Little Heaven

1

AFTER THE SEABORN APPLETON matter had concluded to Micah’s satisfaction—ultimately Shughrue had allowed Appleton to continue to suck breath, though it’s possible Appleton would have preferred death to the state he was left in—the three outlaws hid out on a farm on the outskirts of Angel Fire, a town in Colfax County, New Mexico.

In later generations, it would be difficult for two men and one woman with a history of illegalities to disappear quite so easily. But in the sixties, when records were written out in longhand and transferred to carbons and put in files that went into filing cabinets in dank basements infested by mice and mold, it was still a possibility. You could live off the grid, in unmapped places, sheltered from the long arm of the law. If you kept to yourself and paid in cash and didn’t get sick and drove at the speed limit, well, there was a chance you might never run afoul of those government agencies whose job was to track the movements and intents of its citizenry. You could just… vanish.

Micah had done some work for the farm’s owner back when the man had made his living by rawer means. There was a mutual respect and fealty between them. Johnny Law did not come searching for them. What had they really done, anyway? Tried to kill one another, without success, then ganged up to mutilate a drug dealer. The law had more pressing matters to address.

Over the following months, their wounds healed—not perfectly, but then, wounds rarely do. Micah took to wearing a patch over his squandered eye. Ebenezer’s unrelaxed hair mushroomed into a massive Afro. Minerva kept her own hair razored tight to her skull. They slept in the hayloft above the horses. During the day, they walked the fields alone, testing their strength against some unknown eventuality. The scent of cut garlic leached out of the earth, perfuming their skin. They were happy. As happy as people like them could be. They had no family. Many of their old friends had been eaten by the war.

At night they slept fitfully, like wolves from separate packs forced to share a den. One night, Ebenezer awoke to find Minerva staring at him. Her eyes were a peculiar blue in the drowsy light of the barn.

“See anything you fancy?” he asked.

“Can’t sleep.”

“Try thinking pleasant thoughts.”

“That’s hard, looking at you.”

Ebenezer laughed softly. “Oh, you are truly an incorrigible flirt.”

Minerva would kill him eventually. She was as certain of that fact as she was that the sun would rise in the east—even more sure, in fact, because if the sun failed to rise one day she would still kill Ebenezer in the dark. Ebenezer believed her actions had been motivated by monetary concerns. He did not fear or suspect her. And Micah was right—it would taste all the sweeter for the wait. Minerva had read that people who had the ability to delay gratification were the most successful people on God’s green earth.

ONE DAY, the farm’s owner summoned Micah to his kitchen.

“There’s a job needs doing.”

Micah said, “I thought you were quit of all that.”

The man said, “It ain’t mine. Still needs doing. I figured your crew might be up for it.”

My crew? Micah thought. They are just a couple of strays.

“Payroll job,” the man said. “Hungarian gang operating out of Albuquerque.” He snorted. “How they ended up there, you got me. Good payday. But it’s not a one-man job.”

Micah nodded. “I owe you.”

“Don’t owe me much. Just reckoned it would get you back on your feet, is all.”

Micah floated the idea to the other two. He was surprised when they both readily agreed. Ebenezer was a mercenary at heart, happy to join any cohort so long as a payday was involved. Minerva was the real surprise—but she was sick of bounty hunting, and her old outfit was unlikely to take her back now anyway. They were all poor as church mice, too.

She said, “Even splits?”

“Even splits,” said Micah.

“Then I’ll do it.”

THEY TOOK A GREYHOUND to Albuquerque. Micah bought a Dodge Dart at a used-car lot, signing the ownership papers under an assumed name and paying cash—the last three hundred dollars in his wallet.

Micah drove to the payroll swap site. A hardware store on Euclid Avenue. When the delivery van showed up, Micah strapped a hockey helmet on his head and gunned the Dart’s engine and charged out of a blind alleyway, slamming into the van, T-boning it, and rocking it up over the curb. His head slammed the dash, blood leaping out his nose. He gazed out the busted windshield and saw Ebenezer and Minerva—who had been sitting at a bus stop directly across the road—hauling open the van’s rear doors and dragging out a pair of stunned deliverymen.

Micah staggered out of the Dart. A Hungarian mama with a corrugated dust-bowl face ran out of the hardware store with a machete. Still woozy, helmet on, he leveled his pistol at her. She got the point and dropped the blade. Ebenezer retrieved the cash bag. They dashed down the blind alley and onto another street. Sirens, distant but closing in.

They walked into a pet store. Micah still had the hockey helmet. He took it off, left it on the stacked sacks of dog kibble. They breezed past caged puppies and lizards and twittering birds, exiting out the back door. They walked down another alley to a park where kids were playing baseball. Minerva bought a lemon Italian ice from the ice cream truck. They were sweating, but so was everyone else.

Ebenezer tried to hail a cab, but nobody stopped. One did for Micah, but only once Ebenezer had hidden behind a bus bench. When Eb hopped in, the driver made a face like he’d sniffed something rank, but he kept his lip zipped. He took them to a bar on the outskirts. The cash bag sat under their table. Ebenezer played the pinball machine. Minerva played “Sugar Shack” and “Blue Velvet” on the jukebox. Micah pretty much stared at the wall.

After a few hours, another cab dropped them at the bus station. They caught the 6:30 Greyhound to Angel Fire. Back at the farm, the farmer counted their take. There was also a pound of heroin in the bag. The farmer claimed it was “primo stuff.” Micah didn’t care. He’d had his fill of drugs.

The job had gone off without a snag. They worked well together. The farmer said there were other jobs. The three of them didn’t have much else better to do.

2

AND SO THEY FORMED a loose association. They had no obligations, no taxes on their time. It was not a natural fellowship. Each of them preferred the sound of one hand clapping. Plus one of them nursed a blood grudge against another.

But something happened during their flight from Mogollon, their recovery at the farm, and the jobs they did under the farmer’s supervision. They came together in a manner none of them could credit.

They were professional and declarative in their actions. Judgment did not enter into their thinking. As they were good at their chosen endeavor, for many months they prospered. Between jobs, they would drift apart for a week or two, leaving the farm to pursue their own amusements. Then they would return like honeybees following an old pheromone trace.

This was the nature of their existence for months. Then a woman entered and changed everything, as women often will.

Afterward, Micah Shughrue would dwell on this idyll of good months and the two people he shared it with. He would wonder at their fates. Such a strange path to chart. The heart pulls, the mind resists. The heart wins. It wins.

Nobody can chart the shape of his or her life before that shape emerges. There is hardly any rhyme to that shape and almost no reason. And that is the grandest, the most irreducible mystery of all.

3

MICAH KNEW THE WOMAN was watching him. When a man spends a lot of his life with a target on his back, that man had better develop a sixth sense if he wants to keep drawing breath.

He had driven into Angel Fire in the farmer’s pickup to purchase sundries: flour, sugar, molasses, a new button for his duster. Also ammunition. He’d been practicing on the farm, pegging cans off the corral fence. His aim was screwy with only the one eye—even though he used to squeeze that eye shut when he fired. He had never been a crack shot, anyway. It was more that he never flinched in the cut.

He exited the gun shop with three boxes of 7.62 mm cartridges. He crossed the road to a small groceteria. It was cool inside, an old Westinghouse wall-mounted A/C pumping, the tinselly ribbons tied to its grate fluttering. He walked the aisles. A sack of sugar. A five-pound bag of Gold Medal flour. A box of Sugar Sparkled Rice Krinkles—all men had their vices. He passed a cooler and grabbed a six-pack of Blatz. He felt like blowing the foam off a few. He picked up a church key, too.

He had spotted her by then. First, when he came out of the gun shop. She was lingering across the road, pretending to be absorbed by the display window of the hardware store: a heap of men’s work gloves. Why would she be so interested in those? She wasn’t. She was watching him in the reflection of the glass.

She was tall. Not stork-like, the way Minerva was put together. A hint of power down through those legs. Her dark hair was cut in a bob. She wore dun-colored Carhartts and a T-shirt of palest blue.

She had followed him into the grocery store. Maybe she was craving a Hershey’s bar or a pack of Now and Laters. She didn’t seem threatening. He caught her reflection in the fish-eye mirror at the head of each aisle.

A bag boy put Micah’s items in a brown paper sack. The woman idled behind him. She didn’t have a thing in her basket. She seemed to realize this, and tossed a pack of chewing gum into it.

His truck was parked around the side of the store in the shade of a bur oak. He dropped the tailgate and dug a can of Blatz out of the bag. He punched two holes in the lid with the church key and took a deep drink.

The woman rounded the store. Her face was startling. Her eyes were a peculiar blue—the blue of the water in an Arctic lake—and her hair was so black it reflected the sunlight. But neither of those details was jarring. No, it was the skin on the left side of her face, trailing under her ear and along her jaw, on down her throat. The flesh was mottled and runneled like wax that pooled around a lit candle.

She stopped. She put her hands in her pockets and rocked forward at the hips. Micah was not worried about her—but he scanned behind her, waiting for someone else to show.

“Micah Shughrue?”

She took a step toward him. It was one of the worst facial burns Micah had ever seen. He couldn’t imagine how it had happened or who might have done it to her. She would have been beautiful without it. Micah could not say that she wasn’t, even with it.

“Sherri Bellhaven told me I might find you here,” she said. “In Angel Fire, I mean. Not the grocery store.”

Micah knew Sherri Bellhaven. He’d done a few jobs with her fellow, Leroy Huggins. Bellhaven had been a bank clerk. A square john with a taste for rough customers. Micah had liked Sherri, but believed those tastes would get her in trouble eventually.

He said, “I used to know her.”

“She’s my sister. I’m Ellen Bellhaven.”

Ellen pulled a pack of Doublemint from her pocket and unwrapped a stick. Micah hitched his foot up on the tailgate, balancing his elbow on his knee. Glugged some beer.

“How is she?”

“In jail.” She balled up the foil and flicked it off her thumb. “Up in Tacoma.”

Micah just drank his beer.

“She trusted the wrong people,” Ellen Bellhaven said when it became clear he wasn’t going to speak. “Same old story, huh?”

Micah finished his beer and dropped the empty into the bag. He dug out another can. The woman, Ellen, watched him. Did she expect him to offer her one? He’d give her one if she asked.

“She heard you were out here. Jailhouse intel,” she said.

Eight months ago, Micah had sent Leroy an envelope with the ten dollars he owed. He forgot what Leroy had loaned him the money for, but he never forgot a debt. The letter’s postmark had been Angel Fire. Perhaps that was the how as to why this woman was facing him now.

Ellen laughed. “Like I know a thing about jail! I hardly even got grounded as a kid. The good girl, that was me. Sherri, on the other hand, got grounded so often that her windowsill had grooves in it, she had to sneak out so much.”

Ellen was babbling a little. Micah understood. Normal people tended to do that in his presence.

“Listen,” she said, “are you… ah, for hire?”

Why did some people think he was available for scut work? You want someone to pull your kitty out of a tree? Call a fireman.

“No.”

Her throat flushed; the blush carried up to enflame her unburned cheek. “Oh. Okay. It’s just that my sister said maybe you could—”

“You in trouble?”

“Me?” She shook her head. “No, no, it’s my sister. Her son, actually. Nate. He’s been abducted, I guess you could say.”

“So call the police.”

“No can do. He was taken by his father.”

“You call that an abduction? Your sister is in the clink.”

Ellen nodded. “Sure. Where else is the kid going to go, right? It’s not that Reggie—that’s his father—it’s not that he’s taken Nate so much as where he’s taken him.”

Micah raised an eyebrow.

“Little Heaven,” Ellen said. “You heard of it?”

Micah shook his head.

“It’s some kind of a compound,” Ellen went on. “Survivalist? Really, I don’t know the who or why of it. Religious nuts. Reggie nearly died two years ago, yeah? He was a mailman. Heart attack on his route. The doctors hit him with those shock paddles to kick-start his heart. He woke up blubbering in tongues. A real come-to-Jesus moment. Sherri says he started going on and on about taking his faith to the next level.”

“When I knew Sherri, she was with Leroy Huggins.”

“I remember Leroy,” said Ellen. “Decent guy. Good for my sister, apart from the criminal tendencies.”

Micah drank his beer.

“So anyway, Reggie’s the new guy. Sherri gave up dating badasses. Total one-eighty. She and Reggie started dating after Leroy; it lasted a few years, and Nate was the fruit of it. I met Reggie once, at Nate’s christening. A prissy bald-headed guy with spectacles, his back all stooped from delivering the weekly Pennysaver.”

“Only the one time?”

She started. “Pardon?”

“Only the one time you met him?”

She nodded. “I haven’t seen Nate since he was a tot, either.” Ellen probably expected Micah to ask why. When he didn’t, she told him anyway. “I had some issues of my own during those years. Sherri took the straight and narrow. I strayed, then came back to heel. Then Sherri went off the reservation entirely.”

“So your nephew…”

“Is at Little Heaven. With Reggie. Living with a bunch of snake handlers, for all I know.” She dipped her chin. “You a religious sort?”

Micah shook his head.

“Me neither. I mean, okay, Unitarian, Methodist, those vanilla faiths—fill your boots. But some camp in the forest, people dressed in robes praying eight hours a day…”

She threw her arms up in evident frustration. Micah noted the burn scar carried down her left arm and peeked from the sleeve of her T-shirt.

“Sorry. I’m probably boring the piss out of you.”

“My piss remains in my bladder,” he told her. “I find this interesting.”

That was not one hundred percent true. Micah had heard stories like this a dozen times. But those stories had not been told by Ms. Ellen Bellhaven, from Parts Unknown.

He said, “You try the cops at all?”

“Sherri barked up that tree already. Like I said, custody of Nate fell to Reggie after my sister went to jail. He’s a mailman, for Christ’s sake. Police hear that—stable job, money in the bank—okay, they figure the kid’s fine.”

Could be he is fine, Micah thought. Sure, he is getting a bellyful of scripture, but there are worse things. He is with his father, not huffing diesel fuel out of a jam jar.

“What is your stake in it?”

Ellen looked at him funny. The sunlight fell through the oak leaves and settled on her arresting face.

“You said you hardly even know your nephew,” Micah went on.

“And that matters?”

Micah squinted at the sky. He felt itchy all over. Ah, fuck it. “Beer?”

He punched holes in a can and left it on the tailgate. Ellen came closer to pick it up. She ran the cold can across her forehead. She took the gum out of her mouth and stuck it on the top and took a sip.

“Thanks.”

She pulled a dollar bill from her pocket and dropped it into the grocery sack. Micah took it out and put it into his pocket.

“My sister said you would do it for money.”

“You got much?”

“Our father was pretty good at making money.”

“Why not go on your own?”

She said, “I thought about it. The truth? It freaks me out. The place where they are, this Little Heaven? Really isolated. A bunch of Bible bashers stewing out in the middle of the woods. Hell, I might turn into a pillar of salt.”

“They are harmless, I am sure. Why not hire a wilderness guide?”

She drank deeply. The muscles of her throat flexed. She did not answer his question. But Micah knew that if the boy was in a rough spot, she would want him removed. Any guides would be out of their depth in that circumstance.

“I’d go if you go,” she said.

“You cannot walk out with the kid.”

She set her jaw. “I’ll pay you to try. No, forget I said that—just to get me there, okay? I want to see the place. Peace of mind, yeah?”

Micah shut his eye. The sun warmed the eyelid not covered by the patch.

“No.”

“No, you can’t do it?”

“Cannot is not so much part of it.”

Ellen Bellhaven put the can down. She unwrapped another stick of gum and folded it into her mouth. “Why not?”

Micah got up and shut the tailgate. Ellen took a few steps back. He opened the door and slung his body behind the wheel.

“Hey,” she said. “Hey.”

He started the truck and set it in gear.

“I’m staying at the Budget Inn,” she called as he drove away. “Just think about it, for Christ’s sake!”

4

MICAH HAD NO INTENTION of thinking about it. But he did.

Which is to say, he thought about Ellen Bellhaven. Which forced him to think about her offer.

My sister said you would do it for money.

Which was true. Micah had done much more ignoble things for the coin of the realm. He wasn’t picky, as a rule. But the idea of shepherding a woman into the woods so she could check up on her nephew struck him as a chapter ripped out of a Hardy Boys book. The Legend of Little Heaven’s Gold.

But then, considering he did do pretty much anything for money, and providing Ms. Bellhaven had the means to pay…

He was trying to talk himself into it. Idiotically, he found that he wanted to spend more time with Ellen. Still, wasn’t it easy money? Guide her to this Little Heaven and let her get a peek at the kid. So long as the boy’s arms weren’t covered in fang bites from handling cobras and he didn’t have a crucifix branded on his forehead… well, they could just toddle off again, right? How hard could it be?

Micah dwelled on it for a day. Then he brought it up with the other two. He shouldn’t need them on this job. But there was that old chestnut: Better to bring a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have one.

“So what—this guy and his kid are shacked up with a bunch of Freedomites?” Minerva said once Micah had outlined the situation.

“Something like that,” said Micah.

Ebenezer spanked his hands together and high-kneed around in a little circle. “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna-Krishna-Hare-Hare!”

“How much we talking?” Minerva said.

Micah said, “I am given to understand her family has money.”

Minerva said, “So why not just rob her?”

Micah frowned. “It will only take a few days.”

“We can have a wienie roast,” said Eb, warming to the idea. “And tell spook stories. Isn’t that what you Yanks do on campouts?”

The two of them were game. Micah left it at that. Ellen Bellhaven had probably left by now, anyway. Packed up and returned to wherever she had come from.

She was gone. Micah was sure of it.

5

MICAH PULLED into the graveled lot of the Budget Inn. One car was parked in the lot. He noted its out-of-state plates.

He was heading inside to check with the clerk when he heard his name.

“Micah! Hey, Micah!”

Ellen stood on the second-floor balcony. Dressed in the same Carhartts but a different shirt. The sun glossed her hair and made it shine like a mirror—which was a stupid, dainty detail to take note of. Micah chided himself for it.

He said, “How much to take you?”

She gave him a number. It was quite a high one, with more than two zeroes.

Wouldn’t anything be high enough? an arch voice whispered in his head. Wouldn’t her giving you the time of day be enough?

“We leave tomorrow. My partners will come.”

She slapped the balcony railing and hooted. “Goddamn it, Micah. I was just about to give up on you.”

You are making a fool of yourself, said that arch voice.

Well. Maybe so. He liked to think he never made the same mistake twice. He didn’t have much experience with women—one mistake was within his rights, wasn’t it?

6

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT. Little Heaven lay in darkness.

The Reverend Amos Flesher slept with a purple-headed erection.

Someone was touching him in his dream. Small, soft fingers running up and down the shaft of his penis. Unsexed fingers, not identifiably male or female, boy or girl. But they were very knowing, those fingers. Oh yes. Playing over the crown so teasingly, coaxing him toward climax—oh please, pretty pretty please!—only to slow their rhythm the instant before release.

Next the fingernails dug into the sensitive tip, pinching the slit where some semen was just starting to leak out—

Amos shrieked up out of his slumber. My Lord! He was clasping his cock in a vise grip. The tip was speckled with angry dots: blood vessels that had burst from the throttling pressure.

You have been thinking impure thoughts, boy.

Amos’s chest was clammy with sweat. His pajamas were stuck to him. Three oscillating fans wired to an outdoor generator stirred the room’s muggy air around.

He sat up in bed. A king-sized mattress—everyone else at Little Heaven slept on cots, but Amos needed his sleep. It was when he communed with God and received His guidance.

But God had not come to him tonight. Only those knowing fingers.

Dirty stick. That’s what Sister Muriel, one of the nuns at the San Francisco Catholic Orphanage, used to call the male penis. She always made that distinction—the male penis, as if it was necessary.

Don’t fiddle with it! she would say, adding emphasis with a hard lash of her pointer. That’s what the devil wants—for you to put your hands all over your dirty sticks. Do you want your fingers to rot off, boys? They will. You can count on it.

Amos Flesher went to the window. His compound sprawled out before him. The mess hall, the study hall, the square, and the supply shacks. The hum of gas generators. Security lamps shining around the perimeter.

Little Heaven. His own small slice of perfection.

His gaze fell on the chapel, topped with an enormous crucifix. He’d had it shipped here in pieces and nailed together. The three points of the cross were glossed by the moon—seeing this, he felt a deep tranquility settle within him. It was soon broken.

You were milking your dirty stick, weren’t you? Milking it in your sleep.

Amos tried to ignore Sister Muriel’s voice. His eyes wandered past the cross to the high fence ringing Little Heaven. The woods fanned out in every direction, thick and impenetrable. They offered solitude and isolation, which were necessary for his ambitions. No telephones, no mailing address. The civilized world was full of degradations that forever sought to lead a pious man into licentiousness and vice.

It was here, so far from the machinations of man, that Amos could hear God’s voice clearly. He had awoken one day to hear Him calling—the true, unquestioned voice.

Come to me, my lamb.

These were the only words at first.

Amos had left his ministry in San Francisco to follow that voice. By car, by bus, on foot. He traveled many miles. The voice grew stronger. He did not eat and scarcely slept. The pull of the voice obliterated those needs. There were times during his pilgrimage when he thought he’d go mad or collapse. But the voice guided him through despair.

Come to me, my lamb.

Amos followed the voice to this spot—it was easy, like scanning a radio dial until you tuned in to a powerful frequency. He was exhausted by the time he arrived, his sandals nearly disintegrated from the thirteen-mile hike through the woods. At some point, everything went black. A fugue state. And when the darkness cleared, he was where he was meant to be.

Nothing about the spot screamed out, Behold, the seat of the Divine! Just trees and scrub. Had he been a bit more aware, Amos might have noticed how the sounds of nature had bled into a relative silence the closer he drew to the site. The chirping of the birds died away, as did the rustle of animals in the underbrush.

But the voice overpowered all of that. Once he had tuned in to this unearthly transmission, a direct conduit to the Lord, Amos beckoned his flock. They came, as he had known they would—they would follow their prophet. They helped build Little Heaven to Amos’s exact specifications.

Not all of them had come. He had ministered to some two hundred souls in San Francisco. Only a quarter of them made the trek into the wilds of New Mexico. Still, Amos was satisfied. Most importantly, they were families. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. They were so much better than fifty directionless souls who could lose faith at any moment. Families stayed together. Bloodlines ran thick, oh yes.

They had been here nearly six months. Things were not perfect, but then, things never were. A few outbuildings had collapsed in a freak windstorm. Two worshippers were bitten by snakes. Greta Hughes, the children’s teacher, had broken her leg in a construction mishap. The limb had become gangrenous. Neither the ministrations of Colby Lewis, a onetime medic in the Vietnam War, or the flock’s upbeat prayers had much effect. The Hughes woman wept wretchedly as she was shipped back to the devil’s den of society.

God must test the pure of heart in order to cull the wicked and slothful from their number, Amos had counseled his flock at that evening’s sermon.

There had been one or two other… events. Isolated incidents. Nothing worth dwelling on. A few of the elect had claimed to see things. Shapes in the woods at night. Sounds that could not be accounted for by natural means. Amos had dealt with those complaints harshly. Such hysterics had no place at Little Heaven.

The children, too. Some of them were having trouble adjusting. Their behavior was perhaps a little off from time to time. But that, too, was to be expected. Everyone had to adjust. The poisonous teat of civilization, with its televisions and pinball machines and McDonald’s hamburgers: you had to wean yourself from that vile nipple. The children struggled with this more than the rest of Amos’s worshippers, but—

You were fiddling with yourself, weren’t you? Milking your dirty stick so it would spurt. It is what syphilitic perverts do to themselves. It stains the soul, boy—and yours is stained already, isn’t it?

“Hush’m, hush’m, hush’m!”

Amos spoke in a reedy singsong, the tone of voice you might use to head off an argument. It was a tone his worshippers would find quite different from the rich baritone that issued from his chest during sermons.

Smutty little fiddler fiddling with his dirty filthy stick—

Amos ground his teeth. It sounded like cement blocks rubbing together inside his head. He stared over the trees at the rock formation looming against the sky. It was darker than the night, as though carved out of a different kind of blackness altogether.

The Devil’s Rock. That was its name, according to some mountaineering guide Brother Fairweather had showed him. No matter. It was not for mankind to name the works of the Creator. We must humble ourselves before Him.

Big Heaven. Not the Devil’s Rock. That was Amos’s self-given name for the skyscraping formation that rose pillar-like from the forest floor. He had built Little Heaven, which stood in the shadow of Big Heaven, which itself stood in the shadow of God Himself. He pictured Big Heaven as a massive antenna broadcasting the Lord’s voice to his ears alone…

…although he had to admit that sometimes the voice did not sound as though it belonged to God. Just the odd blip where… Well, it was like when you were on a road trip and you lost the radio signal. That was the only analogy Amos could come up with—the sort of obvious comparison he worked into his sermons so that the more squirrel-headed members of his flock could grasp it. When you were driving and lost one radio station but started to pull in another at almost the same time. That brief span where the frequencies got crossed.

This was how it felt. God’s voice—the calm, uplifting one—would bleed away the tiniest bit and another voice would interfere for just a moment. And this other voice was different.

It wasn’t even a voice, precisely. Amos could call it that only insofar as it spoke to him, though not so much in words. Amos Flesher envisioned an immense dark space teeming with flies, their wings and legs producing a hum that rose and fell in sonorous waves to fill the void with the sound of their mindless industry.

Flies, and something else. A silky constriction that pinged on a fainter sonic register—a rhythmic coiling and tightening that called to mind a sightless worm of endless length braiding over and around itself in knots of terrifying complexity. The rub of its flesh produced a delicate hiss that was somehow staticky, like the sound on a vinyl record between songs.

This voice—was it a voice?—this presence would occasionally intrude upon the voice of God. Amos would flinch from it, shaking his head to fling it out of his mind.

Just a blip. Then it was gone again.

Amos Flesher stared over his fiefdom, shrouded in midnight dark. He heard no voice now. He heard nothing at all. Only the jumpy beat of his own heart.

7

THE ROAD RIBBONED EASTWARD, flat and gray in the morning sunlight. They had been driving for hours: Micah, Minerva, and Ellen in Ellen’s ’57 Oldsmobile. Ebenezer followed on a Honda CB77 motorcycle he had bought from a pawn agent in Albuquerque. Evidently he wasn’t entirely sold on the idea and wanted to be able to skedaddle if things went hinky.

They had stopped in Albuquerque for the motorcycle, gasoline, and camping gear. They bought backpacks, boots, tents, and sleeping bags. Lost hikers—that would be their angle. They would hike it to Little Heaven. Ellen knew its whereabouts; her sister had demanded that Reggie tell her, going so far as to make him draw a map and mail it to her in jail. If they needed a closer look, they would claim to be lost and appeal upon the Little Heavenites’ Christian decency for a night’s sanctuary. Once they knew the boy was well cared for, they would thank the Bible bashers for their hospitality and leave them to their woodland rites.

According to Ellen, the settlement nearest to Little Heaven was Grinder’s Switch. A village of less than three hundred souls situated in a valley, with the wilderness unfolding to the north and east. They drove down a single-lane blacktop banded by vast sweeps of sorghum. They passed the odd billboard for Dash laundry soap or Lestoil or Winston Super Kings, but most of the billboards were of a religious nature.

Satan tries to limit your prayers, one billboard proclaimed, because he knows your prayers will limit him!

“Well, he’s doing a hell of a job,” Minerva said. “I don’t pray at all. So good for you, Satan.”

Ellen tried the radio. They pulled in a few old episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.

“The transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account!” the announcer intoned. “America’s fabulous freelance insurance investigator!” When the station bled out of range, Ellen manipulated the knob with great delicacy to pull in Dr. Don Rose, broadcasting on AM 610, KFRC, all the way from San Francisco. They listened to “One Grain of Sand,” by Eddy Arnold, which segued into “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Pocket Full of Rainbows.” This was followed by commercials for Bubble Up gum, Roi-Tan cigars, and Ken-L Ration dog food, which Ellen sang along to lustily in a little boy’s voice.

They lost the signal in the hills. Ellen fiddled with the dial until—

“Pestilence!”

A great fulmination filled the car. A man’s warbly, southern-fried voice.

“The four horsemen are saddled, payy-poll! Their spurs are sharp to goad their flame-eyed steeds up from the bowels of the infernal pit to spread pain and suffering amongst the unbelievers, the heretical, the unwed muuuthers, the adulterers and the idolaters and fornicators and awwwll the ho-MA-sexshals, the tax chayyyts, the nig-…-gardly of spirit, the interbreeders, the faithless, the impure, the—”

Ellen snapped the radio off.

“Holy shit, buddy,” she said. “Take a pill.”

They pulled into a gun shop that sat off the freeway. Jimmy’s Gun Rack. A squat, flat-topped building that resembled a bomb shelter. Barred windows, smoked glass. They needed ammunition. Micah had his Russian Tokarevs. Minerva, her US Colts. Ebenezer had borrowed the farmer’s English-made Tarpley carbine, a .52-caliber single-shot rifle. He hadn’t hunted wild game—a gentleman’s diversion, if ever there was—in years. This trip might offer the chance to sportingly plug a deer or feral hog.

Micah wasn’t sure they would even need guns. He hoped not. But then, he couldn’t be certain there weren’t a few rogue survivalists at the compound—if so, there was a chance those men would have guns. Better to be safe.

A bell chimed as they walked into the shop. Rifles lined the walls, with heavy-gauge chains threaded through their trigger guards. The man who was assumedly Jimmy stood behind a glass display cabinet. A stuffed boar’s head was mounted on the wall above him. Some joker had put a pair of Buddy Holly glasses over the boar’s snout and stuffed one of those trick cigars—already exploded—in its mouth. The boar’s eyes were wide and shocked-looking, as if the cigar had just blown up in its face.

Jimmy was himself boarish in appearance. Squat and round with stiff hairs sprouting from the vee of his camouflage shirt. His eyes were loose and eggy behind a pair of thick bifocals.

“What can I do you fine folks for?” he said.

“Unusual request, my fine fellow,” said Ebenezer. “I’ve got an old hunting rifle, .52 caliber.”

Jimmy hooted. “Jesus, son—you steal it off a dead Boer?”

Micah and Minerva gave Jimmy their orders.

“Those I can do,” said Jimmy. “And I’ll take a look for some .52 loads. Not promising nothing.”

Jimmy opened a door leading to the stockroom. Ebenezer spotted an unusual weapon just inside that door: two huge canisters and a long-nozzled gun with an attached asbestos-wrapped hose. A flamethrower. He tapped Micah on the shoulder and pointed.

“You ever use one of those in the war?”

Micah shook his head. “No flame unit in our detachment.”

Jimmy returned some minutes later. His forehead was caked with dust. He slapped down a box of shells on the counter.

“Sonofabitch, boy. You’re in luck,” he told Eb.

The box was ancient, the colors bleached out. Jimmy opened it and checked the loads. “They look fine. Found it waaaay in the back, where I lay down poison for the rats. But they’ll fire. I wouldn’t sell them to you if they didn’t.”

“You are a prince amongst men,” Eb said, peeling a few bills out of his wallet.

THEY REACHED GRINDER’S SWITCH just past one o’clock that afternoon. The village had a single paved road. The surrounding land was peppered with shotgun shacks. A sundry store with a gas pump out front composed the entirety of the Grinder’s Switch commercial district.

Minerva pulled the Olds up beside the Sky Chief pump. She had been behind the wheel the last few hours, as Micah’s depth perception tended to drift on long car trips.

Micah popped the hood. The radiator was boiling over. The rad cap was blisteringly hot. He pulled his sleeve over his hand and unscrewed it. Oily steam hissed up.

A man came out of the sundry store. The skin of his face was as thin as a bat’s wing and stretched tight over his skull. He wore overalls with an oil-spotted rag poking out of the chest pocket.

“You let ’er boil dry.” The man spoke in the tone one might use to address the feeble-minded.

Ebenezer pulled in on his bike. He took off his helmet. His hair stuck up in comical sprigs.

“Petrol, garçon.”

The man just looked at him.

“Gas, please,” Ebenezer said. “Fill it up.”

The man hesitated, as if deciding whether he wanted to fulfill the order of a fellow with Ebenezer’s coloration. Then he uncapped the motorcycle’s tank and carefully filled it. The pump dinged at every half gallon. The man wiped a few drops of spilled gas off the tank and said, “Sixty-three cents. Pay inside.”

Micah said, “Do you have a water hose?”

The man shook his head. His mouth was sucked inward, and Micah wondered if he had a tooth left in his head. It looked as if something had been feasting on him from the inside. A parasite of some kind.

“Got a pump round back,” the man said.

The pump was old and rusted; a pail hung off the spout. Micah worked the handle until red-tinged water splashed into the pail. He filled it and went back to the car. The water hit the scorching radiator; steam boiled up. Micah waited for it to clear, then tipped the rest in.

The others were inside. The shop’s shelves were modestly stocked. Micah picked up a tin of Spam, a can of Hunt’s pudding, some wooden matches, and Tootsie Rolls. He added a quart bottle of Nehi grape soda from the ice chest, brushing past Ebenezer, who was picking up two bottles of Yoo-hoo.

“Elixir of the gods,” Ebenezer said.

“The gods of diabetes,” said Minerva. “Drink up.”

Micah took his goods to the cash register. “Nine dollars thirty-five with the gas,” the shopkeeper told him.

Micah informed the man that he needed a receipt. “Business purposes.”

The man scratched one out on a bit of scrap. His fingers trembled.

“We are looking for an encampment,” Micah said to him.

“It’s called Little Heaven,” said Ellen.

“The religious crazies?” the man said. “The hell you want with them?”

Eb said, “We are true believers who seek to walk in harmony with Christ Almighty.”

The man flatly scrutinized Ebenezer. “No, you ain’t.”

“So you’ve met them?” Minerva asked.

“They came in droves, what, going on half a year ago now?” the man said. “Them, their slick-talking leader, and all their earthly possessions. They hired a track machine—a flatbed on a tank chassis, yeah?—to haul everything up. It’s rough sledding through those hillside passes. Since then, I’ll see the odd one pass through on their way up.”

“Any of them ever come out?” Ellen asked.

“Not that I ever saw.” The man flitted his tongue on the tip of his left canine tooth, one of the precious few teeth he had left. “Naw, there was the one. Had to leave on account of a bust leg.”

Micah said, “They seem dangerous to you?”

“Not so much that,” the man said. “They seem stupid. Whole idea of it. Who needs to slog into a forest to commune with God? There are perfectly good churches with roads leading to their front doors. It’s damn dangerous out there. Floods, forest fires, wild animals… all sorts of things.” An apathetic shrug. “Ain’t my job to talk folks out of being stupid.”

“What about the guy in charge?” Ellen asked. “You met him?”

“Not myself, no. Arnie Copps, local guy who owns the track machine, had dealings with him. Short-assed little fella. Wears his hair in a greased-up duck’s ass kept in place with about a pound of pomade. The horseflies got to love him, walking around with that grease trap on top of his head. But his people bend over backward for him. Gobble up every word that falls off his lips, I hear.”

“What’s the best way to get there?” Ellen asked.

“Why in the hell would you want to do that?”

When nobody answered, the man came around the counter and toed the screen door open.

“Follow this road,” he said, pointing. “Three miles you’ll hit a cut. Walk the dry wash a ways and you hit a trailhead. I don’t know the exact spot. I wouldn’t go on a bet.”

Ebenezer peeled the foil off a roll of cherry Life Savers and popped one into his mouth. “You prefer to worship in a civilized setting, I take it?”

“Something like that,” said the man. “You talk queer.”

“I speak the Queen’s English. I can’t imagine you hear it often.”

They stowed their supplies in the trunk and made ready their departure.

“You got something to shoot with?” the man asked. “A rifle? Scattergun?”

Micah said, “We might.”

“Yeah, you seem the type. Don’t know it’ll be much use against whatever’s up there, but better to have than not.”

Ellen said, “What do you mean by that?”

But the man had already turned his back on them. The screen door shut behind him. Flies—dozens of them suddenly—battered their bodies against the wire mesh. The din of their wings was disquieting.

THEY DROVE TO THE CUT. Gravel popped under the tires. Road grit drifted through the windows and clung to their skin. The townsfolk watched them from sagging front stoops or from behind dust-clad windows. Their faces were uniformly ravaged, jaundiced, and cored out just as the man’s at the shop had been.

It was only later that Micah would realize that he had not seen any boys or girls—no kids, and none of their harbingers. No playgrounds. No tricycles or kiddie pools in any of the weed-tangled yards.

Grinder’s Switch was a village of premature ancients. Not a single child.

8

THEY REACHED the cut the shopkeeper had spoken of. They parked the Olds and stretched their road-stiff limbs. They pulled on their Danner boots and organized their packs. They tightened the straps and made their way to the trailhead. Ellen walked in front. She had a bouncy stride. Micah followed Ellen with his eye—then he caught Minerva watching. Minny shook her head with a wry smile. Micah pressed his lips together and focused on the trees. They were scraggly at the base of the valley, clinging to the ribs of rock, but they got taller and shaggier as the valley rose into the hills.

“Pitter patter, tenderfeet,” said Ellen.

A trail was grooved through the dirt. It steadily ascended. They would have no trouble following it. They walked under a canopy of knit branches. The sunlight fell through the leaves and touched their skin, making it look as though their flesh had been dipped in a faint green dye.

“Didn’t that guy say something about a tank delivering supplies?” Minerva said. “Why not just follow this trail?”

“It could get a lot tougher,” said Ellen. “It might cross creeks and mudholes as it winds up into the hills—steep grades, rockslides, that kind of stuff.”

They hiked a few hours. The day grew warm under the trees.

“Hey,” said Minerva to Ellen. “What do you think would be the worst radioactive animal to get bitten by?”

“What?” said Ellen.

“You ever read Spider-Man?” Minerva said. “Peter Parker got bit by a radioactive spider. He got all the powers of a spider. He can spin webs, climb buildings, he’s got a ‘spider sense.’ All in all, pretty good. But I got to thinking, what if he’d got bit by a dung beetle?”

“That doesn’t sound so hot,” Ellen said, laughing.

“You bet,” said Minerva. “Dung-Beetle-Man. He can roll boulder-sized rocks of shit up small hills! He can leap a pile of manure in a single bound!”

Ellen was laughing harder. “What about, I don’t know… Platypus-Man?”

“One day, on a research trip,” Minerva intoned, “a humble scientist, Peter Pancake, was bitten by a radioactive platypus. That day he became Platypus-Man! What can he do? Oh, he can open all sorts of tin cans with his bill! And…”

“Lay eggs?” said Ellen.

“Lay eggs in the soft sand! The world needs a hero, and now they have one—Platypus-Man!”

The women were laughing so hard now that they were having a tough time staying on the trail. Micah and Ebenezer bemusedly watched them.

“What about Tree-Sloth-Man?” Ebenezer ventured. “One day a radioactive sloth fell out of its tree and bit mild-mannered podiatrist Peter Porkchop and—”

“That’s stupid,” Minerva snapped acidly. “Why don’t you shut up? Nobody asked you.”

“This is what happens when you hire professional mercenaries to take you on a hiking junket,” Eb said to Ellen in a mild tone. “They are uncouth. They make things uncomfortable.”

Minerva said, “Go piss up a rope.”

“Example A,” Eb went on pleasantly. “Vulgar, yes? Barbaric, you might even say.”

From that point on, they hiked in silence. The land was dry—the crumbly, baked-earth aridness that would make firefighters pray for rain. Ebenezer aimed his rifle and obliterated a tumorlike toadstool growing on the trunk of a saw palmetto at two hundred yards. The crack of the gun pushed every other sound away, ushering in a thudding stillness.

“Simply checking the aim,” he said, reloading the rifle. “Every gun shoots a little different, as you know.”

Ebenezer and Micah were now breathing hard. The women fared better. Minerva’s strides carried her over gnarled roots and fallen logs. Ellen moved with preternatural grace. The men plodded behind them. A fungoid smell rose from the earth, which was spongy beneath a carpet of browned pine needles.

Minerva said, “What is that?”

She was looking at a hackberry tree. Something had been carved in its trunk. A symbol, a rune. It had been gouged deep into the wood.

Micah ran his fingers over the marking. The bark had not grown back; the pale heartwood was smooth as scar tissue. He had seen things like this in Korea. The enemy would score them on trees or rocks as warnings to passing soldiers. Sometimes an army translator had been able to decipher them and gain Micah’s unit a crucial advantage; other times not.

“A trail marker?” said Ellen. “Maybe someone hung their bear bag in the tree.”

“There’s one over here, too,” said Eb.

They discovered seven of these markings hacked into the surrounding trees. There might have been others farther back, only they hadn’t noticed. The markings were all roughly the same: a cross with a shorter line underneath the horizontal beam. It looked somewhat like a telephone pole. But what struck home was the intensity with which they had been laid into the wood: crude thudding chops that had torn out chunks of wood.

“It was some boys with their daddy’s axe,” ventured Eb. “Or a crazy fool who wanted to remember which tree he buried his jar of pennies under.”

There being no more logical explanation, they silently accepted Ebenezer’s reasoning. But the markings lingered in their minds. The violence with which those marks had been laid.

The path gradually rose. They wended over the foothills into the deeper passes. The land plateaued but never dipped. The trees thickened until the woods became impenetrable in some spots.

A deerfly settled on the nape of Ebenezer’s neck. It bit him and flew away before Eb could slap the bugger. Cocksucking bugs! he thought. Cocksucking trees! Cocksucking dirt! Ebenezer hated everything about the wilderness. Rather inconveniently, he had forgotten this fact. He was not built for this. His was a delicate constitution. As a boy, he’d been forever coming down with the sniffles. His humors were perpetually in arrears, as his grandmother used to say. His iron was probably low. He should shoot something that hopped or skulked through this godforsaken purgatory, put it out of its misery, and eat it raw. That would surely jack the life back into him.

But there was nothing to draw a bead on. He became aware of this quite suddenly. Where before there had been the industry of animals ferreting through the brush and birds wheeling in blue sky, now there was almost nothing. An odd serenity. Just the sound of their boots and Ebenezer’s own breath whistling in his ears.

We’re trapped with the Monster from Green Hell.

Ebenezer flinched visibly. Where had that thought come from? Then it dawned. Monster from Green Hell was a B-movie he had watched, along with The Brain From Planet Arous, at a creature-feature matinee many years ago. In… where had it been? Barstow, Illinois? Bar Harbor, Maine? He’d been on a job. He watched both films at a second-run movie house where the popcorn was stale and the floors sticky. The movie’s plot involved a rocket ship of mutant bees that crash-landed in an African jungle. The queen bee found sanctuary in a dormant volcano. Her progeny set about killing the local tribesmen. Then a delegation of blow-dried American scientists arrived. They tossed grenades into the volcano and triggered an eruption that incinerated the vile bugs. Fin.

The film was forgettable dreck—except there had been this one shot. Only a few frames of stock footage the cinematographer had jammed in to establish the setting. A panoramic view of the jungle. A riot of creeping vegetation and trees that had witnessed generations wither and die under the wide sweep of their limbs. A place where things never stopped growing, implacably and endlessly and insidiously so, pushing up through the ground and twining around whatever was closest to them, strangling it. A lunatic vista of inhospitable, brooding, vengeful green.

“Yet his soul was mad,” Ebenezer whispered. “Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”

Joseph Conrad. As a boy Ebenezer had been forced to study that malarial old moper. Those lines from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had leapt into his head unbidden. But Eb wasn’t in a jungle, was he? He was in a forest… and yet. The green was of a different shade. But it was everywhere.

“Did you say something?” Ellen asked him.

“Nothing of importance, my dear.”

THEY CRESTED the back of a ridge. The sun hung above the treetops.

“We’ve put eight or nine miles under us,” Minerva said. “We should find a place to camp for the night.”

They made their way across the ridge, scanning for a sheltered spot. The daylight was guttering, and they still had to pitch their tents and gather firewood. Minerva saw the Englishman staggering toward her, cursing. She did not want him to collapse—he might fall down the steep slope and break his loathsome neck, robbing her of the opportunity to slit it later on and dance a happy jig in his fountaining blood like a child skipping around an opened fire hydrant. She was half considering retreating to help him, when her thoughts were derailed by something that sat high up in a tree.

She stopped short. Ellen, who had been following tight on her heels, slammed into her back.

“What’s the—?”

Minerva heard Ellen’s breath escape in a whinny. She must have seen it, too. When Micah and Eb caught up, they also saw it.

It was seventy feet up, near the top of a ponderosa pine that had shed most of its needles. Dangling at the end of a branch. It wasn’t that big. It could have been many things. Twilight prevented accurate identification.

It seemed to have been skinned, whatever it was. It glimmered wetly. If it was a body, it could only be that of a small woodland animal. A rabbit, a kit fox. It hung from the branch on a thin strip of something-or-other like a Christmas ornament suspended on a line of filament. What predator would do that? Steal the skin of its prey and hang the body way up there?

The wind spun it in a slow circle. Spinning, spinning. Rags of flesh swayed from its limbs, as though it had perished thrashing and shrieking. The longer a person gazed at it, the more familiar its outline became…

“Let’s go,” Micah said.

9

THEY CAME UPON a tiny meadow carved from the trees and hunkered down. It was too dark to hike any farther.

The tents were made of heavy canvas. The poles were packed in eight-inch sections that had to be slotted together. They snapped on their flashlights and got to work. It took the women twenty minutes to set theirs up. The men muttered and griped as they struggled with their own.

“I’ll sleep outside!” Eb yelled, hurling a pole into the trees. “Bugger it all! I’ll sleep outside like a dog!”

Ellen helped the men get their tent up. She worked quickly but deftly, shooing the men aside so she could work unencumbered.

“A million thank-yous.” Ebenezer offered a bow. “I am afraid I’m all thumbs, my dear.”

Ellen curtsied. “Think nothing of it.”

Their exchanges were exaggeratedly comical—a distraction from the dread they had felt earlier while watching that small thing spin at the top of the tree.

They gathered wood and soon had a fire. The forest closed in, isolating them in that trembling pocket of firelight. Minerva pulled a Hebrew National salami from her pack; she cut it with her pocketknife and ate the thick wedges. Ebenezer drank his warm Yoo-hoos and stared at the can of beans he had brought.

“A can opener,” he said. “Ebenezer, you horse’s ass.”

Micah said, “Give it here.” He stabbed the lid with his dirk knife and levered it open.

“I am not built for such rough living,” Eb said, accepting the can back.

Knots popped in the fire. Minerva produced a flask and drank from it. She passed it to Ellen, who took a nip.

“Is it even legal?” Minerva asked. “An isolated society way out here? No laws, nobody to answer to?”

“They’re adults, is how you have to look at it,” said Ellen, passing the flask back. “It’s their right. Nobody’s forcing them.”

“Unless they’ve been brainwashed,” said Minerva.

“Yeah, unless. It’s not that uncommon,” Ellen said. “You’ve got little, what, enclaves like this all over the country. Utah, Montana, California. I went to the library and looked into it. It’s not that the authorities don’t know where they are; it’s that they don’t give a rat’s ass.”

Minny said, “But you got kids there, too.”

Ellen nodded. She had thought about that part of it quite a lot. It was—apart from her nephew’s general safety—why Ellen felt compelled to make arrangements with Micah. Nate had no choice but to go with his dad. And if Reggie wanted to devote himself to God in some remote encampment, okay. But Nate was being forced down a line, was how Ellen saw it. He was being pushed, bullied for all she knew, to accept this new life. That didn’t sit well with her. If he chose to walk that same line as an adult, fine. But to have that crucial element of choice taken away just because he was too young to make up his own mind seemed totally unfair.

“What about this Grand Poobah?” Eb said.

Ellen said, “I don’t know a thing about him.”

“We know he’s fussy about his hair,” said Minerva.

“Sherri and I weren’t raised religious,” Ellen went on. “So the idea of following someone—one person—devoting your whole life to him, it just doesn’t add up. What if he’s wrong? What if he’s nuts?”

Ebenezer said, “O ye of little faith.”

Eb said it with a smile. He thought this Bellhaven woman was a fool but a good-hearted one, and those were the best sorts of fools. He would gladly take her money. She would get a gander at this rug-rat nephew of hers. On the way back, he would pay a visit to Ruby at the cathouse in Albuquerque. Ruby did this most delightful thing with her hips.

Micah said, “You will not get him back.”

He peered across the fire at Ellen. His face was grave.

“You should not harbor that hope.”

Ellen stared back at him. “All I’m asking is to see him. He doesn’t even know who I am. He won’t remember me. I am—” She casually encircled her face with one finger. “I look different than I did then. Nate was just a baby anyway. Reggie couldn’t pick me out of a lineup, either. I just want to make sure he’s okay.”

Micah said, “Okay by whose estimation?”

Ellen’s shoulders drew tight. Her head dipped.

“You know what my sister said to me once? She said that maybe the best thing about having a child, especially a young one, was that you could love that child shamelessly. She said that you could put everything into that kid, love crazily, give everything in your heart and mind and soul over to that other person. You can’t do that for a husband or a wife, not really. The only other entity you could love that way would be God, if you’re a believer.”

She looked up again. Directly at Micah.

“You and me—we don’t understand that kind of love, do we.”

Micah blinked his eye. He said, “We should turn in.”

10

THUMP.

The first one landed softly. Micah stirred.

Thu-thump.

He cracked his eyelid. He was inside the tent. The Englishman was snoring somewhere to his left.

Thump.

Something collided with the tent. Micah heard it roll down the canvas.

He grabbed one of his pistols and crawled past Ebenezer.

“Whuzza?” Eb mumbled.

Micah pushed the flap aside. The clearing was washed in pale moonlight.

Thump. Thump.

“What the bloody hell?” Ebenezer said. He sounded like a man who had been kicked violently awake.

Thump.

That soft pattering all around them. Something else struck the tent and rolled off. Things were landing on the ground with muted whumphs.

“Shug?” Minerva called out. “You okay over there?”

He didn’t answer. No sense in disclosing their position. He had no idea what manner of assault they were under.

Thump.

This one landed eight inches away, on the grass in front of the tent.

A bird. He did not know what kind. He wasn’t a birder. It was small, its body no bigger than a plum. Its wings were folded tight to its body.

Micah reached out and touched it. Cold. Stone dead.

Thump. Thump.

They continued to fall, the oddest downpour Micah had ever encountered. Ebenezer crawled up next to him. His hair was in disarray, but his eyes were sharp to the task.

“Arm yourself,” Micah whispered.

Ebenezer retrieved the Tarpley carbine. “What is it?” he said.

“Birds.”

“Birds?”

Micah pointed at the ground. Ebenezer’s fingers crept along the grass; he picked the bird up. It must have felt so light, Micah figured, seemingly hollow, but then, birds were built that way to help them fly. Its feathers were brown except the tips, which were shock white. Its beak was open as though it had died midchirp.

Its eyes were white, too. Not black, as a bird’s eyes should be. The white of mother-of-pearl or of concentrated smoke.

There came a final snapping impact—the sound of something much heavier plummeting to earth. The rain of bodies slackened, then stopped.

Micah and Ebenezer crawled from the tent. Ellen and Minerva were already out. Minerva had one Colt stashed behind her waistband, the other Colt in her right hand, and a flashlight in her left hand. Her flashlight beam swept the meadow. They were everywhere. Two dozen birds, maybe more. Most of them were the small brown-winged ones, but there was at least one large bird—a hawk, could be a falcon. None of them were struggling. No wings flapped. It was as if they had died midflight and tumbled gracelessly from the sky.

“It’s like that goddamn Hitchcock movie,” Minerva said.

“They’re kites,” Ellen said softly. “Most of these birds, I mean. They’re called kites. Their coloring’s a bit different from the ones back home, but it’s the same bird.”

“Tippi Hedren,” Minerva went on. “That broad’s got a scream to wake the dead.”

Micah scanned the trees beyond the clearing. Nothing moved.

“I’ve heard about such a thing,” said Ebenezer. “In Dunchurch, a village in Warwickshire not far from my hometown. Birds fell from the sky there one day. Hundreds, they say. Their hearts had burst. Every damned one of them.”

Micah knelt before the largest bird. Its wings were tucked tight to its body, as if it had curled into a protective ball. He tried to pull a wing back to see if it had been shot, but the flesh and bone were locked in place. That was strange in itself. All bodies were softest in the minutes after death, after the muscle and nerve spasms and before rigor mortis set in. But he could not peel the bird’s wing back.

A sharp inhale. Ellen was staring at the woods to the east of the meadow. The blood had drained from her face.

“What is it?” Micah said.

“There’s something there,” she said.

Minerva trained her flashlight. The trees fringing the meadow shone whitely in the glare, the woods impenetrable beyond. They all looked, waiting. Nothing materialized.

“I swear I…,” Ellen said.

“What?” Minerva asked.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head as if to dispel a bad thought. “Just movement. Something… Hey!” she called out. “Who’s there?”

Micah clapped a hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide and shocked above his hard-knuckled fingers. Micah held a finger to his lips. Ellen got the message. She nodded.

“Give him one of your Colts,” Micah told Minerva, nodding at Eb.

“He’s already got the rifle.”

“He is the best shot amongst us. You know it. Best he be armed.”

Reluctantly, Minerva handed Ebenezer one of her pistols; he stashed the Tarpley back in the tent and accepted the sidearm. Minerva pulled the second Colt from her waistband and thumbed the safety off. They faced the woods.

There. A flash. A pale flickering. It trembled through the flashlight’s beam, impossible to categorize.

Micah took a step back. He needed to widen his perspective. He couldn’t make sense of what he’d seen or was still seeing.

But he felt something out there. He suspected they all did. Watching them from the blackness past the trees. Its presence was unmistakable. It galvanized their blood and rashed their necks in gooseflesh. It seethed at them with a hunger they could feel squirming in their own stomachs—hunger, and a malignancy of purpose none of them could even guess at.

It’s nothing, Micah thought, his mind rioting just a little.

“It is nothing,” he said. “Not a damn—”

11

A FLASH. Nothing definite.

It wasn’t that it was too fast for the eye to chart—it was more that the eye rebelled, defaulting on its own optics and reducing whatever was out there to an indefinite smudge. Maybe their brains did this as an instinctive protective measure, to spare them the true contours of the thing.

What they did see was long and gleaming, like an enormous length of bone.

That was all they could make out. It was enough.

Ebenezer raised the Colt and fired. Three quick shots. Flame leapt from the barrel. Minerva’s Colt tore the night apart, making four concussive booms as she squeezed the trigger.

The gunshots trailed away. They squinted through a haze of cordite smoke. Nothing. It had left. They could feel it. That squirming insistence in their stomachs was gone.

But then…

Sounds to the left of the clearing—wait, the right? No, both sides. Twigs and pinecones snapped underfoot. With those came another kind of sound, more difficult to grasp. Snortings, gruntings, these weird high whistles… scrapings and whickerings and noises that might have made sense in isolation but taken together created a lunatic symphony.

Micah ducked into the tent and grabbed his pack. Minerva followed suit. Micah stepped into his boots; Eb blundered inside the tent to yank his own boots on.

They had one obvious escape: the trail that continued onward to Little Heaven. The one they had traveled was on the far side of the meadow, where the noises were coming from. And the meadow felt constricted now—a killing jar.

Ebenezer laced his boots with fingers that shook—just a little, but still. It took a lot to rattle him. He had seen things, done things. Once a man has witnessed a certain kind of human pestilence and seen some of it reflected in his own soul, well, that man turned hard. The last time Eb had been scared, really scared, was during the Suez crisis. But that had been a vital fear, one shared by every soldier in his regiment: of being blown to bits by an enemy mortar, his body scattered in wet chunks over the canal banks… of dying far from everything he knew and could draw comfort from.

But this fear—no, this worry, just a gnawing worry right now—was airy and dreamlike, because it was unanchored from any clear threat. Just noises in the dark. They could be anything. An overweight raccoon, for Christ’s sake!

But it really wasn’t that, was it? No. Ebenezer could not say how he knew that, but it was a fact. The thing (things?) in the woods was dangerous. So what he felt was, if anything, the terror of a boy who knows that something is lurking underneath his bed, even though he has never given that monster a name.

Minerva shone her flashlight on Eb. She saw the pinched worry on his face. Her breath rattled in her lungs. She wanted to run. More than anything on earth. She finished with her boots and picked up the flashlight and her Colt. The gun dangled limply at the end of her arm. It had never felt so useless. A mere toy.

The trees shook. Sixty-foot pines trembled as this thing, whatever it was, grazed their trunks. A smell wafted to her nose—decay and a sourness that reminded Minerva of something her father once said.

You ought to kill an animal with one shot, Minny. It should never die in fear, for two reasons. For one, no creature should have to die that way. And two, when a creature dies terrified, its meat tastes sour. One shot, one kill. Make sure the poor thing never knows what hit it—

She turned to Micah in time to see him raise his Tokarev and fire. Six shots in a tight grouping. He lowered his pistol and then, sensing movement, raised it again and emptied the clip. He ejected the mag and slammed a fresh one in. He was already backing toward the trail. He hissed at the others. They began to retreat, too.

A shape broke through the trees on the far side of the clearing. The night was too thick to make out its exact definitions, but it was enormous. Shaggy and lumpy and stinking of death.

A bear. It could only be.

Minerva fired while backing away. Ebenezer squeezed off a few shots. The thing kept coming.

Something broached the trees on the opposite side of the clearing. The moonlight glossed its contours. Another bear? Micah’s head swiveled. Events occurred more slowly, the way they always did when his adrenaline started to flow.

It wasn’t a bear. This creature was slightly smaller. One of its legs stepped between the pines. Long and clad in coarse fur.

Was that a… wolf?

It made no sense. A wolf and a bear stalking them together? Different species didn’t team up to form a hunting party. It wasn’t natural.

Micah watched the wolf-thing creep forward. Its paw came down near one of the larger birds on the grass. Micah squinted, his head cocked at the inconceivability of what he was seeing—

What he saw was—no, no. The thing’s paw and the dead bird seemed to… to merge. The bird’s body broke apart, liquefying somehow, passing into the other thing’s body. It was absorbed. The thing’s flesh rippled as the bird became a part of it. But that couldn’t be. The starlight bent at weird angles, refracted unnaturally so that it merely seemed this was what had happened.

A growl rippled out of the blackness. Cold, furious, infused with a silvery note of menace.

“Go,” Micah said.

They ran. They left everything. Ebenezer’s rifle, Micah’s second Tokarev, the food. The trail scaled up into the hillsides. It was darker under the trees. The beams of their flashlights—Minerva and Ellen were both carrying one—skipped over the earth, over roots cresting from the soil like fingers. They tripped and stumbled and kept motoring.

Crash and thunder from behind. Micah had hoped the creatures would have been satisfied ransacking the tents. No dice. They were giving chase. Goddamn it all.

Micah whistled sharply. The others turned to him. He slung his pack off.

“Give me some light!”

Ellen trained the flashlight on his pack as he rummaged through it. They were in there somewhere, he knew it. Three waxy cylinders. He had bought them back at the camping store. An impulse buy.

The things were scrambling up the incline toward them. There was nothing stealthy about their pursuit—he could hear them snapping tree limbs and scraping against their trunks. The sound was enormous, out of scale with any animal Micah had ever known. It was as if a blue whale had grown legs and started blundering after them.

They were closing in. Sixty yards, now fifty, now forty—

Ebenezer flanked behind Micah. He squeezed off four shots. The muzzle flash lit the trees, illuminating the shocked face of an owl perched on a low branch. He pulled the trigger again and got only a dry click.

“Give me another magazine,” he said to Minerva.

“I’ve only got the one.”

The things kept coming. If the slugs had hit, they had done nothing to deter them. The sounds intensified—eager squeals like a hog snuffling for truffles.

“Better me than you.” Eb spoke with an eerie calm. “The clip. Now.”

Tight-jawed, Minerva handed it over. Micah was still rooting through his pack.

“Jesus, man,” Ebenezer said, tugging Micah’s arm.

Thirty yards, twenty—

Micah couldn’t find them. They started to run again, putting distance between themselves and their relentless pursuers. They hit a straight stretch. The trees opened up. The moon shone against the clouds to provide a weak welter of light.

Minerva spun, waiting for Ebenezer and Micah to ramble past before she unloaded her Colt. Bullets ripped into the darkness. There was no way a few of her slugs couldn’t have hit their mark—providing the things were using the path, which they might not be.

For a drawn-out moment, silence. The softer sounds of night enveloped them.

Then the thud of pursuit amped up again. Harder now, more intense. The night bristled with screeches and yowls and hisses.

What in Christ’s name are these things? thought Micah.

They ran hard, their lungs shuddering. Ellen tripped and fell, skidding a few feet across the dirt. Her chin was cut, blood cascading down her neck. But she got up and ran on pure adrenaline. The path dipped through a dry creek bed. Micah slung off his pack. He tore stuff out, clothes and other vital supplies, not caring anymore. How would he eat with his jaw torn off? What use were socks when his feet had been gnawed to the bone?

“Shug!” Minerva called out.

He ignored her. The beasts were closing in. Blood-hungry bastards.

They will be in for a rare fucking disappointment if they catch up and sink their teeth in, he thought. They will find our kind to be stringy, all tendon and cartilage. Not good eating, are human beings.

His hand closed on what he’d been searching for. He pulled out an emergency flare and tore the strip. Bright red phosphorus fanned from its tip. He tossed it into the creek bed. He scampered up the other side and thumbed the safety off his pistol.

“Go,” he told the others. “I will meet you directly.”

They obeyed him, scampering farther up the trail. Micah stood rooted. He had to see what he was dealing with.

They came. There were two of them, Micah was almost certain. The sounds of their chase indicated they were coming from both left and right: a scissoring maneuver, the way pack animals hunted, flanking their quarry from each side, cutting off the escape angles, and then—snik!—snapping shut.

The flare shed bloody light over a ten-foot radius. He had shot animals moving at a good clip before. Animals and other creatures, too. It was a matter of putting the bullet where they would be, not where they were at present. He listened. They might try to skirt the flare instead. But the quickest path, the one leading directly to their prey, would carry them through its—

A shape fled through the light. Micah’s mind flinched—though not his body, which remained motionless. The shape was unlike anything in nature. It was composed of too many parts. A seething mass of hysterical dimension, a ball of limbs and tails and teeth, so goddamn many teeth.

It flashed across the riverbed at terrific speed. Micah tracked it with his pistol and fired three times. The thing screeched and withdrew into the trees on the far side of the creek.

The second one was coming now. The big sonofabitch. There was something terrible about its approach—the blundering, crashing awkwardness of its body. It sounded like a creature in almost unspeakable pain.

Micah saw it. Not everything, but an outline. It was huge. It rose up before the light could engulf it and stood there, as a grizzly might on its hind legs. The dry earth of the creek bed cracked beneath it. The rotten stink of its body was overwhelming. Micah had smelled its equal only once before, when he had stumbled across a mass grave in a small village in Korea. The creature made the softest noises imaginable. Little clucks and pips and peeps, gentle exhalations that sounded like a baby drawing breaths in its sleep.

It is a bear, Micah thought, shutting his mind to other possibilities. A rabid bear.

He emptied a clip into the bear, center of mass. He did not feel good doing it, but the creature was ill and it would die by his hand now or days later, crazed with brain fever and foaming at the mouth. At close range, he could hear the slugs smacking into its meat. If that did not kill it, it ought to at least flatten its tires a little.

The bear dropped. A rag of snot or bloody meat hit the flare and made it sputter…

Then it began to advance on Micah again.

Why don’t you just die? he thought tiredly.

He retreated up the trail to find the others. The bear was still chasing them—and he could hear the other one, too, farther down and to the left of the path.

“Go!” he shouted.

They fled again. Slower this time, as they were exhausted and banged up. Just keep moving, Micah reasoned. Both animals had been hit. All they needed to do was keep hustling until their pursuers bled out.

The path switched back up a steep hillside. All four of them scanned the bottomlands for some trace of the beasts. Their faces were shiny with sweat by the time they hit the summit. The land beneath was black and unknowable. They couldn’t hear anything.

“Stay close,” said Micah.

They moved down the trail in a tight knot. The path hit a bottleneck. The trees pinched in on either side—

Minerva heard it before her brain was able to grip what was happening. A sly cracking under her boots—

The ground broke apart under her feet. She plunged into darkness. She caught sight of Ebenezer scrabbling at the lip of the earth, bellowing madly, before his purchase slipped and he was falling with the rest of them.

There came a strange weightlessness, that feeling in the pit of the stomach when a plane takes off. Oh, Minerva thought giddily. I’m falling. It lasted no more than half a second. Minerva hit the earth so hard that the breath was knocked out of her. Pain needled across her chest as her spine bowed—then something slammed into her skull with terrific force.

12

MINERVA’S EYES cracked open. She was squinting up at a box of daylight.

“She’s coming to.”

Where was she? She rolled over, moaning. She could feel an enormous lump on her forehead—as if a hard-boiled egg had been sewn under her skin.

“Minerva?” A woman’s voice. “How do you feel?”

She opened her eyes fully. The sky was breathtakingly blue. Why couldn’t she see more of it? Why only that box? It was as if she were staring up from the bottom of an open elevator shaft.

A face loomed over her. Micah’s. Blood lay gluey on his neck. Minerva swallowed. Her throat was as dry as chalk. Micah tipped his canteen to her lips. She drank and coughed.

Ellen said, “Can you get up?”

Minerva managed to sit up. Her skull thudded. She dropped her head between her knees and breathed deeply.

“Where are we?” she said.

“Trapped,” said Micah.

“Trapped how?”

“In a trap,” he answered her.

She lifted her head. Jesus, that hurt—her skull felt like it was full of pissed-off hornets.

They were in a pit. Clay bottom. The walls were sheer and went up fifteen feet. Severed roots poked through the dirt. Must have taken days to dig.

“Was someone looking for a fucking brontosaurus?” she said.

Micah picked up one of the snapped sticks littering the bottom of the pit. Minerva could see it had been sawed partway through. Her father had dug a similar pit trap on the west side of their shack to catch the foxes that had been killing their Buckeye chickens.

“What’s that smell?”

Ellen pointed behind Minerva. She craned her neck to spy a heap of spoiled meat in the corner, squirming with maggots.

“Bait,” Ellen said.

“How long have I been out?”

“Four hours or so,” said Ellen.

What a mad galloping donkeyfuck this had turned into, Minerva thought. Stuck in a pit with their dicks hanging out. And as the cherry on top of this particular shit sundae, she had a knot the size of a goddamn golf ball on her head—she could see its shadow hanging above her left eye like some overripe fruit set to burst.

“Can we get out?”

“I tried already, standing on Micah’s shoulders,” said Ellen. “No such luck.”

“Why didn’t you help them out?” Minerva growled at Ebenezer. “You got two broken legs?”

“Not quite,” he said, pointing at his left ankle. His boot was off. His flesh was swollen at his ankle, the sock stretched out like a gruesome balloon.

“You bust it?” she asked.

“I don’t believe so,” Eb said. “Just a bad sprain.”

Minerva said, “Lucky you. I’d have left you in here otherwise.”

Ebenezer’s smile was as gruesome as his ankle. “You’re a peach.”

Minerva stood. The blood rushed to her head. She swooned, steadying herself against the pit wall. It was then that they all heard a voice from somewhere above.

“Who’s in there?”

A man’s voice. Gruff and a little worried, but not threatening.

Minerva still had one of her Colts. Micah had his pistol, too. But what were they going to do—shoot at the only person who might be able to get them out?

“Hikers,” Micah called up. “Four of us.”

“I see a gun on the ground up here.”

“That would be mine,” said Eb. “I dropped it when the ground opened up and ate me. I’m sure you understand.”

“The rest of you armed?” the same voice asked.

“Pistols,” Micah said.

“Why are you hiking with pistols?”

“The same reason you must have dug this pit,” Minerva called back.

The man said, “Toss them out.”

Micah launched his Tokarev over the edge of the pit. Someone approached above. A shadow fell over the lip of the pit; then it withdrew.

“Never seen a gun like this before,” the man called out. “You do some work to it?”

“It is stock,” Micah lied.

The man said, “I don’t know about that.”

Minerva heaved her gun out next. “You going to help us or what?” she said.

“Considering it,” the man said.

Minerva clenched her teeth. Her head hived with pain. That she would be left at the mercy of these Bible suckers—who else could they be?—was infuriating. She wanted to quote scripture at them, something about the milk of human kindness or whatever, but she had never memorized a single verse.

In time a rope was lowered over the side of the pit.

“Mind your p’s and q’s. We are armed,” the man said.

13

THE COMPOUND known as Little Heaven was carved back against the encircling trees. The perimeter fence bowed under the menacing weight of the woods. The fence was fifteen feet tall and topped with coils of razor wire. Each supporting rib had been fashioned from a delimbed pine tree, with chain-link fence strung between them. It gave the place the look of a backwoods prison. Upon her approach, Minerva could see the roof of a long, warehouse-like structure, and the smaller peaks of the outbuildings scattered around it. She was half shocked to not spot guard towers manned by shotgun-toting Jesus freaks.

It had been a two-mile hike from the pit to Little Heaven. By the time they arrived, they had learned the names of the men who had hauled them out: Otis Langtree and Charlie Fairweather. They seemed the same age, mid- to late-thirties. Otis was the bigger of the two, but both looked like they could use a good meal. Their faces were drawn, their eyes tunneled too far into their skulls.

Minerva learned a bit more about the men besides their names, as they were both happy to talk. Charlie had been a member of the flock for about three years; Otis, much longer. Otis was single; Charlie had a wife and a son, Ben. Charlie had worked at a box factory before coming here. Otis did not speak much of his history. They had both made the decision to join their leader, giving their life savings over to the erection and continuance of Little Heaven.

They both carried .30-30 rifles. Charlie had a Ruger pistol in a holster, too.

“Sorry you fell in,” Otis said. “We dug the pit for animals.”

Ebenezer was slung between Micah and Ellen; he limped painfully along. Minerva refused to help him.

“What did you dig it to catch, pray tell?” Eb asked.

“Bear?” said Otis. “Wolves? Something’s been carrying off our dogs. We used to have five or six. Then a month or so back they started to go missing. Squirmed under gaps in the fence, never came back. Got eaten, we figured.”

“Or ran into something bigger and hungrier than they were,” Charlie said.

“You do see the odd thing out there at night,” Otis said. “Just shapes in the trees. A flash and flicker. What’s born wild stays wild despite us being here, you know? All God’s creatures.”

Charlie had spat in the dirt when he heard that. Minerva noticed he had a way of spitting that conveyed total disdain.

“Dogs are one thing,” Otis went on, “but we got kids about, too. Not that they’re foolish enough to scramble under the fence, especially come nightfall, but…”

“We dug the pit ten feet deep.” Charlie hitched up his pants, which were swimming around his hips. “We hit a seam of caliche at eight feet. After that it was hard slogging. Busted a few shovels. Our hands had blisters on top of blisters.”

Otis said, “Ten feet—what’s going to get out of that?”

Charlie said, “Well, something did. We come back one morning to find the top brush all busted. But the pit was empty.”

“Maybe it didn’t fall in,” Minerva said. “What if it just kind of carried over the top, like over thin ice as it’s breaking?”

Otis said, “No, it was in there.”

“The bottom of the pit was all torn up,” Charlie told her. “Claw marks dug deep into the clay. A lot of them, too. Like they were put there by an animal made entirely of claws.”

“And teeth,” said Otis.

“Yeah, teeth, too,” Charlie said.

“Bear?” said Micah.

Charlie shrugged. “Could only be. But they aren’t supposed to be that size in this state. You got browns, blacks. They can be ornery, yeah, but not too big.”

“Could be a Kodiak roamed over from California,” Otis hazarded. “A rogue.”

“Anyway, we dug the pit deeper.” Charlie spat again. “Another five feet.”

Otis said, “And covered it over same as before. A few days later we check and see the cover’s broken again.” Otis shook his head. “We creep up and—”

“Empty as a politician’s smile,” said Charlie.

Otis said, “At fifteen feet. And we spotted something else strange, too.”

“What was that?” said Minerva.

Otis swallowed heavily. “There were sticks jammed into the side of the pit. The sticks we’d laid across the top, yeah? Stabbed into the dirt all the way up. It was like whatever had been inside used them as hand-holds, right? To climb out.”

“What animal would have the sense to do that?” Ellen asked. “Or the dexterity?”

“No animal on earth,” Minerva said.

UPON THEIR ARRIVAL at Little Heaven, Otis and Charlie led them past a few pickups and dirt bikes to the wrought iron gate. Each half of the gate was ten feet wide and nearly twenty feet high. What a hassle it would’ve been, hauling that damn thing out into the sticks. A golden letter L was inset on one side. On the other side, H.

It was unlocked by a woman in overalls. She did not introduce herself or speak to Otis and Charlie. Her face had the same winnowed aspect as the men’s. Minerva found it unnerving. She pictured carnivorous roots anchored to the pads of everyone’s feet, slowly sucking the life out of them.

The grounds of the compound were uncluttered. A parade square sat in the center. There were bunkhouses and storage sheds. A tiny playground. Minerva spotted a strip of flypaper dangling from a strut of an open toolshed. Not a single insect—fly or spider or midge—was gummed to the sticky coil.

A row of outhouses sat behind the fence on the easternmost edge of the compound. They sat quite close to the woods. Minerva wondered how many of these people would risk a late-night piss, what with their dogs going missing left and right.

The chapel was the focal point. The eye was drawn to the massive cross rising above it. The horizontal beam was almost as wide as the chapel roof. Looking westward, beyond the chapel and above the trees, Minerva could see a towering rock formation. The rock looked black, not the rust red of most of the igneous rock around there.

Charlie and Otis led them across the square. Minerva saw Ellen’s eyes zipping about in search of her sister’s kid. But the grounds were empty. They walked to a small, well-maintained lodge. Flower boxes were hung on the windowsills. The door was made of heavy oak with an ornate knocker.

The door opened as if in anticipation of their arrival. A man stepped out. He spotted the six of them—two familiar faces, four new ones. His skull rocked back in mild surprise. He recovered quickly and spread his arms.

“We have guests.” A beatific smile. “Welcome to our home under God’s eye.”

14

FUSSY.

That was the first word that popped into Minerva’s head.

Dickhole.

That was the second.

What a fussy fuckin’ dickhole.

There was nothing about the man that screamed dickhole! precisely. The fussiness, absolutely. His hair was oiled up in an elaborate pompadour—who the hell would do that out here, with the horseflies and tree sap? She suspected he cultivated the hairdo to make up for his diminutive stature; she wouldn’t be surprised if he had lifts in his shoes, too.

But a dickhole? Or a rat-assed bastard, as her father might have said? There was no definitive proof that he was, not yet. Just a marrow-deep sense.

The man wore a button-down shirt with wide lapels and cowboy boots of blue-dyed leather. Mirrored aviator sunglasses hooded his eyes. Minerva hated those—they were the sort of shades policemen wore, and you could never tell where a person’s eyes were looking.

He strode purposefully toward them. “Little Heaven welcomes you.”

Minerva said, “Little Heaven?” as if this was the first time she’d heard the name. They had roles to play now—the naïve hikers—and she hopped right to it.

“Our perfect slice of it, yes,” the man said. “I am Reverend Amos Flesher.”

He did not shake their hands—rather, he lifted his fingers limply toward them as if offering the blithest of benedictions.

“We found them in the pit, Reverend,” Otis said with a small bow. “They had fallen in.” A nod at Ebenezer. “This man’s hurt.”

Minerva caught the trace of an apology in Otis’s voice: One of them is hurt, Rev, or else we wouldn’t have brought them.

“Oh, boys. You and that pit of yours.” Reverend Amos tsked. “How did you poor folks stumble into Charlie and Otis’s pet project?”

“We heard it was a nice hike around here,” Minerva said.

The Reverend’s eyebrows lifted—a please, do go on gesture.

“We came up from the lowlands and across the Winding Stair pass ten miles north of here,” said Micah. “My grandfather made the trek. Said it was hard going, but worth it.”

“Your grandfather?”

Micah said, “Years back.”

“Before you folks were here,” Ebenezer said. “Or your pit.”

The Reverend scrutinized Eb. “You’re hurt.”

“I’ll be all right.” Ebenezer smiled warmly. “I’m not going to sue, if you’re worried.”

“You’re not dressed like any hikers I’ve ever seen.” The Reverend nodded at Otis. “I see a gun tucked in Otis’s waistband. Since I know he doesn’t carry one and it’s unlikely he found it under a rock, I take it that it belongs to one of you.”

Minerva thought: This guy might wear his hair like some discount Liberace, but he’s no dummy.

“It’s mine,” Minerva said. “Lots of animals out here.”

“There are,” the Reverend agreed. “Most hunters use rifles.”

Minerva lip-farted. “Wasn’t hunting. Just wanted to scare them if I had to.”

“Where are your tents?” Flesher said, flinching slightly at Minerva’s raspberry. “Your sleeping bags?”

“We had to abandon them last night,” Ellen said, speaking for the first time. “There was something in the woods. Some animal—animals. They chased us.”

The Reverend sighted her down his nose. “You sound like Otis. To hear him speak, the woods are full of man-eating bears and pixies and leprechauns, no doubt. Any animals in these woods are more petrified of us than we could ever be of them. That is how the Lord decreed it. My dear child, don’t you know that we are the highest order of life?”

My dear child. Did he just call Ellen that? Minerva tried to swallow her anger, but it lodged in her throat like a peach stone.

“Then why dig the damn pit in the first place?” she said hotly.

The Reverend’s gaze pinned her. She felt his eyes on her body, even if they were covered by those aviator shades—his eyes boring into her not in a sexual manner, but invasive in a different way: the feeling of sightless bugs crawling over her skin.

“Well.” He spread his hands again, signaling their conversation had come to an end. “I must prepare for the afternoon sermon. The Lord has brought you to our bower and it is our duty to shelter you. Charlie, Otis, they may stay in Greta Hughes’s old quarters. Have Dr. Lewis attend to this fellow’s ankle.”

He cocked his head at his visitors. Their faces were warped in the silver convex of his sunglasses.

“I would invite you to the sermon, but that is only for the elect here at Little Heaven. You will amuse yourselves, though, I’m sure.”

He hadn’t even bothered to ask their names. It was all this fellow and my dear child.

He really is a dickhole, Minerva thought, happy to have her first impressions confirmed.

Otis and Charlie led them to a cramped bunkhouse with two cots. They said they would send for Dr. Lewis. Their guns were not returned to them.

15

ONCE THEY WERE SETTLED, Ellen Bellhaven decided to take a tour of the compound.

“I’m going for a walk,” she announced.

“We’ve been walking for twenty-four hours,” said Minerva.

Ellen expected Micah to object. But he simply nodded. “I’ll stay close by,” Ellen promised.

The sky was scudded with clouds. A cool wind skated across the earth. The parade square remained empty. Apart from the Reverend and the woman who had opened the gate, Ellen hadn’t seen anybody since she’d gotten there.

She crossed the square. The tinkle of a piano drifted across from the chapel. The pianist must have been warming up for the service.

She didn’t want to hear the damn sermon anyway—Amos Flesher struck her as many men of the cloth had done over the years: a bully who had learned to fight with scripture rather than his fists. A wise choice on his part, as he didn’t look like he could punch his way out of a wet grocery bag. Still, her exclusion reminded her of the Catholic services she had attended with her childhood friend Susie Horton; she had to sit in the pews with the other heretics while everyone else enjoyed their tasteless wafers and watery wine.

The perimeter fence followed the northern edge of the forest. The light between the first cut of trees was thin, almost drowsy, like a summer twilight that falls through a girl’s bedroom window as she slips off to sleep. But beyond that point it grew gradually darker until nothing could be seen at all.

Ellen walked the fence line, trailing her fingers along the links. She noticed that the trees were green and healthy except for a stretch, maybe ten yards wide, where they were uniformly sick and dying. Their bark was the gray of dead fingernails, flaking away from the yellowed wood underneath. No needles clung to their branches. The ground beneath was ashen. Ellen could see no cause for it—unless someone had soaked the soil with gallons of tree killer, and who in their right mind would do such a thing?

She peered through the maze of dead limbs, leaning forward until her nose nearly touched the fence… She recoiled.

The light moved differently the deeper into the woods she looked. It shifted and churned and took on a life of its own. Ellen got the unpleasant sense that it was staring right back at her. Which was utter foolishness. It was the middle of the afternoon, and neither light nor shadow had its own animus.

Her eyes lifted over the wasted trees to the rock formation looming to the west. It was massive and boxy, less a mountain than some kind of obelisk—a boxy tusk—pushed up from the earth. It rested against the horizon in solitary abandonment.

She continued past a string of bunkhouses where the Little Heavenites must spend their nights. The windows were transparent sheet plastic stapled to the frames—it would be hard to transport glass up here, Ellen guessed. But all the windows on the Reverend’s dwelling were made of glass, weren’t they? What had these people left to come here? Surely homes more impressive than these. But that was part of faith, wasn’t it? Suffering. Ellen had never cottoned to that thinking. Life was too damn tough on its own terms to go depriving yourself further.

She hoped she’d see her nephew, Nate, gazing through one of the plastic windows or chasing a ball across the square. Even seeing mailman Reggie would be fine, as it would mean Nate was nearby. They couldn’t have left, could they? Well, better if so. Better Reggie was back delivering letters and Nate back in school.

The living quarters gave way to a warehouse strung with wooden doors. All were closed except one. She peered through it into an area containing an array of familiar equipment: an open-faced furnace, metal blowpipes, and buckets of decorative glass beads. A glassblowing setup. Ellen had taken a course on it years ago—she was going through a bohemian phase while dating a modern primitive who played the pan flute in the Tenderloin district. Folly of youth.

She passed around the edge of the warehouse and found herself facing the playground.

A gaggle of children was immersed in some distraction beside the teeter-totter. Curious, Ellen wandered over. It was good to finally see some life at Little Heaven.

Three girls, one boy. The boy was not Nate—he was too old, and a redhead. Nate had brown hair, or was it black? Their laughter frothed over Ellen. They were hunched in a circle, working intently at something.

She drew closer. They all wore the same shoes—Buster Browns. The soles were cracked and scuffed. Maybe they were brother and sisters, or maybe all the children at Little Heaven had to wear the same clothes the way the Amish do? She could hear their animated whispers.

“Stir them around,” one girl said. “That will make them bite.”

The boy did something with a stick. A stirring motion followed by a series of quick jabs.

“Yes, oh yes,” a girl with plaited blond hair said, “that’s working. Do it some more.”

Ellen was five feet away. None of them had noticed her. A powerful dread built inside of her. Why was she so worried? It was just some kids playing.

“Hello,” she said.

They turned, all at once. Ellen’s breath hitched. She took a step back.

There’s something the matter with these kids.

That was her first, purely instinctive thought. They weren’t sick in an obvious way. No boils on their arms or open sores on their faces. They were not palsied, their mouths hanging open and leaking drool. And yet there was something—absolutely, fundamentally—wrong with them.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Who are you?” asked one of the girls. She wore a yellow dress that had faded to the color of old parchment. Her voice made it sound less of a question than an accusation. “You scared us.”

Their faces were caved in the same way Charlie’s and Otis’s had been, but worse—or perhaps it only seemed worse because they were young? Their flesh appeared to be slumping into their skulls, the way the earth sags before a sinkhole opens up in it. There were fine wrinkles around their mouths and eyes and even the knobs of their ears. They looked as if they had stepped from a terrible compression chamber that had added years to them.

Ellen stared past them to their industry—she couldn’t look at their too-old faces for another second. She saw a small ring of sticks jabbed into the dirt, with twine banded round to keep them in place.

Things were moving inside the ring of sticks. Quite a lot of things—

Something was thrashing around in there, too. Thrashing and squealing.

“I’m…” Ellen said slowly. “We were lost in the woods. Some of your people found us and brought us here.”

The boy smiled at her. It was not a pretty smile. His skin seemed too hard and white, more bone than flesh. “Little Heaven welcomes you,” he said.

Ellen stepped closer. The children moved aside so she could see. They exhibited no shame—in fact, they seemed eager to show her.

A hairless shrew was staked inside the ring. A loop of wire was knotted around its tail, the trailing end wound round a stick sunk into the dirt in the center of the ring. The shrew was covered in red ants. They surged over its body in a thick carpet, four deep in spots. The shrew shrieked as the ants mercilessly stung it.

“There are no animals left,” the boy said. “But if we’re good, he gives us one.”

He who? Ellen wondered.

“Why are you doing this?”

One of the girls said: “For everything there is a season.”

The bone-faced boy waved the stick he’d used to stir the ants like a conductor urging his orchestra toward a crescendo. He hummed a tuneless ditty. “Hmmm-hm-hmm-mmmm, ha-hum-hmmmm…”

The girls giggled. The boy’s fingertips were bloody from shrew bites and swollen from ant stings. He seemed to neither notice nor care.

Ellen said, “Where are your parents?”

“You talk too much,” said the girl in the faded dress. They all giggled some more.

The shrew’s struggles were slackening. Its black eyes stared out from the massing ants, dull and expressionless. A terrible soft hiss rose up, the sound of the ants’ bustling bodies. Ellen wanted to kick the ring apart. But she was worried about what these children might do to her if she stopped their barbarous game.

She knelt and pushed the children aside. She did so roughly, mildly revolted by the soapy feel of their skin. They parted willingly, brushing past her, leaving the playground. Ellen thought they had merely grown bored, or were going to tattle on her for pushing them, but they were moving toward the chapel, whose bell had now begun to toll.

The girl with plaited golden hair spun nimbly on her heel.

“You’re going to love it here,” she said. “You won’t ever want to leave.”

Ellen pulled the ring of sticks apart. She saw it had been built around the ants’ hill—they were only defending their home.

The shrew wasn’t moving anymore.

16

“A SHREW?”

Minerva forked chunky, tasteless stew into her mouth. They were sitting in the mess: Minerva, Ellen, Micah. Ebenezer was back in the bunkhouse, waiting for the doctor to look at his ankle.

Ellen had found them here shortly after her encounter with the children. She could only manage a bite of stew. Her appetite was gone. She had buried the poor shrew in a patch of dirt along the fence. Its body was swollen to double its size from the ant venom, so much that its skin had split open.

“They pinned it on top of an anthill,” she said. “They tortured it.”

Minerva picked mystery meat from her teeth. “Little shits. Well. Who am I to criticize? I had a magnifying glass as a kid. You think I used it to look at stamps? I must’ve fried a small city’s worth of ants.”

Ellen nodded. She, too, understood how kids could be. But it was one thing to allow nature to take its course—to watch a spider consume a fly in its web, say—versus actively pushing a horrible outcome. There was something sadistic about it. Not to mention there had been four of them. One child engaging in solitary sadism, okay. You put that kid on a watch list. But to see four of those children celebrating an animal’s suffering…

The mess was empty apart from the cook who had served them the stew. When they had asked the cook where they should sit, he just flapped his hand toward the back of the mess.

“They didn’t look well,” Ellen said. “The kids. They looked… malnourished. I’ve never seen anyone with scurvy—could that be it?”

“They could be underfed,” said Minerva. “Who knows what they eat out here, or how often. Could be some lean days.”

“Yeah, but isn’t that abusive?”

Minerva shrugged. “Not if they signed up for it. Not if they stay.”

“This place,” Ellen said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like him. The Reverend.”

“We will soon depart,” said Micah.

They might—the hired guns. Ellen realized they had been tasked with getting her here, nothing more. They had lost their guns the other night, and it was not shocking that they would want to leave, seeing as the denizens of Little Heaven were quite unwelcoming. But could she go? After seeing those kids and catching a sense of the sickness that appeared to infect this place—and after encountering those things in the woods last night, the creatures that had chased them relentlessly—could she leave without her nephew? What could she tell her sister? Sorry, Sherri, the place creeped me out. I had to hightail it. Even if Nate seemed okay now, who was to say he wouldn’t soon be infected by whatever was spreading around here?

But was anything happening? Or was she just spooked by Little Heaven’s weird vibe and its pompadoured head honcho? It wasn’t like they were sacrificing virgins or dancing naked in the light of the moon.

Not that you know, anyway, said a wary voice in her head.

“I don’t like not having our guns,” Minerva said.

Micah nodded his agreement. “Our weapons are a ways off,” he said. “We do not want to return to the campsite. Not yet.” He lowered his voice. “We will keep an eye out. Perhaps there is a way to get our hands on something.”

The chapel bell tolled as the service ended. People began to file into the mess. They had a glaze-eyed expression that made them look like sleepers roused from a pleasant dream. They filed in silently, shoes whispering on the floorboards. Most of them wore field clothes, overalls and dungarees, even the women. They took notice of the new arrivals, but nobody stopped to say hello. There were about forty in all. Ellen counted fifteen children, including the four who had tormented the shrew. The oldest could have been thirteen, the youngest a toddler.

Reggie and Nate came in last. Ellen’s heart lifted, then sank.

She had not seen her nephew in years. But she recalled a ruddy-cheeked and, well, robust little fella. A stout bowling pin of a boy who had careened recklessly around her sister’s front room, shrieking merrily as Sherri chased him and tickled him under the armpits. The Nate she spied now was pallid and drained, as if there were leeches at work under his clothes. He had the look of a future telethon case: a boy propped up in a bed with tubes poking out of his arms while dewy-eyed viewers called in their pledges.

His father didn’t look a hell of a lot better as he shuffled into the mess behind his son. The skin hung slack off Reggie’s neck, and the flesh under his eyes was the yellow of an old bruise.

Reggie and Nate got in the chow line. Neither of them glanced in Ellen’s direction.

Micah raised his eyebrows. That them? Ellen nodded.

The Reverend Amos Flesher came in last. The sermon had evidently revivified him—it was as if he had stolen vitality from his worshippers and taken it for himself. He passed down the queue, offering that limp-fingered blessing until he reached the head of it.

Great way to cut in line, Ellen thought sourly.

He took his meal—it was served on a fine china plate, Ellen noted, while everyone else’s stew was plopped into green plastic bowls—to his table at the head of the mess. There was only one chair at it.

When everyone was seated, the Reverend stood. The congregation followed suit.

“Mighty Lord,” the Reverend intoned, “thank You for this bounty You have placed before us. Thank You for this bread, this meat, this wine.”

“What’s he talking about?” Minerva whispered so low that only Ellen could hear. “I don’t see any wine.”

“Your beneficence, dear Lord, is unending. Without You we are nothing. You nourish and sustain all things. You provide food for all Thy creatures. Blessed art Thou, Lord, who feeds and waters His children here at Little Heaven. And blessed is Your mouthpiece, who carries Your divine word to the ears of Your flock.”

“Nifty,” said Minerva.

“Amen,” said Reverend Amos Flesher.

“Amen,” said the congregation.

“Amen,” said Ellen, uncomfortably.

Absolutely nothing, said Micah and Minerva.

A strained silence prevailed during the meal. Few people spoke, and if so, they did so in whispers. Even fewer hazarded glances in the newcomers’ direction.

Ellen watched the Reverend. He had an aggressive manner of eating: he held a slice of bread a few inches away from his face, and instead of bringing it to his mouth, he would dart forward like a predatory bird, snapping off bits of crust.

“We have guests tonight,” said the Reverend once he’d finished pecking at his food.

The congregation turned to them now, as if given permission. It was not unlike a single organism with a hundred eyes turning its concentrated gaze upon Ellen and her companions all at once.

“The Lord has brought them to our doorstep,” the Reverend said. “They fell into the pit dug by Brother Langtree and Brother Fairweather.” He clapped his hands, a dry sound like wood planks spanked together. “Finally! They managed to catch something!”

Laughter from the congregation. Ellen cast a sidelong glance at her nephew, Nate, sitting with Reggie. She caught no spark of recognition in their eyes. Good.

“They will stay with us only as long as it takes the fourth member of their party to heal,” he said. “If that is more than a few days, we will arrange for transport to the outside. The Lord has put this hurdle before us and we must abide.”

He’s speaking like we’re poison, Ellen thought. As though our presence is tainting his perfect utopia.

Dessert was passed around next. Tapioca pudding, as tasteless as the stew. Perhaps the Reverend viewed flavor as a sin? They ate in silence as before.

“Well, whoop-de-doo, what a fun bunch,” Minerva muttered. “What do they do on wild nights, watch paint dry?”

Twilight gathered against the mess hall’s plastic-sheet windows. Wind hissed through gaps in the walls with a zippery note.

Two men entered the mess. They had the look of brothers: the same sharp cheekbones and ferret-thin frames. One had a scoped rifle slung over his shoulder. The other had a revolver holstered at his hip like a Wild West gunslinger.

They moved briskly to the Reverend. All three inclined their heads in conversation. The two men spoke animatedly yet in hushed tones; the gunslinger made a few wild flourishes with his hands. The Reverend nodded and signaled for them to depart.

For a minute, the Reverend sat very still with his eyes closed. He opened one eye once, briefly, and his gaze was trained on Ellen’s table. His jaw worked side to side and his lips moved as if in silent prayer.

In time, he stood. His eyes remained closed. His body trembled slightly. The congregation sat riveted. Ellen caught sight of Reggie out of the corner of her eye. His face was cheese white and twitchy as he stared at Amos Flesher, enrapt.

“There come a test,” the Reverend said in a stagey kind of whisper. “In the life of every man there come a test…”

Nods from the congregation. Yes, oh yes, Ellen could picture them all thinking. The Lord tests the faithful.

“The son of Brother and Sister Rathbone has wandered into the woods.”

A shocked group inhale from the congregation—it was as though they had taken a breath as a single unit.

“Eli?” said a woman in a paisley frock. “Eli Rathbone’s missing?”

The Reverend paused, as if unsure of the boy’s name.

“He is safe,” Reverend Flesher said sharply. He cast a baleful eye upon the woman until she sat down again. “The Lord assures me of this. Brother Swicker and Brother Neeps have been looking for him, along with his parents. But now we all must gather. The light draws thin. The poor boy shall not spend the night outdoors.”

Everybody rose. People were animated now—their bodies moved with the jerky-limbed mania that grips a group of people on the cusp of mass hysteria. The Reverend’s chin was tilted upward, his face set in a mask of forbearance—Ellen wondered: Did he envision the boy’s disappearance as a test for himself?

Ellen, Minerva, and Micah filtered into the square, where the adults were gathering. The children had been sent off to the bunkhouses. A few people had flashlights. Ellen spotted Reggie carrying a lantern that gave off a weak glow, its glass blackened with kerosene smudges. Rags were tied to the tips of scrap two-by-twos and dipped into a bucket of creosote. The jury-rigged torches were lit with a Zippo passed from person to person. This all happened quickly and silently. The two-by-twos, rags, and creosote were all at the ready, as if waiting for this very eventuality.

The armed men who looked like brothers addressed the throng.

“Eli’s folks is out thataway,” the one with the rifle said, pointing at a general area past the fence. “They ain’t seen the boy in a few hours. They thought he was with the others in the play area.”

The man with the holstered gun was smoking a home-rolled cigarette. He flicked the butt into the weeds and said, “A mother ought to keep mind of her kids.” He cast an eye on the group, picking out the mothers in its midst. “Ain’t that a pure fact?”

Nobody spoke against him. The torches crackled, sending up plumes of stinking smoke. The flames flickered on the worshippers’ pale pinched faces.

“We’ll fan out,” said the rifleman. “East, west, south, north. No telling whichaway the boy went, or how far afield.”

“Better not be too far,” his partner said. “The woods are a dangerous place to be at night.”

The rifleman grinned. “Lovely, dark and deep.”

Ellen did not care for these two. They seemed to be taking delight in this. The rifleman then pointed at the outsiders.

“You stay here. This is not your calling.”

Minerva and Micah were already holding torches. Micah levered his torch back on his shoulder until his face grew dark. “Your call,” he said.

“It is,” said the rifleman, and spat. His partner rested the heel of his palm against the butt of his revolver. “And I say sit.”

The group exited through the main gate. The monolithic expanse of the woods dwarfed them; the flimsy light of their torches quickly dwindled under the brooding darkness of those trees. The worshippers paired off and began to sweep the woods. Voices called out from every direction.

“Eli?”

“Eli!”

“Eli!”

“Child, come home! God wants you to come home!”

The light of their torches was swallowed by the night. Soon their voices were gone, too. Ellen, Minerva, and Micah stood in the parade square. There was not much else to do. It wasn’t like there was a horseshoe pit or a bingo game they were missing.

A lone figure rounded back into the compound. Charlie Fairweather.

“I don’t care what Cyril or Virgil says,” he said. “That boy needs all the help he can get.”

“Okay,” said Micah.

17

DURING THE WAR, Micah used to drive trucks full of the dead.

Between ten and fifteen bodies piled into the back of an old GMC Deuce-and-a-Half. The bodies of GIs and medics and radiomen and the odd noncombat pogue who had found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The bodies were intact, by and large, though sometimes the stray parts had to be zipped into canvas sacks. They were usually frozen—not strategically, just because the icy temperatures ensured that most of them were rock hard for transport.

Micah and another marine, Eldon Tibbs, would drive them from the front line to Hamhung, a port town under US occupation. It was suspected that the Chinese would strip, loot, and debase the corpses otherwise.

There was one night, winter of 1952. Micah was at the wheel for that haul. He was nineteen years old. The road wound through the pines, which were cottony-looking, with bluish moss hanging from their branches like seaweed. Tibbs didn’t talk much. He and Micah got on just fine. Tibbs smoked a pipe packed with cherry tobacco. He received it every month in a thick waxed envelope. One of his brothers sent it. He was smoking when it happened.

Micah did not see or hear the shot that killed Tibbs. It was either perfect or just plain lucky—bad luck for Tibbs. A hole appeared in the passenger window, and the side of Micah’s face was plastered with wet warmth.

Tibbs’s lit pipe fell into Micah’s lap. The road hit a bend. Tibbs’s body slumped heavily against Micah. A flap of skin from his blown-apart face slapped against Micah’s neck. He smelled the thick iron of Tibbs’s blood.

Wind shrieked through the window hole as the truck veered into the trees. Micah tried to correct the fishtail, but the front end dipped over the edge of the road into a gully. Micah was thrown into the windshield, which splintered when he struck it.

He grabbed the pistol from Tibbs’s holster and heaved himself from the cab. Blood flowed freely from his forehead. Whoever shot Tibbs couldn’t be far away.

He staggered around the side of the truck, keeping low on the gully side. The truck’s rear doors had popped open. Bodies lay scattered over the road. Corpses rested at horrible broken-backed angles. A few of the zippered sacks had burst, spraying remains. The ragged edges of frozen flesh had a crystalized look, crusty red like freezer-burned steak.

Micah crept to the bumper. Ice had formed to a webbing between the black bones of the trees across the road. A figure was approaching down the ditch across the road. Micah fired. The slug missed wide. The figure dropped out of sight.

Next, a round struck the truck a few inches above Micah’s head. He spun away; his heels skidded out from under him and he went down hard on his ass. He pivoted onto his stomach, watching the road from under the truck chassis.

A single Chinese soldier crept out of the ditch. What was he doing so far behind enemy lines? Either crazy or overconfident. He must have thought he’d hit Micah, that he was dead. The man drew nearer. His face was smeared in lampblack. Micah waited until he was so close that all he could see was his legs, then squeezed the trigger.

The slug went through the man’s shin. The man cried out and awkwardly fell. Micah put another round into his head. The man’s flyaway corn-silk hair puffed up as the bullet drilled into his brain.

Micah spent the next twenty minutes loading bodies into the truck. Some had spilled into the earth under the trees, which was weirdly spongy despite the night’s chill, carpeted by a strain of moss he had never encountered. It was hard work—dead bodies possessed an ornery, uncooperative weight. He put the dead Chinaman in with them.

He backed out of the gully and drove on to Hamhung. He left Tibbs in the cab. His body was going stiff…

This was the memory that blitzed through Micah’s mind—collecting frozen bodies under the pines—as he now entered the woods encircling Little Heaven with Charlie, Minerva, and Ellen. This earth had the same soft, rich, obliging, somehow cake-like quality. But there was no moss here. The ground simply felt mushy underfoot, as if it had been saturated with thick and fatty oil.

It feels like flesh was Micah’s thought. The waterlogged flesh of a corpse coughed up from the bottom of a lake.

What a stupid thought. But the inkling remained: they were walking on a huge carcass. If they were to dig, their fingernails would scrape its wormy skin. And if they dug into its hide, its black blood would surely gush out, syrupy as crude oil.

They tried to chart a straight path, but the trees and blowdowns made it hard. Micah spotted the light of a torch burning to the east, a paling pinprick. Shouts rang out—“Eli! ELI!”—but those, too, began to soften as the searchers fanned out in ever-widening orbits.

The light of Micah’s own torch illuminated a ten-foot radius; there was barely enough to navigate by, much less spot the boy. A night in these woods would feel like an eternity to a child. Why would he have taken off? Any number of reasons, Micah supposed. He’d chased an animal. Or his parents had scolded him and he had run away.

Or else something lured him in.

“Needle in a haystack,” Charlie said with a defeated grimace. “I can barely see the fingers at the end of my hand.”

Micah said, “Tell me about those two.”

“What two?” said Charlie.

“The men giving orders.”

Charlie cocked his torch on his shoulder and rubbed his elbow nervously. “The one’s Cyril Neeps. With the longish hair?”

They both had long hair. They were practically identical.

Micah said, “The one with the rifle?”

“That’s the one,” Charlie confirmed. “The other fella is Virgil Swicker.”

“So they’re not brothers?” Ellen said.

“They look it, don’t they? But no. They weren’t part of the congregation back in San Francisco. To be honest, they don’t seem to have much faith at all. I haven’t ever seen their heads bent in prayer.”

“What are they doing here?” said Micah.

Charlie scratched his elbow in a nervous way, like a child called to the front of the class to finish an equation on the chalkboard.

“The Reverend, he brought them on. Guess he figured with the camp being so isolated, and not too many of us having real survival skills, it would be good to have them.”

“I thought the Lord would be your shepherd,” Minerva said.

Charlie gave her a look. “The Reverend had his reasons. He is guided by the Lord.”

Micah noticed that Charlie hadn’t referred to the men as Brother Neeps or Brother Swicker. They had the unmistakable whiff of hired guns. Why take on those two? Maybe, as Charlie said, simply to keep the flock safe… or else to keep the flock in line?

The lights of Little Heaven were no longer visible. Micah’s eye swept the woods for any sign of the missing boy. The darkness rebounded at him, empty and dead.

“We should split up,” he said.

They had already drifted into two distinct parties. Micah and Ellen on one side. On the other, Charlie and Minerva.

“Boy, girl, boy, girl—is that what you’re thinking, Shug?” Minerva said archly. “How orderly.”

Minerva and Charlie moved off in a westerly direction. Micah and Ellen continued straight on.

“Eli!” Ellen shouted. Then, lowering her voice: “Poor little guy.”

They walked beside each other. Micah could have reached out and taken Ellen’s hand. He could smell her: campfire smoke and sweat and something sweet, too, that smelled a little like field berries.

“Are you well?” he asked, just to say something. It was not like him at all.

“I’m okay, considering. Nate and Reggie are here, at least. But they don’t look well, Micah. Nobody looks well. Is that just me thinking it?”

“It is not just you.”

“Right? Everyone looks… sick. The guts vacuumed out of them—the vim, the vitality. A bunch of shambling undead.”

It wasn’t just the people in Little Heaven that set off Micah’s alarm bells. It was the thing or things that had chased them the night before, too. Things Micah assumed must have been bears or wolves. But they hadn’t moved like that, and when he caught a glimpse of their bodies in the flare’s sputtering light—that heart-stopping flicker of movement—in that split second he thought: These are like no creatures I have ever encountered. Those creatures, and the shower of dead birds, and the denizens of Little Heaven, and the soft give of the ground underfoot, and the way the darkness melted unpleasantly into his bones… everything was a bit skewed, a degree off center. None of it seemed odd enough to raise a panic over—you could convince yourself that it was just the weak-nelly dread that domesticated humans felt nowadays, after spending most of their lives in well-lit cities. This was life in the woods. It was dangerous, full of threats. And his experiences in Korea and afterward had enabled Micah to operate calmly under threat. He did not rattle, even when he should. But maybe that was the true danger: you were lulled into a false acceptance as what had once seemed odd came to feel perfectly natural, and by the time things really started to go south it was too late. You were trapped.

“I don’t know if I can leave without Nate,” Ellen said. She was looking directly at Micah. “I’m not expecting anything from you. I just wanted to say.”

Micah said nothing. But he knew he would not leave Ellen. If he was not exactly a good man, he had always been a loyal one. If he took a job, he finished it. Unless something happened to him that prevented it.

They traced a path through the trees. No sounds filtered out of the darkness: none of the little clicks and whistles and snapping twigs that should be there in a forest teeming with life. But the woods felt arid and lifeless—they could have been walking on the moon.

The ground underfoot went from dark to light. The white of pulverized bone. Micah’s boots kicked through drifts of ash… except it wasn’t that. Nothing had been burned.

“I know where we are,” said Ellen. “I saw it this afternoon.”

Dead. Every tree and bush, every tuft of grass. The vegetation was decimated in a manner Micah had never seen: the bark peeled off trees in brittle shreds, the underlying wood gone a sick bile yellow. He saw no termite bore holes, no blight of any kind. It was as though they had died of old age—they had the look of wretchedly ill seniors at a cut-rate old folks’ home, wasted away with cancers that had rotted their bodies from the inside out.

“It’s only right here,” said Ellen. “Ten, fifteen yards wide.”

She reached out tremblingly. Her fingertips brushed a tree. She recoiled as though she had touched a dead body.

“Do you think Eli would have come this way?”

Micah scanned the route they had just walked. He felt something for just an instant. A presence—a delicate, quick-stepping movement he sensed not with his eye but rather a center of perception buried deep in his lizard brain, wed tightly to the fight-or-flight instinct the human species had developed back when we were as often prey as predator.

Yet he saw nothing with his eye. Just the liquid shiftings of the night.

Or—

Fifty yards down the path. Peeking slyly between the ruined trees.

Peekaboo, I see you.

A face. It hovered ten feet off the ground, a tiny earthbound moon. Not a human face. It wasn’t round at all. More long and curved and vulpine. It was as pale as the moon, too—the jarring white of flesh that had never tasted daylight.

Its eyes—were they eyes? was any of this real?—were black as buttons. It opened its mouth. Its face split in half, pulling its head apart; the top of its skull levered back like a Pez dispenser. Inkiness bled out of that slash, a blackness more profound than Micah had ever known.

Ellen grabbed his hand. She had seen it, too.

“Run,” she said.

They sprinted through the woods, their feet flashing over the ground. Ellen veered sharply left, off the path of death. Micah spun around to see if the face—and the body it was attached to—was in pursuit. He tripped and dropped the torch. It fell sputtering into a patch of dry earth. He abandoned it. They followed Ellen’s flashlight. It bobbed against the trees, the beam occasionally skipping skyward when she stumbled. Micah wasn’t sure where they were going, but Ellen ran with a purpose. Already the image of what he had seen—that bloodless face staring at them amid the tree limbs—seemed absurd. What creature could be that tall?

Unless it was up in the tree, he thought. Hugging it like a spider.

He pictured a terrible arachnid-like thing hooked to the spine of a dead pine, its thick furred legs throttling the trunk…

He grabbed her hand. “Stop.”

She checked up. They stood panting.

“We will get lost,” he said.

She pointed to her left. “The compound is that way. I see the light of torches.”

She shot a look behind him.

“Micah, you did see—?”

He nodded. “An animal. An owl.”

He could tell she wanted to believe him. He wanted her to, too.

They walked toward Little Heaven. Whatever the thing was, Micah could hear no breath of its pursuit. Had it even given chase? He wasn’t at all certain. He was becoming less certain of many things.

Those creatures from last night, this one now—what if something unnatural was at play? In the army, some of his more superstitious barrack mates would talk about seeing things while out on patrol. Unearthly lights, distant figures that seemed to float above the earth. Spooks. Ghosties. Another man, a sniper named Groggins, used to claim Korean scientists were creating half-human, half-animal hybrids in underground labs. Super soldiers, ape-men and snake-men, which was what Groggins kept glimpsing through his scope during night watch: lab mutants who had escaped containment roaming no-man’s-land, feasting on rotting corpses sunk in the mud, too skittish to attack—yet.

Micah never put any stock in it. Men’s minds went to strange places when put under pressure. And he knew that even if something strange was happening around Little Heaven, the worst thing to do would be to run half-cocked into the woods. No. They had a home base. Not a very hospitable one, but it would do. They were being fed and sheltered. There were weapons, even if they weren’t yet in Micah’s hands. He could get a gun, if push came to shove. So their best bet was to sit tight, assess the situation, and act only once all the information had come to light.

They walked quickly. Ellen swept the fringing bushes with her flashlight. No sign of the boy. They spotted torchlight. Soon they encountered two searchers trudging back to the compound. Their clothes were dusty, their spirits low. The boy had not been found and it was nearing midnight.

Virgil Swicker and Cyril Neeps idled at the front gates. They had not done much to look for the boy, as evidenced by their clean trousers. Neeps’s jaw tightened at the sight of them.

“What’d I tell you?” he said to Micah.

Neeps grabbed Micah’s sleeve. Micah swung round until they were facing. Neeps’s breath washed over him, hot and electric. Neeps waited until the Little Heavenites had passed from earshot before speaking.

“The fuck are you up to, sonny boy? Told you to stay out of this.”

Neeps’s fingers clawed into Micah’s forearm. If he wanted Micah to wince, he would be disappointed.

“There’s a missing child,” said Ellen. “How could we not—?”

“Wasn’t talking to you, bitch,” Neeps said casually. Swicker, who had been standing a ways off, pinched in at Ellen’s side. He could reach out and grab her if he wanted to.

“You being a clever Clyde?” Neeps’s eyes drilled into Micah’s unpatched eye. “Lost hikers, uh? Nah, I’m thinking not. You’re gonna want to hit the dusty ole trail real soon. Skedaddle your asses.”

Neeps picked a shred of boiled gray meat from between his teeth and flicked it at Micah’s chest. It stuck.

“We are a long way from anything, son,” said Neeps. “Ain’t no rules, except what the good Reverend says.” A chuckle. “And even then… well, Virg and me ain’t never been much for godly matters. I get a sense you ain’t, neither. So go. Take your show on the road, Pontiac.”

Neeps shoved him. Micah stumbled back, then calmly straightened the lapels on his duster. “You bet” was all he said in reply.

He and Ellen walked back to the bunkhouse. Cyril said something to Virgil, which was followed by a donkey bray of laughter.

Micah could tell Ellen was unnerved. Whether it was by the face in the woods or the confrontation with the hired guns, he could not tell. He wondered if he would have to kill Swicker and Neeps. He hoped to avoid it. It would be ideal if they were able to leave soon, just like Neeps wanted. As soon as Ebenezer was well enough to walk. But sometimes men like Neeps pushed a collision. And Micah always made a point of hitting first, and hitting harder.

18

EBENEZER AWOKE from a dreamless sleep. It was dawn. Frail sunlight leaked through the bunkhouse window.

He sat up. The others were asleep on the spare cots that had been brought in last night. Sleeping, or playing at it. Ebenezer wasn’t sure Micah ever really slept—he got the sense the man merely closed his eyes and faked it for a few hours a night.

Ebenezer put his feet down and tested his injured ankle. Dr. Lewis, the compound’s de facto sawbones—an old army meatball medic—had fashioned a splint to take the pressure off. He had given Ebenezer a few pills to help him rest. Ebenezer had taken them and dozed. When he had awoken for the first time, he’d noticed Minerva and Ellen bustling about, searching for a flashlight.

“What’s happening?” he’d asked

“Shut up.” Minerva tossed the pill bottle at him. “Take another pill, Phil.”

Ebenezer thought that a fine idea; he took another one. He slept for hours and swam out of unconsciousness in the early hours of morning. Perhaps it was the effects of the medication or a dream he couldn’t shake off, but he swore he had seen something at the window. The face of a child. But it was bleached white apart from the eyes, which were black, as if the pupils had been pricked like the yolk of an egg, the darkness spreading across each eyeball—

He had slept again and woken up only minutes ago. He stood. The pain was definitely there, a sharp spike radiating up his shin, but it was manageable. He was starving. He was always hungriest after he had been hurt—his body worked so hard at repairing itself that it drained its energy reserves.

He limped out of the bunkhouse. Dawn was streaming through the trees. He saw lights moving in the woods and heard the occasional cry of a boy’s name. Eli. It made him think of the boy he might have spotted at the window last night—the boy who had been nothing but a figment of his pill-addled mind.

He spied a man clocking his progress. A fellow with straggly white-boy hair—the hair belonging to a particular breed of man you’d call a reb—and a pistol holstered at his waist. This man watched him limp across the square with a flat, jeering expression on his face.

“Bit early for your kind to be up, ain’t it?” he called over.

Ebenezer stopped and stared at the man. “Early for a nigger—is that what you mean, my good man?”

“Nope,” the man said chummily. “I meant early for a faggot. You ain’t gonna find a hairdresser for that flowsy hair out here, boy.”

Ebenezer nodded impassively. “Good to know.”

“Get better quick,” the man said dismissively. “Then get your ass out of Dodge.”

Ebenezer found the encounter quaint yet crass. Faggot? The bastard should be so lucky. Eb vowed to slit the hayseed goober’s throat if the opportunity ever presented itself.

He limped into the mess. Begrudgingly, the cook gave him a bowl of porridge. Ebenezer dumped brown sugar on the porridge and ate it and asked for more. The cook groused.

“It’s for the kids’ breakfasts, and the people out looking for poor Eli.”

The cook was about fifty, with a potbelly and a nose that begged for a punch. Ebenezer would have happily kicked him down a flight of stairs, but there were none of those around, and anyway his ankle hurt too much.

“Whensoever you come across a man in need, you shall freely open your arms to him, and shall generously lend him sufficient for his need in whatever he lacks.” Ebenezer showed the cook his outspread palms. “Book of Ephesians, my friend… my friend in Christ.”

The cook gave him another bowl. Ebenezer was delighted. He had just made that shit up! When he was finished, he burped and said, “My compliments to you, chef; I’ll be sure to mention you in my review for Bon Appétit magazine.”

He departed on the chef’s scowl. Fah, to the devil with him. To the devil with this whole miserable encampment. If he were healthy, he would leave this minute with only the clothes on his back. The others could come or not; he wouldn’t care.

Ebenezer could not say what bothered him about Little Heaven, aside from the obvious—that it was a dismal enclave run by a short-assed Bible thumper with a discount Elvis haircut. It was more the smaller details, like how the sunlight seemed shabbier over the compound, leeched of its heat and vibrancy. Or how everyone was stooped like trees struggling to survive on a windswept mountain peak.

He stood in the parade square, watching people come in from the woods. They were exhausted and dirty, carrying torches that had burnt down like enormous wooden matches. What had the cook said? Out looking for poor Eli… Had a boy run off? If so, a missing child was Little Heaven’s concern, not his own. Concern was not and had never been a quality of Ebenezer’s nature. While that counted as a failing in him as a human being, it held many benefits in respect to his chosen profession.

THE MORNING WORE ON. The search continued. Ebenezer overheard Minerva and Micah strategizing while Ellen was out of earshot. Minerva spoke loud enough for Ebenezer to hear—she wanted him to hear, Eb figured. Why couldn’t they just leave? she reasoned. Let Ellen keep her money. If Ebenezer couldn’t make it on his bum ankle, tough shit. Micah shook his head. Ebenezer didn’t hear what he had to say, but it probably had something to do with not wishing to leave Eb behind. Micah was a dutiful fool, though there was a strong possibility that he wished to linger on Ellen’s behalf. He was sweet on her, as even Helen Keller could’ve sniffed out.

“What about the guns back at the camp?” Minerva said. “We could use those.”

“Yes,” Micah admitted, but their conversation stopped there.

The midmorning sermon was short, only fifteen minutes. His holiness Reverend Flesher was committed to organizing the search for Eli Rathbone, but he refrained from setting foot in the woods. Probably didn’t want a bird to shit on his head, Ebenezer figured.

Someone should tell him bird shit makes an A-1 hair conditioner, he thought. That would get him out to shake a few trees.

Ebenezer and the rest of them had been banned from the search, according to Micah. The Reverend’s hired men made the decree. Big deal. Hobbled as he was, Eb would be useless in any search even if he wanted to take part—which he did not. The four of them passed the afternoon watching the Little Heavenites come in from the woods. The worshippers would eat, pray, head out again. The Reverend beseeched God for the safe return of young Eli, who was without sin.

Ebenezer did not spot the missing boy’s parents. Evidently they had been in the woods since yesterday afternoon, when they first suspected their child had run away. They could be ten or fifteen miles from the compound by now—together, though maybe separate—delusional with grief, wandering aimlessly, calling out for their lost son.

The Reverend prayed for Eli’s parents, too. Helluva guy, that Reverend.

Flesher’s hired goons, the rifleman and the other one with a stupid bovine face—Ellen gave their names as Cyril and Virgil, respectively—supervised. They did so with a bored and vaguely hostile air, like ranch hands herding cattle. Ebenezer assumed they were overjoyed at the work: they got to keep the flock in line, following the orders the Reverend doled out, and at such time as Little Heaven came apart—and it would, as the cracks were already showing—they could take what they wanted and escape while the place went to hell.

At six o’clock, dinner was served. The mess was sparsely occupied. Those who were there spoke in whispers.

Should we head to the outside, talk to the police, and organize a proper search party?…

The Reverend, sensing the winds of dissent, stood and addressed the gathering.

“It is at times such as these, when we are at our greatest need, that we must band more closely together,” he said. “Did I not bring you here so that you could hear the word of God more clearly? And now, at the first sign of trial, you talk of fleeing back to the godless heathens who compelled our departure?”

The Reverend’s hands tightened on the table, twisting into claws.

“Do you want to be cast out of the Eden we have made? Do you? The boy will be found. God will bring him back. God is merciful until His works are questioned. Eli must wander the desert as Moses did until God brings him back, and He will. He will.”

Silence from the congregation—until a tremulous voice spoke up from the back.

“Are you sure this was the first sign, Reverend?”

Amos Flesher scoured the room until his gaze fell on a woman dressed in a plain smock. She sat with a man, equally plain, obviously her husband.

“What did you say, Sister Conkwright?”

“The first sign of trial.” The woman struggled to hold the Reverend’s gaze. “Because Sister Hughes broke her leg, remember? And… yes, a few other things.”

“Such as?”

Sister Conkwright’s hands knotted in her lap. Her husband set his hands over her own. She put her head down.

“Nothing,” she mumbled. “God is good.”

The Reverend let a few seconds tick past. His gaze settled on Ebenezer and the others for a moment—the flat, dead gaze of a viper—before flicking away.

“Sister Conkwright, if you or anyone here so gathered wishes to leave Little Heaven, you may. With my blessings.”

But the way the Reverend spoke, it was like he was inviting her to step off a cliff.

“Cyril and Virgil will escort you out. But once you are gone—just as it was with Adam and Eve from Eden—you are… gone.”

The congregation filed out. Sister Conkwright required her husband’s assistance, as she was shaking badly. The men and women of Little Heaven returned to the square to fashion more torches. The search continued.

19

THE CONKWRIGHT BITCH. She would ruin everything.

Amos Flesher paced his quarters. His heart bappity-bapped in his chest. Every so often, he slammed his fist into his palm. The meaty slap of skin was soothing.

To hurt is to love.

Who had said that? One of the nuns at the San Francisco Catholic Orphanage? He had been left on its steps as a toddler. It happened a lot in that city. A city of whores. Amos barely remembered his mother. His father was unknown—but Amos knew he must have been a great man. A man of God who had been called away to follow the same voice that Amos himself could hear.

Amos had lived at the orphanage for sixteen years. His was the longest residency in its history. The goal was to have every child adopted into a God-fearing family. But Amos never was. He would spend a few weeks with a family, but they always sent him back. One time, he had overheard his prospective mother and father whispering with the nuns.

Peculiar boy. Strange tendencies.

All the other boys and girls got adopted. Even the dwarfs and the ones with harelips and the ugly specimens with IQs no bigger than their belt size. They were shipped off to families who lived in sparkling houses overlooking the bay. Amos stayed at the orphanage with the nuns and the pea green floor tiles.

The nuns became his surrogate mothers. None of them took a shine to Amos—they treated him as a burden once it became clear he would never get adopted. But one of them, Sister Muriel, saw it as her duty to teach him the wages of sin. And the wage was high, oh yes. Your immortal soul.

Prurient desires are the devil rapping at the door to your soul, she said to him. If you give in, boy, you let Satan trip-trap in on his cloven hooves.

She meted out discipline for lustful behavior. It happened a lot with the older boys and girls. If Sister Muriel found out that a boy had been fiddling with his dirty stick or a girl with her pink button—and Sister Muriel had an unerring way of knowing this—those transgressions would be met with lashes.

Sister Muriel’s discipline did not extend to the encephalitic or soft-brained orphans—God’s children, as they were known—who were kept in a separate ward. Those unlucky souls should be allowed to act on the impulses other boys and girls must stifle, she reasoned. Amos had not seen it that way at all. All vice was an affront to the Lord, was it not? And if those imbecilic simpletons could not check their acts of self-gratification, why should they escape punishment? It wasn’t fair.

Once he turned twelve, the nuns began to assign duties to Amos so he could make himself useful. One of those duties was to preside over God’s children during naptime. Many of them had to be strapped down so they didn’t hurt themselves—some of them shook so badly that the bonds actually helped them sleep: they would struggle uselessly for a few minutes, then fall into an exhausted slumber.

Amos would walk the rows of cots in his crepe-soled slippers, same as the nuns wore. They made no noise on the tiles. Sunlight streamed into the ward, honey gold on all those terrible misshapen bodies.

One of God’s children, a boy named Finn, rarely slept. He had a head like a pumpkin, his features stretched across that bulging canvas. He was thirteen or fourteen, nobody knew for sure, and nearly blind. During naptime, he would work at his wrist straps until he popped one hand loose. That hand would immediately go to his crotch. He masturbated furiously. His erection was a permanent fixture. All day, that fleshy spike in his drawers. Sometimes he would orgasm without even touching himself. He could bring himself to climax with the workings of his mushy mind alone.

Amos wondered what Finn thought about. Girls? Boys? Maybe just the pressure of his hand on his penis? Finn only produced guttural groans and blabbers, so it was impossible to say. But Amos didn’t like it. Finn strained against his straps so diligently that his wrists were forever scabbed. The nuns had to change the bloody linens every day. Finn ought to be taught a lesson.

Amos knew every crevice of the orphanage, and stole a pin from the nuns’ sewing room. He didn’t consider it stealing, though, because he was doing the Lord’s work.

That afternoon during naptime, he crouched beside Finn’s bed.

“Stop your fiddling, Finn,” he whispered, liking the way the order rolled off his tongue. His voice had already developed a rich tenor. “Or else.”

Finn just grunted and continued to work at his straps. His erection tented the soft material of his sleeping gown.

Amos pulled the pin out of his sock, where he’d put it for safekeeping. It was three inches long. He pushed it through Finn’s gown until the tip dimpled Finn’s skin. Finn grunted quizzically. Amos pushed harder. The pin broke Finn’s flesh, skewering a half-inch into his thigh. Finn moaned. He seemed to enjoy it. Interested, Amos pushed harder. Finn made a noise that could only be interpreted as one of ecstasy. He never stopped trying to get out of his restraints. How very odd.

For the next few days, Amos stuck Finn with that pin during naptime. He stuck a few of the other children, too—none of the ones who could talk, however. Their reactions were more in line with Amos’s assumptions: inarticulate screeches of pain. But Finn liked it. He loved the pain. It made him feel more alive, maybe, or it deepened the pleasure he was already experiencing. That, too, was a sin. And Amos was participating in it. But he was learning some very important things.

Before that week was out, the nuns noticed the bloody pricks up and down Finn’s torso. Bedbugs were suspected. The mattresses had to be fumigated. But Sister Muriel gave Amos the stink eye, and he was taken off naptime duty. Sensing he would be questioned, he dropped the pin down the playground storm drain.

The experience taught Amos this: he enjoyed being in charge. He had never had that agency in his life. And it stood to reason that people liked to be dominated. Not just morons like Finn—regular everyday folks. They needed to be told what to do and how to act. But you couldn’t just stride up and start bossing them around. You needed to get ahold of the whip hand somehow. People knew that they were sinful and licentious. Finn showed it plainly, but most people wore a mask. Under that mask were all the depraved, malignant elements of their souls. They wanted to be punished, because after punishment comes forgiveness.

And if Amos were to punish those people as he saw fit, well, it was a punishment that God would surely smile upon.

To hurt is to love, he now thought as he restlessly paced his quarters. The Conkwright bitch. Bitch, BITCH. Speaking out against him. She wanted to flee like a chicken-gutted weakling, shrieking for help. It would ruin everything. He didn’t want his flock to think about the outside world; it should not be acknowledged except as the seat of sin. He had placed blinders over their eyes and now one of them was trying to rip those blinders off.

Eli. Stupid child. Run off into the woods. He would come back; he would be fine; why wouldn’t he be? Children had run away from the orphanage all the time. Hopped the fence and vamoosed. If they never returned, it wasn’t necessarily because calamity had befallen them. It was because they didn’t want to come back. But Eli had no choice. His family was at Little Heaven. His God was here.

Amos would set everything to rights tomorrow. He would call the flock in from the woods whether or not the boy had been found. He would speechify to them until he saw that stunned, goatlike gloss touch their eyes again—a look he first became familiar with years ago, preaching atop a soapbox in Haight-Ashbury, amassing a small throng of worshippers. He’d soon gathered enough to start his own ministry. He understood the keys that opened the locks to human nature better than any head-shrinker. Those keys were labeled Vice, Punishment, Forgiveness. That last key was the crucial one. If you withheld it, banishing unbelievers from not only the Kingdom of Heaven but also the earthbound circle of fellowship they had come to know… that was the worst thing they could possibly imagine. It kept them at heel.

Amos stopped before the window. Night had drawn down on Little Heaven, but the security lamps burned. He stared at his church, topped with that mighty crucifix.

He stood, transfixed, listening to the Voice.

It came to Amos every night. God’s Voice—whom else could it belong to? He let it settle into his bones, soothing him. The Voice had already warned there would come a dissent. Amos had known this before the first fence post went up at Little Heaven. It was why he had hired Cyril and Virgil, whose acquaintance had been made through unsavory but needful methods.

Any flock could stray, despite the best efforts of its shepherd. That was why a smart shepherd trained a few ill-tempered dogs to keep the sheep in line.

He would weather this storm. He would cast out the irritants and prevail. He must. God had a plan for him. He felt it gathering in the deepest recesses of his mind: that other voice whispering to him, using words he could not make out. A low continuous drone like the massing of flies over rotted offal. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

He retreated to his bed, where he lay stiff as a rod. Without being aware of it, he began to knead his groin. He opened the night table and pulled out the long sharp pin that lay beside his Bible.

Release, he thought. By God, release.

20

EBENEZER COULD NOT SLEEP his second night at Little Heaven. His blankets itched, as did his ankle while it healed. He rolled off the cot and pulled on his trousers and one boot. The others were still sleeping. He hobbled out the door.

The night was cool. Combers of ground fog rolled across the square. It flooded over his legs, so thick he could barely see his own feet. A flashlight snapped on behind him.

“What are you doing?”

He turned. Minerva was pointing the light directly at his face. “Lower it,” he said.

She snapped it off. Folded her arms against the chill. She beheld him the way she always did—as if picturing how his head might look on the end of a sharp stick.

He was fairly certain she hated him. That was not so odd in itself—Eb had repulsed plenty of women over his lifetime—but there was no legitimacy to her loathing. On their first encounter she had tried to kill him as a matter of business. That he could understand and even approve. Why, then, throughout their acquaintanceship, had her hatred not slackened? It wasn’t the color of his skin. Eb could sniff a racist at twenty yards. It wasn’t his Englishness, either. So what, then?

“I was going to pick posies for you,” he said. “On account of you being so peachy keen.”

“Oh yeah?” She spat in the dirt. “Drop dead in a shed, Fred.”

“Dive off a cliff, Biff,” he shot right back.

Little Heaven was silent. The only light came from the security lamps strung round the perimeter. The fog hung thickly between the first cut of pines. It swirled in odd patterns, as if at the beck of forces Ebenezer was not attuned to.

They heard it then. Ringing, singsong. The laughter of a child.

They moved toward it, Minerva walking and Eb limping. Ebenezer didn’t want to take another step—the laughter had developed a throaty undertone he didn’t much care for—but his feet would not obey him. He kept gimping on, vaguely horrified at his inability to stop. Minerva’s flashlight shone on the ground in front of them. Nobody else was awake. The compound was at rest. It was just them, alone.

The sound was coming from behind the chapel. The shadows were heaviest there, as the chapel lay at the edge of the compound facing the trees. The flashlight illuminated its rough boards, the paint beginning to flake. The laughter hummed against Ebenezer’s ears like the beat of tiny wings.

“Hello?” Minerva said.

The laughter stopped. In its place was a dry crackly noise that made Ebenezer picture wet seashells, thousands of them, tumbling over one another.

They rounded the side of the chapel that faced the woods. A shape hunched under the silhouette of the crucifix. The fog was hugged tight to it.

“Who’s there?” Ebenezer said.

The flashlight beam jittered toward the shape; Eb got the sense Minerva was reluctant to illuminate this thing, whatever it was. The light crept over the chapel wall and down, falling on the head of the figure sitting there. The fog peeled back, divulging more and more of its body—

A boy. He sat facing away from them. The mist still clung to his lower half. He was doing something with his hands. The dry, chittery sound was quite powerful now. Ebenezer had no clue what was making it, but the noise itself was enough to sour the spit in his mouth.

They approached the boy, who seemed to have taken no note of them. Fifteen feet, ten feet… the boy turned. He was naked from the waist up. His ribs protruded. His clavicles jutted like beaks. His flesh was white as soap. His eyes were gray. The color of a slug.

Minerva stumbled back and bumped into Ebenezer. He felt the beat of her heart through her clothes—it was hammering hard enough to rattle her entire frame.

The boy smiled. He was bucktoothed—teeth like elephant toes. His slug eyes seemed to pin them both, though lacking pupils it was hard to tell for sure.

The shucking, chittery sounds intensified…

The boy held a dead bird in his hands. The bird’s eyes were the same as the boy’s. He stroked it tenderly. His demeanor was quiet and content, as if he had been found playing with his Matchbox cars in his bedroom.

There was something the matter with one of his hands. The skin seemed to have melted or calcified or fused, the fingers welded into a solid scoop of flesh. He stroked the bird with it, lovingly so. Later, Ebenezer wouldn’t be sure he had seen any of this—there was a vacancy in his memory, a dark sucking hole where something dirty had been buried.

The mist rolled away from the boy’s lower half, the white wisps trailing off to reveal a bristling carpet of perpetual industry.

Bugs. Bark beetles and cockroaches and God knew what else. Millions of bugs covered the boy to his waist. They surged around his hips, antennae waving, crawling over and around one another the way insects do—a way that humans never could, because that mindless proximity of bodies would drive any person mad. They flooded around the boy’s legs, fanning out in a ten-foot circle. Most of their bodies were the brown of a blood blister, but some were a larval albino white. They massed in a pattern that seemed random, but if you looked closely, their movements appeared to have some spirit of organization.

Minerva turned to Ebenezer, her eyes bulging in horror. Ebenezer was barely able to stifle a scream himself—when was the last time he’d screamed in abject fright? As a child, surely, at the prospect of the boogeyman lurking under his bed.

The boy beheld them with those horrid, soul-shriveling eyes and said, “I am so happy to be back home.”

21

THE NEXT MORNING, Brother Charlie Fairweather showed up at their bunkhouse.

“Mind if I come in?”

Micah was still trying to piece together the events of the past night. He’d heard Eb get up, and Minny after him. He hadn’t made much of it when they both stepped outside—Minny wouldn’t make her move now, he knew, so the most she’d do was jaw at him a little.

Minutes later, there was a big commotion. Had Micah misjudged it—had she tried to flatline Ebenezer? It would have to count as strange timing, but Minerva was an odd woman. But then he’d heard the Reverend yelling: “Cyril! CYRIL!”

Turns out that the boy, Eli, had been found behind the chapel. It was Eb and Minny who found him. But by the time Micah made it to the square, the Reverend had already hustled the boy off to a private bunkhouse. Nobody had seen him since.

Afterward, Ebenezer and Minerva sat on the same cot. Minerva’s face was white as clotted cream, Eb’s a bloodless gray. They said they had come upon the boy covered in bugs. The boy had pupil-less eyes. Something fucked to do with his hand, too.

Following this revelation, serious consideration was given to just up and leaving. What if they were to kidnap Nate? Knock him out—did that Doc Lewis have any ether? If Reggie raised a stink, Micah was willing to knock him out, too, either with ether or his fists. But the plan was imperfect. Eb was still hobbled, for one. And chances were they’d be spotted. While Neeps, Swicker, and the Reverend would be happy to see the ass end of them, they weren’t likely to permit Micah to cart one of their lambs away over his shoulder like a sack of oats. Neeps and his partner had guns, too, and things had soured to the point where Micah was pretty sure they would use them. After that, it would be him, Eb, and Minny flung into shallow graves with quicklime eating their eyes. Maybe Ellen, too. Still, snatching the boy could be their best shot. Do it quiet, cause a distraction, leave in the pandemonium. Let Little Heaven go to hell in a handbasket and read all about it in the papers a few months later.

They were discussing this when Charlie knocked. Micah opened the door and ushered him inside. Charlie cleared his throat and said, “A few of us been talking. Me and Otis, Nell and Jack Conkwright. Plus my own wife. We think… well, we might like to take a break from Little Heaven.”

He spoke as though the words gave him physical pain. He peeked out the window to make sure nobody was poking around outside. “We figured you could help us,” he said.

“We’re hikers,” said Micah.

“You aren’t no hikers. And why wouldn’t you want to leave?” said Charlie. “Why not we all go? Safety in numbers.”

“We cannot all go.” Micah nodded at Ebenezer, laid up on his bunk. “Not with him in his shape.” He eyed Charlie cagily. “Why now, Charlie? What is prodding you?”

Charlie shifted foot to foot like a man with a bladderful of piss. “Was there something wrong with Eli’s eyes?” he asked Minerva. “Dr. Lewis says it isn’t anything. A milky glaze… an occlusion, he called it. Just a coating, like pulp or something. He wiped it away and Eli’s eyes were just fine underneath.”

Minerva rolled her own eyes. “I think Lewis wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. He’d hold it until your Rev gave him permission to spit.”

“Eli’s off limits,” Charlie said. “Nobody’s seeing him ’cept the doc and the Rev. His folks haven’t come back yet. Two full days they’ve been gone.”

“Your utopia is blowing up,” Ebenezer said.

Charlie stuffed his hands into his pockets. “The Lord sets trials for us all. And I’m not one to scurry from them. But I got a kid, right? My son, Ben. And to be honest, he’s not been himself lately.”

“What do you mean?” Ellen said, leaning forward on her cot.

“I don’t know, just off. Kind of, well… cruel. The other day my wife found him out back of our bunkhouse watching a big ole green grasshopper die in a jar of gasoline. When she asked what he was doing, Ben said that grasshoppers breathe through their sides—like, imagine if we had little mouths all down our ribs, sucking in air. He had a book of matches, too. My guess was that he was gonna wait until the bug was nearly drowned before fishing it out and lighting it up.”

Charlie shook his head. “That isn’t my boy. He’ll collect bugs, sure, and toads and snakes and what all. But he puts them in a shoe box with cotton batting so they’re good and comfy. He makes sure to poke holes in the lid. He likes the idea of owning them, I guess, and studying them, but he lets them go when he gets bored. Ben’s never purposefully killed them. And it’s one thing to thoughtlessly squash a bug to see the yellow of their guts squirt out—boys do that, and the Lord forgives them. It’s another thing to torture them, then light them on fire. That takes real consideration. Takes planning.”

Charlie shook his head again. “I gave Ben a proper hiding when I heard. Bent him over my knee and beat the white off his ass. Wasn’t right, Lord knows. I think I was more scared than him, because it’s like waking up to find something that isn’t quite your son sleeping in your son’s bed. Ben didn’t cry out or anything. He kept looking up as I spanked him like to say, That all you got, Pops?”

“A lot of people acting weird in Little Heaven,” Ellen said softly.

“It’s not always been so,” said Charlie. “The first bunch of months were great, just like the Rev said they would be. But lately, with the animals in the woods and the dogs going missing and the kids acting out of turn and now this with Eli…”

Micah said, “Do you think the Reverend will let you go?”

Charlie’s hands balled into fists. “We came willingly.”

Micah said, “Even still.”

“I worry about Cyril and Virgil,” Charlie admitted. “What they might do.”

Micah stared at Charlie. “Our other guns are back at the campsite.”

Charlie nodded. “I had your pistols, but Cyril, he took ’em.”

“You really think we’ll have to blast our way out of here?” said Ellen. “Have things gotten that nuts?”

Things can get nuts pretty fast, Micah thought. He knew it. He’d seen it.

Minerva said, “There’s something else in these woods.”

Everyone looked at her. A flush crept up her throat.

“Just something hostile,” she went on, undeterred. “I felt it the other night, searching for the boy. A million eyes scuttling over my skin. I don’t care if that sounds stupid. Maybe I’m going a little nuts myself.” She stared at them, her jaw fixed tight. “This fucking place.”

Nobody disputed her sense of things.

22

THEY DEPARTED MIDAFTERNOON. Micah, Minerva, Charlie, and Otis. As it turned out, it was an easy matter to slip away. The Reverend and his hired men were currently taken up with Eli. Not long before they left, Micah had spotted Cyril exiting the windowless bunkhouse where Eli was being kept. The man looked green around the gills.

Ellen agreed to stay back with Ebenezer. If anyone noticed they were missing, she would tell them the God’s honest truth—they had gone to recover their belongings from the campsite and would soon return for their injured friend.

“Be careful,” she told Micah. “We need you back here.”

Micah wondered: Was she worried they wouldn’t come back? Did she think they might get the guns and continue to the car, pedal to the metal, tear-assing eighty miles an hour away from Little Heaven?

They set off under an overcast sky. They walked through a forest drained of life. Not a peep, not a rustle. Charlie had his rifle and pistol. Otis had a compound bow and a quiver of hunting arrows.

“I don’t think you’ll find much to shoot at,” Minerva told him.

Otis nodded. “I haven’t spotted so much as a sparrow.”

They chatted to pass the time. Minerva asked Otis how he had come to know the Reverend.

“I’ve been with him going on fifteen years now,” he told her. “Long before Charlie came along. I was a pill head when Reverend Flesher found me. Staggering around the Tenderloin chock-full of drugs. I’m ashamed to tell you how I laid my hands on them, but that’s the way of that particular devil—you’ll do anything to please it.” He hung his head, humiliated at the memory of the man he’d been. “The Rev took me in. I was one of his first. I just looked at him and knew. The Lord speaks through this man. My folks raised me serious southern Baptist, but I fell away from the path. The Rev dragged me back on it. I helped stain and sand the floor in his new chapel, and I slept there at night. It gave me something to do with my hands. Helped keep the devil at bay. That, and the Reverend’s sermons. Then later, when he said he’s taking his flock into the unspoiled wilderness, away from all the wickedness and vice—I said, sign me up!”

“And it was good,” Charlie said. “Real good for a stretch here.”

“That’s a fact,” said Otis. “Little Heaven was just that. Heaven on earth. And now the clouds have rolled in. But the devil tests us, and he tests the Reverend most of all—because Satan knows if he can break the Rev’s resolve, he can snatch our souls. But the Reverend won’t let it happen.” Otis’s voice rose to the pitch of a true believer. “No, sir. He’s gonna walk Satan down and stomp a mudhole in his ass, pardon my French—”

“Ah, we’re all friends here,” said Minerva.

“The Reverend’s going to send Old Splitfoot back down to the pit,” Otis went on. “We just got to stay the course in our hearts and spirits. If we have to leave for a spell while the Reverend wages this battle, well… dark days, sure, but we’ve been through them before. Reverend Flesher has always guided us out.”

Charlie said, “Amen to that.”

They walked in silence until they came upon the pit. It was empty, the bottom filled with groundwater. They continued on, glimpsing few signs of the things that had pursued them nights ago. The odd snapped branch, ripped bark torn off trees, even a few pines torn out at the roots—but the damage seemed random, following no particular path.

Darkness was coming on by the time they reached the campsite. Their tents were undisturbed. Nothing had been torn apart or scattered. Micah crawled inside his tent and retrieved his second Tokarev pistol and several boxes of ammunition. He also found the long-bore Tarpley rifle. He felt reassured by its sturdiness. Heavy as a blunderbuss.

Minerva retrieved several boxes of ammunition for her own guns, currently in Cyril’s possession. She exited the tent with a small revolver.

“I found it in Ellen’s pack,” she said. “.38 police special.” She laughed. “Who would have figured Little Miss Bellhaven was packing heat? What a hellcat, uh?”

Maybe Ellen had brought it thinking she could take her nephew from Little Heaven by force. A desperate move, in Micah’s opinion. One that could have gotten her killed. He didn’t like to picture Ellen dead—and yet he did. Just for a flash.

They sat round the fire pit as dusk settled between the trees. A cool wind howled over the grass, making each blade sing like a tiny instrument.

“We have no choice but to make camp here,” said Micah. “Return tomorrow morning.”

Micah caught Minerva’s unspoken worry: What if those things are still hanging around? He had no assurance they weren’t, but it seemed wiser to batten down in a spot with clean sight lines and establish a watch rather than hike back through the unlit woods.

“Reverend’s gonna know we’ve been gone for sure now,” said Otis.

Charlie nodded. “Got to accept it. We’ll make our amends if it comes to that.”

They got a fire going. They ate the food Micah and the others had bought back in Grinder’s Switch—it was completely untouched, even the bread. They skewered bits of Spam on sharpened sticks and grilled it over the fire. It tasted bad, and not just because it was Spam: some bitterness in the wood imparted a foul essence into the meat. Being ravenous, they ate it anyway.

One of them would have to keep watch. Micah volunteered to take the first shift. Minerva took one tent. Charlie and Otis bedded down in the other.

Micah fed the fire. Acrid smoke spiraled up. The flames warped the woods beyond, creating shapes where there were none.

He would sit that way, nearly unblinking, for many hours.

23

THE NIGHT AFTER he returned to Little Heaven, Eli Rathbone paid a visit to Nate.

They weren’t even friends, not as Nate saw it. Eli had always been kinda mean—and he’d gotten a lot meaner the past few weeks, right up until he vanished into the woods.

Eli was a tall, skinny redhead with a wiry frame and bony hands. He liked to hold the smaller kids down and give them the Rooster Peck: sitting on their chests and jabbing his fingers into their breastbone while they struggled to name ten chocolate bars, which was the only way to get him to stop.

Milky Way… uh, ah, AH—Hershey bar, aaaaah! Payday! Milky Way!

You said that one already, dummy. Start again!

He’d done it to Nate, too. Elton and Billy Redhill laughed when Nate had gotten hung up on nine. His brain froze. He could think of any number of candies and gums and soda pops—Flipsticks, Lemonheads, Black Bart, SweeTarts, Frostie Root Beer!—but not one stupid chocolate bar. Eli’s fingers punched into his breastbone so hard that Nate had been sure his chest would cave in.

“Scooter Pie!” he had screamed.

Eli said, “Judges?”

Elton and Billy shook their heads. “Nah, that’s a cookie,” said Elton.

Eli grinned. “Start over!”

Eli could be mean as rattlesnake venom, as Nate’s grandmother might say. But he was sweet as pie when the Reverend came around. A real honey-dripper—a suck-up. Eli knew the Bible well. His ability to recite catechism made him one of the Reverend’s favorites, although it seemed to Nate that the Reverend looked at kids the way Nate looked at the monkeys at the zoo.

And it was Eli’s voice Nate heard now. He could swear it, even though that would be crazy. Eli’s voice, coming from the darkness just beyond his bunkhouse window.

Nate… wake up, Nate…

When Nate first showed up, Eli hadn’t been bullying anybody. Back then they were supervised by Missus Hughes, a foreboding woman who didn’t take any sass. But then Missus Hughes broke her leg and had to leave. The kids had been left to do whatever they wanted, pretty much; their only obligation was to attend the sermons. Eli used this newfound freedom to torment his chosen targets.

Eli hadn’t always been quite so nasty. Rooster Pecks, sure, but that was the same sort of treatment Nate had received from bullies back home. Everyone had to deal with bullies, Nate reasoned, until you became an adult, at which point everyone stopped acting so mean… except that his dad’s old boss, Postmaster Jim, was a bully, too—a grown-up version of Eli. He used to make fun of his father to his face, even when Nate was right there. “Sunny” Jim would slap his father between the shoulder blades so hard that his dad would stagger, and laugh and say something like, You’d be better off in a flower shop, wouldn’t you, Reg, pruning pansies. And the other mailmen would laugh, which was what kids did, too—laughed along with the bully so they didn’t get picked on themselves.

It was times like that when Nate wished his mom was still around. She would have slapped Sunny Jim in front of everyone for speaking that way—which was sad when you thought about it, because Nate’s father wouldn’t even defend himself. Nate often wondered why his mother even loved his father, or vice versa; they were so unalike it was as if they were different species. But if Sunny Jim were to say, You need your wife to defend you, Reg? his mother would slap him again. And if Sunny Jim ever raised his hand to her in return, she’d find something sharp to stick him with. And if ole Sunny Jim did the same to her, well, Nate was sure his mom would get a gun next. Her temper wasn’t just hot; it was lava. She went supernova.

Which was why she was in jail. Society frowned on people who couldn’t keep their rage in check—even if they were defending someone they loved. But his mom wasn’t in jail for that reason. She broke the law trying to make money. And even though she had cried and told Nate she only did it for him, he couldn’t fully forgive her—because her crimes meant he had to move with his father to Little Heaven.

Nate rolled over in bed. The cot springs squealed. It was dark inside the bunkhouse. His father snored a few feet away. They used to live in a house. A teensy three-bedroom with a postage stamp lawn, but still. Now they lived in something a hunter might squat in while trapping minks in the winter. There was no indoor plumbing, so Nate had to use the outhouse. Sometimes he had to pee at night, which meant he had to cross the square to the jakes, as they were called, and squat over a pool of dark, smelly waste. As he tried to force his pee out, something would scratch-scratch on the outhouse. Just the branches of a tree, he knew, but at three o’clock he couldn’t help picturing a witch, all dried up and pruney with teeth like busted periwinkle shells, raking her nails on the boards behind his head. His piss tube would clamp shut in fear. Some nights he lay in bed in abject agony, his bladder bursting, cursing himself for having that second glass of water at dinner. Better his bladder burst, better he soak the mattress with pee, than he have to crouch in that outhouse with those witch’s nails scraping at him.

Nate got out of bed. The bunkhouse was cold. His bare legs broke out in gooseflesh.

The phosphorescent hands on the alarm clock read 2:55 a.m. He screwed his knuckles into his eyes and stared blearily at the window. Nothing there…

…but he could feel something out in the dark. Just a few feet away from the window. Waiting.

Little Heaven hadn’t been quite so bad when they first showed up, but Nate had never felt at home here. His mom didn’t put much stock in religion—People can eat whatever they want, she’d said, but they better not show up on my doorstep asking if I want a bite of their apple—so Nate was at a disadvantage from the start, seeing as he didn’t know the Bible. He had to wear thick wool pants to every service; now his legs itched like fire whenever the Reverend even opened his mouth—this was called a Pavlovian response. Nate had learned that back at his old school, where they studied things like science and the human brain. Such things weren’t talked about at Little Heaven. Science gets in the way of our communion with the Lord, Nate was told. He missed his old school. He missed other things, too. TV and comic books and the smell of the dime-store vanilla perfume the girls in his class used to wear and even the smell of car exhaust and of cigarettes in movie theaters—even though, if you’d asked him, he would have told you he’d never miss tailpipe fumes and throat-itching Marlboro smoke, not in a million years. What Nate really missed was going places in cars. Just like he missed watching movies at the theater. But that all got mixed up in his head with the bad smells associated with those joys—and he couldn’t give voice to those more sophisticated thoughts. He was a boy. He just felt.

The Reverend didn’t pay much mind to Nate or his father; they were late joiners, low on the totem pole. It didn’t seem to bother his dad, but it bugged Nate a whole bunch. And things had been going downhill for a while. Everyone looked different. Skinnier and wasted away. Even Nate. He hated looking at himself in the mirror now. It was hard to put a finger on it. There was no cause for it, which was why nobody talked about that stuff. This was where the Lord had led them. Why would He lead them into sorrow?

But Nate could feel it. Something working all around him. As if the air were filled with a trillion invisible mouths, each mouth studded with microscopic teeth, all those mouths gnawing at you all day long. Or—an even worse imagining—those same tiny mouths all over the ground, every inch, but instead of teeth, each mouth had a needle tongue that jabbed into everybody’s feet, sucking the way a mosquito sucks, funneling everyone’s energy into a pale bloated sack like a stomach deep under the earth. A single tube led from that stomach even deeper underground, where it nourished something much larger and more terrible—

Nate was now walking toward the bunkhouse window. He didn’t want to. He was exquisitely aware of this. More than anything he wanted to slip back into bed and pull the covers over his head and… pray. He hardly ever prayed for real. Yes, he could recite the words and cross himself and all that paint-by-numbers stuff, but he wasn’t asking for anything or talking to God man to man. In his life, he had really prayed only a few times. When his mother got put in jail, he prayed that God would keep her safe because he used to watch Dragnet and some of the people Joe Friday put in the clink were tough tickets and he wanted his mom to be safe if she got a cell mate named Big Bertha or Hellcat Hettie. He had prayed for his dad a few times, too, because even though he was a wimp—and it was horrible that a boy would already understand this about his father—Nate thought his dad was essentially a good man.

But Nate wanted to pray now. Oh yes. He wanted to hear God’s voice and be reassured. But he couldn’t because his feet kept guiding him toward the window. Toward Eli’s voice—which didn’t sound much like Eli’s normal voice. It sounded clogged. As if Eli’s throat were packed with potting soil or rotted sewage, so that what came out of his mouth was a choked gargle.

Nate… don’t be a pussy like your daddy the mailman. Come see me. No Rooster Pecks, honest Injun…

His father snorted in his sleep. Nate tried to call out—Dad, wake up!—but his throat was so dry that nothing came out, like trying to whistle with a mouthful of soda crackers.

It wasn’t just how everyone at Little Heaven had started to look lately, either. It was how they acted. In the beginning, the kids had all been normal. More religious than Nate was used to, sure, but pretty much like everyone else he knew from his old school. He would join them after breakfast and Missus Hughes would have them read their Bible and do Christian crossword puzzles and stuff like that. After the midday sermon, they had supervised playtime. The kids welcomed Nate outwardly, it being the right thing to do.

But after Missus Hughes left, the playtime sessions turned strange. The older kids, led by Eli and the Redhill brothers, started playing nasty games. One was called Doctor Psycho. They would chase someone around until they caught him; then they pinned that poor kid down. Eli would pretend to put on rubber gloves and say, “This operation is in session.” He would slice his captive’s belly open with an imaginary scalpel and start pulling out the insides. Each would be examined for a second before he said, “Nope, not good enough,” and threw it over his shoulder and reached in for more. If the captive knew what was good for him, he would scream and gasp, “No! No, please!” Eli took it easier on you if you played along instead of sitting there like a dead fish.

Nate… you are starting to piss me off. You don’t want to piss me off…

Nate was only a few feet from the window now. The wind fluttered the plastic in the frame. There was nothing at the window. Maybe there was nothing at all. Was he dreaming? Nate’s fists clenched, nails digging into his palms. Maybe he would wake up and this would all be—

He saw it then. At the outer limits of his sight, past the edge of the window on the right-hand side. Standing there silently, tucked tight to the bunkhouse wall.

Eli’s playtime games had become more and more nasty. Little Heaven used to have an ant problem. There were five or six big hills scattered around the compound. The ants were of the stinging variety. One afternoon, not too long ago, Nate had come upon Eli, one of the Redhill boys, Jane Weagel, and Betsy Whitt crouched around one of the hills. Eli had a bottle of lemon juice. He was squeezing juice down the ant hole. Drip, drip, drip. The ants scurried around crazily. The other kids held the busted bottoms of Coke bottles. They focused the sun through them, sizzling the ants as they rushed about. Zzzzssssstap!

“The acid in the juice screws with their brains,” Eli told Nate with a vacant smile. “They don’t know up from down.”

The other kids barely noticed Nate. Betsy Whitt’s eyes were glazed and moony. She was the sort of person the phrase wouldn’t hurt a fly was coined to describe. Nate had actually seen her open a door and shoo a fly outside so it wouldn’t get swatted.

“Move,” she said, shoving Nate. “You’re blocking the sunlight.”

Later that same day Nate had found Betsy behind the warehouse. She was crying. Tears streaked her cheeks.

“I didn’t want to hurt those ants,” she sobbed. “I don’t want to hurt anything. If you hurt another living thing, God sees it. He judges. But I couldn’t help myself.” Her face scrunched up. “Do you ever feel that way, Nate?”

Nate hadn’t known what to say. But yes, he felt it. The feeling was getting stronger each day. Sometimes he wanted to hurt things, too. Anything would do. Whatever was weakest, and easiest, and nearest at hand… He’d never felt that way back home.

It wasn’t just the kids, either. One night Nate awoke to find his father standing in the corner. He was naked and sweaty and muttering, “Kill you kill you fucking kill you.” Nate had never heard his father swear. His hands were clenched as though he was choking someone. He was sound asleep. But he rose happily the next morning, claiming to be hungry as a horse.

Nate… ole buddy ole pal-o-mine…

Nate was only a foot from the window now. He could make out the shape in profile. Thin and grisly white, hunching next to the bunkhouse. He caught a mad buzz, a sound like flies bouncing around inside an empty jar of Gerber baby food.

“Eli?” he said tremblingly.

The figure swung round to the window like a door blown closed by a stiff wind.

Thwap! A face hit the plastic.

Nate took a step back. A great big one.

It was Eli Rathbone. And Eli looked… not good.

Eli was white as tallow, white as the flame in the deepest part of a fire. His hair, clown-red before, was now old man’s hair. It was bone white, as if some follicular vampire had sucked all the color out of it. He was thinner than Nate ever could have conceived a person should be—his ribs poked out, his nipples stretched and elongated, his flesh threadbare.

Eli’s face was the worst. A leering Hollywood idol, pure plastic. His eyes bulged, and his teeth pushed past his lips like blunt discolored tusks. He looked unspeakably lonely and lost… but also very, very hungry. His face and frame radiated a yearning that pinned Nate where he stood, a moth skewered in a specimen case.

Oh, hello, Nate. May I come in? Mother, may I?

A drowsy terror settled upon Nate—it wasn’t a heart spiker, the kind of fear that shot adrenaline through your body; no, this was a lazy and drifting fright that bobbed like a kite on a string, dipping and ascending without ever settling.

“I don’t think so,” Nate whispered. “You look sick, Eli.”

The buzz grew louder. Nate noticed an emptiness under Eli’s armpit. Things were moving in there. Nate could see stuff crawling and stuttering about.

Oh no, Nate thought. Oh no no no no—

Nate’s eyes were riveted to the spot under Eli’s armpit. Things were coming out of it. Flies. Or things that looked like flies—

Eli lifted his arm. A deep hole was sunk into his flesh, all pulpy and black. Things squirmed in it. White things. Darker things.

“Go away, Eli.” Nate was amazed at how calm he sounded.

Eli leaned forward until his nose touched the window again. The plastic dimpled with the pressure. Eli’s eyes switched back and forth like a metronome set to a hi-hat beat. Tick-tock-tick-tock, back and forth, tick-tock.

He gave Nate a chummy wave. His hand was misshapen, the fingers fused into a mangled hook. Flies now boiled out of his armpit and pelted the plastic. Puk! Puk! Puk! They were larger than common bluebottles, with gas mask faces. A few tried to squirm through the plastic at the window’s edges; they buzzed frantically, a gleeful note.

Eli smiled. His lips peeled back from his dirty yellow teeth, the buckteeth of a rat. Flies crawled between them—they were coming from inside Eli’s mouth, their bodies wet with saliva. They flew at the window and hit, leaving moist blots on the plastic.

You will come with us, Eli said. His lips were not moving, but Nate heard his voice all the same. All the sweet boys and girls. You are good meat.

His teeth clicked animatedly, the sound of bone castanets. Nate lunged forward, moaning, and yanked the flimsy curtains shut. Eli Rathbone stood in front of the window for a few moments before his shape drifted away.

Shivering, Nate retreated to bed. He pulled the covers over himself and shook until he was sure his body would rattle to pieces.

24

MINERVA JOLTED AWAKE. Firelight played through the gap between the tent’s canvas flaps. Micah was supposed to be keeping watch outside.

She got up. Grabbed Ellen’s gun. Crawled to the flap.

Micah stood outside with his back to her. He was staring at something across the fire. He held the Tarpley rifle at port arms.

“Shug?”

He glanced over his shoulder. Saw her. Turned to face the woods again.

Minny’s eyes were adjusting. Inky darkness pooled past the glow of the fire. She couldn’t tell what Micah was looking at.

“Get Otis’s bow,” he said carefully.

Otis’s compound bow lay outside the other tent. Neither Charlie nor Otis had stirred. Minerva crossed to the tent quickly and brought the bow and the arrows to Micah.

“What the hell?” she whispered.

Micah chucked his chin toward something lurking in the first cut of trees. Minerva couldn’t see anything. Her vision was all staticky as her eyes adjusted.

“There is a flare in my pack,” Micah said. “And tape. Tape the flare to an arrow. Quickly.”

Minerva located the flare and a roll of duct tape. She peeled a strip of gray tape and paused. “Near the arrowhead or further back?”

“A few inches from the head,” Micah said calmly.

“We could burn the whole forest down,” said Minny.

After a moment, Micah replied with: “Good.”

Minerva became aware of a series of sounds coming from not far away: clicks and wheezes and peeps and other animal noises. It was like listening to a disjointed sound loop from David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest, the voices of a dozen beasts all blurred together.

“What is that?” she said.

But she knew. It was one of those things that had chased them the other night. The things Otis and Charlie had tried to capture in the pit that had caught them instead.

She taped the flare to the shaft of an arrow. “Can you shoot a bow?”

Micah indicated his eye patch. “Not so well.”

Otis poked his head out of the tent. “What is it?”

“Come here,” Micah told him.

Otis came over at a low crouch. “It a bear?” he whispered.

“Or something,” said Micah.

Minerva could see it now. Its shape seemed impossible. She had seen bears before—not in the wild, but in photographs. This did not echo her understanding of a bear. It stood fifty yards away, motionless between the trees. Its body pooled upward from a wide base like a bell laid on the ground. It did not have legs, or if it did, they were stubby and deformed—or else it had a multitude of them and moved in the scuttling manner of a crab. Minerva could perceive a host of strange protrusions all over its body. Shortened limbs, bulbous growths. It looked to be covered in huge, throbbing lesions.

Otis saw it, too. “That’s no bear,” he said in a voice full of dread.

The sounds it was making were equally senseless. Syrupy exhalations, ticks and whirrs and chirps and growls and hoots. A cacophony of noise as if an entire menagerie were speaking through a single organism.

“Can you hit it?” Micah said.

Otis nodded shakily. “If it stays put.”

Micah said, “It has not moved since I saw it.”

Otis took the bow from Minerva and notched the flare-weighted arrow on the bowstring. Minerva pulled the strike strip. The flare popped alight.

Otis drew back the arrow and let it fly. It arced through the night, the flare fraying in the wind, and struck the thing. It did not move.

The glow of the flare spread, bringing the shape into sharper relief. It made no sense. It was not one identifiable thing. It was many, or parts of many.

“What am I seeing?” Minerva said.

The thing was never at rest. It twitched and jerked. Parts of it opened; other parts closed. A stew of parts. Heads, snouts, tails, limbs. It was enormous. A seething hillock of flesh. It was nothing God’s light had ever shone upon.

At last it shambled forward. Micah shouldered the Tarpley. Minerva cocked Ellen’s .38. Her hands shook.

A random strip of fur ignited down the thing’s side. The hair went up like a fuse. The thing shuffled toward them. It undulated, seemingly legless, hovercrafting across the ground. It shrieked and gibbered and emitted phlegmy dog-panting sounds. Watching it, Minerva was reminded of Play-Doh. Little shreds of Play-Doh, red and blue and yellow and green, scattered on a table after arts and crafts class. She imagined rolling all those bits into a ball. Squashing everything into a solid mass while still being able to see the individual components: streaks of yellow, blots of red, veins of blue. But instead of Play-Doh, this thing was made of animals, all compressed and crushed together—

Micah fired. The bullet tore a chunk off. The thing squealed in a half dozen pitches with as many mouths. It continued toward them, faster now.

“Oh God,” said Otis. “Let’s go go oh no oh no let’s goooo—”

Minerva aimed and fired. Four shots, each one finding its mark. Gouts of blood—or whatever the thing was full of—spurted wildly. It did not stop. She could smell it now. The reek of spoiled meat and fricasseed hair.

The fire licked downward to spread around the belled shape of its body. It looked like the grass skirt of a hula dancer that had leapt up in flame.

Micah picked up the lantern and tossed it thirty feet ahead of them, directly in the thing’s path. “Shoot it,” he told Minerva. “The kerosene tank.”

Minerva steadied herself and fired. The bullet raised a burr of dirt six inches left of the lantern.

The thing neared the lantern. Eight yards, seven, six…

She fired again. The slug struck a half-buried rock and whined off target.

She fired again. A dry click. The gun was empty. She glanced at Micah, stricken.

He unloaded with the Tarpley, firing from the hip. The carbine boomed. The lantern flipped end over end, spraying kerosene onto the thing. It went up with a roar. Flames rose along the tortured slag heap of its body as flesh melted off in thick gobbets. It made noises that should be heard only in hell. Its many mouths screamed and bleated as its limbs swung spastically.

Charlie clambered out of the tent. He watched with numb horror as the thing toppled onto its side and lay there, squealing and hissing. Nobody could tell if the noises it made were the product of its mouths or the sound of its untold organs rupturing and popping from the heat. In time, it stopped moving.

Micah approached the creature. Minerva clenched her jaw and followed him. She couldn’t believe she had missed the lantern… twice. She had made shots like that a thousand times. She could pick tin cans off a fence post at forty yards. But it’s different when your back’s up against it. Your cool crumbles. You fuck-up.

The body still smoked. It was already softening into the earth. Its configuration was lunatic. It was made out of different animals, a mishmash of species. Fish, fowl, insects, beasts of the woods. All melted together. Every one of its faces—fox and deer and pheasant and coyote and otter—was wrenched into an expression of tortured despair. Everywhere Minerva looked, some awful horror greeted her. Here, a clutch of bats’ heads sprouting from the mouth of a gray wolf. There, a naked rib cage housing the flayed remains of a squirrel, its innards studded with a half dozen eyeballs that had burst in the flame. A blackened ball of ants compressed to the density of a baseball hanging on a strip of organ meat.

Minerva saw the melted remains of what looked to be a dog collar. Had this thing eaten one of Little Heaven’s dogs?

Micah lifted the flap of skin that shielded its means of locomotion. Minerva gagged. How could he stand to touch the thing? The stinking flap rose to reveal dozens of legs. This was how it moved, trundling about with its limbs hidden as though beneath a hoop skirt.

Micah let the flap fall. There came a rude farting noise as a bladder let go inside the thing. The shock was so profound that nobody could speak for some time.

“This is the devil’s work,” Otis finally said. His arms wouldn’t stop shaking.

Minerva checked her watch. It was coming up on five o’clock. The light of dawn was flirting through the trees.

“We have to go back to Little Heaven,” said Otis. “Warn the others.”

Micah and Minerva shared a look. Do we? But they did. She cared nothing for the Englishman, but Ellen and the others did not deserve to be abandoned.

She gazed down the path that led to their car. It looked wide and safe—a hop, skip, and a jump and they would be back at the main road.

But then something stirred. Her breath grated in her lungs.

She pointed. “Look.”

They were out there. Strung all through the woods. Shapes. Some big, others more compact. Some shaggy, others sleek. All unmoving as sentinels.

Micah said, “Grab what you can. Quickly.”

25

EARLY IN THE MORNING, before anyone else was up, Reverend Amos Flesher crossed the square to the bunkhouse where the boy was being kept.

Virgil was asleep on a chair outside. Both he and Cyril refused to be inside the windowless bunkhouse with the boy—not together, and certainly not alone.

Amos kicked Virgil’s foot. The man cracked one eyelid open.

“Yeah?”

“Did you hear anything out of him?”

Virgil licked his lips, which were cracked because he sucked air through his mouth when he slept. Mouth-breathers was what Sister Muriel called the children who did that.

“He must have slept like a baby,” said Virgil. “I didn’t hear a peep.”

Amos nodded. “Wait here.”

“You’re fucking-A right. I sure as hell ain’t going in there.”

Virgil spoke flippantly, but the whites of his eyes quivered like undercooked eggs. Amos set his hand on the doorknob and took a breath.

The Lord love me, save me, and preserve me. Amen.

The bunkhouse was a single room. Eli Rathbone lay in bed. Uncovered in only his underwear. He looked to have not shifted an inch since Amos had last seen him. But his feet were filthy. Covered in dirt and pine needles. They had been clean the last time Amos had seen them—the Reverend was positive of that.

Amos moved cautiously, not wanting to wake the boy. Eli’s chest barely moved. Had he died in his sleep? Perhaps that would be for the best. Yes, all things considered, it just might be. The Lord’s will be done.

Eli’s chest hitched and fell. A ghost of a smile graced his lips.

Amos’s jaw clenched. Adrenaline flared in him. He did not like being near this boy. There was something unseemly about his wasted frame and ashen hair.

Dr. Lewis refused to tend to him any more than he already had. It was all Amos could do to prevent the simpering boob from fleeing into the square in fright after… the earlier unpleasantness. The man was supposed to be a doctor, wasn’t he? A healer of men. He couldn’t even hack the sight of a sick boy.

Granted, the boy was sick in a peculiar way. And granted, Amos wasn’t entirely comfortable around him, either.

There was a stain on the floor a few feet from the bed. Amos gave it a wide berth. Silly. It was only the boy’s blood. The same blood that pumped through the veins of every man, woman, and child at Little Heaven. Except it hadn’t looked like blood when it had come out of the boy the other night. At that time, it had been black and thick as ichor.

It was Lewis who had made the incision. Amos had been the sole witness to it. He had banished everyone from the bunkhouse—he didn’t want anyone else seeing the boy. It would cause alarm. Two of the outsiders had found Eli behind the chapel. The black fairy and the bald-headed lezbo. Amos had actually watched them cross the square in the dead of night; he had been up at the time, listening to the Voice. It had bothered him—nobody should be out at such an hour—but they would all be gone as soon as the black one’s ankle healed. Minutes later, Amos witnessed them stumble around the chapel, their eyes wide with horror.

What the Reverend had then found behind the chapel nearly unhinged him. Pewter-eyed Eli Rathbone immersed in a sea of squirming insects, cradling a dead bird. Glimpsing the boy’s young-old face as his ears had filled with the quarrelsome hiss of the bugs—it conjured within Amos a fear that infested him like a sickness: the sight infected his soul, shriveling it like a slug doused with salt.

“Hello, Reverend,” Eli had said. “Did you miss me?”

Amos had been dismayed to discover how much Eli’s voice mimicked the one that came to him every night.

For Amos, only one fact was certain: if the residents of Little Heaven saw Eli right then, everything he had been building would crumble. Fear would lead to disharmony, which would encourage desertion. The devil has come to Little Heaven, they would say. They would flee with the clothes on their backs, every last cowardly one of them, rats leaping from a flaming barge.

This is a test, he thought. The sternest one I have ever faced.

Swallowing his disgust, Amos had reached for the boy. Bugs crunched under his boots. Amos’s revulsion swelled when Eli reached for him, with a mangled hook of skin that had replaced one of his hands. Amos dodged it and grabbed Eli by the elbow; the boy’s flesh was clammy, that of a corpse in a vault. Amos pulled him up, his strength buoyed by a cresting wave of fear. His scalp was hot and itchy, melting the Dapper Dan pomade in his hair, which trickled down his face in gooey strings. Eli laughed at him. Amos might have been laughing, too, though he couldn’t properly remember—if so, it was the manic laugher of a man whose sanity was under threat.

“Cyril!” he had screamed. “CYRIL!”

Amos managed to drag Eli to the bunkhouse with no windows; the Reverend had had it built specially, thinking there might be a need for a place nobody could see inside. He flung the boy through the door and wiped his hand on his trousers. The boy staggered forward—his legs were wretched sticks—and collapsed. The roaches clinging to his legs let go and scuttled through cracks in the floor. The boy was still laughing.

“Shut up,” Amos hissed. “Shut your rotten mouth.”

Cyril came in. His mouth fell open and a thin moan came out.

“Hello, Cyril,” the boy said, waving his hook.

“Get the doctor,” Amos said. “And not a word of the boy’s state to anyone. If anyone asks you, say that he is back and he is perfectly fine.”

Brother Lewis soon arrived with his black bag. The boy was in the cot by then, covered in a sheet. Lewis took one look at Eli and blanched.

“Is this Eli?” he whispered, stunned. “Little Eli with the red hair…?”

Eli stared at Lewis with those calculating gray eyes. He licked his lips. His tongue was brown and pebbled with waxy lesions.

“Do something,” Amos said. “Fix him.”

“This child is broken,” Lewis said remotely. “Unfixable.”

“Fix me, fix me, then you have to kiss me,” the boy warbled.

The sheet slipped down Eli’s chest. The men saw a bulge under the boy’s armpit. A swollen ball like a fleshy balloon set to burst.

It… pulsed. The entirety of it. Throbbing like a misplaced heart.

Amos watched it, revolted—but also entranced.

“Cut it,” he said mildly.

“I’m sorry?” said Lewis.

“Cut it open. See what’s inside.”

Lewis gave the Reverend a look of open horror. “I couldn’t possibly—”

“You will,” Amos said deathly soft. “If a poison is festering in this child, we must release it.”

Lewis unzipped his bag and produced a scalpel. The man did not question the Reverend any further. Flesher was adept at spotting the most spineless specimens of humanity, and Lewis had always been one of the most obedient lambs in his flock.

Lewis held the tip to the boy’s flesh. The swollen ball shuddered. Eli’s skin opened up under the blade as if it had been begging to do just that. The blood, what there was of it, was black and clotted. The boy tittered. A terrible reek bloomed up. Things squirmed in the spongy red meat inside the scalpel-slit—the red of a blood orange.

“Never seen anything the likes of…” Lewis trailed off.

The slit widened under the pressure of whatever pushed back from inside the bloated ball; the cut opened up like a smile until—

Maggots. A wriggling fall of them. They pushed through the boy’s sundered flesh, writhing animatedly, their fat ribbed bodies making greasy sounds. Amos struggled to conceive of the flies these enormous flabby things would turn into when they assumed their final, revolting shape—a crude image formed: flies as big as cockroaches, inconceivable bloatflies laying their bean-shaped eggs in old cratered meat. The maggots pattered to the ground, where they began to squirm and shudder toward the darkened corners of the room.

Amos stood stunned, trapped in a bubble of disgust. That bubble popped—a wet thop! inside his head—and he set about stomping the foul things to paste under his boots. He relished the soft give of their bodies as they burst moistly, like skinned grapes.

“Hah!” Amos screamed. “Hah! Hah! Hah!”

Something else crawled out of the boy’s wound. A fly. A massive one. It picked its way out of Eli’s ruined flesh and fanned its wings. It took flight, zinging straight at Amos. It hit his chin—it almost flew into his mouth, oh God!—and bounced away, producing a whine like a bullet.

More followed. The room was suddenly teeming with flies. Their buzz was monolithic. The boy’s laughter climbed through several octaves to marry itself to that buzz. The sound drilled into Amos’s ears and beat against his brain.

Dr. Lewis bolted for the door and was out before Amos could lay hands on him.

Amos rushed outside in pursuit. “Stay here,” he told Cyril, who stood watch at the door. “Don’t let anyone in.”

Amos chased Lewis across the square. Nobody had seen a thing except for the outsiders, who would stay out of this if they knew what was good for them. He caught up with the doctor behind the storehouse, where he had collapsed in a sobbing heap.

“No no no no no…,” he said, hiccuping each no between sobs.

Amos knelt and ran his hand through Lewis’s sweaty hair.

“Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,” he said. “You will wake the children. We can’t have that.”

Lewis stared up at him. His face was pink as a boiled ham. “We have to leave, Reverend. That boy… this place is cancerous. It’s making us all sick.”

“Nonsense. You have had a shock.”

“The devil is here,” Lewis said. “I can feel him. The devil took that poor boy and sent him back to us as something vile.”

Amos’s hand clenched in Lewis’s hair. Gently but firmly, he cranked Lewis’s head upward until the simpering imbecile was forced to gaze directly into the Reverend’s eyes.

“The devil was with you in that movie theater in the Tenderloin all those years ago, wasn’t he?” Amos said softly. “There in the dark, wasn’t he? Watching you. And he must have slipped inside of you for a spell, too. Isn’t that right, Brother Lewis? How else could you explain what you did with that boy in that dark theater with the sticky floors? And he was a boy, wasn’t he? No more than sixteen, wasn’t that what you said? A runaway, no doubt. Blond and fair with ruby lips.”

Lewis began to shake. His eyes welled with fresh tears.

“It was the devil who made you ache for that boy. It was the devil who brought you there. It was the devil who unzipped your pants and guided that boy’s mouth onto your—”

“Stop,” Lewis sobbed. “Please, Reverend, please stop.”

“It was the devil who did that, but it was the Lord who brought you to my doorstep. And haven’t I always done right by you? Haven’t I always kept your confessions and occasional indiscretions a matter between myself and the Lord?”

“Yes.”

“The devil is not in Little Heaven,” Amos said firmly. “I won’t allow him in. If there is a sickness, then we must stand together under Christ’s good guidance and expunge it. Do you understand, Brother Lewis?”

“Yes.”

“We must not lose our heads.”

“I can’t,” Lewis said. “Reverend, I can’t go back in there.”

Amos petted Lewis’s scalp. “Very well. But if anyone should ask, you will tell them that Eli is recovering nicely.”

“Yes.”

“His parents have yet to return. Nobody else needs to see him. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“That is your official medical opinion?”

“Yes.”

Such were the ways in which a flock must be kept in line, Amos mused. An observant shepherd must not spare the rod.

But now, a day after that hellish experience, the Reverend faced yet another challenge. A fork in the road, you could say. What to do about the boy? This was the question the Reverend had been debating. The question was simple—was Little Heaven better off with the boy alive or dead?

There was a very good chance the boy would die anyway. The Reverend was no doctor, but Eli’s health could not be good when insects were actively birthing inside of him. But then, children were known to have amazing recuperative powers.

Or… the Reverend could take matters into his own hands.

He had never killed anyone. Much less a child. But Brother Lewis had been correct in one way: Eli did not seem so childlike anymore. A corruption of spirit had occurred. And Amos had never been one to advocate exorcisms.

It could be no easy thing, killing a person. Amos harbored no illusions about that. Humans were tough. They didn’t want to die—even the devout, who would be ushered directly to the gilded gates of heaven. But couldn’t it be seen as a public service in this case? The boy was sick. He was suffering. Was murder a sin? Absolutely. But what of mercy killings? Shouldn’t God turn a blind eye to those, so long as it went toward the greater good?

So then, let’s suppose Eli expired. The Reverend could simply announce that the boy had slipped away painlessly. God retrieved one of His little angels. They could hold a funeral. A closed coffin. Bury the body in the woods. All the proper observances. His parents could grieve if and when they returned. Then things could go back to normal. The flock would calm. Amos would implement a tighter policy of supervision for the children. Yes. He saw the shape of his plan. But it required something of him as well.

He sat on the cot. The boy breathed thinly. Amos’s heart fluttered. A chill washed through his veins. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, exactly—this was strange for Amos, as he was highly aware of his motivations. But now he was struck with a question of an existential nature.

Did he need to kill the boy as a matter of expedience in order to maintain order at Little Heaven…

…or did he want to kill him, just to see how it felt?

The first was bad enough. The second was positively monstrous.

Why don’t you just do it, you filthy little monster?

It was Sister Muriel’s voice in his head. Muriel with her viperish mean streak.

Amos slid the pillow out from under Eli’s head. He bounced it in his hands as if testing it for his purposes. It had an agreeable density. The boy’s eyes were shut, his lips pursed in a queer Mona Lisa smile.

“You horrid abomination,” the Reverend whispered.

He realized that the cold wash through his veins was anticipation. It was the same way he’d felt back at the orphanage, before sticking one of God’s children with a pin. He wanted to do this. Not just because the boy disgusted him. Not simply because it would make his life a whole lot easier. Amos wanted to kill the boy because, in some recessed chamber of his heart, he had always wanted to kill a member of his species. The instinct had been there a long time; Amos had simply never turned his mind to reflect upon this facet of his nature, but now that he had, it was clear and bright, like the sun slanting off a mirror that had been angled to catch its rays. This was the first time when Amos was in a position to profit from murder, too. Before this, the act might have satisfied that predatory side of him, yes, but that wasn’t reason enough to abandon his general prudence and take such a drastic step—but now it was essential. It would salvage everything he’d worked so hard to build.

Kill the boy. Save himself.

A sick child was the perfect start, wasn’t it? He would not have to worry about being overmastered by Eli’s strength. It would be as simple as drowning a rat.

“Amen,” he said, and stuffed the pillow over Eli’s face.

The boy’s arms and legs remained motionless for a few heartbeats. Then he came alive. His hips bucked. He thrashed. A feeble buzz emanated from his armpit. Amos bore down on the pillow. Greasy balls of sweat popped on his forehead.

Eli’s hands rose to touch the Reverend’s face—gently, the caress of a lover. The melted hook tugged at the skin just below his eye, snagging on the socket bone. You little bastard! The fingers of Eli’s other hand hooked into claws that tore shallow cuts into the Reverend’s cheeks.

“Hell spawn!” Amos hissed.

The Reverend pushed down so hard that he could see the distorted features of the boy’s face through the pillow. A nest of snakes thrashed somewhere behind his abdominal cavity, just above his groin—a fluttery squirming sensation. He was doing it, by thunder! He was actually doing it!

More flies buzzed out of Eli’s armpit, sluggishly as if drunk, bumping into Amos’s face. Amos was much bigger than the boy, who was nothing but a wasted shell; Eli soon began to flag. His arms waved about weakly. His heels drummed on the cot. Then the electricity went out of his body. Amos felt it, no different from pulling the plug on a blender.

Amos exhaled. His arms relaxed. The boy sank down into the mattress; with the life sucked out of it, his body seemed to deflate like a leaky balloon. Amos took in a shuddering inhale and let it go. His breath came out as a series of whimpery giggles.

“Hee-aah-heeeeee-hee-heee…”

He wiped the blood off his face. He would have to come up with an excuse for the cuts on his cheeks. He could say he’d been scratched by a critter from the woods, but he couldn’t recall seeing an animal for some time now. No matter. He was adroit with lies. Already that feeling of elation was ebbing; the seltzer effervescence that had percolated through him during the act of killing Eli was going flat. In its place was a leaden heaviness, as if his veins were full of molasses.

He removed the pillow from Eli’s face. The boy’s eyes were closed, his features reposed in death.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to du—”

Eli’s eyes popped open. They were black—the irises blown out, a thin band of bloodshot gray at the edges. His mouth split in a grin, an expression that sat horribly upon the face of someone so young: the come-hither leer of an ancient fairground carnie.

“Was that fun?” Eli asked teasingly. “Did you enjoy that, Reverend?”

The boy shivered in obvious delight. His breath was indescribably foul, bathing the Reverend’s face with its noxious vapors. His grin stretched wider and wider. He began to titter. The sound hacksawed across Amos’s nerve endings. His initial sense of shock and soul-deep revulsion gave way to a terror that coated his brain in a tar-like layer of blackness, choking out every rational thought.

I sent you to hell, the Reverend thought helplessly.

“I came back,” the boy said.

Eli reached for him with the witchy, gnarled fingers of one hand. The nails were as black as if blood had burst beneath them. The Reverend reared and fell off the cot; his ass struck the floor as a shock wave juddered up his tailbone.

Flies escaped from the hole in Eli’s armpit. They massed in the high corners of the bunkhouse. A thick, pendulous blanket of flies—a thousand starving spiders wouldn’t be able to eat them all. The air teemed with the maddening purr of their wings.

Eli sat up. His chest quivered with industry—the Reverend couldn’t help but think that his entire body was full of flies, his insides cored out and replaced by a dark colony of insects.

Eli began to issue full-throated, booming laughs that shook his entire body.

The Reverend finally found his feet. He began to back toward the door on benumbed feet.

“Come back,” Eli pleaded, mock-coy. “I have so much to share with you.”

The Reverend reached for the doorknob. He opened the door, staggered outside, and slammed it. Cyril was eying him warily.

“I heard something,” Cyril said.

“It was nothing,” the Reverend said. “Lock the door. Nobody goes in there.” He swallowed with difficulty. “Not one goddamn person.”

Cyril padlocked the door. Then he moved his chair a few feet away from it.

“Just so you’re not totally in the dark, two of your flock lit out with the one-eyed prick and the scarecrow chick,” Cyril said. “They left sometime yesterday.”

“Who? Which two?”

“Charlie Fairweather and Otis Whats-his-face. The nigger and the other woman are still here. So’s Charlie’s wife and kid.”

“Then they’ll be coming back,” Amos said, regaining a measure of composure.

He staggered back to his dwelling. The boy’s mocking laughter continued to echo in his ears. He was on the verge of hysteria. The dread boiled up from the soles of his feet, spanning through his veins and nerve endings like a poisonous flower coming into bloom.

He collapsed on his bed, burrowed his face into his lilac-scented pillow, and screamed. In the darkness behind his shut eyelids, he kept seeing the boy opening his eyes, the cancerous black of them peering into his lacerated, penitent inner self.

Did you enjoy that, Reverend?

He screamed so hard that his vocal cords frayed. He was only mildly aware when the timbre of it changed—when it came to sound a little bit like unhinged, slightly deranged laughter.

26

THE THINGS IN THE WOODS did not follow them. Or if they did, then at a distance too great for Micah to sense.

They had set off from the meadow at a hurried clip as soon as it became clear that retreat was their sole option. They had taken only what they could easily carry. Dawn washed over the woods, creating trembling pockets of light between the trees. Nothing moved. The forest was drained of natural life—or that life had been repurposed into something infinitely more grotesque.

Micah could not shake the sight of the thing from the previous night. Alive it had been fearsome. Dead, more pitiful. Its slack, flame-eaten pelt, thick as a radial tire. Its many heads and eyes and limbs. Most of all, Micah could not forget the sense of agony that radiated off of it. A thing that would like nothing more than to die, yet was kept alive by infernal mechanics Micah couldn’t possibly understand.

Initially they had run from the meadow, their metal cups and utensils rattling from the riggings of their packs. They had sprinted until their breath came in heaves. But when it became clear that they were not being pursued, their pace had slackened.

“So what the hell was that?” Minerva said.

Nobody could answer. It was nothing that should exist in this world.

“Whatever they are, they are purposeful,” Micah said. “They would prefer we not leave.”

Otis said, “What, do you think they’re…?”

“Funneling us back to Little Heaven?” said Minerva. “I think that’s exactly what Shug means. Isn’t it?”

Micah offered the faintest of nods. He wasn’t sure the creatures themselves were knowingly directing them back the way they had come—perhaps whatever had minted them was doing that.

“Satan,” Charlie said. “Instruments of the devil.”

“Be sober, be vigilant,” Otis quoted tremblingly, “because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

Hours later they walked into the midmorning sun. They were tired and dirty and fearful. Even Micah was scared—Micah Shughrue, a man who some said was so cool that he drank boiling water and pissed ice cubes. He was afraid of no man. He had glimpsed the blackness of the human heart. Yet somehow they had now passed from that known realm of evil—one he could sense in the Reverend especially, and to a lesser degree in the Reverend’s hired men—to a new and uncharted one, populated by forces Micah had never encountered. It unlocked a thirsty horror within him. One so dark he couldn’t see any light in it.

They came to a dip where the path bellied out to a cut between the trees. The land fell away in layers of shale and red dirt into a narrow valley. Micah stared through that cut and saw something he had not seen either time he had passed this spot before.

A squat shape was visible several hillsides over. A structure of some sort. It looked much bigger than a hunting shack.

Micah said, “What is that?”

“I never keyed on it until just now,” Otis admitted.

“You figure somebody’s living out there?” said Minerva.

Micah clocked the distance, judging it at six or seven miles. He could make out a narrow path winding across the valley floor.

“You’re not thinking…,” Otis started.

“We should take a look,” Micah said.

“That’s a good hike,” said Otis. “The daylight will be gone by the time we get there.”

“Do you want to spend another night in the woods?” Charlie asked Micah.

“There is evil at Little Heaven, too,” Micah reasoned.

“My wife and kid are there,” said Charlie.

Micah nodded. “I will go. You need not.”

“You do that,” said Otis, his face reddening. “You go right ahead and fill your boots to the brim with that. See how it works out for you.”

Charlie and Otis took a few steps down the path leading back to the compound. They looked miserable but resigned.

“I wish you would reconsider,” said Otis, abruptly penitent.

Minerva hung between them. “Ah jeez, Shug. Really?”

Micah said nothing.

“Ah, fuck it. What’s that old expression?”

Micah said, “You only live once.”

Minerva shook her head. “That’s not the one I was thinking of. It’s more along the lines of A stubborn bastard and his head are soon parted, unless I go with him.”

Micah said, “I am unfamiliar with that one.”

“Yeah, well, something like that. Let’s go, you pigheaded sonofabitch.”

Otis and Charlie watched them skid down the incline to the base of the valley, their heels kicking up puffs of red dust.

“We will return tomorrow,” Micah called up.

“Go with God!” Charlie called back.

“I’ll go with the crisp, refreshing taste of Shasta instead!” Minerva shouted. “It hasta be Shasta!”

Minerva gave Charlie a cheery wave, but she didn’t feel that way. She felt lost and freaked out. She wished she could see this situation the way Micah surely did. He wasn’t inclined to consider how things came to be. His mind was tuned toward dealing with things the way they were. To him, the creatures in the woods existed, somehow, and had to be reckoned with. Which was the best way of seeing it right now, trapped in the heart of it. Minerva knew Micah was scared—the man was tough, but he wasn’t insane—but his fear inspired a direct levelheadedness. Those awful things were an equation to be solved. Micah didn’t need to explain or understand them. He only had to act. She wished she had that particular nerve, or bone, or part of her brain that allowed her to do the same.

THEY PRESSED THROUGH the valley in the midday heat. The land was deadly quiet. They, too, walked in silence, to conserve energy and because Micah rarely had much to say. They came to a stream. The water was clear but foul, burdened with an aftertaste that slipped down the backs of their throats like toxic oil. But they drank and gagged and drank some more, as they were parched and there was no telling when the chance would come again.

Gray clouds massed against the horizon, ushering in an early twilight. Minerva’s feet ached. Blisters had swollen and burst on her heels; she could feel the warm blister broth soaking into her socks. She had not eaten since yesterday, but her appetite had deserted her, replaced in her stomach by a restless fear.

The valley bellied into a basin studded with cottonwoods. They moved through the waist-high grass, pushing the dry thatches aside with their hands. Not one cricket clung to a single blade. So terrible, Minerva thought, to be the only living things here. A person forgets how she is surrounded by life all day long. Spiders making webs, mice scurrying behind walls, raccoons feasting in your garbage cans, fruit flies colonizing your bananas. And while it could be annoying to rebag your torn trash sacks or sweep up mouse shit, at least it was normal. Otherwise, it felt like you were living on the desolate surface of an uninhabited planet.

“There,” said Micah.

Minerva followed his finger up the spine of a hill. Tracking that rise, about a mile distant, sat the dark outline of what was clearly a homestead.

“Quickly,” Micah said. “Before it rains.”

27

ELLEN BELLHAVEN SPENT the morning at Little Heaven’s glassworks. She melted the borosilicate beads, added tints, rolled and snipped it and worked the molten glass into shapes of her liking. Nobody troubled her; the Little Heavenites had bigger concerns than unauthorized use of the glassworks. The busywork kept one part of Ellen’s mind occupied while the other parts spun off on crazed orbits. She put her hands in service of small tasks to dull the riot inside her head.

Everyone here was so damn… odd. Ellen had known Bible bashers; they could be grating, those sideways looks confirming their belief that Ellen already had one foot in the eternal flames of hell. There was also this sense—implicit, but as yet never stated—that they believed she and the other “outsiders” had brought an indefinable sickness to Little Heaven. A curse. But the thing was, Little Heaven had been ill before they had shown up. And it was only getting worse.

First there was that incident with the kids and the shrew. Then the thing in the woods she and Micah had seen. Within the compound, all sense of oversight seemed to have vanished. Parents barely minded their children, who were free to run amok so long as they didn’t go into the woods. Nobody had gone in there unaccompanied since Eli’s disappearance. It was as if the threat—and there was a threat at Little Heaven, though Ellen couldn’t pinpoint what it was—had not registered. The Little Heavenites continued on in their own obedient way. Narcotized, as if a powerful gas were being pumped up from the ground that made them accept whatever terribleness was coming.

She glanced up to see Cyril Neeps stepping into the glassworks. Tall and ferret-like, with a canine tooth that jagged down to divot his lower lip.

“Well now,” he said breezily. “What do we have here?”

She felt momentarily reduced under his predatory gaze, no bigger than a grasshopper or some other bug. Then she set her jaw. Fuck this guy.

“Just keeping busy. Nobody seems to be using this place.”

Neeps nodded cheerily, but she’d seen this kind of thing—false sunniness hiding the glint of a blade.

“Sure, yep… that’s about the size of it.” He smiled. “Still, shouldn’t you have asked permission first? I mean, you didn’t buy all this stuff, did you?”

He waited for an answer. When she didn’t say anything, he dismissively waved his hand. “Enjoying yourself, are you?” He laughed in a way that encouraged her to join in, although nothing he said had been remotely funny.

“Like I said,” Ellen told him, “just filling time.”

Neeps cocked his head. Assaying the steel in her spine. She stared back equitably. She wasn’t scared. It had been a long time since a man looked at her that way. She’d be damned if she would ever be scared of the Cyril Neepses of this world again.

“Filling time, huh?” His smile turned wolfish. “I can think of better ways to fill it. I’m kind of an expert at filling… time.”

Unflinchingly, she returned his smile. “That so?

He hitched his thumbs in his belt. “Oh, that’s a fact.”

“What about your friend? He an expert in anything?”

“Who, Virg? He’s an expert at sticking his thumb up his rear end. That, and following me around like a lost puppy. You could say I’m the brains of our particular operation.”

“Then Lord help you.”

Cyril’s smile faded. Something dark and hungry passed over his face.

Ellen said, “I can fill my own time, but thanks a bunch.”

Neeps’s fingers diddled along the hilt of a knife sheathed on his belt.

“Yeah, well, here’s the thing about women I’ve learned. Sometimes they need a good filling… of their time. So it’s just a matter of filling it for them until they come round to the sport of it.”

Ellen withdrew the glassblowing pole from the kiln and balanced it on the anvil. Its tip glowed white-hot. It was pointed at Neeps, right around crotch level.

“Glassblowing is my little getaway,” she said, not breaking eye contact. “Do you understand, Cyril?” She spun the pole on the anvil. Around and around. “Solitude is important for any of us, wouldn’t you say?”

Neeps stared at the glowing tip as if mesmerized—

“So why don’t you make like a tree and get the fuck outta here, Cy?”

Neeps’s eyes snapped up to her. His lips curled in a sneer. He seemed to be debating taking matters to the next level, the physical one, but something in Ellen’s face—or the searing metal pointed at his balls—prevented it.

He lip-farted. “I was trying to throw you a bone. A pity poke, plain and simple. To tell it straight, you don’t merit a good fuckin’,” he said with sunny good cheer. “I take one look at that burn all down your face and my pecker just wilts. Christ, what a sight! Face all messed up like that.” He shoved his palms toward her like a toddler pushing away a plate of peas. “Your head looks like a marshmallow someone dropped in a fire.”

“You sure do know how to charm a lady,” Ellen said.

“Maybe you got something going with that one-eyed mute you chum around with. Or the skinny bitch? You’re a slit slurper, that it? You’re as frigid as one, that’s for damn certain.”

“If that helps you sleep better.”

Cyril screwed the toe of his boot into the dirt. “I’ve been watching you. If you take one step out of line, any of you, I will happily…” He checked his threat. “You’re trespassing. So mind your p’s and q’s, hmm?”

“Good-bye, Cyril.”

“Good-fucking-bye, Melto,” he called over his shoulder as the door shut behind him.

NATE RAN ACROSS the woman down by the cistern outside the dry goods shed. One of the outsiders. The one with the burn on her face.

Nate had not slept again after Eli Rathbone’s visit. The night had stretched out like taffy, seconds becoming minutes becoming hours. An eternity trapped under the covers with his dad zonked out a few feet away. He felt no safety in his father’s presence. His dad wasn’t strong or especially smart. If Nate had gone with Eli—or if Eli had come into the bunkhouse and taken him by force—Nate couldn’t picture his father doing much more than crying out in horror. He didn’t picture him tackling Eli in order to rescue him. Sure, his father would search for Nate once he was gone, and he’d be weeping sorrowfully and hunting harder than anyone else. But he wouldn’t have done anything when it really mattered.

This was why Nate hadn’t bothered to tell his father about Eli’s visit. His dad wouldn’t believe him. He’d say Nate dreamed it all. And who knows? Maybe he had. When Nate inspected the bunkhouse that morning, he found no trace of Eli’s presence: no footprints in the dirt, not even the smudge of his nose on the plastic window. Nate desperately wished he had dreamed it. But the memory was full of too many perfect details—Eli’s bone-white hair, the flies with gas mask faces—to believe he’d imagined it.

He bumped into the burned woman just before noon. She was up to something in the glassworks. She emerged with her shirt dark with sweat. Nate was filling his canteen from the cistern. He had been digging marble pits out behind the dry goods shed. He used to have a sack of marbles, cat’s-eyes and oilies and king cobs, but the sack had gone missing. Nate suspected Elton Redhill, but it was un-Christian to accuse anyone of theft. Nate made the pits anyway, stabbing the heel of his boot into the dirt until he’d made a groove, then scooping out dirt with his hands. The patch of earth behind the shed looked like some crazy old coot had been digging for buried treasure without a map.

“How are you?” the woman asked.

Nate shrugged. His father had told him not to talk to the outsiders. Their thoughts were almost certainly impure.

The woman filled a cup from the cistern and drank. “Thirsty work,” she said.

She somehow reminded him of his mother, even though she did not look like her. It was just Nate’s loneliness that made her seem that way. When she smiled, the scarred skin down her face and neck stretched alarmingly, as if it might tear open. But Nate remembered hearing that scar tissue was actually stronger than normal skin, kind of like how cardboard is stronger than foolscap. It was skin that had been hurt and healed into something more durable than it had been—still, it looked pretty gross. Nate apologized inside his head for thinking that.

“I saw you doing something out behind the shed. I wasn’t spying,” she said a little too quickly, the way someone would if she really had been spying. “Qué pasa?”

“Pardon?”

“What are you doing back there?”

He shouldn’t be talking to her. But his father was cleaning up in the chapel and nobody was watching, and anyway, it would be rude to stand there like a lump.

“Digging marble pits.”

The woman’s eyebrows went up. “Oh? Marbles. What kinds do you have?”

Nate twisted the toe of his shoe into the dirt like he was crushing out a cigarette. “I used to have a sack. But I… I must have lost it.”

“Well, you’re not going to believe this, Nate—” She turned her head away, muttering something that sounded like a curse word. “Is that your name? Nate?”

Nate nodded.

“Lucky guess! You look like a Nate. I’ve been working on something that you just might like,” the woman said. “Why don’t I meet you back here?”

She returned a few minutes later. She reached into her pocket and pulled out six polished glass balls. Their insides were shot with blues and blacks and whites. They looked a lot like marbles but weren’t exactly.

“Will they do in a pinch?”

Nate took one from her palm and rolled it toward the nearest pit. It wasn’t perfectly round but close enough. They were more beautiful, more unique, than any marbles he had ever seen.

“They’re swell,” he said, picking the almost-marble up and handing it back to her.

“Keep them,” she said.

“Seriously?”

“I used the glass your father and everyone else paid for, right? They’re more yours than mine, when you think about it.”

“Yeah, but you made them.”

“It’s okay. They’re my bloopers, anyway. So take them.”

She pulled open Nate’s hip pocket and rolled them into it. They clinked against one another in a satisfying way. He could feel them in his pocket, six hard bulges against his thigh.

“Thank you.” It was the nicest thing anybody had done for him in a while.

“De nada.”

“Pardon?”

“No problem.”

The woman hung around while he shot marbles. It was nice to hold things that were his own. Back home, he’d had a few things. His bike, a shelf of books. But at Little Heaven, everyone owned everything and nothing—except the Reverend, who had permission from God to have his own special stuff. But for the rest of them, it was only their Bibles and a few personal items. Nate’s marbles had been about the only things that were his alone. Which was why they were stolen, probably. He would have to hide these new ones. There was no way he would be allowed to keep a gift from an outsider.

“You like it here?” the woman asked. She was looking somewhere else, as if it didn’t matter much to her what Nate said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s what God wants.”

She faced him. “And you feel… safe? I mean, I know you feel safe with God watching over you. That’s great. But here in Little Heaven?”

Nate nodded, but it took a while. “Sometimes I miss my old home. Miss my mom.”

“It’s natural to miss home,” she said.

“I think some of the other kids miss their homes, too.”

“Oh yeah?”

Nate swallowed. Was he actually going to talk about this to a total stranger? Sure, she gave him some marbles, but Nate and his father could get exiled for this sort of thing.

“I think… I don’t know. Just that everything feels a little weird lately. People aren’t acting like themselves.”

The woman nodded as if she understood. Maybe she did. She’d been here long enough to feel it.

“And then last night I think I saw Eli Rathbone, the kid who went missing, walking around with no shirt on in the middle of the night.”

Nate clamped his hand over his mouth. The words had spilled out crazily, without his even thinking about them. He realized just how badly he needed to tell someone, even if it was a woman he’d never met before and wasn’t sure he could trust. But maybe that was it—she was a stranger, so she would understand better than somebody who was stuck in the same monstrous machine.

She leaned forward, prompting him to speak. “What…?”

“He didn’t look too good,” said Nate. “He… uh, looked like he was almost dead. Or like he was dead, which is stupid. This one time my mom took me to the drive-in. We watched To Kill a Mockingbird. Mom gave me a dime for a Zero bar. Coming back from the concession stand, I saw the movie playing one screen over. It was called Premature Burial.” Nate shook his head. “I shouldn’t have watched it. There was this dead guy, all white and hungry, crawling out of a casket. Grave dust was puffing off his shoulders. I had nightmares for a week. Anyway, that’s kind of how…”

“How Eli looked?”

Nate swallowed. “Yeah.”

“Did you tell anyone about this?”

“Only you.”

“Why not your dad?”

“He wouldn’t believe me. He’d say I have an overactive imagination. That it’s the devil burrowing into my brain.”

“Are you going to tell anyone?”

“Maybe I dreamed it,” said Nate hopefully, but the look on the woman’s face said she wasn’t so sure about that. “Nobody has seen Eli since he got back,” Nate went on. “Maybe he’s okay.”

“My friends saw him,” the woman said. “Before the Reverend took him away. The way they tell it, Eli didn’t look so hot at all.”

“Oh” was all Nate could say.

“Enjoy the marbles, okay?” She glanced over her shoulder as though she’d felt eyeballs tiptoeing up her spine. “And if you see anything else weird or scary, will you promise to come tell me?”

He hesitated, unsure.

“Nate,” she said, “I believe you.”

Relief washed over him. “Okay,” he said. “But I hope I don’t see anything.”

“Me, too.”

She returned to the glassworks. A frigid wind screamed around the edge of the shed and brought up goose pimples on Nate’s calves.

28

THE PRESTON SCHOOL FOR BOYS.

These five words were stamped on a strip of tin that arched over the entry path. But the wooden poles that had once held the sign aloft had rotted; the sign hung from the second pole on a rusted spike, the tin eaten through by rain and wind.

The path itself was just a ghost, two narrow strips grown over with weeds and bracken. A set of pitted concrete steps—only two of them, like a staircase that had been abandoned in midbuild—sat beside the path, just past the sign. These were wagon step-downs: a driver would pull a horse-drawn cart beside them to allow passengers to dismount without spraining an ankle.

“Greeeen Acres is the place to be,” Minerva sang. “Faaaarm livin’ is the life for me.” Off a look from Micah: “What, you don’t watch TV? What the hell do you do at night, Shug—stare at the hands on the clock?”

They walked toward the buildings. Minerva tried to whistle the Green Acres theme—anything to drive the stony silence away—but a scouring wind wicked the spit off her lips.

“Old private school, you figure?” she said. “Rich folk sending their Chads and Coopers and Athertons out to the sticks to put some bark on their satiny skin?”

Micah shook his head. “Reform school. Juvenile delinquents.”

“So you’ve heard about this place?”

“No. Just ones like it.”

The Preston School for Boys appeared to be made up of three primary buildings. Two large outbuildings and one house. They approached the larger of the outbuildings. Its door hung cockeyed on rotted hinges. Inside were two rows of bunk beds, five to a side, enough to sleep twenty kids. Ashen light filtered through the dirt-caked windows. The bed frames were remarkably well preserved. The mattresses had a few rips and tears where the horsehair was leaking out. Shingles had blown free of the roof in spots, creating gaps where the sun had bleached the floorboards. But overall, there was an oddly hermetic, museum-quality air to the interior.

Words had been scratched into the far wall. Each letter gouged into the wood—frenzied-looking strokes with a penknife or other sharp object.

Why is 6 afraid of 7?

789! 789!

“A riddle,” Micah said. “Six is afraid of seven because seven ate nine.”

They walked between the bunks. Old footlockers with cracked leather hasps lay at the foot of each bunk. Minerva opened one. Inside sat a tin toy. A stork wearing a top hat. When she wound a key on the stork’s back, the thing chittered to life. First it tipped its hat. Then its long beak opened to reveal a tiny swaddled infant lying on its tongue. Most of the baby’s face was eaten away by rust. The key revolved. The stork’s beak snapped shut on the baby. The gears wound down.

Minerva turned the toy over. Stamped on its bottom was: GELY TOYS 1870. A ripple of discomfort raced up her spine. She put it back in the footlocker, disliking the feel of the metal on her fingertips: warm and greasy, as if it had just recently sat in a child’s clammy hands.

Micah inspected some of the other footlockers. More than a few were empty. Those that weren’t held scant possessions: moldering Bibles, crucifixes, a glass jar half full of marbles, a doll made of braided hair. Items the boys who’d once slept in these beds had been allowed to bring, or else had smuggled in.

Minerva said, “How many boys were here, do you figure?”

“Hard to know,” said Micah. “Ten. A dozen.”

“It’s a long way from anywhere.”

“Better than jail.”

“If you say so.”

They went back outside. The land past the sleeping quarters lay flat in the afternoon sun. A metal plow, the kind hauled by oxen, stood not far from a boarded-over well. Fifty yards from the well, Minerva sighted two squat metal boxes in a nest of weeds. They weren’t much bigger than coffins. They had also rusted through in spots, though the metal was quite thick.

“What the hell are those?”

Minerva walked across the field until she drew near to the boxes. Each had a door on the side. She lifted the latch, knelt, and opened one. Micah followed her. He watched, saying nothing. Minerva caught the smell of rain-rinsed steel and something else, more primal, still traceable after all these years. She got down on her hands and knees and stuck her head and shoulders inside one box. Words had been scratched on the metal. Fanatical and somehow helpless ones, etched with sharp field rocks.

HELP and OUT and SORRY and PLEASE.

A lot of PLEASEs.

All that, plus two alternating words, scratched with terrible precision on the lower left side.

FLESH. BEAST. FLESH. BEAST. FLESH. BEAST.

She squirmed out of the horrible box. Jesus, that couldn’t possibly be legal. But this place was in the middle of nowhere. Who would have been watching?

Micah took in her shocked pallor. “It was a different time,” he said.

“Bullshit,” Minerva spat back, trembling with rage. “Basic humanity is timeless, isn’t it? These were boys.”

They carried on to the other large building, which turned out to be the mess. Like the sleeping quarters, it was intact. The chairs and tables, immaculate. Jars of preserves lined the kitchen cupboards. The seals had burst and many jars had broken, but this had happened so long ago that the stink was gone. The food, whatever it had been, was no more than a crusted stain. No animals had been at the jars. No insects, even. The damage was simply the result of the decades passing by.

“Bizarre,” Minerva said. “It’s as if this whole place has been…”

“Curated,” said Micah.

They exited the mess and made their way toward the house. The front of the house, the porch and veranda, was black from fire. It had not engulfed the entire structure, but it had blown out the front windows and charred the veranda roof, the wooden ribs of which sagged down in fire-thinned quills. Minerva noted the effigy of a rocking chair heat-welded to the porch. She imagined the owner of this house sitting on that rocker in the high heat of a summer afternoon, watching his young charges till the fields. From this distance, he would have heard the boys screaming in the hot boxes, too.

The porch creaked ominously but bore their weight. They walked through the gutted door frame into the house. The fire had made no inroads here. A thick layer of dust had settled over everything. The furniture was still in good enough shape to fetch a fair sum at an antiques show. There wasn’t much of it, however, as the house’s occupant seemed to prefer a spartan living style.

A rack of rifles lined a cabinet in the front room. Micah swung the glass front open and inspected them.

“Civil War era,” he said. “That is a Lindsay model. A Whitworth, there. These guns are over a hundred years old.”

They went upstairs. The walls were papered with a pattern of cabbage roses faded to dim blots. The front bedroom overlooked the mess and sleeping quarters. A pair of field binoculars rested on a tripod before the window. Minerva peered through them. She could see across the fields to the woods fringing the basin that they had climbed earlier.

The room had a desk. The home’s sole photo sat upon it. A sepia shot of a man whose large round head sat atop a thick neck. A walrus mustache. Fat fleshy lips. He stared forward with a certain imperiousness, as if challenging the viewer to contradict his view of the world.

Augustus C. Preston was written on a brass nameplate below the photo.

“The lord of the manor?” said Minerva.

“I reckon.”

“He kept a framed, labeled photo of hissown self on his desk?” Minerva spat on the floor. “Maybe he had Alzheimer’s. Needed to remind himself of who the hell he was.”

Micah opened the desk drawers. Receipts and logbooks, all dated the years 1873 and 1874. The papers were yellowed and dry; a few slips crumbled apart in his fingers. Minerva saw receipts for shipping notices, sums paid, debits owing. Another notebook was labeled ENROLLMENT. Ten boys were listed, between the ages of nine and fifteen. Walter Albee. Percy Snell. Horace Fudge. Cornelius Benn. Wilfred Tens. Five more. Orphan was marked beside eight of the ten names, and Ward of the State beside the remaining two. Recidivist was jotted beside six of the ten—even Merle Pugg, the nine-year-old.

Micah found a sheaf of letters in another drawer, all sent from one Conrad Preston. He teased the first letter out of its envelope. It was dated August 17, 1874. He looked it over and then passed it to Minerva.

“Read it.”

That was the final letter. The ones below bore postmarks from earlier dates. Minerva skimmed them, reading the odd snippet. The initial excitement and productivity at the Preston School appeared to have given way to creeping signs that became increasingly menacing. Sounds from the forest. The haunting trill of a flute.

According to the letters, boys at the Preston School had started to disappear—or this was Minerva’s understanding based on Connie Preston’s one-sided narrative.

The boys disappeared, but they came back. Just like Eli Rathbone? With his white hair and gray eyes and blanket of hissing bugs?

In the second-to-last letter, Conrad Preston mentioned the desertion of the school’s guards, leaving Augustus as the lone authority. Minerva tried to picture Augustus and his delinquent boys stranded on this solitary outcropping. Yet throughout it all—to judge by Conrad’s increasingly desperate letters—Augustus maintained a fervent belief, even as events spiraled into madness. He was Ahab pursuing his white whale.

“Jesus, Shug,” Minerva said. “Do you think… Is it possible that what’s happening at Little Heaven now has happened before? Nearly a hundred years ago?”

Micah said, “I cannot say what is happening now.”

“But if it did happen, how could nobody know about it?”

“People go missing. Whole groups.”

“But this many? Ten boys, maybe more, and their batshit-crazy warden?”

“There are a million ways it could have happened.”

“But I don’t think it happened any of those ways, Shug. I think it happened the way it’s happening at Little Heaven. And I think you do, too.”

Night had begun to fold over the Preston School. Micah said, “Make a fire.”

THEY FOUND A POTBELLIED STOVE in the kitchen. Micah hurled the mattress off Augustus Preston’s bed. He put his boots to the bed frame. The wood was hard oak. Micah was sweating by the time it started to splinter. He ripped the shattered wood from the joists. When he had enough, he slit the mattress and ripped out handfuls of stuffing.

He filled the stove with that cottony fluff, then tossed in bits of the bed frame. Before long, a fire was roaring. Micah seemed pleased. He must have found it cathartic to torch the bed of a blue-blooded sadist who had locked up little boys in boxes.

Minerva hunted through the cupboards. Just crockery. A ringbolt was set in the kitchen floor. Pulling on it opened a trapdoor leading to the cold cellar.

“Flashlight, Shug.”

Micah handed it to her. She went down the worn steps. The cellar swept out under the flashlight’s glow. Ancient dust swirled in the flashlight beam.

The shelves were stocked with preserves that had long gone off. Some of the mason jars had burst, their contents hanging off the edge of the shelf in stalactites—as if the shelves had grown fangs. The liquid had gone thin in other jars, the color of formaldehyde. Things sat suspended inside the liquid. Bulging shapes like beets or blackened turnips or… something. A jar of pickled eggs with some kind of weird flagellate tails attached to them…

She swept the beam away from the jars. It fell upon something that puzzled her. Bars. Crosshatched iron bars. A square of them set into the center of the wall.

It was a cage. A cell dug into the cellar clay. Four feet deep, maybe a foot and a half high. There were three of them, side by side, each fronted by a barred door. They were too small to admit a full-grown person.

Minerva backed away. Her ass hit something. She spun to see a chair. A Chippendale? Brass rivets. Leather cracked over the years. It was then she realized that the cells had been dug at eye level, like… like pictures on a wall. Their occupants would have had to climb up into them—or, worse, they would have needed a boost.

And someone must have sat in this very chair. Smoking a pipe, maybe sipping a brandy. Watching whoever was inside.

What in God’s name had happened in this place?

Nothing that happened here was in God’s name, came a whisper in her head.

She went back up the stairs. She had found a bottle. Whiskey, the cork still waxed. She set it in front of Micah. Her fingers trembled.

“Don’t go down there” was all Minerva said.

“Okay.”

Micah slit the wax with his thumbnail and pulled the cork.

“Drink,” he told her.

The liquor scorched her throat. But Minerva swallowed it and drank some more and handed the bottle to Micah. He drank in turn and then disappeared upstairs and came down with the binoculars. It was nearly dark. He scanned the mess and sleeping quarters through the binoculars. He then went through the rifle cabinet. He inspected each one and threw it aside.

“Cap and ball. Useless.”

He found a bayonet and slid that into his sack. Minerva watched him make minute improvements to their lot, working with the situation as he found it. She wouldn’t want to face this with anyone but him.

She grabbed stacks of plates from the cupboards and smashed them on the porch. The broken shards gritted under her boots as she walked back inside.

“Anything comes, we’ll hear it.”

They retired to the stove and drank. The whiskey kicked like a mule. Soon Minerva’s head was swimmy.

“Your legs,” said Micah.

“What about them?” Minerva said.

“Squeezed pretty tight.”

“Old habit,” she said. “I grew up in a religious area. In school, all the girls had to squeeze an aspirin between our knees for two hours a day. Y’know, to teach us to keep our legs shut until marriage.”

Micah gave her a look.

“I’m fucking with you, Shug. I got to piss like a racehorse.” Switching to a southern belle voice: “Mah eyeballs are plum doin’ the flutter kick, Ah do declare.”

“Piss on his bed.”

Micah did not seem to be joking. Okey dokey, then.

She went up to Preston’s bedroom. A coldness wept from its walls and sent a wire of fear through her—the curdled presence of Augustus Preston. The mattress lay on the floor with its guts slashed open. She yanked down her pants and squatted over it. A stupid desecration, like a child pissing on a hated schoolmaster’s shoes. Her water was locked up inside her. She shut her eyes and exhaled. It began as a trickle and built to a stream that the mattress soaked up hungrily.

She stepped off the mattress before a rill of piss hit her boots. Thunderheads gathered over the hills. Lightning forked down to illuminate the trees—

She saw them then. Three shapes. Shaggy lumpen things. Staggered fifty yards apart in the field facing the house, two hundred yards away.

She hurried downstairs. Micah was at the window with the binoculars.

“You see them?” she asked.

Micah nodded.

“They coming closer?”

Micah shook his head. “Just there. Waiting.”

“For what?”

Micah looked at her. How should he know?

They retrieved their packs from the kitchen. The stove kicked warmth into the front room, where they sat watching the shapes in the field. Micah took another glug of whiskey.

“You can never know the shape of the world, Minny,” he said. It always tickled her when he used the name her father used to call her by. “When you think you have it compassed, something breaks from that geometry to bedevil you.”

It was not like Shug to make such pronouncements. Was he drunk?

“What about Ebenezer?” he said, looking at her.

“I’m still going to kill him, if that’s what you’re wondering. I would have done it earlier, but it’s been a busy stretch.”

She rooted through her bag until her fingers closed around something. She pulled it out and tossed it to him. Micah turned it over in the finger of firelight falling from the kitchen. His gaze reflected puzzlement… until it clicked.

It might have been the first honest-to-God smile she’d ever seen from him.

He said, “You went back.”

“Bet your ass I did. I was fourteen. Climbed the same tree and waited. Knife—two knives, actually. No gun. Wanted it to be a fair fight. It came the next day. It almost killed me. Got my one arm coiled up and squeezed. Busted that arm, crushed the air out of me. But I still had the other arm. I’d lashed the knives to my hands with baling twine so I couldn’t let go. Its skin was real durable—imagine trying to cut through a bike tire. But I hacked its head clean off. Didn’t come easy. Most creatures have got plenty of fight in them even when the battle’s long lost.”

She watched Micah turn the snake’s head over. It was a foot long. Its eyes were dried-up peas in its sockets. Minerva had lost its lower jaw somewhere. The head would become drier and more brittle until all that remained was a fang or whatnot. She’d put that fang in a locket and string it round her neck.

“You are certain this was the one?”

She said, “How many fifteen-foot snakes you think there are? As soon as it was dead, I felt at peace. Like I’d set my brother’s soul free.”

Micah handed it back. “You are a wonder.”

She stuffed the snake’s head back into her pack. “There’s still room in here.”

“For?”

“The Englishman’s head.”

“He will not go easily, Minny. He is good at what he does.”

She sighed. “I was a bounty hunter. You and him are mercenaries. You’ve killed people. There’s a difference between us. I know that. But I want it more.”

“He will want to live.”

The storm had reached them. Rain began to pelt the windows.

“Do you still dwell on them?” Micah asked her.

“My brother and father? Not so much as I used to… You know, as time goes on they become less people in my memory and more, I don’t know, motivations. I don’t like that. Thinking of them that way. When the Englishman’s dead, they’ll come back to me the way they were.”

“You think so?

“I have to think so.”

Micah nodded. “You sleep. I will keep watch.”

“You sure?”

When he didn’t answer, Minerva went into the kitchen and sat with her back to the wall. The warmth was narcotic. She fell into an uneasy doze.

MICAH STAYED UP and watched the fields. Lightning cleaved the sky. He could still see them out there. Three unmoving shapes in the lashing rain.

They wouldn’t attack. He was pretty sure of that. It was the same in Korea: the enemy would harass you, nipping at your flanks, funneling you to a choke point where they could kill you more easily. In this case, the choke point was Little Heaven. Except Micah wasn’t sure these things had killing in mind. What was going on at Little Heaven was a different sort of thing. Nobody was dead, not yet. They were all just sick. And it was either that none of them had the good sense to leave, or the Reverend and his men were preventing it—or something else, some terrible specific gravity, kept them all locked in place. That being the case, those shapes out there in the field were more like ranchers squiring cattle back to the feed pen, which lay in the shadow of the slaughterhouse.

Micah had been thinking about it lately. Souls ascending. It wasn’t Little Heaven that turned his thoughts in that direction; the Reverend’s compound seemed about as divine as the Preston School. No, just the feeling a man gets when he senses the chain of his own life drawing tight around his throat. Micah felt the links of that chain cutting into his neck. And he wondered, idly but with as much feeling as he could summon, how thin a cut it was between a man like Augustus Preston and the man he himself had been at some earlier, rottener time in his existence.

He had killed men for money, and less than money. There were times when an evil had invaded his soul. He felt it drop over him, black and suffocating. That same mantle seemed to hang over the Reverend’s shoulders, too—Micah sensed it to a certainty. And so the question was: If you let a man like that indulge his nature and didn’t do anything about it, are you any better than him? A crazy dog bites, that being its nature. But if you let that dog go on biting, servicing its own ill-bred temperament—knowingly, and with an agency to stop it—then are you not whelps from the same litter? No, you are worse even. That dog cannot help but bite. You know better. Your inaction encouraged that evil to flourish. The blood was on your hands.

Micah thought about things like that. All the time he thought.

29

CY… OOOHHH, Cy baby, I need you…

Cyril Neeps started up from his sleep. He was kicked back in his chair against the side of the bunkhouse that housed Eli Rathbone. He snapped forward, the front feet of the chair stabbing into the dirt.

Jesus. He’d fallen asleep with his head touching the wall of the bunkhouse with that thing shambling around inside. That fucking—

—abomination—

Yeah, okay, fucking-A right, that was the word. A bigger word than Cy was used to throwing around, but sure. A fucking abomination. Those curdled gray eyes and the grubs twisting around in his cored-out armpit. The bugs. Hard as he tried, Cy couldn’t drive that image out of his mind. The boy was just covered in bugs right up to his chest, the little fuckers scuttling all over while the boy stroked that dead fucking pigeon with his disgusting melted hand—Kee-rist, all the liquor in the world couldn’t wash that picture out of a man’s head.

Not that Cy wouldn’t give that a go. Hey! The good ole college try. But the Reverend, the slant-heeled killjoy prick, ran a dry compound. Hell, he and Virg had even tried whipping up a batch of home brew out of spud peels, a bag of sugar, and a few weird-smelling herbs Virg hunted out of the woods—the same woods they had steered clear of lately. But the finished batch smelled of grim death, and when Virg took the tiniest sip, his tongue turned toad green. They agreed it would probably drive them both blind, and then they’d never find their way out of Little Heaven—and their departure was fixing to be sooner rather than later, if anyone wanted the God’s honest truth. Time to blow this pop stand, was Cy’s professional opinion.

And the Reverend—that rat-assed, greasy snake oil salesman! Cyril kinda hated him. He couldn’t understand why all these bozos followed him out here, hanging off his every goddamn word—that was, until he’d seen him in action behind the pulpit. Oh, he changed then. Grew two feet taller, that big voice rumbling out of his pudgy body like a rainbow arching out of a dung pile. Cyril wasn’t a churchgoing man, but he could appreciate the power the Reverend had, and so far as Cy could tell, he’d earned it. The fucker paid good, too. He vacuumed every nickel out of his cow-eyed worshippers’ pockets and gave some of it to him and Virg.

But in Cy’s not-so-humble opinion, no amount of cashola was enough for this. Nope. No way, no how. What good was money when you couldn’t buy the finest things in life: liquor off the top shelf, a pack of Colts wine-tipped cigarillos, and, after a drink and a smoke, maybe a nice slice of pussy? In fact, it didn’t have to be that nice a slice. Just willing. Or, if not willing, at least present. All the women around here had a broomstick up their asses, or else rode one. And they had prick-shot husbands and kids, too, and everyone knew that once a woman had a kid, her cooze flapped like a wind sock at the airport. Cy liked a tight fit. This one clam-faced bitch he’d nailed had told Cy that no fit would be tight enough for his Phillips-head screwdriver of a dick unless he took to fucking electrical sockets—but she had only said that once.

Cy-by… where’s my handsome Cyyyyy-by…

Cyril’s head snapped toward the voice. A blast from the past. An honest-to-Christ mind melter.

“Carlene…?”

Jesus, didn’t that name feel weird in his mouth? Carlene Herlihy from Carbine, Alabama—the glue-trap town Cy had grown up in. Couldn’t be her, of course. But there it was, her voice calling from the heart of the woods just as sugary sweet as he remembered.

My baby, my handsome honey-bunny…

Carlene. Juicy Carlene. A box as sweet as canned peaches. Only you had to wrench the damned lid off her jar. Women! They learned or they got taught, and either way worked fine by Cy. Hell, the fight was half the fun.

Honey-bunny, though? Carlene had never called him that. She wasn’t one for gooey phrasings—as a cashier at the Carbine Pinch N Save, she could scarcely be bothered to make eye contact, and had a way of snapping her gum that made a man feel about an inch tall. Christ, she had no clue Cy even existed until he made his move—which it must be said was a bit… what’s the shit-eatin’ word? Forward.

He was twenty-five. Carlene, eighteen. Body tight as a snare drum. Dewy was the word to race through Cy’s mind looking at her. Just as slick and wet as the earth after a rainstorm. He wasn’t on her radar, so he made damn good and sure to put himself there.

He’d been ready to roll out of town at the time, no forwarding address. But before he left, he had matters to attend to. He caught up with Carlene one night at a bush party. He shouldn’t have been there—he was too old, and with that jittery look he used to get when he was up to something. His eyes were hard these days, no matter what he was doing. He almost missed that old feeling.

Anyway, Cy let Carlene know he’d come into some acid. That bug-fuck weirdo Leary had hipped him to it, Cy said. As if one soul in that scratch-ass town really had acid. But Carlene went with him, bold as a bull. He took her into the woods. She was pissed to the gills; he figured she wouldn’t be able to bat so much as a butterfly off her arm. But she had fight in her. Ooo-eee, what a hellion! Scratching and biting, all but clawing Cyril’s eyes out. She wore fake nails or some shit, took a nice chunk out of his cheek. But when she gave over to him, it was with a sigh. Her legs could have been oiled, the way they spread. Wide open, smooth as creamery butter—

Cy… Cyril… Come over here, Cyril…

Cyril was up off his chair without really thinking—as if he’d grown a second brain in his ass that was controlling his legs. Hey, ass brain, hold your horses! He almost laughed at how fucking silly it was… except the spit had gone sour in his mouth. He took a few hesitant steps away from his post by the bunkhouse door. Sweat trickled down his spine to soak his underwear. His rear end was clammy, and it itched in a place he was helpless to scratch.

The fence shielding Little Heaven from the woods was twenty yards off. He lurched toward it.

Stop.

This was his conscious, direct thought.

Stop moving, feet.

It was strange to address a part of your body as if it had its own will, no different from telling your asshole not to let fly with a fart in a crowded elevator. But he was asking now—begging. His arms and legs had been disconnected, their controls rerouted.

“Stop.” His breath came out in a harsh pop. “Goddamn it, stop.”

But he kept on. Staggering more than walking, part of him putting on the brakes while the other part, the more powerful one now, continued to grind his body forward. You’d think the earth was lined with fucking ball bearings, the way he kept slip-sliding ahead.

Oh, Cy… come on, baby, we’re gonna have us a time. A real screamer.

He’d seen Carlene a few years ago, back in Carbine. Sitting outside the dairy bar with a couple of her runny-nosed, scabby-elbowed kids still shitting in diapers. A human trash pit, it must be said. Oh, how the mighty, y’know? Big flappetty tits hanging off the front of her like two gunnysacks kicked down a bad stretch of road. She didn’t look dewy then, not one bit. More like doody.

He wasn’t surprised. She was nothing special. He remembered her ass had been dimpled with cellulite when he had finally seen it in the woodland moonlight. Like the cratered surface of the fucking moon! It had been like opening a really pretty box to find a dog turd inside. But the way she wore her jeans back then, you’d never know. Well, Cy knew. There had never been a damn thing special about her, which is what pissed Cy off the most—she’d sold him a bill of goods, which had put him on the hunt in the first place. But she was the same ignorant, ditchwater-dull bitch that you’d find anyplace. She hadn’t been worth his time or interest, and he held his old obsession against her.

He had sat down beside her kids, who were clearly the sort who would spend the rest of their bitter, useless lives in that tar pit town. Carlene’s eyes went wide with that old fear at the sight of him.

You’re a shell of your former self, he’d said to her, then got up and sauntered off.

It hadn’t even felt that good. Not like how he’d wanted. Life had already ripped the spine out of every dream she’d ever had. How much could the truth really hurt?

“Virgil,” he moaned now as his feet propelled him helplessly toward the fence, hoping his partner might hear. But it was the dead of night and Virgil was probably asleep, the pudding brain. Cyril felt a little sorry for Virgil. Dumb as a box of hammers, that one. He’d be lost without Cyril. Then he had to ask himself: Where am I going?

At the fence now. It ran fifteen feet up to the razor wire. Cy hooked his hands into the chain link. The sensation of his fingers clawing through that rough industrial metal washed a dry taste of horror through his mouth, as if he’d taken a big gulp of shitty wine.

Come on now, baby. We’re gonna have such fun…

He started to climb. The terror shot through him sharply, a bone-deep electricity radiating from every nerve center. He tried to jerk himself backward, hurl himself to the ground. He didn’t care if he broke a leg, or both legs plus an arm. Anything was better than being dragged toward that voice like a man chained to a winch.

He saw something in the trees. Carlene Herlihy. The pride of Carbine, Alabama. Naked as a jaybird. Jesus please us. He’d never seen a woman so goddamn lovely. Creamy-dreamy red bikini. Breasts not all droopy and sucked out, but firm and high. A nice tanglebush. Boy howdy, Cy would walk twenty miles of busted glass to lay one kiss between those legs.

Except her eyes. Yes indeedy, there was something a bit queer about those.

He was up the fence now. He’d scaled it like a blackie up a coconut tree, hadn’t he? Climbed it faster than that fairy English nigger ever could. Cyril paused, his body trembling, then started to crawl through the razor wire. Oh fuck. Stop. STOP! The wire was studded with long sharp blades just like the ones his father used to shave with. They effortlessly slit Cy’s clothes. Blood leapt out in greedy bursts.

He kept his eyes on Carlene. That traffic-stopping body. Those inhuman eyes. What would she do to him with that body—more important, what would she do with those eyes?

A razor raked his throat. Blood pissed out his neck, a shiny redness spritzing against the night. Fuck it all to hell. He didn’t even feel it. Carlene’s hands were moving between her legs, fingers feathering that space between. Her breasts were so big—way bigger than he ever remembered, though he was an ass man by trade—so big they threw round shadows down her rib cage.

There came the sound of a wet, shredding, rubbery fart—Cyril almost yelped laughter. Sweet Jesus, someone just ripped their britches! A real denim-burster. Except he knew that wasn’t it. In a far-off, unreal, daydreamy sense, he understood that some other part of his anatomy was responsible for that noise. It was the sound of something opening up, and something else slipping out. In some distant chamber of his mind—which sat beside a second chamber where something small and helpless gibbered in mindless fear—he realized that he also had a thudding erection.

A stiffie, as they were called. A peg-pounder. A cunt-corker. A bon—

He saw someone else now. Standing behind Carlene. A bigger shape. Tall. Pale. Kind of pear-shaped.

Playing some kind of musical instrument. A flute, was it?

Cyril was halfway through the razor wire. It was slicing him to ribbons. Who cared? It was good. He would go to Carlene and she would fix him. With her lips and tongue and tits and her perfect pink pussy. Her love. More than anything, that’s what Cy needed. The love of a good woman. That’s why he’d gone wayward. Followed the bad path. But he’d change all that. Him and Carlene together.

Cy jerked his leg. There was a long cold sizzle down his calf, and then that leg was free. He climbed down the other side of the fence. He felt heavy all over: the soddenness of his clothes, sopping with blood, plus a bricklike heaviness of mind. But it would be over soon. It would be fucking beautiful.

He staggered toward Carlene. The lights of Little Heaven reduced until there was no light at all. When he spun, laughing a little, he couldn’t see the chapel or bunkhouses. Just that vast darkness peering back at him.

Who gave a flying fuck, anyway? He had Carlene. Jesus, he’d treated her bad, hadn’t he? He’d been young. An animal. Could you fault him? Any creature is only the sum of its instincts and interests, right? But Cy could change. She could declaw him. He’d be okay to stand for that now. He’d be a kitten for her. He’d curl right up in her lap.

Dimly, so dimly now, Cyril understood that he was dead. Or he would be soon, in a way he had never imagined. The human mind lacks a capacity to embrace such oddities of fate. He was a mess, woozy as blood leaked out of him from a dozen fleshy rips. He smiled, the dopey grin of a child. But a small, helpless voice, locked in the deepest cells of his brain, continued to scream without ceasing.

And Carlene was right fucking there. Just… bam! Ripe as a plucked peach. The years peeled away and they were both young again. Wouldn’t that be just the best? To live forever as you once were, back when you could run half a mile at a dead sprint, drink a six-pack, and then fuck like a rabbit? Yeah, that was the ticket!

She opened her arms. The flute’s music rose to a weird pitch that made his ears itch.

“Carlene…”

Baby…

Carlene’s face started to change. To bubble and run and worse things—

Oh, so so much worse.

Which was when Cyril Neeps began to scream for real, and for a long, long time. But of course, not one soul in Little Heaven heard a thing.

30

ELI’S BACK.

Nate awoke lathered in sweat, clutching his belly as if he’d been stabbed. These two words echoed within his mind.

Nate got up. The bunkhouse floor was icy on his bare feet. He went to the window. The moon was a ghost behind a smear of thin night clouds. A security lamp burned weakly; yesterday Nate had overheard that gasoline was running low, so the generators were running at half power.

Wind licked through paper-thin slits around the window frame. Nate shivered. He clenched his jaw. Stop it. Don’t be a baby. He glanced at his father, who slept with a pinched look on his face.

Distantly, Nate heard the notes of a flute. Thin, high notes that held no melody—more the random, inharmonious notes the wind might make as it blew through a dry reed. Yet there was something compelling about the sound. Frighteningly so.

Nate moved toward the bunkhouse door. He was barely aware he was doing it. His arms were overtaken by the numbness he’d felt when a dentist stuck a needle in his gums before filling a cavity. His hand was wrapped around the doorknob—he looked at his fingers clasping it and thought, Huh, isn’t that weird?

It took an enormous effort, summoned from a part of his brain he had never accessed, to activate his other hand and hook his fingers to the window frame. Grindingly, teeth set, he dragged himself back to the window. His fingers pulled away from the doorknob, which felt as warm as a penny clutched in a hot fist.

“Daddy…,” he whispered in a hoarse rasp. His father did not stir.

Nate stared out at the compound. Just shadows, shifting and swirling…

He’s back.

Eli Rathbone. Nate saw him. Nate knew it was Eli, even though he didn’t look much like his old self. Eli didn’t really look human anymore.

The bold strokes were still there, sure. Eli had two arms, two legs. But everything else was off. That was one of his mom’s pet words. The old man who sat in the public park watching kids play with hungry eyes was off. The neighborhood boy who used to walk down the sidewalk after a rainstorm eating every wriggling worm he could find was off. You know off when you see it, his mom used to say.

Eli Rathbone was naked, his skin white as the chalk dust they spread on the base paths at the ball diamond. He radiated a sick glow, like those deep-sea fish whose bodies produce their own light. He was so skinny now that Nate could see each of his ribs, even the short one at the bottom. His head was just a skull covered in onionskin. His arms were elongated, the arms of an orangutan. He did not seem to walk so much as float—

He ghosted across the compound under the sputtering light of the security lamps. Shadows pooled under his feet—shadows that seemed to bristle with a powerful intensity, like a collection of tiny individual shadows all huddled together.

That flute music zephyred through the air. Each note bristled with an intensity that quilled the hairs on Nate’s neck. He wished he hadn’t woken up. A helplessness rose up in him, this sense that he and everyone else in Little Heaven had been tricked. Though he could not articulate it, he felt the same way an animal in a snare must feel as the trapper’s footsteps approached through the glen.

Eli’s head swiveled. His eyes pinned Nate. Eli’s eyes were black as tar. Nate felt totally naked, as if his body had been touched with a powerful spotlight. Eli smiled. His teeth were all gone. His skin sagged. It was the smile of a million-year-old infant.

Eli passed out of sight beyond the edge of the bunkhouse that belonged to the Rasmussen family. John and Anna and their daughter, Elsa, who had been nice to Nate when he first showed up. That ended when she started to play the games dreamed up by Eli and the Redhill brothers. All the children had slowly given themselves over to cruelty. It was like watching a sickness spread. And now everyone was infected.

He stood at the window for a span of pulseless seconds. Then he went to his father’s bed.

“Dad,” he said. “Get up.”

He shook his father. His dad’s eyes stayed closed, a clenched expression fixed on his face.

“Dad, come on, please.”

His father mumbled and rolled over. Nate returned to the window. A squalid darkness overhung Little Heaven. Nothing moved. Not a single insect buzzed around the exterior lamps. Then—

They came around the edge of the Rasmussens’ bunkhouse.

Eli Rathbone came first, followed by Elsa Rasmussen. Then the Redhill boys, Elton and Billy. Linked hand to hand to hand. Elsa wore pajamas with a pattern of umbrellas. Billy and Elton only wore their underwear, their undeveloped chests pocked in gooseflesh. They did not walk so much as skip, as if they were playing some school-yard game.

One-two, skip to my Lou—skip to my Lou, my darlin’…

They passed under the spotlight. They weren’t just holding hands—their skin was melted together like sticks of wax heated with a Zippo, then pressed together. An ugly mess of flesh welded into a distended knot. They skipped along, Eli leading, toward a spot in the fence where the darkness collected in a narrow slit.

As one, their heads swiveled in perfect unison to Nate. His groin went tight, then seemed to splinter apart, little terror-spiders scuttling up and down through his body, turning his knees to jelly and shooting pins and needles down his fingertips.

Dreamily, in a state of near-paralyzing horror, Nate backed away from the window. He went to his father again.

“Dad!” he said, finding his voice. “Wake up! Wake up!”

Nate’s fingers clawed into his father’s neck. He shook him as hard as he could. He would sink his teeth into his father’s shoulder next—anything to rouse him.

“Wuzza?” his father said, his voice thick with sleep.

“Get up! GET UP!”

Reggie sat up. The fear in Nate’s voice must have penetrated his fogged brain.

“What, Nate?”

“Come look,” he said, hauling on his father’s arm. “Please. Quick.”

“Nate, what is the matter with you?”

His father gazed at Nate with a look of confused apathy. His father had never been the most independent thinker—after his near-death experience, he’d become fond of phrases like The Lord’s will governs all things—but now he too often wore this deeply bewildered expression. It made Nate angry: his father had checked his brain at the gates of Little Heaven, which left Nate to make the grown-up decisions.

“Get UP!”

Obediently, Nate’s father followed him to the window. Eli and the others were almost out of sight as they skipped into the widening dark.

“Look!” Nate said, pointing.

His father followed Nate’s finger. Then his eyes did a funny thing. They went kind of soapy and retracted into their sockets like a turtle’s head tucking into its shell.

“Look at what?”

His voice seemed to come from the corner of the bunkhouse instead of his mouth. Nate gazed at him with a mixture of shock and disbelief.

“That’s Eli, Dad. Eli and Elsa Rasmussen and the Redhills, Elton and Billy. Can’t you see them, Dad? Right there?”

His father laughed—the laugh of a person desperately trying to find the humor in something that isn’t funny at all: a car crash or a public execution or a yellowy old body toppling out of its casket at a funeral.

“There’s nothing out there, Nate. You’re imagining things.”

His father wouldn’t look at him. Nate’s disbelief shaded into dread as a sinister realization began to dawn on him.

Either his father couldn’t actually see what Nate was seeing—some protective part of his brain had switched on, erasing the four gruesome children from his sight…

Or else—and this possibility was unspeakably worse—they were seeing the exact same thing, only his father was either too terrified or too cowardly to acknowledge it.

“Oh, Dad. Dad, please—”

“There’s nothing out there,” his father said robotically. “Not a thing.”

A profound desolation settled over Nate. He felt alone in a way he had never thought possible. He might as well be at the farthest reaches of the universe, at the point where all light died.

“Go back to bed, Nate. You’re being silly.”

His father turned—Nate got the sense of his dad’s body as a tightly coiled spring on the verge of snapping. He ruffled Nate’s hair. His fingers were hard and his nails too long; it was like being raked with sharp twigs. He lay down on his bed, his back to Nate.

Nate’s gaze fled to the window. Eli and the others had vanished. But he could see something in that rip of darkness. Just an outline.

A figure. Far too tall to be human. Long-legged and long-armed, with a giant cask belly. It capered and jigged with evident merriment. Smaller shapes, children-sized ones, danced around it. The discordant melody of the flute cut through the night.

The shape retreated. The smaller shapes followed it into the wooded dark.

31

AMOS FLESHER AWOKE to the sounds of his empire crumbling.

He was unceremoniously hauled out of a contented sleep—a dream where the world was covered with living black oil and he had the only rowboat. The Voice bubbled up from the oil, whispering and hissing…

Next: hysterical shouts. Names hollered over and over.

“Elsa! Elsa!”

“Billy! Elton!”

“Oh God! Oh God, it’s happened again!”

“ELLLLLLSAAAAAA!”

Next: rapping on his door.

“Reverend!”

He opened the door only to be confronted with the agonized faces of several worshippers. Maude and Terry Redhill, the Rasmussens, a few more.

“She’s gone!” Anna Rasmussen screamed. “Our baby girl!”

Worshippers were streaming into the square by then, their faces bloated with sleep. The Reverend’s mind whirled as he processed the situation, calculating the new configuration of things and finding his own angle within it.

“Calm down,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

“She’s gone!” Anna Rasmussen screamed, harpyishly. “Our daughter! Her bed was empty this morning!”

“And Billy and Elton’s, too,” said Terry Redhill.

Amos’s mind clicked and ratcheted. “You’re telling me—”

“Reverend! They’re gone!” Maude Redhill spat. “They’ve been taken just like Eli Rathbone got took!”

Everyone watched the Reverend. Amos was struck by how sick they all looked: their bodies withered, their postures sunken. Their weakness made him ill. His gaze twigged on Reggie Longpre and his son. There was something in their faces he couldn’t intuit and didn’t entirely care for.

“Have the grounds been searched?” he said. “Every nook, every cranny?”

Nobody spoke. The Reverend sensed their collective uncertainty and needled through that gap.

“Search the compound!” he said. “Everyone, now! They could be hiding somewhere. A game to them.”

“It’s not a game!” shouted Anna. “They’re gone! Taken into the woods! Gone just like Eli and Eli’s parents!”

“We don’t know that, Sister Rasmussen. I understand that you’re—”

“We should have left—all of us! As soon as Eli went missing and then came back… came back…”

His worshippers’ faces reflected a vaporous panic—now laced with a hint of resentment directed toward Amos himself. He must step nimbly here.

“Search the grounds,” he said emphatically. “I must confer with the Lord our God, seeking His guidance.”

The worshippers reluctantly dispersed. Anna Rasmussen glanced over her shoulder at him—a poisonous, hateful glare. Amos pictured his hands closing around her throat and tightening until her eyes filled with blood…

“Cyril’s gone, too.”

Amos turned to find Virgil Swicker standing beside him.

“What?”

“Cy.” Virgil looked spooked. “Can’t find him anywhere.”

The Reverend’s mouth filled with bitter saliva. He could barely contain the nervous energy building inside of him; he wanted to scream to let it free.

“If he’s not there, then who is watching the boy?”

Off Virgil’s stunned silence, Amos started across the square at a fast clip. He had to restrain himself from breaking into a run. Virgil tagged along on his heels. He reached the bunkhouse where Eli Rathbone was being held. Cyril’s chair was empty. Amos took a deep breath and unfastened the padlock.

The bunkhouse was empty. Only the fetid stink of the boy’s now absent body remained. Amos closed and locked the door again.

“You keep your mouth shut,” he said to Virgil, who nodded in docile assent.

Amos needed a plan. Quickly. He sized up his options.

One, they could abandon Little Heaven. But if the children really were missing, nobody would agree to that with the little bastards still lost in the woods…

Two, they could accuse someone of taking all four children. A scapegoat, or scapegoats. By Amos’s count, there were two possibilities. He cocked his head, as if to catch the strident bleating of the goats best suited to his purposes—those whose necks could be most easily slit.

“Go to the outsiders’ quarters,” he said. “Do not let them leave.”

A FRANTIC SEARCH ENSUED. The compound was scoured. The children were not found. By the time the worshippers returned to the square, Amos was ready.

“I held palaver with the Lord,” he said. “And I heard His Voice, clear and unfiltered.”

The faces of the worshippers changed: they went from fearful, perhaps even slightly mistrustful, to enrapt—even that bitch Anna Rasmussen, with her hopeful red-rimmed eyes. They wanted answers. Which was all people like them ever wanted. Any answer at all, so they didn’t have to think on their own.

“The evil comes from outside,” he said. “From those not pure of heart or spirit. We opened our door to them, as good and God-fearing folk must, and they have repaid our kindness with malice of the deepest and most hateful nature.”

He pointed at the bunkhouse shared by the English faggot and the burn-faced woman.

“Them. They are the evil that has come as a plague upon us.”

This was the smart bet, and the shrewdest move Amos could make under the circumstances. His flock was already suspicious of the outsiders—Cyril and Virgil had overheard their whispers, and filtered them back to him. It would be an easy pill to swallow; they wanted to swallow it. He watched their faces. Sweat trickled down his neck and soaked his collar. He had worked hard, so hard, for years to put these people under his yoke. They trusted him… or they had until just lately.

One by one their faces began to reflect this. They began to believe. Yes. Of course. The evil lurked, as it always did, in the hearts of men. And the four outsiders had come from far away, bringing a terrible curse with them. They were the devil’s Trojan horse. Little Heaven had accepted and sheltered them, only to be poisoned by them. The Reverend’s people needed a target to channel their rage and fear into. All Amos had to do was provide one.

“Get them,” he said.

EBENEZER OBSERVED the morning’s proceedings with a gathering sense of doom.

He’d leapt out of bed when those agonized screams shattered the calm. He landed on both feet. His ankle was quite a bit better. He could put almost his full weight on it. He and Ellen watched people gather in front of the Reverend’s place. He opened the door and listened. Ellen was at his elbow.

“Oh God,” she whispered when they overheard the Little Heavenites tell the Reverend about the new missing kids. But her nephew was safe. Eb saw the boy standing beside his stoop-shouldered loaf of a father.

Ellen told Eb that she wanted to help with the search of the compound.

“You should, if only to show your empathy,” he said. “But I can’t go.”

“Why not?”

“My ankle.”

“You’re fine,” Ellen said. “You’re walking on it now.”

“Yes, but I don’t want them to know that.”

“Why not?”

Ebenezer thought about quoting Sun Tzu but thought better of it. Ellen said, “Fine, do whatever you want,” and began to pull her boots on. But then Virgil—the more moronic of the Reverend’s two lapdogs—showed up.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he announced.

“Why not?” said Ellen.

“Reverend’s orders.”

After that, the compound was searched. The kids were not found. Worshippers rounded back into the square. Ebenezer listened at the shut door, trying to catch what the Reverend was saying.

“I believe this stands to end poorly for us,” he said to Ellen.

They watched out the bunkhouse window. The Reverend pointed in their direction. A group of supplicants began to stalk toward them. Next, the door swung open and the denizens of Little Heaven poured in.

A red-faced man rushed Eb. He kicked the man in the knee. The man screamed and twisted aside, but another man steamed in behind him and clocked Ebenezer spang in the face. Jesus! Wasn’t very Christian, was it? Ebenezer reeled to see Ellen crushed under a weight of bodies. She was being dragged outside. The man who’d slugged Ebenezer came at him again—big, with a baleful glare in his eyes. The father of the missing girl, Eb was pretty sure. He pinned Ebenezer’s arms to his sides; Eb brought a knee up into his gut. Eb felt slightly bad doing so, the man’s agonies being what they were. Undeterred, the menfolk of Little Heaven hurled themselves at him. Ebenezer tagged a few others with solid shots as they rushed him, but ultimately they got him down, hit him until he could taste his own blood, and hauled him into the harsh morning sunshine.

“You took the children,” the Reverend said. “The four of you planned it, and the other two executed it. They are holding them now, aren’t they? You thought that we wouldn’t catch you out? The Lord has laid your plans bare.”

“Why would we take them?” Eb spat blood. “That makes no sense. Can’t you see that?”

What did these people think they were—a roaming quartet of kidnappers combing the woods for isolated camps so they could poach children? It wasn’t logical, but Eb knew logic had a way of dissolving in circumstances like this. Fear and worry ate into reason like acid, making the most ludicrous possibilities seem plausible.

“Oh, but isn’t the devil a coy liar?” The Reverend’s lips fleered into a manic grin. “The father of lies! Do you think you could prey on our most innocent ones? Did you think the Lord and His humble servants would not strike you down for your vile trespasses?”

“How did nobody hear?” Eb said. “Three kids are gone—”

“Four,” said the Reverend. “Eli Rathbone is missing again, too.”

A strangled moan from somewhere in the crowd at this news.

“Snatched from his bed like the others,” the Reverend plowed on. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

“Four kids gone,” Eb said, swallowing the blood collecting in the back of his throat, “and nobody heard anything? How could that be?”

The Reverend said, “Satan has his ways. His minions, too.”

A voice broke out of the crowd. “Where is Cyril?”

The worshippers peeled back. Otis Langtree stood there, flanked by Charlie Fairweather. They were caked in trail dust, wearing backpacks. Eb figured they had just recently rounded back into the compound.

The Reverend stood stunned, a wristwatch stopped midtick. “What?”

“Cyril,” Otis repeated. “Your man.”

“You two left the compound,” said the Reverend with a leaden swallow. “Isn’t that right? You left with the other outsiders. Where did you go?”

“They wanted to get their gear,” said Otis. “From their campground. We guided them back. We would’ve been back sooner, but we got turned around.” He bit the inside of his cheek. “Lost all track of time. Hours that neither one of us can account for. Something’s gone real screwy in those woods, Reverend.”

“And the first thing we noticed coming back is that Cyril, he ain’t standing watch over Eli’s quarters like he was the other night.” Charlie squinted at Amos Flesher—a bold, assessing glance. “Is he still here, Reverend—Cyril, I mean? He anywhere about?”

Weird voltages raced under the Reverend’s face. “I… He should be—”

Ebenezer watched the scene unfold with keen interest. It was happening fast, but then the balance, when it swung, often did so swiftly—

“Reverend?” said Otis. “If Cyril’s not anywhere to be found…” A meaningful pause, with a nod to Eb and Ellen. “With all due respect, I think you might have chased the wrong dog here. I’m not certain these are your culprits.”

The congregants murmured among themselves. Charlie and Otis were two of the most respected persons at Little Heaven.

Reverend Flesher’s eyes went hard. “The Lord has spoken to me, Brother Langtree. These are His words.”

Otis’s head dropped…

No! thought Ebenezer. Don’t let him cow you! Be a man for once in your goddamn life!

Then, slowly, Otis’s head rose again.

Bloody good show! There’s the iron in that spine!

“Reverend, I’ve been with you for many years,” Otis said. “I followed you and I’m going to keep on following. But I think this one time you got your signals crossed up.”

Another murmur raced through the throng, an electric one this time. Dissent, discord. Ebenezer felt a shifting of the tide—a physical, almost visual swing, like the bubble in a carpenter’s level.

“We’ve been with those other two,” said Charlie. “The outsiders. We took them back to their camp, like I said. We left them many miles shy of Little Heaven. But they ain’t running away. They aim to return. I don’t forecast they should arrive much before dark, if so at all tonight.”

“All that’s to say, they were nowhere near here last night,” said Otis.

“And these two,” said Charlie, with a nod at Eb and Ellen. “They been in their bunkhouse all this time, ain’t that right?”

The Reverend’s face shaded pig-belly pink. Eb could practically see the gears inside his skull burning out in stinking puffs of smoke.

“All things considered, I think Cyril might be your man,” said Otis.

“You take that back!” Virgil said tremblingly.

Otis ignored him. “It might not have been Cyril. Snatching four kids right out of their beds, quiet as a whisper? That’d be a tough job for a whole team of men. So… it could have been something else.”

“What else could it be?” the mother of the missing boys said despairingly.

Charlie shot Otis an angry look. “Nothing,” Charlie said. “It’s not worth talking about now. We have to search the woods,” he went on, not looking at the Reverend.

“In groups,” Otis stressed. “Four or five people to a search party.”

“And if we don’t find them by midafternoon, we send a delegation out to get a proper search team,” said Charlie. “Helicopters, sniffer dogs, and whatnot.”

“I second that idea, Brother Fairweather,” said the missing girl’s mother. “Oh please, let’s do that.”

The fathers of the missing children nodded to each other. One of them went over and helped Ellen up. Another man hauled Ebenezer to his feet. There were no apologies—they couldn’t quite bring themselves to do that, not in front of the Reverend. That small kindness rendered, the men and their wives headed toward the gates. Otis and Charlie followed behind them.

“We’ll pitch in,” Ebenezer called after them.

Charlie accepted the offer with a nod. Eb and Ellen began to make their way toward the gates, too. The remaining worshippers stepped aside to let them pass.

“But you can’t…,” Eb heard the Reverend say.

Only a few had stayed with Reverend Flesher: Doc Lewis, Nate’s father, an unidentified man with the carbuncled face of a toad, and the cook.

“The Lord will punish you!” Flesher shouted. “Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God!” His voice rose to an impotent screech, his face knotted in rage. “The Almighty shall smite you for flouting the word of His earthbound prophet!”

“Oh, shut up, you twat,” Ebenezer muttered, and kept going.

32

MICAH AND MINERVA arrived back at Little Heaven with dusk coming on. In the waning light, they could see torches burning between the trees.

“Not again,” said Minerva. “Please no.”

Their return had been remarkably uneventful. When the morning sun washed over the Preston School, the field lay empty. Maybe the creatures had an aversion to daylight, because they were nowhere to be seen. Micah and Minny hiked through the day, talking little, and made it back in time to hear the shouts ringing out from the woods surrounding the compound. Names being called in hoarse, frightened voices.

They walked through Little Heaven’s main gates, which had been left unguarded. Was everyone out in the woods? A generator chugged sluggishly, powering the overhead spots—but Micah couldn’t help noticing that the bulbs flickered, blinking out for half a second before burning again. His eye roamed over the compound under the faltering lights, settling on the windowless bunkhouse that the boy Eli had been held in. Neither Cyril nor Virgil was occupying the guard post. He walked over. A busted padlock lay near the door. He turned the knob. The door opened into a small room. The smell was foul. The bed was empty, but there was a gluey stain on the mattress.

“How bad do you figure things are?” said Minerva, joining him.

Micah said, “Bad.”

They dropped their packs off at their bunkhouse. Their weapons they kept. Finding nobody about, Micah wandered to the edge of Little Heaven while Minerva changed into fresh clothes.

The children’s playground sat forlorn in the dusk. Micah sat on one of the swings and watched the torches bob through the forest. The sky was the red of a blood blister, the sun’s final rays pooling behind the trees. He had never been scared of nightfall. Even as a child, he’d welcomed the darkness. But bad things tended to happen at night in Little Heaven. Those same terrible things might happen in the day, too, soon enough. But at least they would be able to see them coming.

Ellen Bellhaven appeared on the other side of the fence. Her clothes were smudged with dirt and sap.

“Hey,” she said to Micah.

“Hey.”

She entered through the gates and sat on the swing beside him. Her eyes were encircled by dark rings like washers. A goose egg sat high on her forehead.

“Were you hit?” Micah said.

She nodded. Rage flared inside him. She put a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m fine,” she said, and related the morning’s events. Micah closed his eye and rocked on the swing.

“How many this time?”

“Three children. Two brothers and a little girl,” Ellen said. “And Eli’s gone again, too. We’ve been searching all day. I’m worried.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t see things getting any better.”

“No.”

“This isn’t about Nate anymore. We should all get out. Every person here.”

“There was a chance we could have. But now… the kids.”

Ellen nodded. “We can’t leave without them. It would be…” She sighed. “Hate to use the word, but it would be un-Christian of us.”

“The Reverend?”

“I don’t know how much power his word holds anymore,” Ellen said. “People are scared, Micah. Really, really scared.”

Micah felt that fear seeping out of the woods, where all of Little Heaven was searching for those kids. He could almost smell it coming out of Ellen’s pores, too. He had known that fear himself, years ago. It was kindling in him again now.

Fear finds a home in you. That was a lesson Micah had learned at some price. It finds the softest spots imaginable and sets up residence. That place behind your knees where the nerves bundle up, buckling them. Inside your lungs, pinching the air out of them. Within your head, spreading like fungus. Fear will make you abandon those you care for, even those you claim to love—the people you tell yourself you’d save, sacrificing your body for theirs, if it ever came to that. And hypothetically, yes, you would… at least in those dream scenarios we all concoct. The burning houses, the crazed gunmen. You’d risk that heat or take that bullet. In a man’s fantasies, he always does the right thing.

But sometimes a man must face the absolute reality of his fear. And he’ll discover that terror can chew him up and turn him into something else. A monster of wrath, or of cowardice. That man finds himself inhabiting the skin of a total stranger… except not really. It is the creature he becomes in the pressure cooker. Fear can warp a man. Turn him into a repellent specimen whom he never thought he could be, not in a million years.

Micah knew. He’d seen it. He’d lived it.

In the summer of 1953, a month before the war ended, Micah had found two American soldiers torturing a Korean POW. The incident was being overseen by Captain Luker Beechwood, Micah’s commander. Beechwood was the classic southern dandy. The sort of man whose father drank sweet tea on the porch of the plantation manor where his forebears had had their slaves whipped in the dooryard.

The POW was a kid, eighteen. He was strapped to a chair with baling twine inside an isolated shack on the edge of their encampment. The soldiers were busily cutting pieces of skin off his chest and arms. The POW’s trousers were soaked with blood, and snot was bubbling out of his nose.

“We’re just letting some air into him, Private,” Captain Beechwood told Micah.

The soldiers were from Micah’s unit. One was Lyle Sykes. Fat, suffering from trench foot. He had a furtive and rattish air despite his girth. He was the sort of soldier whose skull you considered clandestinely putting a bullet into, out of the sense that he was somehow more dangerous than the enemy. Declan Hooper was the other man. A good egg. Micah was not surprised to see Sykes at the scene of this atrocity, but Hooper was a shock.

A sack sat at Captain Beechwood’s feet. Inside, Micah caught the gleam of wire cutters, a hammer, some nails. The air was hot inside the shack, filled with the reek of blood.

Micah said: “This is not to code.”

Micah was twenty. He had grown up rough, and by then had done some rough business himself. But what was happening in the shack had nothing to do with the war. Micah understood that Beechwood and the other two men could have as easily done the same to a US soldier if they thought they could get away with it.

“Private Shughrue,” Beechwood said in his plummy southern twang, “this man has information of a vital nature. We are simply endeavoring to extract it.”

Micah regarded them. Sykes, beefy and beady-eyed. Hooper, looking like a boy caught filching dimes from his mother’s purse. But what Micah recalled powerfully was a personal dryness: his own fear leeched the moisture out of his eyes and nose and mouth, his veins running thick as if his blood had been mixed with flour.

“You cannot,” he said more firmly.

Beechwood smiled. “We are, and we will.”

With that, Micah hit his CO in the face. Beechwood’s nose cracked and he fell back with a squawk. The Korean soldier moaned. Hooper and Sykes came on next, clouting Micah with closed fists. Micah fought back, but one of them clipped his chin and sent him crashing to the ground. Beechwood had recovered by then. They all put it to him, stomping his skull with their heavy mud-caked boots.

“Enough,” Beechwood announced, panting. “We’ll kill him. Can’t get away with that.”

They dragged Micah to the brig, where he was imprisoned for assaulting his commanding officer. One month in a lightless cell, fed bread teeming with lice. By the time he got out, Captain Beechwood and the others had shipped out. He never knew what became of the Korean soldier.

Once home, Micah nursed fantasies of hunting Beechwood down and doing to his former commander what Beechwood had done to the Korean. But Micah’s tendency to square the scales was not so strong then. And anyway, some part of him understood the impulse. The three of them had been scared deep in their souls. Fear manifested in terrible ways, especially during wartime. It shows a man the face he didn’t know he had. Later Sykes and Hooper might have been remorseful—Hooper especially—waking with nightmares about what they had done. Beechwood, probably not. All men are built to different tolerances. Put in identical straits, they react differently. And those who act rightly despite that crawling fear cast shame upon those who cave in to it.

Quite simply, you never really know what type of person you are. Micah understood that now. A man never can tell which side of the line he lives on. He will exist forever ignorant until that moment—ruinous and unflinching—when he is forced to confront his hidden inner self.

“Did you get everything from the camp?” Ellen asked, snapping Micah back to the present. Off Micah’s nod, she said, “Any problems?”

“We saw something.”

“What?”

“Some… creatures” was all Micah could say.

“Animals?”

“Not quite.”

He could tell she was about to launch into a barrage of questions about their encounter. Tiredly, he held his hand up to stop her.

“They could be dangerous,” he said. “That is the key point. They may have followed us back… or they have been here all along.”

“Did they attack you?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

How could he frame it? That those things had seemed more like prison guards than attack dogs? He didn’t want to talk about it. Or about the Preston School, either—both he and Minerva felt it would sow deeper fear within a group that was already crippled with it.

Ellen said, “I made something for you.”

She reached into her pocket and came out with three small glass balls.

“They’re eyes,” she said. “I made them in the glassworks.”

“You did not have to do that.”

“Nobody has to do anything, Micah. I did it because I wanted to. I tried to match the shade.” She peered into his eye. “I think I got pretty close. Go on. Try one.”

He took one from her palm. It looked like a marble, except with a credible human eye structure at its center. He reached for his eye patch… then hesitated.

“It is not pretty,” he said.

“I don’t imagine so.” She feathered her burn scar with the fingers of her free hand. “At least yours can be covered up.”

He took the patch off. His empty socket had some lint in it, same as what collects in a belly button. He swabbed it out and tried to pop the glass eye into his socket. It wouldn’t fit.

“Wait a sec,” said Ellen.

She went to the pump and returned with a bucket of water. She dipped the eye and handed it back. The wet eye still didn’t fit. It was too big.

She handed him another one. “They’re slightly different sizes.”

He dipped the second eye in the water. This one slipped past his eyelid and into his socket. He could feel it bumping around.

“Too small.”

“Aha, it’s like the three bears,” she said. “Porridge too hot, porridge too cold.” She held up the third and last eye. “Let’s hope this one’s just right.”

Micah winked; the second eye popped out of his socket. He tried the last one. It fit pretty well.

“Let’s take a look,” Ellen said. “It’s… hmmm, it’s drifting left. I’ll center it.”

She put her finger on the eye. Micah felt it move.

“There.” She clapped. “Perfect. You look like less of a desperado now. You can get a square john job after this. A cashier, a bank teller.”

Now Micah smiled. “Those would suit me fine.”

He could picture it. The little house in the burbs, the white picket fence. The nine-to-five. Ellen was part of it, too. A goofy fantasy, but still, he could see it.

“Can I ask?” he said, touching his face—the spot where Ellen’s was burned.

She faced away from him. Had he spoken out of turn?

“A bold ask, Mr. Shughrue,” she said.

She remained silent for a spell. Then she faced him and said, “When someone can no longer scare you into doing what they want you to do… well, let’s just say they resort to other tactics.”

She pumped her legs and started to swing. Her eyes did not leave his own.

“You don’t know how bad someone is sometimes,” she said. “Because at first, none of that badness is evident. It’s all goodness—or, if not outright goodness, then at least nothing especially cruel. That’s my problem. I like guys with an edge. But there’s edge and then there’s edge, and when I was younger, I couldn’t tell the difference. My sister’s the same way.”

She pumped her legs harder. The swing carried her up and down. The hinges squeaked.

“So when you finally see that badness, Micah, you’re kind of wed to it. That badness doesn’t want to let you go. And it gets angrier and angrier that you won’t bend to it the way it thinks you should. It’s pissed that you aren’t scared of it anymore. So it tries to make you scared again. Any old way it can.”

“Uhhh…,” said a voice behind them. “Hey.”

Micah craned his neck to see Ellen’s nephew, Nate. Ellen dragged her feet through the dirt, bringing the swing to a stop.

“What are you doing here?” she said. “Isn’t someone watching you kids?”

“I snuck away.”

Ellen said, “God, Nate. Someone has to know where you are at all times.”

Nate sawed his forearm across his nose. “Sorry.”

Ellen went over to him. Hugged him fiercely. The boy didn’t protest.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything this morning,” he said. “When… when they dragged you and the other man out of your house.”

“Like what?” Ellen said. “What could you have said?”

Nate breathed in and let it out in a shivering exhale. He mumbled something too garbled for Micah to understand.

“What did you say?” said Ellen.

“I said, I saw them last night. Eli and Elsa and the Redhills.”

The story poured out of the boy. He told them that Eli had come back last night. Nate had seen the four children daisy-chained together, hand to hand. Something about flute music from the woods—that detail raised the short hairs on the back of Micah’s neck. Nate’s last sight of the children was of them dancing around some enormous shape that the boy could not name.

“Do I sound crazy?” Nate asked when he was done.

Ellen said, “No, you don’t sound crazy. Not at all.”

Micah did not know how to take Nate’s story, though it was clear the boy believed it. But then the thing he had glimpsed at their old campsite the other night wasn’t believable, either—and it had been real enough.

“Did you tell your father?” Micah asked.

The boy’s chest hitched. “He didn’t see anything. Or… I don’t know, maybe he couldn’t. He said I was imagining it. That there was nuh-nuh-nothing.”

Ellen hugged Nate again. “We believe you, Nate. Okay?”

Nate sucked back snot. He had nearly cried, but then he hadn’t.

“We’re going to get out of here,” Ellen said. “This place? Little Heaven? We’re done with it. We’ll take as many people as want to go with us. Your dad, too. Hike back, get in our car, and drive someplace for a burger and fries and a chocolate milkshake. A real pig-out. Sound like a plan?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How about it, Micah? Sound like a good plan to you?”

Whether it was a good plan or not, Micah wasn’t sure she should promise the boy anything.

Otis and Charlie appeared at the fence. Their faces were etched with defeat.

“Good to see you back,” said Otis wearily. “No further troubles?”

“No,” Micah told him.

“Glad to hear it. Like the new eye, too. It humanizes you.”

“Hey,” Ellen chided. “He looked plenty human before.”

Otis’s shrug was noncommittal. “Charlie and I are leaving tonight with Terry Redhill. Time to get the police. Get some real help. We should have done it days ago, I guess.”

“We’re taking the truck, Micah,” said Charlie. “Fastest way. Will you come with us?”

33

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, they were set to depart.

Darkness bled over the compound. The search had been called off. Only the Rasmussens were still looking; they had broken away from their search party, moving deeper into the woods—just like the Rathbones had done. And the Rathbones had never come back.

The remaining denizens of Little Heaven assembled to see the pickup truck off. They were worn and fearful, their faces showing little hope. The Reverend was nowhere in sight.

Charlie and Otis sat in the cab of the truck, Terry Redhill in the bed. “We’ll drive to the river,” Otis told everybody, speaking over the idling engine. “If it’s running low enough to cross, we’ll take the truck over. If not, we hike the rest of the way.”

Charlie spoke next. “We can make it down in three-odd hours in the truck. If we have to hike, maybe a day. We’ll tell the police. They’ll send helicopters and sniffer dogs. The whole shebang.”

Charlie’s wife and son stood beside the truck. Both looked worried. Maude Redhill hopped up on the tailgate and gave her husband a kiss. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face blotchy, as if she had been crying nonstop for hours.

“Please be careful,” she said. “I’ve already lost enough today.”

“Not lost,” Terry said. “Just missing. We’ll find them. God will see to it.”

“Are you sure you won’t come?” Charlie asked Micah.

Micah approached the truck. He spoke low so nobody could hear. “Those things. They might have followed us back.”

Otis bit his lip. “You think so?”

Micah said, “There is a passing chance.”

“How many?”

“I could not tell you.”

“Do you think they’ll attack?”

Micah met Otis’s question with a shrug. Charlie and Otis conferred. The truck’s diesel engine ticked along, blurring out their voices.

“Here’s the thing,” Otis said finally. “There may be more of those things out there.” He pointed down the road they would be driving. “And if we don’t get past them and down the hill—well then, everyone here is in real trouble.”

“What about Minerva and the black fella you came with?” Charlie asked. “That one seems a pretty icy character.”

Micah glanced over his shoulder. Minerva stood fifty yards back from the group. Ebenezer leaned against the door to their bunkhouse, much farther away.

“Couldn’t they do something if those things tried to get past the gates—I mean, if you go with us now?” Charlie said.

Micah figured they could, if compelled to. Minerva for sure; Ebenezer was a fifty-fifty proposition—but if those abominations invaded Little Heaven, Ebenezer would have to fight them as a matter of survival.

“We need you,” Otis said simply.

Micah glanced back at Ellen. She stood beside Nate, their shoulders nearly touching. She nodded as if to give permission.

“Give me that scattergun,” he said to Charlie.

Charlie handed an Ithaca pump-action through the window, along with a box of shells. Micah hopped up on the bed beside Terry Redhill. He distributed the shells between his pockets, then jammed two into his mouth, storing them in either cheek—he looked like a chipmunk hoarding nuts. He slapped his palm on the roof.

“Go.”

They set off down the dirt path. Dark lay heavy between the trees. Otis flicked on the high beams. The firs shone whitely under their light, as if they were composed of bone instead of wood. Terry Redhill crouched in the bed beside Micah. A big man with a thick red beard. Pinpricks of sweat stood out on his forehead.

The truck prowled along at five miles an hour. The chassis juddered over rocks and stumps. Drool collected in Micah’s mouth; he removed one shell, spat, then jammed it back in. It was a trick he’d learned during the war; the company sniper always kept one cartridge in his mouth.

It’s the quickest way to get at it, he’d told Micah. Always have one bullet in your mouth for when you really need it.

Little Heaven receded. Otis flicked on the dome light as he nudged the truck down a steep slope; its knobby tires stuttered over the shale, differentials squealing. Micah and Terry leaned against the cab as the truck tilted downward. The headlights pointed directly at the road, throwing the fringing forest into inky blackness—

Micah saw it before anyone else, but even he caught it too late. It flared from the left-hand side, his bad side, streaking out of the trees and hammering into the truck. A huge shape rocked the truck on its axles, the driver-side wheels temporarily leaving the ground. Micah tumbled into Terry Redhill, who barely managed to stay in the bed. Charlie let out a muffled shout; Otis hit the gas as the truck slewed sideways, fishtailing toward the pines. Micah cast a glance through the cab’s rear window and saw the driver-side door was dented inward. Otis’s femur was punched through the fabric of his Carhartts at midthigh, a spike of bone shining deliriously white in the dome light. Otis’s face was bleached and greasy with shock and—with the calm observation that always came to Micah in times like this—he could see that Otis’s foot was pinned to the gas pedal.

The truck accelerated and struck a knotty pine. Micah was thrown against the cab. He ricocheted back, skidding across the bed until his head hit the tailgate. Terry Redhill fell over the side of the truck with a hoarse squawk. The engine cut out, its tick-tick dimming into the nothingness. Out of that enveloping silence came other sounds. Grunts and howls and brays and hisses.

Terry Redhill stood up woozily. His face was bathed in blood from a cut running slantwise across his forehead.

“Whuzzat?” he said dazedly. “Whuzz—?”

Micah didn’t get a good look at the thing that killed Terry Redhill. There was some mercy in that. It darted down from the trees. Part snake, part bird or bat or some winged creature at any rate. It carried with it the ripe stink of death. Micah did catch a glimpse of eyes—a dozen or more bunched like grapes within the runneled ruin of its face, or one of its faces—all staring with bright, malignant hunger. It flapped down with a sort of breezy insouciance, not at all predatory, as if it had merely happened upon Terry Redhill by accident and decided to do what it did to him.

It… it enfolded Terry. Somehow lovingly. Terry’s head, specifically. Those sheer, dark, bat-like wings wrapped around his skull in a suffocating embrace.

“Whuzz—?”

What happened next was hard to explain. The scene was chaotic, the light thin, the air swimmy with diesel fumes from the ruptured gas tank. Micah was aware of the smallest details—the oily taste of the shotgun shells in his mouth, the thin fingernail paring of the moon through the trees. He experienced the following events with senses that were superattuned in some ways and dulled in others. Later, he would suspect his mind had done so automatically, shielding him from things that would have driven him mad on sight.

The thing that was wrapped around Terry Redhill’s head began to flex. To constrict. The whiplike cord upon which it had unfurled from the tree thinned with tension. Terry issued terrible choking sounds that were muffled by the stinking flesh draped over his face—flesh so sheer Micah could see the man’s pain-wrenched features. Those muffled chokes quickly became squeals.

The thing tensed, every part of its awful musculature quivering; then it torqued spastically—it reminded Micah of a man struggling to open a stubborn jar of strawberry jam, that moment when the seal finally gives. This was followed by a wet ripping note. A fan of blood jetted from Terry Redhill’s neck with incredible pressure and painted the side of the truck.

The thing ascended into the tree again. It took Terry’s head with it. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. Terry’s body stood there for another moment, blood fountaining from the raggedly severed neck, before collapsing to its knees like a penitent Pentecostal. Headless Terry fell forward and struck the truck with a hollow bong.

Something rushed from the trees at Micah. He caught the briefest inkling of its shape: a trio of timber wolf heads thrust from a long and eelish body rippling with legs of all different sorts. He raised the shotgun and fired as it hurdled Terry Redhill’s corpse; buckshot tore into the thing, ripping away gobbets of flesh; the impact steered it off course so that, instead of hitting Micah flush, it glancingly struck him, one of its claws or teeth tearing across his rib cage to leave a sizzling note of pain. He fell, his skull striking the tailgate and shooting stars across his vision. The thing carried over the truck bed, a horrifying freight train of legs and snouts and snapping jaws.

Micah staggered up and took aim as it retreated, pumping the Ithaca and firing three shots. The muzzle exploded with flame, illuminating the woods in brief flashes. A chunk blew off the thing’s hide, splattering the side of a ponderosa pine. It squealed and reared—the sinuous segmented movement of a snake sitting up, its spinal cord popping like chained firecrackers—as it moved deeper into the forest. Much else lurked there in the trees, slavering and snapping.

“Otis! Oh God, Otis!”

Charlie was trying to haul his friend out of the truck. Charlie’s nose must’ve broken when his face collided with the windshield; it was squashed off to one side, blood painting the bottom of his face. But Charlie was focused on Otis, who was trapped. The crumpling door had not only broken his leg high up—it had also pinned his foot. Otis’s face was tallowy with shock. Slick balls of sweat rolled down his cheeks. The pain was such that he’d vomited; under the fritzing dome light, Micah could see chunks of that evening’s hastily eaten meal on his shirt.

“Otis!” Charlie hauled on his friend’s arm, too terrified to be gentle about it. “We got to get out.”

Otis’s eyes rolled back in his skull. A ludicrous half smile graced his face. Micah had seen it before. Pain, shock, and adrenaline can put a man into a beatific dream state.

“Come on!” Charlie jerked Otis, who shook like a rag doll. Blood shot from the compound fracture and spritzed the dashboard.

Something thumped off the truck’s roof and bounced into the bed. Terry Redhill’s head. Terry’s lips had been bitten away—such clean, straight teeth, Micah thought with dreamy panic; he must have had a good dentist—and his eyeballs had been sucked out. Half his scalp had been peeled back like a stubborn toupee, from the rear of his skull to the front; gravity folded it down as Micah watched, a vein-threaded red curtain draping Redhill’s ruined face.

Micah fired up into the tree from where the head had fallen. He heard a rippling shriek up there. He saw something latched around the trunk thirty feet up—a jumble of parts, long and arachnid, a sight a human mind couldn’t even summon in a nightmare. Seeing its shape in the muzzle flash, Micah felt as if someone had levered the top off his skull and whispered directly into the twitching gray matter—a terrible secret that he would have to live with the rest of his life. The thing unfurled with effortless grace, its blood pattering down on the truck as it scuttled farther up the tree.

Micah spat the saliva-coated shells into his palm and plugged them into the shotgun. He hopped over the bed. He could die here. In a second, a minute, or anytime between. That fact bestowed an eerie calm within him. This was the world as he’d found it. His only option was to deal with its new parameters.

“Charlie!” Micah shouted, grabbing the man’s shoulder. Charlie turned to face him; his face swam with mindless fear. “He is stuck!” Micah said. “We must free his leg.”

Charlie’s mouth opened and closed like a fish dying on land. But he nodded. “Okay, okay, okay, okay—”

Micah handed him the shotgun. “They are everywhere.”

He climbed inside the cab through the passenger door. It was hot and tight and perfumed with blood and diesel. The windshield was spiderwebbed where Charlie’s head had struck. Micah glanced past Otis, out the window, where shapes were massing some twenty yards off.

“Otis, sit tight,” Micah said, as if the man had any other choice. “This is going to hurt.”

Otis issued a garbled note that Micah took as one of recognition. He crawled down into the foot well. Wires hung from the busted fuse box. He wormed past Otis’s right foot, shoving it rudely aside; Otis screamed as the pain shot up his leg. Micah didn’t apologize; there was no time. He squirmed forward until he was able to close his hand around Otis’s boot, pinned under the buckled metal. He wrapped his fingers through the bootlaces and yanked as hard as he could. Otis screamed afresh. Micah couldn’t summon much force with his body at a bad angle, one arm partially trapped under his chest. But he was redlined on adrenaline and this helped. Otis just kept on screaming. Let it out, friend, Micah thought. Maybe it’ll keep those things at bay.

One hard wrench succeeded in popping Otis’s heel out; Micah let out a small cry of delight as Otis’s boot slid from the crimped metal. He just had to crawl his fingers in a little farther and yank his toes out now—

Charlie screeched. The shotgun boomed.

Something crashed through the windshield above Micah. The dome light dimmed. Next something was inside the cab with them. Micah felt its weight, heavy as several anvils, pressing down on the steering wheel. It poured itself through the shattered glass, thick and black and alive with horrifying industry. In Micah’s fractured view, it resembled nothing more than a ball of parts: the most dangerous and vile bits of every beast and bird and reptile that had once inhabited these woods. Teeth and claws and fangs dripping venom—and eyes. Oh Christ, all the eyes. Some of those eyes spotted Micah. Parts of the thing’s lunatic anatomy oriented on him, hissing and rasping, darting down. But he was under the steering wheel, which provided a barrier; he could see things squirming around the wheel, their mouths inches from his face. One of the thing’s limbs hit the horn; it blatted on and on, a high curious note.

The thing was more interested in Otis. He’d stopped screaming, now face-to-face with it. Otis’s lips trembled as he called out, oh so weakly, for his God.

Then the thing attacked. Otis might as well have walked into a garbage disposal. His face was shredded, legs jittering crazily as he was torn to bits. Blood burst forth and sheeted down, a veritable waterfall of the red stuff splattering Micah’s face.

Micah heeled himself across the foot well toward the passenger door. He heard Charlie scream as he pumped the shotgun.

Nonononono—

BOOM.

The cab filled with noise and light and smoke. Micah’s hearing cut out from the blast; his skull filled with a tinny ringing. The thing attacking Otis jerked as the buckshot riddled it, but it didn’t stop. It hardly mattered. It had torn the first three inches off Otis’s head, which now stopped at his ears: a clean cliff of red meat and cartilage, his jaw hanging cockeyed on a strip of sinew.

Charlie fired again. The thing squalled and retreated, shimmying out of the hole in the windshield. Micah levered himself out of the cab and staggered back, slumping into Charlie.

The thing that had killed Otis was sprawled across the truck’s hood. Twelve feet long, thick around as a trash can. It scuttled backward, its movement more insectoid than animal, claws screaming on the hood.

Micah grabbed the shotgun from Charlie and fired. The first shot blew a hole in the thing’s face. The next shot went into its chest. The thing slumped off the hood, still thrashing and not even close to dead.

Micah turned and started back toward Little Heaven—then tripped over Terry Redhill’s corpse where it slumped against the truck. He went down, snuffled dirt, and spotted the gun tucked in Redhill’s waistband. He grabbed it and gave it to Charlie.

“Go.”

Charlie was staring at Otis. At his friend’s dripping carcass.

“He is dead, Charlie. Now, or we are dead, too.”

Dazedly, Charlie followed. Micah pulled shells from his pocket and thumbed them into the shotgun. The truck’s horn blared on and on. He and Charlie staggered away from the wreck. Its taillights winked in the dark. Micah noted the rip in his shirt. A five-inch slit across his ribs, the meat flayed open.

The two of them scrambled up the slope to the main road. Little Heaven was five hundred yards off. They hadn’t even made it half a mile.

Charlie stumbled. Micah grabbed his hand. Charlie was in shock. Even having glimpsed those things the other night, Charlie could not wrap his head around what they had done to Terry Redhill and his dear friend Otis.

Partner, it is happening, Micah thought as he hauled Charlie on.

The road peeled away from the trees, bathed in creamy moonlight. The night bristled with sounds, but they had dimmed to a low and satisfied purr.

“Otis,” Charlie mumbled. “Oh no, oh no, Otis—”

Something streaked out of a dogwood thicket behind them—a liquid ripple of movement. It passed behind Micah almost soundlessly, an enormous bird zipping low across the earth. He tried to look at it, but a warning klaxon went off in his brain—Danger, Will Robinson!—that kept his head from making the necessary revolution.

Charlie grunted like a man who’d been punched in the gut. His hand—no, his whole arm—dropped three feet. He’d fallen again.

“Come on, Charlie,” Micah said.

Charlie wouldn’t get up this time. Micah had to haul Charlie across the ground. Charlie’s fingers tightened and cut off Micah’s circulation.

“I got you.”

Charlie wasn’t so hard to pull now. Light as a feather, in fact. Must be the adrenaline kicking in. Little Heaven was getting closer. Micah would haul Charlie back and make new plans. A daylight run when they could see the fuckers coming.

Charlie’s fingers began to relax. Micah clenched his own and pulled him another five feet before Charlie’s belt got hung up on a root or some other snag.

“Jesus, Charlie. Help me.”

Micah turned to look. Charlie wasn’t there—the bottom half, anyway. His body had been torn apart at the hips. His legs were gone; Micah couldn’t see them anywhere. Charlie’s guts spilled out of his chest cavity, long ropes with a whitish-blue sheen that trailed ten yards behind him until they blended into the gloom. His face was set in an expression of awestruck shock: eyes wide open, lips peeled back from his teeth.

“Come on,” Micah said stupidly. “It will be okay.” He pulled until Charlie’s halved body became unstuck from the snag. He kept hauling Charlie mindlessly, his brain stuck in a time warp where Charlie was still alive. Charlie’s remains made a graceless burping sound as another knot of intestines drooled out and unraveled across the cracked earth.

Micah’s strength was deserting him; he was now using the shotgun as a cane. “Okay… we are going to be okay, Charlie…”

Let him go, Micah. He is dead.

With a moan, Micah did. Charlie’s arm flopped to the ground. Micah staggered on. Fuck the things that had killed these men. Micah would murder them all and burn their carcasses until the air went black with their smoke.

A DOZEN OR SO PEOPLE were clustered at the gates of Little Heaven. The truck’s horn continued to blare. Seeing Micah alone, Maude Redhill let loose a desolate wail. She was joined by Charlie’s wife; Charlie’s son only stared at Micah openmouthed, not yet gripping what had happened—he was too young to understand that, yes, everything really could go to shit just this quickly.

The gates closed once Micah had shuffled through. His face was wet with blood—Otis’s or Terry’s or Charlie’s, he had no clue. He crumpled to his knees as two dozen eyes stared at him, waiting on some kind of explanation.

“It is death out there” was all he could manage.

Maude Redhill flung herself on him. She grabbed double handfuls of hair and yanked viciously, snapping his head side to side. Micah let her do it, too tired to fight back and feeling that she deserved her wrath.

“Bastard!” she screamed. “What did you do to them? What did you do to my Terryyyyyyyy!”

Somebody finally pulled her off. Maude Redhill’s sobs spiraled up into the night.

God did not hear her. Or if He did, He kept His peace.

The devil had come to Little Heaven.