The Devil Next Door

by Tim Curran

  But it isn’t just mindless, murderous strangers out there, he reminded himself. Michelle is out there. Michelle is with them. If she attacks…can you kill her? Can you point the gun at her and put a bullet in her if it means saving Macy?

  Louis couldn’t think about that.

  He loved Michelle completely. He would have done anything for her. But now things were different. Yesterday, he would have rather put a bullet into his own head than harm her…but now? If she was some savage, blood-maddened beast? He did not know. He did not want to know.

  He stepped off the curb, wanting to give himself some distance from the buildings, the alleys, the cellar stairways cut down into the sidewalk. Too many places to spring an ambush from. And although he had never actually used a 9mm automatic before, he knew enough about the weapon to know that its magazine carried enough rounds to do some serious killing.

  Okay.

  “You’re not going to find your girl,” Doris said. “Be sensible. You’ll get us both killed.”

  Louis ignored her.

  He moved down the street. He was very aware of how long his shadow was growing. Darkness was coming fast and he had a pretty good idea that they wanted it to come, that reduced to what they were now, they would probably be much better in it than he. He could see the Dodge parked up the street from the police station, the shadowy hulks of bodies scattered around it. The driver’s and passenger’s side doors were wide open. The windows were shattered. He preyed it was still drivable.

  He wondered if Michelle was out there. Maybe she had taken Macy.

  Oh, not her, not Michelle, not my wife.

  Louis walked on very slowly for ten or fifteen feet, then paused.

  Doris nearly bumped into him.

  He thought he heard that childish giggling again. His flesh crawled anew. Wasn’t it amazing that one of the sweetest sounds in the world, the delightful laughter of a child, was also one of the most foul and obscene? And particularly in a ghost town. He breathed in and out, readying himself for it, whatever it was, because it was coming. It was building around him and he could feel it. Like a frightened animal, he could sense the waiting teeth out there, the claws and hunger. Tensed like a spring ready to explode, sweat running down his face, he remembered driving up Main with Macy, how dead the town was, how he’d speculated earlier that maybe everyone was dead. But it had all been a ruse, of course. Macy and he had been watched from the moment they pulled down the street. These people were organized, then. They had laid a trap and waited for him to step into it. And, boy, he’d bested their greatest expectations, hadn’t he? Leaving Macy alone in the car even when, deep inside, he’d known it was a mistake.

  Sacrifice.

  He’d offered her up for sacrifice.

  “No,” he said under his breath.

  “What?” Doris asked him.

  “Nothing.”

  He went across the street, stepped up onto the sidewalk. They could have had her anywhere. Or blocks away for that matter. It was hopeless, but he couldn’t give in, couldn’t crumble. He walked over to Indiana Video. He pushed his way through the glass doors. It was silent in there. There was a light on behind the counter, another near the back of the store. Enough light to see by.

  “Macy?” he said.

  There was a moaning sound.

  His heart leaping with possibility, Louis charged over by the children’s movies. A young girl, maybe eight or ten, was squatted on the floor, entirely naked. Arms wrapped around herself, she rocked back and forth.

  She was a redhead.

  Not Macy at all.

  “Honey?” Louis said, still fearful. “Are you all right?”

  The girl looked up at him. Her face was dark with ground-in dirt, her hair greasy and stuck with leaves. There were bruises and contusions all over her. Louis held a hand out to her, afraid she might bite it, but the humanity in him demanding that he try.

  Doris kept the shotgun on the kid. “Jesus Christ, Louis…are you fucking blind as well as stupid? Look at her. That’s not a girl. It’s one of them. Can’t you see that?”

  But he couldn’t be convinced of that. The girl was sobbing, shaking. One of them wouldn’t do that…would they? After a moment the girl took his hand and stood up, breaking into a wail of tears. She pressed herself against him, shuddering. She smelled bad. Like blood and decay and dirt. Her flesh was hot, moist. He could feel her heart thudding.

  “They dragged me through the streets,” the girl said. “They…they…they…”

  But she couldn’t go on; she shook, whimpered.

  “All right,” Louis said. “You’re going to be safe now. My car is outside. We’re driving away from here.”

  Doris didn’t move. “I’m not going anywhere with you. Not with that thing.”

  “Stop it!’ Louis told her.

  “You’re an idiot. You’ll get us all killed.”

  He turned towards the door, the shadows thicker and more tangled out there than nesting cobras now. Death waited out there. In every shadow, in every doorway, and behind every tree. Death. The girl shook in his arms. And then she tightened against him. He could feel the flex of her muscles, the heat of her skin. It was nearly feverish. He tried to pry her away so he could walk, but she circled her arms around him, jumped up and swung her legs around his hip.

  “Honey,” he said, “listen now…”

  She looked up at him from beneath strands of filthy copper-colored hair.

  She was grinning.

  Her eyes were filled with a stark malevolence that was beyond mere insanity. The tips of her teeth were filed into points.

  Louis felt something sink inside him, he felt her repellent flesh against his own. Darting her head, she buried her teeth into his shoulder, breaking through his shirt and puncturing skin.

  He screamed with pain.

  He heard Doris cry out as the other savages rushed in.

  A trap, it had all been a fucking trap…

  54

  Painted for battle, the hunters came out of the back of the store. Another rushed right through the front door. And the most amazing thing was, he held a spear in his hands. And from the barbed point to nearly a foot down the shaft it was stained red.

  The girl dug her teeth into the man.

  This was the one. The one the Huntress wanted. She must not let go of him, she must hold him tight until the hunters could take him down. But he was wild, enraged. He did not shrink with fear as she’d hoped. He tore at her back, digging welts into her skin. He beat at her. He pounded her. Then, gun in hand, he banged the butt off the back of her skull until she pulled her teeth away and cried out. He hit her with the gun again and something went in her skull with a sickly popping noise. Inside the girl’s head, things went dark, then sank into mist and she…she could…not… hold on…

  The man whirled around in a circle, yanking her free with a handful of bloody hair and throwing her as he did so. His locomotion propelled her through the air. She crashed into a case of movie collectibles, her face shattering the plate glass window. A shard of glass went right into her throat and she died kicking in a pool of her own blood.

  The hunters saw it as they charged.

  But they were too late to stop it, nor would they have considered it worth their time: not all members of the clan survived the hunt, the few must perish so the many could survive.

  A spear barely missed Louis as he turned and fired at the three coming out of the back. His first shot was wild his hand shook so badly. But his second and third were right on target. He put a round through a guy whose entire body was blackened with what looked like ash or charcoal. The bullet caught him right in the sternum and threw him backwards in a drunken semi-circle. Blood fountained from his wound and he pitched over face-first, gyrating on the floor, screeching with a high, piercing noise that scarcely sounded human. The second round caught another hunter in the throat, in the Adam’s Apple, and the effect was instantaneous: his throat was blown apart in a spray of bloody mucilage and hi
s head slumped forward. His legs went to rubber, but forward momentum carried him right past Louis. He stumbled right into a wall of DVDs and took them down with him in a clatter of plastic clamshells.

  The third hunter did not hesitate, did not slow.

  He didn’t even throw his spear. When he got close enough, he brought it up over his head and leaped with it, going airborne and bringing it to bear on Louis. Louis pulled the trigger as the man jumped. The bullet was wild, but it caught him in the ribs, glancing off them, spiraling into his body cavity and chewing its way through his stomach like a drillbit.

  But again, forward motion carried him, and he hit Louis. The spear gouged Louis’ right shoulder, but it was off-balance, undirected. They went down in a heap. And gutshot or not, the naked man was not ready to die. He kicked, he scratched, he clawed. He got his hands around Louis’ throat and squeezed with unbelievable strength, making black dots pop before Louis’ eyes as his air was completely shut off by those gnarled, blood-crusted hands.

  He forced Louis down, never breaking his grip and pounded his head off the floor which, thankfully, was carpeted.

  Louis knew he was done.

  He could not fight the maniacal strength of his attacker.

  Blood spilling all over him from the guy’s wound, Louis took the last of his strength and pounded the guy in the face, then he jabbed his thumbs into his eyes. The grip was broken immediately. The man made a squealing sound like a stepped upon dog. Rubbing his eyes, blinded, he launched himself at Louis who was still gasping for air. The guy hit him with his bleeding, loose bulk and they went over together. The guy somehow got his hands on Louis’ head and smashed his face into the floor again and again…but not with as much power as before as his blood spilled out in a steady gushing flow.

  Louis let out an enraged battle cry and brought his elbow back, catching the wild man in the ribs. Once, twice, three times. The man weakened, grunting and squealing. Then Louis reached his hand back between the naked loins of his attacker and grabbed his balls in his fist, savagely twisting them and then squeezing them with a ferocity he did not know he possessed. The man doubled-over, howling with agony.

  Louis wrenched and crushed what was in his fist until it went to a moist pulp.

  Doris’ battle was no easier.

  About the time Louis’s third attacker leaped, the painted man who came through the door threw his spear with a fine, powerful agility and grace. Doris fired, but her aim was off. Buckshot peppered her attacker’s thighs, but by then his spear was already in flight: it sank into the meat just beneath her collarbone. It punctured through fat and muscle, buried in her a good three inches. A couple more and it would have went out her back.

  She screamed with fear, with pain, with everything inside her that had boiled black by that point.

  Then the man hit her.

  She felt the shotgun slide from her hands.

  He hit her, forcing the spear in deeper and she cried out, clawing at him with rage. The buckshot that hit him was basically scattershot. The real blast took out a cardboard standee of Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie. The scatter that hit him peppered his thighs and belly, but did not penetrate deep enough to do any real damage. Regardless, by the time he hit her, he was wet with blood. Her fingers could get no real purchase on him, they scraped over his bloody belly and his chest and face that were painted up with earthen reds and browns in a thick grease. He grabbed the spear shaft and yanked it to pull it free, but it was wedged along the inside of her scapula, the barbed tip caught on a slat of bone. When he yanked it, she came with it. He threw her to the floor, then pulled her back up again and bounced her off display cases, the wound below her collarbone ripped wide open and spouting blood by this point.

  With a growling animal cry, he put all his weight behind the shaft and slammed her up against the counter, the spear point scraping over bone and puncturing out her back. He withdrew it and Doris went down in a shuddering heap, barely conscious.

  She looked up through blood-glazed eyes, seeing him above her with the spear raised to strike.

  Standing over her, he brought it down again and again, sinking it into her belly and thighs, hip and breasts. Then he brought it down into the original wound. He put his bare foot on her throat and yanked with everything he had. There was a wet snapping and the barbed point came free, snapping out a shattered section of collarbone in the process that broke through the skin in a bloody shard. Then the spear came down again-right into her open screaming mouth. It sheered her tongue in two and went through the back of her throat, punching into her cervical vertebrae She was dying and nothing could help her.

  The hunter brought up the spear and let out a wild yelping cry of victory.

  Then there was thundering sound and his left eye blew out of its socket in a spray of tissue with most of the socket itself. He fell over straight as a board, his upper jaw catching the sharp edge of the counter with a violent thudding, teeth scattered over its surface. He folded up, already dead.

  Doris, through a mask of blood and a haze of pain, saw Louis standing over the thrashing body of one of the savages. He had the 9mm in his hands. His eyes were wild, his mouth hooked into a manic sneer…

  55

  Somehow, Doris’ mind cleared and she felt the agony that threaded through her body. Her heart leaped, then leaped again. Her mind swam in and out of the darkness, trying to focus, trying to maintain. She had lost so much blood by that point and suffered so much trauma that she hovered on the edge of shock. She heard more gunfire, heard screams, heard running feet.

  And when her eyes did focus, Louis was gone.

  They must have gotten him.

  The air stank of blood, smoke, and voided bowels. She saw two men standing there with a woman between them. All were naked, all painted-up and covered in something viscous and shining like grease. Their eyes blazed with a flat animal hunger. Light reflected off the filed points of their teeth. They looked like Mesolithic hunters.

  Realizing she was indeed alive, they crept forward, soundlessly.

  Oh God in heaven, no more, no more, just let me die…

  But she did not die. Blinking away the dreams that pushed into her skull, her body felt like it was on fire. Every inch of her flesh was laid bare, it seemed, everything inside ripped and gouged. She tried to swallow the blood that filled her mouth, but her damaged tongue was like a flap of rubber. She was in so much pain that she was literally beyond pain…notched up a level into a place of floating emptiness where she could feel her pain, yet did not seem attached to it. Such is the magic chemical bath of endorphins.

  A grunting, a snarling, a fetid animal stink…

  When Doris again opened her eyes, the three savages were crouching down by her. The woman had a knife, a damn big knife, and, grinning, she jabbed it into Doris’ belly just below the navel, putting her weight on it until it cut deep and sure. As they stared down, the beast-woman sawed the knife clear up to Doris’ sternum.

  They looked pleased.

  With filthy fingers, they pulled the cleaved flesh apart.

  Doris could see what they did, feel the pressure and pulling, yet not the pain. It was divorced from her. They pulled the wound wide, tearing at yellow fat and pink strands of connective tissue. She could see the glistening bulge of her stomach, the coiled ropes of her entrails. She was aware of only the pressure and the pulling as the grunting, drooling creatures yanked things out of her, rooting around in her abdomen, searching, digging, probing.

  They found something.

  They bristled with excitement, chattering their teeth, making low moaning sounds that were nearly orgasmic. All three had their hands in her now, ripping, jerking at something, cutting at it with the knife, finally working it free as they cried out with a strident communal baying. Doris saw it. Saw that great fleshy mass they yanked from inside her…a heavy, pinkish-brown slab of blood-dripping meat that could only be her liver.

  They held it up like a prize.

  Growling and gruntin
g, they brought it to their mouths and bit into it.

  This was the very last thing that Doris saw before the darkness took her…

  56

  Night came then to the Greenlawn.

  It came over the rooftops and from cellars, from dark corners and alleys, crawlspaces and attics and graveyards…all the places it had been tucked away and coveted during the hours of daylight. It came with teeth and intent and degeneracy. The darkness concealed a thousand sins, a thousand terrible deeds, wreckage and corpses and packs of men and women and children that were no longer human, just creeping night things running wild and insane and loathsome through the narrow streets and weedy backlots, the dusky arteries of the town. These were the ones that welcomed the night, that understood it and worshipped it and called it their own. With fixed eyes, primal appetites, and a yawning malignancy where their souls had once been before a certain dormant gene was activated, they returned to the dawn times. Repressed demons and parasitical desires that had long clung to the undersides of their psyches were released with gruesome abandon. In Greenlawn atavistic evil was brought to term and was allowed to bear its pestilent fruit. And the growing season was rich.

  Heeding the primordial call of the wild, filled with an archaic killing instinct born in the pre-Cambrian slime, overjoyed to return to the jungle at last, they took to the streets in wolfpacks, hunting and maiming and devouring.

  And the night went on forever…

  57

  Although she was sore from being raped repeatedly, Leslie Towers was nothing if not completely connected to her surroundings. Though bound as she was, tossed into the grass, she was alert as any animal, sensing the night around her and the things that hunted it. So while Mr. Kenning and Mike Hack slept off their meal of dog-both greased slick with yellow dog fat, Setter hairs and leaves stuck to them-Leslie heard the hunters circling beyond the light of the fire. They had been out there in the darkness for some time.