The Devil Next Door (32 page)

The sound of padding bare feet from behind him.

He turned, ready to fight, heard a curious whooshing sound and another arrow caught him right in the belly. It didn’t go all the way through. The impact put him on his ass, knocked the wind from him. His knife clattered to the concrete. Then the pain came: sharp, cutting waves of it as what seemed oceans of blood welled from the entrance wound of the arrow. Sweating, straining, his heart pounding in his chest, Warren let out a strangled cry and pulled the arrow from his belly. Blood gushed from the hole. He felt dizzy, confused.

The bloody arrow in his hand had a triple-barbed, four-bladed tip on it, a broad head used for bear hunting. It fell from his fingers. He tried crawl down the sidewalk, but he just didn’t have anything left to crawl
with.

Clutching his bleeding belly, he opened his eyes.

They
had ringed him in: the hunters.

There were a dozen of them with clubs and broom handles sharpened to lethal points. They were all dirty and streaked with blood and paint. A high-breasted, green-eyed young woman with a bow in her hands stepped forward. She made a hissing sound and another woman stepped up. She was older than the first, but well-muscled, sleek, her face painted with red and green bands as was her naked body. Things like beads and sticks and tiny bones were braided in her hair. She had a slat of bone thrust through her nose and had peeled her lips away with a razor so her teeth and gums were on display. She carried an axe in one hand and a sharpened broomstick in the other with a human head, that of a teenage boy, impaled on the tip.

Warren blinked at her through his pain. He recognized her. They’d brought the body of the boy to her in the wheelbarrow. She had given the crowd an offering of the old woman upstairs.

She did not recognize him; her eyes were glassy, translucent.

She chattered her teeth and trembled with rage, her eyes simmering black with a vast, stupid hatred.

Warren did not look for mercy and he did not get any. The others waded in with clubs and began beating him until his bones were heard to snap, until his ribs were staved in, and his lower jaw was shattered. Knobs of bloody bone thrusting through his ripped uniform pants, he inched on the ground like a slug, moaning and groaning.

The woman with the bow came over. A hot stench of blood and decay wafted from her. She was menstruating. Blood all over her legs. It dripped from her. While the others held him, she crouched over him and rubbed her moist red vulva over his face, marking him with a crude cross of menstrual blood.

“Now,” she said.

Marked for the reaping.

The other woman handed over her broomstick with the head on it. She gripped her long-handled axe with both hands. With a manic, shrieking cry of delight, she swung the axe and decapitated Warren quite cleanly. His broken body lurched, shook. The eyes in his head blinked a few times and then glazed over with a stark finality.

One of the hunters took his head and impaled it on a broomstick.

He raised it up to the darkening sky and let go with a screeching blood-maddened war cry…

49

Louis kept expecting the dead people in the café to move.

He kept expecting them to wink at him or to call him by name, perhaps take hold of him in their cold, sticky red fists and show him exactly what had gone through their minds when they pressed that serrated steel to their throats, demand that he do the same.

For it was better than the alternative and he knew it.

There was a rustle of cloth and he spun around, his eyes wide and his mouth hooked in a terrible grimace. One of the men at the counter slid from his seat and fell to the floor. The little girl at the table fell forward, striking the plate before her face-first. The fat lady trembled and rolled out of the booth, coming down hard, her bloody knife clattering across the floor and stopping at Louis’ feet.

For one split second, he did nothing. His mind was filled with a roaring, whooshing sound and he was certain that they were coming alive around him, waking up. That they would look upon him with dead, yellowing eyes and reach out for him with blood-encrusted hands. And then everything in him went loose and he almost fell down, then tightened up stiff as a plank. A scream came out of his mouth, but it was dry and scratchy and barely more than a hissing sound.

The dead were just dead.

But the idea of three of them coincidentally moving, falling over or sliding out of their seats, was just too much and Louis could not accept it. His heart hammering and his breath coming very fast, he forced himself to move. To step over the body of the fallen man. He expected them to move again, to reach out or whisper his name, but they were just dead. And to prove this to himself, he went right over to the state cop—avoiding the reflection of his grinning, staring face in the mirror— and pulled the gun from his holster. It was a 9mm. And soon as Louis pulled it out, the cop’s corpse fell over like a tree.

Louis stepped around him, the gun in his hand.

Outside, he heard something that made him go white: the high, joyous peals of laughing children. Just for a moment, but it had been there. Something passed before the window of the café and Louis turned, bringing up the gun and pulling the trigger. But nothing happened. His hands shaking so badly that he almost dropped the gun, he found the safety and clicked it off.

He heard running feet.

He ran to the window, the gun out before him. Out there, the streets were empty. Completely empty. His entire body shook and his bladder felt very full. His heart was pounding so hard he thought it would blow out of his chest. He could see his Dodge from where he was, see it very well.

And the doors were wide open.

Behind him, something moved…

50

They had the girl now.

They dragged her into the shadows while the man was in the café. He never even saw them or suspected they were near. That’s how the clan knew that he was not a hunter, that he was soft and weak, his senses still deadened by who and what he was. Nothing but prey. They could have charged in and taken him but the Huntress did not want that. She would call them to the hunt. She would select the prey. She would find the meat and show them how to bring it down.

She was strange.

She was careful.

But she was also very cunning, very dangerous, and she killed without warning. The others let out a cry of anger when they struck, but not the Huntress. She smiled, exuded a scent of calm, then slashed your eyes, your throat.

The hunters stared down at the girl in the grass.

The men sniffed her. The women pulled at her hair.

She was theirs now…

51

Louis turned, his heart pounding mercilessly.

He turned and found himself staring down the barrel of a double-ought shotgun. The woman clutching it had crazy eyes, messy blond hair. She was dirty, bruised, her shirt was ripped open in the front and he could see most of her left breast quite plainly. But it was those eyes that held him: they were blank, almost unfocused like the eyes of a sleeper.

In a voice that was too calm, too easy, she said, “You just set that pistol on the countertop, mister, and I won’t blow your fucking head off.”

She spoke clearly. Her speech was not garbled or filled with snarling glottals like the regressed ones. He thought she was still human. Yet…her eyes were scary. They made him feel weak, vulnerable, everything inside him running like tepid water.

“Easy,” he said, setting the 9mm down carefully. “I’m not like
them.
I’m not an animal. I’m still human.”

“No shit? Well, excuse me, fuckhead, if I don’t exactly believe that.”

Louis realized then that she wasn’t crazy, just scared, confused, and more than a little desperate. She would kill if she had to. But he saw that she did not really want to.

He kept his hands in the air. “I’m human and you know it. If you doubted it, you would have shot me. Have you ever seen one of them with a gun?”

She sighed. “I guess not.”

“It’s the regression,” he told her. “A return to the jungle, to the original man, the original woman. They are like our ancestors. They hunt. They kill in packs. They reject anything of our world. I think it might almost be a phobia with them.”

“Listen,” she said, lowering the shotgun, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. But I’m glad I found you. We might be the only two left. I’m Doris Bleer. You?”

“Louis Shears.” He crossed over to the window. Practically dark. “We don’t have time for this. There was a girl with me. In that car out there. I think she wandered off. I have to find her. She’s in shock.”

Doris shook her head. “She didn’t wander off, Louis. They took her. The crazy ones. I saw ‘em from the window in the back room where I was hiding.”

“Then I have to go after them,” he said, grabbing up the 9mm.

“Louis,” the woman said, looking very compassionate for the first time. “I’m sorry about your girl. But you’ll never see her again. Next time you do, she’ll either be dead or she’ll be one of them.”

“You’re fucking crazy,” he said, filled with emotional turmoil that turned within him like a steel screw.

“Wish I was. But I’m not. Neither are you.” She looked at him with those lost eyes. “They rushed in our house. They killed my husband. They…they cut him in two. They took my daughter. I escaped.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She shrugged, almost bulky beneath her defensive armor. Nothing could touch her. Not now. Not with what she’d seen. “An hour ago…before I hid out here…a pack of them chased me. My daughter was running with them. My own fucking daughter, Louis. She had a knife in each hand.
She was hunting me. Do you understand? She was hunting her own mother!”

Louis bled for her, but there was only so much blood in him. Right now his blood was reserved for Macy and Michelle. “I’m going out. I’m going to get her back.”

Louis scrambled over to the door and something let out a sharp, piercing ring. His cellphone. He fumbled it from his pocket.

“Hello?” he said, his voice tinny and weak. “H-hello?”

There was breathing on the other end, deep and drawn-out.

“Who is this?” he said.
“Who the fuck is this?”

There was a muted giggling on the other end and then a voice. “Hello, hello, hello.”

An echo.

Michelle.

But
not
Michelle.

This was an imitation of Michelle’s voice. Flat where it should have been bright; hollow where it should have been full; scraping where it should have been smooth and silky. Like a recording slowed down or sped up. A synthetic voice, a deranged voice. Some insane woman had borrowed Michelle’s voice and this was the blasphemy she was doing with it.

“Michelle?” he said. “Baby? Baby? Is that you?”

More breathing. The sound of a tongue licking lips. “Hello.”

“Michelle, please—”

The line went dead.

And Louis went dead with it…

52

They had her now and Macy knew it just as she knew that whatever came next, whatever unimaginable horror that might be, it would be the end of her. She was still gagged. She imagined she would always be. They had dragged her into a sporting goods store and threw her on the floor. Some of them left, but others stayed to guard her. A boy and girl who were probably grade school age, their eyes shining in the semi-darkness, and a woman who wore a red-checked hunting shirt, unbuttoned, naked beyond that.

They all had the same eyes…red-rimmed, almost translucent like those of wolves, just staring with a fixed blackness at their world.

The new world they would inherit.