Flypaper Opus: Dark Psychological Thriller - Book 2 Page 9

  He heard the screaming by the time he reached the third floor. A woman, and she was tearing her throat up. He made it to the fourth. Every door along the hallway was closed. Kern followed the screaming to the end of the hall. Room 413.

  The same room his dad had busted his way into three decades earlier and found something he would carry with him for all his days.

  Kern would kick Nick Dawkins in the teeth if he ever got the chance.

  He took a breath. He had no idea what was on the other side of the door aside from a screaming woman. He could be walking into anything. Shitty, shitty, hand of cards.

  On the bright side, he’d never felt closer to his father than he did in that moment.

  Kern raised his gun and kicked hard at the wooden door, flinging it open and embedding the door knob in the room’s wall.

  The first thing he noticed was a profound amount of blood. The woman was covered in it. So was a man.

  There was no Emmanuel Sharpe, or whatever the guy’s name was, to be seen. Only the sharply dressed woman who sat on the floor at the feet of a chalk-white man who was propped up against the bed.

  “Help us. Please help us.” The woman’s hands and forearms were pure crimson. She had them pressed into the leg of the man. She was trying to put pressure on a wound. “He won’t stop bleeding.”

  And no wonder. The guy had no toes. Or rather, he had them, but they were scattered across the floor amid the shattered remnants of a decorative mirror. In addition to his toes having been completely severed, the male victim had a giant shard of glass jammed into his thigh. A severed artery would explain the massive amount of blood pooling around the poor bastard.

  Kern moved into the room and looked around. There didn’t seem to be anyplace for the guy to hide. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, he left a few minutes ago. Please help.” Blood spurted out from between her fingers. The guy in the t-shirt looked dead already. He didn’t have a lot left in him.

  He glanced at the woman. It was impossible to tell if any of the blood was hers. “Are you injured?”

  “No. He never touched me.”

  Kern pushed the button on his walkie. “This is Kern, I’ve got at least one wounded, ambulance required, suspect is on the move. Over.” He turned his attention to the woman on the floor. “Keep pressure on that leg for me, elevate it. I’ll be back.”

  “Wait. What about the explosives? There are bombs on us. On our backs.”

  Shit.

  He looked at the object taped to the woman’s back. It looked like a block of clay, but who could say for sure? He opened the walkie channel again. “Possible explosives on site. Repeat, possible explosives, over.”

  The woman nodded in the direction of small, silver tube on the floor. “He left the detonator.”

  Kern looked out into the hallway. “Do me a favor, don’t touch that. Focus on his leg for me.”

  “Wait, please don’t leave us, you can’t leave us.”

  He ignored her pleas and moved back into the hallway. He felt terrible leaving the wounded man to continue bleeding all over the floor, but all he’d do is keep pressure on the leg until an EMT arrived and the woman seemed capable of doing that. His time was better spent chasing down the maniac who’d committed the atrocity. He could have wandered anyplace.

  Kern moved quickly but cautiously back down the stairs. He reached the lobby and found Mortie standing in the same exact place he’d left him. “He come through here?” Mortie shook his head. Kern looked back up the stairs. “Get everyone out of the building. Calmly and quietly. There any way out of this place except this lobby? Fire exits, anything?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. It’s an older building.” Mortie lifted a finger. “Hold on. We’ve had problems with kids climbing down the porch. You can get onto it from the second floor.”

  Kern bolted through the lobby as though he’d heard a starter pistol and out the front door. He clambered down the porch steps and looked up into the rain, gun ready. A second-floor window was open.

  Shit shit fuck.

  Kern moved around to the side of the building, a delicate balance of care and speed. He wasn’t ready to die for the Nick Dawkins fan club, but he couldn’t let this one continue maiming his way across Forest Down.

  The white van tore around the corner of the inn, kicking up gravel and mud. Kern stepped to the side and caught a glimpse of a long haired bespectacled man in the driver’s seat. He was sure enough that it was the suspect to pull the trigger.

  A shot rang out across the parking lot and a side window of the van burst. The van splashed the parking lot as Kern fired another round at it. The van didn’t slow down. It hopped over a curb and out onto the main road.

  Kern’s patrol car was right there. Right there. But there was a man bleeding to death on an ugly carpet upstairs, to say nothing of the possible bomb threat.

  Help those who need helping, his father used to say.

  “Kern, respond. Over.” Reed’s voice. He gritted his teeth and hit his walkie.

  “Reed. We got a runner.”

  Chapter 12

  Minutes crawled by as Nick waited for word from Reed. He hadn’t heard from her in some time, not since she’d ran out the door to join the chase. When he’d last seen her, she’d been pulling out of his driveway at an impressive rate of speed, on her way to another Nick Dawkins related crime scene. This time it involved the Shady Thicket Inn. He didn’t know the exact details, but he could hazard a guess. He wrote the story.

  He didn’t catch everything said between the various officers chattering about police codes and so forth on Reed’s radio, but he heard enough to know they had gotten close to the guy. It sounded as though there had been a brief pursuit, but he wasn’t holding his breath waiting for word of an apprehension. If they’d caught the guy, Nick would have heard about it, surely.

  Nick stood on his balcony under a grey sky and exhaled smoke. The rain had stopped. Maybe it was a sign the weather was clearing. Maybe his life would too. He could sure use a ray of sunshine about now.

  His laptop beckoned him from the kitchen. Come press the refresh key, Dawkins. There might be a new video on Myiasis. It was all he’d been doing for hours. He’d developed a cramp in his mouse-clicking finger.

  Nick picked up the mouth-shaped ashtray on the little table beside him and tossed the rain water it had collected over the railing. He stubbed his cigarette out and returned to the kitchen.

  He looked at the time stamp on the Myiasis message board and compared it to the time in the corner of his monitor. A full seven minutes had elapsed; more time than he normally gave it. He pressed ‘refresh’ on his browser window.

  Page not found.

  The laptop’s wireless connection bars were full. He tabbed open another window and opened Twitter. Connection was fine. He couldn’t help but notice that he was still trending—less fine. And true to CorpseFlower’s word, Kim Kardashian had been pushed down by Myiasis. He clicked the word that had become, in his mind, synonymous with “unfettered insane asylum”. Posts from people all over the world filled his screen.

  Myiasis links not working for anyone else?

  Guess they took Myiasis down. #FreeSpeechFail

  WTF is Myiasis and why is it trending?

  Maybe everyone on Myiasis drank the Kool-Aid and hopped a ride on a comet.

  He should have been so lucky. Chances were the increased traffic to the site from the curious masses had been more than it could take.

  Horrible dubstep music emitted from his phone. CorpseFlower.

  “Hey, I was just thinking about you.” Nick said into the phone as he pushed ‘refresh’. “Is this your doing?”

  “I’m a motherfucking badass!” Corpse’s shrill voice was loud with self-congratulations. Nick held the phone away from his face.

  “Ha. I’m ashamed to say my first thought was that it had been crushed under the weight of all the traffic it’s getting. I should have known it was you.” He closed the Myia
sis window and watched tweet after tweet of people grumbling over the downed site fill the screen.

  “Well, technically you were half right.” Corpse’s voice relaxed and quieted. She sounded tired. “All the traffic gave a tool of my own design the nudge it needed to close the deal, so to speak. I call it the Fuckinator.”

  Nick relaxed as well, sinking into his kitchen chair. As far as he knew, the madness in Forest Down never stopped, but this was a significant victory. “Whatever you did, thanks. This asshole has been busy today. If he’s still running around, which I think he probably is, at least he can’t play directly to his audience anymore.”

  “Let’s not start singing kumbaya yet, Nickie-boy. First, this is temporary. I probably bought us a few hours. Whoever’s running this thing knows their elbow from their asshole. Like, they know their shit, know what I’m saying? That’s problem number one.”

  Nick leaned forward. Problem number one?

  “Problem numero dos is what’s coming out of Forest Down right now. About fifteen minutes ago people started reporting on some clusterfuck over at this Shady place.”

  Nick clicked around, looking for what she was referring to. He found it.

  Bomb scare in Forest Down.

  One wounded in latest Nick Dawkins copycat horror.

  The public details were vague. Reports of a man taken to a local hospital and a “bomb scare” were the only things that had surfaced. They were accompanied by pictures of the Shady Thicket’s exterior. Some were stock photos and others were from this afternoon. The inn looked even more ominous liberally decorated in police tape and surrounded by police cars.

  Nick crossed his fingers. “You haven’t seen anything about him being caught, have you?”

  “Fraid not, Mister Bro Jangles. Everything I’m seeing says he fled the scene. At large and what have you.”

  Stupid fingers. Crossing them never did shit.

  Nick’s phone buzzed in his ear. He looked at the screen. Blaire Coutrice. The smiling picture accompanying Blaire’s name belied what would be an unpleasant call. On a day like today, the chance she had good news were remote.

  “Hey, I have a call I should take, even if I don’t want to.” Nick stood up, anticipating some pacing.

  “Blaire, right?” Add ‘psychic’ to the long list of CorpseFlower’s attributes?

  “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “I have eyes and ears everywhere, my friend. Good luck in the trenches. Viva la resistance.” The call ended.

  Nick shook off the feeling of confusion Corpse left him with and pushed the ‘accept’ button on his phone as he walked into his living room. “Hey, Blaire. What’s up?”

  “Nick, darling. So, we have a situation.” Her chipper demeanor clung to a thread. The distress in her voice was the equivalent of Corpse telling him to not freak out. It immediately set him on edge.

  “Okay, what’s that?” It occurred to Nick that he didn’t care. He could see his bed from where he stood and it looked awfully good. Maybe a nap. Or maybe sleep for a few days and hope the whole thing had blown over by the time he woke.

  “The studio is rethinking the release of The Inn. They want to have a conference call.”

  Nick sighed. He drew it out a little to emphasize his annoyance. “Fucking really? Today?”

  “The premiere is in a couple of weeks, Nick. There’s no time to waste on this.”

  He knew what she meant, but couldn’t help but interpret it differently; there was no time to waste on this. “I don’t care. I haven’t slept in…” He looked at the clock. It may as well have been a foreign object. “…a lot of hours. I can’t even do math at this point.”

  If Blaire heard him or cared, she blew past it. “I don’t have to remind you there’s a lot riding on this call. You have points on this release. If they shelve this thing for six months, or god forbid, don’t release it at all, it hurts you, and thus, me. We need to talk them into moving ahead.”

  Nick found himself stumbling through the doorway of his bedroom and toward his bed. He dropped facedown onto it and screamed into the mattress.

  “Nick, darling, are you okay?”

  “What time is the call?” The sheets he had buried his face in muffled his voice.

  “The call is in one hour, via online. Does that work for you?”

  “No.” He was still muffled, not that it mattered. Blaire wasn’t listening anyway.

  “Excellent, talk to you then. Ciao.”

  He rolled onto his back and set an alarm on his phone. Just in case he should happen to doze—

  ***

  Clark parked at the side of the dentist’s ‘office’, if you could indeed call it that. As he had several times before, he logged into their wireless network and silently thanked them for not having the forethought to password protect themselves.

  A chill fell over him; cold air from the busted window on the side of the van. The no-neck Neanderthal was a bad shot. On the plus side, not having a window was airing out some of the crab and feces odors. He’d be angrier about it should it start to rain again.

  He plugged his handheld camera into the laptop and selected the last video he’d shot. He changed the name of the file to The Inn and clicked play. He’d watched it a dozen times while hiding off a back road, but had to watch it once more before sharing it with the world.

  The video’s stars were not happy. Daryl wept openly as Reggie shattered the room’s mirror.

  “Pick up a piece of glass.” Clark had told her. “That one right there.”

  Clark shuddered. Not because of the cold air filling the van, or because of what was about to happen, but because of the sound of his voice. Typical response. Nobody liked the sound of their own voice.

  Reggie started to cry, though she hid it well. The shaking of her hand as she picked up the glass was slight. She wanted to be strong. She raised her shoulders threateningly as she held the shard up at the camera.

  “Okay. Just drop it.” Bless her heart; look at her wearing a false face of fury. If her voice hadn’t quivered he might have been afraid.

  “We’ve been through this.” Clark had held the tiny flashlight right in front of her face. She could have sliced right into his wrist if she’d had the presence of mind to think about it; severed all manner of important things. But she didn’t. He credited himself with that. She wouldn’t have been afraid of the block of harmless clay he’d strapped to her back, but combined with his Oscar worthy performance as a man with his finger on the button, she’d been truly terrified. A sheep that only pretended to be a wolf, like the rest.

  A tear rolled down the woman’s cheek, and she lowered the shard. “Please. Please let us go. My name is Reggie Summers. I live at—”

  “Stop,” he’d said. “Just stop it; I know what you’re doing.”

  Credit to her for that, at least. She knew to attempt to humanize herself with her captor.

  The sound of a car door in front of the dentist’s office reminded Clark how exposed he was. He should have waited until dark to upload the video, but he couldn’t. Everyone needed to see his greatest work yet, while the world’s eyes were still on Myiasis.

  A woman and her child walked from their car to the front of the office. If they knew they were supposed to be on the lookout for a white van with a busted window, they didn’t act like it.

  Clark went back to his work of genius, where he’d convinced the woman to get on her knees at her trained mongrel’s feet.

  “I want you to remove his shoes and socks, both feet,” he’d said.

  Reggie did as she was told. She apologized to Daryl in hushed tones. He sobbed so loudly Clark doubted he’d even heard her.

  “Now, shard of glass in hand, I want you to repeat after me: This little piggy went to market.”

  The woman hesitated. The tears flowed.

  “Say it,” Clark repeated, his voice lowered into a growl before it switched into a singsong cadence to say, “This little piggy…”

  “This little pig
gy…” she sputtered out between sobs.

  Daryl, the asshole, interrupted the first take. “Please, mister, we wanna go home.”

  “Shut up, you little shit.” Clark had yelled. He’d channeled a little bit of his dad in this scene. Maybe a lot. “Reggie. Reggie, look at me. This little piggy went to market.”

  “This little piggy went to market.” Gold. Cinematic gold.

  “Now slice off his pinky toe there. Daryl, this is the part where you get to scream.”

  And scream Daryl did. Cries of protest and promises to never speak of blah blah blah.

  “Daryl. Listen to me, Daryl. Would you rather be dead? We can still go that route.” Jesus, he was a badass. No wonder they both did what they were told. He might have done the same thing if he’d been in their shoes. And if he’d been dropped on his head as a small child. “Off with the toe, Reggie.”

  She apologized to Daryl again. Her sincerity was genuine. Surprising, especially since only minutes before she’d acted as though she wouldn’t have pissed on him if he were on fire.

  And then she did it. Maybe it was her effort to make it as quick and painless for her companion as possible, but that little toe came off as though it were barely attached at all.

  Bled like crazy, though.

  “Good job, that was excellent. You know the rest, right? This little piggy stayed home. Say it, Reggie.”

  Clark sat in the chilly van and watched Reggie cut off one toe after another, a sort of deranged Mother Goose. He smiled to himself and licked his dry, crusty lips. This was the real deal. Left on its own, the world would never have seen a proper interpretation of this scene. Not in some neutered PG-13 Hollywood turd, anyway.

  It was a little long, though. Maybe a tad repetitive on the second foot, and damn his eyes, Daryl never stopped screaming. He stepped on every one of Reggie’s lines. No pun intended.

  Clark noted that if this scenario was any indication, big toes were significantly tougher to cut through than little toes.

  The video ended after the last little piggy went “wee wee wee” all the way home, but before Clark jammed a large shard of glass in Daryl’s thigh. Short of restraints, which would have tainted the scene’s authenticity, he couldn’t think of another way to keep them in place until someone arrived to see what all the screaming was about.