Charlie shot Otis an angry look. “Nothing,” Charlie said. “It’s not worth talking about now. We have to search the woods,” he went on, not looking at the Reverend.
“In groups,” Otis stressed. “Four or five people to a search party.”
“And if we don’t find them by midafternoon, we send a delegation out to get a proper search team,” said Charlie. “Helicopters, sniffer dogs, and whatnot.”
“I second that idea, Brother Fairweather,” said the missing girl’s mother. “Oh please, let’s do that.”
The fathers of the missing children nodded to each other. One of them went over and helped Ellen up. Another man hauled Ebenezer to his feet. There were no apologies—they couldn’t quite bring themselves to do that, not in front of the Reverend. That small kindness rendered, the men and their wives headed toward the gates. Otis and Charlie followed behind them.
“We’ll pitch in,” Ebenezer called after them.
Charlie accepted the offer with a nod. Eb and Ellen began to make their way toward the gates, too. The remaining worshippers stepped aside to let them pass.
“But you can’t…,” Eb heard the Reverend say.
Only a few had stayed with Reverend Flesher: Doc Lewis, Nate’s father, an unidentified man with the carbuncled face of a toad, and the cook.
“The Lord will punish you!” Flesher shouted. “Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God!” His voice rose to an impotent screech, his face knotted in rage. “The Almighty shall smite you for flouting the word of His earthbound prophet!”
“Oh, shut up, you twat,” Ebenezer muttered, and kept going.
32
MICAH AND MINERVA arrived back at Little Heaven with dusk coming on. In the waning light, they could see torches burning between the trees.
“Not again,” said Minerva. “Please no.”
Their return had been remarkably uneventful. When the morning sun washed over the Preston School, the field lay empty. Maybe the creatures had an aversion to daylight, because they were nowhere to be seen. Micah and Minny hiked through the day, talking little, and made it back in time to hear the shouts ringing out from the woods surrounding the compound. Names being called in hoarse, frightened voices.
They walked through Little Heaven’s main gates, which had been left unguarded. Was everyone out in the woods? A generator chugged sluggishly, powering the overhead spots—but Micah couldn’t help noticing that the bulbs flickered, blinking out for half a second before burning again. His eye roamed over the compound under the faltering lights, settling on the windowless bunkhouse that the boy Eli had been held in. Neither Cyril nor Virgil was occupying the guard post. He walked over. A busted padlock lay near the door. He turned the knob. The door opened into a small room. The smell was foul. The bed was empty, but there was a gluey stain on the mattress.
“How bad do you figure things are?” said Minerva, joining him.
Micah said, “Bad.”
They dropped their packs off at their bunkhouse. Their weapons they kept. Finding nobody about, Micah wandered to the edge of Little Heaven while Minerva changed into fresh clothes.
The children’s playground sat forlorn in the dusk. Micah sat on one of the swings and watched the torches bob through the forest. The sky was the red of a blood blister, the sun’s final rays pooling behind the trees. He had never been scared of nightfall. Even as a child, he’d welcomed the darkness. But bad things tended to happen at night in Little Heaven. Those same terrible things might happen in the day, too, soon enough. But at least they would be able to see them coming.
Ellen Bellhaven appeared on the other side of the fence. Her clothes were smudged with dirt and sap.
“Hey,” she said to Micah.
“Hey.”
She entered through the gates and sat on the swing beside him. Her eyes were encircled by dark rings like washers. A goose egg sat high on her forehead.
“Were you hit?” Micah said.
She nodded. Rage flared inside him. She put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m fine,” she said, and related the morning’s events. Micah closed his eye and rocked on the swing.
“How many this time?”
“Three children. Two brothers and a little girl,” Ellen said. “And Eli’s gone again, too. We’ve been searching all day. I’m worried.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t see things getting any better.”
“No.”
“This isn’t about Nate anymore. We should all get out. Every person here.”
“There was a chance we could have. But now… the kids.”
Ellen nodded. “We can’t leave without them. It would be…” She sighed. “Hate to use the word, but it would be un-Christian of us.”
“The Reverend?”
“I don’t know how much power his word holds anymore,” Ellen said. “People are scared, Micah. Really, really scared.”
Micah felt that fear seeping out of the woods, where all of Little Heaven was searching for those kids. He could almost smell it coming out of Ellen’s pores, too. He had known that fear himself, years ago. It was kindling in him again now.
Fear finds a home in you. That was a lesson Micah had learned at some price. It finds the softest spots imaginable and sets up residence. That place behind your knees where the nerves bundle up, buckling them. Inside your lungs, pinching the air out of them. Within your head, spreading like fungus. Fear will make you abandon those you care for, even those you claim to love—the people you tell yourself you’d save, sacrificing your body for theirs, if it ever came to that. And hypothetically, yes, you would… at least in those dream scenarios we all concoct. The burning houses, the crazed gunmen. You’d risk that heat or take that bullet. In a man’s fantasies, he always does the right thing.
But sometimes a man must face the absolute reality of his fear. And he’ll discover that terror can chew him up and turn him into something else. A monster of wrath, or of cowardice. That man finds himself inhabiting the skin of a total stranger… except not really. It is the creature he becomes in the pressure cooker. Fear can warp a man. Turn him into a repellent specimen whom he never thought he could be, not in a million years.
Micah knew. He’d seen it. He’d lived it.
In the summer of 1953, a month before the war ended, Micah had found two American soldiers torturing a Korean POW. The incident was being overseen by Captain Luker Beechwood, Micah’s commander. Beechwood was the classic southern dandy. The sort of man whose father drank sweet tea on the porch of the plantation manor where his forebears had had their slaves whipped in the dooryard.
The POW was a kid, eighteen. He was strapped to a chair with baling twine inside an isolated shack on the edge of their encampment. The soldiers were busily cutting pieces of skin off his chest and arms. The POW’s trousers were soaked with blood, and snot was bubbling out of his nose.
“We’re just letting some air into him, Private,” Captain Beechwood told Micah.
The soldiers were from Micah’s unit. One was Lyle Sykes. Fat, suffering from trench foot. He had a furtive and rattish air despite his girth. He was the sort of soldier whose skull you considered clandestinely putting a bullet into, out of the sense that he was somehow more dangerous than the enemy. Declan Hooper was the other man. A good egg. Micah was not surprised to see Sykes at the scene of this atrocity, but Hooper was a shock.
A sack sat at Captain Beechwood’s feet. Inside, Micah caught the gleam of wire cutters, a hammer, some nails. The air was hot inside the shack, filled with the reek of blood.
Micah said: “This is not to code.”