Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

She let him loose. He sucked in a great breath and stared at her warily, suspecting she’d spring on him again.

“Or are you made of sterner stuff, Ebenezer?” she asked. “You have to be, or you’ll never make it through this life.”

“What do I do?” he asked her.

“Tomorrow, you fight back. Until you can’t stand, if that’s how it must be.” She took his face in her callused palms. “If you bend to them now—if you let them cow you—then you’ll get used to the feel of the yoke around your neck.”

The next day when his tormentors assembled in the sandlot, Ebenezer said: “Well and good, lads. Let’s tussle.” He had nobody on his side; his teachers must have known of this abuse by now, but none of them stepped in. If nothing else, this solidified in Ebenezer the fact that his lot in life was to be a man alone—and if his isolation was to be an ever-present part of existence, he’d better learn how to function within that cold circle.

The first boy who rushed at him was a fat and beery-faced son of the local banker. Ebenezer curled his hand into a fist and struck back—and he was shocked to discover he was quicker and much more powerful than his antagonist. The boy’s fist struck him with the sting of a mosquito bite; meanwhile, his own fist hammered into that porky, satisfied face with a meaty smack . The boy reeled away with a strangled cry. Ebenezer pressed his advantage, throwing venomous punches at the boys ringing him—even the boys who had never struck him, who had only thronged him for the sport of it. You trifle with the bull, you get the horns , he’d thought, swinging vicious roundhouses at the wide-eyed white faces flocked around him. In time, the boys began to hit back—he was hammered hard, repeatedly, but this time, instead of turning tail, he’d hit back, again and again, giving almost as good as he got and relying on his ability to continue sucking up punishment while his adversaries lost their gumption, one by one, and fled.

That night he’d staggered home. His eyes were swollen shut, his nose broken, several knuckles crushed. He did not go to school for days. His aunt nursed him back to health. Even she seemed amazed at the punishment he’d taken. But when he returned to school, the torments ceased.

“You will never be scared again,” Aunt Hazel said proudly. “You’ll never be the hog.”

And he hadn’t been. From that day forward, he’d been the butcher. That had persisted until the night, only days ago, when he’d seen the boy with the slug-gray eyes all covered in roaches. Then—for the first time in over twenty years—he’d felt the blade on his neck. He was the hog again, his heart filled with that quailing, weak-kneed fear he’d fought so hard to push from his soul.

You were scared, Ebenezer , his aunt spoke inside his head. Come clean.

Of course, this was true. As scared as he’d ever been in his life.

That stuck in his craw. He realized it now, many miles from the seat of that fear. He did not like being made to feel scared. More to the point, he was disgusted to find that flaw still dwelling within him—one he’d fought so hard to dispel. But that fear had returned.

Surely it was natural, considering what he had experienced.

Still. Still.

He could not live with it. Nor with the abandonment of his compatriots, which left an unaccountably large hole in him—Minerva and Shughrue and the woman and the boy were not his obligation, were they? Lord no! Yet he felt now as if they had been a part of something together, however awful, and he… he couldn’t believe he had come around to this way of thinking.

But by God, he owed .

Bigger than that, though, was the fear. He had been chased off by it. He had allowed himself to be cowed by whatever lurked in the woods surrounding Little Heaven.

And that… that simply would not do—

The pie plate clattered next to Ebenezer’s ear, breaking his reverie. A fork clanged down beside it. A mug of coffee touched down next, hot droplets sloshing over the rim and burning his scalp.

He lifted his head. There it was. The shoofly pie. Dark, with a flaky crust. He picked up the fork and meticulously cleaned the tines with a paper napkin from the dispenser. Then he flicked the fork away sharply—it pinged off the steel coffee cistern—picked up the pie with his bare, blood-stained hands, and shoveled it into his mouth. Eb ate the thick wedge in five wolfish bites, barely chewing, just stuffing it in until his cheeks bulged, then swallowing with a sinuous motion like a snake devouring a gerbil.

“Christ on a dirt bike, Flo, that’s some good pie!” he roared with such force that bits of filling sprayed from his mouth. “Shoofly, you don’t bother me !”

He pushed himself up and rocked back on his heels. He took a big swig of coffee, burning the top of his mouth in the process, shouted, “Ye gods, Myrtle, that’s some hot joe!” then pulled the dollar bill from his pocket, smoothed it out over the counter’s edge, and set it down primly on his empty plate.

“I shall tell my friends of this place, Darla!” he informed the startled waitress. “I’ll sing its praises to the high heavens! Come for the pie , I’ll tell them, but stay for the delightful fucking hospitality! ”

The woman in the booth covered her daughter’s ears. Her husband—a square-jawed clodhopper in dungarees—appeared as if he might make something of it, but he took a good look at Ebenezer and must have figured his daughter would hear worse in her life.

“Good day to you,” Eb said, booting the door open, “and God bless!”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON,Ebenezer pulled into Jimmy’s Gun Rack. It was closed. Either Jimmy had knocked off early or folks around here didn’t purchase elephant guns past four o’clock. Either way, Eb’s task would be much easier with the shop empty.

He knocked on the front door. No answer. He knocked harder, in case Jimmy was asleep in the storeroom. When that got no response, he walked around back. No car. He returned out front and drove the Olds around back. The mesa stretched away behind the shop—nothing but miles of sand studded with scraggly cacti.

The delivery door was locked, but not with a dead bolt. Instead, steel collars were attached to the door and the cinderblock wall, clasped with a heavy padlock.

Eb popped the trunk and peeled back the floor upholstery. The scissor jack sat atop the emergency spare. He grabbed the jack handle—a two-foot steel rod—and approached the door. He threaded the handle through the shackle U and levered his body against it.

“Come on, you old slapper,” he grunted, putting his full weight on the jack handle.

The lock popped. The jack handle swung up and cracked Eb in the forehead. He staggered back, dazed, and fell on his ass in the dirt.

The lock fell to the earth. The door swung open and—

BOOM!

The heavy steel door blew open like a screen door caught in the wind, slammed the shop’s brick wall, the knob chipping the cement, and ricocheted back.

Eb staggered up and peeked around the door frame. The inside of the door was shredded with pock-holes. A Mossberg shotgun was parked five feet within the entryway, strapped to a mount of welded steel. Copper wire was wrapped around the trigger, the trailing end looped through a series of metal eyelets along the ceiling to a hook on the door.

“Jumpin’ Jesus Christ, Jimmy,” Eb whispered, shaken. “Some might call that excessive.”

He eased past the homemade booby trap and into the storeroom. He flicked a light and gazed over the halogen-lit interior. There didn’t appear to be any other nasty surprises—not obvious ones, anyway.