The Devil Next Door

Louis almost fell right over them, but they paid him little attention.

He yanked a butcher’s knife out of a girl’s back and slashed a woman across the breasts who tried to take hold of him. The air was filled with smoke from the burning house, it lay across the yard like a thick and pungent fog. There was a mist of blood, bodies sprawled dismembered and still kicking at every turn. A scalped boy crawled in his direction. A woman dragging her own viscera grabbed at his legs as another strode out of the haze carrying a bloody dismembered head in each hand, swinging them by the hair.

Louis hopped over corpses, dodging savages with axes and body parts, slipping on the blood-covered grass, and finally tripping over a torso.

When he came back up he was no longer anonymous.

Recognized.

Frank Chalmers stood there, huge and shaggy with the blood-matted fur vest on, like something from a Pliocene cave. He had a hatchet in one hand and a sickle in the other. Louis did not doubt for one moment that he had come to kill him. His body swayed back and forth as if to some unheard melody, his muscles bunching beneath his skin, his knotted hands gripping his weapons and anxious to put them to use.

Louis got up and faced him.

He knew Frank very well, but Frank was dead. This was not Frank.

He felt very useless with his butcher knife facing down this grinning, war-painted bear of a man who at sixty still bristled with corded muscle, his flesh like alligator hide, slit and cut and scarred but still holding together.

Chalmers let out a cry and came right at Louis.

Louis tried to get away from him, but there were too many bodies, too many savages crowding in. The sickle nearly took off the end of his nose and the hatchet came down at what seemed the same time, striking the blade of the butcher knife and knocking it out of his hand, leaving his arm numb right up to the shoulder joint.

That’s how easy it was for Frank Chalmers, the pack Baron.

Louis was his and he knew it. That after all he had been through that it would end with this crazy sonofabitch just wasn’t acceptable. When Chalmers moved again, Louis jumped away, tripped over someone, found a broomstick that had been sharpened into a spear and came right at the bigger man.

It was sheer suicide.

But it worked.

The counter-attack threw Chalmers off his guard and bought Louis enough time to make a valiant jab at him or to run like crazy. It was at that moment that arrows thudded into Chalmers’ left arm and ribs. He cried out and fell back and Louis vaulted in and gave him the spear right in his exposed belly, sinking it deep with all his strength until he felt it hit something in there, maybe bone, and become firmly lodged.

Chalmers screamed and swung his sickle.

Had the blade hit Louis it would have probably split his face open, but Chalmers swung it backhand and hit him with the unsharpened edge. Still, it was quite a blow. Louis was hit in the face and knocked backwards. Just in time to catch an arrow just above the kneecap.

He went down.

He hit the ground, rolling in the bloody grass, and when he opened his eyes Chalmers was gone and there was that arrow sunk into the meat of his leg, a patch of blood soaking through his jeans.

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…

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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…

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