The Living Dead 2

The Rapeworm by Charles Coleman Finlay

Charles Coleman Finlay is the author of the novels The Prodigal Troll, The Patriot Witch, A Spell for the Revolution, and The Demon Redcoat. Finlay’s short fiction-most of which appears in his collection, Wild Things-has been published in several magazines, such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Black Gate, and in anthologies, such as The Best of All Flesh and my own By Blood We Live. He has twice been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has also been nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Sidewise Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

Radiation, a new and exotic phenomena for much of the twentieth century, was seized on by writers as a pretext for all manner of unlikely but exciting developments, everything from giant monsters to Spider-Man. Zombies too, of course: In Night of the Living Dead, it’s suggested that the recently deceased are brought back as zombies due to strange radiation from a passing comet.

The idea of extraterrestrial influence being responsible for an exponentially expanding plague that transforms ordinary people into a sinister menace is an old one in science fiction. Perhaps the best known example is Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers, filmed in 1956 as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and remade several times since), in which lurking alien seed pods grow perfect simulacra of your friends and neighbors, and the impersonators then proceed to murder and replace the originals. Another well-known example is Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel The Puppet Masters, about sluglike aliens that attach themselves to the backs of human hosts and take control of them. (The novel, which taps into the anti-Communist hysteria of the time, makes explicit analogies between the alien menace and the Soviet Union.)

For whatever reason, zombie stories of recent decades have tended to eschew cosmic explanations and have typically blamed zombies on man-made superviruses or else just left the question open. Our next story harkens back to this grand old tradition of zombies from outer space, and reminds us that we should never, ever forget to watch the skies.

When the rapeworms began to rain from the Ohio skies, I tossed my two boys in the truck with cases of canned food and all our camping gear, and we headed south for the Hocking Hills, far away from Columbus and the other big cities.

Too many other folks had the same idea. We found a small colony in and around Old Man’s Cave, clusters of tents spilling down the gorge from the shelter of the cave all the way to the Devil’s Bathtub. There were men and women both, which was just plain stupid with the rains coming this far north. Some folks were hostile, but a couple of college kids offered to help us pitch camp.

Josh hung back at my elbow, fidgeting. When the college kids weren’t looking, he bumped into me and whispered, “Dad, we have to get farther away than this.”

I looked down at his face, and saw the way he was trying to look mean and strong, and I hoped he wasn’t imitating me. He was only thirteen, and his face still had a few soft edges to it.

“Don’t be scared,” I said.

“I’m not scared.”

“Neither am I,” I lied. “It’s safe out here.”

“No, it’s not.”

Josh was a news junkie, had been falling asleep at night with CNN, ever since the spaceship-or whatever it was-passed over Earth and the rapeworms started. At first the scientists thought it was a killer asteroid aimed at the planet. Maybe it would have been better for us all if it had been.

“Hey,” one of the college kids yelled. “You can leave the kids here, go get your stuff from the car.”

Nick, my nine-year-old, tugged frantically at my sleeve, his chin trembling. He talked through clenched teeth, punctuating each word with an angry pause. “Don’t. Leave. Us. Here.”

I put my arm around him and pulled him close, but he struggled against my grip. “I won’t do that. I promise we’ll stay together. We’ll be okay.”

So I told the college kids we’d just go up to the car together so the boys could help me carry stuff. Then when we got to the parking lot, we ran to the car and headed east on Route 56 toward Lake Hope State Park.

It was getting dark. When I first saw the man in the plaid flannel jacket on the side of the road, I figured him for another refugee. But then he saw us, and lurched out into the path of the car waving his arms for us to stop. By the way he moved, all stiff and jerky, I could tell that he was infected.

“Get down,” I yelled at the boys. “Get down!”

I tried to steer around him, but he moved fast, if awkwardly. I had a brief nightmare of him flying through the windshield like a deer, because that would be it for us then. But I twisted the wheel at the last second, clipping him with the bumper, and he flew off the side of the road while I held onto the wheel and controlled the car.

“What was that? What was that?” Nick yelled.

Josh’s voice was calmer. “Did you hit him? Is he gone? Dad, did you hit him?”

“Don’t worry! Settle down!” I yelled. Fighting every natural instinct in my body to pull off to the side of the road, I put my foot down and hit the gas. “It’s all right. Everything’s all right.”

Less than a mile up the road, I saw a car crashed into a ditch, which made me wonder: What if that man wasn’t infected? What if he was just an accident victim, injured, looking for help? I pushed those questions out of my mind; I had to assume he was infected.

When I came to the Lake Hope sign, I drove past it.

Soon enough, we were on a dark, unpopulated road that led through the Wayne National Forest. If we stayed on it, we’d end up in the university town of Athens, where there were too many people. So when I saw a gate for an old logging trail into the forest, I pulled over and broke the chain on it with the tire iron. After driving the car through, I closed the gate again and poked through my toolbox for a spare lock to close the gate again. Sure, somebody else might come along and break it later, but there was no need to advertise we were here.

If I’d been thinking ahead, I would have driven all night. South toward Ironton, there were places in the woods as far away from people as we were likely to get anywhere in Ohio, and the rapeworms were unlikely to spread north into the upper peninsula of Michigan. But it was November, already after seven at night, and in the dark you can’t see the rapeworms falling.

Nick was at the frazzled end of his nerves, whining and sucking his thumb, something he hadn’t done since kindergarten. I just wanted to be someplace, anyplace. So we found a clearing, out of sight of the road, and we set up camp. Josh seemed glad to have some work to do. He practically put up the whole tent by himself while I talked to Nick and tried to get him to calm down.

Well after midnight, when I thought they were both asleep in their thermal sleeping bags, I tiptoed back out to the truck to listen to the radio. There were still stations broadcasting from some of the cities in the north. I sat there shivering, scanning the AM radio channels in hopes of any helpful news.

WTVN out of Columbus was dead, but I was able to pick up WJR out of Detroit. Snatches of news came in through the static.

“…scientists are still trying to understand the alien biology of the parasite infection that is sweeping the globe…”

“…officials report that the nuclear device exploded over Orlando, Florida, has sterilized the threat there, and will prevent the spread of further contamination…”

“…meanwhile in Ohio, the governor has extended martial law to the highways. All personal travel is forbidden as long as the crisis lasts. Cars on the highway may be shot without warning…”

When that signal faded, I tried a Cleveland station with no luck. I could pick up a couple Christian stations out of West Virginia, but I couldn’t stomach their message. If we survived, if I saved my kids, then it wasn’t the end of the world.

I was lost in these thoughts, watching the breath frost from my nose, when a tap at the window made me jump, and I jerked up my gun and aimed it at my attacker.

It was Nick. He was standing there without his coat on, bawling.

I started sobbing even before I opened the door and gathered him into my arms. I rocked him and told him how sorry I was. Snot ran from my nose while static poured out of the tinny speakers.

After a few moments, we both stopped crying. He snuggled down into my arms. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m listening to music.”

I reached out and hit the scan button, looking for something to distract him, but we only caught snatches of news, mostly from the Christian stations in small towns still unaffected by the plague.

“…the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star from heaven fallen unto the earth: and there was given to him the key of the pit of the abyss…”

“…and the rest of mankind, who were not killed with these plagues, repented not of the works of their hands…”

“…hallelujah! Salva-”

I punched it off. Then I turned off the car, to save the battery and the gas. I started to sing to him, “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the Levee-”

“Dad, that’s an old song. It’s so lame.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said, tousling his hair.

“Why couldn’t we bring Schrody?”

“Schrody’s a smart cat. He can look out for himself.”

“But who’s going to change his litter box?”

I hugged him close, looking through the window as the dashboard light faded. The trees formed a black wall around us, like the sides of a pit, and the darkness of the sky made the stars seem to twitch like maggots. “We get to camp out and pretend we’re Indians. Won’t that be fun?”

“Where’s Mom? Is Mom safe?”

I checked my cellphone to see if my ex had called, but the battery was dead and I had forgotten to pack the dashboard charger. Their mother and I had gone through a bitter divorce, which we tried to keep from the boys, even though we split custody. Tomorrow was the usual day I turned them back to her. She would be frantic with worry when she didn’t hear from us, but I convinced myself it was better to have no contact until the plague passed. The government had censored pictures of what happened to women infected by the rapeworm, but we heard rumors.

“Yeah, she’s safe,” I promised. “She wants me to tell you that she misses you.”

His eyes brightened for a second, then he sank back down into my arms. “You don’t really know.”

I held him until he fell back to sleep. He started to wake up every time I tried to put him down or move him, so I leaned the seat back and fell asleep myself.

When I woke up in the morning, the windows were frosted over with ice, and the sun coming through them was bright and harsh. Josh was in the car too, in the passenger seat, curled up with his head against my arm.

They both looked untroubled in their sleep, the way they always had until just a few months before. I knew I would do whatever I had to do to keep them safe.

After we woke up, I checked our supplies. We had our fishing gear, and I had my grandfather’s old single barrel shotgun in the trunk, with a couple boxes of shells. There was also his old.38 Special revolver, the one he bought to protect his store and then never needed. I had just the rounds inside that, and no extras. I didn’t like guns, and wouldn’t have owned these if I hadn’t inherited them.

I checked out our supply of canned foods. If we were careful, we could get through the next few weeks until things settled down.

“Dad, you know what we forgot to pack?” Josh said while we ate canned pears for breakfast.

I picked up the can opener where he’d left it on the ground, and put it back in my kit. “No, what?”

“Twinkies. They’re the perfect food. They never go stale. They survive anything.”

I grinned, and he flashed a smile back. For a moment, I thought everything would be okay. “I think it’s better if we have healthier food,” I said.

“I thought you said we were going to have fun,” he said.

The way he said it threw the lie back in my face. But I grinned anyway.

Over the next few weeks, Josh and I ate canned food until the green beans tasted like the corn like the peaches like the ham. Nick ate only peanut butter, until all the peanut butter was gone. The three of us sat inside the tent, playing Uno until the day Nick tore all the cards in half because we were out of peanut butter. We were cold all the time and we started to stink, spending day after day in the tent, until Josh started holding his nose shut every time he sat next to me. I didn’t pack enough toilet paper, and I screamed at the boys when they used the last roll of it to clean up spilled peaches.

We moved camp twice. The first week, we heard cars roaring by on the nearby roads, so we moved to a clearing farther back in the woods. A week later there were days of planes flying overhead-fighter jets and helicopters-so we moved farther back under the trees. We spent our days watching the skies, staring at the roads, jumping every time a squirrel crunched through the leaves, dashing out our fire any time we heard something like a gunshot.

At night, when the boys were sleeping, I listened to the radio for news. Scientists still hadn’t found a way to remove the rapeworms from brain tissue without killing the patients. We were no longer in touch with the rest of the world: the Middle East was the first to go completely silent. Americans were moving north across the border into Canada.

I thought about following with the boys, but the gas gauge in the car read empty after I fell asleep one too many times listening to the radio with the engine running.

It was the second week of December when I took the shotgun out to try for a deer, telling the boys they had to stay in the tent until I came back. I was a half mile away when I heard an explosion, and then another, something far away but powerful enough to make the ground shake. I ran all the way back to our camp, and the boys were running out to meet me, and we all waited together for something else to happen.

Snow fell that night, the first snowfall of the year that was more than just flurries, three or four inches of it before morning. There was a glow on two horizons, west toward Cincinnati and north toward Columbus, and the fresh snowfall caught the light and spread it everywhere.

Nick had the leftover peanut butter jars, which he had filled full of acorns he collected in the woods. He sat there, shaking them louder and louder, like some kind of shaman trying to ward off evil, until I snapped at him, and told him to be quiet, I just needed some quiet to think.

Before we curled up in our blankets that night, I told the boys to hold my hands. We sat there silently, but I prayed that we would make it. All we had to do was lay low and survive long enough, and my boys would have a chance.

It was in the morning, when we went outside, that we saw the footprints in the snow.

Josh spotted the tracks first when he left the tent to pee. I heard him running back, feet crunching through the snow. He yanked open the tent flap in a panic. “Dad, you gotta see this. Somebody’s been watching us.”

We all three went. I carried Nick, if only to keep him from hanging onto my legs and tripping me. He growled and bit my shoulder and pounded on me with his fists.

“Look, they’re the same size as mine,” Josh said. “It’s just another kid. Maybe he’s out here all by himself.”

Nick squirmed out of my arms at that point, eager to take a look himself.

Together, we trudged through the snow, following the straight line of the trail through the woods. When we came to the road, I realized how stupid I’d been.

“Don’t move,” I whispered to the boys. And then stepping over to a pine tree, I reached inside and broke off several branches, using them to try to cover up my tracks as I retraced them.

Nick fidgeted, shifting from foot to foot, kicking up the snow, but Josh wore a look of horror. “If we can follow them, anyone who comes by here could follow us.”

I nodded. “We’ll go back to camp, stepping in the same footprints as we go, okay? We’ll use the branches to cover our steps.”

“What about the other boy?” Nick asked as I scooped him up in my arms.

“What?”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “He’s probably really scared out here.”

“You can’t leave him out here, Dad.”

I damn well could, I thought, but then I saw their faces. If the boy was infected, he would have walked straight into our camp.

“Okay,” I said. “But you two have to stay here. You can hide inside this pine tree, and watch me go.”

I thought that would be the breaking point, that Nick would change his mind, but he scrambled through the branches, spilling snow, as soon as I put him down. “I’ll take care of him,” Josh said.

I crossed the road, brushing away both sets of prints as I went. I figured to take a quick look around, then report back to the boys that I couldn’t find anything. We’d move our camp again, and this time I would keep a better eye out for other people.

But I was only ten or twenty feet off the road when I saw a splash of camouflage, bright green against the snow, amid a flash of movement.

“Hey, come back!” I called.

I ran after the kid-it was definitely a kid-without bothering to cover my tracks. I came into a small clearing, and saw him standing on the other side, half-hidden by a tree.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Baby?”

That was a new voice coming from off to my right. The kid said, “Dad,” and ran across the clearing into the man’s arms.

Another little family, surviving in the wild, just like us. I put my hands in my pockets, feeling more than a little nervous.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare anyone,” I said, taking a step back.

This other man almost made me feel ashamed of myself. He was clean-shaven, with his hair buzzed short; his clothes were clean, and neat, not covered with stains; he had a pair of sunglasses on his face, so that he wasn’t squinting at the glare of the snow, and a rifle slung over his shoulder. He had a big wad of gum in his mouth, and he was chewing with loud smacks.

He came toward me fast, hand extended in greeting. “No problem,” he said. “You’re that guy who’s been camping up on the ridge with his two boys right?”

“Yeah-” I said.

But as soon as his hand closed on mine, I felt something snag in my coat. Looking down, I saw the tip of a hunting knife at my stomach.

He looked me straight in the eye. “Peace, okay?”

I said, “Okay.”

He said, “I just want to be clear. We’re not friends. If you or your boys do anything to hurt my daughter, or even attempt to hurt my daughter, I will kill you without a moment’s hesitation.”

I looked over at the kid. Now that he said something, I could see she was definitely a girl-the longer hair, the small chin, the thinner body-probably the same age as Josh. Her dad lowered the knife, let go of my hand, and took a step back. “Are we clear?” he asked.

I pulled my hand out of my coat pocket and showed him the.38 that I had aimed at him all along. “I feel the same way about my boys. So I think we have an understanding.”

A small grin twitched at the corner of his mouth. Like he was a man who’d used a gun, and knew how to recognize one who hadn’t. Holding up his knife, he said, “You should save those bullets. They may be hard to replace.”

“I figure I won’t use them unless I absolutely need to.” I hoped that I was implying, Don’t make me need to.

He blew a big pink bubble and let it pop. “You boys make an awful lot of noise up there.”

The guy’s name was Mike, Mike Leptke, and his daughter’s name was Amanda. She was a year younger than Josh, but about ten years more mature in that way that girls have.

Mike would have been just as happy if we walked away and he never saw us again, but Amanda was bored with her dad’s company, and used to getting her own way, so by the end of the week she was coming over to our camp every day to play with the boys. Nick came out of his shell, and would run off after Amanda and Josh, throwing snowballs at them. She got all big-sisterly around him.

One sunny morning, on a day the temperatures shot up to above freezing, we were sitting in our camp eating venison that Mike had shot and cleaned. Mike had built a good-sized fire, without much smoke, and for the first time in weeks, I didn’t feel cold. The kids ran off into the woods pretending to be Indians.

“Have you ever seen the rapeworms?” I asked, voicing something that had been on my mind for a while. “What if they aren’t real?”

“Oh, they’re real. I was stationed at Fort Benning when they fell on Atlanta.”

“No shit?”

“They look like dandelion fluff coming out of the sky. They’ll hitch a ride on anything, but they only do shit to people.” He shook his head. “I went AWOL-so did a lot of other guys after that-and came back to Ohio as fast as I could. Stole Amanda from my ex when she wouldn’t give her up.”

“Ah.”

“It’s us or them, us or them. I hope they nuked ’em all straight back to hell.” He looked away. “What if,” he asked, and then stopped.

“What if what?” I said, helping myself to another plate of stew. I had done my best to shave, and had melted enough water to wash most of the things in our camp, including myself and the boys.

“What if we’re the only people left?” Mike asked, in a tone that said it was painful for him.

“That’s crazy,” I said around a mouthful of the best food I’d had in over a month.

He had his sunglasses on, so I couldn’t see his eyes, and he always had a smile at the corner of his mouth. He lowered his head and spit between his feet. “What if it isn’t?”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t ready to think about Josh and Amanda as some kind of Adam and Eve.

“You were smart enough to get out of the cities,” he said, and then didn’t say any more, seemingly on the principle that if you couldn’t say something nice, don’t say anything.

“Yeah?”

He shook his head. Then after a while, he said, “You mind if I take your older boy, Joshua, out in the woods and show him how to use a rifle?”

I was torn. I didn’t let the boys touch the guns we had-my old beliefs were too ingrained. But I could see his reasoning.

Before I could answer him, Josh came running back into the camp. “Dad! Mike! Nick, he found-”

We jumped up from the log we sat on and Josh froze, his mouth moving, but no words coming out.

Mike walked toward him. “What is it? Where’s Amanda?”

“Sh-sh-she was trying to help-”

“Where’s Amanda?”

Josh turned and ran back the way he came, and we ran after him. I stumbled, tripped, ran into trees, trying to keep up-what had happened to Nick?

Mike trotted easily at Josh’s side, his head up, eyes scanning the woods. As soon as he saw Nick’s bright blue coat against the mottled brown of bark and leaves, he bolted for him.

“Where’s Amanda?” he said.

I ran past Josh, who stood rooted well away from his brother, and reached Nick’s side at the same moment that Mike jumped back.

There was a dog, dead at Nick’s knees, a once beautiful golden retriever with a dirty white-and-green collar.

Its coat had gone gray, and it appeared to be molting right before our very eyes.

I jumped back ten feet, just as Mike had.

The dog was covered with hundreds of maggoty worms, silver-gray and slick, sprouting fluff-clouds of micro-wire-thin cilia at one end. The cilia moved, like the tentacles of tiny squids, tugging the creatures across the ground. The cilia sparked, seemingly at random, little blue explosions like static electricity.

“Nick?” I said, circling around to see his face.

His open mouth was full of the worms. Tiny tufts hung from his nose. One worm banged at the corner of his eye, pushing at his tear duct-while we watched, it shoved its way in, wiggling until it disappeared.

“Shit!”

“Dad, I’m so sorry, Dad!” Josh was crying, scared. “We were playing hide and seek-he-”

“It’s okay, son,” Mike said. My tongue was pinned to my throat and I couldn’t speak. “Amanda ran to hide when she saw them, right?”

“She-” Josh sobbed, unable to speak.

“It’s okay,” Mike said, taking a step back, abrupt and unexpected, like a missed heartbeat. “Which direction did she go?”

“They got in her face!” he screamed. “Before we could stop them.”

Mike walked away without a word. I stood there-staring at Josh, staring at Nick, watching the worms crawl off the dog toward my kneeling son. I was sick. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know who to ask. Josh took another step away, rubbed the corners of his eyes. “It’s not my fault!” he said.

I wanted to scream at him, to say, hell, yes it was his fault, it was all his fault. But I knew the words were really directed at myself.

“It’s not your fault,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure who I was talking to.

Mike returned in moments, wearing a gas mask like some kind of steel and plastic bug. He emptied a can of gasoline all over the corpse of the dog. The smell made me think of gas stations, of normal days. I ran up and grabbed Nick by the collar, dragging his limp body back as Mike tossed a match and the dog went up in flames.

“Look,” I said, pointing at Nick. “Look, he’s okay! They’re all off him!”

“They’re not off him,” Mike said as the flames danced in the reflections of his goggles. “They’re in him.”

“What?”

“He’s too young. He’ll sit catatonic like that until he dies-unless you feed him. Then he’ll sit that way until he hits puberty and the rapeworm kicks in.”

“What?”

“Amanda can’t have gone far, not yet. We’re going to catch her before she joins the bang at Athens.”

Athens was the home of Ohio University, nested in the wooded hills of southern Ohio. Mike was convinced that’s where the rapeworm colony had collected.

“Because it’s the biggest city around?” I asked.

“No,” he said, as he thumped a box of clinking wine bottles into the bed of his 4x4. “Because the dog was wearing an O.U. collar-green and white, go Bobcats.”

“Ah.”

We left Nick with Josh in one of Mike’s deer blinds across the road. Bitter smoke filled the sky where the fire was smoldering out amid the snow-wet trees and the wet leaf cover.

“Dad, don’t leave me here,” he said.

“You have to be brave,” I said. “We’re going to go rescue Amanda, but I promise we’ll come back.”

After Mike and I climbed into his truck and pulled out of the woods onto the main road, he said, “Don’t kid yourself-we’re not going to rescue Amanda.”

He had to choke out the words.

To calm himself down, he started to explain that in Georgia, they’d seen the victims of the worms follow the paths of least resistance, moving along roads to the places where they gathered, what the soldiers had called bangs.

“Why bangs?” I asked.

He looked at me like I was stupid.

“Huh?”

Mike shook his head. Then he lifted his fist in the air and made a whistling sound like a bomb falling as he lowered it toward the dash. When it touched down, he popped it open and said, “Bang.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, there was that reason too. Once a bang started we used to let them gather until there were enough to make the strike count,” he said. Then he had to knuckle the corner of his eye. He shook it off and kept his head up, scanning the sides of the road for Amanda as we drove toward Athens.

I had the.38 in my pocket and the shotgun on my lap. Mike had checked both of them for me. He was loaded with ordinance like some video game character. I didn’t like the way this was headed.

“The people who are infected, they’re still people,” I said.

“Maybe not. The scientists were saying that the worms don’t just rewire the brains when they lodge in them, they rewrite the DNA. The military guys thought, given enough time, they’ll find a virus or something that will take it out.”

“But the people, like Amanda, like Nick, we can do something for them, keep them safe, keep them comfortable, until we find a cure-”

He laughed out loud.

“Wait until we get to Athens, you’ll see,” he said.

But we didn’t get to Athens. We came up over a hill, and Mike slammed on the brakes. “Shit,” he said.

He put it in reverse and backed down below the rim of the road.

Just over the hill, there was an old white farmhouse with a wrap-around porch. Next to the house were three tall blue silos and a red barn with the name McAufley, 1895 spelled out in colored shingles on the roof. A long, one-story animal shed stood next to an unharvested cornfield.

I had to wait until we loaded up and crouched back to the top of the road to see what Mike had seen instantly.

The farmhouse door hung open, with the ripped ends of curtains fluttering through the broken glass of the windows. On the barn, a rope hung from the hayloft pulley, spiraling around and around in the wind. A combine was tipped on its side in a ditch by the road.

There were people moving around the animal shed.

The shed was on the far side of the other buildings. We approached it carefully, creeping along the fence for cover. The stench of blood and shit and sugar was overwhelming. Anguished moans sounded and faded.

“Something’s wrong here,” I whispered. “The worms didn’t start falling until after the harvest. There shouldn’t be any corn-”

“Some folks thought it was the end of the world and stopped doing everything,” Mike said, shrugging. He nodded at the combine. “Maybe there was a rapture, and this guy was the only guy who got taken.”

Something rustled in the corn, the tall stalks swaying. Mike pushed me to the ground, dropped beside me, and brought up his gun.

An old man in a Tommy Hilfiger sweater walked out of the corn: his hair and beard were untrimmed and unkempt; his clothes hung from his body, tatters trailing like fringes from his arms; his smile was beatific and he mumbled nonsense words as he carried an armful of corn back toward the shed.

Mike gestured me to come along, and we followed the bearded guy around the other side of the shed, where we ducked down behind a four-hundred-gallon gas tank.

One wall of the shed had been pulled open, and the building was divided in half. On one side, a boy rested in the bed of straw. A woman crawled away from him, pulling ragged clothes back on. I was relieved to see it wasn’t Amanda.

On the other side of the shed, a dozen or more women were lined up in rows. Their heads were covered with rags, and pieces of old shag carpet and odd bits of blanket were wrapped around their shoulders to keep them warm. They stood in thawing mud, bare feet shifting constantly. The sound that I had mistaken for moaning was a constant low murmur of nonsense words.

When I saw that many of them were pregnant, I wanted to puke.

Mike shifted position, crouching around the other end of the tank. He was looking for Amanda. I was too disgusted to move. Every bone and muscle in my body screamed at me to throw down my guns and run away.

One woman moaned louder than the others. Her swollen belly popped out of her sparkly tee-shirt and soiled sweatpants.

The boy rose up from his bed of straw-he was not much older than Josh, with no beard to speak of and pale as a ghost. When he leaned in to sniff the woman’s mouth, she tried to bite his nose. He jerked his head away, then he bent down to sniff her crotch. Something satisfied him, because he tilted his head back and crooned in some inhuman language.

The old man in the fringe-tatter Tommy Hilfiger sweater dropped his new armload of earcorn and came, whining out his own reply. A third man, still wearing his business suit and tie, but hairy and ragdemalion like the others, came trotting around the corner.

Thing was, I could have known any of those men. I even recognized the cheerful smiles on their faces from a thousand days at the office, from the trips to the mall, from the visits to school.

While I stood there uselessly, Mike ran over to a Chevy parked near the far end of the shed and held a scope in his hand to peer inside.

Tommy Hilfiger and Three-piece repeated the sniffing at mouth and crotch while the woman moaned and panted, clearly in labor. The women around her shuffled out of her way, keeping up their continuous flow of jabberwocky.

The old man took out a knife and handed it to the pale boy. They exchanged words in their weird groaning language, and then without prelude, the boy thrust the knife into the underside of the woman’s belly.

I jerked up the shotgun, banging it into the tank, startling myself. I shrank back, expecting to be seen, but the others were too focused on their task.

The ghostly boy sliced the woman open from hip to hip. At first I thought her intestines were spilling out: then I saw that it was a pile of worms, silver-gray and wet, hundreds or thousands of them, swimming like a school of squids out of the ocean of her belly.

She moaned with another contraction. Three-piece reached his hand up into her stomach and pulled.

A creature flopped out. At first I thought it was a human baby, stillborn, deformed-its head was too small to be fully developed. I thought it was just food for the worms to feed on, and I waited for the mass of tiny creatures to engulf it.

But as the bloody red thing hit the ground, it lifted its head and cried out. It pushed itself up on all fours-its limbs were as inhuman as its head-and began climbing up the woman’s body. She was braced against the wall of the shed, the old man tying her to the wall to hold her upright. Three-piece and the ghost helped the monster climb, petting it and stroking it, crooning to it as it went. The baby bent its squat neck back and cried out again.

The mother cried back, word for word, weakly, fading. The sound sent chills through me, as did the sight of the baby ripping open her shirt and biting into her breast.

“Amanda!”

Mike walked into plain view, toward his daughter, who, I saw now, was hidden in the midst of a cluster of women at the farthest end of the shed.

Her head turned at his voice. She smiled as though she was happy to see him, though her eyes were blank.

Other heads also turned at the sound of his voice. The baby lifted its weirdly disfigured crown and screeched. The mass of worms on the ground wriggled and pulsed in his direction. The three men left the side of the woman and ran toward him.

Mike aimed his gun, and with short controlled bursts, dropped the old man and the ghost. Three-piece fell down, but rose again, blood pouring from his side and from the defensive wounds in his outstretched arms.

My teeth were chattering but I stepped around the tank with the shotgun raised. I was screaming curse words, the same words, over and over and over.

Still I couldn’t bring myself to shoot.

Mike took a step back and shot Three-piece again, dropping him for good. The women in the shed keened and flapped their arms like a flock of frightened birds. Answering calls came from the fields and the houses.

I grabbed Mike by the arm. “We have to get out of here!”

“Amanda,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Amanda.”

She pressed forward, smiling at the sound of his voice: but she echoed the keening cry of the other women, and began to flail her arms.

He shot her in the head, knocking her back and leaving a hole in the wall of bodies.

There were more men coming from the fringes of the farm, out of the house and the cornfield. I had my fist in Mike’s jacket, dragging him backward toward the road. He pulled away from me long enough to light one of the Molotov cocktails he had brought along. The flaming bottle arched through the air and landed in the dry straw of the shed.

The flames raced across the stalls like a golden retriever running to greet its master. The women seemed unable to flee the shed. As they jerked and struggled in the flames, their screams sounded more and more human. The men running out of the cornfields went right past Mike and me, throwing themselves into the flames to try to rescue the most pregnant of the women.

I was retreating, trying to pull Mike along. He was emptying his gun into the screaming bodies, screaming along with them, their voices merged into a single wall of sound that threatened to overwhelm and drown me.

Only the baby escaped the inferno. It had dropped from its mother’s breast at the first roar of the flame, and now it ran, bloody-mouthed, on all fours with its little lizard’s gait toward us.

Mike pointed his gun at the monster, but the trigger clicked on an empty chamber.

The creature stretched out its clawed hand to Mike’s leg, while he tripped, staggering backward, fumbling to switch magazines.

I stepped forward with my shotgun. Raising it over my head, I slammed the butt down on the baby’s head. I hit it over and over, until the stock cracked and flew off, and then I beat at it with the barrel, until the head was pulp pounded into the dirt. I couldn’t even see what I was doing, my eyes were so blurry with tears, my vision red with fury.

Mike pulled me away and I threw the barrel on the monster and yelled at it. My elbow was bleeding, where the gun had gone off and grazed me with the shot. I didn’t even notice when it happened.

As we drove away, the flames reflected in the window of his truck. It felt like the whole world was on fire.

When we were in the car, driving back to our camps, I kept thinking about the way Mike had shot his daughter rather than see her like that. I wanted to be like Mike. If I had to be, I wanted to be strong like he was. I didn’t want to see my children suffer.

Before we went back to the deer blind, Mike made me wash up so I wouldn’t scare Josh with all the blood on me. He talked a lot, more than usual for him-self-recriminations, how he should have extended his perimeter, taken out that bang earlier; talk about teaching Josh how to shoot, heading north for colder country.

We looked into the blind, and I saw that Josh had taken off his belt and tied himself to one of the corner posts.

“What’s up, big man?” I said, trying to sound light-hearted.

He was shaking, sitting on his hands to keep them still. His voice was very low.

“It was only one, Dad. There was only one that got on my face, that’s it, only one. I didn’t know what it was. Nick was saying how they tickled-how it was dandelion seeds but they tickled.”

I looked over at Nick, sitting catatonic in the corner. The Jif peanut butter jar had fallen out of his pocket; it was filled with a dozen squirming worms, setting off tiny blue sparks like little fireflies. The J had peeled off the label, leaving a glowing, brightly colored jar of if.

Josh saw me see it, and his face went sick. He gritted his teeth, put on his meanest face, and said nothing, trying not to shake.

Mike said, “Good work, Joshua. Smart. I need to talk to your dad for a second.”

We stepped away from the blind. Mike put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

I was shaking my head, rubbing my eyes.

He said, “It’s all right. I’ll take care of it. You had my back at the bang, I got yours here.”

I swallowed deep, knowing he was right, wishing that I had known him before everything went so bad, wishing that we could have been friends, that Amanda and Josh could have grown up together. I took a deep, loud breath, and willed my chest to stillness.

Looking him in the eye, I said, “Thanks. Thanks. But I can do it. I need to do this myself.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure.”

He nodded approval, and I found myself wanting his approval as he reached into my pocket and pulled out the revolver. He flipped it open, checked the bullets, and pressed it into my hand.

“After this, we’re going to go kill all those fucking alien monster bastards,” he said. “All right?”

“All right.”

“Dad?” Josh said uncertainly.

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

Mike patted me on the back. The revolver felt heavy in my hand, like an anchor keeping me in harbor during a storm.

I raised the gun and shot Mike in the face.

He toppled backward, and lay on the ground, his head a bloody wound that lay open to the sky.

“Dad!” Josh cried.

“I’m right here.”

I went into the blind. Josh’s teeth were chattering. He was pale and shaking, and his eyes had already started to take on the glazed look. He saw the gun in my hand.

“I don’t want it to hurt,” he whispered. “Don’t let it hurt.”

“I won’t.”

The thing is this: even with the alien taking over, some part of us remains in them, some essential piece of our DNA remains unchanged. I have to believe that. I thought of the way Amanda turned her head at the sound of her father’s voice. Her tongue was inhuman, but her face was full of joy.

So I put down my gun. Untying Josh’s bonds, I say, “Come here,” and I take him in my arms. He squeezes me tight. I look at Nick, who’s already somewhere else, and I pull him onto my lap. I reach down and pick up the peanut butter jar full of rapeworms.

I unscrew the lid and pull one out. Pinched between my thumb and finger, it writhes, cilia twitching and setting off tiny blue sparks.

Josh buries his face against my shoulder, torn between clinging to me and pushing away so he can follow the siren call of the worm in his brain. His voice is weak, not hardly his own voice any more. “Dad, I’m scared.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Holding him to me, I lift the rapeworm to my nose. It sparks as it enters, tickling, making me want to choke. I taste a spurt of hot blood. Then I take hold of Nick’s hand, and Josh’s, and we rise. When we go, we’ll all go together.