The Devil Next Door (52 page)

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.