As the Worm Turns

by Matthew Quinn Martin

  “I’m waiting,” the spook said, crunching away.

  You will not speak of what you have seen here. You will forget my face. Those were the words spoken to him. He didn’t listen to them then. He would listen to them now, no matter the cost. “Seen him? Can’t say that I have.”

  “Can’t?” The spook smiled, pistachio dust all over his wide lips. “Or won’t?”

  Gil felt a pinch. He looked over to see that that the big spook had stuck a needle into his shoulder, right through the jacket. Not so much as a swab of antiseptic or a this might sting a bit.

  “Just something to help you sleep,” the spook with the pistachios said in answer to his unasked question. “We’ll get those answers from you back at the Division compound. Don’t you worry about that. Get you a bath, too.”

  The big spook chuckled. Gil felt himself slipping away, his vision narrowing to a swirling tunnel.

  “We got a long trip ahead of us. Some Division agents like to talk, but not me. I’m what you’d call the strong, silent type. I just haul the fish in. We got boys back at the compound whose job it is to gut ’em.”

  Fifty-three

  The night sky was a dome of tarnished silver clouds reflecting the city lights back to earth like unwelcome flattery. Beth hefted Jack’s pistol, feeling its weight as she stared at a patch of stick-figure graffiti tagged to the bridge’s concrete supports. The dancing Keith Haring knockoffs were about twenty-five feet from where the two of them stood in the abandoned lot. Blood wandered the perimeter, occasionally pausing to sniff something or mark territory. The gun felt light and surprisingly well balanced for something so odd and ungainly-looking.

  Jack had the other pistol. He field-stripped it in front of her. “Carbon dioxide gas.” He pointed to a pair of aluminum tubes concealed in the handle. “The pellets are magnesium in a sodium-silver-nitrate solution. It breaks the skin and ignites inside. Fire and salt both; the salt solution penetrates their bloodstream, and . . . boom.”

  Beth knew the boom. She had seen the boom, heard it too. She lifted the gun, held it out at arm’s length. She sighted the target, her index finger light on the trigger. “Boom,” she echoed, hoping she’d have what it took when all this went beyond just target practice. “If I make a mistake, telling the difference?” she asked. “Will this thing kill a person?”

  “Most definitely. So aim wisely.” Jack dropped a few colored balls into her hand. They looked like wax-coated marbles. “Those are paint pellets. Give it a shot.”

  Beth loaded her gun. She aimed. She pulled the trigger. A splotch of blue paint appeared a full yard above the stick figure.

  “Here.” Jack took a step behind her. He reached both arms around her, steadying the pistol’s barrel. His grip was strong, firm even, but at the same time there was a tenderness to the way he held her that almost made it seem like play. Like he was teaching her how to hold a pool cue or swing a baseball bat. “Align those two sights, but aim a little above the target. You have to compensate for gravity. Then push everything else out of your mind and squeeze the trigger. Don’t pull. Squeeze.”

  Beth squinted, reaching for that calm she sometimes found behind the bar, when things were are their toughest. When that sudden peace that appeared, the one that turned the distractions, the noise, the smoke, the threats, all of it into a thin wash of static. When nothing existed but now. And in that place, she squeezed the trigger.

  Bull’s-eye. A foot-wide splotch of red replaced the dancing graffiti man’s head.

  “You’re a natural.”

  Very little about what Beth had gone through over the past week felt any kind of “natural,” but she relaxed at his words just the same, letting the pistol fall to her side. Jack hadn’t pulled away from her but stood rock-still as she leaned against his body. She felt almost comfortable there, his arms around her. And in that safe harbor, her thoughts turned to the future. “Jack?” she asked. “What happens next? If we survive, what happens then?”

  She felt the muscles in his arms and torso begin to stiffen, to calcify. “I try not to think that far ahead.”

  She wondered if that was the answer Jack wanted to give or just the one he always gave himself. She felt his absence as he let go and stepped back. What was once between them was suddenly replaced by space, cold and empty space.

  Beth lifted the gun, taking aim at the remaining unmarred graffiti stick man. She took aim for Zoë, for Ryan, for Gabby’s mother, for Jack, for everything—for everyone—those things had stolen. She fired three rounds with icy precision. Each one a direct hit—two splotches to the chest and one to the head. Blood barked. Seemed she’d met his approval, finally.

  “You can practice more later,” Jack called to her as he holstered his own pistol. “We have to go over the rest of the gear.” He unrolled a tactical belt. It was almost exactly like his own but smaller, tailored for her. “I’ve only got the two pistols. You’ll take one of them.” He patted the leather holster that would soon ride her hip. “Are you right- or left-handed?”

  “Left,” she answered, watching as he adjusted the belt accordingly. She remembered Jack saying that he was left-handed, too. A small coincidence, but something to share besides death and isolation.

  Jack strapped the belt around her waist. “How’s the fit?”

  “It’s good.” She holstered the pistol. Then pulled it out again. Then repeated the action, then did it again—and again—her draw increasing in quickness each time.

  “You already know about these.” Jack held up one of his stakes, testing the stiletto point with the pad of his thumb.

  Beth nodded. “Juniper wood and garlic. You said it wouldn’t kill them, though.”

  “No. But it will slow them down.” Jack tossed the stake to her. “Grip it tight. Get used to the feel, the weight. If you have to use one on them, aim for the face or chest, and drive deep. Doesn’t have to hit the heart.”

  “Do they even have a heart?”

  “I think they do,” Jack answered, his voice soft and solemn. “But not like ours.”

  Beth stuck the stake through a waiting loop on her belt. Jack added three more right next to them. On the other side, he slipped in three sticks wrapped in brown and orange paper. “Is that dynamite?”

  “Magnesium flares. They’ll burn anywhere,” he explained. “Even underwater. We’ll need them for light, and if necessary, the fire will keep those things at bay for a while.”

  The belt began to take on a weight that was as much comfort as burden. Beth’s head went a bit light. She felt like a bride headed down the aisle to an altar she couldn’t remember agreeing to stand at. “What about the salt?”

  Jack shook his head. “We’ll be slogging through about a mile of water, maybe more. I doubt loose salt would make it. However . . .” He produced a small spray bottle. “This is something I came up with to use on migration points. It’s a repellant solution with a very heavy saline content. Won’t do the same amount of damage as raw salt but might come handy in a pinch.” He added the bottle to her belt.

  “What are those?” Beth pointed to the puck-sized metal disks Jack had just reached for. Rough wires were coiled on top of them. She remembered one exactly like them shearing a screwdriver in half that first time she’d been in his van.

  “Auto-snare. For decapitation.” He shook the wire loose. It formed a wide loop. “Get this over its head, and yank hard on the ring trigger. The tungsten spring inside will do the rest. Messy. Dangerous. But very effective.” He fit two disks into matching pouches on either side of her belt.

  “What goes here?” Beth tugged at some elastic loops that remained empty.

  “You’ll see. Back in the van. Right now it’s time to test the flour bombs.”

  When Jack had first explained his plan to her, she thought it was insane. They were going to take those things down with flour. But then again, if salt could do such damage t
o them, why not flour?

  She’d watched patiently as Jack assembled the bombs. He’d taken empty coffee cans and placed metal disks inside them, each one wired with a small amount of potassium-chlorate-based explosive—something else he’d taught her how to cook up on his tiny makeshift stove. Then he’d filled the cans with a mixture that was mostly flour, with just a touch of gunpowder, and magnesium shavings. He’d capped them and duct-taped a remote control battery pack to each one. Almost everything he’d used had been culled from either the First National supermarket or the Child World toy store. And now he held one of the death-dealers in his hand, ready for the final test.

  Jack walked a hundred yards from where Beth had been massacring the bridge graffiti and set it down gingerly. He extended a small antenna affixed to the side of the battery pack, then came back and stood by her, shoulder to shoulder. “Ready?” he asked as he held up a small plastic box, its face festooned with toggle switches and dials that, in its own daylight life, had once controlled a toy race car.

  Beth nodded.

  “Then here we go.” Jack hit a toggle switch. A fifty-foot cloud erupted from the mouth of the can, the yellow cap flipping end over end high into the air. “Wait for it,” Jack said. “The first stage just kicks the flour mix into the atmosphere. This one ignites it.” He pressed a second switch. In the distance, another small red LED flicked to life. The cloud erupted into a ball of flame the size of a weather balloon, filling the sky with a bright orange glow for one brilliant instant before flittering to blackness once again.

  “Holy shit.”

  “That’s just a light show.” Jack said, still gazing at the afterimage. “In a contained space, like down there in those tunnels, the fire will eat the oxygen right up. All of it, gone in a instant as the flames consume it. And when the air is gone, it’ll create a vacuum so powerful the force will collapse the whole vault. Anything that isn’t burned alive will be crushed and buried. And that is how we are going to beat them.”

  Beth let those words weigh on her for a moment. Everything gone in an instant. Everything crushed. Everything burned. Everything buried alive. “What about the buildings that are above the vault? What will happen there?”

  “It’s just one building,” Jack answered. “And it’ll be gone too.”

  “Gone?”

  “Ever watch a video of one of those controlled demolitions? Where the condemned building folds in on itself like a house of cards does when someone bumps into the table?”

  “Sure.” Beth had seen plenty. It seemed like one had been on the news every month growing up. They’d show them at the end of the hour, sandwiched between footage of baby ducks caught in a drain and cats that could play Ping-Pong.

  “It’ll be like that. But just that one structure,” he added hastily. “All those surrounding it will be fine.”

  “And what is above the vault, Jack?” Almost all of the buildings down at the Strip were abandoned. Almost, but not all. The apartment complex that Gabby lived in certainly wasn’t, and neither was—

  “Axis,” Jack said. “It’s Axis.”

  The word hit her like an open-handed slap. “Jack . . . we can’t—”

  He reached out to grip her shoulder. “That’s why we have to go in tomorrow. You said that it’ll be shut down then. For the next two days, right?”

  Beth nodded so slightly she could barely feel her own chin bobbing. It was true; Axis would be empty. But she couldn’t stop picturing just how close that apartment building—Gabby’s apartment building—was to it. Close enough to jump from one window to another. “And you’re sure . . . you’re sure the other buildings—”

  “I’m sure. Axis isn’t just built over that vault. It’s part of it. Part of the same water treatment plant. The vault is holding the whole thing up. But nothing else. The other buildings came later. Each one has its own foundation and substructure. They’ll survive. Some broken windows, maybe. They might lose electricity. But they’ll be fine. And since the club will be empty, the only people that might get hurt—”

  “Are us,” was all Beth could muster.

  Jack nodded. “We’re going to have to plant the devices evenly throughout the vault,” he said, getting back down to business. “We need to make certain the flour saturates the entire area at the same time, or it won’t work. It’s not going to be easy.”

  “Doing what needs to be done never is.” It was a saying she’d repeated often but never actually knew the weight of—the truth of it—until now.

  Jack turned and headed for the van. “Come on,” he said. “It’s time you learned what you’ll be facing in there. What you’re really going to be up against.”

  Fifty-four

  Remember when I said you’d need to believe me?” Jack asked as he handed her a fresh cup of coffee. The piquant aroma drifting from it was oddly comforting. “How you’d have to believe everything I told you, even when you didn’t?”

  Beth nodded, wordlessly reaffirming the oath she’d taken that night, when the dirt from those policemen’s graves was still fresh under Jack’s nails. They were alone, just the two of them. Blood had been sent off on patrol again. She sat in Jack’s single chair, gazing at the inside of his van and readying herself for the truth.

  “This is the part where you do that. This is the part where you forget everything you know, everything you think you know about vampires.” Jack set his coffee mug down. He leaned back on the tracking console, which had remained dark since he’d come back from the tunnels.

  “The human mind is very pliable,” he said. “Especially so when it confronts something that it can’t comprehend. Or would prefer not to. This is in our nature, our behavioral DNA. We can’t help but project an image onto the unknown. Lightning is the wrath of a vengeful sky god. Earthquakes are the rumblings of a dragon deep beneath the earth.”

  “Legends, you mean.”

  “Yes. But not just legends. Even today, we give names to hurricanes. They’re nothing but wind and rain, but still we name them. We give them personalities. We turn them into us. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.” Beth shifted in the chair, finding no comfort in its hard angles.

  “Every culture on earth has stories about vampires. They vary in the specifics, and they don’t always use that word, vampire, but there’s a consistency to what lies beneath. In Japan, it’s the Kabba, a blood-drinking river demon. In ancient Greece, they called it the Lamia, something half woman, half serpent. The Magyars told tales of spirits that would take the form of a dead lover, then strike and suck the life right out of you. Catholic bishops in the Dark Ages warned of Incubi and Succubi, devils that fed on lust. There’s a pattern, you see?

  “Blood-drinking. Shape-shifting. Serpents. Lust. It’s always the same in countless legends, spread across untold generations, spanning the globe. Different forms, different names, different ways of explaining the same thing.” Jack paused, letting his words land. “Honestly, I don’t know exactly what they are, or where they came from, but I do know what they are not. They are not supernatural beings. They are not human and they never were. And what they do is not magic.”

  Jack reached into the cabinet behind him. “I want you to see something.” He produced a small glass jar and set it down between them. Inside, suspended in a yellowish solution, was a small black slug. Beth watched it swim in the liquid, writhing in a spiral.

  Beth leaned in for a closer look. The thing was beautiful in its own skin-crawling fashion. It almost looked as if it was dancing as it bounced around, struggling to find some purchase on the jar’s smooth cylindrical walls. Was it some kind of parasite? she wondered. Did it take over the mind somehow? Was that how it worked? “Is this . . . one of them?”

  “No,” Jack answered. “This is a leech. Hirudo medicinalis, the common medical leech. I keep it because it helps me think. Helps me visualize what they must be like.” He tapped the lid o
f the jar. Instantly, the thing inside swam upward, drawn by the promise of a warm meal. “Except those things are bigger—much bigger.”

  “Leeches?” She couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t; her mind just wouldn’t let her. “Giant leeches?”

  “I think they share a common ancestor. Some long-extinct subspecies forgotten in deep time.”

  “But how do they make themselves look like us? How do they—”

  Jack held up a hand. “They also exhibit some of the traits and behaviors of more highly evolved internal parasites—blood flukes, in particular.”

  “Blood flukes?” Beth searched her memory for a dimly remembered biology lesson about parasites. She recalled little more than her not getting much sleep that night after school and washing her feet obsessively for weeks.

  “This isn’t science fiction,” Jack added. “Ordinary blood flukes have the ability to rewrite your DNA. They can recode your immune system so that it sees them as red blood cells, as part of the human body. Not just hidden but accepted. And that’s just plain old blood flukes, as far down the evolutionary ladder from those things as earthworms are from us. They recode us, rewire our brains so that we see them as what we want.”

  “How?” The coffee in Beth’s hands had grown cold. She had yet to take a single sip. “How could they possibly recode us?”

  “I’m not positive. But I think it’s viral. I think they emit a set of chemical compounds that invade our genes. It inserts a part of their DNA into ours and rewrites the code. It targets the sex drive and other vulnerable parts of our higher brain functions, the visual cortex in particular, and causes hallucinations in their presence. We end up seeing them as what we most want to.”