The Devil Next Door

15

Mr. Chalmers wasn’t real happy with them for losing the girl. In fact, when they got back and told him that Macy Merchant had slipped away, he came right off the porch. He tossed his newspaper and came right at them. His eyes were filled with a simmering blackness. They were shiny like those of a mad dog.

“Simple goddamn job I give you two,” he said, pulling his belt out of its loops and snapping it in his fists, “and you fuck it up.”

Mike and Matt Hack stood there, knowing they were going to be punished, but not even thinking of running off. They had this coming and they knew it. So they stood there when the belt came at them, lashing them in the faces, the pain sharp and cutting. They cried out and fell to their knees, curling up in balls as the belt laid open their backs in hurting welts.

“You feel that, you little shits? That’s pain and nothing teaches, nothing instructs quite like pain,” Mr. Chalmers told them, studying the belt in his hands. He was grinning now, satisfied, his eyes mocking and filled with venom. “You two gotta quit acting like fucking little boys. This is war. This is survival. When I send you out to get something, you don’t come back without it. Those other neighborhoods, they’re gonna try and take what we got, so we got to hit them first. We gotta take what they got. Their women, their food, their weapons. Do you see? Do you see? DO YOU FUCKING SEE, BOYS?”

Both boys were naked, their faces caked with dirt and sweat. But their eyes were wide and bright and somehow primal. Mr. Chalmers had hurt them and they seemed to like it. The pain had unlocked something in them and it was something they wanted more of.

In the distance there was a sudden chorus of howling. It rose up high and shrieking and then faded away. It was hard to say whether it was from animals or people. At the sound of it, Mr. Chalmers nodded his head as if he understood the need to howl all too well.

“Don’t make me school you again,” Mr. Chalmers said. “Now go out there and bring back a woman. Don’t come back empty handed. Bring me some gee-gee, some nice young gee-gee and don’t come back without it. Go!”

Mike and Matt raced away, less human than they’d been even an hour before. They ran through yards and down alleys, crawled through vacant lots where the grass was yellow and crisp and dusty. This was the high, hot end of green summer and they smelled it, tasted it, knew it like they had never known it before. They rubbed their sweaty naked bodies with dirt, with crackling brown leaves, with chaff and loam until they smelled of summer, of rich earth and low wild things.

They were supposed to get some gee-gee, some nice young gee-gee for Mr. Chalmers, which was pussy and they understood the need and want of fine pussy, but fuck Mr. Chalmers because they were young and free and lost in the heady bouquet of absolute atavism.

So many houses.

So many places to raid.

And behind so many of those doors, the owners had already tasted the new primeval blood of Greenlawn which was the blood of the world now. They were drunk with it as Mike and Matt were drunk with it. Many were already gathering their weapons and stockpiling their food, herding their women and children together, living out their sweet, secret animal joys, just waiting for the night when they would run wild, killing and raping and plundering and tasting the hot blood of their prey upon their slavering tongues.

Many were like that.

And those that weren’t, were quickly becoming the minority. But even in that dim, shocked, confused minority, there were stirrings of ancient drives, the need to run on all fours and fill their senses with the savage delight of simple regression.

The first place Mike and Matt stopped was a trim white ranch house with pink shutters. The yard was immaculate. The flowerbeds bursting with color. They rolled in the grass like dogs, then dove into the flowerbeds and smashed all those vibrant blooms beneath them. They grabbed up bunches of zinnias and marigolds, sweet pea and snapdragon, rubbing the crushed flowers and fragrant petals against their bodies. There was a goldfish pond out back. They caught every fish and smashed them with rocks. Then they went inside the house.

They knew whose house it was.

It belonged to Mrs. Cannon, a retired schoolteacher. If you trespassed on her lawn she would call the police. If you kicked your ball into her yard by accident she would seize it and never give it back. That’s the sort of person she was. A woman who spent her life teaching children, but secretly despised them and their youth. If the parents on the block thought she was a miserable old bitch, the children were sure she was a broom-riding witch.

When Mike and Matt came through the door, Mrs. Cannon, a widow of seventeen years, dearly wished that her husband was still alive because even though she had dealt with some real bad boys in her time, she knew that she had finally met the very worst.

Mike and Matt Hack.

Naked and dirty, leaves and sticks in their hair, their bodies scratched and bruised and plastered with bits of flowers, they were about the most horrible things she had ever seen.

“Hello, Mrs. Cannon,” said Mike.

“Hello, Mrs. Cannon,” said Matt. “We were supposed to get some young gee-gee but we came to see you first.”

Mrs. Cannon, well past eighty, was thin and weak and did not move so good anymore. But her ire was up and she directed it with vehemence: “Get out of my house! You filthy little monsters! Get out of my house!”

And bare seconds after she had said this, she knew it was the wrong thing to do. Because you didn’t try and intimidate rabid dogs. And that’s what these two were. She could see it in their eyes: that blank, glaring animal hatred. They had parted company with civilization. They stared at her with eyes that were shiny, intensely loathsome. Just the sight of those eyes and what was behind them made her bladder let go. She shook. She trembled. But tried not to move because didn’t they say that if you did not move, made no aggressive posturing, that a mad dog would not attack?

But it was too late because they smelled the fear on her.

Matt leaped forward and Mrs. Cannon swatted him in the face, but that just enraged him, made him let go with a coarse growling sound that filled her with more terror than she’d ever known in her life. He grabbed her by the wrist and threw her to the floor and with such force her left arm snapped upon impact. She was old, her bones fragile and reedy. She cried out and he stomped down on her side with his foot. Three ribs gave like dry twigs.

Mrs. Cannon screamed, cried, sobbed, just beyond herself with agony.

She looked up at Matt Hack and knew that what she was dealing with here was not a boy, it was something else. Something evil and cunning and inhuman. There was no boy left inside that dirty husk, all of the culture and learning and civilization that had been hammered into his head for the past ten years had been stripped away, peeled back, revealing this primordial monster.

While she squirmed on the floor, Mike rushed in and helped his brother. They stripped Mrs. Cannon, revealing the shriveled used-up body she hid even from herself. Skin and bones, not much more. Mike took up her unbroken arm, studied it, sniffing his way up the forearm and, deciding that the flabby bicep was by far the meatiest part, bit down on it with everything he had while Mrs. Cannon screamed and flopped and he drew blood. He did not particularly care for the taste of old lady flesh, so he promptly spat it back in her face.

She didn’t last long after that.

The boys jumped up and down on her, shattering her bones until shards of white erupted through her skin. When they were done, Mrs. Cannon was not moving anymore. She was just a bloody, loose-limbed heap and they soon lost interest in her.

They ravaged the house.

They emptied closets and dressers, shredding clothes and bedding with steak knives from the kitchen. They broke mirrors and emptied cupboards, pulverizing dishes and crockery on the floor. They urinated on the sofa and chairs and on the corpse of Mrs. Cannon. Mike took a shit in her bed. Matt did the same on the living room carpet. Like an animal, he was amazed and excited by the raw stench of his own feces. He played with it. He sniffed it. He held it in his hands. He threw it at his brother. Then he knocked the pictures off the walls and wrote his name again and again in brown looping whorls of excrement.

And by that point, his name meant very little to him.

But he enjoyed how it looked on the walls…