The Devil Next Door (40 page)

The old woman stomped her feet twice.

The boys untied one of the women who’d gasped. Macy recognized her from somewhere. She was maybe thirty with long red hair. Rough-looking like the sort that might have chummed around with her mother out at the Hair of the Dog on the highway. When they untied her, careful not to free her wrists, she came to life fighting and kicking at them. A man came over with a length of iron pipe and hit her three or four times until the fight drained from her.

“Please,” she moaned, spitting out blood. “Please…please just let me go…”

She might as well have tried to talk a snake out of biting her, it had as much effect on them. They dragged her away by the ankles, pulling her up onto the altar and depositing her at the feet of that gruesome straw hag nailed to the cross. The burning candles stuffed in the hag’s eyes and mouth guttered and dripped wax. Macy saw something she had not seen before: the hag was like a pincushion. There were things stuck into the flesh. Knives, needles, screwdrivers. It only made that gutted, stuffed corpse look that much more perverse, that much more pagan.

The old woman barked something.

One of the boys gripped a steak knife thrust in the hag’s thigh and pulled it free. He studied the blade with the rapt fascination all boys seemed to have for weapons, save this was infinitely worse. Not curiosity, really, but an almost religious awe. He pressed the blade to his lips, then went down on his knees, yanked the woman’s head up and quickly slit her throat. The woman flopped and gagged, drowning in her own blood. It did not take too long. That’s all the ceremony there was to it…though Macy knew they had not slit her throat at the hag’s feet for no reason.

It was ritualistic.

It was an offering.

They had sacrificed her to the hag.

The boy slid the knife back in the thigh and then he and the others began painting their bodies with the pooling blood. And when their faces and chests were gleaming red, they both painted a weird little symbol on the stitched belly of the hag.

Macy was offended, of course, but not shocked, not really. She had seen so much by this point that trifling things like ordinary shock were beyond her. That intellectual part of her brain that was finding it harder and harder to swim upstream against the currents of atavism that were trying to drown her, knew that it had just witnessed some primeval tribal rite that had not been practiced for eons.

And maybe Macy was fascinated in some way by this, but the woman next to her was not.

She was screaming.

Her gag had come off and she was screaming manically. Macy kept telling her under her breath to shut the hell up, but it was too late. The man and woman who’d first butchered the boy came over. Covered in drying blood, they were savage and insane things. They were whispering under their breath with a chilling sort of hiss. They untied the screaming woman and dragged her off maybe five feet. The man held her arms and forced her down on the stone floor. The woman grabbed her legs, forcing them apart, gripping her thighs and opening them like she was about to deliver a baby.

She brought her head between the woman’s legs.

Is she going down on her?
some crazed, near-hysterical voice in Macy’s head wondered. But Macy knew that whatever was going to happen would have absolutely nothing to do with passion, forced or otherwise. She saw the savage woman grin. Her teeth had been filed to blood-stained points.

Macy gasped.

The bound woman screamed again.

And Macy saw it, though she knew she should have looked away. The savage woman opened her mouth and bit down on what was between the legs, bit down on it with a snapping of her jaws. As her victim screamed with a high, mad treble, she tore and ripped at what she had bitten into, worrying it like a dog trying to shred a piece of tasty meat from a bone.

The screaming women went silent, fell limp. Maybe it was trauma and maybe it was shock. Macy never knew. She saw the savage woman. Her face glistening red, a flap of meat in her jaws.

Macy went out cold…

65

Louis entered the Soderberg house. He stepped in there, sensing immediately that he had just made a very bad mistake. The house smelled like shit and blood and God only knew what else. A steaming odor of waste and offal. He moved through the house, fighting against his own fears. He had to find that gun cabinet. He had to have a weapon that could drop those animals from a distance.

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…”

66

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.