Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

The first one made its move and the Baron slashed the business end of the machete across its eyes. He pivoted and split open another’s skull. Still another hit him and he tossed it aside, eviscerating it. The teeth of yet another sank into his leg and he chopped its foreleg clean.

Then he ran as a howling, barking pack thundered across the killing fields at him.

He made a nearby porch and turned, swinging the machete with blind wrath, splitting the maw of a beagle and then throwing himself through the open door. They ripped the screen door right off its hinges, seven or eight of them, and began to fight over it like a tasty bitch.

The Baron pressed his back against the inside door as they battered and rammed it. Way they were going, he knew, it wouldn’t last long. The door was hardwood and he could hear them smashing themselves against it, their bones popping and crunching. There was a thin pane of glass that ran the length of the door and the Baron forgot about it until the head of a huge, filthy Rotweiler crashed through it, its muzzle catching him in the back and sending him sprawling. But the pane of glass was not safety glass that spiderwebbed with cracks and fell into itself. It was plate glass. It shattered, but a six-inch triangular shard from the base lodged easily into the dog’s throat. The more it wrenched and flopped its massive, heavily-muscled body, the deeper the shard sank until it was impaled there, whimpering.

But it wasn’t dying fast enough for the Baron.

There was a pile of lumber near the stairs, a wall that had been stripped to lathing. Home improvement. The Baron saw a gun-shaped apparatus sitting on the lumber. He went for it, palming it. A cordless drill with a half-inch bit threaded into the chuck. Part of him seemed to recognize it, but there was no conscious memory.

But he knew a weapon when he held it in his fist.

He pressed the trigger. The drill bit whirred around.

Grinning, he ran the bit right through the dog’s thrashing skull. Its eyes glazed over as he scrambled its brains. It slumped over dead, its sheer bulk keeping the others away from the opening it had shattered in the glass.

The Baron pulled the drill back, studied the bit that was slimed with gray matter, bone chips, and strands of coarse hair.

Some time later, he wandered outside.

The street was filled with gutted corpses, human and dog, parts of them, blood and hair and entrails. A few savages devoured raw joints of meat or fought over juicy shoulder portions. What dogs were left scavenged the dead. There was nothing but the moaning of the wounded, the whine of dying dogs.

What remained of the Baron’s pack were beaten, bloodied, exhausted. They stepped amongst the bodies, slipping on blood and corkscrews of intestines.

They gathered at the Baron’s side.

Although he was bitten, blood-streaked, and in considerable pain, he had never felt so joyously alive before…

They’re in the dark, Louis. All around you, slithering hideous things that feed on children, that sharpen their teeth on bones and decorate their lairs with human hides. Wake up! Wake up, you fucking idiot, you’re in the cannibal’s kitchen, you’re in the ogre’s cave, you’re in the musty rot-smelling cellar of the wicked witch and her wicked offspring…

Louis opened his eyes, fighting on the edge of sleep. Inside, he had given up. He had been beaten, cut, dragged through the streets, dry-humped by a cave girl and then pissed on by her mother. It didn’t really seem to him that there was really much to live for because the world had shit its own pants and here he was a prisoner of these fucking things.

But he opened his eyes.

Something plopped in his face. Cool, moist. It plopped again. He looked up and there was the corpse of a man hanging from the rafters…part of a man really. His legs were nowhere to be seen. He was hanging upside down, chained and gutted, a ghastly white in color. And what had plopped onto Louis’ face was something dripping from one of his hollowed eye sockets.

Louis recoiled, squirmed away from it best he could with his ankles and wrists tied.

He looked around.

The mother-he now suspected it was Maddie Sinclair, though she had degenerated so much it had been hard to tell at first-was nowhere in sight. Either were here daughters, whom Louis could not remember the names of.

The air smelled like fresh meat, shit, urine, and vomit. Something else that was heavy and musky and must have been the raw animal stench of the women themselves. The sort of smell you might acquaint with the shit-stained, blood-spattered, bone-strewn den of a wolf pack.

He lay still for ten minutes that became twenty, refusing to entertain any hope that they had abandoned him. He could not be that lucky. He waited. Breathed. Tried to get his mind working, trying to pretend he couldn’t smell the woman’s piss on him.

Something bit his ankle.

He jerked and a rodent went scampering away. A rat? Must have been. Too big to be anything else. He looked around the cellar. Had he been an anthropologist he might have appreciated the primordial squalor of prehumanity. But he certainly did not appreciate it. Bones and hides, human remains, bodies and parts of them hanging from the rafters. A sack-which must have been a human stomach stuffed with something and stitched closed-was hanging from over the fire from a tripod.

Vile, was the only word for it.

But honestly, with all the boxes and bags and crap piled everywhere, Maddie Sinclair’s basement had been a pigsty to begin with.

Imagine that. Uppity, snobby, Little Miss Perfect Maddie Sinclair’s basement was a rat’s nest. Ah, the secrets we hide from our neighbors.

He heard a sound and started. He was expecting them to come back, those white-painted wraiths with their necklaces of human scalps and fingers. He expected them to return to their kills…and their captive. And maybe this time, it would be no simple dry-hump from an overeager teenage savage.

Maybe it would be the real thing.

He thought that if Macy was truly dead and he was the last civilized person in Greenlawn then maybe it would be better off if he just cashed in his chips here and now.

But to die like that, to be peeled and quartered…

His senses were very alert these past hours. So he listened. Processed it all. Outside he could screams of terror or perhaps pure unbridled joy in the distance. Crickets chirping. Nothing else. A calm night. Warm, pleasant.

You better find a way out of this.

You don’t have much time left.

He could feel the numerous gashes and bruises on his body, each one a separate catalog of pain. It would have been unlivable a few days before, but now it only served to reinforce his waning will to live. He was alive. He was a man. Men like him would be needed to straighten this out if such a thing ever became possible.

He had to live.

He squirmed across the floor, smelling the piss in the dirt, the shit that Maddie and her daughters buried in the sand. Jesus.

Footsteps.

Shit.

The three of them came padding down the stairs-and padding seemed appropriate here, because they no longer walked like women, like human beings, they shuffled along like apes or cantered like hunting wolves-and crowded the doorway.

Maddie came over and squatted about four feet from him. She had a bone in her hand that looked roughly about the size and shape of a human femur. It was stained brown and one end was sharpened for stabbing. She said something, a series of guttural barking sounds that he could not begin to decipher. She grunted and then stared at him for response.

When he didn’t respond, she pounded the floor with her bone.

He just shook his head.

She pounded her bone with authority now.