Flypaper Cast: Dark Psychological Thriller - Book 3 Read online

  Nick smirked. “Come on, Worm, that’s no way to talk about your fellow Maggots, is it?”

  “Right.” Wormwood breathed heavily into the phone. “Let’s talk about the Maggots. They’re actually the reason I called. A few of them have matured. Left the nest. As I understand it, they should be arriving at your place any minute now.”

  Nick looked at the front door. “Oh really? And if that were the case, why would you bother to call and tell me.”

  Wormwood laughed. It was high-pitched and giddy. It made Nick’s skin crawl. “Because I’ve been watching the weather reports all day, Nick. You’re trapped. I know you couldn’t go anywhere right now if you wanted to.”

  Corpse returned with a fresh juice box. She studied Nick’s face and then whispered to Meredith. “Who’s he talking to?” Meredith shook her head.

  Nick turned away from them and put his finger in his ear.

  Wormwood continued. “See, Hellen thought we should let bygones be bygones. Call it a day. You beat her, you know. But you haven’t beaten me. I have an ace in the hole or three. You remember the guests you sent our way yesterday? They were fun, thanks for that.”

  Nick covered the growing anxiety in his gut the best he could. “Least I could do, man. Oh, that reminds me, your lawn is for shit.”

  Wormwood laughed. “That’s funny, but you didn’t let me finish. As I was saying, we had a lot of fun and wanted to repay the favor. So the visitors I sent your way? There won’t be quite as many, but I guarantee they’ll be just as much fun. More, even. Quality or quantity, you know?”

  The growing anxiety in Nick’s gut gave way to full on panic, but he wouldn’t give Wormwood the satisfaction of hearing it so he said nothing.

  “Now listen closely, Nick, because it’s very important that this registers with you. Everything that happens from this point forward is on—”

  Nick hung up the phone. No time for that bullshit. They had incoming, and not a lot of time to batten down the hatches. “Corpse, make sure the front door is locked up tight.”

  She ran to the door. “Was that the idiots? You should have let me talk to them.”

  Meredith clutched her chest. “Nickie? What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t know yet.” He yelled at Corpse. “Get your bat.”

  Corpse ran through the living room and slid into her room on her socks.

  His mother pulled at his arm. “Talk to me, baby, what’s happening?”

  He was damn near useless with his busted leg or he’d have been running about preparing for whoever was coming, too. As it was, the best he could do was call for help. He pulled up his contacts and pressed Reed’s name. “It’s kind of a long story, Mom, but we’ve been having sort of a tiff with those guys you talked to the other day and I think now we’re having some company over.”

  Her eyes bulged with fright. “A tiff? What does that mean? Over me?”

  Reed picked up her end of the phone. “Dawkins.”

  Nick turned away from his mother. “Reed, it’s—Right, never mind. Hey, can you get out here?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s the end of the world outside. I’m spending the night here in the station. What’s going on?”

  Nick grimaced at once again being in the position to require aid from people who had an entire town to police. “I’m not actually sure yet and it’d take a while to explain, but I have reason to believe that people who want to inflict harm upon my person may be on the way here. Again. Typical day.”

  Reed sighed. “The state of things out there, I can’t begin to guess how long it would take us. There are parts of 2273 that have to be near impassable. Come to think of it, how would anyone else get out there? A snowcat?”

  Nick blinked. It was a fair point. Maybe he was panicked over nothing. Maybe Wormwood only wanted to give him a good scare. If that were the case, the little shit had succeeded admirably.

  That spark of hope lasted a full three seconds before a pounding at the front door snuffed it out.

  Chapter 16

  “I swear, if we survive this I’m putting a moat around the friggin’ house.”

  Nick and Meredith watched the men on his front porch through the monitor in the foyer. There were two of them. One a muscular bald man, and the other a smaller, scrawny guy who looked like an accountant.

  Nick’s mother clung to his arm. “Who are they? Why would anyone want to hurt you?”

  Corpse appeared behind them, her dark green helmet on her head and a cigarette in her mouth. “That’s rich, coming from you, Bro Mama.”

  She pushed Meredith out of the way and studied the monitor. “They don’t look so tough. Open the door and I’ll give them aluminum enemas.”

  She reached for the first of the door locks.

  “Wait.” Nick stopped her. There was more movement on the screen. In the distance, a massive mountain of a man dropped over the fence that was evidently only good for keeping out people with no arms. “Holy shit. Look at this one.”

  Corpse let out a whistle. “Hoo boy. We’re gonna need a bigger bat.”

  The bald man on the porch pressed the buzzer on the intercom.

  Meredith whispered. “Should we see what they want?”

  Nick replied with a blank stare. He was certain he had a smartass response for her lined up and ready to go, but it escaped him. He pressed the button on his intercom.

  “Nick Dawkins isn’t home right now, but please leave a message at the beep.” There was the smartass response. He followed it with, “Beeeeeeeeeep.”

  The bald man craned his neck toward the camera and smiled. Nick noted that the stranger had a better dentist than Clark. Perhaps he could be reasoned with. “Nick Dawkins. I was told you’d be receiving a phone call letting you know we’d be on the way. I didn’t think that was a smart course of action, but our benefactor insisted. And seeing how we spent the last hour trudging through four feet of snow to get here, I wasn’t in much of a position to argue.”

  The ginormous man in the trench coat cut a swath through the snow to the porch and loomed two heads above his companions.

  The bald man gestured at the other two. “I’m sure you’re familiar with me and my two associates, though not by our birth names. You can call me Defcon.”

  Nick knew the name from Myaisis. He checked with Corpse. She remembered it too, judging by the wide-eyed look on her face. Defcon was best known for long, rambling posts about the murderous rampages Nick perpetrated against his unsuspecting fans. He didn’t imagine it would help if he explained to the guy that both Danielle and Clark died as a result of their own actions.

  Defcon pointed at the squirrely accountant type. “This is Longpig.”

  Nick had a list of people he’d hoped to meet in his lifetime and ‘the guy who wanted to eat him’ was all the way at the bottom of it. Well, maybe not the very bottom.

  Defcon pointed at the mountain on legs. “And the big man here, this is Squamata.”

  That guy was at the very bottom. The human tank who wanted to wear Nick’s skin. It was an insane notion for any number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that Nick’s skin would hardly make this dude a sufficient loincloth.

  Nick pressed the intercom button. “Nice to meet you all. Now get off my porch. Visiting hours are over.”

  Defcon and Longpig looked at each other. Squamata stared up into the falling snow. Defcon smiled. “Tell you what. Come out with your hands up, along with your little friend, and we’ll talk about letting her go.”

  Corpse squeezed between Nick and Meredith and pressed the intercom button. “How about I come out and shove this bat up your ass sideways?”

  Defcon addressed Corpse. “Are we to understand that you are not a hostage in need of assistance?”

  She shook her bat regardless of Defcon’s inability to see the threatening gesture. “I’ll give you assistance, you cue-balled mother—”

  Nick reached up and turned the intercom off. He held his phone up to his ear. “You get all that?”
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br />   Sheriff Reed was still on the line. “Not really.”

  Nick looked at the monitor. The men on the porch spoke amongst themselves. “We got a paranoid, a cannibal and a giant who wants to wear my skin on my front porch. So uh… see you in ten?”

  “That’s funny, Dawkins. We’re on the way, but it’ll be a while. Do me a favor and don’t get yourself killed before we get there.” Reed hung up.

  Corpse stood in the front den and looked out the window. Nick called to her. “Corpse, be careful.”

  “You be careful, Gimpy, you’re the one with the bad peg. Take your Mom and hunker down somewhere. Oh shit.” A sledge hammer crashed through the window.

  Defcon stuck his face through the bars and déjà vu took hold of Nick. Clark had done the same thing six weeks prior. Nick had been alone then. Not this time. The confidence of company was a wind at his back. “You know, the last guy who broke that window was Clark Abernathy. You know how that turned out for him?”

  “The maestro was an amateur.” Defcon raised a gun and pointed it at Nick. The writer threw himself to the foyer floor out of the weapon’s line of fire. His leg reminded him that it had been broken in half pretty recently in the grand scheme of things.

  Corpse dropped to the floor in front of a couch as Defcon fired a couple of rounds into the house. “He’s armed, Nick.”

  Nick nodded at her from the hallway. “Thank you, Corpse. Mom, you okay?”

  Meredith covered her ears and rocked back and forth in a fetal position a few feet down the hall. “I don’t think I’m up for this, Nickie.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’ll let them know.”

  “Fucker.” Corpse swung her bat up into the window’s bars. She caught Defcon by surprise and he fell backward into the snow. The webmaster took the opportunity to dive into the foyer with the Dawkinses. She crashed into the opposite wall, denting it with her helmet.

  “Jesus, you okay?” He surveyed the cracked plaster next to Corpse’s head.

  She straightened her helmet. “You think I wear this as a fashion statement?”

  A hole appeared in the front door, accompanied by the crack of detonating gunpowder. Then another.

  “Mom.” She was still curled into a ball. He kicked at her with his good leg. “Mom, move your ass.”

  Corpse, her head low, grabbed at Nick’s arm to help him away from the front door. He grabbed his crutch and pushed himself down the hall. “I’m fine, get her moving.”

  She did as she was asked, though she grumbled a bit in the process. The two women crawled into the living room with Nick right behind them.

  Defcon called from the broken window in the front room. “So Dawkins, you admit it, then?”

  Nick yelled back. “Admit what?”

  “You murdered Maggot Maestro.”

  “Say that three times fast, you nutjob.”

  Corpse giggled. Meredith didn’t seem to find any of it funny. She was borderline catatonic.

  “Me, a nut?” Defcon clanged on the bars with what Nick assumed was his sledgehammer. “That’s funny, coming from you. What did it, Dawkins? What pushed you over the edge?”

  Nick heard a thump from the back of the house, where the balcony would have been. Corpse heard it too. Nick nodded at her and she crawled across the living room floor.

  “It was the girl, right? Flypaper? That’s my theory, anyway. She showed you something you didn’t like about yourself and you killed her.”

  Nick fumed. The guy was half right. She definitely caused him to question his role in the world. Said he was ‘flypaper’; attracted nuts like these intruders to himself. If she were alive to see this new madness, she’d tell him she’d told him so, and he’d be forced to concede her point. “I didn’t kill her, but I wouldn’t expect you to believe that.”

  Defcon laughed. “You liar. I know a liar, Dawkins, and you don’t believe it either. You killed her.”

  Corpse waved at Nick from the sliding glass door to get his attention. “Hey. The big one is back here. He’s trying to climb up the pieces of your balcony.”

  A window broke in Nick’s bedroom. It snapped Nick’s mother out of her trance. “What was that?”

  Nick yelled down the hall. “Hey, Defcon?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, fuck yourself.” He turned to his mother. “That one’s still at the front of the house and the big one is in back, so it must be the cannibal at my bedroom window. I don’t suppose you can go convince him to eat some bleach or something?”

  Meredith frowned. “That was hurtful.”

  There was another thump against the back of the house. Nick dragged his weighted leg across the floor and looked down through the sliding glass door. Squamata had stacked several pieces of the balcony atop one another.

  Corpse smiled. “When he gets up here I’m gonna bean him good with the business end of my bat.”

  “Atta girl,” Nick said. He gave her a pat on the back.

  The sound of metal grinding on metal came from Nick’s bedroom. He shuffled back across the living room floor.

  “I’ll check on it, sweetie.” Meredith crouch walked across the room to Nick’s bedroom door and looked in.

  Nick whispered, “Mom, be careful.”

  He heard a voice come from his room. “And who are you supposed to be?”

  Meredith stood up and entered the room. Nick followed her, dragging his leg along the floor behind him. “I’m Nick’s mother.”

  “You,” Longpig spat, pointing a finger at her. “I heard you on the podcast. You’re the one who tainted my meat.”

  Nick pulled himself into the doorway and looked up at the disappointingly ordinary-looking man holding a hacksaw against a bar in his widow. “Hey. I’m the only one who gets to hold that over her head.”

  The man’s eyes sparkled. “Nick Dawkins. You look even more succulent in person.”

  Meredith grabbed the crutch from him and thrust it into Longpig’s face with a crunch. “You won’t harm one hair on his head.”

  Longpig yelped, then moaned. “You broke my damn tooth.”

  Nick should have had a witty riposte that involved biting or chewing, but he was distracted by Corpse. She had her hand on the sliding glass door and was prepared to open it. “Mom,” he said.

  She interrupted him. “Be careful, I know.”

  Nick pushed himself across the hardwood once again. His arms cramped, but otherwise he had gotten pretty good at shuffling around the house on his backside. He saw Squamata’s head on the other side of the sliding glass door, inches below his own eye level. “Corpse…”

  “I got it.” Corpse slid the glass door open, braced herself and swung the bat down at the long haired intruder.

  Squamata reached up and caught the bat with one massive hand. “The demon. It’s taken human form.”

  Corpse pulled at the bat, but the big man had a hell of a grip. “No. My bat. Mine. Get your own.”

  For the first time since the fiasco began, Nick saw an opportunity to be useful. But it would hurt. He gritted his teeth, closed his eyes and kicked several pounds of fiberglass into Squamata’s chin. It had to have been as painful for Nick as it was for the other guy. Probably more so. He screamed and opened his eyes in time to see Squamata tilt backwards and disappear amidst the sounds of bone and lumber colliding ten feet below.

  Meredith ran back into the living room and saw Nick on his back, clutching his leg. He closed his eyes and tried to think of anything but the pain. Defcon’s voice provided a welcome distraction. “That sounded painful, Dawkins. Not so much fun when the fans fight back, is it? Tell you what. Take a breather. We’ll be right back.”

  Nick’s mother kneeled beside him. “Nickie, are you alright?”

  “Don’t touch him.” Corpse moved toward Meredith, driving her back.

  A sharp crack broke up the confrontation. It came from the front yard.

  Nick found his voice through the pain in his leg. “The hell are they doing now?”

 
Another crack. Corpse ran from the living room and then ran back. “I don’t get it.”

  He wanted to go see for himself, but couldn’t bring himself to move his leg. “What? What are they doing?”

  Corpse shrugged. “They’re hitting a tree with a sledgehammer? They can’t bring it down, can they?”

  Nick massaged his thigh in the hopes that the rest of his leg would shut up. “The tree over on that side of the house?”

  “Yeah, why?” Yet another crack, the loudest one thus far.

  “The ice on the trees…” Nick said. “It gets too heavy for the branches. They’re trying to bring one down on the power line to the house.”

  A thunderous boom, like a cherry bomb in a trash can, rocked the house. The lights flickered and went out. The white noise of electricity gone, the building became as quiet as the proverbial tomb. A discouraging analogy, but an apt one.

  Silence reigned, broken only by the raucous laughter and shouting of the rogue maggots on Nick’s front lawn.

  Chapter 17

  The fire from Corpse’s lighter was the sole source of light in the entire building. It hung in the air long enough for her cigarette to catch and then expired. Only the burning butt remained, like a red firefly dancing in the ebon darkness.

  Nick felt around the floor for one of his crutches. “Mom, where’s the crutch you had?”

  Her voice traveled from the general direction of his bedroom. “I’m looking for it. I can’t see anything in here.”

  Nick looked up at the red butt floating in the air. “Corpse, how we doing?”

  Corpse’s features were illuminated for a few seconds as she took a drag. “I feel like I was ill-prepared for this eventuality. For that matter, so were you. Why don’t you own a gun, man, what’s wrong with you?”

  It was a question he no longer had a legitimate answer for. “They freak me out. Believe me, after this I’ll be investing in one. Next order of business.”

  The plucky webmaster exhaled smoke; he heard it leave her lungs and kiss the air with a sigh. “Well, we can’t see shit. That’s both a positive and a negative. On one hand, if we can’t see anything, they can’t either. On the other hand, I feel like I could trip on the coffee table and die at any moment. It’s freaking me out.”