Slither (2 page)

Special thanks to: Mike Anthony and Michael Kennedy
for my wonderful Header movie, Bob Strauss for indefatigable proofing; Cedric Perez for tech stuff; Shay
Prentiss and Christine Torres; Noel and Lance at X Ray
Productions; Jen and Monica from Rue Morgue; Kelli
and Kelly from Horror Web; Sascha Mamczak and Francis
Hoch; Juan Carlos Poujade; Barry Anderson, Thomas
Deja, Aaron Williams, Christine Morgan, Nick Yak. Also
Kathy, Mindi, Pam, Tess, and Wendy.

When Carol noticed the two ticks attached to her nipples, she very understandably screamed.

She screamed right into Howie's face.

Parrots screeched, lifting off from palm trees; other
animals tore away through the brambles. Were he not
so shocked himself, it might even have occurred to
Howie that Carol's scream barely sounded human. It
sounded, instead, machinelike: a bad bearing in a highrpm motor.

"Ticks!" Carol shrieked after the scream.

Howie stared at the breasts he'd been dying to see all
month, and then his mouth fell open. He thought: Holy
Jesus God Almighty! What are those THINGS?

And the things-barely the size of jelly beansseemed to be quivering.... .

Are they ... are they really ticks?

"Get them off, get them off, get them off, Howie!"
She shuddered against the tree, her smart and very expensive Victoria's Secret "tankini" top on the ground. All that remained in the way of apparel were stylish
hot-pink Converse tennis shoes and the tiny floral
bikini bottom. Howie had spent the entirety of his junior year yearning to see her like this ...

But not while she's screaming bloody murder with
two-two-two THINGS on her nipples!

She slid down to the ground, probably close to clinical shock now. "Relax, relax!" He tried to calm her.
"Don't pass out! I don't think they're ticks and I don't
think they're leeches...."

What, then?

Slugs?

Carol's face was paling. Her body began to convulse
like slow electrocution.

Oh, shit! Howie hunkered down, gingerly cupped
one tangerine-firm breast, and tweezed one of the
things off her left nipple.

It didn't let go at first, and he couldn't help but imagine the tiniest mandibular hooks sunk into the tender
nipple-tip, drawing out blood. When it finally came off,
a few minute specks of blood welled up. The bug, tick,
slug, or whatever it was felt akin to a cooked pea, only
this "pea" was shiny, as if wet, and a strange yellowish
white, while its outer sheath possessed scarlet dots.
Howie turned the thing over, pinched between his fingertips, and squeezed ...

Oh, Jesus, that's gross!

There were no mandibles-no hooks-but he
thought he did detect the tiniest follicles retreat back
into the thing's body. Some kind of parasitic slug or
something, he guessed. When he tweezed it harder between his fingers, blood did indeed effuse, along with
threads of some milky liquid.

He pulled the other one off Carol's right nipple and
flicked it away.

"Carol?"

She'd already passed out, a shock of brandy-colored
hair falling over her eyes.

Some weekend island shindig, he thought. What a
bust. Got to get her back to the shack, got to tell Alan
and Leona. And then, ever the gallant college student,
Howie picked her up and carried her back down the
trail.

For about twenty feet.

Oh, man!

She wasn't fat at all, but the opposite: trim, svelte, a
pixie. Carrying away damsels in distress, however, was
only easy in the movies. I'll never be able to get her
back to the shack like this....

So he left her.

And he ran.

It had been Alan's idea to bring the girls out to
Pritchard's Key. "It's the perfect party place," he assured Howie. "Nobody goes there. The island's surrounded by big-ass rocks, and there's no beachfront.
No place to dock a boat."

"Then how are we going to dock there?" Howie
asked.

"I know where the inlets are," Alan answered, and
there're only a few, but if we get there at high tide, we
motor the Whaler right in neat as a pin, and no one can
run us off-not even cops."

It sounded great to Howie, and what Alan told him
next sounded even greater: "Carol finally dumped that
jock she was dating, and now she's hot for you, man.
She even said you were cute!"

Howie nearly choked on his Corona Light. "How do
you know?"

"Leona told me the other night when I was done giving her the best sex of her life," Alan proudly revealed,
and Leona and Carol are best friends. Buddy-bro, we'll get those girls out to Pritchard's Key, get 'em all
pissy drunk on Jaeger Bombs, and ball their brains out.
They'll probably even do that little lezbo thing they
do-and let us watch."

That was all Howie needed to hear.

There was a cabin in the middle of the island that
Alan already knew about. "Party Central, man." It
looked more like some kind of old maintenance shed
when Howie finally saw it. "What the hell is this building doing on an island that's inaccessible?" he asked.

"It used to be some kind of army post," Alan informed him, "but I mean, like, a long time ago, in the
fifties or something. They finally closed it down. Anyway, this building was some kind of storage shed."

Howie couldn't have cared less.

Alan and Leona had been setting up the Coleman
stove when Carol winked Howie over. "Let's go for a
walk," she whispered.

It had been a long walk.

Howie knew he was good-looking, and had a certain
style that women liked, but Carol was a dish-anda-half. All long lines and curves, sleek tan legs, broadhipped and flat-bellied. She's the best-looking hunk of
stuff I've ever been out with, he realized with some incredulity. And she's ALL OVER me! Once they'd had a
nice, long hand-holding walk across the island ...

... that was it.

One second they'd been traipsing along, and the next
second they were lip-locked.

"I don't usually lust after guys," she confessed
through a pant, "but I've been lusting after you for a
year...."

And that's when she'd taken her top off-

-and started screaming at the two ticklike things
stuck to her nipples.

As he ran, Howie found that the island was bigger than he'd thought. Where's the damn trail? He got lost
very quickly, tramping through the lush, tropical
woodland. If only he'd brought his cell phone. He
wended his way farther and suddenly found himself
standing in a bloom of sunlight, looking at water. The
inlet, he realized, where they'd moored off Alan's
Boston Whaler. But-

Wait a minute...

There was a boat tied off to some mangrove roots
right there in front of him....

That's not our boat....

It was just a skiff with a little outboard in back. This
must be one of the other inlets Alan was talking about,
Howie realized. The small boat rocked gently in the
water. So ...

There was someone else on the island.

Howie stepped aboard the skiff, hoping dismally to
find a radio, a cell phone, even a flare gun, but there
was nothing. He picked up a small card on the floor.

CENTRAL FLORIDA WEST COAST TIDE TABLE, it read.

Makes sense, Howie thought. Someone else came
out to the island to party, just like we did. Naturally
they'd have a tide table because you couldn't get a boat
in here during anything but high tide.

Howie frowned at the card. It was last month's table.

He picked up a slip of paper in the console. Credit
card receipt. Herbster's Marine Exxon. The captain of
the skiff had obviously filled his tank there. Same place
Alan filled up this morning, Howie remembered. But
this receipt was dated three weeks ago. The card
holder's name was Robb White.

The gears of Howie's brain turned. Robb ...
White ... Recognition. That guy on the football team,
a senior, he recalled with a rising dread.

Dread because Robb White and some of his friends
had been reported missing ...

Three weeks ago.

Not cool, Howie thought. But this was just more to
process; Carol was the priority. Howie scanned the
skiff one last time for a radio or cell phone, came up
with nothing, then turned to step off the craft.

Awwwwww, SHIT!

The corpse of a young woman floated languidly just
beyond the bow. The way her sable-hued hair fanned
out over the water was almost pretty.

The rest of her wasn't so pretty.

She was probably naked, but that couldn't be totally
discerned for what was wrapped around her like a pink
garden hose: something that had to have been a snake.
It coiled about her upper thighs, waist, and bosom,
then her neck, and it glistened intricately. Sickening
enough as it was, what sickened Howie more was the
creature's color: pink, like the inside of someone's
cheek. The woman's eyes no longer existed within their
sockets but instead floated free, suspended by tendrils
of optic nerves. The thing's tail roved listlessly between
her wax-white legs, while its head ...

Howie gaped.

The thing's head burrowed into the woman's mouth,
and its elongated body seemed to pulse ... as if pumping something down through her esophagus.

Howie had had enough. Gotta-get-OUT OF
HERE! But as he leaped off the skiff, something
snagged his vision on the other side of the quiet inlet.

His eyes flicked up-

A man was standing between some trees. He wore
some sort of black jumpsuit with integrated mittens.

And a gas mask and hood.

Military, Howie thought.

When he blinked, the man was gone.

Howie ran back into the woods as if he were being
chased by demons.

"Would somebody explain to me just exactly why this
Pritchard's Key place is so special as far as scarlet
bristleworms go?" the bikini'd blonde at the end asked.
Her name was Annabelle Omart-noon-blue eyes, and
a body like a game show hostess's. She hailed from
New York, the National Geographic editorial offices.
Her body suggested a dedicated regimen of exercisemost likely in upscale fitness salons. The only thing
missing was a preeminent suntan. The woman sat demurely, seat-belted in to the helicopter's muster bench.

"It's because of something called a counterstropic
rivulet," Nora answered with absolutely no interest.
When she didn't elaborate further, Loren Fredrick, her
associate, continued, "Which is actually just an uncharacteristic surge of runoff water from the mainland.
Gravity and the terrain siphons this water to a single
point and a gradient underwater current in the gulf
pushes it outward. Pritchard's Key just happens to exist
at the same point where the surge begins to disperse."

The army guide wasn't listening, and neither was the
cabin master, a gruff warrant officer. They were both
looking at the blonde. Every so often, even the pilots
glanced back from the cockpit to ogle her.

Professor Nora Craig simply sat there and frowned.

She lapsed back against the cabin wall as Loren attempted to dazzle the others with information about
the remarkable scarlet bristleworm. Nora herself let
the helicopter's rotor noise lull her away from the
creeping trickle of low self-esteem. Why am I letting
that blond calendar girl posing as a photographer
make me feel insecure? Perhaps it was just a case of
raging hormones.

She let her eyes move across the cabin, trying to consider everyone in objective terms. Lieutenant Trent
looked more like one of those guys who work in a department store appliance section. Pushing forty, smirking, not much going on behind the eyes except a lack of
enthusiasm. Evidently he was assigned to the army's
public relations unit, the "PR mouthpiece between the
military and the civilian contingent," he'd explained.
"Whenever civvies need to be shown around army
property, I'm the guy they send." Trent's fatigues were
crumpled, which might indicate how often this desk
driver wore them. If it weren't for the distraction of the
blond photographer's cleavage, he would probably be
asleep.

Loren Fredrick was Nora's teaching assistant at the
university. Totally unsocialized like many professional
academics, he sat as gawkily as a textbook nerd. Tall
beanpole physique, knobby knees, and a long neck that
showcased what had to be one of the biggest Adam's
apples in human evidence. Buckteeth, too, and a mop
of wiry dark hair. He sat at the edge of his cabin seat,
animatedly explaining the evolution of bristleworms in
general and their unique "parapodic" means of loco motion more specifically. He's boring them silly, Nora
thought, and he doesn't even realize it.

The army warrant officer was a typical Neanderthal
with his green helmet and ham-hock-sized jaw, and the
two pilots up front were little different. Somebody
peed in the pool, Nora mused over their brute, caveman features. The gene pool, that is. They clearly bore
no interest in this excursion, and if they were even listening to Loren's grueling dissertation, it was to look at
the blonde sitting next to him. They're just here for the
ride and the eye candy, Nora realized.

"Right, Nora?" Loren asked.

Nora blinked, reined her attention back in. "Oh ...
what?"

"I was telling Annabelle about the reproductive habits
of some bristleworms, such as the Eunice didacta."

Annabelle, Nora thought through the bored daze.
Oh, right. The blonde. He's calling her by her first
name, like they're best buds. "The female didacta will
actually ingest the entire posterium of the male."

'Posterium?" Annabelle pronounced.

"'The rearmost tip of the worm's body," Nora defined.

"Which, in the case of this species, also contains the
spermatic reservoir-its penis, if you will," Loren finished, grinning. "That's how the Eunice didacta has sex."

Annabelle's eyes grew wide. "How fascinating!"