Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Charlie spoke next. “We can make it down in three-odd hours in the truck. If we have to hike, maybe a day. We’ll tell the police. They’ll send helicopters and sniffer dogs. The whole shebang.”

Charlie’s wife and son stood beside the truck. Both looked worried. Maude Redhill hopped up on the tailgate and gave her husband a kiss. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face blotchy, as if she had been crying nonstop for hours.

“Please be careful,” she said. “I’ve already lost enough today.”

“Not lost,” Terry said. “Just missing. We’ll find them. God will see to it.”

“Are you sure you won’t come?” Charlie asked Micah.

Micah approached the truck. He spoke low so nobody could hear. “Those things. They might have followed us back.”

Otis bit his lip. “You think so?”

Micah said, “There is a passing chance.”

“How many?”

“I could not tell you.”

“Do you think they’ll attack?”

Micah met Otis’s question with a shrug. Charlie and Otis conferred. The truck’s diesel engine ticked along, blurring out their voices.

“Here’s the thing,” Otis said finally. “There may be more of those things out there .” He pointed down the road they would be driving. “And if we don’t get past them and down the hill—well then, everyone here is in real trouble.”

“What about Minerva and the black fella you came with?” Charlie asked. “That one seems a pretty icy character.”

Micah glanced over his shoulder. Minerva stood fifty yards back from the group. Ebenezer leaned against the door to their bunkhouse, much farther away.

“Couldn’t they do something if those things tried to get past the gates—I mean, if you go with us now?” Charlie said.

Micah figured they could, if compelled to. Minerva for sure; Ebenezer was a fifty-fifty proposition—but if those abominations invaded Little Heaven, Ebenezer would have to fight them as a matter of survival.

“We need you,” Otis said simply.

Micah glanced back at Ellen. She stood beside Nate, their shoulders nearly touching. She nodded as if to give permission.

“Give me that scattergun,” he said to Charlie.

Charlie handed an Ithaca pump-action through the window, along with a box of shells. Micah hopped up on the bed beside Terry Redhill. He distributed the shells between his pockets, then jammed two into his mouth, storing them in either cheek—he looked like a chipmunk hoarding nuts. He slapped his palm on the roof.

“Go.”

They set off down the dirt path. Dark lay heavy between the trees. Otis flicked on the high beams. The firs shone whitely under their light, as if they were composed of bone instead of wood. Terry Redhill crouched in the bed beside Micah. A big man with a thick red beard. Pinpricks of sweat stood out on his forehead.

The truck prowled along at five miles an hour. The chassis juddered over rocks and stumps. Drool collected in Micah’s mouth; he removed one shell, spat, then jammed it back in. It was a trick he’d learned during the war; the company sniper always kept one cartridge in his mouth.

It’s the quickest way to get at it , he’d told Micah. Always have one bullet in your mouth for when you really need it.

Little Heaven receded. Otis flicked on the dome light as he nudged the truck down a steep slope; its knobby tires stuttered over the shale, differentials squealing. Micah and Terry leaned against the cab as the truck tilted downward. The headlights pointed directly at the road, throwing the fringing forest into inky blackness—

Micah saw it before anyone else, but even he caught it too late. It flared from the left-hand side, his bad side, streaking out of the trees and hammering into the truck. A huge shape rocked the truck on its axles, the driver-side wheels temporarily leaving the ground. Micah tumbled into Terry Redhill, who barely managed to stay in the bed. Charlie let out a muffled shout; Otis hit the gas as the truck slewed sideways, fishtailing toward the pines. Micah cast a glance through the cab’s rear window and saw the driver-side door was dented inward. Otis’s femur was punched through the fabric of his Carhartts at midthigh, a spike of bone shining deliriously white in the dome light. Otis’s face was bleached and greasy with shock and—with the calm observation that always came to Micah in times like this—he could see that Otis’s foot was pinned to the gas pedal.

The truck accelerated and struck a knotty pine. Micah was thrown against the cab. He ricocheted back, skidding across the bed until his head hit the tailgate. Terry Redhill fell over the side of the truck with a hoarse squawk. The engine cut out, its tick-tick dimming into the nothingness. Out of that enveloping silence came other sounds. Grunts and howls and brays and hisses.

Terry Redhill stood up woozily. His face was bathed in blood from a cut running slantwise across his forehead.

“Whuzzat?” he said dazedly. “Whuzz—?”

Micah didn’t get a good look at the thing that killed Terry Redhill. There was some mercy in that. It darted down from the trees. Part snake, part bird or bat or some winged creature at any rate. It carried with it the ripe stink of death. Micah did catch a glimpse of eyes—a dozen or more bunched like grapes within the runneled ruin of its face, or one of its faces—all staring with bright, malignant hunger. It flapped down with a sort of breezy insouciance, not at all predatory, as if it had merely happened upon Terry Redhill by accident and decided to do what it did to him.

It… it enfolded Terry. Somehow lovingly. Terry’s head, specifically. Those sheer, dark, bat-like wings wrapped around his skull in a suffocating embrace.

“Whuzz—?”

What happened next was hard to explain. The scene was chaotic, the light thin, the air swimmy with diesel fumes from the ruptured gas tank. Micah was aware of the smallest details—the oily taste of the shotgun shells in his mouth, the thin fingernail paring of the moon through the trees. He experienced the following events with senses that were superattuned in some ways and dulled in others. Later, he would suspect his mind had done so automatically, shielding him from things that would have driven him mad on sight.

The thing that was wrapped around Terry Redhill’s head began to flex. To constrict . The whiplike cord upon which it had unfurled from the tree thinned with tension. Terry issued terrible choking sounds that were muffled by the stinking flesh draped over his face—flesh so sheer Micah could see the man’s pain-wrenched features. Those muffled chokes quickly became squeals.

The thing tensed, every part of its awful musculature quivering; then it torqued spastically—it reminded Micah of a man struggling to open a stubborn jar of strawberry jam, that moment when the seal finally gives. This was followed by a wet ripping note. A fan of blood jetted from Terry Redhill’s neck with incredible pressure and painted the side of the truck.

The thing ascended into the tree again. It took Terry’s head with it. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. Terry’s body stood there for another moment, blood fountaining from the raggedly severed neck, before collapsing to its knees like a penitent Pentecostal. Headless Terry fell forward and struck the truck with a hollow bong .

Something rushed from the trees at Micah. He caught the briefest inkling of its shape: a trio of timber wolf heads thrust from a long and eelish body rippling with legs of all different sorts. He raised the shotgun and fired as it hurdled Terry Redhill’s corpse; buckshot tore into the thing, ripping away gobbets of flesh; the impact steered it off course so that, instead of hitting Micah flush, it glancingly struck him, one of its claws or teeth tearing across his rib cage to leave a sizzling note of pain. He fell, his skull striking the tailgate and shooting stars across his vision. The thing carried over the truck bed, a horrifying freight train of legs and snouts and snapping jaws.