The Devil Next Door

Then they found something else.

A box-cutter with a curving steel blade like that of a scimitar.

Angie had no memory of throwing it in there when she’d sliced open boxes for the recycling. She only knew that it felt good in her hand. It conformed to her palm and begged to be put to use.

“Um…are you all right?” Brandi asked, caught somewhere between confusion and fear.

Angie looked up at her, drool running from her mouth. Her eyes were fixed, staring, almost reptilian. She brought out the box cutter and slashed Brandi across the throat. Brandi stumbled back, shocked, stunned, overwhelmed. Blood bubbled from her torn voice box and she tried madly to stem it with her fingers. It squirted between them like a flow of rich red wine, catching Angie in the face.

The hot spray of blood was not unpleasant.

It was pleasing.

Angie came right over the counter. She slashed Brandi’s outstretched fingers to ribbons, she took the tip of her nose off, she opened one breast, and then she ripped the box-cutter across Brandi’s lovely dark liquid eyes, the hooked blade catching in the left pupil and yanking the bloody, glistening orb out by a section of optic nerve.

People fled the store.

But more disturbing, others did not.

When Angie came around the counter from the hacked, bleeding thing on the floor, two men and one woman stood there, smiling at her, staring at her with dark troglodyte eyes. Eyes that understood. One of the men, middle-aged and balding, stepped up behind her and slid his hands up her shirt, gripping her breasts roughly.

Angie liked it.

Her blue eyes were like crystal drowning pools, lips pulled away from teeth. The front of her pink tee was soaked with blood, crazy whorls of it had splashed over her face. She enjoyed the smell of it. It excited her, stirred primal memories of the hunt. She licked it off her lips.

The others following, she went back behind the counter. She dipped her finger’s into Brandi’s gored throat, swished them around in the wound, then, her fingers dripping with blood, she went over to the wall. She knocked a display of Hostess cakes out of the way, kicked aside a cardboard standee of Dale Earnhardt hawking Budweiser…and proceeded to draw on the wall in blood. Elaborate looping symbols, complex intersecting linear marks, bloody handprints and stick figures, repeating them again and again.

Using Brandi Welch’s corpse as their palette, the others joined her, covering the walls in ritualistic hieroglyphics that looked oddly like the cave paintings of Paleolithic man.

They instinctively knew what she was drawing and they followed suit until the wall was crowded with primitive art.

When Angie walked out of the store, the others followed in her rich, savage blood-wake. It was her scent now and it drew them to her.

And behind in the store, forgotten but unconcerned, Danny reached into the meat case and found a moist, well-marbled slab of sirloin. It dripped with blood. He brought it to his mouth.

Humming, he began to suck the juice from it…

11

After Louis was long gone, Officers Warren and Shaw and Kojozian stood around staring at the dead boy on the sidewalk, each happily reminiscing about other stiffs they’d been called in on. How they looked, how they smelled, what happened when they tried to bag them up. Warren was an old hand, just like Louis thought, and he seemed to have the best stories by far. But the other two kept trying to outdo him like a couple guys reliving their high school glories on the gridiron.

Kojozian, who’d only been a cop five years by that point, kept trying to come up with something that would impress Warren. “I tell you about that nut over on Birch Street a couple years back? Some old guy, retired railroad man, he took to the bottle and took to it hard.”

Warren nodded, as if he’d heard it too many times. “The sauce gets ‘em every time. Take my word for it. I could tell you some stories, boy. The old Sweet Lucy, they get a taste for it, look out, brother.”

“ Sure,” Kojozian said, “sure. This guy’s got it so bad that his wife decides he’s going cold turkey so she up and locks him in the coal bin down in the basement. Keeps him there like a week. You believe that shit? He’s in there, living in the straw, shitting and pissing himself. She slides food under the door for him, but no booze. She wouldn’t have called us, but she broke the key off in the lock. Well, let me tell you, we broke the door down and the smell that came out…oh boy, not nice. The old man was out of his tree with the D.T. s. He’d torn up his nose, clawed it right to hamburger because he thought there were bugs crawling in and out of it. We took him out and it was no easy bit, he bled all over my uniform shirt, just screaming about the bugs living inside him.”