Earl broke down into tears and Louis went to him, tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but the old man just batted it away.
“I killed her because I had to! And because she wanted it!”
Louis sat back down. “What do you mean?”
Earl uttered that awful, bitter laugh again that maybe wasn’t insane, but was living right next door. “I mean she wanted me to! After she said those things, something snapped in her, Louis! Just snapped! It was a violation of everything that dear woman was! She couldn’t live with it! So…I killed her! I killed her because she begged me to do it! Begged me to smash her head in!”
Louis could say nothing to that.
He was speechless and simply worn out by all of this. Earl sobbed and shook and eventually the tears just went away and he was silent, just silent. Not even moving. Not doing anything but dying inside.
“When did you come out of it?” Louis finally asked.
“Before…earlier…I don’t know. It just fades away a little at a time. And now I’m sane, I’m perfectly fine, aren’t I?”
“It wasn’t your fault, Earl. Not really.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Louis. Please don’t do that.” He pulled himself up and sat back on the recliner. “Anything but that. I’m like the others now. A killer. I’m nothing but a killer…”
70
The pack waited patently on the hillside.
In the moonlight, their bodies reticulated with bands of mud-brown, blood-red, and midnight blue like jungle serpents, they were nearly invisible. Only their teeth gleamed in the moonlight, their staring eyes. A slight breeze was carrying the smell of prey, the delicious odor of live meat, and a ripple of excitement ran through the pack.
Down below, in a tree-lined hollow at the edge of what had once been known as Lower Fifth Street, a group of prey had hidden themselves away. They thought they were safe from the things that stalked the night. They were wrong.
The Baron examined the gleaming edges of his weapons-the K-Bar knife, his hatchet, his spear, and his machete which was really just the razor-sharp blade from a paper cutter with a handle at one end. They pleased him. Their edges caught the moonlight, held it. Touching the necklace of ears at his throat, he made a grunting sound under his breath.
The pack rose from the grass.
They were his children. They surrounded him, pressing up against him, smelling the raw blood-stench of brutality that he wielded like a weapon. It made them feel strong.
Without a word, the Baron slipped down the hillside with the others following him. He avoided the sparsely placed streetlights, haunting the shadows, becoming the shadows, sliding through their ebony depths like a snake skimming a pond.
There were three houses and he broke his pack into three hunting bands, each led by his fiercest warriors.
It was time.
Letting out the wild cry of a wolf, he charged through the first yard. He came to a locked door, but it was flimsy and he kicked it open, his band rushing in. Inside, there were lights and screams. His hunters had found a woman and two children cowering. They impaled them with their spears, hacking them with hatchets until patterns of blood were sprayed up the walls and spattering the ceiling.
A man lay dying on the carpeted floor in a pool of his own blood.
There was a hatched imbedded in his skull.
He had fought, fought hard for what was his, shattering the skull of one hunter with a baseball bat and beating another to a faceless wreck. But that was all he did. The hunters were fighting over the scraps of the woman and children, others slitting trophies from the dying man with their knives.
The Baron heard gunshots.
Shattering glass.
More screams.
He ran outside and to the house next door. One of his hunters lay on the porch, a bullet hole in his temple. A window was smashed. Inside another hunter was dead. Then the Baron saw that three of his own were busy gutting a woman and another was feeding the body of an old woman into the fireplace. She screamed as the flames engulfed her. Another hunter was gut-shot on the stairs, a trail of blood marking his progress.
Two more gunshots from above.
Then the howling of hunters. Thrashing noises and a screech of pain. The Baron smiled. Whoever had been doing the shooting had been overwhelmed now. He could hear them shrieking just above the noise of blades hacking into flesh and splintering bone.
Outside again.
The next house. A back door opened as the Baron came around the side. A woman was trying to escape. She got one look at the Baron and tried to slam the door shut. He shouldered it open. She screamed and slashed at him with a steak knife. He beat her down, kicked her until she was nothing but a sobbing heap, and then yanked up her head and slit her throat.
He came across three more of his hunters who had cornered a boy. They were jabbing him with their spears. And in the living room, a sight which even gave the Baron a moment’s hesitation as some shred of humanity kicked in his head.
His hunters had a pregnant woman on the floor. She was dead, slit open from throat to crotch. One of the boys was urinating on her. A group of girls had torn her unborn child from the womb.
They were eating it, the umbilical still attached to its mother.
The Baron slit the woman’s ears off and threaded them onto his necklace as his children devoured, their eyes black and staring, their faces smeared with gore.
He went out onto the porch. There was a man out there, bleeding from spear wounds, hobbled by axe cuts, but not dead just yet. Letting out a cry of victory, the Baron scalped him…
71
The girl was refusing so the Huntress knew she had to be broken much as a young colt must be broken by whatever means necessary. What must come now must not be crude or low in nature, but ceremonial, for it was a rite. And it would be carried out as such.
The Huntress looked down on the girl. “Hunt with us, as us.”
The girl looked up at her. There were tears in her eyes. “Michelle, please-”
The Huntress was taken aback by that name. It was what the man had called her. She feared that name for it was a name of power that made her feel helpless, uncertain. She could not have the clan seeing this. That name. Michelle. It was a magic name, a spell of power. The others must never learn of it or they would break her with it.
The girl opened her mouth again and the Huntress slapped her.
She reached out and took the girl by the throat, squeezing while she trembled and gasped and fought weakly in her grip. The Huntress slammed her up against the wall again and again until there was no fight left.
“Now,” she said, “ready her.”
Macy was suddenly gripped by hands, so many white reaching hands they were like the ensnaring tentacles of a squid, grabbing her, fondling her, pinching her and scratching her leaving deep welts. There was no fight left. Everything had drained out of her and she was limp there on the cool flagstone floor, naked, exposed, vulnerable.
