Worm (6 page)

“Jesus H. Christ!” he cried out, sitting up as the discharge kept flowing out of the bathroom, thick as syrup, warm and glopping like vomit.

Tony tried to climb to his feet, slipped and fell, madly brushing it from his face. A banner of toilet paper was hooked around his boot, a turd rolled off his lap as he scrambled to his knees. Drenched with piss water and just about everything else from the sewers, he gagged at the stench, dry heaves convulsing his stomach.

On his hands and knees, it was no longer dry-heaving but the real thing. He spewed out some bile until he was panting and gagging. Stevie stood there watching him. He was skinny as a drowned rat now that he was drenched in the muck, a streamer of toilet paper around his throat like a necklace.

Tony almost laughed at him, but he knew he looked worse.

This was just a fucked-up nightmare from beginning to end.

There was well over ten inches of the percolating, bubbling goo on the floor.
Wait until Charise gets a load of this.
The stink of rot and methane made his head swim. He had to get out of there before he was completely overcome by the fumes.

And the worm, dummy, don’t forget about the worm.

But he didn’t have to worry about that because just as the thought passed through his mind, the worm rose from the muck in the bathroom. Though it had no eyes, it directed its nodulelike head in his direction, a low, barely perceptible vibration coming from it.

Stevie started yipping at it right away.

The vibrating got louder. The entire worm was trembling with it, sending out tiny ripples through the muck. Its segments were pulsating. The head opened like the bulb of a flower, peeling back to reveal all those teeth that looked like shards of the sharpest bone. There was no denying that this thing was designed by nature to grab and hold on, to tear into flesh and glut itself on blood.

Very carefully, very quietly, Tony began to get up, keeping his eyes locked on the worm.

Stevie had stopped yipping now.

He was leaning forward on three legs, the fourth cocked like a pointer. Tony grimaced. This was a hell of a time for him to begin acting like a real dog.

“No, Stevie,” he said in almost a whisper.

The dog began to growl low in his throat. Of all things. Tony had never, ever seen him act this way. The worm was a threat and he was becoming territorial, drawing on some long-submerged instinct.

The worm was hissing now, gouts of fluid hanging from its mouth.

Stevie began to inch forward, stalking slowly.

“Goddammit, Stevie! Stop it!”

The dog was about four feet from him. He knew Stevie very well. That dog was very fast when he needed to be. Tony had a very ugly feeling that if he tried to grab him, he’d go racing right at the worm to engage in combat that he would never ever win.

Stevie stalked forward.

Tony knew he needed a weapon. Any old thing would do. Just something to throw at the worm to distract it, to buy him enough time to grab the dog and make it out the door.

“Stevie,”
he tried again.

It was pointless. Stevie was completely territorial. He was overwhelmed by atavistic genetic memory, channeling his evolutionary ancestors and their primal, savage need to protect what was theirs and destroy any and all invaders.

Goddamn dumb mutt, now’s not the time!

The worm’s hissing was very loud.

It accepted the contest and was ready to fight. It was a thick-bodied thing, only now it was even thicker, having compressed each coil until it looked like a very fleshy, mucus-dripping Slinky, its mouth wide, jaws extended, teeth like a ring of spikes.

Tony reached for the first thing he could find that had any true weight: a James Patterson novel in hardcover lying in Charise’s rocking chair. It was thick and heavy. He had read a Patterson once at Charise’s bidding and quickly went back to Elmore Leonard. If he could peg the worm with the book, then he would quickly change his opinion that Patterson’s books were of little use except as doorstops.

He got his hand on it, hefted it…then with a shrill barking, Stevie launched himself right at the worm.

“STEVIE, NO!”

The dog charged in and the worm did not move until he was well within striking distance. It waited there like a coiled spring and when Stevie came in for the kill, it moved…it rocketed forward like one of those gag snakes in a can. Its bunched and compressed segments released their muscular pressure and it shot out at Stevie like a bullet, moving with the same blurring corkscrewing motion it had used when it drilled through the wicker clothes hamper.

Stevie literally exploded in a Technicolor blur of blood, bones, and tissue.

The worm punched right through him in an eruption of red, scattering his remains in four directions. The dog had time to let out one pathetic squeal before he was disemboweled and nearly turned inside out. Meat and blood spattered the bathroom walls, tufts of hair drifting down like pillow fluff.

“STEVIE!” Tony shrieked as the worm bored through him.

Then it was coming for him, spinning like an ice auger and he threw the James Patterson book. It hit the worm dead-on, knocking it to the side and into the muck, the book nearly torn in half by the time it fell.

By then, Tony was running.

He grabbed his softball bat and went slipping and sliding through the living room, knowing the worm would be coming for him now and knowing he didn’t stand a chance. His best escape route was through the kitchen so that’s where he went. With any luck—
gah—
the worm would feed off Stevie and that would buy him some time.

Nearly drunk with terror and fear, he launched himself out the back door, flying right off the porch into the muck where there were far worse things waiting.

12

When Ivy screamed—and she screamed absolute bloody murder—Geno jumped out of his chair out on the porch, nearly broke his ankle tripping over the stoop, banged his hip on the door frame, and scrambled into the kitchen swearing under his breath.

He had no idea what he was going to see.

But by the time he got there, he was pissed off.

Ivy was backed up against the wall by the table. She had a rolling pin in her hand, of all things, and it was raised to strike like some incensed housewife in an old movie, preparing to brain her husband.

The floor was flooded in the black mud. There was only maybe an inch or two at most where he was standing, but over near the appliances and particularly in front of the sink, it was at least a foot deep.

“Holy oh shit,” he said. “What a fucking mess.”

The doors under the sink looked like they’d been nearly blown from their hinges and that’s where the stinking muck had come from: under there. It had flowed and sprayed in gouts, by the look of it. And that left only one possible explanation. The waste pipe had burst.

These were the things he saw within his first few seconds of entering the kitchen. It was ugly and smelling and a real mess, but none of it, of course, explained Ivy, who looked like she’d just found a head in the refrigerator.

“It’s under the sink!”
she said.
“Right under the fucking sink!”

Geno just looked at her. “What’s under the sink?”

It seemed like a perfectly rational sort of question, but it was lost on Ivy. She could only stare in the direction of the sink itself, moonstruck, her eyes looking almost swollen in their sockets, unblinking and bloodshot, a sheen of saliva on her chin. She still held the rolling pin high. She was absolutely frozen with it like some kind of classical Greek sculpture…sans the rolling pin, of course.

He was going to ask her again when one of the doors under the sink swung shut with a thud, dangling from its hinge. The other one was jammed, it seemed, halfway open.

Well, whatever it was, it was still in there.

Right away, Geno figured it was a rat. What else could it be? If the waste pipe had burst, bringing that sludge up with it, then it wasn’t that surprising to him that it might bring a rat up, too, from the sewers below.

A weapon was what was needed.

He saw the broom in the corner. Better than nothing. The handle was stout and heavy, more than enough to brain a fucking rat and especially one that had been shot up from the sewers in that tidal flow of muck and regurgitated under the sink.

“Geno…don’t…” Ivy managed.

But by that point, he was pretty much ignoring her because she looked like she was completely losing it, shaking and quaking, eyes wide and blanked with fear, a string of drool hanging from her lower lip. She was a mess, not that he was surprised. It didn’t take much to strip her gears; they were already worn precariously smooth.

This was a man’s job, Geno figured, and he would handle it, the way he handled most things with a wife that lived in a near-constant state of progressive mania. When the phone rang, she moaned, thinking somebody had died. When a car she didn’t recognize was parked across the street, it was criminals casing the joint for a robbery. The ache in her left arm was certainly an oncoming major coronary. Kids walking by were dealing drugs. When a chain letter came in the mail, there was a conspiracy being launched against her. Christ, she rarely left the house anymore because she was afraid of a) catching some horrible communicable disease like bird flu, and b) that she would be beaten and raped in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly.

That one always made him laugh.
Sure, hon, they might try to rape you, but they’ll never finish. Take my word on that one. Fucking you is like fucking an ice cube tray.

Not that he would ever have said anything so cruel, crude, and degrading like that to her…even if it was true.

Which is why you stop by Donna Peppek’s house twice a week.

But he didn’t have time to be thinking of the guilt involved in that or the sheer joy of Donna herself. Friends with bennies, that’s all.

“Geno…don’t do this.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll bash its head in.”

She licked her lips, shaking her head. “It’s a worm.”

A worm? Is that what she fucking said?

Jesus, this was good. He was arming himself for a first-class rat battle when all he needed was a boot to step on it with. He went over to the sink and used the broom handle to pry the door open.

He heard a gurgling sound.

It sounded like an upset stomach. That’s what flashed through his mind very quickly and then…then both doors flew open and a gout of black, syrupy fluid spewed out in a frothing surge, spraying over his shoes and fouling his pant legs. It looked to be equal parts shit, mud, and black subterranean gunk. It splashed to the floor in a spreading, steaming pool. It was as if the cupboard had vomited on him.

“Fuck,” he said under his breath.

And it was as he said this that he saw two yellow eyes staring up at him from the darkness under the sink. He took one step backward and jabbed the broom handle at whatever in the hell was under there, which was certainly no rat and couldn’t possibly be a worm. The broom handle did not hit it exactly, it skated off it like it was greased.

He saw then that what was under there did not have yellow eyes at all.

In fact, it had no eyes. What he had seen was the overhead light reflecting off it. But that brought him precious little comfort as the thing came out, striking at the broom handle like a pissed-off water moccasin…only it was no water moccasin, but a monstrous shit-brown worm that was big around as his thigh and looked to be about the size of a very large boa constrictor.

Geno stumbled back, slipping on the muck and falling on his ass as Ivy totally lost it and began to cry,
“Geno! Geno! Oh my God, get away from it, get away from it!”

Which he knew, in the back of his mind, made perfect sense.

The doors slammed back shut as the thing retreated, or at least as shut as they could get in their condition, and he had a truly crazy idea that the worm had set up housekeeping under the sink and needed a little privacy. That was insane. But that’s exactly what passed through his mind in those few seconds of peace right before the worm came out again like a snake from a rabbit hole, taking one of the doors right off its hinges and rising up above him like a serpent that was ready to strike.

Ivy really let go with a cry then.

She dropped to the floor on her knees, wailing with the sound of a mind that had been torn right open.

Geno had been afraid of very little in his life, but as the worm hovered over him, dirty brown, dropping clots of black muck, its bullet-shaped head moving from side to side in some obscene rhythm, he felt a very real need to crap his pants out of sheer terror.

He drove himself away from it, scuttling on his ass over the floor.

He thought the worm would strike, but it didn’t.

It kept moving its head back and forth on its neck…hell, it was
all
neck…and Geno would have kept backing away in sheer primal horror and revulsion, but his shoulders made contact with the face of the refrigerator. The worm had allowed him a bit of backward scuttling, but he seriously doubted whether it would let him turn and crawl the six feet he would need to get out of the fucking kitchen.