With a grunt, Carter stood and admired their work.
The skins were like a straight jacket, covering the beast from head to toe, the chain so tight that it bulged in places.
Looks like a fucking sausage casing two sizes too small… three little piggies all in a row.
One claw jutted out, as well as the arrowhead of a tail, but the rest was so tight when either swiped, they could only move in a very short arc; it couldn’t even turn the claw back on itself, get at the skins to split them and set the rest of the beast free again.
And the skins themselves… whatever sick fuck had stitched them together had used some strong ass sutures; they were taught, but he couldn’t see any that had broken just yet.
Carter took a deep breath.
“Let’s—” he started, but a voice from behind them cut him off.
“Not so fast—we’re not done here yet.”
Chapter 52
Deputy Bradley Coggins turned in the direction of the voice, and was surprised to see Corina standing there, a scowl on her face, a length of chain draped over one shoulder. She punted a rat out of her way and strode forward.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Father Carter said nervously, but Coggins held his hand out to silence him. While he shared the priest’s concerns, for the time being the sutures looked like they would hold.
He lowered his chin and stared into Corina’s red-rimmed eyes.
Coggins had left Sheriff White down in the sewer because he wanted to—no, wanted wasn’t a strong enough word, because he had to end things here. And Corina had returned from the sewer without the Sheriff, because she was compelled to end it, too.
Father Carter didn’t—couldn’t—understand that.
Coggins nodded to the young woman and encouraged by his reaction, by their mutual realization, she strode forward with an air of authority.
“Hook it up,” she ordered. “Let’s string this fucker up like he did to me… and Nancy… and Alice.”
Coggins’s eyes widened at the mention of Alice’s name, but before he could ask Corina about her, the beast wrapped in skins growled long and deep.
Fury building inside him, Coggins drove an elbow hard in the side of the beast. Then he reached out and grabbed the length of chain from Corina’s hand. As she reached up to grab another, Coggins snapped the clip on the end through one of the links wrapped around Oot’-keban’s thrashing body.
Corina quickly appeared at his side with another chain, and only then did Coggins realize that both chains were attached to the ceiling high above.
A smile slowly crept onto his face, a sensation that was so rare these days that it felt completely foreign and caused his facial muscles to protest by twitching wildly.
He hooked the clip on this chain through another link, this time at the end—the head, it’s near that disgusting scaled head—opposite the first chain.
Then he turned to Father Carter.
“Grab the chains, and hold them tight. Don’t let it up!”
The priest, eyes wide, nodded, then grabbed the lengths of chain. He wrapped them around his wrists and hands, and then leapt up, driving the heels of both boots into the demon’s side. The beast grunted and tried to roll away, but the priest arched his back and pulled the chains until they were tight. He looked like some sort of Presbyterian water skier, but if that wasn’t strange enough, the man seemed to be smiling.
Unbelievably the fucking priest was smiling.
What kind of…
Coggins shook his head and regained focus.
“Don’t let it up!” he repeated as he hurried over to Sabra’s desk, making a concerted effort not to stare at Greg’s body as the rats tore at his dead flesh.
Breathing heavily, he slammed his palm against the red button beneath the desk, and the hidden gears in the ceiling immediately groaned to life.
“What the fuck?” Father Carter muttered.
“Okay, Father, let go of the chains now.”
The priest looked at him with a mask of confusion on his face—the smile had since faded—but when the chains behind him started to tighten, realization washed over him with all the subtlety of a slap in the face.
Only this realization had come too late.
“Father, let go of the—”
“I’m fucking trying! I’m trying!” As if to punctuate this point, his face started to turn a deep red.
He hopped off the beast and then shook his hands, trying to unloop his fingers from the heavy chain. His left slipped out easily enough, but as the chains tightened, they had pinched his right hand painfully across the palm.
“Fucking…” he grumbled, now using his free hand to try and pull his other one out. Chain links continued to disappear into slots in the ceiling until all the slack was gone.
“Help him!” Coggins shouted to Corina. “Jesus, get him out of there!”
Corina ran over to the man, and started to work feverishly to try to get Father Carter’s hand out.
“You need to jump up,” she instructed. “You need to jump up and make it looser!”
Carter looked at the priest’s toes, which were barely touching the ground now, then glanced down at the red button.
Coggins was locked in place. He knew he should just stop the chains, press the button twice and have them bring the priest and the demon back to the ground.
But he couldn’t.
He simply couldn’t risk the thing getting loose again.
Torn between the two options, Coggins opted to do nothing at all.
Father Carter’s cries quickly degenerated into a painful scream as his hand was crushed and he was hoisted into the air. Corina’s face contorted into a grimace, but instead of continuing to struggle to free the priest, she took a step back and turned to Coggins.
She shook her head slowly and Coggins moved away from the desk.
The priest must have seen this, as he took a break from screaming to speak, his eyes darting back and forth between Coggins and Corina.
“No, no, no, no! You can’t do this to me! Put me down!” he shrieked. “Goddamn it! Put me down!”
Coggins took another step away from the desk, and Father Carter’s eyes bulged.
“Please,” he was whimpering now. “Please, it’s crushing my hand—let me down. Don’t do this.”
Coggins shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m—”
“Pull yourself up and untwist it!” Corina suddenly shouted. “Fucking pull yourself up hard!”
Coggins saw the priest’s expression change. Red-faced, he bored down and with the clumsy dexterity of a drunken gymnast, he grabbed the chain with his free hand. With a heroic jerk, the priest somehow managed to pull his body up, waving his other hand madly as he did.
Unbelievably, Father Carter generated just enough slack for his hand to slip out, and Coggins felt his diaphragm finally contract.
The priest fell to the ground in a heap, clutching his injured hand between his knees. And yet despite his obvious pain, he still had the presence of mind to scout away from the demon that continued its ascent toward the heavens.
The beast’s guttural cries increased, and the loose claw reached out. Except now it was hanging down like the boneless limb of a mutated cow, and appeared unable to reach back upon itself to slice at the skins.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Father Carter muttered, reaffirming Coggins’s suspicions that this was no run-of-the-mill priest.
Cooooooom—
The familiar summons suddenly deteriorated into an unintelligible wet moan. More black blood started to seep between the seams of the skins and drip to the floor in a steady stream.
Without thinking, Coggins started to back up toward the closet, noticing in his periphery that Corina and Father were doing the same.
Is this it then? Is this enough? Just let the beast hang? What’s going to happen when the Pekinish PD come in here? Will they let it down? Free it?
He remembered flashes of hi
s conversation with Sheriff White in the sewer.
Will it die if it doesn’t have any stimulants, any drugs? Will the absence of what we first used to kill it now be its undoing?
Coggins shook his head, trying to think clearly. Lack of sleep and emotional exhaustion were taking their toll on him.
What about Alice? Where the fuck is Alice?
A tremendous sigh broke through his rambling thoughts, and Coggins turned his eyes back to the still thrashing beast.
“There,” Corina gasped, pointing a finger to a spot just above where the claw hung ineffectually.
The outline of a strange shape started to appear, jutting from beneath one of the fresher, more pliable skins
Alice’s? Is that Alice’s skin? Please, tell me that’s not Alice.
As he watched, transfixed, the outline became darker, more defined.
It was smaller than he remembered, but Coggins recognized it nevertheless.
Oot’-keban had birthed a cracker.
Coggins started to back up more quickly now, holding his arms out protectively in front of Corina and the priest.
“We should—” get out of here now, he meant to say, but the cracker, a pale white thing somehow managed to weasel its way toward one of the seams and Coggins was unable to continue. A moment later, the cracker fell out, landing on all six legs on the ground in a clatter.
“Shoot it!” someone yelled, and Father Carter raised the only gun they had with live rounds still in it.
Then Coggins heard one of the strangest and most inappropriate comments given the circumstances: the priest mumbled something that sounded like three little piggies.
Confused, he glanced over at the man and saw that one of Father Carter’s eyes was closed, and his tongue was poking into the inside of his cheek. Just as he looked about to fire, however, he started to lower the gun.
“What are you—” Coggins whipped his head around, and for the second time in a span of ten minutes, he started to smile.
The milky cracker was rearing back, showing them its tiny, razor-like teeth. Only it wasn’t readying itself to fly at one of them.
Instead, Coggins recognized this as a defensive posture.
Rats had made a circle around the cracker and were slowly closing in on it.
The cracker lowered itself in that familiar, robotic sequence, and then launched itself at the closest rat. The force of the collision sent them shooting across the room in a collective wad. When they finally skittered to a stop, Coggins saw that those pointed legs had contracted, snapping the rat nearly in two.
But it wasn’t over yet.
Before the cracker could release the dead rat in its grasp, another swarmed the cracker. It’s yellow teeth cracked ineffectively off the hard shell, and the cracker batted at it with one of its pointed appendages. But as soon as that rat was gone, it was replaced by another three. And after those had been swatted away, a dozen.
A hundred.
Within moments, the cracker was lost in a see of brown and gray fur. Seconds after that, Coggins heard an audible crunch from within that thriving mass.
“Hey! Look!” Corina shouted.
Another cracker was dangling from the skins, and Coggins turned just in time to see it fall.
The rats disposed of this one even more quickly, swarming it with wave upon wave of gnashing teeth and wriggling pink tails.
“Jesus,” Father Carter whispered at his right.
The crackers had spread one of the seams between the skins wide enough to fit through, and this caused the flow of black blood to increase. Some of it landed near a mischief of rats who waited for the next cracker to fall, for their next meal however unappetizing.
After all, a starving man did not employ a hunger strike because his meal lacks a little seasoning.
The rats lapped at it curiously at first, but when their snouts were coated with the viscous, black liquid, they started to quake with excitement.
More rats came to investigate, and their reaction was the same: gluttonous excitement.
The sight of all those rats, their fur coated as if by oil, made Coggins queasy, and he subconsciously took another few steps toward the closet.
As he watched, and the blood continued to spill, it seemed that every one of the thousands of rats in the room started to congregate beneath the beast, either hungrily devouring the black blood or tearing apart and suffocating the odd cracker that fell.
And yet this still wasn’t enough.
Six years ago these rats had been pushed into the farthest recesses of the sewers, surviving only by eating their young, a cannibalistic infanticide ritual that had driven their tiny rat brains mad.
They were starving, and they had heeded the call. But now that the demon that had brought them here had lost control, their desires had become more visceral.
They were here to feed.
“Fucking hell,” Corina muttered from his left.
Coggins knew that this was their cue to leave, to get the fuck out of there, but no matter how disgusting, he couldn’t draw his eyes away.
The rats began to writhe on top of one another like some sort of fur-covered obelisk, a growing, rodent pyre in pursuit of the beast that was being cranked upward.
A few seconds later, the chains thunked and Oot’-keban came to a rest, swaying slightly from the jolted stop.
It was almost as if the rats knew what was happening, that their meal was now ripe for the taking.
Their activity grew even more frenetic, each rat lunging or scrambling up the side of the pyramid to increase its height until they were but inches from that dangling claw. The silver nails swiped down, sending a handful of rats flying, but a dozen more replaced these fallen soldiers almost instantly. As their yellow teeth started to bite, desperate now to break through those hard green scales, the beast’s thrashing intensified.
But while the entire ceiling seemed to bow inward slightly, the chains held.
That sick bastard Sabra had engineered a master torture device.
A shout from somewhere toward the front of the house finally broke the spell. Coggins looked toward Father Carter, who was staring at him, eyes wide.
“We should get the fuck out of here,” the priest said. “Is there another way out? A back door?”
“Pekinish PD! Come out with your hands up!” someone shouted, closer now.
Father Carter grimaced.
“Is there another way out?” he repeated. “We can’t be—” but he stopped when he saw the expression on Coggins’s face.
I don’t know who you are, but you aren’t a priest. And something tells me that I’m going to regret not letting you hang up there, with it.
Instead of addressing Carter, he turned to Corina and nodded.
She nodded back and then reached out with two fingers and wiped blood of the brass deputy star on his chest.
“We’re not going out the back way,” Coggins said. “This is our fucking town and we’re going out the front.”
Coggins took a final look back at the thrashing beast hanging from the chains and was suddenly brought back to the time in the Wharfburn Estate, of watching another beast, much like this one, or, perhaps, the same—I am the id without the ego, I am pure unadulterated evil. You made me. I am now, I am forever—stripping the skin off of a man with a cut on his forehead.
The irony of that thing being wrapped up in human skins as the rats formed a pyramid up to devour it, was not lost on him.
Coggins shook his head.
With a last lungful of foul air, the three of them turned and left Sabra’s grand room to the soundtrack of starving rats tearing and feasting on obsidian scales.
Chapter 53
Jared pulled Corina close, and wrapped his arm protectively around her waist. It was hot, and the sun beat down on him relentlessly, making him sweat beneath the Askergan PD uniform that was just a little too big for him.
It didn’t help that the makeshift stage was built on the small embankment without even a
hint of a tree to offer any shade.
Corina squeezed him back.
“People of Askergan County, I stand before you as your humble civil servant, as your Sheriff, but most of all as one of you: a resident of Askergan,” Sheriff Paul White began, addressing the dozen or so people standing by the road and the three news cameras aimed at him. Jared scanned their faces as the man spoke, and noticed that they all had mirrored expressions: exhaustion. Even the way the cameramen adjusted the focus on their cameras was slow, languid.
“These past six years have been hard for many of us, and many of us have lost more than just sleep. I am not unique in having lost someone that I loved, and yesterday’s events were no different,” the Sheriff cleared his throat before continuing. “But we are still here, and Askergan County is still standing. There are people that want—that have tried—to burn this place to the ground and yet we and it remains stolid. I was born in this place—born and raised—and I will never leave.
“I am standing here today to pledge to you that I will rebuild Askergan County to its former glory as a beautiful hamlet devoid of crime, corruption, greed and evil. Once, Askergan was safe. Once, it was beautiful. I promise that it will be that way again.”
A cheer filled the hot summer air. It wasn’t as enthusiastic as the Sheriff had hoped, but he didn’t blame the crowd.
They were all just so damn tired.
“Look, everyone knows that there is something about Askergan County that just draws people in; it’s a strange and endearing quality that brought our ancestors, the Askergan tribesmen of which the County bears their name, to this place. It’s something that should be cherished, nurtured. But, unfortunately, like the surf floating garbage onto the beach, not everyone who comes to Askergan are here to help the County flourish. I further pledge to rid the County of all of those that would see it come to harm.”
Sheriff White looked down at this point, and for a brief second Jared thought that he might wrap his large hands around the cheap veneered pulpit and crush it within his grasp. But he didn’t. Instead, he sighed, and then slowly raised his tired eyes to the crowd.
“But, alas, I am but one man—a flawed human being. As I recognize my strengths, I must also acknowledge my weaknesses. Which is why, today, right here, right now, I have sought help from a higher power: for the first time in nearly three decades, I have decided to appoint the fourteenth Mayor of Askergan County!”
Stitches (Insatiable Series Book 5) Page 23