by Curran, Tim
But when there was absolutely no response from her, he turned back. She was sitting naked on the toilet, her long legs spread, her back up against the tank, her head slumped forward. Her eyes were open and staring. They looked like green crystalline pools.
“Steph?”
He wanted very badly to think he had merely caught her in mid-dump, but the truth was much worse and he knew it. Black muck had slopped up from the toilet and spilled to the floor. Globs of it had run down the inside of her legs. There was blood on her lips.
She was dead.
There was no doubt about it.
She was dead and he knew it.
Then she started to move.
Her eyes still wide, green and glassy and unseeing, she wavered from side to side like she might fall right off the pot. And it was as she did so that he heard a moist, tearing sound that was coming from inside her. She began to lean forward like she was going to stand up and pitched right over at his feet…a swollen, monstrous worm sliding out of her in all its segmented, blood-slicked, phallic horror.
He stumbled back in the doorway, nearly going down.
The worm had been eating her from the inside out. She was facedown on the floor, the bloody globes of her ass still raised as if in offering to that obscenity.
It raised its head at him, the forward segments pulling back and opening like a pipe to reveal the mouth and its rows of hooked teeth. A slime of blood and mucus rained down to the floor.
It hissed at him.
And Tony ran.
He did not think; he ran. He darted down the hallway and tripped awkwardly down the steps. Then he was at the door, falling out into the night, so devastated by what he had seen that he could not even scream. He didn’t stop moving until he heard something moving through the muck in his direction.
18
I’m coming for you, motherfucker. I’m coming to kill you. I’m going to beat you to death.
Clutching the fireplace poker in her white-knuckled fists, Kathleen stalked the thing that had slid into her house like a vein of shadow. She would find it. She would kill it. Then…then…then…then she would go quietly mad because she wasn’t too far away now. Maybe not in the same house, but definitely living next door.
The trail of muck was easy enough to follow.
If the creature—snake, had to be a goddamn snake, a fucking python—was trying to practice stealth, it was failing miserably. It was about as stealthy as a shit-leaking pig. That was the comparison that leaped into her mind and she almost screamed because that’s exactly what Pat would have said.
Don’t you dare fall apart. Not yet.
Trembling, sweating out hot/cold beads of perspiration, she followed the muck trail, turning on lights as she went. The trail led from the bathroom to Jesse’s bedroom. Where was that fucking thing and where was her baby?
She tensed.
She heard a low, rolling rumbling sort of noise just as she had when this whole nightmare started. The house shook. It shook again. The rumbling grew louder. The house moved and she went down on her ass in the muck again as ceiling tiles cracked and jagged rents opened up in the walls. She could hear things falling and crashing downstairs. She was certain one of them was the picture window.
The house is falling down.
She scrambled to her feet in the oily black filth and jogged down the hallway to the stairs. She did not know where she was going. She did not know what she would do when she got there. Her brain was moving, it seemed, in every direction at the same time. And what was behind it, what was fueling it was not the loss of Pat or even that damn snake but something bigger, something vastly more important: the baby, the baby, the baby…where is the baby? All she could see was the baby. She was hypercharged with maternal need to protect her child, only she did not know where her child was.
Move! Do something! Do anything, but you must find the baby!
The words made perfect sense, but she did not know what to do. Her animal instinct told her to find that fucking snake and kill it, but her maternal instinct told her all that mattered was finding her child. The rest could be sorted out later.
She had to search the upstairs.
That’s what she had to do.
And this was exactly what she was going to do, but the rumbling started again and this time the house trembled like a dog had seized it and shaken it. She reached for the railing, but lost her grip and went tumbling down the steps, thud, thud, thud.
The house continued to move.
Everything was in motion. The floor seemed to be rolling beneath her the way they said it did during earthquakes. The lights flickered. They went out, then came back on. The walls were cracking open, coughing out clouds of plaster dust. The dining room ceiling caved in, crashing down onto the antique cherry wood table. It hadn’t been the picture window she heard, but the kitchen window. No matter, the picture window now followed suit. The parquet floor shifted, buckled, the individual blocks pulling apart. The ceiling fan came crashing down.
Then the house began to bleed.
At least, that’s what it looked like. Oceans of dark, bubbling blood oozed up from the cracked, disrupted block floor.
No, not blood…muck.
The same sewer-stinking filth that was in the streets and had vomited from the upstairs bathroom.
My house, my fucking house…it’s coming apart! It’s all coming apart!
Kathleen sobbed. Her body shuddered. Something had let go in her brain now. And even though she was far too gone to realize this, she still felt the sense of loss, the sense that there was a great and jagged division between the here and now and what her life had been only a few hours before.
On her hands and knees she began to crawl as the house moved with occasional tremors around her. She crawled through the muck that bled from the floors, moving from the living room into the trashed dining room and kitchen beyond. Ghost fingers of dread slid along the nape of her neck, trying to warn her away from the muck and what might wait in it, but she was oblivious to just about everything by that point.
Still clutching the fire poker, she stopped.
She cocked her head and listened intently like an animal.
She could hear pieces of the ceiling still dropping. Water running. The muck dripping. But she wasn’t interested in any of that. She was listening for the reptile that had come into her house and taken her life away from her. She would kill it. There was nothing else left in her mind but the desire to kill the thing.
It was here.
She knew that much.
If she kept listening, she would hear it sliding from room to room, stalking her…an evil serpent, its form reticulated and silent, its triangular head set with glittering green eyes, raising even now to strike—
There!
Her breath caught in her throat as she heard something soft and large drop to the floor in the living room the way a boa constrictor would drop on its prey from a jungle tree. Yes, it was coming for her, thick-bodied and serpentine, seeking her out in the semidarkness. It would not show itself until it was certain of the kill. It slithered forward, winding through the muck, closer and closer.
Kathleen stripped her coat away so she could fight unimpeded.
Closer. It was almost visible now.
She tensed, bringing up the poker.
She could see it now…its spiraling shape rising up and up. It knew where she was and now it would strike. With a cry, she swung the poker at it, striking it with a fleshy impact that threw stinging fluid in her face. Had it spit poison at her? Her eyes were burning. She pawed the stuff away with her free hand and it felt like cool jelly. She swung the poker again but something happened. It didn’t strike the thing so much as glance over it, more jelly spraying into her face. The poker slid along its oiled length and out of her fingers. She heard it clang to the floor.
The snake made a hissing noise and came right at her.
Before it could bite her, she seized its neck in her hands. Its touch was repel
lent. A big snake was supposed to feel smooth and rippling with muscular contractions, but this thing was soft…almost gelid. Her stiffened fingers actually pierced its flesh. It was pulpous like the brown spots of decay on a rotting apple. Every inch of it seemed to be crawling and greasy, fluid gushing over the backs of her hands. It had spines that cut into her fingers like the thorns on a rose stem.
It was no snake.
It was a worm.
An immense, semigelatinous worm. It was thicker around than a beer can, seeming to swell by the moment. It writhed in her grip like a fire hose under high pressure. It slid through her fingers and she couldn’t seem to get a grip on it. It was like trying to take hold of a rubber tube greased with bacon fat. It moved. It squirmed. It twisted with corkscrewing undulations.
Then it was loose.
Its obscene weight fell in her lap and it attacked immediately. She thought it would go for her face, her eyes, or her throat. But it did none of these things. What it did was that much more appalling: it brushed between her legs like an immense and flaccid penis, then darted its head upward, sliding under her hoodie and up over her belly, the bristles of its skin tearing into her navel. Its swollen length slid between her breasts the way her husband once had.
The effect was nauseating.
Her breasts were heavy with milk and the worm seemed to know it.
She cried out, falling on her ass in the black slop. She yanked and pulled at the worm but it looped in her fingers, thick gouts of foaming slime issuing from it. She could not hold it or tear it away. Its mouth flexed open, shearing through her bra, and enveloped her left breast. She screamed. Its mouth was cool. She could feel its teeth scrape against her like piercing needles. She beat at it, her nails cutting trenches in its flesh, but the teeth bit right into her.
Kathleen let go with a wild, shrieking cry.
The worm’s teeth slid into her breast, impaling deep into her mammary glands, bringing forth blood and warm milk as the ducts were pierced. She fought all that much harder, but the teeth held on. The mouth shriveled to a puckered hole, suckering to her nipple. She could feel its length pulsating as it drained her with unbelievable pain. It was like being hooked up to a milking machine. But the real agony was not that, but when it tore her nipple loose from its intense, vigorous suction.
At the same moment it did, its teeth lost their traction and she yanked it free, jerking it out from beneath her hoodie and tossing it across the room. She was doubled over with incredible, devastating waves of pain, her hoodie soaking red with her blood.
But the worm was not done.
It was coming to finish her.
It slithered through the muck and vaulted at her. She snatched its writhing form in midair with two blood-spattered fists. She squeezed it, trying to tear it apart but it was elastic and fluid. Then with a manic cry, she brought it up to her mouth and bit into it, her teeth rupturing its membrane. This combined with the force of her hands pulling it in opposite directions sheared it. She bit it in half, her mouth filled with an eruption of gurgling slime and gushing worm jelly.
She went over, vomiting, emptying herself. The heaving was agonizing with her injured breast. Before she passed out, she knew she had to get free, she had to get out of the house.
She ran stumbling out the door, leaving the wriggling worm sections behind her. Screaming and sobbing, she waded out into the thigh-high muck that bubbled and coursed around her legs…vile, yet almost soothing with its warmth.
There was something floating out there.
“My baby,” she said picking it up. “My…baby…”
19
Tony tried two more houses in the neighborhood and found destruction. Not just the destruction from the muck and the houses themselves coming apart, but destruction from the worms that had tunneled into each and every one of them like maggots into bad meat, feeding on what they found there.
As he slogged through the muddy sludge in the streets, he heard screams from time to time.
What kind of fucking nightmare was this?
He was just glad Charise wasn’t here. He hoped she was safe. The worms were using the muck as a vector, he knew, to bring them to their prey, and it was working pretty well thus far. The city streets were supposed to be man’s turf. It was his element. But the muck had changed all that and what had once been familiar and safe was now deadly and alien. The muck was swimming with monsters. Like sharks in a sea of blood, they were circling, closer and closer.
Which is why you need to get to shelter. You have to find somewhere they can’t get you or you won’t last the night.
But where was that? An attic? A roof? The mud was still rising and safety was beginning to become something of an abstract term.
He had to relax. He had to get somewhere safe, but he couldn’t panic in the process because if he panicked, he would make mistakes. And if that happened, the worms would take advantage of it.
One of these houses had to have people in it.
People he could stand and fight with.
Tony stopped as he heard a splashing sound and ripples moved through the mud sea. Something was out there. Something was moving beneath the surface and it could only be one thing. He needed to move but it was the thing he feared most. Instinct told him to run and it told him to stay still. The worms weren’t the brightest lights on the tree. Very skilled predators as far as that went, but not real smart. If he moved, they would seek him out. If he stayed still, they might pass on by.
Carefully, very carefully, he snaked a hand into his hoodie and dug his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He lit one and dragged deep off it.
See? See how fucking calm you can be when you have to?
Pulling off his cigarette, he waited there, still as a post.
Now and again, there were ripples around him. The muck roiled, splashed. Eventually, there was nothing. He sighed and let his back slump.
It was then he saw a form moving in his direction.
20
Death would be love’s last enduring kiss, Eva Jung decided. It would come in the night and its lips would be the heat that lit one last fire in the cooling embers of her heart here on this darkest of all dark nights in this bed where her husband had once made love to her.
The neighborhood was coming apart out there. She could hear houses crashing and walls falling and roofs collapsing. Her own house shook. Its foundation cracked open, black muck filling low places like dark arterial blood, pooling and shifting and rising, ever rising. She could hear pipes bursting and looping forms sliding down hallways and up stairwells.
But she was barely even aware of it. She felt only the years pressing down on her and the emptiness that described them which was hollow and without form. She was lying under the sheets, naked, her flesh covered in a slight dew of perspiration—the sweat of fear and the sweat of anticipation. In her soul, she was a virgin untried, her overripened fruit unplucked and untasted but juicy and full. Soon, very soon now, she would not be alone.
She heard a sound out in the hallway beyond her partially open door: a secretive sliding like skin against satin sheets.
Leonard? Leonard, is that you?
Though she knew somewhere in the vacant corridors of her brain that Leonard was dead, still she waited for him and would not have been surprised if his dark shape filled the doorway. She could almost smell his cologne, which always reminded her of well-oiled leather and green, needling pine forests. What she smelled then, what filled the room in dark fumes, was not that but something else. Her breathing increased as the door swung open and she could smell the foul sweetness of her lover. He had come unbidden, hungry and virile. She would be his meat and his wine and he would grow drunk upon her taste, giddy with what she had to offer.
Bring me your love. Bring me the filth and dirt of it. Let me squirm in it.
Her lover approached the bed with that same satiny swish-swish that was pre-seduction. Her heart throbbed in her chest. Her breath came quickly. Her skin was prickled with
gooseflesh. She could smell what had come to take her. Its stink filled the room with a gassy foulness of rotting drainage ditches, but she was unaware of it. She smelled only the cologne: pine forests and pipe tobacco and worn leather. Her madness here on this last night of her life was complete and seamless; dream obscured reality and fantasy shrouded fact.
Please, oh God, please don’t make me wait, please…please…
Though she was hardly aware of the fact, Eva had uncovered herself, exposing her secrets to her lover. She spread her legs so he might enter her. Her lover raised his head above the level of the bed. Eva did not dare look upon him and destroy the beauty of these precious last moments. It was Leonard and she believed it was Leonard. To look upon the obscene, glistening foulness of the ichor-dripping thing that had come for her would shatter the illusion and it had to remain whole. So she refused to look at the immense, bulging vermiform creature that hovered between her spread legs, its segments pulled back like a foreskin to reveal an enormous oval mouth and the circular rows of razored teeth hanging with caustic threads of slime. Droplet by droplet, she felt its saliva burning hot against her sex.
Now…make it now…
Her lover did. Spinning with a corkscrewing motion indicative of its species, it entered her with a cutting, terrible velocity that brought blood and searing agony as she was torn open and ruptured, sinking into the bed which became a soup of her own fluids. She screamed and screamed again, dying with a last perverse taste of wickedness as she was quite literally split in two, knowing death was surely love’s last enduring kiss.
21
Kathleen moved out into the muck, unable to smell the steaming rottenness of it anymore. It seemed the world had always stunk like this. In the tight, crowded confines of her mind, she was unable to remember a world that was not flooded in bubbling black sludge. She stood there watching it, feeling it moving around her with tiny, sluggish currents.
