Parasite (2 page)

Such shitty props in a place with so much cash.

There was another series of bangs at the door, and the lights in the ancient church flickered again.

“Sabra,” the priest nearly moaned, but Carter paid this comment no heed.

He had heard of Sabra, of course, and the particularly brutal way that the drug dealer punished those who failed to pay. But this didn’t concern Carter; he didn’t plan on sticking around in this Podunk county for any significant period of time.

Nevertheless, they had to get out of the church, and there
was
something out there. Carter pulled a small pistol out of the back of his jeans and clutched it in his right hand. Pike noticed this motion and glanced over at him.

They exchanged nods.

The gun probably wasn’t necessary; after all, he had Pike, and that was almost always enough.

Still…

Carter squeezed the butt of the gun.

When they made it to the door, the priest hesitated, and Carter slowly slid off to one side. Pike moved to the other side of the door.

“Open it,” Carter said. “Open it slowly.”

The priest’s hand was shaking as he brought it out to the slide lock. When he hesitated, Carter repeated his previous request.

Sabra is a just a mid-level drug dealer with a penchant for dramatic ways of torturing those that don’t pay up. He isn’t a clairvoyant… he couldn’t be here already. Could he?

Father Peter Stevens moved the slide bolt back slowly with his narrow fingers and opened the door a few inches. The man took a deep breath and hung his head. It was clear that he’d expected Sabra to reach his fat hand through the two-inch gap and grab him by the throat.

But this didn’t happen.

Nothing
happened.

Now that imminent death had been avoided, the man seemed imbued by something akin to courage, and he pushed the door a little wider. When still nothing happened, the priest threw it all the way open.

Carter leaned out and chanced a peek.

The sky was a strange orange color, an odd dusk-like glow that seemed wholly out of place during this early dawn hour, but other than that, he could see nothing else out of the ordinary. Just the same dirt expanse that he had rolled in on.

When the priest turned to face him, Carter could see that the old man had been crying, his tears following the deep grooves in his face like water drying in ravines.

“The camera,” he said, his voice hoarse.

Carter’s expression turned smug.

“I don’t think so.”

The priest’s face contorted.

“But you said—”

Carter looked skyward.

“Oh, I said a lot of things—I
say
a lot of things. Problem is, Father, that you
did
a lot of things. And these are things that even your holy God can’t forgive. And if He can’t forgive, how would you expect a thief, a conman, an imposter such as myself to forgive?”

He turned to Pike.

“And Pike? Do you forgive?”

Pike remained stone-faced.

Carter shrugged and pouted his lower lip.

“Nope, sorry padre, he doesn’t forgive either. Maybe you should—”

Before Carter could finish his sentence, something struck the priest in the back of the head and he stumbled a few feet back into the church. As he did, he passed Carter, who was still off to the side, and he glimpsed something round and flattened stuck to the back of the man’s head.

To Carter, it looked like some sort of crab.

Pike quickly stepped in front of the priest and held his arms out, ready to intercede should the man continue into the church.

The priest moaned, and his hands went to the back of his head. He started pulling at the creature, trying desperately to tear it off, but it seemed almost glued there. And with each one of these yanks, his balance became more and more unsteady, and when he stumbled forward again, Pike shoved him backward.

The push was strong enough that the man’s direction completely changed, and he receded several feet onto the gravel walk that led to the church’s entrance, backtracking so quickly and stirring up so much dust that he almost seemed cartoonish with whirlwind legs.

Carter squinted into the dawn light, his eyes darting from Father Stevens’ head to the dirt walk. He spied a few more of the crab-like creatures, all perched high on knobby legs and scrabbling toward the priest. When it looked like the man was about to fall on his ass, Pike quickly took two aggressive forward and grabbed for him. While his hand missed Father’s body, his fingers managed to wrap around his collar.

Gripping that white collar, the only thing keeping Father from falling to the ground, Pike turned to face Carter.

Carter, still trying to grasp what was going on, could only manage a confused expression.

“Please,” the old priest managed to croak, his eyes rolling back. “Help me.”

To Carter, it was an oddly inappropriate plea that did nothing to sway his reaction. After all, the boys’ expressions in the photos on the camera in his pocket were equally as horrified.

And they had probably uttered those same fateful words.

Help me.

But no one had helped them, had they? No one had helped them escape from Father Peter Stevens, so why should he help the disgraceful man before him?

Instead, he shook his head, and Pike’s lips pressed together tightly.

The man in the suit raised his right foot—adorned with polished oxblood wingtips—and kicked the priest square in the chest. Carter didn’t know if Pike had intended to keep his hand on the man’s clerical collar, or if he had simply forgotten to let go, but it didn’t matter; the white fabric that signified the man’s priesthood came away in his hand.

Father Peter Stevens fell backward and he landed hard enough that the air was forced out of him and he made an
oomph
sound. Before the man could draw a breath, three more of the creatures flung themselves at him, landing on his face and hands, anywhere he had exposed flesh. Carter spied more of the things now, many more, maybe even dozens of them, all scrambling through the dirt, seeming to come out of nowhere. As the priest screeched in agony and tried to pull them off of him, the other crab-like creatures turned toward the open door.

Carter never hesitated.

He stepped around Pike and slammed the door closed, moments before the crab-like things smashed into it. With the hand not holding the white piece of cloth, Pike slid the lock into place.

Sweating, both men took a step back from the door and stared at it as several more of the things flung their bodies ineffectually at the warped wood.

Thonk, thonk, thonk.

Somewhere deep in his mind, Carter wished that it had been Sabra knocking at the door, and not these strange crustaceans. But he said nothing for a few moments, and neither did Pike.

There was another heavy hit to the door, and then both men instinctively cowered as an explosion somewhere nearby rocked the church.

“What the fuck!”

Carter turned in time to see Jesus fall to the ground, smashing into the altar and showering it in pieces of plaster of Paris and plastic.

The bangs against the door suddenly ceased and an odd silence fell over the church and its two inhabitants.

Pike eventually turned toward Carter, an expectant look on his face. There was no need for him to formulate the question—the look was that obvious.

What now?

Indeed, what the fuck now?

Carter thought about that for a moment.

What should we do now?

His initial inclination had been to leave Askergan after they had relieved the pedophile priest of his cash. But now that the man had gotten his just desserts, maybe they didn’t need to leave so soon.

A smile slowly crept over Carter’s face. He reached out and took the white clerical collar from Pike.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going out there,” he said, pointing toward the back door. “But what I do know is that the people of Askergan will be looking for a scapegoat and a savior after whatever is going on out there passes.”

Carter brought the small piece of white fabric to his throat and flipped the collar of his shirt over top of it. “And, Pike, my good man, I think we just found both.”

“Stupid, stupid cops,” Walter
Wandry said with a laugh as he pealed onto Main Street.

The man’s pupils were wide and unfocused, which blurred the dark landscape before him. It didn’t matter; nobody was on the road on this night—nobody still alive, that is. He didn’t even feel the cuts on his arms and legs, the pieces of glass embedded in his skin from when he had squeezed his way through the tiny window in the big sheriff’s office. He didn’t feel the bruises on his narrow hips from the window frame, or both of his twisted ankles as a result of the fall from the window.

The tires of his dilapidated Chevy crunched over several of the crab-like creatures—the crackers, as the son of a bitch sheriff and his deputies called them—sending shell shrapnel flying. But, like the pains in his arms, legs, hips and ankles, he didn’t notice this, either.

Walter aggressively rolled down the window, sending the pane of glass awkwardly tumbling into the door.

“Fuck you all!” he shouted out into the warm air. Then he stomped on the gas again. “Fuck you all!”

The stupid cops had been so eager to throw him in the cell, to get him to shut up, that they hadn’t even searched him. Good thing, too, as he had had three ounces of heroin and all the beautiful accoutrement necessary to get the drugs in him tucked into… well, tucked away in a dark place.

Walter’s eyes flicked from the road to the passenger seat, and the smile, which had faded somewhat at the thought of the black cop and his anorexic deputies, returned, revealing two rows of yellow and black teeth.

The black drug case
had
been tucked away, but he had since extricated it, and now it lay on the center of the passenger seat in all of its fake leather glory.

It was a beautiful thing.

The world around Walter confused him—confused him even more now that he had seen the crackers, and had witnessed how they somehow embedded themselves into the flesh of the few people that weren’t safely locked away when they had started to… well,
invade
from wherever the fuck they had come from.

The crackers had oddly left him pretty much alone, however, which was both confusing and a blessing. A blessing, because this had given him the time he’d needed to get high. And confusing because, well, what the fuck? All they seemed interested in was eating people… just not him, evidently.

And then there was the sheriff. Fucking big black Sheriff Paul White, who for some ungodly reason had actually let him out. And that was a mistake that the man would live to regret.

No one fucked with Walter Wandry. No one stole his shit, and no one locked him away in a fucking cell.

His father had tried that once, and, well, that had ended badly for one of them.

Walter turned to the open window and took a deep breath of the sour-smelling air. It was still warm outside, despite the fact that it was only leaking into the wee hours of the morning. The air that rushed in through the window caused his beard to flap, and he closed his eyes for a moment, pushing his head further out of the window like some sort of deranged puppy.

The image of Sheriff Paul White’s face popped into his mind after a few moments of mere bliss, and his eyes snapped open.

Walter yanked the steering wheel to the right just in time to avoid a car parked sideways across both lanes. There was a satisfying crunch of another half-dozen or so crackers that were all suddenly heading in the same direction as he—fleeing the station. For whatever reason, this seemed to invigorate him, to enhance his high, to further blur the already fuzzy line between fantasy and reality.

“Join me!” he shouted out the window.

His words mingled with the hot air and seemed to swirl about his head like some sort of verbal smoke or fumes.

“Join me!” he screamed again as the car tires crushed untold numbers of the strange white creatures and sent spurts of equally white liquid flying. “Join me!”

Walter didn’t bother slowing when he hit the intersection, turning left onto Highway 2 from Main Street, trying to put the shithole that was Askergan County behind him as quickly as possible.

Just as he pulled his head back inside the vehicle, he caught sight of a police cruiser parked on the other side of the road, only several blocks from the gas station on the corner… that he only now realized was ablaze, large tendrils of fire reaching high into the air like organic spires. He also spotted several silhouettes, police officers maybe, cowering from the blaze, nearly hidden out of sight.

Walter’s eyes remained trained on the yellow flames as his car whipped by, his eyes locked on the sight like a moth transfixed by a lamp.

“What the fuck?”

An explosion tore the words from his mouth, and his beaten Chevy was sent flying, the entire left side of the car lifting off the ground with the concussive force.