Slither (21 page)

"Because it's too fucked up," she didn't hesitate to
profane. "Us not knowing what this worm is would be
like a military history professor not knowing the date
of the Battle of Hastings."

"October fourteen, 1066," Loren said. "The English
were winning the battle until their king, Harold the
First, caught a flaming arrow in the face."

"Oh, Loren. You really are a hopeless nerd."

"1 know, but your point is well taken. These worms
are big-time super-duper screwed up. They shouldn't
even be in an environment like this. They look like
land-dwelling worms, but we know they're marine because they attacked a lobster. And that means their
motile ova are water-dwelling, too, but we found a
much larger version of the same ova in the shower and
on Trent's shirt-hundreds of yards away from the
closest seawater. Which means they're obviously land
dwellers."

Nora sprang up in her seat. "Wait a minute. We took
samples of the shower ova, didn't we?*

"Yeah. I vialed a bunch of them up.7

'Let's compare them directly to the ova from the
lobster."

'Why didn't I think of that?"

"Because I'm the boss."

They both hustled to one of the other tables where
they'd placed their specimens. The small plastic saltwater tanks Loren had hooked up for the scarlet
bristleworms bubbled away from their air pumps.
Loren's hand eagerly reached for the vials he put the
ovum in, but-

"What the hell!"

Nora stared.

The small vials were all empty.

Loren held several up to the overhead lights.
"They're burned through at the bottoms. It's like the
ova melted the plastic and got out."

"There's a few of them there." Nora pointed.

Several of the grotesque yellow nodes were inching
up the wall. "The ova must possess the same corrosive
enzymes of the worms that bred them."

"Chitin-penetrating and plastic-penetrating," Loren
remarked. His mouth fell open when he turned his
head. "Hey, Nora ..."

"What?"

"Look at the tanks."

Nora lowered her face to the pair of mini aquariums. "Holy shit!" she yelled. "They've infected the
bristleworms!"

In the farthest tank, all of the scarlet bristleworms
had at least one yellow ovum attached to their bodies.
The worms themselves shuddered. But events had progressed further in the closer tank.

Several ova lay dead on the tank's floor. But the
bristleworms they'd attacked seemed to throb, and
were bloated from within. The worms were still alive
but barely moving. Then one of them-

"Unbelievable!" Loren exclaimed.

The bristleworm began to disgorge a slew of much
tinier worms.

Within a few minutes, the other bristleworms in the
tank did the same, until the water was tinted pink with
so many tiny worms.

Nora was flabbergasted.

"Like the Tessae worms in central Africa," Loren
murmured. "And the-"

"And some of the Trichinella family. Our little pink
parasite has the ability to attack a different annelid
species with free-ranging ovum and force it to bear its
young."

But the revelations didn't stop there. Nora and Loren
squinted harder as the minuscule newborn worms began to slither en masse up the face of the tank. Eventually they were twitching out over the side.

I'm starting to get a little freaked," Loren said in a
low drone. "They're coming out of the friggin' water,
Nora."

"Just wait a minute. It won't take them long to die.
They have to suffocate ..."

They waited for another minute, then another.

"Jesus.. . ."

Ten minutes later, the newborn worms hadn't died.
They were all out of the tank and moving across the
table.

"Well, how many impossibilities can we take for
one day?"

"A marine worm with air-breathing capabilities,"
Nora said very slowly. "Every worm in the world that
can do this has been exhaustively catalogued." Her face
felt hot in aggravation. "There's no way-no fucking
way in the world-that an annelid like this could remain
uncatalogued."

"No fucking way in the world, huh?" Loren directed
his displeasure in the obvious direction of the mass of
worms. They were moving toward them on the table. And the bean-sized ova that had crawled up the wall,
too, had changed direction now, once Loren and Nora
had come over to the table.

"They're detecting our presence," Loren said.

"Fibrotic sensory pores," Nora guessed. "They're
reading the carbon dioxide we exhale-which triggers
their instinct ganglia that a potential host is near."

"Uh-huh, and I -don't want to find out what happens
if one of those little things gets on me."

Nora sloughed that one off. "If one of them got into
your bloodstream, your immune-system. would kill it."

"Yeah? I'm not going to wait for my immune system
to do the job." Loren picked up a can of mosquito spray.
Nora was about to object-they were specimensbut...

Not a bad idea, she recanted. The chlordane and
diethyl-meta groups in the repellent would kill the
worms just as it had killed the ova in the shower stall.
The just-hatched worms on the table were so tiny yet
so abundant that they looked more like spilled pink
lemonade-lemonade that moved of its own instincts.

Loren smirked as he sprayed down the table and
wall. He sprayed more directly into the tanks.

In a few moments, the ova on the wall dropped off
dead, and the worms shriveled and died.

"So much for them," Loren said.

"Loren the Worm Killer. But we're going to have to
preserve some of these and take them to Florida Natural
Resources. I guarantee you, they don't know about this.
Chitin-penetrating parasites like these? That reproduce
this actively and can attack multiple hosts? If these
things broke out, they could decimate the gulf's crustacean harvest."

"Well, at least only one lobster was infected," Loren
noted, calmed down now. "This could be a fluke infection, you know."

Could be, Nora thought. Maybe it was a lucky hit on
the part of the worm. But if they wiped out these
bristleworms that easily, it could wipe out an entire
food chain.

Loren had used the lab's forceps to place one of the
dead shower ovum under his microscope. "These are
the same, Nora. Just a lot bigger."

Nora had figured as much. The hunch wouldn't let
go. She took Loren's slide and placed it under her own
dual-lensed scope, to properly compare the dead ova
against the smaller ones mixed with the worms from
the lobster. When she switched on both fields ...

"Oh my God."

"What"

"See for yourself," Nora said.

Loren looked in the comparator scope. He only
looked for a second before he lifted his eyes away.

"Oh my God is an understatement," he said.

Nora had seen it first, and wanted clarification.

The tiny worms from the lobster weren't so tiny anymore. They filled the entire space of the slide's viewing
perimeter now, and the ova in their proximity could
now easily be detailed.

Loren stood erect, dumbfounded. Confusion made
his eyes looked glazed. "This can't be."

"Tell me about it," Nora said. "Those things are ten
times bigger than they were twenty minutes ago."

Loren nudged her back to the microscope. "Look back
in there," he said, a little jittery now. "Keep your eye on
them fora full minute, then tell me your observations."

Nora did so.

She knew what he was driving at in significantly less
than a minute.

She could actually see the worms and ova growing
before her eyes.

"What do you make of it, Sergeant?" the colonel asked,
having made a rare appearance from his makeshift field
office. The sergeant had logged the observed activity at
the old head shack, believing it to be "atypical."

We must be getting ready to leave, the sergeant pondered. Why's he so interested in a bunch of civilians all
of a sudden?

The corporal was manning the monitor controls,
zooming the military's very best lenses, but he seemed
more fixed on the slender woman with frizzed hair.
Have to get that kid's mind out of the garbage, the sergeant thought.

"Look at that," the colonel said. The image onscreen lurched forward from the zoom: a closer shot of
the slender woman in the dark one-piece swimsuit. She
was leaning over a computer now, typing something. The colonel added, "I don't like it. It looks like she's
recording data. Data on what?"

The sergeant stepped closer. "I'm not sure, sir. As I
noted in my log, the civilian activity in that building
seemed harmless. But I could be mistaken."

"It looks like they're keeping specimens of some
kind in there."

"That wasn't the case earlier, sir."

The colonel faced the sergeant directly. "In your estimation, is there any way the civilians know we're
here?"

"In my estimation, sir-no."

"What about you, Corporal?"

"No signs of detection, sir."

"The only civilian who ever saw me was in the second arrival group . . . and he's dead. That's verified and
recorded. The fourth group's craft has been disabled.
In fact, every civilian to come on the island is now infected, this third group being the only exception. What
they're doing seems routine and unalarmed. I think it's
some kind of nature excursion-the blond woman appears to be a photographer."

The colonel thought on it, then watched the screen
some more. "You're always right, Sergeant, and I'm
not disputing your assessment. But I still need to know
what they're up to. I need you two men to make another trip outside and guarantee me that what they're
doing won't compromise our tests."

"Yes, sir," the sergeant said.

"Good, then do it. Do it tonight."

The colonel's boots snapped as he left the room.

The corporal looked up when the door closed. "I
wonder what's up his ass."

"He's bucking for general, and he'll probably get it if
this mission yields positive results. That guy's been do ing these field jaunts for years-it racks up promotion
points. He's not going to let anything screw this up."

The corporal rolled back in the chair, put his feet up
on the old desk that was once used by missile-control
officers. "The hybrids are duplicating better than we
ever expected. We already know that they don't hesitate to attack human hosts. The worms and the ova
alike have already proved that they can live in multiple
environments. Why can't we just go home now?"

"Because the brass says so, and you can bitch about
it all you want, but it won't do any good." The sergeant
laughed and slapped the corporal's back. "Just think of
all that extra-duty pay you'll get."

Fuck that, the corporal thought. I want to get laid.
He'd been in the military long enough to know that
whenever you thought sure a mission was about to
end ... you could slap on another week or even a
month.

"I'm going to go finish my shift log," the sergeant said.
"In the meantime, keep an eye on the civilians." He
pointed to the screen. "Let me know when they lock that
place up for the-night.-That's when we go back out."

"Sure thing, Sarge."

The corporal switched to another camera once the
sergeant left. Now he had the low-light on and was
watching the blonde.

That's more like it.

The blonde was already naked, and sprawled out on
the beach. When she climbed on top of the guy, her
back arched, which couldn't have displayed her breasts
more perfectly in the moonlight.

But the corporal knew that looking would suffice for
only so long.

One thing I know for sure, he told himself, before we
leave this island, I'm going to bang that blonde ...

That wasn't bad, Annabelle thought in the so-called afterglow. Out here I have to take what I can get. She
wasn't used to that-not with her looks and her social
status back in New York. Young power players were
more her speed-and Trent was neither of those-but
he did have an aggressive way about him. He was perfunctory and direct, no frills, all business. If she viewed
the island photo shoot as an adventure, she'd feel more
content.

Cool gulf breezes diced up the night's blanket of
heat. They both lay naked and sweating right up at the
wood line, their clothes flung this way and that before
them. Soft waves fell twenty yards beyond-the tide
was coming up-and the beach sand looked bizarre in
the subdued moonlight, like cold smoky glitter.

Trent looked haggard in the same light. I'm wearing
him out, Annabelle thought with an inner giggle. She
reached into her beach bag and pulled out a flask.

"Holding out on me, huh?" he said.

"I wouldn't call what we just spent the last hour doing 'holding out.'" She took a long sip-dark rumand smiled. The sudden swell of heat in her belly made
her think of a penis going from soft to hard in the channel of her sex. I'm a dirty girl tonight, she joked in
thought. Can't get my mind off anything but sex. It was
the hot night, she knew, and this exotic environ and its
circumstances: stuck on an island with no way off, and
only two men in her midst, both lusting for her faultless physique. The notion lit primal fuses in her psyche,
unleashing the bitchy, antsy, slut-in-heat disposition.
She knew she shouldn't be drinking-it only laxed her
inhibitions more-but the moment seemed to warrant it. She passed Trent the flask, deliberately brushing his
shoulder with a hot breast.

He drank gratefully, and sputtered a satisfaction.
"This busywork assignment has turned out to be a
great time."

"Yeah, and we're both getting paid."

"But I don't think I'll be writing this part down in the
report to my CO. Drinking rum on a moonlit beach at
midnight, with a foxy blonde. No, that wouldn't wash."

Just foxy? She took exception. I'm a hell of a lot
more than that and you know it. Don't get cocky. She
stretched out. A couple of hits of rum right after sex
was an ideal tranquilizer. Trent lay angled away from
her; she could see him gazing out at the surf, his
middle-aged desires clearly sated. A younger, more acceptable man would be on top of her again. She had
that way with men-to make them want more than
they could handle. She reveled in the impression of
herself.