The Devil Next Door (36 page)

That got them.

He was abusing one of the pack and they simply could not allow such a thing. Whatever had rotted their minds and swept 7,000 years of recorded civilization into the dustbin, it had not taken away such very human traits as devotion and loyalty. Maybe they were animals and madmen, but they were a clan and they lived and died for the clan.

They came running out. First five or six, then twice that number and twice it again. They emerged in twos and threes, joining together in a mob. They carried axes and pipes, knives and shards of broken glass. But most simply came empty-handed. Men, women, children. Even a woman nursing a child. They were a filthy and ragged lot, looking little like modern humans and very much like a Neolithic tribe. Hunters and gatherers. And wasn’t that the most amazing thing of all? That they had degenerated so quickly in just a matter of hours? Maybe that said something about the human race and maybe it said something else about the contagion that had afflicted them. The only thing that betrayed their primitiveness, were the Nike shoes and cargo shorts and Wet Seal t-shirts some of the women wore. Though many were shirtless and barefoot, many others were stark naked and painted for battle.

Like New Guinea headhunters.

They assembled on the other side of the Dodge and stopped. Louis could hear them breathing, smelling the body odor and blood on them, a stench of urine and feces and something like vomit.

Behind him, he heard the pattering of feet and some red-haired kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen, came bounding out with a broomstick in his hands. He was naked, his genitals swinging from side to side. He had painted up his body with blue and gray streaks of makeup like a Celtic warrior, bands set under his eyes, his lips painted white.

Louis fired and missed.

Fired again and caught him in the arm. He could plainly hear the kid’s humerus snap like a green stick. The kid skidded to his knees, screaming and spitting, a pink slime of foam on his lips.

Louis put the gun back on the others. “I want the girl,” he said. “I want the girl now and if I don’t get her, I start killing you sonsofbitches.”

They just stood there, holding their weapons, clenching and unclenching their fists. Drool ran from their mouths. Contorted faces were twisted into sneers. Eyes were wide and staring and glassy. There didn’t seem to be any intelligence in them. Hunger and need and hatred, surely, but nothing more. Louis could not believe that any of them were smart enough to orchestrate this little trap.

“Hello,” a voice said.

Michelle stepped from behind the clan. She was still wearing her skirted business suit, though her nylons were torn and her usually carefully coifed long dark hair was matted and there were leaves stuck in it, what looked like flowers and sticks braided into it. There was blood all over her shirt from the killing she’d done. Even with the suit, she was unbearably tribal, vicious. This was her clan, her pack, Louis knew then with a yawning emptiness opening inside him. She was their warrior queen. They were all ritualistically painted with snaking bands, symbols, and tiger-stripes. But their faces…
yes
…they all bore the individual insignia of the tribe, the ceremonial sacraments of the wild hunt: the likenesses of skulls. Every face was painted the same. A flat marble-white base that covered face, ears, and throat, black upturned crescents around the eyes, a black oval around the mouth, and an elongated black triangle down the bridge of the nose.

The effect was chilling.

Michelle was painted the same, the dark glittering jewels of her eyes staring out from that grim death mask. She was no longer human; she was an animal now.

“Michelle…baby, come over here with me,” Louis said to her, everything breaking loose inside him, tears welling in his eyes. Her glare was fierce, hungry, lethal…yet, he wasn’t afraid, not really. Just the sight of her, painted up and bloody or not, crushed him, made him want to weep at her feet. He pitied her, he pitied himself. That their love should be shattered like this, torn asunder by some primordial horror from the dawn of the race. It was an obscenity.
“Please, Michelle, please…”

She just looked at him. There was no recognition in her eyes…and yet, there was…
something.
She seemed almost hypnotized as she stared at him, unblinking. Inside, deep inside, she knew him and the knowledge made her blood run and her heart beat and her chemistry long to be joined with his.

“They’re…they’re all crazy, Michelle. Come with me. I don’t know what the hell got a hold of you and the rest of them, but we can figure it out. Come on, baby. I love you and you know I love you. Don’t do this.” He felt the tears well up in his eyes and overflow onto his cheeks, felt his throat constrict until his voice sounded like that of a whiny little boy. But the emotions he was feeling were almost too much. They paraded through his head with the memories and each one laid him open. He held out a shaking hand. “Come over here, Michelle. I’m your husband. I love you. I won’t let them hurt you.”

She just stared. Maybe her mind was a little more intact than the others, but something essential in her was burned away. There was no love in those eyes. There was manipulation, madness, a means to an end, but certainly not warmth. They were the eyes of a spider as it hunts down its prey, prepares to suck the blood from a fly in its web…a favored fly the spider is drawn to, but a fly nonetheless.

She grinned then and for the first time he saw her teeth…Michelle always had very long teeth, perfectly straight and perfectly white…and now he saw that they had been filed to deadly points, those beautiful teeth. So when she grinned at him, it was the lewd grin of a snarling wolf, a grin of fangs…fangs that were stained pink from what she had been feeding on.

He almost went out cold at that.

She was gone. Not only had she killed, but she had torn and rent her prey with her teeth, filling herself with bloody meat.

Oh, Michelle, oh baby…oh dear God…

The primal fall.

He could hear the guy on the radio and he fully understood it as he hadn’t before. You had to see someone you love regress into a beast to appreciate those words:

Bonfires and stone knives by this time next week, animals hunting in the streets…most of them of the two-legged variety. Now comes the time of the primal fall…

He made a gagging, whimpering sound in his throat that was partly repulsion and partly deep-hewn pain.

It stopped Michelle for a moment. She seemed to understand inarticulate noises better than words. Inside she felt them and understood. She cocked her head to the side, softened, but it didn’t last. She closed her mouth, pursed her lips, then shook her head frantically like a dog trying to throw off bothersome flies. “Come with…us,” she managed. “Walk with…us…the night, the night…
the night…”
she said to him, her words breaking off into a coarse barking sound.

Oh, it would have been easy, but he did not want to be one of them. “No,” he said very loudly.

Bands of shadow fell over her face, making her already skullish appearance unpleasantly cadaverous. Her eyes were seething with a fathomless darkness. She brought up her hand and pointed one long, bloodstained finger at him. And then she said it. Said it without remorse:
“Kill him!”

She was their queen and they just mindless drones and soldiers. The stupor that had consumed the mob broke like the snapping of fingers and they vaulted forward. Some coming around the car, but most scrambling right over the top of it.

Louis fired three shots into the mass and then ran, pausing and shooting, pausing and shooting, dropping half a dozen of them. Then his gun clicked on empty and the others poured forth like hungry insects looking for something to tear and feed upon. Behind them, near the car, Michelle just stood there, supreme and malefic and insane, grinning and grinning at the idea of her husband’s grisly death.

Louis ran…

59

They had failed…all of them, failed! And the task was so simple!

The man bolted away and with surprising speed. So quickly, in fact, that it was several moments before anyone thought of pursuing him. The Huntress fumed. She bared her teeth. She screeched into the night.

“AFTER HIM!” she cried with every ounce of volume she had, so loudly that her voice seem to bounce off the face of the moon itself.
“BRING HIM DOWN!”

They already knew what she was capable of. They already knew what she would do to them. She did not like failure. She did not understand it. For those who failed there was the knife, there was the cutting, the rite of the blooding. Already in those precious few hours they had been together she’d already flayed two hunters.

She watched them scatter into the streets, threading into shadow like worms into meat, all anxious to be the one who brought back the pelt of the man. There would be benefits bestowed: the first choice of mates, the best food, the best weapons.

The Huntress raised her knife to the moon and howled like a wolf.

It was simple, was it not? The girl used as bait to trap the man, then the others hunters taking him, bringing him bound and broken to dump at the feet of the Huntress. Yet…the man had proven himself clever, deadly, treacherous.

As she faded into the darkness herself, she knew they would bring him down.

There were only so many places to hide in the hunting grounds and already the clan had his scent. They would cast for it, locate it, force him out of hiding and then run him, the way wild dogs would run deer to their deaths.

You can run but you can’t hide.

That gave her pause…the words seemed familiar for some reason. She liked them. She would use them again. When the man was found, she would make a spectacle of him…

60

It did no good to cry, it did no good to plead, it did no good to beg: this is what Macy learned very quickly about her captors. They were not human, not anymore. Only human minds,
civilized minds,
understood the high concept of compassion and these things were not human, they were animals. Dirty, smelling, vile animals.

So she did not fight.

She did not beg.

She allowed herself to be dragged naked through the streets, through secret channels of night. Her hands were bound. She was naked and smeared with gore, stinking of urine and sweat. They had thrown a noose around her throat and now she was their pet, their slave. Why they didn’t just kill her, she didn’t know. But she prayed for it.

She prayed for death.

In those rare moments when she wasn’t overwhelmed by horror and repugnance, Macy was amazed at how her world, a world that had been perfectly ordinary twenty-four hours ago, now resembled something out of prehistory. When she was lucid enough to examine things objectively, the absurdity of it floored her. It couldn’t be. It just could not be. But it was and, try as she might, this was one nightmare she could not awake from. Her world, once somewhat dull with repetition yet bright with possibility, had become this: a narrow, nameless void where she was now the victim/plaything/pet and prey of a family of predatory savages. Cannibals. Killers. Animals. Absolute fucking monsters.

And Louis? Where was Louis?

It hurt to think about him because a few days ago he was just the husband of the lady next door, that being Michelle Shears. But today, with all they’d been through, he had become something more: guardian, friend, mentor…God, too many things. Her heart pounded at the memory of him.

It was funny, but before all this she’d never said much more than hello to him when she saw him out washing his car or raking the leaves, that sort of thing. Oh, Michelle and he had those backyard parties every summer, but Mom made such a fool of herself that Macy slipped away soon as possible. So before today, she had not known him. Not really. But they had been through a lot together and she felt herself missing him terribly like some strong emotional bond had been cemented between them. She ached for him in her heart, not because she was hot for him or anything, but because he was the only thing stable she’d found on this awful day. He had been there for her. He risked his neck for her. He’d done it all without a second thought or with any ulterior motives. She held the image of his face in her mind and it calmed her. She knew that if he was alive, he would do anything he could to rescue her.