Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

“Drink,” he told her.

The liquor scorched her throat. But Minerva swallowed it and drank some more and handed the bottle to Micah. He drank in turn and then disappeared upstairs and came down with the binoculars. It was nearly dark. He scanned the mess and sleeping quarters through the binoculars. He then went through the rifle cabinet. He inspected each one and threw it aside.

“Cap and ball. Useless.”

He found a bayonet and slid that into his sack. Minerva watched him make minute improvements to their lot, working with the situation as he found it. She wouldn’t want to face this with anyone but him.

She grabbed stacks of plates from the cupboards and smashed them on the porch. The broken shards gritted under her boots as she walked back inside.

“Anything comes, we’ll hear it.”

They retired to the stove and drank. The whiskey kicked like a mule. Soon Minerva’s head was swimmy.

“Your legs,” said Micah.

“What about them?” Minerva said.

“Squeezed pretty tight.”

“Old habit,” she said. “I grew up in a religious area. In school, all the girls had to squeeze an aspirin between our knees for two hours a day. Y’know, to teach us to keep our legs shut until marriage.”

Micah gave her a look.

“I’m fucking with you, Shug. I got to piss like a racehorse.” Switching to a southern belle voice: “Mah eyeballs are plum doin’ the flutter kick, Ah do declare.”

“Piss on his bed.”

Micah did not seem to be joking. Okey dokey, then.

She went up to Preston’s bedroom. A coldness wept from its walls and sent a wire of fear through her—the curdled presence of Augustus Preston. The mattress lay on the floor with its guts slashed open. She yanked down her pants and squatted over it. A stupid desecration, like a child pissing on a hated schoolmaster’s shoes. Her water was locked up inside her. She shut her eyes and exhaled. It began as a trickle and built to a stream that the mattress soaked up hungrily.

She stepped off the mattress before a rill of piss hit her boots. Thunderheads gathered over the hills. Lightning forked down to illuminate the trees—

She saw them then. Three shapes. Shaggy lumpen things. Staggered fifty yards apart in the field facing the house, two hundred yards away.

She hurried downstairs. Micah was at the window with the binoculars.

“You see them?” she asked.

Micah nodded.

“They coming closer?”

Micah shook his head. “Just there. Waiting.”

“For what?”

Micah looked at her. How should he know?

They retrieved their packs from the kitchen. The stove kicked warmth into the front room, where they sat watching the shapes in the field. Micah took another glug of whiskey.

“You can never know the shape of the world, Minny,” he said. It always tickled her when he used the name her father used to call her by. “When you think you have it compassed, something breaks from that geometry to bedevil you.”

It was not like Shug to make such pronouncements. Was he drunk?

“What about Ebenezer?” he said, looking at her.

“I’m still going to kill him, if that’s what you’re wondering. I would have done it earlier, but it’s been a busy stretch.”

She rooted through her bag until her fingers closed around something. She pulled it out and tossed it to him. Micah turned it over in the finger of firelight falling from the kitchen. His gaze reflected puzzlement… until it clicked.

It might have been the first honest-to-God smile she’d ever seen from him.

He said, “You went back.”

“Bet your ass I did. I was fourteen. Climbed the same tree and waited. Knife—two knives, actually. No gun. Wanted it to be a fair fight. It came the next day. It almost killed me. Got my one arm coiled up and squeezed. Busted that arm, crushed the air out of me. But I still had the other arm. I’d lashed the knives to my hands with baling twine so I couldn’t let go. Its skin was real durable—imagine trying to cut through a bike tire. But I hacked its head clean off. Didn’t come easy. Most creatures have got plenty of fight in them even when the battle’s long lost.”

She watched Micah turn the snake’s head over. It was a foot long. Its eyes were dried-up peas in its sockets. Minerva had lost its lower jaw somewhere. The head would become drier and more brittle until all that remained was a fang or whatnot. She’d put that fang in a locket and string it round her neck.

“You are certain this was the one?”

She said, “How many fifteen-foot snakes you think there are? As soon as it was dead, I felt at peace. Like I’d set my brother’s soul free.”

Micah handed it back. “You are a wonder.”

She stuffed the snake’s head back into her pack. “There’s still room in here.”

“For?”

“The Englishman’s head.”

“He will not go easily, Minny. He is good at what he does.”

She sighed. “I was a bounty hunter. You and him are mercenaries. You’ve killed people. There’s a difference between us. I know that. But I want it more.”

“He will want to live.”

The storm had reached them. Rain began to pelt the windows.

“Do you still dwell on them?” Micah asked her.

“My brother and father? Not so much as I used to… You know, as time goes on they become less people in my memory and more, I don’t know, motivations . I don’t like that. Thinking of them that way. When the Englishman’s dead, they’ll come back to me the way they were.”

“You think so?

“I have to think so.”

Micah nodded. “You sleep. I will keep watch.”

“You sure?”

When he didn’t answer, Minerva went into the kitchen and sat with her back to the wall. The warmth was narcotic. She fell into an uneasy doze.

MICAH STAYED UPand watched the fields. Lightning cleaved the sky. He could still see them out there. Three unmoving shapes in the lashing rain.

They wouldn’t attack. He was pretty sure of that. It was the same in Korea: the enemy would harass you, nipping at your flanks, funneling you to a choke point where they could kill you more easily. In this case, the choke point was Little Heaven. Except Micah wasn’t sure these things had killing in mind. What was going on at Little Heaven was a different sort of thing. Nobody was dead, not yet. They were all just sick. And it was either that none of them had the good sense to leave, or the Reverend and his men were preventing it—or something else, some terrible specific gravity, kept them all locked in place. That being the case, those shapes out there in the field were more like ranchers squiring cattle back to the feed pen, which lay in the shadow of the slaughterhouse.

Micah had been thinking about it lately. Souls ascending. It wasn’t Little Heaven that turned his thoughts in that direction; the Reverend’s compound seemed about as divine as the Preston School. No, just the feeling a man gets when he senses the chain of his own life drawing tight around his throat. Micah felt the links of that chain cutting into his neck. And he wondered, idly but with as much feeling as he could summon, how thin a cut it was between a man like Augustus Preston and the man he himself had been at some earlier, rottener time in his existence.

He had killed men for money, and less than money. There were times when an evil had invaded his soul. He felt it drop over him, black and suffocating. That same mantle seemed to hang over the Reverend’s shoulders, too—Micah sensed it to a certainty. And so the question was: If you let a man like that indulge his nature and didn’t do anything about it, are you any better than him? A crazy dog bites, that being its nature. But if you let that dog go on biting, servicing its own ill-bred temperament—knowingly, and with an agency to stop it—then are you not whelps from the same litter? No, you are worse even. That dog cannot help but bite. You know better. Your inaction encouraged that evil to flourish. The blood was on your hands.