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.