hell up, but it was too late. The man and woman who’d first butchered the boy came over. Covered in drying blood, they were savage and insane things. They were whispering under their breath with a chilling sort of hiss. They untied the screaming woman and dragged her off maybe five feet. The man held her arms and forced her down on the stone floor. The woman grabbed her legs, forcing them apart, gripping her thighs and opening them like she was about to deliver a baby.
She brought her head between the woman’s legs.
Is she going down on her? some crazed, near-hysterical voice in Macy’s head wondered. But Macy knew that whatever was going to happen would have absolutely nothing to do with passion, forced or otherwise. She saw the savage woman grin. Her teeth had been filed to blood-stained points.
Macy gasped.
The bound woman screamed again.
And Macy saw it, though she knew she should have looked away. The savage woman opened her mouth and bit down on what was between the legs, bit down on it with a snapping of her jaws. As her victim screamed with a high, mad treble, she tore and ripped at what she had bitten into, worrying it like a dog trying to shred a piece of tasty meat from a bone.
The screaming women went silent, fell limp. Maybe it was trauma and maybe it was shock. Macy never knew. She saw the savage woman. Her face glistening red, a flap of meat in her jaws.
Macy went out cold…
65
Louis entered the Soderberg house. He stepped in there, sensing immediately that he had just made a very bad mistake. The house smelled like shit and blood and God only knew what else. A steaming odor of waste and offal. He moved through the house, fighting against his own fears. He had to find that gun cabinet. He had to have a weapon that could drop those animals from a distance.
Perfectly good plan.
It took a moment or two for Louis to get his bearings. He’d only been in the Soderberg’s house once or twice. He entered the living room, trying to remember where Mike Soderberg’s den was. Because that’s where his gun cabinet was. He seemed to think it was on the other side of the house, somewhere near the kitchen.
Louis, his heart galloping wildly in his chest, moved through the dining room, barking his shin on a chair and cussing under his breath. So much for stealth. As he came into the kitchen, he thought he heard something out in the backyard. A thumping sound. He cocked his head, listening, sweating and trembling.
Nothing.
Nerves, probably just nerves, he told himself.
He moved on, the moonlight coming through the windows thick as curdled milk.
He became aware then of a particularly vile smell that was sharp and revolting that he could only acquaint with something like rotting onions…or hides. Because when he’d been a boy his class had gone on a school trip to a mink farm. The heaped mink hides had smelled something like this, pungent and unbearably musky. They were told that the stink came from the mink’s scent glands. He was smelling that now. Or something like it.
It was far too strong to mean nothing.
And that’s when a man stepped around the side of the refrigerator. He had something in his hand that might have been an axe. The stench was coming from him. He let out a little shrilling cry and swung what he had at Louis, missing him cleanly. Louis did not hesitate. He swung his hammer with everything he had and felt it connect with the guy’s skull with a sickening hollow thud.
The guy folded up.
The backyard suddenly exploded with light, flooding the kitchen. Louis crouched down. He thought at first it was an explosion of some sort, but from the quality of the light he could see it was a fire. A big fire. He raised himself up and peered out the windows above the sink. Yes, there was a bonfire burning in the backyard. He saw five or six naked forms dancing around it. They looked like kids. Somebody was tied to a tree and kindling had been banked up around them.
They were burning.
The kids were hopping around happily, burning someone. And from the way the bound figure was squirming there was no doubt that they were alive. Tied and gagged, but alive. Something snapped in Louis. He couldn’t watch this. He charged out the back door with a fierce cry, a rebel yell that came from deep within him. He charged with the hammer in one hand and his knife in the other. One of the kids, a teenage girl, launched herself at him and he staved her skull in with the hammer and stabbed a boy in the belly. The girl fell limp at his feet and the boy hobbled away.
The others ran off, taking the girl with them.
Panting, slicked with sweat, his hand holding the knife bloody up to the wrist and the hammer clotted with gore, he looked very much like a savage himself. He whirled around, expecting attack from every quarter. But none came. The tree was engulfed in flames as was the person tied to it. They were beyond help. The flames were so high he could barely see them. But the stink of roasting flesh was thick and nauseating.
Louis fell to his knees, needing to cry, to vent himself somehow.
And from the shadows a voice said, “Over here, Louis. I’m over here…”
66
For some time, the thing that had once been Angie Preen and her tribe of hunters had been shadowing the teenage boy and his females. They had watched in rapt fascination as the boy led them on one conquest after another, running down strays and dogs and attacking smaller packs for food and weapons. They took no slaves. They killed and feasted on all. But mostly, they just killed for the sport of it.
Angie had killed for the sport, too.
But that was just to get the scent of blood into the tribe’s nostrils. To get them a taste of meat. It was necessary to get them enraged, to get them hungry and aggressive. None of this was truly a conscious decision on Angie’s part. She was going purely on instinct and race memory now. She knew these things without thinking them. For in the politics of survival only two things really mattered: territory and dominance. The boy and his females were poaching what Angie considered to be her territory and as she exerted her dominance over the tribe, so must the tribe exert their dominance against intruders to protect their hunting grounds.
The boy and his females were resting now.
In a vacant lot they had stopped and built a fire. Their blood-slicked bodies were lying in the grass. Several of the females were licking each other’s wounds. Two of them lay with the boy, their heads resting against his naked loins. One female was on watch, casting a wary eye into the darkness. She was alert and ready.
Streaked with blood and paint, Angie rose up from the cover of the hedges and stretched her bowstring with an arrow. She sighted in on the female who was watching. As her eyes swept across the field, Angie sucked in a breath of air and then slowly let it out between clenched teeth, releasing the arrow at the same time.
There was a barely audible whooshing noise.
The arrow pierced the female right in the center of her back, puncturing through, the tip exploding between her breasts with a gout of bone and blood. She made a gasping sound, then fell face-first into the fire.
By then, Angie’s tribe-bodies painted with scarlet and green bands for war-was charging from cover, howling and brandishing their weapons.
Kathleen Soames was the first into the fight. She jabbed the sharpened end of broomstick into a female’s neck and then turned on the boy. Before he could pull his knife she swung her axe with both hands and split his skull wide open.
Then it became a war of spears and knives and hatchets. Deadly close-in fighting. Angie’s tribe was numerically superior and had the advantage of surprise. They cut down half a dozen of the enemy before they could
