The Devil Next Door

75

The tribe moved through the shadows, the dappled moonlight from intertwined tree branches overhead enhancing the red and green serpentine stripes covering their naked bodies.

Angie, with Kathleen at her side, two hunters cast ahead, led them.

Dawn was hours away yet, but until then they would hunt. For the tribe lived, breathed, and was of the hunt. Without it they were nothing. It was their blood and soul and purpose. Without it they would be no better than any other pack of animals rooting in the dirt for grubs and worms. The hunt gave them focus, it gave them reason, it was the blood in their veins. Angie knew instinctively that her kind rose above the beast of the field because of the hunt.

When dawn came, they would slink back to their lair and sleep away the daylight hours like the rest, waiting for darkness.

But for now, they hunted. Being that they were more than predators, but creatures of opportunity, scavengers even, they were following another hunting clique. The one led by the old man in the animal skins. He had an army of children following him. They were raiding from neighborhood to neighborhood, killing and slaughtering and laying waste. The tribe followed along because the pickings were so good and out of sheer curiosity.

There was another reason, of course.

And that reason was Angie’s and hers alone.

The old man. He was an excellent hunter, a great leader, savage, bloodthirsty, and exceptionally cunning. Angie learned many things just watching how the old man led his raids. His hunters were very well disciplined.

She respected and feared him.

She emulated him.

She wanted to kill him.

Yes, that’s what she really wanted because that’s how it was done. When you killed another, drank their blood and feasted on their meat, you absorbed what they were. Their strength, their wisdom, their spirit became part of you. Angie knew as her ancestors had known that the center of it all, the nucleus of the being, was the heart itself.

She would kill the old man with one well placed arrow. Then she would bathe in his blood. And lastly, while the others fought over the tidbits, bones, and sweet meats, she would carve out the old man’s heart and eat it raw, filling herself with his spirit and vitality. For the heart was the center of the all, the hub of deeper mystery, the pulsing artery to the beyond. And when she had eaten it and filled her veins with his cruel potency and thrumming life force, then she would skin him and wear his flesh as a garment…