“It is,” said the rifleman, and spat. His partner rested the heel of his palm against the butt of his revolver. “And I say sit.”
The group exited through the main gate. The monolithic expanse of the woods dwarfed them; the flimsy light of their torches quickly dwindled under the brooding darkness of those trees. The worshippers paired off and began to sweep the woods. Voices called out from every direction.
“Eli?”
“Eli!”
“Eli!”
“Child, come home! God wants you to come home!”
The light of their torches was swallowed by the night. Soon their voices were gone, too. Ellen, Minerva, and Micah stood in the parade square. There was not much else to do. It wasn’t like there was a horseshoe pit or a bingo game they were missing.
A lone figure rounded back into the compound. Charlie Fairweather.
“I don’t care what Cyril or Virgil says,” he said. “That boy needs all the help he can get.”
“Okay,” said Micah.
17
DURING THE WAR, Micah used to drive trucks full of the dead.
Between ten and fifteen bodies piled into the back of an old GMC Deuce-and-a-Half. The bodies of GIs and medics and radiomen and the odd noncombat pogue who had found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The bodies were intact, by and large, though sometimes the stray parts had to be zipped into canvas sacks. They were usually frozen—not strategically, just because the icy temperatures ensured that most of them were rock hard for transport.
Micah and another marine, Eldon Tibbs, would drive them from the front line to Hamhung, a port town under US occupation. It was suspected that the Chinese would strip, loot, and debase the corpses otherwise.
There was one night, winter of 1952. Micah was at the wheel for that haul. He was nineteen years old. The road wound through the pines, which were cottony-looking, with bluish moss hanging from their branches like seaweed. Tibbs didn’t talk much. He and Micah got on just fine. Tibbs smoked a pipe packed with cherry tobacco. He received it every month in a thick waxed envelope. One of his brothers sent it. He was smoking when it happened.
Micah did not see or hear the shot that killed Tibbs. It was either perfect or just plain lucky—bad luck for Tibbs. A hole appeared in the passenger window, and the side of Micah’s face was plastered with wet warmth.
Tibbs’s lit pipe fell into Micah’s lap. The road hit a bend. Tibbs’s body slumped heavily against Micah. A flap of skin from his blown-apart face slapped against Micah’s neck. He smelled the thick iron of Tibbs’s blood.
Wind shrieked through the window hole as the truck veered into the trees. Micah tried to correct the fishtail, but the front end dipped over the edge of the road into a gully. Micah was thrown into the windshield, which splintered when he struck it.
He grabbed the pistol from Tibbs’s holster and heaved himself from the cab. Blood flowed freely from his forehead. Whoever shot Tibbs couldn’t be far away.
He staggered around the side of the truck, keeping low on the gully side. The truck’s rear doors had popped open. Bodies lay scattered over the road. Corpses rested at horrible broken-backed angles. A few of the zippered sacks had burst, spraying remains. The ragged edges of frozen flesh had a crystalized look, crusty red like freezer-burned steak.
Micah crept to the bumper. Ice had formed to a webbing between the black bones of the trees across the road. A figure was approaching down the ditch across the road. Micah fired. The slug missed wide. The figure dropped out of sight.
Next, a round struck the truck a few inches above Micah’s head. He spun away; his heels skidded out from under him and he went down hard on his ass. He pivoted onto his stomach, watching the road from under the truck chassis.
A single Chinese soldier crept out of the ditch. What was he doing so far behind enemy lines? Either crazy or overconfident. He must have thought he’d hit Micah, that he was dead. The man drew nearer. His face was smeared in lampblack. Micah waited until he was so close that all he could see was his legs, then squeezed the trigger.
The slug went through the man’s shin. The man cried out and awkwardly fell. Micah put another round into his head. The man’s flyaway corn-silk hair puffed up as the bullet drilled into his brain.
Micah spent the next twenty minutes loading bodies into the truck. Some had spilled into the earth under the trees, which was weirdly spongy despite the night’s chill, carpeted by a strain of moss he had never encountered. It was hard work—dead bodies possessed an ornery, uncooperative weight. He put the dead Chinaman in with them.
He backed out of the gully and drove on to Hamhung. He left Tibbs in the cab. His body was going stiff…
This was the memory that blitzed through Micah’s mind—collecting frozen bodies under the pines—as he now entered the woods encircling Little Heaven with Charlie, Minerva, and Ellen. This earth had the same soft, rich, obliging, somehow cake-like quality. But there was no moss here. The ground simply felt mushy underfoot, as if it had been saturated with thick and fatty oil.
It feels like flesh was Micah’s thought. The waterlogged flesh of a corpse coughed up from the bottom of a lake.
What a stupid thought. But the inkling remained: they were walking on a huge carcass. If they were to dig, their fingernails would scrape its wormy skin. And if they dug into its hide, its black blood would surely gush out, syrupy as crude oil.
They tried to chart a straight path, but the trees and blowdowns made it hard. Micah spotted the light of a torch burning to the east, a paling pinprick. Shouts rang out—“Eli! ELI!”—but those, too, began to soften as the searchers fanned out in ever-widening orbits.
The light of Micah’s own torch illuminated a ten-foot radius; there was barely enough to navigate by, much less spot the boy. A night in these woods would feel like an eternity to a child. Why would he have taken off? Any number of reasons, Micah supposed. He’d chased an animal. Or his parents had scolded him and he had run away.
Or else something lured him in.
“Needle in a haystack,” Charlie said with a defeated grimace. “I can barely see the fingers at the end of my hand.”
Micah said, “Tell me about those two.”
“What two?” said Charlie.
“The men giving orders.”
Charlie cocked his torch on his shoulder and rubbed his elbow nervously. “The one’s Cyril Neeps. With the longish hair?”
They both had long hair. They were practically identical.
Micah said, “The one with the rifle?”
“That’s the one,” Charlie confirmed. “The other fella is Virgil Swicker.”
“So they’re not brothers?” Ellen said.
“They look it, don’t they? But no. They weren’t part of the congregation back in San Francisco. To be honest, they don’t seem to have much faith at all. I haven’t ever seen their heads bent in prayer.”
“What are they doing here?” said Micah.
Charlie scratched his elbow in a nervous way, like a child called to the front of the class to finish an equation on the chalkboard.
“The Reverend, he brought them on. Guess he figured with the camp being so isolated, and not too many of us having real survival skills, it would be good to have them.”
“I thought the Lord would be your shepherd,” Minerva said.
Charlie gave her a look. “The Reverend had his reasons. He is guided by the Lord.”
Micah noticed that Charlie hadn’t referred to the men as Brother Neeps or Brother Swicker. They had the unmistakable whiff of hired guns. Why take on those two? Maybe, as Charlie said, simply to keep the flock safe… or else to keep the flock in line?