Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Micah staggered up and took aim as it retreated, pumping the Ithaca and firing three shots. The muzzle exploded with flame, illuminating the woods in brief flashes. A chunk blew off the thing’s hide, splattering the side of a ponderosa pine. It squealed and reared—the sinuous segmented movement of a snake sitting up, its spinal cord popping like chained firecrackers—as it moved deeper into the forest. Much else lurked there in the trees, slavering and snapping.

“Otis! Oh God, Otis !”

Charlie was trying to haul his friend out of the truck. Charlie’s nose must’ve broken when his face collided with the windshield; it was squashed off to one side, blood painting the bottom of his face. But Charlie was focused on Otis, who was trapped. The crumpling door had not only broken his leg high up—it had also pinned his foot. Otis’s face was tallowy with shock. Slick balls of sweat rolled down his cheeks. The pain was such that he’d vomited; under the fritzing dome light, Micah could see chunks of that evening’s hastily eaten meal on his shirt.

“Otis!” Charlie hauled on his friend’s arm, too terrified to be gentle about it. “We got to get out.”

Otis’s eyes rolled back in his skull. A ludicrous half smile graced his face. Micah had seen it before. Pain, shock, and adrenaline can put a man into a beatific dream state.

“Come on !” Charlie jerked Otis, who shook like a rag doll. Blood shot from the compound fracture and spritzed the dashboard.

Something thumped off the truck’s roof and bounced into the bed. Terry Redhill’s head. Terry’s lips had been bitten away— such clean, straight teeth , Micah thought with dreamy panic; he must have had a good dentist —and his eyeballs had been sucked out. Half his scalp had been peeled back like a stubborn toupee, from the rear of his skull to the front; gravity folded it down as Micah watched, a vein-threaded red curtain draping Redhill’s ruined face.

Micah fired up into the tree from where the head had fallen. He heard a rippling shriek up there. He saw something latched around the trunk thirty feet up—a jumble of parts, long and arachnid, a sight a human mind couldn’t even summon in a nightmare. Seeing its shape in the muzzle flash, Micah felt as if someone had levered the top off his skull and whispered directly into the twitching gray matter—a terrible secret that he would have to live with the rest of his life. The thing unfurled with effortless grace, its blood pattering down on the truck as it scuttled farther up the tree.

Micah spat the saliva-coated shells into his palm and plugged them into the shotgun. He hopped over the bed. He could die here. In a second, a minute, or anytime between. That fact bestowed an eerie calm within him. This was the world as he’d found it. His only option was to deal with its new parameters.

“Charlie!” Micah shouted, grabbing the man’s shoulder. Charlie turned to face him; his face swam with mindless fear. “He is stuck!” Micah said. “We must free his leg.”

Charlie’s mouth opened and closed like a fish dying on land. But he nodded. “Okay, okay, okay, okay—”

Micah handed him the shotgun. “They are everywhere.”

He climbed inside the cab through the passenger door. It was hot and tight and perfumed with blood and diesel. The windshield was spiderwebbed where Charlie’s head had struck. Micah glanced past Otis, out the window, where shapes were massing some twenty yards off.

“Otis, sit tight,” Micah said, as if the man had any other choice. “This is going to hurt.”

Otis issued a garbled note that Micah took as one of recognition. He crawled down into the foot well. Wires hung from the busted fuse box. He wormed past Otis’s right foot, shoving it rudely aside; Otis screamed as the pain shot up his leg. Micah didn’t apologize; there was no time. He squirmed forward until he was able to close his hand around Otis’s boot, pinned under the buckled metal. He wrapped his fingers through the bootlaces and yanked as hard as he could. Otis screamed afresh. Micah couldn’t summon much force with his body at a bad angle, one arm partially trapped under his chest. But he was redlined on adrenaline and this helped. Otis just kept on screaming. Let it out, friend , Micah thought. Maybe it’ll keep those things at bay.

One hard wrench succeeded in popping Otis’s heel out; Micah let out a small cry of delight as Otis’s boot slid from the crimped metal. He just had to crawl his fingers in a little farther and yank his toes out now—

Charlie screeched. The shotgun boomed.

Something crashed through the windshield above Micah. The dome light dimmed. Next something was inside the cab with them. Micah felt its weight, heavy as several anvils, pressing down on the steering wheel. It poured itself through the shattered glass, thick and black and alive with horrifying industry. In Micah’s fractured view, it resembled nothing more than a ball of parts: the most dangerous and vile bits of every beast and bird and reptile that had once inhabited these woods. Teeth and claws and fangs dripping venom—and eyes. Oh Christ, all the eyes . Some of those eyes spotted Micah. Parts of the thing’s lunatic anatomy oriented on him, hissing and rasping, darting down. But he was under the steering wheel, which provided a barrier; he could see things squirming around the wheel, their mouths inches from his face. One of the thing’s limbs hit the horn; it blatted on and on, a high curious note.

The thing was more interested in Otis. He’d stopped screaming, now face-to-face with it. Otis’s lips trembled as he called out, oh so weakly, for his God.

Then the thing attacked. Otis might as well have walked into a garbage disposal. His face was shredded, legs jittering crazily as he was torn to bits. Blood burst forth and sheeted down, a veritable waterfall of the red stuff splattering Micah’s face.

Micah heeled himself across the foot well toward the passenger door. He heard Charlie scream as he pumped the shotgun.

Nonononono—

BOOM.

The cab filled with noise and light and smoke. Micah’s hearing cut out from the blast; his skull filled with a tinny ringing. The thing attacking Otis jerked as the buckshot riddled it, but it didn’t stop. It hardly mattered. It had torn the first three inches off Otis’s head, which now stopped at his ears: a clean cliff of red meat and cartilage, his jaw hanging cockeyed on a strip of sinew.

Charlie fired again. The thing squalled and retreated, shimmying out of the hole in the windshield. Micah levered himself out of the cab and staggered back, slumping into Charlie.

The thing that had killed Otis was sprawled across the truck’s hood. Twelve feet long, thick around as a trash can. It scuttled backward, its movement more insectoid than animal, claws screaming on the hood.

Micah grabbed the shotgun from Charlie and fired. The first shot blew a hole in the thing’s face. The next shot went into its chest. The thing slumped off the hood, still thrashing and not even close to dead.

Micah turned and started back toward Little Heaven—then tripped over Terry Redhill’s corpse where it slumped against the truck. He went down, snuffled dirt, and spotted the gun tucked in Redhill’s waistband. He grabbed it and gave it to Charlie.

“ Go. ”

Charlie was staring at Otis. At his friend’s dripping carcass.

“He is dead, Charlie. Now , or we are dead, too.”

Dazedly, Charlie followed. Micah pulled shells from his pocket and thumbed them into the shotgun. The truck’s horn blared on and on. He and Charlie staggered away from the wreck. Its taillights winked in the dark. Micah noted the rip in his shirt. A five-inch slit across his ribs, the meat flayed open.