by Curran, Tim
Donna Peppek was doing her best to keep Bertie Kalishek under control and Fern had engaged the twins in a game of Crazy Eights. This by candlelight, of course, now that the power was out. Something which made little sense, because the lights were on across the street. Go figure.
Marv went down into the basement with Tony and grabbed the lanterns from the camping equipment. They were battery powered, but that was no problem because like food and toilet paper, Fern had stockpiled them. When they had the living room lit up nicely, they went into Marv’s little den at the back of the house and unlocked the gun cabinet. He had three weapons: a Mossberg four-ten, a bolt-action Remington 30-06 with a scope, and a .38 Special that had belonged to his dad. There was no ammo for the .38, but there were fifteen rounds for the Mossberg bird gun and ten for the Remington deer rifle.
They had food.
They had lights.
They had arms.
They were safe.
“I got this bad feeling things are going to heat up out there,” Tony said as he loaded the four-ten.
Marv nodded. “Me, too. If it was just me, I wouldn’t be too worried…but with Fern and the girls. I don’t know. I’m scared.”
“Let’s go make sure nothing happens to them,” Tony said.
29
The mud was moving out there.
Marv watched it through the picture window. It was no longer just slowly bubbling and oozing, now it was in motion. Huge, dark waves of it were cresting and splashing through yards and slamming into houses with considerable force. A wave of water was one thing, but a wave of mud had considerable weight behind it. As first one and then another hit the house, the living room trembled. The windows rattled. A painting fell off the wall. An anniversary clock on the mantel pitched to the floor and shattered.
“Everyone just hang on!” Tony called out.
Another wave was coming and it was much bigger than the other two. The only good thing about it was that waves of mud, despite their weight and force, moved very slowly. Marv told everyone to get behind the couch and brace themselves.
“Here it comes,” Tony said.
Between the moonlight outside and the streetlight at the corner, it was fairly bright out there. The light glistened off the rolling muck. But as the wave came, it threw a huge shadow before it and by the time it crested outside the living room window, it blocked out any and all exterior light.
It hit with tremendous force.
The house more than shook; it felt like it had been moved three or four feet. Things were falling from shelves and the plaster was cracking, tiles falling from the ceiling. And then…as the wave pulled back, there was a creaking sound and the picture window collapsed in its frame, a river of mud flowing in, knocking aside a recliner and a coffee table. It winked with shards of glass.
“Back into the dining room!” Marv called.
As they scurried away, taking one of the lanterns with them, he stood in about three or four inches of black, churning muck. Right away, he could see things moving in it. And not one or two worms, but maybe a dozen or more. One of them came up out of the mud and he booted it aside, he fired at another, missed, and hit it with the second round, splitting it nearly in two.
“Watch it!” Tony cried out.
A four-foot worm came out of the sludge, its mud-slicked, heaving body thick and spiny. Its forward segment opened, pulling back and revealing a sheath of needle-sharp teeth, each of which had to be at least an inch or two in length. It moved quickly with a rolling muscular contraction and it would have bit right into his leg if Tony hadn’t jumped forward and fired on it. The worms seemed to be made of little more than slime and juice contained in a rubbery envelope of tissue. When the birdshot hit it, it literally exploded into a spray of pulp.
Two others rose up, one making the most obscene sort of croaking noise like a fat bullfrog. Tony fired. But they were everywhere. The mud was a living stew of them and their elastic forms began unwinding from it.
30
“Watch it in there!” Fern heard Marv call to her from the living room and she didn’t need to be told twice. She knew damn well what to watch out for. That worm in the drain had been no bizarre evolutionary accident, but one of many. The muck was infested with them.
Kassie was crying and Kalie told her to knock it off. Fern did her best to soothe both of them. They were trembling and so was she. Tony and Marv were shooting and shooting, trying to turn back the tide of the wriggling invaders.
Then…Donna screamed.
She fell back, kicking her leg in the air. One of the worms had gotten into the dining room. Its teeth were buried in her ankle and it was chewing, simply gnawing with a grating sound of knives against bone. Its body undulated with convulsions as it gulped down what it tore loose.
“One side!” Bertie Kalishek said, pushing past Fern and the twins. “One side!”
By then, Donna was nearly out of her mind with pain and hysteria.
Bertie took it all most calmly. She stepped forward, lighting a Lark 100 and pulling two good drags off it as she lowered herself to her knees—no easy process at her age—and took hold of Donna’s thrashing leg. When she had it still, she pulled off the cigarette again until the cherry was glowing bright orange…then she stabbed it right into the side of the worm. There was a sssstttt sort of sound and the worm reacted immediately, dropping free and writhing on the carpet.
“Don’t care for that much, do you, you little vermin,” she said, pulling herself to her feet with aid of the dining room table. When she was up and steady, she stamped down one rain boot on the worm and it burst open in a flood of cold jelly. About six inches of the tail end disengaged itself, squirming wildly about.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Bertie said and smashed it under her boot. She smashed the head end, too, which was opening and closing its fanged mouth like a fish gasping for air.
Fern called out to Marv that they were okay as she dashed into the bathroom for the first-aid kit.
By then, Donna was looking very pale and very sickly. She was laying flat on the floor, her eyes glazed and barely blinking, her mouth trembling as if she wanted to speak. She was in full view of the twins, of course, who stared down at her with wide eyes. When she made a moaning sound, they cringed and held on to each another.
Fern got back and began to dress Donna’s ankle. There was a great deal of tissue damage and she’d lost a lot of blood. About all Fern could do under the circumstances was pour some disinfectant on it—which made Donna cry out like she had been scorched with a branding iron—and wrap it up good. She needed real medical care and soon. Fern didn’t want to think of the worm’s filthy mouth and what sort of germs were already breeding in the wound site.
“Listen,” Bertie said. “You hear that?”
They were all hearing it. The worms were massing outside, hissing and making that weird hollow croaking noise. They could hear them sliding along the outer walls of the house and Fern was almost sure there was one on the roof…a really big one.
“I’m of the opinion we’re most definitely in the shit here,” Bertie said.
31
Remember when Charise called? You remember when she told you to get out? Well, you should have listened. You should have waded to higher ground or swung tree to tree like a fucking ape, but you should have gotten out.
This was what Tony was thinking as the worms pressed in from every quarter. They were not only coming in through the broken picture window and in such numbers they looked like strings of hamburger being churned out by an old meat grinder, but they were hitting the roof and the other windows like they were being fired from cannons. It made no real sense, but he was seeing it. In the glow of the lantern, they were smashing against the window by the door and with such velocity that they were exploding against the pane until the window was just dark and globby with worm goo.
“Tony!” Marv called out.
Tony avoided a darting worm and almost stepped into the embrace of a much larger on
e that raised itself from the muck with open jaws. He fired with the shotgun and blew it into fragments that continued to writhe. He had been momentarily distracted by the sound of other worms punching into the front door, trying to chew their way through.
Together, he and Marv began to back their way toward the dining room.
If this was a battle, then it was one they couldn’t hope to win. He was getting low on shells for the shotgun and he figured Marv couldn’t have had much more than five or six rounds left for the 30-06.
A huge worm, maybe six or seven feet in length, bashed through one of the few unbroken side panes of the picture window. It was like an immense, swollen tube, segmented and bulging, its mouth as wide as an open coffee can. Tony fired at it, killing it and several smaller ones that clustered around it.
They were going to be buried alive.
There were just too damn many of them.
There was no way in hell they could fight against those kinds of numbers without anything less than a machine gun. And that’s when he began to wonder if there wasn’t some sort of strategy behind the assault. In a human wave attack, the point was not only to overwhelm defenses and breach perimeters, but to get the defenders to waste the majority of their ammunition.
What if, by some absolute perversion of logic, that’s what the worms were doing?
32
It was utter pandemonium, but Fern tried to keep her head.
The twins were holding on to each other so tightly she thought they might break. Donna was in a bad way. Her skin was clammy and damp with sweat. She was unresponsive and trembling. There was no doubt she was in shock or damn close to it. Fern had already raised her damaged leg up onto a chair to keep the blood supply limited to the limb and concentrated in her vital organs. That was necessary.
Tony and Marv were still killing worms, but she knew it was a losing battle. Still, there had to be a way. She was not about to let her friends, her husband, and particularly, her children, get torn up by those awful things, there was just no damn way.
“Watch it!” Bertie said.
The twins screamed.
A worm came out from under the table and darted at her, burying teeth like darning needles right into the arm of the chair next to her. If it had ideas of freeing itself, Bertie ended that when she chopped it in half with a carving knife from the kitchen. She looked perfectly ridiculous standing there with a cleaver in one hand and a knife in the other, a smoldering Lark 100 hanging from her mouth, her eyes huge and fixed behind her bifocals.
Fern turned and saw Tony and Marv backing their way to the dining room door.
Dear God.
The worms were massing before them. She saw what looked like eight or ten of them that had to be the size of pythons and tangled among them, sliding over them, were what looked like hundreds of smaller worms. They pushed forward like some immense, squirming machine, seeming not to so much crawl as roll in a worming, fleshy mass.
“Marv!” she cried out. “Get in here! The both of you get in here!”
Then there was a bolt of pain in her arm. One of them had slipped past Bertie and bitten into her left bicep. Without hesitation, she grabbed its roping, slimy tail and yanked it free, its teeth gnashing madly like the needles of an industrial sewing machine. The only plus was that it had not managed to bite through her denim jacket. She threw it against the wall and it exploded like a wet sack of meat.
They’re going to keep coming until they get the twins. What are you going to do about that? Are you going to let these fucking horrors destroy your children or are you going to take action, real action?
There had to be something, something.
And then she remembered the bleach.
33
Marv got Tony behind him and slammed the dining room door shut. It was solid oak. He didn’t see how the worms could possibly get through it; then again he couldn’t conceive of how any of this had happened in the first place. As he slammed it shut, he severed three worms that were most anxious to join him in the dining room. Another slid over his boot and Tony stomped it.
They were hitting the door now.
At first, it was just a few soft plopping sounds as they struck it almost playfully, but now they were going at it in numbers. Thump, thump, thump-thump-thump. The door was holding, but it was trembling in its frame. The worms were not just striking it, they were trying to chew their way through. They were tearing at it and punching into it like whirring drill bits.
Marv had always been a guy who’d prided himself on knowing what to do in a pinch.
But that failed him now.
What was there to do?
The worms wanted in and they were going to get in. He thought of Fern and the twins and the horrible way they were going to die and it all weakened him, confused him. He did not know what to do. He couldn’t think of a single thing. If they got in, he knew he would fight. He’d use up the last few rounds in his rifle and then he’d go at them with his bare hands. He’d rip dozens to pieces…and then…
That was what he didn’t want to think about.
“We need something to drive ’em back with,” Tony said at his side. “Fire. We need fire.”
Yes, of course. It was one of the oldest of man’s defenses against the onslaught of the unknown and nearly always effective.
And that was when Fern screamed.
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
.
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.
