Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

It wasn’t that it was too fast for the eye to chart—it was more that the eye rebelled , defaulting on its own optics and reducing whatever was out there to an indefinite smudge. Maybe their brains did this as an instinctive protective measure, to spare them the true contours of the thing.

What they did see was long and gleaming, like an enormous length of bone.

That was all they could make out. It was enough.

Ebenezer raised the Colt and fired. Three quick shots. Flame leapt from the barrel. Minerva’s Colt tore the night apart, making four concussive booms as she squeezed the trigger.

The gunshots trailed away. They squinted through a haze of cordite smoke. Nothing. It had left. They could feel it. That squirming insistence in their stomachs was gone.

But then…

Sounds to the left of the clearing—wait, the right? No, both sides. Twigs and pinecones snapped underfoot. With those came another kind of sound, more difficult to grasp. Snortings, gruntings, these weird high whistles… scrapings and whickerings and noises that might have made sense in isolation but taken together created a lunatic symphony.

Micah ducked into the tent and grabbed his pack. Minerva followed suit. Micah stepped into his boots; Eb blundered inside the tent to yank his own boots on.

They had one obvious escape: the trail that continued onward to Little Heaven. The one they had traveled was on the far side of the meadow, where the noises were coming from. And the meadow felt constricted now—a killing jar.

Ebenezer laced his boots with fingers that shook—just a little, but still. It took a lot to rattle him. He had seen things, done things. Once a man has witnessed a certain kind of human pestilence and seen some of it reflected in his own soul, well, that man turned hard. The last time Eb had been scared, really scared , was during the Suez crisis. But that had been a vital fear, one shared by every soldier in his regiment: of being blown to bits by an enemy mortar, his body scattered in wet chunks over the canal banks… of dying far from everything he knew and could draw comfort from.

But this fear—no, this worry , just a gnawing worry right now—was airy and dreamlike, because it was unanchored from any clear threat. Just noises in the dark. They could be anything. An overweight raccoon, for Christ’s sake!

But it really wasn’t that, was it? No. Ebenezer could not say how he knew that, but it was a fact. The thing (things?) in the woods was dangerous. So what he felt was, if anything, the terror of a boy who knows that something is lurking underneath his bed, even though he has never given that monster a name.

Minerva shone her flashlight on Eb. She saw the pinched worry on his face. Her breath rattled in her lungs. She wanted to run. More than anything on earth. She finished with her boots and picked up the flashlight and her Colt. The gun dangled limply at the end of her arm. It had never felt so useless. A mere toy.

The trees shook. Sixty-foot pines trembled as this thing, whatever it was, grazed their trunks. A smell wafted to her nose—decay and a sourness that reminded Minerva of something her father once said.

You ought to kill an animal with one shot, Minny. It should never die in fear, for two reasons. For one, no creature should have to die that way. And two, when a creature dies terrified, its meat tastes sour. One shot, one kill. Make sure the poor thing never knows what hit it—

She turned to Micah in time to see him raise his Tokarev and fire. Six shots in a tight grouping. He lowered his pistol and then, sensing movement, raised it again and emptied the clip. He ejected the mag and slammed a fresh one in. He was already backing toward the trail. He hissed at the others. They began to retreat, too.

A shape broke through the trees on the far side of the clearing. The night was too thick to make out its exact definitions, but it was enormous. Shaggy and lumpy and stinking of death.

A bear. It could only be.

Minerva fired while backing away. Ebenezer squeezed off a few shots. The thing kept coming.

Something broached the trees on the opposite side of the clearing. The moonlight glossed its contours. Another bear? Micah’s head swiveled. Events occurred more slowly, the way they always did when his adrenaline started to flow.

It wasn’t a bear. This creature was slightly smaller. One of its legs stepped between the pines. Long and clad in coarse fur.

Was that a… wolf?

It made no sense. A wolf and a bear stalking them together? Different species didn’t team up to form a hunting party. It wasn’t natural.

Micah watched the wolf-thing creep forward. Its paw came down near one of the larger birds on the grass. Micah squinted, his head cocked at the inconceivability of what he was seeing—

What he saw was—no, no . The thing’s paw and the dead bird seemed to… to merge. The bird’s body broke apart, liquefying somehow, passing into the other thing’s body. It was absorbed . The thing’s flesh rippled as the bird became a part of it. But that couldn’t be. The starlight bent at weird angles, refracted unnaturally so that it merely seemed this was what had happened.

A growl rippled out of the blackness. Cold, furious, infused with a silvery note of menace.

“Go,” Micah said.

They ran. They left everything. Ebenezer’s rifle, Micah’s second Tokarev, the food. The trail scaled up into the hillsides. It was darker under the trees. The beams of their flashlights—Minerva and Ellen were both carrying one—skipped over the earth, over roots cresting from the soil like fingers. They tripped and stumbled and kept motoring.

Crash and thunder from behind. Micah had hoped the creatures would have been satisfied ransacking the tents. No dice. They were giving chase. Goddamn it all.

Micah whistled sharply. The others turned to him. He slung his pack off.

“Give me some light!”

Ellen trained the flashlight on his pack as he rummaged through it. They were in there somewhere, he knew it. Three waxy cylinders. He had bought them back at the camping store. An impulse buy.

The things were scrambling up the incline toward them. There was nothing stealthy about their pursuit—he could hear them snapping tree limbs and scraping against their trunks. The sound was enormous, out of scale with any animal Micah had ever known. It was as if a blue whale had grown legs and started blundering after them.

They were closing in. Sixty yards, now fifty, now forty—

Ebenezer flanked behind Micah. He squeezed off four shots. The muzzle flash lit the trees, illuminating the shocked face of an owl perched on a low branch. He pulled the trigger again and got only a dry click.

“Give me another magazine,” he said to Minerva.

“I’ve only got the one.”

The things kept coming. If the slugs had hit, they had done nothing to deter them. The sounds intensified—eager squeals like a hog snuffling for truffles.

“Better me than you.” Eb spoke with an eerie calm. “The clip. Now .”

Tight-jawed, Minerva handed it over. Micah was still rooting through his pack.

“Jesus, man,” Ebenezer said, tugging Micah’s arm.

Thirty yards, twenty—

Micah couldn’t find them. They started to run again, putting distance between themselves and their relentless pursuers. They hit a straight stretch. The trees opened up. The moon shone against the clouds to provide a weak welter of light.

Minerva spun, waiting for Ebenezer and Micah to ramble past before she unloaded her Colt. Bullets ripped into the darkness. There was no way a few of her slugs couldn’t have hit their mark—providing the things were using the path, which they might not be.