Insatiable Series Omnibus Edition (Books 1-3)

by Patrick Logan

  He reloaded his pistol—he’d already tossed the shotgun off to one side as soon as he had run out of shells—and realized that he only had one magazine left. This was going to end soon, he knew, but for some reason this fact didn’t bother him as much as it should have. In some strange way, it was almost a relief. Being back here, beside his best friend Paul White and his new friend Jared Lawrence, was somehow cathartic, as if he were earning back some cred that had been lost when he’d left—when he had fled, abandoning those who cared for him and the town that he loved.

  A sound like running water and a blast of heat at his back drew his attention back to the front of the station.

  For a second, Coggins forgot to keep shooting.

  What the fuck? What in God’s name?

  A man—or a woman, he had no way of knowing—had stepped out of the passenger side of the car brandishing what looked like a… hose?

  Coggins blinked hard, then looked over at the sheriff and Deputy Williams. Both of their faces were incredulous, and for a brief second they too forgot to keep firing. But this mattered little as the crackers were also distracted, turning and tilting the front ridges of their shells toward the car and the man who was dressed in what looked like a whole array of white garbage bags. The bags were wrapped around his entire body, clinging tightly to his skin by duct tape. The figure was holding what looked like a garden hose and a garden nozzle, and every time he squeezed the trigger, an arc of flame at least eight feet long erupted, immediately setting dozens of crackers alight.

  This was no garden hose to spray your kids on a lazy Sunday afternoon. This was a homemade fucking flamethrower.

  Coggins, still in shock at this strange, demented WHO worker with the improvised flamethrower, fired off another shot and sent fragments of flaming crab spraying through the air.

  The driver’s window rolled down and a handsome man with medium-length brown hair peered out at them.

  “Evening, boys,” he said with an odd smirk. Before they could respond, he pulled a massive handgun—a gun that was so large that it might more appropriately have been called a hand cannon—from somewhere inside the cab and immediately started opening fire on the crackers.

  For the second time in less than a minute, Coggins’ eyes nearly bugged out of his skull.

  This has to be a dream. It just has to.

  The man with the flamethrower pulled down his reflective aviator sunglasses and peered over at them, his face covered in a sheen of sweat.

  “Boys,” he said through gritted teeth and with a slight nod.

  A second later, Sheriff White appeared at Coggins’ side.

  “Greg Griddle,” the sheriff stated.

  And at that moment, Coggins realized that the man in the driver seat of the smoking Chevelle was the man from earlier in the day—it was Kent Griddle’s father.

  “Where’s my boy?” the man with the hand cannon demanded.

  Both Coggins and the sheriff exchanged confused looks.

  Deputy Williams squeezed off another few rounds and made his way to the front of the window, putting one foot outside the glass.

  There appeared to be fewer crackers now—at least this was Coggins’ perception, based on the fact that he had to duck less often. It appeared as if some had fled from the improvised flamethrower, or were just confused by it.

  The huge pistol from the man in the driver’s seat fired again.

  “Got your call, Sheriff—more than happy to lend a hand.”

  Greg turned his attention to the closest cracker and turned it into cottage cheese with one squeeze of the trigger.

  “Where is Kent? Where’s my boy? Neighbor said a cruiser came and got him this afternoon.”

  All three lawmen raised an eyebrow.

  A cruiser? The stolen cruiser?

  A scream from somewhere behind them drew their attention away from the flamethrower and the man in the driver seat of the Chevelle with his hand cannon.

  It was Nancy; she had stopped shooting and was attending to Mrs. Drew, who, at some point during the melee, had fallen to the ground and was now lying with her eyes wide, her mouth open. The cords in the woman’s neck stood out like rebar.

  “No!” Sheriff White roared, and ran to her fallen body.

  Coggins slowly backed away from the window, shouting for Williams and Jared to keep shooting.

  By the time they had made it to Mrs. Drew, it was too late. Coggins felt a lump form in his throat when he caught sight of the unmistakable outline of three crackers—one on her right arm, one on her left, and one on the nape of her neck immediately beyond where the Kevlar ended.

  “No!” the sheriff said again, but this time his voice was languid instead of furious.

  The creatures had already burrowed beneath Mrs. Drew’s skin, causing deep stretchmarks in her armpits and beneath her chin that had already started to fill with blood.

  Coggins was strangely hypnotized by the acute shapes beneath the woman’s skin, and without thinking, his right hand stretched out with the intention of touching the cracker embedded beneath her throat. Thankfully, Sheriff White swatted his hand away before he made contact with the hard shell.

  The sheriff went for the back of her neck and propped her head up, looking into her eyes.

  Coggins heard the all-too-familiar cracking sound and looked up in time to see a cracker flying through the air, aimed directly at the back of the sheriff’s exposed neck. The deputy rolled to his right, grabbed the empty shotgun from the floor, and then swung the butt in a wide arc.

  It wasn’t a direct hit like the sheriff’s had been in the culvert behind the Wharfburn Estate, but it was solid enough to send the thing spinning back in the direction that it had come.

  Maybe I should have been a baseball player, too.

  When he turned back to Mrs. Drew, she was trying to pull herself to her feet despite the sheriff’s protests.

  “Let me up,” she cried. A grimace suddenly attacked her features, and Coggins caught stirring beneath her skin, like a ripple over calm water. Based on what they had seen on the videotape, he knew that it wouldn’t be long before more crackers started budding.

  “No,” Coggins heard himself moan. Even with his muted hearing, that one word was loud and clear.

  First Alice, then Sheriff Drew, and now… this.

  Tears streamed down his face, but he did nothing. He was paralyzed in fear, frozen in guilt, immobilized in grief.

  “Let me up,” Mrs. Drew repeated, and this time the sheriff obliged.

  The woman stood and staggered, needing the sheriff to steady her.

  “I’ll distract them,” she slurred. “You go fucking kill the bastards. Kill all of them.”

  Mrs. Drew’s green eyes were wide. There was sadness in them, but there was also anger.

  The sheriff, now seeming to understand what she was trying to do, went to grab her, but she was deceptively quick despite her affliction. The woman sprinted across the reception area, sliding between both Jared and Deputy Williams, who continued to fire their weapons at the crackers that seemed to have recovered from their shock at the man in the garbage bags wielding the flamethrower.

  “I’m coming, Dana! I’m fucking coming!” the woman screamed as she ran onto the lawn.

  As soon as her first foot hit the lawn, the closest crackers dipped toward her. The woman made it maybe twenty paces before the first of the crackers launched themselves at her. Like a giant spider swinging on an invisible web, its legs spread wide, it struck her in the back of the neck and stuck. A second later, another cracker hit her, this time on the back of her arm. And in the blink of an eye, Mrs. Drew was covered in them, a veritable walking, then stumbling, mass of crackers, all desperate to find a small piece of her bare skin to burrow beneath.

  “No!” the sheriff bellowed just as Greg Griddle’s hand cannon erupted, sending a bullet directly through the back of Mrs. Drew’s skull.

  The woman’s arms flew out to the sides as the front of her face was blown out i
n front of her in a spray of blood and brains. Then she collapsed to the ground and remained motionless.

  Coggins, still weeping, turned away from the wife of his departed idol. The thick black smoke still billowing from the hood of the Chevelle caught his eye.

  “Jared, get in your car!” Coggins screamed as he made his way over to the front door. Despite the fact that Mrs. Drew had since fled this world, the crackers appeared distracted, trying to figure out what to make of Mrs. Drew’s corpse while at the same time trying to avoid the ever present sprays of flame.

  They had a few seconds, Coggins surmised, if that, to make it to the car.

  “No!” the sheriff screamed again, squeezing off another few rounds.

  “Jared!” Coggins repeated. “Get the fuck to the car. And Greg! You get in there, too! We’ll find your son!”

  Jared stop shooting and ran to his car, hopping through the smashed window. The man in the white garbage bags turned the flame toward the front of the car as Jared pulled open the driver-side door, offering them cover. A wave of heat hit Coggins like a wall as he too bolted through the window and toward the car.

  “Stay here, Reggie,” Greg shouted to his friend with the flamethrower.

  Greg Griddle flew jumped into the passenger seat. A moment before Coggins closed the door behind him, he turned back to face his friend, Sheriff Paul White.

  Nancy had pulled herself to her feet and was now standing beside the big man, reloading her gun, clearly intent on offering more covering fire.

  They needed to hurry as there had been more, hundreds more, crackers than could be accounted for by the white smears or the flaming shell fragments on the lawn. They would be back, Coggins knew, and they had to draw them away—they had to draw them back to the source, to the Wharfburn Estate.

  For a brief second, Coggins’ gaze met the sheriff’s dark eyes. There were tears streaming down his face, and Coggins felt a hitch in his throat.

  Even though his hearing was still poor, and the flamethrower roared just outside his open window, he heard the words that the sheriff spoke loud and clear.

  “Go get this motherfucker.”

  This. Not these.

  Go get this motherfucker.

  Go get Oot’-keban.

  38.

  The basement had turned dark and cold.

  Corina Lawrence shivered. She had no idea how long she had been down there, but it must have been at least a few hours. And once again, she was alone.

  She could no longer see Kent, but could feel his head cradled in her lap. He had long since passed, but she couldn’t seem to let him go. There was no room for solace in Corina’s life, but if she could feel a smidgen of respite, the impetus would have been that she had granted the boy his final two wishes: she had been his first and only kiss, and the movement had stopped beneath Kent’s skin. The crackers appeared to have died shortly after the boy himself had passed, as if whatever lifeblood they were suckling from him was no longer useful or valid. And thus she had succeeded in granting his second wish: the boy would not become like his friend Tyler.

  Corina had used the glow of her phone to illuminate small patches of the basement around her after her throat became too raw to continue screaming.

  There were furs—skins—soaked in some sort of fluid just behind where she sat. There were also what looked like broken shells or eggs or something buried beneath these furs, but she lacked both the means and the gumption to investigate further. One glance at her prosthetic leg, and Corina knew it didn’t matter what was in the basement with her, so she stopped looking. The only exit was somewhere about seven or eight feet above her head. Under normal circumstances, she might have been able to make the jump and pull herself out. But not now, not with her twisted and broken carbon fiber foot.

  She was going to die in the basement.

  Corina shifted Kent’s lifeless head in her lap and ran her fingers through his short hair.

  She could feel the familiar tingle in her lower lids as tears tried to form, but none came. She was all cried out. For whatever time interval had passed since she had snaked her forearm beneath Kent’s chin, she had cried for everyone—for Kent, for Oxford, for Henri, for Mom, for Grandma, even for Grandpa… but most of all she had cried for her dad, for Cody. God, how she missed him.

  And yet it was all his fault.

  If Cody had been here, if Cody had taken her and not Henri, none of this would have happened.

  It wasn’t true, of course, but that didn’t matter. Rationality had been whisked away when she had stolen the police car, while the fabric of reality had been punctured and torn when she’d kidnapped Kent.

  A flurry of movement from above drew Corina out of her mental spiral, and her ears perked. After their initial frenzy in response to her screams, the crackers had stopped making any noise from above. Somewhere in a dark recess of her mind, she had come to grips with the fact that the crackers had likely resigned themselves to just waiting for her to come out, conserving their energy to burrow under her flesh to make new crackers as they had with Tyler and as they had tried to do with Kent.

  Fuck you. I’m down here for good.

  There was no stronger desire in the animal world than the need to reproduce, and these things were living—and dying—proof of that. She could not know if the things above were subject to natural selection, to evolution, but it didn’t matter; the necessity to procreate was an innately secular construct.

  The crackers needed to live, and to live they needed skin—they needed flesh to infest and incubate.

  But now, somewhere in the darkness above her head, the crackers stirred, revealing their presence with the archetypal cracking of their tough, cartilaginous joints.

  Corina waited and listened.

  Soon she picked up the sound of something else, something far off, but something that was becoming increasingly familiar.

  The crackers’ stirring increased in intensity, and before long they were all scampering back toward the French doors that they had smashed through earlier in the day.

  What’s happening?

  Then the other sound increased in volume and she realized what it was: the sound of an engine, of a car.

  Corina’s eyes went wide.

  A car! Someone is coming!

  Corina swallowed hard, trying to lubricate her raw vocal cords.

  “Help!” she screamed. Her voice was dry, hoarse, but she didn’t care. “Help! I’m down here!”

  39.

  The Wharfburn Estate was eerily quiet after Jared shut the engine off. Deputy Coggins scanned the front of the house, his eyes moving back and forth rapidly, his finger on the trigger of his pistol. Gregory gripped the massive handgun—which Coggins now saw was a Desert Eagle .50—in two sweaty palms.

  Not only was the place quiet, but it appeared deserted as well; not so much as a bird chirping or a squirrel foraging for a nut.

  Nada.

  Where are you fuckers?

  “There,” Gregory said, pointing a trembling finger off to the right of the Estate.

  The man had been on edge ever since they had tracked the stolen cruiser to the Wharfburn Estate, but now that he had seen the vehicle, his anxiety had become palpable. Deputy Williams’ car was pulled awkwardly onto the grass, tucked partway beneath one of the large oak trees, as if either the person driving it had either been a shitty parker or had attempted to hide the vehicle.

  Corina, Coggins thought. Not a person driving it—Corina driving it.

  Coggins looked at Gregory Griddle and saw something in his eyes. The deputy didn’t have much family—only his demented mother was still alive—so he didn’t much comprehend the bond that Jared had for first his brother, then his niece, and he definitely didn’t understand what Greg was going through with his missing son. But what he did understand was that look that occasionally passed over these men—a look that indicated one thing: that they would stop at nothing to get back the person they loved.

  Coggins felt a strange weigh
t on his chest. Part of him felt envious that he had yet to forge such relationships—am I even capable?—while the other part desperately wanted him to help these men succeed. Eventually, the latter won out.

  “Look!” Jared shouted, breaking Coggins’ train of thought.

  Coggins turned in time to see a white streak of that fluid in the doorway, organic movement that could only mean one thing: crackers.

  He opened the door and stepped out, pumping the shotgun.

  This ends here.

  “I’m heading ‘round back,” he informed the others, fingering one of the two hand grenades that were attached to his hip.

  Jared Lawrence answered.

  “I’m going inside with Greg—going to find Corina.”

  “And Kent,” Greg added.

  Both Greg and Jared finished loading their own guns and all three of them exited the vehicle.

  Coggins grunted and prepared himself to face the demon that had haunted him for all these years.

  This ends here.

  40.

  Sheriff White had one bullet left. One single, solitary nine millimeter Parabellum brass-cased bullet. It was all that stood between him and Nancy and the crackers.

  After Jared, Coggins, and Greg had left in the car, he too had made his way outside, coming up beside the man with the makeshift flamethrower—this Reggie, as Gregory Griddle had referred to him—and together they had managed to keep the crackers at bay. Nancy was still shooting, too, but she lingered inside the station, hovering over the cameraman who, unsurprisingly, had managed to twist a fat ankle and was confined to half lying, half sitting on the floor by the cell. In a way, they were all shooting—only the cameraman was using film instead of rounds.

  It dawned on him that both Nancy and her cameraman would be better off inside the cell, particularly so that the larger crackers couldn’t get at her.

  Sheriff White fingered his final round and glanced over at her. Nancy was sweating, and her yellow dress, so vibrant earlier in the day, was now smeared with an equal number of black grease marks and white stains. She had since tossed her white pumps and was barefoot, and her hair, the blond bob that was usually so meticulously arranged for the camera, was stringy and damp with exertion. Still, despite her considerably grungy appearance, when she squeezed off a round from the pistol, he couldn’t help but feel aroused. There was just something about women—his woman—and guns.