The Devil Next Door

90

At last.

Louis found a car with keys in it. A little Ford Escort that smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. He had checked dozens of cars since he left the fields of the dead with the taste of the warrior woman’s blood still gamey and fetid in his mouth. This was the first one with keys. This was his salvation. This was his deliverance. He did not know where he was going and common sense told him there really wasn’t anywhere to go, but he was going nonetheless. He had to escape the primeval jungle of Greenlawn and his mind did not want to think about what came after that.

He turned the car over.

It started easily enough.

He shifted, released the clutch, and drove through the battle-ravaged streets of his home town. There was wreckage everywhere. Entire neighborhoods were still burning. Bodies were sprawled in the streets. Some were hanging in the trees.

He would not think about it.

He would not let himself understand what it meant, that Greenlawn was just another piece in a huge puzzle that had, in the course of less that twenty-four hours, completely gutted civilization from one end to another. He turned on the radio but there was nothing but dead air. All the power was out in Greenlawn now.

Yes, finally, a world lit only by fire.

An unconscious genetic urge will unmake all we have made, gut civilization, and harvest the race like cattle as we are overwhelmed by primitive urges and race memory run wild…

Earl Gould.

Jesus, Earl Gould.

Somehow he had forgotten about him as he was beginning to realize that he was forgetting about a lot of things. He would not think about it. He followed Providence Street until it crossed the river, then turned onto Main. He followed it right out of town, knowing that it hooked up with the county road and eventually led to highway 421. But where then? He did not know and he did not want to ask himself.

The sun would be up soon… and what would it see? What would it light? A world thrown back in time to the Pleistocene and all because of a gene. A microscopic chemical transmission of heredity.

Louis could not make sense of it. Not any longer.

He touched the bloody scab at his leg where the arrow had been. It would need attention soon or it would become infected.

Faces passed through his mind—Michelle, Macy, Dick Starling—too many to make sense of and each of them bringing pain to him.

Just outside town there was a sign the Kiwanis had put up: WELCOME TO GREENLAWN. His headlights splashed over it. Somebody had speared a human head atop of it. How fitting.

Ahead, there were silhouettes in the road.

Many of them.

Naked people standing in the road as the car sped down on them. They had regressed to the point that they did not understand what the car symbolized. That it was a moving machine that would crush them. Like deer, they stood there, transfixed by the headlights. Louis slowed down, knowing that he would have to drive right through them. The idea was not as offensive as it once might have been for he wanted to kill then. They represented everything he hated now.

He sounded the horn a few times and they only moved forward.

They were going to attack the car.

They were charging it with axes and spears, hammers and pikes and God knows what, all with that crazy animal gleam in their eyes. They were prehistoric hunters who had discovered a monster in their midst and they were going to kill it. They were going to slay the beast, bring the mastodon down.

Louis stopped the car, just amazed by what he was seeing.

Now he shifted into gear and slammed down on the accelerator. Fucking idiots. Fucking primitive idiots. Bear skins and tribes and stone fucking knives. It was incomprehensible. They charged the car and he plowed right into them, knocking three aside and rolling over the body of a fourth. But one of them swung something at the car and it had shattered the passenger side window. The Escort rocked with the impact but kept rolling.

Thank God, thank God.

Dammit.

More of them.

The same scene all over again. They were attacking the car. He hit a few of them and one of those was knocked up from the impact, crashing into the windshield. The glass went white with spidewebbing, the body still wedged there, blood running down the cracks. By then Louis could not see where he was going. He let out a mad scream as he saw that they were everywhere, naked people crowding the shoulders and standing in the road. He hit two or three more.

The wheel spun in his hands.

He screamed again as the car was pelted with rocks and the body of the person on the windshield fell into the car as the blood-streaked safety glass let loose. The body slid across the dashboard and fell right into his lap. He jammed the breaks as he tried to fight the bleeding husk off him. The car skidded through gravel, bumped and rolled, and then found a ditch and flipped right onto its side.

Louis could hear them howling in the distance.

He wasn’t injured.

The corpse—a man—had fallen into the backseat when the car went over. There was no time. Louis crawled through the missing glass of the passenger side window, pulling himself out. He slipped and fell into the ditch, right into about three feet of stagnant water. He splashed free, up the grassy bank. In the light of the rising sun he could see a farmer’s field spread out, sheep grazing.

He limped forward, his lungs aching, his breath hot in his throat.

The world was still shadowy and he stumbled right out into a pack of the savages. They had come here into this field after the sheep. The sheep were all dead. Skinned. What he had seen was not sheep grazing, but savages wearing their blood-spattered white hides.

Dozens of them rose up around him and he tripped over his own feet, going down in the grass.

He heard birds singing. The rooting, grunting sounds of the savages as they moved in on him. This was it. They had him and there was no more running, no more hiding, no more anything. But maybe better, he thought, to get it done with. For how long can you run when you’re the last man on earth and the monsters are closing in from every side?

Better to die than become like them.

He watched them come on and they offended him on every level. Throwbacks to a time when humans were nothing but filthy, shaggy predators covered in hides and ritualistic tattoos and piercings. Things that picked through bone heaps and fashioned crude weapons, coveting the skulls of their ancestors and the scalps of their enemies, chanting to long-forgotten pagan gods of the hunt, rearing their foul young in shadowy, meat-smelling caves where flesh was smoked—animal and human—over the ritual fires which lit their tenebrous, malevolent little world.

No, he refused to become something like that.

As they pressed in around him, pulling at him and scratching him, he lost consciousness and what a delicious fall it was headlong into the darkness, into the oblivion of nothingness. Even they could not get him here.

He was safe…