The lights of Little Heaven were no longer visible. Micah’s eye swept the woods for any sign of the missing boy. The darkness rebounded at him, empty and dead.
“We should split up,” he said.
They had already drifted into two distinct parties. Micah and Ellen on one side. On the other, Charlie and Minerva.
“Boy, girl, boy, girl—is that what you’re thinking, Shug?” Minerva said archly. “How orderly.”
Minerva and Charlie moved off in a westerly direction. Micah and Ellen continued straight on.
“Eli!” Ellen shouted. Then, lowering her voice: “Poor little guy.”
They walked beside each other. Micah could have reached out and taken Ellen’s hand. He could smell her: campfire smoke and sweat and something sweet, too, that smelled a little like field berries.
“Are you well?” he asked, just to say something. It was not like him at all.
“I’m okay, considering. Nate and Reggie are here, at least. But they don’t look well, Micah. Nobody looks well. Is that just me thinking it?”
“It is not just you.”
“Right? Everyone looks… sick. The guts vacuumed out of them—the vim, the vitality. A bunch of shambling undead.”
It wasn’t just the people in Little Heaven that set off Micah’s alarm bells. It was the thing or things that had chased them the night before, too. Things Micah assumed must have been bears or wolves. But they hadn’t moved like that, and when he caught a glimpse of their bodies in the flare’s sputtering light—that heart-stopping flicker of movement—in that split second he thought: These are like no creatures I have ever encountered. Those creatures, and the shower of dead birds, and the denizens of Little Heaven, and the soft give of the ground underfoot, and the way the darkness melted unpleasantly into his bones… everything was a bit skewed, a degree off center. None of it seemed odd enough to raise a panic over—you could convince yourself that it was just the weak-nelly dread that domesticated humans felt nowadays, after spending most of their lives in well-lit cities. This was life in the woods. It was dangerous, full of threats. And his experiences in Korea and afterward had enabled Micah to operate calmly under threat. He did not rattle, even when he should. But maybe that was the true danger: you were lulled into a false acceptance as what had once seemed odd came to feel perfectly natural, and by the time things really started to go south it was too late. You were trapped.
“I don’t know if I can leave without Nate,” Ellen said. She was looking directly at Micah. “I’m not expecting anything from you. I just wanted to say.”
Micah said nothing. But he knew he would not leave Ellen. If he was not exactly a good man, he had always been a loyal one. If he took a job, he finished it. Unless something happened to him that prevented it.
They traced a path through the trees. No sounds filtered out of the darkness: none of the little clicks and whistles and snapping twigs that should be there in a forest teeming with life. But the woods felt arid and lifeless—they could have been walking on the moon.
The ground underfoot went from dark to light. The white of pulverized bone. Micah’s boots kicked through drifts of ash… except it wasn’t that. Nothing had been burned.
“I know where we are,” said Ellen. “I saw it this afternoon.”
Dead. Every tree and bush, every tuft of grass. The vegetation was decimated in a manner Micah had never seen: the bark peeled off trees in brittle shreds, the underlying wood gone a sick bile yellow. He saw no termite bore holes, no blight of any kind. It was as though they had died of old age—they had the look of wretchedly ill seniors at a cut-rate old folks’ home, wasted away with cancers that had rotted their bodies from the inside out.
“It’s only right here,” said Ellen. “Ten, fifteen yards wide.”
She reached out tremblingly. Her fingertips brushed a tree. She recoiled as though she had touched a dead body.
“Do you think Eli would have come this way?”
Micah scanned the route they had just walked. He felt something for just an instant. A presence—a delicate, quick-stepping movement he sensed not with his eye but rather a center of perception buried deep in his lizard brain, wed tightly to the fight-or-flight instinct the human species had developed back when we were as often prey as predator.
Yet he saw nothing with his eye. Just the liquid shiftings of the night.
Or—
Fifty yards down the path. Peeking slyly between the ruined trees.
Peekaboo, I see you.
A face. It hovered ten feet off the ground, a tiny earthbound moon. Not a human face. It wasn’t round at all. More long and curved and vulpine. It was as pale as the moon, too—the jarring white of flesh that had never tasted daylight.
Its eyes—were they eyes? was any of this real?—were black as buttons. It opened its mouth. Its face split in half, pulling its head apart; the top of its skull levered back like a Pez dispenser. Inkiness bled out of that slash, a blackness more profound than Micah had ever known.
Ellen grabbed his hand. She had seen it, too.
“Run,” she said.
They sprinted through the woods, their feet flashing over the ground. Ellen veered sharply left, off the path of death. Micah spun around to see if the face—and the body it was attached to—was in pursuit. He tripped and dropped the torch. It fell sputtering into a patch of dry earth. He abandoned it. They followed Ellen’s flashlight. It bobbed against the trees, the beam occasionally skipping skyward when she stumbled. Micah wasn’t sure where they were going, but Ellen ran with a purpose. Already the image of what he had seen—that bloodless face staring at them amid the tree limbs—seemed absurd. What creature could be that tall?
Unless it was up in the tree, he thought. Hugging it like a spider.
He pictured a terrible arachnid-like thing hooked to the spine of a dead pine, its thick furred legs throttling the trunk…
He grabbed her hand. “Stop.”
She checked up. They stood panting.
“We will get lost,” he said.
She pointed to her left. “The compound is that way. I see the light of torches.”
She shot a look behind him.
“Micah, you did see—?”
He nodded. “An animal. An owl.”
He could tell she wanted to believe him. He wanted her to, too.
They walked toward Little Heaven. Whatever the thing was, Micah could hear no breath of its pursuit. Had it even given chase? He wasn’t at all certain. He was becoming less certain of many things.
Those creatures from last night, this one now—what if something unnatural was at play? In the army, some of his more superstitious barrack mates would talk about seeing things while out on patrol. Unearthly lights, distant figures that seemed to float above the earth. Spooks. Ghosties. Another man, a sniper named Groggins, used to claim Korean scientists were creating half-human, half-animal hybrids in underground labs. Super soldiers, ape-men and snake-men, which was what Groggins kept glimpsing through his scope during night watch: lab mutants who had escaped containment roaming no-man’s-land, feasting on rotting corpses sunk in the mud, too skittish to attack—yet.
Micah never put any stock in it. Men’s minds went to strange places when put under pressure. And he knew that even if something strange was happening around Little Heaven, the worst thing to do would be to run half-cocked into the woods. No. They had a home base. Not a very hospitable one, but it would do. They were being fed and sheltered. There were weapons, even if they weren’t yet in Micah’s hands. He could get a gun, if push came to shove. So their best bet was to sit tight, assess the situation, and act only once all the information had come to light.