Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

Then the pain hit him.

Things hadn’t exactly been easy for him that night. His body had taken its fair share of abuse…but this was beyond all that. At first, when he went down, there was just the sting of impact…but now, the real pain arrived. It hit him blindly and with full force. There was nothing remotely subtle about it. It exploded in his leg and made him cry out, made something inside him roll over as wave after wave of agony moved through him tearing up everything in its path.

And when he again was able to take in his surroundings, his face covered with a warm, sour-smelling sweat, he saw a woman advancing on him. She carried a human head on the end of a spear…

Macy had him on the ground and no one interfered.

Most of the clan had followed the Huntress off on a hunt and those that remained did not interfere. Macy stood over him, the man that had raped her, with a bloody knife in one hand. There had been a time, perhaps ages ago, when Macy Merchant had been a very shy, bookish girl who cringed at the idea of swatting a fly or stepping on a spider, but that Macy was as extinct as the tribes the people of the world had regressed into.

She watched him bleed to death but it was hardly enough.

She raised her knife over her head and jabbed him in the belly, the spray of hot blood in her face invigorating as she put both hands on the hilt and forced the blade upwards, gutting him like a trout.

He died squirming in his own blood and entrails and Macy watched death take him with a cold, almost clinical eye. She rose up from his carcass, studying the blood on her knife, her hands, her arms.

Unafraid, raging with primal memory, she licked it off her fingers…

Louis watched the woman approach him and he was not entirely sure it was a woman. She was wearing a freshly peeled human hide and a looping scarf of bowels around her throat. As she glided towards him, she was muttering something under her breath in a hoarse, gargly sort of voice, brandishing the head of a teenage boy on a sharpened pole in one hand and an axe in the other.

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…

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.