The Devil Next Door (51 page)

What the hell is this now?

It was a woman, naked, washed down with blood and ceremonial paint. Her hair was a tangled, snarled mess plaited with what looked to be bones and sticks and shining beads. Her face was an absolute atrocity, like some gruesome tribal mask: flesh peeled away from her mouth in a lopsided oval so that her red-stained teeth were on full display, a slat of bone shoved through her nose, eyes like bleeding holes.

Frank Chalmers had been bad enough…but this…
God.

She saw him there, singled him out from the masses in the streaming moonlight, and gestured at him with her axe, her teeth parting and a high, keening howl of rage and savagery cutting through the night.

Louis got to his feet and it was no easy thing with the pain throbbing in his leg. But he did get up and he faced her uneasily with the butcher knife in his hand.

The warrior woman charged, tossing the head pole aside. She came swinging her axe, absolutely demented and filled with primitive wrath. She looked like some kind of living voodoo fetish doll, a surreal version of a cannibal witch-doctor.

Louis ducked under the axe and slashed out with his knife.

But he was far too slow or maybe she was just too fast.

He missed her entirely and as regained his balance and brought his knife-hand around, she lashed out with a foot and kicked him in the side. His leg gave out immediately in a baptismal of pain and he went face-first into the grass, his head spinning and the breath gasping from his lungs.

She jumped on his back, a hot, greasy hand grabbed his hair and yanked his head back for throat-slitting. At least that’s what he expected, but the blade never came, but her teeth did. She seized his ear and bit right through it. They were filed sharp as daggers and sliced right through the cartilage. The pain made Louis forget about his leg. He thrashed beneath her as she held on, his bloody ear clenched in her jaws. He threw himself this way and that. When he got her off balance, he brought his elbow back and felt it mash into her face.

That did it.

She came up right away, grinning cadaverously in the moonlight, her teeth glistening with fresh blood. She looked at him with those dreadful vulpine eyes and uttered a growling guttural sound that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

“Bitch!”
he cried at her.
“Stinking rotten fucking bitch!”

It meant nothing to her, of course, but it did wonders for his adrenaline and hatred. She dove at him and he met her and they fought tooth and claw in the grass, rolling through the blood and spilled viscera. No weapons, just the rage of the primitive and the absolute loathing of the civilized man for such racial backsliding. It was like fighting a serpent. She writhed and squirmed with a fluid muscular grace, her teeth biting into him and her nails tearing him open.

Finally, he again threw her.

On all fours she faced him, a primordial thing of bloodlust, eyes wide and almost luminous like new moons. The stench of hot urine wafted from her. That and a sharp, gagging musk that was revolting.

She could have easily grabbed a weapon, but she did not. She was going to take him down like an animal with claws and teeth and nothing less would be acceptable to her.

Louis never had time to get his knife because she came again and he met her, raining down a series of blows on her that had no effect. He managed to get behind her, to lock an arm around her throat. He rode her like that while she thrashed and growled and snapped, coming alive beneath him, but he held fast, forcing her head back with a strength he didn’t know he possessed.

She lost balance and collapsed under his weight.

He yanked her head back, fingers digging into her eyes until she screamed and still he kept yanking and straining until she began to make wheezing, gagging sounds in her throat. Things began to pop and snap in there. He kept stretching it back until his face was buried in her oily warm throat. Until he could smell her filthy reek and taste her foul dog-smell.

He felt something pulsing in her throat.

Something throbbing and pumping and straining.

Without thought, wired mainly on instinct, he sank his teeth into her throat, biting and gnashing and tearing until that pulsing thing sheared open and sprayed hot, salty blood down his throat and into his face.

But he did not let go.

He kept chewing and ripping as the woman went slack beneath him.

He held onto her until she was limp beneath him. He limped maybe three or four feet and went down in the grass, vomiting, cleansing himself of the unclean, polluted taste of her.

When he gained his feet, there was nothing but corpses scattered in the moonlight. The hunters had moved on…

88

Angie closed in on the Baron.

It was not difficult. After the warfare broke between her tribe and the Baron’s pack, he had few followers. His pack was mostly killed, wounded, or driven off into the night. It was only a matter then of following his blood trail.

That he had come this far was testament to his strength.

His vitality.

Angie had tracked his blood spoor for nearly three blocks until it ended here, at the athletic field behind the high school where the Greenlawn High Wildcats strutted their stuff on the gridiron come September.

Angie was ignorant of all that, of course.

She followed his blood trail to the fence, circling it quietly, looking for some means of egress. But even the gate was locked. She lost the Baron’s spoor for a moment, but then caught his scent where he’d urinated on a tree. Angie sniffed this for telltale signs of his condition. The urine had a weak smell. She could scent the blood in it and the waning trace odors of the hormones usually associated with a healthy, fighting animal.

The Baron was dying.

She found where he’d gone over the fence. Shouldering her bow, she climbed up and over, dropping silently on all fours into the grass.

The spoor was simple to track now on the freshly-shorn grass. He was bleeding badly and it was splashed in copious amounts everywhere. Yes, she could see him now. He was staggering, moving for a few feet, falling, then rising, pushing himself on through willpower and little else. There were woods beyond the field and this is where he was going: he wanted to die in the forest where his kind had always been born.

His darkened shape was simple to pick out on the flat field in the moonlight.

Angie put an arrow in her bow, stretched it, sighted in on the feeble shape in the distance. Clenching her teeth with a slow exhalation of air, she let it fly. He let out a garbled cry as it struck him in the back.

He pitched forward, limbs jerking.

Now! Take your kill! Make it yours!

Angie rushed out and he heard her coming, tried to crawl away from her. But it did no good. She stood above him, a painted and bloody tribal warrior maiden, breathing deeply, smelling the death of her pray and reveling in it as only the hunter can.

Menstrual blood ran down the inside of one leg.

She leaped on him, landing hard, his breath coming out in a whooshing gasp. She grabbed the arrow in his back and yanked it out. He moaned and tried to crawl away. She let him. When he made it a few feet, she blocked his path and stabbed him lightly with the arrow until he turned. And when he crawled in a different direction, she stabbed him again. She toyed with him a bit as she liked to with her kills. It amused her. To toy with prey was the world’s oldest form of foreplay.

He stopped crawling, looking up at her with fixed hatred.

He made a grunting, puffing noise. He coughed out ribbons of blood. His fur pelt was shiny and wet with it. Still, even weakened, he was huge and vicious. His tongue lolled from his bloody mouth, his nose sniffing.

Angie dropped to her knees to watch his death throes.

He closed his eyes…then, with a final burst of strength and a terrible muffled roar deep in the chimney of his throat, he leaped at her.

She was caught by surprise, knocked into the grass.

He pinned her down, his eyes filled with a deadly intensity

Angie slid her knife from its sheath.

She did not fight.

This stopped the Baron momentarily. He cocked his head sideways.

She slashed him in the face, slicing a strip of meat from his temple to jawbone. He tightened his grip on her throat and she buried the knife in his eyesocket.

He made a drawn-out growling sound…and attacked again, filled with a hideous, primal rage. Streamers of vile-smelling saliva oozed from his jaws. Blood and tissue dripped from his ruined eye. Then as his jaws came at her, she buried the blade of the butcher’s knife into his belly right to the hilt.

The Baron released her with a squealing, miserable sound like a run-down puppy…then he went crazy, snapping and biting and clawing.

Angie was howling herself: an atavistic war cry pulled up from the forgotten, shuttered basement of human history.

And as she did so, as the Baron’s fangs nipped at her face, tearing a hurting channel into her cheek, she drew the knife up from his belly to his sternum. His viscera, hot and steaming and slimy, spilled over her and its reek was raw, horrible…and delicious, ultimately invigorating.

Angie threw him to the ground and began to slash and hack his corpse. The knife rose and fell and blood splashed and flesh was bisected and she kept going until she’d thoroughly mutilated his hide, his head nearly severed from its neck.

Hurting, but alive because of it, her veins surging with electricity, Angie let out a deafening shriek and buried the knife in her kill. Then she broke open his ribs and carved his heart free. It was hot and pulsing in her hands. She brought it to her mouth, licking it, tasting it, coveting the muscled, marbled mass. Then bit into it with a shuddering carnal moan.

She tore it apart with a violent feeding frenzy until her face was covered in blood, tissue, and hot juices.

She fell back into the grass, sated, fulfilled, feeling the Baron’s strength and cunning becoming her own. Beneath the waning eye of the moon, the night was made complete…

89

The Huntress returned to the place she remembered.

It was a lair.

A lair she had once shared with the man, but long ago for she could not scent herself there. She immediately set about marking the place with her urine, her blood, her scat until her smell was everywhere and those that dared come here would know, would sense the warning and the danger and flee.

She brought in meat and stuffed it in nooks and crannies where it would season and age properly. She salted several hides, brought in leaves and sticks and brush for the nest. Then she brought in the carcass of a freshly-killed man. She set out her collection of knives that she had scavenged. Knives for scraping and boning, skinning and slitting.

When the man returned he would see these things.

He would smell her upon them.

He would know this was his lair.

When things were ready, the Huntress went back out into the night. Already the horizon was stained with indigo. The sun would be up soon and she knew the man would come here to lair. He had to. He would be drawn here as she was.

The Huntress moved off into the night.

For one last kill, one last feast of blood to give thanks to the moon goddess above with an offering of meat and death…

90

At last.

Louis found a car with keys in it. A little Ford Escort that smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. He had checked dozens of cars since he left the fields of the dead with the taste of the warrior woman’s blood still gamey and fetid in his mouth. This was the first one with keys. This was his salvation. This was his deliverance. He did not know where he was going and common sense told him there really wasn’t anywhere
to
go, but he was going nonetheless. He had to escape the primeval jungle of Greenlawn and his mind did not want to think about what came after that.