Worm

34

It came from the kitchen.

Another door at the back of the dining room led in there and it was open.

Bertie got there before either Tony or Marv or even the twins. In fact, she charged in there like a barbarian diving into battle. Fern was pressed up against the dishwasher with a jug of Hilex bleach in each hand. An immense worm was bearing down on her. It was a massive, stout thing, inching forward with muscular contractions of its segments, which bulged like inner tubes, flexing and relaxing, flexing and relaxing. The spiny bristles growing from it scraped over the floor with a scree-scree sort of sound.

About four feet from Fern, it hesitated.

Maybe it saw it was outnumbered and maybe it saw its own death in the hating faces of the people gathered there. It looked confused. Its head—or the forward end, at any rate—moved from side to side like it was listening to some unheard melody. Its segments slid back and its mouth opened. For one moment before the teeth unsheathed themselves like the claws of a cat, Fern found herself staring down a pink throat that looked wide enough to swallow her entire leg. Then the worm’s orifice made a wet, smacking sound and its gums, soft and mottled, pushed from the mouth and the teeth slid from them like daggers. She saw there was not a single ring of them, but two or three rings, perhaps thirty or more individual teeth glistening like fishhooks.

She knew she didn’t have a chance.

Bertie knew she didn’t have a chance.

So did Marv and Tony, who didn’t dare shoot because from their angle in the doorway, the worm was just too damn close to fern.

Marv heard the twins whimpering behind him.

He was afraid to move. Afraid he would startle the worm and it would sink its teeth right into Fern’s throat.

But something had to be done and Bertie did it.

As the worm showed its teeth, its head at eye level with Fern, she swore under her breath and threw the cleaver. She hadn’t so much as thrown a ball since the 1960s, but she put everything behind it and struck quickly. The worm flinched about a split second before the cleaver sheared right into, slicing neatly through two or three segments. The worm hit the floor, flopping and twisting, its teeth tearing ruts in the kitchen tiles. It pissed a brown ichor from its gaping wound and made a shrill mewling sort of sound as it bunched and contracted, expanding its mass and putting out a river of slime that looked like clear floor wax.

It was Tony who finished it off.

His last two rounds from the Mossberg made an unsightly, liquid mess of the worm. But even rent and splattered and pulverized, shining pieces of it still wriggled in the slime, refusing death.