Slither (14 page)

Who cares?

Nora walked down a trail, not even really aware of any
direction. Her flip-flops crunching over twigs could
scarcely be heard over the night sounds that pulsed all
around her. Lizards scattered wherever she pointed the
lantern light. An array of multicolored winged creatures
buzzed around her.

The head shacks stood dark now, a row of lonely
bunkers. She got her mind off the frenzied dream-and
the utter letdown of its conclusion-and thought back
on the details of the day.

Those things in the shower ...

There was little room for error after so close an examination. She and Loren were indeed the experts, and
they both knew now what the things had to be.

Motile ova. From some species of tropical annelid.

A worm.

She sat down on a stump and pondered. Some worms
were sexed, some were asexual, while others were hermaphroditic. The phenomenon of ova motility among
species of worms was well documented. The ovum, via
its own means of locomotion, would seek out its own
place to hatch, and certain parasitic varieties would
seek out a living host for that purpose. But these were
all marine species, and-

They're all tiny, she knew.

A mature worm ovum the size of a coffee bean?
How big would the ovum be when it was immature?

Then the most obvious question struck her:

How big would the gestating worm be?

The question totally confounded her, and she knew it
was doing the same to Loren. I can't wait to get those
samples back to the college, she thought. If she told
any of her peers she'd found a motile ova that big,
they'd laugh at her.

But now they'd be able to see for themselves.

Let it rest there, she decided. For now she knew she
needed to concentrate on the task at hand: finding a scarlet bristleworm for this smart-ass blond photographer.

Nora blanked her mind on the subject of Annabelle.
It was like at school. Sometimes you had to work with
someone you didn't like, and that's just the way things
were. Nora had never had a problem with clashing
personalities.

So why now?

Something felt ticking inside her. She turned the
lantern all the way down, to draw fewer bugs, and to
think about anything but Annabelle ...

That's when she realized her eyes were focused on
something ...

With the lantern off, darkness reclaimed the cove.

So ... what the hell is that light?

It wasn't coming from the first head shack that she and Loren were using as a lab. One of those down
there...

She kept the light off, and walked quickly down the
row of old missile units. She kept her eye trained,
thinking it would go away as she approached, that it
was just an odd reflection of moonlight, or some foxfire. But no ...

A thin beam of light seemed to be leaking out of the
roof of the head shack at the very end of the row.

She walked right up to the long brick building and
stared upward. Yeah. That's definitely light. Electric
light. The building's roof of corrugated metal was arch
shaped, and there was very clearly a hole in it. The
beam of light shot up into the trees.

Why
would
the
inside
lights
be
on?
None
of
these
head shacks had been used in years.

Then the obvious answer came to her. Trent checks
these places every month for signs of squatters and
vandalism. He probably forgot to turn the lights off last
time he checked.

No big mystery.

But when she turned to leave, something else caught
her eye.

More light.

At the very edge of the next building's roof, where
the metal met the brick, she saw the faintest line of
light leaking out.

Hmm.

She checked the rest of the head shacks and found
no further evidence of lights on inside. Then she
checked the doors and found them all locked.

I'll have to remember to tell him tomorrow...

She looked around and realized she was suddenly ill
at ease. She supposed this was a creepy place to be
alone in. Earlier, when she'd been studying the ova, she
thought she'd heard voices outside, even a shriek, but she knew it was either her imagination or a night bird
somewhere.

She strode hastily back to the campsite, or so she
thought when she realized she'd taken the wrong trail.

She was about to turn the lantern back on when-

A voice fluttered.

"God, that's good ..."

A woman's voice.

In another small cove, she saw pale shapes moving.
She kept the lantern off, squinting as the moonlight
brought out details. At first she wasn't sure, then-

I don't believe what I'm seeing.-. .

It was Trent and Annabelle, both naked.

How tacky, Nora thought. They're doing it standing
up.

Evidently Trent was stronger than he looked. Annabelle's arms and legs were wrapped around him as
Trent's pelvis stroked her in an almost machinelike
rhythm. Her breasts squashed against his chest, her ankles locked; she was hanging on to him-a monkey on
a tree, only Trent was the tree. Judging the noises that
came from Annabelle, it was apparent she was enjoying
it, but-

Nora was aghast. This was making love? This was a
physical gesture of passion? Nora's mind broke it down
to bare parts: They're just standing there, screwing.
They don't really even know each other! It was true,
they'd only met this morning, and here they were, two
animals in the woods.

Is that what it's all about? Nora wondered dismally.
I guess that's just the way some people are ...

Eventually, Trent lowered the blonde to the ground,
to continue, and then she broke into a new round of
gasps and moans, Trent's hips pounding onward, a
mindless derrick. Nora continued to watch from behind a tree without even knowing why. She didn't have a voyeuristic streak at all, and there was certainly nothing enticing about the scene. Annabelle's back arched,
her long, bare legs shooting up into the air in a wide V.
Nora had never seen anything so perfunctory in her life.

Just leave, she told herself. This is depressing.

She should've obeyed herself, but she chose to watch
a few moments longer, and in those moments, Annabelle's face turned toward her ...

Nora's heart jolted.

In the moonlight, Annabelle's eyes met hers. Oh my
God! She sees me!

Annabelle never said a word. She simply smiled.

Nora pulled herself back, turned, and ran away.

A crush of emotions buried her. She fled haphazardly back toward the campsite, images swimming in
her head. By most people's standards, what she'd witnessed was of little consequence. So what? she tried to
convince herself. There must've been some spontaneous attraction between the two of them, so then one
thing led to another. Nora was a scientist; she should
be able to understand that with no problem. But she
knew what a psychologist might say: that the real reason the scene upset her was that Trent had selected
Annabelle instead of her. It didn't matter that Nora felt
no attraction to the army officer at all, it was merely
the process of natural selection.

Being seen was the worst part. My God, she fretted.
That bitch will never let me live it down. Nora knew
she shouldn't care but she did anyway. The scientist in
her was losing out very quickly to the human.

Just go back to the camp and go to sleep. Forget
about it.

She stopped a moment to rest, that jolt to her heart
finally wearing off. She placed her hand against a tree-

-then flinched.

What was that?

Her hand touched something.

A stud of some sort.

She turned the lantern up to look .. .

In the bright halo of gaslight, she couldn't have appeared more puzzled. A screw of some kind had been
embedded in the tree trunk, but there wasn't a screw
head at the end of it, as she expected.

Instead it was a clear glassine bulge. Like a lens.

Slydes lounged back in the fishing chair at his boat's
aft. He raised his leg and farted, and found an inexplicable satisfaction in the act. He felt content now that
they'd gotten in and out of the head shack without being seen, and more content in knowing that Jonas
would turn that bag of pot into at least a thousand dollars in cash very quickly. It did secretly bother him,
though-that Jonas made more money with his gig
than Slydes did with his. Jonas believed that was proof
of some intellectual superiority, but-

I'm smart too, damn it, Slydes reassured himself. He
knew how to catch gator and effectively butcher it,
didn't he? And he even knew how to prep and tan the
hides, and that wasn't easy. Once he and his poaching
buddies had thrown a gator-skinning contest (Jonas
had had the audacity to not bet on his brother), but
Slydes had won lickety-split. I put 'em all to shame, he
remembered.

He didn't have anything to prove to anyone.

He lobbed the next beer bottle over the side. Goin'
through 'em tonight ... And why shouldn't he? It was
hot and he'd worked hard all day. But now all those
beers were leading to the inevitable result. The deck
creaked when he lumbered to the stanchion cable and
opened his pants. More inexplicable satisfaction arrived when he leaned back and pulled a hard piss over the
side. Ahhhhhhhhh ... -

After a couple of minutes, Slydes was still urinating.
Damn! Come on, peter. I ain't got all night. He half expected to see the lagoon rise an inch or two. Bet it
pisses the fish off, he allowed himself the scholarly hypothesis. But when he was shaking off, he ...

He squinted at the sensation. Not an itch, but-

Something tingled very slightly.

On his scrotum.

Not a modest man, Slydes pulled his "bag" up and
looked at it in the bright moonlight.

Fuck!

A beetle or something was clinging to one of his testicles. Bean-sized ... and very disconcerting. At first
he thought it might be some sort of sore-he'd had
those in the past-but then the "sore" was moving.
And the color?

That was the grossest part. The thing's shell was the
color of pus.

He plucked it off with haste, then turned on one of
the deck lights. Damn! he thought, outraged. The
fuckin' thing was on my 'nads! He squinted at it.

Some piss-yellow bug, but it wasn't hard as he'd expect a beetle to be. It felt hot, wet.

"Fucker," he grunted. "You're fish food," and he
flicked it over the side.

Thank God it hadn't bitten him-whatever it was.
He surely would've felt a sting of pain on so sensitive
an area. If anything, the area he'd plucked it off felt ...

Kind'a cool and tingly, he noted. It wasn't unpleasant in any way.

How'd the fucker get in my pants? he wondered
next. No biggie, it was gone now, but he figured it
must've crawled up his leg when they were cutting
through the woods to get Jonas's dope.

Suddenly Slydes twitched in place, stood up straight
and wide-eyed. Now he felt another sensation.

"You gotta be shittin' me!" he muttered and stuck
his hand down his pants in the back. He fished around
and, sure enough, pulled another one of the things out.

It had crawled right down into the cleft of his buttocks. Another one in my ass crack!

In truth, though, Slydes had to feel sorry for the bug.

Dumbfounded, he checked his entire body and
found no more of the things.

Some squirmy kind of leech or slug, he reasoned.
He'd picked it up in the woods, so that meant Jonas
and Ruth probably had too.

He thunked down the steps to the cabin.

"Jonas! Ruth! The two of you's better check yourselfs for bugs. I just picked two off me."

But when he looked around, no one was there.

Belowdecks reeked of pot smoke. He'd seen them
down here earlier, toking up some of the stash they'd
brought off the island.

Slides climbed back up and popped the cap off another beer. He looked out toward the island's massive
tropical forest. I wonder where the hell they went ...

The warm bare wood beneath Ruth's nakedness felt
weirdly luscious; in fact, her entire body felt that
way-cocooned in the wonderful, lulling buzz. Jonas
took them to this old shed when they'd left the boat;
he'd seen it on previous trips, just an old storage shed
of some kind. A lot better than doing it in the woods,
she thought, with God knows what kind of bugs crawling around. Not to mention that snake that had jumped
on her earlier .. .

Jonas was already up and had his clothes back on. "Want another toke, baby?" He hoisted his favorite
carved-wood pipe.

She grinned and shook her head, hair disarranged
and skin teeming with sweat.

Jonas took a few more hits, then popped a brow. "I
swear my stuff gets better and better. No wonder my
bagmen are screamin' at me to grow more."

Ruth slowly sorted her thoughts. "A year from now,
you'll be rich, Jonas. When we start more plants in the
other head shacks."

"Damn straight." Something seemed to catch his eye
in the corner. "What's this?"

Ruth felt too lazy now to even lean up and look.

They hadn't noticed it before, but Jonas picked up a
drawstring bag. He curiously inventoried the contents:
"Swimmin' trunks, towels, suntan lotion ..." Then he
looked at her. "Shit, Ruth, someone left their shit
here."

"The photographers?"

"Naw, they're keeping their stuff at the campsite."

"Slydes said that college kids come out here sometimes," Ruth recalled. She had her flashlight set on
end, shining at the ceiling. It brought down a murky
umbrella of ringed light that Ruth found fascinating.
"They must've left it."

"Hmm. Yeah. Guess so." He seemed satisfied with the
conclusion. Another conclusion might've occurred to
him had he been observant enough to notice the portable
grill outside, and the beer cooler full of melting ice.

"Let's get going, I'm tired."