by Nick Cutter
Micah fired up into the tree from where the head had fallen. He heard a rippling shriek up there. He saw something latched around the trunk thirty feet up—a jumble of parts, long and arachnid, a sight a human mind couldn’t even summon in a nightmare. Seeing its shape in the muzzle flash, Micah felt as if someone had levered the top off his skull and whispered directly into the twitching gray matter—a terrible secret that he would have to live with the rest of his life. The thing unfurled with effortless grace, its blood pattering down on the truck as it scuttled farther up the tree.
Micah spat the saliva-coated shells into his palm and plugged them into the shotgun. He hopped over the bed. He could die here. In a second, a minute, or anytime between. That fact bestowed an eerie calm within him. This was the world as he’d found it. His only option was to deal with its new parameters.
“Charlie!” Micah shouted, grabbing the man’s shoulder. Charlie turned to face him; his face swam with mindless fear. “He is stuck!” Micah said. “We must free his leg.”
Charlie’s mouth opened and closed like a fish dying on land. But he nodded. “Okay, okay, okay, okay—”
Micah handed him the shotgun. “They are everywhere.”
He climbed inside the cab through the passenger door. It was hot and tight and perfumed with blood and diesel. The windshield was spiderwebbed where Charlie’s head had struck. Micah glanced past Otis, out the window, where shapes were massing some twenty yards off.
“Otis, sit tight,” Micah said, as if the man had any other choice. “This is going to hurt.”
Otis issued a garbled note that Micah took as one of recognition. He crawled down into the foot well. Wires hung from the busted fuse box. He wormed past Otis’s right foot, shoving it rudely aside; Otis screamed as the pain shot up his leg. Micah didn’t apologize; there was no time. He squirmed forward until he was able to close his hand around Otis’s boot, pinned under the buckled metal. He wrapped his fingers through the bootlaces and yanked as hard as he could. Otis screamed afresh. Micah couldn’t summon much force with his body at a bad angle, one arm partially trapped under his chest. But he was redlined on adrenaline and this helped. Otis just kept on screaming. Let it out, friend, Micah thought. Maybe it’ll keep those things at bay.
One hard wrench succeeded in popping Otis’s heel out; Micah let out a small cry of delight as Otis’s boot slid from the crimped metal. He just had to crawl his fingers in a little farther and yank his toes out now—
Charlie screeched. The shotgun boomed.
Something crashed through the windshield above Micah. The dome light dimmed. Next something was inside the cab with them. Micah felt its weight, heavy as several anvils, pressing down on the steering wheel. It poured itself through the shattered glass, thick and black and alive with horrifying industry. In Micah’s fractured view, it resembled nothing more than a ball of parts: the most dangerous and vile bits of every beast and bird and reptile that had once inhabited these woods. Teeth and claws and fangs dripping venom—and eyes. Oh Christ, all the eyes. Some of those eyes spotted Micah. Parts of the thing’s lunatic anatomy oriented on him, hissing and rasping, darting down. But he was under the steering wheel, which provided a barrier; he could see things squirming around the wheel, their mouths inches from his face. One of the thing’s limbs hit the horn; it blatted on and on, a high curious note.
The thing was more interested in Otis. He’d stopped screaming, now face-to-face with it. Otis’s lips trembled as he called out, oh so weakly, for his God.
Then the thing attacked. Otis might as well have walked into a garbage disposal. His face was shredded, legs jittering crazily as he was torn to bits. Blood burst forth and sheeted down, a veritable waterfall of the red stuff splattering Micah’s face.
Micah heeled himself across the foot well toward the passenger door. He heard Charlie scream as he pumped the shotgun.
Nonononono—
BOOM.
The cab filled with noise and light and smoke. Micah’s hearing cut out from the blast; his skull filled with a tinny ringing. The thing attacking Otis jerked as the buckshot riddled it, but it didn’t stop. It hardly mattered. It had torn the first three inches off Otis’s head, which now stopped at his ears: a clean cliff of red meat and cartilage, his jaw hanging cockeyed on a strip of sinew.
Charlie fired again. The thing squalled and retreated, shimmying out of the hole in the windshield. Micah levered himself out of the cab and staggered back, slumping into Charlie.
The thing that had killed Otis was sprawled across the truck’s hood. Twelve feet long, thick around as a trash can. It scuttled backward, its movement more insectoid than animal, claws screaming on the hood.
Micah grabbed the shotgun from Charlie and fired. The first shot blew a hole in the thing’s face. The next shot went into its chest. The thing slumped off the hood, still thrashing and not even close to dead.
Micah turned and started back toward Little Heaven—then tripped over Terry Redhill’s corpse where it slumped against the truck. He went down, snuffled dirt, and spotted the gun tucked in Redhill’s waistband. He grabbed it and gave it to Charlie.
“Go.”
Charlie was staring at Otis. At his friend’s dripping carcass.
“He is dead, Charlie. Now, or we are dead, too.”
Dazedly, Charlie followed. Micah pulled shells from his pocket and thumbed them into the shotgun. The truck’s horn blared on and on. He and Charlie staggered away from the wreck. Its taillights winked in the dark. Micah noted the rip in his shirt. A five-inch slit across his ribs, the meat flayed open.
The two of them scrambled up the slope to the main road. Little Heaven was five hundred yards off. They hadn’t even made it half a mile.
Charlie stumbled. Micah grabbed his hand. Charlie was in shock. Even having glimpsed those things the other night, Charlie could not wrap his head around what they had done to Terry Redhill and his dear friend Otis.
Partner, it is happening, Micah thought as he hauled Charlie on.
The road peeled away from the trees, bathed in creamy moonlight. The night bristled with sounds, but they had dimmed to a low and satisfied purr.
“Otis,” Charlie mumbled. “Oh no, oh no, Otis—”
Something streaked out of a dogwood thicket behind them—a liquid ripple of movement. It passed behind Micah almost soundlessly, an enormous bird zipping low across the earth. He tried to look at it, but a warning klaxon went off in his brain—Danger, Will Robinson!—that kept his head from making the necessary revolution.
Charlie grunted like a man who’d been punched in the gut. His hand—no, his whole arm—dropped three feet. He’d fallen again.
“Come on, Charlie,” Micah said.
Charlie wouldn’t get up this time. Micah had to haul Charlie across the ground. Charlie’s fingers tightened and cut off Micah’s circulation.
“I got you.”
Charlie wasn’t so hard to pull now. Light as a feather, in fact. Must be the adrenaline kicking in. Little Heaven was getting closer. Micah would haul Charlie back and make new plans. A daylight run when they could see the fuckers coming.
Charlie’s fingers began to relax. Micah clenched his own and pulled him another five feet before Charlie’s belt got hung up on a root or some other snag.
“Jesus, Charlie. Help me.”
Micah turned to look. Charlie wasn’t there—the bottom half, anyway. His body had been torn apart at the hips. His legs were gone; Micah couldn’t see them anywhere. Charlie’s guts spilled out of his chest cavity, long ropes with a whitish-blue sheen that trailed ten yards behind him until they blended into the gloom. His face was set in an expression of awestruck shock: eyes wide open, lips peeled back from his teeth.
“Come on,” Micah said stupidly. “It will be okay.” He pulled until Charlie’s halved body became unstuck from the snag. He kept hauling Charlie mindlessly, his brain stuck in a time warp where Charlie was still alive. Charlie’s remains made a graceless burping sound as another knot
of intestines drooled out and unraveled across the cracked earth.
Micah’s strength was deserting him; he was now using the shotgun as a cane. “Okay . . . we are going to be okay, Charlie . . .”
Let him go, Micah. He is dead.
With a moan, Micah did. Charlie’s arm flopped to the ground. Micah staggered on. Fuck the things that had killed these men. Micah would murder them all and burn their carcasses until the air went black with their smoke.
A DOZEN OR SO PEOPLE were clustered at the gates of Little Heaven. The truck’s horn continued to blare. Seeing Micah alone, Maude Redhill let loose a desolate wail. She was joined by Charlie’s wife; Charlie’s son only stared at Micah openmouthed, not yet gripping what had happened—he was too young to understand that, yes, everything really could go to shit just this quickly.
The gates closed once Micah had shuffled through. His face was wet with blood—Otis’s or Terry’s or Charlie’s, he had no clue. He crumpled to his knees as two dozen eyes stared at him, waiting on some kind of explanation.
“It is death out there” was all he could manage.
Maude Redhill flung herself on him. She grabbed double handfuls of hair and yanked viciously, snapping his head side to side. Micah let her do it, too tired to fight back and feeling that she deserved her wrath.
“Bastard!” she screamed. “What did you do to them? What did you do to my Terryyyyyyyy!”
Somebody finally pulled her off. Maude Redhill’s sobs spiraled up into the night.
God did not hear her. Or if He did, He kept His peace.
The devil had come to Little Heaven.
1
THEY PASSED THROUGH several villages unseen and unheard, skirting settlements like coyotes on the lope. The Long Walker carted Petty Shughrue swiftly over great distances. She wondered what had become of the preacher back at the carnival. How badly did the townspeople hurt him? The Long Walker hadn’t even seemed all that delighted when those men started to beat the preacher down. It had actually looked bored.
The Long Walker carried them up a hillside and across the narrow spine of a ridge. Petty could not help but notice how the plants wilted wherever the thing passed. A trail of death.
The ridge fed down to a grassy valley. A faint prickling of light between the trees. They came upon an isolated shack. Smoke spindled from a flue in its roof. Firelight cut between the chinking of its logs. Skins were tacked to hide stretchers near the door.
The Long Walker’s posture was loosey-goosey, shoulders rounded forward and head hanging between its shoulders. Its fingers twitched at the ends of its hands as if in search of some more spirited pursuit.
“Is someone out there?” came a man’s voice from inside the shack. “I can hear you.”
From inside, there came the popping of knots in the fire. After that, the unmistakable cocking back of a shotgun’s hammers.
“I will ask once more. Then I must assume you mean to cause harm. Who the hell is out there?”
Finally, the Long Walker opened its mouth—its terrible, skull-spanning mouth. In the moonlight, Petty could see its insides: the soft, pulpy flesh of a toothless infant.
“It is your mother, Cedric Finnegan Yancy!” the Long Walker cried in a voice that could not be its own—this was the shrill tone of a woman. “Will you not come out to greet me?”
Silence. Then a trembling voice: “That ain’t you, Ma. You’re dead, God rest your soul. You been dead eight years now.”
“And whose fault is that?” the Long Walker said, its lips spreading in a corrosive grin. “Who left his mother when she was just getting sick? Whose departure quickened his mother’s path to the grave?”
When the man finally replied, it was in a tone of disbelief. “What devil lurks past my door?”
“Devil?” The Long Walker laughed. “Devil! Ha! My own son, flesh of my flesh. Come outside, boy. Apologize to your mother. For your sins are plentiful, as we both know. The whoring we may set aside, for what man has not fallen afoul of the pleasures of the flesh? But to leave your own mother, who cradled you and kissed your scraped knees—to leave her alone to die? This, my son, is a sin most unforgivable.”
“They sent me to ’Nam!” the man shrieked. “I was given no choice in the matter!”
“I died in pain greater than you could imagine.” The Long Walker spoke in a crooning singsong. “My body rotted from the inside. The sawbones cut my tits off—the same tits you latched to as an infant to suckle and bite—yes, bite, for you were a cruel nurser. Where did the doctor toss my diseased old tits? To the dogs, for all I know. Nobody was there to speak for me. My husband dead, my ungrateful son gone and run off. I screeched and bled night after night. Nobody cared. Nobody came to help me.”
“Please.” The man’s voice was choked, pleading. “Ma, please.”
“My cunty rotted out, Cedric,” the Long Walker said matter-of-factly. “Everything that had gone off inside of me came right out, slicker than snot on a doorknob. But it was sloooooow. It took months. I lay there for hours in my own shit and ruin. I died alone, all alone.”
A thundering BOOM!—
A ragged hole punched through the shack door, splinters spitting in every direction. Lead shot whizzed past mere inches from Petty’s ear, so close that it sent her hair fluttering.
The Long Walker advanced. The door opened without it even touching the handle, as if blown open by a mammoth gust of wind. The Long Walker’s body expanded, the flaps of its duster billowing, then shrank again to fit through the doorway. It dragged Petty inside with it.
The shack was lit by a kerosene lantern. A fire guttered in a potbellied stove. Animal skins cured on the walls. The man was big and self-sufficient by the looks of it, with a graying beard. He was jacking shells into his double-barreled shotgun as the Long Walker came in.
“Oh God,” the man said, dropping the gun. “Oh no . . .”
He curled up in the corner and covered his face with his hands and shook. He had lived in these inhospitable woods with the howling of wind and wolves, yet he had been reduced to a child at the mere sight of this thing.
“Go away,” he pleaded. “Please just go away.”
The creature seemed even bigger within these confines, its milky skull brushing the roof. A coldness wept off its body, particular to creatures that live at the bottom of the ocean. It crossed the shack, passing the man where he sat mewling, to a tool rack on the wall. Knives and other sharp implements for the flensing, puncturing, and skinning of animal carcasses.
The Long Walker selected one seemingly at random—but Petty could tell that this thing never acted randomly. Its every gesture served some terrible purpose. The knife was fingerling thin. The blade was pitted and rusty, but its edge was sharp—and it became keener, more glittery, when the thing took possession of it, as though the Long Walker’s touch conferred a deeper refinement of its purpose. The Long Walker ran the edge along its fingers. The blade slit its tissue cleanly, but no blood welled: its flesh was flawless porcelain clean through to whatever bone might have lurked at its core.
“Vivisection,” it said. “Is this word familiar to you, my Pet?”
Petty shook her head. The Long Walker flirted the blade over its fingers.
“Oh yes,” it said. “Sometimes it is the only way.”
The Long Walker hunched before her with its arms hugged round its knees, the knife’s tip touching the oiled dirt floor. Its posture did almost nothing to change the sweeping size of its body. Its eyes were very strange indeed. To Petty they resembled Christmas tree ornaments but darker, more secretive—and she could see things moving behind them, their shadows held by the lamp.
“To know something—to truly know that thing—you must open that thing up.”
The man continued to moan. More than anything in the world, Petty wanted to run away, to run and keep running even if that meant she would be alone in the woods. She had an overwhelming sense that the Long Walker was going to show her things soon. Open her eyes to wonderments
she could go several lifetimes without ever knowing.
“The only way to understand anything is to see what makes it tick.” The Long Walker exposed its toothless gums. “Tick. Tick. Tick.” It held the knife by its handle and let the blade swing side to side like the pendulum on a clock. “To see how those things fit together, yes? To expose the soft and delicate parts.”
“You already know how they fit together,” said Petty.
The Long Walker shook its head. “Each is subtly different, my Pet. And it is these subtleties that intrigue.”
She could see that it was excited for what was to come. Its skin jumped with anticipation. Yet mixed in with that excitement was a strain of deep tiredness, as if it had done this exact thing so often that the act had long ago surrendered any enjoyment. Seeing this, Petty felt a weird pity for the thing.
Wretchedly, the man asked: “Am I in hell?”
The Long Walker hung its head between its shoulders. The knife moved from one of its hands to the other, never stopping, as if the blade was white-hot to the touch.
“Hell is a box,” it said to the man. “Yes, it is. Hell is a box not much bigger than your own body. It is dark inside the box, and cold, but the encasement is thin—so thin that you can almost convince yourself that you can break out if you only tried. You cannot feel anything inside this box. But you can hear and . . . sense, to a certain extent. Outside of that box is everyone you ever loved. All the people you have cared for and who care for you. And they are in agony. You cannot touch them. They are screaming, calling for you—your name is always upon their lips. And you cannot go to them or comfort them in any way. And that is your hell, friend. Hell is a box.”
The knife’s handle danced along its knuckles, a neat trick. The shadows thickened and the lamp’s light bled low.