“Move one step and I’ll kill him—I’ll kill them both.”
Despite the intimidating men and woman before him, the comment was not addressed to them, or even to Pike. Instead, he was speaking to Carter, who stood off to one side, the same smug expression on his face.
Greg tightened his grip on Corina’s throat, and he heard the girl gag. It was amazing how quickly things in the church had changed, from uneasy parishioners listening to a very unconventional sermon, to standing at arms, willing to do anything that Carter bade.
Astonishing, really, what desperation could do to a person—especially if the person was being guided by a man such as Father Carter Duke.
Carter shook his head subtly, something that Pike picked up on, and he stood down, indicating for the parishioners to do the same.
When the men and women stepped backward, Greg realized that they had actually been standing on top of the downed biker, but he fought the urge to look at the mangled corpse. He had seen enough death for one day.
“Good,” the man hissed in his ear. His breath was a sour mixture of whiskey and stale cigarettes.
And then they were backing toward the door. Before Greg knew it, the three of them were in the hot sun.
“Be gone! Like the Devil, you will pay for your sins!” Carter shouted, which was accompanied by an enthusiastic ‘Amen.’
Squinting hard, Greg managed to turn his head a quarter of an inch to make out a faded blue van, the door thrown wide.
And then something smashed into his temple and the sun suddenly reduced to but a pinpoint of light.
The last thing he heard before being thrown into the van with Corina was the biker shouting back into the church.
“The Crab will come for you, preacher! The Crab will come for you all!”
33.
‘Will I ever see you again?’ the boy asked, his eyes downcast.
‘I don’t know. Maybe. I hope so.’
‘I hope so, too.’
They were at the tree again, only this time they were standing by the trunk and not sitting on one of its branches. Using taking out the compost as an excuse, the boy who had just stood up to his father, who in that very moment had become a man, had found Donnie weeping by the tree.
There was something profound about this moment, a feeling that was only intensified by the realization that they might not see each other again.
Ever.
Donnie strode forward and hugged his brother.
‘What will happen to you?’ he asked.
Walter pulled away, confused at the question.
‘Nothing… probably nothing. After all, he never hits me. What… what will happen to you?’
Donnie swallowed hard.
‘I dunno. I just know that I can’t stay here. He’ll kill me if I stay, I think.’
They embraced again, and Walter whispered in his brother’s ear, ‘I’ll find you. One day, I swear I’ll find you.’
After a squeeze, the two boys separated. And then Donnie turned and started to run.
He never looked back.
“—and what do I want with two nobodies? A cripple and her father?”
Greg’s head was spinning and his back and side hurt. He resisted the urge to open his eyes, knowing that this would only make things worse.
Instead, he listened.
“Do whatever you want with them… I needed them to get out of there. You should have seen it. The new priest… he has this guy that destroyed Rick. Like, destroyed him.
“Rick?”
“Yeah. Didn’t even get a punch in. And this here bitch fucked up my arm.”
The other man paid no attention to the complaints.
“And you came back with no money? What about the drugs?”
There was a slight hesitation, before the biker from the church continued.
“Nothing. These aren’t… they aren’t normal church people. And the people there, the uhh, the uhhh, donators? Whatever the fuck you call them, the people watching the priest, well they fucking tore him apart. They ripped Rick to shreds when he was unconscious.”
Corina. Kent.
This time Greg opened his left eye, but he did it slowly, careful not to make his captors aware that he was awake. The lids stuck together tightly, and he felt a crinkling sensation from his right eye all the way up his forehead.
Dried blood.
“And no money or drugs?”
For some reason, this voice also sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.
“No.” Unlike in the church, his voice lacked authority now.
The Crab—he had to be talking to the Crab.
Greg forced his eye open a little more, taking in some of the world around him. He seemed to be in a dimly lit room, lying on top of some sort of patterned rug. His left arm was beneath him, and it was completely numb. His left hip was also numb, but he could feel his left leg from his quad down.
Directly in front of him was the top of Corina’s head, her short hair arranged in such a way that he knew she must still be unconscious.
“Well then how am I supposed to pay you and your fucking group of Dixie chicks? Huh? You had one job to do: get the money and the drugs. And you come back here with two fucking—what? Two Bible thumpers? You come back with stories about being beat up by a fucking priest!”
“It wasn’t the priest—”
The man’s words were interrupted by a loud smack, and the biker stumbled backward, gaining control of himself only moments before tumbling on top of Greg.
Greg flinched instinctively, pulling his arm in closer to his body. The drums in his heads protested by beating even louder.
“Not a priest,” the biker mumbled. “But his, uh, his friend.”
“I don’t care!” the Crab roared and moved forward again.
Greg pulled himself into a ball as the biker’s thick boots came perilously close to his head.
“You are going to—ah, one of these churchgoers is waking up now. Why don’t we hear what he has to say, what do you think?”
Greg closed his eyes tightly, but it was too late. The Crab had seen him, and he was coming for him. His first instinct wasn’t to bound to his feet and fight or even run. His second instinct was to try and reach for Corina, to squeeze her arm as he had done before, but he hesitated when he saw that her hands had been bound behind her back. And this brief pause cost him the opportunity to react in any way.
He felt fingers in his hair, and he had no choice but to allow himself to be pulled to a sitting position.
He winced as he felt fresh blood leak from the cut in his scalp from whatever the biker had struck him with to knock him out.
“What happened in the church, you—?”
Greg opened his eyes, and the man that had been holding him by the hair immediately let go and stumbled backward.
“Donald?”
34.
“Go on, tell the sheriff what you told me.”
The man in the jean vest looked at Deputy Williams, then turned to face the sheriff.
“My name is Dirk Kinkaid, and I used to work for Sabra.”
The sheriff’s mouth twisted at the sound of the man’s name. Sabra was the faceless man behind the drug problem in Askergan, and had been one of many problems that Sheriff Paul White had been unable to solve since taking office.
“Go on,” he said, staring at the man sitting before him. It had been one of the worst days he had ever had, rivaling the day of the storm and the day of the invasion.
“Dirk here was speeding on Highway 2, when I—”
Paul’s eyes shot up and he gave Deputy Williams a look. The man’s square jaw clamped shut.
“Go help Reggie outside. Keep the townsfolk at bay.”
The deputy looked as if he were going to add something else, but decided against it.
“Go!”
Before the door closed behind Williams, he hollered after him.
“Any word from Coggins?”
The man offered
a confused look.
“No. Still nothing. You think he’s still local? I mean—”
The Sheriff shook his head in frustration.
“I dunno! I dunno! Just keep fucking trying!”
The deputy nodded and quickly left the room. Sheriff White waited for the door to close completely before turning back to Dirk. Even then, he didn’t speak right away, choosing instead to take a few deep breaths, trying his best to regain control. His heartrate slowed, but the frown remained etched on his face.
“What are you doing here, then?”
Dirk took a deep breath and stared the sheriff directly in the eyes.
“I’m gonna lay it to you straight, because whatever you and your men have been through over the past few days ain’t nothing compared to what’s going to happen next.”
The sheriff’s eyes narrowed. Sabra was bad, but he was just a drug dealer. The man was notorious for his obscene and obscure torture methods, but these only usually affected other dealers or junkies that failed to pay up. He thought back to the men that he had fought at the bar when he had retrieved Coggins the first time, how they had made quick work of them.
The bikers that surrounded Sabra were bad, but they also had an agenda. And killing random people was not on the docket… it was just bad for business.
The sheriff wiped his sweaty forehead with the palm of his large hand.
If history was any indication, after what had happened over the past few days, there would be hundreds of Askergians seeking solace in either product or the church.
Paul wasn’t sure which was worse.
“Go on, then,” he said. “Tell it to me straight.”
The man nodded, and for the briefest of moments, Paul thought he caught fear in the man’s face. As quickly as it appeared, it was gone.
“I’ve seen some crazy shit in my day, but this takes the cake. A couple of days ago, a man came to see Sabra—a regular junkie, through and through. We had sent a couple of hitmen out to collect from him, but for some reason this man came back alone. I picked him up outside Sabra’s compound, and I brought him in to see the boss. This, in itself, was strange. I mean, the men we sent to collect were pros, man.”
Dirk paused as he waited to see if Paul caught his meaning of the word ‘collect’.
He did, and Dirk continued.
“But he came to us… and he was blabbering about something to do with his son—nonsense, really. At first I thought he was high. High, but relatively harmless, you know? Especially considering the biker army that Sabra had built up around his compound—what’s the worst he could do? But this man, this Walter, didn’t at all seem afraid. It almost seemed like he wanted to be caught. He wasn’t—”
“Wait, what did you say his name was?”
Dirk paused.
“Walter.”
Paul swallowed hard.
“Black hair, white beard? Skinny little shit?”
Dirk nodded slowly.
“You know him?”
Where the fuck is my boy?
Paul thought back to when the man had blown through the doors at the station, and how he had nearly strangled the racist prick when he was behind bars. But then, during the cracker attack, the man had escaped.
“Walter?”
“Walter.”
“And you say he was there at Sabra’s? Why?”
“Man, this is only the beginning.”
And then, while Paul listened, his eyes growing wider with every word, Dirk told his story about Walter, about the crackers that budded off him, about how he had exacted his revenge.
When he was finally done, both men stared with wide eyes and pale faces. Even though Dirk had experienced it, Paul could tell that he didn’t quite believe his own tale. But like young Kent Griddle’s story that had been spun in this same room mere days ago, the sheriff knew that Dirk was telling the truth.
Paul exhaled loudly. On any other day, at any other time, he would have told this biker to go fuck himself, to get out of the station with his ridiculous story before he looked up outstanding warrants and threw him in jail. But this wasn’t any other day, and the stress and anxiety that he gone through over the past three days rivalled even the cracker attack. The danger wasn’t as potent, perhaps, but the pressure and tension of dealing with hundreds of townsfolk, their heads filled with nonsense uttered by the new preacher in town, was equally as palpable.
He wiped sweat from his brow and encouraged Dirk to continue.
“The men… the men I work with, they have seen and done things that would make you cringe, Sheriff.”
He paused.
“Remember Mayberry Street?”
Paul nodded hesitantly.
Less than six months ago, the sheriff had been called out to a house on the border of Askergan and Pekinish. A neighbor had called in, said that the smell was so bad that people in the neighborhood were starting to get sick.
Inside, the sheriff witnessed a scene of pure horror. Seventeen people dead, seventeen people dismembered—junkies, all of them. In the basement, they had discovered a mishmash of materials used for making meth. But it was such a mess down there that the sheriff was surprised that they hadn’t blown the whole block to smithereens. No ventilation, not even a cracked window, for Christ’s sake. Still, amidst the horror, it was clear who was responsible.
It was Sabra sending a message, and the message itself was clear as day: if you’re mixing on my ground, you will face my wrath.
“Well, the bikers did that. And yet what Walter did, that was worse. Some men turned and ran… but most were so frightened that they stayed. They call him the Crab now, and he is the worst thing that we have ever seen.”
Sheriff White stared at Dirk. He couldn’t quite comprehend the fact that the twitchy man that had been in the cell, shouting racist insults, was this man, this Crab, who incited such fear in hardened bikers.
“You need to call the FBI or something, Sheriff.”
Paul shook his head.
“I did—I called them right after all of this started happening. Do you know what they did?”
Dirk shrugged.
“They sent me a pathologist. Some doctor… Doctor Eliza Dex. Said they couldn’t spare any real agents.”
“Well then call them again. Call them again, now.”
The sheriff rose to his feet, stretching out his sore legs. He had been on his feet all day, trying to keep whatever semblance of peace still existed in Askergan.
“Dirk, I appreciate you coming here today, and for what it’s worth, I believe you. Problem is, I’ve got over a hundred bodies in the morgue, and hundreds more townsfolk that are losing their shit over dead relatives. I’ve also got a shooting out at the church—the county is on the verge of collapse. And this stuff about Walter, or the Crab, or whatever, has to wait.”
Sheriff White thought about that for a moment. Sabra’s lair, so to speak, wasn’t even technically in Askergan, which made him wonder why Dirk had come to him.
“Why did you come here? What does this have to do with Askergan? I know we have a drug problem, but—”
“Because, Sheriff—because the Crab’s beef isn’t with Askergan.”
The man took a deep breath and then exhaled through his nose.
“It’s with you. And he’s coming.”
35.
Greg couldn’t believe his eyes. Walter stood before him, and even though he hadn’t seen his brother in decades, even though he had jet-black hair and a long white beard, even though he was a grown man now, he knew it was him.
It was his face, his eyes, the fact that despite his shocked expression, the man still had a permanent, sly sort of grin.
The Griddle Grin, as Kent had dubbed it so very long ago. Only it wasn’t a Griddle Grin; never had been. Greg was even beginning to doubt that there was such thing as a Griddle, even though he had lived with the alias for more than two decades now.
It was a Wandry Grin, through and through.
Greg shook his head.
No. It’s not possible.
“Quick,” the man instructed the biker that had bashed him in the head. “Help him onto a chair.”
“Yes, Walter,” he said.
Greg’s head was spinning, and it was all he could to prevent himself from passing out again.
It can’t be.
Squeezing his eyes tightly, he tried to clear his head, to dismiss what was clearly an illusion brought on by extreme stress and exhaustion. But when he opened his eyes again and stared into Walter’s face, he knew unequivocally that it was his brother; no one endured what they had endured, what he had endured, and forgot the face of the person that had saved his live.
But it wasn’t Walter and Greg who used to hide out in the old oak tree behind their farmhouse.
It was Walter and… Donnie.
Still groggy, Greg felt his body being lifted and carried before he was dropped onto a massive chair in front of an even larger desk.
“Walter?”
The man with the white beard smiled.
“Yes, it’s me—they call me the Crab now.”
Then he reached down and embraced Greg. Walter smelled foul, and he appeared to be wearing some sort of leather coat, a deeply tanned job that covered not only his chest, but his arms all the way to his wrists.
“It’s me, brother, it’s me.”
Greg squeezed his eyes together tightly.
Will I ever see you again?
I don’t know. Maybe. I hope so.
I hope so too.
But now, after ending up here, in this place, Greg wasn’t so sure.
“I told you I would find you,” Walter whispered.
Parasite Page 16
