Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

“He kills for money,” Micah said simply, “and you are not worth anything.”

She silently digested this. Micah laughed real soft.

“Did you ever consider the sweetness of the moment? If you were to draw him in, gain his confidence, and then…”

Minerva bit her tongue. But Micah could tell she was pondering it.

THE ENGLISHMAN LURCHEDinto wakefulness like a ghoul shuddering from its casket. His neck wore a plated collar of blood. Micah was uncertain whether Minerva would get her chance to end his life—Ebenezer appeared to be knocking on death’s door with some urgency already.

They set off again. They were dehydrated—their horses, too—their stomachs empty and their wounds festering. Simply getting mounted required a massive outlay of will. The Englishman was sinking into a delirium; he rambled on about last night’s nightmare, where rats—the galling black-eyed bastards infesting the sewers in his hometown of Stretford—were packed into his chest cavity, squirming contentedly in the fuming stew of his guts, their ropy pink tails curled around his ribs—

“Their fur tickles.” He tittered. “So tickly .”

The sun crested the hills and beat down wrathfully. Horseflies alighted on their shoulders and heels, carrying away tasty morsels of flesh. They came to a pool of brackish, sulfur-smelling water. They drank and retched most of it back up, then drank some more. Their horses drank and exhibited a mild rejuvenation. They rode on. The sun turned the blood on their bodies to a dark crackling. The Englishman rode naked to the waist, the sheet wadded clumsily around his hips. His flesh was a heavy, beautiful black with an undernote of blue.

A rough path bled down through the swale to a swift-running river. They followed it in the direction of its flow, their shadows lengthening across still pools where the river ran into slackwater hollows. Micah spotted a pin of smoke rising some ways off. They crossed at a shallow meander, tracking the smoke. Micah drew the deputy’s pistol.

A fire. Three men sat ringing it. Naked as jaybirds, drying themselves after bathing in the river. Their clothes hung from a line knotted between two trees.

“Stand up,” Micah said.

They did. Two of them covered their privates. The third did not.

“What are you doing here?” Micah asked them.

“We’re hunting for burl,” the shameless man told him.

“Do you have a vehicle nearby?”

“A pickup,” the second man told Micah, gesturing with a nod. “Five hundred yards thataway.”

“We will need clothes,” said Micah.

“So will we,” said the man who had until then not uttered a word.

Micah said, “Do you have extra pairs?”

The same man said, “We do not.”

A pause.

Micah said, “We need clothes.”

SEABORN APPLETONwas a happy man. Delighted, in fact.

Business was booming . He had experienced an unprecedented run of prosperity ever since Micah Shughrue had fallen off his scent.

That situation could not have resolved itself any more pleasantly. Shughrue was dead, or assumedly so. The English assassin and the woman had been cut out of the picture, too. He owed not a nickel for their services. Saints be praised!

Of course, he had felt some concern upon discovering they had escaped before the US Marshals had arrived in Mogollon. But those who witnessed their flight claimed that the trio was bedraggled, bloody, and without supplies—and on horseback , the idiots. They could not have lasted long in the unforgiving wilds. Their bones were surely yellowing inside a wolf den by now. Savages, the three of them. Appleton found no joy in his dealings with such individuals. He was a businessman. He preferred not to traffic with unsavories, other than the ones buying his merchandise.

His VW was parked in a field skirting the mining town of Chloride, New Mexico. This place had fallen upon hard times. Its citizenry was primed for the sort of succor Appleton could provide. It had gotten so that he could see the dread and anxiety hanging in a pall above such burgs. It resembled a thick gray cowl. It was an exquisite sight. It looked like money.

His men were sleeping in a car fifty yards off, in the shelter of the willows. The night was still, only the chirruping of crickets. Appleton poured a stiff belt of rum and reflected on how good things happened to good people—to enterprising people such as himself.

A sound carried across the wind-scrubbed earth, from the direction of the willow trees. A strangled scream that became a hissing whistle… the sound a man might make as his throat was cut. It was joined by a rising adagio of pain and bewilderment that ended abruptly, replaced by a wet hiccuping sound. That went on awhile, too, before being ushered into the softer notes of night.

Appleton adjusted the flame on his oil lamp, washing the VW’s interior with its shifting light. The sliding door was open. He could barely discern the flat fall of the earth, the rich soil dark as grave dirt—

“Eugene?” he called. “Danny?”

The imbeciles. They drank without measure. They played childish games and hooted laughter well into the night, only to act petulant the following morning, their heads rotten with the ache. He really should find new men, ones whose wits challenged his own.

He held the lantern out, squinting against its greasy glow. A figure coalesced from the darkness. It was joined by another.

“You dolts,” said Appleton. “If you’re looking for liquor, I have none for you. Go back to the goddamn car.”

A third figure joined. Appleton’s breath came out in a sharp hiss.

“Mr. Appleton.”

The voice seemed to come from a great distance away, deep within the guts of the earth… and yet it was close, too, so terribly close, nestled right up to his ear.

“I have come home to roost,” Micah Shughrue said.

Hearing his voice, Seaborn Appleton began to scream.

He would scream for some time before all was said and done.

PETTY SHUGHRUEdid not know what this creature might be, but she was positive it was not a man.

It looked human. Two arms. Two legs. A head.

But that was the problem—it only looked that way. For one, it was far taller than any man on earth; the dairyman, Mr. Bickner, was the tallest man Petty had ever seen, and this thing was at least two feet taller than him. Its arms were long and its joints were set in weird places, making its arms bend in odd ways. Its legs were also too long and did not hinge at the knees so much as pivot in all directions, a bit like a spider’s legs. It wore dark pants and a duster of black lizard skin. The coat rippled out from its body, stinking like the dead gopher she’d found under the porch two springs ago.

Its face… Petty didn’t ever want to look at its face again. Its head was big and bulgy and hairless. It had no nose, only a pair of moist holes. Its mouth was so wide it nearly split its head apart—and its lips were plump, fleshy, somehow succulent, which was a word Petty had recently learned in grammar class. The summer strawberry was succulent. You almost wanted to kiss those lips—not really, in fact you’d rather kiss anything else, a bowl of razor blades or a starving piranha or any other thing at all… What Petty felt was an ungodly compulsion, a revolting desire to kiss those lips. Even though she knew they would taste like death.