It was funny how things had a tendency to come full circle. Six years ago, he had become indebted to a charming man with a broken arm because of some stolen heroin and a debt that needed to be paid. Fast forward to a few months ago, and a tape that they had found that night led them here, to Askergan, just a stone’s throw from where it all began.
And how easily Father Carter had assumed a role that the county so desperately needed, that the people sought with such unspoken angst.
Shuffle to today when they were trying to make sure that future heroin deals went through untethered and, most importantly, that they were funneled through the church.
Static from the walkie on the dash filled the car, and Pike grabbed for it.
“Pike, you there? It’s Sheriff White.”
“Here,” he said simply.
“We’re on—we need the distraction out front.”
Pike thought of the bullet he had fired, the one that had split the Mexican’s brain in two. Even he had questioned the logic or safety in using the cartels, but Father Carter had insisted. From his time with Tony and Yori, of watching them deal heroin out of the gym, Pike knew that these types of men were all about profit—so long as they were making money, their investment secure, they wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the situation. He had made a deal with the cartels before, and things turned out alright. That, however, had little bearing on this arrangement.
In Mexico, DEA agents were protected because harming them would result in a heavy crackdown on their business.
And they were all about profit.
But this wasn’t Mexico. This was Askergan Fucking County, which had somehow become the hub for heroin distribution throughout the North Eastern United States. He doubted that the protection for law enforcement spread so far north.
“Did you hear me? I said, we’re on.”
Pike nodded.
“Confirmed.”
“Good; we need an hour. Tell them that in exactly one hour they are to cause a distraction out front.”
“Confirmed. One hour. 10:42.”
“10:42. And tell Carter that—”
Static broke over the walkie, turning the Sheriff’s sentence into a wind storm.
“Did not copy, Sheriff.”
“I said, tell—”
But again his words were cut off.
Something about Carter.
Tell Carter what?
“Still not reading you,” Pike said, shaking his head in frustration.
He waited, but there was no response.
“Sheriff?”
Still nothing.
Pike put the walkie back onto the dash and started the car. He took a deep breath, then grabbed his cell phone and placed the call.
***
“Get on the horn, Coggins; get in touch with Johnny the Mechanic. Tell him to get ready—we’re going to need him to get into the sewers. Keep it at that.”
Coggins nodded, and retreated out of sight, cell phone in hand.
“Williams, gather up the weapons and dole them out. I think Coggins should have the shotgun. Reggie, what do you prefer?”
“Blowtorch,” the man answered quickly. “But I can’t see that happening so I’ll go with the M16.”
He held the gun up for the other deputies to see.
Sheriff White nodded, his expression grim. Vision of Nancy’s pale, dead eyes were flashing across his vision nearly every time he blinked now, and his heart was racing. He could feel sweat tickling his forehead.
One way or another this ends tonight. Either you will be avenged, or I’ll be joining you, my love.
“Williams, that leaves me and you with the handguns—and we all have our service revolvers. But I have to stress that the guns are a precaution, a last resort. Let the cartels do the shooting outside. Dirk will be there too, making sure that civilians are cleared out, and to make sure that things don’t get out of hand.”
“I’m still not comfortable with the—”
Sheriff White cut him off; he knew what Williams was going to say.
“Me neither, but we have no choice. This ends tonight. Tonight, men, we get Askergan back.”
He turned his eyes to the pile of headlamps and clip-on flashlights, as well as two of the traditional kind, that they had pulled from the Maselo shelves.
“Everyone grab a light and a backup as well. The walkies should still work down in the sewers, but if they don’t we can always signal with the lights.”
He reached down as he spoke and grabbed a clip on light and put it in his pocket. Then he slipped a handheld version through the loops on his belt.
Coggins returned then, his mouth a thin line slashing through his red beard.
“And? What’d he say?”
“Johnny will meet us where Main Street meets Highway 2—at the border of Askergan and Pekinish—in ten minutes. He’s bringing some gear that will help us in the sewer.”
Sheriff nodded.
“Good,” he said sharply and then hooked a chin at Leon who was still unconscious on the floor. “If you guys think of anything else you need, grab it now. He can bill us for it later. So, ten minutes to get to the Main and 2, five more to enter the sewers. Then, if your map is accurate, Williams, then it should only take another twenty-five to walk to the main discharge valve below Sabra’s mansion. Ten, five, twenty-five… gives us twenty minutes to get ready, to wait for Dirk’s signal that shit is going down up above. And then, gentlemen, we get to show this county that there are still good guys in this place—we get to show Askergan that we are the good guys.”
Part III - Forced Entry
Chapter 24
Corina’s arms had gone numb hours ago. Forget about her fingers; she had lost all feeling in those for so long that even when she wasn’t strung up, they felt like alien digits controlled by a clumsy puppeteer.
The Crab only lowered her to the ground twice a day; once to shit and piss and the other to eat.
But that was before they had taken her leg. Now that they had stolen it form her, they had become more lax, not bothering to hoist her up to the ceiling anymore. She was still only lowered twice a day, and even then they kept the chains looped around her wrists at all times, but as it was now, she could almost, almost, brush the ground with her worn running shoe.
And yet she had it better than the one they called Alice.
Much better.
It was clear to her now that Alice was in some sort of deep coma. And this posed a problem when it came time to eat the gruel that some greasy biker had prepared for them.
And that’s where that freak Seth came in.
Like with Corina, they would lower her to the ground, but that’s where the similarities ended. They would toss her a plate of the gray, congealing paste and she would eat it hungrily with her numb fingers. It made for a messy ordeal.
But when Alice was lowered, Seth would stand beneath her, easing her toward the ground. Then he would cradle her head in his arms, whisper something to her, then would take the gruel into his mouth.
Like a lover’s tainted kiss, he would then spit it into her mouth in a thin stream.
The first time Corina had seen Alice’s throat expand, she gagged. The second time, she had offered to feed the woman, feeling that this invasion was, if not worse, on par with being stripped nude and hung from the ceiling.
She never got a response. And everyday around noon, Seth would stagger into the room and complete this ritual.
Just thinking about it made Corina feel sick to her stomach.
“Your time is almost up, shweeaheart,” the creature said from behind his massive desk before snorting an inch thick line of coke off a handheld mirror. He looked up after he was done, revealing eyes so red that they looked rimmed with lipstick. “Almost up… almost up.”
Corina could barely look at the man without experiencing the same revulsion she felt when Seth fed Alice.
The Crab, as he liked to be called, was a horrific mess. At some point during the last week, as his transition
into something less human accelerated, he had stopped bothering to sport the silk robe with the name Sabra stitched over the breast. And thus Corina bore witness to a sight more graphic than even the worst nightmare could have afforded.
The man had been neutered; he still had a penis, a thin, gnarled thing that reminded Corina of a crude nursery rhyme that kids used to sing in the schoolyard—when he enters your room late at night, giving you an awful fright, asking you to say his name, knowing nothing’ll be the same, how did he get in, it doesn’t matter his name is rumpled-dick-skin—but his balls were gone, replaced by a rough, pink and red scar. And yet that was likely the smoothest spot on his sore-addled body.
The cracker was still clearly visible in his shoulder, a hard, charcoal-smeared outline like an overturned desert plate. But the criss-crossing red and purple bruises, thick like coiled snakes, that streaked across his chest had lost their vibrant luster. Instead, they had become a dark green, or maybe even black. Gangrenous, perhaps.
Most of his beard, a gnarled white thing, had fallen out, revealing more of the tough, leathery-like skin beneath. Even his nose, the one currently caked with coke, had started to change. His nostrils, so irritated by constant snorting, had started to rot and recede, becoming larger, oblong.
Reptilian.
“What are you trying to prove? You think that the Sheriff isn’t going to barge in here? Kill you and your fucked up band of misfits?” Corina spat. She had wanted her voice to come out strong, with authority, but it had been so long since she had spoken that it came out like a dry croak.
The Crab looked up again, and a smile spread across his face, revealing a mouth that was nearly completely devoid of teeth. Even his gums looked dark, as if stricken by some sort of accelerated scurvy.
“Oh, I hope you are right, shweeheart. I really, really hope you are right.” His lack of teeth turned every word into a wet lisp, turning the entire sentence into slobbery, consonant-free ramblings.
Corina grimaced, and turned her thoughts inward.
I need to get out of here.
They might have taken her leg, but she didn’t need it; she didn’t need her leg to extract her revenge. The Crab might kill her, maim her, eat her, rape her, or do some other ungodly thing to her body, but when he did, she wasn’t going to go alone.
If it wasn’t the Crab, it would be that bastard Seth. Or Greg/Donnie wherever the fuck he was.
“They’re coming,” she hissed, spit coating her chin. “They’re coming, and when they get here, they are going to light your ass up—fill your fucking sacless body with lead!”
For a moment, the Crab’s face went slack. Then the cracker in his shoulder shifted, and the horrible oscillating teeth started to whir.
When the Crab spoke again, his voice had changed. It had become deeper, more guttural, and to Corina it reminded her very much of a time long ago.
A time when they had been trapped in the snowstorm. A time when there was something else inside her head.
“I am waiting, Corina, I have been waiting for a long, long time.”
And then he started to laugh, and Corina started to cry.
Chapter 25
Donnie Wandry, who up until a few days ago had called himself Greg Griddle, stared at his brother, and felt his stomach flip. It was his brother, but at the same time, it wasn’t.
Walter Wandry was different, and it wasn’t just his body that was changing. He was transforming into something more primitive, more base.
But Donnie had changed, too. Broken at the core, destroyed by the murder of his son, he was not the person he had been when he had joined forces with the Sheriff to blast the crackers. He wasn’t even the same person hanging out with Walter when they had been boys, worried about the next beating that their father would inflict on them.
And the bitch who had started all of this was now strung up by her arms. Donnie had been the one that had suggested throwing her artificial leg to the cops, to get them reeling again. To keep the memory of what happened when someone crossed the Wandry brothers fresh.
He had wanted to go all the way, to kill her the way that Walter had murdered the reporter. But his brother wouldn’t let him.
“Not yet,” the Crab had said, calling upon some vestibule of patience that he hadn’t known his brother to posses. “We wait until Seth returns, then we can send her head via same-day delivery to Sheriff Blacky and his minions.”
This had annoyed Donnie, but he was in no position to protest. Not now, not with what Walter was in the process of becoming.
“What about the other girl? The one in the coma?”
Walter growled, a sound that came from deep within his thin, mucousy chest.
“She’s important—I can feel that she is important. Do you feel it, Donnie? Do you feel that tightness in your head?”
Donnie just stared at his brother. He wanted to believe that these were just the ramblings of a psychopathic junkie—the man had been high constantly going on for at least the entire two weeks that Donnie had been at the compound—but he didn’t. If he was being honest with himself, he had no choice but to reluctantly admit that he felt something too, and he didn’t partake in the various pharmaceuticals that Walter and the entire clan of Skull Krushers seemed to indulge in on a constant basis.
It was as if something was coming, something dark, even darker and more evil than Walter was now. What Donnie wasn’t sure of, in spite of everything, was whether or not he wanted to be here when it arrived.
“After… what do we do after, Walter?”
“After what?”
“After all of this… after the Askergan PD has been destroyed, after we have extracted our revenge. Then what? We can’t just stay here forever. You know that the FBI will eventually bash the door in, and that—” he swallowed hard and hooked a chin toward the horrible malformation embedded in his shoulder —”that thing isn’t going to help us get through a grenade or machine gun fire.”
Walter surprised him by shaking his head.
“No, it won’t. But after we have dealt with the police, it will be here.”
“It? What—”
“I’m getting stronger,” Walter whispered, flexing his arms. The scaly skin across his chest twisted and creaked like wet leather. A shudder ran through his body, and for a split second Donnie swore that he could see through the man’s pale skin. There was something buried beneath, something alive.
But then it was gone, and Walter had returned.
“When it comes, we will all be saved, Donnie. All of us.”
Donnie didn’t think he could wait that long.
Shaking the memory of the conversation from his head, he held his chin high a he strode toward the two guards standing outside the door to the Crab’s lair.
“He’s not in,” the man on the left said without prompting. He was a large man, nearly twice the size of Donnie himself, with a shaved head and a cleft lip.
“Where is he?”
The man ignored the query, lifting his head and staring over top of Donnie.
“Can I go in anyway?”
It was the other man, slightly shorter than the first, but no less impressive in terms of musculature, who answered.
“Only the Crab is allowed in.”
Donnie eyed him with interest. The man had fresh sores on his cheeks and lips, oozing red and yellow pustules that made him look like he was suffering from a horrible bout of adolescent chicken pox.
A heroin junkie, through and through.
Their fear of the crab was palpable, but there were other needs that ran just as deep.
“A teener if you let me in,” Donnie whispered.
Both men lowered their gazes. The first, the one with the cleft lip looked at him as if he were inside, while the other…
“Take a walk, Boyd.”
There was a silent exchange, and the man with the cleft lip looked conflicted. Eventually, however, he shook his head.
“This is on you, Carl. If the Crab—”
/> “He won’t. Now take a walk.”
After the man sauntered off, Carl turned to Donnie.
“You have the teener?”
“Open the door first,” Donnie replied, teasing a small baggy from his pocket. The man’s eyes widened at the sight of the heroin, and he barely stopped short of salivating. With his eyes still locked on the bag, he reached over and unlocked the door using a key from his hip.
Donnie felt his heart flutter in his chest. He wasn’t even sure why he wanted to go into the room.
Did he want to see the girl again? Mock her naked body while she hung from the ceiling? Maybe. But there was something else driving him forward, too. Something inside his skull urging him to go inside, something like a dull, persistent throb in the back of his skull.
Donnie had never experienced the start of a migraine, the aura that often preceded these bouts, but if he had, he might have summed it up to something similar.
Without thinking, he tossed the bag at Carl and while the man was preoccupied with trying to catch it, he hurried inside the dimly lit room and then quickly closed the door behind him.
The first thing that struck him was the smell; a thick wall of odor, reminiscent of rotting meat, forced the crook of his elbow up to his face.
Donnie turned his watering eyes first to the nude girls strung up by their wrists, the bruising from the chains like thin worms making lines down to their armpits and splaying out over the tops of their small, pale breasts. The one that Seth called Alice was breathing deeply, rhythmically, as she had been since the day he had brought her in. The other one, Corina, the girl who had ruthlessly murdered his son, had a pained expression on her face, but she too appeared to be sleeping. Unlike Alice, only one of her legs hung down, three or four inches above the hardwood. Scowling, he turned his attention to the massive desk next, which was covered in drug paraphernalia. Eventually his eyes drifted upward and he focused on the grotesque tapestry of skins that Walter had insisted on making, and the creation of which he had helped.
“Walter’s been busy,” Donnie whispered, noticing that it was now seven skins across. They were strung out and sutured together like some sort of demented laundry line, the human flesh stretching nearly halfway across the length of the room. The final two were the freshest, appearing almost pliable, and he noticed several stretched out patterns of blue ink on their surface.
Stitches (Insatiable Series Book 5) Page 11