The Devil Next Door (33 page)

A man came in, carrying a club with a nail driven in the end of it. He set it aside, and helped the kids drag Macy into the back room, some kind of storeroom behind the counter. She fought against them and they kicked her, hit her. She punched the girl in the face and the girl went berserk. She made a hissing sound like a mad dog and proceeded to slap the hell out of Macy, her arms windmilling, the slaps landing hard and hurting one after the other on Macy’s face until she stopped moving. The boy grabbed an arm and bit it. The girl did the same with her leg. Not just a nip like the boy, but biting down hard until Macy screamed behind her gag.

She could feel the blood running down her bare thigh.

The woman came in now. By the light of a nightlight—which they all seemed just absolutely fascinated by—she looked up into the woman’s face. It was shrunken like the face of a corpse, deep-cut by wrinkles that looked almost like scars. Gray hair hung in her face like moss. She bent down, sniffed Macy’s throat, then licked her cheek.

Her breath was like tombs.

Grunting in her throat, she rallied the two children who began to strip Macy under the watchful gaze of the man.

Good God, more than just savages, animals, but a family of them: mother, father, two children.

They tore off Macy’s shorts, her shirt, ripping them right off her. And when they wouldn’t come, they used their knives to cut them free, slicing her in the process. Naked now save for bra and panties, they rolled her face-down and tied her hands behind her back. She was trussed like a swine ready for the roasting pit.

She cried out, fighting against her bonds. The girl grabbed her hair and rolled her over. Macy tried to shout behind the gag. The girl slapped her again. Then something hot and wet, almost burning sprayed in her face:
urine.
The boy was standing there, pissing on her. The stink was rank, gagging. Not normal human urine at all…this was wild with a sharp-smelling musk to it.

Then, as the woman watched over her, the children joined the man.

She heard them wrestling with something, something heavy. They were grunting and puffing, making snarling sounds in their throats from time to time. She could hear the man straining. A pounding noise.
Rap, rap, rap-rap-rap.
Macy did not want to know what they were doing…but she craned her head and looked. Needing to see.

That scream again, held in check by the awful-tasting gag in her mouth.

By the glow of the nightlight and the fading illumination coming in from the street, she saw…oh dear God…she saw—

She saw a corpse hung by its feet.

She did not know who it was and it was really too dim by that point to see, but it was the corpse of a woman. Oh, how meticulous and wicked were they. They had nailed the feet right to a beam overhead. That was the pounding she heard. As the man hoisted the woman up, the children nailed her feet by standing on crates. Her arms were still swinging back and forth from it. It was the corpse of a middle-aged woman, heavy in the breast, bunched with fat at the belly and hips. There was a glistening scar across her abdomen probably from an old C-section. Her flesh was impossibly white, almost luminous in the nightlight that buzzed on and on. The crown of her head and hair were clotted with blood that looked black.

There was a shattering noise out in the store like a case had been broken into and the man came back. He threw something on the floor: knives. He’d been in a knife case. Dozens of hunting knifes, blades sliver and razor-sharp gleaming on the floor.

They were going to slaughter her like a steer.

Like autumn’s first kill—

Taking a handful of the dead woman’s hair, he yanked her head up and stabbed a hunting knife with a seven-inch blade right into her throat, sawing and sawing as blood splashed down his arms and over his chest. It sounded like the noise of sawing the lid off a Halloween pumpkin: meaty, muscled. He sawed, then jerked her head to the side with cracking motion, then pulled it right off and tossed it.

He went down on his knees and drank from the flow. The children fought their way in, drinking, slurping, sucking at the stump. The woman knocked them aside and lapped at the stream of blood, smacking her lips appreciatively.

The boy untied the gag and pulled it from Macy’s mouth. She dared not scream. He studied her face. He snapped at her with his teeth and giggled when she jerked in fear.

Then the girl cupped her hands, filling them with blood.

She crouched by Macy, careful not to spill the nectar.

“Here,” she said in a grating voice. “Here, here, here…”

She opened her hands and let the blood splatter over Macy’s mouth, rubbing her bloody hands all over her face and lips so that she got a good taste of it. “Good,” the girl said. “Good.”

Macy screamed, her face red and glistening. She thrashed and screamed, turned her head and vomited.

The man used his knife, cutting shanks of meat free from the dead woman’s thighs and belly. The family fed upon them, chewing and snapping and tearing, eating it raw and bloody like tigers in the jungle. Cutting free a slab of meat from between the woman’s leg, probably her vagina, he handed it to the woman. She sniffed it, licked it, then she stuffed it into her mouth whole, chewing it slowly. She kept taking it out, working it with her fingers, then stuffing it back in and chewing it some more.

And in Macy’s mind a voice was screaming:
she’s not eating it! She’s not eating it at all…she’s tenderizing it, chewing it to a soft fleshy mush.

And that’s exactly what she was doing.

She went down on her hands and knees, breathing hard, her face glossy with blood, the thin juice of what she had been chewing upon smeared on her lips. She spit it into her hand along with a snotty tangle of saliva. She held it out, shaking it at Macy, grunting deep in her throat with an almost bleating sort of sound. The others went down on all fours with her.

Then together, like beasts of the field lowing in the grass, they crept in closer, blood-drenched ghouls with huge black eyes, their teeth white and shining, drool falling from their mouths.

They moved in closer…and closer.

Macy screamed because she
knew.

While the children and the man took hold of her, the woman forced her jaws open. She stuck the handle of a knife in her mouth and pried them open. Then she brought the thing she had been chewing on closer, forcing it into Macy’s shrieking mouth…

53

When Louis stepped out of Shelly’s Café, the streets were empty.

Oh,
they
were out there, somewhere, but he could not see them. He could feel them, though, gathered thickly in the spreading shadows like locusts in a farmer’s field. Just as destructive, just as lethal, just as patient. He thought he could even smell them—their sweaty bodies and sour breath and bloody hands, the ripe stink of death hovering over them.

As he stepped out into the fading sunlight, the precarious uneven illumination of twilight, he could certainly feel their eyes on him. It was very unsettling. Like being some beast of the field ringed in by the hungry eyes of predators. They were watching him, gauging him, seeing what kind of defense he could put up and how easy they could take him down. He felt like a suckling pig in a pen surrounded by ravenous wolves. He actually thought he could smell their hot breath and drool.

Doris was behind him and she felt it, too. She kept the shotgun in both fists. She would kill anything that moved. There was no doubt of it. “We better find somewhere safe. And fast. I don’t think we have much time.”

Louis was terrified.

There was no way around that.

He was utterly terrified and instinct told him to run, to get the hell out, but he wasn’t going to do that. He knew he was in terrible danger. But what worried him most was Macy. So he would not run. As he stepped out onto the sidewalk, the cop’s 9mm in his hand, he did everything he could to look calm and in charge, even if he was lights years beyond these things. He was a man and he was going to act like one. Maybe they’d kill him, but he wouldn’t make it easy. He wouldn’t give them the pleasure of his fear.

Confidence.

Just a word any other time, but suddenly Louis seemed to understand what it meant. How it was a tool you used. If you panicked and bolted, those
people
out there would come running and howling, smelling his fear like wild dogs and sensing an easy kill. But if he was confident, they’d be cautious. They were playing mind games on him and now he would play the same game.

But it isn’t just mindless, murderous strangers out there,
he reminded himself.
Michelle is out there. Michelle is with them. If she attacks…can you kill her? Can you point the gun at her and put a bullet in her if it means saving Macy?

Louis couldn’t think about that.

He loved Michelle completely. He would have done anything for her. But now things were different. Yesterday, he would have rather put a bullet into his own head than harm her…but now? If she was some savage, blood-maddened beast? He did not know. He did not want to know.

He stepped off the curb, wanting to give himself some distance from the buildings, the alleys, the cellar stairways cut down into the sidewalk. Too many places to spring an ambush from. And although he had never actually used a 9mm automatic before, he knew enough about the weapon to know that its magazine carried enough rounds to do some serious killing.

Okay.

“You’re not going to find your girl,” Doris said. “Be sensible. You’ll get us both killed.”

Louis ignored her.

He moved down the street. He was very aware of how long his shadow was growing. Darkness was coming fast and he had a pretty good idea that they wanted it to come, that reduced to what they were now, they would probably be much better in it than he. He could see the Dodge parked up the street from the police station, the shadowy hulks of bodies scattered around it. The driver’s and passenger’s side doors were wide open. The windows were shattered. He preyed it was still drivable.

He wondered if Michelle was out there. Maybe she had taken Macy.

Oh, not her, not Michelle, not my wife.

Louis walked on very slowly for ten or fifteen feet, then paused.

Doris nearly bumped into him.

He thought he heard that childish giggling again. His flesh crawled anew. Wasn’t it amazing that one of the sweetest sounds in the world, the delightful laughter of a child, was also one of the most foul and obscene? And particularly in a ghost town. He breathed in and out, readying himself for it, whatever it was, because it was coming. It was building around him and he could feel it. Like a frightened animal, he could sense the waiting teeth out there, the claws and hunger. Tensed like a spring ready to explode, sweat running down his face, he remembered driving up Main with Macy, how dead the town was, how he’d speculated earlier that maybe everyone was dead. But it had all been a ruse, of course. Macy and he had been watched from the moment they pulled down the street. These people were organized, then. They had laid a trap and waited for him to step into it. And, boy, he’d bested their greatest expectations, hadn’t he? Leaving Macy alone in the car even when, deep inside, he’d known it was a mistake.

Sacrifice.

He’d offered her up for sacrifice.

“No,” he said under his breath.

“What?” Doris asked him.

“Nothing.”

He went across the street, stepped up onto the sidewalk. They could have had her anywhere. Or blocks away for that matter. It was hopeless, but he couldn’t give in, couldn’t crumble. He walked over to Indiana Video. He pushed his way through the glass doors. It was silent in there. There was a light on behind the counter, another near the back of the store. Enough light to see by.

“Macy?” he said.

There was a moaning sound.

His heart leaping with possibility, Louis charged over by the children’s movies. A young girl, maybe eight or ten, was squatted on the floor, entirely naked. Arms wrapped around herself, she rocked back and forth.

She was a redhead.