The Devil Next Door

They bristled with excitement, chattering their teeth, making low moaning sounds that were nearly orgasmic. All three had their hands in her now, ripping, jerking at something, cutting at it with the knife, finally working it free as they cried out with a strident communal baying. Doris saw it. Saw that great fleshy mass they yanked from inside her…a heavy, pinkish-brown slab of blood-dripping meat that could only be her liver.

They held it up like a prize.

Growling and grunting, they brought it to their mouths and bit into it.

This was the very last thing that Doris saw before the darkness took her…

56

Night came then to the Greenlawn.

It came over the rooftops and from cellars, from dark corners and alleys, crawlspaces and attics and graveyards…all the places it had been tucked away and coveted during the hours of daylight. It came with teeth and intent and degeneracy. The darkness concealed a thousand sins, a thousand terrible deeds, wreckage and corpses and packs of men and women and children that were no longer human, just creeping night things running wild and insane and loathsome through the narrow streets and weedy backlots, the dusky arteries of the town. These were the ones that welcomed the night, that understood it and worshipped it and called it their own. With fixed eyes, primal appetites, and a yawning malignancy where their souls had once been before a certain dormant gene was activated, they returned to the dawn times. Repressed demons and parasitical desires that had long clung to the undersides of their psyches were released with gruesome abandon. In Greenlawn atavistic evil was brought to term and was allowed to bear its pestilent fruit. And the growing season was rich.

Heeding the primordial call of the wild, filled with an archaic killing instinct born in the pre-Cambrian slime, overjoyed to return to the jungle at last, they took to the streets in wolfpacks, hunting and maiming and devouring.

And the night went on forever…

57

Although she was sore from being raped repeatedly, Leslie Towers was nothing if not completely connected to her surroundings. Though bound as she was, tossed into the grass, she was alert as any animal, sensing the night around her and the things that hunted it. So while Mr. Kenning and Mike Hack slept off their meal of dog-both greased slick with yellow dog fat, Setter hairs and leaves stuck to them-Leslie heard the hunters circling beyond the light of the fire. They had been out there in the darkness for some time.

Now they were coming.

Leslie was tense, ready. Her wrists were tied behind her back so there was no chance to gnaw her way free. Trussed-up as she was, she could only lay there, an unwilling victim. She longed to run free and wild through the grim, silent night. She also longed for a knife to protect herself with.

The hunters crept in closer.

Mr. Kenning slept on as did Mike Hack.

Silence.

Heavy, pregnant with foreboding and dread.

Soon now.

They were closer.

She could smell the stink of them: gamey, rich, hot. There were males as well as females.

Now she could see them…hulking shapes, but small and lithe. Children. Children led by a large man who was shaggy and stealthy. Their faces were darkened with tiger-striped bands, bodies slashed with browns and blues. With a shrieking battle cry, they rushed in. Mr. Kenning leaped to his feet and two spears sank into him, one in the belly and the other in the back. A knife slashed his eyes into bleeding holes. A hammer crashed down on his skull with a sickening popping noise. He went to his knees, more spears jabbing into him. Blood poured from him and an insane doglike howl roared from his contorted mouth. Mike tried to help and was put down under a rain of fists and clubs.

The hunters ravaged the camp, looking for weapons, for food. They kicked over the spit that the dog had been roasted on. They scattered the coals of the fire into a heap of dry kindling that immediately began to blaze.

Leslie thought they might not notice her there in the grass, away from the fire. But the rekindled blaze made the yard glow orange and yellow, flickering. Then a form jumped down by her, a girl with long hair knotted with wildflowers and sticks. Her painted face was like that of a wild boar…fat, puffy, greasy, her eyes glistening black. She stank like shit and blood.

She dragged Leslie by the ankles over towards the fire.

The other girls snarled and snapped at her, kicked her and spit on her. The boys rushed in, gripping her breasts and the globes of her ass. One of them bit into her shoulder. They fought over her, yanking her in all directions, their dirty nails scratching into her back. They were all hard and she could smell the brine of their balls.

She screamed.

She hissed.

Fingers groped her face and she bit one of them to the bone.