their attackers had to withdraw…into an onslaught of dogs and crazy solitary hunters who claimed no true affiliation and slaughtered anything that moved.
Providence Street that night was a cacophonous hive of noise…barking, howling, screeching, wailing. Some was from the animals that walked on four legs and some from those that walked on two. Just absolute, thundering chaos.
Slowly, though, the dogs were dropping, being overwhelmed by cutting blades and devoured by their fellows.
The Baron, with so many of his pack littering the street, charged in again and again, dealing death and fighting tooth and nail. Swinging his machete like a sword, he gutted cockapoos and boxers and spaniels while to all sides the wounded were drowning in the living, biting sea.
The Baron was bitten, gouged, bloodied, and torn.
But he never stopped killing.
He saw a poodle hanging from a hunter’s face by its teeth. He decapitated it, but the head still hung, jaws locked in a death grip.
Dozens of hunters took his lead and frantically waded in, chopping at the animals, chopping at blood-covered savages, and in the end, chopping at one another. The leader of the other pack, whom the Baron had sighted as his kill and his kill alone, was overwhelmed. He’d once been known as Dick Starling and he’d once been knocked cold by Macy Merchant, but by then he was just a savage wearing the bloody pelt and peeled headpiece of a Great Dane. A Rotweiler-split neatly in half-was hanging from his belly by its fangs, still biting, still clawing. The Baron, dragging an Irish Setter with him whose teeth were in his leg, moved in and decapitated him.
Finally, even the Baron withdrew from the killing fields.
He slashed the Setter until it released its bite and stood there, bloodied but unbowed, viewing the carnage around him. The decimation of both packs.
Then a final group of dogs came at him.
A hodgepodge of shepherd, collie, and Great Dane mixes, they advanced. He stood his ground. They moved with a slow, economical shambling, fur bristling, jaws open.
The first one made its move and the Baron slashed the business end of the machete across its eyes. He pivoted and split open another’s skull. Still another hit him and he tossed it aside, eviscerating it. The teeth of yet another sank into his leg and he chopped its foreleg clean.
Then he ran as a howling, barking pack thundered across the killing fields at him.
He made a nearby porch and turned, swinging the machete with blind wrath, splitting the maw of a beagle and then throwing himself through the open door. They ripped the screen door right off its hinges, seven or eight of them, and began to fight over it like a tasty bitch.
The Baron pressed his back against the inside door as they battered and rammed it. Way they were going, he knew, it wouldn’t last long. The door was hardwood and he could hear them smashing themselves against it, their bones popping and crunching. There was a thin pane of glass that ran the length of the door and the Baron forgot about it until the head of a huge, filthy Rotweiler crashed through it, its muzzle catching him in the back and sending him sprawling. But the pane of glass was not safety glass that spiderwebbed with cracks and fell into itself. It was plate glass. It shattered, but a six-inch triangular shard from the base lodged easily into the dog’s throat. The more it wrenched and flopped its massive, heavily-muscled body, the deeper the shard sank until it was impaled there, whimpering.
But it wasn’t dying fast enough for the Baron.
There was a pile of lumber near the stairs, a wall that had been stripped to lathing. Home improvement. The Baron saw a gun-shaped apparatus sitting on the lumber. He went for it, palming it. A cordless drill with a half-inch bit threaded into the chuck. Part of him seemed to recognize it, but there was no conscious memory.
But he knew a weapon when he held it in his fist.
He pressed the trigger. The drill bit whirred around.
Grinning, he ran the bit right through the dog’s thrashing skull. Its eyes glazed over as he scrambled its brains. It slumped over dead, its sheer bulk keeping the others away from the opening it had shattered in the glass.
The Baron pulled the drill back, studied the bit that was slimed with gray matter, bone chips, and strands of coarse hair.
Some time later, he wandered outside.
The street was filled with gutted corpses, human and dog, parts of them, blood and hair and entrails. A few savages devoured raw joints of meat or fought over juicy shoulder portions. What dogs were left scavenged the dead. There was nothing but the moaning of the wounded, the whine of dying dogs.
What remained of the Baron’s pack were beaten, bloodied, exhausted. They stepped amongst the bodies, slipping on blood and corkscrews of intestines.
They gathered at the Baron’s side.
Although he was bitten, blood-streaked, and in considerable pain, he had never felt so joyously alive before…
78
They’re in the dark, Louis. All around you, slithering hideous things that feed on children, that sharpen their teeth on bones and decorate their lairs with human hides. Wake up! Wake up, you fucking idiot, you’re in the cannibal’s kitchen, you’re in the ogre’s cave, you’re in the musty rot-smelling cellar of the wicked witch and her wicked offspring…
Louis opened his eyes, fighting on the edge of sleep. Inside, he had given up. He had been beaten, cut, dragged through the streets, dry-humped by a cave girl and then pissed on by her mother. It didn’t really seem to him that there was really much to live for because the world had shit its own pants and here he was a prisoner of these fucking things.
But he opened his eyes.
Something plopped in his face. Cool, moist. It plopped again. He looked up and there was the corpse of a man hanging from the rafters…part of a man really. His legs were nowhere to be seen. He was hanging upside down, chained and gutted, a ghastly white in color. And what had plopped onto Louis’ face was something dripping from one of his hollowed eye sockets.
Louis recoiled, squirmed away from it best he could with his ankles and wrists tied.
He looked around.
The mother-he now suspected it was Maddie Sinclair, though she had degenerated so much it had been hard to tell at first-was nowhere in sight. Either were here daughters, whom Louis could not remember the names of.
The air smelled like fresh meat, shit, urine, and vomit. Something else that was heavy and musky and must have been the raw animal stench of the women themselves. The sort of smell you might acquaint with the shit- stained, blood-spattered, bone-strewn den of a wolf pack.
He lay still for ten minutes that became twenty, refusing to entertain any hope that they had abandoned him. He could not be that lucky. He waited. Breathed. Tried to get his mind working, trying to pretend he couldn’t smell the woman’s piss on him.
Something bit his ankle.
He jerked and a rodent went scampering away. A rat? Must have been. Too big to be anything else. He looked around the cellar. Had he been an anthropologist he might have appreciated the primordial squalor of prehumanity. But he certainly did not appreciate it. Bones and hides, human remains, bodies and parts of them hanging from the rafters. A sack-which must have been a human stomach stuffed with something and stitched closed-was hanging from over the fire from a tripod.
Vile, was the only word for it.
But honestly, with all the boxes and bags and crap piled everywhere, Maddie Sinclair’s basement had been a pigsty to begin with.
