Worm (12 page)

Donna stopped them there in the muck. For a few seconds, she barely breathed.

A great rippling passed through the mud just ahead of them as if something quite large had passed beneath it.

“Well, what the hell now?” Bertie asked.

“Just wait a minute.”

“I don’t have a minute to wait. I’m near dead now.”

Donna ignored her.

She heard the rippling again.

This time it was behind them. Now off to her right. It was like they were being circled by something under the mud. And as crazy as it seemed, the first thing that jumped into her mind was
shark,
even though that was perfectly ridiculous. Sharks didn’t swim in mud and they sure as hell didn’t live in fucking Wisconsin.

Yet…that eerie sense that they were being circled did not lessen. It increased.

Behind them, there was splashing…as if something had surfaced and then dove again.

“C’mon, Bertie, we have to get over there. It’s not far.”

“Isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”

Donna tried to move faster in the mud, but that only got Bertie bitching at her all the more. They had to move fast. Donna couldn’t explain it—and she sure as hell did not have the time to—but something out there was closing in on them.

Something very big.

Above, the full moon came out.

27

Tony wanted to pull Marv aside and say,
that’s not a baby she has, that’s not Jesse, it’s a fucking plastic baby doll. Kathleen’s carrying a fucking baby doll. Don’t you see that?
But, of course, he didn’t because he couldn’t and he figured he really didn’t need to; Marv was fully aware that Kathleen was crazy. And like Tony himself, he did not want to know the details of what had sent her wandering through the sludge with a baby doll.

Tony was thinking about Fern and the twins.

Did they really want to bring this crazy woman back with them? But then, what choice was there? They couldn’t leave her wandering. Fern would know what to do. Women always did. Tony was almost beginning to wish Charise were there. Even Stevie.

But he didn’t want to think about Stevie.

Kathleen had stopped.

By the time they became aware of it, she was fifteen feet behind them. She was just standing there, making a deep moaning sound that was nearly erotic in tone like she was quite near to getting off.

“Oh…oh…
oh,”
she said in a voice filled with confusion and delight. “It’s so warm. It’s so very warm. Can’t you
feel
it? It’s almost hot. I can feel it all over my legs, all over my…my…”

“Kathleen,” Marv said. “We have to go.”

She just stood there, hip-deep in the muck that seemed to be rising by the hour, struck senseless like she was in some kind of religious rapture. Marv called out to her and she started moving again, very slowly, plodding along like she had been wound up with a key.

She stopped again, went stiff as a pillar. She looked like a toy soldier in the moonlight. “Oh…oh…oh,” she said again. “It feels like it’s boiling, like it’s…it’s…” She never got farther than that. Her mindless rambling became a gasp of surprise, then one of pain.

Her hand had been trailing in the mud.

She jerked it free and there was a worm hanging onto it. It was a huge, bristled monster that looked to have the circumference of a wastepaper can. It had bitten into her hand and now it bit once again. Tony clearly heard the bones snapping under intense pressure. Kathleen whipped her head from side to side, screaming and flailing her arm, trying to rid herself of the thing, but it wasn’t working.

“Shit!”
Tony shouted out into the night.
“It’s got her! One of those fucking things has got her!”

He stumbled forward into the muck but Marv grabbed him, pulled him back. “No,” he said. “You can’t help her.”

Tony was ready to swing at him.

He
could
help her, but he goddamned well needed to get to her first…but then the worm rocketed up out of the muck and this time, it swallowed her entire arm right up to the shoulder blade. It retreated just as fast, its teeth peeling not only the sleeve of her raincoat free, but her skin as well. It peeled her arm right down to red meat and tendons.

“KATHLEEN!” he cried out.

She disappeared beneath the muck.

By then, Marv was dragging him off and Tony just didn’t have the strength to fight him.

Behind them, the muck roiled and sluiced and splashed upward in great foaming gouts.
“Help me!”
Kathleen cried out as she surfaced, her face black with mud.
“Oh dear God somebody please help me! IT’S GOT ME! IT’S GOT MEEEE—”

She thrashed in the bubbling sludge, but was beyond help. Absolutely beyond it. The worm kept biting at her, taking more of her with each strike. Its teeth gleaming like surgical knives, it scraped across her chest taking not only most of her coat away but her breasts, too. Great segmented loops of it wound her up, squeezing her until her screams became a choked, gurgling sound. Her bones were crushed with a sound not unlike dry autumn leaves under boots. Her head thrashed from shoulder to shoulder like some grisly puppet, a gout of dark arterial blood ejecting from her between her lips with incredible hydrostatic force.

Then she went limp, her insides bulging from her mouth.

One bloody hand still slapping at the gelid flesh of the worm, maybe out of reflex action, it towed her under the surface. Both Tony and Marv could clearly see a slow-cresting torpid wave moving down the street as the worm dragged her away to unknown depths to be fed on at its leisure.

“C’mon, Tony,” Marv said. “We have to go…”

But Tony just stood there, staring dejectedly back to where she had been in the muck. There was nothing there now, not so much as a ripple. No…there
was
something floating there and for one panicked moment he thought it might be one of her limbs.

But it was nothing like that.

Just the filthy baby doll floating on the surface of the muck.

28

Holed up in the O’Connor house were all the survivors of Pine Street: Fern and Marv O’Connor, the twins—Kassie and Kalie—and Tony Albert, Donna Peppek and Bertie Kalishek. As far as they knew, there was no one else. The mud sea outside was rising and soon it would be completely impassable. Marv figured if the goddamn National Guard didn’t arrive real soon, things were not only going to get desperate but downright ugly.

But as Fern had said, they were together and they were alive.

That was true, he figured. Unlike the other houses on Pine, he knew his was much older and had actually been a farmhouse back when there were no other houses on the street (which was then just a dirt drive). The point being, it was solid brick and it had weathered a lot of years. So far, it was weathering the mud sea, too, unlike a lot of the other prefabs that had nearly completely collapsed. He figured they were safe. And Fern, God bless her, kept a very well-stocked pantry, so nobody would go hungry.

Donna Peppek was doing her best to keep Bertie Kalishek under control and Fern had engaged the twins in a game of Crazy Eights. This by candlelight, of course, now that the power was out. Something which made little sense, because the lights were on across the street. Go figure.

Marv went down into the basement with Tony and grabbed the lanterns from the camping equipment. They were battery powered, but that was no problem because like food and toilet paper, Fern had stockpiled them. When they had the living room lit up nicely, they went into Marv’s little den at the back of the house and unlocked the gun cabinet. He had three weapons: a Mossberg four-ten, a bolt-action Remington 30-06 with a scope, and a .38 Special that had belonged to his dad. There was no ammo for the .38, but there were fifteen rounds for the Mossberg bird gun and ten for the Remington deer rifle.

They had food.

They had lights.

They had arms.

They were safe.

“I got this bad feeling things are going to heat up out there,” Tony said as he loaded the four-ten.

Marv nodded. “Me, too. If it was just me, I wouldn’t be too worried…but with Fern and the girls. I don’t know. I’m scared.”

“Let’s go make sure nothing happens to them,” Tony said.

29

The mud was moving out there.

Marv watched it through the picture window. It was no longer just slowly bubbling and oozing, now it was in motion. Huge, dark waves of it were cresting and splashing through yards and slamming into houses with considerable force. A wave of water was one thing, but a wave of mud had considerable weight behind it. As first one and then another hit the house, the living room trembled. The windows rattled. A painting fell off the wall. An anniversary clock on the mantel pitched to the floor and shattered.

“Everyone just hang on!” Tony called out.

Another wave was coming and it was much bigger than the other two. The only good thing about it was that waves of mud, despite their weight and force, moved very slowly. Marv told everyone to get behind the couch and brace themselves.

“Here it comes,” Tony said.

Between the moonlight outside and the streetlight at the corner, it was fairly bright out there. The light glistened off the rolling muck. But as the wave came, it threw a huge shadow before it and by the time it crested outside the living room window, it blocked out any and all exterior light.

It hit with tremendous force.

The house more than shook; it felt like it had been moved three or four feet. Things were falling from shelves and the plaster was cracking, tiles falling from the ceiling. And then…as the wave pulled back, there was a creaking sound and the picture window collapsed in its frame, a river of mud flowing in, knocking aside a recliner and a coffee table. It winked with shards of glass.

“Back into the dining room!” Marv called.

As they scurried away, taking one of the lanterns with them, he stood in about three or four inches of black, churning muck. Right away, he could see things moving in it. And not one or two worms, but maybe a dozen or more. One of them came up out of the mud and he booted it aside, he fired at another, missed, and hit it with the second round, splitting it nearly in two.

“Watch it!” Tony cried out.

A four-foot worm came out of the sludge, its mud-slicked, heaving body thick and spiny. Its forward segment opened, pulling back and revealing a sheath of needle-sharp teeth, each of which had to be at least an inch or two in length. It moved quickly with a rolling muscular contraction and it would have bit right into his leg if Tony hadn’t jumped forward and fired on it. The worms seemed to be made of little more than slime and juice contained in a rubbery envelope of tissue. When the birdshot hit it, it literally exploded into a spray of pulp.

Two others rose up, one making the most obscene sort of croaking noise like a fat bullfrog. Tony fired. But they were everywhere. The mud was a living stew of them and their elastic forms began unwinding from it.

30

“Watch it in there!” Fern heard Marv call to her from the living room and she didn’t need to be told twice. She knew damn well what to watch out for. That worm in the drain had been no bizarre evolutionary accident, but one of many. The muck was infested with them.

Kassie was crying and Kalie told her to knock it off. Fern did her best to soothe both of them. They were trembling and so was she. Tony and Marv were shooting and shooting, trying to turn back the tide of the wriggling invaders.

Then…Donna screamed.

She fell back, kicking her leg in the air. One of the worms had gotten into the dining room. Its teeth were buried in her ankle and it was chewing, simply gnawing with a grating sound of knives against bone. Its body undulated with convulsions as it gulped down what it tore loose.

“One side!” Bertie Kalishek said, pushing past Fern and the twins. “One side!”

By then, Donna was nearly out of her mind with pain and hysteria.

Bertie took it all most calmly. She stepped forward, lighting a Lark 100 and pulling two good drags off it as she lowered herself to her knees—no easy process at her age—and took hold of Donna’s thrashing leg. When she had it still, she pulled off the cigarette again until the cherry was glowing bright orange…then she stabbed it right into the side of the worm. There was a
sssstttt
sort of sound and the worm reacted immediately, dropping free and writhing on the carpet.