Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Ellen was breathing regularly. He pinned one of her eyelids open; her pupil dilated when the light touched it. Okay, okay, she wasn’t—

A hand slid around his hips. He tried to knock it away, but it was too quick; the hand unsheathed the bayonet. Someone crashed down on him. A pudgy, antic body wriggling on top of his chest. The Reverend: Micah could tell by the reek of his goddamn pomade.

THE FIRE WAS CONSUMINGever-greater swathes of the forest.

“How much longer?” Eb asked.

Minerva checked her watch. Seven minutes had passed. The children were waiting in the track machine. Eb sat behind the wheel.

Every man jack of us has to make his own decision in this nasty old world. Minerva figured Shug had made his. She hoped his was the right one for him, and she hoped the decision she was about to make was right for everyone else.

Please, Micah. Just get your stubborn ass out of there alive.

“Fire it up,” she said to Ebenezer. “Let’s cut and run.”

“WORMWOOD!” AMOS SCREECHED,stabbing frantically with the bayonet. “The star’s name was called Worm-wooOOood—!”

Micah’s hand closed around the blade. Amos jerked it away, raised it to stab down again. Micah’s palm and fingers opened, blood pissing from the gash. Micah managed to corral the Reverend’s wrist as he brought the bayonet down; the tip of the knife struck his glass eye; he felt the glass splinter all through his skull bone as the knife scrrrrriiiiitched across its surface.

“Wormwood!” Amos yelped, and laughed like a schoolboy.

Micah knocked the bayonet away. The Reverend was still on top of him. Micah jabbed upward with his thumb; he felt it sink into the Reverend’s eye, which burst with a ripe pop. Vitreous jelly spilled down the back of his hand. The Reverend fell away, shrieking. Micah grabbed his ankle. Oh no. You’re not going anywhere. Micah’s rage was overwhelming. He skinned up Amos Flesher’s thrashing body—“My eye!” he was screaming. “My eye my eye my eye!”—grabbed twin fistfuls of his stinking hair and rammed his skull into the ground again and again.

The Reverend soon went limp. Micah crawled over to the flashlight and shone it on Flesher. He was knocked out, his nose shattered, blood bubbling from his nostrils.

He pinned Ellen in the beam. Her eyelids were fluttering. He crawled over to her.

“Can you stand?”

“Micah?” She blinked, squinting into the light. “Where are we?”

“Nowhere we want to be. Can you stand?”

“I think so.”

Micah retrieved the bayonet. He swept the flashlight around until it fell upon the baby. It lay facing him now, its eyes focused on him with feverish need.

Give that one to me , it said. The trickster.

Yes , Micah thought. You deserve each other.

Micah stalked over to Flesher. He jammed his knee into the Reverend’s spine. Flesher moaned and spat up blood. Micah slit Flesher’s shirt with clinical skill, exposing his pallid back. He pinned him easily to the stone; the Reverend bleated and cried out.

“Father! Don’t let him hurt me!”

But the thing that the Reverend beseeched offered no aid. Its saggy mouth opened and closed as it watched both men with eager, feral eyes.

Micah stabbed the bayonet into the Reverend’s back a few inches above his hips. The Reverend squealed like a stuck pig. Micah then proceeded to hack a trench into Flesher’s back. He set about his task efficiently, the way he had always worked at such grim bodily matters; he grunted with strain as he sawed through flesh, but that sound was drowned out by the Reverend’s screams.

When the trench was deep and long enough, he backed away. He wiped the blood off his lips with the back of his hand, watching as the Reverend crawled into a corner of the chamber. Micah followed him with the flashlight. Flesher curled fearfully against the wall. His trousers were heavy with blood. His face had become childlike in its fear.

“Please,” he whimpered. “Don’t hurt me anymore. Be merciful.”

“You stay here,” Micah said.

“I will.” The Reverend nodded, exaggerated bobs of his head. “It’s all I ever wanted.”

Micah left him in the vaulted room. He and Ellen traced their way back through the tunnel. At first they could hear the Reverend mewling, and then—like a bully trying to regain some of his old bravado—he began to scream: “I’ll kill you! Kill you all! Wormwoooood! ” They ignored him. Micah told himself he would not return to that black box, not for all the money in the world. Not if God himself gave the order.

They came to a fork in the tunnel labyrinth. Micah began to crawl to the left—

“No,” Ellen said. “This way.”

He followed her. Their breath knocked harshly inside the cramped space. Micah tried not to think of the children’s faces lit by the muzzle flash: innocent again in the final reckoning, their expressions a mixture of bewilderment, anguish, and fear.

They reached the tunnel mouth. The ladder hung down the side of the basin. Ellen climbed it with obvious difficulty, her balance wonky from blood loss. Micah followed her up, steadying her when needed. When they reached the top, he pulled the ladder up. He did not want the Reverend following them—or anything else, for that matter.

They made their way through the cleft. There came a soft, moist pattering. The olms—those weird salamander things—were falling from the roof. A disgusting shower of albino amphibian flesh.

“They will not hurt us,” said Micah.

“I know,” Ellen said. “They’re just…”

“Gross?”

“That’s the word, Micah.”

They tucked their heads and raced through the falling olms. Micah felt one wriggle down his collar—it felt like a cold, thrashing wad of snot. Ellen made a noise of revulsion as they plopped in her hair. When they had passed their nesting ground, they shook the piggybacking amphibians from their hair and clothing. Ellen picked one off Micah’s shoulder and set it gently on the ground.

“They never hurt anyone,” she reasoned.

A few minutes later, they reached the entrance to the cleft. The track machine was gone. Micah was glad. The forest was already engulfed in flames. The fire was reflected in Ellen’s wide awestruck eyes.

“I don’t do well with fire.”

Micah said, “It will not reach us. The sand.”

She turned to face him. “Your eye.”

She reached up, gingerly fingering his glass eye. It crumbled from his socket at her touch; the Reverend’s blow had shattered it to pieces. He blinked to clear the pebbly shards, which fell to the ground like crushed ice.

“I’ll make you another one, okay?”

“I would like that.”

“Your hand,” she said.

“Your head,” he said.

By the light of the raging forest fire, he inspected her wound. The ragged cut was a few inches long, just above the ridge of her burn tissue.

He said, “It will leave a scar.”

She waved his concern off. “What’s a scar? They give a person character, don’t you think?”

They stood close but not quite touching, watching the world burn.

THE TRACK MACHINEraced down the path, and the flames raged after it.

Nate was shocked by how loud the fire was—it growled and hissed, and when the wind gusted, it made a ripping-screaming sound like some huge beast without a body. The trees didn’t stand a chance: in the side-view mirror he watched the fire eat towering pines in a matter of seconds, sucking them into its molten heart; they went up in sizzling flashes, the trunks glowing white-hot— It’s their souls was Nate’s bizarre thought; that’s the shape of a tree’s soul just as it winks out —before the inferno rolled right over them.