The Devil Next Door (50 page)

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.

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.