Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

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…

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…

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.

He turned the car over.

It started easily enough.

He shifted, released the clutch, and drove through the battle-ravaged streets of his home town. There was wreckage everywhere. Entire neighborhoods were still burning. Bodies were sprawled in the streets. Some were hanging in the trees.

He would not think about it.

He would not let himself understand what it meant, that Greenlawn was just another piece in a huge puzzle that had, in the course of less that twenty-four hours, completely gutted civilization from one end to another. He turned on the radio but there was nothing but dead air. All the power was out in Greenlawn now.

Yes, finally, a world lit only by fire.

An unconscious genetic urge will unmake all we have made, gut civilization, and harvest the race like cattle as we are overwhelmed by primitive urges and race memory run wild…

Earl Gould.

Jesus, Earl Gould.

Somehow he had forgotten about him as he was beginning to realize that he was forgetting about a lot of things. He would not think about it. He followed Providence Street until it crossed the river, then turned onto Main. He followed it right out of town, knowing that it hooked up with the county road and eventually led to highway 421. But where then? He did not know and he did not want to ask himself.

The sun would be up soon…and what would it see? What would it light? A world thrown back in time to the Pleistocene and all because of a gene. A microscopic chemical transmission of heredity.

Louis could not make sense of it. Not any longer.