Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

For a drawn-out moment, silence. The softer sounds of night enveloped them.

Then the thud of pursuit amped up again. Harder now, more intense. The night bristled with screeches and yowls and hisses.

What in Christ’s name are these things? thought Micah.

They ran hard, their lungs shuddering. Ellen tripped and fell, skidding a few feet across the dirt. Her chin was cut, blood cascading down her neck. But she got up and ran on pure adrenaline. The path dipped through a dry creek bed. Micah slung off his pack. He tore stuff out, clothes and other vital supplies, not caring anymore. How would he eat with his jaw torn off? What use were socks when his feet had been gnawed to the bone?

“Shug!” Minerva called out.

He ignored her. The beasts were closing in. Blood-hungry bastards.

They will be in for a rare fucking disappointment if they catch up and sink their teeth in , he thought. They will find our kind to be stringy, all tendon and cartilage. Not good eating, are human beings.

His hand closed on what he’d been searching for. He pulled out an emergency flare and tore the strip. Bright red phosphorus fanned from its tip. He tossed it into the creek bed. He scampered up the other side and thumbed the safety off his pistol.

“Go,” he told the others. “I will meet you directly.”

They obeyed him, scampering farther up the trail. Micah stood rooted. He had to see what he was dealing with.

They came. There were two of them, Micah was almost certain. The sounds of their chase indicated they were coming from both left and right: a scissoring maneuver, the way pack animals hunted, flanking their quarry from each side, cutting off the escape angles, and then— snik! —snapping shut.

The flare shed bloody light over a ten-foot radius. He had shot animals moving at a good clip before. Animals and other creatures, too. It was a matter of putting the bullet where they would be, not where they were at present. He listened. They might try to skirt the flare instead. But the quickest path, the one leading directly to their prey, would carry them through its—

A shape fled through the light. Micah’s mind flinched—though not his body, which remained motionless. The shape was unlike anything in nature. It was composed of too many parts. A seething mass of hysterical dimension, a ball of limbs and tails and teeth, so goddamn many teeth.

It flashed across the riverbed at terrific speed. Micah tracked it with his pistol and fired three times. The thing screeched and withdrew into the trees on the far side of the creek.

The second one was coming now. The big sonofabitch. There was something terrible about its approach—the blundering, crashing awkwardness of its body. It sounded like a creature in almost unspeakable pain.

Micah saw it. Not everything, but an outline. It was huge. It rose up before the light could engulf it and stood there, as a grizzly might on its hind legs. The dry earth of the creek bed cracked beneath it. The rotten stink of its body was overwhelming. Micah had smelled its equal only once before, when he had stumbled across a mass grave in a small village in Korea. The creature made the softest noises imaginable. Little clucks and pips and peeps, gentle exhalations that sounded like a baby drawing breaths in its sleep.

It is a bear , Micah thought, shutting his mind to other possibilities. A rabid bear.

He emptied a clip into the bear, center of mass. He did not feel good doing it, but the creature was ill and it would die by his hand now or days later, crazed with brain fever and foaming at the mouth. At close range, he could hear the slugs smacking into its meat. If that did not kill it, it ought to at least flatten its tires a little.

The bear dropped. A rag of snot or bloody meat hit the flare and made it sputter…

Then it began to advance on Micah again.

Why don’t you just die? he thought tiredly.

He retreated up the trail to find the others. The bear was still chasing them—and he could hear the other one, too, farther down and to the left of the path.

“Go!” he shouted.

They fled again. Slower this time, as they were exhausted and banged up. Just keep moving , Micah reasoned. Both animals had been hit. All they needed to do was keep hustling until their pursuers bled out.

The path switched back up a steep hillside. All four of them scanned the bottomlands for some trace of the beasts. Their faces were shiny with sweat by the time they hit the summit. The land beneath was black and unknowable. They couldn’t hear anything.

“Stay close,” said Micah.

They moved down the trail in a tight knot. The path hit a bottleneck. The trees pinched in on either side—

Minerva heard it before her brain was able to grip what was happening. A sly cracking under her boots—

The ground broke apart under her feet. She plunged into darkness. She caught sight of Ebenezer scrabbling at the lip of the earth, bellowing madly, before his purchase slipped and he was falling with the rest of them.

There came a strange weightlessness, that feeling in the pit of the stomach when a plane takes off. Oh , Minerva thought giddily. I’m falling. It lasted no more than half a second. Minerva hit the earth so hard that the breath was knocked out of her. Pain needled across her chest as her spine bowed—then something slammed into her skull with terrific force.

MINERVA’S EYEScracked open. She was squinting up at a box of daylight.

“She’s coming to.”

Where was she? She rolled over, moaning. She could feel an enormous lump on her forehead—as if a hard-boiled egg had been sewn under her skin.

“Minerva?” A woman’s voice. “How do you feel?”

She opened her eyes fully. The sky was breathtakingly blue. Why couldn’t she see more of it? Why only that box? It was as if she were staring up from the bottom of an open elevator shaft.

A face loomed over her. Micah’s. Blood lay gluey on his neck. Minerva swallowed. Her throat was as dry as chalk. Micah tipped his canteen to her lips. She drank and coughed.

Ellen said, “Can you get up?”

Minerva managed to sit up. Her skull thudded. She dropped her head between her knees and breathed deeply.

“Where are we?” she said.

“Trapped,” said Micah.

“Trapped how?”

“In a trap,” he answered her.

She lifted her head. Jesus, that hurt—her skull felt like it was full of pissed-off hornets.

They were in a pit. Clay bottom. The walls were sheer and went up fifteen feet. Severed roots poked through the dirt. Must have taken days to dig.

“Was someone looking for a fucking brontosaurus?” she said.

Micah picked up one of the snapped sticks littering the bottom of the pit. Minerva could see it had been sawed partway through. Her father had dug a similar pit trap on the west side of their shack to catch the foxes that had been killing their Buckeye chickens.

“What’s that smell?”

Ellen pointed behind Minerva. She craned her neck to spy a heap of spoiled meat in the corner, squirming with maggots.

“Bait,” Ellen said.

“How long have I been out?”

“Four hours or so,” said Ellen.

What a mad galloping donkeyfuck this had turned into, Minerva thought. Stuck in a pit with their dicks hanging out. And as the cherry on top of this particular shit sundae, she had a knot the size of a goddamn golf ball on her head—she could see its shadow hanging above her left eye like some overripe fruit set to burst.

“Can we get out?”

“I tried already, standing on Micah’s shoulders,” said Ellen. “No such luck.”

“Why didn’t you help them out?” Minerva growled at Ebenezer. “You got two broken legs?”