Worm (2 page)

Two doors down, Tessa saw Mr. Green waddle through the slop to his car and jump in. He backed out into the street and became instantly mired. He tried rocking the car back and forth; then it stalled. He jumped out, swearing and shouting, slipping beneath the muck and coming up looking like he’d been tarred.

Tessa couldn’t help giggling under her breath at that.

Glub-glub-glub.

She turned. This time it was coming from
inside
not outside. It made her shiver…it was a very
bad
sort of sound.

A piercing scream echoed outside, somewhere down the block, and Tessa tensed with terror. The scream came again, then faded off into a lot of yelling and shouting. She tried to see through the window where it was coming from, but couldn’t.

“God, what now?”

When she looked back for Mr. Green, he was nowhere to be seen. His car looked like an island out there in the fuming cesspool of mud. One door was still open. People were gathered on porches but no other fools were willing to join him for a dip in the slimy muck.

Glub-glub-glub.

Dammit. There it was again.

Tessa crossed the living room and traced the sound to the bathroom. The sink was half-full with bubbling black sludge. The toilet water looked like ink. And again, using bathroom analogies, she decided it looked like the mother of all messy dumps.

Glub-glub-glub.

From the kitchen!

Pained and distressed, Tessa arrived to see glops of chunky black ooze dropping from the faucet into her shiny clean stainless steel sink.
Plop, plop, plop.
More of it dropped, looking almost like it was ejected from pressure.

Oh, not my new sink, not my new sink.

She instinctively grabbed the spigot, hoping to wash that filth down into the drain. No water came out, just more of the glistening ebon slush.

And this was all bad enough with the mess and the stink that reamed out her nose, but in the three or so inches of slop, she saw movement.

Not bubbling.

Something else.

A weird, almost serpentine shape.

There was something alive in the sink.

3

Sitting on his porch, Geno Desjardins watched the muck flowing in sluicing, gelid channels through the neighborhood. It was already lapping up to the third stair on the porch. The mess and the smell were bad enough, but the cleanup would be very expensive, astronomical even. It would drive everyone’s insurance rates right through the roof and the time it would take…not good.

He’d just gotten off his cell with his brother on the other side of Camberly and the muck was in the streets over there, too, filling them like a cup.

What a fucked-up mess.

Ivy came out and handed Geno a beer that he nearly emptied on the first swallow. She sat down, nervously puffing on a cigarette, a Benson & Hedges 120. It looked like a long, sleek white missile, afterburners blazing as she puffed on it.

“It’s getting worse,” she said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Should we try and drive out of it?”

“In
that?
”

Exasperated, scared, smoke fuming from her nostrils like foundry stacks, she said, “Well, anything would be better than drowning in it…don’t you think?”

“It won’t rise much more.”

“Says you.”

Geno ignored her. It was a hobby of his. He’d already been on the phone with Public Works and they were responding to similar incidents all over town. The mayor had contacted the governor and the National Guard was being mobilized to set up temporary structures outside of town for those forced from their homes. The Army Corps of Engineers was on its way.

All of which was great, Geno figured. He was glad to see his tax dollars at work. But none of it answered one very basic question: what in the hell was this stuff? It wasn’t sewage exactly or mud or gray water or seepage, but maybe some weird combination of all those things and a few others to boot.

Disgusting, that’s what.

“We’ll wait it out for the time being. If it gets too deep, we’ll make a run for it.”

But Ivy didn’t like that in the least.

She was far too hyper and far too neurotic to sit around waiting. She paced from one end of the porch to the other, mumbling under her breath and chain-smoking. She favored Virginia Slims 120s. They were as long as No. 2 pencils. She’d smoke one halfway down, frantically puffing at it, then toss it over the railing and fire up another one. In the fifteen minutes she’d been on the porch, she’d killed three of them.

Geno knew better than to mention the fact.

“Look,” she said.

He turned and peered across the street.

Mr. Green was backing out into the sludge, trying to make a break for it. His car dogged out almost instantly. Geno chuckled low under his breath as Green got out, slipped and went under, came up swearing and snorting.

“Aren’t you going to help him?” Ivy wanted to know.

“Let me think about it,” he said. Then:
“No.”

Why the hell would he help Green? The guy was a prying, spying, nosey asshole who constantly called the police on his neighbors for everything from backyard bonfires to loud music to their garages not being up to code.

No, this was entertainment. He wasn’t about to help that tubby sonofabitch.

Green kept slipping and sliding, covered in black mud now.

Everyone in the neighborhood was watching, but nobody was helping. The comedy was too rich, like discovering Buster Keaton for the first time.

Ivy was mad, of course. She stalked into the house and slammed the screen door. She would go back into the kitchen now, Geno knew, and reorganize the cupboards for the fifth or sixth time, making sure all the spices were arranged alphabetically.

He finished his beer, giggling at Green.

Then Ivy screamed.

4

Eva Jung sat at the kitchen table, studying her fingers on the tablecloth. They were the one thing she took great comfort from, those long, slender fingers of hers. Though the knuckles were now arthritic and swollen, the fingers themselves were still quite handsome, she thought, the nails smooth and manicured.

Though she was by all appearances a frail woman and most on Pine Street believed she wasn’t exactly baking with a hot oven, Eva’s mind was quite sharp. Sharp enough to know her neighbors were conspiring against her. They disliked her because her grass was often too long and her weeds unplucked, her fence falling over and the house badly in need of painting…but these things were not her fault. Leonard was no longer here and he had always taken care of such things. She hired a boy to attend to the yard work in the summer, but only once a month.

Ever since Leonard died, she came out of her big old house only rarely and mostly at night when her neighbors could not watch her.

She did not like to be watched.

Or listened to.

Or even noticed.

When the muck rose from beneath the earth and laid waste to her yard, she was really not that surprised. In the back of her mind she had been expecting catastrophe for years.

Through carefully parted Venetian blinds, she watched it flow and gurgle.

It would be dark soon. She knew what would happen then: the monsters would come….just as they came for her when she was a little girl shivering in her bed. Long-armed and red-eyed, they’d come creeping out of the darkness, slithering and hungry.

When Ivy Desjardins screamed, distracting the others, Eva kept her eyes on Mr. Green out in the road, fighting his way from his stalled car in the mud sea. She was the only one on Pine Street that saw him go under for the last time just as she was the only one that saw what grabbed him.

Monsters. There are monsters in the muck.

5

At the Albert household, Tony was on his ass.

The house had not only shaken, it had shifted…and enough to knock him off his feet. Earthquake, it had to be a goddamn earthquake. His bladder still full and Stevie yipping like the little pansy he was, Tony got up and carefully walked over to the window. He stepped lightly as if his weight would bring the house down around him.

Holy shit.

He saw the black muck oozing in the streets, flooding and surging and slopping through yards. There was wreckage in the neighborhood. Porches damaged and picnic tables flipped over, lots of assorted junk floating in the mud sea—everything from inflatable pools to bird feeders to clumps of decorative shrubbery.

A mudslide? Is that what this is?

It was the first thing he thought. Like out in California where heavy rains washed out entire hillsides and the houses built atop them. But for something like that to happen there had to be a whole lot of rain to create enough mud for a slide in the first place, and they hadn’t gotten much of that lately.

Then what? What?

Stevie yipped at his heels.

“Shut the fuck up,” Tony told him.

The mud was everywhere, flowing and sluicing, seeming to rise as he watched. Where the hell was it all coming from?

The cordless rang. He saw on the caller ID that it was Marv O’Connor from down the block. “You seeing this shit, Tony?”

“Am I ever. What the hell is it about?”

“I don’t know, but I think our pool game is canceled for tonight.”

Tony laughed. “You’re lucky. I was going to show you a few moves.”

“I bet you were.”

It was an inside joke: Tony had lost fourteen of the last twenty weekly games. He owed Marv over two hundred bucks, but Marv knew he’d never get it just as Tony knew he’d never pay it. They were both okay with that.

“Well, you get bored over there, put on your waders and come over. Fern is making steak sandwiches. I’m providing the beer.”

Tony grinned. Marv brewed his own beer. It was strong stuff. The last time Tony drank some—an odd coconut-flavored concoction—he got so drunk he fell off the porch and threw up on himself. Twice.

“Sounds good, but if I come, I have to bring Gollum with me.”

“Ah, the kids love Stevie. Bring him over.” Marv laughed. “You know, you two are closer than you think.”

Tony set down the phone and, right away, his cell rang. Grand Central Station today.

If it was another political call, he was going to puke.
Vote for me because I am honest and hardworking and middle-class just like you. I am not a money-grubbing prick taking money under the table and dry-fucking the people who put me into office. There is not one drop of corporate jism on my chin.

But it wasn’t another desperate politico, it was Charise calling from her office. “Tony…oh my God…do you see what’s happening out there?”

“Yeah. I’m looking at it right now.”

“It’s going on all over town. They’re saying it’s coming up from below.”

“How can that be?”

“That’s what they’re saying. You better get out of there.”

He laughed dryly. “Really? And how am I supposed to do that? There’s got to be three feet of black, runny shit in the streets. My little Celica would bog-down in ten feet.”

“Is Stevie okay?”

Is Stevie okay?
Yeah, this woman was precious, all right. She had a tipped uterus and couldn’t have children, so she pressed her maternal, adoring, totally fucked-up mother love onto that hairball. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so goddamn pathetic. Like some crazy, dried-up old bag lady pretending her dolls were real children or the thirty stray cats in her living room were some kind of extended family. He didn’t even like to think about all the times she’d embarrassed him in public because of that damn dog. Other women (ones that weren’t fucking nuts) would show pictures of their kids and Charise, true to form as the bug-job she was, whipped out pictures of that mangy little turd on her iPhone. Stevie napping. Stevie playing with his ball. Stevie with his faggoty winter sweater on. Stevie sitting on her lap (probably afraid that Donna Peppek’s aged feline—Buttercup—would kick the piss out of him). Dear God. All the other women would get that look on their faces—sympathy and remorse for Char’s decaying mind and barren womb, and the guys would just turn away.
Poor Tony, he married a real head case.

“Tony? Tony? Is Stevie okay?”

No, some gerbils beat the hell out of him and then gang-fucked him. Sorry, hon. Now how’s about we get a real dog? One that I don’t have to feel ashamed of?