The Devil Next Door

18

When the door to her office opened, Michelle Shears almost came right out of her skin. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but it was only Carol, her boss. Usually she knocked, but today she burst right in. Stood there with a glassy look in her eyes.

“Have you heard?” she said.

Michelle felt butterflies winging in her belly. “What now?”

“It’s all over the radio.”

“I… no. I’ve just been trying to finish up some things. I want to get out of here.”

Carol just stared with those dead eyes. “It’s everywhere now.”

“What is?”

“What’s happening in this town. It’s happening everywhere. There’s rioting in LA. People are setting fires in Chicago. There’s been some kind of mass suicide in New York. Things are going crazy.”

Michelle tried to swallow but couldn’t.

Mass insanity… all over the country? Right away, like everyone else, she started looking for reasons, connections. She started thinking about terrorists letting lose some bioweapon, some kind of germ. She saw a show once where they said that if such a germ were let loose in a major airport, commuters would spread it from one end of the country to the other in a matter of hours.

Was that it?

No, it didn’t make sense. She could see it hitting Chicago and New York and LA, all the major arteries of the airlines. But Greenlawn? Unless someone just happen to have been infected on a flight and come back here, spread it around real fast… no, it didn’t make sense.

“What the hell’s going on, Carol?”

“I don’t know. But it’s all over the place. They said on the news some guy in Fort Wayne murdered a family with an axe. They were his next door neighbors for godsake.”

Michelle felt something beginning to fragment inside her.

She’d been entertaining some fantasy all afternoon of getting home and getting out of town with Louis until the madness blew over. But if it was everywhere… where could you run to?

“The governor of Texas has declared a state of emergency, Michelle. It’s all over CNN. People are killing each other. Like animals.”

“Good God.”

Carol just stood there a moment, hugging herself. Then she looked over at Michelle with dark, simmering eyes. “Animals,” she said. “Animals. I wonder what that’s like…”

She left the room.

Michelle looked out her window.

She saw the sunny streets of Greenlawn. Everything looked perfectly fine. In the distance, there was the whine of an ambulance. All over the country. Good God. All over the country. But she knew she couldn’t worry about that. Not now. She had to worry about this place.

About Greenlawn.

Suddenly, she could see nothing else, know nothing else. Tunnel vision. One place. Her town. Her territory. Everything else faded as something important and vital inside her went with a warm, wet snapping noise. There was purity then. There was joy. She could smell her own skin and taste the salt on her lips and feel the heat between her legs.

She rummaged through her desk drawers.

Found something she could use.

A letter opener with a six-inch blade…