Slither (33 page)

Some char marks seemed to sweep up the shed's
wall. Must've been a fire here, he realized, but somebody managed to put it out. A logical deduction.

Yet who was the bigger "pea brain"? Slydes walked
right back into the shed and never even noticed the water hose lying at the other end.

"Ain't no fuckin' gas in the tank," he said, back inside.

"Fuck." Ruth sat against the wall, an orange hand to
her belly. "I feel like shit, Slydes. I feel like I could
croak. Maybe those worms infected us."

Slydes wanted to throw up, in part from how he felt,
and in part from remembering exactly what Jonas
looked like the last time he saw him. if we got infected, we'd be turnin' yellow, like Jonas. We ain't infected, we just need water." Darker thoughts entered
his head. He kept looking at Ruth ... and the stark
veins standing out in her sweaty neck. He knew this:

When hunters couldn't find water, they could drink
the blood of any animals they killed. Blood was mostly
water.

In which case, Ruth was a veritable bucket of water.

Am I that much of a scumbag? he asked himself.
The question almost bothered him.

Almost.

He had his Buck knife right there on his belt. He'd
skinned and gutted many a gator with it. And compared to gator skin, cutting Ruth's throat would be like
putting his knife through mashed potatoes.

The question appeared to be answered.

But if he was going to kill her for the water in her
blood, then-

I just gotta have it one more time, Slydes figured.
His lack of reservations, perhaps, represented his human truth, so at least he was being honest. He was going to use her mouth for his own sexual pleasure and
then drink her blood. Great guy.

He sat down and put an arm around her.

"What-are-you doing?"

"Cuddlin'," he said.

Ruth rolled her eyes. "Now?"

Now, or any time. You're always beautiful."

Ruth was stunned by the compliment, however phony.
Slydes held her tighter, caressed a breast. "Come on,
baby. I've been missin' you fierce."

Ruth's expression showed sheer befuddlement. Any
other time, she'd be happy to oblige, but under these
circumstances? Jonas dead along with God knew who
else? Giant worms, and a zombie in the woods? Plus,
she was feeling really lousy...

"Slydes ..."She tried to push his hand away, but by
now he'd already pulled her T-shirt up. "I feel like shit,
like I'm gonna throw up."
-- - - - - - -- -- - - -- -- -

Slydes's beard tickled her when he kissed her neck.
"Please, baby, don't leave me hanging. I'm needing you
really bad."

"I'm not in the mood, Slydes!" she outright whined.

He had his jeans opened, and pushed her head
down. "It'll only take a minute, sugar. See, Ruth, you're
so beautiful, it just makes me hot for you all the time."

Ruth frowned and shrugged. It wasn't the first time
she'd performed a sex act simply because there was
nothing else to do. Slydes groaned once her expertise
was upon him. He obviously wasn't the most considerate
of men, and given that he'd been sweating and stinking
on this island for the past three days only proved more of
Ruth's resilience. Yeah, she's a trooper, all right, he
thought, the sensations building already. In which case
she'd be a dead trooper very shortly.

Just as Slydes would have his moment, she stopped
and looked up at him. "Oh, fuck, what a couple of
morons we are!"

"What!" he shouted, outraged. He pushed her head
back down. "Come on, girl! You don't stop right before
a guy's going to-"

"I just thought of where we can get water!"

"Huh!" The distraction spun in his head. Yeah! Your
neck! Again, he tried to force her head back down.

"Would you wait a minute!' she managed to blurt.

"We can get all the water we want at the head shacks
where Jonas grows his pot. The drip lines, from that
old army filter or whatever the fuck it is!"

Slydes eyes widened. Holy shit, she's right! Unbeknownst to her, Ruth's perceptivity had just that second saved her life. "'That's good thinkin', baby!"

'Fuck-yeah!"-

"But finish the job." And then he shoved her head
back down.

Ruth, indeed, finished the job, treating Slydes to a potent climax, the residue of which was displaced into her
mouth.

"Aw, yeah, honey, that was great ..."

But Ruth sat bolt upright, eyes pried open. Her lips
puckered in distaste, as though she'd taken in a mouthful of turpentine.

"What's wrong with you?" Slydes asked, refastening
his pants.

Ruth spat loudly on the floor, and when she looked
at what she'd expectorated, she grimaced. "Oh, fuck!
That's fuckin' gross!"

"What'choo talking about?" Slydes leaned over and
looked.

Oh, fuck. That IS fuckin' gross, his thoughts heartily
agreed. There were no other words.

Roiling amid his spat-out semen were hundreds of
tiny yellow beads, smaller versions of the ones he'd
plucked off his body the other night.

"You're infected with those worm things!" Ruth
shrieked at him.

"Bullshit! I ain't infected. They came out of you!
They came up out of your belly or somewhere!"

Ruth jumped up. "They didn't come out of my stomach, Slydes, and you know it! They came out of your
pecker!"

Slydes stroked his beard. Had they? He looked at his
arms, looked under his shirt. My skin ain't yellow, he
saw. Jonas said you turned yellow if you were infected.
But...

Ruth wasn't yellow, either.

And the ova came from somewhere. "They were on
the floor already, like the ones outside," he tried to
convince himself.

Ruth stomped around the shed, spitting incessantly.
"I could feel 'em squirming in my mouth, Slydes!"
Then glared as though he were a leper.

Slydes didn't much care for that look.

"You're infected! I'm getting out of here!"

The predicament irritated Slydes ... so he decided
to kill her anyway. I know it ain't me who's infected, he
kept telling himself.

What else could he believe?

As he reached for his knife, though, he cast a glance
at the semen again.

Those little yellow worm eggs ...

Had they doubled in size in the last two minutes?

"I'm fuckin' sorry, Slydes, but I gotta get away from
you," Ruth declared. "I don't wanna get infected with
those fuckin' things."

I'm carving her up, Slydes resolved. It was a matter
of pride. He'd done a lot for her, and now she was
abandoning him.

Low-class.

Slydes shucked his knife just as Ruth opened the
door to flee the shed.

But she didn't flee.

She screamed and just stood there.

Someone was blocking the door, and when she jerked
backward, Slydes saw who it was ... or, not really
even who anymore, but what.

He would have no way of knowing Robb White by
name, he only remembered Ruth's claim of a big yellow
zombie lurking around, and then Jonas's dying revelation that the very first person to be infected by the
worms continued to live through repeated mutations.
He's a big guy, Jonas had related. Watch out for him.
He's trompin' around here like a fuckin' zombie.

This person/thing was a "big guy," all right. He stood
huge in the open doorway, hair all gone now, replaced
by mottled yellow scalp, old swim trunks essentially
rotting on his pelvis. The eyes looked more like wads of
spit, but somehow they seemed to recognize Ruth.

Then the ruined, yellow face ... smiled.

"He's come back for me!" Ruth shrieked. She dodged
a swipe from a huge arm, then ducked behind Slydes.
"Stick him with your knife, Slydes! He's gonna kill us!
He wants to feed us to the worms!"

Moments of consternation such as this were difficult
to reckon. Slydes was scared shitless and paralyzed as
he stood there, Ruth hiding behind him. His first instinct, indeed, told him to fight. But when he took a
closer look at the thing that was thunking into the shed
with mutated arms outstretched, he knew there was no
point. He wouldn't be fighting a man, he'd be fighting
an organic monstrosity.

The face beamed back at him, yellow and runneled.
A gray tongue emerged to lick segmented lips. Slydes
noticed a chunk missing from the guy's cheek, revealing
a sore crater in pus-rife flesh. Muscles and veins flexed
beneath the shiny, runny skin, and worse than the inhuman sick-yellow hue were the blazing red spots.

And, yes, the thing was smiling.

It's smilin' at Ruth ...

"Don't let him get us, Slydes!" she screamed.

"Us?" Slydes questioned.

This would be even better than cutting her throat.

Ruth's screams cartwheeled around the room when
Slydes turned, grabbed her by the shoulders, and threw
her into the waiting arms of the college jock formerly
known as Robb White.

Was the thing giggling? Slydes thought so. It
wrapped its arms around Ruth's slender physique,
dragged her to the floor, then wrapped its stout legs
around her too.

"You coward piece of fuck scumbag motherfucker,
Slydes!" Ruth cut loose in her loudest scream yet.

Slydes stepped around them, and slipped out the
doorway.

"Oh, fuck, no, no, n !"

Slydes took one last peek inside. Ruth's zombie had
pulled down its rotten swim trunks, and was now
yanking down her shorts. Slydes closed the door and
jogged away.

"I've never been this far across the island," Loren said.
He followed Nora through the thickening woods. Time
and disuse had narrowed the trails this far in, to mere
overgrown scratches; they could barely see them
enough to follow them.

"I've explored a little," Nora confirmed, "but not
quite this deep. According to Lieutenant Trent, the old
control center is this way."

"You really think there's someone there?"

Nora tried to weigh the question in concrete terms.
What they'd discovered thus far almost seemed unbelievable, but then she knew she believed it all because
she'd seen it all. "Actually, Loren, I really do."

Loren gulped, and went silent.

"Seriously," she went on. "I can't deny what we've seen. A parasitic worm that displays features and traits
of multiple species? Their hydroskeletons and ova
growing exponentially? That sounds like laboratoryinduced mutation."

"I know, but-"

"And we have found surveillance cameras all over
the island. I've seen them, you've seen them. Now, you
and Trent just told me that Annabelle got hauled up
into a tree by a twenty-foot worm. That's an unbelievable story-but I believe it because I just saw several
worms almost as long back in the trench. You and I
both know worms like these can't grow this large or
this fast without some kind of artificial catalyst inducing it." She paused. "And I know I saw a submarine out
in that trench. It wasn't oxygen deprivation, Loren, and
it wasn't hallucinosis spurred by variances in water
pressure."

"I believe you saw a sub or submersible," Loren admitted. "And I believe something really screwed up
and unnatural is going on here. But aren't we asking
for trouble now? Aren't we getting in too deep?"

"One of our party is already dead," Nora reminded
him, "and we know other people have been killed on
this island recently. We already are in too deep."

"I want to know what's going on, too. But if there really are people at this control center, what are we going
to do? Ask them what they're doing? Invite them to
lunch?"

"No. We're going to apprehend them, with that gun
you have. We're going to get to the bottom of this."

Loren laughed hard-and nervously. "They're military, Nora! They have guns too, and the big difference
is they know how to use theirs. I'm just a mildmannered polychaetologist, not Wyatt Earp."

Nora shoved away some branches and moved on.
"Relax, Loren. We're just going to take a look. You're a scientist, too-aren't you curious about what's going
on here?"

"Um-hmm, and Magellan was curious about what was
going on in the Philippines ... and he got butchered by a
bunch of-pissed-off natives."

Nora shook her head. "Just come on."

"What's that there?"

Loren had noticed a small tin shed that seemed to be
humming.

"It's the filtration and desalinator for the island's water supply." Then Nora pointed to the black power cable and metal box it branched off from. "And that's the
voltage regulator."

Loren stared at it. "And the generator is ... where?"

"It's over there some place," she said quickly. "Come
on."

Loren followed the cable, finding its terminus at the
large slab of concrete on the ground, and the accommodating sign: KEEP AWAY! RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL IN USE!

Loren frowned at her. "No wonder I've never heard
a generator motor. There isn't one. That's an RTG,
isn't it?"

"Yeah," Nora admitted. "I found it by accident the
other day; we're not supposed to know about it. Trent
said I'll actually have to be debriefed by army security
people just for seeing the damn thing."

"I guess so. If terrorists knew this was here, they
could use it to make a dirty bomb if they could get to
the source material. Probably Cesium 137."

"Trent said the army's not worried about it. The
source is buried in the middle of fifteen tons of steelreinforced concrete."

Loren chuckled. "Oh yeah, that makes me feel a lot
more secure. Shit, Nora, maybe it's leaking. Maybe the
RTG is causing the mutations."

"That's impossible, and you know it. It's only a couple of rads heating up a thermocoupler. We've seen
these things in our own field. They're safe, and their
power is exaggerated."

"We better hope so. Greenpeace would love to hear
about this. Let's call Nader."

"Just come on!"

Another black cable paralleled another scratch of a
trail. Nora and Loren followed it through a small clearing. "No anoles or iguanas," Nora said. "Have you noticed that?"