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  Kill Your Neighbor

  Andersen Prunty

  Kill Your Neighbor copyright © 2017 by Andersen Prunty. All rights reserved.

  Cover illustrations copyright © 2017 by shoeberl/Shutterstock

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author.

  Also by Andersen Prunty

  This Town Needs a Monster

  Squirm With Me

  Creep House: Horror Stories

  Sociopaths In Love

  The Warm Glow of Happy Homes

  Bury the Children in the Yard: Horror Stories

  Satanic Summer

  Fill the Grand Canyon and Live Forever

  Pray You Die Alone: Horror Stories

  Sunruined: Horror Stories

  The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians

  Hi I’m a Social Disease: Horror Stories

  Fuckness

  The Sorrow King

  Slag Attack

  My Fake War

  Morning is Dead

  The Beard

  Zerostrata

  Jack and Mr. Grin

  The Overwhelming Urge

  One

  The cul-de-sac was quiet. The inside of my head was not. I looked over at Emma, hoping she could restore some sense of calm, but she was flushed and breathing heavily—almost panting—her eyes wide, the machete clutched in her right hand. Under the faint moonlight, she glowed with a feverish excitement.

  “Emma . . .” I didn’t even know what else I’d planned to say.

  “You’re not backing out now, Kip,” she said through clenched teeth. She never used my name. This was serious.

  I clutched the butcher knife tighter, as if to draw some steely resolve from its cold metal blade.

  “No. Of course not, dear.” My voice shook and quavered around the tightness in my chest.

  We crossed into Meg Chinaski’s yard for the first time since we’d moved next door nearly two years ago and it felt like entering some hostile enemy territory. The amount of bullying and harassment she’d subjected us to in that time period carried a palpable weight. Her weapon was her very presence.

  Emma and I were not hotheads. We were not savages. We were not fighters. The list of offenses that took us into our neighbor’s yard that night was long. They were little things that added up. Perhaps we could have filed suit against her on a couple of the offenses but, with the purchase and moderate fixing up of the house, we didn’t have any money for a lawyer. Even if we did have the money, we wouldn’t have had the time. We were busy people.

  Do you know who wasn’t a busy person?

  Meg Chinaski.

  And that made her devious evil seem almost insurmountable.

  She had one of the most valuable resources when it came to fighting a long, quiet war: time.

  Of course, given the fact that she was almost permanently tethered to three yapping dogs meant even the quiet war was never really that quiet.

  Ultimately, this was the only solution Emma and myself could think of. And, okay, maybe things had grown a little stale between us. And, okay, maybe it was mostly Emma’s idea.

  Two

  While Chinaski may have had all the time in the world, one thing she didn’t have was money. That much was clear and it was going to work against her now. She didn’t even have a porch light and, since we’d turned ours off and the streetlight had been out since we moved here, her yard was dark, dark, dark.

  It would have been easier to just hop the fence into her backyard but one of the previous owners had erected a twelve-foot high privacy fence between the two backyards.

  So we quickly crossed the front yard, not even watching out for the copious piles of dog shit landmining the overgrown lawn. By the time we reached the far side of her house and the gate leading into the backyard, we were cloaked in a cloud of feces.

  No lock on the gate.

  No motion sensitive lights.

  Too poor.

  The constant roar of Chinaski’s air conditioner completely hushed the slightest sounds of our actions.

  I started to round the back corner of the house and Emma gripped my wrist with a latex-gloved hand.

  “Wait,” she said.

  This still didn’t feel real to me. I just wanted to charge in and get it done or, better yet, get really close to actually doing it and then chickening out. Going back to the way things were. Taking the time to come up with a more logical, less homicidal, and way less illegal plan.

  I turned to Emma, looked into her wild, beautiful eyes. “What is it?”

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  I swallowed hard. My mouth was dry. My nervous system felt overloaded and I shook like I had some kind of palsy.

  One hand still holding the machete, she overlaid her wrists at the back of my neck and rose to her tiptoes as she pulled me down and into her. It was nearly impossible to respond. Her lips suctioned against mine and her fat wet tongue probed around in my dry cavity, but all I could think about was the pervasive stench of dog shit and the roar of the air conditioner and what we were about to do.

  I tried to think of other things. The stars and moon overhead. The sweet smell of fresh cut hay in the distance and the woods behind the cul-de-sac. Emma’s perfect face and lithe little body. The confidence and power radiating from within her.

  But the nervous fear felt impenetrable and she broke the kiss and shrank back into herself.

  “I’m not doing this alone,” she said.

  When it came to buying the house, we didn’t do our proper research. We did the basic research. The house was structurally sound. Newer roof. Newer a/c unit and water heater. No mold. All we’d really have to do was slap some paint on the walls inside and take up the carpet to reveal the original oak floors and we’d be good for a while. The asking price was comparable to other houses in the area. So, on paper, everything looked great. But we had a time crunch. Our current lease was up in a couple of months and the landlord didn’t offer any month-to-month terms. So it was either lock ourselves into another year of rent we could barely afford or bite the bullet and try for an affordable mortgage in a less desirable area.

  We asked to see the house on Hooper Court two minutes after the realtor sent us the listing.

  I was at Broagies, unwinding from the lunch rush, when Emma texted the listing to me.

  “Whaddya think?” the text accompanying the listing said.

  “Hooper Court makes me think of basketball,” I texted back.

  “We’re meeting the realtor at 5:30.”

  “OK.”

  I fired up the ancient PC on my desk and pulled up the listing. It was a two-bedroom Cape Cod. Exactly what we wanted. Less housework and lower heating and air-conditioning bills. It was one of only four houses on the cul-de-sac and there was a nature preserve behind it and, behind that, something called Point Park. I had to research that to make sure it wasn’t a shooting range or a kennel or motorcycle club or something. It turned out to be a type of country club, private, exclusively for executives of The Point, a ubiquitous chemical/ defense/ pharmaceutical/ medical/ food company. Emma worked for them in Human Resources. I wondered if she’d ever been to Point Park.

  I looked at the ten or so images of the place and tried not to get my hopes up. It seemed like everything we’d looked at that was remotely in our price range had been previously occupied by a pack of wild animals who never took off their shoes and didn’t mi
nd if their dogs and cats just shat on the floors.

  “Checked it out. Looks good,” I texted Emma.

  There was a light knock on the office door.

  “It’s open,” I said.

  The door opened and Chloe Brenner peered timidly into the office.

  “Mr. Dupree?” she said.

  “Yeah?” I wasn’t going to ask her to call me Kip again.

  “I gotta take off. Remember? I’ve had this abortion scheduled for like a week.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah. I’m on my way up.”

  I stood and followed her to the counter, watching the way the black uniform pants hugged her tight, teenage ass. It was nice, but Emma’s was better.

  The front door jangled and we both turned to the morbidly obese middle-aged couple entering the store and said, as loud as we could, “Welcome to Broagies! Where the fist bumps are always free!”

  Chloe took off her hat and exited the store.

  I pulled a sheet of butcher paper from the spool, slapped it down on the counter, tried not to acknowledge the growths on the man’s face, and asked, “How hard do you want to bro today?”

  Then I reached my fist over the glass and he dazedly bumped it and I smiled as big as I possibly could and slid my hands into some disposable plastic gloves.

  Emma picked me up after work and we drove to the house at 6 Hooper Court. The day was overcast and most of the neighborhoods we drove through to get there were depressing but nearly every neighborhood in this area was depressing and we were pretty familiar with the area so it wasn’t a big shock. The cul-de-sac was at the end of a particularly distressed neighborhood but seemed somewhat dislocated from it. The house we would be looking at sat at the end of the cul-de-sac and almost gave the impression of being surrounded by woods. It wasn’t the Twin Springs retreat we both dreamed of but it seemed like we could almost delude ourselves into thinking it was.

  Our realtor, Jim Hagathorne, wasn’t there yet so we pulled into the driveway and got out.

  Emma’s mouth ticked up into a smile.

  “Pretty quiet,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Other than the distant hum of the highway and the chirping insects and birds, it was, oddly, pretty quiet. Of course, we’d been living in an apartment downtown so just about any place would have been quieter than that.

  We looked around at the other houses on the cul-de-sac. The two on the ends looked vacant. No lights. No cars in the driveway. Lawns wildly overgrown. Flowerbeds full of weeds.

  The house to the left of the one we were looking at (I had to fight the urge to think of it as ours) actually looked worse than the possibly vacant houses but there were signs of life, however sad that implied life might be. The yard was actually the most overgrown one and the flowerbeds were not just in need of weeding, they looked like they contained nothing but weeds. A red SUV was parked in the unpaved driveway and had the appearance of not moving very much. The grass and weeds growing up through the gravel didn’t even look mashed down. All the houses were the same Cape Cod style but this one was covered in a layer of black mold that had turned it gray.

  I come from a long line of white trash and, after living downtown and watching people harvest cigarette butts from public ashtrays, scrounge for food and beverages from trashcans, and piss in the open, the state of the neighboring property wasn’t cause for major alarm. I was comfortable with—sometimes even thought I might prefer—trashiness. My biggest cause for concern was the two dogs staring out the bay window and yapping. They were not big dogs. But, still, they were dogs.

  Emma noticed them too. “I hope that’s not a problem,” she said.

  “There’s not going to be any getting away from dogs in this area.”

  She sighed. “I know.”

  Emma and I were both basically vegetarians for ethical as much as health reasons, so it wasn’t like we hated dogs or animals. We would have probably had cats if I weren’t deathly allergic. In the last few years of living in the apartment, we’d had a series of people living across the hall from us, all of whom owned dogs, and all of those dogs seemed to bark nearly non-stop. The first time around we’d called the police to lodge a noise complaint. The police came. The barking quieted for a day or two. And then the next time Emma and I had anyone over or the TV up too loud after ten p.m., there would be a cop knocking on the door saying they’d received a noise complaint about us. There was no winning. I could have gone into a philosophical debate with the officer. About how there are human sounds and animal sounds. Humans will have friends, they will laugh and carry on, they will raise their voices in joy and anger, they will watch TV and listen to music, sometimes too loudly, because these things are basic human nature. Unless one is blind, there is no necessity in owning a dog. The sound of a dog barking is the animal world intruding into the civilized world, which is fine in the wilderness, but not in an urban apartment where you’re paying more than a thousand dollars a month to live. It is up to the humans to keep the animals at bay. One could argue and say it’s all the animal world and we invaded it but I don’t see dogs being smart enough to build roads and houses. Anyway, it’s ultimately never about the dogs, it’s about the owners.

  We began walking around the house, making sure there weren’t any cracks or holes, that none of the windows were busted out, that scrappers hadn’t made off with the a/c unit.

  “Looks pretty good,” Emma said as we rounded the back corner of the house.

  Attached to the back of the house was what I thought was the crown jewel—a redwood deck, screened in and covered. I could immediately see us sitting there on summer evenings, having drinks and listening to insect sounds as dusk dropped onto the woods out behind the backyard.

  I stood in the middle of the deck and said, “From right here, you can’t see a single other house.”

  Emma smiled again and I could tell she was fighting off an even bigger smile, not wanting to get too excited, girding herself against almost inevitable disappointment.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s nice.”

  And between us, there was that unspoken thing we’d already gone through a couple of times. Like with the house by the cemetery. Or the one surrounded by cornfields. They had been in our price range. We’d fallen in love with them. We’d already pictured ourselves living there. And they were both already gone by the time we made the offer. Were probably even gone before we looked at them. But we’d had a different realtor then and had to let him go. Maybe Hagathorne would come through for us.

  We heard the crunch of his tires in the driveway and went around to meet him.

  I grabbed a bag out of our car and said, “Hey, man, I brought you a broagie!” and handed it to him before he could even get out of the car.

  Three

  On one of my previous lawn mowing sessions, I’d grabbed a couple bricks that were part of the retaining wall for one of our backyard flowerbeds and, careful to make sure Chinaski wasn’t in her backyard, flung them over the high privacy fence. The likelihood of her discovering them before we did our deed was slim. Of course, I was hoping the deed would go undone. I was hoping we’d never find ourselves in her backyard searching for those bricks.

  Yet, here we were.

  “Use the light on your phone,” Emma said.

  Back here, we were even closer to the outdated air-conditioning unit and its roar muffled Emma’s words.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Your phone. Use your phone.”

  I reached into my pocket with my free hand, trying to keep the shaking under control. I pressed the button to activate the screen, not knowing if it would react to my touch through the latex gloves. My hands shook so badly that I kept pressing the wrong app.

  Frustrated, Emma snatched the phone from my hand and said, “I’ll do it.”

  She quickly turned the flashlight on and went walking deeper into the backyard.

  Chinaski didn’t seem to have any discernible schedule so there was no guarantee she was snoozing away in her bed.
I glanced toward her gross house, half expecting to see her peering out through a parted blind. But there weren’t even any lights on.

  I heard Emma say something and began walking toward her.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I said I can’t carry both of them.”

  I drew up next to her and she handed my phone back to me. I pocketed it and we both bent down to pick up one of the bricks.

  “We’re going to try the back door first, right?” I said.

  “I guess,” Emma practically huffed.

  We’d discussed this previously. Obviously, if the back door were unlocked, our entrance would be much quieter. Emma had argued against it, saying it didn’t matter. The dogs would start going crazy as soon as they heard the door anyway. Also, we were both pretty sure Chinaski was a paranoid schizophrenic and didn’t think she’d ever leave her doors unlocked. Probably afraid everyone was after her shitty, moldy hoard. My winning rationale was that it would simply be a lot safer to walk in through a door if we didn’t have to compete with shards of broken glass. I got the feeling that Emma wanted the explosion of sound, the chaos.

  I glanced over at her, beautiful in the moonlight, and thought about saying, “Can’t we just go home?”

  But I didn’t.

  She began walking toward the house and I followed her.

  “That was quite a welcome to the neighborhood, huh?” Emma said.

  We lay in bed on our first night in our new house.

  “I’m sure she’s harmless,” I said. “Maybe just not very friendly.”

  “Or she’s zonked on meds.”

  Once the movers had moved everything into the house, we’d gone downtown to grab some falafel and fries from the Middle Eastern place.

  The neighbor was out. It was the first time we’d seen her. At that point, we weren’t even sure it was just her living there. She stood in the front yard, three small dogs restrained by leashes and yapping about two feet from our driveway. I don’t really like to immediately profile people but, at first sight, I classified her as straight up white trash. I like to think I know where I come from. She had the kind of pinched, clueless yet angry face so many people in this part of the country seem to wear constantly. Her hair was gray and greasy and matted. She wore a heavily stained plain blue t-shirt that I guessed was about a 4X, sad gray sweat pants, and plain white tennis shoes. It made me think she just went to the dollar store and grabbed the first and biggest things she saw. Were it not for her massive, unrestrained breasts, I would have had no idea if she were a man or a woman.