The Devil Next Door

66

For some time, the thing that had once been Angie Preen and her tribe of hunters had been shadowing the teenage boy and his females. They had watched in rapt fascination as the boy led them on one conquest after another, running down strays and dogs and attacking smaller packs for food and weapons. They took no slaves. They killed and feasted on all. But mostly, they just killed for the sport of it.

Angie had killed for the sport, too.

But that was just to get the scent of blood into the tribe’s nostrils. To get them a taste of meat. It was necessary to get them enraged, to get them hungry and aggressive. None of this was truly a conscious decision on Angie’s part. She was going purely on instinct and race memory now. She knew these things without thinking them. For in the politics of survival only two things really mattered: territory and dominance. The boy and his females were poaching what Angie considered to be her territory and as she exerted her dominance over the tribe, so must the tribe exert their dominance against intruders to protect their hunting grounds.

The boy and his females were resting now.

In a vacant lot they had stopped and built a fire. Their blood-slicked bodies were lying in the grass. Several of the females were licking each other’s wounds. Two of them lay with the boy, their heads resting against his naked loins. One female was on watch, casting a wary eye into the darkness. She was alert and ready.

Streaked with blood and paint, Angie rose up from the cover of the hedges and stretched her bowstring with an arrow. She sighted in on the female who was watching. As her eyes swept across the field, Angie sucked in a breath of air and then slowly let it out between clenched teeth, releasing the arrow at the same time.

There was a barely audible whooshing noise.

The arrow pierced the female right in the center of her back, puncturing through, the tip exploding between her breasts with a gout of bone and blood. She made a gasping sound, then fell face-first into the fire.

By then, Angie’s tribe—bodies painted with scarlet and green bands for war—was charging from cover, howling and brandishing their weapons.

Kathleen Soames was the first into the fight. She jabbed the sharpened end of broomstick into a female’s neck and then turned on the boy. Before he could pull his knife she swung her axe with both hands and split his skull wide open.

Then it became a war of spears and knives and hatchets. Deadly close-in fighting. Angie’s tribe was numerically superior and had the advantage of surprise. They cut down half a dozen of the enemy before they could even mount a counterattack.

One of the females, blonde and fierce, well-muscled, gutted two of Angie’s best hunters with agile slashing motions that disemboweled them. Then she herself went down with three spears in her.

Angie was in the battle by then, shrieking her war cry as one of the females jumped out to meet her with a carving knife in each hand. There was no fear on her. Nothing but bloodlust. She slashed admirably, almost taking Angie’s head off, but then a hatchet caught her in the neck and Angie seized the moment. She leaped, bringing her foot down on the girl’s kneecap. There was a pleasing snap and a pleasing cry from the female who was instantly hobbled. Angie sliced her across the breasts with her butcher knife, then sank it between her legs, pulling upwards at the same time, opening the female wide. Her blood splashed against Angie and it was invigorating.

Another female with dark lustrous hair had gored two of Angie’s hunters.

As Angie approached her, she had just eviscerated one of them—a man—and he crouched there on his knees, his hands filled with the white coils of his own intestines. The female slashed him across the eyes, turned, and began stabbing the other hunter—a woman—in the face, throat, and chest.

Then Angie jumped her, knocking her down and stabbing her through the throat. The female fought and screamed, but Angie yanked her head back, felt the female’s teeth bite into her hand with an explosion of pain. Angie shrieked and slit her throat, sawing through the windpipe and carotid artery, hacking through meat and muscle until the blade bit into the cervical vertebrae. And even then, filled with pain and anger and a wild animal dementia for the kill, she cracked the vertebrae and sliced the head free. She held it up to the sky and the mother moon above in glory, blood splashing from the stump of neck down her face and making her feel more alive than she ever had before.

It went on for maybe ten minutes, probably not even that long. Knives cutting and axes chopping. Blades grinding against bone and clubs shattering ribs and spears punching through soft white underbellies.

And then… silence.

Nothing but corpses and parts there of.

Hacked victims still squirming on the ground.

And the victors, blood-drenched and meat-smelling, rising up from their kills and howling to the sacrificial moon high above. Angie, spitting out blood, surveyed the scene of carnage instantly. Three of the boy’s pack had run off to regroup, but the others had been slaughtered. Angie noted that six of her own were dead, five others mortally wounded.

Kathleen Soames had already eaten the boy’s genitals as was her way. Then she had disemboweled him and was now rolling in his blood and entrails, scenting herself with the kill. Others of the tribe were imitating her.

They did not touch the heart.

Angie carved open the chest with her knife, shearing through muscle, snapping ribs in her bare hands. She slit the arteries away, sliced the heart free of its protective membrane. As the others watched with almost religious awe, she bit down deep into it, feeling the strength of its owner becoming her strength.

The boy’s cunning was her own now.

As a hunter devours the flesh of a wolf to absorb its ferocity, so she ate the boy’s bloody heart, tearing strips of it away with her sharpened teeth, enjoying every taste and texture. She fed upon it with a mystical rapture, feeling his spirit entering her with each bite.

When she was done, she went around to the mortally wounded and slit their throats one after the other. It was the way a warrior must die. Not slowly like a pig in the straw, but with blood in their mouths and a glaring steel memory of killing.

As she stood over her tribe, watching for other packs that might try and poach their kills, her hunters took trophies of bones and ears and body parts. One woman was fashioning a necklace of vaginas that she had slit free then threaded onto a necklace of beads around her throat. More heads were taken and speared on broomsticks.

Kathleen Soames, her red and green banded body now entirely red, stood by Angie’s side, appraising the night. Killing to her was not only ritual and necessary, but almost sexual in nature. She drew her strength from the taking of lives, from her victim’s blood washing her down, from the select remains she then fed upon. She was a fearsome sight standing there, blood still dripping from her. The moonlight gleamed off the sticks and rodent bones braided into her hair, the bone inserted through her nose.

Her lips long since sliced free, she grinned with gums and teeth.

“Enough,” Angie told the tribe and they rose up from the field of blood, bones, limbs, and torsos.

The men urinated on the remains so all would know the penalty of poaching the tribe’s territory. The women squatted near where the men pissed and wetted the ground themselves.

Then, Kathleen Soames leading the way with a decaying head on a broomstick, they faded into the night, glutted and pleased at the offerings of the mother high above…