The Devil Next Door

58

He ran because there were too many of them. He shot and killed two, wounded a third, and as the others set on them to feast and three more went after Doris, Louis ran into the back of the store and out the rear entrance. He cut down the alley, moving through the shadows. He waited for shapes shaggy, meat-smelling and vaguely human to jump out at him… but none did.

He made it onto the street.

There were bodies everywhere.

Had there been that many before? Two or three were lying by the car. He couldn’t remember if they’d been there before. Carefully, he stepped forward and then he knew. Maybe one or two them had been there, but not these others. If they had, he would have run right over them. These bodies were dirty and ragged, but they were alive. Crazies playing dead and setting up an ambush.

Very clever.

Louis scanned the darkened buildings, the rooftops, the shadowy storefronts. Even with the streetlights on, the main force could have been just about anywhere. So many places to hide. He moved forward, pretending not to notice the ones on the pavement… a man, a woman, a teenage boy. But he gave them a wide berth. He heard one of them stir behind him and swung back with the gun.

“You can get up now,” he said, “nap time is over.”

The boy made it to his feet first, bringing out a carving knife. Louis pulled the trigger and the kid took a round in the chest that knocked him flat. He twisted and thumped on the pavement, hissing and gagging and that was it. The man ran off, but the woman came right at him. Louis fired point-blank at her. The slug caught her in the belly and she went down, a river of blood running from her hands which were clenched over her stomach. She had no weapon. Just fingers and teeth. Her face was smudged with dirt, her eyes huge and glistening, staring black holes. She was gutshot and she wouldn’t make it. She squirmed around on the ground leaving a blood trail, coughing and wheezing.

Louis was sickened by the killing he had done, yet exhilarated. There was power in holding a gun, using it. He could feel the darkness welling inside him then, something huge and organic and clutching, the beast within clawing up, scrambling for hold, wanting to own him. It liked the killing. It fed on it like an engorged leech at an artery.

He fought it back down.

He would kill to survive. Not for pleasure. That was the difference, that was the difference between civilization and the primal call of the jungle.

Louis stared at the bodies. They had thought him easy prey and now he had shown them different. There was a satisfaction in that.

“All right!” he called out, his voice echoing off the buildings. “You wanted me and here I am! Come and get me! You hear me? Come and get me!”

He heard sounds from between the stores, from alleys and shadowy tangles of shrubs. Rustling sounds. They were there, but they did not want to show themselves.

Sure, not much more than animals, but certainly not stupid animals.

“DID YOU FUCKING HEAR ME?” he shouted now. “SHOW YOURSELVES! WHERE’S THE GIRL? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HER? YOU LET HER GO AND WE’LL DRIVE OUT! YOU CAN HAVE THIS PISSING TOWN!”

More rustling, some subdued voices, nothing more.

The woman on the ground was still squirming. Louis was suddenly filled with a hatred he had never known before. The blood, the carnage, none of it could touch him. Macy, dear God, poor sweet Macy. He walked right over to the woman and kicked her. She grunted and rolled to the side. When she tried to get up to crawl, he kicked her in the ass. When she turned to bare her bloody teeth at him, he kicked her in the face. Her eyes rolled back white and she flopped to the ground.

That got them.

He was abusing one of the pack and they simply could not allow such a thing. Whatever had rotted their minds and swept 7,000 years of recorded civilization into the dustbin, it had not taken away such very human traits as devotion and loyalty. Maybe they were animals and madmen, but they were a clan and they lived and died for the clan.

They came running out. First five or six, then twice that number and twice it again. They emerged in twos and threes, joining together in a mob. They carried axes and pipes, knives and shards of broken glass. But most simply came empty-handed. Men, women, children. Even a woman nursing a child. They were a filthy and ragged lot, looking little like modern humans and very much like a Neolithic tribe. Hunters and gatherers. And wasn’t that the most amazing thing of all? That they had degenerated so quickly in just a matter of hours? Maybe that said something about the human race and maybe it said something else about the contagion that had afflicted them. The only thing that betrayed their primitiveness, were the Nike shoes and cargo shorts and Wet Seal t-shirts some of the women wore. Though many were shirtless and barefoot, many others were stark naked and painted for battle.

Like New Guinea headhunters.

They assembled on the other side of the Dodge and stopped. Louis could hear them breathing, smelling the body odor and blood on them, a stench of urine and feces and something like vomit.

Behind him, he heard the pattering of feet and some red-haired kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen, came bounding out with a broomstick in his hands. He was naked, his genitals swinging from side to side. He had painted up his body with blue and gray streaks of makeup like a Celtic warrior, bands set under his eyes, his lips painted white.

Louis fired and missed.

Fired again and caught him in the arm. He could plainly hear the kid’s humerus snap like a green stick. The kid skidded to his knees, screaming and spitting, a pink slime of foam on his lips.

Louis put the gun back on the others. “I want the girl,” he said. “I want the girl now and if I don’t get her, I start killing you sonsofbitches.”

They just stood there, holding their weapons, clenching and unclenching their fists. Drool ran from their mouths. Contorted faces were twisted into sneers. Eyes were wide and staring and glassy. There didn’t seem to be any intelligence in them. Hunger and need and hatred, surely, but nothing more. Louis could not believe that any of them were smart enough to orchestrate this little trap.

“Hello,” a voice said.

Michelle stepped from behind the clan. She was still wearing her skirted business suit, though her nylons were torn and her usually carefully coifed long dark hair was matted and there were leaves stuck in it, what looked like flowers and sticks braided into it. There was blood all over her shirt from the killing she’d done. Even with the suit, she was unbearably tribal, vicious. This was her clan, her pack, Louis knew then with a yawning emptiness opening inside him. She was their warrior queen. They were all ritualistically painted with snaking bands, symbols, and tiger-stripes. But their faces… yes… they all bore the individual insignia of the tribe, the ceremonial sacraments of the wild hunt: the likenesses of skulls. Every face was painted the same. A flat marble-white base that covered face, ears, and throat, black upturned crescents around the eyes, a black oval around the mouth, and an elongated black triangle down the bridge of the nose.

The effect was chilling.

Michelle was painted the same, the dark glittering jewels of her eyes staring out from that grim death mask. She was no longer human; she was an animal now.

“Michelle… baby, come over here with me,” Louis said to her, everything breaking loose inside him, tears welling in his eyes. Her glare was fierce, hungry, lethal… yet, he wasn’t afraid, not really. Just the sight of her, painted up and bloody or not, crushed him, made him want to weep at her feet. He pitied her, he pitied himself. That their love should be shattered like this, torn asunder by some primordial horror from the dawn of the race. It was an obscenity. “Please, Michelle, please…”

She just looked at him. There was no recognition in her eyes… and yet, there was… something. She seemed almost hypnotized as she stared at him, unblinking. Inside, deep inside, she knew him and the knowledge made her blood run and her heart beat and her chemistry long to be joined with his.

“They’re… they’re all crazy, Michelle. Come with me. I don’t know what the hell got a hold of you and the rest of them, but we can figure it out. Come on, baby. I love you and you know I love you. Don’t do this.” He felt the tears well up in his eyes and overflow onto his cheeks, felt his throat constrict until his voice sounded like that of a whiny little boy. But the emotions he was feeling were almost too much. They paraded through his head with the memories and each one laid him open. He held out a shaking hand. “Come over here, Michelle. I’m your husband. I love you. I won’t let them hurt you.”

She just stared. Maybe her mind was a little more intact than the others, but something essential in her was burned away. There was no love in those eyes. There was manipulation, madness, a means to an end, but certainly not warmth. They were the eyes of a spider as it hunts down its prey, prepares to suck the blood from a fly in its web… a favored fly the spider is drawn to, but a fly nonetheless.

She grinned then and for the first time he saw her teeth… Michelle always had very long teeth, perfectly straight and perfectly white… and now he saw that they had been filed to deadly points, those beautiful teeth. So when she grinned at him, it was the lewd grin of a snarling wolf, a grin of fangs… fangs that were stained pink from what she had been feeding on.

He almost went out cold at that.

She was gone. Not only had she killed, but she had torn and rent her prey with her teeth, filling herself with bloody meat.

Oh, Michelle, oh baby… oh dear God…

The primal fall.

He could hear the guy on the radio and he fully understood it as he hadn’t before. You had to see someone you love regress into a beast to appreciate those words:

Bonfires and stone knives by this time next week, animals hunting in the streets… most of them of the two-legged variety. Now comes the time of the primal fall…

He made a gagging, whimpering sound in his throat that was partly repulsion and partly deep-hewn pain.

It stopped Michelle for a moment. She seemed to understand inarticulate noises better than words. Inside she felt them and understood. She cocked her head to the side, softened, but it didn’t last. She closed her mouth, pursed her lips, then shook her head frantically like a dog trying to throw off bothersome flies. “Come with… us,” she managed. “Walk with… us… the night, the night… the night…” she said to him, her words breaking off into a coarse barking sound.

Oh, it would have been easy, but he did not want to be one of them. “No,” he said very loudly.

Bands of shadow fell over her face, making her already skullish appearance unpleasantly cadaverous. Her eyes were seething with a fathomless darkness. She brought up her hand and pointed one long, bloodstained finger at him. And then she said it. Said it without remorse: “Kill him!”

She was their queen and they just mindless drones and soldiers. The stupor that had consumed the mob broke like the snapping of fingers and they vaulted forward. Some coming around the car, but most scrambling right over the top of it.

Louis fired three shots into the mass and then ran, pausing and shooting, pausing and shooting, dropping half a dozen of them. Then his gun clicked on empty and the others poured forth like hungry insects looking for something to tear and feed upon. Behind them, near the car, Michelle just stood there, supreme and malefic and insane, grinning and grinning at the idea of her husband’s grisly death.

Louis ran…