by Tim Curran
The smell was getting stronger, carried by the breeze.
They followed it to a yard of night-blooming flowers and sweet grass, the smell of running plant sap invigorating. Down on all fours, the Baron could smell the scent trail of another. The stink of urine and musk was unmistakable. This yard had been marked as another’s territory. The other hunters smelled it and quivered. They did not like it. There was something wrong here.
But the Baron was too intrigued by the other odor: that delicious stench of rot.
He pissed on the trail to obliterate the smell of the other. Several other hunters, male and female, did the same.
Still, the Baron could smell the other’s urine. He did not like this. It was an affront to him. It raised his hackles, challenged him, usurped his authority. It made him angry. It made him want to seize another by the throat Still, that other smell… he needed to find it, to cover himself with it.
He was getting furious. The urine smell was female. There was no mistaking it. There were a series of scent trails laid out in the vicinity of this yard, all leading up to the darkened house before him. It was confusing. The Baron knew that it was necessary to proceed with caution, but his blood was up. The scent trail. The other delicious odor of rot. It made him feel very aggressive. He let out a low growling sound and several other males imitated him even while many of the females pulled back, suddenly concerned about the nature of this place.
They had been led here. There was no doubt of it.
But the Baron didn’t care. He was challenged. It was now a matter of territory and dominance. He would find the females who had sprayed these conflicting scents-there were several, he knew that now-and make them bow down to him.
The pack was tense.
The Baron cast several of his males forward. They peered in bushes, around the garage, pawed through flower beds. One of them made a sharp yelping sound of surprise and pleasure; he was calling to the pack. The others followed him around the garage, past the potting shed…there was a sudden cry of surprise, a crackling sound, and then a drawn-out whine of agony.
The Baron rushed forward.
His male was down in a pit about ten feet, the walls of black earth carefully squared off. The male cried out a few times, shook, and went still. The entire pack smelled his death, his terror, the blood trace he left in the air. Whoever had dug the pit, had lined its bottom with four-foot stakes that were sharpened to lethal perfection. The young male was impaled upon them. They were thrust through his groin, belly, and throat. One pierced his arm and another thrust from his wide open mouth.
The Baron let forth a bloodcurdling cry that echoed throughout the neighborhood. The other males, again, imitated him. This was an insult to the pack, a blood crime that would have to be avenged.
Much more cautious now, the Baron crept towards the house on all fours…
81
Maddie tasted the blood in her mouth and savored the pain.
She had marked this man as her own. She would mate with him and perhaps produce offspring…but he was defiant, he was willful and arrogant. She would not have that. If she brought him in for a breeder and spared him the knife, then there were things expected. She would not be rejected.
Not here in her own lair.
Not by this pig who spurned her offered meat.
In the hazy corridors of her mind she could remember other men, shadowy figures without faces, and never had they rejected her like this. She always had her fill when the season was upon her.
Grinding her teeth, she watched the man by the fire. He was well-muscled, firm, he would have made a very good breeder. Too wiry for the eating, but that did not mean he wouldn’t know the knife. As she sharpened a carving blade against a dull stone she knew there were ways to break pigs like him.
The heat inside her was almost unbearable…pulsing, wet, hungry. It would need to be fed and if he would not feed her then another would be found. But maybe this one. Maybe if she punished him, cut a few things off, let her daughters toy with him a bit.
Then he would beg for what she offered.
Because it was his and she had already selected. He would fill her needs or she would flay him alive…
82
Wearing the shadows, Angie’s tribe remained hidden.
For some time they had been trailing the Baron’s pack. It was not too difficult. At first, Angie had been impressed by the Baron…his strength, his cruelty, his knowledge of hunting and stalking. But the more he killed, the more drunk with power he became and the more careless was his leadership.
Angie’s tribe had watched with amusement as the Baron’s pack waged war with the other pack on Providence Street. He had lost the majority of his hunters. His bravado was stronger than his wisdom. Such was the way with males.
Now they had been drawn to the house.
Angie had known it was a trap for she had been past the place several times that night and each time did not linger. But the Baron had been drawn in effortlessly. Just by a hanging bag of rotting meat and dead fish outside the back door. It drew males from blocks around. This combined with the crisscrossing female urine scents was enough to drive any male wild.
And so it had.
As Angie watched, she saw the females of the pack hang back. They knew instinctively that the yard was not a good place to be. But the Baron would not submit to their fears just as he would not submit to his own.
The tribe waited to see what would happen next.
That there was death in the house, Angie knew without question. Her only concern was that the females who lived there would get the Baron before she did. And she needed to bring him down.
Even now, she could taste the juice of his heart in her mouth…
83
Louis heard screams and instantly jerked out of his fugue.
One of the woman’s daughters-Elissa-stumbled down the stairs with a spear punched clean through her. She clutched it and clawed at it, her own blood that was very dark in the firelight gushing from the wound, dripping off the shaft. There was more than just pain on her contorted face, but surprise. Absolute surprise.
A group of savages rushed down the stairs.
They were children.
Louis saw them and was amazed, though he shouldn’t have been by that point. Just kids. Most of them were grade school age, a few teenagers amongst them. All naked and painted up with blue, brown, and red stripes, brandishing spears and hatchets, their eyes flat black and predatory.
They converged on Elissa and brought her down with their hatchets, chopping on her until she was a writhing, red-splashed thing, her head split open, her face hanging by a thread, one arm on the floor.
The children went wild.
They screamed and shrieked their primal delight, hacking on the girl and splashing themselves with her blood. The oldest amongst them, a boy, shoved the others aside and peeled the girl’s scalp.
Louis knew they would see him by the fire.
He was next.
Where was the woman and the other girl?
Good question and one soon answered. For now they charged out of the shadows with axes. Four children had split skulls before the others could organize themselves. Maddie and Kylie, still painted ash-white, were soon spattered with blood and meat. The other children were terrified as these ghosts attacked them. They could see the scalps at their throats. The meat and limbs hanging from the rafters, the human remains and refuse scattered over the floor, smell the gut sack that smoked over the fire.
While Kylie swung her axe from side to side, Maddie hobbled about, circling the invaders who bunched together. She sang a high, shrill song that clearly frightened the children as she lumbered about them, her axe held high for the taking of lives. Even though Louis knew she was no ghost, he wondered if the children were frightened of her for that very reason.
By the looks of them, they weren’t exactly the passive, non-violent types.
But the woman had struck dread into them.
S
he circled them, singing her song louder and louder and something about it even chilled Louis. He did not know what any of it meant-it did not even sound like English or any other language that he had ever heard-but the threat behind the words was without question.
He fought at the ropes that held him.
If somehow he could convince the children to attack.
But they were submissive now, terrified. Several had even urinated. Who or what did they think the woman was? Granted, smeared with white ash, red bands enclosing her eyes and mouth, her teeth yellow and sharp, and her eyes like two windows looking into a madhouse…she was a real horror.
“ You kids!” he called out. “She’s not a ghost! She’s not a spook! Kill her! Do you fucking hear me? Kill the bitch!”
Kylie hissed at him and Maddie broke off her song, snarling in his direction and there was absolutely no doubt in Louis’ mind that he was no longer the favored, coveted plaything, but a shank of meat to be slit and deboned, salted and cured. She would slit his throat, disembowel him and bathe in his blood, wear his skin and gather his bones in a red-stained heap.
He was definitely a dead man.
But then…he hadn’t been brought down to this awful place to be treated as a favored guest now, had he? And murder, violent and brutal as it would be, was far preferable to being used for the amusement of the witch and her daughters.
“ Kill her!” Louis cried.
It was a terrible chance to take, but if he could goad the children into fighting back then maybe, just maybe, he had a chance. Regardless, his shouts disrupted the spell that Maddie was putting on them.
“ Kill her! Goddammit, kill her!”
Maybe it was an authoritative adult voice, but one of them jabbed his spear at Kylie. She deflected it with her axe. But the others took the cue. A spear sank into Maddie’s leg and her axe nearly cleaved a girl in half. Now it became a nightmare of blood. Spears thrusting, hatchets slicing, axes chopping. Louis watched it momentarily with insane glee, wanting the blood like somebody watching a football game secretly wanted blood. But unlike sports, he truly got it as the children clashed with Maddie and her mother who fought with insane, raging hysteria.
That’s it, kids, Kill the witch. Slice her right fucking up.
Louis rolled closer to the fire, ever aware of that grotesque sack of human entrails smoking on the tripod. There was a carving knife on the other side of the pit and he planned on having it. Maybe he was going to die, but he was going to die with a knife in his hand, he was going to go down fighting.
A window shattered and something exploded on the floor, spraying flames over the wall and up a stack of cardboard boxes that started to burn right away.
Louis inched around the pit like a caterpillar until he saw the knife and brought his hands around until he grasped it. He immediately started sawing at the ropes on his wrist. It was expertly sharpened and right away the fibers began loosening one by one.
In the flames and the smoke, the blood sport near the stairs went on unheeded. It was like some twisted, blood-drenched nightmare. The children fighting in a pack, glistening red, Maddie and Kylie both slashed and bleeding but refusing to go down. Knives bisected skins and hatchets laid flesh open, spears sinking into bellies and axes shearing heads from necks.
It ended on the floor with the three remaining children chopping on Maddie while Kylie, split wide open and clutching her intestines in one hand, lurched in Louis’ direction. She had a knife in the other hand. Her hair was plastered to her face with blood. She limped forward, dragging a bad leg behind her that was nearly severed at the knee.
She made a low growling noise that was wet and gurgling as she choked on her own blood.
Louis’ hands were free, but not his ankles.
He had a knife but he didn’t know if he was any match for Kylie who was by that point beyond anything as simple as a savage. She was a gruesome, hobbling zombie, a monster who understood nothing but killing.
“ Don’t do it,” Louis told her.
She spit out a glob of blood and came closer. She would have had him, too, and her last act in this world would have been to make him suffer unbelievably. But a spear plunged through her belly and then another through her chest. More children were rushing around. They sliced limbs and meats from the rafters overhead, kicked over the tripod which spilled to the floor, the gut bag bursting with a sickening hot smell as organs and entrails steamed over the dirt.
They were destroying everything.
Throwing bottles of gasoline at the walls and roaring with delight as the flames spread, consumed, and the air became as hazy as fog.
Louis slit his ankles free.
His legs were numb but he made them obey. He knocked a couple kids out of the way, dodging and darting towards the doorway. A spear just missed him. A girl swung something at him that he realized was a severed arm. And then he was jogging up the steps, coughing on the smoke.
More savage children.
They were pissing on the walls and pulling the stuffing out of sofa cushions, tipping over furniture and tossing their scat at one another. Several of them saw Louis, hesitated, maybe unsure if he was one of their own or not. They decided and bared their teeth.
Then a huge, bristling man stepped forward.
His face was tiger-striped with black slashes of paint, old and seamed, the eyes glittering with dementia. He wore a vest made of fur, his bare chest and arms filthy with blood and dirt. There was a necklace of what must have been human ears around his throat.
Louis hesitated.
Good God…was this Chalmers? Frank Chalmers from a few streets over?
He knew it was and then Chalmers dove on him. They rolled to the floor, knives forgotten, fighting tooth and nail. Chalmers was old, but in incredible shape from so many years in the Army humping it through jungles and leaping out of airplanes. Louis hit him three times and Chalmers barely flinched. His hand like a claw, he took hold of Louis’ windpipe and squeezed it close. Louis fought and tried to throw him off, but it was useless. The world went dark and he went limp.
When he opened his eyes again, he was lying in the grass.
The house was burning.
Two girls squatted by him and both had knives. They were no more than eight or ten years old and seeing them there-painted for war, splattered with flesh and blood, their eyes just gone wild-it was ludicrous. For a few days before they might have been selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. Now they were hunting people, slaughtering anyone or anything they could catch.
Louis licked the blood off his lips.
The girls moved in closer, crawling on hands and knees towards him like Preying Mantises stalking their prey. They had been waiting for him to come to. It would have been no fun for them to gut a sleeping man. One of the girls raised her knife for the kill…there was a human scalp on a thong around her wrist, the hair red and lustrous.
Then Louis heard a whooshing sound and a hatchet came flying end-over-end with a perfect throw, imbedding itself in the skull of the girl with the scalp.
Other savages charged in and it was war to the knife…
84
Macy was outside the lair, the church, and sucking in the not-so clean air of Greenlawn. She had status now. She was one of the Huntress’ clan. By blood-rite she had secured the right to stand with them, to hunt with them and butcher, and to die with them.
She heard a noise behind her.
She turned quick with sharp animal reflexes.
A man was standing there.
He was tall and filthy, hair hanging to his shoulders in greasy curls. His face was painted like a skull as all those of the inner circle. His body was likewise painted with white and blacks streaks, though smeared with ground-in blood, dirt, and animal fat.
He held a scalp in his hands, still bleeding from its owner.
The hair was lustrous gold, beautiful, like something spun on a spinning wheel. The moonlight caught it, held it, made the golden mane glow.
Macy recognized it.
The scalp of the girl she’d killed in the blood-rite.
Yes, she remembered it as she remembered the man who held it out to her. It was an offering. The scalp belonged to Macy. Golden, beautiful, any warrior would be pleased to have it hanging upon their scalp pole. He made sure it was brought to her.
Laid it at her feet.
Like burnt offerings.
Macy just stared at him with something leagues beyond hate. A mania that was all-consuming and burned bright.
She remembered him, too.
The wet dog stink of him as the others held her down and he mounted her. She remembered the pain between her legs and the oily feel of his skin against her own.
Having set the scalp at her feet, believing them to be conjoined now like fetal twins because of the rite, he looked up at her and smiled.
Macy slashed her knife against his throat.
He stumbled away, gagging on his own blood, shocked, mortified, beyond himself by what had just transpired. How could she do this, how, how, how, how Macy stepped over to him with her knife and smiled with a blood-stained mouth at the huge slaughter moon high above…
85
As the hatchet was embedded in the girl’s skull with a wet thudding noise and she pitched over on top of him, eyes glazed in death, Louis saw the barbarian hordes rushing in from all directions.
People screamed.
Howled.
Bayed like animals.
Spears were thrown. Axes cleaved off limbs and shattered bone and arrows punched through chests and bellies.
And there he was, barely conscious, his mind reeling in every imaginable direction as the warfare broke out in every quarter. He was confused…but happy. For just as the children brought hell and death down upon Maddie Sinclair and her slinking, animal daughters, now hell and death was coming down upon the children and their leader which had once been a fellow named Frank Chalmers, though only God knew what he was now.