by C. K. Vile
Nick screamed again as his leg bent and then landed with a thud on the first step. And then the second. He’d been wrong. This wasn’t on par with being lit on fire. It was worse. The excruciation was transcendent.
Five steps, each one another hot poker in the leg. They blended together into a white noise of agony.
Clark opened the wooden door. Nick was hoarse. His throat was a bloody beach.
Rat King.
Not like that. He couldn’t go out like that. He screamed. The sky screamed back.
The wooden door slammed closed.
Chapter 17
They were close. So said Sheriff Reed. Deputy Kern wasn’t as sure.
The psychopath who had brutally attacked Nick Dawkins and absconded with him into the rain-soaked night could have driven for the next state over.
But Reed said he’d head for a place close by. Kern didn’t know if it was police instinct or personal investment clouding her judgment, but either way, she called the shots. They drove up and down the back roads of Forest Down scanning the tree lines for any sign of a white van with a busted window.
A busted window. He should have hit the perp in the head, moving target or no. Sloppy shooting. He’d hoped the first time he fired his sidearm on the job he wouldn’t be that guy; the one who blinked and missed.
“What’s that?” Reed bristled. Kern saw why. There was a damn body in the road. Dawkins? No. Too thick around the midsection to be Dawkins.
Reed jumped from the car and pulled her gun. She approached the man lying on the side of the road.
Kern opened his door and drew his gun as well. He wouldn’t take anything for granted. The rain was heavy, a wet tarp blanketing the road.
Reed nudged the body with her foot.
Kern took a few steps. The guy was either dead or sleeping soundly. Was that... he took another step closer… yes, a friggin’ syringe stuck out of his eye.
Reed extended a hand and touched his neck. She stood up and bit her lip. Whoever the guy was, he hadn’t made it.
They surveyed the road. What had happened there?
Kern and Reed both honed in on the same thing: A dark stain a few feet away. The rain had washed away a lot of it, but it was clear someone had spilled a fair amount of blood. It streaked along the ground, like the wounded had been pulled several feet.
A muddy path led off the main road. There were tire tracks through it, but they could have belonged to anyone. Still, the blood, the body with the hypodermic in it… Kern believed in coincidence; not everything was connected like it was in the movies. It was one of the first things his pop had taught him when he started out. But this wasn’t one of those times. Everything pointed down that road.
Reed knew it too. She gestured back at the car. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
Kern moved back to the driver’s side door. “You know what’s up that road?”
They climbed into the car. Reed opened her phone. “I do not recall.”
The rain battered at the corpse in the road. “Any idea who that is?”
Reed thumbed at her phone. “None. Probably local. Driver who came upon something he wasn’t supposed to.” She pointed at the gaping hole in the trees. “It looks like the Happy Beaver logging company is up that road. Was up that road, rather. They closed up shop back in oh-nine. I’d forgotten that was even out here.” She closed her phone and opened the car door. “Pop the trunk.”
Kern pulled the trunk lever under the steering wheel. Reed ran around to the back and rummaged through it. She closed the trunk lid and moved to the front of the car. She carried a couple of roadside flares with her.
She ignited them, and the bright red lights reflected off the rain. It looked as though it were raining blood. A plague upon the town.
Reed tossed the burning flares to either side of the body in the road and climbed back into the car. “It’d be nice if no one would disturb our crime scene.”
Kern nodded in the direction of the body. “You sure you want to leave him there?”
Reed buckled herself in. “I’m operating under the assumption that our perp took a hostage up that path. Now, he left a body lying in the middle of the street, so I’m also operating under the assumption that we’re approaching some kind of end game here.”
The deputy drove the car onto the muddy path. “You think he’d go to all the trouble to bring Dawkins out here to kill him? I don’t get what this guy’s playing at.”
Reed unhooked the radio from the dash. “I think we’re on a clock before Dawkins ends up somebody’s lawn ornament. Kill the red-and-blues. Running lights only. I don’t want to spook this creep if we can help it.” She pushed the button on the radio’s handset. “Reed to all units in the vicinity of 2273, please respond to one dead, possible hostage situation on a side road near the three-mile marker of Northpoint. Roadside flares marking the scene. Over.”
The car shook as Kern drove it across the uneven terrain. “Boy, I do not like this.”
Reed looked at her phone. “What’s to like? This road isn’t even on the map.”
Kern stopped the car. “Hell, then I’m guessing this isn’t either.”
The sheriff looked up. “Oh, of course.”
There was a fork in the path. The muddy road split into two; one off to the left, the other to the right. Each path trailed into darkness.
“You want to pick one, drive up it, then come back if we need to?”
Reed checked her flashlight. “Actually I figure time is a factor and we’re wandering into an unknown hostage situation anyway, let’s ditch the car altogether. You go left, I’ll go right. One radios the other if they find anything.”
Kern eyeballed one path and then the other. “You sure that’s the smart play? We don’t know how far back these paths go.”
Reed opened her door. “I was up here once, checked out a work injury. The buildings aren’t much farther back, so this is the play I’m calling. You go left. I’ll go right. Radio if you see anything.”
Deputy Kern got out into the rain once again. His shoe sunk into the ground as water filled it. He clicked his flashlight on and walked down the left branch of the road. He looked back toward the car and Reed’s flashlight disappeared into the night.
He’d say it again. He did not like this.
Son-of-a-bitching Nick Dawkins.
Chapter 18
Every part of the wooden room around Nick creaked and moaned. Water dripped through the ceiling and onto the floor. The place seemed alive; like it had devoured him whole and the only thing left to do was wait for the inevitable end.
He looked at his leg, at the chunk of bone protruding through a hole in his pants. He lasted several seconds before averting his eyes that time. He was either becoming desensitized to the sight or was in shock. Maybe a bit of both. He did feel pretty lightheaded, but that could have been the concussion. He’d all but forgotten how badly his head had hurt minutes earlier. Or his hands. Or his mouth. Now his leg had his full attention.
He lay on his back, on top of his bruised and aching arms and hands, and stared at the ceiling. He was in bad shape. Maybe if he closed his eyes the concussion would do its job and he’d drift off. Maybe he would be spared what Clark had planned for him next.
That’s what he’d come to; lying on a rotten, stinking wooden floor in the middle of nowhere, hoping to die before things got worse. Clark’s story about the dog rang true. He was under the porch now. A thousand miles from any real friends or family.
Well, not from family. After all that time, years apart, his mom was only a few miles away. He thought back to his childhood, lying in bed while she—by all appearances—nursed him back to health. He still envied that kid. Ignorance was bliss, and back then he was as blissful as could be, watching Friday the 13th VHS’s back-to-back-to-back while his mother brought him popsicles.
Comic books and chicken noodle.
The present and past blended together as the world grew fuzzier. It felt like days since he’
d slept.
The front door to the building slammed open. Clark stormed in with his arms full and the rain at his back. The commotion brought Nick squarely back into the then and now.
“You could have chosen a nicer porch.” Clark set his load down on a nearby workbench. He picked up his camera and fiddled with the controls. “Yeah, how’s that working out for you?” He turned the lens toward Nick. “This, everyone, is the main man, Mr. Nick Dawkins. He will be the star of this piece. Fitting, since he’s also the inspiration. Say hello to the people on Myiasis and beyond, Nick.”
Nick spit the blood that pooled in his mouth onto his chin. “Fuck you.”
“There we go. Our hero’s true colors, ladies and gentlemen. There seems to be no end to the disdain he harbors for his fan base.” Clark turned off the camera and set it back down. “Man, did you ever blow it. If I had an entire website full of people whose every thought and action seemed devoted to me and my work. I don’t even know what I’d do. Bask in it, I guess.”
Nick adjusted his head. The wooden floor was doing a number on it, but he was in no position to do anything definitive about it. “My fondest dream is that someday you have fans like mine, Clark.”
“Why, so I can sell them out? Take down their website? Sell my work to Tinseltown troglodytes like Trumble? No thanks. See, you fucked up when you took your fans for granted. We don’t like that. We rebel. And that’s something you forgot along the way, Nick. Without us you’re nothing.” Clark stepped into another room of the building.
Nick heard scraping noises in the other room. Then a loud thump, like wood hitting wood. “You’ve got it backwards.”
A rumbling, like thunder, reverberated throughout the building. Clark rolled a wooden barrel through the doorway and into the front room. “Couldn’t hear you, what was that?”
Nick couldn’t take his eyes off the barrel. It confirmed what he had feared since Clark had pulled him up the porch one mind-bogglingly painful step at a time. “I said you’ve got it backwards. I didn’t forget that I was nothing without fans. I forgot that I was something without them.”
Clark rolled the barrel over to Nick. “I do believe you’re delirious. The loss of blood, the pain from your leg, they’ve scrambled your poor little brain.”
“You’re probably right about that. But I know what I’m saying.” Nick closed his eyes. “I did my best work when I gave no fucks. I’d shut everything else out and write. I fucked up when I let people like you in my head; worried about what you’d think of me. I let…” Nick trailed off. He melted into the floor.
The right side of Nick’s face ignited with pain. Clark had slapped the ever-loving shit out of him. “Wake up. You don’t get to drift off on me. Wait here.”
More scraping sounds from the other room. Clark dragged something heavy across the floor. He shouted over the noise. “Which was Rat King then, Nick? In your less than humble opinion? Was that one where you forgot about the fans? Or were you thinking of us then?”
Nick watched the door to the other room, waiting for Clark to reappear with whatever he was dragging. “Rat King was just for me. Cancer Man was the one I fucked up. Too worried about being the big hot-shit writer. When I wrote Rat King, I was afraid I’d fuck up again. At least wanted to fuck up my own way.” He noticed his leg didn’t hurt as much. That was good or bad depending on the point of view. “You were right, though. It was the best thing I ever did.”
Clark emerged from the dark room next door, dragging a large crate behind him. “I don’t know about the rest of that shit, but I do agree with you there.” He pulled the crate across the floor, huffing and puffing the entire way. He finally stopped next to the barrel and wiped his brow. “Damn, that’s heavy. Look what I’ve got, Nick. If you loved Rat King, you’ll love this.”
Nick doubted that. He should have written more stories about kittens.
Scratching noises emitted from the crate. A creature or creature unknown moved within.
Creature unknown, his ass. Nick knew exactly what was in it. For all his propensity for suspenseful buildup, Clark had been telegraphing it since they’d arrived.
The long haired lunatic pulled the top off the crate. Nick could hear them, scuttling over one another, squeaking and shrieking. Clark picked one up.
A big, fat, wet and dirty rat.
“Pie in the sky, I’d have preferred to get Victor Trumble out here for this. I thought there’d be a special irony for him to die in a reenactment of the ending he butchered when he put Rat King on film.” Clark bent over and held the thrashing rat by its tail over Nick’s face. “We have to be in agreement there at least, right? The new ending was shit.”
The dangling rat was inches from Nick’s face. Funny where the mind goes. Nick’s leg was well past fucked up and he was almost certain he was about to die super horribly. But in the moment, all he hoped was that this damn thing wouldn’t defecate on his face.
“Right?” Clark shouted at Nick. “The new ending was shit.”
Nick nodded. He didn’t want to open his mouth.
Clark unceremoniously tossed the rat back into the crate. “Right, so how great would that have been? People would have lost their minds. But I could never figure out how to get him all the way out here without driving that van back and forth through a dozen flyover states. So I was just going to pick someone. We can’t always get what we want, Nick. You said that in an interview once.”
Nick again spit out the blood that had pooled in his mouth. “I was quoting the Stones, you jackass.”
Clark pulled the lid off of the barrel and turned it toward Nick’s legs. “I think you know where this is going, Nick. In you go.”
Nick looked down at the empty barrel. If he went into it, that would be it. The end of the story. Everything he’d ever known or experienced would come to an irrevocable halt.
Oblivion was minutes away.
No.
It wasn’t his time. He wasn’t done.
Clark pulled on Nick’s bad leg. “In.”
Muscle and cartilage gave way in Nick’s leg and he howled as bone scrubbed against bone. He didn’t let that stop him, he kicked at Clark with his good leg, but the son-of-a-bitch grabbed that one too. He had them both and he seemed to take great pleasure in pulling Nick toward the barrel.
Nick wasn’t ready. Not to die. Not like that. He thrashed and scrabbled at the floor with his aching and swollen fingers.
Clark straddled the barrel and shoved Nick’s legs inside. “In, you simpleminded piece of shit.”
“No!” Nick rolled over, ignoring the pain in his leg. On his stomach, he tried to worm away with his knees. He had to get away. He had to. He had people to see. Blaire. Reed.
His mother.
Anyone. He wanted to see anyone again.
Forest Down was not the fucking porch he’d gone under to die.
Clark disagreed. He yanked Nick’s legs hard, dragging his chin along the floor. He pressed on the bone jutting out of Nick’s skin.
Nick went blind with pain. He channeled it, using the adrenaline surging through him to jerk and writhe as Clark pushed him into the dark wooden cylinder. Feet, shins, thighs, hips. He couldn’t stop himself from going in, but he wouldn’t make this easy.
“In you go, there we are.” Clark pushed on Nick’s shoulders, stuffing him into the small space.
Nick gnashed his teeth at Clark’s hand, but missed.
Clark moved to the side of the barrel and pulled at it. “Biting, really?”
The barrel lifted up and landed upright with a thud. Nick screamed as his weight shifted onto his wounded leg. He couldn’t find the leverage to stand. He was immobile, his fingers crushed against the side of the barrel behind him.
“You know,” Clark said as he walked across the room, “that part—the leg—is your fault. You shouldn’t have run. When you think about it, you got that dumb shit out in the road killed. Maybe at least that one hadn’t procreated yet.” He reappeared over the barrel with the camera i
n hand again. He pushed a button on the device. “Okay, so this is the big one. Rat King. We have our star, the titular king of the rats himself, Nick Dawkins, about to meet his poetically justified demise.”
Nick rested his head against the side of the barrel, breathless and exhausted. “Aren’t you worried—?”
Clark hit him on the head with the camera. “Quiet.” He turned away from the barrel and pointed the camera toward the crate on the ground. “And then, of course, we have our costars. I’ve spent the past two weeks collecting those in traps out here. The whole place is overrun with them.” He turned the camera off. “I had to get a room at the Shady Thicket just to sleep. I tried to sleep here, but I could hear them around me at night. Gave me the creeps.”
Clark kneeled over, out of sight. “Alright, here we go.” His hands appeared at the edge of the barrel and dropped two rats inside. They both landed awkwardly between Nick’s chest and the barrel’s wooden frame and began wriggling around in search of solid ground.
“Fuck! Fuck, you fucking asshole!” Nick twisted his head away from them. Their tiny feet pulled at his shirt. Whiskers brushed against his neck.
Another pair of rats fell into the barrel, one landing on Nick’s shoulder, the other briefly on his head before losing its footing and sliding down his face. It sniffed at the cuts on his cheek. Nick could feel wet whiskers. He moaned with his mouth tightly closed.
“Is this how you imagined it when you wrote that scene, Nick? When they shove him in the barrel and fill it with rats? Did you picture it like this?” Clark threw another pair of rats into the shrinking cylinder.
The rodents were agitated, scratching and squeaking and trying to crawl into new hiding places. One wormed its way between his legs. Another between his arm and the side of the barrel. He cried out as the greasy creature nibbled at the place on his arm where Clark had broken the skin with his teeth.
Another pair fell in. Then another. They bit and tore and scraped at everything around them. Nick, the barrel, each other. The sounds of their claws scraping at the sides of the barrel echoed all around him, the music of a feral symphony.