Nate breathed in and let it out in a shivering exhale. He mumbled something too garbled for Micah to understand.
“What did you say?” said Ellen.
“I said, I saw them last night. Eli and Elsa and the Redhills.”
The story poured out of the boy. He told them that Eli had come back last night. Nate had seen the four children daisy-chained together, hand to hand. Something about flute music from the woods—that detail raised the short hairs on the back of Micah’s neck. Nate’s last sight of the children was of them dancing around some enormous shape that the boy could not name.
“Do I sound crazy?” Nate asked when he was done.
Ellen said, “No, you don’t sound crazy. Not at all.”
Micah did not know how to take Nate’s story, though it was clear the boy believed it. But then the thing he had glimpsed at their old campsite the other night wasn’t believable, either—and it had been real enough.
“Did you tell your father?” Micah asked.
The boy’s chest hitched. “He didn’t see anything. Or… I don’t know, maybe he couldn’t. He said I was imagining it. That there was nuh-nuh-nothing.”
Ellen hugged Nate again. “We believe you, Nate. Okay?”
Nate sucked back snot. He had nearly cried, but then he hadn’t.
“We’re going to get out of here,” Ellen said. “This place? Little Heaven? We’re done with it. We’ll take as many people as want to go with us. Your dad, too. Hike back, get in our car, and drive someplace for a burger and fries and a chocolate milkshake. A real pig-out. Sound like a plan?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How about it, Micah? Sound like a good plan to you?”
Whether it was a good plan or not, Micah wasn’t sure she should promise the boy anything.
Otis and Charlie appeared at the fence. Their faces were etched with defeat.
“Good to see you back,” said Otis wearily. “No further troubles?”
“No,” Micah told him.
“Glad to hear it. Like the new eye, too. It humanizes you.”
“Hey,” Ellen chided. “He looked plenty human before.”
Otis’s shrug was noncommittal. “Charlie and I are leaving tonight with Terry Redhill. Time to get the police. Get some real help. We should have done it days ago, I guess.”
“We’re taking the truck, Micah,” said Charlie. “Fastest way. Will you come with us?”
33
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, they were set to depart.
Darkness bled over the compound. The search had been called off. Only the Rasmussens were still looking; they had broken away from their search party, moving deeper into the woods—just like the Rathbones had done. And the Rathbones had never come back.
The remaining denizens of Little Heaven assembled to see the pickup truck off. They were worn and fearful, their faces showing little hope. The Reverend was nowhere in sight.
Charlie and Otis sat in the cab of the truck, Terry Redhill in the bed. “We’ll drive to the river,” Otis told everybody, speaking over the idling engine. “If it’s running low enough to cross, we’ll take the truck over. If not, we hike the rest of the way.”
Charlie spoke next. “We can make it down in three-odd hours in the truck. If we have to hike, maybe a day. We’ll tell the police. They’ll send helicopters and sniffer dogs. The whole shebang.”
Charlie’s wife and son stood beside the truck. Both looked worried. Maude Redhill hopped up on the tailgate and gave her husband a kiss. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face blotchy, as if she had been crying nonstop for hours.
“Please be careful,” she said. “I’ve already lost enough today.”
“Not lost,” Terry said. “Just missing. We’ll find them. God will see to it.”
“Are you sure you won’t come?” Charlie asked Micah.
Micah approached the truck. He spoke low so nobody could hear. “Those things. They might have followed us back.”
Otis bit his lip. “You think so?”
Micah said, “There is a passing chance.”
“How many?”
“I could not tell you.”
“Do you think they’ll attack?”
Micah met Otis’s question with a shrug. Charlie and Otis conferred. The truck’s diesel engine ticked along, blurring out their voices.
“Here’s the thing,” Otis said finally. “There may be more of those things out there.” He pointed down the road they would be driving. “And if we don’t get past them and down the hill—well then, everyone here is in real trouble.”
“What about Minerva and the black fella you came with?” Charlie asked. “That one seems a pretty icy character.”
Micah glanced over his shoulder. Minerva stood fifty yards back from the group. Ebenezer leaned against the door to their bunkhouse, much farther away.
“Couldn’t they do something if those things tried to get past the gates—I mean, if you go with us now?” Charlie said.
Micah figured they could, if compelled to. Minerva for sure; Ebenezer was a fifty-fifty proposition—but if those abominations invaded Little Heaven, Ebenezer would have to fight them as a matter of survival.
“We need you,” Otis said simply.
Micah glanced back at Ellen. She stood beside Nate, their shoulders nearly touching. She nodded as if to give permission.
“Give me that scattergun,” he said to Charlie.
Charlie handed an Ithaca pump-action through the window, along with a box of shells. Micah hopped up on the bed beside Terry Redhill. He distributed the shells between his pockets, then jammed two into his mouth, storing them in either cheek—he looked like a chipmunk hoarding nuts. He slapped his palm on the roof.
“Go.”
They set off down the dirt path. Dark lay heavy between the trees. Otis flicked on the high beams. The firs shone whitely under their light, as if they were composed of bone instead of wood. Terry Redhill crouched in the bed beside Micah. A big man with a thick red beard. Pinpricks of sweat stood out on his forehead.
The truck prowled along at five miles an hour. The chassis juddered over rocks and stumps. Drool collected in Micah’s mouth; he removed one shell, spat, then jammed it back in. It was a trick he’d learned during the war; the company sniper always kept one cartridge in his mouth.
It’s the quickest way to get at it, he’d told Micah. Always have one bullet in your mouth for when you really need it.
Little Heaven receded. Otis flicked on the dome light as he nudged the truck down a steep slope; its knobby tires stuttered over the shale, differentials squealing. Micah and Terry leaned against the cab as the truck tilted downward. The headlights pointed directly at the road, throwing the fringing forest into inky blackness—
Micah saw it before anyone else, but even he caught it too late. It flared from the left-hand side, his bad side, streaking out of the trees and hammering into the truck. A huge shape rocked the truck on its axles, the driver-side wheels temporarily leaving the ground. Micah tumbled into Terry Redhill, who barely managed to stay in the bed. Charlie let out a muffled shout; Otis hit the gas as the truck slewed sideways, fishtailing toward the pines. Micah cast a glance through the cab’s rear window and saw the driver-side door was dented inward. Otis’s femur was punched through the fabric of his Carhartts at midthigh, a spike of bone shining deliriously white in the dome light. Otis’s face was bleached and greasy with shock and—with the calm observation that always came to Micah in times like this—he could see that Otis’s foot was pinned to the gas pedal.
The truck accelerated and struck a knotty pine. Micah was thrown against the cab. He ricocheted back, skidding across the bed until his head hit the tailgate. Terry Redhill fell over the side of the truck with a hoarse squawk. The engine cut out, its tick-tick dimming into the nothingness. Out of that enveloping silence came other sounds. Grunts and howls and brays and hisses.