The Devil Next Door

“We’re going to the police station,” he said, trying to sound confident.

But even then he knew he was making an awful mistake…

41

The Huntress waited behind the dusty glass of a second hand store.

She watched the man and the girl get into the car.

There was something about the man she remembered, as if perhaps they’d been joined at one time. The more she watched him, the more she was certain of it. Just the sight of him made her blood run hot, made her heart beat in a delicious new rhythm. She licked her lips. She clutched the hunting knife in her hand very tightly.

The Huntress could no longer remember who she was.

She could no longer remember why she was.

It seemed that the way she’d been living these many hours was the way things had always been. Flooded with the primal memory and instinctive recall that had swallowed all that she was or ever had been with a simple plunge into the ancient black waters of prehistory, she was content. Content with the hunt, content with the kill. What more was there?

The car moved slowly up the street.

Hiding in the store, the others of her clan waited breathlessly. They wanted to hunt. They wanted to bring down prey with claws, teeth, and gleaming blades. She could smell the raw animal stink of them and it excited her. She led them because she was cunning. They were brutal, bloodthirsty, but almost idiotic in their simplicity. They understood only savagery, the law of the beast, kill or be killed, and they raided in such a fashion: with berserk, screaming mania. She, however, understood tactics, ambush, stealth. They were in awe of her.

One of them made a grunting, slobbering sound.

“Wait,” she told them. “Not just yet.”

She was tall and raven-haired, lean with rippling muscle, her eyes just as dark as the animal inheritance that misted her brain. Intrigued by the man, she trembled. Everything inside her-from heart to liver to lights-was pulsing, thrumming, anxious.

The Huntress had a vague recollection of the girl.

But that was unimportant.

She would have the man to satisfy her curiosity about him. And the girl? She would be killed or enslaved to amuse the sexual appetites of the clan…

42

Ray Hansel was alive.

He staggered down Main to where his patrol car was parked. The streets were silent now, deathly silent. There were bodies strewn about, the carcasses of dogs. Blood and entrails everywhere, a reeking fly-specked stew in the streets and spread over the walks. He was dazed and hurting and half out of his mind. As he walked-staggered, really-the sinking sun still hot on his neck, he tried to put it all together and make sense of something that was utterly senseless. He remembered the insane woman coming in, making for Bob Moreland’s office, how they overpowered her. Moreland said it was his wife and then, and then…

And then you heard the screaming, he reminded himself. The awful torturous screaming and you rushed downstairs right behind Moreland and every other cop that was up there. Remember? Remember how it looked? Men, women, children, and…dogs. Dozens and dozens of people and twice that many dogs.

He seized up right there on the walk, a dead man at his feet, sprawled over the concrete. He had died in battle with a Doberman. The Doberman’s jaws were locked on his throat, the knife in his hand still buried in the animal’s guts. They were both tangled in the dog’s viscera; it was knotted over them in fleshy ropes. Mangled and gutted, a surreal sculpture of human and canine locked in a fearsome and appalling death. Like two wax figures that had melted into one another. They both looked like they’d been dipped in red ink.

Choking on his own bile, Hansel moved past them, past the carnage spread everywhere.

All that blood, all those mutilated bodies.

He wanted to vomit, but there was absolutely nothing left in his stomach. His uniform was in rags. He was cut and bitten and scratched and generally banged-up. There was blood all over him, human blood and dog blood mixed in with his own.

He saw his patrol car and shuffled his way over, only stopping when he was a few feet away.

He looked around, his eyes glazed and his face scratched to the bone.

Are they all dead? Is the entire town dead now?

Logic told him it could not be, yet he’d never felt so terribly alone and terrible vulnerable. He wondered vaguely where his partner was. Where the hell was Paul Mackabee? Dead? Was he dead, too?

Standing there, he was wondering why the dogs had attacked.

Because at first, when they’d first flooded into the police station with that mob of wild-eyed people, they had attacked together, dogs and people. In unison. All shrieking and howling and foaming at the mouth. It had been a slaughter, an absolute slaughter. The cops overwhelmed and buried alive beneath people and dogs.