The Devil Next Door

52

They had her now and Macy knew it just as she knew that whatever came next, whatever unimaginable horror that might be, it would be the end of her. She was still gagged. She imagined she would always be. They had dragged her into a sporting goods store and threw her on the floor. Some of them left, but others stayed to guard her. A boy and girl who were probably grade school age, their eyes shining in the semi-darkness, and a woman who wore a red-checked hunting shirt, unbuttoned, naked beyond that.

They all had the same eyes… red-rimmed, almost translucent like those of wolves, just staring with a fixed blackness at their world.

The new world they would inherit.

A man came in, carrying a club with a nail driven in the end of it. He set it aside, and helped the kids drag Macy into the back room, some kind of storeroom behind the counter. She fought against them and they kicked her, hit her. She punched the girl in the face and the girl went berserk. She made a hissing sound like a mad dog and proceeded to slap the hell out of Macy, her arms windmilling, the slaps landing hard and hurting one after the other on Macy’s face until she stopped moving. The boy grabbed an arm and bit it. The girl did the same with her leg. Not just a nip like the boy, but biting down hard until Macy screamed behind her gag.

She could feel the blood running down her bare thigh.

The woman came in now. By the light of a nightlight—which they all seemed just absolutely fascinated by—she looked up into the woman’s face. It was shrunken like the face of a corpse, deep-cut by wrinkles that looked almost like scars. Gray hair hung in her face like moss. She bent down, sniffed Macy’s throat, then licked her cheek.

Her breath was like tombs.

Grunting in her throat, she rallied the two children who began to strip Macy under the watchful gaze of the man.

Good God, more than just savages, animals, but a family of them: mother, father, two children.

They tore off Macy’s shorts, her shirt, ripping them right off her. And when they wouldn’t come, they used their knives to cut them free, slicing her in the process. Naked now save for bra and panties, they rolled her face-down and tied her hands behind her back. She was trussed like a swine ready for the roasting pit.

She cried out, fighting against her bonds. The girl grabbed her hair and rolled her over. Macy tried to shout behind the gag. The girl slapped her again. Then something hot and wet, almost burning sprayed in her face: urine. The boy was standing there, pissing on her. The stink was rank, gagging. Not normal human urine at all… this was wild with a sharp-smelling musk to it.

Then, as the woman watched over her, the children joined the man.

She heard them wrestling with something, something heavy. They were grunting and puffing, making snarling sounds in their throats from time to time. She could hear the man straining. A pounding noise. Rap, rap, rap-rap-rap. Macy did not want to know what they were doing… but she craned her head and looked. Needing to see.

That scream again, held in check by the awful-tasting gag in her mouth.

By the glow of the nightlight and the fading illumination coming in from the street, she saw… oh dear God… she saw—

She saw a corpse hung by its feet.

She did not know who it was and it was really too dim by that point to see, but it was the corpse of a woman. Oh, how meticulous and wicked were they. They had nailed the feet right to a beam overhead. That was the pounding she heard. As the man hoisted the woman up, the children nailed her feet by standing on crates. Her arms were still swinging back and forth from it. It was the corpse of a middle-aged woman, heavy in the breast, bunched with fat at the belly and hips. There was a glistening scar across her abdomen probably from an old C-section. Her flesh was impossibly white, almost luminous in the nightlight that buzzed on and on. The crown of her head and hair were clotted with blood that looked black.

There was a shattering noise out in the store like a case had been broken into and the man came back. He threw something on the floor: knives. He’d been in a knife case. Dozens of hunting knifes, blades sliver and razor-sharp gleaming on the floor.

They were going to slaughter her like a steer.

Like autumn’s first kill—

Taking a handful of the dead woman’s hair, he yanked her head up and stabbed a hunting knife with a seven-inch blade right into her throat, sawing and sawing as blood splashed down his arms and over his chest. It sounded like the noise of sawing the lid off a Halloween pumpkin: meaty, muscled. He sawed, then jerked her head to the side with cracking motion, then pulled it right off and tossed it.

He went down on his knees and drank from the flow. The children fought their way in, drinking, slurping, sucking at the stump. The woman knocked them aside and lapped at the stream of blood, smacking her lips appreciatively.

The boy untied the gag and pulled it from Macy’s mouth. She dared not scream. He studied her face. He snapped at her with his teeth and giggled when she jerked in fear.

Then the girl cupped her hands, filling them with blood.

She crouched by Macy, careful not to spill the nectar.

“Here,” she said in a grating voice. “Here, here, here…”

She opened her hands and let the blood splatter over Macy’s mouth, rubbing her bloody hands all over her face and lips so that she got a good taste of it. “Good,” the girl said. “Good.”

Macy screamed, her face red and glistening. She thrashed and screamed, turned her head and vomited.

The man used his knife, cutting shanks of meat free from the dead woman’s thighs and belly. The family fed upon them, chewing and snapping and tearing, eating it raw and bloody like tigers in the jungle. Cutting free a slab of meat from between the woman’s leg, probably her vagina, he handed it to the woman. She sniffed it, licked it, then she stuffed it into her mouth whole, chewing it slowly. She kept taking it out, working it with her fingers, then stuffing it back in and chewing it some more.

And in Macy’s mind a voice was screaming: she’s not eating it! She’s not eating it at all… she’s tenderizing it, chewing it to a soft fleshy mush.

And that’s exactly what she was doing.

She went down on her hands and knees, breathing hard, her face glossy with blood, the thin juice of what she had been chewing upon smeared on her lips. She spit it into her hand along with a snotty tangle of saliva. She held it out, shaking it at Macy, grunting deep in her throat with an almost bleating sort of sound. The others went down on all fours with her.

Then together, like beasts of the field lowing in the grass, they crept in closer, blood-drenched ghouls with huge black eyes, their teeth white and shining, drool falling from their mouths.

They moved in closer… and closer.

Macy screamed because she knew.

While the children and the man took hold of her, the woman forced her jaws open. She stuck the handle of a knife in her mouth and pried them open. Then she brought the thing she had been chewing on closer, forcing it into Macy’s shrieking mouth…