Worm (8 page)

As the scream came out of her mouth and the room seemed to spin round and round, her heart thundered in her chest and her own breathing sounded like wheezing bellows in her ears. The room was dimming as the sun set and her face was rinsed of color. She felt the blood drain out of her head and trunk and down into her lower extremities. Darkness filled her brain and she dropped to her knees, devastated by fright, completely numb and senseless. This was the aftereffect of absolute horror, of looking the worst-case scenario dead in the eye.

How much time passed before she was able to move or process even the simplest rational thought, she didn’t know. Shadows were beginning to crawl across the floor. The light coming in through the blinds was negligible.

She began to move.

She had to turn on the light and proceed very calmly now. A voice in her brain was giving her the same pep talk as when she went to look for Pat. She knew beyond a doubt that something very dirty and hideous had come into this room and snatched her son. She did not know what it was, but her mind kept telling her it was the snake that had gotten Pat.

Now it was in the house.

It was in
her
house.

It had killed her husband and now her infant son. Though part of her wanted to rage and scream, she did neither. There was no point in screaming. Screaming was to vent horror and to bring help, but there was no valve that could release the horror inside of her and no help to be found.

What she would do, she would do alone.

The snake was here somewhere and she would find it.

There was nothing left inside her now but the need to hunt the thing and bring about its doom.

Yet, for all her hate and all her resolve, she sank to the floor, sobbing…at least until her mouth opened and a wailing voice came out:
“WHERE’S MY BABY? WHERE IS MY BABY?”

14

Eva Jung lay on her bed, not asleep and not quite awake, thinking, dreaming, wondering about arteries and veins and capillaries. These are the words she used even though she knew what she was really thinking about were
pipes.
All the pipes that connected the town to the freshwater pumping stations and the wastewater treatment plant. An absolute network that united homes and factories, office buildings and apartment houses as arteries, veins, and capillaries connected organ systems into a common whole.

Wasn’t that funny and wasn’t that strange?

In came the water and out went the waste, just like a living thing. The good, clean water came up through narrow pipes and aqueducts, all the bad stuff was sucked below into subterranean channels of night and dank brick catacombs where rats scratched and things bobbed in rivers of filth. It all went down there—the piss and shit, gray water and bacon lard, hairballs and menstrual blood, old spaghetti and animal fat, all the rotting waste, the vegetable and animal matter, the organic detritus of the human kind.

Down there, down below, down in the black, diseased, and reeking bowels of the city.

And it was there, she knew, that things mutated and took shape in the sunless, polluted, steaming channels and pipework. Oh yes. The very same things that were rising now and spilling into the streets and homes on bubbling rivers of black muck.

Knowing this, Eva decided the veins and arteries of the town were more like conduits that linked the dark underworld with the sunlit world of men. They were highways that led into every single house.

15

In the end, Marv O’Connor left Fern with the kids because there was no damn way he was letting her go out into the darkness with that goddamn reeking mud flowing in the streets. Fern weighed about 105 pounds soaking wet. He could just picture her getting washed away in the slop never to be seen again. No, this was a job for someone a little meatier and that was him. At 6’3” and 260 pounds, it was going to take some real mud to wash him away.

Besides, he was just as worried about Tessa Saldane as she was.

Help me…I’ve been attacked…

Those were the words Fern said Tessa used on the phone. Marv knew Tessa pretty damn well by that point. She wasn’t someone to call and say something like that unless there was a very real threat. She was far too old and far too proud for such theatrics.

But
attacked
…?

It was crazy.

It was no easy thing getting over to her house. Tessa lived at the very end of the block and that was a long, slow slog when the muck was up above your thighs. Marv was wearing his rubber chest waders or he would have been soaked to the skin with the filth which was not just mud and muck but sewage as well, judging by the vile stink of it.

After a good twenty minutes of chugging along, he finally got to Tessa’s.

He dragged himself up the porch and pounded at the door. His legs felt weak and weightless after pushing through the mud for so long.

“Tessa!” he called. “Tessa! It’s me, Marv O’Connor!”

There was no response. He threw the door open and charged in, calling her name and clicking on lights as he went. He got a bad feeling right away and wished he had brought something to defend himself with. Even a penknife. Anything. All he had was a flashlight.

It was the smell in the air that bothered him.

It wasn’t the gaseous, noisome stench of the black muck, but a smell that he was all too familiar with as a deer hunter: blood. The house was a ripe, reeking envelope of it. It smelled the way the gut shed up at hunting camp smelled in November…like a slaughterhouse. The stink of bowels and marrow, animal fat and oceans of draining blood.

But here…in Tessa’s house?

He moved faster until he reached the kitchen. Then he came to a dead halt as he reached for the light switch and clicked it on. The smell was so bad in there, so concentrated, that it brought his stomach up the back of his throat.

Then, in the light, he saw.

Tessa was dead. In fact, she was more than dead. She looked like she had been torn right open. She was laying in a pool of blood, more of it splattered against the counters and smeared on the cupboards and appliances.

Marv turned away.

When he turned back, something moved.

What the fuck?

It crawled out from beneath Tessa’s corpse, parting her hair like a comb…a worming, fleshy thing that seemed to be composed of ringlike segments, each of which seemed to be pulsating. It looked like some kind of millipede. More so, like some flesh-eating nightmare worm from a B-movie. It crawled free of Tessa, hitting the blood-puddled floor with a soft thud.

Then it raised its anterior end off the floor and showed him a perfectly oval cavity of a mouth with perfectly sharp teeth.

It hissed.

Marv took two shuffling steps backward, his hand blindly—and instinctively—reaching out for some kind of weapon, because he had no doubt this thing was a fucking killer. Maybe it was only two or three feet long, but it was thick around as his arm, muscular and evil with teeth made for shredding. His fingers fumbled across cutting boards and canisters of flour and salt.

The worm lowered its head/mouth back to the floor.

It began to vibrate. Then it began to move in his direction…slowly, slowly, but he had the oddest feeling that if it wanted to, it could fly right across the room at him with dizzying speed.

The butcher block. He yanked a carving knife free.

The worm came at him, not slowly now, but with amazing speed. He knew he could have dashed through the door, but the idea of turning his back on that monster was scary. He could just about imagine it climbing his spine and sinking its teeth into the back of his neck.

It leapt.

It was four feet away and Marv was brandishing a carving knife that could gut a pig, still it leapt…fearless, remorseless, almost manic with its need to attack. It made it to within a foot of him before he swung the blade and missed, his wrist knocking the worm to edge of the counter where it hung, the spiny protrusions jutting from its segments scratching to gain a hold.

Marv let out a cry and slashed at it with the knife.

He missed the head (if
head
it could be called) and slashed open a couple of its segments, that pissed out a vile, watery discharge that could not possibly be blood. The worm turned to fight. It struck at him and he slashed it again, laying it open. It made a weird trilling sound that might have been a cry of pain.

It knew then he was dangerous.

Like most predators, it was basically cowardly. Fattened and sluggish from feeding on Tessa, it wanted to kill, but it wanted an
easy
kill. So as he hacked at it again, it fled. It slithered over the counter with great speed and unstoppable power. It knocked aside dishes, overturned a flour canister, sliding behind the breadbox when he stabbed at it, jumping up and clinging to the underside of the cupboards when he brought the knife around.

It oozed copious amounts of foaming brown slime that left a dirty, greasy trail behind it. The fluid practically gushed from its segments.

Marv knew what it was trying to do.

The sink was full of black muck and that’s where it had come from and that’s where it was going now. It was retreating with a full belly. It did not want to fight; it wanted to hide.

It moved, it slinked, it slithered and wriggled.

He kept slashing at it, making damn sure it knew he meant business so it would not get any bright ideas in its little wormy brain and decide to counter-attack. He had to keep it on the defensive.

When it reached the sink, it turned and bared its teeth, hissing again.

The mouth darted at him, the segments elongating so its strike was fast and elastic.

Marv kept away from it, only slashing at it when it pulled back.

It tried to get into the left basin of the sink where the black goo was still bubbling and slopping. He slashed it, cutting it open. It tumbled into the right basin, twisting and writhing, its spines scraping over the shiny metal trying to get some kind of a grip and finding it nearly impossible.

Marv struck.

He brought the knife down and speared it just behind the head, slime and brown goo flooding the basin in a discharge of jelly. The worm hissed and flopped, but he had it and he knew it. But he wouldn’t have it long. He had it pinned to the sink, but he could feel its strength. It was flexing like a huge muscle, pulsing and straining, pouring out mucus, its body inflating and convulsing.

It would work itself loose and he knew it.

Kill it, kill this motherfucker!

“No, you don’t,” he said under his breath as its whipping tail tried to wrap around his wrist, its spines tearing open the back of his hand. He turned on the garbage disposal, the Insinkerator, and it began to whir and gurgle, a few bubbles of black goo coming up out of the drain cup.

The worm fought manically.

But Marv was determined.

He forced it into the drain, pushing it down with the knife until he heard the blades bite. The worm went stiff like a penis, throbbing and straining, then loose and limp and whipping. The Insinkerator blades chewed into it. He used his free hand to shove the bulk of the worm down into the drain.

More goo came bubbling up…but this was pink and meaty with foaming slime. The Insinkerator kept whirring.

Finally, Marv shut it off.

He stumbled away, refusing to look at the remains of Tessa and refusing to think about what had just happened.

16

Snarling like an animal, Ivy launched herself at the worm.

Geno saw her do it, but he was numb and helpless from worm toxins and the loss of blood. It was all like a dream to him. He was beyond the point where he even knew what day it was or where he was or how he had come to be there.

Ivy seized the worm with a murderous fury and tore it away from his knee. She gripped it right behind the head with both hands like it was a poisonous snake and right away, the worm began to writhe and squirm with muscular contortions and boneless gyrations. It was a powerful, sinuous creature that did not like to be grabbed. Its fanged mouth hissed, its head segment snapped from side to side, its body looped, but she held on with an impressive strength and determination.

“You fucking thing!”
she shrieked at it.
“You don’t come into my fucking kitchen with your filth and disease!”

The section she gripped seemed to sag and deflate.

The worm had a hydrostatic skeleton pressurized by fluid. The tighter she gripped it, the more the fluid was drained into other segments. But that hardly meant it was going to submit without a fight. Its body began to whip in her hands with violent contractions, the segments oozing out a thick, gelid mucus until she could barely hang on to it. They flattened. They elongated. They swelled with fluid.