The Devil Next Door (47 page)

But it wasn’t dying fast enough for the Baron.

There was a pile of lumber near the stairs, a wall that had been stripped to lathing. Home improvement. The Baron saw a gun-shaped apparatus sitting on the lumber. He went for it, palming it. A cordless drill with a half-inch bit threaded into the chuck. Part of him seemed to recognize it, but there was no conscious memory.

But he knew a weapon when he held it in his fist.

He pressed the trigger. The drill bit whirred around.

Grinning, he ran the bit right through the dog’s thrashing skull. Its eyes glazed over as he scrambled its brains. It slumped over dead, its sheer bulk keeping the others away from the opening it had shattered in the glass.

The Baron pulled the drill back, studied the bit that was slimed with gray matter, bone chips, and strands of coarse hair.

Some time later, he wandered outside.

The street was filled with gutted corpses, human and dog, parts of them, blood and hair and entrails. A few savages devoured raw joints of meat or fought over juicy shoulder portions. What dogs were left scavenged the dead. There was nothing but the moaning of the wounded, the whine of dying dogs.

What remained of the Baron’s pack were beaten, bloodied, exhausted. They stepped amongst the bodies, slipping on blood and corkscrews of intestines.

They gathered at the Baron’s side.

Although he was bitten, blood-streaked, and in considerable pain, he had never felt so joyously
alive
before…

78

They’re in the dark, Louis. All around you, slithering hideous things that feed on children, that sharpen their teeth on bones and decorate their lairs with human hides. Wake up! Wake up, you fucking idiot, you’re in the cannibal’s kitchen, you’re in the ogre’s cave, you’re in the musty rot-smelling cellar of the wicked witch and her wicked offspring…

Louis opened his eyes, fighting on the edge of sleep. Inside, he had given up. He had been beaten, cut, dragged through the streets, dry-humped by a cave girl and then pissed on by her mother. It didn’t really seem to him that there was really much to live for because the world had shit its own pants and here he was a prisoner of these fucking
things.

But he opened his eyes.

Something plopped in his face. Cool, moist. It plopped again. He looked up and there was the corpse of a man hanging from the rafters…part of a man really. His legs were nowhere to be seen. He was hanging upside down, chained and gutted, a ghastly white in color. And what had plopped onto Louis’ face was something dripping from one of his hollowed eye sockets.

Louis recoiled, squirmed away from it best he could with his ankles and wrists tied.

He looked around.

The mother—he now suspected it was Maddie Sinclair, though she had degenerated so much it had been hard to tell at first—was nowhere in sight. Either were here daughters, whom Louis could not remember the names of.

The air smelled like fresh meat, shit, urine, and vomit. Something else that was heavy and musky and must have been the raw animal stench of the women themselves. The sort of smell you might acquaint with the shit-stained, blood-spattered, bone-strewn den of a wolf pack.

He lay still for ten minutes that became twenty, refusing to entertain any hope that they had abandoned him. He could not be that lucky. He waited. Breathed. Tried to get his mind working, trying to pretend he couldn’t smell the woman’s piss on him.

Something bit his ankle.

He jerked and a rodent went scampering away. A rat? Must have been. Too big to be anything else. He looked around the cellar. Had he been an anthropologist he might have appreciated the primordial squalor of prehumanity. But he certainly did not appreciate it. Bones and hides, human remains, bodies and parts of them hanging from the rafters. A sack—which must have been a human stomach stuffed with something and stitched closed—was hanging from over the fire from a tripod.

Vile, was the only word for it.

But honestly, with all the boxes and bags and crap piled everywhere, Maddie Sinclair’s basement had been a pigsty to begin with.

Imagine that. Uppity, snobby, Little Miss Perfect Maddie Sinclair’s basement was a rat’s nest. Ah, the secrets we hide from our neighbors.

He heard a sound and started. He was expecting them to come back, those white-painted wraiths with their necklaces of human scalps and fingers. He expected them to return to their kills…and their captive. And maybe this time, it would be no simple dry-hump from an overeager teenage savage.

Maybe it would be the real thing.

He thought that if Macy was truly dead and he was the last civilized person in Greenlawn then maybe it would be better off if he just cashed in his chips here and now.

But to die like that, to be peeled and quartered…

His senses were very alert these past hours. So he listened. Processed it all. Outside he could screams of terror or perhaps pure unbridled joy in the distance. Crickets chirping. Nothing else. A calm night. Warm, pleasant.

You better find a way out of this.

You don’t have much time left.

He could feel the numerous gashes and bruises on his body, each one a separate catalog of pain. It would have been unlivable a few days before, but now it only served to reinforce his waning will to live. He was alive. He was a man. Men like him would be needed to straighten this out if such a thing ever became possible.

He had to live.

He squirmed across the floor, smelling the piss in the dirt, the shit that Maddie and her daughters buried in the sand. Jesus.

Footsteps.

Shit.

The three of them came padding down the stairs—and
padding
seemed appropriate here, because they no longer walked like women, like human beings, they shuffled along like apes or cantered like hunting wolves—and crowded the doorway.

Maddie came over and squatted about four feet from him. She had a bone in her hand that looked roughly about the size and shape of a human femur. It was stained brown and one end was sharpened for stabbing. She said something, a series of guttural barking sounds that he could not begin to decipher. She grunted and then stared at him for response.

When he didn’t respond, she pounded the floor with her bone.

He just shook his head.

She pounded her bone with authority now.

As dangerous as the situation was, it reminded Louis of that scene in
2001: A Space Odyssey.
He could have laughed at the absurdity of it had he not been so close to tears at that point.

There was something she wanted him to understand. She kept pounding the bone, offering him the toothy grin of baboon.

Maddie Sinclair had been an attractive woman before this happened to her. Yes, elitist and pompous, but also the sort of women men watched, the penis having no true shame. She was not thin and willowy like some TV spokesmodel, but shorter, hips and ass well-rounded, breasts quite large, long hair just this side of bronze and large liquid black eyes. Sexy. That was the word for it. She had it and she carried it well and that’s all there was to it.

But now…good God.

Naked and painted white, that brilliant red war paint at her face and breasts and loins, the streaks of dried blood and filth mottling her. Her hair hung in her face like strands of wet straw, her mouth hooked into a contorted, evil funhouse sort of leer. And those eyes—could you really call them eyes?—wicked crevices peering into a pestilent sewer blackness.

She edged in closer, slapped the ball joint of the bone in her palm.

The way she smiled was not the way human beings smiled. It was the lurid, carven grin of a crocodile. A smile of teeth and bone-crushing appetite. She glided forward on hands and knees, the stench of her enough to put Louis’ stomach in his throat. Her breath was sharp smelling like rat poison.

She had him and there was no way out.

Despite the crawling beast she was, the craven leer in her eyes was unmistakable. She did not want to make love, hell no, she wanted to screw, to fuck. And even that was far too dignified for a rodent like her. She wanted to rut like hogs in the mud and breed like wolves in the brush and apes in the trees. Rutting season. She was in heat and she wanted what he had.

And if he didn’t give it?

He knew the answer to that. The ones that had refused were hanging from the rafters, salted, boiled, tanned, or bubbling away in pots.

Maddie’s mouth was open and he could see her tongue worming in there like a maggot considering blackened meat. She crept closer, her breasts swinging from side to side like the teats of a cow. Louis could feel the heat coming off her. It was feverish, diseased, sickening. Not the sort of heat you associated with a human body, but maybe a cooling engine block.

He tried to squirm away from her and she did not like that.

She dove on top of him, grabbed him by the ears like a school bully and smacked his head off the hardpack of the floor five or six times. She was an absolute horror close like that…the greasy feel of her, the loose boneless gyrations of her body, the molten heat rising from her pores, and worse, oh God yes, the smell of her which was like dirty straw in a monkey cage. A unique and revolting effluvium of urine, scabby hides, and simian drainage.

Don’t throw up, Louis. Jesus Christ, don’t you dare do that.

She grinned down at him with that obscene drooling blow-hole of a mouth and he almost lost it right there. Some things were not meant to smile and she was one of them.

She ran her hands all over him, letting her fingers do the walking while he trembled at her touch and his stomach contents bubbled up the back of his throat. There was no escape, that was the most horrifying and demeaning part of it all. She groped his balls and squeezed his legs. She slapped his chest and gripped his shoulders while she slapped her thighs against him until he felt that his full bladder would burst. She pressed her fetid smelling corpse-face into his own, nibbled his throat and covered him with sloppy kisses, licked him and
tasted
him with a tongue that was coarse and gritty like that of cat. And when she pulled away, she left a rope of spit that broke wetly against his cheek.

The entire thing was not so much violation or suggested rape, but more like being a piece of meat: seasoned and tenderized, made ready for the stewpot.

Or maybe the marriage bed in this case.

She crawled away and he saw just how filthy her ass was. She turned, saw him looking at her, grinned almost childishly and spread her legs apart. She jabbed a thumb up inside herself and pushed it in and out and there was no mistaking what she had in mind.

Louis pissed right down his leg.

He had never felt so unclean in his life, contaminated by her touch, her smell, his own helplessness.

She went over to the fire.

She had a bowl in her hand.

She slit a few stitches of the gut bag and pried it open. The hot stink that came out was meaty and blood-smelling. She scooped something out of there with her fingers and brought the bowl to him. She wanted to feed him. Steam rose off the bowl, the juice inside congealed and fatty, the meat itself flabby and pale. He could not say what it was…a bit of lung? A strip of heart meat? A slice of kidney?

He drew away from it.

She opened her mouth with a sawtoothed grin and snapped her jaws shut. It was all so simple in her mind: meat was meat. No inhibitions against cannibalism, against feeding on your own kind, absolutely no cultural taboos because they had not yet been
invented
at her level of psychological evolution.