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  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.”

  PART I - WALTER

  1.

  “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.

  2.

  Glass.

  That was the first thing that popped into Walter’s mind: glass.

  Even before he opened his eyes to see it, he could feel it everywhere: in his long gray beard, in his neatly parted and slicked black hair. He could feel it biting into the backs of his arms and the base of his neck. It was embedded in his cheeks; it had sliced his upper lip.

  Walter gasped, his narrow chest drawing in a huge breath for what seemed like the first time in ages. And then he started to cough, a thick, throaty cough that was accompanied by the familiar coppery taste of blood in his mouth. Eyes still closed, he spat, not caring where the thick wad landed.

  The ringing in his ears droned onward, but now he recognized another sound, one that was just as persistent.

  The ocean? Is that water I hear?

  But that couldn’t be; he had been driving, hadn’t he? He had been driving down the cracker-covered street when…

  Everything came flooding back to him and his eyes snapped open, his pupils so wide that his dark irises were all but invisible.

  It wasn’t the roaring of seawater that he was hearing, but the sound of fire, the eager sound of flames consuming everything in its path.

  Walter Wandry was lying on his back in the center of the road, his head angled to the left. His eyes slowly began to focus on what remained of the gas station that cornered Highway 2 and Main Street, the same gas station that he had passed less than a day ago when he had come racing into town, looking for his lost son.

  For Tyler.

  He cracked his jaw and closed his eyes for a moment before quickly opening them again.

  The cop car. Where is the cop car?

  Keeping his head still, his eyes scanned the fiery blaze, looking for the cop car or the dark figures.

  He didn’t see anyone. There was nothing, only smoke, fire, and crispy shells.

  I hope they burned. I hope those fuckers burned.

  Images of the final few seconds before the explosion started coming back to him, and his heart began to race.

  My drugs.

  “No,” Walter grumbled, the sound rolling around in his mouth, making friends with blood and saliva. He spat again, this time making sure that the offending substance landed on the tarmac instead of on himself.

  “No.”

  With a groan, he rolled onto his stomach, and then pushed himself onto his knees, trying his best to brush as much of the glass off of him as he could. It was an impossible task, as he quickly realized that the Chevy’s windows must have blown inward, and all of the tiny cubes of shatterproof glass had collected on his person as if he were some sort of magnet for superheated sand.

  So Walter gave up and went back to searching the road for the cop car or the Chevy… his Chevy, the one with his drugs on the passenger seat.

  His eyes widened when he saw three crackers begin to make their way toward him, their fluid movements somehow erotic, enticing. Six legs, all of them moving and bending in such coordination over the road littered with burning debris. It appeared as if they were floating.

  “Out of the way!” he roared, shooing them with his left hand as he crawled in their direction.

  The crackers paid him no mind and continued past, all still heading in the same direction like a school of chitinous fish.

  Another explosion ripped through the air, and Walter turned his gaze toward the east. A giant fireball licked the skyline, bathing the tops of the trees in a dirty orange glow.

  What the fuck is going on?

  But the thought was fleeting—only one thing mattered to Walter now.

  He squinted as he scanned the asphalt, and his eyes eventually fell on something familiar. A smile graced his thin face.

  His black pouch was lying on the road between the white hash marks roughly ten feet from him.

  Walter crawled forward again, ignoring the fact that it seemed every muscle in his body was crying out for him to stop, to just lie there and wait for help. It occurred to him that he couldn’t see his car anywhere, that he must have been thrown from the vehicle with the explosion, but his goals and motivations, as they had so many times in his life, became singular. And creeping forward literally one inch at a time, the fact that his left leg was nearly numb and his jeans were sticking to his skin from his thigh down to his ankle barely registered.

  He had nearly made it to his black case when he saw the first cracker die. It wasn’t something he would have noticed—truthfully, when he got like this, even the most basic of needs, be it eating, sleeping, or shitting, went ignored—but this happened but a few inches from his face and would have been impossible not to see.

  At first, the cracker’s movements seemed to slow, the rhythmic bursts of air exiting the top of the shell becoming hastened, irregular. Then with the next few steps, the many joints of the frontmost leg refused to lock and then became limp, and the other five legs resorted to dragging it along like a numb, arthritic finger. When another leg stopped working, and then another, its forward progress was significantly inhibited. It was only when the fourth leg was paralyzed that it fell to the asphalt. One of its legs, one of two that still seemed to be clicking and clacking, tried to drive itself into the road and force the shell up again, but it failed. After a few more desperate, grasping attempts, it too fell limp. The final leg soon followed suit.

  Dead; the air stopped pulsing through its white shell.

  It was finally dead.

  And Walter couldn’t have cared less. He crawled another foot forward, and watched—only because it was still in front of him—as the thing began to turn translucent. A moment later, the legs curled upward, articulating those many joints not in the smooth, fluid movements as it had made its way over the uneven terrain, but like jerky drying in the sun. And there they remained, all six of the roughly eight-inch protuberances pointed into the air until the cracker resembled something of the exoskeleton of an overturned crab.

  Turning his head to the side, Walter spat again. And then he reached out with his left hand, trying to grasp the case without having to pull his body forward another inch. Like the dead cracker before him, his left leg had become nearly completely useless, and dragging it was becoming more and more difficult. He wheezed as he stretched out, grunting as the muscles in his chest and shoulder screamed at him.

  Nothing; his fingernails only came back with grit buried beneath.

  Walter, eyes closed tightly, head to one side, crawled forward another foot and then a second before collapsing onto the road again. This time when he reached out blindly, his hand closed on the familiar shape and texture of his black faux-leather case.

  A sigh escaped his lips, vibrating the blood and saliva that clung to his bottom lip.

  His relief was short-lived, however. A second later, he felt something graze the back of his hand. It only brushed against him at first, but then, as if gaining courage, he felt six distinct pressure points in his skin. Then he felt those points lazily make their way onto his wrist, then up his forearm in an awkward, drunken gait. Walter was so tired and sore that he couldn’t even be bothered to turn his head to look at what was crawling on him.

  But one thing was certain: it was much different from the itching that happened under his skin when he went more than a day without a hit.

  Hit; drugs. I have my drugs.

  As if to affirm this thought, he squeezed the leather case with his hand, and a smile again crossed his thin, pale lips.

  He closed his eyes when the crawling reached his shoulder. For a moment, he thought he had fallen asleep; that the only reason the thing had stopped moving was because he had pass
ed out again. But then the cracker nestled the soft underside of its shell against his skin. It felt oddly comforting—drugs; I have my drugs—but this sensation only lasted a short moment.

  The cracker’s conveyor-like teeth suddenly clamped down on Walter’s shoulder and then began cutting their way into his flesh, slowly, carefully, meticulously dissecting his skin, before the entire cracker forced itself beneath.

  High or not, in possession of his drugs or not, Walter couldn’t help the scream that bubbled from deep within him.

  Despite the power of the cry that rocked his frail body, when the sound finally escaped his thin and chapped lips, it was more a whimper than a wail.

  Then Walter’s mind started spinning, and he tumbled into a pit of unconsciousness.

  3.

  The sun shone brightly down on Askergan County that morning, illuminating the dark embers from the multiple fires that floated in the air like disinterested pixies.

  Thousands of the crackers had either died or had been destroyed in those early morning hours, their corpses with their upturned legs drying in the sun like forgotten fruit. There would be much cleaning and restitution after this day was done, but Walter Wandry had no interest in participating in this effort.

  In fact, he had no interest in Askergan at all, save for once again seeing it recede in his rearview.

  It was difficult for him to open his eyes, especially given the fact that in addition to a cruel pounding behind them, the lids were gummed shut. At first he’d tried to reach up with his left arm to wipe the substance away, but that arm felt heavy and ungainly and he’d quickly abandoned the effort. His right arm felt strange too, but this was a familiar strangeness, one that he knew was the result of recently having injected into the crook of his elbow.

  As his slender fingers finally managed to wipe away thin trails of mucus from his eyes and the lids slowly separated, he quickly closed them again.