Flypaper Cast: Dark Psychological Thriller - Book 3 Read online

  Nick leaned in and studied the screen. There were multiple comments alluding to some kind of event that may or may not have gone according to plan the night before.

  Anyone know if it happened yet?

  I wish someone could have been there to get video.

  Updates, please.

  He rubbed his hand across his face. “You can’t find what they’re talking about?”

  Corpse shook her head. “I think they probably posted a thread, dragged a handful of people into a private chat somewhere and everything else was done through direct messaging. It’s sure as hell what I would do.” She stood up and paced back and forth around the room. “Damn it, this is why I don’t sleep. The world never stops. You miss things; important things that can bite you in the ass. I need a Power Up.”

  Nick called to her as she hurried into the kitchen. “I don’t think you need more—never mind. Could you find these private chat rooms or messages?”

  Corpse came back into the living room full on chugging a tall can of sugar, caffeine and god only knows what. Spinal fluid from sharks, for all he knew. It would explain a lot. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “I’m good, not god, Broses.”

  Nick drubbed his fingers at his table and stared at her laptop. “One of those needles in a haystack type things?”

  Corpse took several more gulps and sat next to him again. “More like the needle I’d be looking for is in a haystack, inside a bank vault, and I don’t know what country it’s in.” She trailed off and stared into space. “Yeah, that’s a good analogy. Totally accurate. Point goes to me.”

  Nick shook his head “Shit. Why wouldn’t we tell Reed about this?”

  Corpse raised a hand as though she might smack him again.

  He raised his hands in defense. “Don’t friggin’ hit me. I’m not seeing the problem is all.”

  Corpse stood up again and resumed wearing a groove into the living room floor. “Don’t you get it? We don’t know who told them about your mom. We don’t know who cut down the metaphorical cherry tree. We’re in the trenches, man, we can’t trust anyone.”

  Nick watched her pace back and forth, a ball of lightning and venom. In the weeks she’d been there he’d never seen her quite this worked up. But in all fairness, he’d never seen her very nearly severely injured at the hands of assailants unknown, either. In that context, he couldn’t be surprised. “I wish you’d stop pacing, you’re freaking me out.”

  She did as he asked, but it didn’t help with his own level of calm. “We should hit back.”

  He paused and considered everything she’d just said. “Yeah, don’t know about that. Let’s assume you’re right, it was Hellen and Wormwood…”

  Corpse snapped her fingers insistently. “I’m right, move along.”

  “Fine. I’m not sure escalating things further is a good idea.” She stared at him in anticipation of a further point, but he had nothing more to add.

  “Seriously?” Corpse leaned in closer. Her eyes smoldered with quiet fury. “Dude, they called your mom, dragged every painful childhood secret of yours they could out of her, they blackmailed you and then they tried to hurt you. What does it take for you to grow a pair and hit fucking back?”

  His mom. He’d just started to put some semblance of a relationship with her back together. Bad enough they’d found a way to drive a wedge in there from however many miles away. But then they took a shot at him, and Corpse had been caught in the crossfire. In his mind’s eye, he saw her dangling there on the side of his house, terror stretched across her face. A familiar desire to lash out balled up inside of him. Not with words this time. This time, he wanted to reach out and do some real damage. Not unlike the damage that’d been done to him time and again.

  He took a deep breath.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  Chapter 8

  The doorbell rang.

  Hellen shot up in bed. What time was it? She wrenched her eyes open and picked up her smartphone.

  12:32 PM.

  The doorbell rang again. Who the shit would be at their door so early? She got out of bed, her legs like rubber. Wormwood turned over and murmured nonsense. Useless ass.

  The doorbell was followed by knocking. More of a banging, really. Whoever was at the door grew impatient. Hellen pulled on a pair of sweatpants. It didn’t match her tee, but it was probably Jehovah’s witnesses or something. Hell if she’d be the first to show them something they’d never seen before.

  She stumbled through the dark cave of a home she and Worm had created for themselves. Night owls by nature, they had covered every crevice and crack leading to the outside world in thick, dark curtains.

  Hellen cracked her foot on an empty whiskey bottle and cried out. “Dick. Pick up after yourself.”

  Another bang at the door. Unintelligible garbles came from the bedroom.

  She approached the front door and looked through the peephole. A man in a red and blue shirt and cap walked away. A small car sat at the curb at the end of the yard, a red and blue sign on top.

  Pizza?

  Hellen unlocked and opened the door. The daylight threatened to burn her away. “Hey.”

  The pizza guy turned. “Hey yourself. I’d started to think this was some kind of weird crank.”

  She squinted into the overwhelming light of day. “It still might be. We didn’t order any pizza.”

  Pizza Man held up a piece of paper and read off an address. Their address.

  “Yeah, that’s us, but someone’s taking you for a ride, Pizza Man.” She displayed her ill-conceived ensemble, complete with bed head. “We’re not even up yet. We didn’t order shit.”

  Pizza Man walked back to his car. “Well someone sure loves you then, because I’ve got like twenty pizzas here for you and they’re paid for.”

  Hellen watched as Pizza Man pulled two giant bags from the back of his car and hoisted them across her yellowed lawn, one hanging off each shoulder. Her eyes adjusted to the light, giving her a view of lower middle class suburbia. Across the street, a small child whipped what looked like a battery at a passing car.

  “Would you mind if I come in to set these down?” Pizza Man bobbed his head in the direction of the inside of Hellen’s home.

  She motioned him inside. Screw it, who looked free pizza in the mouth? Or whatever the saying was. She’d only had four hours of sleep.

  Pizza Man unloaded four stacks of pizza boxes onto the table in their recording room, each stack five high.

  Hellen rubbed her eyes. “You said already paid for?”

  He produced a receipt from his pocket and a pen from behind his ear. “That’s right, just sign here.”

  She scrawled illegible lines across the bottom of the white slip. Pizza Man looked at it and frowned. What was his problem? The tip. Tipping was still a thing, right? She wrote the number three at the bottom of the slip. Pizza Man still wasn’t happy, but moved for the front door anyway.

  “Thanks,” he said. Hellen didn’t think he meant it.

  She slammed the door behind him and returned to the recording room. Twenty pizzas. What was the deal? Again, screw it. Free pizza. She could eat.

  Hellen opened one of the boxes. It was a pizza, but just a red circle. No cheese. No toppings, only sauce. In her estimation, it didn’t even qualify as pizza, per se. It was tomato crust.

  Ew.

  She opened another. The same thing. And another. A pattern emerged.

  “What the flipping fuck?”

  Wormwood dragged his bare naked ass from into the recording room. “Wha’s goin’ on?”

  Hellen opened the sixth box of pizza and gave up. “Someone is screwing with us, that’s what’s going on. Twenty pizzas, no toppings. Paid for.”

  Wormwood rubbed his head. “That’s a lame way to screw with someone. Who would do that?”

  Music played in the other room. Hellen’s ringtone. She ran back into their bedroom and looked at the screen. Unknown caller. She slid her thumb across the screen. “
Hello?”

  The other end of the line clicked. Dead.

  She walked back into the recording room. “Something really weird is happening. I just got a call from an unknown number. Whoever it was hung up.”

  Wormwood looked through a few pizza boxes. “Dawkins? If his response to what we did to him is to crank call us and have shitty pizza delivered, he’s lamer than we thought. What a loser.”

  The phone rang again. Unknown number. Hellen answered. “Who the hell is this?”

  A voice screeched from the other end of the call. “They’re all gonna laugh at you.”

  “Dawkins?” She yelled into the phone. “Fuck you, Dawkins.”

  The caller on the other end giggled and then hung up.

  Wormwood snatched the phone out of her hand. “Jesus Christ, give it here.” He spoke into it. “Hello?”

  “They hung up, ass.” Hellen went to her computer. “Maybe he e-mailed us or something.”

  Hellen’s phone dinged in Wormwood’s hand. He read the incoming text out loud. “Is this really Wormwood and Hellen?” He thumbed at the phone, an insane look in his eye. He read aloud as he typed out a response to the texter: Who is this?

  The phone dinged again. And again. It wouldn’t stop.

  “What is happening with my phone?” Hellen was intent on her computer’s monitor. She pulled up Myiasis in the hope of some kind of clue as to what they’d found themselves in the middle of.

  “I don’t know, these are all texts from different numbers. Are you Hellen, you’re hot. We support you WW and H. Please kill yourselves, but please record it. This is insane. What the actual fuck?”

  Hellen opened a thread and came face to face with a wall of text she recognized every inch of. She knew it immediately because it was their entire life on a virtual platter. “Oh my god.”

  Wormwood came and stood behind her.

  Wormwood – Real name: Joseph Platz.

  Hellen – Real name: Helen Faraday.

  It continued on and on like that. Their address. Private e-mail addresses. Phone numbers. IP addresses. Their social security numbers.

  Hellen clutched at her head. “Motherfuck, we’ve been doxxed.” Her smartphone continued to ding as though it had a mind of its own.

  Wormwood squinted at the screen. “Who the hell is CorpseFlower?”

  Both hands fisting her hair, she screamed at the ceiling, “It’s the cunt. The one on the phone with him, he called her ‘Corpse.’ Don’t you get it, she’s with him. She’s probably the one who brought the site down a couple of months ago. She doxxed us.” Hellen opened their Flystrike e-mail and found the one they’d gotten from the Myiasis administrator.

  Hellen’s phone dinged again. Wormwood flung it against the wall. “Son of a bitch.”

  She raised her hands as though she’d strangle him. “What the shit did you do that for?”

  Wormwood seethed. “We’ll get new phones. I’m going to that bumfuck backwater and I’m going to kill those assholes myself.”

  “No you are not, we’ll fix this.” Hellen clicked on the link in the Administrator’s e-mail. A little black chat room opened. She typed into the box: Are you there? “Come on, come on.”

  Wormwood threw a stack of pizza boxes to the floor. Tomato sauce spattered in every direction.

  Hellen screamed. “Will you stop it, you jackass? You won’t be the one to clean that up and you know it.”

  He stomped over to her and leaned into her face. “Do not take your shit out on me. You did this.” He was so close to her, flecks of spit landed on her lips.

  Hellen lowered her voice. “Get out of my face, Worm.”

  Text appeared in the chat window: Problems?

  “Look, here we go.” Hellen typed out a response: Dawkins doxxed us. Can you please get our shit off the site?

  A few moments passed before more text appeared: Probably not a good idea. See: The Streisand Effect.

  ‘The Streisand Effect.’ Internet terminology for ‘the harder someone tries to suppress information, the more people are inclined to spread it’.

  Wormwood read the response over Hellen’s shoulder. “Fuck.” He punched the wall behind her, leaving a dent in the plaster.

  “Joseph, don’t tear up the house, Jesus.” It never failed. The more submissive someone was in bed, the more likely they were to act like a giant baby when they didn’t get their way. Hellen wiggled her fingers above the keyboard. “He’s probably right about The Streisand Effect.”

  She typed another response: What should we do?

  “We should go to Forest Down and kick Nick Dawkins’ door in, that’s what we should do.” Wormwood picked up another box of pizza and threw it across the table.

  “Fucking child.” Hellen said. She never took her eyes off the screen. “I hate it when you get like this.”

  “—what’d you call me?” Wormwood approached her, but stopped short, his hand raised, his sad excuse for a chest puffed out so she might forget she was taller than him.

  More text appeared on her screen: Hit him where it hurts.

  Hellen shook her head. “Yeah, no, I don’t think that’s a solution, fucko.”

  “Why isn’t it?” Wormwood leaned into her space, ostensibly so he could see her monitor, but she knew better. He wanted to passive-aggressively crowd her out of her own computer space.

  She shouldered him in an attempt to reclaim her territorial bubble. “Because I think we’ve gone far enough, don’t you? We messed with them, they messed back. Let’s just call it square and walk away.”

  Wormwood hit the table. Hellen’s monitor shivered in response. “We are not square. They doxxed us. This shit is going to upend our lives, mark my words. I can’t believe you, of all people, are just going to be like…” He bent over the table and stuck his ass out. “Here. Go ahead and fuck us. Here you go. Give it to us good, Nick Dawkins.”

  Hellen lifted a middle finger then pointed an index one at him. “Think this through. We’ve just now gotten our lives to a pretty decent place considering where we were a couple of years ago and we have no idea whatsoever what this CorpseFlower chick is capable of. For all we know, this was a warning shot. The last thing we want to do is invite another salvo.”

  “Yesterday…” He forcefully tapped at the table for emphasis. “Yesterday, you convinced two Maggots to trespass and vandalize this dude’s balcony in the dead of night because he annoyed you.”

  She crossed her arms. “That is not why we did that.”

  Wormwood was incredulous. “Oh come on. Of course it was. You didn’t really think you’d destroy the guy’s house and he’d be like, ‘Well, okay, you got me. I’ll do your show.’ You felt disrespected and wanted to hurt him. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  There was a grain of truth in his words, but damned if she would admit it out loud. “So what if I did? What’s your point?” Wormwood pushed Hellen’s roller chair out of the way. “My point is that Hellen the Human Windsock has once again done a complete one-eighty at the slightest change in the breeze. Move.” He hunched over her keyboard and banged away at it.

  “I have not.” She spoke to the back of his head. “I never intended for things to go further than the balcony. I just said what I did to him because I wanted to get in his head.”

  “So you’re spineless, bi-polar and completely full of shit. Good to know.” Wormwood hit enter: How can we hurt him?

  Hellen got up and walked away from the computer. Then she walked back. She didn’t want to pursue it any further, but couldn’t turn away, either. “Worm, stop.”

  He pushed her away. “Don’t tell me what to do. You don’t want to be of any use? Take a walk.”

  She watched over his shoulder as the Administrator’s response appeared: There are people he cares about. Flypap3r mentioned them in one of her posts. Old couple she lived with.

  For the first time, Hellen wondered what kind of person was on the other side of the screen. What kind of Devil had they gotten into bed with? Whoever it was sent
another line of text…

  The Littleberrys. Hit the Littleberrys.

  Chapter 9

  The clock ticked toward eight o’clock. Still a few minutes to go, but close enough. No one had wandered into the store in over an hour. Bad as the roads got after dark these days, people didn’t tend to come around this late anyway.

  Chuck Littleberry walked around the counter to the front door and flipped the sign that said We’re Open so that it read Sorry, We’re Closed to any Johnny-Come-Latelies who might pass by. He reached for the lock, but the small brass switch pulled away from his fingers as the bell above the door rang.

  A young man in a hoodie, with the hood pulled over his head, had opened the door. He was as startled to see Chuck standing right there as Chuck was to have the door opened that time of night.

  “Oh, sorry buddy. I was just closing up.” Chuck raised his head to get a better look at the kid through his glasses. He didn’t recognize him off-hand. Couldn’t have been much more than twenty. “But uh—I’ll be happy to help you if I can. What brings you by?”

  The kid kept his hood up, but glanced around the store. Nervous little fella. Like one of those dogs Bonnie thought were so cute—yippy little things. “Looking for something to snack on.”

  Chuck moved toward the aisle best suited for snacking needs. “Well, we got your candy and chips and whatnot over here. I like Fritos myself. You a Frito man?”

  The kid wiped his nose and eyed Chuck up and down. He didn’t seem all that interested in the Fritos.

  The bell above the door rang again as the door opened wide. Another young man, this one with a bowl cut. Thick and wide as he was, he must have had fifty pounds on Chuck. Too young to be that heavy. Country’s youth had gone to hell.

  “Hello there,” Chuck greeted the new customer out of habit. Something about this felt off. He looked over the two of them. “You boys not from around here? Passing through?”