Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

They met on a bench in Union Square. Virgil was puffy and scabbed, his teeth loose in his gums from eating dumpster fruit. Cyril was tanned and fit and had this way about him that said, Hey, world, get a load of me! He seemed the kind of man who could do anything he wanted with his life, and Virgil was instantaneously awed by him.

“What’s your story, fella?” Cy had asked without much interest, investigating the cracks of his teeth with a cinnamon-flavored toothpick.

Virgil had hemmed and hawed for about fifteen seconds before Cyril laughed great big, sucked a shred of meat off the tip of the toothpick, and said: “You’re as dumb as a box of rocks, ain’t ya?”

“…I guess so.”

Cyril clapped him on the back. “Hey, no big whoop. You probably didn’t spend enough time in your mama’s belly. You came out like a cake that’s still mushy in the middle.”

“I guess.”

“Here, have a toothpick,” Cy said, unwrapping a fresh one. Virgil was overcome by this small charity.

“That’s right, dummy,” Cyril said cheerily. “Use the pointy end.”

There was nothing cruel in the way he said dummy —just stating a fact, which Virgil guessed was true. Cyril would call him dumb in many flavorful ways as their relationship went along. Dumb as a bag of hammers. Three bricks short of a load. Squirrel-headed. Pudding-brained. Not the sharpest pencil in the drawer. Drooling fuckin’ mongoloid when he was running hot. Sometimes Virgil would go red in the face when Cyril said these things, but he never argued. He just wished Cy had the good manners not to mention his dumbness, the way you shouldn’t call attention to the fact that a kid was missing his hand or was blind or something like that. It was mean, pointing out defects. But then, Cyril wasn’t really a nice guy.

But he was smart. A whole lot smarter than Virgil—granted, that was a low bar to clear. But Cyril had command. Presence. When he walked into a room, people looked up. If they looked long enough, they would see Virgil trailing in on his heels. Virgil helped Cyril stick up a few gas stations and a Chinatown grocer. It was dead easy. Cyril laid his hands on a gun. They wore panty hose over their faces. They made good money, too. Fifty bucks here, thirty-seven bucks there. All in cash! Untraceable was the word Cyril used.

Still, they got pinched. Bad luck, was all. They both did a hitch. Two years, sentences reduced due to prison overcrowding. After they got out, they returned to the Tenderloin. Virgil tried to sell his body to the waify mincers and nine-to-five types who trolled the park for rough trade. But Virgil looking how he did, there weren’t many takers. Cyril was tired of him by then, Virgil could tell. He wanted a real partner, someone to help him become the criminal big shot he knew he could be. Someone a damn sight better than shit-a-brick Virgil Swicker. But Cyril never did find that running mate—maybe because he wasn’t such hot shit, Virgil secretly thought.

One day, they wandered through the doors of Amos Flesher’s church. Cyril thought they might steal a chalice or something and pawn it. Instead they met the supreme-o creepster himself, ole Reverend Flesher with his greasy muskrat-pelt hair. Flesher had bumbled out of the whatever-the-fuck-you-call-it, his dressing room where he put on his goofy church clothes. He saw them skulking around.

“You looking for something, fellas?”

He had an aw-shucks way about him. But Virgil could see that was a sham. This was a guy who could spot the angle in a circle.

“Gimme all your money,” Cyril said mock-jokingly, but with that ever-present flint in his eye.

The Rev cocked his head at them. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a flashy roll—a wad of cash. What was a man of God doing with a pimp roll? He peeled off a few twenties and handed them over.

“The Lord provides,” he told them. “Why don’t you come back later? I might have a job for you.”

The Rev saw something in them that he could use. And so it transpired that they came here to Little Heaven, to buttfuck nowhere, to nursemaid a bunch of religious freakos. It wasn’t too bad at first. The Reverend promised them plenty of dough. It was easy work. They would’ve been happy to keep the churchy fuckos in line, really crack the fuckin’ whip, but the Rev’s followers never fell out of line. So most of the time, he and Cy sat around with their thumbs up their asses, feeling antsy. They had plenty of ammo, so they shot their guns off in the woods. But after a while, there wasn’t much to shoot at.

Virgil hated it—nothing but trees and dirt clods and people mumbling prayers. Cyril was madder than a wet hen, too. Little Heaven messed with his brain waves, he said. They tried brewing hooch to stabilize Cyril’s bummed waves, but that plan went tits up.

Then things got weirder. Voices in the woods. Shapes, some even claimed . But nothing you could point a finger at and say: This here, this is messed up. Just a feeling. Everyone started acting hinky, especially the kids. It was sorta like that movie he’d watched at the Presidio a few years back after filching some coins out of a blind beggar’s cup— Invasion of the Body Snatchers . As if the whole damn camp had been taken over by pod people. Virgil half expected to find a bunch of oozing, cracked-open pods down in the kitchen cellar.

Then the outsiders showed up—Virgil hadn’t minded so much, because at least there was nothing much weird about them. They came from the world of streetlights and restaurants and roller-disco rinks, from the real world. But soon after, things got unreal when that kid Eli came back looking like something in the woods had sucked the life out of him… and then Cy went missing. Virgil was terrified that he’d run off home without telling him. Just took off in the dead of night. Hasta la vista, Virg, I’ll see you in the funny pages, ole buddy ole chum.

And then just this morning that fucking nigger cunt went and stole a motorcycle. When Virgil went to stop it, he got a goddamn wrench chucked at him. It hit him so hard that he tasted metal on his tongue and his skull rang like a church bell. Before he knew it, the rotten pig-fucker was beating the living daylights out of him! And not a damn one of these religious bumpkins stepped in to stop the long-haired spook. They just let the prick whale away. Go ahead, you thieving foreigner, beat the tar out of a goddamn honest American!

Virgil had woken up in Doc Lewis’s quarters. His forehead was so swollen he looked like a caveman. His eyes were puffed to slits. That wouldn’t have happened if Cy had been around. He would have shot that black bastard dead in his boots. But Cy wasn’t around anymore and it broke Virgil’s heart.

Presently he got out of his bed in Doc Lewis’s bunkhouse and went outside. His face hurt like hell. He walked the fence. Nobody was around. The long-haired English faggot had taken off on the motorbike, he figured. Virgil hoped he’d gotten ripped apart by the things in the woods, that they ate his stringy black ass like beef jerky. Serve him right.

Clouds gathered overhead. The rain started as a light drizzle and built to a torrent, fat drops drumming on the warehouse roofs. Virgil let the downpour soak him to the skin. As a young boy he used to stand at the edge of the desert on scorching summer days watching chain lightning skate over the hillsides, waiting for the rain to come. There was great relief when those swollen clouds finally split open above him.

He watched the forest. Maybe he should run, too. There was another motorbike, right? He ought to get the hell out of here before things got any worse and—

Something or someone was standing between the trees.