53

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

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

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

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

Louis was terrified.

There was no way around that.

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

Confidence.

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

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

Louis couldn’t think about that.

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

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

Okay.

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

Louis ignored her.

He moved down the street. He was very aware of how long his shadow was growing. Darkness was coming fast and he had a pretty good idea that they wanted it to come, that reduced to what they were now, they would probably be much better in it than he. He could see the Dodge parked up the street from the police station, the shadowy hulks of bodies scattered around it. The driver’s and passenger’s side doors were wide open. The windows were shattered. He preyed it was still drivable.

He wondered if Michelle was out there. Maybe she had taken Macy.

Oh, not her, not Michelle, not my wife.

Louis walked on very slowly for ten or fifteen feet, then paused.

Doris nearly bumped into him.

He thought he heard that childish giggling again. His flesh crawled anew. Wasn’t it amazing that one of the sweetest sounds in the world, the delightful laughter of a child, was also one of the most foul and obscene? And particularly in a ghost town. He breathed in and out, readying himself for it, whatever it was, because it was coming. It was building around him and he could feel it. Like a frightened animal, he could sense the waiting teeth out there, the claws and hunger. Tensed like a spring ready to explode, sweat running down his face, he remembered driving up Main with Macy, how dead the town was, how he’d speculated earlier that maybe everyone was dead. But it had all been a ruse, of course. Macy and he had been watched from the moment they pulled down the street. These people were organized, then. They had laid a trap and waited for him to step into it. And, boy, he’d bested their greatest expectations, hadn’t he? Leaving Macy alone in the car even when, deep inside, he’d known it was a mistake.

Sacrifice.

He’d offered her up for sacrifice.

“No,” he said under his breath.

“What?” Doris asked him.

“Nothing.”

He went across the street, stepped up onto the sidewalk. They could have had her anywhere. Or blocks away for that matter. It was hopeless, but he couldn’t give in, couldn’t crumble. He walked over to Indiana Video. He pushed his way through the glass doors. It was silent in there. There was a light on behind the counter, another near the back of the store. Enough light to see by.

“Macy?” he said.

There was a moaning sound.

His heart leaping with possibility, Louis charged over by the children’s movies. A young girl, maybe eight or ten, was squatted on the floor, entirely naked. Arms wrapped around herself, she rocked back and forth.

She was a redhead.

Not Macy at all.

“Honey?” Louis said, still fearful. “Are you all right?”

The girl looked up at him. Her face was dark with ground-in dirt, her hair greasy and stuck with leaves. There were bruises and contusions all over her. Louis held a hand out to her, afraid she might bite it, but the humanity in him demanding that he try.

Doris kept the shotgun on the kid. “Jesus Christ, Louis…are you fucking blind as well as stupid? Look at her. That’s not a girl. It’s one of them. Can’t you see that?”

But he couldn’t be convinced of that. The girl was sobbing, shaking. One of them wouldn’t do that…would they? After a moment the girl took his hand and stood up, breaking into a wail of tears. She pressed herself against him, shuddering. She smelled bad. Like blood and decay and dirt. Her flesh was hot, moist. He could feel her heart thudding.

“They dragged me through the streets,” the girl said. “They…they…they…”

But she couldn’t go on; she shook, whimpered.

“All right,” Louis said. “You’re going to be safe now. My car is outside. We’re driving away from here.”

Doris didn’t move. “I’m not going anywhere with you. Not with that thing.”

“Stop it!’ Louis told her.

“You’re an idiot. You’ll get us all killed.”

He turned towards the door, the shadows thicker and more tangled out there than nesting cobras now. Death waited out there. In every shadow, in every doorway, and behind every tree. Death. The girl shook in his arms. And then she tightened against him. He could feel the flex of her muscles, the heat of her skin. It was nearly feverish. He tried to pry her away so he could walk, but she circled her arms around him, jumped up and swung her legs around his hip.

“Honey,” he said, “listen now…”

She looked up at him from beneath strands of filthy copper-colored hair.

She was grinning.

Her eyes were filled with a stark malevolence that was beyond mere insanity. The tips of her teeth were filed into points.

Louis felt something sink inside him, he felt her repellent flesh against his own. Darting her head, she buried her teeth into his shoulder, breaking through his shirt and puncturing skin.

He screamed with pain.

He heard Doris cry out as the other savages rushed in.

A trap, it had all been a fucking trap…

 

54

Painted for battle, the hunters came out of the back of the store. Another rushed right through the front door. And the most amazing thing was, he held a spear in his hands. And from the barbed point to nearly a foot down the shaft it was stained red.

The girl dug her teeth into the man.

This was the one. The one the Huntress wanted. She must not let go of him, she must hold him tight until the hunters could take him down. But he was wild, enraged. He did not shrink with fear as she’d hoped. He tore at her back, digging welts into her skin. He beat at her. He pounded her. Then, gun in hand, he banged the butt off the back of her skull until she pulled her teeth away and cried out. He hit her with the gun again and something went in her skull with a sickly popping noise. Inside the girl’s head, things went dark, then sank into mist and she…she could…not…hold on…

The man whirled around in a circle, yanking her free with a handful of bloody hair and throwing her as he did so. His locomotion propelled her through the air. She crashed into a case of movie collectibles, her face shattering the plate glass window. A shard of glass went right into her throat and she died kicking in a pool of her own blood.

The hunters saw it as they charged.

But they were too late to stop it, nor would they have considered it worth their time: not all members of the clan survived the hunt, the few must perish so the many could survive.

A spear barely missed Louis as he turned and fired at the three coming out of the back. His first shot was wild his hand shook so badly. But his second and third were right on target. He put a round through a guy whose entire body was blackened with what looked like ash or charcoal. The bullet caught him right in the sternum and threw him backwards in a drunken semi-circle. Blood fountained from his wound and he pitched over face-first, gyrating on the floor, screeching with a high, piercing noise that scarcely sounded human. The second round caught another hunter in the throat, in the Adam’s Apple, and the effect was instantaneous: his throat was blown apart in a spray of bloody mucilage and his head slumped forward. His legs went to rubber, but forward momentum carried him right past Louis. He stumbled right into a wall of DVDs and took them down with him in a clatter of plastic clamshells.

The third hunter did not hesitate, did not slow.

He didn’t even throw his spear. When he got close enough, he brought it up over his head and leaped with it, going airborne and bringing it to bear on Louis. Louis pulled the trigger as the man jumped. The bullet was wild, but it caught him in the ribs, glancing off them, spiraling into his body cavity and chewing its way through his stomach like a drillbit.

But again, forward motion carried him, and he hit Louis. The spear gouged Louis’ right shoulder, but it was off-balance, undirected. They went down in a heap. And gutshot or not, the naked man was not ready to die. He kicked, he scratched, he clawed. He got his hands around Louis’ throat and squeezed with unbelievable strength, making black dots pop before Louis’ eyes as his air was completely shut off by those gnarled, blood-crusted hands.

He forced Louis down, never breaking his grip and pounded his head off the floor which, thankfully, was carpeted.

Louis knew he was done.

He could not fight the maniacal strength of his attacker.

Blood spilling all over him from the guy’s wound, Louis took the last of his strength and pounded the guy in the face, then he jabbed his thumbs into his eyes. The grip was broken immediately. The man made a squealing sound like a stepped upon dog. Rubbing his eyes, blinded, he launched himself at Louis who was still gasping for air. The guy hit him with his bleeding, loose bulk and they went over together. The guy somehow got his hands on Louis’ head and smashed his face into the floor again and again…but not with as much power as before as his blood spilled out in a steady gushing flow.

Louis let out an enraged battle cry and brought his elbow back, catching the wild man in the ribs. Once, twice, three times. The man weakened, grunting and squealing. Then Louis reached his hand back between the naked loins of his attacker and grabbed his balls in his fist, savagely twisting them and then squeezing them with a ferocity he did not know he possessed. The man doubled-over, howling with agony.

Louis wrenched and crushed what was in his fist until it went to a moist pulp.

Doris’ battle was no easier.

About the time Louis’s third attacker leaped, the painted man who came through the door threw his spear with a fine, powerful agility and grace. Doris fired, but her aim was off. Buckshot peppered her attacker’s thighs, but by then his spear was already in flight: it sank into the meat just beneath her collarbone. It punctured through fat and muscle, buried in her a good three inches. A couple more and it would have went out her back.

She screamed with fear, with pain, with everything inside her that had boiled black by that point.

Then the man hit her.

She felt the shotgun slide from her hands.

He hit her, forcing the spear in deeper and she cried out, clawing at him with rage. The buckshot that hit him was basically scattershot. The real blast took out a cardboard standee of Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie. The scatter that hit him peppered his thighs and belly, but did not penetrate deep enough to do any real damage. Regardless, by the time he hit her, he was wet with blood. Her fingers could get no real purchase on him, they scraped over his bloody belly and his chest and face that were painted up with earthen reds and browns in a thick grease. He grabbed the spear shaft and yanked it to pull it free, but it was wedged along the inside of her scapula, the barbed tip caught on a slat of bone. When he yanked it, she came with it. He threw her to the floor, then pulled her back up again and bounced her off display cases, the wound below her collarbone ripped wide open and spouting blood by this point.

With a growling animal cry, he put all his weight behind the shaft and slammed her up against the counter, the spear point scraping over bone and puncturing out her back. He withdrew it and Doris went down in a shuddering heap, barely conscious.

She looked up through blood-glazed eyes, seeing him above her with the spear raised to strike.

Standing over her, he brought it down again and again, sinking it into her belly and thighs, hip and breasts. Then he brought it down into the original wound. He put his bare foot on her throat and yanked with everything he had. There was a wet snapping and the barbed point came free, snapping out a shattered section of collarbone in the process that broke through the skin in a bloody shard. Then the spear came down again—right into her open screaming mouth. It sheered her tongue in two and went through the back of her throat, punching into her cervical vertebrae—

She was dying and nothing could help her.

The hunter brought up the spear and let out a wild yelping cry of victory.

Then there was thundering sound and his left eye blew out of its socket in a spray of tissue with most of the socket itself. He fell over straight as a board, his upper jaw catching the sharp edge of the counter with a violent thudding, teeth scattered over its surface. He folded up, already dead.

Doris, through a mask of blood and a haze of pain, saw Louis standing over the thrashing body of one of the savages. He had the 9mm in his hands. His eyes were wild, his mouth hooked into a manic sneer…

 

55

Somehow, Doris’ mind cleared and she felt the agony that threaded through her body. Her heart leaped, then leaped again. Her mind swam in and out of the darkness, trying to focus, trying to maintain. She had lost so much blood by that point and suffered so much trauma that she hovered on the edge of shock. She heard more gunfire, heard screams, heard running feet.

And when her eyes did focus, Louis was gone.

They must have gotten him.

The air stank of blood, smoke, and voided bowels. She saw two men standing there with a woman between them. All were naked, all painted-up and covered in something viscous and shining like grease. Their eyes blazed with a flat animal hunger. Light reflected off the filed points of their teeth. They looked like Mesolithic hunters.

Realizing she was indeed alive, they crept forward, soundlessly.

Oh God in heaven, no more, no more, just let me die…

But she did not die. Blinking away the dreams that pushed into her skull, her body felt like it was on fire. Every inch of her flesh was laid bare, it seemed, everything inside ripped and gouged. She tried to swallow the blood that filled her mouth, but her damaged tongue was like a flap of rubber. She was in so much pain that she was literally beyond pain…notched up a level into a place of floating emptiness where she could feel her pain, yet did not seem attached to it. Such is the magic chemical bath of endorphins.

A grunting, a snarling, a fetid animal stink…

When Doris again opened her eyes, the three savages were crouching down by her. The woman had a knife, a damn big knife, and, grinning, she jabbed it into Doris’ belly just below the navel, putting her weight on it until it cut deep and sure. As they stared down, the beast-woman sawed the knife clear up to Doris’ sternum.

They looked pleased.

With filthy fingers, they pulled the cleaved flesh apart.

Doris could see what they did, feel the pressure and pulling, yet not the pain. It was divorced from her. They pulled the wound wide, tearing at yellow fat and pink strands of connective tissue. She could see the glistening bulge of her stomach, the coiled ropes of her entrails. She was aware of only the pressure and the pulling as the grunting, drooling creatures yanked things out of her, rooting around in her abdomen, searching, digging, probing.

They found something.

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

They held it up like a prize.

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

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

 

56

Night came then to the Greenlawn.

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

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

And the night went on forever…

 

57

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

Now they were coming.

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

The hunters crept in closer.

Mr. Kenning slept on as did Mike Hack.

Silence.

Heavy, pregnant with foreboding and dread.

Soon now.

They were closer.

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

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

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

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

She dragged Leslie by the ankles over towards the fire.

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

She screamed.

She hissed.

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

Then the huge shaggy figure waded in, tossing the boys aside, screeching at all of them until they drew back and away. Leslie looked up at him. He was a huge man, shining with sweat. His hair was white and bristly, his face set with deep-hewn wrinkles and ruts. He wore a shaggy fur coat with the arms torn off, his chest on display. He had many tattoos. There was a hatchet and a knife in his belt. A necklace of blackening ears was strung around his throat.

Leslie recognized him for what he was: the baron of the pack.

He pulled her to her feet, sniffed her face, then licked it. His breath was foul like he’d been chewing on rotten meat. “Did they take you, child?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Did they force you here?”

She nodded.

“Would you hunt with us? Kill for us? Be with us?”

“Yes,” she said in a dry, cracking voice.

The man spun her around, pulled his knife and cut her the binds from her wrists and ankles. He shoved her away towards the other girls. They touched her hair and face. They sniffed her breasts, between her legs, and especially her ass. This was how they would know if she could be one of them. They were sniffing for the telltale trace of adrenalin, which would indicate fear. They smelled none.

A spear was thrust into her hands.

She liked the feel of it. She would use it. She would bring down prey and her simple little animal mind wanted nothing more.

Mike Hack, forgotten in the grass, leaped to his feet and tried to escape. Three of the girls jumped on him, took him down. He fought madly, but they bit and scratched and hit him, beating him into submission. They tore at his eyes and worried his testicles until there was no fight left. He was pulled to his feet. The pack did not like runners. It respected those who stood and fought; it despised cowards. While five or six of the pack held him, another cut the tendons behind his knees, the others behind his ankles. He flopped uselessly in the grass, blood rushing out of his wounds.

Mr. Kenning was lifted up, hoisted by the half dozen or so spears sunk into him. He could barely stand. He was wet with his own blood, gagging and grunting, a spray of vomit at his chin. He was pushed over to the tree where he had earlier hung the carcass of his Irish Setter, Libby. The noose was still there. It was looped around his throat, drawn taut. The spears were pulled from him, blood gushing out of the holes. Six of them took the rope and pulled on it, yanking him up off the ground by the noose around his throat.

The pack baron pulled out his knife and began to slash Mr. Kenning, hacking and slicing with wild abandon until he was flayed open, slabs of flesh dangling by threads of red gristle, his intestines hanging in slimy loops. Laid raw, Mr. Kenning was still alive.

Leslie, excited by what he had done, rubbed herself against the girl next to her whose flesh was hot and slippery.

All were watching, all were breathless, all excited sexually.

With a few deft movements of the big knife, the Baron slit off Mr. Kenning’s balls, then his penis. He threw them into the grass and the girls went after them, fighting over the scraps, biting and clawing each other. The boys went after the viscera, yanking it out in coils that they chewed on.

The Baron turned towards Mike Hack. He put away his knife and took out his hatchet. Bleeding, broken, Mike squirmed in the grass as the Baron towered over him, his eyes filled with a primordial malignance.

“Mr. Chalmers,” Mike moaned. “Please, Mr. Chalmers…”

The Baron let out a piercing cry and brought the hatchet down. Again and again and again. Such was the punishment for disobeying the rules of the pack…

 

58

He ran because there were too many of them. He shot and killed two, wounded a third, and as the others set on them to feast and three more went after Doris, Louis ran into the back of the store and out the rear entrance. He cut down the alley, moving through the shadows. He waited for shapes shaggy, meat-smelling and vaguely human to jump out at him…but none did.

He made it onto the street.

There were bodies everywhere.

Had there been that many before? Two or three were lying by the car. He couldn’t remember if they’d been there before. Carefully, he stepped forward and then he knew. Maybe one or two them had been there, but not these others. If they had, he would have run right over them. These bodies were dirty and ragged, but they were alive. Crazies playing dead and setting up an ambush.

Very clever.

Louis scanned the darkened buildings, the rooftops, the shadowy storefronts. Even with the streetlights on, the main force could have been just about anywhere. So many places to hide. He moved forward, pretending not to notice the ones on the pavement…a man, a woman, a teenage boy. But he gave them a wide berth. He heard one of them stir behind him and swung back with the gun.

“You can get up now,” he said, “nap time is over.”

The boy made it to his feet first, bringing out a carving knife. Louis pulled the trigger and the kid took a round in the chest that knocked him flat. He twisted and thumped on the pavement, hissing and gagging and that was it. The man ran off, but the woman came right at him. Louis fired point-blank at her. The slug caught her in the belly and she went down, a river of blood running from her hands which were clenched over her stomach. She had no weapon. Just fingers and teeth. Her face was smudged with dirt, her eyes huge and glistening, staring black holes. She was gutshot and she wouldn’t make it. She squirmed around on the ground leaving a blood trail, coughing and wheezing.

Louis was sickened by the killing he had done, yet exhilarated. There was power in holding a gun, using it. He could feel the darkness welling inside him then, something huge and organic and clutching, the beast within clawing up, scrambling for hold, wanting to own him. It liked the killing. It fed on it like an engorged leech at an artery.

He fought it back down.

He would kill to survive. Not for pleasure. That was the difference, that was the difference between civilization and the primal call of the jungle.

Louis stared at the bodies. They had thought him easy prey and now he had shown them different. There was a satisfaction in that.

“All right!” he called out, his voice echoing off the buildings. “You wanted me and here I am! Come and get me! You hear me? Come and get me!”

He heard sounds from between the stores, from alleys and shadowy tangles of shrubs. Rustling sounds. They were there, but they did not want to show themselves.

Sure, not much more than animals, but certainly not stupid animals.

“DID YOU FUCKING HEAR ME?” he shouted now. “SHOW YOURSELVES! WHERE’S THE GIRL? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HER? YOU LET HER GO AND WE’LL DRIVE OUT! YOU CAN HAVE THIS PISSING TOWN!”

More rustling, some subdued voices, nothing more.

The woman on the ground was still squirming. Louis was suddenly filled with a hatred he had never known before. The blood, the carnage, none of it could touch him. Macy, dear God, poor sweet Macy. He walked right over to the woman and kicked her. She grunted and rolled to the side. When she tried to get up to crawl, he kicked her in the ass. When she turned to bare her bloody teeth at him, he kicked her in the face. Her eyes rolled back white and she flopped to the ground.

That got them.

He was abusing one of the pack and they simply could not allow such a thing. Whatever had rotted their minds and swept 7,000 years of recorded civilization into the dustbin, it had not taken away such very human traits as devotion and loyalty. Maybe they were animals and madmen, but they were a clan and they lived and died for the clan.

They came running out. First five or six, then twice that number and twice it again. They emerged in twos and threes, joining together in a mob. They carried axes and pipes, knives and shards of broken glass. But most simply came empty-handed. Men, women, children. Even a woman nursing a child. They were a filthy and ragged lot, looking little like modern humans and very much like a Neolithic tribe. Hunters and gatherers. And wasn’t that the most amazing thing of all? That they had degenerated so quickly in just a matter of hours? Maybe that said something about the human race and maybe it said something else about the contagion that had afflicted them. The only thing that betrayed their primitiveness, were the Nike shoes and cargo shorts and Wet Seal t-shirts some of the women wore. Though many were shirtless and barefoot, many others were stark naked and painted for battle.

Like New Guinea headhunters.

They assembled on the other side of the Dodge and stopped. Louis could hear them breathing, smelling the body odor and blood on them, a stench of urine and feces and something like vomit.

Behind him, he heard the pattering of feet and some red-haired kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen, came bounding out with a broomstick in his hands. He was naked, his genitals swinging from side to side. He had painted up his body with blue and gray streaks of makeup like a Celtic warrior, bands set under his eyes, his lips painted white.

Louis fired and missed.

Fired again and caught him in the arm. He could plainly hear the kid’s humerus snap like a green stick. The kid skidded to his knees, screaming and spitting, a pink slime of foam on his lips.

Louis put the gun back on the others. “I want the girl,” he said. “I want the girl now and if I don’t get her, I start killing you sonsofbitches.”

They just stood there, holding their weapons, clenching and unclenching their fists. Drool ran from their mouths. Contorted faces were twisted into sneers. Eyes were wide and staring and glassy. There didn’t seem to be any intelligence in them. Hunger and need and hatred, surely, but nothing more. Louis could not believe that any of them were smart enough to orchestrate this little trap.

“Hello,” a voice said.

Michelle stepped from behind the clan. She was still wearing her skirted business suit, though her nylons were torn and her usually carefully coifed long dark hair was matted and there were leaves stuck in it, what looked like flowers and sticks braided into it. There was blood all over her shirt from the killing she’d done. Even with the suit, she was unbearably tribal, vicious. This was her clan, her pack, Louis knew then with a yawning emptiness opening inside him. She was their warrior queen. They were all ritualistically painted with snaking bands, symbols, and tiger-stripes. But their faces…yes…they all bore the individual insignia of the tribe, the ceremonial sacraments of the wild hunt: the likenesses of skulls. Every face was painted the same. A flat marble-white base that covered face, ears, and throat, black upturned crescents around the eyes, a black oval around the mouth, and an elongated black triangle down the bridge of the nose.

The effect was chilling.

Michelle was painted the same, the dark glittering jewels of her eyes staring out from that grim death mask. She was no longer human; she was an animal now.

“Michelle…baby, come over here with me,” Louis said to her, everything breaking loose inside him, tears welling in his eyes. Her glare was fierce, hungry, lethal…yet, he wasn’t afraid, not really. Just the sight of her, painted up and bloody or not, crushed him, made him want to weep at her feet. He pitied her, he pitied himself. That their love should be shattered like this, torn asunder by some primordial horror from the dawn of the race. It was an obscenity. “Please, Michelle, please…”

She just looked at him. There was no recognition in her eyes…and yet, there was…something. She seemed almost hypnotized as she stared at him, unblinking. Inside, deep inside, she knew him and the knowledge made her blood run and her heart beat and her chemistry long to be joined with his.

“They’re…they’re all crazy, Michelle. Come with me. I don’t know what the hell got a hold of you and the rest of them, but we can figure it out. Come on, baby. I love you and you know I love you. Don’t do this.” He felt the tears well up in his eyes and overflow onto his cheeks, felt his throat constrict until his voice sounded like that of a whiny little boy. But the emotions he was feeling were almost too much. They paraded through his head with the memories and each one laid him open. He held out a shaking hand. “Come over here, Michelle. I’m your husband. I love you. I won’t let them hurt you.”

She just stared. Maybe her mind was a little more intact than the others, but something essential in her was burned away. There was no love in those eyes. There was manipulation, madness, a means to an end, but certainly not warmth. They were the eyes of a spider as it hunts down its prey, prepares to suck the blood from a fly in its web…a favored fly the spider is drawn to, but a fly nonetheless.

She grinned then and for the first time he saw her teeth…Michelle always had very long teeth, perfectly straight and perfectly white…and now he saw that they had been filed to deadly points, those beautiful teeth. So when she grinned at him, it was the lewd grin of a snarling wolf, a grin of fangs…fangs that were stained pink from what she had been feeding on.

He almost went out cold at that.

She was gone. Not only had she killed, but she had torn and rent her prey with her teeth, filling herself with bloody meat.

Oh, Michelle, oh baby…oh dear God…

The primal fall.

He could hear the guy on the radio and he fully understood it as he hadn’t before. You had to see someone you love regress into a beast to appreciate those words:

Bonfires and stone knives by this time next week, animals hunting in the streets…most of them of the two-legged variety. Now comes the time of the primal fall…

He made a gagging, whimpering sound in his throat that was partly repulsion and partly deep-hewn pain.

It stopped Michelle for a moment. She seemed to understand inarticulate noises better than words. Inside she felt them and understood. She cocked her head to the side, softened, but it didn’t last. She closed her mouth, pursed her lips, then shook her head frantically like a dog trying to throw off bothersome flies. “Come with…us,” she managed. “Walk with…us…the night, the night…the night…” she said to him, her words breaking off into a coarse barking sound.

Oh, it would have been easy, but he did not want to be one of them. “No,” he said very loudly.

Bands of shadow fell over her face, making her already skullish appearance unpleasantly cadaverous. Her eyes were seething with a fathomless darkness. She brought up her hand and pointed one long, bloodstained finger at him. And then she said it. Said it without remorse: “Kill him!”

She was their queen and they just mindless drones and soldiers. The stupor that had consumed the mob broke like the snapping of fingers and they vaulted forward. Some coming around the car, but most scrambling right over the top of it.

Louis fired three shots into the mass and then ran, pausing and shooting, pausing and shooting, dropping half a dozen of them. Then his gun clicked on empty and the others poured forth like hungry insects looking for something to tear and feed upon. Behind them, near the car, Michelle just stood there, supreme and malefic and insane, grinning and grinning at the idea of her husband’s grisly death.

Louis ran…

 

59

They had failed…all of them, failed! And the task was so simple!

The man bolted away and with surprising speed. So quickly, in fact, that it was several moments before anyone thought of pursuing him. The Huntress fumed. She bared her teeth. She screeched into the night.

“AFTER HIM!” she cried with every ounce of volume she had, so loudly that her voice seem to bounce off the face of the moon itself. “BRING HIM DOWN!”

They already knew what she was capable of. They already knew what she would do to them. She did not like failure. She did not understand it. For those who failed there was the knife, there was the cutting, the rite of the blooding. Already in those precious few hours they had been together she’d already flayed two hunters.

She watched them scatter into the streets, threading into shadow like worms into meat, all anxious to be the one who brought back the pelt of the man. There would be benefits bestowed: the first choice of mates, the best food, the best weapons.

The Huntress raised her knife to the moon and howled like a wolf.

It was simple, was it not? The girl used as bait to trap the man, then the others hunters taking him, bringing him bound and broken to dump at the feet of the Huntress. Yet…the man had proven himself clever, deadly, treacherous.

As she faded into the darkness herself, she knew they would bring him down.

There were only so many places to hide in the hunting grounds and already the clan had his scent. They would cast for it, locate it, force him out of hiding and then run him, the way wild dogs would run deer to their deaths.

You can run but you can’t hide.

That gave her pause…the words seemed familiar for some reason. She liked them. She would use them again. When the man was found, she would make a spectacle of him…

 

60

It did no good to cry, it did no good to plead, it did no good to beg: this is what Macy learned very quickly about her captors. They were not human, not anymore. Only human minds, civilized minds, understood the high concept of compassion and these things were not human, they were animals. Dirty, smelling, vile animals.

So she did not fight.

She did not beg.

She allowed herself to be dragged naked through the streets, through secret channels of night. Her hands were bound. She was naked and smeared with gore, stinking of urine and sweat. They had thrown a noose around her throat and now she was their pet, their slave. Why they didn’t just kill her, she didn’t know. But she prayed for it.

She prayed for death.

In those rare moments when she wasn’t overwhelmed by horror and repugnance, Macy was amazed at how her world, a world that had been perfectly ordinary twenty-four hours ago, now resembled something out of prehistory. When she was lucid enough to examine things objectively, the absurdity of it floored her. It couldn’t be. It just could not be. But it was and, try as she might, this was one nightmare she could not awake from. Her world, once somewhat dull with repetition yet bright with possibility, had become this: a narrow, nameless void where she was now the victim/plaything/pet and prey of a family of predatory savages. Cannibals. Killers. Animals. Absolute fucking monsters.

And Louis? Where was Louis?

It hurt to think about him because a few days ago he was just the husband of the lady next door, that being Michelle Shears. But today, with all they’d been through, he had become something more: guardian, friend, mentor…God, too many things. Her heart pounded at the memory of him.

It was funny, but before all this she’d never said much more than hello to him when she saw him out washing his car or raking the leaves, that sort of thing. Oh, Michelle and he had those backyard parties every summer, but Mom made such a fool of herself that Macy slipped away soon as possible. So before today, she had not known him. Not really. But they had been through a lot together and she felt herself missing him terribly like some strong emotional bond had been cemented between them. She ached for him in her heart, not because she was hot for him or anything, but because he was the only thing stable she’d found on this awful day. He had been there for her. He risked his neck for her. He’d done it all without a second thought or with any ulterior motives. She held the image of his face in her mind and it calmed her. She knew that if he was alive, he would do anything he could to rescue her.

If he was alive.

Thinking this way, she began to realize that she liked him in a way that was not strictly platonic. It was stupid and she knew it. Really, really stupid. She was sixteen for godsake and he was like forty or something. He was married to Michelle and she was gorgeous, tall and leggy with long dark hair sweeping down her back. Carried herself with that stature, that poise that was simply beyond Macy. Louis would never even consider for a moment, he would never think

But what if he did, Macy? she asked herself. What if he did? What if they were still together and he put an arm around her…what then?

And she knew. She could feel the heat inside her that she’d only felt once or twice before and never for boys in school, always for older men. The boys at school were gangly and silly and immature. They were not men. Not like Louis was. Sure, if he tried something, she would melt in his arms. She would let him lay her down. She would let him inside her. She knew that now. Maybe she’d tried to pretend otherwise ever since this afternoon when they’d hooked up, but she didn’t doubt it anymore. She felt it building in her, that blaze, ever since they’d sat on his porch and he had looked at her with that…that hunger.

She’d thought it then. There had been precious few boys at school that interested her, but often older men intrigued her. And Louis intrigued her like no other. She wanted her first time to be with him. Not a sweaty, groping, inexperienced boy…but a man. An older man.

Get a grip!

Yes, yes, she had to. Where was all this nonsense coming from? It had to be all the stress and weirdness and fear. That had to be it. Because this wasn’t the way she thought. This was how Chelsea or Shannon or one of the slutty cheerleaders thought. They fantasized about things like this, about having sex with older men and spreading their legs and feeling someone pushing into them with a slow and deliberate rhythm that would speed up and speed up until you couldn’t take it anymore. The feel of flesh against flesh, tongues mating with tongues

Macy was breathing hard now, her flesh hot to the touch. If Louis had been there, she would have blushed.

Or maybe you’d just go down on your knees…

Oh, good God, it was happening again.

It was taking control of her again. She’d been worried all day since she’d attacked Chelsea that it would return, that it would come back and claim her…that boiling darkness. That whatever iniquitous flower that bloomed in her head and closed back up, would bloom anew and take her back to that awful place. That primal and destructive place where you acted on any and all urges with sinister delight. She could remember it now. How it had felt, how it had

(excited)

offended her. How all the dirty and dark desires in the pit of her mind had jumped to the fore and she had no control, had not honestly wanted control or even understood what control was. Was it happening again? Was it taking her over again? If it was, she was only glad that Louis was not here, because if he was, she would want him. She would put her mouth on his and her hands on him and demand that he put his on her, do things to her, use her and use her again.

Still breathing hard and trembling now, too, Macy realized that it was not happening to her. At least, not how it had happened before. Though she would never have admitted it, she’d felt free when the madness had taken her. She was feeling that way now. But not in a dangerous way. She was just feeling the stirrings of who and what she was. She was feeling desire and lust and she was not honestly uncomfortable with it. The woman in her was making herself known and although it scared her to a certain extent, she felt liberated by it. Because she had been expecting it for a long time and now it was here.

But she had to be realistic here.

But if Louis is not dead and we find each other, then…then…

She only hoped that if he was dead it had been quick, relatively painless. Something that would take him fast. She had been dehumanized to the point now that she was becoming almost desensitized to everything. She didn’t care what they did to her, she just hoped that Louis Shears died quickly.

The girl who was leading her stopped.

Macy realized she had been stumbling along for a long time now, totally disconnected from reality. She knew Greenlawn well. But in the darkness, she could not say exactly where they were. The man did not seem to be sure either. He was standing there, looking around. He said something to the woman and she went down on her hands and knees, crawling through the grass of somebody’s yard and sniffing. Sniffing like a dog. She jumped up excitedly, started making grunting sounds and gesticulating madly. The man seemed to understand what she was saying. Macy couldn’t. That grunting and snorting…like the guttural language of wild hogs.

The man walked to a tree and pissed on it, scenting his trail. The boy hopped over there and started to do the same, but the man hit him, clopped him upside the head, knocking him down. The boy did not seem angry. Better to be hit than put on the spit.

They moved on.

The girl gave the noose a jerk and Macy stumbled forward. The boy kept watching her. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, but every time he looked at her with those dead amethyst eyes, a leering depravity came over his face that was elfin, carnal, unspeakable. And when it did, he groped himself.

Whenever the woman saw him do it, she kicked him.

The man trudged along. He had a black plastic Hefty bag tossed over one shoulder that was bulging from what it carried. Now and again what was in there shifted with a moist, slopping noise.

The remains of the woman they’d butchered.

Macy had tasted her blood, her meat. There hadn’t been a choice and still, she could feel its texture on her tongue, its flavor that was rich and sweet and nauseating. Yet…yet, part of her almost liked it. That dark part that kept trying to insinuate itself. Macy did not want it, but she really didn’t have the strength to fight it and why fight it anyway? Inch by inch, it was taking her over. Something had shut down in her and something else was waking up.

But she wouldn’t be like them.

Never.

Ever.

She refused.

But part of her, maybe instinct, was much sharper than before. For she was hearing everything, feeling everything. Never had a night been like this, never did the breeze seem to be overloaded with the scents of night blooms and dark earth and green grass. The odors were so pungent, each almost seemed to have a flavor. And despite the shadows shrouding the streets, she was seeing exceptionally well…everything vibrant, vivid. Like a cat.

It all scared her…and intrigued her.

The girl yanked her lead and Macy moved forward. They were taking her to their lair and she could not even conceive of what sort of place that might be. Down alleys, through vacant lots thick with hay-smelling weeds. She thought they were down by the city park. They moved along until they reached a high, whitewashed building with a steeple above brushing the stars. Macy knew where they were now. Yes, by the park, 8^th Street and Holly Avenue: the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church.

This place? This was where they were taking her?

She was led up the stairs, pushed through the doors. It was a narrow edifice, the walls pressing in from either side, rough-hewn beams overhead. A crowded aisle, pews to either side. Like some goddamn frontier church in Dodge City or one of those places, she thought.

Claustrophobic.

Cave-like.

Yes, the den of animals, the warren of beasts.

She smelled the stench of death right away. There were shadows clustering amongst the pews, many of them. The shadows came out to greet them, becoming people or something like people. They rushed in towards her. Dirty, oily hands fondled her. Moonstruck faces. Grinning sawtoothed mouths. All those people were taking hold of her and the smell that came off of them…sweat and body odor, blood and meat and filth.

She was pushed up towards the altar.

It smelled like urine and bloody viscera.

Bodies were dumped there, three or four of them, all slit open like salmon, what was inside carefully cleaned out and dumped into buckets. And high above, where Christ had spent so many years nailed to the cross, there was another effigy now. Christ was gone.

There was a corpse nailed up there.

The corpse of an obese woman that was dark with dried blood. Her breasts were immense and flabby, her stomach swollen, her thighs pale and meaty. She was open in places and Macy could plainly see the crude black stitchwork that held her together. But the suturing had burst in places and it was evident that she had been stuffed with dry leaves, hay, cane straw.

Yes, gutted…then stuffed.

A totemic effigy.

A straw hag.

Macy stared up at the abomination speechless. It was profane, grotesque. Candles had been thrust into the corpse-woman’s mouth and the hollows of her eyes. They were lit, burning, guttering, casting eldritch shadows over the blood-drenched obscenity the altar had become.

The girl yanked Macy’s lead and tossed her to the altar, into the dirty straw and bloody carpet, there amongst the slaughterhouse of human husks, limbs, and snaking entrails. Macy squirmed in the bile and slime, staring up horrified and awestruck at the plucked, stuffed, and slit goddess of the new church…

 

61

Louis was running.

Maybe from the town and maybe from himself, but mostly from the clan coming after him. He was running and running, trying not to think of what had just happened back there. Trying not to think of anything else but the clan hunting him down. Trying not to see Michelle and that look in her eyes or to remember that it was her, really, that had put the clan on him.

He couldn’t think about that.

Because the only reason he’d stayed in this goddamn town was because of her and now she was a stranger, a sadistic queen wasp with her very own hive. If he hadn’t stayed, then he would not be a player in this nightmare and Macy would be with him. Not out there. Not dead or raped or worse…just like them.

Not now, though, not now.

He couldn’t worry about any of that now.

Already his lungs were aching and his feet were getting sore, his clothes drenched with sweat. Jesus, he was too old for this shit. Just way too old. He needed a hiding place, but everything he saw—house, alley, or hedgerow—just looked alive with threat. Dark places where gnarled hands could find him, bring him down and do the most awful things.

He rounded a turn on Main Street and paused. He could keep going and maybe run right out of town…if he could keep this up for another mile or so. Or he could find a car or a building, some place to hide. There simply wasn’t the time to check every single parked car for a set of keys. If he started that, they’d be all over him.

He looked down Main, looked down the side streets and interconnecting avenues. He stood there, hands on his knees, panting and panting. Jesus, he just couldn’t go on like this. If he didn’t find a safe place or a car to get out of town with, then this would go on until dawn, maybe even longer than that. The clan would run him right to death like dogs running a stag.

Main Street twisted and turned like the back of a snake, lots of sharp corners and tall buildings and leafy trees to obscure things, little rolling hills. There were so many places to hide. He imagined that most of the stores and buildings on Main would be locked. One or two might be open, but again, he just did not have the time to be checking doors. His instinct was telling him just to go home. But if Michelle wanted him dead, then she would no doubt direct the clan there.

If she remembered where home was.

Louis looked behind him and, yes, they were coming. He saw them crest a hill behind him, maybe a dozen of them washed down by the moonlight. He could hear their pattering feet and their shouting voices. Why the hell didn’t they just give up? Why didn’t they go after someone else?

Maybe there isn’t anyone else, Louis. Maybe you’re the last one.

Christ, that was unthinkable. If it were true, if there were thousands of them out there…he’d never make it. He just couldn’t make it.

He took off running, getting a second wind now. His body was aching and he was just glad that he had not smoked in like seven or eight years. He’d picked up jogging about three years back, but that hadn’t lasted. He wished now that he’d kept up with it.

More of them now.

The fast ones had come over the hill first. The young and fit ones, the middle-aged people lagging behind. But now they were all coming down the hill.

Louis put forth a burst of speed, coming around one of those sharp corners and sprinting through shadows thrown by a row of buildings. He darted down an alley, came out the other side and jogged down an avenue, cutting through yards and the parking lot of a gas station. He paused, trying to catch his breath. He could still hear them.

He ran down a narrow side street until he linked up with Providence, which itself ran south to north right through the middle of town. He crossed the Providence Street Bridge which spanned the Green River and the sounds of his pursuers faded into the distance. He kept going, trying to put as much distance between himself and them as possible. If he followed Providence Street for about six or seven blocks, 7^th Avenue would cut across it and then it was just a short hop to Rush Street. If he wanted to do that, of course. And he was thinking he did. Because he knew that neighborhood and though people were crazy there, too, he knew where quite a few of them kept the keys to their cars.

Providence was one of those streets that was partially commercial and partially residential. You’d pass two blocks of private homes, hit a couple bars, maybe a furniture outlet or a truck depot, pass some more houses and there was a beer distributor and a little hole in the wall hamburger stand or a fried chicken joint. Lots of little shops and taverns, their storefronts changing all the time as an archery supplier went out and an upholstery place came in. Lots of the storekeepers lived right above their businesses as their parents and grandparents had.

Louis had grown up just off Providence on Middleton Street. Though his parents were long gone as were most of his relatives, the house he grew up in still stood, though the second story had been taken off following a fire fifteen years before. But he had grown up on south Providence Street and he knew every nook and cranny, every courtyard and cul-de-sac. Every old empty shed and tucked away warehouse. When he was a kid there’d been a big red barn on the corner of 5^th Avenue and Providence with a large fenced in yard where they used to play. Years ago it had been a livery stable, but that was long before his time as were the old street cars that used to run up and down Providence. The tracks were still there, he was told, under the present street, along with the remains of the brick road that had housed them.

He came to 4^th Avenue and collapsed under a row of spreading oak trees, just panting and gasping. He knew these trees. As a kid he’d climbed them. You could shimmy out onto the branches that overhung Providence and watch cars and trucks pass beneath you. He knew his initials and those of his friends were still carved up there on the tree above him. Just down the block was the Sloden Mortuary, a looming gray concrete edifice flanking the town cemetery, and across the street from that there was a creamery on the corner—Fretzen Brothers—and lots of old houses pressed in tightly together.

Sure, it hadn’t really changed much.

Except they weren’t really houses anymore, just block upon block of cages. Each one filled with one or more slavering things that used to be human. In fact

They were coming.

It didn’t seem possible, but they were. He started to wonder if they were not only a pack in appearance, but in reality. If maybe, somehow, they had his scent or were going to run him to ground. He’d taken a pretty circuitous route and still they’d found him, casting around for his scent like true dogs.

Louis didn’t think he could run anymore.

They were still a long way off. He looked up at the moonlight dappled tree above him. It rose a good thirty feet above Providence, if not forty. Looking around, he checked the trunk which was so wide that two men could not have put their arms around it. Some of the old footholds had been broken off by storms or children. But there was enough there. He reached up and grabbed a limb above his head, getting his foot on one of the old knobs. He started up, straining and cursing under his breath. Definitely feeling his age. His foot slipped once and he dangled there by the limb, but finally he pulled himself up, breaking spiderwebs with his face. Stout limbs came out from the trunk like spokes. He ducked under some and climbed up others until he was a good fifteen feet up. He sat on a branch and hugged the trunk and just waited, sweat dripping off the end of his nose.

He could hear them.

When he caught his breath, he climbed higher like a frightened monkey.

They were getting closer…

 

62

When Macy came to, maybe an hour or two later, she was suspended in midair about three feet off the blackened carpet of the altar. Her wrists were noosed with hemp ropes that were tied off above. She was hanging there, the ropes cutting into her flesh like hot wires, seeming to wind tighter and tighter, cutting off her circulation. Her arms felt numb, but her shoulders—which were bearing the brunt of her weight—were burning with a dull, constant throbbing.

But the pain seemed distant.

She was in a den of them.

They were everywhere, huddled in the smoky darkness, moving about like primordial shadows in the tenebrous haze. The only lights burning were from candles that threw a flickering, uneven illumination that reflected off clouds of slow-moving smoke in the air. They had built a fire using sticks and pews shattered to kindling. About a dozen of them were huddled around it, men, women, a couple dirty naked children. An old woman, also naked, with terrible pendulous breasts pocked with sores was tossing leaves or herbs into the fire, chanting something beneath her breath.

Macy could not hear what it was.

But the others answered her with harsh, throaty groans that did not sound human at all, more like the low rumbling growl of wolves or dogs. Now and again, one of the children would make a yipping sound that reminded her of hyenas fighting over a carcass.

The smoke burned her eyes, a greasy film lay over her bare flesh. She could just make out things scattered over the floor that looked like bones and hides, maybe a few jawless skulls lying about. She could not see them clearly, but she could smell them. Smell the death on them, smell the tallow and blood of the skins.

Her first instinct was to shout, to twist and fight against the ropes, to scream for help. But she’d already done that and knew very well the futility of such things. Sometimes, sometimes when you were laid out as meat in the cave of a bear it was better not to draw attention to yourself.

She saw that three other women and one man were roped together at the foot of the altar. One of the women was looking up at her with shocked, fearful eyes. And that meant she was not like them, not an animal. Normal. Macy felt pity for her, but there was nothing to be done.

This was no longer a church, Macy saw. It was no sanctified place but the rotting, filthy den of depraved things like troglodytes, cave-dwellars and man-eaters, walking pestilence from a forgotten age.

And realizing this, realizing that these people were not just crazy, not just a bunch of lunatics out on a binge, but primeval and animalistic things, a flesh and blood regression of the species, she was terrified. For a darkness had taken the world and those that hunted it did not seek the light, they were content to scratch in the shadows of reason. The church was a cave, a warren, a lair now. Those things out there were not men and women any longer, they were just…animals. God was not here. This was not his house. This was a place of pagan evils now. The corpse-woman on the cross was evidence of that. And Macy did not doubt that with regression, with the reaffirmation of race memory, that this place was thick with primordial spirits, with long forgotten dark gods of fertility and sacrifice. And maybe, just maybe, if she shut her mind down and let it hum along at its lowest level she might see them: creeping, shaggy things from the misty past that demanded burnt offerings, demanded the flesh and blood of the faithful, expiation in its purest form: Give unto me your firstborn for I would find the child pleasing.

She looked around, squinting. The main doors were open, the night breeze sucking out the smoke. She could see them, the savages, coming in out of the night, dragging things behind them (one man had a naked girl on a rope). A couple were screwing atop a heap of bloody hides. An old woman picked things from the scalps of children, often eating what she found. A man sharpened a bone into an awl. A teenage girl cut designs into her skin with a razor blade while another girl painted her face with the blood from a carcass of a dog while a boy sawed the pelt free with a knife. Others crawled over the floor, picking at bones and refuse, scratching symbols into the stones, gnawing on meat and offal, licking their fingers and groping themselves and snorting in the shadows.

Jesus.

Is this what men had evolved from?

Is this why the species fought so hard for civilization, for order, why they adopted a church that was brutal in its dealings with paganism and adapted strict laws to punish any who acted…uncivilized? She thought so. This was why people were so offended by cannibalism, by headhunting, by ritual murder—yes, it was a cultural thing, of course, a taboo and it was taboo because this was the sort of thing that was skulking in man’s past, the very thing man had finally risen up from, stamped out, was horrified at his core of. For every sadistic murder, every cannibalistic act, was a reminder of our past, what we had evolved from and what we were afraid to backslide into.

But how had it happened?

How had the darkness of the past returned? How had grim racial memory swallowed the civilized world and plunged it back to this degeneracy?

Maybe this regression into primitivism is natural. Maybe like the Dark Ages of Europe that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire and thrust things like culture and learning into the pit until the Renaissance, this was pre-ordained somehow. Maybe the beast within was always more active than anyone ever guessed, much closer to the surface, teeth bared and claws out, ready to pounce. For there was a simplicity to it, wasn’t there? The beast with his rudimentary wants and needs, feeding and fucking, hunting and breeding, living only from one day to the next to satisfy the simple drives of aggression, procreation, and instinctual craving. The world had gone native, it had gone savage and tribal. A new Dark Ages had been heralded in. Like maybe the race was fed up with the burden of civilization, with progress and culture and law, greed and envy, religious intolerance and political corruption, it wanted to return to a time when all men were truly considered equal, when you were only as successful as your last hunt, your innate cunning, the children you bore, the weapons you fashioned with your own two hands. Yes, the call of the wild, an atavistic longing in every man, woman, and child to return to an age of basal simplicity wherein the fire that roasted your meat and warmed your cave also lit your world.

The law of the jungle.

Survival of the fittest.

Darwinism rendered to its simplest form.

These were the things Macy was thinking. She had always had an intellectual bent and prided herself upon it. Any thick-headed idiot could score on the field and any bimbo could jump up and down and cheer, but thinking, real thinking, that was a gift, that took mental power, discipline, and drive. And realizing this, realizing that she was still an intellectual, she knew she was absolutely fucked.

There would be no place for thinkers in this new world of darkness.

She stared out, watching them. There wasn’t much else to do. Some of the smoke had cleared and she now wished it hadn’t. Things were revealed now that she did not want to look upon. For suspended over the fire from a tripod of what looked like aluminum tent poles secured at their apex with electrical tape, was the body of a boy. He was being smoked and from the smell—that sickening odor of blackened meat—he had been cooking for some time.

Macy squirmed now.

There were horrors and there were horrors. She had seen things, witnessed things, been humiliated, beaten, and abused, but this she could not look upon…a child cooked over a fire.

But what came next was infinitely worse.

A man and woman came to the fire. The man had a knife and the woman had a metal pail. He prodded the boy’s corpse with his knife, making it swing back and forth with a slow grisly motion. The boy’s flesh was blackened in places, his belly was bloated pink-yellow and shiny like that of a roasted pig. The man jabbed the knife into him and hot juice ran into the fire, sizzling. Using the knife, the man began slicing slabs of meat, sawing them free. He tossed these to the crowd. He hacked off the boy’s genitals and dropped them in the pail. Then he peeled the flesh from his belly and chest, carefully carving it until it came off in a single sheet he yanked free.

The savages around him, their faces oily and flickering with impure light, could barely contain themselves.

With a forceful plunge, he buried the knife just below the navel and slit the boy gut to throat. He cut free the stomach, liver, kidneys and intestines. It took some time. As he did so, the others were eating, chewing on the flesh, their faces smeared with blood and fat. The internals went into the pail. Using the haft of the knife, he broke through the boy’s ribs, pounding and pounding until the bones gave. Using his hands, his snapped the ribs free and tossed them aside. He cut through the lungs, peeled them back, and sliced the muscled mass of the heart free. It, too, went into the bucket.

The crowd of savages were roaring and squealing with delight.

Macy did not want to look, but she could not help herself. She looked over at the roped-up man and the three women. The one woman looked up at her as before. She was gagged like the others so she did not scream. But judging from her wide, tear-filled eyes, she wanted to.

The boy’s corpse was cut free.

The man dumped it on the floor. Using a hatchet, he chopped off both legs, then the arms. The crowd took charge of these, fighting over them, biting and scratching. The head he did not share. He chopped at it until the cranium was smashed and then he peeled the scalp and shards of bone free, snapping them like crab’s legs. He slit the membrane and exposed the brain. Several women had gathered around him now and he happily shared with them. They sat in a crude circle, dipping their scabby fingers into the skull and scooping out hunks of brain that they chewed almost delicately, sucking them between their lips and pulping them with their teeth.

Meanwhile, the woman with the pail divided up the intestines which were quickly spitted on sticks and roasted in the flames. Blood and fat dropped from them, sputtering on the coals.

Macy saw the heart get pierced with a stick and looked away.

She needed to throw up and not so much from the sight but from the smell. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the woman licking the inside of the boy’s skull clean while the bloody man with the knife violently fucked one of her friends.

Oh God, that stink.

Then Macy realized someone was behind her. Her bra was cut free, then her panties. Callused fingers gripped the globes of her ass, slapped them, poked them with stubby fat fingers. A man. It was a man. He was pressed up against her and she could feel his hardness spearing between her legs. He licked her neck and breathed into her ear. His breath stank like a gangrenous wound.

He reached up and cut the ropes holding her wrists. She hit the altar and prepared to fight him. She had no doubt she was going to be raped. But she would not make it easy. He grinned down at her, his eyes like open infected sores.

He reached for her with crusty, bleeding hands…

 

63

Getting down out of the tree was not quite as simple as getting up it, Louis found out. After the clan had gone away and he had a chance to breathe, he waited a time and then began his descent. He went slowly because he was no kid anymore and a drop out of a tree might mean a broken limb. And something like that tonight in Greenlawn was deadly. So he climbed down slowly. Then about eight feet from the ground his foot slipped off a limb and he nearly fell right onto the pavement. A lucky grab saved his bacon. His hand hooked around a limb and he lowered himself to safety.

And then he ran.

Like a hunted animal he ran home.

When he finally made it to his house on Rush Street, he was panting and sore and drenched with sweat. He collapsed in his front yard and just breathed. He looked up at the stars through the tree branches and was amazed that they were still the same. Shouldn’t they have changed, too?

Finally, he sat up.

It wasn’t safe to be lounging around like this and he knew it.

His brain kept telling him he needed a plan, a mode of survival…but there was nothing. What could he do? Where could he hide? The world had fallen to barbarism and the wild things were everywhere.

He looked down Rush Street.

The streetlights were still on, moths and insects circling them. All the houses were dark as tombs. The Merchant’s next door. The Maub’s, the Soderberg’s, the Loveman’s. Even the Gould’s. There was only a dead silence coming from the Starling’s and Kenning’s across the street. Nothing but shadows, the breeze stirring tree limbs. Usually at night like this you could hear a few cars in the distance, the distant rumble of trucks out on the highway. But tonight…nothing.

He heard a dog howl in the distance.

A shouting voice from several streets away.

He smelled smoke on the breeze from burning neighborhoods and firepits.

Nothing else.

Just the steady sighing respiration of the night world. Probably, he imagined, exactly how summer nights had sounded during the Pleistocene after the retreat of the glaciers.

He got to his feet and walked across the yard and there, stopped dead. Two of his windows had been shattered. The front door was standing wide open. Within was the blackness of plundered crypts. There. Now what? Did he run off or did he dare go in there and face what had done this, what might still be waiting inside?

A weapon.

He would need a weapon. He still had his lockblade knife in his pocket, but he wanted something bigger that he could strike from a distance with.

His mind frantically searched for something. There were plenty of things in the garage. But his keys were still in the Dodge on Main. He remembered there was a rake in the backyard. Better than nothing. Carefully, staying in the shadows, he scouted his way back there, expecting long-armed, hollow-eyed slavering things to leap out at him at any moment.

There was the rake right where he’d left it two weeks before after cleaning up the weeds in the garden. He could hear Michelle’s voice bitching at him to put it in the garage before it rusted.

Michelle, Michelle, Michelle…Good God.

But he couldn’t think about that, he couldn’t—

The door to the garage was wide open.

Dick Starling had escaped.

Now the night seemed more dangerous than ever. But he knew he had to look, to find out. He crept over there. It looked like the door had been kicked in. Dick Starling had been rescued by one of them. It was quiet inside. Raising the rake with one hand, Louis groped in the darkness, found the switch, clicked it on. The light would be like a beacon to them, but he had to take the chance.

Dick Starling was gone, of course.

Louis had a crazy, demented hope that one of them slipped in here and killed him…but no. He was just gone. The duct tape had been cut free of his wrists. It was all over the floor like shed snakeskin. The chain and Masterlock were nowhere to be seen.

Get moving.

He set aside the rake and grabbed a hammer. Then he shut off the light and tip-toed across the yard. He went in the back. Creeping up the back stairs into the kitchen. Silence. He waited, waited some more. He moved down the hallway, sweat running down his face. His heart was pounding so hard he was certain someone would hear if they were there.

He smelled blood.

In the living room, he clicked on the light. There was a body sprawled on the carpet. A woman. Naked, pale. Blood was splattered up the walls, soaking into the carpet. She had been gutted like a steer, her entrails stretched across the room like dead snakes.

He turned away.

Bonnie Maub. It was Bonnie Maub from a few houses away. She had come here, maybe looking for help and…well, they had gotten here. Maybe Dick Starling. Maybe the ones that had set him free. His stomach in his throat, Louis looked at her a little closer. Other than her abdomen being ripped open, there didn’t appear to be any other damage. He was no anatomist. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like whoever had killed her had taken some of her guts with them. She looked awfully… hollow.

Enough.

He was going to the Soderberg’s. Mike Soderberg had guns. Back outside then, hammer gripped tightly, waiting for death to come for him. He slipped past the Merchant house, moving quietly down the sidewalk to the Soderberg’s. It was dark. He crouched by the rose bushes, his head rioting with their perfume. He could see no outward damage. Maybe the savages had overlooked it.

Cautiously, his heart in his throat, he crept up to the house…

 

64

Macy, the rope still binding her wrists, was dragged over to the foot of the altar where the other captives were herded. Here was the man, the other three women she had seen. All roped-up like swine ready for the spit. There were others in the shadows, she knew. She could hear them sobbing and crying out, but could not see them.

The man who had brought her over had left her.

She had thought for sure he would rape her, but the old woman at the fire called out to him in some coarse tongue and he went over to her. Macy was forgotten. At least for the time being. The stench in the church was indescribable. Just filthy and low. Blood and meat and carrion. A high, hot stink of absolute dark corruption like the den of buzzards or vultures must smell. And these things that held her captive were no more human than that. Just beasts. Crawling, flesh-eating beasts. Many of them were still at the fire, feeding on the corpse of the roasted boy. He had been sheared down to bone in many places. His ribs were standing out, shining and well-plucked. She could see the vertebrae at his throat.

How long?

How long before it’s me they cook like that?

The stink of the burning flesh and meat was probably the most offensive thing she’d ever smelled. It revolted her and…intrigued her at the same time. She did not know exactly why. Only that somehow, some way, it was almost…familiar. Like she had smelled it long ago in a dream. And realizing this, she wondered if it was not some warped race memory kicking to life in her, remembering the smell of roasted boy from some dim, bone-heaped cave of prehistory.

God.

The old woman with the pendulous breasts came over with two boys. They were naked, their bodies blackened with ash. The old woman wore nothing but a sort of shawl made of canvas or maybe skin. She pointed at the captives with dirty fingers, mumbling something under her breath that was absolutely unintelligible. The boys seemed excited. Down on their knees, they crawled past the captives, poking them with their fingers. The tied man was oblivious to it. The woman who’d looked up at Macy with shocked eyes just sobbed. The other two women gasped.

The old woman stomped her feet twice.

The boys untied one of the women who’d gasped. Macy recognized her from somewhere. She was maybe thirty with long red hair. Rough-looking like the sort that might have chummed around with her mother out at the Hair of the Dog on the highway. When they untied her, careful not to free her wrists, she came to life fighting and kicking at them. A man came over with a length of iron pipe and hit her three or four times until the fight drained from her.

“Please,” she moaned, spitting out blood. “Please…please just let me go…”

She might as well have tried to talk a snake out of biting her, it had as much effect on them. They dragged her away by the ankles, pulling her up onto the altar and depositing her at the feet of that gruesome straw hag nailed to the cross. The burning candles stuffed in the hag’s eyes and mouth guttered and dripped wax. Macy saw something she had not seen before: the hag was like a pincushion. There were things stuck into the flesh. Knives, needles, screwdrivers. It only made that gutted, stuffed corpse look that much more perverse, that much more pagan.

The old woman barked something.

One of the boys gripped a steak knife thrust in the hag’s thigh and pulled it free. He studied the blade with the rapt fascination all boys seemed to have for weapons, save this was infinitely worse. Not curiosity, really, but an almost religious awe. He pressed the blade to his lips, then went down on his knees, yanked the woman’s head up and quickly slit her throat. The woman flopped and gagged, drowning in her own blood. It did not take too long. That’s all the ceremony there was to it…though Macy knew they had not slit her throat at the hag’s feet for no reason.

It was ritualistic.

It was an offering.

They had sacrificed her to the hag.

The boy slid the knife back in the thigh and then he and the others began painting their bodies with the pooling blood. And when their faces and chests were gleaming red, they both painted a weird little symbol on the stitched belly of the hag.

Macy was offended, of course, but not shocked, not really. She had seen so much by this point that trifling things like ordinary shock were beyond her. That intellectual part of her brain that was finding it harder and harder to swim upstream against the currents of atavism that were trying to drown her, knew that it had just witnessed some primeval tribal rite that had not been practiced for eons.

And maybe Macy was fascinated in some way by this, but the woman next to her was not.

She was screaming.

Her gag had come off and she was screaming manically. Macy kept telling her under her breath to shut the hell up, but it was too late. The man and woman who’d first butchered the boy came over. Covered in drying blood, they were savage and insane things. They were whispering under their breath with a chilling sort of hiss. They untied the screaming woman and dragged her off maybe five feet. The man held her arms and forced her down on the stone floor. The woman grabbed her legs, forcing them apart, gripping her thighs and opening them like she was about to deliver a baby.

She brought her head between the woman’s legs.

Is she going down on her? some crazed, near-hysterical voice in Macy’s head wondered. But Macy knew that whatever was going to happen would have absolutely nothing to do with passion, forced or otherwise. She saw the savage woman grin. Her teeth had been filed to blood-stained points.

Macy gasped.

The bound woman screamed again.

And Macy saw it, though she knew she should have looked away. The savage woman opened her mouth and bit down on what was between the legs, bit down on it with a snapping of her jaws. As her victim screamed with a high, mad treble, she tore and ripped at what she had bitten into, worrying it like a dog trying to shred a piece of tasty meat from a bone.

The screaming women went silent, fell limp. Maybe it was trauma and maybe it was shock. Macy never knew. She saw the savage woman. Her face glistening red, a flap of meat in her jaws.

Macy went out cold…

 

65

Louis entered the Soderberg house. He stepped in there, sensing immediately that he had just made a very bad mistake. The house smelled like shit and blood and God only knew what else. A steaming odor of waste and offal. He moved through the house, fighting against his own fears. He had to find that gun cabinet. He had to have a weapon that could drop those animals from a distance.

Perfectly good plan.

It took a moment or two for Louis to get his bearings. He’d only been in the Soderberg’s house once or twice. He entered the living room, trying to remember where Mike Soderberg’s den was. Because that’s where his gun cabinet was. He seemed to think it was on the other side of the house, somewhere near the kitchen.

Louis, his heart galloping wildly in his chest, moved through the dining room, barking his shin on a chair and cussing under his breath. So much for stealth. As he came into the kitchen, he thought he heard something out in the backyard. A thumping sound. He cocked his head, listening, sweating and trembling.

Nothing.

Nerves, probably just nerves, he told himself.

He moved on, the moonlight coming through the windows thick as curdled milk.

He became aware then of a particularly vile smell that was sharp and revolting that he could only acquaint with something like rotting onions…or hides. Because when he’d been a boy his class had gone on a school trip to a mink farm. The heaped mink hides had smelled something like this, pungent and unbearably musky. They were told that the stink came from the mink’s scent glands. He was smelling that now. Or something like it.

It was far too strong to mean nothing.

And that’s when a man stepped around the side of the refrigerator. He had something in his hand that might have been an axe. The stench was coming from him. He let out a little shrilling cry and swung what he had at Louis, missing him cleanly. Louis did not hesitate. He swung his hammer with everything he had and felt it connect with the guy’s skull with a sickening hollow thud.

The guy folded up.

The backyard suddenly exploded with light, flooding the kitchen. Louis crouched down. He thought at first it was an explosion of some sort, but from the quality of the light he could see it was a fire. A big fire. He raised himself up and peered out the windows above the sink. Yes, there was a bonfire burning in the backyard. He saw five or six naked forms dancing around it. They looked like kids. Somebody was tied to a tree and kindling had been banked up around them.

They were burning.

The kids were hopping around happily, burning someone. And from the way the bound figure was squirming there was no doubt that they were alive. Tied and gagged, but alive. Something snapped in Louis. He couldn’t watch this. He charged out the back door with a fierce cry, a rebel yell that came from deep within him. He charged with the hammer in one hand and his knife in the other. One of the kids, a teenage girl, launched herself at him and he staved her skull in with the hammer and stabbed a boy in the belly. The girl fell limp at his feet and the boy hobbled away.

The others ran off, taking the girl with them.

Panting, slicked with sweat, his hand holding the knife bloody up to the wrist and the hammer clotted with gore, he looked very much like a savage himself. He whirled around, expecting attack from every quarter. But none came. The tree was engulfed in flames as was the person tied to it. They were beyond help. The flames were so high he could barely see them. But the stink of roasting flesh was thick and nauseating.

Louis fell to his knees, needing to cry, to vent himself somehow.

And from the shadows a voice said, “Over here, Louis. I’m over here…”

 

66

For some time, the thing that had once been Angie Preen and her tribe of hunters had been shadowing the teenage boy and his females. They had watched in rapt fascination as the boy led them on one conquest after another, running down strays and dogs and attacking smaller packs for food and weapons. They took no slaves. They killed and feasted on all. But mostly, they just killed for the sport of it.

Angie had killed for the sport, too.

But that was just to get the scent of blood into the tribe’s nostrils. To get them a taste of meat. It was necessary to get them enraged, to get them hungry and aggressive. None of this was truly a conscious decision on Angie’s part. She was going purely on instinct and race memory now. She knew these things without thinking them. For in the politics of survival only two things really mattered: territory and dominance. The boy and his females were poaching what Angie considered to be her territory and as she exerted her dominance over the tribe, so must the tribe exert their dominance against intruders to protect their hunting grounds.

The boy and his females were resting now.

In a vacant lot they had stopped and built a fire. Their blood-slicked bodies were lying in the grass. Several of the females were licking each other’s wounds. Two of them lay with the boy, their heads resting against his naked loins. One female was on watch, casting a wary eye into the darkness. She was alert and ready.

Streaked with blood and paint, Angie rose up from the cover of the hedges and stretched her bowstring with an arrow. She sighted in on the female who was watching. As her eyes swept across the field, Angie sucked in a breath of air and then slowly let it out between clenched teeth, releasing the arrow at the same time.

There was a barely audible whooshing noise.

The arrow pierced the female right in the center of her back, puncturing through, the tip exploding between her breasts with a gout of bone and blood. She made a gasping sound, then fell face-first into the fire.

By then, Angie’s tribe—bodies painted with scarlet and green bands for war—was charging from cover, howling and brandishing their weapons.

Kathleen Soames was the first into the fight. She jabbed the sharpened end of broomstick into a female’s neck and then turned on the boy. Before he could pull his knife she swung her axe with both hands and split his skull wide open.

Then it became a war of spears and knives and hatchets. Deadly close-in fighting. Angie’s tribe was numerically superior and had the advantage of surprise. They cut down half a dozen of the enemy before they could even mount a counterattack.

One of the females, blonde and fierce, well-muscled, gutted two of Angie’s best hunters with agile slashing motions that disemboweled them. Then she herself went down with three spears in her.

Angie was in the battle by then, shrieking her war cry as one of the females jumped out to meet her with a carving knife in each hand. There was no fear on her. Nothing but bloodlust. She slashed admirably, almost taking Angie’s head off, but then a hatchet caught her in the neck and Angie seized the moment. She leaped, bringing her foot down on the girl’s kneecap. There was a pleasing snap and a pleasing cry from the female who was instantly hobbled. Angie sliced her across the breasts with her butcher knife, then sank it between her legs, pulling upwards at the same time, opening the female wide. Her blood splashed against Angie and it was invigorating.

Another female with dark lustrous hair had gored two of Angie’s hunters.

As Angie approached her, she had just eviscerated one of them—a man—and he crouched there on his knees, his hands filled with the white coils of his own intestines. The female slashed him across the eyes, turned, and began stabbing the other hunter—a woman—in the face, throat, and chest.

Then Angie jumped her, knocking her down and stabbing her through the throat. The female fought and screamed, but Angie yanked her head back, felt the female’s teeth bite into her hand with an explosion of pain. Angie shrieked and slit her throat, sawing through the windpipe and carotid artery, hacking through meat and muscle until the blade bit into the cervical vertebrae. And even then, filled with pain and anger and a wild animal dementia for the kill, she cracked the vertebrae and sliced the head free. She held it up to the sky and the mother moon above in glory, blood splashing from the stump of neck down her face and making her feel more alive than she ever had before.

It went on for maybe ten minutes, probably not even that long. Knives cutting and axes chopping. Blades grinding against bone and clubs shattering ribs and spears punching through soft white underbellies.

And then…silence.

Nothing but corpses and parts there of.

Hacked victims still squirming on the ground.

And the victors, blood-drenched and meat-smelling, rising up from their kills and howling to the sacrificial moon high above. Angie, spitting out blood, surveyed the scene of carnage instantly. Three of the boy’s pack had run off to regroup, but the others had been slaughtered. Angie noted that six of her own were dead, five others mortally wounded.

Kathleen Soames had already eaten the boy’s genitals as was her way. Then she had disemboweled him and was now rolling in his blood and entrails, scenting herself with the kill. Others of the tribe were imitating her.

They did not touch the heart.

Angie carved open the chest with her knife, shearing through muscle, snapping ribs in her bare hands. She slit the arteries away, sliced the heart free of its protective membrane. As the others watched with almost religious awe, she bit down deep into it, feeling the strength of its owner becoming her strength.

The boy’s cunning was her own now.

As a hunter devours the flesh of a wolf to absorb its ferocity, so she ate the boy’s bloody heart, tearing strips of it away with her sharpened teeth, enjoying every taste and texture. She fed upon it with a mystical rapture, feeling his spirit entering her with each bite.

When she was done, she went around to the mortally wounded and slit their throats one after the other. It was the way a warrior must die. Not slowly like a pig in the straw, but with blood in their mouths and a glaring steel memory of killing.

As she stood over her tribe, watching for other packs that might try and poach their kills, her hunters took trophies of bones and ears and body parts. One woman was fashioning a necklace of vaginas that she had slit free then threaded onto a necklace of beads around her throat. More heads were taken and speared on broomsticks.

Kathleen Soames, her red and green banded body now entirely red, stood by Angie’s side, appraising the night. Killing to her was not only ritual and necessary, but almost sexual in nature. She drew her strength from the taking of lives, from her victim’s blood washing her down, from the select remains she then fed upon. She was a fearsome sight standing there, blood still dripping from her. The moonlight gleamed off the sticks and rodent bones braided into her hair, the bone inserted through her nose.

Her lips long since sliced free, she grinned with gums and teeth.

“Enough,” Angie told the tribe and they rose up from the field of blood, bones, limbs, and torsos.

The men urinated on the remains so all would know the penalty of poaching the tribe’s territory. The women squatted near where the men pissed and wetted the ground themselves.

Then, Kathleen Soames leading the way with a decaying head on a broomstick, they faded into the night, glutted and pleased at the offerings of the mother high above…

 

67

Don’t you touch me. Don’t you dare touch me.

One of them had taken notice of Macy now. He was a hulking creature, stinking of excrement, his oblong face and body thick with a crust of something that must have been mud, dried blood, and congealed fat. In the flickering firelight she could only really see the gleam of his bared teeth, his eyes like two bloody holes.

He was standing there, watching her, his feet placed right in the pool of blood that was pretty much all that was left of the screaming woman after they’d dragged her remains away. Macy knew it couldn’t go on. They simply wouldn’t ignore her forever. She tried to be quiet, not to draw attention to herself, but now that just wasn’t enough. At best, she would be raped. At worst, they would make her suffer unimaginable agonies before putting her on the spit.

He went down on one knee, arms outstretched, fingers splayed in the pool of blood. He looked like a runner waiting for the start of a race. He was grinning. He knew she was frightened, probably could smell the fear on her as she could smell the filth on him. And the really awful part was that he was enjoying it. She could see that. He was actually enjoying her discomfort, getting off on it, copping a sadistic thrill.

He laughed beneath his breath with a hoarse, grating sound.

Macy was getting angry.

That this inbred, barbaric piece of shit would enjoy her suffering was just too much. Yes, she wanted to run as fast and far away from him as she could. But part of her wanted to stand and fight. To smash his head open with something, wipe that mocking, vicious grin off his face.

He inched forward; she recoiled.

He pulled back, laughing.

A game. That’s all this was. She did not doubt that it would end in something terrible for her, but for now it was just a game. Macy’s wrists were still tied behind her back, but the knots were sloppy and loose. If she only had a few seconds unobserved, she knew she could squirm free.

He was creeping closer, smelling like he’d been eating dead things and garbage.

Macy waited. She would not flinch.

He reached out to grab her ankle and she moved quickly, instinctively. She lashed out with her right foot and cracked him in the face with her heel. He let out a barking sound and fell away.

Macy moved.

She’d spent the past three years in gymnastics and it paid off now. She rolled onto her back and brought her roped wrists down to her ass, wriggling, squirming until she got them around the mounds of her buttocks. Straining every muscle and ligament, she got her wrists to the back of her knees and slipped her legs out.

The man was staring at her. Not quite recovered from the kick in the face, but very much ready to pay Macy back in kind.

Do it now or just forget it.

Macy leaped to her feet and as that caveman sonofabitch tried to grab her ankle, she jumped away and kicked him in the ribs. He grunted and fell. Then she ran, knowing the chances of escape were futile. A boy stood in her way and she knocked him aside, knocked aside another woman and darted around a man with an axe in his hands. And then something hit her from behind, bowling her over to the stone floor and scraping the skin from her knees. It was him. The filth-covered man. He held onto her and she kicked him, hit him, felt her raw knees bounce off his chin. She was almost free—

Then a fist collided with the back of her head.

She saw stars and was thrown into the grip of her adversary once again. This time it was not games. He smashed her in the face, clouted her upside the head. Punched her in the belly and grabbed her hair and kneed her in the ribs. She went down and he reached for her.

Those scabby, filth-covered hands groped her.

Macy came up fighting and even she didn’t know where the strength came from. He was huge, savage, bristling with muscle and fat. He easily outweighed her by a hundred pounds. She clawed his face, gouged his eyes, tried to get her knee into his groin and he hit her again, this time her lower lips split open and a tooth came loose. She went down, spitting it out along with a tangle of blood and saliva.

Breathless, dazed, she waited for retribution.

A ring of savages closed them in, waiting for it, too. Like hyenas surrounding the fresh kill of a lion, they were excited, yammering and snarling and squealing. They wanted a taste, but they wouldn’t touch Macy, not until the apex predator had had his fun first and the apex predator in this case was a tall, heavy man covered in mud, blood, and animal fat that had dried, cracked open in jagged crevices, making him look hideously mummified, something feral and embalmed come to life here in the gutted bowls of a desecrated church.

Macy looked up at him in the flickering light of the fire, a thing of shadows and primal appetites. He was breathing very hard, grinding his teeth, flexing his muscles so that the crust covering him continued to crack and flake away. His eyes were shiny, wild.

She hated him. She lived only to see him suffer. If a knife were placed in her hand, she would have slit his throat.

Standing there, he seemed to know it, and it excited him.

Staring down at Macy, he gripped his penis. He squeezed it. He was already hard. With a bloody hand, grunting like a pig, he masturbated with firm, sure strokes. He looked into her eyes the entire time, his gaze black, bestial, and deranged. He made sure she watched. He let out a cry and came, his semen striking Macy’s cheek in a hot gush than ran down her face.

A day ago, a week ago, she would have screamed.

She would have gotten sick.

But now she did not even flinch. Debased, humiliated, there was nothing left now to flinch with. She did not feel exactly human anymore. Because it was happening now and she knew it and she wanted it to happen: the regression. A civilized, reasonable, intelligent person could not hope to survive with them or against them. You could not reason with them. They did not understand logic. They were territorial. They were animals. They were shaggy, psychotic, shit-smelling, crawling horrors straight out of the Pleistocene. They knew only the politics of the tribe, the mechanics of the hunt, the anatomy of murder and survival and blood sport. It was their liver and lights and soul. Regression was taking Macy with a hot surge of genetic impulse, sinking her slowly, steadily into the black pit of prehistory, down into the primal earth cheek by jowl where she could feel the cool moist soil of atavism and smell the secret animal musk of the race and taste the sweet blood of the primordial void.

She was one with it now.

And as the savage with the flaccid penis glared down at her with an appetite barely slaked, she felt herself falling into a shattering metallic silence.

But sometimes it took a snake to kill another snake…

 

68

She watched the man by the fire.

He was tall, well-muscled, lean. In the moonlight, a bloodied hammer in one hand and gore-dripping knife in the other, he looked every inch the dawn man that could be at once feared, understood, and desired.

Kylie Sinclair trembled.

In the darkness of the bushes, she was just touched by moonlight. She was wearing a crown of sticks and leaves that was not decorative, but meant to break up her silhouette in the night. It was an ancient technique of the hunt. Her sister and mother waited nearby.

The man just stood there.

She was smelling the pig roasted on the fire, the bubbling seams of fat and well-marbled slabs of meat that dripped a tantalizing hot juice into the flames. She was waiting for the man to pluck the carcass free and begin eating. Perhaps he would render it to bone and pack the meat off with him.

No.

He did neither.

He went down on his knees in the grass, shaking. Kylie was confused. For surely this was his kill, slit and spitted, he had drawn first blood and would be the first to taste the sweet bounty of the hunt. But he did not seize it and claim it as his own.

Kylie waited.

She could smell the pungent odors wafting up from her body…leaves and loam and black earth, a telltale stink of musk and animal oils that just barely masked her own ripe body odor. Good earthy smells. Smells that did not confuse, but invigorated and gave confidence. She ran fingers over the ceremonial welts and upraised scars of citricization that mottled her flesh. Like the paint made of blood and marrow fat that she decorated her body with, these were the symbols of who she was, what she was, her tribal affiliation.

She sniffed her fingers, tasted them, intrigued by her own odors and flavors.

She touched fingers to her armpits, her vagina, her rectum. Each smell and flavor was more heady and organic, each one making her more giddy.

The man moved.

He had heard something. Kylie was certain of it for the smell coming from him across the yard had changed. This was sharper: fear. Yes, he heard something. A voice. Weapons in hand, he was going to investigate.

Kylie, peering through the bushes with eyes like glittering black stones, tensed in the dappled moonlight. Her muscles were drawn tight. She could smell violence coming from the man. It made her loins tremble.

Deep inside the dark chest of her mind, biochemical signals had been activated and Kylie knew instinctively that the zenith of the cycle was fast approaching. She could smell it on herself. Taste it on her skin. Tomorrow, perhaps, she would be in estrus—heat—and already she was aching for the filling and the release. She hoped the dam would give her the man. She would bait him with the scent of her womanhood, draw him in, let him spill his milk into her. Then the cycle would be complete.

A voice had spoken to the man.

Kylie did not like the voice. She could tell by its tone that its speaker was not like she, not a hunter but prey. Something to harvest with the rest. The breeze brought her his smell and it was perfume and soap and synthetic fibers, only a ghost of sweat and animal purity.

It was time.

Kylie went back to join her sister and the dam. They had found a bucket filled with white fireplace ashes. They had dumped water into it, mixed it into a smooth white paint. She watched them cover themselves in it. She did the same. The three of them looked like marble-white ghosts. When it was dry, the dam took red lipstick and painted her daughters. She colored both ears red and then drew a wide red band from ear to ear and filled it in so that their eyes were looking out from a belt of bright scarlet. She painted similar bands over their mouths stretching to both jawlines.

When they were done, it was time.

Clutching her spear, Kylie led them on the hunt…

 

69

“Nice job, Louis,” the voice said to him. “Very nice, scaring off those little savages. Commendable. One might think you were a savage yourself.”

Earl Gould.

Louis went over to him in the grass. “What the hell are you doing here, Earl?”

“I was kidnapped by the little horrors.”

He was tied-up in the grass. Louis cut him loose, wondering if it was such a good idea or not. “I’m telling you right now, Earl. I’ve been through the shit, okay? You try and attack me and I swear to God I’ll kick your fucking ass.”

Rubbing his wrists, Earl managed a laugh. “I’m okay, Louis. How about you?”

Louis didn’t bother answering that. What could he say? He had a bloody hammer and a bloody knife in his hand.

“Thanks for getting me out of this…jam,” Earl said. “I was next on the barbi. Nice show of aggression, by the way. You scared the hell out of them.”

“I thought they’d stand and fight.”

Earl shook his head. “Most animals rarely do. When faced with life-threatening show of aggression even a grizzly bear will think twice.”

“We’re in a hell of a situation here, Earl.”

“Yes, we are, Louis. We are in the jungle,” Earl said. “This is where seventy million years of primate development has led us: right back to the beginning.”

Louis led him into the house and made him sit in a recliner in the living room. He did not turn on any lights. He went into the bathroom and washed his face, drank a few handfuls of water. When he came out, he grabbed a poker from the fireplace and sat on the couch. He could see Earl just fine in the moonlight filtering in through the picture window. He was grinning, but it was an awful sort of grin. A mad grin, but hardly dangerous. Just the grin of a man who had parted the black velour curtains of reality and peered deep into the fires of Hell, maybe saw something looking back at him. Something he recognized.

An ex college prof, Earl dressed very neatly, was always well-groomed and on the ball. But today, all that was gone. His white hair was mussed, his clothes dirty and unkempt. There were bruises on his face and a smear of blood at one cheek. He kept taking off his glasses, cleaning them on his shirt. Putting then back on and repeating the process.

“Okay, Earl,” Louis said, his voice very weary. “Tell me about it. Tell me what you did.”

Earl just kept grinning. His eyes were wet in the darkness. “I…I killed, Louis. I killed Maureen.”

There should have been some shock, but there was nothing. Had he told Louis that he bought a new Weed-Eater, the reaction would have been about the same. “Are you sure?”

“I hit her.”

“I saw that.”

“But you ran off, Louis! You ran off!”

“I had to, Earl.”

Although Louis could not see his eyes, he could just about gauge the pain in them. But he figured there was more than pain. Probably recrimination.

“But you let me hit her, Louis.”

“No, Earl, I didn’t let you do anything. I didn’t have time to stop you. Somebody was attacking Macy. I couldn’t help you.” Louis sat there, looking at him. “You hit her, Earl. You hurt her. Not me. You. You’re the one that let that fucking madness take you over.”

Earl sat right up and walked over to Louis like he was going to attack him. “I didn’t have a choice!” He grabbed Louis by the shirt, shook him. “I couldn’t fight against it! You can’t fight against it! It just takes you and you belong to it and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it! Do you see? That’s why I hit her and that’s why I kept hitting her!”

Louis slapped him across the face. Slapped him hard enough to snap his head back and he wanted to keep slapping him. He was just sick of it all. Sick of the shit his neighbors had been doing to each other, to themselves, to the whole goddamn town. He didn’t know why the madness had not gotten to him, but he was starting to think that everyone who was infected was weak. Goddamn fucking weak. So he slapped the old man and he wanted to keep slapping until his hand was red and numb and Earl was on the floor, bleeding and sobbing and pissing himself. To Louis, the old man was the embodiment of all of them. Their weakness. Their inhumanity.

Earl was down on one knee, still grinning, though his eyes were filled with tears.

“Tell me what you did, Earl. Tell me what the fuck you did to your wife and how it felt when you were doing it,” Louis said, needing to rub the old man’s face in the stink he had created. “C’mon, tell me all about it.”

Earl was blubbering now. Just beside himself with guilt and anguish and Louis actually found satisfaction in that because he wanted to see them all like that, down on their knees feeling the pain of their actions. And particularly Michelle. The woman he loved. The woman who had betrayed him now in ways Louis himself could not even begin to catalog.

Jesus Christ, you idiot! She’s sick! They’re all sick! You can’t blame them for it any more than you can blame an alcoholic for hitting the bottle or a junkie for sticking a needle in his arm! Sick! Sick! Sick!

Louis knew it. He knew it was true, but it wasn’t buying beans with him now. Not after what he’d seen. Not after what he’d experienced. Not after what his own goddamn wife had done to him. Finally he sighed. “I’m sorry, Earl. Really I am. Tell me what happened. Take your time.”

It took some time, all right, but Earl did. He opened the flue and all the heat and smoke and suffering blew out of his soul. It had been itching in the back of his skull for hours, the insanity, the need to run free like an animal, the dire compulsion to act out his most debased fantasies and urges. He refused to tell Louis what these were, but Louis could just imagine. There’s nothing more sordid and filled with crawly things as the human subconscious mind, that pit of fears and desires, wants and needs, repressed feelings and anxieties that the rational, conscious mind will simply not allow to be expressed. Louis understood what Earl was saying, because it was much the same thing Macy had told him. Earl said it was caused by a gene. Regardless, it first infected the subconscious, releasing images and ideas and primal wants, flooding the mind with them, and by that point, such things as inhibition and restraint no longer existed. The infected became, essentially, an animal with a human brain, though highly degraded, primitive. It had taken complete charge of Earl as he talked to Louis over the hedges. Maureen’s shouting had acted like some sort of trigger and there was no turning back. He hit Maureen, put her down. Kicked her and kept kicking. She was old, she was frail. She should have been dead, but she wasn’t.

“So I kept hitting her,” Earl said, his eyes wide in the moonlight coming through the window. Like mirrors reflecting the awfulness inside his head. “But she wouldn’t die, Louis. She just wouldn’t.”

“Take it easy, Earl.”

He uttered a cold and sterile laugh. “Oh yes, take it easy. How can I take it easy, Louis? How can I possibly take it easy? She wouldn’t die! She wouldn’t die so I went into the garage and got a hammer. You know what? I remember doing it, I remember wanting to do it. Can you understand that? No, you can’t. You can’t understand or know what it was like, Louis! I went and got that fucking hammer and I was whistling the whole time! Whistling! Like I was going to fix the back door! When I got back there, when I got back to her—”

“You don’t have to do this, Earl.”

“Oh yes, I do! I got back there and…and she was gone! She had dragged herself around the side of the house! I followed the blood trail and when I found her, found her curled up and bleeding, I bashed her goddamn brains in! I kept swinging and swinging and I never wanted to stop! I liked it! I loved it!”

Louis was feeling sick to his stomach now. Yes, he’d seen his share, but this was so much worse. So intimate. A peak into the mind of a lunatic. He thought if he looked deep enough, he might see something in Earl’s eyes that would validate what was in his head. Something looking back at him and grinning.

Earl was kneeling on the floor, rocking back and forth, just devastated by what he had done. “But you don’t know the rest, Louis, you don’t know what it was like.”

“Please, Earl. Stop this.”

But Earl shook his head. “It got her too, Louis. It got in her head and she was just as loony as I was. When I found her there, around the side of the house, she laughed at me! She fucking laughed at me! Started saying all the terrible things she’d always wanted to say to me! And then, and then she…”

Earl broke down into tears and Louis went to him, tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but the old man just batted it away.

“I killed her because I had to! And because she wanted it!”

Louis sat back down. “What do you mean?”

Earl uttered that awful, bitter laugh again that maybe wasn’t insane, but was living right next door. “I mean she wanted me to! After she said those things, something snapped in her, Louis! Just snapped! It was a violation of everything that dear woman was! She couldn’t live with it! So…I killed her! I killed her because she begged me to do it! Begged me to smash her head in!”

Louis could say nothing to that.

He was speechless and simply worn out by all of this. Earl sobbed and shook and eventually the tears just went away and he was silent, just silent. Not even moving. Not doing anything but dying inside.

“When did you come out of it?” Louis finally asked.

“Before…earlier…I don’t know. It just fades away a little at a time. And now I’m sane, I’m perfectly fine, aren’t I?”

“It wasn’t your fault, Earl. Not really.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Louis. Please don’t do that.” He pulled himself up and sat back on the recliner. “Anything but that. I’m like the others now. A killer. I’m nothing but a killer…”

 

70

The pack waited patently on the hillside.

In the moonlight, their bodies reticulated with bands of mud-brown, blood-red, and midnight blue like jungle serpents, they were nearly invisible. Only their teeth gleamed in the moonlight, their staring eyes. A slight breeze was carrying the smell of prey, the delicious odor of live meat, and a ripple of excitement ran through the pack.

Down below, in a tree-lined hollow at the edge of what had once been known as Lower Fifth Street, a group of prey had hidden themselves away. They thought they were safe from the things that stalked the night. They were wrong.

The Baron examined the gleaming edges of his weapons—the K-Bar knife, his hatchet, his spear, and his machete which was really just the razor-sharp blade from a paper cutter with a handle at one end. They pleased him. Their edges caught the moonlight, held it. Touching the necklace of ears at his throat, he made a grunting sound under his breath.

The pack rose from the grass.

They were his children. They surrounded him, pressing up against him, smelling the raw blood-stench of brutality that he wielded like a weapon. It made them feel strong.

Without a word, the Baron slipped down the hillside with the others following him. He avoided the sparsely placed streetlights, haunting the shadows, becoming the shadows, sliding through their ebony depths like a snake skimming a pond.

There were three houses and he broke his pack into three hunting bands, each led by his fiercest warriors.

It was time.

Letting out the wild cry of a wolf, he charged through the first yard. He came to a locked door, but it was flimsy and he kicked it open, his band rushing in. Inside, there were lights and screams. His hunters had found a woman and two children cowering. They impaled them with their spears, hacking them with hatchets until patterns of blood were sprayed up the walls and spattering the ceiling.

A man lay dying on the carpeted floor in a pool of his own blood.

There was a hatched imbedded in his skull.

He had fought, fought hard for what was his, shattering the skull of one hunter with a baseball bat and beating another to a faceless wreck. But that was all he did. The hunters were fighting over the scraps of the woman and children, others slitting trophies from the dying man with their knives.

The Baron heard gunshots.

Shattering glass.

More screams.

He ran outside and to the house next door. One of his hunters lay on the porch, a bullet hole in his temple. A window was smashed. Inside another hunter was dead. Then the Baron saw that three of his own were busy gutting a woman and another was feeding the body of an old woman into the fireplace. She screamed as the flames engulfed her. Another hunter was gut-shot on the stairs, a trail of blood marking his progress.

Two more gunshots from above.

Then the howling of hunters. Thrashing noises and a screech of pain. The Baron smiled. Whoever had been doing the shooting had been overwhelmed now. He could hear them shrieking just above the noise of blades hacking into flesh and splintering bone.

Outside again.

The next house. A back door opened as the Baron came around the side. A woman was trying to escape. She got one look at the Baron and tried to slam the door shut. He shouldered it open. She screamed and slashed at him with a steak knife. He beat her down, kicked her until she was nothing but a sobbing heap, and then yanked up her head and slit her throat.

He came across three more of his hunters who had cornered a boy. They were jabbing him with their spears. And in the living room, a sight which even gave the Baron a moment’s hesitation as some shred of humanity kicked in his head.

His hunters had a pregnant woman on the floor. She was dead, slit open from throat to crotch. One of the boys was urinating on her. A group of girls had torn her unborn child from the womb.

They were eating it, the umbilical still attached to its mother.

The Baron slit the woman’s ears off and threaded them onto his necklace as his children devoured, their eyes black and staring, their faces smeared with gore.

He went out onto the porch. There was a man out there, bleeding from spear wounds, hobbled by axe cuts, but not dead just yet. Letting out a cry of victory, the Baron scalped him…

 

71

The girl was refusing so the Huntress knew she had to be broken much as a young colt must be broken by whatever means necessary. What must come now must not be crude or low in nature, but ceremonial, for it was a rite. And it would be carried out as such.

The Huntress looked down on the girl. “Hunt with us, as us.”

The girl looked up at her. There were tears in her eyes. “Michelle, please—”

The Huntress was taken aback by that name. It was what the man had called her. She feared that name for it was a name of power that made her feel helpless, uncertain. She could not have the clan seeing this. That name. Michelle. It was a magic name, a spell of power. The others must never learn of it or they would break her with it.

The girl opened her mouth again and the Huntress slapped her.

She reached out and took the girl by the throat, squeezing while she trembled and gasped and fought weakly in her grip. The Huntress slammed her up against the wall again and again until there was no fight left.

“Now,” she said, “ready her.”

Macy was suddenly gripped by hands, so many white reaching hands they were like the ensnaring tentacles of a squid, grabbing her, fondling her, pinching her and scratching her leaving deep welts. There was no fight left. Everything had drained out of her and she was limp there on the cool flagstone floor, naked, exposed, vulnerable. They pressed in, savage faces, primordial things from a nightmare, sharpened teeth gleaming and fat-greased faces grinning. The Huntress stood over her, dark and cruel, her eyes cold glistening jewels. Macy looked up at her, but there was no pity. The woman she had known as Michelle was a savage warrior queen now, her face painted white and black like a skull, things knotted in her hair, a necklace of tiny bones at her throat. There was no sympathy, no pity, for Michelle was now from a time of long ago. A dark, misty time where men were little better than the beasts of the forest.

The clan pressed in, stealing her light and her air.

There was nothing but the greasy feel of them, the stink of the pelts they wore and the marrow-grease they coated themselves with, rancid, revolting, meaty-smelling stuff. They were all touching her, feeling her. Nails scratched blood and teeth tore her skin even as tongues licked the sweat from her breasts and moist blubbery lips suckled her wounds and were pressed to her own lips. Clammy hands forced her legs apart and there was no air to scream with, not a single muscle would obey as more hands pushed in, rubbing her down with fats and oils until she glistened as they glistened and then, and then—

Then she did scream with a raw, shrieking sound that echoed through the church as her head thrashed from side to side with the horror of what was happening. The scream was silenced by many mouths and many tongues covering her face.

So Macy did not see.

Did not see the painted, grease-shining man who wore the bloody, ragged pelts of men and animals, the leering snarling-mouthed headpiece of a slaughtered dog. She did not see him or the hands that pressed him down on her, but she felt his penis as it slid along her inner thigh like an engorged snake, pushing higher and higher, sliding into her as she shuddered and kicked and called out the name of the only man she thought would protect her.

Please, please, please, Louis, please don’t let them, don’t let them, don’t let them do this to me, don’t let them destroy me like this—

But there was only the clan, clutching and feeling and holding her, gripping her with dirty fingers until her flesh bruised, kissing her and sucking on her and nibbling her with the serrated edges of their teeth. She was buried alive in their bodies which stank of blood, excrement, and peeled hides as the man on top of her, the one chosen by the Huntress, pushed in and out of her, bringing pain, riding her, grunting like a hog, drool hanging from his mouth in fetid ribbons.

When his seed flowed into her, his body stiff and jerking, she let out a final rending screaming that tore her open inside, ripped her soul wide open in a vicious, bleeding chasm that swallowed everything she had been, ever was, or could be into the black seething nothingness of prehistory…

 

72

Louis watched the darkness outside the window. He knew he should have run as far away as he could before they came back. But he just didn’t seem to care. Everything was collapsing, both within and without, and he had lost focus. In his mind he could see Earl that afternoon, out by the hedges:

We are the instruments of our own destruction! Inside each and everyone of us there is a loaded gun and radical population explosion has pulled the trigger! God help us, Louis, but we will exterminate ourselves! Beasts of the jungle! Killing, slaughtering, raping, pillaging! An unconscious genetic urge will unmake all we have made, gut civilization, and harvest the race like cattle as we are overwhelmed by primitive urges and race memory run wild!

It sounded crazy then; now it simply sounded practical.

“You still sticking to the gene theory?”

Earl buried his face in his hands. “Yes, absolutely. Let me indulge in some Darwinism here, Louis. For if the survival of the fittest is a true thing, then what we have locked up inside each and everyone of us is a genetic propensity towards hunting and killing, taking down prey and destroying our human rivals. I’m talking about the beast inside. The beast that is the very core of who and what we are. That’s what’s causing all this: the beast. The primal, ravenous other inside us all, the dawn-child, the shadow-hunter, the savagery and cruelty that forms the framework of the human animal.”

“The beast,” Louis said. “I’ve seen it. I’ve looked in its eyes.”

Earl nodded. “Yes, and what a disturbing sight it is, eh? At our roots, animals, nothing but animals. Beasts. We crawled from the immortal slime of creation with the will to kill and that will is still upon us. Upright animals with savage instincts and an inheritance of acquired, barbaric characteristics. We can write poetry and make music, build cities and microcomputers and send probes to Mars, but in our hearts, our black beating little hearts, still Miocene apes and pithecanthropoid hunters. Love, hate, greed, want, violence, war. Love is a romanticized adaptation of the breeding/brooding impulse. Materialism is simply an expression of the animal instinct to covet. Nationalism, our flag-waving patriotism, nothing more than the ancient animal drive to maintain and defend a territory and war…yes, even war, nothing but an overblown, exaggeration of the territorial impulse to raid, to kill, to take what belongs to another and make it our own.”

What Louis wanted to know was: what activated this monstrous gene? What set this regression, this primordial memory—or whatever you wanted to call it—into action? “What was the mechanism, Earl? What was the machine or influence that set it all free and on such a massive scale? Just overpopulation? Stress?”

“We’ll never really know, Louis. Anymore than any other herd animal will know. It’s inside us, though, my friend. These impulses, this sadism, it’s inborn and inbred. We’re the product of our ancestors. No more, no less. Why do people murder each other? Why do they kill their own children? Their neighbors? Their wives? Why do they allow genocide to happen? Why do they lynch people of a different skin color? Why do they hate those with more or with less than them or with different religious affiliations? The beast, Louis, the beast inside. The imperatives to descend into our prehistory, into our savage past, are locked up in all of us.

“How many times have you read that somebody killed another and they really weren’t sure why? The Devil made me do it…except, we all carry the devil inside of us. Our animal past is why. We all have terrible buried impulses, but most of us don’t act upon them. But now and again, a select few or even a mob does. It’s a combination of our brutal heredity acting in accordance with deep-seated, repressed wants and desires. That’s what you’re seeing here: all the awful, dirty, hateful, and twisted things growing in the underbelly of this world, this town, in its collective mind, have been unleashed. All the terrible things festering inside these people have been released. It was genetically preordained, I suppose. The conditions were right and it just happened. That’s no answer. Not really. But the potential was there and has been in every human population since we evolved from a lesser primate. God help us, but the world is now a great living laboratory of the human condition and the mechanics of violence, primal instinct, purge and atavism. The evil is here, Louis, and the evil is us. We made the Devil in our own image.”

“But what about the animals, Earl?”

“Animals?”

Louis swallowed thickly as he told Earl about the police station. The dogs there. How they had died fighting men or fighting with them.

“Hmm, interesting.” Earl considered it. “Well, there’s only one logical explanation. Hormones.”

“Hormones?”

Earl nodded. “Yes, hormones, pheromones. It was long thought that pheromones were the province of insects. Not so. Recent biochemical studies tell a different story. All species have them. Most are species-specific, but certain kinds can be read by other species. There are aggregation pheromones which function to herd species in defense against predators or for mating purposes. Primer pheromones which trigger behavioral changes in reaction to environment. Releaser or attractant pheromones which attract mates for miles. Territorial pheromones which are carried in the urine to mark territorial boundaries or lairs or to warn off intruders. Sex pheromones which indicate the female is ready for breeding. All sorts of chemical signatures. And then there are alarm pheromones which alert a species when one of their own is under attack. Studies have shown that these pheromones, in mammals, trigger the fight or flee instinct. They make animals quite aggressive. A harmless tomcat becomes a beast. Prey animals will tend to flee, predators will generally fight. Those primitives out there—that’s a kind word for them—must be letting off alarm pheromones of absolute aggression and the dogs are responding in kind. It’s a chemical thing. The dogs cannot help themselves. They fight. If directed against a common enemy, they fight with our primitives. Lacking the same, they fight against them.”

Louis hated Earl at that moment. He was reducing man to a laboratory rat. Maybe that’s all any species was, a victim of their own chemistry, but he still hated it. It was so…dehumanizing.

“The regression, Earl. Can it be stopped?”

Earl didn’t even attempt to answer that one. “Have you ever heard of a man named Raymond Dart?”

Louis told him he hadn’t.

“Raymond Dart was an Australian anthropologist and comparative anatomist. A true giant in the field. In 1924 he discovered the fossil remains of Australopithecus in a South African limestone quarry. In time, he also discovered more fossils of this extinct hominid, along with great heaps of fossilized bones that were the prey of the Australopithecine. He also discovered crude weapons such as clubs made from antelope bones and knives fashioned from jawbones, as well as heaps of animal bones and baboon skulls which bore the marks of death blows from these very weapons. As did the skulls of other Australopithecines. Evidence that was supported by forensic experts who examined the remains. The dawn of organized murder, Louis! A quarter of a million years before man! From this Dart theorized that we evolved not from a gentle vegetarian ape as established paleoanthropology would have it, but from a savage, predatory ape with a lust for killing. It was called the “Killer Ape” theory. He perpetuated it in his paper, ‘The Predatory Transition from Man to Ape.’ In the paper he said and I quote verbatim: ‘The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices or their substitutes in formalized religions and with world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophiliac practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator—this predacious habit, this mark of Cain—that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora.’ Well, don’t you see, Louis? Don’t you grasp it?”

Louis was way too tired for thinking, for anything this heavy. “We evolved from a killer ape, I guess. Not that I’m really surprised.”

“Yes, basically,” Earl said, very excited to be lecturing once again. “The innate depravity of our species comes directly from the killer ape. Civilization is only an attractive cloak, for beneath we are murderous beasts. We are territorial, aggressive, and murderous. To our species and every other, this is why we wage war, this is the foundation of mass murder, serial killings, genocide, and our instinctive cruelty. We are killers. Listen to me, Louis. Dart further suggested that we did not evolve intelligence and then turn to killing, we evolved intelligence because we turned to killing. At some point, our ancestors branched off from their non-aggressive cousins. These early hominids became predatory probably because of the scarcity of food and probably by imitating other predators as primitives will do. We learned to stand erect to hunt, to give chase to our prey. Hands free to grip and tear, but lacking teeth or claws, we developed weapons. Crude imitations from bone, rock, wood. Ah, now the use of weapons entails great coordination, thus our nervous systems were challenged and our brains enlarged. The development of hunting tactics enlarged our brains still further. We are men today, Louis, because our ancestors were killers. As Robert Ardrey said in African Genesis, man had not fathered the weapon, the weapon fathered man.”

Earl said the “Killer Ape” theory was controversial as hell. Many anthropologists dismissed it and probably because it pretty much swept their conservative, bloodless little theories into the wastebasket where they belonged. But there was no need to doubt it now. Because out there, in the streets, the killer apes were running wild.

“The devil, as it were, has risen up from our chromosomes, Louis. Like certain diseases, cancers that are hereditary in nature, the genetic impulse to regress is irresistible. Fighting against it will be like fighting against the color of your eyes. It’s preset, preprogrammed, and absolutely immutable.”

Louis sighed. “But why did Macy regress and come out of it again? Why did you? Why haven’t I gone native yet?”

“Who can say, Louis? The gene may have been bred out of your family line at some point. There may be thousands like you or only a handful. As to me and the girl…I fear that the reassertion of reason is only temporary. A remission of sorts, if you will.”

There was nothing Louis could say to that. It was wild and impossible, but it was probably also true. And that was the most disturbing thing of all. For man was a beast at heart and civilization, at best, was an illusion. As Earl said, a fancy cloak you could drape over the ugly monster within…and you could hide those claws and those teeth and that bloodthirsty appetite in its folds, but it was still there. Waiting to get out. As Earl also said, it got out pretty commonly on an individual basis and now and again on a communal level. But this, what was happening here, was probably one of the first times it had reached such a proportion, had infected and degenerated so many in such a short span of time, gone global. But it had always been coming, right from the beginning. Now and then the gene was activated—accidentally, no doubt—and you had a serious body count. But the big one, the Big Bang, the Doomsday Effect, of the human race had not come until now.

To think that all man had strived for and accomplished was now being destroyed by a primitive gene, by biochemical reactions deep in microscopic cells. That was scary.

“I’m frightened for the race, Louis. Terribly, deeply frightened. For what if this regression continues?” Earl pondered. “What will a year bring? Will we continue to devolve? Those people out there, they still have language skills and reasoning powers. But I’d say they’re rapidly devolving from Homo sapiens to Homo erectus. That’s just a guess, of course. But what will we be like in five or ten years? Will our culture completely have been forgotten? Will we have degraded into Australopithecine hunting groups, forging tools from animal bones, roaming the veldt, forest, and grassland with our ancestral bloodlust intact while our cities slowly turn to rubble and memory?”

“I don’t know, Earl. I can’t think anymore.”

Earl shook his head. “This is what the Greeks call hubris, Louis.”

“Hubris?”

“Yes, hubris. If man lifts his head too high or raises his achievements and ambitions to a godlike level, the gods will be threatened. And threatened, will react in kind by destroying him. And we’ve—all of us—have certainly acted like gods, haven’t we? Killing one another, waging wars, raping the planet, exterminating other species, crushing any that stand in our way…yes, certainly the province of gods not men. And now nature or God or what have you is putting us in our place. If that’s not karma, I don’t know what is.”

Louis felt like crying as he waited here on the threshold of doomsday. He wanted to weep at the sullen marble grave of civilization and mankind. Jesus, the absolute horror of it all.

Earl sighed. “My head hurts. Dear Christ, but my head hurts. I need to use your bathroom, Louis. I have to wash my face. And piss. Yes, piss in a toilet like a man and not against a tree to mark my trail.” He got up, started walking out of the living room and then turned back. “You’ve been a good neighbor, Louis. The very best. I always thought you were special and now I know that you are.”

But Louis shook his head. “I’m not. I’m nothing special.”

“Oh, but you are,” the old man said. “You haven’t lost it like the rest of us. Not even for a moment. It hasn’t been able to get its claws in you and that makes you special, Louis. Very special. You may be the last of the reasonable men. A species nearing extinction. The last man to study other men rather than simply killing them. What a waste. The nature of man is to study the nature of man, I always thought. But I was wrong. The nature of man is to kill. The territorial imperative, Louis.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Earl. I don’t understand.”

“Learned response, cultural instinct, my friend. These things make up the basis of any creature’s behavior. You have to be taught how to make a paper airplane, but no one has to teach you how to make a weapon. You know. It’s instinctive. Just like the desire to kill.”

“They are making weapons, Earl…spears, clubs, you name it. And you know what? They work. I would think making a spear that could be thrown and actually hit its target might be an art form of sorts. There’s engineering involved. You wouldn’t think those savages could figure it out so quickly.”

“They didn’t have to, Louis. They knew instinctively.”

Earl gave him a quick example. In France, in the Rhone valley, beavers made their dams and lodges for centuries, right back to—and before—antiquity same as beavers did everywhere. But then with the coming of the European fur trade, the beavers were hunted to near-extinction. Only a few remained. For several hundred years, no dams, no lodges. Then the French government extended protection to the small beaver population in the Rhone valley. Their numbers swelled over a period of decades. Then, for the first time in several hundred years, the beavers began building dams and lodges in the tributaries of the Rhone River. Building dams and lodges is a very complex, communal effort…yet, no one had to teach the beavers how to do it, they knew. And those dams in the Rhone were perfectly identical to those built by American and Canadian beavers. Cultural instinct at work.

“And our friends out there, Louis. Nobody has to teach them what their ancestors knew. It’s race memory. They know how to survive. How to kill, how to make weapons, how to dress a carcass and peel a hide. Cultural instinct.”

While Earl was gone, Louis found Mike Soderberg’s gun cabinet. He broke the glass with his hammer and sorted around in the moonlight. He wasn’t much of a shooter himself, so he grabbed a weapon that he was familiar with: A bolt-action Winchester Featherweight .30-06. His father had had one. He’d shot it plenty of times as a boy. He loaded the magazine with Springfield cartridges, stuffed more in his pockets.

“We better get the hell out of here, Earl,” he said when the older man came back.

“Where to?”

“Just out of here for now.”

They stepped out on the porch together. The streets were quiet. But right away Louis got a bad feeling in his stomach and it did not answer to such trifling things as reason or logic. This was an ancient sense. A sense of impending doom.

“I don’t think we’re alone out here,” Earl said.

Something moved in the hedges and Louis did not even hesitate: he brought up the rifle, worked the bolt, and fired. There was nothing but the echo of his shot. No movement.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

Holding the rifle high, he led Earl away out to the sidewalk. He knew it wasn’t safe to stay in the house and it was no more safe out here. They were near and he could smell them: the stink of oily hides and wet dogs. Something moved across the street. Louis hesitated. Something moved behind a parked car. He fired, taking out the windshield. Earl turned to him, mouth opened to say something…but then he grunted and stumbled forward. There was a sharpened spear shaft jutting from his lower back. Blood filled his mouth and he made a gurgling sound and went to his knees.

Louis fired a shot.

He heard a whooshing sound.

He turned, made ready to fire again and his head exploded with stars. The rifle fell from his hands. When he opened his eyes he was flat on his back on the sidewalk. He could hear Earl gasping. But he paid no attention to that. Because somebody was standing over him. They smelled of urine, meat, and shit.

At first he thought it was a monster. Some horrible, walking cadaver that had forced its way out of a muddy grave. But it wasn’t that. It was a woman…or something like one with huge breasts and an axe in her hands. Her flesh was clotted, lumpy, white as bone, glistening. That’s when he knew that she had covered herself in slimy white clay or maybe ash. She had coated herself with it and slicked back her hair, giving her the appearance of a bloodless wraith. Bright red diagonal bands at the mouth and eyes contrasted this. He could see the yellow of her teeth which had been filed sharp, the shining orbs of her eyes. She wore a necklace of fur which he soon realized were maybe a dozen human scalps sewn into a garment.

The stench of her.

The absolute obscenity.

He tried to move, but his head was spinning. Two other women—younger, thinner, breasts like small cones—stepped out of the gloom. They were smeared with ghostly white ash, too. One carried a sling which had propelled the rock into Louis’ head. The other stepped over to Earl, planted her foot in the center of his back and yanked out the spear. Earl screamed and she stabbed him three times in the throat.

I’m next…they’re gonna kill me next.

This is what Louis thought as he hovered at the edge of unconsciousness. They gathered around him for the killing. The older woman crouched down by him, running her hands over him. When one of the younger girls groped at his crotch, she slapped her hand away and hissed at her like a snake.

“Mine,” she said. “Mine…”

 

73

The Baron was scalping his prey.

The body of a man was facedown in the grass. The Baron—or Mr. Chalmers as he had once been known—was kneeling on his shoulders. He pressed the lethal, razored edge of his K-Bar knife just behind the man’s left ear and slit along the back of his skull, above the right ear and along the forehead/scalp line and back to his original incision. Then he peeled the scalp free from the skull with no little exertion, holding it up for all to see.

The pack howled like animals.

They screeched.

They bayed at the moon high above.

The Baron wiped his bloody fingers on his sleeveless fox coat, then he tossed the scalp to the pack. They fought wildly over it. And as they did so, the Baron cut off the man’s ears and then, punching holes in the cartilage with the tip of his knife, threaded them onto his necklace.

He had six sets on there thus far.

He told them he would fill the necklace by morning and the greatest hunter among them would be awarded the necklace of ears as a symbol of their stealth and ferocity. For amongst the pack, these were the things admired the most.

A pair of young boys came running back into the yard. The Baron had sent them scouting for new prey. They were breathless, filthy things who wore only pants and both carried long-bladed hunting knifes on makeshift slings around their necks. The Baron heard them out, his black-striped face grim, impassive. It would be his decision.

“Lead us,” he told them.

The pack howled in honor of the blood sport to come. Then, maintaining the pack discipline that the Baron had told them was so very important, they quieted down and there was only the sound of a summer night. Crickets. A light breeze in the high boughs of the oaks. And in the distance, the screams and war cries of other packs as they raided from neighborhood to neighborhood.

The Baron’s pack moved out in single file with flank guards to either side and the two boys taking point far ahead. Soon there would be scalps for all…

 

74

The girl was broken.

The ritual began.

The Huntress watched the clan seize the girl, take hold of her and drag her from the shadows where she cowered. She did not fight at first. She was becoming of the clan, but she still acted stupid and helpless like prey. Her brain was not yet the brain of a hunter.

But soon.

Soon she would hunt with them.

The Huntress was certain of it. Because just as she could smell fear or the telltale scent trail of other hunters, she could smell what was going on inside the girl. The more like them the girl became, the more her blood ran hot and bright.

At my side. When you have proven yourself, you will hunt at my side.

Then she could wear the paint of the skull, but not before. Only the ones the Huntress selected were given this privilege. Her inner circle.

The men wanted to have the girl, of course. Many of them. They could smell her ripeness and hers was a fruit they wished to pluck so very sweet and juicy was it. But she had been broken by the one the Huntress chose. That was enough. For now. The others would not have her nor the women who wished her for sport. This one was special and she belonged to the Huntress and none dared violate that taboo. The Huntress had other reasons for wanting the girl. She was somehow connected to the man and the Huntress desired to have the man.

But he was sly.

He was cunning.

She would use the girl as bait.

Even now, the Huntress could hear his strange, mystical words:

Come over here, Michelle. I’m your husband. I love you. I won’t let them hurt you.

The Huntress did not understand what he said exactly, but she knew there was a special meaning to those words. The pain and depth of emotion in the man had been all too apparent. And his voice, what he said and how he said it…it had touched something in her, made her feel warm, weak, and soft. And so she had set the clan upon him before they smelled her uncertainty.

The girl cried out in pain.

The clanswomen had thrown a rope over the naked beams above and, tying the girl’s wrists, were hoisting her up by them. The girl was crying out. Her wrists were raw from the other ropes she had been tied with, the skin scraped red. A trickle of blood ran down her left forearm.

“Let it begin,” the Huntress told them.

This was the ritual. The Huntress remembered it from another time and that time seemed to be long ago. When she tried to recall it, everything was dim and misty and what faces she could see were not faces she recognized, yet she was certain that she knew them. And well. No matter. The ritual was ancient and correct. It was a test for a true warrior maiden. If the girl did not cry and whimper like an infant, if she withstood the ordeal, then she would hunt with them.

If not, there were the men.

Then the women and their skinning knives.

It started with sticks from the fire. Once the ends were blazing hot, the women withdrew them and, chanting archaic words under their tongues, they spun the girl so that she twisted on the rope and as she rotated, they jabbed her with the hot sticks. The blazing ends hissed as they sank into her pale white skin. She would forever be marked and forever remembered for this. None that looked upon her would doubt her courage or importance.

The Huntress knew that some died during the ritual.

It was unfortunate, but necessary. If this one died, her ghost would be released from the shell of her body and would be angry. It would seek vengeance as ghosts often did. Young ghosts were always angry.

The girl did not beg for mercy or even whimper during the burning. She just twisted on her rope from bloody wrists, her eyes glazed over and staring. The women were angered by their inability to break her. They took up branches and whipped her mercilessly, drawing blood, tearing open the burned pink flesh until red creeks ran down the girl’s belly and legs.

The Huntress raised her hand and she was cut free.

The women now knotted her hair and tied it tight with the rope. Again, the girl was hoisted above. The man had sticks in their hands. As they passed, they swatted her with them. And when they were finished, they urinated on her.

She was left to hang like that.

Maybe for hours…

 

75

The tribe moved through the shadows, the dappled moonlight from intertwined tree branches overhead enhancing the red and green serpentine stripes covering their naked bodies.

Angie, with Kathleen at her side, two hunters cast ahead, led them.

Dawn was hours away yet, but until then they would hunt. For the tribe lived, breathed, and was of the hunt. Without it they were nothing. It was their blood and soul and purpose. Without it they would be no better than any other pack of animals rooting in the dirt for grubs and worms. The hunt gave them focus, it gave them reason, it was the blood in their veins. Angie knew instinctively that her kind rose above the beast of the field because of the hunt.

When dawn came, they would slink back to their lair and sleep away the daylight hours like the rest, waiting for darkness.

But for now, they hunted. Being that they were more than predators, but creatures of opportunity, scavengers even, they were following another hunting clique. The one led by the old man in the animal skins. He had an army of children following him. They were raiding from neighborhood to neighborhood, killing and slaughtering and laying waste. The tribe followed along because the pickings were so good and out of sheer curiosity.

There was another reason, of course.

And that reason was Angie’s and hers alone.

The old man. He was an excellent hunter, a great leader, savage, bloodthirsty, and exceptionally cunning. Angie learned many things just watching how the old man led his raids. His hunters were very well disciplined.

She respected and feared him.

She emulated him.

She wanted to kill him.

Yes, that’s what she really wanted because that’s how it was done. When you killed another, drank their blood and feasted on their meat, you absorbed what they were. Their strength, their wisdom, their spirit became part of you. Angie knew as her ancestors had known that the center of it all, the nucleus of the being, was the heart itself.

She would kill the old man with one well placed arrow. Then she would bathe in his blood. And lastly, while the others fought over the tidbits, bones, and sweet meats, she would carve out the old man’s heart and eat it raw, filling herself with his spirit and vitality. For the heart was the center of the all, the hub of deeper mystery, the pulsing artery to the beyond. And when she had eaten it and filled her veins with his cruel potency and thrumming life force, then she would skin him and wear his flesh as a garment…

 

76

While the dam saw to the gut sack that smoked over the fire, jabbing it from time to time with a stick, and seeing to what roasted in the coals, Kylie played with the man.

He did not like to be played with.

After binding him with clothesline, they dragged him back to their lair and deposited him in the corner. He had slept for some time—or pretended to—but now he was awake. His eyes were open, wide and bright.

Still covered in ghostly white ash, Kylie grinned at him.

He did not smile back.

Kylie crept over to him on all fours. He tensed. His muscles were good. She straddled him, her long flaxen hair hanging in his face. She studied his eyes, his scent, his facial expression…all the things that would tell her what she wanted to know.

She pressed her crotch down on his own, rubbed it again the coarse material of his jeans. The texture, the pressure excited her. She could feel him getting excited, too, only from what she saw in his eyes he did not like that.

She brought her mouth to his own.

He trembled.

She pressed her lips to his own.

He did not move. She pushed her smallish breasts into his face, daring him to suckle them or nip at them. He did not.

He just looked up at her with eyes that were shocked and glassy. They looked very wet. He was frightened and she could smell it on him.

Frightened. Yes, Louis was frightened. More scared than he’d ever been before in his life. This girl…Jesus, painted white like something dead, completely naked, red bands of paint on her face, red slashes across her breasts and belly and arms. And her skin…it was beaded with welts like she had been burning herself, only the welts were formed into symbols of some sort, concentric patterns and diamonds and half-moons. Like those tribes on TV with the beads under their skin. She hovered over him. Teasing him, rubbing herself against him…he guessed she was no more than thirteen. Younger than the other girl who sharpened stakes in the corner. The older woman at the fire must have been their mother.

And this…this house of horrors…their den.

Their warren.

Louis saw human remains scattered over the dirt floor, bones and scraps of meat. There was a head in the corner. Severed limbs were dangling from the beams overhead on ropes of gut. There was garbage and filth everywhere. The air stank of putrescence, burnt meat, smoke, and excrement. The girl toying with him smelled like urine.

Grinning, she licked his face.

Elissa came over now. She turned to make sure the dam was still occupied; she was.

Kylie gripped the man’s throat with her hands. Spreading her legs wide, she rubbed herself on him faster and faster until she began to tremble. The man’s face was a contorted mask of dread. This excited Kylie more as she rubbed herself against him harder and harder, making communion, feeling her heart pounding, her skin hot and moist.

Still, he resisted.

“Get the fuck off me,” he suddenly said.

Kylie brought her face to his own and he flinched. She buried her face at his throat and licked him, tasted his skin. As wave of ecstasy rolled through her, she bit down on the bare flesh of his shoulder and kept biting until she drew blood, until it filled her mouth. He screamed and she bit down harder, harder, filling her mouth with the taste of his blood, his flesh.

“No!” the dam cried.

She grabbed Kylie by the hair and tossed her aside. She kicked Elissa and then kicked her again when she dared snarl at her. She dragged the man over to the fire and pressed her mouth to his bleeding shoulder. She sucked the blood away and then pressed a rag to the wound. He was shaking, squirming.

The dam poked the gut sack. Hot juice sizzled into the fire.

She drew a rib bone from the coals. It burned her fingers. She gnawed at the meat and pressed it to the man’s mouth. But he would not eat of it. She hissed at him and struck him in the face with her palm. When he refused the meat again, she struck him harder. He was defiant. But she was confident that she could break him. And if not, she would slit him open and yank out his intestines. While he still moved she would roast them and eat them.

It was an ancient punishment.

Kylie and Elissa crawled over. The dam bared her teeth at them. She crouched over the man and scented him with her urine. Then she clawed out at the girls.

“Mine,” she said. “Mine, mine, mine…”

 

77

The Baron’s pack now numbered upward of a hundred. As they moved through the night, raiding from one neighborhood to the next, driving prey from hides, holes, and coverts, none dared stand against them. They raced up streets and down avenues, scattering other hunters and hunting them down if they did not flee. The Baron’s strategy was simple: seize anything worth taking, slaughter the stragglers, burn the houses, and generally lay siege to anything in their path with a horrendous scorched earth policy.

They ran afoul of other hunting packs, of course, and put them down or enslaved their numbers, always moving, always taking more territory and leaving a trail of butchered corpses, dead animals, and flaming neighborhoods in their wake. Soon, the Baron’s ranks included not just children but adults, dozens of them. They wielded axes and pikes, spears and knives, hammers and baseball bats with spikes driven into their ends.

Women were raped and men skinned. The elderly used for sport. And tiny children of no use to the pack were given to the flames, for all knew that a sacrifice must be offered to ensure a successful campaign.

And on it went.

They were an irresistible, relentless force.

Then, on the south end of Providence Street, they were met by another pack. Just as determined. Just as ferocious. Just as territorial. The only difference was this group came with dogs. What seemed to be hundreds of barking, yapping, howling dogs. Things driven mad by the scent of aggression and the rich, tantalizing odor of blood in the air.

Battle was joined.

Energized by bloodlust, hysterical fury, and animal ferocity, the two opposing armies of savages—all painted for war, some naked, others dressed in rags or fresh hides, many brandishing death totems of human scalps, heads, and assorted body parts—charged at each other in howling groups. To a casual observer, it was a deranged display of psychotic frenzy unmatched since the barbarian invasions of Europe. But to those involved it was strictly territorial, the sort of manic blood-rite that the tribes lived for.

The Baron led the first charge, hacking and cutting his way through the intruders. Bodies were cut down by spears and hatchets and machetes. Bones splintered and heads were smashed in, limbs were sliced free and bodies fell disemboweled in the streets. The first five minutes was nothing but wholesale murder, the packs beating one another down, slitting throats and chopping on the fallen.