The Devil Next Door

If viewed from above, Greenlawn would have looked roughly like a postage stamp with the Green River intersecting it. The north side of town was the oldest and the houses there could bear witness to this to any with an architectural eye. The closer you got to Main, the better they were kept up. But the farther you went, the shabbier they became until ultimately they blended into a strip dotted with neighborhoods of ramshackle company houses and old railroad hotels, industrial concerns and saloons and sooty apartment buildings. All of which ended at the very doorstep of the trainyards. South of Main things were much more prosperous and here flanking nice antique blocks of tall, narrow Victorians and frame houses thrown up before the Second World War were neighborhoods of post-war ranch-style houses of brick and stucco. And at the southern edge, modulars and pre-builts that had blossomed in the last twenty years, taking over fields and ball diamonds and any available open space. The west side of town was marked by a looming assortment of warehouses, mills, and machine shops, most of which were closed and rotting. The Green River passed through town, running through old neighborhoods and new, coursing beneath Main Street and continuing north up through the trainyards before leaving town entirely and making for the wheat fields, farmlands, and scrub forest beyond.

All in all, Greenlawn was an ordinary town in the Midwest, no different from any number of towns to the east or west or south. The same families had lived there for generations and what new blood came in, generally settled in and toughed it out or moved away. The schools were good, the streets clean, the crime rate low. There were fireworks in the park on the Fourth of July and parades for Christmas and Veteran’s Day. There was a county fair in August and a circus passed through in May. There was a winter carnival and another come September. The summers were hot and humid, the winters long and white and frigid. It was a great place to raise a family, a great place for fishing and hunting and outdoor recreation. There had been a bad fire in 1915 that started in the shanty village at the western edge and swept through the northern half before it was contained. Old timers still spoke of it. There had been a few murders, though no more than you could count on one hand and nothing in recent memory.

Greenlawn was just an ordinary small town that could be found anywhere.

This, then, was the scene on Black Friday…

4

Maddie Sinclair slid the knife out of her husband’s throat.

Cocking her head like a dog listening for its master’s approach, she studied the blood-streaked blade of the carving knife. She sniffed it. Then she tasted it. She made a bestial groaning noise in her throat.

She stiffened.

A sound.

She waited, gripping the knife, ready to fight, to pounce, to kill. Whatever it took to protect what was hers and hers alone. Footsteps. Slow, stealthy. Maddie’s lips pulled back in a snarl. She tensed. Sniffed the air. Waited. She could smell the musk of the others that were coming. It was an odor she recognized. The odor of female.

She brought the knife up.

Squatted in a killing stance, ready to leap.

Two girls came into the living room. Something in her chest jumped at the sight of them. There was recognition. A warmth that was quickly replaced by something cold, plotting, and atavistic. Maddie recognized them as her brood, her young, her daughters, but there was no emotion at this: the two bitches were not to be trusted. Not yet.

Hissing at them, Maddie sniffed the air they brought with them.

She smelled urine. Blood.

It was a satisfying odor, one that calmed her somewhat. They smelled of the hunt. Not like others out there, not soapy and repugnant. She waited to see if the bitches would challenge her kill, try to take it. But they did nothing but stare. They did not run. There was no fear on them. Just hesitation. They were both naked. They had taken needles and poked their breasts, stomachs, chests, and arms with them, creating a bleeding series of welts that ran in decorative, concentric patterns. The elaborate scarification was symbolic, tribal, and resembled the intricate cicatrisation of certain African bush clans.

Maddie liked it.

If these two bitches were to hunt as part of her band, she would decorate her flesh likewise.

The bitches moved in closer, intrigued.

Maddie let them, watching them. Like her, they were pale, streaked with grime and gore, leaves and sticks braided into their matted hair.

She hissed at them.

They did not make any threatening moves.

Maddie motioned them in with the knife. They squatted by the carcass with her. They laid fingertips upon the kill, touching, feeling, instinctively probing muscle mass and fat deposit, knowing which would be spitted first.

Maddie swallowed. “Down…” she said, her voice dry and scraping, the words difficult to pronounce. “Take the kill down…below…”

The bitches did not argue.