over the dirt.
They were destroying everything.
Throwing bottles of gasoline at the walls and roaring with delight as the flames spread, consumed, and the air became as hazy as fog.
Louis slit his ankles free.
His legs were numb but he made them obey. He knocked a couple kids out of the way, dodging and darting towards the doorway. A spear just missed him. A girl swung something at him that he realized was a severed arm. And then he was jogging up the steps, coughing on the smoke.
More savage children.
They were pissing on the walls and pulling the stuffing out of sofa cushions, tipping over furniture and tossing their scat at one another. Several of them saw Louis, hesitated, maybe unsure if he was one of their own or not. They decided and bared their teeth.
Then a huge, bristling man stepped forward.
His face was tiger-striped with black slashes of paint, old and seamed, the eyes glittering with dementia. He wore a vest made of fur, his bare chest and arms filthy with blood and dirt. There was a necklace of what must have been human ears around his throat.
Louis hesitated.
Good God…was this Chalmers? Frank Chalmers from a few streets over?
He knew it was and then Chalmers dove on him. They rolled to the floor, knives forgotten, fighting tooth and nail. Chalmers was old, but in incredible shape from so many years in the Army humping it through jungles and leaping out of airplanes. Louis hit him three times and Chalmers barely flinched. His hand like a claw, he took hold of Louis’ windpipe and squeezed it close. Louis fought and tried to throw him off, but it was useless. The world went dark and he went limp.
When he opened his eyes again, he was lying in the grass.
The house was burning.
Two girls squatted by him and both had knives. They were no more than eight or ten years old and seeing them there-painted for war, splattered with flesh and blood, their eyes just gone wild-it was ludicrous. For a few days before they might have been selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. Now they were hunting people, slaughtering anyone or anything they could catch.
Louis licked the blood off his lips.
The girls moved in closer, crawling on hands and knees towards him like Preying Mantises stalking their prey. They had been waiting for him to come to. It would have been no fun for them to gut a sleeping man. One of the girls raised her knife for the kill…there was a human scalp on a thong around her wrist, the hair red and lustrous.
Then Louis heard a whooshing sound and a hatchet came flying end-over-end with a perfect throw, imbedding itself in the skull of the girl with the scalp.
Other savages charged in and it was war to the knife…
84
Macy was outside the lair, the church, and sucking in the not-so clean air of Greenlawn. She had status now. She was one of the Huntress’ clan. By blood-rite she had secured the right to stand with them, to hunt with them and butcher, and to die with them.
She heard a noise behind her.
She turned quick with sharp animal reflexes.
A man was standing there.
He was tall and filthy, hair hanging to his shoulders in greasy curls. His face was painted like a skull as all those of the inner circle. His body was likewise painted with white and blacks streaks, though smeared with ground-in blood, dirt, and animal fat.
He held a scalp in his hands, still bleeding from its owner.
The hair was lustrous gold, beautiful, like something spun on a spinning wheel. The moonlight caught it, held it, made the golden mane glow.
Macy recognized it.
The scalp of the girl she’d killed in the blood-rite.
Yes, she remembered it as she remembered the man who held it out to her. It was an offering. The scalp belonged to Macy. Golden, beautiful, any warrior would be pleased to have it hanging upon their scalp pole. He made sure it was brought to her.
Laid it at her feet.
Like burnt offerings.
Macy just stared at him with something leagues beyond hate. A mania that was all-consuming and burned bright.
She remembered him, too.
The wet dog stink of him as the others held her down and he mounted her. She remembered the pain between her legs and the oily feel of his skin against her own.
Having set the scalp at her feet, believing them to be conjoined now like fetal twins because of the rite, he looked up at her and smiled.
Macy slashed her knife against his throat.
He stumbled away, gagging on his own blood, shocked, mortified, beyond himself by what had just transpired. How could she do this, how, how, how, how Macy stepped over to him with her knife and smiled with a blood-stained mouth at the huge slaughter moon high above…
85
As the hatchet was embedded in the girl’s skull with a wet thudding noise and she pitched over on top of him, eyes glazed in death, Louis saw the barbarian hordes rushing in from all directions.
People screamed.
Howled.
Bayed like animals.
Spears were thrown. Axes cleaved off limbs and shattered bone and arrows punched through chests and bellies.
And there he was, barely conscious, his mind reeling in every imaginable direction as the warfare broke out in every quarter. He was confused…but happy. For just as the children brought hell and death down upon Maddie Sinclair and her slinking, animal daughters, now hell and death was coming down upon the children and their leader which had once been a fellow named Frank Chalmers, though only God knew what he was now.
Children dropped all around him, screaming with spears stuck in them. A boy with an arrow in one eye stumbled about, his face red and shining, then fell over. Louis looked for Chalmers because he knew he was out there somewhere delighting in this. A sixty-year old man who could fight better than any two twenty-year olds.
The other girl Louis had seen when he first opened his eyes was leaping around, trying to avoid the blades of older women who were cutting and hacking their way through Chalmer’s perverse pack of hunters and killers. She made a good show of it and then a woman with a sharpened stake in her hand-like something you went to slay a vampire with-took her by the hair, broke her over one knee and pierced her in the throat with it. Then she proceeded to decapitate her.
And look at how much she loves it! Chopping the head off a little kid! Have you ever, ever in your life, Louis, seen such genuine unadulterated pleasure on someone’s face? Such concentration, such conviction in the rightness
