The Devil Next Door

by Tim Curran

  Children dropped all around him, screaming with spears stuck in them. A boy with an arrow in one eye stumbled about, his face red and shining, then fell over. Louis looked for Chalmers because he knew he was out there somewhere delighting in this. A sixty-year old man who could fight better than any two twenty-year olds.

  The other girl Louis had seen when he first opened his eyes was leaping around, trying to avoid the blades of older women who were cutting and hacking their way through Chalmer’s perverse pack of hunters and killers. She made a good show of it and then a woman with a sharpened stake in her hand-like something you went to slay a vampire with-took her by the hair, broke her over one knee and pierced her in the throat with it. Then she proceeded to decapitate her.

  And look at how much she loves it! Chopping the head off a little kid! Have you ever, ever in your life, Louis, seen such genuine unadulterated pleasure on someone’s face? Such concentration, such conviction in the rightness of what they were doing?

  And honestly he had not. And if there was anything left that could frighten him and maybe even unhinge him it was this: they were not human anymore, these people, not even remotely. Men, women, and, yes, children were just game.

  Game for sport.

  And game for meat.

  On the slaughter went and he had a front row seat and never, not since the dawn of what men referred to as civilization, had there been a contest this bloody, this savage, this unrelentingly grisly.

  The children, he soon saw, were really no match for this new army of butchers who seemed come sliding out of every shadow like snakes, leaping from every bush and even dropping from the trees. Primeval, obscene, anti-human-that was exactly the word that flashed through Louis’ crowded mind-and somehow reptilian, they prowled in for the kill, meat-hungry pythons and slinking human pit vipers and deadly rattlesnakes and fang-toothed mambas. The fact that they were covered in not just old blood and dirt, but a crazy warpaint/camouflage of red-and-green bands only heightened the effect.

  They were human reptiles.

  Many of them had bows and arrows and Louis had not seen that up to this point. They had axes and pikes, homemade spears and knives and you name it. And they were very good at what they were doing. The children went down beneath the slashing of blades and when they went down, they were instantly harvested. Trophies were slit free: ears, fingers, scalps, even genitals.

  Louis had not been noticed yet, so he decided now was a good time to slip away.

  Two women held a boy down, slit his mouth open into a bleeding, clownish grin and proceeded to cut his tongue out.

  Louis almost fell right over them, but they paid him little attention.

  He yanked a butcher’s knife out of a girl’s back and slashed a woman across the breasts who tried to take hold of him. The air was filled with smoke from the burning house, it lay across the yard like a thick and pungent fog. There was a mist of blood, bodies sprawled dismembered and still kicking at every turn. A scalped boy crawled in his direction. A woman dragging her own viscera grabbed at his legs as another strode out of the haze carrying a bloody dismembered head in each hand, swinging them by the hair.

  Louis hopped over corpses, dodging savages with axes and body parts, slipping on the blood-covered grass, and finally tripping over a torso.

  When he came back up he was no longer anonymous.

  Recognized.

  Frank Chalmers stood there, huge and shaggy with the blood-matted fur vest on, like something from a Pliocene cave. He had a hatchet in one hand and a sickle in the other. Louis did not doubt for one moment that he had come to kill him. His body swayed back and forth as if to some unheard melody, his muscles bunching beneath his skin, his knotted hands gripping his weapons and anxious to put them to use.

  Louis got up and faced him.

  He knew Frank very well, but Frank was dead. This was not Frank.

  He felt very useless with his butcher knife facing down this grinning, war-painted bear of a man who at sixty still bristled with corded muscle, his flesh like alligator hide, slit and cut and scarred but still holding together.

  Chalmers let out a cry and came right at Louis.

  Louis tried to get away from him, but there were too many bodies, too many savages crowding in. The sickle nearly took off the end of his nose and the hatchet came down at what seemed the same time, striking the blade of the butcher knife and knocking it out of his hand, leaving his arm numb right up to the shoulder joint.

  That’s how easy it was for Frank Chalmers, the pack Baron.

  Louis was his and he knew it. That after all he had been through that it would end with this crazy sonofabitch just wasn’t acceptable. When Chalmers moved again, Louis jumped away, tripped over someone, found a broomstick that had been sharpened into a spear and came right at the bigger man.

  It was sheer suicide.

  But it worked.

  The counter-attack threw Chalmers off his guard and bought Louis enough time to make a valiant jab at him or to run like crazy. It was at that moment that arrows thudded into Chalmers’ left arm and ribs. He cried out and fell back and Louis vaulted in and gave him the spear right in his exposed belly, sinking it deep with all his strength until he felt it hit something in there, maybe bone, and become firmly lodged.

  Chalmers screamed and swung his sickle.

  Had the blade hit Louis it would have probably split his face open, but Chalmers swung it backhand and hit him with the unsharpened edge. Still, it was quite a blow. Louis was hit in the face and knocked backwards. Just in time to catch an arrow just above the kneecap.

  He went down.

  He hit the ground, rolling in the bloody grass, and when he opened his eyes Chalmers was gone and there was that arrow sunk into the meat of his leg, a patch of blood soaking through his jeans.

  Then the pain hit him.

  Things hadn’t exactly been easy for him that night. His body had taken its fair share of abuse…but this was beyond all that. At first, when he went down, there was just the sting of impact…but now, the real pain arrived. It hit him blindly and with full force. There was nothing remotely subtle about it. It exploded in his leg and made him cry out, made something inside him roll over as wave after wave of agony moved through him tearing up everything in its path.

  And when he again was able to take in his surroundings, his face covered with a warm, sour-smelling sweat, he saw a woman advancing on him. She carried a human head on the end of a spear…

  86

  Macy had him on the ground and no one interfered.

  Most of the clan had followed the Huntress off on a hunt and those that remained did not interfere. Macy stood over him, the man that had raped her, with a bloody knife in one hand. There had been a time, perhaps ages ago, when Macy Merchant had been a very shy, bookish girl who cringed at the idea of swatting a fly or stepping on a spider, but that Macy was as extinct as the tribes the people of the world had regressed into.

  She watched him bleed to death but it was hardly enough.

  She raised her knife over her head and jabbed him in the belly, the spray of hot blood in her face invigorating as she put both hands on the hilt and forced the blade upwards, gutting him like a trout.

  He died squirming in his own blood and entrails and Macy watched death take him with a cold, almost clinical eye. She rose up from his carcass, studying the blood on her knife, her hands, her arms.

  Unafraid, raging with primal memory, she licked it off her fingers…

  87

  Louis watched the woman approach him and he was not entirely sure it was a woman. She was wearing a freshly peeled human hide and a looping scarf of bowels around her throat. As she glided towards him, she was muttering something under her breath in a hoarse, gargly sort of voice, brandishing the head of a teenage boy on a sharpened pole in one hand and an axe in the other.

  What the hell is this now?

  It was a woman, naked, washed down with blood and ceremonial paint. Her hair was a tangled, snarled mess
plaited with what looked to be bones and sticks and shining beads. Her face was an absolute atrocity, like some gruesome tribal mask: flesh peeled away from her mouth in a lopsided oval so that her red-stained teeth were on full display, a slat of bone shoved through her nose, eyes like bleeding holes.

  Frank Chalmers had been bad enough…but this… God.

  She saw him there, singled him out from the masses in the streaming moonlight, and gestured at him with her axe, her teeth parting and a high, keening howl of rage and savagery cutting through the night.

  Louis got to his feet and it was no easy thing with the pain throbbing in his leg. But he did get up and he faced her uneasily with the butcher knife in his hand.

  The warrior woman charged, tossing the head pole aside. She came swinging her axe, absolutely demented and filled with primitive wrath. She looked like some kind of living voodoo fetish doll, a surreal version of a cannibal witch-doctor.

  Louis ducked under the axe and slashed out with his knife.

  But he was far too slow or maybe she was just too fast.

  He missed her entirely and as regained his balance and brought his knife-hand around, she lashed out with a foot and kicked him in the side. His leg gave out immediately in a baptismal of pain and he went face-first into the grass, his head spinning and the breath gasping from his lungs.

  She jumped on his back, a hot, greasy hand grabbed his hair and yanked his head back for throat-slitting. At least that’s what he expected, but the blade never came, but her teeth did. She seized his ear and bit right through it. They were filed sharp as daggers and sliced right through the cartilage. The pain made Louis forget about his leg. He thrashed beneath her as she held on, his bloody ear clenched in her jaws. He threw himself this way and that. When he got her off balance, he brought his elbow back and felt it mash into her face.

  That did it.

  She came up right away, grinning cadaverously in the moonlight, her teeth glistening with fresh blood. She looked at him with those dreadful vulpine eyes and uttered a growling guttural sound that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

  “Bitch!” he cried at her. “Stinking rotten fucking bitch!”

  It meant nothing to her, of course, but it did wonders for his adrenaline and hatred. She dove at him and he met her and they fought tooth and claw in the grass, rolling through the blood and spilled viscera. No weapons, just the rage of the primitive and the absolute loathing of the civilized man for such racial backsliding. It was like fighting a serpent. She writhed and squirmed with a fluid muscular grace, her teeth biting into him and her nails tearing him open.

  Finally, he again threw her.

  On all fours she faced him, a primordial thing of bloodlust, eyes wide and almost luminous like new moons. The stench of hot urine wafted from her. That and a sharp, gagging musk that was revolting.

  She could have easily grabbed a weapon, but she did not. She was going to take him down like an animal with claws and teeth and nothing less would be acceptable to her.

  Louis never had time to get his knife because she came again and he met her, raining down a series of blows on her that had no effect. He managed to get behind her, to lock an arm around her throat. He rode her like that while she thrashed and growled and snapped, coming alive beneath him, but he held fast, forcing her head back with a strength he didn’t know he possessed.

  She lost balance and collapsed under his weight.

  He yanked her head back, fingers digging into her eyes until she screamed and still he kept yanking and straining until she began to make wheezing, gagging sounds in her throat. Things began to pop and snap in there. He kept stretching it back until his face was buried in her oily warm throat. Until he could smell her filthy reek and taste her foul dog-smell.

  He felt something pulsing in her throat.

  Something throbbing and pumping and straining.

  Without thought, wired mainly on instinct, he sank his teeth into her throat, biting and gnashing and tearing until that pulsing thing sheared open and sprayed hot, salty blood down his throat and into his face.

  But he did not let go.

  He kept chewing and ripping as the woman went slack beneath him.

  He held onto her until she was limp beneath him. He limped maybe three or four feet and went down in the grass, vomiting, cleansing himself of the unclean, polluted taste of her.

  When he gained his feet, there was nothing but corpses scattered in the moonlight. The hunters had moved on…

  88

  Angie closed in on the Baron.

  It was not difficult. After the warfare broke between her tribe and the Baron’s pack, he had few followers. His pack was mostly killed, wounded, or driven off into the night. It was only a matter then of following his blood trail.

  That he had come this far was testament to his strength.

  His vitality.

  Angie had tracked his blood spoor for nearly three blocks until it ended here, at the athletic field behind the high school where the Greenlawn High Wildcats strutted their stuff on the gridiron come September.

  Angie was ignorant of all that, of course.

  She followed his blood trail to the fence, circling it quietly, looking for some means of egress. But even the gate was locked. She lost the Baron’s spoor for a moment, but then caught his scent where he’d urinated on a tree. Angie sniffed this for telltale signs of his condition. The urine had a weak smell. She could scent the blood in it and the waning trace odors of the hormones usually associated with a healthy, fighting animal.

  The Baron was dying.

  She found where he’d gone over the fence. Shouldering her bow, she climbed up and over, dropping silently on all fours into the grass.

  The spoor was simple to track now on the freshly-shorn grass. He was bleeding badly and it was splashed in copious amounts everywhere. Yes, she could see him now. He was staggering, moving for a few feet, falling, then rising, pushing himself on through willpower and little else. There were woods beyond the field and this is where he was going: he wanted to die in the forest where his kind had always been born.

  His darkened shape was simple to pick out on the flat field in the moonlight.

  Angie put an arrow in her bow, stretched it, sighted in on the feeble shape in the distance. Clenching her teeth with a slow exhalation of air, she let it fly. He let out a garbled cry as it struck him in the back.

  He pitched forward, limbs jerking.

  Now! Take your kill! Make it yours!

  Angie rushed out and he heard her coming, tried to crawl away from her. But it did no good. She stood above him, a painted and bloody tribal warrior maiden, breathing deeply, smelling the death of her pray and reveling in it as only the hunter can.

  Menstrual blood ran down the inside of one leg.

  She leaped on him, landing hard, his breath coming out in a whooshing gasp. She grabbed the arrow in his back and yanked it out. He moaned and tried to crawl away. She let him. When he made it a few feet, she blocked his path and stabbed him lightly with the arrow until he turned. And when he crawled in a different direction, she stabbed him again. She toyed with him a bit as she liked to with her kills. It amused her. To toy with prey was the world’s oldest form of foreplay.

  He stopped crawling, looking up at her with fixed hatred.

  He made a grunting, puffing noise. He coughed out ribbons of blood. His fur pelt was shiny and wet with it. Still, even weakened, he was huge and vicious. His tongue lolled from his bloody mouth, his nose sniffing.

  Angie dropped to her knees to watch his death throes.

  He closed his eyes…then, with a final burst of strength and a terrible muffled roar deep in the chimney of his throat, he leaped at her.

  She was caught by surprise, knocked into the grass.

  He pinned her down, his eyes filled with a deadly intensity

  Angie slid her knife from its sheath.

  She did not fight.

  This stopped the Baron momentarily. He cocked his head sid
eways.

  She slashed him in the face, slicing a strip of meat from his temple to jawbone. He tightened his grip on her throat and she buried the knife in his eyesocket.

  He made a drawn-out growling sound…and attacked again, filled with a hideous, primal rage. Streamers of vile-smelling saliva oozed from his jaws. Blood and tissue dripped from his ruined eye. Then as his jaws came at her, she buried the blade of the butcher’s knife into his belly right to the hilt.

  The Baron released her with a squealing, miserable sound like a run-down puppy…then he went crazy, snapping and biting and clawing.

  Angie was howling herself: an atavistic war cry pulled up from the forgotten, shuttered basement of human history.

  And as she did so, as the Baron’s fangs nipped at her face, tearing a hurting channel into her cheek, she drew the knife up from his belly to his sternum. His viscera, hot and steaming and slimy, spilled over her and its reek was raw, horrible…and delicious, ultimately invigorating.

  Angie threw him to the ground and began to slash and hack his corpse. The knife rose and fell and blood splashed and flesh was bisected and she kept going until she’d thoroughly mutilated his hide, his head nearly severed from its neck.

  Hurting, but alive because of it, her veins surging with electricity, Angie let out a deafening shriek and buried the knife in her kill. Then she broke open his ribs and carved his heart free. It was hot and pulsing in her hands. She brought it to her mouth, licking it, tasting it, coveting the muscled, marbled mass. Then bit into it with a shuddering carnal moan.

  She tore it apart with a violent feeding frenzy until her face was covered in blood, tissue, and hot juices.

  She fell back into the grass, sated, fulfilled, feeling the Baron’s strength and cunning becoming her own. Beneath the waning eye of the moon, the night was made complete…

  89

  The Huntress returned to the place she remembered.