Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

After this dispiriting test, Amos rummaged under the kitchen sink. He found a gallon jug of drain cleaner. Sodium hydroxide. Ooh, that sounded promising. He read the warning label. Breathing difficulty due to throat swelling. Severe burns and tissue damage. Vomiting. Rapid drop in blood pressure. Loss of vision. At the bottom: Do not administer vinegar or lemon juice. Will cause more severe burning.

He mixed the cleaner with sugar water. It foamed up in a mad froth. The smell wasn’t overpowering. He poured the mixture on a potato. It sizzled, reducing the spud to starchy liquid. Okeydokey. Drain cleaner it would be.

Amos stood at the pulpit as his congregants drank the toxic brew. Most did it in one gulp; a few of them grimaced as if it was bitter medicine, then finished the dose. It wasn’t so odd. He’d known rummies in the Tenderloin to drink Sterno or hair spray or worse.

After the initial wave of choking commenced, Amos surveyed the crowd. Virgil Swicker’s eyes were wide with shock. Amos clambered down amid the tormented wheezes of his worshippers and jerked the pistol from the waistband of Virgil’s trousers. The gun was small but heavy—it felt thrillingly powerful in his hands. Virgil let him take it without issue. Bright penny.

The flighty screams of the children pealed off the roof beams. Their Kool-Aid had been spiked with a powerful barbiturate. Nell Conkwright suffered night terrors. She had confessed this to Amos years ago. Dreams where her children were eaten by fanged things right before her eyes. The doctor prescribed sedatives of increasing potency. The ones she took were powerful enough to put an elephant to sleep. He had instructed Virgil to liberate the bottle of pills from her bunkhouse. More than enough to do the trick. Amos only hoped it wouldn’t put the children into slumberland permanently.

The children shrieked as their parents shuffled about with their mouths opening and closing like fish suffocating in the bottom of a boat. Their mothers’ and fathers’ eyes were full of childlike fear; many of those eyes were completely bloodshot from the force of their vomiting, which they began to do uncontrollably shortly after swallowing the toxic vino. At first their puke was the candy-apple red of the cheap wine, but it turned increasingly thick and frothy, with the deeper red tinge of blood. Many of them were hacking up pulpy shreds of tissue as well; these spongy bits fell from their mouths in moist rags, where they lay steaming on the chapel floor.

“People!” Amos shouted. “You must drink the antidote! Take God’s cure!”

He reached under the cart and produced a tray of plastic cups filled with clear liquid. The congregants who heard his voice—the ones who weren’t already thrashing on the floor—made their tortured way toward him. The first was Leo Gerson, a bowlegged man with a pockmarked face, which was now red, and his neck horribly swollen, as if someone had stuffed a thrashing cat down his gullet. He grabbed two cups, the second for his wife, who lay on the floor between the pews with her legs jutting into the aisle, her modest unpatterned frock rucked up to display her enormous—yet still modest—white cotton panties. Gerson tipped the cup to his lips with hands that trembled so badly he spilled a mouthful down his chin. He turned back to his wife, but his legs abruptly went out from under him. He crumpled to the floor, spasming in pain.

Seven or eight other congregants drank from the cups; none of them noted the tang of white vinegar. By the time they glugged it down, Leo had managed to crawl back to his wife. The floor behind him was streaked with blood and fuming chunks of meat. The smell inside the church was utterly foul—the stink of acidified flesh.

Virgil stared at Amos helplessly. “What…? What the hell did you do to them?”

“I purified their souls.”

Nell Conkwright stood in the middle of the aisle. Her face was an angry purple shade, her throat a distended bulge as if she’d swallowed a baseball. Her hubby, Pious Brother Conkwright, was slumped over a pew; his buttocks were facing Amos, and the Reverend saw a dark stain on the seat of Pious Conk’s sensible trousers. Nell’s eight-year-old daughter clung to her mother’s leg, shrieking. Nell cradled the girl’s face with gentle affection, as if knowing exactly what was happening; she coughed up thick knotty structures from somewhere deep in her guts; those structures wriggled between her lips like worms and hit the floor with moist splats. Her daughter continued screaming, but even then her eyelids were drooping.

“Oh my God,” Virgil said. “Oh my Gooooooo —”

Amos grabbed Virgil’s collar and shook him until his teeth rattled.

“This is happening .” He pointed the pistol at Virgil’s chest. “Now is not the time to go soft. If you’re not with me, Brother Swicker, I am afraid my use for you is incredibly limited.”

Virgil gawped at him openmouthed. Numbly, he nodded. “Okay.”

“Go to the vestry and hold the door open. Wait for me there.”

Obediently, Virgil retreated. Amos turned to the congregation in time to see Doc Lewis staggering toward him, arms outflung as if in mimicry of some horror show boogeyman. His eyes bulged so far from their sockets that Amos could see their underswells pooled with blood. Lewis’s lips were skinned back and his teeth gritted; he vomited but didn’t open his mouth, so the bloody pulp came out his nose, twin jets of ropelike red.

Lewis’s hands closed around Amos’s throat; his mitts were so big that they encircled Amos’s beanpole neck entirely, fingers touching at the back. He squeezed with amazing force, considering he was choking to death on tatters of his own throat lining. His breath bathed Amos’s face, rank as meat seared in stearic acid. His eyes looked comical, yet they were filled with swarming hatred. They were the eyes of a man who could see, truly see , for the first time.

Lewis was steadily crushing the Reverend’s windpipe; if Amos couldn’t twist free, he was convinced the man’s fingernails would punch through his skin and rip out his windpipe. Amos brought the pistol up. The barrel dimpled the underside of Lewis’s chin. Lewis grunted quizzically, blobs of bloody tissue ejecting from his nose as he squeezed tighter—

Amos pulled the trigger.

The bullet tore Lewis’s face open from bottom to top. It cleaved his chin, splitting bone and muscle, then blew his nose apart in fleshy wings, burrowed through the skin between his eyes and bisected his forehead before continuing upward to bury itself in the chapel roof. The pressure on Amos’s throat relented; he stumbled back, gagging. Lewis reeled in a drunken circle, blood geysering from his exposed nasal cavities, staring cross-eyed at the tragic ruin of his face. He sat down on his ass dejectedly and inelegantly, an infant taking a tumble. He gazed up at Christ on His cross, his eyes pleading, before his head dipped to touch his chest. He slumped steadily forward until his skull was resting on the waxed boards.

Amos backed toward the vestry, giggling now—a shrill loony note, Ah-hee-hee-ah-hee! —as the congregants shuddered through what he assumed must be their death throes. The smell of blood perfumed the chapel; the temperature seemed to have zoomed up twenty degrees in the last minute. The children continued to scream; a few of them had lurched to the main doors, which were locked, in an attempt to get help. From whom? Who wasn’t here?

The outsider woman with the burn, the Reverend realized—Virgil said the other three had left the compound, but she was still here. There was also the very slim possibility that a few others hadn’t attended. No matter. Amos would deal with them soon.