Worm

35

The Hilex bleach worked as good as fire, it turned out. They poured it under both of the doors. The one leading into the living room was the real danger spot. It was weakening, beginning to split in places from the relentless hammering of the very determined worms. Once the bleach was poured under it, there was a flurry of motion from the other side—the sound of soft bodies sliding over one another in a desperate attempt to escape.

Within five minutes, the house was silent.

Completely silent.

The dining room, of course, didn’t smell too pretty. The bleach smell reamed out noses and made heads spin, but it was still much better than the alternative.

The survivors waited in the dining room for something else to happen, but nothing did. The only weird thing was that the house trembled once, its timbers creaking as if it was being constricted. In Tony’s mind, he thought a very large elephant had just leaned against it. But whatever it was, it never came again.

An hour later, Bertie said, “Must be gone. Quiet out there.”

To be on the safe side, they waited another thirty minutes and it was then that they heard what sounded like a helicopter in the distance. It didn’t come too close, but close enough to cue everyone in that it was searching for survivors.

“We’re going to have to chance it,” Marv said.

Tony didn’t like the idea, but what he liked even less was the idea of being left behind by a search party and having to spend an entire night waiting for the worms to come.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Be careful,” Fern told them.

“I’ll keep an eye on them,” Bertie said.

Tony felt a need to be heroic and tell her she was too damned old to be facing danger like this, but from what he’d already seen of her, she was more than capable. Probably a lot more capable than he himself was.

Marv unlocked the door and they all tensed, just waiting for a tidal wave of worms to come flooding into the room. But that didn’t happen. He swung the door open and other than the sewer stink and the muck itself, there was nothing.

Nothing at all.

He looked over at Tony and shrugged.

With Bertie trailing behind them, they stepped into the living room. There were no worms anywhere, just a few odd remains. Just to be on the safe side, Marv kept his rifle raised and Tony held a bottle of bleach for quick splashing if it came to that.

“Listen,” Bertie said.

Tony expected the very worst, but what he heard was a helicopter. In fact, from his position over near the shattered picture window as he stared out into the muck-drowned neighborhood, he could see a searchlight in the distance scanning above the trees.

“Open that door,” Bertie said.

“What?”

“Open it, I said.”

She grabbed the lantern as Tony and Marv forced the door open against the muck. She stepped out onto the porch and waved the lantern back and forth. “OVER HERE!” she shouted. “OVER HERE, GODDAMMIT!”

She was making a good effort of it, that was for sure.

Marv was at the picture window and Tony was right behind her. The night was dim, the moon hidden in a pocket of dark clouds. Things were quiet out there, save the sound of the chopper’s rotors. Bertie waved her lantern back and forth. But as to whether she was seen was anybody’s guess. The helicopter banked to the right and disappeared.

“Ah… you useless sonsofabitches,” she said.

Tony heard a splashing like waves breaking on a beach and a stink wafted in through the door like that of a cesspool at high summer… moist and green and almost fruiting with filth.

“Get back inside! Get back inside!” Marv cried in a frantic voice. “Bertie, get the fuck back inside!”

Tony looked out past Bertie into the night which was backlit somewhat by the streetlamp across the street. He saw a shape. An unbelievably huge shape moving out of the darkness with a juicy, rubbery sort of sound like a wet intestine pulled from a belly. For one insane moment, he was not really sure what he was looking at… it was like the darkness was splitting open to reveal a glistening black tunnel… but then he saw and he knew: it was the immense maw of an absolutely colossal worm.

That was why Marv cried out, why he was making a mad dash toward the door where Tony stood in moonstruck terror.

The mouth yawned open and a set of spongy pink shining gums jutted forth, mammoth teeth sliding from them like switchblades. It took but a fraction of a second for Tony to see this and for it to register in his mind. By the time Marv got within feet of him, the monster worm had taken Bertie, who had about enough time to say, “Oh, shit,” and then blood exploded in Tony’s face like a summer squall, blinding him and making him cry out.

It happened so fast he thought the worm had just struck at her like an adder, but that’s not what happened at all. By the time she realized the worm was even there, it was maybe ten feet from her. Its mouth opened and for one insane moment it looked like it had vomited out a dozen yellow, gleaming cobras. They were in fact tongues that moved with a squirming peristalsis, their razored tips spearing into her like hypodermic needles, impaling her completely and this was what made the blood spray out of her like a hydrant had been opened.

About the time Tony hit the floor, the tongues yanked Bertie into the worm’s jaws and the teeth came down, splitting her open like a piñata, her bones cracking like walnuts. Her upper torso dangled from its mouth and the incredible pressure of the jaws made her dentures fly from her mouth along with a mist of blood. Her eyes popped from their sockets and her guts were forced up her throat. Then it sucked her all the way in and she was gnawed and chewed before being drawn down the canalicular tunnel of its throat.

As Marv got to the door, Bertie was pulled up and away.

The moon came out from behind a cloud and showed him the thing in all its hideous grandeur. Rising up thirty feet from the muck, it was a cyclopean and shivering thing like a row of train cars standing on end, a monstrous tower of pale, pink, pulsating flesh composed of multiple ringlike segments, each of which were inflated as big around as the opening of a train tunnel… in fact, as he watched, they expanded until they were even much larger, secreting a sea of foaming slime that spread out over the muck.

It rose up against the full moon, its mouth yawning ever wider into a vast dark hole shining with rows upon rows of spikelike teeth, dripping copious amounts of black bile in six-foot elastic ribbons that swung back and forth with its awful boneless, corkscrewing motion.

Tony didn’t see as much of it as Marv did—he was busy pawing Bertie’s blood from his face—but he saw enough to know they were in serious trouble because it was easily big enough to flatten a two-story house with its surging, gelatinous bulk. Maybe it had risen up thirty feet and perhaps more, wavering from side to side over the rooftops and trees, but there was a lot more of it still in the muck and probably more yet in whatever fusty crawl space it had slithered up from.

Marv had his rifle in his hands, but he felt entirely impotent.

He didn’t think even a .50-caliber machine gun would do much damage to the thing. But the rifle was all he had.

It was then that he noticed the worm was not just some giant B-movie-sized vermin, but the Mother Worm: the source, the epicenter, the fucking black pupating womb of them all. Its underside, from where it rose from the rippling muck to maybe a dozen segments from the mouth, was a convulsive nursery of worms. Hundreds of them hung from it like the remoras on a shark’s belly, coiling fleshy tubes, some only a few feet in length and others six or seven feet. The large ones were dropping free and as they did so, smaller ones pushed forth from the jellied flesh of the Mother Worm. She was a great biological machine, a squirming incubator that could have drowned the world in her larvae given time.

She let go with a mewling, echoing cry that got louder and louder until it shrilled like an air-raid siren as if she were calling out her victory over the world of men.

As the house shook and everyone covered their ears and Fern cried out, wanting to know what was going on, Marv—from his position in the doorway—worked the bolt on his 30-06 and fired up at the thing, the bullet drilling into it and through it. The worm barely trembled.

“FUCK ARE YOU DOING?” Tony shouted at him.

But Marv wasn’t really sure himself, but in the back of his mind an insane, last-ditch sort of defense had occurred to him and if things had not been so tense, so surreal, so deadly with grim possibility, he would never have considered it… but desperation was the mother of invention.

The Mother Worm must have felt the round drill through her, minimal as it was in comparison to her nightmare vastness. She rippled and writhed with undulant gyrations, curling like an inchworm and striking at the house. She took out what remained of the picture window and the frame that held it. The walls cracked. Plaster fell. Bricks were pulverized to powder. The impact actually shifted the house a few feet on its foundation.

She hit the house again, striking the door this time and widening it to the girth of a garage door. One more strike and she would be in.

As she hit the door, Tony scrambled away on his hands and knees, her jutting yellow tongues stabbing out at him, brushing over the soles of his boots and slitting the sofa open.

Marv did not retreat.

It was all or nothing now.

As the Mother Worm brought her head up high above the house to cry out again, he got in position with his rifle at the missing picture window. He had a clear shot if he could just make it happen, if he could just put one round where it needed to go.

On his knees, the stock against his shoulder, he tightened the field on the scope and fired at the power line that was strung between two utility poles and was dangling above the rising coils of the worm in the mud. He fired and missed. Shit. He fired again and this time he knew he was close because he split the telecom line which dropped away harmlessly.

Breathing slow and deep, knowing the worm was about to make her last and most devastating strike, the muck around her seeping with the forms of her children, he sighted in on the power line. For a professional shooter or sniper, it would have been an easy shot… for a guy who popped a deer every few years and maybe hit the range a few weeks a year, it was tricky.

He remained calm.

He steadied his nerves.

The line was directly in his sights. Exhaling air between clenched teeth, he squeezed off a round… and it hit. The power line was easily split, throwing a shower of blue sparks and dropping directly onto the Mother Worm where it grounded itself out.

The effect was instantaneous.

The Mother Worm writhed and twisted and coiled. She snapped back and forth like a bullwhip, shattering houses across the street, turning garages into kindling and flattening cars like beer cans. And the more she struggled, the more she ensnared herself in the power line, which fed over 13,000 volts directly into her hide. The muck around her was bubbling and steaming, her young popping like ticks from the heat. She boiled from the inside out, throwing out plumes of churning steam. As she whipped and looped with spasms, huge rents split open her segments and spewed burning tissue and blazing slime until she burst into flame, rising up one last time like a blackened Fourth of July snake before crashing into the muck and breaking apart.

Then there was silence.

Silence for five or ten seconds.

Then Tony said, “I think I fucking pissed myself.”

Marv stumbled into the dining room where his wife and children were waiting for him. He pulled them close to him in a huge bear hug. He could hear the choppers coming. The remains of the Mother Worm were still smoldering and burning in the street. A few houses had lit up with her, flickering like candles.

“Are… are they gone?” Kassie asked. “Are the worms gone?”

“Yes,” Marv told her. “They’re gone.”

And though it was still dark out, night had ended on Pine Street.