THE DEVIL NEXT DOOR

By

Tim Curran

 

“Man is a predator with an instinct to kill and

a genetic cultural affinity for the weapon.”

—Robert Ardrey

 

“Human aggression is instinctual.”

—Konrad Lorenz

 

 

Prologue

 

Somebody had painted the walls with their own feces.

The naked man sat there on the floor, his body a map of bruises and contusions, and smiled at this. His skin was crusty with blood. Some of it was his own and some of it belonged to others. He could tell by the taste. He stared at the walls, licking the salt off his fingertips, trying to make sense of the elaborate graffiti of fingerpainted shit on the wallpaper around him.

Somebody marked this place with their own filth so they could smell it, find it even in the dark.

He wondered what all the childish scrawls might mean, sensing there was important ritualistic symbolism behind them. They seemed familiar. Like maybe once, perhaps as a child, he’d painted a room like this, smeared shit on the walls to marks it as his lair.

What if whoever did this came back?

There was a knife. He looked at it, marveled at the dark stains on it. Sniffing them, he remembered each one.

He put the knife away and went to the window.

The sun was up, all the night things retreated back into their holes. There were wrecked cars in the streets. Several bodies were sprawled on the pavement. One of them didn’t have a head. Two others, a man and woman, had been arranged so it looked as if they were copulating. Whoever did that had a sense of humor.

He sat back on the floor, running fingers through his grimy hair.

There was a corpse in the corner and a collection of knives. A fine nest of leaves and sticks and boughs. The scent on them was female and familiar.

He smelled the shit on the walls. It was a fine, earthy smell. The sort of smell that made one comfortable, relaxed, grounded to nature. Not fighting against it, but part of it. There was serenity to be had in a lair decorated with feces. He thought about the girl and wondered where she was. If he found her again he would claim her. For it was his right and he had fought for that right.

There was grit on his teeth. A bit of something tasty wedged in his molar. Licking and sucking, he worked it free, sucking the juice from whatever it was, and swallowing it. He sat there, hugging himself, humming a low melody under his breath. The stench of his own sweat and pungent body odor made him feel strong. Later, he would piss on the walls, the chairs, so all that came here would know this place was now his.

The ripe stink of a man’s bodily excretions was all he really had in this world. His true fingerprint and it was important to spread them around, mark territory and conquests. Others would smell them and know him.

There was something under a rocking chair.

He crawled over there and seized it.

Meat.

He sniffed it and licked it, not knowing where it came from or how it had come to be there. It was salty and gamy smelling.

He put it in his mouth, chewing.

And waited for the girl…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1

Friday the Thirteenth…

Greenlawn, Indiana. The high, hot outer edge of summer. Louis Shears breathed in deep, let that pure green heady aroma fill him to bursting. He could smell freshly cut grass, azaleas in full glowing bloom, hot dogs sizzling on backyard grills…and then something else that stopped him, disturbed him, passed through his mind like an ugly dark cloud: blood. Just a momentary psychic whiff of it, but one so strong he could feel it churning down in his guts. Blood. The blood of the town. A blood that was rich and vibrant, almost seductive.

Then it was gone.

He just shook his head as people will do, dismissing it.

And dismissing it mainly because he did not know what was about to happen. That good old Greenlawn, Indiana—like the rest of the world that was old but not nearly so good—was poised at the brink of a pit of absolute yawning blackness.

But back to summer.

Back to clean air and green grass and cars sudsed in driveways and kids on skateboards and the long tanned legs of young ladies pumping away in short shorts. Little pink houses for you and me, smiling children and happy faces, clean fresh-scrubbed places. The American dream. Condensed.

Louis had the afternoon off and the weekend was stretched out before him fat and slothful like a plump tabby sunning itself. He’d landed two new accounts over at CSS, the steel vendor he was a sales rep at. All seemed right with the world. He was looking forward to a lazy Saturday morning of yard work followed by an afternoon nap, maybe brunch with Michelle over at Navarro’s on Sunday. And tonight? Well, they were celebrating.

In the backseat of his little Dodge were two nice seasoned porterhouse steaks, a couple baked potatoes, a bottle of Asti Spumante.

After the meal, Louis figured, maybe they’d jump in the hot tub, have a glass of wine or two, and get naked.

These were the things going through Louis’ mind in a happy rhythm as he turned the Dodge onto Tessler Avenue, saw a couple walking hand in hand down the sidewalk beneath the spreading oak branches. It was a warm, muggy day as late August always was in those parts and he had his window open, his arm hanging out. He could smell the thick green odor of clotted vegetation on the riverbank. In the powder blue sky he saw a couple gulls winging past, a kite skimming against the fluffy white clouds. It was just the sort of day to be alive and to be happy. The sort of day you wanted to wave and smile at people.

He saw Angie Preen pass on the walk pushing a baby carriage. Her sapphire eyes sparkled in the sunlight, long autumn chestnut hair swept back in a ponytail. It swished from shoulder to shoulder, keeping time with the admirable jiggle of her bosom. She waved. Louis waved. Angie. Single-mother, but proudly so. Independent, strong, reliable. Came from good stock, as they liked to say in Greenlawn at baked bean suppers and church socials when the lives of anyone and everyone were examined like rare old pottery, checked fastidiously for inconsistencies and flaws.

Ah, Angie. Louis had always thought that if he hadn’t hooked up with Michelle, then Angie and he might—

Then reality as he remembered the envelope sitting on the seat next to him.

The check for the car insurance. Michelle had given it to him two days before to mail and as was his way, he’d simply forgotten. Forgotten the way he sometimes forgot things.

He spotted a blue iron mailbox up Tessler and pulled to a stop. He got out, whistling under his breath, and dropped the letter in.

Then he glanced down the street.

A primer gray sedan pulled to a stop and two men with baseball bats hopped out. There was a teenage boy standing there, a paperboy, his sack dangling limply over his shoulder by a neon orange strap. The men spoke with him, laughed, and the boy followed suit. A perfectly ordinary exchange, it seemed, but Louis was suddenly disturbed. The sky suddenly seemed not blue but iron gray and there was a chill on the breeze. He could still smell the freshly-cut grass and river bottoms, but now they did not smell of life and growing things, but of rank sun-washed death.

Blood.

He smelled it again.

Louis stood there, something expanding in his chest.

The two men laughed again and swung their bats at the kid.

He went down with a strangled moaning sound. They’d caught him in the belly and the hip. For one split second they stood over him and then they started swinging again. Suddenly, the air was split with the meaty sounds of wood impacting flesh and the kid’s wavering screams. The bats kept coming down and Louis plainly heard the splintering of bones.

It all happened in the span of ten seconds.

And like anyone faced with random, extreme violence, Louis’ initial reaction was one of disbelief and even skepticism. This was not happening. These two guys— perfectly ordinary-looking guys—were not beating the shit out of a paperboy with Louisville Sluggers. It was a gag, a joke. Surely there was a camera rolling nearby. Some director would shout, “CUT!” and the two guys would help the kid up, all of them laughing about it.

But that did not happen and the screams coming from the kid’s mouth were surely not play-acting. The men stood there looking at the kid, the ends of their bats stained red. They were laughing.

They just beat the fuck out of that kid and now they’re laughing.

Laughing.

It was at this impossible juncture that something shattered inside Louis because he realized that this was the real thing. Then he was running, running as fast as he could towards the kid and the two men. He had no idea what it was he thought he was going to do when faced with two psychos with baseball bats, but something inside compelled him to intervene.

By the time he got near enough to see the kid and the red pool expanding around him, the two men had already hopped into their car. It passed Louis at a casual speed—a primer gray sedan with a wired-up front bumper and a shattered rear window, a UNION YES! sticker on the trunk—and the two men smiled at him and waved, kept on driving like they were just on their way to the store to grab a six-pack and had not just viciously beaten a paperboy with baseball bats.

Louis thought of chasing the car, but instead he memorized the plate number, and went to the kid.

“Oh Christ,” he said when he got a good look at him.

He was curled up like a dying snake, the femur of his right leg poking through his pant leg. His left knee was shattered, the leg twisted off at a crazy angle. His right arm was like some lumpy purple contusion and his face was swelling to the point that it was nearly impossible to make out his features. His head looked like some garish, knobby Halloween pumpkin capped by spiky tufts of blonde hair.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Louis heard his own voice say.

There was blood everywhere…soaked into the kid’s clothes, spreading onto the sidewalk, running from his mouth and ears and eyes. Louis saw a bunch of white things on the walk and realized they were the kid’s teeth.

“Don’t move,” Louis told him, caught between the need to cry and the need to throw up. “I’ll…I’ll get an ambulance.”

But as he turned to run back to the Dodge for his cell, the kid grabbed his ankle with a bloody hand, the pinkie of which was broken and nearly turned right around in its socket. He lifted his head up and vomited out a spray of blood and bile, his entire body jerking, making a sucking, sticky sound as it convulsed in its own pool of blood. Louis just looked down at him, disgusted and afraid and too many other things he was not even aware of. The top of the kid’s head was shattered, plates of bone sticking up like shards of glass. You could see his brain in there, lots of blood. A trickle of clear fluid ran down his face.

Intercranial fluid. Jesus, that’s intercranial fluid.

“Please…just don’t move,” he said.

But the kid was moving.

He was holding onto Louis’ ankle tightly, very tightly, convulsing and squirming. Louis bent down, had to put his hands on the kid and the warm, fleshy wetness of that made waves of nausea roll through him.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Louis said, sobbing now, looking wildly around and wondering why no one else was seeing this.

And that’s when madness became horror.

The kid let go of his ankle and threw himself at him.

He was so badly broken and injured he should have been capable of little more than moaning, but he suddenly was filled with life, a demented and diabolic life. His fists came up and wrapped around Louis’ throat with a grip that was vital and strong. He gagged and spit blood, but he hung on, things inside him snapping and popping. His eyes were black and intense, his mouth hooked in a ragged sneer, toothless and hanging with ribbons of blood.

Louis screamed.

None of this could have happened in the first place and surely not this. Mortally wounded kids did not react like this…with rage and ferocity. But that’s what was happening. The kid had him by the throat and it was definitely not some weak half-hearted gesture born of brain trauma. This was something else. The hands were strong, immoveable, crushing Louis’ windpipe with a strength that was frightening. Louis grabbed those moist hands and tried to pry them loose…first gently, not wanting to further hurt the kid, and then with a manic desperation born of utter terror.

Because the kid’s face…it just wasn’t right.

He was insane, possessed, something. Those black eyes were flat and relentless; the swollen face bulging with exertion; the mouth contorted into a bloody blow hole, jagged teeth jutting from his gums.

Louis began to see black dots before his eyes as the pressure increased and his air was shut down. What he did next, he did without thought, out of pure instinct. He lashed out blindly, punching the kid in the face with two or three heavy shots that snapped his head back. It was like punching a bag filled with moist bread dough…his fists literally sank into it. But it worked. The kid fell away, rolled onto his back, shuddered for a moment or two, then went still. Blood still ran from him and that fluid oozed from his smashed head, but that was the only movement.

He was dead.

A couple bluebottle flies seemed to know this, for they lit on his face. A third settling onto his left eyeball, rubbing its forelegs together.

Panting, dizzy, half out of his mind, Louis pulled himself away from the wreckage of the kid. His white short-sleeved dress shirt was untucked, several buttons gone, the front muddled with brilliant red stains. He put a trembling hand to his throat and felt the slick, greasy blood there from the kid’s fingers. The world canted this way, then that. He thought he’d go out cold.

But he didn’t.

Sweat ran down his face, a cold sour-smelling sweat, and he was finally aware of the sidewalk beneath him and the birds singing in the trees and the sun in the sky.

That didn’t just happen, a voice kept saying in his head. Dear God, tell me none of that just happened. Tell me I wasn’t attacked by a dying kid and that I had to punch him out to get him off me.

But it had happened and the realization settled into him with a weight that almost pressed him to the concrete. He breathed in and out, blinked his eyes, looked around. Same late summer day. Butterflies winging through the grass and flowerbeds. Bees buzzing. Sun hot and yellow in that endless blue sky. Same smell of cut grass and roasting hot dogs, kids laughing and shouting in the distance.

It was the same. It was all the same.

Yet, down deep where the worst intuitions brooded, he knew it was not. Something was wrong. Something had changed. A shadow had fallen over the streets.

A cry twisting in his throat, Louis ran for the Dodge and his cellphone…

 

2

The police arrived.

Two thick-necked characters in blue uniforms pulled up in a patrol car, parked at the curb, chatted for a moment or two and stepped out. They seemed to be in no hurry. Which was amazing to Louis, because his call to 911 was frantic, bordering on out-and-out hysteria. Still, the cops took their time. They got out, slapped their hats on their pickle jar heads, nodded to each other, and strolled over to the kid’s body.

Standing there, incredulous, Louis just thought, No, no, take your fucking time…

He didn’t know their names at that juncture, but he’d seen them around. There were less than 15,000 people in Greenlawn, so you pretty much saw all the official muscle in town if you stayed around long enough. One of them was fat with a sheen of sweat under his nose; the other was tall and muscular, the tattoo of a shark on his huge forearm. They stared at the kid’s body and kept staring. There was no remorse or shock at seeing the brutally disfigured body of a teenage boy. If Louis hadn’t known better, he would have associated what was in the cops’ eyes as indifference tinged by mild amusement.

One of them bent down to get a better look, waving a few flies off.

“Watch it,” his partner said. “Don’t step in that blood.”

And Louis was, of course, thinking the same thing. It was a crime scene, after all, and he’d seen enough of those shows. Michelle always made him watch CSI with her whether he wanted to or not. So he was thinking that the cop meant, don’t step in the blood, because you’ll screw up the crime scene.

But the fat one just said, “I don’t want you tracking that blood in the cruiser. I just washed the mats.”

Louis widened his eyes, but said nothing.

The fat cop looked over at him. “I’m Officer Shaw and this is Officer Kojozian. You the guy that called? Louis Shears?”

“Yeah, I called,” Louis told him.

“What happened?”

So Louis started to tell his story and as he told it, he started realizing how terribly ridiculous it sounded. The cops just nodded and it was hard to say whether they believed him or not. Their eyes were just dead and gray like puddles of April rain.

“You get a plate number on that sedan?” Shaw said, scribbling in his little notebook.

“Yeah. ZHB three-oh-one.”

“You got a good memory,” Kojozian said, like he found the idea laughable.

Louis swallowed. “I work with numbers all day. I remember them.”

“You an accountant?”

“No, I’m a—”

“Mathematician?”

“No,” Louis said, sighing. “I’m an account rep which has absolutely nothing to do with what I’ve just told you.”

“Just take it easy,” Shaw told him.

Sure, sure, take it easy. Great idea. Problem was, Louis did not feel like taking it easy. After seeing two guys beat a kid’s brains in with baseball bats and then getting himself attacked by the same kid, something which seemed impossible to begin with, taking it easy just wasn’t in him. He needed to shout and rant and maybe even crack the coconuts of these dumb cops together so they would see the light shining in their bovine faces. And maybe after that, a good cry and a good drink.

Shaw had his hands on his hips. “Let me get this straight, Mr. Shears. These guys beat this kid near to death and then when you went to help him…he tried to strangle you?”

“Yes,” Louis said. “Yes. I know how crazy it sounds, but, Christ, I didn’t get all this blood on myself at work. He jumped at me, wrapped his hands around my throat. He was strong…all broken up like this, he was still strong.”

Shaw and Kojozian looked at each other.

“Then what happened? He just died?” Kojozian said.

“No, he wouldn’t let go of me, he was insane or something. He kept trying to strangle me, so I…I mean I…”

“Yes?”

“I…I guess I hit him.”

Kojozian let out a low whistle of disbelief. “Now we’re getting to it.”

Louis gave him a hard look. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

Kojozian shrugged. “You got blood all over yourself. Your fists are bloody. You just admitted you punched out a dying kid…”

Louis laughed. He had to laugh. This whole exchange was ludicrous. “Oh, I get it. You think I assaulted this kid. Well, yeah, that makes perfect fucking sense, doesn’t it? I was bored after work so I beat this kid to death and then I called you guys and made up a story about a gray sedan and two guys with baseball bats. Okay, you got me. Your mind is sharp as a tack, Kojak.”

“That’s Kojozian,” he corrected, totally missing the jibe. “And maybe you ought to quit with the mouth…how’s that sound, hotshot?”

“Both of you calm down,” Shaw said. “We don’t think you killed the kid or beat him up, Mr. Shears. It’s just that the whole thing is a little wild.”

Louis was starting to feel like he’d done something wrong. Like maybe he was in the hot seat here. Was this why people in big cities looked the other way when a crime was committed in plain view? They didn’t involve themselves for fear a couple Keystone Cops like these two might try to implicate them in something they were completely innocent of?

“Sure, it’s wild,” Louis said. “I’m just telling you what happened. I wish I could tell you something that makes more sense. Trust me, if I was going to make up a story, I think I could do better than this.”

Shaw nodded. “Sure, sure. Maybe the kid panicked or something. Maybe he thought you were the guy that did it.”

“I wonder why he’d think something like that,” Kojozian said.

Louis was burning inside.

He had half a mind to punch Kojozian right in the nose. And maybe he would have if he wouldn’t have gotten thrown in jail…right after he got out of the hospital, that was. Because if he took a swing at this ape, he would have gotten his ass not only kicked, but pressed and folded. The funny thing was, he had a pretty good idea that Kojozian wanted him to try something like that. The man was baiting him, intimidating him, pushing him. But Louis would not be baited or pushed, not by an animal like Kojozian.

Not that Louis hadn’t known any good cops, because he had. But these two were not in that category.

He made himself breathe very slowly to calm himself. “I’m just telling you what happened, that’s all.”

“Sure,” Shaw said. “Sure.”

Kojozian looked at him and Louis felt a chill run up his spine. Those eyes were just as black and intense as the kid’s when he’d attacked.

Like the eyes of a mad dog.

“So you’re telling us this kid attacked you?” he said. “He don’t look like he’s in much shape to attack anyone.”

“He was.”

Kojozian shook his head. He walked over to the corpse. “Let’s see…compound fractures, split-open head, massive internal injuries…I’m not seeing it, Mr. Shears. I think you’re full of shit. This guy couldn’t have done nothing but die.” And to prove that, apparently, he kicked the corpse. It made a wet thudding sound. “Nope, he’s all busted up inside.” He kicked him again. “Hear that, Mr. Shears? Hear that slopping sound like Jello in a Ziplock bag? That’s his insides and they’re splashing around. People with injuries like that don’t do much attacking. What they do is they puke up blood and shit out their intestines, but that’s about it.”

Louis felt something drop inside of him.

Not only was this offensive and sickening, it was absolutely insane. The kid was dead and this cop was kicking him, saying those awful things. Louis backed away, his head beginning to spin and he wondered if maybe he was in a padded cell somewhere dreaming all this. Because it could not be real. It could not possibly be real.

“What’s a matter?” Kojozian said. “You got a weak stomach?”

Louis shook his head. “You can’t…you can’t treat a dead body like that. You can’t kick it.”

Kojozian kicked it again. “Why not?”

“Tell him to stop that!” Louis cried.

But Shaw just shrugged. “He’s just making a point, Mr. Shears. That’s all. Just a point. The kid don’t mind.”

Kojozian decided he needed to make another point.

He put his foot on top of the kid’s chest and pumped his leg up and down. The body shook and rolled with a slow, fluidic motion like it was filled with jelly. The sound of everything sloshing around inside was almost more than Louis could take. More blood pissed out of orifices, a blood that looked almost black.

“Yeah, I’m just making a point, Mr. Shears. I’m teaching you something, that’s all,” Kojozian explained. He kept his foot up on the corpse’s chest, his shiny black shoe and the bottom of his creased pantleg wet with blood. He began pumping his leg up and down again but with much more force, so much that his shoe sank into the kid’s chest and came back out again with an appalling sucking sound like somebody working a plunger in a clogged toilet.

Louis took another step back, then went down on his knees, vomiting into the grass. It came and went quickly enough. But when he again looked at the two cops, the fever was still on him. Because Kojozian still had his foot up on the corpse’s chest and Shaw still looked unconcerned.

“Please,” Louis breathed. “Please stop that.”

Kojozian shrugged and pulled his foot free. “Weak stomach,” he said.

Shaw was looking at his shoe and pants. “Lookit the mess you made. You’re not getting in my cruiser like that. Wipe your shoe off on the grass.”

Louis could feel a scream building in his throat…

 

3

If viewed from above, Greenlawn would have looked roughly like a postage stamp with the Green River intersecting it. The north side of town was the oldest and the houses there could bear witness to this to any with an architectural eye. The closer you got to Main, the better they were kept up. But the farther you went, the shabbier they became until ultimately they blended into a strip dotted with neighborhoods of ramshackle company houses and old railroad hotels, industrial concerns and saloons and sooty apartment buildings. All of which ended at the very doorstep of the trainyards. South of Main things were much more prosperous and here flanking nice antique blocks of tall, narrow Victorians and frame houses thrown up before the Second World War were neighborhoods of post-war ranch-style houses of brick and stucco. And at the southern edge, modulars and pre-builts that had blossomed in the last twenty years, taking over fields and ball diamonds and any available open space. The west side of town was marked by a looming assortment of warehouses, mills, and machine shops, most of which were closed and rotting. The Green River passed through town, running through old neighborhoods and new, coursing beneath Main Street and continuing north up through the trainyards before leaving town entirely and making for the wheat fields, farmlands, and scrub forest beyond.

All in all, Greenlawn was an ordinary town in the Midwest, no different from any number of towns to the east or west or south. The same families had lived there for generations and what new blood came in, generally settled in and toughed it out or moved away. The schools were good, the streets clean, the crime rate low. There were fireworks in the park on the Fourth of July and parades for Christmas and Veteran’s Day. There was a county fair in August and a circus passed through in May. There was a winter carnival and another come September. The summers were hot and humid, the winters long and white and frigid. It was a great place to raise a family, a great place for fishing and hunting and outdoor recreation. There had been a bad fire in 1915 that started in the shanty village at the western edge and swept through the northern half before it was contained. Old timers still spoke of it. There had been a few murders, though no more than you could count on one hand and nothing in recent memory.

Greenlawn was just an ordinary small town that could be found anywhere.

This, then, was the scene on Black Friday…

 

4

Maddie Sinclair slid the knife out of her husband’s throat.

Cocking her head like a dog listening for its master’s approach, she studied the blood-streaked blade of the carving knife. She sniffed it. Then she tasted it. She made a bestial groaning noise in her throat.

She stiffened.

A sound.

She waited, gripping the knife, ready to fight, to pounce, to kill. Whatever it took to protect what was hers and hers alone. Footsteps. Slow, stealthy. Maddie’s lips pulled back in a snarl. She tensed. Sniffed the air. Waited. She could smell the musk of the others that were coming. It was an odor she recognized. The odor of female.

She brought the knife up.

Squatted in a killing stance, ready to leap.

Two girls came into the living room. Something in her chest jumped at the sight of them. There was recognition. A warmth that was quickly replaced by something cold, plotting, and atavistic. Maddie recognized them as her brood, her young, her daughters, but there was no emotion at this: the two bitches were not to be trusted. Not yet.

Hissing at them, Maddie sniffed the air they brought with them.

She smelled urine. Blood.

It was a satisfying odor, one that calmed her somewhat. They smelled of the hunt. Not like others out there, not soapy and repugnant. She waited to see if the bitches would challenge her kill, try to take it. But they did nothing but stare. They did not run. There was no fear on them. Just hesitation. They were both naked. They had taken needles and poked their breasts, stomachs, chests, and arms with them, creating a bleeding series of welts that ran in decorative, concentric patterns. The elaborate scarification was symbolic, tribal, and resembled the intricate cicatrisation of certain African bush clans.

Maddie liked it.

If these two bitches were to hunt as part of her band, she would decorate her flesh likewise.

The bitches moved in closer, intrigued.

Maddie let them, watching them. Like her, they were pale, streaked with grime and gore, leaves and sticks braided into their matted hair.

She hissed at them.

They did not make any threatening moves.

Maddie motioned them in with the knife. They squatted by the carcass with her. They laid fingertips upon the kill, touching, feeling, instinctively probing muscle mass and fat deposit, knowing which would be spitted first.

Maddie swallowed. “Down…” she said, her voice dry and scraping, the words difficult to pronounce. “Take the kill down…below…”

The bitches did not argue.

Each gripping an ankle, grunting and gasping, their young scarred bodies rippling with muscle, they dragged their father’s corpse away across the carpeting. Maddie watched them. She was pleased. Her kill was made and her clan established. It was good. Moaning some long-forgotten tribal melody deep in her throat, she retreated into the corner and defecated there on the plush sea-green nap. When she was done, she sniffed what she had produced.

She heard the bitches dragging the carcass below to the cellar.

Its head thumped on each step.

Sniffing the air for intruders and poachers, ever aware of danger, Maddie followed the scent trail of the carcass to the cellar door and below. When she got down in the cool, damp darkness, she schooled the bitches.

Together, they dressed out the carcass…

 

5

The scream started out small in his guts and now it was rolling upward, gaining mass and volume along the way. And Louis was going to set it free and mainly because he didn’t really think he had a choice. Maybe he would have, too, but another Greenlawn police car rolled up behind the other one. The guy that got out was thin and tall, white hair poking around the edges of his cap. His mouth was hooked in a crooked scowl.

“What gives here?” he said.

Louis finally felt some sanity coming back. He knew this guy. His name was Warren and he was a sergeant or something, an old hand on the force. Louis knew that he handled the safety programs at the schools and was always in the newspaper involved in some civic or charitable organization. Warren also sang in the church choir over at St. Stephen’s and had a hell of a set of pipes on him. He was okay. Old school all the way, he’d sort this clusterfuck right out.

“Well, it’s a real mess, Sarge,” Shaw said.

“Let’s have it,” Warren said, pulling a cigarette from behind his ear and showing it some flame.

So Shaw told him all about it and the whole time Warren’s eyes shifted from the stiff to Louis and it didn’t look like he cared for the looks of either. When Shaw finished, Warren just nodded.

“They treating you okay, Mr. Shears?” he said.

And Louis launched right into it. The re-telling of this tale sounded no better than the other one, but the evidence was all over Kojozian’s shoe and pantleg.

“He’s got a weak stomach,” Kojozian said. “He got sick in the grass over it all.”

Warren grinned. “No shit? Well, take it easy, Mr. Shears. Dead is dead. You can tap dance on this kid or drop your knickers and take a dump in his mouth. It’s all the same to him.”

Louis stared up at him, pale and wide-eyed. “You’re all crazy,” he said.

“Boy, he does have a weak stomach, all right,” Warren said, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “No offense, Mr. Shears, but you wouldn’t make much of a cop. Lots of bodies, always lots of bodies.”

“We had a guy last week,” Shaw said, “over on West Rider Street. Mail piling up and all that. Neighbors call us and we go over there. We had to go in through a side window and that stink when we opened it up…holy Jesus! We found the stiff on the shitter. Old guy had a heart attack while he was delivering the mail. Must have been about a thousand flies on him. Another thousand on the windows and flying around. They were buzzing so loud, you couldn’t hear yourself think.”

“That’s nothing,” Warren said. “When I was first on the Department, we got a call to go out to the airport. Middle of summer, some guy’s sleeping in his car with the windows all rolled up. A real hot bastard it was, too. Some kids were riding their bikes around, saw the guy laying in there, said he had rice all over him. Rice. Ha, what a mess! The smell would have put you right down to your knees, swear to God. He’d been in there almost a week, came apart like boiled chicken when we tried to pull him out. Most of him stuck to the seat…”

Louis got to his feet and then he was running, running dead out for the Dodge. His brain was filled with a screaming black noise and he was certain that he had lost his mind. Nothing else could possibly explain it.

“Hey, where you going?” Kojozian called out.

“Let him go,” Shaw said. “We don’t need him. What we need here are a couple shovels to scrape this kid off the sidewalk with…”

And then Louis was in his Dodge. He could feel the seat beneath him and his hands gripping the steering wheel. He held on tight before the entire world went flying away beneath him. Because it was coming, he knew it was coming.

He squealed around in a U-turn and saw Warren wave to him in the rearview. As he screeched away down Tessler Avenue, barely missing a parked car, his face was slicked with sweat and his entire body was shaking. He needed badly to pull over and be sick, but he didn’t dare. He just did not dare. He had to make Rush Street and home. And the most insane, impossible thing of all was that the cops did not come after him.

They did not come after him…

 

6

At Greenlawn High, things began to happen.

Macy Merchant, a junior and honor roll student, sat down in her fifth hour Mass Media class and tried to shut out the teenage soap opera that played around her as it did on a daily basis. Macy was not a popular girl. She was smart and ambitious and serious, qualities which certainly did not endear her to the more socially elite of Greenlawn High.

Not that any of this really bothered Macy.

At least, not that she was willing to admit openly. Some kids were funny and some kids were jocks, some were drop-dead gorgeous and some were burgeoning criminals, and some, like her, were just smart. A thin, flaxen-haired, girl, she knew her one true attribute was her brain. And she was adult enough to know that in the real world, this is ultimately what counted. Sometimes she wished she had looks like Shannon Kittery or Chelsea Paris or some of the other senior vixens, had guys worshipping at her feet. But not too often. For she knew that looks faded, as they said, and that both Shannon and Chelsea would probably end up living in trailers with three screaming brats each and the obligatory alcoholic, abusive husband who once upon a time had rushed for a hundred yards in the big game, but now only rushed to the refrigerator or to the TV set to watch the WCW or Girls Gone Wild on DVD.

Unlike so many of the others that ran the maze of high school looking for their slice of cheese, Macy had ambitions. School and study came easy to her, so early in her freshman year she decided to go to law school upon graduation and commenced to arrange her classes accordingly. Yes, a good law school. Then maybe criminal law followed by district attorney and even judge. After that, a leap into politics and who could say where it would all end?

Yes, Macy had high ambitions, lofty aspirations, but no one save the school counselor knew this. None of her classmates would have suspected that brainy, quiet little Macy was aiming at positions of great power.

And the reason for that was Macy herself.

She was, sadly, shy and introverted and much-ignored. Much as she fantasized about being a great wolf of the courtroom, the fact was that she found it nearly impossible to give even a three-minute oral report before the class or to even speak up unless directly called on. These things, she well knew, were something she would need to work on.

On her way into Mass Media, she steered her way through the mulling bodies in the hallway and slipped into her seat. No one noticed her outside and nobody noticed her inside. She was simply a fixture in the minds of the other students, much like a chair or a desk. She sat up in front, arranging her materials, trying to shut out all the gossip and bitching that was going on around her. Sometimes it all seemed so terribly juvenile she could barely stomach it.

“—and if he doesn’t call tonight, that’s it—”

“—thinks she’s got me wrapped, dude, but she’s in for a surprise—”

“—so they blamed me, can you believe it? It’s just a little dent—”

“—that top cost me fifty bucks, so the dumb bitch puts it in the dryer—”

“—he told us to hand it in tomorrow, like I have the time—”

“—if that’s what he thinks of me, he can kiss my ass—”

And on and on and on.

Macy could hear Shannon Kittery and her pop squad discussing something almost breathlessly and she figured it probably had something to do with hair color or shoes or something else equally as revelatory.

“All right, all right, pipe down!” Mr. Benz said as he waltzed into class, chewing a big wad of bubble gum as usual. “Everybody in their seats or I’ll get my whip out.”

He opened his briefcase and snapped his gum. Everyone took their seats and the commotion died to a low murmur.

“You’re not supposed to chew gum unless you have enough to share,” Shannon Kittery giggled. A few stifled laughs broke out, mainly from her group.

Benz strode over to her, grinning. “All I’ve got is this piece,” he said, pulling the blob of wet gum from his mouth and sticking it about an inch from the end of her nose. “But you’re welcome to it. Go ahead.”

Shannon made a disgusted sound and shut up.

“Anybody else want it? No? Heck with ya.” He shoved it back in his mouth and went up to the board. He ran his fingers across the bald pate atop his head and said, “My hair look okay?”

Everyone laughed.

“Good. My hair is my life.” He sorted through some papers on his desk. “Today, I want all of you to break up into twos with your assigned study buddy and get to work on your reports. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s only the third day of school, but those reports are still due next Friday. Any questions?”

A few hands shot up.

“Good. Get to work.”

Benz sat down at his desk and read a newspaper, ignoring everyone.

Macy felt a slow painful groan well up inside her for this was the moment she dreaded most of all. For some ungodly reason, Benz had teamed her up with Chelsea Paris, one of Shannon’s ratpack. Chelsea was a varsity cheerleader and after Shannon herself, the reigning queen of the hive. Chelsea had no use for Macy and that undying love went both ways. Chelsea came over, looking like she was approaching a septic tank, and sat down at the desk nearest Macy. She crossed her arms over her impressive bosom, rolled her eyes and proceeded to look very bored.

“I don’t like this any more than you do,” Macy told her, surprised that she had even said it.

“Oh, spare me, you little nit,” Chelsea said, examining her lustrous auburn hair for split ends. “Spacey Macy. I’m so sure.”

“I was just saying—”

Chelsea held a hand up, palm towards her study buddy. “Yeah, yeah. Whatev.”

“Knock it off,” Macy said, something hot bubbling inside her. “Bitch.”

Chelsea looked like she’d been slapped. “What did you say?”

Macy just licked her lips.

She couldn’t believe she’d just said that.

Not that it was uncalled for, really, but she wasn’t like that, she never spoke up…but suddenly it just felt right. For years now she’d wanted to tell Chelsea and Shannon and the rest of the bimbo bunch exactly what she thought of them. And now, she had. It was amazing and more than a little shocking for both girls.

Macy sat there, staring at Chelsea, and it was crazy, but it was almost like there was a voice in her head, telling her what to do, egging her on. But not a thought voice, but an actual voice, one that was deep and confident. Haven’t you taken enough shit? it seemed to be saying to her. Haven’t you given these insufferable, vacuous, superficial little bitches every chance? You’ve been pushed and pushed and pushed and each time you’ve been kind, each time you turned the other cheek, they rewarded you with treachery. It’s high time you gave a little back, don’t you think?

Macy smiled. “Bitch,” she said. “Rotten slutty fucking cheerleader bitch.”

Chelsea looked like she was going to cry. “You, you can’t talk to me like that, you little—”

“I’ll talk to a little cunt like you any way I want.”

Both girls stood up now, facing each other.

Everyone was waiting, anticipating bloodshed.

Chelsea was taller, athletic, but inside she was weak and frightened like the rest of her ratpack. Terrified of rejection, of the curse of unpopularity. Afraid to be told the truth and particularly by a socially inferior nit like Macy Merchant. And Macy? For the first time in her life, there was no fear, no indecision. She stood there, smiling, her eyes the flat gray of tombstone marble. She wanted to hurt Chelsea, she wanted to draw blood and make the little cheerleading whore beg for mercy.

The animal in her was hungry.

“Cunt,” she said.

“Ah, girls…” Benz said.

Chelsea’s eyes narrowed to slits and she slapped Macy across the face.

There were muted cheers from the ratpack.

Macy grabbed Chelsea by the throat, yanking her right over the desk and bouncing her face over its top not once, but twice. Chelsea made a strangled sound, eyes bulging, blood running from her nose. And before anyone could intervene or hope to, Macy yanked Chelsea’s head up by a handful of hair, grabbed a sharpened No. 2 pencil off the desk, and buried it in her left cheek. A few gasps rose up as Chelsea stumbled back, a look of horror on her face, the freshly sharpened No. 2 Ticonderoga jutting from her cheek, a wet trail of blood running down her jaw. Whatever sort of shock had gripped her, it now faded, and she opened her mouth to scream. Opened it wide enough that Macy could see that the tip of the pencil had impaled her tongue, gone right through it in fact.

“Yahhhggg,” Chelsea gagged, blood gushing from her mouth now and right down the front of her pink Old Navy tee. “Gaaahhhlllggg…”

It was not a pleasant sound.

Macy could smell the blood.

It made her mouth water…

 

7

And, at the moment Macy Merchant lost control, upstairs in Mr. Cummings 5^th hour BioLab, Billy Swanson waited.

Waited.

Because even the best plans were really a matter of timing and stealth. The new Billy knew this even if the old one was too goddamn stupid to realize such basic laws. So he waited until Cummings paired them up for their lab assignment. He waited until Cummings asked for a volunteer to pass out the dead frogs for dissection.

“I’ll do it,” Billy offered, grinning pleasantly.

Cummings looked surprised, but shrugged. “Go to it,” he said.

Tommy Sidel laughed as he passed by. “Think you can handle it, dip shit?”

Billy kept smiling. “I can handle anything, douchebag. Didn’t you know that?” He leaned in closer. “You still going out with Shannon Kittery, Tommy? Lucky boy. I think I’m going to fuck that bitch in the mouth.”

Tommy tensed. “You’re fucking dead,” he said.

“We’re all dead, Tommy. Take my word for it.”

Tommy looked like he was ready to piss nails and Billy knew that after school, old Tommy star-running-back-scumbucket-pencil-dick was going to be thinking payback and it would be the worst decision his little pea brain had ever come up with. But then, everyone knew that Tommy Stick-Up-His-Ass-Sidel had all the cunning of a box of petrified camel dung and all the charm of an open sore. Yeah, he’d come looking for payback and Billy would give him a little treat he’d never forget. And when he was done cutting on him, he’d do something to that uppity prick’s corpse that would make his own mother puke.

They were all assholes.

They all deserved to die.

For like Macy Merchant, something inside had suddenly changed. Whoever and whatever Billy Swanson had been all those years was gone. The worming caterpillar named Billy had crawled into its cocoon and emerged as a pissed-off butterfly with a brand new attitude, one that looked down in disgust at the mess the old Billy had made out of his life.

There came a time, the new Billy assured him, when enough was enough. When you stopped chewing other peoples’ shit and asking for seconds.

And that time was now.

Because the old passive shit-eating Billy days were all over. History.

He’d been picked on, put down, and shit upon…but no more. That was for the weak. And Billy was no longer weak.

The supply room in which the frogs were stored was in a large, bulky stainless steel refrigerator reached by a door at the back of the classroom. The storeroom had another adjoining door which led to the chemistry classroom. It was closed, the room on the other side empty. The storeroom was where the chemicals and lab glassware and utensils were stored.

It was also where Cummings and a few other science teachers stored their lunch bags and coats.

Billy saw Cummings’ red Thermos.

He smiled.

There was a yellow metal cabinet on the other wall which read DANGER HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS! in brilliant red letters. As always, the key was in the lock. Calmly, purposefully, Billy opened it and removed the jug of sulfuric acid. He slipped on the elbow-length protective rubber gloves and did what had to be done. Afterwards, he got the frogs out. They were in heavy plastic bags. He passed one out to each lab team and placed them unceremoniously on the wax-lined dissection trays.

It was simple.

All things truly wonderful usually were.

Then he took his seat. His lab partner was Lisa Korn, another much put upon student who always looked a bit ragged. She was jittery and prone to fits of crying and sudden fainting spells. She had all the earmarks of a future neurotic, a condition that was in many ways fostered and encouraged by the incompetence and blind eyes of the public school system. Billy always felt sorry for her, because he knew what her life was like. The abuse the other students handed out to her which the faculty simply preferred to ignore. By the nastier students and uppity bastards like Tommy Sidel and his posse, Lisa was known simply as Lovely Lisa Korn-Hole.

She looked nervous as always, afraid maybe that she had done something wrong or would say something wrong if she dared open her mouth.

“Don’t worry, Lisa,” Billy told her. “It’s all about to change.”

She just looked at him and he smiled.

He could smell the sex between her legs. It made him giddy.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

Taking the scalpel, he slit open the frog’s belly like it was something he’d done a thousand times. While Lisa turned an amusing shade of green, he pinned back the frog’s skin with tiny dissection needles and got to work.

And waited for the shit to hit the fan.

He did not wait long.

Mr. Cummings went into the supply room and came out with his Thermos, pouring himself a cup of coffee. He made it all the way to his desk before he took his first gulp. Like he always contended, he was nothing without his caffeine and today was the day when he would finally get his fill. He raised the cup to his lips, scanning the lab teams with disinterest, and swallowed a big gulp.

No one was really paying any attention to him at that moment.

No one but Billy Swanson.

Cummings drew the cup away from his lips with dawning horror. What was at first a scowl of distaste soon became a twisted rictus of agony. The coffee cup slid from his trembling fingers and shattered at his feet.

And then everyone was suddenly paying attention.

Cummings was staggering around and shuddering, clawing at his throat as gouts of steam wafted from his mouth like cigarette smoke. No one said a word in that split second of realization that something was very wrong with him. His glasses flew off, his eyes bulging, his face the color of Wisconsin cherries. Rivers of sweat coursed down his brow.

“What’s he doing?” Tommy Sidel said.

Cummings fell back against his desk, overturning a stack of graded test papers. His fingers were hooked into claws, thrashing and tearing at himself and everything in sight. “Ggggghhhhlll,” he gagged, blood running from his mouth in dark ribbons.

“Mr. Cummings?” Tommy Sidel said, the first one on his feet. “Mr. Cummings! Are you all…right…”

Cummings collapsed to the floor, his fingers tearing open his shirt, cutting deep red welts in his corded throat. A high, inhuman wailing came from him. He thrashed around, thumping his fists and moaning just moments before he began to vomit out great clots of steaming, bloody tissue.

“Mr. Cummings,” Tommy said, at first trying to get a hold of him, but now backing away in disgust as gore sprayed in the air. “Mr. Cummings! Goddammit, somebody get an ambulance, a fucking doctor! He’s dying or something…”

And he was.

His mouth opened in a terrible continuous scream, his teeth snapping and gnashing, tearing his lips to shreds. His face was a contorted red fright mask, his tongue dangling from his lips until his teeth literally bit it in half. All the students were gathered now in a tight circle to watch his agony. He was like some nightmare cartoon run in fast motion. An evil caricature of someone possessed by a demon, hopping and flopping and moving with epileptic speed and at such impossible angles that they could hear his tendons popping and bones dislocating.

Nobody rushed out for help.

Not a one.

Something was happening to them, something they did not understand or really even question. It passed from one to the other like cold germs and when it was done, the students of 5^th hour Biolab were not who they had been a few moments before. They were altered, changed. They looked down at Mr. Cummings and there was not a single twinge of remorse or sympathy in them. What they felt was rage, a stupid and insane rage that consumed them. And one that needed to be voided on something, someone.

Billy stood behind them with Lisa Korn at his side. “Watch, Lisa,” he said. “Now you’re going to see what they really are down deep.”

Lisa just stood there, speechless, her eyes unblinking, her mouth pulled into a straight colorless line.

Billy was smiling, smelling the raw stink of atavism coming from the crowd.

It was delicious.

For maybe twenty or thirty seconds, the students ringed around Cummings did not move. They stood in mock surprise at what had happened, at the dying thing at their feet. Then they began to move. Slowly, inexorably, like some machine cycling up, they started to move as one. Cummings was barely moving, but that didn’t stop them. You could see what was coming in their eyes, in the grim set of their mouths.

There was a sudden flurry of voices that combined into a steady, flat droning:

“—gave me a C on that report—”

“—wouldn’t have gotten kicked off the team if it wasn’t for you—”

“—coulda let me slide, you rotten fuck—”

“—just had to tell my old man you saw me smoking—”

“—always making fun of me—”

“—flunked me—”

“—narced on me for changing grades—”

It all kept rolling, the petty hatreds and accusations and suspicions until it became a sort of mindless chant, building inside each and everyone of them to a pulsing, deadly crescendo and the very air was roiling with heat and malevolence.

And it was then that first true incident of mass insanity in Greenlawn struck. The students went after Mr. Cummings, kicking and scratching and punching and biting him. They went after him like animals with sheer bloodlust and brutality. Something inside them needed voiding and that something needed a common enemy and in their dying teacher, they found it. They crowded in, beating him to a pulp, trying to twist his limbs off and stomping his guts to sauce. They did not even slow down until their fingers were red, their mouths drooling, their clothes spattered with blood.

And the only thing that really slapped them out of it was a voice that cried: “What in the name of hell is going on here?”

The voice belonged to Howard Sullivan, the head custodian. Known as “Sully” to faculty and students alike, he was much loved and had been at Greenlawn High since the days of the Kennedy administration, was only a year shy of retirement, in fact. Anger was a rare commodity for Sully; he liked the kids, year after year, he honestly liked the kids. Liked their fads and music and devil-may-care attitudes. He said they made him feel young and custodian at the high school was the only job he could land where he never really had to grow up.

But today, Sully was mad.

He was shocked and sickened and beyond words. He waded right into the mass of students, pulling them away from Mr. Cummings, actually shoving them out of his path.

When he got a good look at Cummings’ corpse, he looked at the circle of students around him. He saw their vacant eyes, their grinning mouths, all that blood on them…smeared, splashed, dripping. Tears rolled from his eyes. “Kids…Jesus Christ, what…what the hell are you doing here? What have you done? What the fuck have you done?”

The students pressed in closer.

Sully looked from face to face, saw what was coming, tried to get away, but it was just too late.

They fell on him.

Like lions falling on a gazelle.

And behind them, Billy Swanson grinned…

 

8

Louis Shears made it home and as he walked through the door, he swore to God he would never leave it again.

The world had gone mad and he was content to leave it to its own devices. He shut the door behind him, locked it. And then on second thought, he threw the deadbolt. He walked into the living room and then the kitchen, feeling like some wind-up toy soldier going first in this direction and then that. He sat in his recliner, got up, sat on the couch, then he got up again. Went to the cupboard above the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Chivas Regal. He poured himself two fingers in a water glass, swallowed it down, then poured himself another.

You better get a grip already, he told himself, and that sounded good in theory, but in practice…well, it was something else again.

He sat back in the recliner.

Pulling from his drink and peering out the picture window, the world seemed all right. Cars passed on the street and leaves fluttered gently in the trees. He could hear the sound of a lawn mower and some kid going up the sidewalk on a skateboard.

These things were the normal sights and sounds of an August afternoon.

But what about what happened on Tessler Avenue? Where did any of that fit in? How did he qualify what he had seen this day? Two guys beating a kid near to death with baseball bats and then the kid attacking him and those whacked-out cops showing up? Where did that fit in the annals of a late summer’s day? Where did you find the box that would hold such things or a label to slap on it?

“You don’t,” Louis said. “You don’t even try. You just sit here and get drunk. Get shitfaced and forget about it.”

Very nice, very nice, indeed.

But hardly practical.

He thought about the steaks and the wine out in the back of the Dodge. The meat needed to be gotten into the fridge before it started to turn. Those porterhouses were nearly two inches thick, custom cut, and had cost him nearly fifteen bucks a throw.

He just couldn’t leave them out there.

But that’s exactly what he was planning on doing.

The cellphone in his shirt pocket jingled and he jumped, nearly spilling his drink. He put it to his ear, almost expecting one of those crazy cops to be on the other end. But it wasn’t them. It was Michelle.

“The weekend stretches out before you,” she said. “I hope I didn’t interrupt your nap.”

Louis started laughing. No, honey, I wasn’t taking a nap. I was sitting in my recliner sucking down whiskey. You ought to see me. Buttons popped off my shirt, bloodstains all over it, my throat bruised from some mortally wounded kid who decided to have one last hurrah and strangle me.

“What’s the matter, Louis?” Michelle said. Even half way across town over at Farm Bureau Insurance, she could sense it on him. That something was most definitely wrong.

“Where should I start?”

“Oh no…you didn’t get the accounts, did you?”

“Oh no, I got them. That part of my day was fine. It’s just that this town is going crazy. I’m just wondering if you can buy straightjackets in bulk, because I’m thinking we’re going to need a lot of them.”

Michelle said, “Oh, you heard then?”

“Heard what?”

“About the bank.”

Louis felt a heaviness in his chest. What now? “Tell me,” he said.

“I only know what they’re saying,” she said. “I guess an hour ago some old lady came into the bank across the street, you know, First Federal, and wanted to close her account. The teller told her she needed a slip to do that and the old lady just went ballistic. Get this, she whipped out a knife, a big knife, from her purse and stabbed the teller. Stabbed her like five or six times. At least, that’s what they’re saying. We heard the sirens. It was awful.”

“Shit.”

“It gets worse. The old lady supposedly walked right out with her bloody knife, sat on the bench outside, and then…well, she just slit her wrists. Slit them, Louis, and then folded them in her lap and calmly bled to death.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. But they said she was smiling. Just sitting there, bleeding to death…and smiling.”

Louis swallowed. “The teller survive?”

Michelle said she didn’t know. “She lost a lot of blood, I guess. Louis, it was Kathy Ramsland.”

“Kathy?” Louis said. “Oh, Jesus, Vic’s kid sister?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Calling Kathy a “kid” was maybe overdoing it in that she was nearly thirty. But, hell, Louis had grown up next to her, hung out tight with brother Vic right through high school.

Sitting there, the booze bubbling and acidic in his belly, he was picturing Kathy as a kid. Pushing her around on her bike when she was learning to ride without the training wheels. Making her up as Bride of Frankenstein for Halloween. The awful stories Vic and he used to tell her to scare the shit out of her. The time her hamster died and she buried it in the backyard in a metal Band-Aid box and then he and Vic digging it up a week later to see what it smelled like.

Not Kathy, Christ, not Kathy.

“Louis?” Michelle said. “I don’t know what’s going on but something happened over at the high school.”

Louis swallowed. “Like what? A shooting?” he said, making the quick assumption as most did after Columbine.

“I don’t know. But I guess there’s like ten cop cars out there…the townies, sheriff, state police. Whatever it is, it must be pretty bad. That’s what Carol said. She just drove by there.”

The heaviness wasn’t just in his belly now, it was laying over him, crushing him down in the recliner. He was now starting to wonder and as he wondered, he worried. Maybe you could write off one or two weird things happening, but when they occurred in bunches then you started thinking things. You started seeing the sort of connections that canceled out coincidence. The sort of connections that made paranoia leap into the back of your mind.

“What the hell is going on?” he said out loud, though he’d honestly meant only to think it.

“I don’t know,” Michelle said. “But it’s weird, isn’t it?”

“It gets weirder,” he said and then he started telling his own tale. The assault. The dying boy. The crazy cops. And as he told that story, realizing yet again that it sounded positively absurd in the telling, he began to turn it all over in his mind. What he’d seen. The stabbing at the bank. Whatever was going down at the high school. Sure, it could have been a series of grim coincidences, but he couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around that. For deep down, he was almost scared. Scared that something was happening to Greenlawn.

Something on a huge scale.

In the distance, he could hear sirens. Lots of them. And he wondered what else was going on out there, what other awful things were occurring behind locked doors in all those neighborhoods piled up end to end.

But he stopped himself right there.

It was not healthy thinking. Just because some very odd things were happening did not mean for one moment the town was going insane. That was just paranoia doing his thinking for him. He wasn’t about to go down that road. You started thinking crazy bullshit like that, next thing you knew you were afraid to leave the house. Louis had had an aunt like that. She became a shut-in, terrified of everything outside her own door. He wasn’t about to become like that.

Yet, the feeling that something was wrong, really wrong, persisted. Like a bad taste, he just couldn’t seem to wash it out of his mouth.

“Louis? Louis? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” he told his wife.

“Are you telling me that cop was really kicking that boy’s body? Stomping on it?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”

“That’s scary. That’s really scary.”

“Sure,” he said. “And goddamn Greenlawn, of all places.”

“You better report this,” Michelle said. “Call down to the police station right now or go down there, tell them what those nuts were doing. Good God. It’s horrible.” She was breathing very fast on the other end. “Louis? Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, I’m okay as I can be.” He paused, studying the whiskey in his glass. “I wish you could come home. I know it sounds stupid, but I’d just feel better if you could.”

“I’ll get there soon as I can. I have to finish up some things here first, though. I’ll be about an hour, maybe an hour and a half.”

That wasn’t good enough, but he didn’t tell her so. Every minute she was away from him made that hollow in his guts open wider. But how could he honestly explain any of it to her? How could he make her understand, make her feel what he was feeling himself?

“Okay,” he said. “Get home as soon as you can.”

“Louis…are you sure you’re all right? You don’t sound good.”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes.”

“All right. I’ll be home soon as I can.”

“Okay. I’ll be—” He paused.

“What? What is it?”

Louis wasn’t sure himself. He heard the creaking of the steps out on the porch. It didn’t mean anything really. Could have been the kid delivering the paper or the mailman. Yet, with what he’d been through and what Michelle had told him, he was expecting something bad.

“There’s…there’s someone on the porch,” he said in almost a whisper.

“Louis…you’re scaring me, okay? Just stop this now.”

“Hurry home, baby. Please just hurry home.”

Hurry…

 

9

Louis broke the connection, slid the phone back in his pocket.

Setting his drink aside, he started wondering what he had for a weapon in case he needed one. He wasn’t a hunter or a hobby shooter, so he didn’t have any guns. His trout rod and reel didn’t count for anything. There were knives in the kitchen, of course. He went to the closet by the front door and dug out a driver from his golf bag. Then the step out there creaked again. He pulled the sheer aside from the oval window set in the door.

Just the mailman.

Old Lem Karnigan.

Louis sighed. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he inflating this all into something bigger than it was, some crazy conspiracy?

Lem saw him out of the corner of his eye and waved absently.

Louis pulled the door open.

Lem was pushing seventy, but hadn’t retired and there was no talk of him doing so. They’d probably have to force him out. Lem’s wife had died two years ago this past winter and his kids were all moved away. He probably didn’t have anything but the job. And that was sad when you thought about it.

He was standing on the bottom step sorting letters and fliers. The mailbag strapped over his shoulder looked impossibly bulky and heavy. Almost too much for a skinny old guy like him.

“One of these days, Louis,” he said without looking up, “I’m getting out. I’m going down to Florida with the rest of the old coots. I ran into Ronny Riggs last week, just up from Miami Beach. You know what he said? He said there’s beaches down there where the girls don’t wear no tops. How do you like that? he says. So I say, Bobby, I like that just fine.” Chuckling to himself, Lem looked up and his laughter stopped. He saw Louis’ disheveled appearance, the crusted bloodstains on his shirt. “Jesus. H Christ, Louis! What the hell happened? You get in a fight?”

Louis shook his head. “Some kid got in an accident…I had to help. It was a real mess.”

Lem just stood down at the bottom of the steps, staring at him.

And as Louis watched, it was almost as if a shadow passed over his face. Lem shuddered, his mouth pulled into a scowl. It looked as if something, something necessary had just drained out of him. And that quick.

Then he did the most amazing thing: he sniffed the air.

Sniffed it like he could smell the blood all over Louis. Like an animal.

“You okay, Lem?”

“So you helped that kid, did you?” Lem said. “Well, that was kind of you.”

Louis just swallowed. Gooseflesh had broken out on his arms. Look at his eyes. Look at his goddamn eyes. What Louis saw made him wish that he’d brought the golf club with him. Because Lem’s eyes were flat and black and shiny like those of a rattlesnake right before it strikes. Just like the kid’s eyes…nothing in them.

“You okay, Lem?” he said again.

Lem squinted, his lips pulled back from his teeth. “No…no I ain’t all right, Louis Shears. I ain’t all right at all. I was thinking…I was thinking about last Christmas…you never left me a tip like you used to do. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s my job to deliver your fucking mail, but a tip tells me you appreciate the job I do. That I bust my ass six days a week in good weather and bad, bringing you you’re fucking mail.”

Louis made ready to spring back inside. “Well, Lem, I’m sorry about that. Last Christmas was a bad time for us. Michelle’s mom got sick and all. Everything was crazy.”

Lem ran his tongue along the fronts of his teeth. “Sure, Louis, sure. Guys like you, they always got an answer for everything, don’t they? Well, don’t you worry, Mr. Louis Shears, I know my job. I do my job. Ain’t nobody that has to tell me how to do my job, least of all you. Here’s your goddamn mail.” He crunched it up in his fist, letters and magazines and fliers, threw at Louis. “There you go, you sonofabitch.”

And then he ambled away, glancing over his shoulder from time to time at Louis like he hated the sight of him. He moved up the sidewalk, talking to himself. The real frightening thing was that he was moving with a rolling, loping gait like that of an ape.

And worse: he was digging in his mailbag and tossing letters in the air.

Tossing them in bunches.

Then he stopped at row of rose bushes at the Merchant’s house next door, unzipped himself and took a piss. Right there in plain view.

Louis just stood there.

There was something in the water, something in the air. He didn’t know what, but they were all starting to lose it. What in the hell was happening? He’d seen it come over Lem, that emptying of all he was or ever had been, leaving something behind that was primal and uncivilized, raging.

He wondered if it was the blood on his shirt.

Lem had been all right until he’d seen the blood. Didn’t they say that the sight and smell of blood could create a sort of aggressive response in animals? In dogs? Was that true for people, too? No, that was ridiculous. There had been a sudden inexplicable aggression in Lem, but it had been more than that. He was like the kid or the cops. Suddenly, somehow, things like ethics and self-control had suddenly vanished, leaving a predatory anger in its void.

Louis shut the door.

Then he locked it.

He peered out the window.

At the Merchant’s house next door, Lem left mail scattered on the lawn. Two houses down at the Loveman’s, he dug into his bag, scratching around in there like an animal rooting in soil for grubs. Then he put a hand to his face and shook. He tossed the bag aside and just wandered away up the walk like he was sunstruck.

It was happening and Louis knew it.

Something horrifying and unknown was taking the town one by one…

 

10

An easy three blocks away from where Louis Shears was being introduced to the new postal system in Greenlawn, Tessler Avenue crossed Ash Street and right there, right at the bottom of the grassy hill where all the houses were whitewashed and the flowerbeds bloomed lushly with black-eyed susan and rose-pink spider lily, there was a store called Cal’s One-Stop. It was named after Bobby Calhoun, who had run it since just after World War II until his death six months ago. Cal’s was the sort of place to grab a six-pack or a gallon of milk or a pack of smokes, but not much else since everything was vastly overpriced.

When Angie Preen set out for Cal’s, tucking little Danny in the buggy, she did so not because she needed beer or milk or cigarettes or even paper plates or a bottle of ketchup. She had other reasons. None of which were altruistic.

She was going there to turn the screw, as she liked to call it.

And said screw just happened to be firmly lodged in Brandi Welch’s back.

And I’ll twist it in that little witch, God yes, I’ll make her squirm.

“We’re going to the store, Danny,” she announced. “We need some things.”

“We always need things, don’t we, Mommy?” said little Danny and for one uneasy moment there, Angie was almost certain that there was a deep salty rut of sarcasm behind his words. But that was silly. He was barely two-years old.

Paranoia, that’s what.

Besides, it was that time of the month and her flow was heavy. She was moody, quick to anger, ready to scratch out eyes for the least infraction. Some women, she knew, did not get crazy like she did when they were menstruating. Lucky them.

She looked down at Danny, struck, as always, at how much he looked like his father and how little he looked like her. He had his father’s smooth flawless Mediterranean skin and moody, chocolate-dark Sicilian eyes. As such, he was beautiful. Just like his father. Pleasing to behold. One could only hope that he was nothing like his father in every other way.

“I want a candy bar,” Danny said.

“Okay. We’ll get you a Mounds or a Three Musketeers or something.”

Danny seemed satisfied with that, then he furrowed his brow, said, “I want a gun.”

“Stop that!” Angie chided him, a bead of sweat popping at her temple.

“I want a gun so I can shoot people dead!”

Angie stopped the buggy right there, right on Tessler where the streets are handsomely lined with oak and yellow poplar. “Stop it, Danny. Don’t you let me hear you talk like that again. Only bad men shoot people. And bad men get thrown in cages for the rest of their lives. You don’t want that, do you?”

A tear in the corner of his eye, he shook his head.

God, she wondered if he was already becoming his father.

Jimmy Torrio. Angie had met him in Terra Haute. A week later she was sleeping with him and the transition between stranger and lover had been exceptionally smooth. But Jimmy Torrio was nothing if not smooth. He gave her Danny, who was beautiful and precious, but that’s the only thing he had given her.

Then why did you keep spreading your legs for him?

Ah, the question of the day, the year, the century. Why? She had a good job, she was from a good family, at least by Greenlawn standards. Jimmy was an asshole, he was selfish, he was corrupt. He had a criminal record that he had not revealed until she was in too deep to care. He was really good at nothing beyond drinking and gambling and mooching money. He was not even really very good in bed. Yet, Angie had stayed. At least until she’d found out that she was only one of many. Then she ran straight back to Greenlawn, a bun baking in the old oven, no money, and absolutely no self-respect.

Two years later, she was still obsessed by him. Maybe it was smoldering hate now, but they always said that hate was merely the flipside of love.

“Can I have two candy bars?” Danny asked.

“Of course you can,” Angie told him. Why not?

It was a beautiful day and Angie was thinking about Louis Shears who had just driven by, how he always smiled at her, how his eyes flashed like coins in a streambed and behind that look, just behind it, a touch of heat and a touch of interest. Louis was nice. Louis was funny. But he was also married to Michelle who was a very nice lady. So Angie would admire from afar. As always.

Across the street, she saw Dick Starling walk by. He was a very nice man. Everyone loved him. His daughter, Brittany, was on the archery team. Angie had won three state championships in archery when she was in high school and Dick Starling had been instrumental in getting her to take the job of archery coach. Angie hadn’t wanted to at first…but she finally submitted. Putting an arrow in a target was not only a great distraction from the stresses of life, it was sheer joy when you imagined that the target was in fact Jimmy Torrio. Bullseye every time, heh, heh.

She waved to Dick Starling…he did not wave back. He was gripping his head in his hands and staggering up the sidewalk like he had a good hangover going. Angie decided it was none of her business.

Cal’s was just up the block now.

Angie grinned.

Other than archery, tormenting Brandi was her only true joy in life.

Maybe I should use that bitch for target practice.

Danny’s birthday tomorrow. Maybe Jimmy was already in town. Sometimes he did that. He’s show up in Greenlawn, look up some of his old cronies and throw together a card game, indulge in a little whoring with cheap sluts like Little Miss Saucy Tits Brandi Welch. Asshole. He’d probably screwed the little witch last night. Maybe this morning. You could never tell, oh God in high Heaven, you could just never tell.

Angie pushed her buggy through the door of Cal’s.

There were maybe six or seven people in there, buying bread, examining the beer in the cooler, chit-chatting as people in Greenlawn will do.

Angie swept the store with acidic eyes.

Ha, there she was. Right behind the counter: Little Miss Saucy Tits. Look at them everyone, admire them, see how plump they are. Women, wouldn’t you just love to have a set like these and, men, wouldn’t you just love to squeeze them or bury your face in the sweet valley between, yummy-yummy.

At the sight of her, a slight headache bloomed in the back of Angie’s skull: it was sharp, insistent. It made her squeeze her eyes shut. And for the briefest of moments, it cast a dark shadow over her thoughts. A shadow that she instantly recognized with some fundamental half-submerged awareness that was ancient and misty. It crawled up from within her, breaking the sleep of reason.

Then it was gone.

Brandi looked up from her Soduku magazine, pencil pausing, saw Angie and tensed, God how she tensed.

Angie smiled at her, a lethal meat-eating smile.

Poor Little Miss Saucy Tits. Look how nervous she is. See how her breasts, so jutting and firm, have deflated somewhat. See how her liquid black eyes shift about nervously like those of a rat wary of the cat. She trembles. Her lips so full and pink and juicy are now pulled into a pale gray line of despair.

Poor little thing, Angie thought. It’s nothing truly personal, you know, but you shouldn’t have been fucking my ex. He comes to town maybe once a year and you fuck him and I know it and you know it and I’ll never let you forget it.

Angie lifted Danny from the buggy. “Go find yourself a candy bar,” she said, then turned her full hating attention on Brandi Welch who was already withering away like a flower before October’s first frost.

“I’d like a lottery ticket,” Angie said.

Brandi swallowed. “Um…which kind?”

“What kinds do you have?”

Hee, hee. Make her go through the whole list from Megamillions to the state drawings to instant scratch-offs like Pot-o’-Gold and Million-Gazillion and E-Z Street. It took her about five minutes to go through them all and tell Angie how much they cost and how much you could win, all the unnecessary details. And when she was finished, a fine dew of sweat on her brow, Angie said, “No, I’ve changed my mind.”

What Angie badly wanted to do was to read the little whoring witch right out in front of everyone. What a scene it would be with little Danny at her side! Just tell Little Miss Saucy Tits what she thought of her in plain terms. Refer to her openly as that part of the female anatomy that you generally reserved for the worst, evil little shrews, the old Cee-U-Next-Tuesday. Which was a word that Angie would not allow herself to say out loud or in mixed company because, dammit, she was from a good family and she was better than that…wasn’t she?

“I want some cigarettes.”

“Cigarettes?”

Angie flashed her the dead smile of a window dummy. “Yes, cigarettes.”

“I guess…I mean, I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Lots of things you don’t know, isn’t there?” Angie told her. “But trust me, Brandi, in time you’ll get to know all about me.”

Brandi swallowed. She recognized the implied threat and the tension was so thick on her you could have sliced it like cake. “What kind? What kind of cigarettes?”

“What kind do you have?”

Brandi sighed. “Listen, do we have to go through this every time?”

“Through what?”

“You know damn well what I’m talking about.”

“I only know that you’re being very rude to a customer.”

Danny, damn him, came running up and tossed two Almond Joys on the counter, breaking up the fun which had all the earmarks of being exceptional.

“Is there anything else?” Brandi asked her, a thin smile on her lips.

Angie, pissed-off, cheated, and trembling with barely-concealed rage, dug through her purse, clawed through it really, found her wallet…and it was at that precise moment that the little headache blooming in her skull like a corpse-orchid suddenly flowered and its petals filled her head and its fragrance consumed all that she was.

With moonstruck eyes, she looked from the purse to Brandi, recognizing neither or their place in the scheme of things. She made a guttural grunting sort of sound deep in her throat. Her fingers continued to dig in the purse, finding a wallet, a cosmetic bag, a cellphone, a box of crayons for Danny…things she no longer recognized or understood.

Then they found something else.

A box-cutter with a curving steel blade like that of a scimitar.

Angie had no memory of throwing it in there when she’d sliced open boxes for the recycling. She only knew that it felt good in her hand. It conformed to her palm and begged to be put to use.

“Um…are you all right?” Brandi asked, caught somewhere between confusion and fear.

Angie looked up at her, drool running from her mouth. Her eyes were fixed, staring, almost reptilian. She brought out the box cutter and slashed Brandi across the throat. Brandi stumbled back, shocked, stunned, overwhelmed. Blood bubbled from her torn voice box and she tried madly to stem it with her fingers. It squirted between them like a flow of rich red wine, catching Angie in the face.

The hot spray of blood was not unpleasant.

It was pleasing.

Angie came right over the counter. She slashed Brandi’s outstretched fingers to ribbons, she took the tip of her nose off, she opened one breast, and then she ripped the box-cutter across Brandi’s lovely dark liquid eyes, the hooked blade catching in the left pupil and yanking the bloody, glistening orb out by a section of optic nerve.

People fled the store.

But more disturbing, others did not.

When Angie came around the counter from the hacked, bleeding thing on the floor, two men and one woman stood there, smiling at her, staring at her with dark troglodyte eyes. Eyes that understood. One of the men, middle-aged and balding, stepped up behind her and slid his hands up her shirt, gripping her breasts roughly.

Angie liked it.

Her blue eyes were like crystal drowning pools, lips pulled away from teeth. The front of her pink tee was soaked with blood, crazy whorls of it had splashed over her face. She enjoyed the smell of it. It excited her, stirred primal memories of the hunt. She licked it off her lips.

The others following, she went back behind the counter. She dipped her finger’s into Brandi’s gored throat, swished them around in the wound, then, her fingers dripping with blood, she went over to the wall. She knocked a display of Hostess cakes out of the way, kicked aside a cardboard standee of Dale Earnhardt hawking Budweiser…and proceeded to draw on the wall in blood. Elaborate looping symbols, complex intersecting linear marks, bloody handprints and stick figures, repeating them again and again.

Using Brandi Welch’s corpse as their palette, the others joined her, covering the walls in ritualistic hieroglyphics that looked oddly like the cave paintings of Paleolithic man.

They instinctively knew what she was drawing and they followed suit until the wall was crowded with primitive art.

When Angie walked out of the store, the others followed in her rich, savage blood-wake. It was her scent now and it drew them to her.

And behind in the store, forgotten but unconcerned, Danny reached into the meat case and found a moist, well-marbled slab of sirloin. It dripped with blood. He brought it to his mouth.

Humming, he began to suck the juice from it…

 

11

After Louis was long gone, Officers Warren and Shaw and Kojozian stood around staring at the dead boy on the sidewalk, each happily reminiscing about other stiffs they’d been called in on. How they looked, how they smelled, what happened when they tried to bag them up. Warren was an old hand, just like Louis thought, and he seemed to have the best stories by far. But the other two kept trying to outdo him like a couple guys reliving their high school glories on the gridiron.

Kojozian, who’d only been a cop five years by that point, kept trying to come up with something that would impress Warren. “I tell you about that nut over on Birch Street a couple years back? Some old guy, retired railroad man, he took to the bottle and took to it hard.”

Warren nodded, as if he’d heard it too many times. “The sauce gets ‘em every time. Take my word for it. I could tell you some stories, boy. The old Sweet Lucy, they get a taste for it, look out, brother.”

“Sure,” Kojozian said, “sure. This guy’s got it so bad that his wife decides he’s going cold turkey so she up and locks him in the coal bin down in the basement. Keeps him there like a week. You believe that shit? He’s in there, living in the straw, shitting and pissing himself. She slides food under the door for him, but no booze. She wouldn’t have called us, but she broke the key off in the lock. Well, let me tell you, we broke the door down and the smell that came out…oh boy, not nice. The old man was out of his tree with the D.T.s. He’d torn up his nose, clawed it right to hamburger because he thought there were bugs crawling in and out of it. We took him out and it was no easy bit, he bled all over my uniform shirt, just screaming about the bugs living inside him.”

Warren just kept nodding, watching the flies gathering on the kid’s corpse. Right then, they were investigating the crater at the top of the head. Warren finished his cigarette and flicked it at them. It scattered them, but the butt lodged right there in the sticky goo coming out of the skull.

It sizzled and went out.

Kojozian said, “Hot out today.”

He yanked his tie off and threw it. Then he unbuttoned his uniform shirt, took it off, and pulled off his T-shirt beneath. He threw it in the grass. He put his uniform shirt back on, but did not button it back up. The sun felt good on his bare chest.

Shaw mopped sweat from his face, just shaking his head. “Sure, goddamn booze. You remember old Father Brown over at St. Luke? Oh, now that was long before your time, Kojozian. Father Brown was a hell of a guy, let me tell you. That old sonofabitch ran the church, St. Luke’s school, the whole nine yards. Christ, he’d been over there since the forties.”

“Forties?” Warren said. “Try the thirties.”

“Yeah, well, Father Brown he had quite an operation going over there. Everyone loved him right to death. The church picnic in the summer, the fall carnival, the Halloween spookhouse, the Christmas programs…hell, what a guy. Every old lady in town worshipped that man.”

“He used to have supper at our house twice a month when I was a kid,” Warren said.

“Sure. He was like that. But what very few in this town knew was that he had an awful thirst. Once a week, usually Thursdays, old Father Brown would just get pissed three sheets to the wind. His housekeeper would always call down to the station and we’d go off looking for him. One time, there he is on Main, leaning up against a parking meter, pissing on the sidewalk.” Shaw was grinning now and couldn’t help himself. “Well, we get out of the squad car and he sees us right away, tells us to go get fucked and when we’re done with that to go fuck our mothers. That’s the truth, Kojozian. He was one mean sonofabitch when he got a bellyful.”

“He was,” Warren said. “Christ, was he ever.”

Shaw went on. “Well, me and my partner, Bill Goode…you remember Goody, Sarge? Yeah, well we had a hell of a time with him. Brown had been a boxer in the old days and he still thought he was. He was swinging at us and we were dodging and ducking, but finally we got him under control. Neither of us thought about his johnson that was hanging in the wind. He pissed all over Goody, saved a few squirts for me. What a goddamn mess that was.”

Kojozian tried to think of another one, but drew a blank. He worked his shoe under the dead kid’s arm and made it bounce up and down, made the palm of his hand slap the concrete in a jumpy rhythm. Slap, slap, slap-slap-slap.

“Boy, I’d hate to get piss all over me.”

“Well,” Warren said. “That’s nothing. If all you get in this job is some piss on you, you’re doing all right. We picked up this character on a parole violation out at his house down by the train yards…one of those old houses down there, you know? Well, we came right in and the guy says, I gotta take a shit. Just let me take a shit. But we weren’t buying it. We cuffed him and threw him in the back of the squad car. We’re pulling out of the driveway and he shits his pants. Damn, I don’t think he shit in two weeks. He filled his drawers and it overflowed right down the leg of his pants. Christ, the smell. We took him down to the jail and hosed him off. I spent the afternoon cleaning shit out of the back of the squad car. Every time it got warm in there, even a month later, you couldn’t smell nothing but that guy’s shit.”

“Oh yeah?” Shaw said. “I can live with the shit. That’s nothing. It’s the vomit I can’t stand. I pulled over a guy for drunk driving when I was working midnights. I pulled him out of the car and he vomited right on me. It was summer and I had my collar open and he puked right down the front of my shirt. For the next two hours, my belly is coated with this guy’s puke.”

Warren just laughed. “Puke is just puke. I ever tell you about the train that plastered that bum the first year I was on the Department? Holy O. Christ. It hit him and he got tossed underneath, cut into about fifty pieces. Middle of goddamn winter and we’re poking around in the snow, bagging up pieces of him. There I was, just green with it, carrying around an arm in one hand and a foot in the other. Another rookie found a hand and he stuffed it in my pocket because we didn’t have anywhere else to put it. We had those old leather coats with deep pockets then. It fit just fine. Well, it was a busy night and I forgot about the hand in there. We got off shift and we went and got loaded. I come home and I hit the hay. You shoulda seen the look on my old lady’s face when she looked through my pockets!”

They had a good laugh over that one.

Cars kept coming by, slowing down to get a look and Kojozian waved them along. This was police business here. When they got a look at him, they sped away.

“Well,” Warren finally said. “This isn’t getting this stiff off the public sidewalk.”

“We need a shovel,” Shaw said.

Kojozian was wondering where they’d get a shovel when he saw a guy down the block trimming his hedges outside a trim little ranch house. They all saw it same time he did.

Warren in the lead, they went on down there…

 

12

“Excuse me, sir,” Warren said, taking his hat off. “We’re on police business here. What’s your name?”

The guy stood there in blue jeans and a tank top, clippers in hand. He was very neat and immaculate as was the lawn behind him, just as green as emeralds. He was staring at Kojozian. His shirt open, chest glistening with sweat.

“What are you looking at?” Kojozian asked him. “You never seen a cop before?”

“No…no…it’s just that…um…”

“I asked you your name,” Warren said.

“Um…Ray Donnel. What’s going on here…what’s this about?”

Kojozian chuckled. “He wants to know what this is about.”

“Sure, he does,” Shaw said. “He’s just being a concerned citizen, that’s all.”

But Warren shook his head. “Sorry, Mr. Donnel. This is police business and we’re not at liberty to discuss the particulars. We need a shovel, maybe those clippers, too.”

Donnel looked from one to the other. The blood had drained from his face. “I have tools in the shed.”

“He says they’re in the shed,” Kojozian said.

“Sure, where else would they be?” Shaw said.

He led them back behind the house and they all commented on his yard, how nice it was, how green the grass was, the nice edging job he’d done on his walk. They were all really impressed and they told him so. Inside the shed there were racks of gardening tools, spotless and shining. Shovels arranged by size. Donnel was definitely a guy who believed everything in its place and a place for everything.

Warren grabbed a shovel, admired the clean blade on it. “Nice,” he said. “Real nice. We’ll try not to dirty it up too much.”

“That’s okay,” Donnell said, fumbling over his words. “I’m…I’m just a neat freak, I guess.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Shaw said, mopping more sweat from his face.

“As long as I get ‘em back, I’m not worried.”

Warren handed the shovel to Kojozian. “You’ll get it back. I’ll see to it. We’re cops and you can trust us. We’re not thieves, you know.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that.”

“You believe this guy, Kojozian?” Shaw said. “He thinks you’re a thief. Thinks you won’t bring his shovel back. How do you like that?”

The big man bristled. “I don’t like it at all.”

Donnel looked at them like maybe it was a joke, but they were deadpan to a man. They saw nothing funny about a guy like him who thought cops were thieves. In fact, in their book, there was nothing worse than a guy like him that didn’t trust cops. What was the world coming to?

Donnel just shook his head, smelling something on these three he did not care for. Something savage, something desperate.

“Listen, officers, I didn’t mean anything. I didn’t mean anything at all.”

The three of them were circled around him now like they didn’t want him getting away and Donnel was starting to sense that. Their faces were hard, their eyes shining like basalt. They licked their lips with the pink worms of their tongues. Shaw’s belly growled.

“Maybe he wants the shovel back right now,” Warren said. “You better give it to him.”

Kojozian shrugged and swung it with everything he had at Donnel’s head. There was a clanging and Donnel dropped to their feet, a gash opened from his left ear to his right eyebrow, blood pooling out. Kojozian kicked him with a gore-encrusted shoe, but Donnel did not move. He just bled some more.

“What a guy,” Shaw said. “You just can’t reason with some of ‘em, you know that, boys?”

They knew, all right.

They gathered up three shovels, a rake, and a wheelbarrow which would make carting the stiff around a lot easier. Shaw and Kojozian stepped out into the sunlight.

“Hey,” Warren said. “You’re not gonna just leave him there, are you?”

“Why not?” they said.

Warren shook his head. “This guy likes things neat. We should at least respect that. Give me a hand with him.”

Kojozian lifted the body up where a hook was sticking out of the wall. While he held Donnel, Shaw and Warren pushed the body onto the hook. It entered just beneath the back of his skull with a moist, grating sound. He hung there just fine.

“That’s better,” Warren said. “Donnel would have appreciated that.”

“I hope I look so neat when I’m dead,” Shaw said.

Kojozian studied the blood all over his hands. He was fascinated by it in a way that blood had never fascinated him before. He kept sniffing his hands. Finally, a loose and almost comical smile on his face, he rubbed blood all over his right index finger and painted his face with it. A huge red X that went from jawline to temple, the apex being dead center of his nose.

The other two did not seem to notice.

They all just stood there for a few minutes, approving of what they had done. Donnel was hanging from the wall, blood running down his face and out of his left eye. They listened to it drip to the floor for a time, then they went to take care of the kid…

 

13

Macy Merchant walked home from school that day in something of a daze. She did not understand what had happened. She only knew that it left her feeling very scared. Very disturbed. She thought it over and kept thinking it over and all she came up with was a blank. An absolute blank.

It just did not make sense.

Sure, she couldn’t stand Chelsea Paris or Shannon Kittery or any of the rest of their uppity, elitist pack. But she’d never mouthed off to them before. She’d never dared. And she certainly had never attacked one of them. Macy couldn’t remember ever being in a fight. Chelsea and Shannon had been mean to her long as she could remember, but even when they shoved her in the halls in junior high or knocked her books out of her hands, she’d never fought back.

You did more than fight back, Macy, a stern voice in her head informed her. You attacked. You attacked Chelsea. You stabbed her in the cheek with a frigging pencil.

Oh, God. Oh, dear God.

Thing was, she could remember doing it just fine.

She could remember the absolute hatred and loathing she’d suddenly felt for Chelsea. It had been like a poison working its way through her, until…until she had just lost control. All of it boiled in her and she’d started calling Chelsea names.

Then she’d grabbed her.

Pounded her head off the desk.

Then stabbed her with the pencil.

And the blood…God, the smell of it. It had made her hungry. It had made her mouth water. And worse, far, far worse, it had made her horny.

Just the memory of that sickened her.

Mr. Benz had dragged her down to the office and Chelsea was taken to the school nurse. She remembered Mr. Shore, the principal, reading her the riot act, asking her again and again why she, a straight A honor roll student with a spotless record, had done something so vicious and cruel. Chelsea was being taken to the hospital. She would need stitches. And as Shore went on and on, Macy just sat there, that black poison still seething in her guts. She kept smiling even though Shore told her to wipe that goddamn smirk off her face. But she hadn’t been able to. It was like someone was smiling for her, thinking awful things and doing worse things, and she had only been along for the ride.

While Shore raged, she had stared at his belly. It was so full and round beneath his starched white shirt. What a mess it would be, she thought, if someone opened it with a knife.

Then…whatever had taken hold of her, just faded.

Macy started crying.

And not your average boo-hoo crocodile tears, but the real thing. Whatever that awful compulsion had been, when it released her, it was like she had been torn open inside, cut right to the bone, and then the blood had flowed and kept flowing. This blood was clear and ran from her eyes, but in her mind it was just as red and just as hot as blood as it spilled down her cheeks. Even Shore had melted when he saw it happen.

Macy…sweet, gentle, kind…was back and maybe he saw this.

That other thing was gone. Shore had tried to console her, tried a great many things, in fact, short of telling her it was okay, it was nothing to get upset about. But, truth be told, Macy was in such a state of tearful despondency by then, it had even crossed his mind to say that. Then the school secretary, Mrs. Bleer, had come in and did what many men seemed so incompetent at and incapable of: she soothed Macy. She talked her down, hugged her, let her know that while, yes, it was bad attacking another student, that they would work it out.

Had it been someone other than Macy Merchant, the treatment would not have been so sympathetic or understanding. But Mrs. Bleer knew Macy just as Mr. Shore did and Macy was a good kid. Smart, well-adjusted, dutiful…she was not some wildcat that routinely assaulted other girls.

Both of them kept asking her the same thing again and again: Why? Why had she gone after Chelsea like that? What had Chelsea said? What had she done? Because neither of them were ignorant of Chelsea Paris and the sort of girl she was. And the way they were seeing it was that Chelsea must have really, really done something bad this time around to get a reaction like that out of Macy Merchant, of all people.

Yes, they wanted to know why.

And as Macy walked down Colidge Street, making for 7^th Avenue and Rush Street, she wanted to know why, too.

She saw Kathleen Soames standing on her porch. She waved.

She kept walking, aware only of the thoughts that filled her head and this was enough. Clutching her books to her chest, her head slumped down, she stared at the sidewalk. The cracks in it. The anthills blossoming every few feet.

The thing that absolutely terrified her about it all is that she had felt no control, as if someone or something else had simply taken over. She wondered if that’s how crazy people felt when they opened up with a gun in a supermarket or took an axe after somebody, like they were not really to blame, that it had been someone or something else, some terrible urge that had taken control of them completely, one they were powerless to stop.

Is that how it was?

Was she now in that category?

God, there’d never been anything like this, no indication that she was crazy. She had bad thoughts like anyone else, but she’d never hurt a fly before in her life. Right then, despite the fear and sadness, she did not feel essentially different than she had two weeks before or two years before. And that was the scary thing…would it happen again? Just out of the blue would she attack someone? And have no control over it when it happened?

What a mess, what a terrible mess.

Maybe she had a chemical imbalance like schizophrenia or one of those things they’d learned about in Personal Psych last year. Multiple personalities. Good Macy and bad Macy. If that was true, then there would be medications and therapy. Regardless, her life would never be the same again. At school, she would be tagged as a psycho by some and be a hero to all the others who’d always wanted to put Chelsea Paris in her place but had never dared. Yeah, that was some kind of fame. The sort of fame she could live without.

Mom would not be happy with any of it.

Macy’s dad had died when she was five from a heart attack and, although she could not remember exactly what her mom was like before that, she had a pretty good idea that her mom was not a drunk. That she was capable of holding onto a job for more than two or three months at a crack. And that she had not been sleeping with anyone she happened to run into at the bar.

At least, she hoped so.

But the truth was that sometimes it was really hard to say who was doing the parenting. There was only the two of them now and mom was usually pretty hung over which dumped just about everything in Macy’s lap. She generally did the cooking and washing and house cleaning. She was the one that balanced the checkbook when there was actually any money in it. If it needed doing, it fell on Macy. She knew what the gossip in the neighborhood was, the common assumption that mom was a drunken whore and that Macy, with no true parental supervision, would soon enough follow in her tracks. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, as they said.

But they were all wrong.

Macy did not smoke or drink or do drugs and at sixteen, she was still a virgin unlike Chelsea Paris, Shannon Kittery, and the rest of the pop squad. Maybe as far as the virginity thing went, there had been precious few opportunities because she was not a natural vixen with all the necessary equipment in place by the eighth grade. Still, even had she been like Chelsea or Shannon she did not think she would have hit the mattress as fast as they had. It was the same with drinking and drugs, all the other assorted temptations that commonly led teenagers astray.

Macy did not indulge because she chose not to.

Maybe she had self-control and maybe she had self-respect and maybe she was more emotionally mature than her peers. Regardless, she set a high standard for herself and sometimes she wondered if it was because of her mother and her father. Her mother because Macy was honestly embarrassed at what mom was and had no desire to be like her. And dad because he had died young and Macy had never gotten a chance to really know him, but she felt that she owed it to his memory to conduct herself in a way that would have made him proud.

Macy, of course, never admitted this to anyone, let alone mom.

Because mom didn’t like to talk about dad. Whenever his name was mentioned she dropped into one of her funks and the only person who could get her out of it was Jim Beam. Macy sometimes thought that mom wanted her to run wild, would have been much happier if her only daughter fell from grace, stopped being such a “goody-two-shoes” as she often called her.

And how was that for parenting?

Mom would get a kick out of this, though. Macy attacking another girl and getting suspended—dear God, suspended—pending an investigation. Macy had a funny feeling she would laugh when she heard, say something stupid like, well, well, you’re just like the rest of us after all, aren’t you?

And that was the thing, wasn’t it?

Macy did not want to be like the rest.

She worked hard, studied hard, set high standards for herself to follow and now that had all come crashing down. She’d assaulted Chelsea Paris. Of all the impossible, unexplainable things.

She’d never live this down.

Half way down 7^th, Macy suddenly looked up.

Looked up and couldn’t believe what she was seeing…

 

14

The Hack twins, Mike and Matt, were standing on the sidewalk, lording over a pile of rocks, and casually tossing them at a minivan parked at the curb. Macy just stood there, watching as the boys threw them one after the other. The windows were spider webbed from the impacts, the doors and quarter panels scratched and dinged in.

Macy couldn’t believe it.

She’d babysat the two of them off and on for the past three years. They were monsters at heart, but they were not wantonly destructive like this.

“Mikey!” she called out. “Matt! What do you think you’re doing?”

They looked over at her, smiled in recognition, and began throwing rocks again. The impacts were loud enough so that everyone in the neighborhood must have been hearing them, but nobody was paying any attention. Mr. Chalmers was even sitting out on his porch in plain view, just reading his paper.

“We’re throwing rocks,” Mike said with typical ten-year old honesty.

Macy rushed over to them. “Stop it! What the heck is wrong with you two? Can’t you see you’re wrecking that minivan? Your mom will go nuts! God, what’s wrong with you two?”

Mike scratched his sandy-blonde hair. “Mom said we could.”

“Yeah,” Matt agreed, “that’s what she said.”

Macy just shook her head. “Oh, I’ll just bet she did.”

“It’s none of your business,” Mike said. “You better go.”

“Mikey…”

Matt stared at her and his eyes were funny. “Get out of here! You don’t belong here!”

As Matt said that, Mike was behind her, too close for Macy’s liking. And what he was doing…this is what made her jump away and give Mike a shove that planted him squarely on his ass.

He’d been sniffing her.

Like a dog.

Sniffing her ass.

Mike got up, looked like he was fighting against something. “Maybe…maybe you better just go, Macy. Things are different now. Things can happen.”

“That’s it,” Macy said, reaching out and snaring Matt by the wrist. “You’re coming inside right now, the both of you.”

But Matt yanked his wrist free.

Macy took a step back when she got a real good look at what was in his eyes. Neither of them had ever been openly defiant like this, but now they were not just defiant but almost savage. Their freckled faces were damp with sweat, hair plastered to their foreheads. And those eyes…so intense and hating, almost reflective like black glass.

Macy suddenly felt a shift of power around her.

The boys were not afraid of her. Not in the least. In fact, they were looking at her with no fear whatsoever and something even deeper and more caustic like absolute hate. They looked like animals, like they wanted to take her down with teeth and claws, guts her right there on the sidewalk.

“You guys…you better go in,” she said.

Mike grinned at her. “Fuck you,” he said.

“What?”

Macy stepped forward to grab him, even though the idea of touching the boy was suddenly repulsive to her. She stepped forward and Matt kicked her in the shin. Mike punched her in the arm. And then they both took hold of her and she had to fight with everything she had to throw them off. Her books went one way and she went the other. She made it maybe ten feet when the first rock struck her in the back. Then another glanced off her brow, slicing her open.

“Stop it!” she cried. “That hurt! You better stop it right now!”

But they weren’t going to stop and she knew it.

They had gone crazy, the both of them. Something in them had just snapped and she could not only see it in their eyes, she could smell it wafting off of them in a hot, pungent odor. Trying to reason with them now was like trying to reason with wild dogs that were intent on taking you down. Another rock hit her in the stomach, another in the crook of her arm and hard enough so that it went numb right down to the wrist.

Macy ran.

The boys came after, flinging stones at her with everything they had. Rocks glanced off her back, whistled over her head. She outdistanced them quickly, vaulting over the hedges and running right up to Mr. Chalmers’ porch. The boys hopped the hedges and then skidded to a halt when they saw him.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Mr. Chalmers said. “Why’re you boys chasing this girl? That you, Macy?”

“Yes,” she panted. “They’ve gone nuts! They’re pegging me with rocks!”

“They are, eh?” Mr. Chalmers tucked his reading glasses in his shirt pocket and set his paper aside. “What the hell’s got into you boys?”

“We were throwing rocks at her,” Mike said.

“Yeah, we were going to kill her,” Matt added.

Macy felt all the spit in her mouth suddenly evaporate.

There were no words to adequately describe what went through her head at that moment. Fear and shock and horror, too many other things. It all left her feeling weak and hopeless.

Mr. Chalmers stood there, hands on hips, appraising the situation. Though he was in his sixties, he was still a large, well-muscled man with broad shoulders and a thick chest, the result of his twenty years in the Army as a paratrooper with both the 82^nd and 101^st Airborne Division. He still had the requisite thick neck and bristly crewcut, though now gone white.

“Mr. Chalmers,” she said. “There’s something happening here. I don’t know what. But some kids at school went crazy like this and attacked a teacher and the janitor. They killed them.”

But Mr. Chalmers was not interested in that. “You boys want to kill this girl, don’t do it in my yard, you hear? This is my territory! My territory! I marked it with my scent and you better not cross my scent, you understand?”

Macy was shaking her head from side to side.

Mr. Chalmers, too.

It was in his eyes like it was in the eyes of the Hack twins: that seething, primal emptiness. That blankness that was without bottom.

“How’d you mark your territory?” Mike asked. “We want to mark ours, too!”

Mr. Chalmers laughed. “Like this, boys. Just like this.”

And as Macy watched, he unzipped his pants and pulled his penis out. Still smiling, he proceeded to urinate on the steps, washing them down so all would know the boundaries of his territory.

When he was done, the boys sniffed it, recognizing his smell and remembering it.

Macy let out a scream.

“Get her, boys!” Mr. Chalmers said. “Run her down! Whichever one takes her down first gets her!”

Macy took off running, the twins in hot pursuit.

She darted down the sidewalk and then cut between two houses, ducked behind a garage. The twins came running, looking around, and then jogged away down the alley. Macy hid there, panting and sweating, something broken loose now in the back of her mind.

She saw the twins in the distance.

They had stripped off all their clothes now.

They were pissing on trees like dogs.

Macy tried to catch her breath, tried to hold her world together before it flew apart.

It was some kind of mass insanity, she decided, that’s what it was. That’s what had made those kids go crazy in Biolab and attack Mr. Cummings and Sully and that was what had made her go after Chelsea Paris. It was like some kind of insanity bug.

And now it had the Hack twins and Mr. Chalmers.

I have to get out of here, Macy found herself thinking. They could be everywhere. The whole town could be crazy…

And that was a possibility, she supposed.

She calmed herself the best she could and crossed the alley, slipped through a couple yards and thankfully saw no one. She didn’t know what was going on. But what she kept thinking was that if she had snapped out of it, maybe the others would, too. What amount of damage would be done by then she could not know and did not want to guess at—

“Hey, Macy,” a voice said. “How’s my favorite girl?”

Macy turned, flooded with fear, and then for maybe two or three seconds she relaxed. She breathed. Why, it was only Mr. Kenning who lived up the block. Mr. Kenning was a Boy Scout troop leader, he announced football games for the Greenlawn High Wildcats, and he sold cars for a living. A nice man who loved sports and kids and his Irish Setter, Libby. He always had a few kind words for Macy.

Except…this was not that Mr. Kenning.

This Mr. Kenning was standing in the back yard, completely naked and covered with blood. Neither of which seemed to bother him in the least. He was smiling, hacking on something with a knife. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped from his elbow.

“Come here, Macy. I have a secret I want to share with you.”

Macy just stood there, the instinctual need to flee very overpowering. She stepped around the hedges, knowing she shouldn’t, but needing to see just how bad this situation was.

“Come here, Macy. I won’t bite you.”

I have a secret I want to share with you.

But Macy could see his secret quite plainly: there was a carcass hanging from the limb of Mr. Kenning’s apple tree and he was in the process of dressing it out. It was skinned, fleshy, bleeding. There was no doubt what it was. Even if she hadn’t seen the ragged pelt of lustrous orange fur at his feet, she would’ve recognized the dog. It was hung by the throat.

Mr. Kenning stabbed his knife into the torso, slitting it upwards. Libby’s viscera spilled out in a coiled, bloody mass. Mr. Kenning studied his dripping red fist that held the dripping red knife. He sniffed it, then licked the back of it.

“Oh no,” Macy said, the world beginning to spin around her. “Oh no…oh no…oh no…”

Her whole body was shaking, tears rolling down her face, nausea rolling in her belly with the hot, rank stink of slaughtered dog.

Mr. Kenning kept smiling. That grin was depraved and obscene, filled with a raw unflinching appetite. He would rape her if he could, Macy knew, then he would feed on her.

“Come here, Macy,” he said, his blood-spattered penis standing erect. “I’ll share my kill with you…if you share what you have with me.”

Macy screamed and ran and, thankfully, he did not follow. He called out to her to bring her mother over, the whole time hacking and chopping at the dog. Macy threw up in the Maub’s hedges, cut through the Sinclair’s side yard, then ran across the street to her own porch.

She stopped right there, catching her breath, trying to make sense of it all. Everything looked so positively normal that what she had just gone through seemed ridiculous. She heard a siren in the distance, but that didn’t really mean much. Not by itself.

Behind her, there was movement, feet coming through the grass.

She whirled around, eyes wide and mouth open, ready for just about anything. She saw Mr. Shears standing there. He lived next door. But this was not the Mr. Shears she knew. His eyes were glassy, his hair wild. His shirt was torn and hanging open, bloodstains all over it.

In his hands was a golf club and he looked ready to use it.

“Please,” Macy said. “Oh, please, just stay away from me…”

But Mr. Shears kept coming…

 

15

Mr. Chalmers wasn’t real happy with them for losing the girl. In fact, when they got back and told him that Macy Merchant had slipped away, he came right off the porch. He tossed his newspaper and came right at them. His eyes were filled with a simmering blackness. They were shiny like those of a mad dog.

“Simple goddamn job I give you two,” he said, pulling his belt out of its loops and snapping it in his fists, “and you fuck it up.”

Mike and Matt Hack stood there, knowing they were going to be punished, but not even thinking of running off. They had this coming and they knew it. So they stood there when the belt came at them, lashing them in the faces, the pain sharp and cutting. They cried out and fell to their knees, curling up in balls as the belt laid open their backs in hurting welts.

“You feel that, you little shits? That’s pain and nothing teaches, nothing instructs quite like pain,” Mr. Chalmers told them, studying the belt in his hands. He was grinning now, satisfied, his eyes mocking and filled with venom. “You two gotta quit acting like fucking little boys. This is war. This is survival. When I send you out to get something, you don’t come back without it. Those other neighborhoods, they’re gonna try and take what we got, so we got to hit them first. We gotta take what they got. Their women, their food, their weapons. Do you see? Do you see? DO YOU FUCKING SEE, BOYS?”

Both boys were naked, their faces caked with dirt and sweat. But their eyes were wide and bright and somehow primal. Mr. Chalmers had hurt them and they seemed to like it. The pain had unlocked something in them and it was something they wanted more of.

In the distance there was a sudden chorus of howling. It rose up high and shrieking and then faded away. It was hard to say whether it was from animals or people. At the sound of it, Mr. Chalmers nodded his head as if he understood the need to howl all too well.

“Don’t make me school you again,” Mr. Chalmers said. “Now go out there and bring back a woman. Don’t come back empty handed. Bring me some gee-gee, some nice young gee-gee and don’t come back without it. Go!”

Mike and Matt raced away, less human than they’d been even an hour before. They ran through yards and down alleys, crawled through vacant lots where the grass was yellow and crisp and dusty. This was the high, hot end of green summer and they smelled it, tasted it, knew it like they had never known it before. They rubbed their sweaty naked bodies with dirt, with crackling brown leaves, with chaff and loam until they smelled of summer, of rich earth and low wild things.

They were supposed to get some gee-gee, some nice young gee-gee for Mr. Chalmers, which was pussy and they understood the need and want of fine pussy, but fuck Mr. Chalmers because they were young and free and lost in the heady bouquet of absolute atavism.

So many houses.

So many places to raid.

And behind so many of those doors, the owners had already tasted the new primeval blood of Greenlawn which was the blood of the world now. They were drunk with it as Mike and Matt were drunk with it. Many were already gathering their weapons and stockpiling their food, herding their women and children together, living out their sweet, secret animal joys, just waiting for the night when they would run wild, killing and raping and plundering and tasting the hot blood of their prey upon their slavering tongues.

Many were like that.

And those that weren’t, were quickly becoming the minority. But even in that dim, shocked, confused minority, there were stirrings of ancient drives, the need to run on all fours and fill their senses with the savage delight of simple regression.

The first place Mike and Matt stopped was a trim white ranch house with pink shutters. The yard was immaculate. The flowerbeds bursting with color. They rolled in the grass like dogs, then dove into the flowerbeds and smashed all those vibrant blooms beneath them. They grabbed up bunches of zinnias and marigolds, sweet pea and snapdragon, rubbing the crushed flowers and fragrant petals against their bodies. There was a goldfish pond out back. They caught every fish and smashed them with rocks. Then they went inside the house.

They knew whose house it was.

It belonged to Mrs. Cannon, a retired schoolteacher. If you trespassed on her lawn she would call the police. If you kicked your ball into her yard by accident she would seize it and never give it back. That’s the sort of person she was. A woman who spent her life teaching children, but secretly despised them and their youth. If the parents on the block thought she was a miserable old bitch, the children were sure she was a broom-riding witch.

When Mike and Matt came through the door, Mrs. Cannon, a widow of seventeen years, dearly wished that her husband was still alive because even though she had dealt with some real bad boys in her time, she knew that she had finally met the very worst.

Mike and Matt Hack.

Naked and dirty, leaves and sticks in their hair, their bodies scratched and bruised and plastered with bits of flowers, they were about the most horrible things she had ever seen.

“Hello, Mrs. Cannon,” said Mike.

“Hello, Mrs. Cannon,” said Matt. “We were supposed to get some young gee-gee but we came to see you first.”

Mrs. Cannon, well past eighty, was thin and weak and did not move so good anymore. But her ire was up and she directed it with vehemence: “Get out of my house! You filthy little monsters! Get out of my house!”

And bare seconds after she had said this, she knew it was the wrong thing to do. Because you didn’t try and intimidate rabid dogs. And that’s what these two were. She could see it in their eyes: that blank, glaring animal hatred. They had parted company with civilization. They stared at her with eyes that were shiny, intensely loathsome. Just the sight of those eyes and what was behind them made her bladder let go. She shook. She trembled. But tried not to move because didn’t they say that if you did not move, made no aggressive posturing, that a mad dog would not attack?

But it was too late because they smelled the fear on her.

Matt leaped forward and Mrs. Cannon swatted him in the face, but that just enraged him, made him let go with a coarse growling sound that filled her with more terror than she’d ever known in her life. He grabbed her by the wrist and threw her to the floor and with such force her left arm snapped upon impact. She was old, her bones fragile and reedy. She cried out and he stomped down on her side with his foot. Three ribs gave like dry twigs.

Mrs. Cannon screamed, cried, sobbed, just beyond herself with agony.

She looked up at Matt Hack and knew that what she was dealing with here was not a boy, it was something else. Something evil and cunning and inhuman. There was no boy left inside that dirty husk, all of the culture and learning and civilization that had been hammered into his head for the past ten years had been stripped away, peeled back, revealing this primordial monster.

While she squirmed on the floor, Mike rushed in and helped his brother. They stripped Mrs. Cannon, revealing the shriveled used-up body she hid even from herself. Skin and bones, not much more. Mike took up her unbroken arm, studied it, sniffing his way up the forearm and, deciding that the flabby bicep was by far the meatiest part, bit down on it with everything he had while Mrs. Cannon screamed and flopped and he drew blood. He did not particularly care for the taste of old lady flesh, so he promptly spat it back in her face.

She didn’t last long after that.

The boys jumped up and down on her, shattering her bones until shards of white erupted through her skin. When they were done, Mrs. Cannon was not moving anymore. She was just a bloody, loose-limbed heap and they soon lost interest in her.

They ravaged the house.

They emptied closets and dressers, shredding clothes and bedding with steak knives from the kitchen. They broke mirrors and emptied cupboards, pulverizing dishes and crockery on the floor. They urinated on the sofa and chairs and on the corpse of Mrs. Cannon. Mike took a shit in her bed. Matt did the same on the living room carpet. Like an animal, he was amazed and excited by the raw stench of his own feces. He played with it. He sniffed it. He held it in his hands. He threw it at his brother. Then he knocked the pictures off the walls and wrote his name again and again in brown looping whorls of excrement.

And by that point, his name meant very little to him.

But he enjoyed how it looked on the walls…