by Nick Cutter
“Well, he’s doing a hell of a job,” Minerva said. “I don’t pray at all. So good for you, Satan.”
Ellen tried the radio. They pulled in a few old episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.
“The transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account!” the announcer intoned. “America’s fabulous freelance insurance investigator!” When the station bled out of range, Ellen manipulated the knob with great delicacy to pull in Dr. Don Rose, broadcasting on AM 610, KFRC, all the way from San Francisco. They listened to “One Grain of Sand,” by Eddy Arnold, which segued into “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Pocket Full of Rainbows.” This was followed by commercials for Bubble Up gum, Roi-Tan cigars, and Ken-L Ration dog food, which Ellen sang along to lustily in a little boy’s voice.
My dog’s better than your dog;
My dog’s better than yours—
They lost the signal in the hills. Ellen fiddled with the dial until—
“Pestilence!”
A great fulmination filled the car. A man’s warbly, southern-fried voice.
“The four horsemen are saddled, payy-poll! Their spurs are sharp to goad their flame-eyed steeds up from the bowels of the infernal pit to spread pain and suffering amongst the unbelievers, the heretical, the unwed muuuthers, the adulterers and the idolaters and fornicators and awwwll the ho-MA-sexshals, the tax chayyyts, the nig- . . . -gardly of spirit, the interbreeders, the faithless, the impure, the—”
Ellen snapped the radio off.
“Holy shit, buddy,” she said. “Take a pill.”
They pulled into a gun shop that sat off the freeway. Jimmy’s Gun Rack. A squat, flat-topped building that resembled a bomb shelter. Barred windows, smoked glass. They needed ammunition. Micah had his Russian Tokarevs. Minerva, her US Colts. Ebenezer had borrowed the farmer’s English-made Tarpley carbine, a .52-caliber single-shot rifle. He hadn’t hunted wild game—a gentleman’s diversion, if ever there was—in years. This trip might offer the chance to sportingly plug a deer or feral hog.
Micah wasn’t sure they would even need guns. He hoped not. But then, he couldn’t be certain there weren’t a few rogue survivalists at the compound—if so, there was a chance those men would have guns. Better to be safe.
A bell chimed as they walked into the shop. Rifles lined the walls, with heavy-gauge chains threaded through their trigger guards. The man who was assumedly Jimmy stood behind a glass display cabinet. A stuffed boar’s head was mounted on the wall above him. Some joker had put a pair of Buddy Holly glasses over the boar’s snout and stuffed one of those trick cigars—already exploded—in its mouth. The boar’s eyes were wide and shocked-looking, as if the cigar had just blown up in its face.
Jimmy was himself boarish in appearance. Squat and round with stiff hairs sprouting from the vee of his camouflage shirt. His eyes were loose and eggy behind a pair of thick bifocals.
“What can I do you fine folks for?” he said.
“Unusual request, my fine fellow,” said Ebenezer. “I’ve got an old hunting rifle, .52 caliber.”
Jimmy hooted. “Jesus, son—you steal it off a dead Boer?”
Micah and Minerva gave Jimmy their orders.
“Those I can do,” said Jimmy. “And I’ll take a look for some .52 loads. Not promising nothing.”
Jimmy opened a door leading to the stockroom. Ebenezer spotted an unusual weapon just inside that door: two huge canisters and a long-nozzled gun with an attached asbestos-wrapped hose. A flamethrower. He tapped Micah on the shoulder and pointed.
“You ever use one of those in the war?”
Micah shook his head. “No flame unit in our detachment.”
Jimmy returned some minutes later. His forehead was caked with dust. He slapped down a box of shells on the counter.
“Sonofabitch, boy. You’re in luck,” he told Eb.
The box was ancient, the colors bleached out. Jimmy opened it and checked the loads. “They look fine. Found it waaaay in the back, where I lay down poison for the rats. But they’ll fire. I wouldn’t sell them to you if they didn’t.”
“You are a prince amongst men,” Eb said, peeling a few bills out of his wallet.
THEY REACHED GRINDER’S SWITCH just past one o’clock that afternoon. The village had a single paved road. The surrounding land was peppered with shotgun shacks. A sundry store with a gas pump out front composed the entirety of the Grinder’s Switch commercial district.
Minerva pulled the Olds up beside the Sky Chief pump. She had been behind the wheel the last few hours, as Micah’s depth perception tended to drift on long car trips.
Micah popped the hood. The radiator was boiling over. The rad cap was blisteringly hot. He pulled his sleeve over his hand and unscrewed it. Oily steam hissed up.
A man came out of the sundry store. The skin of his face was as thin as a bat’s wing and stretched tight over his skull. He wore overalls with an oil-spotted rag poking out of the chest pocket.
“You let ’er boil dry.” The man spoke in the tone one might use to address the feeble-minded.
Ebenezer pulled in on his bike. He took off his helmet. His hair stuck up in comical sprigs.
“Petrol, garçon.”
The man just looked at him.
“Gas, please,” Ebenezer said. “Fill it up.”
The man hesitated, as if deciding whether he wanted to fulfill the order of a fellow with Ebenezer’s coloration. Then he uncapped the motorcycle’s tank and carefully filled it. The pump dinged at every half gallon. The man wiped a few drops of spilled gas off the tank and said, “Sixty-three cents. Pay inside.”
Micah said, “Do you have a water hose?”
The man shook his head. His mouth was sucked inward, and Micah wondered if he had a tooth left in his head. It looked as if something had been feasting on him from the inside. A parasite of some kind.
“Got a pump round back,” the man said.
The pump was old and rusted; a pail hung off the spout. Micah worked the handle until red-tinged water splashed into the pail. He filled it and went back to the car. The water hit the scorching radiator; steam boiled up. Micah waited for it to clear, then tipped the rest in.
The others were inside. The shop’s shelves were modestly stocked. Micah picked up a tin of Spam, a can of Hunt’s pudding, some wooden matches, and Tootsie Rolls. He added a quart bottle of Nehi grape soda from the ice chest, brushing past Ebenezer, who was picking up two bottles of Yoo-hoo.
“Elixir of the gods,” Ebenezer said.
“The gods of diabetes,” said Minerva. “Drink up.”
Micah took his goods to the cash register. “Nine dollars thirty-five with the gas,” the shopkeeper told him.
Micah informed the man that he needed a receipt. “Business purposes.”
The man scratched one out on a bit of scrap. His fingers trembled.
“We are looking for an encampment,” Micah said to him.
“It’s called Little Heaven,” said Ellen.
“The religious crazies?” the man said. “The hell you want with them?”
Eb said, “We are true believers who seek to walk in harmony with Christ Almighty.”
The man flatly scrutinized Ebenezer. “No, you ain’t.”
“So you’ve met them?” Minerva asked.
“They came in droves, what, going on half a year ago now?” the man said. “Them, their slick-talking leader, and all their earthly possessions. They hired a track machine—a flatbed on a tank chassis, yeah?—to haul everything up. It’s rough sledding through those hillside passes. Since then, I’ll see the odd one pass through on their way up.”
“Any of them ever come out?” Ellen asked.
“Not that I ever saw.” The man flitted his tongue on the tip of his left canine tooth, one of the precious few teeth he had left. “Naw, there was the one. Had to leave on account of a bust leg.”
Micah said, “They seem dangerous to you?”
“Not so much that,” the man said. “They s
eem stupid. Whole idea of it. Who needs to slog into a forest to commune with God? There are perfectly good churches with roads leading to their front doors. It’s damn dangerous out there. Floods, forest fires, wild animals . . . all sorts of things.” An apathetic shrug. “Ain’t my job to talk folks out of being stupid.”
“What about the guy in charge?” Ellen asked. “You met him?”
“Not myself, no. Arnie Copps, local guy who owns the track machine, had dealings with him. Short-assed little fella. Wears his hair in a greased-up duck’s ass kept in place with about a pound of pomade. The horseflies got to love him, walking around with that grease trap on top of his head. But his people bend over backward for him. Gobble up every word that falls off his lips, I hear.”
“What’s the best way to get there?” Ellen asked.
“Why in the hell would you want to do that?”
When nobody answered, the man came around the counter and toed the screen door open.
“Follow this road,” he said, pointing. “Three miles you’ll hit a cut. Walk the dry wash a ways and you hit a trailhead. I don’t know the exact spot. I wouldn’t go on a bet.”
Ebenezer peeled the foil off a roll of cherry Life Savers and popped one into his mouth. “You prefer to worship in a civilized setting, I take it?”
“Something like that,” said the man. “You talk queer.”
“I speak the Queen’s English. I can’t imagine you hear it often.”
They stowed their supplies in the trunk and made ready their departure.
“You got something to shoot with?” the man asked. “A rifle? Scattergun?”
Micah said, “We might.”
“Yeah, you seem the type. Don’t know it’ll be much use against whatever’s up there, but better to have than not.”
Ellen said, “What do you mean by that?”
But the man had already turned his back on them. The screen door shut behind him. Flies—dozens of them suddenly—battered their bodies against the wire mesh. The din of their wings was disquieting.
THEY DROVE TO THE CUT. Gravel popped under the tires. Road grit drifted through the windows and clung to their skin. The townsfolk watched them from sagging front stoops or from behind dust-clad windows. Their faces were uniformly ravaged, jaundiced, and cored out just as the man’s at the shop had been.
It was only later that Micah would realize that he had not seen any boys or girls—no kids, and none of their harbingers. No playgrounds. No tricycles or kiddie pools in any of the weed-tangled yards.
Grinder’s Switch was a village of premature ancients. Not a single child.
8
THEY REACHED the cut the shopkeeper had spoken of. They parked the Olds and stretched their road-stiff limbs. They pulled on their Danner boots and organized their packs. They tightened the straps and made their way to the trailhead. Ellen walked in front. She had a bouncy stride. Micah followed Ellen with his eye—then he caught Minerva watching. Minny shook her head with a wry smile. Micah pressed his lips together and focused on the trees. They were scraggly at the base of the valley, clinging to the ribs of rock, but they got taller and shaggier as the valley rose into the hills.
“Pitter patter, tenderfeet,” said Ellen.
A trail was grooved through the dirt. It steadily ascended. They would have no trouble following it. They walked under a canopy of knit branches. The sunlight fell through the leaves and touched their skin, making it look as though their flesh had been dipped in a faint green dye.
“Didn’t that guy say something about a tank delivering supplies?” Minerva said. “Why not just follow this trail?”
“It could get a lot tougher,” said Ellen. “It might cross creeks and mudholes as it winds up into the hills—steep grades, rockslides, that kind of stuff.”
They hiked a few hours. The day grew warm under the trees.
“Hey,” said Minerva to Ellen. “What do you think would be the worst radioactive animal to get bitten by?”
“What?” said Ellen.
“You ever read Spider-Man?” Minerva said. “Peter Parker got bit by a radioactive spider. He got all the powers of a spider. He can spin webs, climb buildings, he’s got a ‘spider sense.’ All in all, pretty good. But I got to thinking, what if he’d got bit by a dung beetle?”
“That doesn’t sound so hot,” Ellen said, laughing.
“You bet,” said Minerva. “Dung-Beetle-Man. He can roll boulder-sized rocks of shit up small hills! He can leap a pile of manure in a single bound!”
Ellen was laughing harder. “What about, I don’t know . . . Platypus-Man?”
“One day, on a research trip,” Minerva intoned, “a humble scientist, Peter Pancake, was bitten by a radioactive platypus. That day he became Platypus-Man! What can he do? Oh, he can open all sorts of tin cans with his bill! And . . .”
“Lay eggs?” said Ellen.
“Lay eggs in the soft sand! The world needs a hero, and now they have one—Platypus-Man!”
The women were laughing so hard now that they were having a tough time staying on the trail. Micah and Ebenezer bemusedly watched them.
“What about Tree-Sloth-Man?” Ebenezer ventured. “One day a radioactive sloth fell out of its tree and bit mild-mannered podiatrist Peter Porkchop and—”
“That’s stupid,” Minerva snapped acidly. “Why don’t you shut up? Nobody asked you.”
“This is what happens when you hire professional mercenaries to take you on a hiking junket,” Eb said to Ellen in a mild tone. “They are uncouth. They make things uncomfortable.”
Minerva said, “Go piss up a rope.”
“Example A,” Eb went on pleasantly. “Vulgar, yes? Barbaric, you might even say.”
From that point on, they hiked in silence. The land was dry—the crumbly, baked-earth aridness that would make firefighters pray for rain. Ebenezer aimed his rifle and obliterated a tumorlike toadstool growing on the trunk of a saw palmetto at two hundred yards. The crack of the gun pushed every other sound away, ushering in a thudding stillness.
“Simply checking the aim,” he said, reloading the rifle. “Every gun shoots a little different, as you know.”
Ebenezer and Micah were now breathing hard. The women fared better. Minerva’s strides carried her over gnarled roots and fallen logs. Ellen moved with preternatural grace. The men plodded behind them. A fungoid smell rose from the earth, which was spongy beneath a carpet of browned pine needles.
Minerva said, “What is that?”
She was looking at a hackberry tree. Something had been carved in its trunk. A symbol, a rune. It had been gouged deep into the wood.
Micah ran his fingers over the marking. The bark had not grown back; the pale heartwood was smooth as scar tissue. He had seen things like this in Korea. The enemy would score them on trees or rocks as warnings to passing soldiers. Sometimes an army translator had been able to decipher them and gain Micah’s unit a crucial advantage; other times not.
“A trail marker?” said Ellen. “Maybe someone hung their bear bag in the tree.”
“There’s one over here, too,” said Eb.
They discovered seven of these markings hacked into the surrounding trees. There might have been others farther back, only they hadn’t noticed. The markings were all roughly the same: a cross with a shorter line underneath the horizontal beam. It looked somewhat like a telephone pole. But what struck home was the intensity with which they had been laid into the wood: crude thudding chops that had torn out chunks of wood.
“It was some boys with their daddy’s axe,” ventured Eb. “Or a crazy fool who wanted to remember which tree he buried his jar of pennies under.”
There being no more logical explanation, they silently accepted Ebenezer’s reasoning. But the markings lingered in their minds. The violence with which those marks had been laid.
The path gradually rose. They wended over the foothills into the deeper passes. The land plateaued but never dipped. The trees thickened until the woods became impenetr
able in some spots.
A deerfly settled on the nape of Ebenezer’s neck. It bit him and flew away before Eb could slap the bugger. Cocksucking bugs! he thought. Cocksucking trees! Cocksucking dirt! Ebenezer hated everything about the wilderness. Rather inconveniently, he had forgotten this fact. He was not built for this. His was a delicate constitution. As a boy, he’d been forever coming down with the sniffles. His humors were perpetually in arrears, as his grandmother used to say. His iron was probably low. He should shoot something that hopped or skulked through this godforsaken purgatory, put it out of its misery, and eat it raw. That would surely jack the life back into him.
But there was nothing to draw a bead on. He became aware of this quite suddenly. Where before there had been the industry of animals ferreting through the brush and birds wheeling in blue sky, now there was almost nothing. An odd serenity. Just the sound of their boots and Ebenezer’s own breath whistling in his ears.
We’re trapped with the Monster from Green Hell.
Ebenezer flinched visibly. Where had that thought come from? Then it dawned. Monster from Green Hell was a B-movie he had watched, along with The Brain From Planet Arous, at a creature-feature matinee many years ago. In . . . where had it been? Barstow, Illinois? Bar Harbor, Maine? He’d been on a job. He watched both films at a second-run movie house where the popcorn was stale and the floors sticky. The movie’s plot involved a rocket ship of mutant bees that crash-landed in an African jungle. The queen bee found sanctuary in a dormant volcano. Her progeny set about killing the local tribesmen. Then a delegation of blow-dried American scientists arrived. They tossed grenades into the volcano and triggered an eruption that incinerated the vile bugs. Fin.
The film was forgettable dreck—except there had been this one shot. Only a few frames of stock footage the cinematographer had jammed in to establish the setting. A panoramic view of the jungle. A riot of creeping vegetation and trees that had witnessed generations wither and die under the wide sweep of their limbs. A place where things never stopped growing, implacably and endlessly and insidiously so, pushing up through the ground and twining around whatever was closest to them, strangling it. A lunatic vista of inhospitable, brooding, vengeful green.
