Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Two motorbikes were parked past the gates. One was an old French Metisse with a 350cc two-stroke engine. The other was a newer Japanese model.

Micah caught up with him. His posture wasn’t threatening, only curious.

“What are you doing?”

“Leaving, good chum,” Eb said. “Hitting the lonesome trail, in your Yank parlance.”

He snapped open the toolbox, which he had stocked the day before for this very eventuality. He retrieved a can of two-in-one oil. He lubricated the chain and the suspension rig on the Metisse, straddled the seat, and bounced up and down to work the oil into the shock absorbers. Minerva hung back at the gates, watching him.

Micah said, “Think you will make it?”

“A bike is more nimble than that truck. It’s perfect for this terrain.”

“You think you’re gonna leave us with our asses hanging out, huh?” Minerva called over.

Ebenezer spoke to her over Micah’s shoulder. “I’m taking a sabbatical, milady. Much to your dismay, I can only guess. I promise to send a postcard.”

Minerva pulled Ellen’s pistol from her waistband, cocked it, and held it to her thigh. Ebenezer could only smile.

“Will you shoot me in the back?”

Minerva cocked her head as if to say, Try me. Ebenezer’s smile widened.

“Your aim is suspect, my dear. I’ll take my chances.”

He bent over the bike to check the timing gear. Someone shouted. “Hey! What the hell you think you’re doing?”

Ebenezer turned. Hooray, if it wasn’t Virgil, the more dunderheaded shitkicker of the Reverend’s gruesome twosome.

“Hey—black boy! That ain’t your property! You ain’t gonna—”

Virgil’s voice drilled into Ebenezer’s ears, unlocking an old memory. As a child, he and a friend had queued up for a showing of Crossfire starring Robert Mitchum at the Grenada Theatre. They had saved up all week. But when they reached the wicket, the ticket seller told them No Negroes allowed . He said it casually, almost apologetically—an existential apology for their bad luck to have been born black, a stain that would doom them the rest of their lives. So Ebenezer and his friend snuck in through the fire door and sat in the empty balcony section. But before the newsreel even finished, an usher found them. He clouted Eb on the ear with one fat fist. Sneaky little tar babies! he’d hissed, and chased them down the stairs. They ran out the emergency door closest to the movie screen. The sunlight hit Eb’s eyes, dazzling in its intensity; he turned to see the white people in the front row rearing back at the sudden light, their faces pale and marbly as cheese—they looked like terrified vampires at the moment Van Helsing let the sunlight into their coffins. Eb and his friend dashed down the alley to the street. The usher pursued for a block or two, but he was a porker and he faded fast, heaving on the cobbles, shaking an impotent fist.

Afterward, Eb sat on the curb outside the sweetshop, nursing his swollen ear. He had a powerful urge to go back and hurt that usher. In his young mind, he pictured a very sharp, long knife. He saw himself pinning the usher’s hand down by the wrist and cutting deep between the webbing of his fingers, halfway down his palm, so that when the flesh healed the man would be left with these tangly, freakish witch-fingers, long and spidery with almost no palm to speak of. But Ebenezer hadn’t owned a knife and lacked the will to steal one.

Ebenezer now thought of that afternoon because Virgil looked an awful lot like that usher. He wasn’t nearly as fat, but he was stalking toward Eb with the same goatish belligerence, his eyes squinted in vaporous idiocy. Ebenezer reached into the toolbox and selected a heavy wrench.

“What the fuck you think you’re doing, you uppity nig—”

Ebenezer threw it. The wrench spun end over end, tomahawk-style, and poleaxed Virgil spang between the eyes. Virgil went down on one knee, looking like Al Jolson singing the crescendo of “My Mammy,” then staggered up and tilted off in a new direction toward the trees. His forehead was split open, blood pissing out.

Eb curled his hand around an old spark plug lying in the toolbox and walked over to Virgil. He swung his fist in a tight arc, clouting Virgil on the back of his head. Virgil grunted and fell face-first into the dirt. Ebenezer turned him over and punched him in the face, hard. And again. And again. Virgil’s eyelids fluttered, and blood leaked from both sides of his mouth.

“Eb,” Micah said.

Ebenezer turned. He could feel the warmth of Virgil’s blood freckling his face.

Micah said, “Lay off.”

“Cheerfully!” Eb said. He rolled Virgil over, grabbed the man’s gun from his waistband, then walked back to the bike and tossed the spark plug into the toolbox. Virgil lay still with blood bubbling out of his mouth.

“Those things in the woods, Eb,” said Micah, taking no interest in the downed man. “They are fast.”

“I saw them before, Micah. Back at the campsite.”

“No. These ones are different.”

Eb sighed. “What choice do we have? No phone, no telegram, no carrier pigeons, no smoke signals. Someone has to get out of here. Who does it hurt if that someone is me?”

Micah said, “You coming back?”

“No,” Eb said evenly. “Why the hell would I? But I promise I’ll call the authorities. I’ll have Johnny Law dispatched here posthaste.”

“If you make it.”

“If I make it.”

Micah considered this. “Give us some time. We can help.”

Micah went away with Minerva. Ebenezer spent the good part of an hour tinkering with the bike. Doc Lewis and another man showed up meanwhile and dragged Virgil off; Virgil’s boot heels left shallow rails in the dirt.

The sun skinned above the trees. Shapes shifted in the bad light of the woods. The electric tang of dread lay heavy in Eb’s mouth. Micah returned with Ellen and two male followers. Both men carried compound bows.

“Ellen made these.”

Micah held up a globe of paper-thin glass with a hole in the top. The men filled each globe with gasoline—now a precious resource—and lashed the globes to hunting arrows with duct tape.

“We will try to hit a few,” Micah said. “At least you will see them coming.”

Ebenezer duct-taped Virgil’s gun to the motorbike’s handlebars. He kick-started the engine. The motor coughed, sputtered, then buzzed to life.

“You better make that fuckin’ phone call!” Minerva shouted over the engine.

“I’ll miss you most of all!” he shouted back to her.

The men notched arrows in their bows. Ellen lit the gasoline in the glass bowls. Micah hefted the Tarpley rifle. Minerva had Ellen’s .38 pistol.

“We’ll lay down cover,” she said grudgingly. “Race like your ass is on fire.”

Minerva and Micah jogged fifty yards ahead. The shapes in the trees were massing now. Ebenezer gunned the engine; the bike buzzed louder—those wine-swilling Frenchies made one hell of a motorcycle.

Ah, well , Eb thought. Who wants to live forever?

Two arrows arced over his head. One hit a tree, whose trunk went up in a furious cone of fire. The other arrow hit one of the creatures, which shrieked as flames burst over its body. The fire clawed all over it to showcase its enormous and baffling size.

“Go!” Micah shouted.

Eb opened the throttle. The bike took off like a scalded cat. He raced between Minerva and Micah, bike screaming, tachometer in the red. The bike bottomed out in a rut, the chassis kicking up sparks. He shot past Charlie Fairweather’s corpse—Charlie’s eyes wide open, his dust-covered intestines resembling floured sausage links. Two more arrows arced overhead; something went up fifty yards ahead of him, a lunatic combustion that threw the woods into momentary relief. Noises from all angles, a cacophony of screeches and howls.