The Devil Next Door

Energized by bloodlust, hysterical fury, and animal ferocity, the two opposing armies of savages-all painted for war, some naked, others dressed in rags or fresh hides, many brandishing death totems of human scalps, heads, and assorted body parts-charged at each other in howling groups. To a casual observer, it was a deranged display of psychotic frenzy unmatched since the barbarian invasions of Europe. But to those involved it was strictly territorial, the sort of manic blood-rite that the tribes lived for.

The Baron led the first charge, hacking and cutting his way through the intruders. Bodies were cut down by spears and hatchets and machetes. Bones splintered and heads were smashed in, limbs were sliced free and bodies fell disemboweled in the streets. The first five minutes was nothing but wholesale murder, the packs beating one another down, slitting throats and chopping on the fallen.

Then the dogs charged in.

The Baron, pulling back with dozens of wounded, watched them tear through the ranks, biting and clawing and feeding on the injured. A huge shepherd gripped the head of a boy and shook it in his jaws while three others fed on his writhing body. The dogs ravaged both sides and even themselves. When an axe dropped a Doberman, its head nearly cleaved in two, a group of beagles tore it apart, fighting over the bloodiest chunks of meat. Men killed men and children killed children and both killed dogs and were killed by them.

As the Baron watched the atrocities, there was a vague memory in the back of his mind: driver ants. South American driver ants cutting a killing swath through the jungle. Trees and bushes stripped, animals eaten down to bones. Nothing escaped them, not even men who were stupid enough to get in their way. It flashed through his mind and vanished as quickly.

The dogs were like that.

The main force was an army of teeth and claws and hunger. A huge and voracious machine of destruction. The smell of blood, meat, and death drove them wild.

They attacked people. They attacked parked cars. They charged through screen doors and dove through windows. They tore sidings loose and chewed at woodwork. They ran roughshod through gardens and tore small trees up by the roots. If they couldn’t kill it or maim it, they pissed on it.

The Baron saw dogs fucking. Dogs eating people. Dogs eating each other. A fearful feeding frenzy. A group of armed women had been caught in their masses and the dogs went insane tearing and ripping and biting. Pretty soon so many dogs had pressed into the melee, you couldn’t see the women. Just dogs biting each other. Biting themselves. Blood was flowing, was gathering in a heaving, stinking mist over the streets. And still the killing continued.

Both packs were under siege now by the animals and fought side by side.

Tribal affiliation was forgotten.

A raging group of men with machetes, most homemade, tried to slash through their numbers. But the dogs were like ants sacrificing themselves madly for their queen. They literally piled up their own crushed bodies until their attackers had to withdraw…into an onslaught of dogs and crazy solitary hunters who claimed no true affiliation and slaughtered anything that moved.

Providence Street that night was a cacophonous hive of noise…barking, howling, screeching, wailing. Some was from the animals that walked on four legs and some from those that walked on two. Just absolute, thundering chaos.

Slowly, though, the dogs were dropping, being overwhelmed by cutting blades and devoured by their fellows.

The Baron, with so many of his pack littering the street, charged in again and again, dealing death and fighting tooth and nail. Swinging his machete like a sword, he gutted cockapoos and boxers and spaniels while to all sides the wounded were drowning in the living, biting sea.

The Baron was bitten, gouged, bloodied, and torn.

But he never stopped killing.

He saw a poodle hanging from a hunter’s face by its teeth. He decapitated it, but the head still hung, jaws locked in a death grip.

Dozens of hunters took his lead and frantically waded in, chopping at the animals, chopping at blood-covered savages, and in the end, chopping at one another. The leader of the other pack, whom the Baron had sighted as his kill and his kill alone, was overwhelmed. He’d once been known as Dick Starling and he’d once been knocked cold by Macy Merchant, but by then he was just a savage wearing the bloody pelt and peeled headpiece of a Great Dane. A Rotweiler-split neatly in half-was hanging from his belly by its fangs, still biting, still clawing. The Baron, dragging an Irish Setter with him whose teeth were in his leg, moved in and decapitated him.

Finally, even the Baron withdrew from the killing fields.

He slashed the Setter until it released its bite and stood there, bloodied but unbowed, viewing the carnage around him. The decimation of both packs.

Then a final group of dogs came at him.