Micah of a man struggling to open a stubborn jar of strawberry jam, that moment when the seal finally gives. This was followed by a wet ripping note. A fan of blood jetted from Terry Redhill’s neck with incredible pressure and painted the side of the truck.

  The thing ascended into the tree again. It took Terry’s head with it. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. Terry’s body stood there for another moment, blood fountaining from the raggedly severed neck, before collapsing to its knees like a penitent Pentecostal. Headless Terry fell forward and struck the truck with a hollow bong.

  Something rushed from the trees at Micah. He caught the briefest inkling of its shape: a trio of timber wolf heads thrust from a long and eelish body rippling with legs of all different sorts. He raised the shotgun and fired as it hurdled Terry
Redhill’s corpse; buckshot tore into the thing, ripping away gobbets of flesh; the impact steered it off course so that, instead of hitting Micah flush, it glancingly struck him, one of its claws or teeth tearing across his rib cage to leave a sizzling note of pain. He fell, his skull striking the tailgate and shooting stars across his vision. The thing carried over the truck bed, a horrifying freight train of legs and snouts and snapping jaws.

  Micah staggered up and took aim as it retreated, pumping the Ithaca and firing three shots. The muzzle exploded with flame, illuminating the woods in brief flashes. A chunk blew off the thing’s hide, splattering the side of a ponderosa pine. It squealed and reared—the sinuous segmented movement of a snake sitting up, its spinal cord popping like chained firecrackers—as it moved deeper into the forest. Much else lurked there in the trees, slavering and snapping.

  “Otis! Oh God, Otis!”

  Charlie was trying to haul his friend out of the truck. Charlie’s nose must’ve broken when his face collided with the windshield; it was squashed off to one side, blood painting the bottom of his face. But Charlie was focused on Otis, who was trapped. The crumpling door had not only broken his leg high up—it had also pinned his foot. Otis’s face was tallowy with shock. Slick balls of sweat rolled down his cheeks. The pain was such that he’d vomited; under the fritzing dome light, Micah could see chunks of that evening’s hastily eaten meal on his shirt.

  “Otis!” Charlie hauled on his friend’s arm, too terrified to be gentle about it. “We got to get out.”

  Otis’s eyes rolled back in his skull. A ludicrous half smile graced his face. Micah had seen it before. Pain, shock, and adrenaline can put a man into a beatific dream state.

  “Come on!” Charlie jerked Otis, who shook like a rag doll. Blood shot from the compound fracture and spritzed the dashboard.

  Something thumped off the truck’s roof and bounced into the bed. Terry Redhill’s head. Terry’s lips had been bitten away—such clean, straight teeth, Micah thought with dreamy panic; he must have had a good dentist—and his eyeballs had been sucked out. Half his scalp had been peeled back like a stubborn toupee, from the rear of his skull to the front; gravity folded it down as Micah watched, a vein-threaded red curtain draping Redhill’s ruined face.