Flypaper Opus: Dark Psychological Thriller - Book 2 Read online

  “God, are we calling him that? Oh, wait. Oh fuck.”

  “Yeah.”

  Nick slowed his car to a crawl. His driveway was up there somewhere and visibility had dropped to zero. “I’m almost home now.”

  The rain drowned out Reed’s voice. What did she say? Nick turned up the volume of his car’s speakers, but it didn’t help. “Say that again, I couldn’t hear you.”

  “I said it might not be safe for you at home right now.”

  Nick’s driveway appeared through the wall of rain in front of the car. He turned into it and his headlights immediately lit up something lying across the pavement. He gasped and slammed the brakes.

  “Dawkins?” Reed’s voice was a tinny shrill through his car’s speakers. “Dawkins, talk to me, you okay?”

  The figure lying directly in front of his car writhed and lifted a hand into the air, fingers outstretched, pleading.

  Help me, they said.

  Chapter 7

  The car’s wipers whipped back and forth across the windshield, giving Nick brief glimpses of the person sprawled out on his driveway in the pouring rain.

  “There’s someone in my driveway.” He practically yelled over the sound of the downpour.

  Reed’s voice was audible over the car’s speakers, but Nick had to strain to hear her. He missed a couple of words, but pieced together what she’d said from context. “Dawkins, be careful. Hell, just leave. I’m sending a car your way.”

  The man lying in Nick’s driveway clawed at the air.

  Nick drummed at his steering wheel. “I don’t think this is—” He was not calling this maniac the ‘Maggot Maestro’. He flat out refused. “I don’t think it’s our guy. I think it’s probably your missing guy.”

  He heard Reed talking to someone at the station, but couldn’t make out what she said. Only that her voice sounded hurried, frantic. She spoke directly to him again. “Maybe, maybe not. We’ve got a car and a paramedic on the way. I’m on my way out too. The best thing you can do is stay in your car, doors locked. Just stay put.”

  Nick stared at the guy in the driveway through the beating wipers and the rain. Whoever it was, he was scratching at the ground, in the direction of the car.

  He’d seen an animal act like this once before; a raccoon had been run down on the side of the road. When Nick had pulled alongside the creature, it twitched and clawed at the ground in an effort to pull itself to safety.

  “Shit Reed, I think this guy’s hurt bad.”

  He didn’t do anything about the raccoon. He didn’t think he had it in him to kill an animal up close and personal; figured nature would take its course and do the dirty work of putting the creature down. And what if someone had come along, seen him bludgeoning Ranger Rick on the side of the road? Then he’d be the weird outsider who beat forest critters to death in broad daylight.

  This wasn’t a raccoon in Nick’s driveway. It was a man. In all likelihood, it was whoever Needles McSurgeon had yanked off the side of the road.

  A flash of lightning turned night into noon. Nick did his best to jump out of his skin. “Jesus!”

  “Dawkins, what happened?” Reed’s voice was tinged with concern. It unnerved him.

  “It’s fine, I’m fine. Fucking lightning.”

  The follow up thunder cracked. The guy in the driveway had a dark red spot on his shirt.

  “Reed, shit, this guy’s bleeding. I think he’s been shot or stabbed or some shit.”

  The Sheriff said something, but he couldn’t put it together. Her voice was drowned out; by the rain on his car, the rain on her car, the beat of the wipers, and by the conflicting voices in his head. One wanted him to get out and help the poor bastard; the other screamed it’s a trap!

  Nick looked in every conceivable direction. If what’s-his-nut was anywhere around, he’d hidden himself well.

  He opened the car door. The ‘door open’ ping did its one job.

  “Dawkins! Dawkins, stay in the car!”

  Nick heard her, but stepped into the rain anyway. He pulled his jacket over his head, then let it drop back down. He was already drenched.

  He stepped toward the man on the ground. He had an extraordinarily fuzzy face; not quite a beard, but far from clean shaven. Two big red spots stained his blue button-down shirt.

  “Buddy, you alright?” Nick surprised himself. People did ask stupid shit like that in situations like this. Of course the guy wasn’t alright.

  Fuzzy-face moaned.

  Nick kept a distance. “There are cops and an ambulance on the way.”

  The man in the drive reached for him and moaned again. Was it a moan? It sounded more like he’d tried to speak, but was muffled. Had he been gagged?

  Nick got closer. Fuzzy-face tried to speak. Then he tried to scream. Both were muzzled.

  Through the substantial scruff on the bleeding guy’s face, Nick spotted a black crisscross pattern and more blood. The man’s lips tried to part, tugging at the thread that bound them closed. He moaned again.

  His motherfucking lips were sewn shut.

  Nick stepped back and tried to look in every conceivable direction at once, keenly aware that whoever had done that could still be there. He expected a monster to come out of the dark. Jason Voorhees. Hannibal Lector. Dee fucking Snyder.

  But no one lunged out of the black. It was Nick and the wounded man who had been left in his driveway.

  He crouched beside of the man. The red spots had grown. What had Dr. Giggles done to this guy?

  Nick held his breath—bad air out, good air in—and pulled open the man’s shirt, popping the buttons off. They bounced across the wet concrete and disappeared.

  The two wounds were obvious. What took a moment was the realization of what he was looking at.

  Two incisions, each partially stitched closed. And not stitched well. They were the same hack-job he’d seen on his front porch. More than that, they were moving. The skin had been pulled over and sewn into place around live crabs.

  Live crabs.

  So that’s where they’d gone.

  “Oh my god.”

  No wonder the poor guy was in agony. The crabs were as distressed as he. Their little pincers opened and closed as their legs kicked at anything they could find in an effort to gain traction. Stitches pulled at skin with every movement, drawing blood in tiny streams.

  “Hang on man, doctor’s comin’.” Nick’s platitudes rang hollow. They hadn’t invented words to comfort a person in this kind of situation.

  “Oh fuck, guy.” Those words sounded more genuine, although even less helpful. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I should try to move you or what.”

  Was there any reason this guy couldn’t walk? Nick looked down at the man’s pants. He hadn’t noticed before—the guy’s rain-soaked jeans were dark all by themselves—but two dark stains were bleeding through his pants as well, one on each leg.

  The guy tried to speak. Nick grimaced, feeling sympathy pain in his own mouth. “No, shit, don’t talk, oh my god.”

  Over the pouring rain, Nick heard a siren.

  “Hear that? Police. Cops are coming. Hang in there.”

  Through the rain pattering down on the victim’s head, Nick could see tears flowing down his cheeks.

  Poor fucking bastard.

  ***

  The Beasley Medical Center’s ambulance rolled away, its sirens in a shouting war with the rolling thunder that continued to bombard the countryside.

  A handful of Forest Down’s finest had taped off the part of the driveway where the crab guy had lain. Nick watched them from his doorway.

  Sheriff Reed’s slicker dripped onto Nick’s floor. It was the loudest thing in the room.

  “Dawkins.”

  Nick slammed his front door, shaking a nearby window. He walked past Reed without saying a word and straight into his bedroom.

  “Dawkins, it doesn’t do any good to—”

  Nick shut the door in her face. He shook his head. She didn’t
deserve that. “I’m changing my clothes, they’re soaked. I’ll be right out.”

  He stripped and tossed his wet clothes into his adjacent bath.

  Reed’s voice came through the door. “Which book was it?”

  Nick pulled dry clothes off hangers in his closet and put them on. “It wasn’t any book. Are you kidding me? I don’t know how many other ways I can say it. I never wrote anything about crabs, period. You think I’d have forgotten something like a bunch of arthropodic crustaceans popping out of a dude? The only thing even remotely like that would be—”

  He stopped speaking, his shirt still halfway over his head. He was equal parts horrified and impressed. And a little horrified to be impressed.

  Reed called out. “Would be what? What is it?”

  He finished pulling his shirt down, walked to the door and opened it. “I never wrote anything about crabs.” He walked past Reed, toward the kitchen. She followed.

  “You said that. So what was it?”

  Nick pulled a glass out of a cabinet. “I’m having a drink, you want one?”

  Reed stood at the kitchen doorway. “I’m on duty, and I thought you didn’t drink.”

  “I don’t have a beer when I come home from a hard day, but it doesn’t mean I don’t drink.” He pulled a bottle of whiskey out of a cabinet. “I drink when I finish writing something good, which, to be fair, seems to happen less and less often. I drink on major holidays or at social events. And apparently, I drink when guys stuffed with crabs are left in my driveway, because holy fuck.”

  Reed leaned against Nick’s kitchen wall. “I was going to say before; it doesn’t do any good to blame yourself for what happened out there.”

  Nick poured whiskey into his glass. “My second book was called Cancer Man. Don’t guess you’ve read it.”

  Reed shook her head. Nick put the bottle away and took a drink.

  “I read an article once about these Tasmanian devils, down in Australia. They all had these gargantuan tumors on their faces, this rare parasitic cancer. Most cancer is, you know, an abnormal cell that multiplies over and over and over, becomes a tumor. But parasitic cancers are this rare transmissible kind you don’t see often. Caused by bacteria, or a virus.”

  The wind outside picked up, beating the rain against the windows of the house. On a good night, the sound was soothing. On a night like that one, less so.

  Nick sipped from his glass. “This shit spread like wildfire down there because a sick Tasmanian devil would come in contact with a healthy one, and I don’t know if they fought because one of them was sick, or if it’s in their nature, but regardless, they would go at it tooth and claw. When that happened, the tumors would spread from the face of one devil to the wounds on the face of another. And that’s how it spread. Something like fifty percent of the population had it at one point.”

  “That’s a real thing?” Reed sounded genuinely interested.

  Nick raised two fingers to the sky. “Scout’s honor. So anyway, you could say I always had a…” Deep underlying concern. “…Fascination with the concept of sickness being transmitted from one person to another. So I wrote this book, Cancer Man, about this guy with this incredibly contagious form of cancer. Eventually, in the end, his body becomes so riddled with tumors that they start to burst out of him. Like, you know…”

  Reed nodded. “The crabs. Cancer. Like the constellation.”

  Nick took another drink. “Crabs. Clever, right?”

  “It is creative, I’ll give him that.”

  He leaned against his counter. “So this is what I do. This is what I was saying the other day.”

  Reed stuck a finger out. “And I was saying you can’t think like that.”

  Nick spread his arms. “Tell me what else I’m supposed to think. I write something on my little computer…” He wiggled his fingers in the air. “…And then someone does this to whoever he chooses. Do you know who he was?”

  Reed nodded so slowly it was barely perceptible.

  “Who?”

  “His name is Delbert Williams. He’s local.”

  A lump in Nick’s throat threatened to choke him.

  “He have a wife? Kids?”

  Reed didn’t blink. “He does. Wife. Two little ones. That he will make it home to.”

  Nick grunted. “Well, then. No harm, right?”

  The Sheriff waved a hand up and down, gesturing from Nick’s head to his toes and back again. “You get this out of your system. You go ahead. Tonight you can mope around and feel sorry for yourself, and for Delbert and his family and whoever. Because here’s the news. I don’t think our boy’s done. Sewing a bunch of animals together? Kidnapping a guy and putting crabs in him? This guy’s going to a lot of trouble to show you how much he likes your work, Dawkins.”

  Nick looked at the drink in his hand. Reed continued.

  “I don’t say that to make you feel bad. I say it because we don’t have any reason to think he’s going to stop now. If anything, I think he’s escalating. And that means tomorrow we’ve all got to wake up bright and early and catch him before he does something much, much worse.”

  All the things Nick had ever written flooded into his head at once. Acts of depravity. Horrors both real and imagined. If this guy had recreated something as out there as Cancer Man, he could find some sick and twisted way to interpret and recreate anything.

  Reed picked up on the multitude of wheels turning in Nick’s head. “Save it for tomorrow. I’ll be back out. We’ll go over all of your stuff then. Books, stories, fucking slam poetry... anything you’ve ever written, published or posted. See if we can figure out what he might try to do next.”

  Posted. Nick winced at his laptop as though it might bite him.

  Reed picked up on that, too. “I know, there’s probably video. Do yourself a favor, don’t watch it. Finish up your drink and go to bed. I need you sharp between the ears tomorrow, feel me?”

  Nick finished his drink and set the glass on the counter. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll go to bed.”

  Reed adjusted her hat. “Good deal.” She looked down at the puddle that had accumulated around her feet. “Sorry about your floor.”

  He waved her off. She stopped at his doorway on the way out. “Say, eleven in the morning?”

  Nick yawned. “Sure thing. See you then.”

  The sheriff paused in front of his stoop. “Oh, and I know so far all this guy’s only tried to impress you, but it’d make me feel better if I left a car out here for the night.”

  Nick scrunched his face up and whined like a kid who thought he was too old for a sitter. “Aw, Mom.”

  “It’s not to make you feel better, it’s to make me feel better.”

  Nick nodded begrudgingly. “Alright, fine.”

  “Night, Mr. Dawkins.”

  “Night, Sheriff.”

  He closed the door and locked it until he ran out of locks.

  Bed. He didn’t know if he’d ever sleep again. Of course he’d said that a few times before.

  Nick walked back into his kitchen. Water and mud pooled on the floor. Thanks, Reed.

  The laptop caught his eye. He opened it and pulled up Myiasis. A new thread had been started less than ten minutes prior.

  Project 2 – Cancer Man.

  He clicked Play.

  Within seconds the screams of Delbert Williams, father of two, filled the house.

  Nick didn’t sleep a wink that night.

  Chapter 8

  If MaggotMaestro didn’t have a captivated audience before, he did now.

  Within an hour of the Cancer Man video going live on Myiasis, the post had been viewed and commented on more than any other in the site’s history, aside from the RIP Flypap3r thread.

  Within two hours, there was fan art. One piece had depicted poor Delbert and his crabs as the stars of their own children’s cartoon. Another, as a superhero named Cancer-Man who flung crabs at evildoers out of little pouches in his skin.

  Within three hours, someone had sped up the
video and set it to the theme from Benny Hill.

  Well into the night and early hours of the morning this carried on. Images from the video were altered, turned into memes and then posted and reposted ad infinitum. There were musical remixes, both with and without dubstep.

  A handful of people spoke up as the voices of reason, but were quickly shouted down as oppressors of free speech. The First Amendment was thrown around a lot, which implied there were a low number of constitutional scholars amongst the site’s membership.

  At the heart of it all was MaggotMaestro, who had been silent since the initial post.

  Nick never interacted. He didn’t dare. He felt exposed enough just looking at the site; as though the users on it would spontaneously notice him watching and fixate on him like a collective Eye of Sauron.

  He never slept. He tried every now and then. He tossed and turned, but every time he closed his eyes, he saw Delbert being cut into, and he never stopped hearing the poor guy’s screams in his head. Then he would get up and rubberneck the grisly spectacle taking place in his name and the whole cycle would begin anew, the exact opposite of what Sheriff Reed had told him to do.

  A few minutes after dawn, CorpseFlower called him.

  “Nick Nick Nick Nick.”

  Sometimes Corpse’s mind moved faster than her mouth. When that happened, she tended to repeat the same word or phrase over and over until they synched up again.

  Nick verged on twenty-two hours with no sleep and wasn’t ready for that kind of energy. “What? Jesus Christ Corpse, what is it?”

  Corpse shifted gears. “Wait, I can’t believe you actually picked up. What time is it?”

  Nick rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock on his wall. “It’s super early. Or super late. I guess it depends on your point of view. I haven’t slept.”

  “Me neither, man, I feel ya.”

  Nick hit refresh on the Cancer Man thread and found a newly posted fake movie poster with the tag line, Calvin has cancer, but he’s not mad. He’s a little crabby. “You’ve been up all night watching this insanity too, huh?”