The Devil Next Door

by Tim Curran

  “What about you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why it hasn’t gotten to me. But maybe if it hasn’t, it hasn’t gotten to a lot of others, too.”

  Maybe. He just hoped he was immune. For wasn’t it possible that if this was a genetic impulse of sorts, an ancient imprinting, that it might have been bred out of certain segments of the race or that it might malfunction in certain individuals?

  He hoped so.

  For the idea of becoming some primal beast was frightening. The idea that he might get “infected,” might become something like Dick Starling.

  Because if that happened…what might he do to Macy?

  Louis shook it from his head, trying to tell himself that Earl Gould was nothing but a crazy old crackpot whose brain was soft from too much research, too many crazy old books.

  But he didn’t believe it for a minute…

  35

  When Rosemary Kittery, the mother of Shannon Kittery-Macy’s old pal- tried to lock up K amp; G Apparel on Main that evening just after eight, three men came in and they had other ideas. She was hanging the CLOSED sign on the door and they burst right through it, nearly knocking her on her ass.

  So much for subtlety.

  Right away, Rosemary knew she’d made a godawful mistake by not just closing the doors at four or even five. Things were happening in town. Maybe you could, like Rosemary, tell yourself different, but the proof was in the pudding. The pudding in this case being two cops in dirty, ragged uniforms. Then a third whose uniform was unbuttoned, his bare chest and face painted up with what looked like blood. Like warpaint as if he were some fanatical Kiowa warrior preparing to die in battle.

  Rosemary swallowed, doing her best not to scream outright.

  “Evening,” said the older of the three. He had white hair and a crooked mouth, a perfectly lopsided mouth truth be told. “Sorry to barge in on you, Miss…”

  “Kittery, Rosemary Kittery,” she said in a weak voice, not knowing what else she could say. But she knew she had to keep calm. Show no fear. These three were crazy, but she had to act like they were not. “Is…is there a problem?”

  “She wants to know if there’s a problem,” the painted warrior said, a tall muscular fellow with blank eyes. “Don’t that beat all.”

  The other cop, short and fat with a porcine face, just shook his head. “You see it all in this job.”

  The white-haired cop ignored them. “I’m Sergeant Warren,” he said. “These two are Shaw and Kojozian. Don’t pay ‘em any mind. Last thing you want to do with a couple sick bastards like this is pay them the slightest attention. You do…well, look out.”

  “Yeah, look out,” Shaw said.

  Kojozian chuckled. “The Sarge is right, ma’am, you get me going and I’m a real barrel of fucking monkeys. I lose control, I like to start putting my hands on people, you know? Sometimes I touch ‘em in all the wrong places. I’m funny like that.”

  “For chrissake,” Shaw said, “you’re gonna scare her. She don’t need to know about that. Don’t you pay him no mind, ma’am.”

  Rosemary, a slight blonde woman pushing forty who still maintained her varsity cheerleader figure, blinked her big blue eyes a few times. “I won’t,” she said.

  Dear Christ, look at their eyes.

  Just look at their eyes.

  Something was missing there and something else had taken its place.

  “Both of you shut up,” Warren said. “We’re here on business. If anybody’s gonna paw up this broad it’ll be me.” He smiled at her. “No offense, ma’am.”

  Okay, this was not good.

  Rosemary had seen this one before, this Warren. Maybe in the paper or around town. He’d been a cop forever. At first she hadn’t recognized him. It was as if he’d undergone some subtle change…maybe his face was too long or too wide, his eyes too sunken. It was there, something was. Looking at him and the other two, she knew she had to play this cool, play it natural. Because there was no getting around the condition of their uniforms or the fact that they were stained with blood. A lot of blood. What she thought were freckles on Warren’s face were not freckles at all.

  She smiled thinly, wanting very much to scream. “Well, you said you were here on business. How can I help you?”

  “She wants to know how she can help us,” Kojozian said.

  “Maybe you ought to show her,” Shaw said.

  Warren sighed and lit a cigarette. “Why don’t the both of you pipe down? Thing is, ma’am, our uniforms are looking pretty bad. And we’re cops, you know? We have to keep the peace and Greenlawn don’t want its peace-keepers parading around in rags like this. We were eyeing up those trenchcoats in the window, the khaki ones. They look pretty smart.”

  Rosemary just stood there, their eyes on her. They did not blink. They did not do anything other than burn holes right through her. “Well,” she finally said. “Why don’t you try them on?”

  “Yeah, that’s what we were thinking,” Warren said.

  Shaw and Kojozian knocked displays out of the way getting to the trenchcoats in the window and all Rosemary did was keep smiling. It seemed that her smile was painted on. She didn’t think she could have pulled her mouth out of it even if she wanted to.

  The cops put on the trenchcoats right over their ragged uniforms. Warren’s fit him all right, but the other two were big men and they couldn’t begin to get them on. Kojozian tried damn hard, splitting open a few seams in the process.

  “Look what you did!” Warren said.

  “Oh, it’s no problem,” Rosemary said. “You need bigger sizes is all. I have a couple more in the back room. I’ll get them. Try on some hats while you wait.”

  They bought it, seemed to be buying it.

  “Do what the lady says,” Shaw told the other two. “Goddamn monkeys.”

  She went into the back room at a leisurely pace, humming under her breath, taking the time to straighten a display of shoes as she went. She was good, she knew she was good. She’d been in the high school drama club and it certainly showed. In the back room, she moved around some boxes so it sounded like she was doing something. She could hear them muttering to themselves, admiring Warren’s trenchcoat. It was hot and muggy out there and they wanted trenchcoats. God.

  Breathing hard, Rosemary slipped out to the loading dock and opened the back door. She could still hear them. They were arguing. While they were thus engaged, she slipped out the rear door, closing it quietly behind her. Oh, it was going to work, she was really going to escape and she knew it.

  The heat of the day hit her as soon as she stepped out into the alley.

  She jogged around the side of the loading dock and they were waiting for her.

  Not the cops.

  No, the children.

  Maybe not children exactly, but teenagers.

  Fifteen or twenty of them and they all looked like the cops…bloody, faces streaked with grime. She recognized more than a few of them from school, from parties Shannon had had. Holly Summer and Janet Weiss, Kalen Archambeau and Brittany Starling. Sure, the gang was all here. Tommy Sidel, Shannon’s boyfriend, was even there. All the girls from school. And Tommy. That was not only strange, but disturbing. But what was even worse was that they were all naked.

  Completely naked.

  Rosemary opened her mouth to say something, but she knew it was probably pointless. Their eyes were simply dead, their faces pale, their mouths grinning.

  She tried to move past them and they tightened their circle, staring and staring. And those faces, dear God, just bleached of anything remotely human. A few of them were drooling and more than a few had dried blood smeared around their mouths as if they’d been chewing on raw meat.

  “Please,” Rosemary said. “I need to get past.”

  But they stood their ground.

  Behind them was a huge pile of rubble. It was the remains of Hobson’s Shoes that had burned down the winter before and finally been demolished. The kids all had chunks of red brick in both ha
nds. Good size pieces, broken and jagged.

  “Tommy,” Rosemary said. “Let me go, okay? We’ll go home and see Shannon, all right?”

  But he just shook his head. “No, you won The Lottery.”

  “Yes, The Lottery,” another said.

  And soon they were all chanting it with dead voices: “The Lottery, The Lottery, The Lottery, The Lottery…”

  The Lottery? The Lottery? It didn’t make any sense, but then again, maybe it made all the sense in the world. They sure as hell weren’t talking about the state lottery drawing, Winfall or Megamillions, no this particular lottery was of a much darker variety and she damn well knew it. Because right then as they ringed her in and she saw the stark madness in their eyes and what they were holding in their hands, she knew. She knew. Because they were all around Shannon’s age and Shannon had been reading a story for school called “The Lottery.” Rosemary knew the story. She’d read it in school herself. And in that story, the person that won the lottery was “No!” she said to them. “You can’t do this! You can’t do what you’re thinking!”

  “Yes, we can,” Tommy said.

  “Please!” she cried, holding out her hands in supplication. “That’s just a story! It’s not real! You can’t do this! You can’t do something like this!”

  Now they were grinning and raising the shards of brick in their hands. Behind her was a wall and before her, only the kids themselves. If she wanted out, she would have to go right through them. But it was too late, because it began. Rosemary ducked under the first few shards, but others struck her legs and chest. She cried out in pain and two more shards struck her head, putting her right down to her knees.

  And then all the children came forward.

  They threw more chunks of brick and with everything they had. Rosemary’s scalp was cut open, her flaxen hair going red with a blossom of blood. Another hit her nose hard enough to break it. Another knocked three teeth out of her mouth and still another peeled the flesh away from her cheekbone. And they kept coming, stones and rocks and missiles, knocking her senseless. Before she fell, a cruelly aimed hunk of brick caught her right in the left eye, smashing it to pulp right in the socket.

  And through bloody vision she saw her daughter there amongst them.

  Shannon stood there, grinning.

  “WHAT IS THE LAW?” she said. “WHAT IS THE LAW?”

  With a wet and tormented moaning coming from her lips, Rosemary pitched straight over and then the kids circled around her, pummeling her from above with more shards of brick until she stopped moving, until her legs kicked with weak spasms and blood ran from her shattered skull and punched-in face.

  Laughing, the kids kept at it for some time…

  36

  Night was coming fast now and Mr. Chalmers, content now for perhaps the first time in his life with who and what he was, smelled it on the breeze. Dogs howled in the distance and he listened, judging from the sounds just how far away they were and if they presented any danger to his clan.

  He was watching his hunters by the fire.

  In what had once been his backyard, they were hard at work applying what he had taught them. Using the limbs of straight saplings, they were fashioning spears. After the limbs were peeled, the ends were split so the blade of a knife could be inserted and lashed into place. Now they were fire-hardening the points as he had also showed them. Chalmers himself had learned this technique in survival school while he was in the Army. And though much of his former life was now misty, indistinct, or absolutely incomprehensible, he remembered this.

  Somewhere, a few streets away probably, there rose a chorus of blood-curdling screams. They came and went, rising and falling with a rhythmic cadence. These were not the screams of agony or fear, but of joy. The night was coming and the clans were getting excited for the barbarity and promise that only darkness could bring.

  Chalmers had once been married. Many, many years ago. His wife had passed on and he had never remarried, remained childless to this day. But he had always wanted children, felt the paternal pangs for a brood of his own. And then, as he entered his sixth decade, the pangs for grandchildren.

  Now he was satisfied.

  Now he had children.

  They were his hunters: a ragged, disparate group with naked, oiled bodies, dirty faces and grubby bodies painted up with earthen browns, electric blues, and blood reds. As he watched them by the fire, he saw that they had threaded and knotted beads, feathers, and tiny bones into their hair. With their naked, lithe bodies and the ritual painting, it made them look fierce.

  There were a dozen of them. The youngest was six and the oldest was twelve.

  Their parents had abandoned them-heeding the call of the wild that had been activated within them to run free-and Mr. Chalmers had brought them together into a cohesive whole. And tonight, he would lead them against the other clans.

  Mr. Chalmers still wore his favorite khaki pants, though very dirty now, and boots, but he had torn off his shirt and took to wearing his dead wife’s fox coat that had been stored in mothballs in the spare bedroom. He had cut off the sleeves so that all could see the many tattoos sleeving his arms from his days in the Army. Although for many years he had kept them covered, grim reminders of his days in the Vietnam War when he led reconnaissance patrols and hunter/killer teams deep into enemy territory, he now revealed them. They were badges of honor, symbols of military blood rites, of combat and life-taking.

  The children, his clan, respected him and knew he was their leader.

  Those that dared question that, he had beaten. And one particularly arrogant fifteen-year old boy, he had murdered, slitting his throat using the same knife had carried during the war: a K-Bar fighting knife with a ten-inch carbon steel blade. He now wore the boy’s ears on a necklace around his throat along with his scalp.

  The screams rose up again.

  His clan jumped around the fire, imitating the sounds, bristling with excitement for the hunt that would begin soon, the raiding against other neighborhoods.

  His blood running hot and sweet, Chalmers felt more like a man than he had since his days laying ambushes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail many years before. He had a plastic tube of eyeliner in his hands. Breaking it open with his K-Bar, he covered his fingertips in the black make-up. Carefully, just as he had in the war, he painted black tiger-striped bands across his face, darkening his chest and arms.

  Tonight, after so long, he was returning to the jungle…

  37

  As they got closer to downtown, they stopped talking. Maybe the conversation hadn’t been much to begin with, but as they started getting a good look at the town and what was going on, it was like they had been gagged, rags shoved into their mouths and taped in place.

  “It’s the whole town,” Macy said, not trying to hide the emotion that welled up in her now. It filled her, sank her down to new depths of despair. “It’s the whole town, Louis! The whole town has gone crazy!”

  “Just take it easy,” he said, finding it extremely hard to take it easy himself.

  But it was everywhere and it wasn’t just a matter of feeling something was wrong now, for you could see it: cars were smashed and left out in the middle of the street, houses were burning, garbage cans were overturned, windows smashed, naked corpses sprawled in yards. Like a tornado of destruction had passed through.

  Something had snapped here.

  Something had given way.

  The whole damn town needed to be buckled down in a straight jacket. Louis watched it all and he was just beyond words to sum it up in his own mind. You’d pass through blocks of wreckage and madness, then, two or three streets over, things seemed perfectly ordinary. People were washing their cars and walking their dogs and cutting their grass. But he had a pretty good idea that those people were not sane either. There was no way they had not heard of what was going down around them, yet they went about their boring little chores like all was well with the world. The only thing that gave Louis hope were the neighborhood
s where there were no people at all, nothing to suggest there was anyone around but a few curtains parted to see who was driving by.

  “Why isn’t something being done?” Macy wanted to know. “They can’t…they can’t just let this happen. Where are the police?”

  Louis was wondering the same thing himself. They should have been out in force, but he had yet to see a single patrol car. Though, in the distance, he was hearing sirens. Lots of sirens. He couldn’t be sure if they were police vehicles or ambulances or fire trucks, but there were a lot of them.

  He’d only seen a small portion of the town now, but he suspected it was going on everywhere. If that was the case, there would be way more happening than the locals could handle. Even with the state and county boys chipping in, it would be way too much. They would need the National Guard or something. Maybe they were already on their way and maybe not. Because, realistically, whatever was turning people into maniacs and animals, it wouldn’t just be afflicting the civilians. Cops, too, would be mad as hatters.

  Seeing it, unable to understand any of it, left him feeling confused and reeling. A chill went up his spine. It was just too much. A few crazy people was scary…but an entire town?

  A country?

  A world?

  This is nothing, Louis, a voice coldly informed him. This is absolutely nothing. You just wait until tonight. It’ll be dark soon and then you’ll see some shit. Oh yes, you certainly will.

  But he had no intention on being around by then.

  Macy had had an episode herself, but it had been temporary. Was he hoping for too much in thinking that maybe it would only be temporary with the others, too? Was that even possible now? He didn’t and couldn’t know. But, the fact remained that he had not gone crazy. He had no wild urges or black thoughts. Absolutely nothing.

  Not yet.

  But if Earl Gould’s theories were true-and Louis was beginning to think they were-then it was only a matter of time.

  Regardless, if he was still normal, there had to be others. Maybe those quiet neighborhoods were full of normal people. People that had decided to lock their doors and wait things out. But what happened when the crazies were the majority? What happened tonight when they took the town and started kicking in doors and diving through windows, slaughtering the last of the rational ones?