seemed to bother him in the least. He was smiling, hacking on something with a knife. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped from his elbow.
“ Come here, Macy. I have a secret I want to share with you.”
Macy just stood there, the instinctual need to flee very overpowering. She stepped around the hedges, knowing she shouldn’t, but needing to see just how bad this situation was.
“ Come here, Macy. I won’t bite you.”
I have a secret I want to share with you.
But Macy could see his secret quite plainly: there was a carcass hanging from the limb of Mr. Kenning’s apple tree and he was in the process of dressing it out. It was skinned, fleshy, bleeding. There was no doubt what it was. Even if she hadn’t seen the ragged pelt of lustrous orange fur at his feet, she would’ve recognized the dog. It was hung by the throat.
Mr. Kenning stabbed his knife into the torso, slitting it upwards. Libby’s viscera spilled out in a coiled, bloody mass. Mr. Kenning studied his dripping red fist that held the dripping red knife. He sniffed it, then licked the back of it.
“ Oh no,” Macy said, the world beginning to spin around her. “Oh no…oh no…oh no…”
Her whole body was shaking, tears rolling down her face, nausea rolling in her belly with the hot, rank stink of slaughtered dog.
Mr. Kenning kept smiling. That grin was depraved and obscene, filled with a raw unflinching appetite. He would rape her if he could, Macy knew, then he would feed on her.
“ Come here, Macy,” he said, his blood-spattered penis standing erect. “I’ll share my kill with you…if you share what you have with me.”
Macy screamed and ran and, thankfully, he did not follow. He called out to her to bring her mother over, the whole time hacking and chopping at the dog. Macy threw up in the Maub’s hedges, cut through the Sinclair’s side yard, then ran across the street to her own porch.
She stopped right there, catching her breath, trying to make sense of it all. Everything looked so positively normal that what she had just gone through seemed ridiculous. She heard a siren in the distance, but that didn’t really mean much. Not by itself.
Behind her, there was movement, feet coming through the grass.
She whirled around, eyes wide and mouth open, ready for just about anything. She saw Mr. Shears standing there. He lived next door. But this was not the Mr. Shears she knew. His eyes were glassy, his hair wild. His shirt was torn and hanging open, bloodstains all over it.
In his hands was a golf club and he looked ready to use it.
“ Please,” Macy said. “Oh, please, just stay away from me…”
But Mr. Shears kept coming…
15
Mr. Chalmers wasn’t real happy with them for losing the girl. In fact, when they got back and told him that Macy Merchant had slipped away, he came right off the porch. He tossed his newspaper and came right at them. His eyes were filled with a simmering blackness. They were shiny like those of a mad dog.
“Simple goddamn job I give you two,” he said, pulling his belt out of its loops and snapping it in his fists, “and you fuck it up.”
Mike and Matt Hack stood there, knowing they were going to be punished, but not even thinking of running off. They had this coming and they knew it. So they stood there when the belt came at them, lashing them in the faces, the pain sharp and cutting. They cried out and fell to their knees, curling up in balls as the belt laid open their backs in hurting welts.
“You feel that, you little shits? That’s pain and nothing teaches, nothing instructs quite like pain,” Mr. Chalmers told them, studying the belt in his hands. He was grinning now, satisfied, his eyes mocking and filled with venom. “You two gotta quit acting like fucking little boys. This is war. This is survival. When I send you out to get something, you don’t come back without it. Those other neighborhoods, they’re gonna try and take what we got, so we got to hit them first. We gotta take what they got. Their women, their food, their weapons. Do you see? Do you see? DO YOU FUCKING SEE, BOYS?”
Both boys were naked, their faces caked with dirt and sweat. But their eyes were wide and bright and somehow primal. Mr. Chalmers had hurt them and they seemed to like it. The pain had unlocked something in them and it was something they wanted more of.
In the distance there was a sudden chorus of howling. It rose up high and shrieking and then faded away. It was hard to say whether it was from animals or people. At the sound of it, Mr. Chalmers nodded his head as if he understood the need to howl all too well.
“Don’t make me school you again,” Mr. Chalmers said. “Now go out there and bring back a woman. Don’t come back empty handed. Bring me some gee-gee, some nice young gee-gee and don’t come back without it. Go!”
Mike and Matt raced away, less human than they’d been even an hour before. They ran through yards and down alleys, crawled through vacant lots where the grass was yellow and crisp and dusty. This was the high, hot end of green summer and they smelled it, tasted it, knew it like they had never known it before. They rubbed their sweaty naked bodies with dirt, with crackling brown leaves, with chaff and loam until they smelled of summer, of rich earth and low wild things.
They were supposed to get some gee-gee, some nice young gee-gee for Mr. Chalmers, which was pussy and they understood the need and want of fine pussy, but fuck Mr. Chalmers because they were young and free and lost in the heady bouquet of absolute atavism.
So many houses.
So many places to raid.
And behind so many of those doors, the owners had already tasted the new primeval blood of Greenlawn which was the blood of the world now. They were drunk with it as Mike and Matt were drunk with it. Many were already gathering their weapons and stockpiling their food, herding their women and children together, living out their sweet, secret animal joys, just waiting for the night when they would run wild, killing and raping and plundering and tasting the hot blood of their prey upon their slavering tongues.
Many were like that.
And those that weren’t, were quickly becoming the minority. But even in that dim, shocked, confused minority, there were stirrings of ancient drives, the need to run on all fours and fill their senses with the savage delight of simple regression.
The first place Mike and Matt stopped was a trim white ranch house with pink shutters. The yard was immaculate. The flowerbeds bursting with color. They rolled in the grass like dogs, then dove into the flowerbeds and smashed all those vibrant blooms beneath them. They grabbed up bunches of zinnias and marigolds, sweet pea and snapdragon, rubbing the crushed flowers and fragrant petals against their bodies. There was a goldfish pond out back. They caught every fish and smashed them with rocks. Then they went inside the house.
They knew whose house it was.
It belonged to Mrs. Cannon, a retired schoolteacher. If you trespassed on her lawn she would call the police. If you kicked your ball into her yard by accident she would seize it and never give it back. That’s the sort of person she was. A woman who spent her life teaching children, but secretly despised them and their youth. If the parents on the block thought she was a miserable old bitch, the children were sure she was a broom-riding witch.
When Mike and Matt came through the door, Mrs. Cannon, a widow of seventeen years, dearly wished that her husband was still alive because even though she had dealt with some real bad boys in her time, she knew that she had finally met the very worst.
Mike and Matt Hack.
Naked and dirty, leaves and sticks in their hair, their bodies scratched and bruised and plastered with bits of flowers, they were about the most horrible things she had ever seen.
“Hello, Mrs. Cannon,” said Mike.
