by Tim Curran
And now, for lack of a better term, it was on the loose stalking its chosen prey: the human race.
Another area of concern was that sooner or later, one of the worms would be studied by people who knew what they were looking for. That they would spot the engineered genes carefully placed in its genetic code.
“Then the shit will most certainly hit the fan,” the Old Man whispered.
He ran it through his head again and again. Sterile organisms which could not survive without a host for more than three days had slept for six years and began reproducing. As yet, there had been no repercussions from the Syrians. No hint that they suspected the Americans of unleashing a plague upon them. As far as intelligence could discern, the Syrians were not discussing the recent outbreak in the desert. They had reacted swiftly and decisively in exterminating the infected populations.
Still, the Old Man worried.
Not so much about the American outbreak, but that the Syrians and their Islamic extremist colleagues had gathered specimens of the parasite and would one day use them as a weapon. Perhaps against Israel or even the US or its allies. If that happened, if a plague of parasites was allowed to spread, there would be no earthly way to contain it.
And that may happen anyway, he thought, if we don’t stop them here and now.
With that in mind, he went to the cubicles and watched.
One of the hit teams had snatched two living subjects for further study. Actually, they’d only been sent to grab the man, one Marcus Grimes, but through unforeseen circumstances they’d had to take his wife as well. Which was probably for the best. Grimes had been one of the unlucky Gulf vets who had tromped through the vicinity of Nkudbkah some months after the destruction of said village.
No one at the time, of course, thought there could possibly be a danger in troops moving through the area. But they were wrong. And Grimes, like hundreds of others, had picked up a little passenger in his belly that had waited six years before making its terrible appearance.
Behind the reinforced Plexiglas, Marcus and Teresa Grimes were a pathetic and frightening sight. They both had parasites in them. Marcus had infected his wife within hours after arriving. As the research teams watched, the drama unfolded. Marcus slipped into a coma. Teresa was nearly mad with rage, screaming at the team outside the cubicle, pounding her fists on the Plexiglas shell. She wanted to know why they’d been arrested. Why they were being kept in a cage. Why they wouldn’t help her husband who was obviously very ill. And why everyone was dressed in those goddamn space suits.
The medical staff did not respond, they merely observed.
Within a few hours of slipping into his coma, Marcus began to stir.
The team watching and making copious notes (as well as digital video recordings), Marcus sat up. Teresa told him he should lie down, rest, conserve his strength until these CIA honky motherfuckers let them out.
But Marcus didn’t want to rest.
Or maybe what was inside him didn’t want to.
He shambled after his wife, his flesh like old candle wax, his eyes glassy and wet. And it was about that time that Teresa finally saw the light. Finally got a firsthand taste of what had been causing her husband’s medical problems. Marcus launched himself at her, forcing her down. She screamed…oh God, how she screamed…then she became almost docile, accepting. Then Marcus let go of her. He didn’t have to hold her down because what he had she wanted. She clung to him, wrapping herself around him… then he opened his mouth.
Yawned wide, one of the technicians said later, like an open manhole.
The worm came out, segment by segment, shiny white and eyeless. It went right down Teresa’s throat like a snake into a mouse hole. And for a time, it stayed like that. The two were connected by the thing. Marcus’ eyes rolled back into his head and something like slime ran from his mouth in sparkling loops. After about twenty minutes, the worm slithered back into Marcus, leaving a segment of itself in his wife’s belly.
Like the flatworms they were engineered from, each segment, or proglottid, was a sexually complete hermaphroditic unit in which sperm and ova were produced. When the ova were mature and fertilized, the parent worm would break off a segment into another host organism. And each segment contained hundreds of eggs and each egg, an embryonic worm. Thereby, propagating itself and its species.
And when you considered that the worms were basically made up of segment after segment of fertilized eggs, the potential for proliferation was awesome. The threat to any population was staggering.
Left unchecked, these creatures could decimate a city in weeks.
The Old Man chuckled dryly in his throat. And wasn’t that exactly what we’d designed them for?
They were much nastier than anyone imagined or could imagine.
And what it came down to—and what should serve as a benchmark for further weaponized organisms—was that never, never should a life form’s inherent desire for survival be overlooked or underestimated.
The two in the cubicle proved that.
They sat next to each other now, two dead-eyed zombies clutching each other while parasitic guests cowered in their bellies. Teresa was comatose for the most part. From time to time, the head, or scolex, of a worm would emerge from Marcus’ mouth and coil in the air. But never for long. Slowly, slowly they drained their hosts of life, wanting only to breed and infest.
“We could starve them to death eventually,” one of the parasitologists told the Old Man. “Eventually, if the original project research was correct, the worms will begin to cannibalize their hosts.”
The scientists often argued the finer points of parasitization, but one thing they did agree on was that by the time the worms were sexually mature (and that seemed to be when they were four or five feet in length) their hosts were no longer capable of independent reasoning or action. They were merely vessels for the worms, zombies as it were. No one was sure how they managed neurological control of their hosts, but the facts remained. There was one theory, of course. That somehow, the creatures managed to tap into the cerebral cortex of their hosts. Once this was done, their hosts would be incapable of independent actions.
At least that’s what the medical staff were thinking.
Further study was needed.
But it raised frightening possibilities.
The Old Man was beginning to sweat profusely standing there in his hot suit watching the hosts.
There was only one lucky thing in all of this, he knew.
That Marine in Bethesda. If it hadn’t been for him dying mysteriously and the autopsy revealing the parasite inside him, the outbreak might have gone on unchecked for many weeks more than it already had. They’d gotten lucky with that. After the Syrian outbreak, the DoD had put a plan into action. They formed a database with the names, addresses, and medical histories of all servicemen and women who had passed through the Nkudbkah area. They monitored these vets for any medical problems and particularly anything related to “Gulf War Syndrome” which was a blanket term if ever there was one. If it hadn’t been for that... well, things might have been over for the country before action could have even been initiated.
And as it was, the Old Man knew, things were bad enough. The very idea of the parasite biomass out there right now scared the hell out of him. Because he knew one thing—it was spreading. Fast.
AUGUST 23
OUTBREAK—NATIONWIDE
It was everywhere.
In every state, in every population center, in bustling crowded cities and small towns alike. And although a few remote rural hamlets had avoided the contagion thus far, it wouldn’t last. Statistically speaking, it was near on impossible. The country was filled with walking vectors and transmission was a certainty. Like germs spreading through contact, hand to mouth and body to body, the infestation spread and became something of a silent epidemic. Though wild stories of giant worms and frightening conspiracies were thick on the Internet, as usual no one paid attention. And those in power, the very people—o
r some of them—that had started this particularly ugly ball rolling, hid away, covering their heads and cowering, praying for it to end as suddenly as it had started, while damage control was still possible.
But they were deluding themselves.
Though they continued to press on, fighting a covert war against carriers and disease vectors, the enemy was thoroughly entrenched and the infestation was quickly reaching epidemic proportions. The parasites, as hideous and horrible as they might be, were only doing what they had been programmed to do.
Hour by hour and day by day, the plague sunk its claws that much deeper into the red meat of the human population.
Critical mass had nearly been reached and as the country took one shambling step closer to the graveyard, no one was the wiser.
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND:
FEDERAL HILL
10:27 A.M.
They were after him and Craig Gooding knew it. He saw them in every crowd, peering from every alley, every nook and doorway and cul-de-sac. Cops. Had to be cops, in his way of thinking. Maybe they’d seen him snatch that purse over in Harborplace—goddamn tourists were such easy marks—but if they had his number, then why weren’t they putting the arm on him?
Crazy.
It was just crazy.
He told the bartender to give him another shot of Jim Beam and his hands were shaking so badly, he could barely get it to his lips. Of course, the bartender noticed. He was keeping his eye on Craig and Craig didn’t like that.
Asshole. I’m a vet. I fought for this country. Don’t you look down your nose at me.
He went back out onto the streets.
Where to now? He’d snatched three purses in the last twenty-four hours and there hadn’t been shit in them. Twenty bucks. That was it. Everyone was using fucking debit cards now and he needed the green. Just a month ago things had been good and he’d been riding high and proud, good booze, good hookers, a crib over at the St. Charles, dig it…now, just the streets. Sleeping in parks and alleys. Panhandling for dimes. And now a goddamn purse-snatcher.
Wait.
There. See ‘em over there? Don’t look. Pretend you don’t see.
Yup. They were there, all right. Those same two dudes that had been following him all morning. Crewcuts. Thick necks. Looked like a couple jarheads. Had to be narcs. They were sitting on a bench down the way, pretending they were reading newspapers.
Shit.
Craig couldn’t shake them.
That was because they knew. They knew.
For nearly a year he had a good thing going. He did his bit in Iraq so he got free medical at the VA. There was a Pakistanny doc over there, fucker barely had a green card, that was giving Craig pretty much all the Oxycontin and Dilaudid he wanted. Like 400 pills a month. Even Craig’s addiction wasn’t that hungry. He sold most of it to Biscuit over in Cherry Hill. The living was easy and the cotton (as in Oxy) was high. Then that Paki doc got busted for trafficking prescription drugs and the narcs raided Biscuit and put her black ass behind bars. Now they were looking for Craig because Biscuit might have been all that but she was terrified of doing time, so she sang like a tweeting yellow bird and now the narcs wanted the conduit: Craig himself.
He stepped into the flow of the crowd.
Lots of tourists. Easy to lose himself in their masses. Sure. Just slip into the crowd, become one of the many. Down past the park he went, making for Cross Street. They had something going on down there. It was worth checking out. Steel drum bands playing and tourists everywhere, standing in the street, hanging out in the beer garden. He moved faster now, caught in the surge of bodies, but being careful because he knew those two had him in their sights and were going to run him to ground. They probably wouldn’t do it around all the tourists, though. Gentrification and all that, look how pretty our inner city is, no crime, no bullshit, just easy living and colonial beauty, keep spending those dollars, keep on—
Oh Jesus.
There it came again, right down in his belly like a knife scraping along his stomach.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Burning, digging, white pain in his guts. Crackling, sizzling, snapping like a whip in there.
People were looking at him, staring at him, hands reaching towards him and others wanting no part of him. You all right? You okay, buddy? You don’t look so good… Get away, get away. Christ, if they only knew what it was like inside when you felt the pain and had the need. Nothing could touch it. Craig had eaten his last two Oxy this morning and now every nerve ending in his body was tightening, tightening, twisting like screws.
He plowed through the crowd, doubled over, the agony kicking him in the stomach again and again, and everyone was staring and pointing and shouting at him as he knocked them aside, running, stumbling, going back the way he came, making for the park where the crowds wouldn’t be so thick, pushing in from all sides, their eyeballs all over him.
He made it up the park steps, then he was crawling through the grass on his hands and knees. Into the bushes now, his face bleached white, mottled red, cold/hot sweat flooding down it. He threw up bile into the grass because there was nothing else inside him… gah… everything went loose, his body no longer his own, breath wheezing from his lungs in a dry ragged gasping, hot shit leaking from his ass, his bladder voiding itself. His muscles were flab, nothing connected, blood roaring in his head, fever sweat filling his eyes, and inside him that pain moving and coiling, sharp and cutting… like needles piercing and puncturing, a horsehair rope snapping taut in his bowels…
He was rolling on the ground now, contorting and jerking while pink saliva flew from his mouth in slimy tangles and inside his belly…pressure building, bloating, distending…and then, oh dear God, release, release as it all came up out of him, filling his throat and his mouth with an awful sewer-black taste, a convulsive white rope of jelly pushing from his lips in the form of a contracting, pulsing white worm thick around as his arm.
By then, Craig’s mind was no longer his own.
He lay there, shuddering in his own waste, as the worm slid back into his mouth, down, down into the coveting blackness. It had wants and it had needs. It telegraphed them to its host with hunger pangs that were so severe that Craig cried out with a lunatic shrieking.
Then he was on his feet, staggering, stumbling, his eyes the color of fresh blood, shining and wet. The hunger pains ratcheted up in his belly—drilling, cutting, punching deeper and deeper. What he did then was purely automatic: he ate. He ate anything that was available, biting into his own tongue again and again until his mouth filled with blood. There should have been pain but the worm had neutralized his neuroreceptors and kicked the hunger drives of his hypothalamus into hyperdrive.
He was quite literally an eating machine.
All else was suspended. He chewed away at chunks of his own tongue, licking blood from his lips. It ran down his chin in great gouts. He bit into his lower lip, tearing and ripping at it until a great bleeding section of it came loose that he could mash between his teeth.
But it was hardly enough.
The hunger pains hit him again and again like a buzzard striking at a carcass. He was in starvation mode. He needed fuel. He needed lots of it. He spotted a hot dog vendor on the sidewalk and made for him. Said vendor had his back turned as he chatted with a young woman.
Craig knocked a man out of his way in his frantic flight to the hot dog cart. “HUNGREEEEEE!” he cried out in a weird, childlike voice. “I’M SO HUNGREEEEEE!”
He began grabbing handfuls of cooked franks from the cart and shoving them in his mouth, gnawing them greedily into strands of pink meat. He went through them like a buzzsaw. He was insatiable.
“Hey!” the vendor shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”
He grabbed Craig by the arm and spun him around. It was then that he knew he had made a terrible error. Craig was drooling and chewing, blood running from his nostrils, his face a waxy blotched yellow.
Craig leaped on him.
He knocked the vendor down and
pounded his head against the sidewalk until there was an audible cracking. People were shouting, screaming, crying out for help. But nobody dared get anywhere near Craig. Not that he cared. The world no longer existed. There was only the hunger. He bit into the vendor’s throat, tearing open his rubbery carotid until a hot—and satisfying—gush of blood sprayed into his face. And still he bit, he chewed, and tore like an animal. He gouged out the vendors eyeballs and savaged his cheeks and nose, pulling his tongue from his mouth and biting into its warm, wet, beefy goodness, salivating and moaning.
Though he was violently cannibalizing the vendor—and in full view of a dozen shocked and horrified witnesses—in his mind, what was left of it, he was no monster but a starving little boy glutting himself on sour cherry balls and crunchy jawbreakers, sucking nougat from chocolate wafers and lapping up chewy ribbons of caramel. He ate and ate and ate.
He did not see the two men that had been following him pull out 9mm handguns and pop about eight rounds into him or hear their voices on cells: “We got one here… adult form… we need cleaners…”
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA:
SWIFT CREEK
11:45 A.M.
Kitty McKee—a.k.a. Little Kit—had a gopher snake in a jelly jar and she was hunting flies for its lunch. It was a baby gopher snake, and it was good-tempered and did not bite. Sometimes when they got older and bigger, they would hiss or snap, but not the babies and Kitty’s snake was only five inches long. She had named it Lady. She loved how sleek and smooth Lady was. People thought snakes were slimy, but that was only people who had never held one. Because in truth they were smooth like glass.
