The Devil Next Door

The man used his knife, cutting shanks of meat free from the dead woman’s thighs and belly. The family fed upon them, chewing and snapping and tearing, eating it raw and bloody like tigers in the jungle. Cutting free a slab of meat from between the woman’s leg, probably her vagina, he handed it to the woman. She sniffed it, licked it, then she stuffed it into her mouth whole, chewing it slowly. She kept taking it out, working it with her fingers, then stuffing it back in and chewing it some more.

And in Macy’s mind a voice was screaming: she’s not eating it! She’s not eating it at all…she’s tenderizing it, chewing it to a soft fleshy mush.

And that’s exactly what she was doing.

She went down on her hands and knees, breathing hard, her face glossy with blood, the thin juice of what she had been chewing upon smeared on her lips. She spit it into her hand along with a snotty tangle of saliva. She held it out, shaking it at Macy, grunting deep in her throat with an almost bleating sort of sound. The others went down on all fours with her.

Then together, like beasts of the field lowing in the grass, they crept in closer, blood-drenched ghouls with huge black eyes, their teeth white and shining, drool falling from their mouths.

They moved in closer…and closer.

Macy screamed because she knew.

While the children and the man took hold of her, the woman forced her jaws open. She stuck the handle of a knife in her mouth and pried them open. Then she brought the thing she had been chewing on closer, forcing it into Macy’s shrieking mouth…

53

When Louis stepped out of Shelly’s Cafe, the streets were empty.

Oh, they were out there, somewhere, but he could not see them. He could feel them, though, gathered thickly in the spreading shadows like locusts in a farmer’s field. Just as destructive, just as lethal, just as patient. He thought he could even smell them-their sweaty bodies and sour breath and bloody hands, the ripe stink of death hovering over them.

As he stepped out into the fading sunlight, the precarious uneven illumination of twilight, he could certainly feel their eyes on him. It was very unsettling. Like being some beast of the field ringed in by the hungry eyes of predators. They were watching him, gauging him, seeing what kind of defense he could put up and how easy they could take him down. He felt like a suckling pig in a pen surrounded by ravenous wolves. He actually thought he could smell their hot breath and drool.

Doris was behind him and she felt it, too. She kept the shotgun in both fists. She would kill anything that moved. There was no doubt of it. “We better find somewhere safe. And fast. I don’t think we have much time.”

Louis was terrified.

There was no way around that.

He was utterly terrified and instinct told him to run, to get the hell out, but he wasn’t going to do that. He knew he was in terrible danger. But what worried him most was Macy. So he would not run. As he stepped out onto the sidewalk, the cop’s 9mm in his hand, he did everything he could to look calm and in charge, even if he was lights years beyond these things. He was a man and he was going to act like one. Maybe they’d kill him, but he wouldn’t make it easy. He wouldn’t give them the pleasure of his fear.

Confidence.

Just a word any other time, but suddenly Louis seemed to understand what it meant. How it was a tool you used. If you panicked and bolted, those people out there would come running and howling, smelling his fear like wild dogs and sensing an easy kill. But if he was confident, they’d be cautious. They were playing mind games on him and now he would play the same game.

But it isn’t just mindless, murderous strangers out there, he reminded himself. Michelle is out there. Michelle is with them. If she attacks…can you kill her? Can you point the gun at her and put a bullet in her if it means saving Macy?

Louis couldn’t think about that.

He loved Michelle completely. He would have done anything for her. But now things were different. Yesterday, he would have rather put a bullet into his own head than harm her…but now? If she was some savage, blood-maddened beast? He did not know. He did not want to know.

He stepped off the curb, wanting to give himself some distance from the buildings, the alleys, the cellar stairways cut down into the sidewalk. Too many places to spring an ambush from. And although he had never actually used a 9mm automatic before, he knew enough about the weapon to know that its magazine carried enough rounds to do some serious killing.

Okay.

“You’re not going to find your girl,” Doris said. “Be sensible. You’ll get us both killed.”

Louis ignored her.