The Devil Next Door

by Tim Curran

  75

  The tribe moved through the shadows, the dappled moonlight from intertwined tree branches overhead enhancing the red and green serpentine stripes covering their naked bodies.

  Angie, with Kathleen at her side, two hunters cast ahead, led them.

  Dawn was hours away yet, but until then they would hunt. For the tribe lived, breathed, and was of the hunt. Without it they were nothing. It was their blood and soul and purpose. Without it they would be no better than any other pack of animals rooting in the dirt for grubs and worms. The hunt gave them focus, it gave them reason, it was the blood in their veins. Angie knew instinctively that her kind rose above the beast of the field because of the hunt.

  When dawn came, they would slink back to their lair and sleep away the daylight hours like the rest, waiting for darkness.

  But for now, they hunted. Being that they were more than predators, but creatures of opportunity, scavengers even, they were following another hunting clique. The one led by the old man in the animal skins. He had an army of children following him. They were raiding from neighborhood to neighborhood, killing and slaughtering and laying waste. The tribe followed along because the pickings were so good and out of sheer curiosity.

  There was another reason, of course.

  And that reason was Angie’s and hers alone.

  The old man. He was an excellent hunter, a great leader, savage, bloodthirsty, and exceptionally cunning. Angie learned many things just watching how the old man led his raids. His hunters were very well disciplined.

  She respected and feared him.

  She emulated him.

  She wanted to kill him.

  Yes, that’s what she really wanted because that’s how it was done. When you killed another, drank their blood and feasted on their meat, you absorbed what they were. Their strength, their wisdom, their spirit became part of you. Angie knew as her ancestors had known that the center of it all, the nucleus of the being, was the heart itself.

  She would kill the old man with one well placed arrow. Then she would bathe in his blood. And lastly, while the others fought over the tidbits, bones, and sweet meats, she would carve out the old man’s heart and eat it raw, filling herself with his spirit and vitality. For the heart was the center of the all, the hub of deeper mystery, the pulsing artery to the beyond. And when she had eaten it and filled her veins with his cruel potency and thrumming life force, then she would skin him and wear his flesh as a garment…

  76

  While the dam saw to the gut sack that smoked over the fire, jabbing it from time to time with a stick, and seeing to what roasted in the coals, Kylie played with the man.

  He did not like to be played with.

  After binding him with clothesline, they dragged him back to their lair and deposited him in the corner. He had slept for some time-or pretended to-but now he was awake. His eyes were open, wide and bright.

  Still covered in ghostly white ash, Kylie grinned at him.

  He did not smile back.

  Kylie crept over to him on all fours. He tensed. His muscles were good. She straddled him, her long flaxen hair hanging in his face. She studied his eyes, his scent, his facial expression…all the things that would tell her what she wanted to know.

  She pressed her crotch down on his own, rubbed it again the coarse material of his jeans. The texture, the pressure excited her. She could feel him getting excited, too, only from what she saw in his eyes he did not like that.

  She brought her mouth to his own.

  He trembled.

  She pressed her lips to his own.

  He did not move. She pushed her smallish breasts into his face, daring him to suckle them or nip at them. He did not.

  He just looked up at her with eyes that were shocked and glassy. They looked very wet. He was frightened and she could smell it on him.

  Frightened. Yes, Louis was frightened. More scared than he’d ever been before in his life. This girl…Jesus, painted white like something dead, completely naked, red bands of paint on her face, red slashes across her breasts and belly and arms. And her skin…it was beaded with welts like she had been burning herself, only the welts were formed into symbols of some sort, concentric patterns and diamonds and half-moons. Like those tribes on TV with the beads under their skin. She hovered over him. Teasing him, rubbing herself against him…he guessed she was no more than thirteen. Younger than the other girl who sharpened stakes in the corner. The older woman at the fire must have been their mother.

  And this…this house of horrors…their den.

  Their warren.

  Louis saw human remains scattered over the dirt floor, bones and scraps of meat. There was a head in the corner. Severed limbs were dangling from the beams overhead on ropes of gut. There was garbage and filth everywhere. The air stank of putrescence, burnt meat, smoke, and excrement. The girl toying with him smelled like urine.

  Grinning, she licked his face.

  Elissa came over now. She turned to make sure the dam was still occupied; she was.

  Kylie gripped the man’s throat with her hands. Spreading her legs wide, she rubbed herself on him faster and faster until she began to tremble. The man’s face was a contorted mask of dread. This excited Kylie more as she rubbed herself against him harder and harder, making communion, feeling her heart pounding, her skin hot and moist.

  Still, he resisted.

  “ Get the fuck off me,” he suddenly said.

  Kylie brought her face to his own and he flinched. She buried her face at his throat and licked him, tasted his skin. As wave of ecstasy rolled through her, she bit down on the bare flesh of his shoulder and kept biting until she drew blood, until it filled her mouth. He screamed and she bit down harder, harder, filling her mouth with the taste of his blood, his flesh.

  “ No!” the dam cried.

  She grabbed Kylie by the hair and tossed her aside. She kicked Elissa and then kicked her again when she dared snarl at her. She dragged the man over to the fire and pressed her mouth to his bleeding shoulder. She sucked the blood away and then pressed a rag to the wound. He was shaking, squirming.

  The dam poked the gut sack. Hot juice sizzled into the fire.

  She drew a rib bone from the coals. It burned her fingers. She gnawed at the meat and pressed it to the man’s mouth. But he would not eat of it. She hissed at him and struck him in the face with her palm. When he refused the meat again, she struck him harder. He was defiant. But she was confident that she could break him. And if not, she would slit him open and yank out his intestines. While he still moved she would roast them and eat them.

  It was an ancient punishment.

  Kylie and Elissa crawled over. The dam bared her teeth at them. She crouched over the man and scented him with her urine. Then she clawed out at the girls.

  “ Mine,” she said. “Mine, mine, mine…”

  77

  The Baron’s pack now numbered upward of a hundred. As they moved through the night, raiding from one neighborhood to the next, driving prey from hides, holes, and coverts, none dared stand against them. They raced up streets and down avenues, scattering other hunters and hunting them down if they did not flee. The Baron’s strategy was simple: seize anything worth taking, slaughter the stragglers, burn the houses, and generally lay siege to anything in their path with a horrendous scorched earth policy.

  They ran afoul of other hunting packs, of course, and put them down or enslaved their numbers, always moving, always taking more territory and leaving a trail of butchered corpses, dead animals, and flaming neighborhoods in their wake. Soon, the Baron’s ranks included not just children but adults, dozens of them. They wielded axes and pikes, spears and knives, hammers and baseball bats with spikes driven into their ends.

  Women were raped and men skinned. The elderly used for sport. And tiny children of no use to the pack were given to the flames, for all knew that a sacrifice must be offered to ensure a successful campaign.

  And on it went.

  Th
ey were an irresistible, relentless force.

  Then, on the south end of Providence Street, they were met by another pack. Just as determined. Just as ferocious. Just as territorial. The only difference was this group came with dogs. What seemed to be hundreds of barking, yapping, howling dogs. Things driven mad by the scent of aggression and the rich, tantalizing odor of blood in the air.

  Battle was joined.

  Energized by bloodlust, hysterical fury, and animal ferocity, the two opposing armies of savages-all painted for war, some naked, others dressed in rags or fresh hides, many brandishing death totems of human scalps, heads, and assorted body parts-charged at each other in howling groups. To a casual observer, it was a deranged display of psychotic frenzy unmatched since the barbarian invasions of Europe. But to those involved it was strictly territorial, the sort of manic blood-rite that the tribes lived for.

  The Baron led the first charge, hacking and cutting his way through the intruders. Bodies were cut down by spears and hatchets and machetes. Bones splintered and heads were smashed in, limbs were sliced free and bodies fell disemboweled in the streets. The first five minutes was nothing but wholesale murder, the packs beating one another down, slitting throats and chopping on the fallen.

  Then the dogs charged in.

  The Baron, pulling back with dozens of wounded, watched them tear through the ranks, biting and clawing and feeding on the injured. A huge shepherd gripped the head of a boy and shook it in his jaws while three others fed on his writhing body. The dogs ravaged both sides and even themselves. When an axe dropped a Doberman, its head nearly cleaved in two, a group of beagles tore it apart, fighting over the bloodiest chunks of meat. Men killed men and children killed children and both killed dogs and were killed by them.

  As the Baron watched the atrocities, there was a vague memory in the back of his mind: driver ants. South American driver ants cutting a killing swath through the jungle. Trees and bushes stripped, animals eaten down to bones. Nothing escaped them, not even men who were stupid enough to get in their way. It flashed through his mind and vanished as quickly.

  The dogs were like that.

  The main force was an army of teeth and claws and hunger. A huge and voracious machine of destruction. The smell of blood, meat, and death drove them wild.

  They attacked people. They attacked parked cars. They charged through screen doors and dove through windows. They tore sidings loose and chewed at woodwork. They ran roughshod through gardens and tore small trees up by the roots. If they couldn’t kill it or maim it, they pissed on it.

  The Baron saw dogs fucking. Dogs eating people. Dogs eating each other. A fearful feeding frenzy. A group of armed women had been caught in their masses and the dogs went insane tearing and ripping and biting. Pretty soon so many dogs had pressed into the melee, you couldn’t see the women. Just dogs biting each other. Biting themselves. Blood was flowing, was gathering in a heaving, stinking mist over the streets. And still the killing continued.

  Both packs were under siege now by the animals and fought side by side.

  Tribal affiliation was forgotten.

  A raging group of men with machetes, most homemade, tried to slash through their numbers. But the dogs were like ants sacrificing themselves madly for their queen. They literally piled up their own crushed bodies until their attackers had to withdraw…into an onslaught of dogs and crazy solitary hunters who claimed no true affiliation and slaughtered anything that moved.

  Providence Street that night was a cacophonous hive of noise…barking, howling, screeching, wailing. Some was from the animals that walked on four legs and some from those that walked on two. Just absolute, thundering chaos.

  Slowly, though, the dogs were dropping, being overwhelmed by cutting blades and devoured by their fellows.

  The Baron, with so many of his pack littering the street, charged in again and again, dealing death and fighting tooth and nail. Swinging his machete like a sword, he gutted cockapoos and boxers and spaniels while to all sides the wounded were drowning in the living, biting sea.

  The Baron was bitten, gouged, bloodied, and torn.

  But he never stopped killing.

  He saw a poodle hanging from a hunter’s face by its teeth. He decapitated it, but the head still hung, jaws locked in a death grip.

  Dozens of hunters took his lead and frantically waded in, chopping at the animals, chopping at blood-covered savages, and in the end, chopping at one another. The leader of the other pack, whom the Baron had sighted as his kill and his kill alone, was overwhelmed. He’d once been known as Dick Starling and he’d once been knocked cold by Macy Merchant, but by then he was just a savage wearing the bloody pelt and peeled headpiece of a Great Dane. A Rotweiler-split neatly in half-was hanging from his belly by its fangs, still biting, still clawing. The Baron, dragging an Irish Setter with him whose teeth were in his leg, moved in and decapitated him.

  Finally, even the Baron withdrew from the killing fields.

  He slashed the Setter until it released its bite and stood there, bloodied but unbowed, viewing the carnage around him. The decimation of both packs.

  Then a final group of dogs came at him.

  A hodgepodge of shepherd, collie, and Great Dane mixes, they advanced. He stood his ground. They moved with a slow, economical shambling, fur bristling, jaws open.

  The first one made its move and the Baron slashed the business end of the machete across its eyes. He pivoted and split open another’s skull. Still another hit him and he tossed it aside, eviscerating it. The teeth of yet another sank into his leg and he chopped its foreleg clean.

  Then he ran as a howling, barking pack thundered across the killing fields at him.

  He made a nearby porch and turned, swinging the machete with blind wrath, splitting the maw of a beagle and then throwing himself through the open door. They ripped the screen door right off its hinges, seven or eight of them, and began to fight over it like a tasty bitch.

  The Baron pressed his back against the inside door as they battered and rammed it. Way they were going, he knew, it wouldn’t last long. The door was hardwood and he could hear them smashing themselves against it, their bones popping and crunching. There was a thin pane of glass that ran the length of the door and the Baron forgot about it until the head of a huge, filthy Rotweiler crashed through it, its muzzle catching him in the back and sending him sprawling. But the pane of glass was not safety glass that spiderwebbed with cracks and fell into itself. It was plate glass. It shattered, but a six-inch triangular shard from the base lodged easily into the dog’s throat. The more it wrenched and flopped its massive, heavily-muscled body, the deeper the shard sank until it was impaled there, whimpering.

  But it wasn’t dying fast enough for the Baron.

  There was a pile of lumber near the stairs, a wall that had been stripped to lathing. Home improvement. The Baron saw a gun-shaped apparatus sitting on the lumber. He went for it, palming it. A cordless drill with a half-inch bit threaded into the chuck. Part of him seemed to recognize it, but there was no conscious memory.

  But he knew a weapon when he held it in his fist.

  He pressed the trigger. The drill bit whirred around.

  Grinning, he ran the bit right through the dog’s thrashing skull. Its eyes glazed over as he scrambled its brains. It slumped over dead, its sheer bulk keeping the others away from the opening it had shattered in the glass.

  The Baron pulled the drill back, studied the bit that was slimed with gray matter, bone chips, and strands of coarse hair.

  Some time later, he wandered outside.

  The street was filled with gutted corpses, human and dog, parts of them, blood and hair and entrails. A few savages devoured raw joints of meat or fought over juicy shoulder portions. What dogs were left scavenged the dead. There was nothing but the moaning of the wounded, the whine of dying dogs.

  What remained of the Baron’s pack were beaten, bloodied, exhausted. They stepped amongst the bodies, slipping on blood and corksc
rews of intestines.

  They gathered at the Baron’s side.

  Although he was bitten, blood-streaked, and in considerable pain, he had never felt so joyously alive before…

  78

  They’re in the dark, Louis. All around you, slithering hideous things that feed on children, that sharpen their teeth on bones and decorate their lairs with human hides. Wake up! Wake up, you fucking idiot, you’re in the cannibal’s kitchen, you’re in the ogre’s cave, you’re in the musty rot-smelling cellar of the wicked witch and her wicked offspring…

  Louis opened his eyes, fighting on the edge of sleep. Inside, he had given up. He had been beaten, cut, dragged through the streets, dry-humped by a cave girl and then pissed on by her mother. It didn’t really seem to him that there was really much to live for because the world had shit its own pants and here he was a prisoner of these fucking things.

  But he opened his eyes.

  Something plopped in his face. Cool, moist. It plopped again. He looked up and there was the corpse of a man hanging from the rafters…part of a man really. His legs were nowhere to be seen. He was hanging upside down, chained and gutted, a ghastly white in color. And what had plopped onto Louis’ face was something dripping from one of his hollowed eye sockets.

  Louis recoiled, squirmed away from it best he could with his ankles and wrists tied.

  He looked around.

  The mother-he now suspected it was Maddie Sinclair, though she had degenerated so much it had been hard to tell at first-was nowhere in sight. Either were here daughters, whom Louis could not remember the names of.

  The air smelled like fresh meat, shit, urine, and vomit. Something else that was heavy and musky and must have been the raw animal stench of the women themselves. The sort of smell you might acquaint with the shit-stained, blood-spattered, bone-strewn den of a wolf pack.

  He lay still for ten minutes that became twenty, refusing to entertain any hope that they had abandoned him. He could not be that lucky. He waited. Breathed. Tried to get his mind working, trying to pretend he couldn’t smell the woman’s piss on him.