by Nick Cutter
He was fifty yards from Ellen’s Oldsmobile when the bike’s engine rose to a pained squeal. Smoke poured from the transmission compartment as the gears stripped loose. The bike sputtered once and died. Ebenezer pushed the bike to the car. He laid it down reverentially.
“Thank you,” he said to it. “Thank you so much.”
The car keys were still tucked under the bumper where Micah had stashed them. He slid the key into the lock and sat in the driver’s seat. He gripped the steering wheel. He stared at himself in the rearview mirror. His skin was grayish, a pallor it had never held before. The top quarter of his left ear was gone, blood dried down his neck. He was not fit for human eyes. But he was alive, goddamn it. Alive.
He pumped the gas pedal and cranked the key. The engine caught with a magnificent roar, that eight-barrel engine rumbling. He backed into the tall grass, swung the big car around, and drove away from the cut. He unrolled the window and let the cool air play over his face.
“Free at last, free at last,” he hooted, “good God almighty, free at last!”
4
“YOU FIGURE the bastard made it?”
Minerva stood at the fence with Micah. It had been hours since Ebenezer had left.
Micah said, “Think so.”
Minerva was pretty sure he had, too. The devil’s own luck, that prick.
Little Heaven was chilly in the late morning, skies hung with the threat of rain. The compound was quiet. The things in the woods seemed content to remain where they were so long as everyone in Little Heaven stayed put.
“We got to find them, Shug. Or try, at least.”
“The children?”
“Yeah, Shug. The children.”
Micah said, “We have not heard the last of the Reverend.”
“What do you think he’s up to?”
“Something,” said Micah. “He will commune with God, or so he will tell his flock. Then he will make his move.”
Minerva looked at him, sucked at her teeth, then glanced away. “It’s still weird.”
“What is?”
“You. With two eyes.”
“One is glass.”
“Really? The old one didn’t grow back?” She frowned. “Sorry. I’m ill at ease.”
Minerva hooked her fingers through the fence. The sun fought through a bank of clouds and shone down on the woods. They appeared empty; the things could be clustered closer to the road, disregarding the northern flank of Little Heaven. The massive rock formation loomed over the trees. Her fingers tightened.
“I think we’re gonna die here, Shug.”
Micah didn’t reply. She hadn’t expected him to. She closed her eyes. She saw the children clustered together under the kitchen trapdoor, their faces white as gaslight. She opened her eyes again, not wanting to see them anymore. “Any clue where they went?”
Micah angled his chin at the black rock that rose at a blunt angle against the sky.
The two of them walked back to their bunkhouse. The grounds were unoccupied; everyone was inside, out of sight. Ellen and Nate were inside. Nate’s father was not. Minerva grabbed her backpack. She checked the loads on Ellen’s pistol.
“Where are you going?” said Ellen.
“To find the kids,” said Micah, arranging his own pack for travel.
“What about those things?” Ellen said.
“We’re going north, toward the rock formation,” Minerva told her. “They don’t seem to be gathered out that way.”
“But what if they are?”
Minerva gave her a grisly smile. “It’ll be a short trip.”
“Why?” said Nate. “I mean, I saw those kids. I don’t think . . . they may not come with you. It won’t let them.”
“What do you mean, it won’t let them?” Minerva asked.
“That’s what Eli said when he came up through the door,” the boy told her. “It wants you, he said. It wants all of you.”
A chill fled down Minerva’s spine. “If we don’t know what we’re up against, we stand a much worse chance of surviving.”
“But don’t you think Ebenezer will send for—”
“I have no fucking idea,” said Minerva, cutting Ellen off. “I don’t trust that shithead any farther than I can throw him. Sorry for cursing, kid.”
“I want to go,” Ellen said.
Micah shook his head. “Someone needs to stay. Keep an eye.”
“Why me?” said Ellen, pissed.
Nate clutched her hand. “Please don’t go.”
“Okay,” Ellen said after a pause. “We’ll stay.”
“We won’t be gone long,” Minerva promised.
“Just be careful,” Ellen said, looking at Micah.
THEY SET OFF in the early afternoon. Nobody saw them leave—or if so, they made no effort to stop them. What would be the use now? Micah snipped the fence at the farthest edge of Little Heaven with some bolt cutters he’d found in a supply shed. He and Minerva slid through the gap, entering the woods.
The trees were thin, with no discernable trail through them. Minerva had a pistol. Micah went unarmed. A gun felt trivial in his hand now. A useless toy.
They stumbled upon a path of sorts. A band of desolate gray stripping through the woods. Not a thing was living along it. Not a tree, a shrub, a weed. It was as if a scouring fire had burned across the ground, leaving only powdery ash behind.
The path wound toward the black rock, which Minerva could glimpse through gaps in the trees. An unsettling sight: a sheer cliff of blackness so dark it swallowed the sunlight. The woods were silent. They were not being trailed.
They kept their own counsel. Minerva could tell that Micah was exhausted. His encounter with the things that had left Otis and Charlie and the red-bearded man dead had sapped his energy. His stride was labored, but his pace was remorseless. Minerva felt weary, too. It was like living in the shadow of a dormant volcano: you never knew when it was going to erupt and spew molten lava all over you.
Clouds rolled in. Rain pattered down. A steady trickle soon grew to a sheeting downpour. They found shelter under the firs. Minerva became aware of the powerful funk of her body. How long had she gone without bathing? She thought back to her last shower in a motel bathroom a few hours’ drive from Grinder’s Switch. The yellowy water spraying from a calcified nozzle. The mildewed shower curtain with a pattern of bow-tied ducks. How much would she pay to take a shower right now? A thousand dollars? Ten thousand?
The downpour lasted fifteen minutes. The rain turned the ash into a slurry that clung to their boots. They walked until the sun began to fade.
They rounded a bend, and it came into view. The black rock.
The trees petered out, becoming more stunted and palsied. The surrounding landscape was as sandy as a desert. It was monolithic. A giant rotted tooth pushing up from the red sand. It was a mile distant, but Minerva could feel its forbidding magnetism gripping her already—she was a lead filing dragged toward its brooding shadow.
“You do not have to come,” Micah said.
“Like hell I don’t.”
5
YOU’RE ONE DUMB BUNNY, Virgil Swicker.
Virgil’s mother used to say that. His own mother, who was so damn smart she got knocked up eight times by five different daddies. So damn smart she couldn’t wring a shaved nickel out of any of them in child support, so she and her brood lived in a saltbox shack on the edge of the Mojave Desert, sucking on sand. A real smarty-pants, his ma!
But she had him dead to rights. Virgil was dumb. He was just smart enough to know it. Which was a pretty sad place to pin the tail on that particular donkey. If he’d been juuuuust a little dumber—if he could have killed off a few measly IQ points—he probably wouldn’t have been able to grasp how witless he was. And then it wouldn’t have bothered him so much. What a kick in the teeth, huh?
One thing about knowing your limits is you learn how to operate within them. Virgil Swicker had learned early on that his lot in life was being a follower. He felt safest
behind someone else, looking down at that man’s heels. A leader needed smarts and fire and drive. All a follower ever needed to know was where to line up.
Virgil had left home at fifteen to little fanfare; his mother could barely care enough to wave good-bye from the stoop. He hitchhiked to San Francisco and lived on the streets, eating out of dumpsters behind Chinky restaurants. He was a big kid and nobody had raised him right; he started rolling drunks, and that went well for a while before this one rummy wheeled on him with a switchblade. The guy was nimble with that blade, too, even three sheets to the wind—“I’m over from Stockton, motherfucker!” he kept screaming, as if that should mean something to Virgil, as if laying your hands on a wino over from Stockton was a capital crime. That Stockton trash maniac opened a big slash under Virgil’s armpit, then chased him down the street, laughing like a schoolboy, tee-hee-hee—if the nutzoid hadn’t tripped into a gutter, he would have caught Virgil and stabbed his eyes out.
After that, Virgil mooned around the Tenderloin like a kicked dog. There were times he thought about buying a knife or maybe a gun—that bastard with the switchblade wouldn’t have been so high-and-mighty if Virgil had stuck a pistol in his face, bet your ass on that—but he couldn’t afford either of those items. It was in the depths of despair that a single ray of sunlight brightened Virgil’s world. That ray had a name: Cyril Neeps.
They met on a bench in Union Square. Virgil was puffy and scabbed, his teeth loose in his gums from eating dumpster fruit. Cyril was tanned and fit and had this way about him that said, Hey, world, get a load of me! He seemed the kind of man who could do anything he wanted with his life, and Virgil was instantaneously awed by him.
“What’s your story, fella?” Cy had asked without much interest, investigating the cracks of his teeth with a cinnamon-flavored toothpick.
Virgil had hemmed and hawed for about fifteen seconds before Cyril laughed great big, sucked a shred of meat off the tip of the toothpick, and said: “You’re as dumb as a box of rocks, ain’t ya?”
“. . . I guess so.”
Cyril clapped him on the back. “Hey, no big whoop. You probably didn’t spend enough time in your mama’s belly. You came out like a cake that’s still mushy in the middle.”
“I guess.”
“Here, have a toothpick,” Cy said, unwrapping a fresh one. Virgil was overcome by this small charity.
“That’s right, dummy,” Cyril said cheerily. “Use the pointy end.”
There was nothing cruel in the way he said dummy—just stating a fact, which Virgil guessed was true. Cyril would call him dumb in many flavorful ways as their relationship went along. Dumb as a bag of hammers. Three bricks short of a load. Squirrel-headed. Pudding-brained. Not the sharpest pencil in the drawer. Drooling fuckin’ mongoloid when he was running hot. Sometimes Virgil would go red in the face when Cyril said these things, but he never argued. He just wished Cy had the good manners not to mention his dumbness, the way you shouldn’t call attention to the fact that a kid was missing his hand or was blind or something like that. It was mean, pointing out defects. But then, Cyril wasn’t really a nice guy.
But he was smart. A whole lot smarter than Virgil—granted, that was a low bar to clear. But Cyril had command. Presence. When he walked into a room, people looked up. If they looked long enough, they would see Virgil trailing in on his heels. Virgil helped Cyril stick up a few gas stations and a Chinatown grocer. It was dead easy. Cyril laid his hands on a gun. They wore panty hose over their faces. They made good money, too. Fifty bucks here, thirty-seven bucks there. All in cash! Untraceable was the word Cyril used.
Still, they got pinched. Bad luck, was all. They both did a hitch. Two years, sentences reduced due to prison overcrowding. After they got out, they returned to the Tenderloin. Virgil tried to sell his body to the waify mincers and nine-to-five types who trolled the park for rough trade. But Virgil looking how he did, there weren’t many takers. Cyril was tired of him by then, Virgil could tell. He wanted a real partner, someone to help him become the criminal big shot he knew he could be. Someone a damn sight better than shit-a-brick Virgil Swicker. But Cyril never did find that running mate—maybe because he wasn’t such hot shit, Virgil secretly thought.
One day, they wandered through the doors of Amos Flesher’s church. Cyril thought they might steal a chalice or something and pawn it. Instead they met the supreme-o creepster himself, ole Reverend Flesher with his greasy muskrat-pelt hair. Flesher had bumbled out of the whatever-the-fuck-you-call-it, his dressing room where he put on his goofy church clothes. He saw them skulking around.
“You looking for something, fellas?”
He had an aw-shucks way about him. But Virgil could see that was a sham. This was a guy who could spot the angle in a circle.
“Gimme all your money,” Cyril said mock-jokingly, but with that ever-present flint in his eye.
The Rev cocked his head at them. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a flashy roll—a wad of cash. What was a man of God doing with a pimp roll? He peeled off a few twenties and handed them over.
“The Lord provides,” he told them. “Why don’t you come back later? I might have a job for you.”
The Rev saw something in them that he could use. And so it transpired that they came here to Little Heaven, to buttfuck nowhere, to nursemaid a bunch of religious freakos. It wasn’t too bad at first. The Reverend promised them plenty of dough. It was easy work. They would’ve been happy to keep the churchy fuckos in line, really crack the fuckin’ whip, but the Rev’s followers never fell out of line. So most of the time, he and Cy sat around with their thumbs up their asses, feeling antsy. They had plenty of ammo, so they shot their guns off in the woods. But after a while, there wasn’t much to shoot at.
Virgil hated it—nothing but trees and dirt clods and people mumbling prayers. Cyril was madder than a wet hen, too. Little Heaven messed with his brain waves, he said. They tried brewing hooch to stabilize Cyril’s bummed waves, but that plan went tits up.
Then things got weirder. Voices in the woods. Shapes, some even claimed. But nothing you could point a finger at and say: This here, this is messed up. Just a feeling. Everyone started acting hinky, especially the kids. It was sorta like that movie he’d watched at the Presidio a few years back after filching some coins out of a blind beggar’s cup—Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As if the whole damn camp had been taken over by pod people. Virgil half expected to find a bunch of oozing, cracked-open pods down in the kitchen cellar.
Then the outsiders showed up—Virgil hadn’t minded so much, because at least there was nothing much weird about them. They came from the world of streetlights and restaurants and roller-disco rinks, from the real world. But soon after, things got unreal when that kid Eli came back looking like something in the woods had sucked the life out of him . . . and then Cy went missing. Virgil was terrified that he’d run off home without telling him. Just took off in the dead of night. Hasta la vista, Virg, I’ll see you in the funny pages, ole buddy ole chum.
And then just this morning that fucking nigger cunt went and stole a motorcycle. When Virgil went to stop it, he got a goddamn wrench chucked at him. It hit him so hard that he tasted metal on his tongue and his skull rang like a church bell. Before he knew it, the rotten pig-fucker was beating the living daylights out of him! And not a damn one of these religious bumpkins stepped in to stop the long-haired spook. They just let the prick whale away. Go ahead, you thieving foreigner, beat the tar out of a goddamn honest American!
Virgil had woken up in Doc Lewis’s quarters. His forehead was so swollen he looked like a caveman. His eyes were puffed to slits. That wouldn’t have happened if Cy had been around. He would have shot that black bastard dead in his boots. But Cy wasn’t around anymore and it broke Virgil’s heart.
Presently he got out of his bed in Doc Lewis’s bunkhouse and went outside. His face hurt like hell. He walked the fence. Nobody was around. The long-haired English faggot had taken off on the motorbike,
he figured. Virgil hoped he’d gotten ripped apart by the things in the woods, that they ate his stringy black ass like beef jerky. Serve him right.
Clouds gathered overhead. The rain started as a light drizzle and built to a torrent, fat drops drumming on the warehouse roofs. Virgil let the downpour soak him to the skin. As a young boy he used to stand at the edge of the desert on scorching summer days watching chain lightning skate over the hillsides, waiting for the rain to come. There was great relief when those swollen clouds finally split open above him.
He watched the forest. Maybe he should run, too. There was another motorbike, right? He ought to get the hell out of here before things got any worse and—
Something or someone was standing between the trees.
Virgil squinted through the sheeting rain. He was still woozy from the beating that jigaboo had laid on him. For an instant, he pictured a gaggle of witches—these old crones with sagging papery skin and cruel twists of mouths shuffling between the tall dark pines clung with eldritch skeins of moss . . . witches, or perhaps just creatures who dressed to look like witches, but who were in truth more ancient and evil than any witch—
But no. It was just one person. A figure standing motionless in the shadowy canopy of the woods.
“Who’s out there? Who—”
Whatever it was, it came forward fast—spooky fast. One moment it was fifty yards off and the next it was right there, a few feet from the fence. It was Cyril . . . looked like Cy, anyhow. Except the eyes were off. And the way he stood there kinda creaky-looking, like his bones were all busted under his skin.
He looks like somebody already dead. This was Virgil’s trembling thought. His old pal Cy was dead as a doornail, except that little nugget of information hadn’t sunk into his decayed head quite yet. Virgil figured it would have to come as a shock to his dear friend.
“Everything okay, Cy?”
Cyril smiled. His teeth were gray like the dead tooth in his grandma’s mouth with a copper wire around it. Except every one of Cy’s teeth was gray—you’d think he had painted them with lead or something.