Insatiable Series Omnibus Edition (Books 1-3)

by Patrick Logan

  While the sound of the falling plywood drew the sheriff’s attention, the cracker didn’t move.

  “Deputy, stay your ground,” the sheriff instructed, holding out his hand.

  “What… what is it?”

  The sheriff shook his head.

  “Should I shoot it?”

  Again the sheriff shook his head, eyes remaining locked on the cracker in the cell.

  “It can’t get out.”

  Paul took a small step to his left and the cracker seemed to lean that way. As far as he could tell, the thing had no eyes and no nose… no sensory organs at all, save the orifice on the underside and the strange fluttering perforations on top.

  The sheriff took another step closer to Deputy Williams, and then another. With every shuffling movement, the cracker turned a little bit more, the front ridge of the shell that separated the clean white of the underside and the milky top seeming to dip toward him.

  I’m watching you, the tilt said.

  When he was right next to the deputy, the sheriff spoke, keeping his eyes trained on the creature now locked in Askergan’s only holding cell.

  “Where is Mrs. Drew?” he asked out of the corner of his mouth.

  After the woman’s scream, he had heard her run by him, but his focus had been on the cracker and he hadn’t seen where.

  “In the armory. Where’s Walter?”

  The sheriff’s concentration was broken.

  Fuck! Walter!

  He turned away from the cracker and headed back the way he had come, back into the office area.

  “Keep your gun on it, Williams. And if it moves, shoot it.”

  The deputy responded by crouching slightly and training his pistol on the cracker.

  “Don’t fucking move,” he whispered.

  Sheriff White opened the door cautiously in case there were other crackers inside. After peeking in, he listened.

  He heard nothing.

  With the palm of his hand, he opened the door just wide enough for his body to fit through, then immediately bolted to the table, picking up a pistol and the shotgun. He jammed the former into his hip holster, and brought the shotgun out in front of him, his eyes scanning the room.

  Nothing.

  He heard and saw nothing—no crackers.

  “Walter?” he asked tentatively.

  When there was no answer, he called the man’s name again.

  Still nothing.

  The sheriff’s eyes drifted down to the table and his heart sank. There was one shotgun, four grenades, and a myriad of shells, but only one handgun. He had one pistol and one shotgun, and he knew both Deputy Williams and Mrs. Drew had one. There had been five pistols, however, he was sure of it.

  “Williams!” he hollered over his shoulder, keeping his eyes trained on the room before him, still scanning for any movement. “Williams, how many pistols were there?”

  “Five!” the deputy cried back.

  “Fuck.”

  The sheriff’s eyes slowly drifted upward to the smashed window. He could see what looked like a trail of drops of blood on the sill, the remaining fragments of glass reflecting a deep crimson in the fading sunlight.

  The window was small, roughly ten inches high by two feet wide. It was also purposely high above them, with at least a ten-foot drop on the outside, and a few feet shy of that on the inside.

  No one could fit out that window.

  His eyes drifted downward and he caught sight of what looked like a dusty footprint square in the middle of his desk.

  No one could have made that jump.

  But Walter Wandry was not an ordinary man… he was a rail-thin junkie who would do anything to get his next hit.

  And now he had a gun.

  Sheriff White shook his head. There was no way he could have planted a foot on the desk and then slithered his way out the window. Even if he did, there was no way he could have made the drop to the hard pavement outside and then fled without the crackers getting him… could he have?

  “Walter Wandry, where the fuck are you?”

  There was still no answer.

  There was no way the man could have gotten out through the window—except he wasn’t here. So where else could he be?

  The sheriff grabbed the two Kevlar vests from the table and tossed them into the hallway behind him. Then he picked up the grenades and the remaining shotgun and pistol and slowly backed out of the room.

  “Sheriff? Come take a look at this. It’s doing… it’s doing something.”

  The sheriff backed completely out of the room, and only then did he turn and look at the cracker.

  The thing was still hunched, its front rim—if it had a front—pointed toward the floor, but it was now pulsating slightly. And when he listened closely, he could hear the air being forced out of the top, a barely audible whoosh, whoosh, whoosh sound.

  It could be breathing, he thought, but it wasn’t continuous; it seemed to have a pattern to it. There were two whooshes, two body dips as if to force the air out, followed by a pause and then a longer whoosh.

  “What the fuck is it doing?” the deputy asked.

  The sheriff looked away from the cracker and turned to face Deputy Williams. The man was still in a half-crouched position, both hands clasped on the gun that he held out in front of him.

  “Take this,” he said, leaning his body toward the man, presenting the weapons. “Take a shotgun.”

  The deputy turned to face the sheriff.

  “And put a vest on.”

  Deputy Williams nodded and reached for a shotgun.

  “What is it do—?”

  A crash from the office behind them interrupted Williams’ repeated query. Deputy White turned in time to see the other window smash inward, followed by at least a dozen small crackers. At the same time, more began streaming in through the other broken window. The crackers tumbled over one another as they fell to the ground below.

  The crackers appeared stunned when they smacked off the desk and floor, but based on what he had seen in the cell, the deputy knew that they only had a few seconds before they recovered.

  The sheriff whipped his head around and stared at the cracker in the cell, surprised that despite this carnage, it continued forcing air out of the top of its shell in the same rhythm as before: whoosh, whoosh, pause, whoooooosh.

  And then he realized why.

  The cracker wasn’t breathing; it was calling to the others.

  And the others had arrived.

  31.

  Corina Lawrence yanked Kent’s arm so hard that they both nearly toppled. After catching their balance, Kent began backpedaling with Corina, and they slowly moved away from the naked boy in the tunnel and the now half dozen crackers that had arranged themselves in front of the culvert.

  “Nooooo!” Tyler moaned, reaching out for them clumsily with his useless, clubbed hand.

  Kent hesitated and his posture changed; he leaned forward slightly as if he meant to go to his friend.

  No fucking way.

  Corina pulled again and this time Kent mobilized. With another yank, she spun him around, and together they ran for the back porch with her half dragging her useless leg. All of those years of practicing a normal gait with the appendage went out the window as she tried desperately to outrun the crackers that she knew were hot on their heels. After a few dozen paces, Kent achieved full control of his faculties and took over. Another few steps and it was him supporting her weight instead of the other way around.

  Corina’s breathing was loud in her ears, but even over this droning noise she could hear them—she could hear the crackers. They were close.

  Corina was nearly dragged up the porch stairs and through the still open doors to the back of the house.

  Once they both cleared the doorway, Kent quickly turned and slammed one of the French doors closed, while Corina, still breathing heavily, grabbed the other and did the same.

  They locked the doors and turned their attention to the lawn.

 
The crackers were closer than either of them had thought, and there were more of them now, at least a dozen, maybe more, all seamlessly crawling up the porch steps with their six articulating legs.

  Corina instinctively pulled away from the glass doors, reaching out and grabbing Kent by the biceps and urging him to do the same.

  The first cracker to make it up the steps locked into place and then flung itself at the glass.

  Corina screamed.

  The cracker hit the glass with a thud and fell to the ground, where it lay motionless for a second before scrambling woozily back onto its long, multi-knuckled legs.

  Two more hit the glass in rapid succession a moment later.

  Bam, bam.

  It was like a drumroll.

  As Corina and Kent stared in horror, another cracker smacked into the glass, only this this time it sent a six-inch-long sliver toward the corner of the pane.

  When the next hit, the crack turned into a spider web.

  “Run!” Corina shouted, once again spinning Kent around.

  They only made it three paces before the glass smashed and caved inward.

  Corina could see the open front door—the doorless front—right across the kitchen and between the two staircases that ascended upward into darkness. It was right there, just past the burnt smear in the foyer.

  A crack sounded from behind her and something hit the wall right next to her head.

  The open doorway was right there, but there was no way they were going to make it.

  “In here!” Kent shouted, and for a moment Corina had forgotten that she was not alone—for once, during one of the hard times, one of her dark times, she was not alone.

  It didn’t matter that the person she was with was just a sixteen-year-old boy that she had met but two hours ago. It didn’t matter that she had stolen a cop car and had brought him here under a veil of deception. All that mattered was that she was not alone, and that was good.

  Corina skidded to a stop, steeling herself against the desire to turn and look at the throng of crackers that were undoubtedly streaming into the house. Kent was in front of her holding up a small trapdoor in the center of the kitchen. The boy’s eyes were wide and he was screaming something unintelligible.

  Corina started to run again, but when she tried to stop in front of the hole in the floor, her prosthetic limb buckled and she felt a strange pulling sensation on her thigh. In the blink of an eye, she tumbled headlong into the opening.

  Screaming, she managed to grab the edge of the floor with one hand and pressed down as hard as she could.

  It worked; pushing down on the ground managed to flip her around as she fell so that when she landed half on the dirt ground roughly six or seven feet below, she did so feet first. The prosthetic limb thankfully took the brunt of the force, and she cried out when the metal bar holding the foot folded backward, bending the plastic shin part into her thigh.

  A jarring force fired up her other leg, but this barely registered as something big tumbled through the opening and hit the ground a few inches to her right.

  The force of Kent’s body hitting the dirt floor was so great that Corina was knocked backward on her ass at least a foot.

  The trapdoor slammed closed, crushing several limbs of a cracker hovering above the hole with a sickening crack.

  And then they were immersed in darkness.

  * * *

  The cracking above, a sound that was thankfully muted by the floor, went on for several minutes before fading away. The scampering eventually receded, too, as the crackers presumably fled through the broken door at the back of the Wharfburn Estate.

  Despite the fact that the creatures were gone, Corina’s heart was still beating a mile a minute. It took another few minutes to realize that it wasn’t just her heartrate that was rocking her body. At some point after he had fallen, she had unknowingly grabbed Kent and was now holding him close, and the boy curled up against her heaving chest.

  What the fuck are we doing here?

  It wasn’t quite pitch black in the basement, as there was a thin rectangle of light seeping in through the cracks that separated the trapdoor from the floor. But as evening bled into night, Corina knew that this too would eventually fade.

  Neither of them said or did anything for the first little while, content in sitting in each other’s arms, attempting the impossible task of trying not to think of the horrors that they had just witnessed.

  But Corina, for one, couldn’t build a wall fast enough to keep them out of her mind.

  The scar. It was the scar on the boy’s cheek, the one thing—the only thing—that made his mangled face and horribly distended body real, made it look human.

  And she couldn’t help but think that something like this had happened to her uncle—to Oxford.

  Had he been turned into one of those… those breeders, like Tyler?

  She shuddered hard, and when she turned her eyes downward, she was surprised to see that Kent was staring up at her.

  His face was glistening from tears, and the light from above cast strange streaks on his face, as if he were staring out from bars of a prison cell. And maybe he was; maybe he was a prisoner. After all, Corina had kidnapped the boy.

  It was just so foreign, thinking that she stole a cop car and kidnapped Kent only to bring him here. It was wrong. But did it matter now?

  What mattered now was surviving.

  When Kent spoke next, it was as if the boy had read her mind.

  “Are we going to die down here?” he whispered.

  His eyes were huge, round orbs that took up his entire face.

  Corina shook her head violently.

  “No,” she said. Yet, despite her denial, she started to sob. “No, we are not going to die.”

  Kent opened his mouth to say something else, but the next sound that Corina heard wasn’t the boy’s voice. Instead it was something else. It was a crack.

  This crack was unlike the sounds above, which were muted by the ceramic tiles and subfloor. This was a loud crack. A crack that came from inside the basement.

  32.

  Sheriff Paul White pulled the shotgun trigger and the cracker inside the cell exploded in a geyser of thick white fluid.

  “It won’t be communicating anymore,” he muttered.

  Deputy Williams didn’t hesitate turning his handgun on the crackers that were still spilling in through the office windows. There were so many of them now that there no longer seemed to be spaces between them; they covered the floor and desks like a writhing white duvet. The deputy fired off six or seven shots, and the sheriff turned in time to see several of the much smaller creatures explode.

  “Get the ammo!” Sheriff White shouted, stepping into the room himself and strafing to his left. He squeezed off another blast of the shotgun and a cracker that was readying itself to launch instantly became into a smear of white milk.

  The deputy fired again and then took two large bounds forward, scooping up two of the boxes of nine millimeter bullets.

  Most of the crackers that had already fallen from the two smashed windows had begun to regain their bearings and were poised to jump. The sheriff heard a loud crack from his right and turned in time to see a small, baseball-sized cracker flying directly at him. Having expended the five shells in his Remington 870, the sheriff swiveled his body while turning the shotgun in his hands at the same time. As he had done before in the culvert with Deputy Coggins, the sheriff smashed the cracker with a full swing of the butt of the gun, sending fragments of hardened bone and shell flying in all directions.

  Coggins was right; maybe I should have been a baseball player. Maybe that kind of pressure would be easier to deal with.

  Another cracker flew at him, and he just barely managed to turn sideways to avoid it. The cracker landed hard against the back wall behind him, just to the right of the open door, and lay motionless, legs skyward.

  “Grab the shells, too,” the sheriff shouted, backing toward the door.

  Deputy W
illiams scooped as many of the shells as he could manage while still holding his gun out in front of him before quickly retreating with the sheriff. Another two crackers flew at them before they could flee the room. The first barely missed the sheriff, while the other smacked the deputy square in the chest. Thankfully, at some point during the melee, or perhaps before it started, the deputy had managed to put the Kevlar vest on, and the cracker bounced off the hard material harmlessly, leaving a milky smear over the ACPD initials and crest.

  “Go!” the sheriff shouted, watching as the now flock or herd or pride or whatever the fuck you call a horde of crackers began to line up in front of and on top of his desk. There were so many of them now, with more flowing in through the windows every second, that they looked like a miniature army.

  The call the thing in the cell had made had evidently been heard—and obliged.

  Paul pushed the deputy out the door behind him and then backed out of the room, quickly pulling the door closed. A second later, they heard three successive thumps strike the other side of the door with such force that the brass doorknob rattled in the sheriff’s large hand.

  “Fuck!” Deputy Williams shouted. He put the ammo on the ground in front of him and then wiped at the sticky smear on his vest. When he pulled his hand away, thick tendrils of the milky white substance clung to his fingers. “Sick!”

  The sheriff ignored his comments.

  “Take the other vest and give it to Mrs. Drew, then hole yourself up in the armory.”

  His eyes drifted to the large glass windows that flanked the front of the police station. These were made of thicker glass than the small windows in the office room, but he didn’t know how long they would hold if the crackers turned their attention to them next.

  The doorknob rattled in his hand again as several more of the crackers smashed against the door.

  No, the windows won’t hold forever.