Authors: Patrick Logan
A horrible feeling started to brew in the sheriff’s guts. For the second time today, he had a sinking suspicion that Coggins would be better off elsewhere—that his friend would have been better off not seeing him today.
Or ever.
“What is it?” Coggins repeated, but the sheriff again abstained from answering.
Instead, he kept walking, crouching down when he eventually came level with the bag. It was filled with something dark, he saw, something that was hard to make out in the dim light offered by the men’s flashlights.
He took the pen out of the front pocket of his shirt and tried to flip the bag over. It was heavier than he might have thought, and his pen bent as he pushed against the spherical object.
Eventually, it flopped awkwardly onto the other side.
“No,” Coggins gasped as he caught sight of the contents. “No!”
The sheriff, fearing that he might be sick, turned away.
“No!” Coggins yelled again. He turned toward the dual taillights of the two bikes that receded down Main Street.
When Coggins pulled his gun, Sheriff White tried to reach out and grab his arm, to keep him at bay.
But he missed, and before he knew it, Coggins was walking down the sidewalk, screaming
‘no’
and emptying his clip at the fading motorbikes.
Sheriff felt tears spill from his eyes and pat softly on the plastic bag.
A part of him didn’t want to get a better look; a part of him didn’t want to know exactly what was in there, what Coggins had so quickly determined, but he had to.
He just had to know.
With his pen, he pushed the bag to one side again, revealing two wide eyes and an open mouth.
He was staring directly into a woman’s face, her decapitated head stuffed into a plastic bag that was bound with several rubber bands.
And then it was him pulling his gun from his holster shouting ‘
no’
into the night.
The knife easily cut through the skin on the back of her arms, drawing a razor-thin line of blood. After that, it was only a matter of teasing the blade beneath the skin, slowly cutting away the thin layer of fat from the muscle and sinew and bone beneath.
Walter’s tongue poked out of the side of his mouth as he worked, and perspiration beaded on his brow.
He couldn’t remember feeling this alive.
As if to affirm this feeling, the cracker in his shoulder tensed.
“Already?” he grumbled, intent on removing the last little bit of tissue that connected the woman’s skin to her body before he acquiesced to the cracker’s needs.
The cracker squeezed again, and he picked up his pace, knowing that he needed another hit to satiate the creature; there was no way he wanted to piss the thing off again.
Once since it had crawled up his arm and nestled beneath his shoulder—what seemed like an eternity ago now—he’d tried to resist the urge to use. And what had happened was a feeling he didn’t want to experience again. A vice-like grip that had kept increasing in pressure until he’d been reduced to a ball of flesh curled in a fetal position. He wasn’t sure what would have happened had Donnie not brought him a line of coke.
Thoughts of his brother reminded him that he was somewhere in the room with him.
“Brother,” he said, his mouth dry. “I need you.”
He heard shuffling behind him, and when he cut away the final connections of the woman’s skin, Donnie appeared at his side, holding the silver mirror out to him.
Walter didn’t even bother putting down the bloody knife; he simply leaned over and buried his head in the mound of coke, breathing in deeply with both nostrils.
He closed his eyes, waiting for it. Even though he knew that the hit to his brainstem, the sudden rush, wasn’t coming, he still waited for it.
He yearned for it.
But the only thing that happened was that the pressure in his shoulder relaxed, and the thick vessels on his chest stopped pulsating.
There
, he thought,
you happy now?
And indeed the cracker was happy, at least for now.
He turned to his brother next and was struck by how tired the man looked. Dark circles clung desperately to the thin skin beneath his eyes. His brother’s arrival, unlike Seth’s, had been a surprise, and a welcome one at that.
And the girl, this Corina? That had been a wonderful addition.
“What should I do with her, Walt?” Donnie asked, clearly referring to the freshly skinned corpse on the floor before them.
Walt
. Only Donnie called him that; the other bikers, the ones that hadn’t fled or that he hadn’t punished, called him the Crab. Which was fine, provided they obeyed him—he didn’t give two shits about what they called him, to his face or behind his back.
“The girl?” Donnie asked again, and Walter realized that he had been staring. He looked away, turning his attention back to the body that he had just skinned.
Her chest was a mess, of course, having exploded after the cracker that had budded from his mottled flesh had infiltrated and then nested inside her body. Moments later, the other crackers, the tiny white ones, had first bubbled under her skin as if it were a piece of cellophane over a colony of maggots.
And then they had burst forth in all of their frothing ecstasy.
Again his thoughts turned to his son, to Tyler, and he wondered, not for the first time, if the boy had suffered a similar fate.
He shook the image from his thoughts.
It didn’t matter now. He was dead, but Askergan was still very much alive.
For now.
Walter’s eyes drifted back to the woman’s corpse, travelling up past the hole in her chest and abdomen and stopping at the ragged stump of a neck.
He had cut her head off with a steak knife. He didn’t think she was alive at the time, but he hadn’t bothered to check.
“Walt?”
“Burn her.”
Donnie nodded, and when he bent down to take the woman’s skin, Walter grabbed his arm.
“No, not that. Leave the skin; I’m going to add it to the others.”
Donnie nodded again, and instead grabbed the woman by a wet red ankle. Walter watched her being dragged away, leaving behind a bloody streak on the hardwood. He would get one of the bikers to clean that later.
Someone moaned, and Walter’s eyes snapped up.
There were only two women chained up by their hands now, and one of them seemed to be waking. But this didn’t interest Walter so much, and when the smile crossed his thin lips, its origins were rooted in his own handiwork.
Behind the two chained women was what looked like a series of quilts, all attached with thick thread reminiscent of shoelaces. Like a macabre tapestry, the skins of his other victims hung from the ceiling, all eighteen of them, starting with Sabra.
The edges of their flesh had started to curl, he saw, the dim lights in the room causing them to darken and dry.
His smile grew.
Askergan was going to pay.
A lot of people perceive that writing a book is a solitary experience, and in a way it is. I zone out, fall into a Zen-like state of concentration, and hammer the keys (which most people find obnoxious, by the way—I really do
pound
my keyboard). As pretentious as it sounds, however, this is honestly the easiest part of my job. After writing, the real work starts. There is the cover, for whom I have Dane and his team at ebooklaunch.com to thank. Then there is the editing, for which I have Tom Shutt to thank. There is also the marketing, which is a labyrinth that I am constantly battling to understand. It really is a team effort to bring a finished product to market.
I like to think that even with no readers, I would still write the books, but thankfully, this is one hypothesis that I don’t have to test. Every review that you guys write, and the emails and messages I get from you stating that you enjoyed one of my books, puts a smile on my bearded face. I’m no altruist, but with the shit going on in the real world recently—including, but of course not limited to, the horrific events in Orlando—that has a tendency to sour one’s outlook, I really do enjoy the fact that I have transported you, the reader, out of reality, if only for a few hours.
From the bottom of the four-chambered muscle that pumps blood to my body, I thank you, the reader, for affording me this honor.
From time to time, people ask me why I don’t just write all the books in a series at once—case in point you might have to wait a month or two (closer to the latter) for Book 5 in the Insatiable Series, STITCHES. There are several reasons for this; for instance, I have the Family Values Trilogy to also work on. Then there is the practical reality that sometimes I need a break… particularly from the schizophrenic end of PARASITE to return to homeostasis before I start up again. But I promise that there is an end to this particular tale, and it will be completed within 2016.
Special thanks goes to my beautiful, adoring, and patient wife who reads my books even though the horror/thriller genre is definitely not her cup of David’s Tea. Even when she was in labor with our recent family addition, I was typing away, putting the finishing touches on the very book that you just finished reading. Without her, Coggins, Paul White, and the Lawrence clan would definitely not exist.
Thanks again for reading, and if you enjoyed this book I hope you are struck with the inspiration to leave a review where you bought it.
Best,
Patrick
Montreal, 2016
Other Books by Patrick Logan
Book 1:
Skin
Book 2:
Crackers
Book 3:
Flesh
Book 4:
Parasite
Book 5: Stitches (Summer 2016)
Short Stories
Family Values Trilogy
Father (Coming soon)
Daughter (Summer 2016)
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents in this book are either entirely imaginary or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or of places, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Patrick Logan 2016
Cover design: Ebook Launch (www.ebooklaunch.com)
Interior design: © Patrick Logan 2015
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, cannot be reproduced, scanned, or disseminated in any print or electronic form.
First Edition: June 2016