The Devil Next Door (19 page)

The cop with the bitten arm let his partner drag him down to the first aid station, leaving Hansel alone with the unconscious woman. She was breathing hard, her bathrobe hooked up around her waist, legs splayed in opposite directions. Catching his breath, Hansel pulled out his handcuffs and kneeled beside her. One eye was open and staring, a metallic gleam to it; the other was closed. He took hold of her left arm and the flesh was hot and greasy feeling. He snapped a cuff on it and as he was about to put the other on, Moreland appeared.

“Oh, my Christ,” he said.

Hansel lifted her and snapped the other cuff on her, breathing easier when it was done with. He couldn’t stand the feel of her beneath his hands, her flesh feverish and moist, almost reptilian in its slipperiness. He looked down at the one eye and it reminded him of the eye of a jungle snake, flat and predatory.

“She was heading right for your office, Bob,” he said. “She had a knife.”

Moreland just stared dumbly.

“
You better get that council together, Bob,” he breathed. “We need people in here. The mayor can give the governor a jingle, I’m thinking. We need bodies in here. National Guard and maybe the CDC out of Atlanta. This goes on, we’ll have a fucking revolution by tonight. You hearing me, Bob? We need martial law here.”

That’s what came pouring out of Ray Hansel’s mouth, even though he knew none of the above was remotely practical. Knee-jerk, that’s what it was. Whole state was going crazy, governor wouldn’t give a high hot shit about goddamn Greenlawn.

But Moreland was oblivious to anything he was saying. He kept staring at the woman sprawled on the floor. Hansel did not like what was in his eyes.

“Bob…Bob, do you know her?” he asked.

Moreland slowly nodded his head. “Yes…yes, I do. It’s my wife…”

Hansel swallowed.

And then downstairs, the screaming started…

29

When Susan Donnel pulled into the driveway of her house on Tessler Avenue, she was in a state of high panic. She’d downed a Darvocet at lunch and washed it down with two Bacardi and Cokes. The world was unraveling. So much was happening in so many different places that she refused to even listen to the radio anymore.

Doom.

Gloom.

Horror.

And this time it wasn’t just in Afghanistan or the Left Bank. It was here. It was everywhere. Even Greenlawn, her oasis, had lost its collective mind. As she drove through town, she saw devastation. Burning houses. Trash in the streets. Dogs running in packs. People running wild and naked in the streets.

And when she pulled in the driveway, hoping Ray was home and wondering why he wasn’t answering his cell, she had to sit behind the wheel for five minutes. It took that long to pry her fingers off it. They were white-knuckled claws. Her stomach was upset. Her head was aching. She was shaking, every muscle drawn taut.

She stepped out into the driveway.

Into the absolute silence of Tessler Avenue. Not so much as a passing car. A kid on a bike. The hum of a lawnmower. Nothing. Oh, Jesus, that silence was worse than just about anything. Holding back a cry, she ran into the house.

“Ray!” she called.
“Ray!”

Dammit, it was his day off. His car was at the curb. He had to be here, he just had to be. The house was neat. There were the remains of a sandwich on the table. Ray’s lunch. She dashed from room to room in a frantic, sweaty panic. They would get out of town. They would pack up what they needed and get up to the cabin on Indian Creek, wait for this…
madness
to blow over. For God help her, it had to, it just had to.

He wasn’t in the house.

Dammit!

She ran outside, looked in the backyard, saw the door to the garage was open. Of course. Of course. The garage. His private haven. Probably practicing his OCD, arranging his gardening tools or numbering his screws.

“Ray! Ray! Goddammit, Ray, why aren’t you—”

A dank clamminess spread over flesh, her head spun, cold sweat ran down her face in rivers. She went down to her knees, a scream breaking loose in her throat.
“No, no, no, no, no, Jesus God, no…”

Ray was hanging on the wall.

He was hanging by a hook there amongst the shovels, rakes, and hoes. Her husband. Her lover. Her rock.
Hanging there.
His eyes were wide and staring, the crown of his head ruptured, cleaved open in a grisly, jagged rent. Fingers of scarlet blood had run down his face, accentuating his chalk-white pallor.

Screaming, crying, her mind gone to sauce, Susan crawled out of the garage on all fours. She found her feet, staggered a bit, went down in the grass, vomiting. A voice in her head kept saying that such things as this could not be. They’d gotten up together this morning. Ray had made her breakfast. They’d laughed together. They’d showered together. He kissed her goodbye at the door and now…and now…

Susan ran.

Marge, she thought, Marge.

She ran next door, diving right over Ray’s carefully sculpted hedges and landing face-first in a flowerbed. She scrambled through the yard. The Shermer’s. Marge Shermer was practically like a mother to her. Her husband, Bill, was cranky, but he would know what to do. He was a crusty old war vet that always seemed to know what to do. He would know. Susan saw his pick-up truck in the driveway. The windshield was shattered.

Oh, no.

She went to the door, didn’t bother knocking. Inside, there was wreckage. Paintings had been yanked off the walls. The TV set was tipped over. Potted plants scattered from one end of the living room to the other. She trampled across black potting soil, not daring to call out. Something inside her, long dormant, was aware now. It sensed danger. No sense alerting anyone or any
thing
to her location.

She slipped into the kitchen, flattened herself up against the refrigerator.

The same, dear God, it was the same. Cupboards had been emptied, the contents of drawers scattered over the floor: knives, spoons, forks. Canisters of flour and sugar had been spilled about. There were bloody handprints on the countertops. The walls looked like they’d been gouged with knives.

There was a stink of raw urine in the air.

Somebody had gone insane in here and then pissed with glee.

Susan went down to the floor, grabbed a knife.

Tears ran from her eyes, drool filled her mouth. There was a wild tic at the corner of one eye. Shadows jumped in her brain. She was hearing a creaking sound. It was coming from the backyard. Tensing, Susan crept over the floor, leaving footprints in the flour. She eased herself up the counter so she could peer through the kitchen window out into the yard.

Careful, don’t give yourself away.

She saw the bushes back there, the potting shed. She craned her neck. There was the clothesline. A gentle breeze made sheets flap. But that creaking. That continual creaking. It reminded her of—

She craned her neck. Her body was prickly with sweat, her blouse stuck to her back. She saw…she saw Marge. Marge was hanging from the oak tree back there. Susan saw it, wanted to scream, to cry out, to do many things, but by that point something had shut down in her.

So she just looked.

Marge, poor old arthritic Marge, was strung up from that oak like a lynched desperado in an old western. She was naked, her body bloated and purple and broken. Her face was a swollen contusion. She was only recognizable by her fine silver, moon-spun hair. It looked like she had been beaten to death. With bats. With boards. With hammers. It was hard to know. Her limbs were shattered, bent at unnatural angles.

Susan didn’t bother looking for Bill.

Not running now, but moving with a quick, stealthy burst of speed like a hunted animal. She went to the Lychek’s next door. They were a bunch of Bible-thumping Jehovah’s Witnesses who were always leaving pamphlets and leaflets in everyone’s mailboxes: SIGNS OF THE SECOND COMING or JESUS IS HERE NOW ON EARTH or YOU CAN BE GOD’S FRIEND! Nobody liked the Lychek’s. They didn’t believe in things like Christmas or Halloween. Pagan holidays, they said. The neighborhood kids always pranked them on Halloween. Oh, the awful things they did.

But Susan didn’t care what they believed or what they didn’t believe. For she could not be sure at that moment, as the world lost solidity and focus for her, just exactly what she believed in herself anymore.

She didn’t bother knocking.

She stepped right in, brandishing her knife, waiting for attack that never came. She could smell blood, shit, piss, worse things. The living room was trashed. Bound volumes of
The Watchtower, Awake!,
and
Our Kingdom Ministry
had been yanked from bookshelves, pages torn out in a wild rage. They lay everywhere like fallen autumn leaves along with dozens of pamphlets preaching against progressive ideas like evolution and the separation of church and state. Then someone had defecated all over them. And by the amount of shit heaped and smeared on those pages, probably quite a few people. Susan immediately had a lunatic scenario in her head where a bunch of crazies came in here, torn up the books, and then, dropping their drawers, squatted down and happily shit together.

It was ridiculous.

But she feared it wasn’t far from the truth.

Apparently they’d been using the pages as toilet paper, too, which was probably the most constructive use any of it had ever been put to, she decided.

Thump, thump, thump.

Susan went down in a crouch. The knife trembled in her hand. That thumping. What was this now? It was coming from a doorway at the far side of the room, possibly a dining room. She thought of running. Her animal sense demanded it. But being that she was still more or less a reasoning being, she was curious.

Tensed, ready for battle, she stepped across the room, very aware that she was stepping through human shit. The smell was overpowering, sickening. She noticed that there were bare human footprints in the waste, that filthy prints led away into the room she was now creeping up on.

She got to the doorway.

Thump, thump, thump.

Louder now. She could hear a man grunting, a woman gasping. The sound of flesh slapping against flesh. No, no, it couldn’t be
that.
Not here. Not with shit spread all over the place. No human beings could be that vulgar, that crude, that low and bestial. But the sounds were getting louder and louder. There was no mistaking them. Despite herself, Susan felt a stirring inside her.

Looked in there.

A man and woman were screwing on the floor. The man was entirely naked, his body covered with scratches and dried bloodstains. The woman wore only a short skirt and this was pushed up around her hips. Another woman, older, was crouched by them, rocking back and forth in mimic of their motions, gnawing on an apple.

And beyond them…in fact, only a few feet away…the remains of the Nychek’s, Jack and Wendy. Her legs were missing. He’d been split open like a suckling pig, his abdomen wide open. His entrails bulged out, were heaped on the floor in a fleshy, coiling mass. Blood had spread out from the both of them in a sticky red pool. The couple were fucking in it, streaked with blood and shit, just happily going away at it.

Susan just stared, appalled and sickened.

In the back of her mind there was a memory. Some show on TV. Something about man’s modern world, his cities and technology, being like a cage that he had locked himself up in. The captivity repressed his natural instinctive desires, his animal impulses. In the cage, man no longer had to fear predators or hunt for food or defend his territory. Like a monkey in a zoo, he had no other instinctive outlet but sex. That’s why people were so obsessed by sex. Simply because all the other impulses nature had installed were repressed. All that remained was
sex, sex, sex—

There were low voices in the kitchen, the sound of bottles or jars smashed on the floor.

Susan made to back away…and then something hit her from behind. Right between the shoulder blades with an explosion of impact and agony. She was tossed into the room, slipping on the blood and landing atop the lovers. The man paid her no notice; he was intent on what he was doing. The woman hissed at him. She struck out with a backhanded fist, catching Susan in the mouth and sending her sprawling. This time she landed in the viscera on the floor. She cried, slipping and sliding on it, feeling it under her shoes like greasy snakes.