The Devil Next Door

1

Louis shambled through the streets carrying a bone.

He slapped the ball knob of it in his other palm, knowing it could cause damage, knowing it could bring down enemies and also prey. And a man, he knew, was judged by the weapons he carried and the game he killed.

I need to find the girl. It is the season for the girl.

He had covered himself in river mud so that his enemies could not spot him so easily. The stench of the river bottoms also made his scent harder to pinpoint. He knew these things without thinking them. They were part and parcel of who he was. Imprinted onto the blueprint of his being.

He had found the rest of the clan.

Something had happened. They had all rushed off and left him. He found hundreds of corpses in the river. So many that he could have walked across them without ever getting his feet wet. He understood only that they were dead. It meant little more to him than that. He did not know that the gene that had been activated within them had reached fruition with a mindless mass migration wherein everyone—or nearly all—the town’s former residents heralded the call of the wild and left in a mad rush, trampling and killing one another, each seized by the inexplicable desire to run and run and run, to seek new feeding grounds and nesting habitat. The old, the wounded, the weak and diseased were purged in the process, their bodies lying everywhere. The others kept running through the fields and forests until what was inside them, what was activating them, finally ceased.

And by then, only a third of them were still alive.

In the coming days, they would regroup and form tribal units for the hunt.

Louis was unaware of this. Such things did not concern him. He was only interested in finding food, shelter, water, and possibly a mate. When he had the previous he would have the latter for the females always came when a male had built himself a handsome lair.

He walked through the town, pissing his scent so others would smell it and remember him.

He stepped over mutilated cadavers, snarled at dogs that were feeding upon them. A few people were digging through overturned garbage cans. He paid them no mind. Nor the few others that walked on past with distinctively simian strides. Brushing flies from his face, he saw only Greenlawn which lay before him like a ravaged and violated corpse.

By instinct and memory, he found the house.

The walls were painted with shit and blood. There was a carcass in the corner and a collection of fine cutting knives. Someone had made a comfortable nest of leaves and sticks and boughs. He would sleep in it. This would be his lair. He could smell something very familiar here. A trace odor of the woman he had laid with under the sheep hide. She did not concern him.

She was called something once and her feel was velvet, her skin like satin, her taste that of honey and secret sweetness—

He studied the symbols written in shit and blood on the walls. He picked at a scab on his foot, examining the numerous injuries, touching them, picking at them until fresh blood ran. He sniffed his armpits, his crotch, licking his fingertips and remembering the field of sheep. He could remember little else.

The girl.

Yes, he could remember the girl.

She was young and ripe and firm.

She would come, yes, he knew she would come. Even now she was probably looking for him as he had looked for her in the streets. He had marked scent posts with his urine throughout the city. His scent would lead her here.

Scratching his ass, he hummed a song and picked at his teeth, finding tasty bits wedged in them. Each one reminded him of things. Many made no sense. He found a piece of meat under a chair. It was old and its smell was intriguing. Sometimes, the worse something smelled, the more a man wanted to roll himself in it or taste it.

He ate the meat and curled up in the nest.

He slept…

2

He came awake later to a smell of blood that was rich and gamey. It came from the girl who stood over him, watching him. Yes, the girl. She had found her way to him. He looked up into her big chocolate brown eyes, studied the curve of her smallish breasts, the roundness of her hips, her tangled hair the color of wheat chaff. Her skin was scabbed with dried blood.

He grunted at her.

She licked her plump lips, gathered saliva with her tongue, then spit on him so he would know her smell. He rubbed her saliva on his fingers, smelling it, tasting it. It was pleasing and good.

This is the girl who lived in my heart. She has come here. It is her season.

He got to his feet and took hold of her roughly. She fought and clawed and he threw her down in the nest. He urinated on her to mark her with his scent. Once he did so, she accepted things and did not fight so.

He jumped on top of her and pressed a hand to her mouth and she bit it. He struck her and she scratched him. She seemed to find the play amusing. She watched him as he spread her legs and made ready to take her. He penetrated her and she gasped, grinding her teeth and hissing at him. This and only this is what she had been dreaming of, even before in those times she could no longer remember, she knew she dreamed of this and wanted it and felt it in her blood until it became part of her, the heat that had simmered before but now made her burn.

As he rammed into her, grunting and growling, a light passed through her eyes and in that momentary burst of light there was absolute horror because this was not how it was supposed to be at all, oh dear God, not like this, like this, like this… oh please, Louis it was not supposed to be like this…

But then it was gone and he pumped into her and she squirmed with the feel of it, knowing this was who and what she was and who and what he was, that they were joined in the ancient dance of the heat, his hands wrapped around her neck and her nails dug deep into his flesh and the blood ran and the world swam with tiny black dots and a voice in her head screamed until it became a howling, an atavistic baying, as every cell in her body electrified with primal starving estrus, yes, yes, yes, just like this, just like this, do it faster and faster, kill me kill me kill me—