Flypaper Cast: Dark Psychological Thriller - Book 3 Read online

  “Oh hell no he didn’t.” Corpse typed faster. Her eyes ricocheted back and forth between the TV screen and her laptop’s screen as though she watched a tennis game in fast forward.

  In the six weeks Corpse had been staying in his guest room, Nick had come to know the look that settled across her face. It was the look of a person who walked the fine line between brilliance and insanity.

  He’d come to know the look, but he still wasn’t quite used to it, or her. Her presence had been a tremendous adjustment. Prior to the day she arrived on his doorstep—short, full-figured and baring facial piercings he’d only seen in movies—he hadn’t shared a living space with anyone in over a decade. Now he shared a space not with any old person, but one of the most bombastic personalities he’d ever known; an equal parts adorable and frightening Genghis Khan with a graphics card. His very own mad webmaster.

  And now her attention had been drawn to the poor sap who had nothing better to do with his day than to dump his toxicity on an online video game. “Really? We’re doing this, are we?” Nick didn’t really try to stop her. She was off to the races. Again.

  The soldier on the screen ran circles around Nick’s avatar. “Piece of shit mother—” The soldier blinked out of existence and his tirade of profanity went with it.

  Nick smiled and planted his face in his palm. Having a mad webmaster hanging around while his broken leg healed up did have its perks.

  Corpse stopped typing again. “Oh shit. Heads up.”

  Nick scanned his television. “What?”

  “Not there, here.” Corpse had one of Nick’s security cameras pulled up on her screen. A blurred figure wandered across Nick’s snow-covered front lawn as a second figure dropped down over his fence.

  Corpse closed her laptop and bounded from the couch to her room. “Stay here, I’m on it, Captain.”

  Nick looked at the cast on his leg. As though there were any danger of him charging into battle. It took him two minutes to get to the bathroom twelve feet away. Still, curiosity had its teeth in him. He grabbed the crutches leaning against his side of the couch.

  He heard a clank behind him and turned to see Corpse standing on the hardwood floor, an aluminum bat leaned against her leg. She’d set it down to light a cigarette. Smoke curled around the dark green army helmet perched atop her head. “Hokay, you want to play rough?” she belted in a bad Cuban accent as she picked up the bat and clutched it with both hands. The cigarette wobbled up and down between her lips as she spoke. “Hokay. Say hello to my little friend.”

  Oh sure, she’s seen Scarface. Nick used the crutches to hoist himself up off the couch. An ache filled his wounded leg. “Hey, be careful, you don’t know—”

  Corpse was already at the front door, unbolting the six locks that ran along it. “If I don’t come back, burn my laptop, keep my PS4 and smoke my weed.”

  Nick grunted as he hobbled toward the door, dragging several pounds of fiberglass along with him. “You know I don’t smoke—oh never mind.” The door slammed and she was gone. Gosh damn kid. He’d never forgive himself if she got herself hurt. It was the third time she’d charged out the door with that bat in hand and a cancer stick hanging out of her mouth.

  He made it to the front window and peered out between the steel bars that lined it. Corpse swung her bat like a Yankee high on bath salts, driving the two panicked figures across the yard in the direction of his fence.

  A massive sigh of relief fogged up the window. Just a couple of lookee-loos. More tourists come to catch a peek at the reclusive author who made headlines by getting himself abducted by the crazed MaggotMaestro, Clark Abernathy.

  Nick looked at the bars and cursed himself. If he’d had the damn things installed months ago, Clark would never have gotten in to begin with. He’d never have bashed Nick’s head in with a coffee pot. He’d never have taken him for a joyride in the back of a van smelling of crabs and puppy poop. He’d never have stuffed him into a barrel full of rats and closed the lid on him.

  Then again, had none of those things happened, he’d also never have broken his leg and hired Corpse to help him around the house. And it would have been a shame to miss the chance to watch her whack at the legs of the trespasser who currently scrambled back over his fence with an aluminum bat.

  Corpse, satisfied that the intruders had been sufficiently driven from Nick’s land, turned back toward the house. The stranger on the other side of the fence, who presumed to be safe from her wrath, shouted at her. Nick snorted. That was stupid. Corpse doubled back and scaled the fence herself, bat still in hand.

  Holy mother, was Nick ever glad she was on his side. She’d become his personal attack dog both online and off. Woe to anyone who came around looking for trouble these days.

  Corpse dropped back over the fence and ran circles around Nick’s yard singing ‘We are the Champions’. He smiled and turned to begin the long journey back to the living room.

  The house was quiet for the first time in forever. As much as he enjoyed Corpse’s company, the girl never stopped. She went days without sleeping and when she did sleep it was within a cocoon of booming music and marijuana smoke. He wasn’t a fan of the smell, but quickly realized it was the only thing that took her out of fifth gear long enough to get any rest. So screw it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what she was like without a mellowing agent.

  Nick smirked as he pictured the counterpoint anti-drug PSA he could make. This is CorpseFlower not on drugs. Cue the egg leaping out of the frying pan and singing ‘Hello My Baby’.

  Nick crashed back onto the couch and exhaled. As good as the exercise of moving from one room to another was for him, it was also exhausting. He picked up his remote and turned off the television.

  Quiet. He’d forgotten what it sounded like.

  Corpse burst through the front door still singing ‘We Are the Champions’ at the top of her lungs. She locked the door behind her and danced through the foyer and into the living room. She stopped in front of Nick, the bat in one hand and her cigarette in the other. “Invaders repelled. You should have seen the looks on their faces. Let us celebrate with meat and mead.”

  Nick raised a hand. “I hate to be a party pooper, but I was actually thinking about taking a nap. Also, you know the rules.”

  Corpse looked at the cigarette in her hand. “Right. Balcony only. You got it, good sir. Perfect timing anyway. It’s Flystrike day. I’ll see what’s happening in the wonderful world of Myiasis this week.”

  Nick dropped his hand to the couch cushion next to his leg. “You do that. I’m going to work up the energy to get back up and go to my room. When I wake up, we can play a game together or something. Cool?”

  Corpse skipped off to her room, across the house from his. Nick figured if he got up and crutched his way to his room immediately, he had a little over an hour before she’d be done listening to the podcast. An hour of relative silence, guaranteed by the fact that she only listened to Flystrike over her headphones. He’d tried to listen to the show with her once and had to tap out halfway through. Way too much weirdness dedicated to him condensed into sixty minutes. All of Myiasis distilled into a concentrated dose and injected straight into his ears. No thank you.

  He picked up his crutches and lifted himself off the couch again as Corpse came back through the living room with her headphones on. She hummed along with Nobody But Me and walked out onto the balcony.

  Nick cringed. The melody threw him back to another time and place. A 1994 Shitbox. The acrid smell of flammable chemicals in the air. Three hundred and sixty degrees of pitch black, save for the single expanding headlight directly ahead of him. The smell of the chemicals gave way to the pungent odor of burning flesh and hair. The light became an image of Danielle, engulfed in flames. The beat of the song collapsed into screams and the roar of an oncoming train. He gripped his crutches and pushed the memories back down to whatever part of his scarred psyche they lived in.

  Sometimes, when he was lucky, he went an entire day witho
ut thinking of his ex-girlfriend and the night she tried to murder-suicide them both. On the unlucky days, he thought about her a lot.

  Forget it. Sleep it off.

  Nick steadied himself and moved toward his room.

  “Oh fuck me.” Corpse’s voice traveled into the house. “Fuck me, are you kidding? Nick. Nick Nick Nick.”

  He stopped at the door to his room and braced himself. His worst days always began with Corpse wearing his name out.

  Corpse stubbed her cigarette out and came back inside. Her headphones hung around her neck like the noose that he could feel tightening around his. “Sorry man, you’ve gotta hear this.”

  Nick leaned on his crutches. “Do I have to? Can you just give me the Cliff’s Notes? It’s not the lizard guy again is it, because that dude gives me the creeps.”

  “I wish.” Corpse walked over to Nick and put her headphones over his ears. “Let me back it up a few seconds.” She pressed rewind on her phone and Nick’s ears were filled with the sound of chipmunks jabbering in reverse. She pushed play.

  The male podcaster spoke. Wormwood, he called himself. “—Guarantee this will be the best episode of the show we’ve ever done. Has to be.”

  He was followed by the female, Hellen. “Total agreement. We’ve never had anything or anyone like this before. This is a game changer.”

  Wormwood’s voice quivered with excitement. He couldn’t contain himself. “That’s right, I’ll be honest, I don’t even know how to announce this. I can’t possibly do it justice.”

  Hellen was equally ecstatic. “I say don’t try, just blurt it out.”

  “Okay, okay. Here we go.”

  Nick clutched at his crutches. Out with it already. He looked at Corpse and saw a face he’d never seen on her before. It was apologetic.

  Wormwood took a deep breath. “Myiasis Maggots, this is the big one. Today Hellen and I will be joined on the phone by none other than Nick Dawkins’ own mother, Meredith Dawkins.”

  Earth tilted on its axis and Nick struggled to maintain his balance. It wasn’t just the leg that had been punctured by bone on the side of a back road six weeks earlier that refused to hold him up. It was his good leg, too. It was his spine. His neck. Nothing worked. His skeleton had turned to gelatin.

  Corpse caught him and propped him up. His mind reeled for any possible explanation. It was a hoax. A joke. Someone trolling the podcasters. Anything. It had to be. His sanity depended on it.

  Hellen greeted whoever it was on their line. “Ms. Dawkins, we can’t tell you how honored we are that you’ve agreed to talk with us.”

  “Well I’m very honored to be here, I can’t tell you how special I feel to have you call me like this.” The voice on the phone cut through Nick’s heart, but the organ kept right on beating in spite of itself. He pulled off the headphones with a trembling hand and gave them to Corpse.

  “Jacket. Shoe.” He spoke in grunts, but she got the meaning and got moving.

  Corpse ran to the foyer and grabbed Nick’s jacket and right shoe. “Are you sure you wanna go out? It’s not like you can stop her, this is prerecorded.”

  Nick hopped to the couch and sat down. “Don’t care. She’s gone too far. Too fucking far by half. I’ll kick her ridiculous Munchausen ass out of Forest Down myself.”

  Corpse dropped Nick’s jacket and shoe at his feet. “I’ve never seen you like this. It’s rad.”

  Nick shoved his shoe onto his good foot and put on his jacket. “Let me ask you something. How come every time you charge out the front door you have a cig hanging out of your mouth?”

  Corpse shrugged. “Hell if I know. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, right?”

  Nick lurched off the couch and fished the pack of cigarettes and lighter out of his jacket pocket. “Damn straight.” He ejected one out of the pack, put it in his mouth and lit it. “Go start the car. Time to visit Mom.”

  Chapter 3

  Nick sat in the passenger seat of his own car. It was a shift in perspective he’d yet to grow accustomed to, despite the multiple trips into town he’d taken with Corpse at the wheel.

  The two silently navigated the slush-covered back roads leading into Forest Down to a soundtrack of Meredith Dawkins baring her soul to two podcasters over the car’s speakers.

  Her voice was steeped in nerves and cautious excitement. “You just can’t imagine the attention you get when you have an ill child. People see you instead of seeing through you. You matter. I’m ashamed to say that I soaked in all of that attention. I took advantage of it and encouraged it.”

  Wormwood and Hellen were mesmerized. It was evident in their respective tones. Especially hers. “Ms. Dawkins—”

  “Meredith, sweetie, please.”

  “—Meredith, I realize this must be very hard for you to talk about—“

  “Hah!” Nick projected a noise of incredulous disbelief. “If only.”

  Hellen continued her line of questioning. “—but you mentioned there came a point where Nick was taken from you. What happened to you after that?”

  Corpse clung to the wheel and steered the car through the veritable tunnel of ice that lined the road. Nick had never seen her so quiet. He wasn’t sure if she was listening intently or being respectful of his headspace. Either way, it was unnerving.

  His mother’s voice cracked with remorse, though it was impossible to say whether said remorse was manufactured or genuine. Given his childhood of contaminated food and lengthy hospital visits, he simply didn’t trust her to be genuine about anything. As far as he knew, the world was a perpetual stage, and she was front and center. “I was charged with aggravated child abuse and fraud. The trial was over very quickly. I was sentenced to forty-three years, but released after sixteen. Good behavior.”

  Good behavior. The state had set a low bar; one that boiled down to stop poisoning children.

  Corpse pulled onto Forest Down’s main street and parked Nick’s car in a free space a block away from Bonnie and Chuck’s General Store. She put the car into park, but then smacked herself in the forehead. “Shit dude, I wasn’t thinking, you want me to pull up and let you out?”

  “No, this is fine. Could use the exercise.” That was the truth, but only half of it. The other half was that he doubted his leg would bother him on the walk to the store. Roiling anger was a hell of an anesthetic. He opened the passenger door and stuck his crutches out onto the street. “I don’t need to hear the rest of the show. Let’s get this over with.”

  Nick and Corpse walked up the sidewalk toward the general store. As always, they did their best to ignore the stares they drew from the slack-jawed townsfolk. And as always, Corpse acted out the id Nick had kept suppressed for the past three years. “—the fuck are you looking at?” She grabbed her crotch at Postmaster Grimley. He stopped clearing the snow from his walk and ran inside.

  “Don’t antagonize them. If anyone picked a fight today I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself from braining them with one of these things.” He nodded down at his crutches.

  Corpse laughed and flipped the bird at Grimley through the post office window. “I’d pay good money to see that.”

  “So would he.” Nick fixed his gaze on Deputy Douglas Kern. The deputy walked up the sidewalk from the opposite direction and continued his six week long streak of not saying a single word to the writer.

  “Why is everyone here so damn rude?” Corpse said intentionally loud enough for the deputy to hear. It was a rhetorical question. She knew exactly why Nick got the treatment he did. Since Clark Abernathy had killed a local, a cameraman, and maimed another local, Nick had been the town’s most despised resident. The fact that he himself had been a victim of Clark’s artistic torture spree carried no weight whatsoever.

  “Cut him a break, he killed a guy.” Nick stopped at the general store door. “Who knows what that does to someone? I’m only here because of him.”

  In the last month-and-a-half Nick had spent a significant amount of time attempting to put himself in the Dep
uty’s shoes. Kern had made no effort to hide his disdain for Nick whenever their paths crossed, but when the chips were down and the fecal matter hit the fan, the man put three rounds into a fanatic and pulled Nick’s catatonic shell from a barrel overflowing with starving rodents. Credit where credit was due, Douglas Kern was a stand-up guy.

  Corpse grunted and opened the door for him. Nick understood it to be the closest he’d get to a conceded point.

  “Hey, you two.” Bonnie Littleberry greeted the local pariahs as kindly as ever. She and her husband Chuck were the exception to the rule. Not just because their business had benefitted from the extra traffic they’d seen since Forest Down had become “the home of horror wunderkind Nick Dawkins,” but because that’s the kind of people they were. Warm. Folksy. Non-judgmental. “What can we do for you today?”

  Nick scraped together what little polite conversation he could considering the mood he was in. “We need a few things. Usual stuff. Cigs, juice, maybe some of those hot pocket things.” He turned to Corpse. “Actually, would you mind stocking up? That cold front’s supposed to hammer us in a few days anyway. I’ll go talk to Mom.”

  Bonnie clicked her tongue. “Oh, that’s right, you two in particular should get ready. Once, uh—what are they calling it this year?”

  “Snowmegeddon,” Nick deadpanned.

  “Right. Helluva storm coming. You remember what the last couple have been like. That road between here and your place…?” Bonnie whistled. “I’ve never had the need to drive it, but I’ve heard stories. Sounds awful.”

  Nick did remember. Every time one of these winter storms blasted the region it became a frozen hellscape filled with falling trees, impassable roads and downed powerlines. Winter Wonderland. Dean Martin was full of shit.

  At any rate, Bonnie had a point and Nick knew it. “What she said. Get some groceries like the world’s ending. Think zombie apocalypse. Savvy?”

  “Aye aye, Cap’n.” Corpse gathered what would be the first of several armfuls of junk food for herself before she turned to their legitimate nutritional needs.