Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

Amos grabbed Virgil’s collar and shook him until his teeth rattled.

  “This is happening.” He pointed the pistol at Virgil’s chest. “Now is not the time to go soft. If you’re not with me, Brother Swicker, I am afraid my use for you is incredibly limited.”

  Virgil gawped at him openmouthed. Numbly, he nodded. “Okay.”

  “Go to the vestry and hold the door open. Wait for me there.”

  Obediently, Virgil retreated. Amos turned to the congregation in time to see Doc Lewis staggering toward him, arms outflung as if in mimicry of some horror show boogeyman. His eyes bulged so far from their sockets that Amos could see their underswells pooled with blood. Lewis’s lips were skinned back and his teeth gritted; he vomited but didn’t open his mouth, so the bloody pulp came out his nose, twin jets of ropelike red.

  Lewis’s hands closed around Amos’s throat; his mitts were so big that they encircled Amos’s beanpole neck entirely, fingers touching at the back. He squeezed with amazing force, considering he was choking to death on tatters of his own throat lining. His breath bathed Amos’s face, rank as meat seared in stearic acid. His eyes looked comical, yet they were filled with swarming hatred. They were the eyes of a man who could see, truly see, for the first time.

  Lewis was steadily crushing the Reverend’s windpipe; if Amos couldn’t twist free, he was convinced the man’s fingernails would punch through his skin and rip out his windpipe. Amos brought the pistol up. The barrel dimpled the underside of Lewis’s chin. Lewis grunted quizzically, blobs of bloody tissue ejecting from his nose as he squeezed tighter—

  Amos pulled the trigger.

  The bullet tore Lewis’s face open from bottom to top. It cleaved his chin, splitting bone and muscle, then blew his nose apart in fleshy wings, burrowed through the skin between his eyes and bisected his forehead before continuing upward to bury itself in the chapel roof. The pressure on Amos’s throat relented; he stumbled back, gagging. Lewis reeled in a drunken circle, blood geysering from his exposed nasal cavities, staring cross-eyed at the tragic ruin of his face. He sat down on his ass dejectedly and inelegantly, an infant taking a tumble. He gazed up at Christ on His cross, his eyes pleading, before his head dipped to touch his chest. He slumped steadily forward until his skull was resting on the waxed boards.

  Amos backed toward the vestry, giggling now—a shrill loony note, Ah-hee-hee-ah-hee!—as the congregants shuddered through what he assumed must be their death throes. The smell of blood perfumed the chapel; the temperature seemed to have zoomed up twenty degrees in the last minute. The children continued to scream; a few of them had lurched to the main doors, which were locked, in an attempt to get help. From whom? Who wasn’t here?

  The outsider woman with the burn, the Reverend realized—Virgil said the other three had left the compound, but she was still here. There was also the very slim possibility that a few others hadn’t attended. No matter. Amos would deal with them soon.

  He walked backward to the vestry, still facing the pews. He took it all in. His flock—the deceitful scabs, the filthy betrayers—were dying in wretched agony, coughing up scraps of their guts as their children lay on the floor insensate or still clinging to their parents as they expired.

  God’s will be done, he thought with tremendous satisfaction.

  Another man was tottering down the aisle toward him. His face was plastered with blood to the point that Amos could no longer identify him. Earl the Pearl, is that you? Why the long face, Earl? Oho-o-ho! Amos backed into the vestry and locked the door. He turned and saw Virgil sitting in the corner, shivering. Amos grimaced. He hoped the blubbering clod could hold it together until his usefulness dried up.

  Amos crossed to his desk and removed the claw hammer stashed in the drawer. Somebody hit the vestry door.

  “Earl the Pearl, don’t interrupt!” Amos said, and hooted laughter. “Can’t you see I’m busy in here? Make an appointment with my secretary!”

  A pair of fists pounding . . . but as the seconds drew on, their force ebbed. Soon nothing but a kittenish scratching could be heard from the other side of the door.

  FIRST, NATE HEARD THE SCREAMS. Then the gunshot.

  He was outside the bunkhouse with Ellen. They had watched everyone file into the chapel. Soon after, they heard the Reverend sermonizing. Nate pictured everyone inside, eyes closed and swaying. Things might turn out okay, he thought. Maybe God really was watching over them again.

  Shortly after that the screaming had started. Ellen went stiff. She grabbed Nate’s hand. The shrieks inside the chapel ascended to a shrill peak and stayed there. Next came the loud bang. Nate wouldn’t have been sure a year ago, but by now he’d heard enough gunshots at Little Heaven to know that sound.

  “No” was all Ellen said.

  They stood in the chilly night with the woods silent beyond the fence. Who was doing the shooting? His father was in there. And the Conkwrights, whom Nate liked a whole bunch. And some others he guessed were decent enough.

  Neither Nate nor Ellen moved. Nate’s legs were locked up—someone might as well have bolted his knees together. Clearly something horrible was happening. Could he help? He yanked his hand away from Ellen’s—“Nate!” she cried out—and stole toward the chapel.

  He crossed the square as if in a dream; the momentum was sickening, unstoppable. The screams intensified, pulsing against his eardrums. As he got closer, he heard other noises: choking, wheezing.

  He crept around the side of the chapel. The blood pounding in his skull made him dizzy. He had to brace himself on the wall so he didn’t faint. A terrible pressure inside his head pushed against his eyeballs and nose so hard that he had to breathe through his mouth, which had gone dry, his lips glued together with pasty spit. He curled his fingers over the windowsill and peeked inside.

  WHEN AMOS OPENED the vestry door again, a blood-slick body slumped forward to hit his shoes. Amos roughly kicked it aside and passed down the aisle, pistol in one hand and hammer in the other.

  A strange light had entered his eyes. A mincing, eager refraction that had lain dormant for his whole life, really, apart from a few brief and secretive incidents where it had been allowed to glow brightly. There was nothing to stop it now. That light was free to stoke itself into a gleeful inferno.

  He high-stepped down the aisle over the twitching bodies of his worshippers. A few of the older children were still conscious, beating their fists weakly against the doors. The younger ones were already insensate.

  A hand manacled around his ankle. Amos followed it to the body of Nell Conkwright, the rancid sow, lying facedown next to her unconscious daughter. The flesh of her fingertips had been eaten away by the acidic vomit she’d hacked up. She was mumbling something. A prayer, a curse—who cared? Amos shook his ankle free in disgust. Then he set his foot on her shoulder and shoved her onto her back. Her eyes were milky, flecks of bloody vomit smeared on her face. Her skin sizzled as the drain cleaner continued to eat into it. She kept mumbling even though most of her teeth had fallen out, her gums stripped back to the bone, her mouth sagging inward like an old pumpkin left to rot on a front stoop.

  “O ye of little faith,” Amos whispered. “You did this to yourself, heathen. And to your child, too.”

  The woman’s face wrenched into an expression Amos took as mortal terror. She reached blindly for her daughter. Amos raised the hammer and brought it down on her skull. He’d never hit someone with a hammer, so he didn’t know how hard he ought to do it—as hard as possible seemed wisest, but at the last instant he quailed, so the hammer impacted Nell Conkwright’s head with a flat smack, taking away a coin-sized blot of skin. She moaned and retched again. Amos gritted his teeth and flipped the hammer around to the claw end and brought it down again much harder. It punched through the top of Nell Conkwright’s head. Success! Now she thrashed and yowled; Amos felt the thrum of her body all the way up the hammer’s wooden shaft. He wrenched the claw free and continued on. He did not notice the horrified face of Reggie Longpre’s boy hovering
at the window.

  Movement to his left. He marked someone crawling toward the doors. He expected it to be Bart Kennick or Shane Weagel, who were among Little Heaven’s hardiest specimens—but land sakes alive, if it wasn’t Reginald Longpre. Reggie was near the exit on his bloody hands and knees. Saying something, too, though it came out all mush-mouthed. Nate, I’m sorry, it sounded like.

  Amos stepped over a half dozen bodies as if they were sandbags, making his way to the front. Only one boy was trying to open the doors now; Amos tucked the hammer under his armpit and cupped his hand over the boy’s face and pushed hard; the boy groaned and fell, curling into a fetal ball. Amos unlocked the doors and threw them open with a flourish.

  “Monsieur,” he remarked to Reggie, “you look as if you could use some fresh air.”

  Reggie crawled past Amos, perhaps not even cognizant he was there. Amos took no offense at this, seeing as Reggie was likely blind from the cleaner burns. Sturdy ole Reg made it all the way out the doors, struggling down the swaybacked steps onto the trampled grass. His palms slipped, and he sprawled on his belly. He wormed around on the ground; the sight filled Amos with revulsion. He stepped forward, set his foot firmly on the back of Reggie’s neck, and shoved him down into the dirt. Then he cocked the pistol and—

  ELLEN WATCHED THE CHAPEL DOORS swing open. She caught a brief glimpse of the insides—bodies lying on the ground or slumped over the pews—before her attention was stolen by the sight of her sister’s ex crawling out the doors. By the light streaming out of the chapel, she could see that Reggie was covered from head to toe in gore. He squirmed awkwardly, chest heaving, strings of bloody drool swaying from his lips. He clawed his way down the steps and made it a few more feet before collapsing.

  The Reverend followed Reggie out. He walked with a purpose, seemingly unhurt. He held something in each hand. Ellen watched, awestruck with horror, as the Reverend stomped on the back of Reggie’s neck, forcing a sad bleat out of the servile mailman, then cocked the pistol in his right hand and fired it point-blank at Reggie’s head.

  The gun issued a sharp crack. The feathery fringe of hair at the back of Reggie’s head—it must have been months since his last haircut—puffed up as the slug drilled into his skull. Reggie grunted softly, as if in mild disagreement with something the Reverend had said. The bullet corkscrewed through his head and made its exit above his wide gaping eyes, blowing a window of bone out of his forehead. It looks like the box the little bird pops out of in a cuckoo clock, Ellen thought in a daze of fright.

  The Reverend leapt back, loosing a giddy shriek like a boy who’d gotten a jolt from his uncle’s joy buzzer. Reggie’s boots drummed the earth. Virgil Swicker emerged from the chapel doors; he stood transfixed with shock. The Reverend raised the hammer in his other hand and swung it into the broken bowl of Reggie’s skull. Wet clots spattered his face. He hooted as he brought the hammer down again, again, his pompadour unraveling as he sweated through the pomade, his hair hanging in lank wings over his ears like a hardcover book opened in the middle.

  Ellen did not move. She was physically unable to. The world fractured into shards like an enormous mirror shattering, and behind it lay a black hopeless place teeming with madness and suffering and death.

  The Reverend looked up. He saw her. He grinned. He raised the pistol and fired. The bullet zipped past her head. An instant later she heard the pop!

  She turned and ran. The gun went off again; the slug drove into the siding of a bunkhouse ten yards ahead. Ellen ducked, zigzagging. She flashed around the side of the nearest outbuilding, noticing an uncapped drum of weed killer sitting half shadowed inside. Another gunshot. She flinched but kept running.

  Her mind buzzed; it was hard to think, to plan anything more than putting one foot in front of the other. The gates loomed into view. The woods were menacing, yes, but who was to say things hadn’t become more dangerous inside Little Heaven now?

  She skidded to a stop at the main gates and wormed through the gap. The forest lay a hundred yards off. She checked up, her shoes scuffling in the dust—then she saw a shadow elongating around the shed and knew the Reverend was hot after her. Trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she bolted. The woods reached out for her. Another shot rang out. Ellen hit the woods at a dead sprint; the temperature dropped as soon as she entered the canopy of trees. Her feet went out from under her; she crashed down on the carpet of pine needles. She got to her knees and cast a panicked glance behind her; the forest was too dark to make out anything beyond the ten feet of trees and bush. She hoped to God those things might leave her alone, at least for the next few minutes.

  She peered through the trees at the compound. The Reverend stood at the gates, squinting into the trees. He pulled the pistol’s trigger again and again; all he got was a dry click. He bared his teeth, which gleamed amid the bloody canvas of his face. He smashed the hammer against the gate in frustration, then set off toward the chapel.

  Ellen waited thirty seconds. She couldn’t be sure the Reverend wasn’t still watching. Perhaps he’d taken the time to reload the gun. But she couldn’t just sit here.

  She crept out of the woods but remained in the shadows of the trees. She slunk around the perimeter of Little Heaven to the woodpile, which was stacked ten feet long and six feet high, covered with a burlap tarp. Her mind was still reeling. What the hell had happened? The Reverend had gone mad—that was the only certainty. Unless he had been crazy from the start, which was not entirely impossible to conceive.

  Her next panicked thought: Nate! Ellen could only hope he hadn’t seen the slugs driving into his father’s head.

  She crept around the woodpile and slipped under the burlap tarp. The air was laden with the smell of pinesap. She crawled to the front and lifted the flap, peeking out. Her vantage provided a view of Little Heaven; she could see clear across the square to the chapel. Its doors open, light spilling out. The Reverend came into sight again. Ellen saw him speaking with Virgil. Then they went inside and began to drag bodies out. They didn’t look like adults. Too small for that.

  Had everyone been slaughtered? Ellen crouched under the tarp, her hands cut and bleeding. It didn’t seem possible, and yet . . .

  What kind of devil would do such a thing? If only Micah and Minerva were here. They wouldn’t let the Reverend get away with it. They would—

  Something crashed into the burlap, nearly knocking her down. She shoved herself back on her heels until her spine sat flush with the timber pile as something blundered around on the other side of the tarp. She stifled a scream, expecting a bullet or a knife or talon to pierce the burlap and shut her lights out for good—

  The tarp rose. Nate peered in at her. “Hey,” he whispered. He crawled under. They hugged. Nate was trembling. They both were.

  “How did you find me?” she said.

  “I saw you running. I hid behind the big warehouse.”

  “The Reverend didn’t—?”

  “See me? Don’t think so.”

  “Did you see . . . ?”

  “Inside the chapel?” Nate let out a choked sob. “They’re dead. The Reverend killed Nell Conkwright. I saw him do it . . . They’re all dead, I think.”

  “Everyone?”

  “The grown-ups. The other kids . . . I don’t know. Maybe not. I saw some of them. They weren’t as bloody as the grown-ups.”

  They lifted the tarp and peeked out. Virgil and the Reverend were dragging the children’s bodies out and lining them up on the ground.

  “What the hell are they doing now?” said Ellen.

  VIRGIL WAS UTTERLY LOST.

  Never did he imagine it could go this way. He wouldn’t ever have agreed to come to Little Heaven if he had thought, for even one second, that things could—

  Blood. More blood than he had ever seen. More than he thought bodies could possibly hold. You look like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag—Cyril had once told Virgil this after a string of hard-
drinking nights. That had been Virgil’s thought while gazing over the bodies in the chapel. Ten pounds of blood in a five-pound bag. Where had it all come from? Some horrible magic trick. It was as if extra blood, buckets of it, had leaked through the chapel floorboards—And up through the ground came a bubblin’ cruuude. Oil, that is. Black gold! Texas tea!—to mix with the stuff pouring from the worshippers’ mangled bodies.

  Virgil hadn’t liked any of them to begin with. Shrill Goody Two-shoes, the lot. He would happily take their money, but not their lives. They didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserved this.

  “Brother Swicker!”

  Virgil turned to find the Reverend crossing the square toward him. The gun was pointing at Virgil’s chest. His own gun.

  “Bullets,” the Reverend said. “Do we have more?”

  Virgil stood at the chapel entrance. The smell of blood was hot and slimy in his nose. He wondered if this was what slaughterhouse workers inhaled all day—a mist of blood like the air on a foggy morning. How did the stench not drive them batshit? It wormed into his mouth and ears until he was drowsy with it. He wanted to crawl into the darkest space he could find, curl up, and close his eyes.

  “Bullets?” he said dazedly. “I think . . . uh . . .”

  The Reverend’s face swarmed out of the night, so close that Virgil could see the oily blackheads on his nose. His features were alive with tics and flutters, as if drumstick-legged locusts were trapped desperately under his skin. The Rev’s arm swung in a big loop and the gun cracked Virgil on the side of the head. He sprawled on the chapel floor, dimly amazed at the change in the short-assed fraudster. The Reverend now terrified him worse than Cyril ever had.

  “Up,” the Reverend said curtly. “Up-up-up!”

  Virgil woozily heaved himself to his feet. His hand made contact with the cooling limb of a dead worshipper and he cringed. The Reverend grabbed him by the collar.

  “We must hurry.” The Rev’s breath stunk of bitter bile. “It will be here soon.”