Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

Perfectly good plan.

It took a moment or two for Louis to get his bearings. He’d only been in the Soderberg’s house once or twice. He entered the living room, trying to remember where Mike Soderberg’s den was. Because that’s where his gun cabinet was. He seemed to think it was on the other side of the house, somewhere near the kitchen.

Louis, his heart galloping wildly in his chest, moved through the dining room, barking his shin on a chair and cussing under his breath. So much for stealth. As he came into the kitchen, he thought he heard something out in the backyard. A thumping sound. He cocked his head, listening, sweating and trembling.

Nothing.

Nerves, probably just nerves, he told himself.

He moved on, the moonlight coming through the windows thick as curdled milk.

He became aware then of a particularly vile smell that was sharp and revolting that he could only acquaint with something like rotting onions…or hides. Because when he’d been a boy his class had gone on a school trip to a mink farm. The heaped mink hides had smelled something like this, pungent and unbearably musky. They were told that the stink came from the mink’s scent glands. He was smelling that now. Or something like it.

It was far too strong to mean nothing.

And that’s when a man stepped around the side of the refrigerator. He had something in his hand that might have been an axe. The stench was coming from him. He let out a little shrilling cry and swung what he had at Louis, missing him cleanly. Louis did not hesitate. He swung his hammer with everything he had and felt it connect with the guy’s skull with a sickening hollow thud.

The guy folded up.

The backyard suddenly exploded with light, flooding the kitchen. Louis crouched down. He thought at first it was an explosion of some sort, but from the quality of the light he could see it was a fire. A big fire. He raised himself up and peered out the windows above the sink. Yes, there was a bonfire burning in the backyard. He saw five or six naked forms dancing around it. They looked like kids. Somebody was tied to a tree and kindling had been banked up around them.

They were burning.

The kids were hopping around happily, burning someone. And from the way the bound figure was squirming there was no doubt that they were alive. Tied and gagged, but alive. Something snapped in Louis. He couldn’t watch this. He charged out the back door with a fierce cry, a rebel yell that came from deep within him. He charged with the hammer in one hand and his knife in the other. One of the kids, a teenage girl, launched herself at him and he staved her skull in with the hammer and stabbed a boy in the belly. The girl fell limp at his feet and the boy hobbled away.

The others ran off, taking the girl with them.

Panting, slicked with sweat, his hand holding the knife bloody up to the wrist and the hammer clotted with gore, he looked very much like a savage himself. He whirled around, expecting attack from every quarter. But none came. The tree was engulfed in flames as was the person tied to it. They were beyond help. The flames were so high he could barely see them. But the stink of roasting flesh was thick and nauseating.

Louis fell to his knees, needing to cry, to vent himself somehow.

And from the shadows a voice said, “Over here, Louis. I’m over here…”

For some time, the thing that had once been Angie Preen and her tribe of hunters had been shadowing the teenage boy and his females. They had watched in rapt fascination as the boy led them on one conquest after another, running down strays and dogs and attacking smaller packs for food and weapons. They took no slaves. They killed and feasted on all. But mostly, they just killed for the sport of it.

Angie had killed for the sport, too.

But that was just to get the scent of blood into the tribe’s nostrils. To get them a taste of meat. It was necessary to get them enraged, to get them hungry and aggressive. None of this was truly a conscious decision on Angie’s part. She was going purely on instinct and race memory now. She knew these things without thinking them. For in the politics of survival only two things really mattered: territory and dominance. The boy and his females were poaching what Angie considered to be her territory and as she exerted her dominance over the tribe, so must the tribe exert their dominance against intruders to protect their hunting grounds.

The boy and his females were resting now.

In a vacant lot they had stopped and built a fire. Their blood-slicked bodies were lying in the grass. Several of the females were licking each other’s wounds. Two of them lay with the boy, their heads resting against his naked loins. One female was on watch, casting a wary eye into the darkness. She was alert and ready.

Streaked with blood and paint, Angie rose up from the cover of the hedges and stretched her bowstring with an arrow. She sighted in on the female who was watching. As her eyes swept across the field, Angie sucked in a breath of air and then slowly let it out between clenched teeth, releasing the arrow at the same time.

There was a barely audible whooshing noise.

The arrow pierced the female right in the center of her back, puncturing through, the tip exploding between her breasts with a gout of bone and blood. She made a gasping sound, then fell face-first into the fire.

By then, Angie’s tribe-bodies painted with scarlet and green bands for war-was charging from cover, howling and brandishing their weapons.

Kathleen Soames was the first into the fight. She jabbed the sharpened end of broomstick into a female’s neck and then turned on the boy. Before he could pull his knife she swung her axe with both hands and split his skull wide open.

Then it became a war of spears and knives and hatchets. Deadly close-in fighting. Angie’s tribe was numerically superior and had the advantage of surprise. They cut down half a dozen of the enemy before they could even mount a counterattack.

One of the females, blonde and fierce, well-muscled, gutted two of Angie’s best hunters with agile slashing motions that disemboweled them. Then she herself went down with three spears in her.

Angie was in the battle by then, shrieking her war cry as one of the females jumped out to meet her with a carving knife in each hand. There was no fear on her. Nothing but bloodlust. She slashed admirably, almost taking Angie’s head off, but then a hatchet caught her in the neck and Angie seized the moment. She leaped, bringing her foot down on the girl’s kneecap. There was a pleasing snap and a pleasing cry from the female who was instantly hobbled. Angie sliced her across the breasts with her butcher knife, then sank it between her legs, pulling upwards at the same time, opening the female wide. Her blood splashed against Angie and it was invigorating.

Another female with dark lustrous hair had gored two of Angie’s hunters.

As Angie approached her, she had just eviscerated one of them -a man-and he crouched there on his knees, his hands filled with the white coils of his own intestines. The female slashed him across the eyes, turned, and began stabbing the other hunter-a woman-in the face, throat, and chest.

Then Angie jumped her, knocking her down and stabbing her through the throat. The female fought and screamed, but Angie yanked her head back, felt the female’s teeth bite into her hand with an explosion of pain. Angie shrieked and slit her throat, sawing through the windpipe and carotid artery, hacking through meat and muscle until the blade bit into the cervical vertebrae. And even then, filled with pain and anger and a wild animal dementia for the kill, she cracked the vertebrae and sliced the head free. She held it up to the sky and the mother moon above in glory, blood splashing from the stump of neck down her face and making her feel more alive than she ever had before.