Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

The Reverend leapt back, loosing a giddy shriek like a boy who’d gotten a jolt from his uncle’s joy buzzer. Reggie’s boots drummed the earth. Virgil Swicker emerged from the chapel doors; he stood transfixed with shock. The Reverend raised the hammer in his other hand and swung it into the broken bowl of Reggie’s skull. Wet clots spattered his face. He hooted as he brought the hammer down again, again, his pompadour unraveling as he sweated through the pomade, his hair hanging in lank wings over his ears like a hardcover book opened in the middle.

Ellen did not move. She was physically unable to. The world fractured into shards like an enormous mirror shattering, and behind it lay a black hopeless place teeming with madness and suffering and death.

The Reverend looked up. He saw her. He grinned. He raised the pistol and fired. The bullet zipped past her head. An instant later she heard the pop!

She turned and ran. The gun went off again; the slug drove into the siding of a bunkhouse ten yards ahead. Ellen ducked, zigzagging. She flashed around the side of the nearest outbuilding, noticing an uncapped drum of weed killer sitting half shadowed inside. Another gunshot. She flinched but kept running.

Her mind buzzed; it was hard to think, to plan anything more than putting one foot in front of the other. The gates loomed into view. The woods were menacing, yes, but who was to say things hadn’t become more dangerous inside Little Heaven now?

She skidded to a stop at the main gates and wormed through the gap. The forest lay a hundred yards off. She checked up, her shoes scuffling in the dust—then she saw a shadow elongating around the shed and knew the Reverend was hot after her. Trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea.

After a moment’s hesitation, she bolted. The woods reached out for her. Another shot rang out. Ellen hit the woods at a dead sprint; the temperature dropped as soon as she entered the canopy of trees. Her feet went out from under her; she crashed down on the carpet of pine needles. She got to her knees and cast a panicked glance behind her; the forest was too dark to make out anything beyond the ten feet of trees and bush. She hoped to God those things might leave her alone, at least for the next few minutes.

She peered through the trees at the compound. The Reverend stood at the gates, squinting into the trees. He pulled the pistol’s trigger again and again; all he got was a dry click. He bared his teeth, which gleamed amid the bloody canvas of his face. He smashed the hammer against the gate in frustration, then set off toward the chapel.

Ellen waited thirty seconds. She couldn’t be sure the Reverend wasn’t still watching. Perhaps he’d taken the time to reload the gun. But she couldn’t just sit here.

She crept out of the woods but remained in the shadows of the trees. She slunk around the perimeter of Little Heaven to the woodpile, which was stacked ten feet long and six feet high, covered with a burlap tarp. Her mind was still reeling. What the hell had happened? The Reverend had gone mad—that was the only certainty. Unless he had been crazy from the start, which was not entirely impossible to conceive.

Her next panicked thought: Nate! Ellen could only hope he hadn’t seen the slugs driving into his father’s head.

She crept around the woodpile and slipped under the burlap tarp. The air was laden with the smell of pinesap. She crawled to the front and lifted the flap, peeking out. Her vantage provided a view of Little Heaven; she could see clear across the square to the chapel. Its doors open, light spilling out. The Reverend came into sight again. Ellen saw him speaking with Virgil. Then they went inside and began to drag bodies out. They didn’t look like adults. Too small for that.

Had everyone been slaughtered? Ellen crouched under the tarp, her hands cut and bleeding. It didn’t seem possible, and yet…

What kind of devil would do such a thing? If only Micah and Minerva were here. They wouldn’t let the Reverend get away with it. They would—

Something crashed into the burlap, nearly knocking her down. She shoved herself back on her heels until her spine sat flush with the timber pile as something blundered around on the other side of the tarp. She stifled a scream, expecting a bullet or a knife or talon to pierce the burlap and shut her lights out for good—

The tarp rose. Nate peered in at her. “Hey,” he whispered. He crawled under. They hugged. Nate was trembling. They both were.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“I saw you running. I hid behind the big warehouse.”

“The Reverend didn’t—?”

“See me? Don’t think so.”

“Did you see…?”

“Inside the chapel?” Nate let out a choked sob. “They’re dead. The Reverend killed Nell Conkwright. I saw him do it… They’re all dead, I think.”

“Everyone?”

“The grown-ups. The other kids… I don’t know. Maybe not. I saw some of them. They weren’t as bloody as the grown-ups.”

They lifted the tarp and peeked out. Virgil and the Reverend were dragging the children’s bodies out and lining them up on the ground.

“What the hell are they doing now?” said Ellen.

VIRGIL WAS UTTERLY LOST.

Never did he imagine it could go this way. He wouldn’t ever have agreed to come to Little Heaven if he had thought, for even one second, that things could—

Blood. More blood than he had ever seen. More than he thought bodies could possibly hold. You look like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag —Cyril had once told Virgil this after a string of hard-drinking nights. That had been Virgil’s thought while gazing over the bodies in the chapel. Ten pounds of blood in a five-pound bag. Where had it all come from? Some horrible magic trick. It was as if extra blood, buckets of it, had leaked through the chapel floorboards— And up through the ground came a bubblin’ cruuude. Oil, that is. Black gold! Texas tea! —to mix with the stuff pouring from the worshippers’ mangled bodies.

Virgil hadn’t liked any of them to begin with. Shrill Goody Two-shoes, the lot. He would happily take their money, but not their lives. They didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserved this.

“Brother Swicker!”

Virgil turned to find the Reverend crossing the square toward him. The gun was pointing at Virgil’s chest. His own gun.

“Bullets,” the Reverend said. “Do we have more?”

Virgil stood at the chapel entrance. The smell of blood was hot and slimy in his nose. He wondered if this was what slaughterhouse workers inhaled all day—a mist of blood like the air on a foggy morning. How did the stench not drive them batshit? It wormed into his mouth and ears until he was drowsy with it. He wanted to crawl into the darkest space he could find, curl up, and close his eyes.

“Bullets?” he said dazedly. “I think… uh…”

The Reverend’s face swarmed out of the night, so close that Virgil could see the oily blackheads on his nose. His features were alive with tics and flutters, as if drumstick-legged locusts were trapped desperately under his skin. The Rev’s arm swung in a big loop and the gun cracked Virgil on the side of the head. He sprawled on the chapel floor, dimly amazed at the change in the short-assed fraudster. The Reverend now terrified him worse than Cyril ever had.

“Up,” the Reverend said curtly. “ Up-up-up! ”

Virgil woozily heaved himself to his feet. His hand made contact with the cooling limb of a dead worshipper and he cringed. The Reverend grabbed him by the collar.

“We must hurry.” The Rev’s breath stunk of bitter bile. “It will be here soon.”

“What’ll be here?”

The Reverend did not answer. His fingers tightened. “Bullets, Brother. Now. ”