by Tim Curran
“All right,” Cave said. “Let’s go in.”
“That’s it?” Stein said. “That’s our briefing?”
“You got it,” Cave told him. “We have an unknown number of vectors in that structure. All are contaminated. All have to be put down. When we finish, the BCTs will mop up.”
Stein got it. Maybe McKenna was still scratching his head but Stein got it loud and clear: they’d waste everyone in the building and the BCTs would torch everything after making sure there was nothing living. The story that would reach the media would be fairly sterile: a tactical unit went up against armed combatants and the building burned to the ground with no survivors. All the coroner’s people would find would be charred bones. The worms were invertebrates, no skeletons, they’d melt away.
Ah, the architects of bullshit have already plugged up the loose holes in this one, he thought.
They went through the front door of the tenement, smelling cat piss and human excrement, garbage and something much worse, something sweet and foul at the same time and Stein knew it was the stench of the worms themselves. He’d smelled it before. It was positively nauseating.
They were here in numbers.
Within minutes they’d located Orange Team and coordinated the clean-up. Orange would take the first floor and cellar. Green Team would take the second and third floor. They’d all keep in constant communication via TacSat radio and with command outside. Blue Team would monitor communications and stage if necessary.
“Let’s make this short and sweet,” Cave said as they went up the stairs.
When they reached the top, the lights went out. Tactical flashlights bolted to the MP5s were clicked on.
“Where’s those lights?” Cave said into his headset.
Power failure, he was told. They moved out slowly, playing their lights around, making sure there were no ugly surprises waiting for them. McKenna was on point, moving forward, sweeping his light back and forth across the corridor that in the blackness looked like a subterranean tunnel.
“Look,” he said, crouching down.
Cave and Stein were at his side. They saw it. It was hard to miss: a trail of blood droplets that moved up the corridor until they weren’t droplets anymore but puddles and then an unbroken river that led to one of the doorways at the end.
“Where’s those lights?” Cave said over the headset.
The voice from the tac van told him that some whacko—probably infected—had gone at the old fuse box out back with a sledge hammer. He’d smashed the shit out of it. There’d be no lights. Not for a while.
Stein and McKenna just looked at Cave, knowing it was his call.
They waited in the dark and the stink.
The sensible thing to do is pull back, Stein thought, until we get those lights on. But he won’t. I know he won’t. This entire op is timed and they want it cleaned-up right now.
“Let’s go,” Cave said, true to form, leading them down the hallway, following the blood trail.
McKenna gave Stein a desperate look in the glare of their lights but Stein ignored it. He should have known better. A bullet-eater like Cave would not be deterred by lights or lack of them.
Cave crept up to the doorway. He tried the doorknob but it was locked. He slapped a shaped charge of C-4 on it and set it. They pulled back and the charge went off with an echoing concussion and a brilliant flash of orange-yellow light.
Cave charged in, kicking the door open and McKenna and Stein came in after him, the three of them spreading out and maintaining low firing positions as they swept the room with their lights. It was a living room apparently and it looked like a hurricane had whipped through there, furniture cast around and broken, holes punched in the walls, everything shattered underfoot. And the smell…hot bacterial decay tainted with that sick/sweet smell of rank fungal rot.
Some chatter came over the headset and they heard the sounds of weapons being discharged below. Orange Team had made contact.
“They got it under control,” Cave said.
Yeah, I’ll bet they do, Stein thought.
Playing their lights about, Green Team moved forward, shadows jumping and crawling up the walls, broken pipes hanging from the ceiling and dripping dank-smelling water. There was an archway leading into a hallway and this was where they went. Their lights showed them walls stained with runny red blotches and strings of tissue. On the floor, midway down the hallway, there was what looked to be the remains of a woman…or something like a woman.
“Shit,” McKenna said which was a pretty apt observation.
Stein studied the remains in his light and decided they were what a human being might look like if it was shaken around in a bottle of acid and then poured back out. He saw four splayed limbs—arms, legs—that appeared to be intact, but everything else had gone to a liquid slushy seepage of blood, flesh, and hair melting down into a bubbling swamp of biological refuse. In his light he saw red-slicked bones and floating teeth and a single bobbing eyeball.
He wondered then if this was what happened to a human host when a worm was done with it. After it had been used and abused, leeched and drained and was of no further use.
Then one of the legs moved.
It was impossible, but he saw it.
“Moved,” McKenna said, breathing hard. “It fucking moved.”
“It can’t move.”
“It did,” Stein said. “I saw it.”
Cave moved in closer, keeping his light on the runny mess but there was nothing, no movement, nothing more than a few bubbles of blood popping on the surface of that grisly sea.
“C’mon,” he said.
Stein and McKenna stepped to either side, trying to avoid the human compost on the floor and that’s when McKenna cried out. One of the arms reached out and gripped his ankle. He tried to kick it free, but it hung on tenaciously, connected to the remains by strings of tissue and nerve and ligament. Finally, his face wild and beaded with sweat, he kicked it loose. It hit the wall and slapped to the floor, the fingers drumming the bloody tiles like it was bored or impatient.
They heard a giggling from one of the rooms farther down.
All four of the limbs were moving now, thumping and splatting in that sea of flesh-humus.
Stein and McKenna almost collided with each other trying to get away from that…that horror.
But the laughing…
Cave followed it and stepped into a room and here was the epicenter of the evil and infection: an ugly, deranged man with a face that looked pitted as if by thousands of hornet stings. He crouched in the corner, a fat white worm coiling in his hands. It was two or three feet long and as they put the lights on it, he made a snarling sound and opened his mouth, the worm sliding back down his throat.
Cave swore under his breath and shot him point-blank with two three-round bursts that blew him apart and sprayed him up the walls, releasing his parasite which crawled through an aperture in his torn-open abdomen and rose up like a rattlesnake ready to strike. Cave shot it, too, blasting it into gray drainage and white pulp. It seemed to dissolve into itself, becoming a snotty discharge of webby eggs.
Stein turned away and that’s when he saw that they were not alone.
There were people chained to the walls.
“Jesus,” he said.
4:39 A.M.
On the first floor, Orange Team—commanded by Captain Smith—had eradicated no less than eight infected vectors and it went well. It got a little hairy for a few moments there, but his boys held tight and maintained their killing positions. As the BCT moved in to assess the dead vectors and what had crawled out of them, Orange Team went to the cellar for phase two of their clean-up op. The first thing they saw was the cat.
At least, it looked sort of like a cat.
Johnson saw it and White did, too.
Smith brought his light around and looked right at the thing, its jade-green eyes glistening and wet with running puss.
It waited atop a stack of water-stained boxes, its hair stan
ding on end like it was filled with voltage. It was a swollen, ulcerated thing. There was something hanging between its legs like a clown-white penis: a worm dangling from a hole in its belly. The cat yawned its jaws wide and made a croaking/mewing sort of sound that was equal parts torment and agony. Worms burst from its eyes and ass and pushed out of its mouth like white fingers.
And it leaped.
Maybe Smith and the others should have expected it and maybe they were just too shocked by what they were seeing.
It made it about three feet into the air, fanning its flesh out as if it was some kind of mutant flying squirrel, and they opened up, rounds busting everywhere. Eight or ten of them drilled into the cat and it literally exploded in mid-flight, spraying them down with blood and fluid and cat-meat… and worms.
“Get ‘em off me!” White cried. “Oh, God, get these fucking things off me!”
Whilst Johnson and Smith himself were struck mostly by tissue and fluids—save one looping worm that Johnson crushed to paste—the spray pattern had tossed half a dozen worms right at White. They were on his Kevlar vest. One was wrapped around his wrist. Another trying to find a way into his fatigues and two more going for his face, climbing up him with amazing speed.
That’s when Johnson lost it.
That’s when whatever glue that held him together ran like warm sap and he stumbled back, shouting, “NO! NO! NO! NO, THIS AIN’T FUCKING HAPPENING! I AIN’T SEEING THIS!” Smith barked orders at him, but Johnson was no longer listening. In fact, he had torn off his headset and dropped his weapon, clapped hands over his ears and sank to his knees, making a high wailing that was the sound of a human mind that was literally emptying itself.
Smith, swearing a blue streak, grabbed hold of White and threw him up against the boxes and stripped worms from him and White, of course, was so out of his mind by that point that he threw two punches into Smith’s face. Once the worms were clear, Smith slapped him three times until he got himself under control.
Two things happened then.
A worm dropped from somewhere overhead and draped itself over Johnson’s face. It was a big one, thick and writhing, and it wound itself around his throat while Johnson’s clawing fingers dug at it, fingers piercing the white greasy flesh, segments erupting with gushing gray drainage and pearly clusters of eggs.
None of which seemed to bother the worm.
It went right for Johnson’s left eye.
In his light, Smith saw it happen.
The worm had a head or something like a head that was sort of an elongated globular bulb with a slit-like X-shaped mouth surrounded by wiry spines that it jabbed right into Johnson’s face…and almost immediately he went limp, head lolling on his shoulders like he’d been spiked with Seconal. Then the worm opened its mouth and it was perfectly round and pink inside, filled with three or four slender appendages that were pulsing, extending from the mouth, then retracting.
Before Smith could do a damn thing, that bulb-head reared back, hooked protrusions like teeth slid from the mouth, and those slender appendages seized Johnson’s eyeball and the teeth sank into his face.
Johnson screamed… drugged or desensitized, he still screamed.
The worm yanked its bulb-head back and pulled the eye out by its bleeding stalk. The sound of that was sickening: like someone tonguing a juicy cherry from its sheath of chocolate.
Smith had his MP5 in his hands and he pulled the trigger.
The clip was empty.
The worm ripped Johnson’s eye out and tossed it aside, forcing itself into the bleeding socket with a moist, slithery sort of sound. By the time it had penetrated four or five inches, Smith had his pistol-gripped Remington tactical shotgun in his hands. He put the bracketed light right on the worm and blew Johnson’s head apart in a raw splash of skull matter and pink tissue.
Johnson slumped over dead.
Smith, seeing the worm pulling itself back out, racked the pump and blew it to fragments. He racked it again and pulverized anything that was left.
That was the first thing that happened.
The second happened at nearly the same time. As Smith saw the worm fall on Johnson, White heard a voice. Despite everything going on, he heard a slight whispering voice. Turning, he grabbed up his dropped weapon and put the light on the source.
A girl…is that a girl?
It was.
Just a little slip of a thing in a blood-stained nightgown, her dark eyes huge and pathetic and very glassy. But he did not notice this or the yellow cast to her face. He only heard the voice that came from her lips— “Help me, mister, oh won’t you please help me?” —and was blissfully unaware that her eyes were fixed, unseeing glass balls and that her mouth was opening and closing like a fish gulping air, but her lips were not truly forming words.
He went over to her and picked her up. She was amazingly light, a sweet stink coming off her that made his head reel. But in his state of mind, he was not truly cognizant of this because his common sense had already jumped its rails and was wildly careening this way and that.
“WHITE! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?” Smith shouted at him.
But White was oblivious.
He held the poor little girl to him.
Smith moved forward towards White, his flashlight beam jiggling and tossing shadows around. He saw the girl and knew she was no girl. She was a puppet and her master was a worm. When White had picked her up he thought her remarkably weightless and there was a good reason for that: for the biggest worm Smith had yet seen, thick as a man’s leg, was behind the girl. It had impaled her, burrowing into her back, lifting her up like a hand puppet and drawing White in. White was ignorant of the fact in his childlike stupor… at least until the worm’s bulbous head drilled out of the girl’s chest in a spray of gore and opened its jaws, spitting a stream of black bile into his face.
Then he noticed.
His face hung in ribbons and strings of flesh as the acidic juice burned into it. He screamed, hands wrapped around the worm whose thick pulsating body was greasy and stinging with secretions. He tried to keep its mouth away from him as he stared down the black tunnel of its gullet, smelling the hot sweet stink of its digestive tract blowing out at him. He saw the teeth-like projections that looked very much like shards of glass. Then the stinging spines at its mouth injected their venom and he flopped forward.
“WHITE!” Smith cried out but it was hopeless, and he knew it.
The worm forced itself into his mouth, breaking his jaws in the process, and pushed down his throat. Smith jumped forward with the shotgun and by then the worm had both the little yellow-faced girl and White threaded onto its length. It lifted them in the air, making them dance and flop about with loose limbs.
Enough.
Smith fired two times at it and turned, running. He clambered up the steps as dozens of worms slid out of the warm darkness to claim him.
4:47 A.M.
The people chained to the walls weren’t chained exactly.
They wore dog collars like precious pets. Collars attached to dog chains that were nailed to the plasterboard behind them. It was insane and more than a little disturbing.
As he put his light on them, a single thought came veering white-hot into Stein’s mind: They were brought here. That crazy man with the holes in his face, he brought them here one by one, chained them up and let the worms have them. Probably his own worms.
They were mostly women and children, about seven or eight of them, horribly emaciated with pipe cleaner limbs and bellies rounded like root beer barrels, their flesh scaly like the leprous skin of rats. They were making wet smacking sounds with their lips, eyes rolling in their heads, tongues thick in their mouths like pink slugs. Their heads were moving side-to-side, not whipping exactly, but with a sort of rhythmic motion like they were hearing some distant music.
When the lights had been trained on them maybe ten seconds, they each disgorged worms that came gliding wetly from their mouths with succulent noises that went right
up the spines of Green Team.
“What…” McKenna began to ask.
Cave shook his head. “All vectors. Waste ‘em.”
“Sir?”
“WASTE ‘EM!”
McKenna and Stein didn’t need to be told twice. They opened up and perforated the worm-carriers with slugs until their magazines were empty and the people were slumped over, held upright only by their chains.
That was it. This room was done. And there were God only knew how many more apartments to go through and at that particular moment, each man wondered if he’d have the strength for it. That’s what Stein was thinking. Could they and would they? Why not torch the place? Just burn it and be done with it.
“Back away slow,” Cave said then. “Real…slow.”
Stein had no idea what he was talking about, then he turned and put his light over in the direction of the deranged man’s corpse. He saw it. Just as Cave and McKenna had. A worm. Probably the biggest worm yet seen by the teams. It was rising up from a pocket of shadows behind a broken sofa the way a spitting cobra will rise up in a defensive posture before it strikes. It reared up and seemed to be looking right at them. Each glistening white segment was round and tinged with pink as if the worm had glutted itself on blood. Its bulb-head opened and its mouth yawned wide, lined with hook-like teeth and whipping pink tendrils. The stinging spines around the mouth were trembling, the color of fresh blood.
Mouth wide, it made a hissing thh-thh-thh-thh-thh sort of sound and launched itself at them in a hot wave of honeyed stench.
Green Team did not hesitate.
They opened up and blew it into strings of pulp and worm-meat and then got the hell out of there. It wasn’t until they reached the corridor that they saw there were worms everywhere, slithering across the floor and inching down the walls and hanging from the ceiling, all of them hissing and shrilling.
4:53 A.M.
Captain Smith, the last survivor of Orange Team, came vaulting up the steps from the cellar screaming over his headset for reinforcements. He was told to link up with Green Team on the second floor and even though he knew somehow it was a horrendous mistake, he had been following orders for too long to disobey now. Sometimes orders could be a comfort, he knew, another brain making the decisions that you had lost the ability to make yourself.
