Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

She watched the man and the girl get into the car.

There was something about the man she remembered, as if perhaps they’d been joined at one time. The more she watched him, the more she was certain of it. Just the sight of him made her blood run hot, made her heart beat in a delicious new rhythm. She licked her lips. She clutched the hunting knife in her hand very tightly.

The Huntress could no longer remember who she was.

She could no longer remember why she was.

It seemed that the way she’d been living these many hours was the way things had always been. Flooded with the primal memory and instinctive recall that had swallowed all that she was or ever had been with a simple plunge into the ancient black waters of prehistory, she was content. Content with the hunt, content with the kill. What more was there?

The car moved slowly up the street.

Hiding in the store, the others of her clan waited breathlessly. They wanted to hunt. They wanted to bring down prey with claws, teeth, and gleaming blades. She could smell the raw animal stink of them and it excited her. She led them because she was cunning. They were brutal, bloodthirsty, but almost idiotic in their simplicity. They understood only savagery, the law of the beast, kill or be killed, and they raided in such a fashion: with berserk, screaming mania. She, however, understood tactics, ambush, stealth. They were in awe of her.

One of them made a grunting, slobbering sound.

“Wait,” she told them. “Not just yet.”

She was tall and raven-haired, lean with rippling muscle, her eyes just as dark as the animal inheritance that misted her brain. Intrigued by the man, she trembled. Everything inside her-from heart to liver to lights-was pulsing, thrumming, anxious.

The Huntress had a vague recollection of the girl.

But that was unimportant.

She would have the man to satisfy her curiosity about him. And the girl? She would be killed or enslaved to amuse the sexual appetites of the clan…

Ray Hansel was alive.

He staggered down Main to where his patrol car was parked. The streets were silent now, deathly silent. There were bodies strewn about, the carcasses of dogs. Blood and entrails everywhere, a reeking fly-specked stew in the streets and spread over the walks. He was dazed and hurting and half out of his mind. As he walked-staggered, really-the sinking sun still hot on his neck, he tried to put it all together and make sense of something that was utterly senseless. He remembered the insane woman coming in, making for Bob Moreland’s office, how they overpowered her. Moreland said it was his wife and then, and then…

And then you heard the screaming, he reminded himself. The awful torturous screaming and you rushed downstairs right behind Moreland and every other cop that was up there. Remember? Remember how it looked? Men, women, children, and…dogs. Dozens and dozens of people and twice that many dogs.

He seized up right there on the walk, a dead man at his feet, sprawled over the concrete. He had died in battle with a Doberman. The Doberman’s jaws were locked on his throat, the knife in his hand still buried in the animal’s guts. They were both tangled in the dog’s viscera; it was knotted over them in fleshy ropes. Mangled and gutted, a surreal sculpture of human and canine locked in a fearsome and appalling death. Like two wax figures that had melted into one another. They both looked like they’d been dipped in red ink.

Choking on his own bile, Hansel moved past them, past the carnage spread everywhere.

All that blood, all those mutilated bodies.

He wanted to vomit, but there was absolutely nothing left in his stomach. His uniform was in rags. He was cut and bitten and scratched and generally banged-up. There was blood all over him, human blood and dog blood mixed in with his own.

He saw his patrol car and shuffled his way over, only stopping when he was a few feet away.

He looked around, his eyes glazed and his face scratched to the bone.

Are they all dead? Is the entire town dead now?

Logic told him it could not be, yet he’d never felt so terribly alone and terrible vulnerable. He wondered vaguely where his partner was. Where the hell was Paul Mackabee? Dead? Was he dead, too?

Standing there, he was wondering why the dogs had attacked.

Because at first, when they’d first flooded into the police station with that mob of wild-eyed people, they had attacked together, dogs and people. In unison. All shrieking and howling and foaming at the mouth. It had been a slaughter, an absolute slaughter. The cops overwhelmed and buried alive beneath people and dogs.

Those weren’t people, Ray, he told himself. You saw them…many of them were naked like animals, painted up like jungle savages, their hair wild and matted, their faces set, eyes shining with a moist blackness, just staring and staring. There was nothing human about that mob. Savages. Just savages out to rend and kill, bite and slash.

Same as the dogs that ran at their sides.

Yes, that’s how it had been. He remembered pulling his gun as Moreland and the others in front of him had gone down under claws and teeth and fingers and paws. He kept shooting until he’d emptied the clip. He’d brained two women with the butt of his pistol and then ran back upstairs, the pack howling at his heels. He’d been bitten and scratched and nearly taken down by a pair of bird dogs, but he’d escaped.

Barely.

What he remembered most, what he would always see, was not just the blood and bodies, the dogs and crazies dismembering people and biting into throats and tearing open bellies, not just that or the violent, repellent stink or the mist of red that settled over the squad room…no, what he would always remember was that people, human beings, had been running on all fours with the dogs, biting like them, tearing like them, bringing down their prey in packs just like them. And the scariest part was that he honestly couldn’t tell after a few moments which were the dogs and which were the people.

He saw only slaughtering, muscled, slashing red forms.

Dear God, dear God.

Hansel climbed into the cruiser and got on the emergency channel. He didn’t bother with call numbers or police codes. He simply said, “This…this is Trooper Hansel! Do you hear me? Trooper fucking Hansel! I’m in Greenlawn! I need back-up, I need troops! We’ve got bodies everywhere, civil unrest…move it, move it, move it!”

There was nothing but static for a moment or two, then: “Greenlawn! Come in, Greenlawn!”

Hansel brought the mic to his mouth, his hand shaking violently. “This is Greenlawn…do you hear me? This is Greenlawn!”

More static. Then a voice: “How’s the hunting over there?”

The mic fell from Hansel’ fingers.

They’ve all gone fucking mad. God help us, but they’ve all gone mad…

Then he did something that he had not done for six years since his wife passed: he pressed his hands to his face and he sobbed. He could not stop sobbing, his entire body trembling, the tears rolling hot down his cheeks. It all ran through his head, all the awfulness that he’d seen this day culminating with the slaughter at the police station. It all came pouring out of him and he could not stop, could not do anything but shake and sob until there was nothing left.

He was only alive because he’d gotten upstairs, gotten into a closet and stayed there. That’s when the dogs must have turned on the people or vise versa. He remembered them scratching at the door, the dogs and the people, and then the screaming and shouting and growling and snapping. They had hunted side by side until there was no more game, then they’d hunted each another.

They turned on one another.

The fighting and savagery had gone on for some time and then things had grown quiet incrementally. When he finally dared go down there-about fifteen minutes ago-there had been nothing but death. The squad room was a carpet of bodies, human and dog, and parts thereof, a red sea of filth. There were dozens of corpses locked in death throes with the dogs, dog teeth in human throats and human teeth in dog throats. He had not paused to examine any of it. He made his way outside and threw up on the steps of the police station.