The Devil Next Door

14

The Hack twins, Mike and Matt, were standing on the sidewalk, lording over a pile of rocks, and casually tossing them at a minivan parked at the curb. Macy just stood there, watching as the boys threw them one after the other. The windows were spider webbed from the impacts, the doors and quarter panels scratched and dinged in.

Macy couldn’t believe it.

She’d babysat the two of them off and on for the past three years. They were monsters at heart, but they were not wantonly destructive like this.

“Mikey!” she called out. “Matt! What do you think you’re doing?”

They looked over at her, smiled in recognition, and began throwing rocks again. The impacts were loud enough so that everyone in the neighborhood must have been hearing them, but nobody was paying any attention. Mr. Chalmers was even sitting out on his porch in plain view, just reading his paper.

“We’re throwing rocks,” Mike said with typical ten-year old honesty.

Macy rushed over to them. “Stop it! What the heck is wrong with you two? Can’t you see you’re wrecking that minivan? Your mom will go nuts! God, what’s wrong with you two?”

Mike scratched his sandy-blonde hair. “Mom said we could.”

“Yeah,” Matt agreed, “that’s what she said.”

Macy just shook her head. “Oh, I’ll just bet she did.”

“It’s none of your business,” Mike said. “You better go.”

“Mikey…”

Matt stared at her and his eyes were funny. “Get out of here! You don’t belong here!”

As Matt said that, Mike was behind her, too close for Macy’s liking. And what he was doing… this is what made her jump away and give Mike a shove that planted him squarely on his ass.

He’d been sniffing her.

Like a dog.

Sniffing her ass.

Mike got up, looked like he was fighting against something. “Maybe… maybe you better just go, Macy. Things are different now. Things can happen.”

“That’s it,” Macy said, reaching out and snaring Matt by the wrist. “You’re coming inside right now, the both of you.”

But Matt yanked his wrist free.

Macy took a step back when she got a real good look at what was in his eyes. Neither of them had ever been openly defiant like this, but now they were not just defiant but almost savage. Their freckled faces were damp with sweat, hair plastered to their foreheads. And those eyes… so intense and hating, almost reflective like black glass.

Macy suddenly felt a shift of power around her.

The boys were not afraid of her. Not in the least. In fact, they were looking at her with no fear whatsoever and something even deeper and more caustic like absolute hate. They looked like animals, like they wanted to take her down with teeth and claws, guts her right there on the sidewalk.

“You guys… you better go in,” she said.

Mike grinned at her. “Fuck you,” he said.

“What?”

Macy stepped forward to grab him, even though the idea of touching the boy was suddenly repulsive to her. She stepped forward and Matt kicked her in the shin. Mike punched her in the arm. And then they both took hold of her and she had to fight with everything she had to throw them off. Her books went one way and she went the other. She made it maybe ten feet when the first rock struck her in the back. Then another glanced off her brow, slicing her open.

“Stop it!” she cried. “That hurt! You better stop it right now!”

But they weren’t going to stop and she knew it.

They had gone crazy, the both of them. Something in them had just snapped and she could not only see it in their eyes, she could smell it wafting off of them in a hot, pungent odor. Trying to reason with them now was like trying to reason with wild dogs that were intent on taking you down. Another rock hit her in the stomach, another in the crook of her arm and hard enough so that it went numb right down to the wrist.

Macy ran.

The boys came after, flinging stones at her with everything they had. Rocks glanced off her back, whistled over her head. She outdistanced them quickly, vaulting over the hedges and running right up to Mr. Chalmers’ porch. The boys hopped the hedges and then skidded to a halt when they saw him.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Mr. Chalmers said. “Why’re you boys chasing this girl? That you, Macy?”

“Yes,” she panted. “They’ve gone nuts! They’re pegging me with rocks!”

“They are, eh?” Mr. Chalmers tucked his reading glasses in his shirt pocket and set his paper aside. “What the hell’s got into you boys?”

“We were throwing rocks at her,” Mike said.

“Yeah, we were going to kill her,” Matt added.

Macy felt all the spit in her mouth suddenly evaporate.

There were no words to adequately describe what went through her head at that moment. Fear and shock and horror, too many other things. It all left her feeling weak and hopeless.

Mr. Chalmers stood there, hands on hips, appraising the situation. Though he was in his sixties, he was still a large, well-muscled man with broad shoulders and a thick chest, the result of his twenty years in the Army as a paratrooper with both the 82^nd and 101^st Airborne Division. He still had the requisite thick neck and bristly crewcut, though now gone white.

“Mr. Chalmers,” she said. “There’s something happening here. I don’t know what. But some kids at school went crazy like this and attacked a teacher and the janitor. They killed them.”

But Mr. Chalmers was not interested in that. “You boys want to kill this girl, don’t do it in my yard, you hear? This is my territory! My territory! I marked it with my scent and you better not cross my scent, you understand?”

Macy was shaking her head from side to side.

Mr. Chalmers, too.

It was in his eyes like it was in the eyes of the Hack twins: that seething, primal emptiness. That blankness that was without bottom.

“How’d you mark your territory?” Mike asked. “We want to mark ours, too!”

Mr. Chalmers laughed. “Like this, boys. Just like this.”

And as Macy watched, he unzipped his pants and pulled his penis out. Still smiling, he proceeded to urinate on the steps, washing them down so all would know the boundaries of his territory.

When he was done, the boys sniffed it, recognizing his smell and remembering it.

Macy let out a scream.

“Get her, boys!” Mr. Chalmers said. “Run her down! Whichever one takes her down first gets her!”

Macy took off running, the twins in hot pursuit.

She darted down the sidewalk and then cut between two houses, ducked behind a garage. The twins came running, looking around, and then jogged away down the alley. Macy hid there, panting and sweating, something broken loose now in the back of her mind.

She saw the twins in the distance.

They had stripped off all their clothes now.

They were pissing on trees like dogs.

Macy tried to catch her breath, tried to hold her world together before it flew apart.

It was some kind of mass insanity, she decided, that’s what it was. That’s what had made those kids go crazy in Biolab and attack Mr. Cummings and Sully and that was what had made her go after Chelsea Paris. It was like some kind of insanity bug.

And now it had the Hack twins and Mr. Chalmers.

I have to get out of here, Macy found herself thinking. They could be everywhere. The whole town could be crazy…

And that was a possibility, she supposed.

She calmed herself the best she could and crossed the alley, slipped through a couple yards and thankfully saw no one. She didn’t know what was going on. But what she kept thinking was that if she had snapped out of it, maybe the others would, too. What amount of damage would be done by then she could not know and did not want to guess at—

“Hey, Macy,” a voice said. “How’s my favorite girl?”

Macy turned, flooded with fear, and then for maybe two or three seconds she relaxed. She breathed. Why, it was only Mr. Kenning who lived up the block. Mr. Kenning was a Boy Scout troop leader, he announced football games for the Greenlawn High Wildcats, and he sold cars for a living. A nice man who loved sports and kids and his Irish Setter, Libby. He always had a few kind words for Macy.

Except… this was not that Mr. Kenning.

This Mr. Kenning was standing in the back yard, completely naked and covered with blood. Neither of which seemed to bother him in the least. He was smiling, hacking on something with a knife. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped from his elbow.

“Come here, Macy. I have a secret I want to share with you.”

Macy just stood there, the instinctual need to flee very overpowering. She stepped around the hedges, knowing she shouldn’t, but needing to see just how bad this situation was.

“Come here, Macy. I won’t bite you.”

I have a secret I want to share with you.

But Macy could see his secret quite plainly: there was a carcass hanging from the limb of Mr. Kenning’s apple tree and he was in the process of dressing it out. It was skinned, fleshy, bleeding. There was no doubt what it was. Even if she hadn’t seen the ragged pelt of lustrous orange fur at his feet, she would’ve recognized the dog. It was hung by the throat.

Mr. Kenning stabbed his knife into the torso, slitting it upwards. Libby’s viscera spilled out in a coiled, bloody mass. Mr. Kenning studied his dripping red fist that held the dripping red knife. He sniffed it, then licked the back of it.

“Oh no,” Macy said, the world beginning to spin around her. “Oh no… oh no… oh no…”

Her whole body was shaking, tears rolling down her face, nausea rolling in her belly with the hot, rank stink of slaughtered dog.

Mr. Kenning kept smiling. That grin was depraved and obscene, filled with a raw unflinching appetite. He would rape her if he could, Macy knew, then he would feed on her.

“Come here, Macy,” he said, his blood-spattered penis standing erect. “I’ll share my kill with you… if you share what you have with me.”

Macy screamed and ran and, thankfully, he did not follow. He called out to her to bring her mother over, the whole time hacking and chopping at the dog. Macy threw up in the Maub’s hedges, cut through the Sinclair’s side yard, then ran across the street to her own porch.

She stopped right there, catching her breath, trying to make sense of it all. Everything looked so positively normal that what she had just gone through seemed ridiculous. She heard a siren in the distance, but that didn’t really mean much. Not by itself.

Behind her, there was movement, feet coming through the grass.

She whirled around, eyes wide and mouth open, ready for just about anything. She saw Mr. Shears standing there. He lived next door. But this was not the Mr. Shears she knew. His eyes were glassy, his hair wild. His shirt was torn and hanging open, bloodstains all over it.

In his hands was a golf club and he looked ready to use it.

“Please,” Macy said. “Oh, please, just stay away from me…”

But Mr. Shears kept coming…