Slither (27 page)

A relevant question, but the answer wouldn't do
them any good.

The V -8s valve covers did indeed exhibit several
holes, but the closer Slydes looked the more it occurred to him that they weren't drill marks. The tiny
holes varied in diameter, their edges ... irregular.

Slydes put his face right up to a cover. "Looks more
like something burned through the metal ...

"Fuck!" Ruth blurted. She began to sob again.
"What-what's that down there?" A dirty finger
pointed to the bottom of the engine compartment.

Slydes saw it at once.

Curled up in the oily bilge were several dead worms.

Annabelle threw her snorkeling gear down in the sand.
"That was really gross. Did you see that?"

"Sure did," Trent said. He sat down to rest, trying
very hard not to overtly stare at Annabelle's almost totally naked body. "Looks like those little pink parasites
made mincemeat out of your bristleworm nest. Chalk
one up for the good old order of nature."

Wet now, Annabelle's bare skin shone in the high
sunlight. "Those little worms looked just like the ones
in my lobster, and you know what? I think they're just
baby versions of that really big worm I found in the
shower. -I think they'rethe same type of worm."

Trent's eyes followed the line of her legs. "Could be,
I don't know from worms."

"It's just gross," Annabelle emphasized. "That shower
worm was over a foot long. They're probably all over
the island but we just don't know it ... along with
those yellow ticks-or whatever she said they were."

"Nora said they were worm eggs, I think. Ova. I
don't know what you're all bent out of shape over.
They're just worms, Annabelle. You see a worm, you
step on it."

Annabelle made a sour face at the recollection.

Now Trent was staring at her fat-free abdomen as
she bent over to get something from her bag. The way
her breasts hung down in that pose ...

Trent was grinding his teeth. Those things should
hang in the National Gallery of Art... .

Annabelle pulled out her flask and took a long hit.

Trent swatted at a few mosquitoes, then withdrew
some repellent from his own bag. "What are we going
to do now?"

Annabelle frowned toward the gulf. "I don't know
about you, but I think I'll get drunk."

Now you're talking, Trent thought. She was a prize,
all right, and more so when she had a few in her. He
rubbed the repellent on his arms and neck. "That
sounds like a plan, but I need to do a radio check with
my post first. I've been doing it with my cell phone, but
there hasn't been any reception all day."

"Mine-crapped- out earlier, too."

"So did Nora's. You can't trust technology these
days, but one thing you can trust is an army radio. I've
got a portable in my tent."

They meandered back to the campsite, trading hits on
the flask. Annabelle's anxiety over seeing all those
worms seemed to recede as the rum worked into her. Aw,
Christ, Trent thought. I am one lucky son of a bitch ...
She had her arm around him as they made their way
down the trail, her damp body bumping against his. She
sure as shit makes it easy getting into her pants, he
thought. She never wears any ... When they got back to
the camp, though, she pulled on a tube top.

Damn.

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Trent quickly came back from his tent, bearing the
weighty handheld radio. He switched on the service
frequency.--

Annabelle sat idly on the picnic table, wagging her
legs.

"Jay
One, this is Area November calling for radio
check," he said into the unit. "Do you copy?"

When he released the transmission key, all that came
back was throbbing static.

"I'm going to go take a nap," Annabelle decided and
got up.

Trent was pissed. "I thought we were going to get
drunk."

"I changed my mind." Moments later, she was getting-into her tent.

Moody bitch, Trent thought. Always jerking guys
around. Frustrated, he rekeyed the radio. "Jay One,
this is Area November. Do you copy?"

Just more throbbing static.

This is really fucked up, he thought. Cell phones were
one thing, but this was a secure military radio band.

He frowned, and still couldn't shake the inexplicable
notion: I'll be damned if that doesn't sound just like a
jammer ...

Loren snorkeled concentric circles around the largest
body of coral. Any evidence of bristleworms was just
as disconcerting as before. They were all either
bloated ... or emptied out and dead. His flippers languished, then stopped when he happened upon a
thorny starfish. The creature didn't move when he
picked it up. Is it dead? he wondered.

When he flipped it around, he saw a stream of tiny
pink worms exiting the aperture that was the starfish's
mouth. With his finger then, he flipped over a common
urchin, and found its underside pocked with tiny yellow ovum.

Jesus! The parasites are all over the place!

He came up for air a few more times, finding more
and more evidence of infection. The worms attack any
invertebrate in their path .. .

He floated around more incrustations of coral, and
found himself looking straight down the slope of the
trench.

In the water, it looked like a long black gouge in the
sea floor. Can't hurt to go in just a little, he told himself. He knew his earlier warnings of moray eels and sharks were exaggeration; both creatures rarely attacked humans. Loren wanted to see if their odd pink
parasite had ventured into the trench, too.

He entered slowly and turned on his flashlight.

A one-second glance was all it took.

Bubbles erupted from his lips. He shot to the surface
and immediately began to swim to shore.

What he'd seen lying in the mouth of the trench was
a human corpse with slabs of dough-white flesh hanging off its bones.

Nora tried to make calls on her cell phone for the rest
of the day-to no avail. I've never heard interference
like that before ... The odd, throbbing static over the
line. When she went out toward the very end of the
beach, hoping fora clearer track to the mainland ...

The same throbbing buzz.

Trent said it sounded like a jammer, she recalled, but
she knew he wasn't serious. Jammers were used by the
military, and this site was of no importance to the army
anymore. The lieutenant's later suspicions were something else altogether, but the more she thought about
it, the more she realized how ludicrous the idea was.

"No phone calls today," she muttered to herself and
snapped her phone off. She headed back. Where is
everyone? She hadn't seen any of the others for hours.
If they're still out in the water looking for bristleworms, that's one long swim. Actually she was more interested
in their newest discovery as far as worms went..-.

Nora couldn't deny her first impressions. Both the
newborn hatchlings from the tanks as well as their
foot-and-a-half long specimen looked like trichinosis
worms.

And there's no trichinosis worm like that ... unless
Loren's right about us discovering an entirely new
species.. .

More exciting things had happened in her field, just
not to her. She posed questions to herself as she walked
back to the camp, a number of what-ifs.

What if this worm really could infect higher mammals?

The most famous of the Trichinella species did exactly that: the Trichinella spiralis, notorious by its ability to infect all carnivores and omnivores. But that's an
inborn worm, she reminded herself, almost microscopic. And it's NOT a marine parasite.

That's when Nora spotted the nest of possums at the
foot of an old pine tree.

Possums were common in Florida, a clumsy rodentlike marsupial mostly known for waddling into the
middle of highly trafficked roadways, but they actually
flourished in tropical woodlands. Nora leaned over to
look at the nest of animals.

They're all dead .. .

It was a mother, with a half dozen young. The adult
lay askew, mouth and eyes opened, little legs stiff. It
appeared to have died recently-no sign of flies, maggots, or other parasites. Nora got down on one knee to
look closer ...

The infant possums weren't moving either, but they
seemed ...

Bloated, she saw.

So young they remained hairless, the newborns all
possessed bellies that looked distended.

Nora quickly retrieved a box from the head shack,
returned, and transferred the adult possum and one
baby back to her lab.

It didn't take her long to get one of the infants under
the microscope. Oh no, she thought the instant she
sectioned the hairless abdominal wall.

Somehow, she wasn't surprised.

In the bright, magnified circle, it was almost stunning the way the hundreds of tiny ova poured forth.
The cilia on each yellow egg roved vigorously. To a person in her field, this spectacle was fascinating.

And potentially horrifying.

Now-. . . don't take your eye off, she ordered herself.
Don't even blink ...

It wasn't her imagination. Very minutely, the ova
were growing.

She barely noticed Trent coming in behind her.

"Ready for something weird?" he asked.

I'm LOOKING at something weird, she thought.
"What's that?"

"I still can't get a call out on my cell phone, and now
I can't even get out on this."

Nora saw that he was holding up a clunky green radio, antenna extended. "You're kidding me. Are the
batteries dead?"

"Nope. Full charge. All I get is that same static that
wavers in and out."

"I kept getting the same thing on my cell phone just
a few minutes ago. I even went out to the far end of the
beach facing the mainland."

"Like I said before," he told her. "It sounds like a
military jammer. What do you make of that?"

Trent distracted her. She wanted to continue with
her dissection. "Why would the army jam this island?"

"There's no reason that I can imagine, and that's
what bothers me. I just have this funny feeling that
something's going on here-that-they didn't tell me."

Nora thought about it. "You know, it could simply be
some other kind of interference." She pointed to the
door. "Or maybe there's some naval ship out in the
gulf, testing its jammers."

"That's an idea," he agreed. "Or it could be the air
force base in Tampa, or the National Guard on maneuvers somewhere."

These were logical explanations, so ...

Why is he paranoid? she wondered.

"What's this?" he asked next, spying the dead possum in the box.

"I found a nest of them, all dead. And-well--I
guess I should tell you this now-but they were killed
by the same parasite that was in Annabelle's lobster.
And it's the same species of worm that she found in the
shower yesterday."

The information jolted him. "But that thing was as
long as my forearm. The worms from the lobster were
tiny."

"They grow fast," was all she could say, and when
she looked back in the microscope, she saw that the
ova had doubled in size. "We could have a bit of a
problem here. These worms can infect mammals,
and..."

"We're mammals," Trent said very dryly. He stared
off through his next contemplation. "And we don't
have any way to get off the island, and to make matters
worse-"

"No way to call out to someone," Nora realized. "But
we shouldn't overreact. Small mammals are one thing,
but humans are much more sophisticated, not to mention we have much more efficient immune systems." It
seemed an appropriate thing to say, but there still wasn't much consolation. "But we'll still have to safeguard ourselves."

"What do you mean?"

Her eye was back at the microscope. "We don't know
what this is, but if it's anything like what we think it is
we shouldn't take chances." The ova continued to grow
under the microscope, a shimmering, yellow spectacle.

"What's the worst-case scenario?" 'Dent asked. "What
are the chances of these things actually being able to
kill humans?"

A lanky shadow crossed the room. "They may have
already done that ..."

It was Loren who'd come in.

Nora was almost shocked by his appearance: dripping wet and trembling.

"You look like you've just seen a ghost," Trent said.

"Not a ghost, a corpse," Loren replied.

"What?"

Loren dropped his gear. "I went back out to the
bristleworm nest. The parasite's infected everything-I
couldn't believe how fast it tore through the area. Then
I found a dead body."

Trent squinted. "Are you sure? The three of us were
out there an hour ago. There was no body."

"It was in the trench."

Nora stood up and faced him. "Loren, this is very
important. Was the body infected by the parasite we've
found?"

He sat down, brushed wet hair out of his eyes. "I
couldn't tell, it was too decomposed."

"So it's been there a long time," Trent figured.

"Not necessarily. In water this warm, plus bottom
feeders? A body wouldn't last long at all," Nora said.

"And who the hell's body is it?" Trent asked next.
"We're the only ones on the island."

Nora looked to Trent. "Go find Annabelle and bring her in here. We're going to have to have a group discussion. Her little photo shoot isn't important anymorewe don't know what we might be up against, and with
no boat and all our phones inoperable, we might be in
some serious trouble."

"What about the phones?" Loren asked with some
alarm. "My cell phone worked fine yesterday."

".ny it now,. Trent suggested. "Nothing's been getting through all day, not even my radio."

'Lieutenant Trent says the interference sounds like a
jammer," Nora added.

Loren's brow creased at the comment. "That's ridiculous." And he dug his cell phone out of his bag, dialed
some numbers.