The Devil Next Door

She did not recognize him; her eyes were glassy, translucent.

She chattered her teeth and trembled with rage, her eyes simmering black with a vast, stupid hatred.

Warren did not look for mercy and he did not get any. The others waded in with clubs and began beating him until his bones were heard to snap, until his ribs were staved in, and his lower jaw was shattered. Knobs of bloody bone thrusting through his ripped uniform pants, he inched on the ground like a slug, moaning and groaning.

The woman with the bow came over. A hot stench of blood and decay wafted from her. She was menstruating. Blood all over her legs. It dripped from her. While the others held him, she crouched over him and rubbed her moist red vulva over his face, marking him with a crude cross of menstrual blood.

“Now,” she said.

Marked for the reaping.

The other woman handed over her broomstick with the head on it. She gripped her long-handled axe with both hands. With a manic, shrieking cry of delight, she swung the axe and decapitated Warren quite cleanly. His broken body lurched, shook. The eyes in his head blinked a few times and then glazed over with a stark finality.

One of the hunters took his head and impaled it on a broomstick.

He raised it up to the darkening sky and let go with a screeching blood-maddened war cry…

49

Louis kept expecting the dead people in the cafe to move.

He kept expecting them to wink at him or to call him by name, perhaps take hold of him in their cold, sticky red fists and show him exactly what had gone through their minds when they pressed that serrated steel to their throats, demand that he do the same.

For it was better than the alternative and he knew it.

There was a rustle of cloth and he spun around, his eyes wide and his mouth hooked in a terrible grimace. One of the men at the counter slid from his seat and fell to the floor. The little girl at the table fell forward, striking the plate before her face-first. The fat lady trembled and rolled out of the booth, coming down hard, her bloody knife clattering across the floor and stopping at Louis’ feet.

For one split second, he did nothing. His mind was filled with a roaring, whooshing sound and he was certain that they were coming alive around him, waking up. That they would look upon him with dead, yellowing eyes and reach out for him with blood-encrusted hands. And then everything in him went loose and he almost fell down, then tightened up stiff as a plank. A scream came out of his mouth, but it was dry and scratchy and barely more than a hissing sound.

The dead were just dead.

But the idea of three of them coincidentally moving, falling over or sliding out of their seats, was just too much and Louis could not accept it. His heart hammering and his breath coming very fast, he forced himself to move. To step over the body of the fallen man. He expected them to move again, to reach out or whisper his name, but they were just dead. And to prove this to himself, he went right over to the state cop-avoiding the reflection of his grinning, staring face in the mirror- and pulled the gun from his holster. It was a 9mm. And soon as Louis pulled it out, the cop’s corpse fell over like a tree.

Louis stepped around him, the gun in his hand.

Outside, he heard something that made him go white: the high, joyous peals of laughing children. Just for a moment, but it had been there. Something passed before the window of the cafe and Louis turned, bringing up the gun and pulling the trigger. But nothing happened. His hands shaking so badly that he almost dropped the gun, he found the safety and clicked it off.

He heard running feet.

He ran to the window, the gun out before him. Out there, the streets were empty. Completely empty. His entire body shook and his bladder felt very full. His heart was pounding so hard he thought it would blow out of his chest. He could see his Dodge from where he was, see it very well.

And the doors were wide open.

Behind him, something moved…

50

They had the girl now.

They dragged her into the shadows while the man was in the cafe. He never even saw them or suspected they were near. That’s how the clan knew that he was not a hunter, that he was soft and weak, his senses still deadened by who and what he was. Nothing but prey. They could have charged in and taken him but the Huntress did not want that. She would call them to the hunt. She would select the prey. She would find the meat and show them how to bring it down.

She was strange.

She was careful.

But she was also very cunning, very dangerous, and she killed without warning. The others let out a cry of anger when they struck, but not the Huntress. She smiled, exuded a scent of calm, then slashed your eyes, your throat.

The hunters stared down at the girl in the grass.

The men sniffed her. The women pulled at her hair.

She was theirs now…

51

Louis turned, his heart pounding mercilessly.