The Devil Next Door

77

The Baron’s pack now numbered upward of a hundred. As they moved through the night, raiding from one neighborhood to the next, driving prey from hides, holes, and coverts, none dared stand against them. They raced up streets and down avenues, scattering other hunters and hunting them down if they did not flee. The Baron’s strategy was simple: seize anything worth taking, slaughter the stragglers, burn the houses, and generally lay siege to anything in their path with a horrendous scorched earth policy.

They ran afoul of other hunting packs, of course, and put them down or enslaved their numbers, always moving, always taking more territory and leaving a trail of butchered corpses, dead animals, and flaming neighborhoods in their wake. Soon, the Baron’s ranks included not just children but adults, dozens of them. They wielded axes and pikes, spears and knives, hammers and baseball bats with spikes driven into their ends.

Women were raped and men skinned. The elderly used for sport. And tiny children of no use to the pack were given to the flames, for all knew that a sacrifice must be offered to ensure a successful campaign.

And on it went.

They were an irresistible, relentless force.

Then, on the south end of Providence Street, they were met by another pack. Just as determined. Just as ferocious. Just as territorial. The only difference was this group came with dogs. What seemed to be hundreds of barking, yapping, howling dogs. Things driven mad by the scent of aggression and the rich, tantalizing odor of blood in the air.

Battle was joined.

Energized by bloodlust, hysterical fury, and animal ferocity, the two opposing armies of savages—all painted for war, some naked, others dressed in rags or fresh hides, many brandishing death totems of human scalps, heads, and assorted body parts—charged at each other in howling groups. To a casual observer, it was a deranged display of psychotic frenzy unmatched since the barbarian invasions of Europe. But to those involved it was strictly territorial, the sort of manic blood-rite that the tribes lived for.

The Baron led the first charge, hacking and cutting his way through the intruders. Bodies were cut down by spears and hatchets and machetes. Bones splintered and heads were smashed in, limbs were sliced free and bodies fell disemboweled in the streets. The first five minutes was nothing but wholesale murder, the packs beating one another down, slitting throats and chopping on the fallen.

Then the dogs charged in.

The Baron, pulling back with dozens of wounded, watched them tear through the ranks, biting and clawing and feeding on the injured. A huge shepherd gripped the head of a boy and shook it in his jaws while three others fed on his writhing body. The dogs ravaged both sides and even themselves. When an axe dropped a Doberman, its head nearly cleaved in two, a group of beagles tore it apart, fighting over the bloodiest chunks of meat. Men killed men and children killed children and both killed dogs and were killed by them.

As the Baron watched the atrocities, there was a vague memory in the back of his mind: driver ants. South American driver ants cutting a killing swath through the jungle. Trees and bushes stripped, animals eaten down to bones. Nothing escaped them, not even men who were stupid enough to get in their way. It flashed through his mind and vanished as quickly.

The dogs were like that.

The main force was an army of teeth and claws and hunger. A huge and voracious machine of destruction. The smell of blood, meat, and death drove them wild.

They attacked people. They attacked parked cars. They charged through screen doors and dove through windows. They tore sidings loose and chewed at woodwork. They ran roughshod through gardens and tore small trees up by the roots. If they couldn’t kill it or maim it, they pissed on it.

The Baron saw dogs fucking. Dogs eating people. Dogs eating each other. A fearful feeding frenzy. A group of armed women had been caught in their masses and the dogs went insane tearing and ripping and biting. Pretty soon so many dogs had pressed into the melee, you couldn’t see the women. Just dogs biting each other. Biting themselves. Blood was flowing, was gathering in a heaving, stinking mist over the streets. And still the killing continued.

Both packs were under siege now by the animals and fought side by side.

Tribal affiliation was forgotten.

A raging group of men with machetes, most homemade, tried to slash through their numbers. But the dogs were like ants sacrificing themselves madly for their queen. They literally piled up their own crushed bodies until their attackers had to withdraw… into an onslaught of dogs and crazy solitary hunters who claimed no true affiliation and slaughtered anything that moved.

Providence Street that night was a cacophonous hive of noise… barking, howling, screeching, wailing. Some was from the animals that walked on four legs and some from those that walked on two. Just absolute, thundering chaos.

Slowly, though, the dogs were dropping, being overwhelmed by cutting blades and devoured by their fellows.

The Baron, with so many of his pack littering the street, charged in again and again, dealing death and fighting tooth and nail. Swinging his machete like a sword, he gutted cockapoos and boxers and spaniels while to all sides the wounded were drowning in the living, biting sea.

The Baron was bitten, gouged, bloodied, and torn.

But he never stopped killing.

He saw a poodle hanging from a hunter’s face by its teeth. He decapitated it, but the head still hung, jaws locked in a death grip.

Dozens of hunters took his lead and frantically waded in, chopping at the animals, chopping at blood-covered savages, and in the end, chopping at one another. The leader of the other pack, whom the Baron had sighted as his kill and his kill alone, was overwhelmed. He’d once been known as Dick Starling and he’d once been knocked cold by Macy Merchant, but by then he was just a savage wearing the bloody pelt and peeled headpiece of a Great Dane. A Rotweiler—split neatly in half—was hanging from his belly by its fangs, still biting, still clawing. The Baron, dragging an Irish Setter with him whose teeth were in his leg, moved in and decapitated him.

Finally, even the Baron withdrew from the killing fields.

He slashed the Setter until it released its bite and stood there, bloodied but unbowed, viewing the carnage around him. The decimation of both packs.

Then a final group of dogs came at him.

A hodgepodge of shepherd, collie, and Great Dane mixes, they advanced. He stood his ground. They moved with a slow, economical shambling, fur bristling, jaws open.

The first one made its move and the Baron slashed the business end of the machete across its eyes. He pivoted and split open another’s skull. Still another hit him and he tossed it aside, eviscerating it. The teeth of yet another sank into his leg and he chopped its foreleg clean.

Then he ran as a howling, barking pack thundered across the killing fields at him.

He made a nearby porch and turned, swinging the machete with blind wrath, splitting the maw of a beagle and then throwing himself through the open door. They ripped the screen door right off its hinges, seven or eight of them, and began to fight over it like a tasty bitch.

The Baron pressed his back against the inside door as they battered and rammed it. Way they were going, he knew, it wouldn’t last long. The door was hardwood and he could hear them smashing themselves against it, their bones popping and crunching. There was a thin pane of glass that ran the length of the door and the Baron forgot about it until the head of a huge, filthy Rotweiler crashed through it, its muzzle catching him in the back and sending him sprawling. But the pane of glass was not safety glass that spiderwebbed with cracks and fell into itself. It was plate glass. It shattered, but a six-inch triangular shard from the base lodged easily into the dog’s throat. The more it wrenched and flopped its massive, heavily-muscled body, the deeper the shard sank until it was impaled there, whimpering.

But it wasn’t dying fast enough for the Baron.

There was a pile of lumber near the stairs, a wall that had been stripped to lathing. Home improvement. The Baron saw a gun-shaped apparatus sitting on the lumber. He went for it, palming it. A cordless drill with a half-inch bit threaded into the chuck. Part of him seemed to recognize it, but there was no conscious memory.

But he knew a weapon when he held it in his fist.

He pressed the trigger. The drill bit whirred around.

Grinning, he ran the bit right through the dog’s thrashing skull. Its eyes glazed over as he scrambled its brains. It slumped over dead, its sheer bulk keeping the others away from the opening it had shattered in the glass.

The Baron pulled the drill back, studied the bit that was slimed with gray matter, bone chips, and strands of coarse hair.

Some time later, he wandered outside.

The street was filled with gutted corpses, human and dog, parts of them, blood and hair and entrails. A few savages devoured raw joints of meat or fought over juicy shoulder portions. What dogs were left scavenged the dead. There was nothing but the moaning of the wounded, the whine of dying dogs.

What remained of the Baron’s pack were beaten, bloodied, exhausted. They stepped amongst the bodies, slipping on blood and corkscrews of intestines.

They gathered at the Baron’s side.

Although he was bitten, blood-streaked, and in considerable pain, he had never felt so joyously alive before…