The Devil Next Door (41 page)

It went on for maybe ten minutes, probably not even that long. Knives cutting and axes chopping. Blades grinding against bone and clubs shattering ribs and spears punching through soft white underbellies.

And then…silence.

Nothing but corpses and parts there of.

Hacked victims still squirming on the ground.

And the victors, blood-drenched and meat-smelling, rising up from their kills and howling to the sacrificial moon high above. Angie, spitting out blood, surveyed the scene of carnage instantly. Three of the boy’s pack had run off to regroup, but the others had been slaughtered. Angie noted that six of her own were dead, five others mortally wounded.

Kathleen Soames had already eaten the boy’s genitals as was her way. Then she had disemboweled him and was now rolling in his blood and entrails, scenting herself with the kill. Others of the tribe were imitating her.

They did not touch the heart.

Angie carved open the chest with her knife, shearing through muscle, snapping ribs in her bare hands. She slit the arteries away, sliced the heart free of its protective membrane. As the others watched with almost religious awe, she bit down deep into it, feeling the strength of its owner becoming
her
strength.

The boy’s cunning was her own now.

As a hunter devours the flesh of a wolf to absorb its ferocity, so she ate the boy’s bloody heart, tearing strips of it away with her sharpened teeth, enjoying every taste and texture. She fed upon it with a mystical rapture, feeling his spirit entering her with each bite.

When she was done, she went around to the mortally wounded and slit their throats one after the other. It was the way a warrior must die. Not slowly like a pig in the straw, but with blood in their mouths and a glaring steel memory of killing.

As she stood over her tribe, watching for other packs that might try and poach their kills, her hunters took trophies of bones and ears and body parts. One woman was fashioning a necklace of vaginas that she had slit free then threaded onto a necklace of beads around her throat. More heads were taken and speared on broomsticks.

Kathleen Soames, her red and green banded body now entirely red, stood by Angie’s side, appraising the night. Killing to her was not only ritual and necessary, but almost sexual in nature. She drew her strength from the taking of lives, from her victim’s blood washing her down, from the select remains she then fed upon. She was a fearsome sight standing there, blood still dripping from her. The moonlight gleamed off the sticks and rodent bones braided into her hair, the bone inserted through her nose.

Her lips long since sliced free, she grinned with gums and teeth.

“Enough,” Angie told the tribe and they rose up from the field of blood, bones, limbs, and torsos.

The men urinated on the remains so all would know the penalty of poaching the tribe’s territory. The women squatted near where the men pissed and wetted the ground themselves.

Then, Kathleen Soames leading the way with a decaying head on a broomstick, they faded into the night, glutted and pleased at the offerings of the mother high above…

67

Don’t you touch me. Don’t you dare touch me.

One of them had taken notice of Macy now. He was a hulking creature, stinking of excrement, his oblong face and body thick with a crust of something that must have been mud, dried blood, and congealed fat. In the flickering firelight she could only really see the gleam of his bared teeth, his eyes like two bloody holes.

He was standing there, watching her, his feet placed right in the pool of blood that was pretty much all that was left of the screaming woman after they’d dragged her remains away. Macy knew it couldn’t go on. They simply wouldn’t ignore her forever. She tried to be quiet, not to draw attention to herself, but now that just wasn’t enough. At best, she would be raped. At worst, they would make her suffer unimaginable agonies before putting her on the spit.

He went down on one knee, arms outstretched, fingers splayed in the pool of blood. He looked like a runner waiting for the start of a race. He was grinning. He knew she was frightened, probably could smell the fear on her as she could smell the filth on him. And the really awful part was that he was enjoying it. She could see that. He was actually enjoying her discomfort, getting off on it, copping a sadistic thrill.

He laughed beneath his breath with a hoarse, grating sound.

Macy was getting angry.

That this inbred, barbaric piece of shit would enjoy her suffering was just too much. Yes, she wanted to run as fast and far away from him as she could. But part of her wanted to stand and fight. To smash his head open with something, wipe that mocking, vicious grin off his face.

He inched forward; she recoiled.

He pulled back, laughing.

A game. That’s all this was. She did not doubt that it would end in something terrible for her, but for now it was just a game. Macy’s wrists were still tied behind her back, but the knots were sloppy and loose. If she only had a few seconds unobserved, she knew she could squirm free.

He was creeping closer, smelling like he’d been eating dead things and garbage.

Macy waited. She would not flinch.

He reached out to grab her ankle and she moved quickly, instinctively. She lashed out with her right foot and cracked him in the face with her heel. He let out a barking sound and fell away.

Macy moved.

She’d spent the past three years in gymnastics and it paid off now. She rolled onto her back and brought her roped wrists down to her ass, wriggling, squirming until she got them around the mounds of her buttocks. Straining every muscle and ligament, she got her wrists to the back of her knees and slipped her legs out.

The man was staring at her. Not quite recovered from the kick in the face, but very much ready to pay Macy back in kind.

Do it now or just forget it.

Macy leaped to her feet and as that caveman sonofabitch tried to grab her ankle, she jumped away and kicked him in the ribs. He grunted and fell. Then she ran, knowing the chances of escape were futile. A boy stood in her way and she knocked him aside, knocked aside another woman and darted around a man with an axe in his hands. And then something hit her from behind, bowling her over to the stone floor and scraping the skin from her knees. It was
him.
The filth-covered man. He held onto her and she kicked him, hit him, felt her raw knees bounce off his chin. She was almost free—

Then a fist collided with the back of her head.

She saw stars and was thrown into the grip of her adversary once again. This time it was not games. He smashed her in the face, clouted her upside the head. Punched her in the belly and grabbed her hair and kneed her in the ribs. She went down and he reached for her.

Those scabby, filth-covered hands groped her.

Macy came up fighting and even she didn’t know where the strength came from. He was huge, savage, bristling with muscle and fat. He easily outweighed her by a hundred pounds. She clawed his face, gouged his eyes, tried to get her knee into his groin and he hit her again, this time her lower lips split open and a tooth came loose. She went down, spitting it out along with a tangle of blood and saliva.

Breathless, dazed, she waited for retribution.

A ring of savages closed them in, waiting for it, too. Like hyenas surrounding the fresh kill of a lion, they were excited, yammering and snarling and squealing. They wanted a taste, but they wouldn’t touch Macy, not until the apex predator had had his fun first and the apex predator in this case was a tall, heavy man covered in mud, blood, and animal fat that had dried, cracked open in jagged crevices, making him look hideously mummified, something feral and embalmed come to life here in the gutted bowls of a desecrated church.

Macy looked up at him in the flickering light of the fire, a thing of shadows and primal appetites. He was breathing very hard, grinding his teeth, flexing his muscles so that the crust covering him continued to crack and flake away. His eyes were shiny, wild.

She hated him. She lived only to see him suffer. If a knife were placed in her hand, she would have slit his throat.

Standing there, he seemed to know it, and it excited him.

Staring down at Macy, he gripped his penis. He squeezed it. He was already hard. With a bloody hand, grunting like a pig, he masturbated with firm, sure strokes. He looked into her eyes the entire time, his gaze black, bestial, and deranged. He made sure she watched. He let out a cry and came, his semen striking Macy’s cheek in a hot gush than ran down her face.

A day ago, a week ago, she would have screamed.

She would have gotten sick.

But now she did not even flinch. Debased, humiliated, there was nothing left now to flinch
with.
She did not feel exactly human anymore. Because it was happening now and she knew it and she wanted it to happen:
the regression.
A civilized, reasonable, intelligent person could not hope to survive with them or against them. You could not reason with them. They did not understand logic. They were territorial. They were animals. They were shaggy, psychotic, shit-smelling, crawling horrors straight out of the Pleistocene. They knew only the politics of the tribe, the mechanics of the hunt, the anatomy of murder and survival and blood sport. It was their liver and lights and soul. Regression was taking Macy with a hot surge of genetic impulse, sinking her slowly, steadily into the black pit of prehistory, down into the primal earth cheek by jowl where she could feel the cool moist soil of atavism and smell the secret animal musk of the race and taste the sweet blood of the primordial void.

She was one with it now.

And as the savage with the flaccid penis glared down at her with an appetite barely slaked, she felt herself falling into a shattering metallic silence.

But sometimes it took a snake to kill another snake…

68

She watched the man by the fire.

He was tall, well-muscled, lean. In the moonlight, a bloodied hammer in one hand and gore-dripping knife in the other, he looked every inch the dawn man that could be at once feared, understood, and desired.

Kylie Sinclair trembled.

In the darkness of the bushes, she was just touched by moonlight. She was wearing a crown of sticks and leaves that was not decorative, but meant to break up her silhouette in the night. It was an ancient technique of the hunt. Her sister and mother waited nearby.

The man just stood there.

She was smelling the pig roasted on the fire, the bubbling seams of fat and well-marbled slabs of meat that dripped a tantalizing hot juice into the flames. She was waiting for the man to pluck the carcass free and begin eating. Perhaps he would render it to bone and pack the meat off with him.

No.

He did neither.

He went down on his knees in the grass, shaking. Kylie was confused. For surely this was his kill, slit and spitted, he had drawn first blood and would be the first to taste the sweet bounty of the hunt. But he did not seize it and claim it as his own.

Kylie waited.

She could smell the pungent odors wafting up from her body…leaves and loam and black earth, a telltale stink of musk and animal oils that just barely masked her own ripe body odor. Good earthy smells. Smells that did not confuse, but invigorated and gave confidence. She ran fingers over the ceremonial welts and upraised scars of citricization that mottled her flesh. Like the paint made of blood and marrow fat that she decorated her body with, these were the symbols of who she was, what she was, her tribal affiliation.

She sniffed her fingers, tasted them, intrigued by her own odors and flavors.

She touched fingers to her armpits, her vagina, her rectum. Each smell and flavor was more heady and organic, each one making her more giddy.

The man moved.

He had heard something. Kylie was certain of it for the smell coming from him across the yard had changed. This was sharper:
fear.
Yes, he heard something. A voice. Weapons in hand, he was going to investigate.