The Devil Next Door (5 page)

“Don’t worry, Lisa,” Billy told her. “It’s all about to change.”

She just looked at him and he smiled.

He could smell the sex between her legs. It made him giddy.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

Taking the scalpel, he slit open the frog’s belly like it was something he’d done a thousand times. While Lisa turned an amusing shade of green, he pinned back the frog’s skin with tiny dissection needles and got to work.

And waited for the shit to hit the fan.

He did not wait long.

Mr. Cummings went into the supply room and came out with his Thermos, pouring himself a cup of coffee. He made it all the way to his desk before he took his first gulp. Like he always contended, he was nothing without his caffeine and today was the day when he would finally get his fill. He raised the cup to his lips, scanning the lab teams with disinterest, and swallowed a big gulp.

No one was really paying any attention to him at that moment.

No one but Billy Swanson.

Cummings drew the cup away from his lips with dawning horror. What was at first a scowl of distaste soon became a twisted rictus of agony. The coffee cup slid from his trembling fingers and shattered at his feet.

And then everyone was suddenly paying attention.

Cummings was staggering around and shuddering, clawing at his throat as gouts of steam wafted from his mouth like cigarette smoke. No one said a word in that split second of realization that something was
very
wrong with him. His glasses flew off, his eyes bulging, his face the color of Wisconsin cherries. Rivers of sweat coursed down his brow.

“What’s he doing?” Tommy Sidel said.

Cummings fell back against his desk, overturning a stack of graded test papers. His fingers were hooked into claws, thrashing and tearing at himself and everything in sight. “Ggggghhhhlll,” he gagged, blood running from his mouth in dark ribbons.

“Mr. Cummings?” Tommy Sidel said, the first one on his feet. “Mr. Cummings! Are you all…right…”

Cummings collapsed to the floor, his fingers tearing open his shirt, cutting deep red welts in his corded throat. A high, inhuman wailing came from him. He thrashed around, thumping his fists and moaning just moments before he began to vomit out great clots of steaming, bloody tissue.

“Mr. Cummings,” Tommy said, at first trying to get a hold of him, but now backing away in disgust as gore sprayed in the air. “Mr. Cummings!
Goddammit, somebody get an ambulance, a fucking doctor! He’s dying or something…”

And he was.

His mouth opened in a terrible continuous scream, his teeth snapping and gnashing, tearing his lips to shreds. His face was a contorted red fright mask, his tongue dangling from his lips until his teeth literally bit it in half. All the students were gathered now in a tight circle to watch his agony. He was like some nightmare cartoon run in fast motion. An evil caricature of someone possessed by a demon, hopping and flopping and moving with epileptic speed and at such impossible angles that they could hear his tendons popping and bones dislocating.

Nobody rushed out for help.

Not a one.

Something was happening to them, something they did not understand or really even question. It passed from one to the other like cold germs and when it was done, the students of 5
^th
hour Biolab were not who they had been a few moments before. They were altered, changed. They looked down at Mr. Cummings and there was not a single twinge of remorse or sympathy in them. What they felt was rage, a stupid and insane rage that consumed them. And one that needed to be voided on something, someone.

Billy stood behind them with Lisa Korn at his side. “Watch, Lisa,” he said. “Now you’re going to see what they really are down deep.”

Lisa just stood there, speechless, her eyes unblinking, her mouth pulled into a straight colorless line.

Billy was smiling, smelling the raw stink of atavism coming from the crowd.

It was delicious.

For maybe twenty or thirty seconds, the students ringed around Cummings did not move. They stood in mock surprise at what had happened, at the dying thing at their feet. Then they began to move. Slowly, inexorably, like some machine cycling up, they started to move as one. Cummings was barely moving, but that didn’t stop them. You could see what was coming in their eyes, in the grim set of their mouths.

There was a sudden flurry of voices that combined into a steady, flat droning:

“—gave me a C on that report—”

“—wouldn’t have gotten kicked off the team if it wasn’t for you—”

“—coulda let me slide, you rotten fuck—”

“—just had to tell my old man you saw me smoking—”

“—always making fun of me—”

“—flunked me—”

“—narced on me for changing grades—”

It all kept rolling, the petty hatreds and accusations and suspicions until it became a sort of mindless chant, building inside each and everyone of them to a pulsing, deadly crescendo and the very air was roiling with heat and malevolence.

And it was then that first true incident of mass insanity in Greenlawn struck. The students went after Mr. Cummings, kicking and scratching and punching and biting him. They went after him like animals with sheer bloodlust and brutality. Something inside them needed voiding and that something needed a common enemy and in their dying teacher, they found it. They crowded in, beating him to a pulp, trying to twist his limbs off and stomping his guts to sauce. They did not even slow down until their fingers were red, their mouths drooling, their clothes spattered with blood.

And the only thing that really slapped them out of it was a voice that cried:
“What in the name of hell is going on here?”

The voice belonged to Howard Sullivan, the head custodian. Known as “Sully” to faculty and students alike, he was much loved and had been at Greenlawn High since the days of the Kennedy administration, was only a year shy of retirement, in fact. Anger was a rare commodity for Sully; he liked the kids, year after year, he honestly liked the kids. Liked their fads and music and devil-may-care attitudes. He said they made him feel young and custodian at the high school was the only job he could land where he never really had to grow up.

But today, Sully was mad.

He was shocked and sickened and beyond words. He waded right into the mass of students, pulling them away from Mr. Cummings, actually shoving them out of his path.

When he got a good look at Cummings’ corpse, he looked at the circle of students around him. He saw their vacant eyes, their grinning mouths, all that blood on them…smeared, splashed, dripping. Tears rolled from his eyes. “Kids…Jesus Christ, what…what the hell are you doing here? What have you done?
What the fuck have you done?”

The students pressed in closer.

Sully looked from face to face, saw what was coming, tried to get away, but it was just too late.

They fell on him.

Like lions falling on a gazelle.

And behind them, Billy Swanson grinned…

8

Louis Shears made it home and as he walked through the door, he swore to God he would never leave it again.

The world had gone mad and he was content to leave it to its own devices. He shut the door behind him, locked it. And then on second thought, he threw the deadbolt. He walked into the living room and then the kitchen, feeling like some wind-up toy soldier going first in this direction and then that. He sat in his recliner, got up, sat on the couch, then he got up again. Went to the cupboard above the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Chivas Regal. He poured himself two fingers in a water glass, swallowed it down, then poured himself another.

You better get a grip already,
he told himself, and that sounded good in theory, but in practice…well, it was something else again.

He sat back in the recliner.

Pulling from his drink and peering out the picture window, the world seemed all right. Cars passed on the street and leaves fluttered gently in the trees. He could hear the sound of a lawn mower and some kid going up the sidewalk on a skateboard.

These things were the normal sights and sounds of an August afternoon.

But what about what happened on Tessler Avenue? Where did any of that fit in? How did he qualify what he had seen this day? Two guys beating a kid near to death with baseball bats and then the kid attacking him and those whacked-out cops showing up? Where did that fit in the annals of a late summer’s day? Where did you find the box that would hold such things or a label to slap on it?

“You don’t,” Louis said. “You don’t even try. You just sit here and get drunk. Get shitfaced and forget about it.”

Very nice, very nice, indeed.

But hardly practical.

He thought about the steaks and the wine out in the back of the Dodge. The meat needed to be gotten into the fridge before it started to turn. Those porterhouses were nearly two inches thick, custom cut, and had cost him nearly fifteen bucks a throw.

He just couldn’t leave them out there.

But that’s exactly what he was planning on doing.

The cellphone in his shirt pocket jingled and he jumped, nearly spilling his drink. He put it to his ear, almost expecting one of those crazy cops to be on the other end. But it wasn’t them. It was Michelle.

“The weekend stretches out before you,” she said. “I hope I didn’t interrupt your nap.”

Louis started laughing.
No, honey, I wasn’t taking a nap. I was sitting in my recliner sucking down whiskey. You ought to see me. Buttons popped off my shirt, bloodstains all over it, my throat bruised from some mortally wounded kid who decided to have one last hurrah and strangle me.

“What’s the matter, Louis?” Michelle said. Even half way across town over at Farm Bureau Insurance, she could sense it on him. That something was most definitely wrong.

“Where should I start?”

“Oh no…you didn’t get the accounts, did you?”

“Oh no, I got them. That part of my day was fine. It’s just that this town is going crazy. I’m just wondering if you can buy straightjackets in bulk, because I’m thinking we’re going to need a lot of them.”

Michelle said, “Oh, you heard then?”

“Heard what?”

“About the bank.”

Louis felt a heaviness in his chest. What now? “Tell me,” he said.

“I only know what they’re saying,” she said. “I guess an hour ago some old lady came into the bank across the street, you know, First Federal, and wanted to close her account. The teller told her she needed a slip to do that and the old lady just went ballistic. Get this, she whipped out a knife, a big knife, from her purse and stabbed the teller. Stabbed her like five or six times. At least, that’s what they’re saying. We heard the sirens. It was awful.”

“Shit.”

“It gets worse. The old lady supposedly walked right out with her bloody knife, sat on the bench outside, and then…well, she just slit her wrists.
Slit
them, Louis, and then folded them in her lap and calmly bled to death.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. But they said she was smiling. Just sitting there, bleeding to death…and smiling.”

Louis swallowed. “The teller survive?”

Michelle said she didn’t know. “She lost a lot of blood, I guess. Louis, it was Kathy Ramsland.”

“Kathy?” Louis said. “Oh, Jesus, Vic’s kid sister?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Calling Kathy a “kid” was maybe overdoing it in that she was nearly thirty. But, hell, Louis had grown up next to her, hung out tight with brother Vic right through high school.