Little Heaven

1

NATE WAS STILL AWAKE. Everyone else was asleep.

Only a few hours had passed since the one-eyed man had come back. He and Mr. Redhill and Mr. Fairweather and Mr. Langtree had gone off in the truck to get help. They hadn’t made it far. In fact, they were still within earshot when Nate heard Mr. Redhill start to scream. He thought it had been Mr. Redhill, anyway. It was too dark to see, the truck too far away by then, and anyway, when people scream—even full-grown men—they all tend to sound the same. That wasn’t something Nate would have guessed, but he could say so now. Only the one-eyed man had returned to Little Heaven alive.

Now Nate was in the mess hall with his father, the three outsiders, and Ellen—she had told him her name, so she wasn’t an outsider to him anymore. A bigger group was over in the supply warehouse. A few stragglers were standing watch at the gate.

After the one-eyed man came back, a lot of people tried to get into the chapel. Sanctuary was the word Nate had heard. But the chapel was locked. The Reverend wouldn’t answer his door, either. What did it matter? Nobody cared what the Reverend had to say now. It’s about time, Nate thought. He had never really liked Reverend Flesher. He reminded Nate of a door-to-door salesman: he spread out his wares on your living room rug, and they weren’t much good, all scuffed and cheaply made, but he pressured you to buy them anyway. Nate was glad the Reverend had lost some of his control. Nate could say that now, couldn’t he? Sure. He could say or think almost anything. And that was a scary thought.

Everyone had questions for the one-eyed man, too. A lot of those questions had been screamed into the one-eyed man’s face, and they were less questions than accusations. He didn’t answer any of them. It was as if whatever had happened out there had temporarily melted his brain. That was a scary thought, too, because the one-eyed man seemed tough. Steel-belted, his mom would say. If whatever had happened out there was bad enough to do that to him, Nate figured it had to be really bad.

One thing was for sure: nobody wanted to step past the gates. The only thing they could do was take cover and wait until morning. Everyone was praying that whatever was in the woods—the things that had killed Mr. Langtree and Mr. Fairweather and Billy and Elton’s dad—wouldn’t enter Little Heaven. It was whispered that they must be afraid of the lights—but with the gasoline dwindling, who knew how much longer the lights would stay on.

Now everyone had split up and made their way either to the warehouse or the mess. The watchers at the gate had whistles in case they saw anything. Nate’s dad wanted to sleep in the warehouse with Maude Redhill and the others, but Nate wanted to stay with the outsiders. He trusted them. Plus, they had more guns. His father gave him a look but said that God would abide.

So they settled in the mess hall. The Englishman was appointed as first watch. The adults quickly fell asleep—even the Englishman. Someone might as well have slipped a knockout drop under their tongues.

But Nate couldn’t sleep. Something awful was happening—had been happening for a while now. Maybe it had been happening since the moment the Reverend stumbled upon this spot in the woods, driven here by the voice of God. What if he’d followed the wrong voice? Sacrilege to think it, his dad would say. Well, maybe his dad was dead wrong, too.

Had all the adults been wrong? Was building Little Heaven their biggest mistake? Even the strongest adults could be misguided—guys like Mr. Fairweather and Mr. Langtree, who Nate was pretty sure were both dead. Dead: before tonight he had never felt the coffin nail finality of that word. He had lost two goldfish and a hamster, Mr. Pips. That was his only experience with death. His mother had flushed the fish down the toilet—a burial at sea, she called it. Mr. Pips got buried in a shoe box in the backyard of a house they had been renting outside Portsmouth. Nate felt bad at losing them, but their deaths had been quick—he woke up to find the fish floating in their bowl before his mom scooped them out with a little skimmer; Mr. Pips died over the weekend when he was away at his dad’s place, so Nate only saw him inside the box, which his mom had padded with cotton batting. They hadn’t screamed like the men had earlier tonight. He had never heard the fear or the wretched bewilderment that their screams had held, either—fish and hamsters just went glub-glub or squeak-squeak, and then, Nate guessed, they died. So it was different. Humans died in worse ways, or at least Mr. Fairweather and Mr. Langtree and Mr. Redhill had.

Nate wondered, if those men could walk it all back—the decision to join Reverend Flesher’s congregation and come here to Little Heaven—would they do it? But it was too late. You can’t relive your life. You couldn’t hop into H. G. Wells’s time machine and zap back to the site of your bad decisions and make a better one. If the decisions you made were stupid ones, well, it wasn’t just you who suffered. No fact seemed clearer to Nate than this: adults were as often wrong as right. And what choice did their kids have but to follow along? Wasn’t that your job as a kid—to tag along and not make noise? And a kid has to believe that those added years should equal added wisdom, right? H-E-double-hockey-sticks no! Adults could be stupid when it came down to it. When the rubber hit the road, as his mom would say—his mother, who had been stupid herself, getting locked up in jail when Nate needed her most. He hated being mad at her, and angry at his father for his weakness… but his parents’ mistakes had led him here.

It dawned for the first time how difficult and perhaps how fearful it was to be an adult. And Nate was suddenly and selfishly afraid not only for himself now but also for what it seemed he might become.

Nate got up. The one-eyed man snored and rolled over—he actually had two eyes now, even though one of them was glass. His shirt was torn, his wounds clumsily covered with duct tape. The black man was slumped in his chair. Nate thought about shaking him for abandoning his responsibility, but he seemed the sort of person who might punch a boy in the face for waking him up. Nate walked to a window. The compound lay motionless under the security lamps. His eyes flicked left, then flicked ri—

The air soured in his lungs. He tried to back away from the window, but his legs locked up.

His old playmates. They were back. The four of them linked together, hand to hand. Their skin so pale it was nearly translucent. Could nobody else see them?

Eli Rathbone was at the end of the chain this time. Eli couldn’t stand; the others dragged him carelessly, the way a toddler might haul a teddy bear by its arm. His body bumped over the ground. He was so thin: a collection of driftwood lashed into the shape of a boy. Nate could see his hip bones—he never knew how bones might look, really, because they were always covered in enough skin. The only skeletons he’d seen were the cardboard ones hung in the windows at Halloween. But Eli looked too much like those skeletons now.

They approached him quickly; in a heartbeat, they were at the window. Nate tried to call out, but his lips were frozen. A wire ran through his entire body from the tip of his head to his pinkie toe—and that wire tightened, paralyzing him.

Go away was all he could think. Oh please, just go.

Elsa was naked. They all were, but Elsa was different. Nate had never seen a naked girl. Boys, sure. A lot of boys were eager to show their penises to whoever. But girls’ bodies were a riddle Nate hadn’t yet solved. Elsa was wasted but with a big tummy like those starving children in Life magazine. Her tiny breasts were deflated like balloons found behind the sofa three months after the party was over, all wrinkly and saggy. Her… her vagina (as Missus Edwards used to say in sex-ed class) was a stiff trench between her legs, covered in delicate hairs that had gone gray to match the hair on her head. All the kids’ hair had gone gray—no, white, the shocked white of a fright wig. That, along with their bony bodies and pruney skin, made them look ancient—these young-old things dancing to the jangly notes of a flute.

They paraded past the window one by one, grinning at him. The skin of their faces was lined and crepey around their jaws but pulled tight around their sockets so that their eyes bulged out. Their teeth were gray as tombstones. Their pupils were a shade of black that didn’t exist in nature, and blown out to cover their whole eyeballs.

Eli was last. And worst. Nate could see his skull. His skin had worn through at his temples, wearing down the way your toe wears through a cheap Kresge’s sock until there’s only a few fiber fluffs left. His lips were gone: they hadn’t fallen off or been bitten away but had thinned out to the point where they weren’t really there anymore. His gums peeled back from his teeth, which were waaay too big; they looked like the molars the dentist had pulled out of his friend Gregory Betts’s mouth—the dentist gave them to Gregory in a little glass jar and Nate was amazed how long they were with the buried roots visible, like fangs.

Eli pressed his face to the window. The other kids helped prop him up, like a lifeless puppet. The plastic stretched to flatten his features. His face projected inward, threatening to rip through. His mouth stretched into a grin. His eyes were dark and huge; they reached through the plastic somehow, horrid, swallowing, hunting for something soft inside Nate’s chest.

Come out, said a voice in Nate’s head. Come out and play.

Oh no. Nope. No way. That was the last thing on earth he wanted.

And yet…

His arm jerked. He had no control of it. He tried to scream, but all that came out was a wheeze. He reached toward Eli’s face; Eli’s grin stretched even wider, so big that Nate was sure Eli would eat his fingers through the plastic, grind up his skin and chomp his knuckles and keep on moving down his arm… and Nate was even more terrified he would want to keep feeding Eli, helplessly shoving his hand and then his wrist into Eli’s mouth.

He flung his gaze away from the window. His father was sitting up on the floor, watching Nate. His face was bathed in sweat. His eyes huge wet discs.

Daddy, Nate mouthed. Oh, Daddy, please…

His father nodded curtly, as if he had just received some bad news. Then he pulled the blankets up, his eyes still bugged out and his hands trembling, lay down, and rolled over into a little ball.

Nate’s fingers made contact with the plastic window. His head whipped back to see he was touching Eli’s face through the plastic; Eli’s skin was cold and hard, as if Nate had touched stone. He moaned and shut his eyes.

Oh please, please just don’t make it hurt too much and don’t make me into one of them—

Then the pressure went away. When Nate looked, Eli was gone. Nobody was at the window.

He sagged to the floor, shivering uncontrollably. The tips of his fingers were still cold—would they ever feel warm again? He glanced at his father, still rolled on his side, pretending to sleep. A wave of hatred rolled through Nate, so black it made him woozy.

Coward, he thought. Chicken-guts FAKER.

Rattling from the mess. Back in the kitchen.

No, Nate thought. No-no-no-no—the cellar.

He raced through the swinging galley door. A security lamp shone through the lone window. The kitchen countertops gleamed; the stink of rancid grease hung heavy. A trapdoor was set into the floor at the far end of the kitchen, next to the fridge. The door led down to the cold cellar, which could also be accessed through a set of doors outside. Nate had watched the cook swing those doors open and hump sacks of flour, rice, and potatoes into the storage area; he would bring them up through the trapdoor as needed. The outer doors weren’t locked—only three places in Little Heaven always had locks: the chapel, the Reverend’s quarters, and the windowless bunkhouse.

The trapdoor rattled again. Nate jumped; his skin felt too tight all of a sudden, as if it were about to split down a hidden seam. The trapdoor was held down under two chains lashed to the ringbolt. When it rattled, the chains rattled, too. Nobody heard it except Nate.

The trapdoor opened—just a hair. In that heart-stopping slit of darkness, Nate saw their faces. All four of them clustered under the door, peering out at him.

“You’re cute,” said the Elsa-thing, and giggled.

It was no longer the voice of a child. It was a choked and sewage-y gurgle, the sound that bubbles up from a clogged drainpipe.

“Come with us,” said Eli. “Come and be meat.”

“It will be neat,” said one of the Redhill boys, laughing at the silly rhyme.

Nate could smell them: ripe and fruity, the stink that wafts through the car vents when you drove past days-old road kill. He said, “No.”

Eli grinned. His mouth stretched so wide, almost ear to ear—the smile of a shark. Flies buzzed through the trapdoor, fat sluggish ones that landed on the kitchen window and blotted out the moon.

“It wants you,” Eli said. “It wants you all.”

Eli began to laugh. The others joined him. Cold nausea swept over Nate. He hated them. Not Eli and Elsa and the Redhills—though they had never been very friendly to him—but whatever they had become. They were disgusting and lewd, and it made his soul sick to look at them.

Before he knew what he was doing, Nate rushed at them. Stop! STOP! his mind chattered. But he was as mad as he’d ever been. They were bullies before and they still were. You had to stand up to bullies or you would spend your whole life in fear. You would grow up to be a man like his father.

Nate leapt and came down on top of the trapdoor. It banged down hard. He stood there a moment, seesawing his arms, fear rising in him like a fever. What was he doing? Was he crazy?

“Go away!” he shouted. “Leave me alone!”

He felt like raising his arms in victory, washed in a giddy sense of triumph—until the door popped up with a sharp bang, rattling the chains and spilling Nate onto his ass. He yelped and dug in his heels, trying to crab-walk away from the—

A withered arm shot through the trapdoor gap and snatched his ankle.

EAT KILL SWALLOW EAT EAT HURT KILL EAT CHEW KILL EAT

—schniiik!—

Nate reared back, screaming and clawing at his skull. Something had leapt into his head the moment those fingers closed around his ankle. His mind had been covered in choking oil that blotted everything out—everything except a powerful, uncontrollable urge to break and hurt other living things.

He was in the kitchen again. The trapdoor was shut. The skinny outsider woman was next to him. She held a huge butcher’s cleaver. Her lips moved, but Nate couldn’t hear her. His head was fuzzy. It had felt as if… as if a giant worm or leech had fixed its mouth around his brain, inhaling it into its black guts and transmitting its alien thoughts into him. They were the crudest, the most awful feelings imaginable: of eating and chewing and ripping and just hurting, hurting scared helpless creatures before eating them.

The skinny woman stabbed down with the knife, impaling something on the tip. A child’s hand. Black blood oozed from its severed wrist. She flung the knife and hand away. It skittered across the floor and jammed up under the fridge.

“You okay?” she asked. He could hear her now.

There were five icy blots on Nate’s bare ankle where those fingers had touched him. Nate managed to nod. Whatever had invaded his head was gone now, but coldness continued to seep over his scalp ten times worse than an ice cream headache.

The one-eyed man came into the kitchen, followed by Ellen and the Englishman.

“What happened?”

“One of them was grabbing his leg,” the skinny woman answered the one-eyed man. She stabbed a finger at the Englishman. “What the hell happened to you?”

The Englishman wiped sleep drool off his chin. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how I—”

“You fucking moron,” the woman said.

“One of who?” said Ellen. “Who, Minny?”

“The children,” the skinny woman said in disbelief. “The boy Eli. Jesus, I’ve never seen anything so awful.”

The one-eyed man approached the trapdoor. Nate said, “No, please don’t open it.”

The man pushed him out of the way and lifted the door a few inches. The skinny woman pulled Nate to her chest. The man took another knife off a magnetized rack above the sink, unhooked the chains, and went into the cellar. Nate waited for him to start screaming. Thirty seconds later, he came back.

“Empty. But the outer doors are open.”

“What happened, Nate?” Ellen asked.

The experience seemed too huge and horrible to talk about. The children’s dead eyes, the force taking over his mind…

The one-eyed man crouched beside the severed hand. He touched one finger with the tip of the knife. The other fingers jerked. Nate began to cry when he saw that. Sobs ripped out of his chest, these loon-like whoops.

We’re all dead, Nate thought. Or worse. Death might be better.

He glanced over the skinny woman’s shoulder and saw his father hovering at the kitchen door. He waved at Nate. Apologetically, or just confusedly, Nate would never know.

“Did you see anything, Reggie?” Ellen asked.

Reggie paused, then shook his head. “I was asleep like all of you. Didn’t see a thing.” He swallowed and said, “We need the Reverend’s guidance. He will tell us—”

“We don’t need shit from him,” the skinny woman spat.

Nate glared at his father.

I hate you.

The fury of Nate’s thought zipped through the air and slammed into his father. Nate saw his dad flinch from the psychic pain of it. He went back through the swinging door, leaving Nate in the kitchen.

2

THE REVEREND AWOKE in the chapel covered in blood.

He had been biting his hands while he slept. He’d worried divots of flesh out of his palms and wrists and woke up sucking on his own blood.

Amos was sleeping in the chapel sacristy, in the credenza. He felt safe in there, curled into a ball with the doors shut. He let his hatred collect into a hard little ball, too, nursing it on his own black bile.

His flock had abandoned him. All but a few—the stupidest and most useless ones. After all he had done for them! The bastards! Cunts! He imagined stealing into the mess hall and finding the largest knife to slit all of their Iscariot throats. Or, if not all of them, then those who had instigated the insurrection. He pictured grabbing Otis Langtree’s hair, drawing the skin of his neck taut, and sawing through his treacherous windpipe. Reaching into Nell Conkwright’s mouth, gripping her eelish tongue, slicing it out at the root, and laughing as the blood splashed his chest. Pinning Charlie Fairweather down and carefully slitting his eyeballs, pushing on them until the gooey centers burst through the slit like peeled grapes—

Yes! Nothing would be finer. But of course, he could not. He was physically weak, always had been. His gift was to make people do his bidding through guile and honeyed words and his command of the Good Book… or it had been until now. He was powerless, a declawed kitten. His most trusted lieutenants had instigated a rebellion against him. It made him boil with rage. And now, if his understanding of the situation was correct, it was too late to kill them himself. Langtree and Fairweather were dead. He’d watched the scene out of his window—the one-eyed bastard returning alone, then his assault at the hands of Maude Redhill. Good. It was perfectly fine that those traitorous scum were dead. His only sadness was that he couldn’t have watched the life drain out of them personally.

He heard something out in the chapel.

Amos crawled out of the credenza. His blood sang and his skin prickled all over. He walked out of the sacristy into the chapel proper. The Voice beckoned him.

He walked between the pews. Musical notes came from all around him, but from inside of him, too. Something was there in the chapel with him. But the doors and windows were locked. It was Christ’s sanctuary. Yet it was here. A presence. Something with a massive weight and gravity that sucked at the deepest part of him. His soul, just maybe.

“Hello?” he said childishly.

Up here.

His gaze ascended. Something lurked in the apse, in the shadows above the crucified Christ. It seethed in that arched vault, a dark mass that shifted and breathed and chittered.

“My God…”

Amos Flesher’s heart fluttered. His insides went to water.

Oh no, the thing spoke in his mind. Not God, child.

Of course not. It never had been. That understanding arrived with a thunderclap. What he was hearing now was the same Voice he had followed to this spot all those months ago. Not the voice of God, but a different one—a Voice of chaos and blood. A Voice that hummed like flies sometimes; other times it sounded like a worm of limitless length coiling around and around its own infinite body. And… Amos was fine with that. Yes, he was. The fact rested easily in his head. A gear locked in place, spinning contentedly on its axis.

The thing in the rafters of the ruined, befouled chapel gibbered and giggled. Amos saw only a hint of its true shape. It was enough. It spoke to him in a familiar voice.

“You have been fiddling with your dirty stick, haven’t you?”

Amos was unsurprised to find he had an erection. It tented the satiny material of his pajamas. Idly, he reached under the waistband and began to pull on his cock. It felt nice to milk it like an itsy-bitsy udder.

“Yes,” he said stupidly.

“Fiddling and fiddling and fiddling…,” the thing crooned.

Amos pulled with greater force. He was going to make a mess. Back at the orphanage, he hated doing that; he would tease himself to the point of release, then grip it and squeeze so his seed wouldn’t spill out, so hard that blood vessels burst on the head of his penis. But he wasn’t worried about that now. He pulled on it real hard, just like the soft-brain Finn used to do to his own thick mongoloid dick. Amos yanked so forcefully that the skin ripped down the shaft, though it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it felt wonderful. The air touched the ripped flesh with a pleasant tingle. He wasn’t thinking of anything remotely sexual; instead, he envisioned that his body had turned into an enormous mouth with teeth the size of bricks, snapping and chattering around inside the locked orphanage, chasing screaming kids and grinding them up, breaking their bones and pulping their soft flesh and cracking their skulls between his mammoth molars like walnuts and—

“What do you want?” he asked, feverishly.

“You know what,” Sister Muriel said.

And Amos did know. The Voice wanted what it had always wanted. What it had brought Amos out here for. The sweetest fruit of Little Heaven.

Amos began to laugh. It started out as effervescent titters but soon became throaty, then booming. It was not entirely sane, that laughter, but then, Little Heaven was no longer a sane place.

Amos wanted to obey the Voice. More than he’d ever wanted to follow the tenets of God. The Creator was a stodgy old bore. God stifled the true nature of man. The Voice spoke directly to that nature and asked that Amos do nothing more than give vent to the brutality that had long lurked at his core.

“Give it to me,” Sister Muriel—or the thing that was speaking in her voice—called down to him. “Give me what I want and I’ll give you what you need…”

But as Amos was a physical weakling and at heart a coward, he would have to be crafty. Well, crafty he could be. A plan was already flying together in his head, the pieces slotting flush.

“Yes.” His voice floated up into the poisoned chapel as Christ stared down impassively from His cross. “Yes.”

3

EBENEZER WAS UP AT DAWN, heading out of the mess hall and across the square. Micah called after him, but Eb didn’t bother to acknowledge his hail.

Eb stopped at a shed and grabbed a red toolbox. The box rattled against his thigh as he strode across the compound to the front gates. The sun was rising over the trees to lighten the woods. A few hollow-eyed Heavenites stood watch.

“Good morning, chappies,” he said to them. “Open up, daylight’s wasting.”

He was tired of these cornpone, Bible-bashing troglodyte shitbirds. They could go eat a bucket of elephant testicles, for all he cared. A big ole pailful, as these buffoons might say. Hyuk, hyuk. Crass, yes, but he had reached the end of his tether. If he was going to die, so be it. But not among these ingrate yokels, who would drag his soul into some hillbilly purgatory, where he’d be forced to listen to washboard-and-jug band jamborees for all eternity. Hell would be preferable.

When the morons didn’t move, Eb lifted the latch himself and pushed the gate open. He was whistling a Cockney tune. His hair had gone frizzy and was tangled up with shreds of dead leaves and maple keys—he would kill, quite literally kill, for a hot shower and a bottle of Lustre-Creme shampoo. Sunlight washed the access road, touching the body of Charlie Fairweather, who lay three hundred yards off. Well, half of Charlie, by the looks of it. Poor bastard.

Two motorbikes were parked past the gates. One was an old French Metisse with a 350cc two-stroke engine. The other was a newer Japanese model.

Micah caught up with him. His posture wasn’t threatening, only curious.

“What are you doing?”

“Leaving, good chum,” Eb said. “Hitting the lonesome trail, in your Yank parlance.”

He snapped open the toolbox, which he had stocked the day before for this very eventuality. He retrieved a can of two-in-one oil. He lubricated the chain and the suspension rig on the Metisse, straddled the seat, and bounced up and down to work the oil into the shock absorbers. Minerva hung back at the gates, watching him.

Micah said, “Think you will make it?”

“A bike is more nimble than that truck. It’s perfect for this terrain.”

“You think you’re gonna leave us with our asses hanging out, huh?” Minerva called over.

Ebenezer spoke to her over Micah’s shoulder. “I’m taking a sabbatical, milady. Much to your dismay, I can only guess. I promise to send a postcard.”

Minerva pulled Ellen’s pistol from her waistband, cocked it, and held it to her thigh. Ebenezer could only smile.

“Will you shoot me in the back?”

Minerva cocked her head as if to say, Try me. Ebenezer’s smile widened.

“Your aim is suspect, my dear. I’ll take my chances.”

He bent over the bike to check the timing gear. Someone shouted. “Hey! What the hell you think you’re doing?”

Ebenezer turned. Hooray, if it wasn’t Virgil, the more dunderheaded shitkicker of the Reverend’s gruesome twosome.

“Hey—black boy! That ain’t your property! You ain’t gonna—”

Virgil’s voice drilled into Ebenezer’s ears, unlocking an old memory. As a child, he and a friend had queued up for a showing of Crossfire starring Robert Mitchum at the Grenada Theatre. They had saved up all week. But when they reached the wicket, the ticket seller told them No Negroes allowed. He said it casually, almost apologetically—an existential apology for their bad luck to have been born black, a stain that would doom them the rest of their lives. So Ebenezer and his friend snuck in through the fire door and sat in the empty balcony section. But before the newsreel even finished, an usher found them. He clouted Eb on the ear with one fat fist. Sneaky little tar babies! he’d hissed, and chased them down the stairs. They ran out the emergency door closest to the movie screen. The sunlight hit Eb’s eyes, dazzling in its intensity; he turned to see the white people in the front row rearing back at the sudden light, their faces pale and marbly as cheese—they looked like terrified vampires at the moment Van Helsing let the sunlight into their coffins. Eb and his friend dashed down the alley to the street. The usher pursued for a block or two, but he was a porker and he faded fast, heaving on the cobbles, shaking an impotent fist.

Afterward, Eb sat on the curb outside the sweetshop, nursing his swollen ear. He had a powerful urge to go back and hurt that usher. In his young mind, he pictured a very sharp, long knife. He saw himself pinning the usher’s hand down by the wrist and cutting deep between the webbing of his fingers, halfway down his palm, so that when the flesh healed the man would be left with these tangly, freakish witch-fingers, long and spidery with almost no palm to speak of. But Ebenezer hadn’t owned a knife and lacked the will to steal one.

Ebenezer now thought of that afternoon because Virgil looked an awful lot like that usher. He wasn’t nearly as fat, but he was stalking toward Eb with the same goatish belligerence, his eyes squinted in vaporous idiocy. Ebenezer reached into the toolbox and selected a heavy wrench.

“What the fuck you think you’re doing, you uppity nig—”

Ebenezer threw it. The wrench spun end over end, tomahawk-style, and poleaxed Virgil spang between the eyes. Virgil went down on one knee, looking like Al Jolson singing the crescendo of “My Mammy,” then staggered up and tilted off in a new direction toward the trees. His forehead was split open, blood pissing out.

Eb curled his hand around an old spark plug lying in the toolbox and walked over to Virgil. He swung his fist in a tight arc, clouting Virgil on the back of his head. Virgil grunted and fell face-first into the dirt. Ebenezer turned him over and punched him in the face, hard. And again. And again. Virgil’s eyelids fluttered, and blood leaked from both sides of his mouth.

“Eb,” Micah said.

Ebenezer turned. He could feel the warmth of Virgil’s blood freckling his face.

Micah said, “Lay off.”

“Cheerfully!” Eb said. He rolled Virgil over, grabbed the man’s gun from his waistband, then walked back to the bike and tossed the spark plug into the toolbox. Virgil lay still with blood bubbling out of his mouth.

“Those things in the woods, Eb,” said Micah, taking no interest in the downed man. “They are fast.”

“I saw them before, Micah. Back at the campsite.”

“No. These ones are different.”

Eb sighed. “What choice do we have? No phone, no telegram, no carrier pigeons, no smoke signals. Someone has to get out of here. Who does it hurt if that someone is me?”

Micah said, “You coming back?”

“No,” Eb said evenly. “Why the hell would I? But I promise I’ll call the authorities. I’ll have Johnny Law dispatched here posthaste.”

“If you make it.”

“If I make it.”

Micah considered this. “Give us some time. We can help.”

Micah went away with Minerva. Ebenezer spent the good part of an hour tinkering with the bike. Doc Lewis and another man showed up meanwhile and dragged Virgil off; Virgil’s boot heels left shallow rails in the dirt.

The sun skinned above the trees. Shapes shifted in the bad light of the woods. The electric tang of dread lay heavy in Eb’s mouth. Micah returned with Ellen and two male followers. Both men carried compound bows.

“Ellen made these.”

Micah held up a globe of paper-thin glass with a hole in the top. The men filled each globe with gasoline—now a precious resource—and lashed the globes to hunting arrows with duct tape.

“We will try to hit a few,” Micah said. “At least you will see them coming.”

Ebenezer duct-taped Virgil’s gun to the motorbike’s handlebars. He kick-started the engine. The motor coughed, sputtered, then buzzed to life.

“You better make that fuckin’ phone call!” Minerva shouted over the engine.

“I’ll miss you most of all!” he shouted back to her.

The men notched arrows in their bows. Ellen lit the gasoline in the glass bowls. Micah hefted the Tarpley rifle. Minerva had Ellen’s .38 pistol.

“We’ll lay down cover,” she said grudgingly. “Race like your ass is on fire.”

Minerva and Micah jogged fifty yards ahead. The shapes in the trees were massing now. Ebenezer gunned the engine; the bike buzzed louder—those wine-swilling Frenchies made one hell of a motorcycle.

Ah, well, Eb thought. Who wants to live forever?

Two arrows arced over his head. One hit a tree, whose trunk went up in a furious cone of fire. The other arrow hit one of the creatures, which shrieked as flames burst over its body. The fire clawed all over it to showcase its enormous and baffling size.

“Go!” Micah shouted.

Eb opened the throttle. The bike took off like a scalded cat. He raced between Minerva and Micah, bike screaming, tachometer in the red. The bike bottomed out in a rut, the chassis kicking up sparks. He shot past Charlie Fairweather’s corpse—Charlie’s eyes wide open, his dust-covered intestines resembling floured sausage links. Two more arrows arced overhead; something went up fifty yards ahead of him, a lunatic combustion that threw the woods into momentary relief. Noises from all angles, a cacophony of screeches and howls.

Something charged from his left-hand side; he cranked the bars to the right. Micah’s rifle cracked; the thing skip-tumbled away, a good chunk of its anatomy obliterated by the blast—

The tires hit a rut; the bike wobbled, threatening to spill him off, but he recovered and rose up off the seat as the bike launched out of the rut on a bad line. The wheels spun, engine whining, before he slammed back down. His skull hammered the handlebars. He pulled his head up, woozy, seeing stars—he was riding straight at the trees. An abomination loomed out of the woods: the skulls of many animals smashed together, the bone humped and carbuncled like a walnut with a horrible mouth splitting its surface. Ebenezer dropped one leg down and wrenched the bars hard, spinning a tight one-eighty; he gunned the throttle, and the bike reared up as something snagged at his shirt collar, slitting the material and leaving a burning line of pain down his back. He cat-walked the bike away from the trees, shifted his weight to bring the front tire down again, and slewed onto the path. Blood was trickling down his back. He shot past the pickup truck and caught a flash of blood on its windows and a headless body slumped against the tire.

Sweat dripped into his eye; he blinked, and when his vision cleared, he saw something in the firs to his right, forty yards ahead. It kept rising and rising in a crazed mass of limbs like a living totem pole. It slumped forward, falling like a tree but much faster—more like an enormous whip being cracked. It slapped down on the path, sending up a stinking puff of dust, this terrible skinned rope studded with red-rimmed eyes and mouths full of teeth gnashing with mindless hunger—

Eb jerked the handlebars, popping the front wheel up, and hurdled the thing like a speed bump. The tires burred over its body, sending up the stink of burned rubber; for a heart-sinking moment Eb was sure the thing’s teeth or claws would puncture the tire, leaving him to flee on the shredded rim, but the rubber held, thank Christ.

The path widened and ran flat; the shapes between the trees began to thin. He sensed movement from behind, things blundering and crashing through the bush, but he was moving faster than them now.

Ha-haaaaah! he thought joyously. Run, run, just as fast as you can, you can’t catch me—I’m the bloody GINGERBREAD MAN!

A shadow fell across his shoulder. He caught the decayed smell of his pursuer. He glanced back in time to see something swooping in from above. Its plated wings were fanned out, a fearsome ten-foot span of vein-threaded blackness. He swerved to avoid its predatory strike; its wings flapped directly overhead, the air filling with rancid white dust like the powder off a moth. It latched onto his ear; its talons were blunt but incredibly powerful—it was like getting pierced with ballpoint pens. The creature flapped its enormous wings; Eb’s ass lifted a few inches off the seat. He screamed as the thing tried to muscle itself skyward; it raked his head with other claws, these much sharper, slicing his scalp open.

Eb clung desperately to the handlebars as the thing rose up, clutching his ear like an angry schoolmarm. One hand was pried off the bars, his fingers barely holding on; his screams intensified as his panic hit maximum intensity. Then, with a fibrous zippering tear, part of his ear was gone, ripped right off the side of his head. He barely felt it, on account of the adrenaline washing through his system. He dropped back onto the seat; the shocks groaned as the bike bottomed out again, spraying a fan of gravel. There came a pressurized hiss as blood sprayed from the wound, flowing around his jaw and down his neck.

The thing screeched and wheeled through the air in front of him. This huge black thing, part bat and part buzzard and part snake but larger than those creatures by far, with a segmented tail that winnowed to the stinger of a scorpion.

Eb ripped the pistol off the handlebars and fired. The second bullet hit its chest; the thing was blown backward in midair, body crumpling as it crashed into the roadside nettles.

Ebenezer tossed the gun away. This was his chance, maybe his only one. He could hear them behind him, a murderous stampede. He opened the throttle. The bike whined in protest; fingers of black smoke trailed up from the transmission.

Come on, Eb thought desperately. Just a few more miles, little pony.

The path dropped steadily downward. He maneuvered the bike over small dirt moguls and shale slides, laying off the throttle and letting the momentum take hold. Casting a glance back, he saw nothing.

The engine was so hot that it baked the flesh of his calf, but the little Metisse didn’t overheat or conk out. If he made it through this, Ebenezer would never speak ill of the French again. The side of his head throbbed where part of his ear had been wrenched off; he touched the wound and recoiled as blistering pain shot through his skull. Christ Almighty. Well, at least he already wore his hair long. Blood leaked down his forehead from the shallow cuts in his scalp, but he didn’t feel faint yet.

He rode until he hit the creek. Its bottom was covered in water-polished stones as one might find in an ornamental aquarium. He gussied the bike down the banks and into the shallows. Water hissed off the engine. He gingerly nosed it forward. The rear tire stuttered over the smooth stones; the bike slid out from under him, but he was able to hold it up and goose the throttle until the tires caught again. The motor almost cut out at the deepest point, water rising up to the base of the gearbox, but Eb powered it through with a few quick punches on the throttle.

He geared up the far bank and let the bike idle. He wanted to switch it off and let it cool down, but he wasn’t sure it would start again. He was not being pursued, that he could see. He swung the bike around and continued down the road.

At some point, the path bled into a clearing. The grass ran waist-high on either side. In the afternoon sunlight, he could see Ellen’s car parked at the cut.

“Holy shit.” He slapped the side of the bike the way a cowboy might the flanks of a trusty steed. “We made it.”

He was fifty yards from Ellen’s Oldsmobile when the bike’s engine rose to a pained squeal. Smoke poured from the transmission compartment as the gears stripped loose. The bike sputtered once and died. Ebenezer pushed the bike to the car. He laid it down reverentially.

“Thank you,” he said to it. “Thank you so much.”

The car keys were still tucked under the bumper where Micah had stashed them. He slid the key into the lock and sat in the driver’s seat. He gripped the steering wheel. He stared at himself in the rearview mirror. His skin was grayish, a pallor it had never held before. The top quarter of his left ear was gone, blood dried down his neck. He was not fit for human eyes. But he was alive, goddamn it. Alive.

He pumped the gas pedal and cranked the key. The engine caught with a magnificent roar, that eight-barrel engine rumbling. He backed into the tall grass, swung the big car around, and drove away from the cut. He unrolled the window and let the cool air play over his face.

“Free at last, free at last,” he hooted, “good God almighty, free at last!”

4

“YOU FIGURE the bastard made it?”

Minerva stood at the fence with Micah. It had been hours since Ebenezer had left.

Micah said, “Think so.”

Minerva was pretty sure he had, too. The devil’s own luck, that prick.

Little Heaven was chilly in the late morning, skies hung with the threat of rain. The compound was quiet. The things in the woods seemed content to remain where they were so long as everyone in Little Heaven stayed put.

“We got to find them, Shug. Or try, at least.”

“The children?”

“Yeah, Shug. The children.”

Micah said, “We have not heard the last of the Reverend.”

“What do you think he’s up to?”

“Something,” said Micah. “He will commune with God, or so he will tell his flock. Then he will make his move.”

Minerva looked at him, sucked at her teeth, then glanced away. “It’s still weird.”

“What is?”

“You. With two eyes.”

“One is glass.”

“Really? The old one didn’t grow back?” She frowned. “Sorry. I’m ill at ease.”

Minerva hooked her fingers through the fence. The sun fought through a bank of clouds and shone down on the woods. They appeared empty; the things could be clustered closer to the road, disregarding the northern flank of Little Heaven. The massive rock formation loomed over the trees. Her fingers tightened.

“I think we’re gonna die here, Shug.”

Micah didn’t reply. She hadn’t expected him to. She closed her eyes. She saw the children clustered together under the kitchen trapdoor, their faces white as gaslight. She opened her eyes again, not wanting to see them anymore. “Any clue where they went?”

Micah angled his chin at the black rock that rose at a blunt angle against the sky.

The two of them walked back to their bunkhouse. The grounds were unoccupied; everyone was inside, out of sight. Ellen and Nate were inside. Nate’s father was not. Minerva grabbed her backpack. She checked the loads on Ellen’s pistol.

“Where are you going?” said Ellen.

“To find the kids,” said Micah, arranging his own pack for travel.

“What about those things?” Ellen said.

“We’re going north, toward the rock formation,” Minerva told her. “They don’t seem to be gathered out that way.”

“But what if they are?”

Minerva gave her a grisly smile. “It’ll be a short trip.”

“Why?” said Nate. “I mean, I saw those kids. I don’t think… they may not come with you. It won’t let them.”

“What do you mean, it won’t let them?” Minerva asked.

“That’s what Eli said when he came up through the door,” the boy told her. “It wants you, he said. It wants all of you.”

A chill fled down Minerva’s spine. “If we don’t know what we’re up against, we stand a much worse chance of surviving.”

“But don’t you think Ebenezer will send for—”

“I have no fucking idea,” said Minerva, cutting Ellen off. “I don’t trust that shithead any farther than I can throw him. Sorry for cursing, kid.”

“I want to go,” Ellen said.

Micah shook his head. “Someone needs to stay. Keep an eye.”

“Why me?” said Ellen, pissed.

Nate clutched her hand. “Please don’t go.”

“Okay,” Ellen said after a pause. “We’ll stay.”

“We won’t be gone long,” Minerva promised.

“Just be careful,” Ellen said, looking at Micah.

THEY SET OFF in the early afternoon. Nobody saw them leave—or if so, they made no effort to stop them. What would be the use now? Micah snipped the fence at the farthest edge of Little Heaven with some bolt cutters he’d found in a supply shed. He and Minerva slid through the gap, entering the woods.

The trees were thin, with no discernable trail through them. Minerva had a pistol. Micah went unarmed. A gun felt trivial in his hand now. A useless toy.

They stumbled upon a path of sorts. A band of desolate gray stripping through the woods. Not a thing was living along it. Not a tree, a shrub, a weed. It was as if a scouring fire had burned across the ground, leaving only powdery ash behind.

The path wound toward the black rock, which Minerva could glimpse through gaps in the trees. An unsettling sight: a sheer cliff of blackness so dark it swallowed the sunlight. The woods were silent. They were not being trailed.

They kept their own counsel. Minerva could tell that Micah was exhausted. His encounter with the things that had left Otis and Charlie and the red-bearded man dead had sapped his energy. His stride was labored, but his pace was remorseless. Minerva felt weary, too. It was like living in the shadow of a dormant volcano: you never knew when it was going to erupt and spew molten lava all over you.

Clouds rolled in. Rain pattered down. A steady trickle soon grew to a sheeting downpour. They found shelter under the firs. Minerva became aware of the powerful funk of her body. How long had she gone without bathing? She thought back to her last shower in a motel bathroom a few hours’ drive from Grinder’s Switch. The yellowy water spraying from a calcified nozzle. The mildewed shower curtain with a pattern of bow-tied ducks. How much would she pay to take a shower right now? A thousand dollars? Ten thousand?

The downpour lasted fifteen minutes. The rain turned the ash into a slurry that clung to their boots. They walked until the sun began to fade.

They rounded a bend, and it came into view. The black rock.

The trees petered out, becoming more stunted and palsied. The surrounding landscape was as sandy as a desert. It was monolithic. A giant rotted tooth pushing up from the red sand. It was a mile distant, but Minerva could feel its forbidding magnetism gripping her already—she was a lead filing dragged toward its brooding shadow.

“You do not have to come,” Micah said.

“Like hell I don’t.”

5

YOU’RE ONE DUMB BUNNY, Virgil Swicker.

Virgil’s mother used to say that. His own mother, who was so damn smart she got knocked up eight times by five different daddies. So damn smart she couldn’t wring a shaved nickel out of any of them in child support, so she and her brood lived in a saltbox shack on the edge of the Mojave Desert, sucking on sand. A real smarty-pants, his ma!

But she had him dead to rights. Virgil was dumb. He was just smart enough to know it. Which was a pretty sad place to pin the tail on that particular donkey. If he’d been juuuuust a little dumber—if he could have killed off a few measly IQ points—he probably wouldn’t have been able to grasp how witless he was. And then it wouldn’t have bothered him so much. What a kick in the teeth, huh?

One thing about knowing your limits is you learn how to operate within them. Virgil Swicker had learned early on that his lot in life was being a follower. He felt safest behind someone else, looking down at that man’s heels. A leader needed smarts and fire and drive. All a follower ever needed to know was where to line up.

Virgil had left home at fifteen to little fanfare; his mother could barely care enough to wave good-bye from the stoop. He hitchhiked to San Francisco and lived on the streets, eating out of dumpsters behind Chinky restaurants. He was a big kid and nobody had raised him right; he started rolling drunks, and that went well for a while before this one rummy wheeled on him with a switchblade. The guy was nimble with that blade, too, even three sheets to the wind—“I’m over from Stockton, motherfucker!” he kept screaming, as if that should mean something to Virgil, as if laying your hands on a wino over from Stockton was a capital crime. That Stockton trash maniac opened a big slash under Virgil’s armpit, then chased him down the street, laughing like a schoolboy, tee-hee-hee—if the nutzoid hadn’t tripped into a gutter, he would have caught Virgil and stabbed his eyes out.

After that, Virgil mooned around the Tenderloin like a kicked dog. There were times he thought about buying a knife or maybe a gun—that bastard with the switchblade wouldn’t have been so high-and-mighty if Virgil had stuck a pistol in his face, bet your ass on that—but he couldn’t afford either of those items. It was in the depths of despair that a single ray of sunlight brightened Virgil’s world. That ray had a name: Cyril Neeps.

They met on a bench in Union Square. Virgil was puffy and scabbed, his teeth loose in his gums from eating dumpster fruit. Cyril was tanned and fit and had this way about him that said, Hey, world, get a load of me! He seemed the kind of man who could do anything he wanted with his life, and Virgil was instantaneously awed by him.

“What’s your story, fella?” Cy had asked without much interest, investigating the cracks of his teeth with a cinnamon-flavored toothpick.

Virgil had hemmed and hawed for about fifteen seconds before Cyril laughed great big, sucked a shred of meat off the tip of the toothpick, and said: “You’re as dumb as a box of rocks, ain’t ya?”

“…I guess so.”

Cyril clapped him on the back. “Hey, no big whoop. You probably didn’t spend enough time in your mama’s belly. You came out like a cake that’s still mushy in the middle.”

“I guess.”

“Here, have a toothpick,” Cy said, unwrapping a fresh one. Virgil was overcome by this small charity.

“That’s right, dummy,” Cyril said cheerily. “Use the pointy end.”

There was nothing cruel in the way he said dummy—just stating a fact, which Virgil guessed was true. Cyril would call him dumb in many flavorful ways as their relationship went along. Dumb as a bag of hammers. Three bricks short of a load. Squirrel-headed. Pudding-brained. Not the sharpest pencil in the drawer. Drooling fuckin’ mongoloid when he was running hot. Sometimes Virgil would go red in the face when Cyril said these things, but he never argued. He just wished Cy had the good manners not to mention his dumbness, the way you shouldn’t call attention to the fact that a kid was missing his hand or was blind or something like that. It was mean, pointing out defects. But then, Cyril wasn’t really a nice guy.

But he was smart. A whole lot smarter than Virgil—granted, that was a low bar to clear. But Cyril had command. Presence. When he walked into a room, people looked up. If they looked long enough, they would see Virgil trailing in on his heels. Virgil helped Cyril stick up a few gas stations and a Chinatown grocer. It was dead easy. Cyril laid his hands on a gun. They wore panty hose over their faces. They made good money, too. Fifty bucks here, thirty-seven bucks there. All in cash! Untraceable was the word Cyril used.

Still, they got pinched. Bad luck, was all. They both did a hitch. Two years, sentences reduced due to prison overcrowding. After they got out, they returned to the Tenderloin. Virgil tried to sell his body to the waify mincers and nine-to-five types who trolled the park for rough trade. But Virgil looking how he did, there weren’t many takers. Cyril was tired of him by then, Virgil could tell. He wanted a real partner, someone to help him become the criminal big shot he knew he could be. Someone a damn sight better than shit-a-brick Virgil Swicker. But Cyril never did find that running mate—maybe because he wasn’t such hot shit, Virgil secretly thought.

One day, they wandered through the doors of Amos Flesher’s church. Cyril thought they might steal a chalice or something and pawn it. Instead they met the supreme-o creepster himself, ole Reverend Flesher with his greasy muskrat-pelt hair. Flesher had bumbled out of the whatever-the-fuck-you-call-it, his dressing room where he put on his goofy church clothes. He saw them skulking around.

“You looking for something, fellas?”

He had an aw-shucks way about him. But Virgil could see that was a sham. This was a guy who could spot the angle in a circle.

“Gimme all your money,” Cyril said mock-jokingly, but with that ever-present flint in his eye.

The Rev cocked his head at them. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a flashy roll—a wad of cash. What was a man of God doing with a pimp roll? He peeled off a few twenties and handed them over.

“The Lord provides,” he told them. “Why don’t you come back later? I might have a job for you.”

The Rev saw something in them that he could use. And so it transpired that they came here to Little Heaven, to buttfuck nowhere, to nursemaid a bunch of religious freakos. It wasn’t too bad at first. The Reverend promised them plenty of dough. It was easy work. They would’ve been happy to keep the churchy fuckos in line, really crack the fuckin’ whip, but the Rev’s followers never fell out of line. So most of the time, he and Cy sat around with their thumbs up their asses, feeling antsy. They had plenty of ammo, so they shot their guns off in the woods. But after a while, there wasn’t much to shoot at.

Virgil hated it—nothing but trees and dirt clods and people mumbling prayers. Cyril was madder than a wet hen, too. Little Heaven messed with his brain waves, he said. They tried brewing hooch to stabilize Cyril’s bummed waves, but that plan went tits up.

Then things got weirder. Voices in the woods. Shapes, some even claimed. But nothing you could point a finger at and say: This here, this is messed up. Just a feeling. Everyone started acting hinky, especially the kids. It was sorta like that movie he’d watched at the Presidio a few years back after filching some coins out of a blind beggar’s cup—Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As if the whole damn camp had been taken over by pod people. Virgil half expected to find a bunch of oozing, cracked-open pods down in the kitchen cellar.

Then the outsiders showed up—Virgil hadn’t minded so much, because at least there was nothing much weird about them. They came from the world of streetlights and restaurants and roller-disco rinks, from the real world. But soon after, things got unreal when that kid Eli came back looking like something in the woods had sucked the life out of him… and then Cy went missing. Virgil was terrified that he’d run off home without telling him. Just took off in the dead of night. Hasta la vista, Virg, I’ll see you in the funny pages, ole buddy ole chum.

And then just this morning that fucking nigger cunt went and stole a motorcycle. When Virgil went to stop it, he got a goddamn wrench chucked at him. It hit him so hard that he tasted metal on his tongue and his skull rang like a church bell. Before he knew it, the rotten pig-fucker was beating the living daylights out of him! And not a damn one of these religious bumpkins stepped in to stop the long-haired spook. They just let the prick whale away. Go ahead, you thieving foreigner, beat the tar out of a goddamn honest American!

Virgil had woken up in Doc Lewis’s quarters. His forehead was so swollen he looked like a caveman. His eyes were puffed to slits. That wouldn’t have happened if Cy had been around. He would have shot that black bastard dead in his boots. But Cy wasn’t around anymore and it broke Virgil’s heart.

Presently he got out of his bed in Doc Lewis’s bunkhouse and went outside. His face hurt like hell. He walked the fence. Nobody was around. The long-haired English faggot had taken off on the motorbike, he figured. Virgil hoped he’d gotten ripped apart by the things in the woods, that they ate his stringy black ass like beef jerky. Serve him right.

Clouds gathered overhead. The rain started as a light drizzle and built to a torrent, fat drops drumming on the warehouse roofs. Virgil let the downpour soak him to the skin. As a young boy he used to stand at the edge of the desert on scorching summer days watching chain lightning skate over the hillsides, waiting for the rain to come. There was great relief when those swollen clouds finally split open above him.

He watched the forest. Maybe he should run, too. There was another motorbike, right? He ought to get the hell out of here before things got any worse and—

Something or someone was standing between the trees.

Virgil squinted through the sheeting rain. He was still woozy from the beating that jigaboo had laid on him. For an instant, he pictured a gaggle of witches—these old crones with sagging papery skin and cruel twists of mouths shuffling between the tall dark pines clung with eldritch skeins of moss… witches, or perhaps just creatures who dressed to look like witches, but who were in truth more ancient and evil than any witch—

But no. It was just one person. A figure standing motionless in the shadowy canopy of the woods.

“Who’s out there? Who—”

Whatever it was, it came forward fast—spooky fast. One moment it was fifty yards off and the next it was right there, a few feet from the fence. It was Cyril… looked like Cy, anyhow. Except the eyes were off. And the way he stood there kinda creaky-looking, like his bones were all busted under his skin.

He looks like somebody already dead. This was Virgil’s trembling thought. His old pal Cy was dead as a doornail, except that little nugget of information hadn’t sunk into his decayed head quite yet. Virgil figured it would have to come as a shock to his dear friend.

“Everything okay, Cy?”

Cyril smiled. His teeth were gray like the dead tooth in his grandma’s mouth with a copper wire around it. Except every one of Cy’s teeth was gray—you’d think he had painted them with lead or something.

“Fine and dandy, Virg.”

“Well, good.” Virgil swallowed. Rain washed down his throat. It tasted bad, like water a corpse had sat in for days. “Where you been?”

“Oh, out and about.”

That was another worrisome thing. Cy’s voice was funny, too. Wet and rattling as if stuff was coming loose inside of him.

“I thought… jeez, you’re going to call me a dummy, but I thought maybe you’d left, Cy. You couldn’t stand another minute and skedaddled.”

“Aw, hell.” Cy hawked back and spat. The oyster of congealed phlegm just kinda fell out of his mouth like a dead slug and dribbled down his boot, black as clotted oil. “You think I’d leave all this happy horseshit?”

“Sure. No.” Virgil tried to smile, but the muscles of his face didn’t feel like they were working so hot. “You bet.”

Right then, Virgil felt like running. Yep, turning tail and sprinting away from his old buddy Cy. His heart was bappity-bapping inside his chest, and there was a tightness in his crotch as if a hard little balloon were swelling up behind his bladder.

“They all ought to pay, don’t you think?”

“Who’s that, Cy?”

Cyril motioned at Little Heaven with his chin—the pitiful whole of it. “Everyone. All these fuckers. Pay for disobeying the Lord.”

Since when did Cy give two shits about the Lord? “Well now, I don’t really see how they’ve—”

“Shut up, squirrel head,” Cy said. Virgil zipped his lip. “Shouldn’t they pay for what they let happen to you? That fairy nig beating on your head like a bongo drum while they all stood around with their dicks in their hands?”

Virgil caught a smell coming off his compadre. He nearly gagged. It would be rude to puke on account of Cy reeking so bad. A strong sense of unreality washed over Virgil; he felt light-headed, like when he used to huff gasoline in Mission Dolores Park.

“They could have stepped in, yeah.”

“Bet your ass, buckaroo,” said Cy. “Now let me tell you—clean the shit out of your ears, dim bulb, and listen up good—the Reverend’s got a plan.”

Virgil smiled dozily. “Is that so?”

“That’s a fact, jack. And all you got to do is exactly what he says. Figure you can manage that, or will following simple instructions make your fool brains squirt out your ears?”

“Aw, come on now, Cy…”

Virgil’s thoughts were swimmy and remote. It was as if his brain was trying to sprint away from him, away from Little Heaven and everything that was happening. But where could it go? It was trapped in his stupid skull, just like Virgil was trapped here.

“Can you help, Cy? I’d feel a lot better if you were helping. You always were the—”

“The brains of the operation. Yeah, Virg, I know. Lord knows I do. But not this time. You’re on your own.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t anymore.”

“Why?” Virgil repeated stupidly.

Cyril opened his mouth. Virgil took an instinctive step back. The inside of Cy’s mouth was all black, but things were moving in the pit of his throat. Bugs, it looked like. But it couldn’t be. Roaches scuttling over one another…

Virgil said, “Oh.”

Cyril shut his mouth. He had begun to drift away from the fence, back toward the woods. Virgil couldn’t see his feet moving. That was odd, wasn’t it?

I hid a gun in our bunkhouse, Cyril said… Actually, he didn’t say anything. His lips were shut. But Virgil could hear him just fine.

A long bladelike insect—a centipede?—slid out of Cyril’s nostril. It curled around the rim of his nose, its legs skiddle-skaddling and antennae twitching, crawled between his eyes and up his forehead to vanish into the tangled nest of his hair. Virgil did not scream, but if his throat hadn’t been so dry all of a sudden, he surely would have.

Look under the bed, Virg. Take the gun. You’ll need it.

Cy kept on floating back toward the trees. To be honest, Virgil couldn’t say he was all that sad to see him go. Cyril’s body knitted into the gloom of the woods. A few minutes later, the rain stopped entirely.

Virgil walked through the muddy slop to their bunkhouse. The gun—a Bulldog .38 revolver—and a box of ammunition were stashed under the cot in a hole dug under the clapboards, just like Cyril had said it would be. Good ole Cy, always looking out.

Virgil stuck the pistol into his waistband. Then he crossed the square to the chapel and knocked on the door. The Reverend answered. He didn’t look so hot. His hair fell over his forehead in greasy strings. He stunk like a polecat in July.

“Come in.” He smiled—a gruesome sight—his eyes flicking edgewise. “We have much work to do.”

Reluctantly, with the same dread a man might feel stepping into his own casket, Virgil Swicker went inside.

6

EBENEZER FLED the ruin of Grinder’s Switch and hit the interstate, gunning the Oldsmobile’s engine hard as he piled up the miles between himself and Little Heaven.

The big-bore engine sent a soothing vibration through the whole car. He flicked on the radio and caught the Sonics singing “The Witch” on KIOT 102.5—“Spinning platters without the chatter!”—out of Albuquerque.

The blood on his scalp and ear had coagulated and turned crusty. He stopped at a Texaco station and cleaned himself up in the bathroom—the gas jockey had looked like he was going to withhold the lavatory key, but something in Eb’s demeanor convinced him to hand it over. When Eb emerged, he looked somewhat presentable. He got on the road again and pulled into a roadside diner sometime later. A bubble of polished glass and steel made dull by the constantly blowing dust. He could see a few people inside at the counter or sitting in padded booths. A pie case revolved at the end of the counter—huge, three-inch-thick wedges peaked with meringue or whipped cream. He wiped the drool off his lips and considered his state. He was in no shape for public viewing, not without having to answer a lot of questions. What he needed was a motel room, a bath, and to sleep in a real bed for roughly fifteen years.

A pay phone stood near the diner’s entrance. He flipped open the car’s ashtray and found a crumpled dollar bill, plus a few dimes and nickels. His back was welded to the upholstery with sweat; he peeled off the seat like a giant Band-Aid and made his way to the phone.

“Truth or Consequences Police Department. Do you have a crime to report?”

Eb cleared his throat. “I do, yes.”

The line clicked. A series of buzzes, then a man picked up.

“Detective Rollins speaking. What’s the problem?”

The man sounded as if he was expecting an elderly woman to tell him that her cat, Mr. Buttons, was stuck up an elm tree.

“Er, yes…” Ebenezer was unsure how to proceed. He should have rehearsed. “I believe something’s happening in the woods and hills up past the town of Grinder’s Switch.”

“That so, buddy? What kinda something we talkin’ about?”

The detective sounded fat. Eb pictured him leaning back in a wooden chair while an electric fan stirred the squad room’s humid air around. He saw rolls of flab cascading down the back of Rollins’s neck to his too-tight collar, balls of sweat rolling down his forehead to dampen his caterpillar eyebrows above a pair of small, piggy eyes.

“I was hiking around that area and I came across—”

“Where you from, pardner? You don’t sound local.”

“I’m English, if that matters.”

Rollins’s voice grew hard. “What matters is what I say matters. We clear on that, pard?”

“Crystal.”

“Go on, tell your story. I don’t got all day.”

Ebenezer gazed through the dusty window into the diner. The waitress—an old battle-ax named Flo or Marge or Betsy, no doubt—was gawping out at him. The pie case spun enticingly at her elbow.

“I was hiking in the hills,” Eb said tightly. “Came across a camp. A survivalist setup. Little Heaven, I believe it’s called. Have you heard of it?”

“Nope.” The detective popped the p in a way that conveyed his total boredom.

“Yes, so, about thirty or forty of them. Living on their own in the woods.”

“That’s not a crime. Weird, but not a crime.”

“Right, well… I think some of them might have died.”

He heard a loud scriitch—the sound of Rollins pulling his chair closer to his desk, perhaps. His voice was suddenly bright with interest.

“Go on.”

“I don’t know how it happened, or what happened. All I know is that—”

“What did you see?” Rollins said.

“A body. Maybe more. Some dead bodies.”

“You sure? How close did you get to them bodies? You positive whoever it was wasn’t just sleeping or knocked out or—?”

“Sleeping? No. Dead.”

“Dead how?”

“I beg pardon?”

“How were these bodies dead? Bullet in the head? Knife? What?”

What use was it to tell this man the truth? That Charlie Fairweather and Otis Langtree and the big redheaded bull had been savagely dismembered by beasts beyond the Sheriff’s wildest imaginings—creatures that would wreck his tiny, suet-engirded mind?

Ebenezer sighed. “I… I don’t know. They’re just dead. Either you believe that or you don’t.” You shitkicking fathead, he thought.

A grumbling exhale from Rollins’s end. The chair squeaked as his body settled back into what Ebenezer assumed to be its original uninterested posture.

“You know it’s a federal offense to transmit wrongful information to a law enforcement officer, don’tcha?”

Ebenezer shut his eyes and rested his head against the phone booth. He should have practiced his story.

“I’m not lying, Officer.”

“What’s your name?”

“Julius.”

“Uh-huh. Julius who?”

“Julius Thriftwhistle.”

“Well then, Mr. Thriftwhistle, why don’t you haul your ass down to the station and fill out a report for us? Then we can get to work sorting your story out.”

Ebenezer wasn’t going to any police station. Not in his state—not at all. They would ask for his ID. They might even run his fingerprints, and that would be very bad indeed. Ebenezer and the authorities were on less-than-jolly terms with each other.

“Or why not tell me where you are and I come to you? Pretty sure I heard a big truck blast by a minute ago on your end, so I’d guess you’re at a pay phone along the interst—”

Eb hung up. Bloody hell. That had gone poorly. He gazed into the diner. Pure undiluted Americana: bright linoleum and shiny chrome and the smell of delicious starches fried in oil. After a momentary debate, he pushed through the door. A bell tinkled. A father and mother and their young daughter sat in one booth. A traveling-salesman type occupied the counter. Pearl was dishing up them vittles.

He sat on a padded counter stool. He flipped through the miniature jukebox mounted beside his elbow. He slid a nickel in and punched B6. “Stand By Me,” by Ben E. King. Eb was surprised to find a black man’s song on the jukebox. The waitress approached with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.

“You okay, Mister?” Pronounced it as misser.

Eb smiled winningly. It probably didn’t help. “Tip-top, my dear. Thank you for inquiring.”

She set her order pad down and watched him carefully, the way you’d watch a small but vicious dog that had slipped its leash.

“What kinds of pie do you serve?”

“Sweet potato, blueberry, lemon, shoofly pie—”

“Shoofly?”

“It’s a northern thing,” she said. “Molasses pie. Our baker came down from Pennsylvania Dutch country. He brung the recipe with him.”

“Molasses, mmm? Sounds like treacle pudding. I ate that as a child in England.”

Flo clearly did not give a tin shit what Eb had done back in Merry Ole. She tapped her pencil on the order pad, wanting him to eat, pay up, and leave.

“How much?”

“Forty cents.”

“Sold! And a cup of coffee you can stand a spoon up in, if’n you please.”

“We don’t make that kind of coffee.”

His smile widened. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”

Eb closed his eyes and dropped his skull to the countertop. The ceramic was cool on his forehead. Lovely, such small pleasures. He ruminated. What were his options? He could keep going. That was good, and it suited his temperament. He’d promised them he’d call the police. Well, he had. That shitkicking detective gave him the gears, all because Eb had a funny way of talking. He wasn’t going to the police station; he’d wind up in a cell. What more did he owe, for Christ’s sake?

You’re scared, Ebenezer.

It was his aunt’s voice in his head. His aunt Hazel, dead nearly two decades now. But Hazel practically raised him. Eb’s father did what plenty of rot-ass fathers did—went out for a bottle of milk and a pack of Mayfair cigarettes one fine afternoon and never showed his face again. Not even to bring that tossing milk home. His mother was a sensitive type, prone to bouts of the nerves, as they were known in those days; as such, his rearing fell mainly to her older sister, Eb’s aunt, Hazel Coggins. Hazel was unmarried—“Men are as useful as a chocolate teapot,” she was fond of saying—and worked at the local butcher shop. A big, handsome woman, and a dab hand with a cleaver: she could draw and quarter a hog faster and cleaner than anyone. Hazel was a hard woman: eyes, body, outlook. Life was eat or be eaten, according to her, and better to be hunter than prey.

But as a primary school student, Ebenezer had too often been prey. The first-form boys would surround him in the sandlot after school—eight or ten boys, all of them white—to throw insults and, soon enough, fists. When Ebenezer returned home bloody-nosed on a third consecutive day, his aunt took action.

She was still wearing her butcher’s apron, wet at the hem with hog’s blood. She took it off, wadded it up, and—while Eb struggled—pressed it over his mouth and nose.

“Smell it!” She shoved it into his face as he choked on the sodden fabric. “Are you a hog, boy? Are you meat?”

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

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

“What do I do?” he asked her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely it was natural, considering what he had experienced.

Still. Still.

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

But by God, he owed.

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

And that… that simply would not do—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOOM!

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

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

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

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

He grabbed a Beretta 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun and ten boxes of shells. To this he added a pair of Colt M1911s, a hundred rounds of ammo, and six spare clips. He stashed everything in the car trunk, then went back inside. He shed his shirt and pants. His chest and arms were cut, but apart from his ear the damage was superficial. He donned a camouflage hunting outfit he found in the main showroom.

Then he went back for the flamethrower he’d pointed out to Micah when they had first come into the shop. He hefted the canisters. Something sloshed inside the left one—jellied gasoline. The right one would be full of nitrogen propellant.

He found a few other items—a bowie knife, a flare gun, some stout rope, and a Zippo lighter in a desk in Jimmy’s office. The lighter sat next to some cigars. Once he identified them as genuine Cubanos and not the trick exploding kind, he slid two of them into the chest pocket of his spiffy new hunting outfit.

He muscled the flamethrower into the Oldsmobile’s backseat. He considered leaving a note for Jimmy, telling him his store had been looted by the forces of good… but he did not do this, because he was not an especially good person and felt no compulsion to lie about it. He did close the back door. The least he could do.

Ebenezer followed the highway until he found a deserted access road. He drove a mile down it and stopped. He opened the trunk, loaded the guns and the spare clips. A scorpion sunned itself on a flat rock nearby.

He got into the car and drove back to the head of the access road. A big store sat on the side of an otherwise deserted stretch a few hundred yards off. Big Al’s Bargain Village. He swung into its parking lot. The dusty bay window showcased the store’s wares. Blenders and fondue pots and tennis rackets and sterling silver tea sets—Al’s got everything under the sun! the display boasted.

A seventeen-inch Magnavox TV was broadcasting an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. Bug-eyed Barney Fife was giving Opie advice. Someone was always giving Opie advice. The carrot-topped, weedy idiot. Eb closed his eyes and rested his head against the glass. Are you really going to do this? he asked himself. Are you that much of a damned fool? He pictured those monstrosities skulking through the woods; he recalled the charnel stink wafting off the one that had swooped down and aggressively relieved him of half his ear.

He didn’t owe any of them a Christly thing. It had been a business arrangement, nothing more. He’d fulfilled his end of the bargain, hadn’t he?

“Can I help you, fella?”

A fat man in a seersucker suit stared at him from the store entrance. Big Al his own self, by the looks of it. He had the flat-hanging, shiny red face of a carnival barker—but he didn’t look all too impressed to see a black man in a camouflage outfit mooning around his display window.

“Just reflecting on life,” Eb said.

“That so, Alec Guinness?” Big Al bit his thumbnail; his teeth crunched on the calcified enamel. “Does that reflection include a desire for midquality consumer goods?”

Ebenezer smiled. “I guess not.”

“Then I’ll kindly ask you to fuck right off.”

Ebenezer laughed. “And the horse I rode in on, yes?”

“That’s about the size of it. I don’t need your nose prints all over my glass.”

Still chuckling, Eb walked back to the car. Big Al glared after him. Eb slid behind the wheel and fired up the Olds. “Eve of Destruction” was playing on the radio. He cranked the volume knob and peeled out of the lot, heading back in the direction he’d come.

7

DARKNESS HAD NEARLY FALLEN by the time Minerva and Micah reached the rock. They stopped twenty yards from its southern face. It was black as obsidian. Its outcroppings were sharp as cut glass, impervious to the scourings of wind and rain. Its sheer face climbed nearly two hundred yards before reaching a flat apex. Micah wondered if there was a route to the summit—and, if one existed, did they really want to see what was up there?

They circumnavigated the rock, working eastward. They kept their distance from it, walking through the clingy sand that carpeted the slope. The sun’s dying rays washed the woods, but did not lighten the monolith itself. It was as if the sun’s light was consumed by it.

It took half an hour to cut around to its eastern face. The monolith was carved sharply, its angles nearly as neat as those on a skyscraper. The new face rose even more sheerly: a black mirror that, instead of reflecting, swallowed the reflections of anything set before it.

The sun set behind the firs. The woods were quiet. The only sound came from the rock itself: a low bristling hum, as if, behind its edgeless face, trillions of flies were filling its core with the seethe of their industry.

“This place is terrible,” Minerva said, standing off Micah’s shoulder.

Micah could not disagree. It was dreadful to encounter such spots: places that appeared to have experienced horrors that, while unseen and ages-old, were still trapped there—held there by whatever malignancy had minted them. But there was no visible evidence. No sacrificial altar, no open graves or moldering skulls mounted on pikes. Just the implacable rock and the fearsome chill it gave off.

They came upon an entrance of sorts: an inverted V in the rock face, about twenty feet tall at its apex. Darkness crawled out of it. It gave off a more profound cold, too: Micah’s forearms broke out in gooseflesh. He removed a flashlight from his pack and shone it into the cleft. The beam gave no indication how far in it went or where it might lead.

“Think the kids are in there?” Minerva said. Her voice was tight with strain. “We could keep walking around the whole—”

“This is the place, Minny.”

“Yeah. Feels like it.”

The cleft was five feet wide at its base, but it narrowed quickly; they had to duck to get inside. The cleft gave way to a cavern carved through the rock. The flashlight picked up a scattering of pebbles on its uneven floor. Mineral deposits jagged down from the cavern’s ceiling: they were two feet long, skinny as soda straws. These weird rock icicles. One raked the top of Micah’s scalp like the scrape of an emery board. The rock was wet here, with a popcorny appearance: it resembled a vast exposed brain.

The tunnel was set on a gradual decline, almost too imperceptible to discern. The air was stale with an alkaline undertaste—the taste that comes up off hot pavement after a storm. Micah swept the beam over the walls and ceiling, which was no longer carbuncled but instead perfectly rounded, as if it had been smoothed with a grinder. Their breath filled the cramped space, creating vibrations that flitted against the sensitive apparatus of their inner ears.

A sly squirming noise emanated overhead. Micah stopped. Minerva ran into his back and let out a squawk. He pressed a finger to his lips. The squirming was wet, unctuous, lush. He swung the beam up to the cave ceiling. Minerva dry-heaved in revulsion.

The ceiling was covered in a seething mass. Eelish creatures, each roughly three inches long, carpeted the rock. They were pale yellow, the color of margarine or the fatty tissue of an excised tumor. Their pencil-thin bodies were belled at one end and tipped with a flagellate tail at the other. Thousands of them squirmed on the rock above.

“Olms,” Micah said quietly. “A kind of salamander. They are not native to this part of the world.”

The creatures massed into large balls the size of grapefruits. The balls quivered pendulously, threatening to fall and splat on the floor—or on their upturned faces.

“What the hell are they doing?”

“Breeding,” said Micah.

They moved past the olms, deeper into the cavern. The flashlight swept over something… Micah registered it the next instant and swung the beam back. A hair barrette. Dull pink. The sort of thing a girl wore. The little Rasmussen girl, for instance.

The cavern narrowed until they had to walk single file. Minerva grabbed ahold of Micah’s belt loop. The blackness pushed back at them, almost a physical presence; if he shut off the flashlight—or if the batteries suddenly died—Micah imagined it slipping over them, inside of them, sliding around their eyeballs and between their lips, a predatory darkness seeking something to feast upon. He stumbled and set a hand on the wall to steady himself. The rock was not cold to the touch, at least not this deep inside the monolith: it was warm and slick, like the flesh of a sleeping giant.

The floor dropped away five feet ahead; the flashlight beam picked up motes of dust swirling in a mammoth darkness.

“Hold up,” said Micah.

They had reached the lip of a precipice. There was just enough room to perch at its edge. Micah shone the light down. The drop was nearly straight. Micah guessed it was a thirty-foot fall. At the bottom was a basin with a ten-foot-wide base. He could make out the mouth of a tunnel down there; it was more cramped than the cavern they had already traversed—the tunnel looked to be about four feet in height, three feet in diameter. It must lead deeper inside the rock.

A rope ladder traveled down the face of the drop; the rope was sturdy but old, the wooden rungs worn smooth with age. Micah shone the light upward. The ceiling bellied a few feet above them. There was just the precipice, the drop, and the tunnel mouth below.

“Who would put a ladder here?” Minerva said.

Micah grunted. It wasn’t a question worth contemplating. The ladder was here. That was the only thing that mattered. He kicked a pebble over the edge and followed it with the flashlight. It bounced off the rocks at the bottom of the basin and skipped toward the mouth of the tunnel—

Micah’s breath hitched, then whistled out on a near-silent note.

Four sticks. Craggy and white as driftwood. Four sticks were latched around the top of the tunnel’s mouth. At least, that’s what they looked like on first blush. So much so that Micah’s mind tried to immediately dismiss them as such. Except for their placement. How would sticks get to such a place? How would they find themselves latched round a tunnel mouth so deep within this place? Maybe they were exposed roots—but if so, roots to what? What tree or weed could grow down there? And how would those roots push themselves out of solid rock?

Then it dawned on him that those sticks were moving ever so slightly. They were vibrating minutely, in fact, the outermost stick lifting and coming down again on the rock. Tapping, almost…

…almost like a finger.

Four more sticks materialized close to that first bundle. They crept out of the darkness at the tunnel’s mouth and latched around its upper curvature. Micah stood frozen. The fingers were long and wiry like insulated electrical cables. Well, isn’t that odd? Dreamily, Micah wondered what they could be attached to. He tried to picture the wrists and arms, the body… Next, his brain went dark, his synapses dimming like a cityscape during a rolling blackout.

Then came the sounds. They traveled up from the tunnel below them. The laughter of children. A charmless sound, full of mocking malice.

“Come.”

A child’s voice. But not exactly. More the voice of a child who had lived in this sunless place for a minor eternity. A child whose eyes were yellow as a cat’s eyes and whose flesh has the look of old parchment. A wizened and corrupted thing whose throaty chuckling drifted up from the bowels of the earth.

“Meat for the feast,” the voice called.

The strain of terror that entered Micah’s heart at that moment was unlike any he’d ever felt—even worse than anything he’d experienced in Korea, though he had been scared an awful lot over there. But those were understandable fears. Fears about what war—and the machinations of his fellow man—could do to your body and mind. He was ripped back through time to a cold night in Korea when he’d been walking past the medic’s tent; the flap blew open in a high wind. He saw a young soldier—still a boy, really—lying on a makeshift bed. His arms and legs had been blown off. All that was left were these rags of flesh that swung and drooped from the stumps of his legs like thick moldering curtains. The boy wasn’t screaming. The shock put him beyond all that. Micah had glimpsed the surgeon’s eyes above his blood-spattered mask: they reflected a dull emptiness, as if he wasn’t seeing the patient in front of him. A single word drifted out of that open flap before the wind blew it shut again: Mommy. One of those men had called out for his mother—and Micah was almost positive that it hadn’t been the soldier’s voice.

The terror of war was a bodily one—the fear that you might die in the shit and muck or, worse, get blown apart and live and have to continue on in a horribly reduced capacity. But at least it was a known horror, and your enemy was clear. He shared your same skin.

But right now? Those fingers curled round the rock and the sound of that laughter… it was a rip in the everyday fabric. A glimpse in the roiling heart of something impossible to comprehend. Even those things in the woods were dangerous only to a point: they would rip you to shreds and make an end of you. Tear your guts out like they had done to poor Charlie and Otis, who were beyond suffering now.

“Shug?” Minerva said from someplace over the mountain and far away.

Micah’s eyes remained on those fingers. They tensed as if in preparation to propel the rest of its body forward the way a spider pushes itself from its hidey-hole: the legs coming first, spanning all around the hole, then the fat black nut of its body surging forth—

The laughter dried up… Then it returned even louder than before.

Minerva gripped his wrist. “Please.”

8

BE PENITENT. Be remorseful. Be the father they need.

Reverend Amos Flesher sat cross-legged on the chapel floor. A chapel built to his exact specifications and erected by his flock. For months, he had sermonized from its pulpit. His people had received his words with the lamblike docility he had entrenched in them and thus come to expect.

But now, their trust in him had been shaken. At first he had been angered by their treachery—his rage had been such that he’d pictured bashing their heads in until their skulls resembled broken, bloodied crockery… but then the Voice spoke, and he listened. Now he understood that the best way back into his people’s hearts was through atonement. He had to grovel on his belly.

Be humbled, Amos. Humbled before God and humbled by these ungodly circumstances. They will welcome you back into their hearts.

He stood and walked between the pews. He inhaled the lemony scent of the wood wax—he had insisted upon the brand, as he had insisted on the tiniest detail at Little Heaven. He stood before the chapel window. Night hung over the compound. His face was reflected in the glass. His cheeks were furred with a three-day beard, his eyes set deep in his sockets. No matter. He would feel so much better soon. He had been promised, hadn’t he? All he had to do was fulfill his end of the bargain. And Amos would have help in this, he knew. It was in the water now, in the food they ate and the air they all breathed. They were helpless against the forces marshaling against them. They were mindless insects. But then, in Amos’s eyes, they always had been. They would come back to him, slaves to the sonar in their meek little brains that carried them to Amos like ants back to a poisoned hill.

He fixed his hair, setting it just so. He set his shoulders and straightened his spine, drawing himself up to his full height. A showman must always hold a sense of the moment.

He walked between the pews to the front doors. His hands gripped the brass knobs—L imprinted on the left, H on the right.

“Showtime.”

He threw the doors open. Then he signaled Virgil to ring the bell. It tolled steadily, rolling over the compound and into the inhospitable woods. He spread his arms.

“Come, my children,” he whispered. “Come back to me.”

He watched them stumble into the square. Single worshippers at first, but they were soon joined by entire families. They were fearful and bruised of spirit. Amos would salve them. It was his gift. His voice was their balm. His people stood before his chapel like frightened animals. Its beckoning light spilled over Amos’s shoulders. He saw that light reflected in the eyes of his flock.

“I stand penitent before you. I want to say that I am sorry,” he said. “Truly I am.”

NATE WAS WITH ELLEN when the chapel bell began to toll. Each ring shivered the bunkhouse walls. Nate went to the window. The Reverend was standing at the chapel door with his arms outspread.

Ellen opened the bunkhouse door. She and Nate stepped onto the grass. The things in the woods hadn’t been heard from all day. But it was night now, and that was always when monsters came out.

People began to filter into the square. They look so lost, Nate thought. A lot of them wore timid, hopeful smiles. They walked with their heads tilted forward and their fingers pointing back. They looked cartoonish, like Porky Pig drifting toward a pie cooling on a windowsill: they all had that same dozy, dopey expression.

His father passed by. “You coming, Nate?”

Nate gave him a flat stare. “Maybe later.”

His dad shoved his hands in his pockets. He tried to smile, but his face wouldn’t cooperate. “Things will get better, buddy. You just watch. The Reverend will—”

Nate grabbed Ellen’s hand. His father saw it. He dropped his head and nodded once, a tiny bob of his head, then followed the others.

“You don’t want to go with him?” Ellen asked once he was gone.

Nate shook his head. “I don’t trust him.”

“The Reverend or your father?”

Neither of them, Nate thought.

“COME IN, COME,” Amos said. “Enter the house of the holy.”

Nell Conkwright—the leprous cunt, the scheming bitch the sea hag the whore—stopped at the chapel threshold. She licked her lips, as if physically hungry for everything that lay within. But she couldn’t quite force herself through. She eyeballed Amos coldly.

Amos waited. A bubble of tension formed. His heart rate quickened. Nell’s husband stepped forward, brushing past his wife, entering the forgiving warmth of the chapel. Nell reached for him—he shrugged her off with an inelegant, brusque move, as if swiping dandruff flakes off his sleeve. His eyes were focused inside the chapel, on Jesus up on His cross where He suffered eternally for the sins of mankind. Nell Conkwright gaped at Amos, that coldness giving way to a submissive helplessness. Amos smiled at her, mild as milk. Nell Conkwright dropped her head and followed her husband inside.

Amos knew right then that he had them. All of them, mind and soul. They were his to hold and hone, as they had always been. He tamped down a grin. His smile had begun to look manic lately.

They came. Some eagerly, some hesitantly, some even angrily, which was not wholly unexpected—but they all came. The spell had been cast. That old black magic. Amos stroked the odd shoulder as his worshippers filed in, laying hands on his people. He had to physically stop himself from squeezing too hard—if he did that, his hands might take on life of their own, tearing at fleshy spittle-wet lips and gouging at eyes filled with gaseous idiocy. Bastards and bitches, traitors and heretics, scum-scum-scum-scum… Most of them smiled at him gratefully, the way a whipped dog will still wag its tail when a cruel master pets it.

When they had all come inside, Amos stepped outside the doors. The woods pinched in from every angle. The generators sputtered; they were down to the last few gallons of gasoline by now. The spots dimmed and flickered.

Amos stared into the forest. He could not see anything, but he felt it—something watching. Something black and primitive, built of blood and old bones, breathing back at him. Encouraging him, oh yes. That something, whatever it was, wanted him to succeed and would aid his efforts to make that success a reality. His silent benefactor.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, to no one at all.

Amos shut the doors and ushered himself to the pulpit. He basked in the warm, approving gaze of his congregants. Whether it was approval of him or simply approval of this ritual—the chapel, the uncomfortable wooden pews under their asses once again, the biblical verses they would move their bloated lips to like cows chewing cud—mattered very little to Amos. Whatever the cause, he soaked up their abject need like a sponge.

“Brothers and Sisters,” he said, “the devil has come to Little Heaven.”

They made no noise at this. It was obvious, wasn’t it?

“I’ve been in deep palaver with our Lord these past hours and days,” he said. “It has taken me to the edge of sanity—sometimes, just for a moment, I felt it slip. Now, I’m going to be just as plain as I know how to tell you. I’ve never lied to you,” he lied. “I never have lied to you. An evil has come down on our heads. An evil blacker than anything you could possibly imagine. It’s out there in those woods. Now, I know what you’re thinking—you’re thinking: Rev, wasn’t it you who led us here in the first place? And yes, it was. Perfect, or as perfect as we can expect in this fleshy realm. I tried to give that perfection to you.” His voice grew deeper and slightly wrathful. “I laid down my life for you. I’ve practically died every day to give you peace. And do you have that peace? Sister Conkwright, do you feel it?”

“I do not,” Nell Conkwright said, startled to have been called upon.

“And you blame me—no, no, don’t answer that. I know. His eye on the sparrow, Sister.” Amos set his finger below his eyelid and pulled down, exposing the bloodshot white. “Now, why and how did this evil descend upon us? We who are the chosen, our lives given to the pursuance of good and holy matters? But aaaah, the devil, he is sly. He hunts for apathy and sloth and dines out on it. He peers deep into our hearts and finds the evil lurking there. It is his sweetest nectar, oh yes.”

The chapel began to warm. Sweat collected on the upper lips and foreheads of the congregants. Their eyes had that dull sheen Amos knew well. They were enrapt. They were practically drooling. Amos smiled inwardly. He was going to make them pay for their disobedience. He’d make them squirm for what they had done to him. For scaring him and stripping his power away, even for a moment.

“I’m here to talk corruption, Brothers and Sisters! Corruption of the spirit. The insidious sort, the corruption that rusts you from the inside out. From the outside, oh yes! Once you let it in, aaaaah, ain’t it a devil to root out! And I’m here to tell you, corruption wormed its way into Little Heaven well before those things in the woods showed up. Oh yes! They just followed the stink of rotten souls, drawn like flies to a trash heap. How did that corruption get here, you ask? It was smuggled in the only way it ever can be—in hearts and minds and in souls. Your soul, Brother!” He stabbed his finger at Reggie Longpre, who flinched. “And yours, Sister!” Stabbing that same finger at Nell Conkwright, relishing her agonized expression. “And yours! And yours! And yours!”

He slammed his palms down on the pulpit. His followers jolted in the pews.

“A person’s a fool who continues to say that they’re winning when they’re losing,” he said, switching registers, turning calm. “At first I didn’t want to see that poison. I wouldn’t credit it. How could my own people, my chosen, welcome such filth into their souls? But I prayed that the Lord remove those scales from my eyes so that I could see clearly. And yeah, God did, and yeah, I did—oh, terrible clarity! I saw the bubbling river of spite flowing through the heart of Little Heaven. The paradise I built for you! The paradise I nearly died finding for you! The paradise some of you have defiled through treachery and sin!”

Nobody spoke against him. He knew their secret hearts. Who had stepped out on whom, who had stolen and lied and cheated and done villainy against their fellow man. That had always been the price of entry to join his inner sanctum—Tell me your secrets, my child. As God knows, so must I. They had all paid that price, willingly.

“Sister Redhill. Stand up.”

Maude Redhill rose from the pew. Her husband dead, her boys missing. Her face looked washed out and used up, like burnt pot roast with a wig on it. Amos almost grinned at this mental image.

“What do you deserve, Sister Redhill?”

“What do I—?” she parroted back bewilderedly.

“Deserve, Sister. And ooooh, ain’t that a slippery slope? When it stops being about what we can give to the Lord and our fellow man and starts to be about what we need, deserve, in our hungry little hearts? So what is it, Sister? Tell me true.”

After a while, the stupid bitch spat out, “We deserve peace. We all came here for peace.”

“And we’ve— Have we had it?”

“No. Not for some time, Reverend.”

“And you blame me for that. Don’t you, Sister?”

She started to twist, her hands knotted at her sides. Amos favored her with a death’s-head grin.

“Oh yes, you do. You, and the person next to you, and the person next to him. All of you. Your hearts turned calloused against me. Your prophet. Your daddy. The one true mouthpiece of the Lord. You abandoned me and threw in with the outsiders. After all I did for you,” he said furiously, flecks of spittle leaping from his lips. “You ungrateful wretches.”

You will see, deceivers. You will see what you have wrought, all of you.

He closed his eyes, becoming peaceful. “Could I detach myself? Of course, yes. I could detach myself from all of you. Why not?” He shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no-no-NO! I never detach myself from any of your troubles. I’ve always taken your troubles right on my shoulders. And I’m not going to change that now.”

The eyes of his congregation shone up wetly at him. A powerful loathing ripped through his guts at the sight of their cringing, craven need, their faces looking like a bunch of stepped-on dog turds.

“You must wonder where I’ve been these last hours. Well, I’m gonna tell you. Last night, at my lowest point, I heard a Voice,” he said. “It was not the voice of the Lord. It was unspeakably cold. Cruel. I followed that Voice out into the woods.”

A low murmur flooded through the congregation.

“Was I scared, Brothers and Sisters? Yes. Did I go anyway? Yes. To protect you. My children.” He let this sink in. “I walked in a daze. I came to a small clearing. A creature stood there. A figure of pure darkness.”

The current of unease rippling through the congregation intensified. Amos let their fear ferment and ripen. He savored the dread that sat plainly on their faces—the sniveling children’s faces most especially.

“Its smell washed over me. The stink of corpses in a charnel house. It spoke. Never have I heard its equal. Scabrous, sharp as a razor. It hurt just to listen to it. I asked it what it wanted. It lifted one hand and pointed. But not at me. Oh no.”

Amos let it sit. He withheld it. Tension mounted inside the packed chapel.

“Who?” said Doc Lewis in wretched agony. “Who does it want?”

Amos pitched his voice at the perfect octave: almost a whisper, but still loud enough that the peanut gallery could hear.

“The children. It wants your children.”

The congregation erupted. Mothers threw their arms around their snot-nosed offspring. Grown men whimpered in their seats like petrified infants.

“It wants your babies, mothers. It wants your sons and daughters. It wants to take them into the woods and”—the mildest of shrugs—“engage in deviltry.”

“You can’t let it take the children!” someone shrieked.

“What did they ever do?” shouted Brother Conkwright.

“The sins of the father…” the Reverend gravely intoned.

They were whipped into a frenzy. Bug-eyed and quivering, all of them. The children were blubbering in their mothers’ arms. Oh, how perfectly fitting, thought Amos.

“It asked for the children,” Amos went on over their donkey-like bleats. “It said that if we gave them to it, the rest of us would be spared.”

A collective wail went up, shuddering the roof beams. Amos laid his head down. To the congregants, it might have looked as though their prophet had become overwhelmed. But he was smiling, and he couldn’t let them see it. His body shook. Was he crying? No, he was laughing, hard enough to shed tears.

He raised his head. Tears of mirth stained his cheeks, but his buffoonish congregants surely mistook them for those of sorrow. He set his face in an expression of sadness… Slowly, he let it change into one of steely resolve.

“Do you think I accepted its terms? Would I not have been justified, considering your venomous behavior towards your loving prophet? Or should I turn the other cheek, as our Lord commands? Well…? Well?”

They goggled at him, expecting something. Watery eyes, drool-wet lips. They revolted him. He might as well have been sermonizing to a writhing mass of maggots.

“Brothers and Sisters, I quaked. My soul was at stake. But I stared right back at that foul thing and I said, No!” He thumped his fist on the pulpit. “NO! No, you will not take our children! NO! NO! I will not let you have them, demon from below!”

His people broke into rousing applause, clapping so hard Amos was sure they’d break their spastic hands.

“Praise be!” someone shouted.

“Shelter us in your arms!” cried someone else.

“NO, demon, you won’t win this battle!” Amos thundered. “For we have the Lord Almighty on our side! He is watching from His heavenly seat, and He will not let an abomination such as you take our most treasured prize!”

“We raise our hands to the Lord!” Maude Redhill screamed, her thick suety face awash with tears. “Daddy, we love you!”

“We will fight you on the battlements, hell spawn!” Amos said.

“Hallelujah!” the congregation responded.

“We will fight you on the plains!”

“Praise our prophet!”

Amos shushed them. “Say. Say. Say peace, my children.”

“Peace,” they intoned.

“And finally the hell beast said, I will have them! Then it was gone, leaving a sour note of brimstone. I then returned to Little Heaven. My task was clear.”

The lips of a worshipper in the third row moved in a silent plea: Help us, prophet. Amos could scarcely recall the man’s name. Earl something-or-other. Earl or Merle. Earl or Merle was stumpy, with a prematurely bald, ovoid head. Earl the Pearl. Amos did not care about Earl. Earl was weak. They were all weak. They were broken and expected him to fix them. They were human trash. Wasted lives, wastes of skin. He was everything to them, and they meant nothing to him. There was not a thing worth harvesting from them anymore.

And so, the field had to be razed. In a way, what was about to happen would be the best thing for them all.

He gripped the pulpit. “What are you without me?”

He needed to hear them say it.

“Nothing,” said Reggie Longpre, his voice clear as a bell.

“Nothing,” went the echo.

Amos said, “Without me, what meaning would your lives have?”

“None at all,” spoke the people of Little Heaven.

“That’s right. I’m the best thing you’ll ever have.”

Wild applause. Nell Conkwright shouted, “Thank you for everything, prophet! You are the only. The only. I am sorry for my trespasses.”

“Sit down and be quiet,” he told them all coldly. They sat at once, like some sentient organism of wretched servility.

Amos signaled to Virgil, who wheeled in a cart from the vestry. On it sat a stack of plastic cups and two jugs of liquid, one red and the other purple.

VIRGIL HAD USED a lot of sugar. An entire bag, holy jeez. The Reverend said it needed to be real sweet.

Why so goddamn sugary? Virgil wondered. He didn’t ask. Followers did as they were told. Virgil had followed Cyril for years, and when Cy up and vanished, well, the Reverend was right there to fill the gap. And the good Rev—who was used to telling his followers what to do—never bothered to tell Virgil what he’d mixed into the Kool-Aid after Virgil had made it.

Virgil used to drink the stuff as a kid. It was all his mother could afford. She mixed it so weak that it didn’t quite cover the sulfur taste of the well water. Redneck lemonade, she called it. Virgil and his brothers and sisters would sit on the porch, guzzling watery cherry Kool-Aid until the skin above their top lips was stained pink.

He’d dumped in double the amount of sugar the recipe called for. The Reverend gave it a taste and said, “More.” Eventually it stopped dissolving—no matter how much Virgil stirred, the sugar crystals just sat at the bottom of the jugs like beach sand. The Reverend took the jug into the vestry and closed the door. When he came out, it looked the same, but there was a slight chemical odor to the Kool-Aid.

“Don’t touch it,” the Rev had told him. “It’s for the children.”

Virgil wouldn’t drink that shit on a dare. Just thinking about it made his teeth ache.

“Now do the same with the wine,” the Reverend told him.

“You want me to sugar up the wine, too?”

The Reverend sneered. “Did I stutter?”

Virgil dumped a sack of Domino sugar into the sacramental wine. The stuff was pretty much unsweetened grape juice, not a drop of booze in it—if so, Virgil and Cy would’ve necked it long ago. He tested it. He just about got diabetes from a single sip. The Rev disappeared with the wine for a couple of minutes. When he returned, it also had a chemical tang—but different from the Kool Aid.

Now, on the Rev’s cue, Virgil wheeled in the cart with the jugs sitting on it. The people in the chapel seemed happy. The Reverend had trotted out the old dog and pony, put on a real whizbang of a show. Now they all wore the goony grins of lobotomy victims.

“We will fight this abomination,” the Rev was saying. “We will save the children. We will restore Little Heaven to what it was—the home of the chosen people!”

“Hallelujah!” the crowd yelped.

“We will beat back the scourge!”

“Hallelujah!”

“I alone can do this.”

“Praise you, Father!”

They linked hands and swayed in the pews like hypnotized cobras.

“Come forward, all of you, and accept your offering,” said the Reverend. “Wine for adults and juice for the children, as always.”

Virgil poured wine and Kool-Aid into the cups: only a few mouthfuls in each, just as the Reverend had instructed earlier. The worshippers stumbled up with those dozy grins pasted on their faces. They looked like moths flying into a bug zapper. They each took a cup and sat down. If they had children, they took cups of juice for them. The Reverend watched closely. Virgil noticed the bead of sweat on his nose and the way his fingers trembled.

As Virgil poured, his gaze drifted to the window. Cyril was standing outside in the dark. His face was white as lard. He was grinning, but it wasn’t dopey, like those of the worshippers. More of a leer. Cyril pressed his face to the window. It went flatter than skin ought to—

Virgil kept pouring, managing to not spill a drop. Cy’s lips were moving like he was speaking, but it didn’t look like talking so much as chewing. Then poor Cyril’s left eye burst and a thick black runner leaked down his cheek and—

Virgil closed his eyes, hoping Cy would be gone when he opened them. But he was still there a few seconds later. Was Virgil the only one who could see him? The black goo running down Cy’s face started to curl upward—it was then that Virgil realized his eye hadn’t burst at all. His eye was already gone and a centipede had been coiled up inside the empty socket; the insect scurried down under Cy’s jaw, then up around his ear before tucking itself back inside his socket, neat as a pin.

Groovy trick, huh? Cy’s voice chimed in Virgil’s head.

Sure thing, Cy, Virgil thought queasily. A real screamer.

Soon the drinks were poured and everyone was sitting again. Their eyes had that docile glaze. The eyes of ritual junkies.

The Reverend said, “We shall drink the purifying tonic of the Lord. The children first, then the adults. In that order. This is as He wishes. As your prophet wishes.”

The children raised the cups to their lips. Some of them coughed a little on account of the sweetness. But none of them spat it out. Watching them, Virgil understood. If Cyril asked him to drink that Kool-Aid, Virgil would have done it in a New York minute. That was what followers did, after all. No questions asked. Who would dare question the Lord? Why question fate?

The Reverend leaned forward. A smile touched the edges of his lips.

“Now you, my older children. Drink. To the very last… drop.”

9

EBENEZER REACHED GRINDER’S SWITCH as the sun was setting. He wheeled the Olds into the sundry store where they’d stocked up a week ago.

The bell tinkled when he kicked the screen door open. The sick-looking shopkeep who had told them how to get to Little Heaven stood behind the counter. Eb snatched a bottle of Yoo-hoo from the cooler. He drank it and dropped the bottle on the floor. He burped loudly, grabbed another one, and started to drink it, too.

“You think I’m running a food bank here?” the man said peevishly.

Ebenezer held one finger up—Hold on, I’ll get to you—tipped the bottle to his lips and drained it. He dropped it and grabbed a box of Goobers off the candy rack. He ripped the top off and walked toward the counter, tossing chocolate-covered peanuts in the air and catching them in his mouth.

“Remember me, my fine fellow?”

The man squinted. “You figure I should?”

“Oh, who knows? I’m sure you meet a lot of sophisticated people.”

The man was reaching for something under the counter. “You got some kind of mental problem, boy?”

Eb dropped the box of candy and grabbed the man’s wrist before it could clear the counter. He lifted the man’s arm up and brought it down sharply on the ledge. The gun fell out of the man’s hand—a .25-caliber popgun with hockey tape wrapped around the butt. Ebenezer brought the man’s bony wrist up and down on the counter again and again until something went snap. The man shrieked and fell, hitting his head on a box of Manila Blunts cigars on a shelf behind the counter.

“You knew,” Eb said while the man mewled and clutched his broken wrist. “It was death up there and you let us go anyway.”

“I don’t know nothing, you black sonofabitch,” the man whined.

Eb hurdled the counter and dropped down beside the cringing wreck. He punched the man in the face, quite hard. The man squawked.

“There’s more where that came from,” Eb promised.

Blood poured out of the man’s nostrils and bubbled over his lips.

“You mentioned a track machine.”

“Wh-what?” the man blubbered.

“A track machine, you called it. Some kind of retrofitted tank.”

The man bared his teeth… then dropped his eyes and nodded.

“Where can I find it?”

“Why the hell would you go back?” the man said. “You got away, crafty prick.”

Ebenezer restrained the impulse to pummel the man into unconsciousness.

“An address, please. And if you call the police after I leave, rest assured I will come back and slit your throat before they take me to jail. Are we understood?”

“Yeah… understood.”

“Good. That wrist will heal up fine. You will be up and grease-monkeying again before you can say Jack Robinson.”

THE TRACK MACHINE sat in the yard of a farmhouse along the western flank of Grinder’s Switch. Eb parked a ways down the road and approached on foot.

It was an honest-to-goodness World War II tank, the M2A1 or perhaps the M3, stripped to the treads. A bed had been installed over its back end, same as on a pickup truck, with wood-slat sidings all around. The cab of a Ford pickup had been chopped down and welded to the front end.

Ebenezer slunk through the long grass, climbed the treads, and stole a look through the driver-side window. The interior looked nearly the same as any truck, except instead of a wheel, a pair of steel steering rods protruded from the floor. The original roof had been removed and a zippered flap installed, turning it into a convertible of sorts. It even had an automatic transmission.

Ebenezer glanced at the farmhouse. The kitchen light was burning. This wouldn’t be your garden-variety thievery. He would need a few minutes to figure out how the track machine drove, which meant he could count on a visit from its owner. He tried the driver’s door. Unlocked. God bless the trusting rubes who populated this scratch-ass town. He slid into the cab. Gas and brake pedals, same as a car. There was no wheel, which meant no steering collar, which was what he would normally break open to access the ignition wires for a hot-wire job.

He flipped down the visor. A pair of keys fell into his lap. People were stupid, hallelujah.

The ignition switch was located under the seat, between his legs. He slid the key in. The machine rumbled to life. The enormous engine sent a shiver through his body. He popped the manual brake and pressed his foot on the gas pedal. Nothing. He frowned and tried the brake pedal. The machine trundled forward. So the brake and gas were reversed. Good to know.

He pulled the rod on his left side. The rod on his right shifted forward automatically. The machine turned on its axis until it was pointed at the farmhouse. He caught frantic movement behind the drapes.

He swung the machine around and set off in the direction of the Oldsmobile. The tank rampaged across the yard. The left tread hit an ornamental rock at the edge of the driveway; the machine tilted, throwing Eb against the driver’s door as it scraped over the rock, and hammered back down.

“Oh, I like this!”

He pulled up beside the Olds. When he hopped out, he saw someone running across the field. Next he caught a flash of something streaking across the ground toward him, much closer. He managed to scramble back into the cab the instant before a dog hurled itself against the door, growling and slavering.

Eb pulled a pistol from his waistband. He could see the owner of both the dog and the machine drawing near. The man was carrying a pitchfork. Who did he think was stealing his property, Frankenstein’s monster?

“Get after ’im, Pepper!” Eb heard the man shout. “Tear his trespassin’ ass a new one!”

Eb unrolled the window a few inches. He slid the barrel of the pistol through the gap and angled it at the leaping dog. The owner froze.

“You wouldn’t—”

“Oh, but I would,” Eb said. “Unless you bring it to heel.”

The man whistled sharply. The dog immediately quieted down.

“You just stay calm, Mister,” the man said.

Ebenezer shut the machine off and hopped out. The man could have been forty but looked much older, his face prematurely ruined by drink or too much sun or simply life in Grinder’s Switch. Either way, he seemed to be taking the theft of his machine with good grace. That probably had something to do with the gun pointed at his face.

“I just paid that sucker off,” he said. “You wouldn’t go stealing it from me, now would you?”

His appeal to Ebenezer’s better nature was uplifting, if completely misplaced.

“I will be taking it,” Eb said. “But I’ll bring it back, as I have no use for this kind of contraption in my day-to-day life—and if I don’t return with it, you can come find it in or around Little Heaven. You know where that is, don’t you?”

The man scuffed his toes in the dirt. “Guess I do, sure.”

“Those people helped pay this great walloping beast off, didn’t they?”

“You could say.”

“I’m going to toss my equipment in,” Eb said. “Then I’ll be off. If you and Chopper there play nice, I won’t have to shoot you.”

The man jabbed his pitchfork into the lawn. “We’ll be plenty nice, Mister. And her name’s Pepper. Goddamn it.”

Eb hurled the guns and flamethrower into the bed of the track machine. The gormless man and his dog observed with matching expressions of tight-lipped impotence—Eb wasn’t one hundred percent sure about the dog, but it did look quite pissed.

“You planning on starting World War Three?”

Eb gave the man a look. “How many times have you been to Little Heaven?”

The man shrugged. “Four, maybe five.”

“When was your last visit?”

“Month ago, coulda been.”

“Did you ever find anything strange about the place?”

The man appeared to seriously consider this. “They take their faith a little too sincerely, you ask me. Me and my wife go to church on Sundays, and Maggie—that’s my wife—she bakes vanilla squares for the annual bake sale. But if someone said to me, Hey, Arnie, guess what? God needs you to live in the middle of the woods as a test of faith… Mister, I don’t think the Lord much cares where we practice our faith.”

Eb nodded. “You seem a decent bloke. Steer clear of the place.”

Ebenezer clambered into the cab. He popped the manual brake, and the machine thundered off toward the trail leading to Little Heaven.

10

LITTLE HEAVEN’S COOK, an old shipwreck named Tom Guthrie, was the first to start choking. His face went pink, then brightened to red as he clutched at his throat. The chapel quickly filled with the sound of hoarse gasps and the frenetic swinging of limbs. By the time Guthrie started coughing up blood, the rest of the adult congregants were either in paroxysms of their own or staggering around wide-eyed as their throats closed up to pinholes.

Seeing it, Amos was relieved to note that he had selected correctly. He had considered weed killer, but had ultimately settled on drain cleaner. A wise choice, it turned out.

Ammate Weed Killer, by Du Pont. Better things for better living… through CHEMISTRY! read the tagline on its label. Effective against poison oak, sumac, and ivy. Charlie Fairweather had suggested they buy a drum of the stuff; better to douse the grounds than have the kids scratching themselves crazy and having to run back to civilization for tubes of calamine lotion. Amos had snuck into the equipment shed yesterday and read the ingredients on the drum carefully. Ammonium sulfamate was the active chemical. My, that sure sounded dangerous. He put a handful of the coarse white crystals in a paper sack and took it to the kitchen, where he mixed it with sugared water. It sent up a powerful smell. He was unsure they would drink it, even with the sugared-wine overlay. He cut a potato in half and doused its weeping flesh with the sugary weed killer. The reaction was mild, only a faint sputtering. That probably wouldn’t do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I purified their souls.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amos pulled the trigger.

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

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

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

He walked backward to the vestry, still facing the pews. He took it all in. His flock—the deceitful scabs, the filthy betrayers—were dying in wretched agony, coughing up scraps of their guts as their children lay on the floor insensate or still clinging to their parents as they expired.

God’s will be done, he thought with tremendous satisfaction.

Another man was tottering down the aisle toward him. His face was plastered with blood to the point that Amos could no longer identify him. Earl the Pearl, is that you? Why the long face, Earl? Oho-o-ho! Amos backed into the vestry and locked the door. He turned and saw Virgil sitting in the corner, shivering. Amos grimaced. He hoped the blubbering clod could hold it together until his usefulness dried up.

Amos crossed to his desk and removed the claw hammer stashed in the drawer. Somebody hit the vestry door.

“Earl the Pearl, don’t interrupt!” Amos said, and hooted laughter. “Can’t you see I’m busy in here? Make an appointment with my secretary!”

A pair of fists pounding… but as the seconds drew on, their force ebbed. Soon nothing but a kittenish scratching could be heard from the other side of the door.

FIRST, NATE HEARD THE SCREAMS. Then the gunshot.

He was outside the bunkhouse with Ellen. They had watched everyone file into the chapel. Soon after, they heard the Reverend sermonizing. Nate pictured everyone inside, eyes closed and swaying. Things might turn out okay, he thought. Maybe God really was watching over them again.

Shortly after that the screaming had started. Ellen went stiff. She grabbed Nate’s hand. The shrieks inside the chapel ascended to a shrill peak and stayed there. Next came the loud bang. Nate wouldn’t have been sure a year ago, but by now he’d heard enough gunshots at Little Heaven to know that sound.

“No” was all Ellen said.

They stood in the chilly night with the woods silent beyond the fence. Who was doing the shooting? His father was in there. And the Conkwrights, whom Nate liked a whole bunch. And some others he guessed were decent enough.

Neither Nate nor Ellen moved. Nate’s legs were locked up—someone might as well have bolted his knees together. Clearly something horrible was happening. Could he help? He yanked his hand away from Ellen’s—“Nate!” she cried out—and stole toward the chapel.

He crossed the square as if in a dream; the momentum was sickening, unstoppable. The screams intensified, pulsing against his eardrums. As he got closer, he heard other noises: choking, wheezing.

He crept around the side of the chapel. The blood pounding in his skull made him dizzy. He had to brace himself on the wall so he didn’t faint. A terrible pressure inside his head pushed against his eyeballs and nose so hard that he had to breathe through his mouth, which had gone dry, his lips glued together with pasty spit. He curled his fingers over the windowsill and peeked inside.

WHEN AMOS OPENED the vestry door again, a blood-slick body slumped forward to hit his shoes. Amos roughly kicked it aside and passed down the aisle, pistol in one hand and hammer in the other.

A strange light had entered his eyes. A mincing, eager refraction that had lain dormant for his whole life, really, apart from a few brief and secretive incidents where it had been allowed to glow brightly. There was nothing to stop it now. That light was free to stoke itself into a gleeful inferno.

He high-stepped down the aisle over the twitching bodies of his worshippers. A few of the older children were still conscious, beating their fists weakly against the doors. The younger ones were already insensate.

A hand manacled around his ankle. Amos followed it to the body of Nell Conkwright, the rancid sow, lying facedown next to her unconscious daughter. The flesh of her fingertips had been eaten away by the acidic vomit she’d hacked up. She was mumbling something. A prayer, a curse—who cared? Amos shook his ankle free in disgust. Then he set his foot on her shoulder and shoved her onto her back. Her eyes were milky, flecks of bloody vomit smeared on her face. Her skin sizzled as the drain cleaner continued to eat into it. She kept mumbling even though most of her teeth had fallen out, her gums stripped back to the bone, her mouth sagging inward like an old pumpkin left to rot on a front stoop.

“O ye of little faith,” Amos whispered. “You did this to yourself, heathen. And to your child, too.”

The woman’s face wrenched into an expression Amos took as mortal terror. She reached blindly for her daughter. Amos raised the hammer and brought it down on her skull. He’d never hit someone with a hammer, so he didn’t know how hard he ought to do it—as hard as possible seemed wisest, but at the last instant he quailed, so the hammer impacted Nell Conkwright’s head with a flat smack, taking away a coin-sized blot of skin. She moaned and retched again. Amos gritted his teeth and flipped the hammer around to the claw end and brought it down again much harder. It punched through the top of Nell Conkwright’s head. Success! Now she thrashed and yowled; Amos felt the thrum of her body all the way up the hammer’s wooden shaft. He wrenched the claw free and continued on. He did not notice the horrified face of Reggie Longpre’s boy hovering at the window.

Movement to his left. He marked someone crawling toward the doors. He expected it to be Bart Kennick or Shane Weagel, who were among Little Heaven’s hardiest specimens—but land sakes alive, if it wasn’t Reginald Longpre. Reggie was near the exit on his bloody hands and knees. Saying something, too, though it came out all mush-mouthed. Nate, I’m sorry, it sounded like.

Amos stepped over a half dozen bodies as if they were sandbags, making his way to the front. Only one boy was trying to open the doors now; Amos tucked the hammer under his armpit and cupped his hand over the boy’s face and pushed hard; the boy groaned and fell, curling into a fetal ball. Amos unlocked the doors and threw them open with a flourish.

“Monsieur,” he remarked to Reggie, “you look as if you could use some fresh air.”

Reggie crawled past Amos, perhaps not even cognizant he was there. Amos took no offense at this, seeing as Reggie was likely blind from the cleaner burns. Sturdy ole Reg made it all the way out the doors, struggling down the swaybacked steps onto the trampled grass. His palms slipped, and he sprawled on his belly. He wormed around on the ground; the sight filled Amos with revulsion. He stepped forward, set his foot firmly on the back of Reggie’s neck, and shoved him down into the dirt. Then he cocked the pistol and—

ELLEN WATCHED THE CHAPEL DOORS swing open. She caught a brief glimpse of the insides—bodies lying on the ground or slumped over the pews—before her attention was stolen by the sight of her sister’s ex crawling out the doors. By the light streaming out of the chapel, she could see that Reggie was covered from head to toe in gore. He squirmed awkwardly, chest heaving, strings of bloody drool swaying from his lips. He clawed his way down the steps and made it a few more feet before collapsing.

The Reverend followed Reggie out. He walked with a purpose, seemingly unhurt. He held something in each hand. Ellen watched, awestruck with horror, as the Reverend stomped on the back of Reggie’s neck, forcing a sad bleat out of the servile mailman, then cocked the pistol in his right hand and fired it point-blank at Reggie’s head.

The gun issued a sharp crack. The feathery fringe of hair at the back of Reggie’s head—it must have been months since his last haircut—puffed up as the slug drilled into his skull. Reggie grunted softly, as if in mild disagreement with something the Reverend had said. The bullet corkscrewed through his head and made its exit above his wide gaping eyes, blowing a window of bone out of his forehead. It looks like the box the little bird pops out of in a cuckoo clock, Ellen thought in a daze of fright.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How did you find me?” she said.

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

“The Reverend didn’t—?”

“See me? Don’t think so.”

“Did you see…?”

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

“Everyone?”

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

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

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

VIRGIL WAS UTTERLY LOST.

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

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

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

“Brother Swicker!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’ll be here?”

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

Virgil wasn’t sure he wanted to give the man more ammo. He got a sense the next round the Rev chambered might be earmarked for Virg’s noggin. But with the whipped-dog servility that had been knit to his nature for years, he went into the vestry and got the bullets. His eyes fell on the shape of the Conkwright woman with her brains bashed in.

When he returned, the Reverend handed him the gun. “Load it.”

Virgil did as he asked. It was so much easier this way. Just follow instructions. Virgil always got into trouble when he tried to think for himself. Better to put it in someone else’s hands. His mind relaxed as he thumbed the rounds into the pistol. The Reverend led; Virgil obeyed. Easy as peach ’n’ pie.

He handed the gun back. The Reverend jammed it down the front of his trousers. He chuckled.

“Look at me. Johnny Six-guns!”

Virgil managed a tinny laugh. It was kinda funny. The Reverend with his fancy hair sweated flat as a pancake and hanging over his ears, with a roscoe peeking out of his pants. He couldn’t help noticing the Reverend also sported a huge erection. It jabbed against the tight material, hard and somehow bladelike.

Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me, sailor?

Virgil laughed again, a little hysterically. Man, life moved fast, didn’t it? One day this, the next day that. Go with the flow, Joe.

The Reverend wrapped his hand around the back of Virgil’s neck and pulled him forward until their foreheads touched. “These next twenty minutes are the most important ones of your life. Do you understand?”

“Uh-huh,” Virgil said, not understanding at all.

“If you stay the course, your reward will be infinite. Would you like that, Brother Swicker?”

“Sure, I guess.”

The Reverend grinned. “Bless your pea-pickin’ heart.”

The Reverend then went to the nearest child, a girl of about eight. He grabbed her ankles and pulled. The girl’s dress hiked up. Her panties were wet on account of her pissing herself. The Reverend dragged her out the door down the steps—her skull made a hollow bonk on each stair—and laid her on the ground not far from the fence.

When he came back in, Virgil hadn’t moved. The Reverend frowned.

“Are you waiting for an engraved invitation?”

Virgil hopped to it. It didn’t take long—about twenty minutes, like the Rev said. At the end, the kids were lying side by side all in a row. They were asleep, not dead, their legs twitching. Most of them had peed themselves, and they began to involuntarily shiver when the piss cooled on their thighs.

“Yes, oh yes,” the Reverend cooed. “We have done good works today.”

“Why…?”

The Rev cut his eyes at Virgil. “Why what?”

“Why… the kids?”

“Because,” the Rev said, “it has always been the children.”

The Reverend’s headlamp eyes were staring into the woods. His body was motionless as if he’d been frozen. Virgil stared in the same direction.

Something was coming, just like the Reverend promised. No, not just one thing—many. Virgil rubbed his eyes—he really did that, just like an actor in a movie who thinks he’s seeing a mirage. It didn’t make sense, was why. This all felt unreal, same as a movie.

The shapes drew closer. Virgil saw them… but it couldn’t be. There was something else behind those shapes, too—something larger, draped in shadow. Gooseflesh climbed the knobs of Virgil’s spine and spread around his neck in a pebbled collar. His breath came in small, whiny gasps like a hurt dog.

“For you,” the Reverend said to the shadowy thing. “All for you.”

Virgil’s mind broke a little at the sight—or maybe broke a lot. It was hard to tell with minds, because the world didn’t change. Only the way you processed it did.

Hey! Just go with the flow, Joe.

11

EBENEZER PILOTED the track machine up the path leading to Little Heaven. The high beams illuminated the pines. The machine lumbered over stumps and downed logs, charging through the river without issue. He drove it with ease; the steering levers required only small adjustments. Not a single bug splattered the windshield. It then came to Eb: he’d been in the woods for days and didn’t have one mosquito or blackfly or tick bite.

He set the brake and idled at the base of a shallow rise. From here, the path ran straight to the gates of Little Heaven with no aggressive turns or bends.

He let out a shaky breath. “Right. Hop to it, my son.”

He unzipped the cab’s roof. The sky was salted with muted stars. He stood on the seat and hopped over the front panel into the bed. Working quickly, he laid out the shotgun, the Colts, the spare clips. He strapped the clips to the front panel of the bed with duct tape. Then he cut three lengths of rope and tied them around the topmost slat of the panel. He fastened the shotgun and the pistols to the end of each rope—shotgun on the left side, pistols on the right. The guns hung from the ropes and clinked lightly against the panels, all within reach.

He cut a longer length of rope and threaded it through his belt loops. He pulled one of the Cubanos from his pocket, unwrapped it, and nipped the nub off with his teeth. He spat it out and flicked the Zippo and thumbed the flywheel and lit the stogie. A deep inhale, a cough, then he hopped down from the tailgate.

The forest did not stir, but ahead—and not far, either—he could sense them. The skin tightened up in his throat.

He found a stick that looked like it might work and opened the driver-side door. He set one end of the stick on the gas pedal and wedged the other end under the seat; the engine growled. He tested to make sure it wouldn’t jar loose, then locked the steering levers so the machine would drive straight ahead. He puffed on the cigar and blew a few smoke rings. It had been ages since he’d had one of these. Why in blazes had he quit? Lovely habit.

He licked his lips. His mouth was dry as a wood chip. Ebenezer’s entire life boiled down to the following few minutes. Well, hell, couldn’t the same be said of any man? There was that handful of minutes that really mattered, and then there were all the other minutes that made up that man’s life. And those minutes had led him here, hadn’t they? That big clock in the sky was always ticking against fate.

“Fortune favors the brave,” he whispered. “Or does it favor the lunatics? Either way, Ebenezer, my son, you’ve got a coin flip’s chance.”

He popped the transmission into drive. The track machine lurched forward. He swung himself over the front panel into the bed. He twisted the knobs on the flamethrower’s canisters and heard a hiss; he lit the nozzle with the Zippo—a small blue flame like a furnace’s pilot light. He shrugged the weapon over his shoulders.

Steadying himself as the machine clattered up the incline, he tied one end of the rope around his waist to the wood slat on his left side of the front panel, then knotted the other end on the right side. He leaned back, testing the makeshift harness. He could sway his body a foot to the left or the right along the rope, close enough to cut his guns loose if the flamethrower petered out.

Ebenezer fired a flare into the trees ahead on his right. It traced a low orbit and dropped, sputtering, into the woods two hundred yards ahead. He reloaded the gun and shot another flare into the woods to his left. By their fitful glow, he could see things moving, their bodies crossing the flickering light in an agitated manner.

He sucked on the cigar and cracked his neck to drain his sinus cavities. His heart was pounding, but his hands barely shook. He would kill them all if possible, or he would die in the midst of killing however many he could. They would not scare him ever again.

That’s my boy, he could hear his aunt Hazel say. My Ebenezer, he’s no hog.

“Git aloooong, little dawwww-gies, git aloooooong,” he crooned.

The machine rumbled over the rise. The lights of Little Heaven winked in the distance.

“Come on, you bastards.”

The machine rumbled ahead. The wrecked pickup came into view. The windshield smashed, some luckless sonofabitch’s headless body still tilted against its rear wheel. The flares brightened in the wind that scoured the woods. They were there—Christ, he could see them now. Some large, some smaller, all of them hunched and ungodly. He charted the air above, concerned one of them might plummet from the sky, like the one that had mangled his ear. But they remained where they were.

The machine charged steadily toward the gate; it stood less than a hundred yards off, moonlight glinting off the gilded L and H. Eb glanced behind him and saw nothing in pursuit. He had not really anticipated reaching the compound—he’d half expected to be ripped to pieces before reaching the gates, although it had tickled him to picture the track machine crashing through it, propelling his mangled corpse straight to and then through the chapel doors. But he was alive, less-than-miraculously so, and had to step lively now.

He grabbed for the bowie knife. The machine hit a dip, jostling him; the knife slipped from his fingers.

“Shit!”

He stretched for the blade as it clattered on the metal bed. The rope threaded through his belt loops prevented him from bending down any farther. The flamethrower dipped; the scorching nozzle brushed his leg and he let out a screech. The gates were fifty yards away. If he didn’t cut himself free and get into the driver’s seat, the machine would—

His fingers closed on the knife. He sawed through the rope. When he was free, he shrugged off the flamethrower and clambered over the front panel, toppling into the cab just as the machine hit the entrance to Little Heaven, tearing through the gates like Tinker Toys; the iron squealed as they tore off their hinges, crumpling under the machine’s determined progression.

Eb sat up, blinking a trickle of blood out of his eye. The machine was making a beeline for a utility shed. He didn’t see anybody, but figured they should be awake by now, scurrying to the nearest window to see what fresh hell had invaded their midst. It’s the cavalry, you miserable sods!

He grabbed the stick pinning the gas pedal down; it wouldn’t budge. The machine hit the shed broadside, reducing it to matchsticks. He kicked at the stick until it snapped. With no pressure on the gas pedal, the machine slowed immediately. He stomped on the brake pedal. The track machine jerked to a stop.

He crawled up into the bed and hacked the shotgun free from the rope. He swung around with it, ready to blast anything that had a mind to barrel through the gates after him. But the path was empty. Far off, the flares continued to gutter on the forest floor.

He hopped off the tailgate. The spotlights flickered around the compound; some were now going dead for several seconds before struggling back to life. Though he couldn’t see well in the fitful light, Eb could tell that nobody was out. A vague sense of dread zephyred through him. He’d come back. Jesus, what a fool. He palmed blood out of his eyes; it trickled steadily down from the cut on his head. His cigar had remained clamped between his teeth all this time, but it was snapped nearly in half. He tore off the dangly bit.

A restless silence overhung the compound. He stared at the chapel—door open, lights weakly glimmering. A body lay on the grass ten yards from the door, bathed in the jumpy spots. He gripped the shotgun and headed toward it. Ebenezer’s dread intensified with each step. The inside of the chapel came into view.

“Good Christ…”

His feet ground to a halt. The cigar slipped from his lips. What in the name of—

“Ebenezer?”

He swung around to see Ellen and the boy. Their shoulders were carpeted with wood chips.

“What happened here?”

“He killed them,” the boy said quietly. “The Reverend.”

“…Everyone? Micah and Min—?”

Ellen shook her head. “They left after you did. In the afternoon. To search for the missing kids. They went deeper into the woods, moving north. Towards—”

Eb held up his hand. Micah and Minerva’s whereabouts were of less integral importance than what the boy had just said. “The Reverend killed them? Who? How many? How did he—?”

“All of them, Ebenezer. His entire flock. In the chapel during the sermon.” Ellen ran a trembling hand through her hair. “I’m not sure how he did it.”

“They threw up blood,” the boy said hollowly.

“He must have poisoned them,” Ellen said. “You can almost smell it.”

Poison, Eb thought. The madman poisoned his own people. Part of him wasn’t terribly surprised. He’d sniffed a hint of lunacy in Amos Flesher the first time he’d set eyes on him—the itchy gaze, that switchblade smile. The line between prophet and lunatic was a thin one indeed. And his followers were just that. Every lemming off the cliff. He could see it happening. Yes, all too easily.

“And you didn’t attend the service?” he said.

Ellen shook her head. “I wouldn’t have been welcome. And Nate stayed with me.”

“Tell me what else happened,” Eb said.

“After he killed them, the Reverend came out of the chapel,” Ellen said. “He shot…”

She nodded to the body on the grass but would not say who it was. Ebenezer could guess. Nate didn’t look as if he’d been crying, though his eyes were compassed by swollen red flesh—as if tears were lurking close to the surface, but he was wise enough to know this wasn’t the time to grieve the loss. That, or perhaps he was mildly glad his father was gone. Ebenezer didn’t know the boy well enough to say.

“After that, Flesher shot at me,” Ellen continued. “So I ran. Hid in the woodpile. Nate found me. The Reverend gave up trying to find us. Other things to worry about, I guess.”

“Other things?”

Neither of them answered.

“The children aren’t dead. At least I’m pretty sure,” Ellen told him. “They dragged them out of the chapel.”

“Who?”

“The Reverend’s hired man. The one you beat up this morning.”

“Virgil. He and the Reverend are the only ones left?”

Ellen nodded.

Eb said, “So they dragged the kids out and…?”

Ellen and the boy exchanged a look.

“Something came,” the boy said, his voice nearly inaudible.

“What was it?”

“Out of the woods.” The boy stared at his feet as if he couldn’t bear to look at the chapel. “It… took them. Or…”

“Or what, boy? For Christ’s sake, wh—”

“Or they went with it willingly,” Ellen said softly. “Anyway, they all went.”

“The children?”

Ellen and the boy nodded, neither one meeting Eb’s eye.

“It took the children,” Ellen said.

Something always wants the fucking children, Eb thought. “And the Reverend and Virgil with them?”

More nods. Eb swiped a hand across his mouth; he felt hot, his skin clammy, first signs of the flu. “What took them?”

They did not speak for some time. Finally Ellen said, “It wasn’t human.”

“Or an animal,” the boy said.

“Or one of those things in the woods,” Ellen said. “It was something else entirely.”

Ebenezer’s hands clenched on the shotgun. The track machine’s engine ticking down was the only sound in an otherwise still night.

Not human, hmm? he thought. Well, there’s hardly much surprise in that, now is there? Not a lot of humans left in these here parts. Outnumbered, outgunned. Last of a dying breed. We’ve trapped ourselves in the killing jar, all of us for one reason or another. I may be daftest of all because I escaped, only to fly back in. And something’s pumping in the ether now.

His shoulders slumped. What else could he do? In for a penny…

“Which way did they go?”

12

THEY WERE ON THEIR WAY back to Little Heaven when it came.

Minerva felt a dry electrical tang at the back of her throat that reminded her of those hot afternoons during her childhood when the sky would scud over with clouds: the taste of a thunderstorm gathering over the horizon.

She checked up in the middle of the ashen path.

“What?” said Micah.

She flicked her head toward the trees. Micah got the hint. They moved quickly, hiding in the heavy dark of the firs ten feet off the path.

The notes of a flute drifted through the air. Jangling, discordant, yet possessed of a rhythm that touched a hidden center in Minerva’s chest, a second heart within the main organ.

She didn’t see much of it. Only a flurrying of legs—the low-hanging branches, laden with needles, prevented her from viewing anything in its entirety. The first pair of legs were abnormally long and stork-like; they passed in a mad dervish, spinning and pirouetting and high-kicking like a court jester. The flute music intensified, sharp notes invading Minerva’s skull and itching at her brain. Other, smaller sets of legs followed. Pale legs streaked with blood. Feet clad in dusty boots or buckled shoes with ruffled socks. They passed silently, only the crunch of their soles on the dead gray earth, their movements manic as they jigged and capered toward the black rock.

Neither Micah nor Minerva moved for some time after the procession passed. Their breath rattled out of their lungs where they knelt under the trees. Micah’s eyelids were squeezed shut. When he finally opened them, she saw a new hardness in his working eye.

“We have to go back,” Micah said. “I have to get down there.”

Her chest tightened. “Into the…”

“That is where they will be.”

Minerva started to shiver. She couldn’t stop.

“Shug, I don’t think I can.”

“I understand.”

“That cave,” she went on, feeling the need to explain. “Those… fingers. Those noises. I want to help. I just don’t think…”

“I understand.”

She put a hand on his leg. His muscles jumped. “Do you have any clue what’s down there, Shug?”

In time he said, “I know it is a bad thing. But then…”

“Then what?”

“I have done bad things, too.”

“You’re talking about human evil. It’s different.”

He did not appear to agree. “We all owe, Minerva. We owe and we are all paying, every day. What else is life but the repayment? But them, what could they owe?”

“Jesus, Shug. What is it you think you owe?”

“They are children, Minny. Only children.”

“Yes.”

“All lives are not equal. Some are worth more than others.”

She said, “I won’t argue it with you.”

“You could return to Little Heaven.”

“I could, yeah,” she said. “But I won’t. I’ll go with you. But I’m telling you right now that I don’t know if I can follow you all the way down there, right to the bottom.”

Micah pressed a finger to his lips. Minerva held her breath. She heard it then—footsteps.

These came from the same direction as the others had—from Little Heaven. Two sets of legs passed this time. An agonized wheeze accompanied them, two sets of lungs heaving.

Micah and Minerva waited until those legs had passed before crawling out from under the trees. Minerva pulled Ellen’s pistol. Micah shone the flashlight up the path, pinning the backs of two men in its beam fifty yards ahead. The men froze. Slowly, they turned.

“Greetings, fellow travelers,” the Reverend said with sunny good cheer.

Bloody as butchers, the two of them. The good Reverend’s hair was slapped on either side of his skull like a muskrat pelt. He was smiling, wide-eyed. Virgil looked like he was ready to burst out crying.

The Reverend reached into his waistband and put something in Virgil’s hand. He stood on his tippy-toes, whispering into Virgil’s ear—

“KILL THEM, MY SON,” the good Reverend said.

The weight of the pistol in Virgil’s hand. A good weight—the weight of finality. Virgil could end it all now. For himself, the Reverend, the one-eyed wonder, and the skinny dyke bitch. End them all. Him, Virgil Quincy Swicker. He had that power now. Maybe that would be the best thing. Better than following that abomination deeper into the woods.

It was all Virgil could do to not put the barrel in his own mouth and pull the trigger. He wanted to do that. He couldn’t get the image of it out of his head. Its enormous body with its flap-a-dangly arms and long, cartoonish legs. Its head and its mouth and its horrible, terrible eyes. How the notes of its flute—a bleached femur bone, it looked like, with holes riddled through it—roused the children from their drugged sleep. They had all gotten up as one, linked hands, and danced into the woods following that horrific piper.

Seeing that, something in Virgil gave over to the madness. He followed the piper into the woods, blood storming through his veins. It didn’t even feel like he was walking—more like he’d stepped onto an enormous buried conveyor belt that was stubbornly pulling him along. At some point, he stared up into a tree and saw, or thought he’d seen, a body glossed by the moonlight. Cyril’s body, just maybe—Cy, his brother from another mother!—spinning bonelessly, lifelessly, at the end of a thick bough. Cy looked like some awful Christmas tree ornament hung by a giant malicious child. Seeing this, a trapdoor sprang open inside Virgil’s head; beneath that door was a stinking yellow room whose bristling and undulating floor suggested that something huge was moving quarrelsomely beneath it…

Things had gone a little hazy after that. The minutes or hours slipped by until… until… until…

And now here he was. In the woods with the Reverend and a gun in his hand.

“Kill them both.” The Reverend’s honeyed voice in his ear. “End them.”

Virgil was crying. The tears came easily. He barely realized it. When was the last time he’d really sobbed? As a teenager, when he found the body of a stray dog under the bushes in Union Park, kicked to death by some sadistic shitheel. He hadn’t cried since. Never seemed a deep enough need. But he did so now—for the dead fools at Little Heaven; for their children, who were fated for something far worse; for his buddy Cyril, who had been turned into a fucking tree ornament; and for his own dumbshit self, who didn’t have the brains to see a way out of this awful muddle.

The gun came up. He saw it there at the end of his arm, but it didn’t feel like part of him. He pulled the trigger. It was as easy as breathing, it really was.

The bullet creased the air inches from Minerva’s skull. The pop! filled her ears. Her own gun jerked up automatically. She fired. Virgil didn’t go down. He was walking toward her, sobbing the same words over and over. I’m sorry, it might have been. He was bawling like a baby.

He shot again, missing his mark. Pop! She fired and also missed. Her hand trembled. Stop it, goddamn it, stop shaking just st—

A bullet smashed into the ash between her spread legs. She couldn’t stop the shakes. Virgil was walking and firing. He was half blind from crying, but it wouldn’t matter; a few more strides and it would be pretty much a point-blank proposition.

Her finger froze on the trigger. She couldn’t—couldn’t—

Micah snatched the gun out of her hand. Bang. Virgil’s head snapped back in a mist of red. His body was flung with such force that his left foot was ejected from his boot. He rolled bonelessly to the edge of the path. He did not get up.

“Shug, I’m sorry.” A wave of adrenaline shakes rolled through her. She stared at her gun hand, the one that had betrayed her. “I don’t know what…”

She read it in his eyes. You are not made for this, Minny. There was nothing cruel in his appraisal. It wasn’t a slight on her toughs or spine—simply that, in the cut, she couldn’t pull the trigger. And he could.

They walked over to Virgil. His big toe poked through a hole in his woolen sock. Merciless, what a bullet could do. There was no need to check for a pulse. The top of Virgil’s head was missing. Everything above his eyes, which were still filmy with tears, staring blankly into the cold night sky.

13

THIS IS ONE BLUBBERING NINNY who’s better off dead was Amos’s thought as he put the gun into Virgil’s hand.

The idiot’s eyes were all swimmy as he made with the waterworks. Amos had to swallow his revulsion. Virgil had been useful in a pinch, but now he was deadweight. In fact, Amos had been speculating about how to get rid of the dummy. And now, out of the blue, the perfect opportunity—two birds with one stone.

Virgil nodded at the Reverend’s simple instructions, docile as a lamb. Then he began to fire. Amos didn’t wait to see the result. He scampered up the incline, slipping on dead pine needles. He laughed thinly—a-hee, a-hee-heeee—because there was something deliciously funny about the events of the past hours… and because he couldn’t stop laughing, even when he bit his lip so hard that the skin tore and blood gushed—he just kept on howling, the shrill gasping notes pouring out of him.

Job 8:21, he thought. God will fill thy mouth with laughing, and thy lips with rejoicing! Hallelujah, praised be, and pass the spuds!

He ran as fast as his legs would carry him as the gunshots continued to ring out from behind. Pop-papop-pop-poppoppop! The shots abruptly stopped; the woods ran thick with silence. Good-bye, Virgil! See you in the funny pages, Skinny Bitch! Farewell, One-Eye! Godspeed to none of you, and may Satan feast on your genitals in hell!

He hurried toward the black rock. He was not tired, and his pace did not flag. He was filled with a limitless reservoir of energy. Even though his legs were leaden and his chest searing, he felt like those niggers in Africa who had developed incredible cardiovascular endurance from being chased across the veld by hungry lions. He could run a million miles!

His eyes momentarily slipped shut. The wondrous creature lay there, imprinted on his eyelids. Oh, what a sight that had been.

You are beautiful.

This had been Amos’s awestruck thought. The thing had to be twelve feet tall. Long, articulate legs and arms. Its flesh was smooth as porcelain. Its belly was cask-like, as if pregnant with some unfathomable offspring. Amos’s heart quailed at the sight of it easing through the trees. Its head was enormous. Its mouth stretched across the entirety of its face; it looked to be smiling, but as its mouth followed the upward curve of its skull, a smile must be its default expression. Its eyes were ineffably black and lusterless, like buttons: Amos pictured the four little holes in their centers where a seamstress could loop her thread.

It had come through the trees slowly and somehow playfully. There was a hint of shyness in its movements. Amos’s eyes had quivered in their sockets, as if his peepers were under some enormous pressure, jittering like roaches in a hot pan. He knew why his eyes were struggling, too: they were trying to see the shape behind the shape. The creature had another face, and it lurked beneath the one Amos was allowed to see—but his frail human eyes and his inadequate and too-literal mind were preventing him from seeing its more breathtaking true shape.

It had bent over the sleeping children, sniffing them as a coyote might a moldering carcass; the slits in the middle of its face dilated. Its black tongue made a sandpapery note as it slid over its fleshless lips. It had no teeth to speak of; rags of wet tissue dangled and swayed in its mouth, reminding Amos of the fibrous pith inside a pumpkin.

It then produced a flute. Its fingers danced nimbly along its length, coaxing from it notes that raised the hairs on the nape of Amos’s neck. The children had stood up all at once. Their eyes were still closed, but their bodies were alert. They linked hands. The creature began to dance. It was both horrible and magnetic: the strange articulation of its limbs, the mad glee with which it jigged. The children mimicked it, their legs and arms moving unnaturally.

The thing danced into the woods. The children followed. They went quickly, their feet seeming not to touch the ground. Virgil only stood in a slack-mouthed stupor. Amos shook him—when that failed, he slapped Virgil hard across the face. The dimwit’s eyes unfogged, the faintest glimmer coming back into them.

“We must follow, my son.”

Virgil swallowed with effort. “Yeah. Follow. I can do that.”

And they had done so, shuffling along in pursuit of the thing. Until they had been set upon by the troublesome outsiders—but those two ended up doing Amos a great service by erasing a vestigial player from the proceedings and hopefully wiping themselves out in the bargain. Everything was coming up Flesher!

The trees now gave way to a clearing. The moonlight settled across an empty expanse—sand scalloped by the wind and the black rock standing watchfully in the distance. In that same moonlight, he could see small footprints in the sand. He followed them, his heart singing.

He had done his duty. Now he would reap the reward. What form would it take? He had no use for money or renown, the common ambitions that common men spent their common lives pursuing. He desired knowledge. An understanding of how this world—or the worlds beyond it—operated. A peek behind the curtain. He wanted to see God—not the one his worshippers cowered before, either. The God that had led Amos out here in the first place. The God of Flies and Blood. He wanted to thank that God for making Amos Flesher just the way he was.

The footprints led straight to the black rock. A quiet hum emanated from it. He followed the footprints around the rockface, glancing back to see if anyone was in pursuit. He paused. There—far away but visible. The sweep of a flashlight? He bared his teeth. The outsiders. The bastards. He could only hope that Virgil had killed one of them and perhaps hurt the other. But the one-eyed man struck Amos as a fellow who’d be calm in a shoot-out. No matter. Once he had claimed his just reward, Amos would deal with them. Oh yes, he could take his time with it. There was nobody out here to help them.

Amos picked up the pace, swallowing the blood from his torn lip. The rock tilted ninety degrees as it opened onto a fresh face. He jogged along it. His sweat mixed with the lanolin in his pomade and slid down his cheeks in gooey runners. He wiped them away absentmindedly and crooned an old gospel ditty.

Amos tripped and stumbled, arms outflung. He found his feet again and carried on, singing a new song that he made up as he went. His rich baritone carried out over the wastes.

He reached a cleft in the rock. An odd glow poured from its mouth. The footsteps carried on into the enveloping darkness that existed past the entry.

“You have been fiddling. Fiddling, fiddling, fiddling…,” said a familiar voice.

It sat twenty feet to Amos’s left, crouched on the sand. The moon touched its awesome contours, reflecting off the egg-like dome of its skull. It spoke in a perfect mimicry of Sister Muriel.

“You always were a filthy boy, Amos Flesher. The filthiest, by far. Do you know what will happen if you keep fiddling with your dirty stick, hmm? It will fall off. That’s right! Snap off like a winter icicle, it will. And you will be so ashamed, won’t you? You will have no choice but to bury it in the yard, as a dog does with a bone. Your uuuu-rhine will simply fall from the hole where your little stick once poked, Amos. Yes, as sure as Christ sits in Heaven.”

Amos took a step back. He realized right then how alone he was, miles and miles from anyone. “I did what you asked.”

The creature made a sound like the chittering of an insect. “I didn’t ask anything of you,” it said as Sister Muriel.

A thin wire of unease threaded into Amos’s heart. The thing chittered on and on. It was too dark for Amos to tell if the sound was coming from some part of its odd anatomy or if this was its version of laughter.

“Not me, no, no, no,” it said, this time in a voice that might have been its own: high and breathy, the voice of a baby who had learned to enunciate its words. “My father asked… my father, my father, my daddykins…”

“Your… your father?”

The thing squatted in the sand, repeating those two words over and over. “My father, my father, my father…”

The understanding rocked Amos. This thing was no more than the lapdog of a far greater entity. Comprehending this, the sight of it—its bloated belly, its bird legs and button eyes—now filled Amos with disgust. Hunched in the dark, babbling the same two idiot words: My father, my father. It was nothing but an overgrown mynah bird with a gift for impressions. It made Amos sick to look at it now—no different from those soft-brained children at the orphanage he’d delighted in jabbing with a pin.

“Where?” he said to it. “Where, you filthy thing?”

The thing raised its arm, one exquisitely long finger pointing at the cleft.

“My father is waiting.”

MICAH ROUNDED THE BLACK ROCK. Minerva lagged behind, still shaken from the encounter with Virgil. He pressed on without her. Maybe it was best she stay out of it.

Micah’s mind was cluttered; he lacked a great deal of information, and under normal circumstances he would retreat and regroup. But there was no time for that and he was fueled by a rage more profound than anything he’d experienced in years. Worse than what he’d felt for Seaborn Appleton or even his old Captain Beechwood.

He would kill the Reverend. He should have done it the first time he’d laid eyes on the man. He had practically smelled the crazy seeping out of him—it had a scent, true craziness did: the stench of old flooring rotted through with cat piss. Micah had sensed the malice festering in the fuming wastes of the Reverend’s soul, and he should have put a bullet in his brain right then and there… but Charlie and Otis had taken his sidearm, robbing him of the opportunity.

Abruptly, Micah came to the cleft. He had been so taken up with thoughts of vengeance that he lost track of time. He shone his flashlight into the crevice. Moody blue shadows gave way to deeper enveloping blacks. He spun on his heel, alerted by a klaxon blaring in his unconscious mind—

Something loomed motionlessly out in the sand. A huge humanlike form plated in moonlight.

“Fine evening for a perambulation, eh, Private?”

It was the voice of Captain Beechwood. The thing issued a terrible flapping sound like an enormous cockroach beating its wings.

“My father is waiting,” it said in Beechwood’s voice. “My father will just let some air into those children, Private Shughrue. Just a little air. My father is thirsty. So thirsty. Hungry. Yes. Meat.” Its mouth stretched wide, splitting its entire face in two; then its jaws snapped shut with a sound like wood planks spanked together. “Meat for the feast. My father, my father, my father…”

It pointed at the cleft. Micah took a few steps in that direction, his eye never leaving the thing. It did not move or try to stop him. In fact, it appeared to be urging him inside. Micah aimed his flashlight into the gap again. Dust sifted down, sparkling in the beam.

“My father is waiting…”

He entered the cleft. Beads of sweat popped on his brow. He held a hand out for balance; it brushed the cave wall and he recoiled, disturbed once again by the soft and somehow fleshy character of the rock. It felt like the skin of a sick old man, smoothed and made clammy with age and disease. The darkness sucked in on him with unnatural avidity; it hungered after the feeble beam shed by his flashlight, nibbling at its glow with invisible black teeth.

He passed under the colony of olms and came to the precipice rather quickly. The rope ladder clattered against the rock, down and down, stirred by a subterranean wind—or by someone who had recently climbed down it. He stared down to the tunnel below. An odor drifted up, almost too faint to credit. A smell that spoke of childhood. A mix of bubble gum and dime-store perfume, the blood off skinned knees and chocolate coins wrapped in shiny foil. It was all of those things, but corrupted somehow. Mixed with the smell that permeates an old folks’ home: sickness and dust and the yellowing reek of bodies rotting from the inside out. The smell of living death.

Staring down, Micah pictured something hunched just past the mouth of the tunnel. His mind couldn’t entirely compass it. But the outline was of a person of unfathomable age: two hundred, three hundred, a thousand years old. He pictured this corrupted thing quivering in the darkness below, leering with its young-old mouth, its gums black as tar—

Micah’s jaw tensed. “I am coming,” he whispered.

He stuffed the flashlight into his pocket and dropped one foot down until it touched the first rung of the ladder. He gripped the ropes as the ladder swung out from the rock, throwing him off balance. He stabilized himself and followed it down. The flashlight shone inside his pocket, its tepid glow illuminating the space directly below him.

It came then. Thick, throaty—the laughter of a child.

Shapes swarmed in the darkness below. Alien, twisting movements. Micah’s bladder clenched. Fear poured into his brain; he stood rooted for a span of time he could not judge, then slowly pulled the flashlight from his pocket. When he shone it down, nothing was there.

The ladder slapped the stone. His foot found the basin floor. He released the ladder and turned, kneeling, shining the flashlight into the tunnel.

The beam outlined the start of a cave system carved through the rock. Micah crept to the tunnel mouth. It stretched twenty feet or so before hitting a bend. The tunnel was honeycombed with holes—some small, others big enough to accommodate a person’s body. He wondered just how large this network of tunnels could be, and where they all might lead.

Body tensed, head throbbing, he forged into the alkaline dark.

14

“DO YOU LIKE TO PLAY… games?”

Minerva stopped. The voice belonged to a small child. She turned toward it, summoning every ounce of her willpower. Something squatted in the dark not far from the cleft, which she had arrived at some minutes after Shughrue. The moon gave only a hint of this thing’s contours.

“Games,” the voice called. “Shall we play?”

Her paralysis was absolute. With a fervency she hadn’t felt since she was a girl, she wished she could squeeze her eyes shut and just disappear. Wink out of existence and appear somewhere else, ten thousand miles away where the sun was shining and the world made sense.

“We will play.”

The voice became stern. Minerva could see it better now. She wished she couldn’t. She wished she were blind. It sat in the moonlit sand with its long legs crossed, knees flared out so as to resemble wings. Its pendulous stomach spread across its thighs.

“Come,” it said.

Minerva went to it. There was no option. Its voice was a summoning. She sat before it and crossed her legs in kind.

“Do you like games?”

She shook her head numbly.

It smiled. A repellent sight. “I thought all children enjoyed games.”

“I’m not a child,” she managed to say.

“You are all children of eggs,” it said.

She said, “What are the rules?”

It tittered. “My rules.”

“What are the stakes?”

“Everything you owe, my dear.”

A seed of terror planted itself in her stomach. “What do I owe?”

Another dry titter. “Everything. Nothing. The game decides.”

A cloud scudded over the moon. The landscape went dark. The creature’s eyes glimmered wetly.

“Let’s play, Minny! It will be ever so much fun!”

Its voice had changed. Gone were the breathy baby syllables. Now it spoke in the voice of Minerva’s dead brother. Little Cortland Atwater.

“AND THE NAME OF THE star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died in the waters, because they were made bitter…”

Revelation 8:11. Wormwood, Wormwood, the name of the star is called Wormwood… It was a favorite passage of the Reverend’s. The waters turned bitter; many people died. He had always liked the sound of that.

He was inside a burrow carved into the rock. He was the worm now. But not a worm in wood, oh no. A worm in its wormhole. No roots to get in his way. No birds pecking at him with their sharp beaks. He was hidden safely, deep within the rock. It was dark down here, though. So very dark. That scared him a little. But this was a quibble. The father would pay him what he had earned soon.

Laughter drifted through the rock, coming from everywhere and nowhere. Children’s laughter. He’d never cared for it. No matter how many shrieking infants he’d blessed or how many apple-cheeked little shits he’d kissed on the forehead, he couldn’t stomach kids. Their sticky hands and gap-toothed smiles and their stupidity—everything that people seemed to love about them, Amos loathed. All children were useless until they had grown old enough to contribute to his coffers.

But currently, that laughter sounded quite sweet to his ears. Angelic, even.

It was hard to say how much time had passed since he had climbed down the rope ladder to the secondary tunnel system. There was no natural light at all, but the rock held a strange glow. He had begun to crawl through the main tunnel, scraping his knees, inching toward the hum that emanated from someplace ahead. The tunnel walls were pocked with holes—burrows, it almost seemed. Big ones. They reminded him of termite boreholes, or honeycombs where bee larvae might pupate. But the bugs that would nest in holes of that size would be… no, they were not bug burrows.

He’d kept crawling toward the heart of that hum. Yet the closer he had gotten, the more scared he became. The fear pulsed in his brain, taking on terrible forms. He pictured an enormous chalice inside the rock—a bowl teeming with massive insects. Beetles the size of border collies. Bloated roaches with wings fanned out like garbage can lids. Millipedes with legs thick as a baby’s arm. Tens of thousands of them, blind from lack of sun, their bodies either transparent or foggy white so you could see the queer workings of their guts. Skittering madly inside the smooth rock basin, trundling over the corpses of their dead. The basin was studded with huge bean-shaped sacks that burst with wet pops, spewing forth flabby larvae with skin that sweated like gray sickly cheese, these revolting grubs that mewled like newborn babes. The bowl was too steep for any of them to escape; all they could do was squirm and shuck madly, waiting for an unassuming visitor to tumble down from above…

The image entombed itself in his head. He couldn’t shake it. Suddenly frightened by that hum, he had crawled into one of the burrows off the main tunnel. It was so tight that his shoulders brushed the sides. He couldn’t say how far or deep he pressed into the hole. At some point, it had swollen into a bubble. He curled up. The rock was warm as flesh. It felt like a womb. The darkness pressed against his eyeballs. He was careful where he set his hands—in some silly chamber of his mind, he thought he might touch the resting shape of… well, something. Whatever might slumber deep in this rock. He pictured a hairless rat with yellowed teeth like shards of broken crockery; he pictured his hand closing on its tail, thick as a garden hose, a whip of oily flesh…

The image spooked him. Still, at least a giant rat would be of this world—a common enough sight, even if blown up ten times its normal size. What he really feared was that he might encounter something not of this world. Something he wouldn’t find in his worst dreams, because, after all, those dreams were still culled from the sights and sensations he would have experienced while waking.

He let go of a jittery laugh. The rock sponged up the sound so quickly it was as if he’d never made a peep.

The breath whistled out of his lungs. He was safe here. He would wait and recite some scripture to calm down.

“The name of the star is called Wormwood… Wormwood… Wormwood…”

The laughter came again. Dancing and sprightly, tickling the hairs of his inner ear. Almost a song, holding lyrics that he couldn’t quite make out.

Distantly, he heard something or someone pass the mouth of his burrow—he already thought of it in that possessive way: his burrow. Was it one of the outsiders? Rage flooded through him; the air flared red before his eyes. They would not take his gift. The father owed him. He had given it what it wanted. But Amos was too terrified to move. It was as if he had crawled to the very bottom of the earth, down with the hiss of unseen voices and the punch and seethe of machines made from bone and teeth, machines whose purpose he could not understand. The father’s beautiful instruments.

“Wormwood,” he whispered hoarsely. “The name of the star…”

MICAH FORGED DOWN the tunnel. He wasn’t focused on the Reverend anymore; that bloodlust had sluiced out of him. His every muscle was tensed and screaming. A tiny voice inside his head yammered for him to stop, for God’s sake, go back.

The smell was stronger as he navigated toward its source. He gagged on the putrid stench, a smell like rotted offal marinating in mothballs—so powerful that it was more a taste. The rock seemed to throb—thu-thump, thu-thump—shuddering slightly like a thick artery.

His boot brushed something, making a metallic jangle. He shone the flashlight on a manacle, hand-forged and browned with rust. How old could it be? A hundred years? The sort of thing a slave would have worn… except it was too small to fit around a man’s wrist.

He continued on. He was scared, oh yes—terrified—but that rested easily within his mind. It was a perfectly natural reaction, so he did not try to fight it. He came across a shoe next. A child’s size, incredibly old. He picked it up, trembling. Faded but still legible on the bottom of the vulcanized rubber sole: Charles Goodyear, 1871.

He encountered other artifacts: tatters of clothing, a busted pocket watch. A wooden doll with the eyes scratched out.

The tunnel bent gently, the rock running smooth as alabaster. He shone the flashlight along its upper curvature, which was so low his head brushed it even as he crawled. It was carpeted with an odd fungoid growth, black and spiky. He raised the flashlight beam to it. The fungus broke apart. What he had mistaken for fungus was in fact a dozing ball of sightless spiders; they scuttled down the tunnel’s circumference, dancing lightly on the rock, vanishing into tiny holes in the floor. Micah noticed that the floor and walls were pocked with thousands of similar holes, tiny pits of darkness the flashlight beam could not penetrate. What else was hiding in there?

The father the father is so thirsty so hungry meat for the feast…

The air got progressively more rotten. He pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth, breathing shallowly. He spotted a bone. Bleached white, picked clean. It could belong to an animal. But animals were too wary to venture down to such a place, weren’t they?

He stared closely at the bone—a long, elegant filigree, the tips polished smooth by time or by… by something sucking on it until the ends went smooth.

Which is when he heard them. The worst, the most awful sounds.

“THERE ARE CALIBRATIONS of the nerve endings, Minny, that you have never known to exist,” the thing said in little Cort’s voice. “There are registers that you have never felt, the way dogs can hear sounds humans cannot. I can help you reach them. It will be my pleasure.”

The thing’s long-fingered hands moved in graceful patterns, its nails tapering to sharp points. Their movements were hypnotic. Minerva felt as if she’d chugged codeine cough syrup.

“Lay your hands out,” it said as Cort. “Palms up, Minny, pretty please.”

Helplessly, she obeyed. It touched a fingernail to a spot on her wrist where the veins ran blue under the skin. The pain was instant and exquisite, like nothing she had ever known. Too painful to scream, even. Its finger withdrew. Her skin had not been broken. There was no mark.

“I can open you up,” it said in Cort’s voice. “I can make you feel as you have never felt before, Minny. Things precious few of your kind have ever known. Would you like that?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want you to.”

The creature made a frowny face. Its voice was now a babyish coo: “Why-sy why-sy, pudding and pie-sy? We could have such fun, you and I-sy.”

It reached again. Minerva flinched. Its finger slowly retracted. Its head was cocked on its thin neck, its eyes reflecting the moonlight.

“It hurt,” it said in her dead brother’s voice. “When the snake ate me. It hurt so much, Minny. You didn’t do anything to help.”

She let out an airless gasp. “Cort, no, I wanted to—”

“But you didn’t,” the thing said spitefully. “Wanting to isn’t doing, Minny. And now what am I? Shit. Snake shit.”

“Stop,” she whispered.

“It was pink, Minny. The sun shining through the snake’s skin. The light was pink inside its mouth. Pink with black threads where its veins ran. There was the smell of squashed grasshoppers. I suffocated, but it took a long time. A lot longer than you’d think. My ribs were broke and my lungs filling with blood, but I think I screamed. Do you remember how my screams sounded? I bet you heard me. You weren’t far away. Just up that tree. Safe and sound.”

“Please stop,” she begged.

The creature touched her other wrist. The pain was immense, world-eating. Its finger withdrew. It blew gingerly on her flesh. The pain receded.

“Shall we begin, my love?”

“No, please no…”

It shook its head with what appeared to be true sadness, as if to say the following events were beyond its power to control. “We must.”

“No, no, no…”

It said, “If it’s information you seek, come and see me. If it is pairs of letters you need, I have consecutively three.”

“Wh-what?”

A macabre smile. “The game, my dear.”

This horrid thing wanted her to answer riddles? She almost laughed at the banality. Then she remembered the words scrawled on the wall back at the Preston School for Boys.

Why is 6 afraid of 7?

789! 789!

“What if I don’t play?”

“You will, my dove.” It spoke as one might when an answer exists beyond all doubt. “And you will lose, because your kind always does. The pain you experience will exist beyond your wildest conception; your purest amazement will be in just how deeply you can feel.” A forlorn sigh. “Your suffering will show me nothing new or novel. I have played this game too many times. There are no secrets your kind has left to tell me.”

“So why even play?”

An expression crossed its face that in the embalmed moonlight could have passed for sorrow. The thing was revolted at itself for what it was—what it couldn’t help but be. But aren’t we all prisoners of our natures, deep down?

SSSSSLLLLLLLLLLLLUUUUUHHHH…

A sucking, slurping sound. Prolonged and somehow chunky. There was a hideous eagerness to it.

These noises drifted through the tunnel and slid into Micah’s ears. He was unprepared for the blast of panic that filled him. He sensed an opening ahead. He clapped his fingers over the flashlight lens, letting just enough light seep through to illuminate the rock directly in front of him. He did not want to announce his presence to whatever might be lurking ahead. He crept forward, blood blitzing through his heart—he was dizzy with the pulse of it.

The sounds intensified. Good Christ, what could be making them?

The tunnel ended. He was able to stand up again. He had entered some kind of vault. Some kind of—lair was the word that skated uneasily through his mind.

He was in a bubble deep inside the rock, perhaps at its very center. He could not intuit its size, but by the frail light leaking through his fingers he saw the walls on either side of the tunnel running upward to give a faint impression of scale. It was less a bubble than a cube.

Or a… a box.

The sucking sounds were louder. Whatever was making them was in here. Carefully, heart thudding, he lifted one finger off the flashlight beam. A slice of light fell across the chamber’s floor. The rock was black as obsidian. The sounds stopped. There was a pregnancy to the pause; Micah pictured a thousand eyes swiveling in his direction.

Amos Flesher, he thought. Is that you?

But he knew it wouldn’t be the Reverend, much as he dearly wished it. There was only so much threat Flesher could pose. The noises in the dark unlocked a far more potent terror. They whispered directly into his veins, mainlining fear into his heart.

The father…

He lifted another finger off the flashlight lens. He could see the odd bone fragment and moldering tatter of clothing. Uniforms? The flashlight dimmed briefly, the contact points on the batteries failing for an instant. Oh Jesus. Not now. Don’t let that happen.

He lifted a third finger. A crease of light cut across the chamber and touched the rock wall thirty-odd yards away—

Something skittered across the beam. A white, wormish fluttering. A network of tubes or something—his instinctual impression was of a gargantuan maggot hacked into sections, the segments stitched into a vaguely humanoid form.

He lifted his final finger clear as dread knotted in his throat. He swept the beam across the chamber, trying to take in as much as he possibly could in hopes of understanding what he was dealing with—

He saw it then.

15

THE STRANGEST POSSIBILITY trip-trapped over the surface of Minerva’s brain once the game had started. She thought: What if God or Buddha or the Creator or who-the-fuck-ever had come to her as a freshly conceived zygote; what if the Creator had said: Listen, you, this is how your life is going to unspool. Dead father, dead brother, sadness and rage and regret aplenty, and the whole shebang’s gonna end on the far side of the desert with some unearthly creature making you answer riddles. Knowing all this, chum, you sure you want to ride this merry-go-round?

What would she have said, knowing the shape of her life to come?

“If it is information you seek, come and see me. If it is pairs of letters you need, I have consecutively three.”

The thing chanted this riddle in Cort’s voice. She had always gotten an F in classes where deductive reasoning was taught. That stuff maddened her. When would she ever need to know What has four eyes but can’t see? or What has hands but can’t clap?

The thing licked its lips. Its corrugated black tongue slipped out, sopping up the drool that threatened to cascade down its chin. Its body trembled with tension, although its eyes remained dull and dead.

Far off: the sound of trees snapping.

“Please,” it said. “An answer.”

“Give me a few minutes. Isn’t that fair?”

“Fair has very little to do with it, Minny,” the thing said in Cort’s voice.

Minerva’s brain synapses burned up, smoke practically pouring out her ears. If it is pairs of letters you need, I have consecutively three. She pictured six envelopes, six stamps, six addresses, all in a neat row. If it is information you seek… The letters held important information, but she couldn’t open them. Each envelope was fastened shut. Goddamn it, open!

The tree-snap sounds grew louder. A new sound joined those snaps: a low rumble. The creature must have heard it, too.

“Tick-tock,” it said in its own voice.

Minerva squeezed her eyes shut. Information you seek… pairs of letters…

She laughed mirthlessly. “I never was any good at these.”

The thing chuckled. “Should have paid more attention in school, big sis.”

Minerva gave it a sunless smile. “Fuck off. Stop talking like that.”

“You have fire,” it said, no longer in Cort’s voice. “I like that. It will take time to extinguish.”

The rumble was unmistakable now. The sand trembled under Minerva. The creature unkinked its legs and stood. It towered over her, its limbs throwing shadows across her face.

The rumble became the metallic rattle of an engine. A pair of headlights burnt through the trees. The thing’s attention was diverted. She took that chance to skitter away.

Some kind of vehicle bore down on them. The driver blared the horn. The thing took a step back, its perplexity deepening. Was it some kind of… tank? A figure stood on its hood. A familiar English voice rose over the churn of the engine.

“Git aloooong, little dooooogies…”

The thing lifted one arm, a spindly finger pointing.

“Father—?” it said questioningly.

A concentrated stream of fire ripped through the night. It hit the thing square in the chest. Ebenezer’s face was lit by the glow off the igniting gasoline. The creature went up like a kindling effigy. Illuminated by the brilliant light, its face held an expression of puzzled wonderment. Then it began to scream. A high trilling shriek that ascended through several octaves before dropping to a searing howl. It gibbered in many voices, a few of them recognizable to Minerva.

Ebenezer let his finger off the flamethrower. The thing stood in a flickering column of orange, crackling and hissing. It craned its head toward Minerva; its eyes were unchanged, black as lumps of coal in the melting tapestry of its face. The fire had peeled its mouth even wider. It issued a mocking titter and began to jig in place, its legs kicking crazily, flinging gobbets of roasting skin from its shanks.

It took two steps toward Ebenezer. He let loose with another burst. The thing shrieked in what seemed to be true pain. Then it fled down the slope toward the forest. A mesmerizing sight: its fiery limbs carrying it swiftly through the night, twenty yards in a single stride. It reached the woods and monkeyed up the first tree, then began to leap from treetop to treetop. It left a point of flame at the tip of each fir; the trees began to burn, the fire spreading rapidly.

Minerva approached the machine. Eb remained on the hood, a nitrous blue finger dancing from the nozzle of the flamethrower. Ellen was driving. Nate was there, too.

“The cavalry has arrived,” Ebenezer said grandly.

Minerva grinned. She couldn’t help herself.

“Ah!” Eb said. “Finally, a smile! What was that god-awful thing?”

“That was what took the kids,” Ellen said to Eb.

“Ah-ha!” Ebenezer said, full of overadrenalized good cheer. “Mystery solved!”

Minerva pointed at the cleft. “They’re in there. The children are.”

“We better go find them,” said Ellen.

“Oh, I don’t think you want to do that,” Minerva whispered.

MICAH SHUGHRUE knew it wasn’t the Reverend. But the man’s face was familiar.

Even by the most charitable definition, this could not be considered a man anymore. He hung in the center of the box buried deep within the black rock. He was suspended on a network of red ropes resembling wet sinews; the ropes were attached to various points of the man’s anatomy but primarily his shoulders and head and neck, bearing him aloft. The ropes issued a faint thrum like high-tension power lines.

This man was grotesquely shriveled, and human only insofar as he had a pair of driftwood legs and arms that were no more than bones clad in the barest stretching of tissue. His chest was so withered that the skin had shrunk around every rib, his innards encased in a yellowish sack in the center of the rib cage. His head was a grinning, fleshless skull, nose a blade of cartilage. His legs were pulled up tight to his body, the kneecaps visible as saucers, the bones of his feet jutting like gruesome sticks. His posture was that of a sickening fetus curled up in its womb.

The flashlight beam hung on its terrible face for an instant. As wasted as it was, Micah had seen it before. But where? Something in the flinty slope of those cheeks, the jut of those calcified ears…

It finally registered. He’d seen this man’s portrait on a desk in the Preston School for Boys. It was Augustus Preston himself.

Preston’s appearance encouraged a gruesome fixation. Much as he wanted to, Micah could not look away. It was as if the man had been devoured from the inside out, the way termites remorselessly harvest an oak tree. If Micah were to touch him the wrong way, he was certain Preston’s innards would spill out—parched, desiccated, sawdusty: his lungs and liver and heart all pulverized and turned to powder. And still, the annihilations of the man’s soul seemed somehow worse, if less obvious, than the ruin of his body. There was nothing inside him anymore. This was Micah’s dread sense. Not even sawdust. Only a yellowing, howling emptiness that his soul had fled years ago. The essence of his humanity had been irretrievably lost, boiled away like steam off a hot pan.

How had Preston arrived at this place? How many years had he been hanging here? For nearly a century—was that in any way possible? What were those ropes? What was the purpose of this vault and—

Ssssslllllllllllluuuuuhhhh…

Micah swung the flashlight. The light bled beneath Preston’s suspended feet. He saw something, and followed it up to Preston’s body. Micah had somehow missed it on the initial sweep.

A tube ran out below Preston’s bottom rib. It was white and wrinkled, like the milky intestines of a gutted fish. The tube trailed down to the floor and wormed into the dark. It flexed and cramped the way a garden hose does when fed water from a tap; it swelled in places as if something larger, more solid, were passing through it.

Micah followed it without wanting to.

His blood ran cold. Micah had never been much for books, but he did enjoy a dime-store paperback from time to time. The Feasting Dead. That had been a pretty good one. The Body Snatchers, too. In such books, he had read that phrase a dozen times. His blood ran cold. He didn’t know much about writing, but he knew that was a lazy cliché, right up there with water through a sieve and a deer caught in headlights.

Yet this was his exact sensation. A paralyzing chill swept through him—it was as if his blood had been sucked out and stashed in a deep freeze and injected back into his veins. A coldness that made his lungs lock up and his bowels throb with the urge to be voided.

The tube ran out of Augustus Preston and into a small body. A boy’s body. Could that be Eli Rathbone—?

If it was Eli, there was precious little boyish about him anymore. Eli lay limp on the floor, eyes open in an expression of unending horror. The tube—the umbilicus, Micah thought; that is what it looks like, a huge elongated umbilical cord—expanded into a funnel, which was latched over the boy’s mouth. The cord rippled at its tip as if tiny insects were trundling under its surface; Eli’s body jerked helplessly as the cord cramped and flexed, as that awful slurping sound filled the air.

Not wanting to but unable to stop himself, Micah followed Eli’s body with the beam. Eli’s hand was linked with that of a small girl—Elsa Rasmussen? Who else could it be? Their hands were melted into a carbuncled knob. The girl was welded to the boy behind her in the same manner, and that boy to another boy, and him to another, and another, and perhaps ten more after that. Their bodies rag-dolled into the nether recesses of the vaulted box, chained together through some hideous alchemy. Eli looked the worst by far; Elsa was a bit better, and the two boys a bit better than her. It was as if something was feeding on them in turn: First Eli, who was almost used up. Then Elsa, then the two boys who looked like brothers. The most recent additions appeared relatively unmarked. Micah was looking at a food chain in the most literal sense.

The children behind the two boys were still clothed. Their eyes were open, too—their pupils constricted when the beam touched them—but they were unmoving and unspeaking, as if they had been injected with a paralysis toxin from a giant spider. Micah shone the beam to chart the upper reaches of the chamber, expecting to see a huge shaggy arachnid hanging from the ceiling, rappelling toward him eagerly on a skein of gossamer thick as a steel cable… but there were only those red ropes rising to knit with the rock.

Micah forced himself to approach Preston. It was only a few steps, but scaling Everest would have been easier. He had no idea how big the man had been before, but whatever process his body had been subject to had altered it horribly. Now that Micah was up close, he could see that Preston wasn’t just thin—he had shrunk, his arms and legs shortening, the bones dissolving or something, until he was nothing but a twisted effigy. He was no more than four feet tall, an emaciated dwarf.

The chamber was silent except for that suck-suck, and even that had quieted. He stopped a foot from Preston. The man’s body did not give off any sort of smell—not of age, or rot. He looked almost mummified: the topmost layer of his skin was crackly, the crust of a flaky pie. Micah was sure the faintest touch would cause it to crumble away entirely, exposing the bleached bone. Dear Auggie had been consumed by some relentless hungering force—and now, with Preston used up, that same force had reached out for other sustenance. The sweetest, youngest delicacies it could find.

Preston’s eyelids were shut. Micah wasn’t certain he would find eyes behind those lids; if anything, they might resemble putrefying grapes. He had no intention of finding out. The red ropes radiated a pleasant warmth. A vein of solid light shone inside each of them. He gingerly shifted around Preston, shining the flashlight to make sure nothing lurked out of sight. Then he trained the beam on the gruesome cord running out of Preston’s body to attach to Eli’s face. Micah’s free hand gripped the hilt of the bayonet he’d taken from the Preston School days before—

Watery voices drifted in from the tunnel. Minerva? He wanted to shout out to her—Stay away!—but he might need her help, and selfishly he did not want to face this alone.

His gaze fell on Preston’s spine. Preston’s right arm was tucked behind his back in a chicken wing that would have snapped his bones under normal circumstances; his forearm was shielding something on his lower back. Biting down on his revulsion, Micah used the flashlight to lever that arm up; it moved with the dry creak of ancient leather. There was a long slit across Preston’s spine, six inches above his buttocks. A full foot long, running from hip to hip. The lips of the wound were dry and hard as cured meat. The flesh inside those lips was bright pink. The wound looked somehow fresh.

The voices drew nearer. Micah barely heard them. He was fixated on the wound…

Without much thought, he unsheathed the bayonet. He touched the tip of it to one edge of the wound in Preston’s back. It split the gummy surface; clear fluid burped through. Now there was a smell coming from Preston, almost indescribable—the stink of pure putrefaction and death. He let the nausea pass. The lips of flesh opened and closed as if breathing. Mesmerized, disgusted, he reinserted the bayonet tip into the wound. The blade sank into ripe, squishy softness. Preston did not stir. Micah ran the blade through the wound lightly, slitting a translucent layer gluing the lips together. They pulled apart in a pink leer—

Micah could see something inside. Runneled and warty like a diseased brain.

It… Did it move?

The enormous umbilical cord jerked, spastically. Micah’s consuming urge was to step on it, crimp the line—would the pressure build until it ruptured, spewing…?

Breathing shallowly, trying to inhale as little of the stench as possible—the air swam with the fumes wafting from the slit—Micah inserted the knife again. The blade dimpled the pink and carbuncled thing inside. It twitched hectically, somehow gleefully. The cord whipped and spasmed; the sucking intensified, and Micah could hear the children’s bodies shucking and jerking in the darkness.

The blade opened a one-inch secondary cut in the pink flesh inside the wound. Micah pulled the bayonet away. Whatever lay inside the smaller cut was black and shiny. It radiated a powerful sense of malice that Micah could feel physically—it felt as if burning ants were crawling over every inch of his flesh.

Oh Jesus, what is that what is that what IS that—

The pinkness closed over the black bulb momentarily before opening again. That blackness radiated an ageless festering rage.

With a thunderclap of understanding, Micah realized what it was.

An eye. Purest black. And that eye had just blinked. Or winked.

In the same instant, Augustus Preston’s head cranked around to face Micah. It should not be anatomically possible, as Preston had been hanging in the opposite direction—but it happened all the same, his neck making horrid snapping sounds as it twisted, the skin of his throat tearing like cheesecloth to display a papery tube that could have been his trachea. His eyelids flew open; Micah had been mistaken in thinking Preston’s eyes must have shriveled away; they stared at him now with a bright malignancy and a profound insanity—the look of someone whose brain had been utterly ruined. And yet there was hatred in that gaze, too, the loathing that can accrue only in the mind and heart of any creature that has had to exist in such a place for so long—a hatred for anything that has experienced love, humor, and the simple pleasure of sunlight on its face.

“Meeeeeeattttt…” Augustus Preston whispered through his ruined vocal cords, his voice like a razor drawn down a strop. The children began to laugh.

Fear flocked into Micah’s brain on dark wings. The flashlight slipped from his grip and spun on the ground; he stumbled, bellowing in surprise, then reached up instinctively—

—his fingers closing around one of those trembling red ropes.

MINERVA HEARD SHUG BELLOW somewhere in the tunnel system. A short, powerful burst that quickly faded.

She and Ebenezer had already climbed down the rope ladder when she heard Micah hollering. Nate and Ellen were still at the top of the drop, where they had agreed to wait.

“Keep watch,” Minerva called up to them. “Do you have a flashlight?”

A grim nod from Ellen. Clearly she didn’t want the creature Ebenezer had set aflame and chased off to return with them all alone. None of them wanted that. Minerva turned to join Ebenezer at the tunnel mouth. Ebenezer shone his flashlight into it. Micah’s voice had come from wherever the tunnel led, deeper into the rock.

“There’s only enough room to go single file,” said Minerva.

“I’ll go first,” Eb said.

They crawled inside. The flashlight beam bobbed on the walls. It was studded with holes, some shallow and small, others wide and deep. Minny got a chill when passing the larger ones—it seemed conceivable that some hungry thing with sightless eyes might dart out and snatch her. The smell she had noted at the mouth of the cleft intensified. She could not describe it, but it raised the short hairs on her neck.

Their breath filled the tunnel. The weight of the rock pressed down. They rounded a bend. Was the Reverend down here somewhere? Had Shug found him in this confounding warren? Or had the Reverend gotten the jump on Shug—was the bellowing they’d heard the result of Amos Flesher driving a knife into his heart?… It couldn’t be that. The Reverend was no match for Micah Shughrue; if Minerva was sure of one thing in life, it was that.

Still… it was so dark down here. Disorienting. The perfect element for a reptile like that crazy-ass preacher.

“There’s an opening ahead,” Eb said.

The tunnel emptied into a huge darkened space. As soon as Minerva stood up, she saw Micah’s boots lit by the glow of his flashlight. They were jittering madly, as if he was being electrocuted.

“Shug!” she cried.

WARMTH. That was Micah’s first sensation upon touching the living rope. Glorious, comforting warmth.

Harmony. That was the second sense. A feeling of satisfaction and well-being more profound than any he had ever known.

“Shug!”

He heard his name, but could not respond. He was bathed in this bliss. He didn’t want to respond. He wanted to stay this way forever, perfectly content.

Hands on his shoulders and arms. They pulled remorselessly. No, you bastards! No, no, stop, please sto—

He stumbled into the arms of Ebenezer and Minny. The beautiful fog lifted. He was back in the black box with Augustus Preston. He tore himself from their grip. He dropped to the floor, his muscles not wanting to cooperate with him.

“You all right?” Minny asked.

“Yes,” he said. He picked up the flashlight where it had slipped from his fingers and stood up again.

“What happened?”

“I do not know. But I am fine. Stand back,” he said, his voice a bit shaky.

“Shug, what—?”

“I said stand back.”

They did, all three training their flashlights on Preston’s body. It jerked roughly, as if a pair of huge invisible hands was jolting it. Then something began to push itself out of Preston’s back. His spinal cord ripped through the paper-thin flesh. The children writhed beyond the light, their bare feet whushing on the stone. Preston’s toothless mouth was open, withered eyes alight with horror.

“Faaaaather,” Preston breathed as he bucked like a giant revolting newborn in the girdle of red ropes. “Father, noooooooo…”

All of them watched, horrified, as a wriggling shape emerged from Preston’s squandered flesh. It perched for a moment on a flap of hardened skin before toppling gracelessly to land with a splat. The fibrous tendrils attached to its body snapped as it fell; those tendrils must have been mooring it to Preston at some unseen root.

That connection severed, Preston began to thrash even more animatedly. His mouth opened so wide that the skin split at its edges, stretching it into a gruesome bloodless slash. The red ropes anchoring him to the ceiling began to snap one by one; Preston jerked awkwardly, like a snarled parachutist getting cut down from a tree. When the second-to-last rope let go, Preston swung on the final cord, a gibbering pendulum. When that last one disconnected, Preston hit the stone with the unmistakable snap of bone.

Preston mewled as he tried to crawl toward whatever had pushed itself from his body. His arms were shattered, the sharp edges of bone shorn through his papery flesh. He issued a pitiable cry—not of pain, but of abandonment. The wail of a milksop boy left in the woods by his callous parents. It was terrible to gaze upon a body lacking a true animus, a soul—at least Micah prayed so, even for a man as horrible as Preston surely had been—as it squirmed and thrust on the cold stone floor of this inhospitable place. It was like watching a wooden marionette stir to ghastly life, its legs kicking in feeble paroxysms, its lifeless marble eyes rolling wildly in their beveled sockets—

“Faaaaaaather. Oh please, my faaaaaather…”

The gunshot was deafening. Preston’s head did not explode so much as crumple like a dry bird’s nest. The brain inside the blown-open skull case was arid and chalky as an old cow flop.

Ebenezer holstered his pistol. The three of them stared through the haze of smoke at the shape that had deposited itself on the stone.

16

WHEN THE GUNSHOT THUNDERED UP from the tunnel below, Ellen flinched. She exchanged a glance with Nate: What should we do?

She shone her flashlight over the ledge. The gunshot’s echo continued to ricochet through the cave system. Who had done it—and why? Was someone hurt?

“Wait here,” she told Nate. “I’m coming right back, okay?”

Nate’s face was pinched with worry. “Hurry.”

Ellen slid her flashlight into her pocket and climbed down the ladder. Nate peered over the ledge, watching the darkness swallow her. She reached the floor and crept to the tunnel.

“Ellen?”

“I’m okay,” she called up to Nate.

She crawled into the tunnel carefully, the rock smooth under her knees. The tunnel was pocked with holes. She shone the flashlight into one. The light turned grainy, giving no sense of its depth. She crawled on, ears straining for a human voice. All she could hear was a dull hum. She wondered where it could be coming fro—

A pair of hands shot out of the hole she was passing, one that was deep and vaporous. A cheese-white face swarmed out of the darkness.

“Wormwood!”

The Reverend’s hands closed over Ellen’s mouth before she could make a sound. He jerked her skull with terrific force, slamming it into the rock.

“ELLEN?”

No reply. Nate knelt at the ledge. He felt a point of concentrated cold at the nape of his neck, as if he had been touched with a dead man’s finger.

He looked behind him. Nobody was there. Just the faintest glow of fire on the rocks. He was scared that the thing—the huge prancing monster the Englishman had set aflame—would come stomping down the cave next, its skin crackly black and its eyes full of hate. He had seen the thing’s face as it went up in fiery incandescence. It had looked, at least momentarily, like his own father’s face. His father saying, I’m so sorry, Nate. So, so sorry…

Please, Ellen, he thought. Come back.

A BABY. Could it possibly be?

For all the world, it appeared to be just that. An infant, cherubic and chubby, its flesh a clean-scrubbed pink. A healthy eight pounds, six ounces, if any of them were to hazard a guess.

This was what had tumbled from the slit in Augustus Preston’s back. What had been nesting inside of his body for God knows how long.

It squirmed from its gelatinous sheath—a placental sac of sorts, splattered with the contents of Preston’s skull. It wriggled out of its translucent membrane and writhed on the stone like a fat, contented grub. Michelin Man arms and legs, plump fingers grasping at the air. It could have just fallen from the stork’s blanket. It was as cute as a bug’s ear, it really was. A thousand photographers would line up to snap a shot of the little darling.

The three of them stepped around the shriveled mess that was Augustus Preston, drawing nearer to the baby. Its aspect shimmered; it was almost as if it was clarifying and solidifying its own shape before their eyes. For an instant Micah saw a prawn-bodied fetus with a bulbous rotted-melon head crawling spastically over the stone; its eyes and mouth and nose were horribly compacted, as if it had been born under immense pressure that had wrenched its features monstrously out of shape—

The next instant, those deformities disappeared. The baby was cute, angelic.

The compulsion to touch it was irresistible. Each of them felt a powerful stirring in their sex organs—but there was nothing lustful in this feeling. It was a straightforward, procreative urge. They each wanted to have a baby. Desperately. Right that minute. A baby just like this perfect dewdrop, right here.

The creature shimmered again; in that shimmer, its perfection dissolved for a few stuttering heartbeats. The child had no sex organs; the space between its legs was studded with inflamed nodes that looked a little like misshapen nipples. Its skin was faintly wrinkled—the crepe-like folds that grace the backs of an old woman’s hands. And its eyes were not those of an infant: black as tar, glinting with an ancient cunning.

But these obvious malformations quickly dwindled to irrelevancies. This infant was purest beauty, sheerest love. It made a display of its nakedness, angling its body to show off its buttery curves. Inviting them to touch it—just one finger, the barest brush of its skin. It humped awkwardly toward Eli Rathbone, who lay a few feet away. The baby’s tongue popped out of its too-plump lips, licking them lasciviously, obscenely—an infantile come-on that made Ebenezer ill. But his revulsion was a distant thing, far less powerful than his urge to touch or even kiss this child. He was not a fan of babies. Shrieking, shitting, life-ruining creatures. But this child… oh yes, he wanted to sweep it up in his arms and shower it with kisses, even though he felt certain those kisses would taste of old death.

It is not a baby was Micah’s own desperate thought. It is something terrible, something that wants to have its way with all of us…

Minerva’s knees gave out; she sank down in front of the child. “Such a pweeetty bayyyy-beeeee,” she cooed.

She reached out a trembling hand. Micah batted it away. The baby’s eyes rolled, trapping Micah in its baleful glare.

“We have to kill it,” Micah heard himself say.

“And why would we ever consider doing that to such a cutie-pie?” Ebenezer said in a breathy voice.

Micah was distantly aware of the horror of the scene: the three of them in a box made of rock with a dozen emaciated children, doting over something that looked for all the world like a baby but was in fact something far older and infinitely more hostile.

The Father.

Micah drunkenly swung around. He had surrendered control of his limbs. This thing on the floor was robbing him of his motor skills somehow. The beam of his flashlight fell upon the bayonet. He approached it clubfootedly, swaying like a wino. He managed to pick it up. He swiveled to spot Ebenezer and Minerva reaching for the baby again.

“No!”

He blundered toward them. His feet got tangled with Preston’s legs as he lurched past the corpse. Eb’s and Minny’s fingers were only inches from the baby’s piglet-pink skin—Micah swept his arm in a rude chopping motion, hitting their grasping hands away. He shouldered them both aside, hearing the wind whoof out of Ebenezer.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Don’t look at it.”

He knelt next to it. He lifted the bayonet and stabbed down, aiming for its chest. The thing’s eyes widened in shock. The bayonet zagged sideways, nicking the rock an inch left of the baby. Micah raised the blade—it took an enormous force of will—and tried again. This time, the bayonet zagged in the other direction. It felt like trying to touch two giant magnets with matching polarities; he would get close—so, so close—only to miss with his strike.

Ebenezer grabbed his elbow. “Heeeeyyy, don’t hurt the—”

Micah shrugged him off. The baby was squalling pitiably, eyes squeezed shut as saliva bubbled between its lips. It looked more like an infant than ever: perfect, pristine. Micah positioned the blade directly over its flaccid chest. He hunched his shoulders, using the full weight of his body to bring the bayonet slowly and remorselessly down—

The baby’s eyes widened. For the first time, Micah saw fear kindling in those fuming black pits.

No. Don’t you dare.

The voice that filled Micah’s head was the dreadful rasp. Micah shuddered… then, summoning all his will, bore down again.

Stop, the thing spoke inside his head with a rising note of concern.

Micah glanced at Minerva and Ebenezer. So they could hear it, too. It wasn’t just him.

No, Micah thought back at it. You die now.

Anything, it said desperately. Whatever you desire…

AFTERWARD, WHEN THEY THINK ABOUT it, the shape of those moments will never be quite clear. Their thoughts become hazy. Did any of them truly ask for anything? Did they wish in the traditional sense: a plucked eyelash, a whispered hope before blowing out their birthday candles? Was it ever so cut-and-dried?

Or was it more that the Father had reached into their hearts and found their deepest longing, and in that moment granted it? Was it that they didn’t even understand what they had wished for—and would that be so unbelievable? How many of us truly know the beat of our hidden hearts?

None of them will be able to find any certainty. It simply occurred. All three of them felt it. Their bodies filled with the terrible, overpowering certainty of it happening.

Anything. Whatever you desire.

One wish. A terrible one. They were granted their heart’s desire. Unconsciously and involuntarily. And from that moment forward, they would be forever burdened with it.

WHEN THEIR MENTAL HAZE BEGAN to lift, they found that they were still in the chamber. The baby was crawling toward Eli.

“No,” Micah said.

He shook his head to clear the cobwebs. What had just gone on? He felt like a dinner party guest who had entered a room where everyone had been talking about him and now they had all lapsed into an uncomfortable silence.

The baby continued humping toward Eli. Its fingers were elongating, becoming less plump and coming to resemble twitching pink wires.

“No,” Micah said, more forcefully this time.

I neeeed them, the thing’s voice wheedled in his mind. I gave you what you wanted… gave you everything…

Gave him what? Micah shook his head again. He couldn’t clear the fog; his skull felt as if it was stuffed full of cotton balls.

“Not the children,” he said.

You must give me someone, it groveled. You must must must—

Micah took two big steps, pistonned his leg back and punted the hateful infant as hard as he could. His boot sank into the marbled tissue of its chest. The baby tumbled pell-mell into the darkness, arms and legs flapping. Silence… then a squalling cry that rose to a petulant shriek.

The children at the back of the chain were beginning to stir. Their hands came unstuck as they entered wakefulness. Their movements were clumsy, as if they’d been drugged. Minerva and Ebenezer helped them up. They were scared and shaky, like children who had just come out of a coma—and perhaps they had, of a sort. None of them cried. They were too shocked for tears, though those would surely come before long.

“Where are we?” asked a little girl.

“We’re in the dark,” Minerva told her gently. “But we’re going to find our way back out, okay? You stick tight with me.”

The girl rubbed her eyes. “Why is a baby crying? I can’t see it.”

“It misses its mom, I guess.”

“Oh.”

Eli, Elsa, and the Redhill boys did not stir. Their hands were welded together, the flesh melded and seamed. The other children had not suffered this same fate. Those ones—who Micah had to assume had only recently arrived here—seemed to be recovering already. He hoped so. He shook Eli’s shoulder; flies buzzed from the rotten hole under his armpit. Wordlessly, Micah held his hand out for Ebenezer’s pistol.

“Take the rest,” he said. “I will follow directly.”

Ebenezer and Minerva led the children to the tunnel. Ebenezer said: “Hop lightly, boys and girls.”

They trailed him into the tunnel. Minerva waited until they were all through before bringing up the rear. She hesitated.

“You sure, Shug?”

“Go on, Minny.”

Once she was gone, Micah sat with Eli. The baby’s keening screams shot acid through his veins. Biting back his disgust, he gripped the umbilical cord fixed over Eli’s mouth. It clung to his face as if attached with fishhooks. He pulled, terrified he’d rip the boy’s skin off or discover some giant leech projecting from his mouth—

The baby’s cries abruptly cut out.

Take them, then, it said spitefully.

Eli shuddered upright. His eyes shone black and he was screaming; his gleeful, lunatic cackles traveled through the funnel of opaque skin. The other children staggered up, too. Their stick-figure bodies began to prance in the flashlight’s beam as their ghastly laughter filled the darkness. Their hands were fused together in those ulcerated florets; they swung one another around as if playing a hellish version of “Skip-to-My-Lou.”

There was no longer anything recognizably human about them. Some essential quality had been cleansed away. The thing living inside Preston hadn’t simply eaten their flesh—it had eaten their spirits, their sanity… their almighty souls, if those existed.

Micah stifled a scream, his own sanity threatening to go right along with them. There was no saving them. There was only one final mercy he could offer.

He raised Ebenezer’s gun. It should have taken four bullets. But it took a few more. It was so dark.

And Micah’s hands were shaking so damn bad.

17

WHEN MICAH MET THEM outside the black rock, his hands were still trembling.

The night was cool. The children who had been saved were standing around a strange vehicle. Micah figured it must be the track machine the shopkeeper in Grinder’s Switch had spoken about. Ebenezer was helping them into its bed. Micah caught snatches of the children’s anguished speech—“Where’s Mommy and Daddy?” and “What did the Reverend do to my momma?”

Down the slopes, the forest was burning against the night. A fire was spreading quickly, urged on by the wind blowing over the mesa.

“We have to get out of here,” Minerva said.

“We can still make it,” Eb said, “but the fire is curling down the hillside to Little Heaven. Our only shot is to outrun it.”

Nate rounded the edge of the machine. His face was peppered with ash.

“Where’s Ellen?” he said.

“Wasn’t she with you?” Micah asked the boy.

“No. She followed them down.” Nate pointed at Minerva and Ebenezer.

Jesus. Ellen was still in there.

“Go,” Micah told Minerva.

“We can wait, Shug. We’ll go back together.”

Micah shook his head. “If you do not get the children out now, it will be days before help comes.”

Minerva cast a glance at the fire gathering along the hillside.

“Five minutes,” she said. “Then we go.”

Micah nodded. He walked back into the cleft.

WORMWOOD WORMWOOD WORMWOOD the star’s name is called—

Amos Flesher lay in his rocky burrow with the burn-faced woman. Their bodies were pressed together. He could smell the blood from her wound, warm on his nose. He giggled. He had hit her quite hard. Had he fractured her skull? He hardly knew his own strength anymore! Something about the darkness, the smells, and the dripping rock gave him an immense sense of power. Wonderful voltages coursed through his bloodstream.

He had been tucked safe in his hidey-hole when the gunshots rang out. Four or five, he couldn’t count, as they had come so fast. Then three more, spaced out with some deliberation. The woman jerked with each shot, but she did not regain consciousness—just nerves, he figured, the way a fish will flop when you drive a knife into its brain.

Next came the sounds of passage through the tunnel. Someone was exiting, following the children he’d heard leaving already. Things went silent again. Had everyone gone? Were they all alone, finally?

Aaaaaamos.

The Voice filled his skull. Oh! Painful. Like putting his ear next to a huge stereo speaker. Warm wetness coated his lips. Was his nose bleeding? He could feel it trickling from his ears, too.

Come to me. Worship.

Yes, Father, Amos thought. Anything for you.

He squirmed out of the burrow. Gripping the woman’s ankles, he dragged her into the tunnel with him. He flicked her flashlight on. Oh my! That was a lot of blood. Doc Lewis could have stitched up that gash on her head, but Lewis was now dead in a pool of his own blood. Ah, well. Fiddle-dee-dee.

It was hard work dragging her through the tunnel, but Amos labored with a song in his heart. After all the struggle and compromise amid his inferiors, his day of reward had arrived… or night—he could no longer tell. Time had lost all meaning. Only the darkness, heavy and unending.

The tunnel bellied into a vast vault. The floor was scattered with items of clothing… The beam swept over what appeared to be a body, but it was so ghastly that he could scarcely credit it as being human. Its head had been blown apart.

The children’s bodies were here, too. Eli, the Redhill brats, the Rasmussen urchin—

From somewhere in the nether reaches of the chamber: timid, fluttery inhales. A small pair of lungs drawing delicate sips of air. He shone the flashlight toward that sound. He saw or thought he could see a small shape heaved up against the far wall, its legs cycling uselessly—

He caught sound behind him, from the tunnel. Someone was approaching.

He flicked the flashlight off and left the woman on the floor. He hid.

MICAH FOUND ELLEN in the chamber. Her face was a mask of blood.

He rushed over to her. Inspected her head. The wound was bloody but superficial. He shone the flashlight on the bodies of Preston and… the others. Nothing moved now, and nothing had moved since he’d been here.

Ellen was breathing regularly. He pinned one of her eyelids open; her pupil dilated when the light touched it. Okay, okay, she wasn’t—

A hand slid around his hips. He tried to knock it away, but it was too quick; the hand unsheathed the bayonet. Someone crashed down on him. A pudgy, antic body wriggling on top of his chest. The Reverend: Micah could tell by the reek of his goddamn pomade.

THE FIRE WAS CONSUMING ever-greater swathes of the forest.

“How much longer?” Eb asked.

Minerva checked her watch. Seven minutes had passed. The children were waiting in the track machine. Eb sat behind the wheel.

Every man jack of us has to make his own decision in this nasty old world. Minerva figured Shug had made his. She hoped his was the right one for him, and she hoped the decision she was about to make was right for everyone else.

Please, Micah. Just get your stubborn ass out of there alive.

“Fire it up,” she said to Ebenezer. “Let’s cut and run.”

“WORMWOOD!” AMOS SCREECHED, stabbing frantically with the bayonet. “The star’s name was called Worm-wooOOood—!”

Micah’s hand closed around the blade. Amos jerked it away, raised it to stab down again. Micah’s palm and fingers opened, blood pissing from the gash. Micah managed to corral the Reverend’s wrist as he brought the bayonet down; the tip of the knife struck his glass eye; he felt the glass splinter all through his skull bone as the knife scrrrrriiiiitched across its surface.

“Wormwood!” Amos yelped, and laughed like a schoolboy.

Micah knocked the bayonet away. The Reverend was still on top of him. Micah jabbed upward with his thumb; he felt it sink into the Reverend’s eye, which burst with a ripe pop. Vitreous jelly spilled down the back of his hand. The Reverend fell away, shrieking. Micah grabbed his ankle. Oh no. You’re not going anywhere. Micah’s rage was overwhelming. He skinned up Amos Flesher’s thrashing body—“My eye!” he was screaming. “My eye my eye my eye!”—grabbed twin fistfuls of his stinking hair and rammed his skull into the ground again and again.

The Reverend soon went limp. Micah crawled over to the flashlight and shone it on Flesher. He was knocked out, his nose shattered, blood bubbling from his nostrils.

He pinned Ellen in the beam. Her eyelids were fluttering. He crawled over to her.

“Can you stand?”

“Micah?” She blinked, squinting into the light. “Where are we?”

“Nowhere we want to be. Can you stand?”

“I think so.”

Micah retrieved the bayonet. He swept the flashlight around until it fell upon the baby. It lay facing him now, its eyes focused on him with feverish need.

Give that one to me, it said. The trickster.

Yes, Micah thought. You deserve each other.

Micah stalked over to Flesher. He jammed his knee into the Reverend’s spine. Flesher moaned and spat up blood. Micah slit Flesher’s shirt with clinical skill, exposing his pallid back. He pinned him easily to the stone; the Reverend bleated and cried out.

“Father! Don’t let him hurt me!”

But the thing that the Reverend beseeched offered no aid. Its saggy mouth opened and closed as it watched both men with eager, feral eyes.

Micah stabbed the bayonet into the Reverend’s back a few inches above his hips. The Reverend squealed like a stuck pig. Micah then proceeded to hack a trench into Flesher’s back. He set about his task efficiently, the way he had always worked at such grim bodily matters; he grunted with strain as he sawed through flesh, but that sound was drowned out by the Reverend’s screams.

When the trench was deep and long enough, he backed away. He wiped the blood off his lips with the back of his hand, watching as the Reverend crawled into a corner of the chamber. Micah followed him with the flashlight. Flesher curled fearfully against the wall. His trousers were heavy with blood. His face had become childlike in its fear.

“Please,” he whimpered. “Don’t hurt me anymore. Be merciful.”

“You stay here,” Micah said.

“I will.” The Reverend nodded, exaggerated bobs of his head. “It’s all I ever wanted.”

Micah left him in the vaulted room. He and Ellen traced their way back through the tunnel. At first they could hear the Reverend mewling, and then—like a bully trying to regain some of his old bravado—he began to scream: “I’ll kill you! Kill you all! Wormwoooood!” They ignored him. Micah told himself he would not return to that black box, not for all the money in the world. Not if God himself gave the order.

They came to a fork in the tunnel labyrinth. Micah began to crawl to the left—

“No,” Ellen said. “This way.”

He followed her. Their breath knocked harshly inside the cramped space. Micah tried not to think of the children’s faces lit by the muzzle flash: innocent again in the final reckoning, their expressions a mixture of bewilderment, anguish, and fear.

They reached the tunnel mouth. The ladder hung down the side of the basin. Ellen climbed it with obvious difficulty, her balance wonky from blood loss. Micah followed her up, steadying her when needed. When they reached the top, he pulled the ladder up. He did not want the Reverend following them—or anything else, for that matter.

They made their way through the cleft. There came a soft, moist pattering. The olms—those weird salamander things—were falling from the roof. A disgusting shower of albino amphibian flesh.

“They will not hurt us,” said Micah.

“I know,” Ellen said. “They’re just…”

“Gross?”

“That’s the word, Micah.”

They tucked their heads and raced through the falling olms. Micah felt one wriggle down his collar—it felt like a cold, thrashing wad of snot. Ellen made a noise of revulsion as they plopped in her hair. When they had passed their nesting ground, they shook the piggybacking amphibians from their hair and clothing. Ellen picked one off Micah’s shoulder and set it gently on the ground.

“They never hurt anyone,” she reasoned.

A few minutes later, they reached the entrance to the cleft. The track machine was gone. Micah was glad. The forest was already engulfed in flames. The fire was reflected in Ellen’s wide awestruck eyes.

“I don’t do well with fire.”

Micah said, “It will not reach us. The sand.”

She turned to face him. “Your eye.”

She reached up, gingerly fingering his glass eye. It crumbled from his socket at her touch; the Reverend’s blow had shattered it to pieces. He blinked to clear the pebbly shards, which fell to the ground like crushed ice.

“I’ll make you another one, okay?”

“I would like that.”

“Your hand,” she said.

“Your head,” he said.

By the light of the raging forest fire, he inspected her wound. The ragged cut was a few inches long, just above the ridge of her burn tissue.

He said, “It will leave a scar.”

She waved his concern off. “What’s a scar? They give a person character, don’t you think?”

They stood close but not quite touching, watching the world burn.

18

THE TRACK MACHINE raced down the path, and the flames raged after it.

Nate was shocked by how loud the fire was—it growled and hissed, and when the wind gusted, it made a ripping-screaming sound like some huge beast without a body. The trees didn’t stand a chance: in the side-view mirror he watched the fire eat towering pines in a matter of seconds, sucking them into its molten heart; they went up in sizzling flashes, the trunks glowing white-hot—It’s their souls was Nate’s bizarre thought; that’s the shape of a tree’s soul just as it winks out—before the inferno rolled right over them.

The Englishman steered them down to Little Heaven. The ashen path was wide enough that the machine could fit; any tree in the way got snapped and ground up by the treads. The Englishman glanced at Nate. His face was shiny with sweat.

“You watch how I’m driving, son. I may need you to take the helm soon.”

“Me?”

Nate knew how to pedal a bike, sure, but a tank? He could hear his old playmates crying in the back of the vehicle. He wanted to cry right along with them. They were dead. Everyone’s parents. Even people who had no kids like Doc Lewis and the grouchy cook. His own father. Nate shut his eyes. He could still see the scene inside the chapel: people screaming with blood all down their chests, shrieks and moans, the Reverend standing at the pulpit with his arms in the air as if this was all God’s will.

“What was that thing?” he asked the Englishman.

“What thing are you talking about, precisely?” the Englishman said in the manner of someone who had seen a lot of strange things lately.

“The thing you set on fire.”

The Englishman worked the steering rods. A tree snapped under the treads. “There are details of this world that exist beyond understanding,” he said. “I never would have expected to say such a thing. But there it is. I don’t know what it was, son. Try not to think about it.”

“I can’t help it. I will see it for the rest of my life.”

“I will, too, if it’s any consolation.”

They were nearing Little Heaven. Ebenezer had no intention of driving into it—could you imagine the looks on the kids’ faces at the sight of their dead parents? Better those bodies get burned up, he figured. Better the kids recall their folks in a less traumatic light.

But those things might be lurking in the woods leading back to civilization. No, they would be. He was sure of it. They had let him back in because—well, why wouldn’t they? Another lamb to the slaughter. But he was sure that the slaughterhouse door only swung in one direction, and that they would shortly have to force their way back out.

To that end, Eb would have to be wielding a weapon. Minny, too. It was the only way they’d stand half a chance—and if he were a wagering sort, those were the best odds he’d give them right now.

Little Heaven came into view. Ebenezer drove around the fence, skirting the chapel and the terrible sights it held.

“The woodpile!” Minerva yelled.

He drove to it. When he got out, he saw the fire tearing through the woods to the north. It was advancing with stunning speed: points of flame dancing across the treetops, which swiftly burned down to the forest floor, igniting the browned needles. Christ, he could hear it now—a low, wet, gnashing sound, like a hive of insects chewing and eating as the fire fed on the forest. Minerva hopped down and hauled the burlap tarp off the woodpile.

“We need to wet this!” she said to Eb.

They carried the tarp to the pump. Eb feverishly worked the handle; it took a minor eternity before water began to splash out. They dragged the sopping cover back and wrangled it into the bed of the track machine.

“Get under it!” Minerva instructed the kids.

They did as she said. They all fit underneath the tarp, which would provide at least some protection from the fire that was now bearing hungrily down. Sparks blew all around them, whipped on the wind; they swirled around the track machine like fireflies, fizzling in Eb’s frowsy hair.

Eb clambered back into the cab and angled the machine until it pointed directly down the path leading out of the woods.

“Have you been watching me?” he said to Nate. The boy nodded. “All right, then, come sit where I’m sitting.”

Dutifully, the boy slid over. Eb took Nate’s hands and put them on the steering rods. “You don’t have to adjust these at all, yes? Just keep them steady. Now, you see this pedal? That’s the gas. I want you to put your foot on it.”

Nate pressed down on it with his toe.

“A little harder.”

Nate did. The motor growled menacingly.

“There. That’s the perfect weight. Now put your foot on the brake.” Nate did. Eb slid the transmission into drive. “When I tell you, take your foot off that pedal and put it back on the other one, the gas. We’ll start to move. I want you to keep your foot on the gas pedal just like you did there, okay? And you keep going, no matter what.”

The boy said nothing.

“Okay?”

The boy said, “Okay.”

Ebenezer clapped him on the shoulder. “Good lad.”

He clambered into the bed with Minerva. The fire was nipping at their heels; the skin tightened down his neck, sweat darkening his collar. He glanced back and saw the shimmering wall of flame advancing in a breathtaking wave—breathtaking in a literal sense: the fire ate the surrounding oxygen, leaving him with precious little to fill his own lungs. Ebenezer wondered if it would crash over them that same way—a fiery tidal rip curl picking them up, pushing them forward, charring their bodies to ash before they had even a moment to scream—

He slipped the flamethrower tanks over his shoulders. He could see the things massing ahead. They weren’t going to make it easy.

“You ready?”

Minerva nodded. There was a hardness in her eyes he hadn’t seen before.

“Go,” he told the boy.

With a jerk, the machine trundled forward. A few children cried out under the tarp. Eb lit the flamethrower’s pilot light.

The forest fire was closing in; looking back, he saw a vein of white flame rip out of the woods toward the chapel. It would soon climb its roof and set that mighty cross on fire. After that, the bodies inside would begin to blister and char.

“That’s perfect,” he called down to the boy. “That exact speed.”

They hit the first cut of woods. The things attacked.

It happened quickly. A frenzy of activity. They came in multiple surges. Time fractured, and what Eb recalled came in flashes.

FLASH: A shaggy brutish something lumbering out of the trees, many-limbed and growling. Ebenezer hit it with the flamethrower. It went up in a soaring cone of fire, its legs continuing to saw toward the track machine until Minerva shot it twice with the shotgun, blasting gobs of flaming tissue across the dirt. A fresh horror dodged in from the opposite side: a wet, shimmering, torsional creature of outrageous length, the wiry fibers of its anatomy braided together in some living, livid rope—

FLASH: A pack of smaller things rushing at them, a dozen or more, the size of house cats but much faster; Minerva picked a couple of them off as they advanced, and a few more got squashed under the rumbling treads. But two managed to scale the machine and clamber into the bed; their oily skin was covered in wart-like growths, their mouths studded with needle teeth. The first one attacked Eb’s boot, tearing a chunk from the leather. Minerva kicked it into the corner and blasted it into red hash. She wheeled around to grapple with the second monstrosity as—

FLASH: Something swooped down from the sky to land on the hood. An enormous bat-like thing—black wings spread across the whole hood, claws hooking it to the grille. Its body was the size of a big dog, a madcap mishmash of parts. It snapped at the windshield as its claws scrabbled on the hood, trying to climb the glass like some friendly puppy that only wanted to lick the boy’s face. Nate shrieked; the vehicle slowed and he shrank back in the seat, his foot slipping off the gas. Eb pulled the flamethrower’s trigger and got a sad hiss. The fuel tank had run dry. He cut a pistol lose from the slat and shot the thing at point-blank range; it hissed and screeched. He emptied the clip into it, but it clung tenaciously to the hood, scraping its way up the windshield. Minerva turned the shotgun on it. The gun boomed twice, and then the thing was carried off the edge of the track machine, hanging to the hood by the claw on its wing. It shrieked pitifully as the treads caught the flapping edge of its other wing, chewing it underneath the vehicle, where its body crunched with a sickening sound…

Then, seemingly moments after it started, it was over. The track machine shunted down the slope, leaving the things behind. They had escaped the kill zone, and nothing appeared to be following. The forest fire was now a faint glow across the bottomlands, though it wouldn’t be long before it caught up to them again.

Eb threw his arms up. “You beautiful bastard, you!” he shouted at Minerva.

The track machine ground to a halt. Ebenezer took a peek under the tarp to make sure the children were okay; then he turned to Minerva with a boyish grin—

She kicked him in the chest and sent him crashing off the tailgate. He hit the ground hard, the wind knocked out of him.

“Get up,” she said coldly, hopping off the tailgate herself.

It felt as though his chest had caved in. He was able to pull in a few shallow heaves and drag himself to his feet. What the hell was she on about? They had survived by the skin of their teeth and now—

“Get your gun,” she said once he was up.

She walked to a spot thirty yards away. Then she turned to face him, waiting.

“I’m going to shoot you now, Ebenezer Elkins,” she said calmly.

He was still doubled over, sucking wind. “Wh-what?”

“I’ll give you a moment to check your weapon and catch your wind. You tell me when you’re ready.”

He stared at her, baffled. “Minerva, for Christ’s sake.”

“Check your load, pal. We don’t got all day here.”

Fire collected along the curve of the earth. Minerva closed her eyes and waited. She had felt it by then, for the first time ever: the sensation she would come to know as the Sharpening. She’d felt it during the firefight just passed. Everything had slowed down, and she was able to operate calmly within the cool center of chaos. Right at that moment, it felt the most natural thing in the world.

Ebenezer dusted himself off. “You can’t possibly be serious.”

She closed her eyes, feeling her newfound capacities surge through her. “Oh, I am. As a heart attack.”

His voice changed—became accepting, as men such as him tended to be under even the most unreasonable circumstances. “May I ask why?”

“No. You ready yet?”

She opened her eyes. Eb stared searchingly at her across the starlit path.

“I’m not ready, no. Not hardly. Minny, I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to understand, Ebenezer. You just have to skin that pistol, point, and shoot. Should be easy enough for you. Made a tidy living off it, haven’t you?”

Ebenezer saw something then. A thin band of gold rimming her irises—though it was too dark and he too far away to note it with such precision—but yes, something deep-set and ineffable in her eyes. Something ticking ever clockwise, sharp and pure.

“If we do this, I—I don’t shoot to wound,” he said. “I’m not built that way.”

“You better do what you do, then.”

The children peeked from beneath the tarp, their eyes wide and curious.

“I don’t want to, Minerva. I will kill you. I’ll have to. Why end everything like this when we’ve been so lucky?”

She didn’t answer him. Her hand fell to the Colt at her waist. Ebenezer tucked his own pistol into his waistband. His fingers danced above the grips. The fire was set to scream over the rise, devouring everything in its path.

“Ready?” she said.

“No. But I’m afraid I’ll be ready well before you are, milady.”

They drew.

She’s so fast was Ebenezer’s amazed thought.

Minerva’s first shot tore through his leg just below his knee. He’d managed to clear the gun from his waistband, but her next shot clipped its barrel, sending it flying through the air. He uttered a shocked cry and fell back, clutching his knee. Blood pulsed through the neat hole in his pants.

“Ah-fuuuuuuuuu—” was all he could get out.

She hopped into the track machine again and came back to him with something in her hands. She flung it at his feet. He was in such pain, tears swimming in his eyes, that he could not make it out. She toed it a little closer. Some kind of dried reptile head. A snake, if he had to guess.

“You killed my father in a shack near Yuba fourteen years ago,” she said simply.

He stared at her gape-jawed, unable to comprehend.

“And because you killed my father, my brother died. All on the same day.”

“Who?” he managed to ask through gritted teeth.

“Charles Atwater.”

“But I didn’t…”

Minerva cocked the pistol and pointed it between his eyes. “Think on it.”

In time, he nodded. “Ah. A gambler… yes?” He winced, the pain in his knee drilling up and down his leg. “I was hired… to collect his debt.”

“You were just doing your job, right?”

“Of course. Had I known…”

“How could you have known?” she said, softening just slightly.

He dropped his head. Then he began to laugh. His shoulders hitched softly with it.

“All this time, Minerva. You’ve been waiting on this moment?”

She didn’t answer. What was the point? When Ebenezer looked up, he was smiling. “You got it out of your system, I trust?”

“I don’t figure so, no.”

“That would have been my guess.” He laughed again. “The whole time! Oh, but you are a patient viper.”

Minerva walked to the machine and slung herself into the cab. “Scoot over,” she told Nate. She put the vehicle in gear. The fire glinted in the side-view mirror, bearing down.

“What just happened?” Nate asked.

“He said he wants to walk home.”

Ebenezer’s voice rose over the onrushing fire: “Are we all square now, Minerva? Tell me we’re even now, at least!”

She didn’t bother answering that, either.

19

THE REVEREND AMOS FLESHER screamed out of unconsciousness.

It was dark. So very dark. Had he been dreaming? The dream itself was gone, but its outlines still clung to his mind: an inky spillage roiling with unseen bodies. He shivered. He was shirtless, his belly spilling over the waistband of his trousers.

He was still here. His father’s room. The house of treasures. He saw a light a dozen yards off. A flashlight lay on the floor, pointing at the wall. The rock met at a perfect ninety-degree angle. Puzzling. His initial sense of this space was of a huge bubble inside the rock. But seeing the way the rock met, his mind reoriented its parameters: not an orb but a cube.

Hell is a box.

He recoiled. The voice had come from his own head—mirthless, a flat, deadened tone—but the words were so powerful that it felt as if they had been whispered into his ear. But when he turned and looked, only the darkness peered back.

His legs were tacky with blood. How? It came back to him. The one-eyed bastard! Amos’s fingers roamed around to his spine. His fingertips touched flayed meat. He cried out in pain. Jesus Lord, merciful provider. The fucker had quartered him like a hog. He would bleed to death! He tried to call out, but his lips were waxy and his vocal cords shredded. Had he been screaming in his sleep?

He tried to stand. Impossible. His legs were numb and useless; they might as well have been made of wood. Had the one-eyed fuck severed a nerve cluster in his spine?

He hauled himself forward, fingers seeking purchase on the rock. One of his fingernails peeled off with a gluey snap, but it didn’t hurt one bit. He laughed again—what’s a fingernail? what’s a finger? what’s a toe?—and hauled his body on, singing an old hymn:

He was near the flashlight when the first rope descended. He could identify it by the thin thread of light running through it, like an electric eel darting in a dark sea cave. The rope danced hypnotically in front of him. He smiled and laughed; he wanted to clap, it was such a neat performance. The rope grazed his shoulder. He gasped. What a wonderful sensation. Indescribably lovely. His mind burst with colors. Flowers holding hues that did not exist in nature bloomed in his head.

This is Heaven, he thought rapturously. I must have died; this is my everlasting reward.

The ropes spooled down from above. Dozens of them alighted on his flesh; his mind expanded with wonderments so massive that he struggled to contain them all. The ropes lifted him up. He had never felt such a profound sense of love and tenderness. They hoisted him effortlessly, his body drawn to a standing position in the center of the chamber—the box. His legs hung under him, useless deadweight; his arms were also immobilized. He could barely move except to wriggle his torso a little, but it hardly mattered. He was safe and warm and loved.

Next: sounds from the far edge of the chamber. The moist shucking of a body across the stone. He stared around blearily, a kittenish smile on his face.

Where was that coming from? What was—?

It crawled through the flashlight beam. A baby…? was the only conception his mind registered. Something determinedly dragging its pulpy pink body across the beam. Flesher blinked, peering closer. Its body shimmered, and he saw a different shape entirely. Something that reminded him of a wet, wadded-up dish towel. Grub-like, but with a lean articulation of limbs up and down its body—the legs of a centipede. Fat and ribbed with skin that was not baby pink but a rotted-banana black, with seeping boils all over. Its eyes were pinned on the Reverend with a malignancy of purpose, a singular hunger, and a hatred deeper than human fathoming.

Then the shimmer ebbed and it was simply a baby again, chubby-cheeked and cute beyond belief. It humped through the flashlight beam, its feet pushing eagerly. He could hear it advancing toward him with a slick suction. A chill broke out over his body. He began to convulse in the harness of ropes, which held him in a gentle but stern embrace. He did not want that thing touching him. There was nothing in the world he could possibly want less. Better to let crows peck out his eyes; better to set wasps loose inside his mouth. Anything would be better than that horrible thing with its ancient shriveling stare.

Hell is a box, hell is a box, hell is a—

Something touched his naked calf. Now that he could feel. He tried to jerk his leg away, but it was useless. He couldn’t move an inch.

Nonononono—

The thing began to mount his leg. It skinned its way up gradually, as if savoring the ascent. Instead of a baby’s slack limbs, the appendages climbing his flesh felt more like a lobster’s spiny legs. Before long, the flashlight’s batteries would die. After that, the darkness would be total.

The thing was at his knee now. It was making loud sucking sounds like an infant hungering for a big fat tit.

Father must fill its belly, spoke a voice in his ear.

Being eaten wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Not in the grand scheme of things. It would be absolutely horrible, of course, to be eaten alive by the thing now licking its way up his inner thigh, pausing to tease the head of his dangling fear-shrunk cock; it would be excruciatingly painful to be eaten piece by piece, and the pain would amplify until he was driven mad with it, in all likelihood… but still, there would be an end to it. There was only so much of him to consume.

I have made the most terrible mistake, the Reverend thought.

Amos Flesher sensed this thing would do something far worse than merely devour him. Something that sat well outside the rational bounds of human pain or madness. Its feasting would be deliriously slow and torturous in a way that would eclipse all taxonomies of pain known to flesh or mind. All he knew was that the suffering would be immense and utterly lonely—trapped in the despairing dark, no way to mark the years as they bled into decades while this thing broke him down piece by relentless piece.

Please, he thought frenziedly. Don’t hurt me I’ll do anything be anything for you just don’t hurt me please God I don’t want you to hurt meeeeeee…

I will not hurt you, came the cooing reply. I will love you. You will be loved deeper than you ever imagined possible.

Love. Never in Amos’s life had a word held such a sinister undertone.

The thing was muscling around his hips now, moving toward the wide slice in his back. The Reverend thrashed madly, his dead legs slapping together to make comical sounds. The ropes held him in place. Their warmth and wonderments had retreated. They had become but dutiful tools of restraint.

The thing slipped inside his opened flesh. Teasingly so—inching just a cunt’s hair inside of him, as if wishing to savor it this first time. The pain was monolithic; his brain shrieked, every synapse shuddering. The Reverend squealed breathlessly; the sound fled up into the darkness to die. The thing was squirming inside of him rather energetically now, a birth in reverse; the Reverend felt his organs being displaced as the thing pushed doggedly inside—

Finally, its little feet sucked through the slit, which then closed over, the lips gumming shut on their own. The thing shuddered contentedly inside of him, its body flexing minutely as it enjoyed its new home.

For a long empty moment, nothing. Then: the smallest and most timid voice.

Let us begin, shall we?

MICAH COULD HEAR THE SCREAMS over the roar of the forest fire. They boiled out of the black rock. They were followed by silence and then—most chillingly—by a prolonged laugh.

“Did you hear that?” Ellen asked.

Micah nodded.

“The Reverend?”

“I suppose.”

They spent the night at the mouth of the cleft as the forest burned. The wind was gusting and the trees dry; Micah wouldn’t be surprised to hear that half the state had gone up. The heat intensified. They were forced to retreat into the cleft. It was much cooler inside the rock. Micah had a sense that even if the fire was raging right outside, it was always cool and wet inside this particular rock. He closed his eye, his eyelid lit by the mellow orange of the distant inferno. He hoped Minerva had made it out with the children.

The fire swept north and west the next day. Ellen managed to sleep for a few hours while Micah kept watch. The burned trees continued to glow until a heavy rain bucketed down. Columns of steam rose from the blackened forest floor. When the downpour cleared, they walked the wet sand to the edge of the forest. The tusks of what had been fifty-foot pines jutted from the earth.

“Should we start walking?” Ellen wondered. “We shouldn’t get lost, at least.”

“The fire could still be burning underground. In the tree roots.”

“Well?”

They agreed to set off before evening. They had no water or food; their lips were cracked and white, the first stages of dehydration. Maybe the well at Little Heaven had survived the blaze. They could draw a few ashy mouthfuls.

They had just set off when the air filled with the thacka-thacka of chopper blades. A search helicopter crested the western horizon, bearing steadily toward them. Ellen waved her arms. The pilot swooped low overhead, buzzing their position.

“He must have seen us,” Ellen said.

Micah nodded. “He will bank around and land nearby.”

“You don’t seem all that happy.”

“I do not wish to talk to the authorities.”

He began to walk toward Little Heaven again.

“Micah?”

“You go with them,” he said.

She trotted over to him. “You’re not serious.” When he did not reply: “Micah, you could die. After all this—”

But she could see he was resolute. Mule-headed to the end, this man.

“Then I’ll come with you.”

He shook his head. “Go with them. I will be fine.”

“How will I know that?”

He took her hand. The gesture seemed to surprise both of them.

“You will know because I will come find you, Ellen.”

“You promise?” She held a hand up. “Don’t answer that.”

“I will not. But you know the answer.”

She nodded. “I’ll see you then, Micah.”

“Yes. You will.”

She watched him walk into the landscape. He did not melt into the trees, there being no living trees left. But the fabric of his trench coat liquefied into the blackness surrounding it, becoming one with the charred earth after a few hundred yards.

“You better get your ass back to me!” Ellen shouted.

Twenty minutes later, a helicopter cut down from the pristine sky. And by then Micah Shughrue was only a name.