by C. K. Vile
That explained so much.
“Sadists and pedophiles, yes. Please continue.” Nick played along. Both professional and personal curiosity demanded he know where this was going.
“Clark’s father wanted young Clark to be a dentist, like him. But Clark said no. He didn’t want to be a dentist. He wanted to do his own thing. He wanted to be a veterinarian. He wanted to help animals. So that’s what he went to school for.”
Nick ran a finger along the edge of the zip tie. He’d put several grooves in it, but none of them were substantial. He needed to stick the edge of the glass in one and keep it there.
Clark ranted on. “Clark read a lot, but he didn’t relate to most books. They were about people he didn’t understand. But then he came across Nick Dawkins.”
Nick remembered a time when he thought having a fan would be the neatest thing ever.
“Nick Dawkins had written a number of stories that Clark could relate to.”
Nick could hazard a guess.
“Pet Project, which was about another little boy who wanted to be a vet.”
He also wanted to be a serial killer, but please, go on.
“Cancer Man, which was about a sick man who destroyed everything he touched. Like Clark’s father.”
Nick tried to focus on cutting through his zip tie, but there was a subtext there he couldn’t help but be distracted by.
Clark’s eyes were wild and overtook the rearview mirror. “Oh, and Rat King. And if nothing else, Rat King was peak Nick Dawkins, am I right? And then Victor Trumble went and shit all over it.”
“Um.” Was that a rhetorical question? Nick couldn’t tell. He was quickly losing track of the conversation. “Peak? Really?”
“Rat King was peak, absolutely. It was about a nice, normal guy who was devoured by the horrors of the world despite always trying to do the right thing. Who can’t relate to that?”
Nick couldn’t deny that Clark got the point of that one even though it wasn’t properly applied. Still, he did get the point. Even Victor Trumble hadn’t fully understood what Nick had done with that book.
“And let’s face it, Nick. Rat King was the best you’ll ever do. It’s all downhill from here. Love Scars and Marks? Garbage.”
Nick contemplated biting through Clark’s throat, but wrote it off as wishful thinking. Besides, he had more important things to bite through—he’d finally made a dent in the zip tie. He needed a few minutes more. “Geez, Clark, tell me how you really feel, don’t hold back.”
Clark was no longer looking at the road. His eyes were on the rearview mirror. He drove pretty fast for not being able to see more than ten feet in front of the van. “You know, Nick, there’s a whole subgroup on Myiasis who think you killed Fly? They’re like Nick Dawkins truthers. They sit in their basements wearing tinfoil hats and concocting conspiracy theories about how you sold your soul to Hollywood. Sold out your fans. Killed Fly because she got too close.”
Nick hadn’t seen those. If he had, he might have punched a hole through a wall. “Danielle.”
Clark went back to watching the road. “What’s that?”
Nick got louder, partly so Clark could hear and partly out of genuine anger. “Her name was Danielle. Not ‘Fly’.” He sawed at the zip tie. He had to be getting close to making it through. He didn’t want to stop the progress he was making long enough to check. “And you don’t know shit about her. You don’t know shit about shit.”
Nick saw it coming again. The off-ramp to Rantville. He could never resist stopping by to say hello. For the first time since Nick had woken, Clark stopped talking.
“You think what you’re doing is art? It’s not art. Let’s assume for a second that it was okay to kidnap a father of two and shove crabs under his skin. What you’re doing is fan art at best.” Nick could read the hurt and anger on Clark’s face. He kept cutting at him in the same way he kept cutting at the zip tie. “Your shit’s not original. You’re not contributing anything new to the world. You’re standing on the shoulders of a giant. That’s what you gave up being a vet to do? My god. Do you still live with your dad, too? You do, don’t you?”
Clark erupted. “I defended you. I told the truthers there had to be a rational explanation for Fly’s death. For the Trumble movies. For your shitty new books. But they were right. You’re a fucking sellout.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, I hate Trumble’s movies.” Nick scratched furiously at the zip tie. He felt blood on his fingertips, but he wasn’t sure if it came from his wrist or his fingers or both. It all hurt. “But let me tell you something, Clark. I’ve seen a lot of hacks and wannabe’s in my day. And that’s what you are.”
Clark said nothing, but floored the van and swerved off the road. He didn’t slow down even as the van hopped up and down, slamming Nick into the metal floor over and over. Nick lost the piece of glass he held, but it was secondary to the pent-up bile he spewed onto his captor.
“You’re nothing, Clark. You’ve wasted your life. Me? I’ve accomplished something. I’ve made children wet their beds and couples squeeze each other in the dark. I’m trending today, bitch.”
Clark glared into the rearview mirror. “So am I.”
“As a shadow. As a pale imitation of the original. You’re MaggotMaestro, which, holy shit, is about the most undeservedly self-gratifying screen name on that site. Me? I’m Nick motherfucking Dawkins. The teller of terror. So why don’t you bend over and kiss my—”
Clark slammed on the brakes and Nick slid into the passenger seat of the van with a painful amount of force.
Perhaps he’d gone too far.
Clark was livid and the zip tie wasn’t going anywhere. Clark’s long hair whipped behind him as he opened the door and climbed out of the van.
Nick had one chance at this, and no hands. He looked at the glass on the floor of the van. If his hands were free he’d be golden. But they weren’t. He had to use what he had. He ran his lips across a groove in the floor, gathering up as many pieces of glass as he could. He picked up a fair amount of mud and rainwater along with them.
He rocked himself to his feet. The world rolled. He ignored it and held his balance. His mouth filled with the taste of copper as the glass cut into his lips and gums.
Clark opened the back door of the van. Nick lunged toward him and spit mud, blood, and glass as hard as he could into his face.
Nick hopped out of the van and landed socks first in the mud. The pouring rain drenched him. “How do you like it, you piece of shit?”
Clark didn’t like it at all. He pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Son of a bitch!”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Nick yelled as he got his bearings, or lack thereof. He spun around. Trees, trees, everywhere. And one ominous looking wooden building that hadn’t been occupied in some time. A mill or something.
That would be Clark’s art studio. The last place on Earth Nick wanted to be.
Run, motherfucker.
Nick’s legs moved faster than was prudent with his hands behind his back. Every step threatened to topple him. He ran off the muddy road, between the trees.
Clark called to him. “Run all you like, Nick. Run your ass off. You’ve got nowhere to go.” He screamed into the wet and dismal night. “There’s not a living soul within miles of here. I’m beginning to see why you like this place.”
Chapter 16
Nick tongued at what he hoped was the last piece of glass he’d picked up in the van. The stubborn little bastard didn’t want to stop rolling into the back of his mouth, behind his molars. It was doing some real damage back there as near as he could tell, but it would be nothing compared to what it’d do to him if it journeyed down his esophagus and mixed with the blood and mud in his stomach.
He stepped on a rock and suppressed a cry of pain. Clark hadn’t bothered to put shoes on him after beating him senseless and dragging him from his home, something Nick hadn’t fully considered when he came up with his cunning plan
to run through the woods with his hands tied behind his back.
Clark.
If he’d managed to get free in the van, banged up hands or not, he’d have punched Clark in his jacked up teeth until the world stopped turning.
Nick cursed himself. He had to go and antagonize this guy. No more trips to Rantville. It was a bad neighborhood.
He splashed through a puddle. His throat and lungs hurt from the cold air, to say nothing of the rest of him. He wasn’t sure how useful his hands would be if he did get them free, and his right arm housed a bite that was bound to get infected with some truly heinous bacteria. The rain stung the right side of his face. Probably cuts from the glass he took.
Nick’s game plan had been non-existent apart from the general concept of running away, but that was a good start. He wasn’t up for round two.
Prelude, Clark had said. Damned if Nick stay for the main event.
He’d decided to run into the woods based on the simple premise that if he ran in a random direction every now and again it would be more difficult for Clark to follow. Maybe he’d even stumble upon someplace he could hide, maybe hibernate for the winter.
Nick rethought that idea after stepping on a sharp stick. Mother pussbucket, that hurt. He wouldn’t make it far ripping his feet to shreds on the landscape. The alternative was the muddy road and while it was more exposed, it sounded better and better with every painful step. He’d have to stay well ahead of Clark.
He ran back onto the mud path. There were still plenty of twigs and rocks to step on, but it was a marked improvement from tearing through the trees in his socks.
Clark’s sing song taunting echoed through the forest. Nick couldn’t quite make it out, but the lack of urgency in his voice was eerie.
The rain ran into his eyes. He shook it off and his head swelled. He wanted to lie down with ninety percent of his being. The other ten percent wanted to keep one leg in front of the other. Keep moving. Not end up in Clark’s house of horrors with a full set of billiard balls shoved up his ass.
What was he thinking when he wrote that scene? He regretted it in hindsight.
Lightning flashed. Nature’s sporadic strobe was the only illumination he had. It was enough to show him the road ahead. He’d pick a direction and run. Maybe Clark would choose the other.
Nick stepped in a groove in the mud and his foot turned sideways. “Nyyyaaaagh!”
Every step now was a shotgun blast to his ankle. Had he twisted it? Could he not catch a fucking break?
He ran out onto the road and saw a flash of light to the right. Lightning. No. Not lightning, too steady for that. Headlights.
Headlights. Coming around the bend, reflecting off the trees.
Nick stood at the edge of the road, his weight on his good foot. He wiggled back and forth, the most movement he could manage with his arms bound. He shouted at the oncoming car as it rounded the curve. It hugged the edge of the road.
No no no no no.
Poised to jump to the side, Nick’s ankle rebelled and his leg went slack.
The car only grazed Nick’s leg, but in his mind it’d been taken clean off. For a brief moment that seemed like an eternity, the crack of the impact replaced every sight, every sound. All he knew was pain. It became his entire world. He couldn’t remember anything before it.
When reality came back into focus, he was face down on the ground. He struggled to move, scraping his face across the pavement. Nothing on him worked right. His arms were still useless. His left leg was on fire. Not literally, though the agony was on par. It had to be broken. He’d never broken a bone before, but he’d imagined what it felt like, or thought he had. The real experience dwarfed his imagination.
He looked down at his leg and assessed the damage in the blood-red brake lights of the car parked a few yards away.
Bone. That was bone protruding out of his damned leg.
He cried out. Well played, universe. Good game.
The driver of the car opened his door and climbed out. “My god, I didn’t see you. Are you okay?”
Nick rolled onto his back and shouted between gasping breaths. He could have sworn his leg had torn itself in half in the process.
The driver leaned in close. His gaze had been drawn to Nick’s bound arms. “What the hell—?”
Nick coughed. That final piece of glass flew from his mouth, along with quite a bit of blood.
The driver held his hands over Nick’s prone body, moving them back and forth as though he didn’t know where to begin to help.
“Guy coming,” was the best Nick could do, but his words didn’t register with the driver. Either he couldn’t hear Nick or he was too preoccupied with the tied up guy he’d creamed with his Volvo to listen.
Nick tried again. “He’s coming. Crazy guy.”
That registered. The driver stood up and looked behind him. Clark came roaring out of the darkness and plunged a syringe into the driver’s left eye. The driver dropped and screamed to high heaven, but it was brief. Two seconds passed and he didn’t care. Four seconds passed, and he couldn’t care. Nick suspected the driver wouldn’t care about anything ever again.
Clark stood over the driver, bathed in the car’s parking lights.
“I was going to knock you out with that, Nick. And now look.” Clark scurried toward him, spider-like. “You’ve broken your leg and—yep, that’s what you call a compound fracture.”
Nick yelled the loudest his body would allow. “Somebody help me.”
Clark stepped over Nick and spread his arms wide. He raised his head and shouted far louder than Nick could. “Somebody help. Man with a broken leg here.” He looked down at Nick. His tone quieted. “Sad, washed up little man with a broken leg here.”
Clark dug his fingers into Nick’s underarms. More pain. There wasn’t a place on him that didn’t have the dials turned up to eleven. His body told him to stop moving; Clark didn’t get the memo. He dragged Nick along the street, toward the Volvo.
Stupid, boxy leg-breaking piece of shit.
“There’s no one here to help you, Nick. You chose your isolation well.” Clark dropped Nick to the ground alongside the car. He opened the door to the back seat. “I wondered for a long time why you moved out here. To this place. Away from your fans. Away from an entire world you had at your fingertips.”
Clark picked Nick up by his underarms again. Lightning flashed through the sky and through his leg.
“With your money and fame you could have gone anywhere. Done anything. Lived in Cancun. Married a Spice Girl. Whatever. So why move all the way out here to Podunk U.S.A.?”
Clark shoved Nick into the back seat of the Volvo. He wasn’t considerate with the bone protruding from Nick’s leg, and his cries of pain did nothing to slow him down. “But I think I’ve figured it out. I have a theory. Want to hear it?”
Nick moaned. He grasped at the back seat of the car as Clark pushed his legs inside and closed the door. He’d heard of people blacking out from pain, but he was still conscious, leaving him to wonder where the fuck the threshold was.
Clark climbed into the driver’s seat and shook the rain from his scraggly hair. “Holy damn, this rain.” He put the car in gear and drove back onto the muddy road. “See, when I was a kid, I had a dog named Shep. Beautiful Retriever. Slept with me every night. Man, I loved that fucking dog.”
Every bump and dip in the road was like a knife in Nick’s leg. And there were a lot of them. Dozens.
“One night Shep doesn’t come in for bed. I went looking for him, found him under the porch. He wouldn’t come out. I go to my dad, miserable old sadist that he was, and I say, ‘Dad, dad, Shep won’t come out from under the porch’. Dad says, ‘Well, he’s probably sick, son’.”
Clark’s voice became monotone. He didn’t seem to be talking to Nick anymore. More to himself. “I say, ‘Okay dad, but if we can get him out, we can take him to the animal doctor, right?’ Dad, he pulls me up onto his lap, which he did a lot in those days, and he says, ‘S
hep is pretty old, son. Much older than you. And when an animal gets old and knows his time is up, sometimes he goes and finds a place to be alone, to die.’ And he was right. The next day, Shep died.”
Another big bump. Nick cried out.
“You were a fucking god, Nick. Your work was truth. But logical fact: Every artist, every creative person has a finite amount of time on this Earth. They’re born, they create, and then they die. You with me? And one of those projects, Nick, will be the best thing they ever do. Their masterpiece. Their magnum opus.”
Clark slowed the car as they approached their destination. “Everything after that pales in comparison. It’s a never-ending string of disappointments. And some of these artists, Michael Jackson, George Lucas, they linger on and on. But nothing they ever do will be Thriller or The Empire Strikes Back.”
Clark stopped the car and put it into park. “Or Rat King. See, you’re not that old, Nick, but I think you knew your time was up. I think on some level you knew your best days were behind you and Forest Down was your place under the porch. A lonely place to die.”
Clark got out of the car and walked to the passenger side. He opened the back door and yanked at Nick’s underarms. Nick saw it coming as if in slow-motion. When Clark had pulled him far enough out of the car, his leg would drop to the ground.
“Stop. Stop.” Rain fell from the sky and into Nick’s mouth as he called out.
His leg hit the ground and he tore his throat apart screaming.
Clark breathed heavily as he pulled Nick through the mud to the front steps of the wooden building. Dragging Nick around had taken its toll. “I’m not going to make the same mistake as you, Nick. I’m quitting while I’m on top.”
The rain had plastered Clark’s hair to his face and glasses. His thick round glasses gave him the appearance of a drowning bug. “Rat King was your opus, Nick. It’s going to be mine, too.”
Clark pulled Nick up the steps. “Up we go.”