The Baron, pulling back with dozens of wounded, watched them tear through the ranks, biting and clawing and feeding on the injured. A huge shepherd gripped the head of a boy and shook it in his jaws while three others fed on his writhing body. The dogs ravaged both sides and even themselves. When an axe dropped a Doberman, its head nearly cleaved in two, a group of beagles tore it apart, fighting over the bloodiest chunks of meat. Men killed men and children killed children and both killed dogs and were killed by them.

As the Baron watched the atrocities, there was a vague memory in the back of his mind: driver ants. South American driver ants cutting a killing swath through the jungle. Trees and bushes stripped, animals eaten down to bones. Nothing escaped them, not even men who were stupid enough to get in their way. It flashed through his mind and vanished as quickly.

The dogs were like that.

The main force was an army of teeth and claws and hunger. A huge and voracious machine of destruction. The smell of blood, meat, and death drove them wild.

They attacked people. They attacked parked cars. They charged through screen doors and dove through windows. They tore sidings loose and chewed at woodwork. They ran roughshod through gardens and tore small trees up by the roots. If they couldn’t kill it or maim it, they pissed on it.

The Baron saw dogs fucking. Dogs eating people. Dogs eating each other. A fearful feeding frenzy. A group of armed women had been caught in their masses and the dogs went insane tearing and ripping and biting. Pretty soon so many dogs had pressed into the melee, you couldn’t see the women. Just dogs biting each other. Biting themselves. Blood was flowing, was gathering in a heaving, stinking mist over the streets. And still the killing continued.

Both packs were under siege now by the animals and fought side by side.

Tribal affiliation was forgotten.

A raging group of men with machetes, most homemade, tried to slash through their numbers. But the dogs were like ants sacrificing themselves madly for their queen. They literally piled up their own crushed bodies until their attackers had to withdraw…into an onslaught of dogs and crazy solitary hunters who claimed no true affiliation and slaughtered anything that moved.

Providence Street that night was a cacophonous hive of noise…barking, howling, screeching, wailing. Some was from the animals that walked on four legs and some from those that walked on two. Just absolute, thundering chaos.

Slowly, though, the dogs were dropping, being overwhelmed by cutting blades and devoured by their fellows.

The Baron, with so many of his pack littering the street, charged in again and again, dealing death and fighting tooth and nail. Swinging his machete like a sword, he gutted cockapoos and boxers and spaniels while to all sides the wounded were drowning in the living, biting sea.

The Baron was bitten, gouged, bloodied, and torn.

But he never stopped killing.

He saw a poodle hanging from a hunter’s face by its teeth. He decapitated it, but the head still hung, jaws locked in a death grip.

Dozens of hunters took his lead and frantically waded in, chopping at the animals, chopping at blood-covered savages, and in the end, chopping at one another. The leader of the other pack, whom the Baron had sighted as his kill and his kill alone, was overwhelmed. He’d once been known as Dick Starling and he’d once been knocked cold by Macy Merchant, but by then he was just a savage wearing the bloody pelt and peeled headpiece of a Great Dane. A Rotweiler—split neatly in half—was hanging from his belly by its fangs, still biting, still clawing. The Baron, dragging an Irish Setter with him whose teeth were in his leg, moved in and decapitated him.

Finally, even the Baron withdrew from the killing fields.

He slashed the Setter until it released its bite and stood there, bloodied but unbowed, viewing the carnage around him. The decimation of both packs.

Then a final group of dogs came at him.

A hodgepodge of shepherd, collie, and Great Dane mixes, they advanced. He stood his ground. They moved with a slow, economical shambling, fur bristling, jaws open.

The first one made its move and the Baron slashed the business end of the machete across its eyes. He pivoted and split open another’s skull. Still another hit him and he tossed it aside, eviscerating it. The teeth of yet another sank into his leg and he chopped its foreleg clean.

Then he ran as a howling, barking pack thundered across the killing fields at him.

He made a nearby porch and turned, swinging the machete with blind wrath, splitting the maw of a beagle and then throwing himself through the open door. They ripped the screen door right off its hinges, seven or eight of them, and began to fight over it like a tasty bitch.

The Baron pressed his back against the inside door as they battered and rammed it. Way they were going, he knew, it wouldn’t last long. The door was hardwood and he could hear them smashing themselves against it, their bones popping and crunching. There was a thin pane of glass that ran the length of the door and the Baron forgot about it until the head of a huge, filthy Rotweiler crashed through it, its muzzle catching him in the back and sending him sprawling. But the pane of glass was not safety glass that spiderwebbed with cracks and fell into itself. It was plate glass. It shattered, but a six-inch triangular shard from the base lodged easily into the dog’s throat. The more it wrenched and flopped its massive, heavily-muscled body, the deeper the shard sank until it was impaled there, whimpering.

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

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

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

He pressed the trigger. The drill bit whirred around.

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

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

Some time later, he wandered outside.

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

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

They gathered at the Baron’s side.

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

 

78

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

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

But he opened his eyes.

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

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

He looked around.

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

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

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

Something bit his ankle.

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

Vile, was the only word for it.

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

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

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

Maybe it would be the real thing.

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

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

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

You better find a way out of this.

You don’t have much time left.

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

He had to live.

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

Footsteps.

Shit.

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

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

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

He just shook his head.

She pounded her bone with authority now.

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

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

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

But now…good God.

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

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

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

She had him and there was no way out.

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

And if he didn’t give it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe the marriage bed in this case.

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

Louis pissed right down his leg.

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

She went over to the fire.

She had a bowl in her hand.

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

He drew away from it.

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

She shoved the bowl in his face and some of the juice spattered him, running down his cheek. It smelled like hot vomit.

He recoiled.

She stuck the bowl in his face again and he butted it out of her hands with his head. It flopped to the floor, right into the dirt. She made an enraged growling sound, snapping up a piece of meat and shoving it in his face.

I won’t.

I will not eat that, you foul fucking cunt, and I don’t care what you do to me but I will not eat human meat. So just…piss…right…off.

She saw the defiance in his eyes and jumped on him, scratched ruts in his face with her nails. If he didn’t want the offered meat, then he must want something else. She grabbed his pants and fought with the zipper while he fought against her. It was no use. Hands tied, legs tied, he was about as offensive as a wriggling worm. She yanked his pants down and he could feel himself shrivel to nothing. She brought her face down there, sniffing his balls. She jabbed her fingers into them, making him jerk with pain, but she kept right on doing it like some confused bratty child who did not comprehend why her Jack-in-the-Box just wasn’t working.

Then she straddled him again.

Rubbing herself against him while her daughters watched in breathless fascination. She stuck her breasts in his face, leaving white streaks on his cheeks. She kissed him, licked him, melted her rancid body into him. And when she slid her cankerous tongue into his mouth, he did the only thing he could.

He bit down on it until he drew blood…

 

79

When Macy pulled herself off the floor, she was aware of the pain thrumming through her body, but it was ancillary, removed, like the beat of her heart and the pulsing of her muscles it was part of her identity now. She was grimy from dirty hands, lustrous with grease-fat. A trickle of blood ran down the inside of one leg, it was crusted over breasts and belly, reddening her lips and smeared over her chin. Her hair hung in filthy strands over her face.

They had ringed her in, the clan.

Facing her was another girl, older than she. Like Macy she was naked though carefully painted with black and white stripes. Her hair was dirty, though a lustrous gold.

The girl hissed through clenched teeth.

Macy steeled herself.

Her eyes, go for eyes, then her throat.

The girl backed away, seemed almost submissive and when Macy let her guard down for that one instant, she charged. She leaped three feet and hit Macy square in the face, then hit her in the head and gave her another jab to the chin. Macy was overwhelmed, seeing stars and funny lights in her head. She folded up and the girl pounded on the back of her skull.

The girl made to kick her and Macy rolled away, more out of dizziness than anything else.

The girl jumped on her back, locking an arm around her throat and yanking her head back until it felt like her spine would snap. The girl grabbed her own wrist and tightened the hold, applying more pressure until Macy thought she would pass out. She clawed at the girl’s scabby arms, tugged at her hair.

The girl only squeezed that much tighter.

The clan was excited, cheering and howling. This was a blood rite, an ancient test of strength and cunning and also one of the few true entertainments that existed in the prehistoric world.

Macy’s vision began to blur.

She couldn’t draw a breath.

She’s killing you! Killing you! Killing you!

A strangled growl started in Macy’s throat. She bared her teeth, drool foaming from her mouth. She reached back and grabbed the girl between the legs, filled her hand with her womanhood, and twisted it with every ounce of strength she had left.

The girl screamed and loosened her grip.

Macy went wild, writhing and squirming with reptilian gyrations. She got her chin under the girl’s arm and bit down on her forearm until she felt her teeth break through the skin and blood filled her mouth.

The girl, screeching madly, released her and hopped away, tripping over her own feet. When she turned from babying her wound, Macy was on her. Letting loose a snarling, wolflike sound, Macy snatched up a handful of the girl’s hair and twisted her head on her neck. The girl raged, scratching and hissing. Macy stuck her thumb in the girl’s left eye and she cried out again, going nearly limp. Then Macy had both her hands in the girl’s hair. She yanked her head down and started kicking her. In the belly, the groin, the legs.

The girl fell back.

Her left eye was swollen purple, nearly closed, but her right was huge and staring, filled with murder.

The girl came at her.

Macy tried to sidestep her, but the girl rammed right into her, throwing her off balance. She jabbed her elbow back and felt the impact, heard the girl’s nose break with a sickening popping sound. She brought hands to her face. Blood ran between her fingers.

Macy went at her.

And to Macy, at that moment, the girl epitomized the suffering, the degradation, the violation that she had endured and been put through. She punched her in the face again and again and then kicked her in the ribs. The girl screamed and tried to fight back, but it was no easy bit with being half-blind. Macy came from every direction, battering her with fists and feet.

The girl fell to one knee, bleeding and dazed.

She tried to rise up and Macy kneed her in the side of the head and kicked her repeatedly when she fell back.

Then she jumped her, clawing her face and then sinking her splintered nails into the girl’s hurt eye. Tearing right through the lid and scratching her eyeball, laying it raw. The girl screamed with an agony that was shattering and bone-deep. She fought and bit, but Macy would not quit digging at her eyeball. She had it now, her nails speared into it, her fingertips worked into the socket. With a primal yell, she ripped the eye from its socket. It came out with a bundle of pink muscle and an oozing length of optic nerve.

Throwing her weight behind it, Macy yanked it right out until it came away in her hand, still pulsing with life.

The girl was a blubbering, shuddering mass of flesh by that time, overwhelmed by agony and barely conscious. Macy hit her a few more times. Then something was shoved into her fist.

A knife.

There was no conscious thought on the matter. Macy gripped the knife and what she did with it was done out of reflex, entirely instinctual. She pulled the girl’s hair back by the roots and slashed the knife against her throat, blood spraying in her face and over her breasts. She slashed the girl again and again until it looked like both she and her victim had been dipped in red ink.

The girl struggled a bit, then flopped over into Macy’s lap.

The clan was wild from the violence, from the stink of raw blood in the air. You could see it in their eyes. They wanted to cover themselves with it, swim in it, paint the walls of the lair with it.

This was nectar.

This was the juice of life.

This was the fluid of the great mystery.

They were screaming and jumping around, beating on each other, rolling on the floor, fucking, spitting, scratching themselves bloody. It passed from one to the next and the next and the next like some kind of hideous circuit was completed.

Macy was not immune to it.

Her heart was pounding, her flesh wet with blood and sweet-smelling sweat. She felt the heat between her legs, in her belly, and especially in her mind like some all-consuming firestorm.

The grotesque faces of the clan staring out at her in rapt anticipation, Macy buried her face to the girl’s throat, wrapping her lips around the knife wound that had split her carotid open. The blood still gushed. It was hot and salty as it filled her mouth and flowed down her throat, as she sucked and gulped, more content than a baby suckling mother’s milk from an offered breast.

At last, she pushed the corpse away, blood running from her mouth. She raised her hands into the air, cocked back her head, and screamed her rabid lust to all creation. For she was blooded now. She was of the clan. She was a hunter…

 

80

The pack needed to be careful now, they needed to rest and lick their wounds, recover from the physical injuries of the open warfare on Providence Street and soothe the psychological ones. Both kinds were still wide open and hurting.

But the Baron would not have it.

The more lives he took, the more blood and guts he spilled, the more pain he took, the more alive he felt. He could not and would not roll into the straw like some beaten dog, not when there was hunting and the night called to him. He was energized, thrumming with energy as if he were mainlining the very honeyed ambrosia of life itself.

The pack lay in a grassy field, licking their wounds and calming one another, a few of the more daring ones clutching weapons, ready for the hunt. The Baron stood up and walked towards the street. A few of his hunters went with him. The others perked up their ears, concerned, alarmed, but not following.

There was an odor on the breeze.

The baron had caught its scent and it enlivened him. It was tantalizing, pleasing. He followed its trail, curious and excited. It awoke cravings in him he had not felt in some years. It made his heart flutter, his blood run hot. His penis stood hard. One of his hunters, a teenage girl was down on all fours, sniffing the trail. The Baron went up behind her, grasped her hips, pushed her open and penetrated her. She shrieked and snapped at him, but she had offered herself and the chemical signature of that was unmistakable. He took her as she wanted to be taken with fierce thrusts, his thighs slapping against her ass cheeks.

When he was done, the odor was stronger.

He followed it, the other hunters coming now, too, sneaking through the grass, weapons in hand, eyes glittering with moonlight. The odor was of dead things, meat rotting and fly-specked. It left a trail of rank, green stink, exciting canine impulses in the entire pack. They all wanted to roll in it and scent themselves.

The Baron led them forward, through yards, across vacant lots.

The smell was getting stronger, carried by the breeze.

They followed it to a yard of night-blooming flowers and sweet grass, the smell of running plant sap invigorating. Down on all fours, the Baron could smell the scent trail of another. The stink of urine and musk was unmistakable. This yard had been marked as another’s territory. The other hunters smelled it and quivered. They did not like it. There was something wrong here.

But the Baron was too intrigued by the other odor: that delicious stench of rot.

He pissed on the trail to obliterate the smell of the other. Several other hunters, male and female, did the same.

Still, the Baron could smell the other’s urine. He did not like this. It was an affront to him. It raised his hackles, challenged him, usurped his authority. It made him angry. It made him want to seize another by the throat—

Still, that other smell… he needed to find it, to cover himself with it.

He was getting furious. The urine smell was female. There was no mistaking it. There were a series of scent trails laid out in the vicinity of this yard, all leading up to the darkened house before him. It was confusing. The Baron knew that it was necessary to proceed with caution, but his blood was up. The scent trail. The other delicious odor of rot. It made him feel very aggressive. He let out a low growling sound and several other males imitated him even while many of the females pulled back, suddenly concerned about the nature of this place.

They had been led here. There was no doubt of it.

But the Baron didn’t care. He was challenged. It was now a matter of territory and dominance. He would find the females who had sprayed these conflicting scents—there were several, he knew that now—and make them bow down to him.

The pack was tense.

The Baron cast several of his males forward. They peered in bushes, around the garage, pawed through flower beds. One of them made a sharp yelping sound of surprise and pleasure; he was calling to the pack. The others followed him around the garage, past the potting shed…there was a sudden cry of surprise, a crackling sound, and then a drawn-out whine of agony.

The Baron rushed forward.

His male was down in a pit about ten feet, the walls of black earth carefully squared off. The male cried out a few times, shook, and went still. The entire pack smelled his death, his terror, the blood trace he left in the air. Whoever had dug the pit, had lined its bottom with four-foot stakes that were sharpened to lethal perfection. The young male was impaled upon them. They were thrust through his groin, belly, and throat. One pierced his arm and another thrust from his wide open mouth.

The Baron let forth a bloodcurdling cry that echoed throughout the neighborhood. The other males, again, imitated him. This was an insult to the pack, a blood crime that would have to be avenged.

Much more cautious now, the Baron crept towards the house on all fours…

 

81

Maddie tasted the blood in her mouth and savored the pain.

She had marked this man as her own. She would mate with him and perhaps produce offspring…but he was defiant, he was willful and arrogant. She would not have that. If she brought him in for a breeder and spared him the knife, then there were things expected. She would not be rejected.

Not here in her own lair.

Not by this pig who spurned her offered meat.

In the hazy corridors of her mind she could remember other men, shadowy figures without faces, and never had they rejected her like this. She always had her fill when the season was upon her.

Grinding her teeth, she watched the man by the fire. He was well-muscled, firm, he would have made a very good breeder. Too wiry for the eating, but that did not mean he wouldn’t know the knife. As she sharpened a carving blade against a dull stone she knew there were ways to break pigs like him.

The heat inside her was almost unbearable…pulsing, wet, hungry. It would need to be fed and if he would not feed her then another would be found. But maybe this one. Maybe if she punished him, cut a few things off, let her daughters toy with him a bit.

Then he would beg for what she offered.

Because it was his and she had already selected. He would fill her needs or she would flay him alive…

 

82

Wearing the shadows, Angie’s tribe remained hidden.

For some time they had been trailing the Baron’s pack. It was not too difficult. At first, Angie had been impressed by the Baron…his strength, his cruelty, his knowledge of hunting and stalking. But the more he killed, the more drunk with power he became and the more careless was his leadership.

Angie’s tribe had watched with amusement as the Baron’s pack waged war with the other pack on Providence Street. He had lost the majority of his hunters. His bravado was stronger than his wisdom. Such was the way with males.

Now they had been drawn to the house.

Angie had known it was a trap for she had been past the place several times that night and each time did not linger. But the Baron had been drawn in effortlessly. Just by a hanging bag of rotting meat and dead fish outside the back door. It drew males from blocks around. This combined with the crisscrossing female urine scents was enough to drive any male wild.

And so it had.

As Angie watched, she saw the females of the pack hang back. They knew instinctively that the yard was not a good place to be. But the Baron would not submit to their fears just as he would not submit to his own.

The tribe waited to see what would happen next.

That there was death in the house, Angie knew without question. Her only concern was that the females who lived there would get the Baron before she did. And she needed to bring him down.

Even now, she could taste the juice of his heart in her mouth…

 

83

Louis heard screams and instantly jerked out of his fugue.

One of the woman’s daughters—Elissa—stumbled down the stairs with a spear punched clean through her. She clutched it and clawed at it, her own blood that was very dark in the firelight gushing from the wound, dripping off the shaft. There was more than just pain on her contorted face, but surprise. Absolute surprise.

A group of savages rushed down the stairs.

They were children.

Louis saw them and was amazed, though he shouldn’t have been by that point. Just kids. Most of them were grade school age, a few teenagers amongst them. All naked and painted up with blue, brown, and red stripes, brandishing spears and hatchets, their eyes flat black and predatory.

They converged on Elissa and brought her down with their hatchets, chopping on her until she was a writhing, red-splashed thing, her head split open, her face hanging by a thread, one arm on the floor.

The children went wild.

They screamed and shrieked their primal delight, hacking on the girl and splashing themselves with her blood. The oldest amongst them, a boy, shoved the others aside and peeled the girl’s scalp.

Louis knew they would see him by the fire.

He was next.

Where was the woman and the other girl?

Good question and one soon answered. For now they charged out of the shadows with axes. Four children had split skulls before the others could organize themselves. Maddie and Kylie, still painted ash-white, were soon spattered with blood and meat. The other children were terrified as these ghosts attacked them. They could see the scalps at their throats. The meat and limbs hanging from the rafters, the human remains and refuse scattered over the floor, smell the gut sack that smoked over the fire.

While Kylie swung her axe from side to side, Maddie hobbled about, circling the invaders who bunched together. She sang a high, shrill song that clearly frightened the children as she lumbered about them, her axe held high for the taking of lives. Even though Louis knew she was no ghost, he wondered if the children were frightened of her for that very reason.

By the looks of them, they weren’t exactly the passive, non-violent types.

But the woman had struck dread into them.

She circled them, singing her song louder and louder and something about it even chilled Louis. He did not know what any of it meant—it did not even sound like English or any other language that he had ever heard—but the threat behind the words was without question.

He fought at the ropes that held him.

If somehow he could convince the children to attack.

But they were submissive now, terrified. Several had even urinated. Who or what did they think the woman was? Granted, smeared with white ash, red bands enclosing her eyes and mouth, her teeth yellow and sharp, and her eyes like two windows looking into a madhouse…she was a real horror.

“You kids!” he called out. “She’s not a ghost! She’s not a spook! Kill her! Do you fucking hear me? Kill the bitch!”

Kylie hissed at him and Maddie broke off her song, snarling in his direction and there was absolutely no doubt in Louis’ mind that he was no longer the favored, coveted plaything, but a shank of meat to be slit and deboned, salted and cured. She would slit his throat, disembowel him and bathe in his blood, wear his skin and gather his bones in a red-stained heap.

He was definitely a dead man.

But then…he hadn’t been brought down to this awful place to be treated as a favored guest now, had he? And murder, violent and brutal as it would be, was far preferable to being used for the amusement of the witch and her daughters.

“Kill her!” Louis cried.

It was a terrible chance to take, but if he could goad the children into fighting back then maybe, just maybe, he had a chance. Regardless, his shouts disrupted the spell that Maddie was putting on them.

“Kill her! Goddammit, kill her!”

Maybe it was an authoritative adult voice, but one of them jabbed his spear at Kylie. She deflected it with her axe. But the others took the cue. A spear sank into Maddie’s leg and her axe nearly cleaved a girl in half. Now it became a nightmare of blood. Spears thrusting, hatchets slicing, axes chopping. Louis watched it momentarily with insane glee, wanting the blood like somebody watching a football game secretly wanted blood. But unlike sports, he truly got it as the children clashed with Maddie and her mother who fought with insane, raging hysteria.

That’s it, kids, Kill the witch. Slice her right fucking up.

Louis rolled closer to the fire, ever aware of that grotesque sack of human entrails smoking on the tripod. There was a carving knife on the other side of the pit and he planned on having it. Maybe he was going to die, but he was going to die with a knife in his hand, he was going to go down fighting.

A window shattered and something exploded on the floor, spraying flames over the wall and up a stack of cardboard boxes that started to burn right away.

Louis inched around the pit like a caterpillar until he saw the knife and brought his hands around until he grasped it. He immediately started sawing at the ropes on his wrist. It was expertly sharpened and right away the fibers began loosening one by one.

In the flames and the smoke, the blood sport near the stairs went on unheeded. It was like some twisted, blood-drenched nightmare. The children fighting in a pack, glistening red, Maddie and Kylie both slashed and bleeding but refusing to go down. Knives bisected skins and hatchets laid flesh open, spears sinking into bellies and axes shearing heads from necks.

It ended on the floor with the three remaining children chopping on Maddie while Kylie, split wide open and clutching her intestines in one hand, lurched in Louis’ direction. She had a knife in the other hand. Her hair was plastered to her face with blood. She limped forward, dragging a bad leg behind her that was nearly severed at the knee.

She made a low growling noise that was wet and gurgling as she choked on her own blood.

Louis’ hands were free, but not his ankles.

He had a knife but he didn’t know if he was any match for Kylie who was by that point beyond anything as simple as a savage. She was a gruesome, hobbling zombie, a monster who understood nothing but killing.

“Don’t do it,” Louis told her.

She spit out a glob of blood and came closer. She would have had him, too, and her last act in this world would have been to make him suffer unbelievably. But a spear plunged through her belly and then another through her chest. More children were rushing around. They sliced limbs and meats from the rafters overhead, kicked over the tripod which spilled to the floor, the gut bag bursting with a sickening hot smell as organs and entrails steamed over the dirt.

They were destroying everything.

Throwing bottles of gasoline at the walls and roaring with delight as the flames spread, consumed, and the air became as hazy as fog.

Louis slit his ankles free.

His legs were numb but he made them obey. He knocked a couple kids out of the way, dodging and darting towards the doorway. A spear just missed him. A girl swung something at him that he realized was a severed arm. And then he was jogging up the steps, coughing on the smoke.

More savage children.

They were pissing on the walls and pulling the stuffing out of sofa cushions, tipping over furniture and tossing their scat at one another. Several of them saw Louis, hesitated, maybe unsure if he was one of their own or not. They decided and bared their teeth.

Then a huge, bristling man stepped forward.

His face was tiger-striped with black slashes of paint, old and seamed, the eyes glittering with dementia. He wore a vest made of fur, his bare chest and arms filthy with blood and dirt. There was a necklace of what must have been human ears around his throat.

Louis hesitated.

Good God…was this Chalmers? Frank Chalmers from a few streets over?

He knew it was and then Chalmers dove on him. They rolled to the floor, knives forgotten, fighting tooth and nail. Chalmers was old, but in incredible shape from so many years in the Army humping it through jungles and leaping out of airplanes. Louis hit him three times and Chalmers barely flinched. His hand like a claw, he took hold of Louis’ windpipe and squeezed it close. Louis fought and tried to throw him off, but it was useless. The world went dark and he went limp.

When he opened his eyes again, he was lying in the grass.

The house was burning.

Two girls squatted by him and both had knives. They were no more than eight or ten years old and seeing them there—painted for war, splattered with flesh and blood, their eyes just gone wild—it was ludicrous. For a few days before they might have been selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. Now they were hunting people, slaughtering anyone or anything they could catch.

Louis licked the blood off his lips.

The girls moved in closer, crawling on hands and knees towards him like Preying Mantises stalking their prey. They had been waiting for him to come to. It would have been no fun for them to gut a sleeping man. One of the girls raised her knife for the kill…there was a human scalp on a thong around her wrist, the hair red and lustrous.

Then Louis heard a whooshing sound and a hatchet came flying end-over-end with a perfect throw, imbedding itself in the skull of the girl with the scalp.

Other savages charged in and it was war to the knife…

 

84

Macy was outside the lair, the church, and sucking in the not-so clean air of Greenlawn. She had status now. She was one of the Huntress’ clan. By blood-rite she had secured the right to stand with them, to hunt with them and butcher, and to die with them.

She heard a noise behind her.

She turned quick with sharp animal reflexes.

A man was standing there.

He was tall and filthy, hair hanging to his shoulders in greasy curls. His face was painted like a skull as all those of the inner circle. His body was likewise painted with white and blacks streaks, though smeared with ground-in blood, dirt, and animal fat.

He held a scalp in his hands, still bleeding from its owner.

The hair was lustrous gold, beautiful, like something spun on a spinning wheel. The moonlight caught it, held it, made the golden mane glow.

Macy recognized it.

The scalp of the girl she’d killed in the blood-rite.

Yes, she remembered it as she remembered the man who held it out to her. It was an offering. The scalp belonged to Macy. Golden, beautiful, any warrior would be pleased to have it hanging upon their scalp pole. He made sure it was brought to her.

Laid it at her feet.

Like burnt offerings.

Macy just stared at him with something leagues beyond hate. A mania that was all-consuming and burned bright.

She remembered him, too.

The wet dog stink of him as the others held her down and he mounted her. She remembered the pain between her legs and the oily feel of his skin against her own.

Having set the scalp at her feet, believing them to be conjoined now like fetal twins because of the rite, he looked up at her and smiled.

Macy slashed her knife against his throat.

He stumbled away, gagging on his own blood, shocked, mortified, beyond himself by what had just transpired. How could she do this, how, how, how, how—

Macy stepped over to him with her knife and smiled with a blood-stained mouth at the huge slaughter moon high above…

 

85

As the hatchet was embedded in the girl’s skull with a wet thudding noise and she pitched over on top of him, eyes glazed in death, Louis saw the barbarian hordes rushing in from all directions.

People screamed.

Howled.

Bayed like animals.

Spears were thrown. Axes cleaved off limbs and shattered bone and arrows punched through chests and bellies.

And there he was, barely conscious, his mind reeling in every imaginable direction as the warfare broke out in every quarter. He was confused…but happy. For just as the children brought hell and death down upon Maddie Sinclair and her slinking, animal daughters, now hell and death was coming down upon the children and their leader which had once been a fellow named Frank Chalmers, though only God knew what he was now.

Children dropped all around him, screaming with spears stuck in them. A boy with an arrow in one eye stumbled about, his face red and shining, then fell over. Louis looked for Chalmers because he knew he was out there somewhere delighting in this. A sixty-year old man who could fight better than any two twenty-year olds.

The other girl Louis had seen when he first opened his eyes was leaping around, trying to avoid the blades of older women who were cutting and hacking their way through Chalmer’s perverse pack of hunters and killers. She made a good show of it and then a woman with a sharpened stake in her hand—like something you went to slay a vampire with—took her by the hair, broke her over one knee and pierced her in the throat with it. Then she proceeded to decapitate her.

And look at how much she loves it! Chopping the head off a little kid! Have you ever, ever in your life, Louis, seen such genuine unadulterated pleasure on someone’s face? Such concentration, such conviction in the rightness of what they were doing?

And honestly he had not. And if there was anything left that could frighten him and maybe even unhinge him it was this: they were not human anymore, these people, not even remotely. Men, women, and, yes, children were just game.

Game for sport.

And game for meat.

On the slaughter went and he had a front row seat and never, not since the dawn of what men referred to as civilization, had there been a contest this bloody, this savage, this unrelentingly grisly.

The children, he soon saw, were really no match for this new army of butchers who seemed come sliding out of every shadow like snakes, leaping from every bush and even dropping from the trees. Primeval, obscene, anti-human—that was exactly the word that flashed through Louis’ crowded mind—and somehow reptilian, they prowled in for the kill, meat-hungry pythons and slinking human pit vipers and deadly rattlesnakes and fang-toothed mambas. The fact that they were covered in not just old blood and dirt, but a crazy warpaint/camouflage of red-and-green bands only heightened the effect.

They were human reptiles.

Many of them had bows and arrows and Louis had not seen that up to this point. They had axes and pikes, homemade spears and knives and you name it. And they were very good at what they were doing. The children went down beneath the slashing of blades and when they went down, they were instantly harvested. Trophies were slit free: ears, fingers, scalps, even genitals.

Louis had not been noticed yet, so he decided now was a good time to slip away.

Two women held a boy down, slit his mouth open into a bleeding, clownish grin and proceeded to cut his tongue out.

Louis almost fell right over them, but they paid him little attention.

He yanked a butcher’s knife out of a girl’s back and slashed a woman across the breasts who tried to take hold of him. The air was filled with smoke from the burning house, it lay across the yard like a thick and pungent fog. There was a mist of blood, bodies sprawled dismembered and still kicking at every turn. A scalped boy crawled in his direction. A woman dragging her own viscera grabbed at his legs as another strode out of the haze carrying a bloody dismembered head in each hand, swinging them by the hair.

Louis hopped over corpses, dodging savages with axes and body parts, slipping on the blood-covered grass, and finally tripping over a torso.

When he came back up he was no longer anonymous.

Recognized.

Frank Chalmers stood there, huge and shaggy with the blood-matted fur vest on, like something from a Pliocene cave. He had a hatchet in one hand and a sickle in the other. Louis did not doubt for one moment that he had come to kill him. His body swayed back and forth as if to some unheard melody, his muscles bunching beneath his skin, his knotted hands gripping his weapons and anxious to put them to use.

Louis got up and faced him.

He knew Frank very well, but Frank was dead. This was not Frank.

He felt very useless with his butcher knife facing down this grinning, war-painted bear of a man who at sixty still bristled with corded muscle, his flesh like alligator hide, slit and cut and scarred but still holding together.

Chalmers let out a cry and came right at Louis.

Louis tried to get away from him, but there were too many bodies, too many savages crowding in. The sickle nearly took off the end of his nose and the hatchet came down at what seemed the same time, striking the blade of the butcher knife and knocking it out of his hand, leaving his arm numb right up to the shoulder joint.

That’s how easy it was for Frank Chalmers, the pack Baron.

Louis was his and he knew it. That after all he had been through that it would end with this crazy sonofabitch just wasn’t acceptable. When Chalmers moved again, Louis jumped away, tripped over someone, found a broomstick that had been sharpened into a spear and came right at the bigger man.

It was sheer suicide.

But it worked.

The counter-attack threw Chalmers off his guard and bought Louis enough time to make a valiant jab at him or to run like crazy. It was at that moment that arrows thudded into Chalmers’ left arm and ribs. He cried out and fell back and Louis vaulted in and gave him the spear right in his exposed belly, sinking it deep with all his strength until he felt it hit something in there, maybe bone, and become firmly lodged.

Chalmers screamed and swung his sickle.

Had the blade hit Louis it would have probably split his face open, but Chalmers swung it backhand and hit him with the unsharpened edge. Still, it was quite a blow. Louis was hit in the face and knocked backwards. Just in time to catch an arrow just above the kneecap.

He went down.

He hit the ground, rolling in the bloody grass, and when he opened his eyes Chalmers was gone and there was that arrow sunk into the meat of his leg, a patch of blood soaking through his jeans.

Then the pain hit him.

Things hadn’t exactly been easy for him that night. His body had taken its fair share of abuse…but this was beyond all that. At first, when he went down, there was just the sting of impact…but now, the real pain arrived. It hit him blindly and with full force. There was nothing remotely subtle about it. It exploded in his leg and made him cry out, made something inside him roll over as wave after wave of agony moved through him tearing up everything in its path.

And when he again was able to take in his surroundings, his face covered with a warm, sour-smelling sweat, he saw a woman advancing on him. She carried a human head on the end of a spear…

 

86

Macy had him on the ground and no one interfered.

Most of the clan had followed the Huntress off on a hunt and those that remained did not interfere. Macy stood over him, the man that had raped her, with a bloody knife in one hand. There had been a time, perhaps ages ago, when Macy Merchant had been a very shy, bookish girl who cringed at the idea of swatting a fly or stepping on a spider, but that Macy was as extinct as the tribes the people of the world had regressed into.

She watched him bleed to death but it was hardly enough.

She raised her knife over her head and jabbed him in the belly, the spray of hot blood in her face invigorating as she put both hands on the hilt and forced the blade upwards, gutting him like a trout.

He died squirming in his own blood and entrails and Macy watched death take him with a cold, almost clinical eye. She rose up from his carcass, studying the blood on her knife, her hands, her arms.

Unafraid, raging with primal memory, she licked it off her fingers…

 

87

Louis watched the woman approach him and he was not entirely sure it was a woman. She was wearing a freshly peeled human hide and a looping scarf of bowels around her throat. As she glided towards him, she was muttering something under her breath in a hoarse, gargly sort of voice, brandishing the head of a teenage boy on a sharpened pole in one hand and an axe in the other.

What the hell is this now?

It was a woman, naked, washed down with blood and ceremonial paint. Her hair was a tangled, snarled mess plaited with what looked to be bones and sticks and shining beads. Her face was an absolute atrocity, like some gruesome tribal mask: flesh peeled away from her mouth in a lopsided oval so that her red-stained teeth were on full display, a slat of bone shoved through her nose, eyes like bleeding holes.

Frank Chalmers had been bad enough…but this…God.

She saw him there, singled him out from the masses in the streaming moonlight, and gestured at him with her axe, her teeth parting and a high, keening howl of rage and savagery cutting through the night.

Louis got to his feet and it was no easy thing with the pain throbbing in his leg. But he did get up and he faced her uneasily with the butcher knife in his hand.

The warrior woman charged, tossing the head pole aside. She came swinging her axe, absolutely demented and filled with primitive wrath. She looked like some kind of living voodoo fetish doll, a surreal version of a cannibal witch-doctor.

Louis ducked under the axe and slashed out with his knife.

But he was far too slow or maybe she was just too fast.

He missed her entirely and as regained his balance and brought his knife-hand around, she lashed out with a foot and kicked him in the side. His leg gave out immediately in a baptismal of pain and he went face-first into the grass, his head spinning and the breath gasping from his lungs.

She jumped on his back, a hot, greasy hand grabbed his hair and yanked his head back for throat-slitting. At least that’s what he expected, but the blade never came, but her teeth did. She seized his ear and bit right through it. They were filed sharp as daggers and sliced right through the cartilage. The pain made Louis forget about his leg. He thrashed beneath her as she held on, his bloody ear clenched in her jaws. He threw himself this way and that. When he got her off balance, he brought his elbow back and felt it mash into her face.

That did it.

She came up right away, grinning cadaverously in the moonlight, her teeth glistening with fresh blood. She looked at him with those dreadful vulpine eyes and uttered a growling guttural sound that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

“Bitch!” he cried at her. “Stinking rotten fucking bitch!”

It meant nothing to her, of course, but it did wonders for his adrenaline and hatred. She dove at him and he met her and they fought tooth and claw in the grass, rolling through the blood and spilled viscera. No weapons, just the rage of the primitive and the absolute loathing of the civilized man for such racial backsliding. It was like fighting a serpent. She writhed and squirmed with a fluid muscular grace, her teeth biting into him and her nails tearing him open.

Finally, he again threw her.

On all fours she faced him, a primordial thing of bloodlust, eyes wide and almost luminous like new moons. The stench of hot urine wafted from her. That and a sharp, gagging musk that was revolting.

She could have easily grabbed a weapon, but she did not. She was going to take him down like an animal with claws and teeth and nothing less would be acceptable to her.

Louis never had time to get his knife because she came again and he met her, raining down a series of blows on her that had no effect. He managed to get behind her, to lock an arm around her throat. He rode her like that while she thrashed and growled and snapped, coming alive beneath him, but he held fast, forcing her head back with a strength he didn’t know he possessed.

She lost balance and collapsed under his weight.

He yanked her head back, fingers digging into her eyes until she screamed and still he kept yanking and straining until she began to make wheezing, gagging sounds in her throat. Things began to pop and snap in there. He kept stretching it back until his face was buried in her oily warm throat. Until he could smell her filthy reek and taste her foul dog-smell.

He felt something pulsing in her throat.

Something throbbing and pumping and straining.

Without thought, wired mainly on instinct, he sank his teeth into her throat, biting and gnashing and tearing until that pulsing thing sheared open and sprayed hot, salty blood down his throat and into his face.

But he did not let go.

He kept chewing and ripping as the woman went slack beneath him.

He held onto her until she was limp beneath him. He limped maybe three or four feet and went down in the grass, vomiting, cleansing himself of the unclean, polluted taste of her.

When he gained his feet, there was nothing but corpses scattered in the moonlight. The hunters had moved on…

88

Angie closed in on the Baron.

It was not difficult. After the warfare broke between her tribe and the Baron’s pack, he had few followers. His pack was mostly killed, wounded, or driven off into the night. It was only a matter then of following his blood trail.

That he had come this far was testament to his strength.

His vitality.

Angie had tracked his blood spoor for nearly three blocks until it ended here, at the athletic field behind the high school where the Greenlawn High Wildcats strutted their stuff on the gridiron come September.

Angie was ignorant of all that, of course.

She followed his blood trail to the fence, circling it quietly, looking for some means of egress. But even the gate was locked. She lost the Baron’s spoor for a moment, but then caught his scent where he’d urinated on a tree. Angie sniffed this for telltale signs of his condition. The urine had a weak smell. She could scent the blood in it and the waning trace odors of the hormones usually associated with a healthy, fighting animal.

The Baron was dying.

She found where he’d gone over the fence. Shouldering her bow, she climbed up and over, dropping silently on all fours into the grass.

The spoor was simple to track now on the freshly-shorn grass. He was bleeding badly and it was splashed in copious amounts everywhere. Yes, she could see him now. He was staggering, moving for a few feet, falling, then rising, pushing himself on through willpower and little else. There were woods beyond the field and this is where he was going: he wanted to die in the forest where his kind had always been born.

His darkened shape was simple to pick out on the flat field in the moonlight.

Angie put an arrow in her bow, stretched it, sighted in on the feeble shape in the distance. Clenching her teeth with a slow exhalation of air, she let it fly. He let out a garbled cry as it struck him in the back.

He pitched forward, limbs jerking.

Now! Take your kill! Make it yours!

Angie rushed out and he heard her coming, tried to crawl away from her. But it did no good. She stood above him, a painted and bloody tribal warrior maiden, breathing deeply, smelling the death of her pray and reveling in it as only the hunter can.

Menstrual blood ran down the inside of one leg.

She leaped on him, landing hard, his breath coming out in a whooshing gasp. She grabbed the arrow in his back and yanked it out. He moaned and tried to crawl away. She let him. When he made it a few feet, she blocked his path and stabbed him lightly with the arrow until he turned. And when he crawled in a different direction, she stabbed him again. She toyed with him a bit as she liked to with her kills. It amused her. To toy with prey was the world’s oldest form of foreplay.

He stopped crawling, looking up at her with fixed hatred.

He made a grunting, puffing noise. He coughed out ribbons of blood. His fur pelt was shiny and wet with it. Still, even weakened, he was huge and vicious. His tongue lolled from his bloody mouth, his nose sniffing.

Angie dropped to her knees to watch his death throes.

He closed his eyes…then, with a final burst of strength and a terrible muffled roar deep in the chimney of his throat, he leaped at her.

She was caught by surprise, knocked into the grass.

He pinned her down, his eyes filled with a deadly intensity

Angie slid her knife from its sheath.

She did not fight.

This stopped the Baron momentarily. He cocked his head sideways.

She slashed him in the face, slicing a strip of meat from his temple to jawbone. He tightened his grip on her throat and she buried the knife in his eyesocket.

He made a drawn-out growling sound…and attacked again, filled with a hideous, primal rage. Streamers of vile-smelling saliva oozed from his jaws. Blood and tissue dripped from his ruined eye. Then as his jaws came at her, she buried the blade of the butcher’s knife into his belly right to the hilt.

The Baron released her with a squealing, miserable sound like a run-down puppy…then he went crazy, snapping and biting and clawing.

Angie was howling herself: an atavistic war cry pulled up from the forgotten, shuttered basement of human history.

And as she did so, as the Baron’s fangs nipped at her face, tearing a hurting channel into her cheek, she drew the knife up from his belly to his sternum. His viscera, hot and steaming and slimy, spilled over her and its reek was raw, horrible…and delicious, ultimately invigorating.

Angie threw him to the ground and began to slash and hack his corpse. The knife rose and fell and blood splashed and flesh was bisected and she kept going until she’d thoroughly mutilated his hide, his head nearly severed from its neck.

Hurting, but alive because of it, her veins surging with electricity, Angie let out a deafening shriek and buried the knife in her kill. Then she broke open his ribs and carved his heart free. It was hot and pulsing in her hands. She brought it to her mouth, licking it, tasting it, coveting the muscled, marbled mass. Then bit into it with a shuddering carnal moan.

She tore it apart with a violent feeding frenzy until her face was covered in blood, tissue, and hot juices.

She fell back into the grass, sated, fulfilled, feeling the Baron’s strength and cunning becoming her own. Beneath the waning eye of the moon, the night was made complete…

 

89

The Huntress returned to the place she remembered.

It was a lair.

A lair she had once shared with the man, but long ago for she could not scent herself there. She immediately set about marking the place with her urine, her blood, her scat until her smell was everywhere and those that dared come here would know, would sense the warning and the danger and flee.

She brought in meat and stuffed it in nooks and crannies where it would season and age properly. She salted several hides, brought in leaves and sticks and brush for the nest. Then she brought in the carcass of a freshly-killed man. She set out her collection of knives that she had scavenged. Knives for scraping and boning, skinning and slitting.

When the man returned he would see these things.

He would smell her upon them.

He would know this was his lair.

When things were ready, the Huntress went back out into the night. Already the horizon was stained with indigo. The sun would be up soon and she knew the man would come here to lair. He had to. He would be drawn here as she was.

The Huntress moved off into the night.

For one last kill, one last feast of blood to give thanks to the moon goddess above with an offering of meat and death…

 

90

At last.

Louis found a car with keys in it. A little Ford Escort that smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. He had checked dozens of cars since he left the fields of the dead with the taste of the warrior woman’s blood still gamey and fetid in his mouth. This was the first one with keys. This was his salvation. This was his deliverance. He did not know where he was going and common sense told him there really wasn’t anywhere to go, but he was going nonetheless. He had to escape the primeval jungle of Greenlawn and his mind did not want to think about what came after that.

He turned the car over.

It started easily enough.

He shifted, released the clutch, and drove through the battle-ravaged streets of his home town. There was wreckage everywhere. Entire neighborhoods were still burning. Bodies were sprawled in the streets. Some were hanging in the trees.

He would not think about it.

He would not let himself understand what it meant, that Greenlawn was just another piece in a huge puzzle that had, in the course of less that twenty-four hours, completely gutted civilization from one end to another. He turned on the radio but there was nothing but dead air. All the power was out in Greenlawn now.

Yes, finally, a world lit only by fire.

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…

Earl Gould.

Jesus, Earl Gould.

Somehow he had forgotten about him as he was beginning to realize that he was forgetting about a lot of things. He would not think about it. He followed Providence Street until it crossed the river, then turned onto Main. He followed it right out of town, knowing that it hooked up with the county road and eventually led to highway 421. But where then? He did not know and he did not want to ask himself.

The sun would be up soon…and what would it see? What would it light? A world thrown back in time to the Pleistocene and all because of a gene. A microscopic chemical transmission of heredity.

Louis could not make sense of it. Not any longer.

He touched the bloody scab at his leg where the arrow had been. It would need attention soon or it would become infected.

Faces passed through his mind—Michelle, Macy, Dick Starling—too many to make sense of and each of them bringing pain to him.

Just outside town there was a sign the Kiwanis had put up: WELCOME TO GREENLAWN. His headlights splashed over it. Somebody had speared a human head atop of it. How fitting.

Ahead, there were silhouettes in the road.

Many of them.

Naked people standing in the road as the car sped down on them. They had regressed to the point that they did not understand what the car symbolized. That it was a moving machine that would crush them. Like deer, they stood there, transfixed by the headlights. Louis slowed down, knowing that he would have to drive right through them. The idea was not as offensive as it once might have been for he wanted to kill then. They represented everything he hated now.

He sounded the horn a few times and they only moved forward.

They were going to attack the car.

They were charging it with axes and spears, hammers and pikes and God knows what, all with that crazy animal gleam in their eyes. They were prehistoric hunters who had discovered a monster in their midst and they were going to kill it. They were going to slay the beast, bring the mastodon down.

Louis stopped the car, just amazed by what he was seeing.

Now he shifted into gear and slammed down on the accelerator. Fucking idiots. Fucking primitive idiots. Bear skins and tribes and stone fucking knives. It was incomprehensible. They charged the car and he plowed right into them, knocking three aside and rolling over the body of a fourth. But one of them swung something at the car and it had shattered the passenger side window. The Escort rocked with the impact but kept rolling.

Thank God, thank God.

Dammit.

More of them.

The same scene all over again. They were attacking the car. He hit a few of them and one of those was knocked up from the impact, crashing into the windshield. The glass went white with spidewebbing, the body still wedged there, blood running down the cracks. By then Louis could not see where he was going. He let out a mad scream as he saw that they were everywhere, naked people crowding the shoulders and standing in the road. He hit two or three more.

The wheel spun in his hands.

He screamed again as the car was pelted with rocks and the body of the person on the windshield fell into the car as the blood-streaked safety glass let loose. The body slid across the dashboard and fell right into his lap. He jammed the breaks as he tried to fight the bleeding husk off him. The car skidded through gravel, bumped and rolled, and then found a ditch and flipped right onto its side.

Louis could hear them howling in the distance.

He wasn’t injured.

The corpse—a man—had fallen into the backseat when the car went over. There was no time. Louis crawled through the missing glass of the passenger side window, pulling himself out. He slipped and fell into the ditch, right into about three feet of stagnant water. He splashed free, up the grassy bank. In the light of the rising sun he could see a farmer’s field spread out, sheep grazing.

He limped forward, his lungs aching, his breath hot in his throat.

The world was still shadowy and he stumbled right out into a pack of the savages. They had come here into this field after the sheep. The sheep were all dead. Skinned. What he had seen was not sheep grazing, but savages wearing their blood-spattered white hides.

Dozens of them rose up around him and he tripped over his own feet, going down in the grass.

He heard birds singing. The rooting, grunting sounds of the savages as they moved in on him. This was it. They had him and there was no more running, no more hiding, no more anything. But maybe better, he thought, to get it done with. For how long can you run when you’re the last man on earth and the monsters are closing in from every side?

Better to die than become like them.

He watched them come on and they offended him on every level. Throwbacks to a time when humans were nothing but filthy, shaggy predators covered in hides and ritualistic tattoos and piercings. Things that picked through bone heaps and fashioned crude weapons, coveting the skulls of their ancestors and the scalps of their enemies, chanting to long-forgotten pagan gods of the hunt, rearing their foul young in shadowy, meat-smelling caves where flesh was smoked—animal and human—over the ritual fires which lit their tenebrous, malevolent little world.

No, he refused to become something like that.

As they pressed in around him, pulling at him and scratching him, he lost consciousness and what a delicious fall it was headlong into the darkness, into the oblivion of nothingness. Even they could not get him here.

He was safe…

 

91

He awoke later and the sun was up.

He was whole.

He had not been sliced up or spitted.

His leg did not hurt so bad and he saw it had been packed with a crude poultice of mud, leaves, and herbs. Whatever that stuff was it was working.

But he was not alone.

He was in the grass, the stinking pelt of a sheep thrown over him. There was a woman with him, her naked back pressed to his chest and her ass pressed to his groin. They had always slept like that, curled into one another—

Michelle.

He was with Michelle as crazy as that sounded. And he dared not move because it would shatter the fantasy, destroy the dream…but then he realized it wasn’t a dream at all. He was with her. Really with her. She was alive and breathing and warm. She smelled like blood and dark earth and raw meat, but it was still Michelle, her body painted or not.

Swallowing down his fear, he pressed into her, let his hands glide over her smooth tanned flesh. She felt the same. She responded immediately, grinding her ass into him. And he grew hard, despite the violent smell coming off her—or maybe because of it—he grew hard, engorged, and he thought at that moment that he’d never, ever been that hard before, that aroused, that hungry for the act. He trembled for it. His blood burned in his veins. He reached out. Michelle moaned. Still behind her, he grasped her ass in his hands, reaching down and pulling one of her long legs up so that he could enter her.

She was wet for it.

He pushed into her violently, his thighs slapping against her ass cheeks and she made grunting, groaning sounds of pleasure that he barely heard above his own. He pounded into her until he could stand it no more than he buried himself in her, gripping her legs and trembling as he came.

Then he fell away, barely able to breathe.

It was like he had just emptied himself of something more than just semen. She turned around and grinned at him with bloody teeth, still a beast of the night, still a regressed animalistic hunter. Her dark hair was slicked with grease, braided with bones and beads. Her face was still painted white, eyes set in blackened hollows, nose and lips darkened. She was savage, primordial, but still beautiful, maybe even more so reduced to her simplest form. A sleek and hungry cat…but submissive now, not deadly, his wife as she’d always been his wife.

She dug a piece of raw meat from somewhere.

She offered it to him.

No, he would not eat his meat raw. If he did that then he was no better than they were and he had to hang onto his humanity. He had to. But the hunger. It opened in his belly, it chewed at his stomach. He could smell the salty blood, the meat marbled with veins of fat. He began to drool.

Don’t do it. Please Louis, don’t do it. You’re right on the edge now. The gene is active in you. You’re standing on the edge of a huge black pit and beneath is the crawling blackness of prehistory.

Do not eat the meat.

Do not even taste it.

One taste and you will not be a man.

You will be shoved into the darkness.

The primal fall…

He snatched the meat from her and bit into it, moaning with pleasure. Oh, how good it was. How wonderful. How delightful and sensuous it felt upon his tongue as its juices filled his mouth and made him feel a simple joy he had never known before, one long denied him, but one that somehow owned him and made him part of what it was and what he would never be again.

Michelle watched him eat.

She smiled.

When he was done, he curled up against her again and was instantly aroused. His wife. His female. The meat had excited him and now he needed to have her, to dominate her. He took her again. He was crude, physical, forcing pain upon her and delighting in the fact. When again he was spent, there was blood in his mouth and he realized he had bitten into her shoulder.

He closed his eyes, content now.

His dreams were simple and fulfilling.

When he opened his eyes he was alone. He started awake, peeled the sheep’s hide from him. The sun was high in the sky. There were abandoned sheep hides everywhere but no people to go with them. Naked, but unashamed of the fact, he stood up and, listening, sensing for danger. They were gone and he was alone. Where had the clan gone?

He looked around for a weapon. Something he could grip in his hand and kill with. For in his mind he dreamed the dream of the first man, the primal man, the original man. And that dream was the dream of a weapon.

The sun hot on his bare skin, he looked for something to hit or stab with. Because only then, only with a weapon in hand, was he above the beasts…not a grubbing root-eater, but a man…a man…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Epilogue

 

1

Louis shambled through the streets carrying a bone.

He slapped the ball knob of it in his other palm, knowing it could cause damage, knowing it could bring down enemies and also prey. And a man, he knew, was judged by the weapons he carried and the game he killed.

I need to find the girl. It is the season for the girl.

He had covered himself in river mud so that his enemies could not spot him so easily. The stench of the river bottoms also made his scent harder to pinpoint. He knew these things without thinking them. They were part and parcel of who he was. Imprinted onto the blueprint of his being.

He had found the rest of the clan.

Something had happened. They had all rushed off and left him. He found hundreds of corpses in the river. So many that he could have walked across them without ever getting his feet wet. He understood only that they were dead. It meant little more to him than that. He did not know that the gene that had been activated within them had reached fruition with a mindless mass migration wherein everyone—or nearly all—the town’s former residents heralded the call of the wild and left in a mad rush, trampling and killing one another, each seized by the inexplicable desire to run and run and run, to seek new feeding grounds and nesting habitat. The old, the wounded, the weak and diseased were purged in the process, their bodies lying everywhere. The others kept running through the fields and forests until what was inside them, what was activating them, finally ceased.

And by then, only a third of them were still alive.

In the coming days, they would regroup and form tribal units for the hunt.

Louis was unaware of this. Such things did not concern him. He was only interested in finding food, shelter, water, and possibly a mate. When he had the previous he would have the latter for the females always came when a male had built himself a handsome lair.

He walked through the town, pissing his scent so others would smell it and remember him.

He stepped over mutilated cadavers, snarled at dogs that were feeding upon them. A few people were digging through overturned garbage cans. He paid them no mind. Nor the few others that walked on past with distinctively simian strides. Brushing flies from his face, he saw only Greenlawn which lay before him like a ravaged and violated corpse.

By instinct and memory, he found the house.

The walls were painted with shit and blood. There was a carcass in the corner and a collection of fine cutting knives. Someone had made a comfortable nest of leaves and sticks and boughs. He would sleep in it. This would be his lair. He could smell something very familiar here. A trace odor of the woman he had laid with under the sheep hide. She did not concern him.

She was called something once and her feel was velvet, her skin like satin, her taste that of honey and secret sweetness—

He studied the symbols written in shit and blood on the walls. He picked at a scab on his foot, examining the numerous injuries, touching them, picking at them until fresh blood ran. He sniffed his armpits, his crotch, licking his fingertips and remembering the field of sheep. He could remember little else.

The girl.

Yes, he could remember the girl.

She was young and ripe and firm.

She would come, yes, he knew she would come. Even now she was probably looking for him as he had looked for her in the streets. He had marked scent posts with his urine throughout the city. His scent would lead her here.

Scratching his ass, he hummed a song and picked at his teeth, finding tasty bits wedged in them. Each one reminded him of things. Many made no sense. He found a piece of meat under a chair. It was old and its smell was intriguing. Sometimes, the worse something smelled, the more a man wanted to roll himself in it or taste it.

He ate the meat and curled up in the nest.

He slept…

 

2

He came awake later to a smell of blood that was rich and gamey. It came from the girl who stood over him, watching him. Yes, the girl. She had found her way to him. He looked up into her big chocolate brown eyes, studied the curve of her smallish breasts, the roundness of her hips, her tangled hair the color of wheat chaff. Her skin was scabbed with dried blood.

He grunted at her.

She licked her plump lips, gathered saliva with her tongue, then spit on him so he would know her smell. He rubbed her saliva on his fingers, smelling it, tasting it. It was pleasing and good.

This is the girl who lived in my heart. She has come here. It is her season.

He got to his feet and took hold of her roughly. She fought and clawed and he threw her down in the nest. He urinated on her to mark her with his scent. Once he did so, she accepted things and did not fight so.

He jumped on top of her and pressed a hand to her mouth and she bit it. He struck her and she scratched him. She seemed to find the play amusing. She watched him as he spread her legs and made ready to take her. He penetrated her and she gasped, grinding her teeth and hissing at him. This and only this is what she had been dreaming of, even before in those times she could no longer remember, she knew she dreamed of this and wanted it and felt it in her blood until it became part of her, the heat that had simmered before but now made her burn.

As he rammed into her, grunting and growling, a light passed through her eyes and in that momentary burst of light there was absolute horror because this was not how it was supposed to be at all, oh dear God, not like this, like this, like this…oh please, Louis it was not supposed to be like this…

But then it was gone and he pumped into her and she squirmed with the feel of it, knowing this was who and what she was and who and what he was, that they were joined in the ancient dance of the heat, his hands wrapped around her neck and her nails dug deep into his flesh and the blood ran and the world swam with tiny black dots and a voice in her head screamed until it became a howling, an atavistic baying, as every cell in her body electrified with primal starving estrus, yes, yes, yes, just like this, just like this, do it faster and faster, kill me kill me kill me—

 

—The End—