The Devil Next Door

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.