The Devil Next Door

87

Louis watched the woman approach him and he was not entirely sure it was a woman. She was wearing a freshly peeled human hide and a looping scarf of bowels around her throat. As she glided towards him, she was muttering something under her breath in a hoarse, gargly sort of voice, brandishing the head of a teenage boy on a sharpened pole in one hand and an axe in the other.

What the hell is this now?

It was a woman, naked, washed down with blood and ceremonial paint. Her hair was a tangled, snarled mess plaited with what looked to be bones and sticks and shining beads. Her face was an absolute atrocity, like some gruesome tribal mask: flesh peeled away from her mouth in a lopsided oval so that her red-stained teeth were on full display, a slat of bone shoved through her nose, eyes like bleeding holes.

Frank Chalmers had been bad enough… but this… God.

She saw him there, singled him out from the masses in the streaming moonlight, and gestured at him with her axe, her teeth parting and a high, keening howl of rage and savagery cutting through the night.

Louis got to his feet and it was no easy thing with the pain throbbing in his leg. But he did get up and he faced her uneasily with the butcher knife in his hand.

The warrior woman charged, tossing the head pole aside. She came swinging her axe, absolutely demented and filled with primitive wrath. She looked like some kind of living voodoo fetish doll, a surreal version of a cannibal witch-doctor.

Louis ducked under the axe and slashed out with his knife.

But he was far too slow or maybe she was just too fast.

He missed her entirely and as regained his balance and brought his knife-hand around, she lashed out with a foot and kicked him in the side. His leg gave out immediately in a baptismal of pain and he went face-first into the grass, his head spinning and the breath gasping from his lungs.

She jumped on his back, a hot, greasy hand grabbed his hair and yanked his head back for throat-slitting. At least that’s what he expected, but the blade never came, but her teeth did. She seized his ear and bit right through it. They were filed sharp as daggers and sliced right through the cartilage. The pain made Louis forget about his leg. He thrashed beneath her as she held on, his bloody ear clenched in her jaws. He threw himself this way and that. When he got her off balance, he brought his elbow back and felt it mash into her face.

That did it.

She came up right away, grinning cadaverously in the moonlight, her teeth glistening with fresh blood. She looked at him with those dreadful vulpine eyes and uttered a growling guttural sound that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

“Bitch!” he cried at her. “Stinking rotten fucking bitch!”

It meant nothing to her, of course, but it did wonders for his adrenaline and hatred. She dove at him and he met her and they fought tooth and claw in the grass, rolling through the blood and spilled viscera. No weapons, just the rage of the primitive and the absolute loathing of the civilized man for such racial backsliding. It was like fighting a serpent. She writhed and squirmed with a fluid muscular grace, her teeth biting into him and her nails tearing him open.

Finally, he again threw her.

On all fours she faced him, a primordial thing of bloodlust, eyes wide and almost luminous like new moons. The stench of hot urine wafted from her. That and a sharp, gagging musk that was revolting.

She could have easily grabbed a weapon, but she did not. She was going to take him down like an animal with claws and teeth and nothing less would be acceptable to her.

Louis never had time to get his knife because she came again and he met her, raining down a series of blows on her that had no effect. He managed to get behind her, to lock an arm around her throat. He rode her like that while she thrashed and growled and snapped, coming alive beneath him, but he held fast, forcing her head back with a strength he didn’t know he possessed.

She lost balance and collapsed under his weight.

He yanked her head back, fingers digging into her eyes until she screamed and still he kept yanking and straining until she began to make wheezing, gagging sounds in her throat. Things began to pop and snap in there. He kept stretching it back until his face was buried in her oily warm throat. Until he could smell her filthy reek and taste her foul dog-smell.

He felt something pulsing in her throat.

Something throbbing and pumping and straining.

Without thought, wired mainly on instinct, he sank his teeth into her throat, biting and gnashing and tearing until that pulsing thing sheared open and sprayed hot, salty blood down his throat and into his face.

But he did not let go.

He kept chewing and ripping as the woman went slack beneath him.

He held onto her until she was limp beneath him. He limped maybe three or four feet and went down in the grass, vomiting, cleansing himself of the unclean, polluted taste of her.

When he gained his feet, there was nothing but corpses scattered in the moonlight. The hunters had moved on…