Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Seaborn Appleton was also a suspicious sort. A paranoiac, you might even say. He’d adopted perpetual motion as a lifestyle—his enemies, of which he was convinced there were many, would find it harder to zero in on a moving target.

Part of Micah Shughrue’s job was to drive the VW camper from town to town while Appleton dozed fitfully on the foldout cot, occasionally screaming out as if in pain. Micah drove in silence at Appleton’s behest—no radio, only the musical tinkle of Appleton’s powders and liquids, all housed in glass bottles, rattling in the back.

Appleton preferred to sell directly to his clientele. Most drug lords—and Appleton was that, if one of minor regard—usually tasked low-level flunkies with the selling. Who wanted to deal with the scabby-faced, buttery-skinned addicts themselves? Who wanted to confront the physical manifestation of the poison they profited from? But Appleton got a kick out of it. He enjoyed the craven need in all those twitching, bloodshot eyes.

Appleton himself was a dour, funereal, and jarringly skeletal man. But put him in front of a gaggle of crankers, and his limbs loosened, his dourness receded, and his voice took on the rich, plaintive tones of a lay preacher.

“Ooooh, yes,” he’d say, displaying his newest wares. “You will be astonished, my pretties. This magical stuff will take you places you never dreamed existed.”

By the time Micah joined him, Appleton was beloved by the addicts of the towns he cycled through. They would catch wind of his arrival and do everything short of roll out a welcome mat. When it was time to move on, they practically clawed onto the bumper of his van, wailing at him to take them with him. For Micah, the work was easy. There were the expected scuffles. Jittery addicts brandishing box cutters, demanding money or product. An upstart rival asserting claim over a territory that had been the Chemist’s for years—but Appleton had let it go with a shrug. “This country is too vast, and too full of paying customers, to go to war over one tiny patch of it,” he’d said. For eight months, Micah kept Appleton from bodily harm, and was compensated handsomely for his efforts.

Then Micah met a woman. They had been looping back down into Oregon at the time, plying their trade in familiar ports of call. The woman showed up at the abandoned soap factory where Appleton was entertaining clientele. She was carrying something.

Micah approached carefully, measuring her intentions, one hand on the butt of his pistol. Maybe she was carrying a gun—in his experience, sometimes the direst threat came in the most unlikely package. He roughly caught her arm.

“Show me,” he said.

The woman twisted painfully to reveal her sleeping infant daughter, partly swaddled in a grubby fleece blanket. The baby’s arms… well, that was the trouble. The little girl had no arms. Only a pair of melted nubs like amputation remnants jutting from her shoulders.

“She was born this way,” the woman said quietly. “And blind, too.”

“I am… sorry.” Micah didn’t know what else to say.

“It was the drugs that did it.” She looked wretched, cored out by grief. “I shouldn’t have taken them with her in my belly, but I was weak.”

The babe awoke and began to mewl. Its eyes were a featureless gray, as if molten pewter had been poured into the sockets.

“Would you shut that up?” Appleton called over. “It’s ruining my mood.”

After the last bug-eyed scrounger had left, Micah detailed this encounter to Appleton while they sat inside the van. Appleton’s response was in keeping with his nature.

“I sell drugs, man! Drugs hurt people. They hurt the trembling lives inside those people, too. They also make people feel wondrous and let them escape the horror of their inept, ridiculous existence for a while. I can’t be responsible. I won’t be!”

On the most basic level, Micah understood Appleton’s point. People were responsible for their own lives. But still, he couldn’t shake the sight of that tot.

“From what depths of soul do you dredge up this moral outrage, anyway?” Appleton said with a mocking laugh. “You’ve probably killed more men than my products ever will. Why else would I have hired you?”

“Not women, not children, not the unborn.”

Appleton shrugged. “It’s settled, then. We’re both killers.”

“Most every man I have ever killed was trying to do the same to me at the time.”

“That infant isn’t dead,” Appleton said petulantly. “She will simply have more challenges to face than other youngsters.”

Something snapped inside Micah right then. It happened from time to time, often without warning. He couldn’t help it and didn’t even try to—it came as a release of all that pent-up pressure.

Micah stepped outside the van. He grabbed a box of the Chemist’s newest, dandiest product and hurled it onto the cement of the soapworks. He set about stomping on it, grinding the bluish powder into the oily floor, reducing it to worthless paste.

“What are you—?” Appleton cried. “You cocksucking sonofa whoooore !”

Micah kept at it, laughing like a satyr. So intense was his rage that he did not notice Appleton reach under his cot for a small-bore pistol, which he quickly fired.

The slug hit Micah under the armpit, both his arms being raised in a gleeful jig. He was thrown down and the wind knocked out of him. He reached for his gun, but Appleton was already behind the wheel. He fired the van up and tore out of the soapworks, leaving Micah on the floor with the silvery tang of the crushed drug sharp in his nose.

He lay bleeding for several minutes. He thought: It is always the goddamn amateurs who score the luckiest hits. He stood and staggered five long blocks to a pay phone. He could not call a hospital. They would fix him up, but they would also send for the police. So he called a veterinarian, a man who owed Micah a favor. The vet arrived some time later to find Micah passed out in an alley not far from the phone booth.

The vet drove Micah to his office. He dug the bullet out and inserted a stent into Micah’s chest to vent the blood. For many days, Micah lay in the garden shed out behind the vet’s house with that stent jabbing out of him; he twisted a spigot to drain his own blood. He coughed up pints of blood, dark and thick as pancake batter, and descended into hallucinations.

Once he healed, he embarked upon a relentless pursuit of Seaborn Appleton, who was by then miles away in the company of new henchmen. Micah shot two of those new men in a cathouse in Elko, Nevada, but Appleton escaped with his third hired gun. After that, Micah caught wind that Appleton had put out a call for harder men—professional mercenaries, ex-military—and put a bounty on his former protector’s head.

Undeterred, Micah headed to Mogollon. He suspected it would be the bastard’s next stop, following his migratory pattern.

And when Appleton arrived, Micah Shughrue would kill him dead and that would be that.

MINERVA ATWATERhad come to Mogollon to kill two men.

Her contract called for only one individual, a man named Micah Henry Shughrue. A veteran of the Korean War who had spent the ensuing years on the shadow side of the law. A gun for hire. A merc. Of late, he’d been loosely associated with a criminal enterprise operating out of Kansas City. He wasn’t a member of that particular outfit—more of a stringer. Five years ago, he’d been set upon by Deputy US Marshal Clint Smith, who rousted him in the bathtub of a Topeka whorehouse; Micah Shughrue shot Smith in the leg with a zip gun stashed under the towel folded neatly next to the tub and alighted on foot, running down the street and into the Topeka gorge naked as a jay. Evidently he’d survived. Shughrue seemed to be that, if nothing else. A survivor.