Stitches (Insatiable Series Book 5)

by Patrick Logan

  Please, sir, can I have some more?

  The spray didn’t end there; it extended across the hallway and splattered both a door and the frame, both of which were peppered with bullet holes.

  What the fuck happened here? Carter thought at the same time as he gagged. He saw legs of another body sticking out of the room, but he quickly averted his eyes; his stomach wouldn’t be able to handle any more carnage.As it was, he had to continue to swallow to force burning bile back down to the pit of his stomach, and pray that it stayed there.

  Just as he regained control of his breathing, a woman’s voice, strangely soft and sweet in this house of horrors, came to him from inside the room.

  “Bradley, why didn’t you save me?”

  Breathing rapidly, Father Carter Duke leaned against the wall and listened, wondering if he, like the man shouting about Leland and the Goat and Mother, had gone insane.

  Chapter 46

  Sheriff Paul White lowered himself into the sewer, cradling Corina Lawrence’s body as he made the short drop off the lowest rung of the ladder.

  He landed on one knee, re-adjusted Corina on his left shoulder first, then the backpack on his right, and with a grunt raised to his full height.

  A second later, he almost found himself on his knees again. A dull, resonating thud from somewhere above, somewhere inside the estate, made the entire sewer quake.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, bracing himself for another impact. “What the hell was that?”

  He paused, his head turning skyward. A cloud of dust fell from above, and his eyes followed it as it fluttered to the ground, where it was hungrily lapped up by the thin layer of sludge.

  His first instinct was that it had been an explosion, but what followed was not what he expected: silence.

  Explosions, grenades, pipebombs, artillery were almost always followed by their sequelae: smashing glass, collapsing walls, and, of course, screams.

  But there was none of that. There was only silence.

  As he waited for an aftershock that never came, he managed to remove his shirt and drape it over Corina’s body, all the while thinking about what Coggins was doing up above.

  I shouldn’t have left him alone up there. I should be with him—this is my responsibility.

  But while there was truth in those words, another glaring fact overshadowed the former.

  Coggins was right; Askergan needed him.

  He glanced up at Corina’s pale, flaccid face.

  Corina needed him, too.

  And while he had hoped, expected even, to find Alice in the room with Corina, he wasn’t ashamed to say that if only one was to be recovered, he was glad that it was the latter.

  After all, the doctors had said repeatedly that it was unlikely that if—and it was a big if; she had been in a coma for more than six years—Alice ever awoke, there wouldn’t be much in terms of brain activity.

  Still, it felt wrong leaving Alice in the hands of a psychopath, and it felt wronger still to abandon Coggins up there to fight alone.

  Askergan needs you. Corina needs you.

  Paul swallowed hard, and then started to move again.

  After only a few steps, he was suddenly struck by how absolutely quiet and still it was in the tunnel. There had been no sound after the explosion or whatever had rocked the sewer had ended.

  A vivid image of the calm that he and his men had felt in the basement of the police station moments before the crackers had descended upon them flashed in his mind.

  His heart racing now, he unhooked the flashlight from his belt and illuminated the sewer tunnel in front of him. The flashlight was much brighter than the light on his shirt pocket, and he was forced to bring a hand up to shield his eyes.

  As he waited for his eyes to adjust, the only sound he heard was the dull thud of his heart in his chest, and Corina’s soft, rhythmic breathing on his shoulder.

  Why is it so damn—

  The walkie on his belt suddenly clicked twice and Sheriff White gasped. Corina slipped from his shoulder, and he shifted, barely catching her before she fell the six feet or so to the sewer tunnel floor.

  “Fuck,” he gasped, reaching for the walkie on his belt. “Williams? Reggie?”

  There was only dead air.

  As he waited for his deputies to respond, he thought he heard something else in the distance.

  A distinct scratching sound.

  His eyes widened.

  The crackers… they’ve come back!

  The scratching was getting louder, clearly moving in his direction.

  Fingers numb with fear, he searched for the talk button again, but he missed. On his second attempt, his finger only grazed the button before it clicked again. Only this time, it didn’t click twice, but at least a dozen times in rapid succession.

  What the fuck is going on?

  His large thumb came down on the button.

  “Williams? What’s going on at the fork?” he paused, and then spoke in a low voice. “Do you guys hear that? I think—I think something’s coming…”

  He took two steps forward, still squinting down the length of the tunnel, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from.

  With Corina hanging on one shoulder and the flashlight in that hand, the walkie in the other, he was going to have to make a choice if he was to draw either of the pistols on his hips.

  Judging by how the sound was increasing in both pitch and intensity by the second, he needed to make the decision of which to let go of sooner rather than later.

  He thumbed the talk button again.

  “Reggie? Williams?”

  Cooooooooooooome

  The sound was so loud inside his head that Sheriff White actually dropped both the walkie talkie and the flashlight.

  What the fuck was that?

  Now his thoughts weren’t of the crackers, but of being in that damn closet again.

  As with the thud from above, he waited, poised, ready to draw his pistols if the voice returned.

  When the only sounds that persisted were the same scratching, scrabbling noise, he reached down with a trembling hand and picked up the walkie.

  He wiped it off and with a shaking finger, pressed the talk button. Only this time, he didn’t hear the comforting click and accompanying hiss letting him know that it was clear to speak. At first he thought that it had broken in the fall, but by his pocket light he could only see a small ding on one of the corners and a smudge of green slime on the grill.

  Otherwise, it looked fine.

  He pressed the button again, but still nothing happened.

  Confused, he held it up to his ear, and realized that there was a sound coming from the small speaker.

  clickclickclickclickclickclick

  Someone—Reggie? Deputy Williams—was pressing the button on their end so rapidly that he was unable to break the sequence.

  Against his better judgment, but unable to think of what else to do, Sheriff White decided on a more basic approach.

  He shouted.

  “Reggie! Williams!” he paused to shift Corina higher up his shoulder, making sure that if he had to draw with both hands, he would still be able to do so even with her weight pressing down on him. “I—I could use some help over here! There’s something down here!”

  Again he waited. When there was no reply, Paul drew in a deep breath.

  “Williams!”

  But the only answer was his echo… and the scratching sound.

  Where is that damn noise coming from?

  At some point, he had realized that it couldn’t be the crackers; the crackers made distinct popping sounds.

  This noise, on the other hand, was too soft, too continuous. Too delicate.

  Crackers or not, he had to get moving. His shoulder and arm were getting tired from hauling Corina around. Soon, it would go numb and when that happened he wouldn’t be able to draw at all.

  Sheriff White scooped up the flashlight and then took two aggressive steps forward.

&nbs
p; When the dull thudding or voice inside his head failed to recur, he grew more confident and strode forward with renewed determination.

  He nearly made it to where the tunnel split when he first saw them.

  “Ffffuckkkkk,” he moaned.

  Sheriff White staggered backward, instantly regretting his decision not to stay in the estate with Coggins.

  There were hundreds—no, thousands—of rats scrambling directly at him, a blanket of mottled brown and gray fur moving as one.

  At first he thought that it might be some sort of trick, an optical illusion caused by the reflection of the acute light of his flashlight off the two inches of sludge at the bottom of the sewer. But when he blinked hard and changed the angle of the light they were still there.

  As the wriggling mass quickly closed the twenty or so feet between them, their features became more distinct, vanquishing any idea that this was an exhaustion-fueled mirage.

  He could see their black, beady eyes, their wet, wriggling noses. Thick, yellow front teeth.

  Cooooooome

  Sheriff White whipped his head around, trying to find out an alcove, a dent, anything at all to hide in, to get the hell out of their way.

  It’s the voice, they’re moving toward the voice.

  This revelation, which seemed to materialize not unlike the way the word had shocked into his mind, did nothing to calm his jackrabbit heart.

  There was nowhere to hide; his only option was to head back, to ascend the ladder and return to the estate, but something told him that that was where they were headed.

  Reggie had been the most vocal in his disgust of rats, but Paul’s own words rang true.

  Everyone hates rats.

  He cringed, then watched in awe as the rodents, plump from feeding off what waste human bodies failed to make use of, continued toward him. It was a horrible sight, something from nightmares, but he just couldn’t seem to look away.

  His original estimate of thousands was a gross understatement, he realized. There were so many rats that they not only covered the floor of the sewer pipe, but their collective mass had pushed partway up the sides as well. Paul saw some of the smaller ones being trampled, forced into the murky slime to drown, overwhelmed by the frenetic ecstasy that drove them onward.

  Only they didn’t drown. Eventually they rose up again, their faces covered in a green and brown sludge that flowed over their eyes, noses, into their mouths.

  Sheriff White could hear the pads of their feet smack against the fetid water, their nails skittering across the metal beneath.

  It was as if the sewer tunnel itself was regurgitated a foul, brown carpet.

  There weren’t thousands of them, but tens of thousands.

  And they were nearly upon him.

  Sheriff Paul White was out of options.

  He couldn’t run back, and he couldn’t move forward; the rats had passed the fork already. So he exercised the only other option he had.

  He moved as close to the side of the sewer as possible, where it was almost completely dry. Working quickly, he laid his bag on his lap, and then lowered Corina on top of the bag.

  Her face was calm, relaxed, her breathing slow. To Paul, she looked much like Alice had before she had been kidnapped.

  Peaceful.

  He took a deep breath and then huddled over her protectively, trying to cover her completely with his large arms and burly chest.

  Sheriff Paul White bowed his head, then bit his tongue to suppress a scream as the first of the thousands of rats scampered over his bare back.

  Chapter 47

  The man’s skin was thin and puckered, the color of which reminded Bradley Coggins of a translucent tic tac. He was completely nude and aside from the mess between his legs, the most horrifying attributes were the thick lines coursing across his chest. Each one of them seemed to pulsate hypnotically in sequence, ebbing and engorging as if someone were filling them with a silicon paste.

  Beneath this layer of pale flesh, Coggins saw a hint of something dark green with a distinct diamond pattern to it.

  Something familiar.

  “No, I killed you—I shot you in the face,” Coggins croaked. He licked his lips, frantically trying to moisten his pasty mouth.

  The horrible undulating laughter returned, once again sending his vision askew.

  “You can’t kill me, Coggins,” the deep voice rumbled. Then the creature, for that was what it was now, a creature, something inhuman, turned its head toward the guard lying facedown just inside the doorway.

  “Stand,” he roared.

  The man’s eyes popped open and he grunted and promptly pushed himself to his feet. His nose was broken, turned upward like a pig’s snout, and his lips were fat and swollen. Blood trickled from his nostrils and spilled into his mouth, and yet he made no move to wipe it away.

  Coggins stopped licking his own lips.

  “No, please,” he gasped.

  A vision of Oxford in the skin suit standing in the center of the room of the Wharfburn Estate flashed in his mind.

  The laughing continued.

  The man once named Walter Wandry tilted his head toward the biker and his neck suddenly seeming to engorge like a snake unhinging its jaw. It snapped together suddenly, splitting the corners of its mouth. Inside these cracks, Coggins spied more of those hard, dark green scales, but no blood to speak of.

  This can’t be happening again.

  He blinked hard, trying to force this horrible nightmare away.

  It persisted.

  The guard started to undress, slowly disrobing with a sort of mechanical precision that made the act even more disturbing.

  Coggins’s entire body was shaking, causing the Cracker that he had forgotten was still in his hand to chatter. He glanced down at that hard shell, at the horrible teeth that had pulled back from the gums or whatever the fuck they jutted from in death, and gagged.

  Fuck it, he thought, knowing that the thing was just as—if not more—likely to affix to his face as it was to attack the beast before him.

  “Do you know my name?” the thing suddenly asked as it slowly started to move behind the now naked biker.

  “Oot’-keban,” Coggins said softly. “Oot’-keban.”

  His fingers moved as he spoke, trying to pry open the baggie of heroin that Paul had given him with one hand. Except it was a near impossible task; his hand wavered like someone suffering from advanced Parkinson’s and was slick with sweat.

  More laughter ensued.

  “Oot’-keban is not my name, Bradley Coggins.”

  Coggins tried again to open the baggie, but it was sealed tight and his fingers slipped.

  This better fucking work.

  His eyes glanced to the shotgun on the ground in front of him. He would try that next, if the cracker failed.

  After all, it had worked once before. Somehow, though, he doubted it would be successful on a second attempt.

  They had managed to poison the demon with drugs on their first encounter, and it had responded by birthing crackers that thrived on the stuff.

  A shotgun blast to the face wasn’t going to cut it this time.

  “No, Coggins. That is not my name. That is what the ancients called me—it means evil skin, but that is not my name.”

  The beast suddenly extended its hands, and the mushy flesh that had once belonged to Walter Wandry popped and then peeled back, revealing dark fingers adorned with long silver claws.

  Coggins’s time was running out.

  “What are you, then? What is your name?”

  The claws rested on the biker’s shoulders. Now that the thing was behind the naked biker, cast in shadows, Coggins really was back in the Wharfburn Estate.

  Get up, Oxford! Get the fuck up! What are you doing?

  But Oxford didn’t rise. Instead, he just lay there on the ground while the reptilian demon stripped him first of the false skin, then his own.

  In its wake was a red and white sinewy anatomical representation of a human.


  But Oxford, like Dana and Walter, was no more.

  “People have called me many things over the years… a demon, the devil, Leland, Mother, the Goat. But I am none of these.”

  Coggins tried desperately to open the baggie, but his fingers kept slipping.

  C’mon! C’mon open the fuck up!

  And then, on what felt like his hundredth time, he heard the click as the plastic Ziploc seal released.

  Yes!

  Moving slowly, terrified that any sudden movement would alert the beast, Coggins slid his hand over top of the cracker’s open orifice.

  “What are you then?” he nearly gasped, his heart pounding so hard in his chest that he feared it might explode at any moment.

  “I am the id without the ego, I am pure unadulterated evil. You made me. I am what you fear most, I am a culmination of the most deplorable acts that humans have ever committed. I am now, I am forever.”

  Coggins sprinkled the heroin into the orifice then shoved the dead Cracker across the hardwood, where it twirled like some sort of clay tajine.

  “You ain’t human,” Coggins spat. “And you never fucking were.”

  The beast stopped dissecting the biker’s skin and reared back, its thick neck and head turning toward the crackerc that spun toward it.

  Coggins smiled when one of the thing’s white legs cracked, and then started to straighten.

  Chapter 48

  Corina had regained consciousness before all the rats had flowed over them, but she kept her eyes closed until the last horrible, wet paw slapped her arm.

  There was a knot in the pit of her stomach, partly from the horror of being covered in rodents, and partly from the blows that Greg had delivered.

  Greg!

  She gasped, and tried to sit up. It took a few seconds, but Sheriff White, realizing that she was awake, finally unfurled his body.

  “Greg?” she asked, a mixture of desperation and fear in her voice. “Where’s Greg?”

  Sheriff White sighed, and wiped sweat from his brow.