Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Minerva stared at him a long time.

“Take me,” she said.

“Well, I do not know.”

“I won’t be a burden. I can move as fast as greased goose shit when I have to. How would we do it?”

“Can you ride a horse?”

“I helped out at a local stable when I was a girl. To earn some pin money. Used to canter the horses around the paddock—y’know, exercise them. Most of them were nags or glue-footers, but I can ride any horse you put in front of me.”

Micah said, “Okay.”

“And him?” Minerva said, meaning the Englishman.

“Oh yes.” The Englishman’s druggy voice floated over the curtain. “I shall be along. I was hoping to leave you for the crows, but Mr. Shughrue’s veins run thick with the milk of human kindness. But be aware, milady—if you so much as look at me funny, I will snap your neck like a hen’s.”

THEY MADE THEIR ATTEMPTthe following evening. The sunlight was paling over the ridges. Chain lightning flared soundlessly to the east. The day had been spent in nervous anticipation—they expected to catch the rumble of the marshals’ trucks down the main road. But the rumble had not come.

Their clothes had been confiscated. Their boots, too. But otherwise their wardship was surprisingly lax. They had not been handcuffed or restrained in any way. A deputy checked on them every few hours. In all, they had been treated more like convalescing patients—which they were—than ruthless and calculating mercenaries. This gave them ample opportunity to plan their escape.

The three of them grunted in pain as they wound bedsheets around their bodies. When they were done, they resembled Socratic disciples on their way to the agora. The deputy guarding them was an easy matter. Micah ethered him with the contents of a brown bottle the doctor had carelessly left in a supply cupboard—it was almost as if these gormless deputy dawgs wanted them to escape.

Micah arranged the deputy’s body in the chair, tipping his head back so he would not choke on his tongue. He took the deputy’s sidearm and walkie-talkie.

They crossed the street barefoot in the deepening night, bedsheets fluttering. A few solitary squares of light burned in the odd house window, but the street was empty. Nobody saw them make their way to the stable, looking like a trio of half-fleshed Halloween ghosts.

The stable was deserted, the horses penned. They found saddles in the tack room. It was a chore strapping them to the horses: the light was thin and they were badly hurt, and only Minerva was a true horsewoman. The horses whinnied softly, but to Micah’s ears they might as well have been shrieking. The seconds snipped off a clock inside his head, counting down to the moment when their escape would be discovered.

Micah assayed his companions. The woman was clearly nauseated with pain. The doctor had stitched her wounds with catgut, but a goodly number must have popped already, because her bedsheets were bloody—only a pinpricking so far, but the more she moved, the faster the blood would flow. The Englishman was not much better. Micah resolved to abandon them if they couldn’t keep up—perhaps they could kill each other before the authorities slapped handcuffs on them, if that was their wish.

The walkie-talkie crackled. “Wylie, come in. Edie’s off to the Sip N’ Dip for bear claws and coffee. I get you some?”

Micah pictured the town sheriff—fat and beery the way only southern lawmen could be, a barrel-shaped gut straining against the buttons of his mule-colored shirt.

“Wylie, come on back now.” Silence. Then, with a wary edge: “Wy?”

“Mount up, goddamn it,” Micah said.

Minerva and Eb struggled into their saddles. Micah knotted the deputy’s pistol to his saddle with a length of rawhide. The horses shied beneath them—Minerva’s steed was an especially twitchy specimen. Micah shouldered the stable doors open. They galloped onto the main road, cracking the stirrups into the horses’ ribs.

A few townsfolk occurred in lit windows and on the porches of the houses along the main street. They watched the criminals ride into the deep black of the mountainsides—half naked, bloody, ungainly atop animals that dearly wished to buck them off, without food or flint or medicine. What an odd sight they must have made: three pasty phantoms on horseback stampeding into the wild, like a fever dream of the Old West.

“God will see them dead,” one man said to his wife once the trio had ridden from sight. “His holy eye will seek them out and cut them down.”

MICAH’S EYELID FLUTTEREDover his empty socket as he flogged his horse into the foothills. The slack flesh, no longer bulwarked by an eyeball, flapped in the wind that blew into his face. The eyelid made a tender sucking sound, the wet edges of each lid gumming shut before blowing open again, as he imagined wet curtains might do. The sensation was not entirely disagreeable—the wind washed into the empty socket, cooling the inflamed tissues. It felt as if it had been swabbed out with lidocaine, or essence of spearmint.

They halted after half an hour of hard riding. White froth foamed at the edges of the horses’ mouths. They had reached a split in the path.

Micah examined his companions. The woman was slumped over the saddle, her head lolling against the horse’s neck. The Englishman sat favoring his wounded hip; his sheet was red with blood, the excess running down his leg to drip steadily off his toes. His arm swayed limply from his ruined shoulder, and yet he was grinning like an idiot.

Micah considered which way to go while his companions waited patiently and bled.

“We could ride up and off the path until the ridge plateaus,” he said.

“Ride, then,” said Eb. “I will follow.”

“And if I fall,” Minerva said, her voice muffled by the horse’s mane, “leave me where I lie.”

Micah said, “I will.”

The whop-whop of helicopter blades carried over the hillsides. They sallied their horses under an oak tree; the horses’ hooves crackled on a carpet of rotted acorns. Once the whirlybird had passed on, Micah gussied his horse along the steep incline. The beast stirred up clouds of dust, which drifted into his empty socket. He probed inside it with his finger and touched an exposed nerve—a jolt of pain drove straight back into his skull.

The hillside carried up over bear grass and fescue and through a copse of gnarled desert willows. Micah’s breath exited his mouth in plosive pops as he leaned hard into the horse. Every so often, he hazarded a glance back. The other two appeared to be held atop their horses less by gravity than by some unholy magic. Their heads sagging, their bodies rocking so it seemed they would pitch into the hawthorn on the horses’ very next step. Yet they kept following Micah, a pair of ghostly effigies.

He topped the plateau. A bone-searching wind rattled the scorpion weeds. The other two caught up. Their sheets were now more blood than white. Micah gussied his horse alongside Minerva and checked to see that she was still alive. Her breath came thin and raspy.

“We must sleep together,” said Micah. “Any other way, we freeze to death.”

They led their horses to a dip in the earth bulwarked by a flat-topped chunk of shale. The limbs of a cottonwood tree fanned overhead to provide cover. Micah dismounted and corralled Minerva’s horse. He popped her feet from the stirrups and braced her across his shoulders.

“…goddamn hands to yourself,” she mumbled. She was in a dream state, trapped someplace between waking and sleeping, alive and dead.