Fluke beckoned him close, then took his jug and tossed it over the railing, into the tub directly beneath them. “They spliced the digestive genes from our tapeworms into these unholy fuckers. Nematodes.”
“What the hell for?”
“Nobody will eat trash who doesn’t have to, dummy. Nobody wants a worm inside them, either. But the worms can get fat on our trash, and turn it into edible paste that they can turn into food.”
“Like the dog food?”
“That’s how they got you, yeah? They infested a lot of people by mistake. The new batches wiped out the old parasites, because they wanted to control the food supply. Even the worms are on the clock.”
“How did they get so big?”
Fluke leaned over the railing and pointed at the tubs. “They live in a giant stomach. All they do is eat, and someone else eats their shit. It’s the American dream, ain’t it? They use dogs as hosts when they can find them, but humans are cheaper. Okay, watch this.”
A worm longer than a city bus rose up out of the muck and vomited blood and smoking foam into the tub. The other worms went into a frenzy and tore into their afflicted mate. In the other tubs, the same or worse: one tub collapsed and spilled writhing, dying giant worms into the conveyor belt jungle.
Fluke chanted, “Honk honk, here comes the bonk.”
Gleaners in hip-boots waded into the tubs with pikes to separate the worms, but the dead and dying in their midst set the others into a panic.
Somewhere on the other side of the wall, a bomb went off. The sheet metal billowed and flew apart. Fluke ran past him and slid down a ladder. Stan slipped and fell halfway down the ladder, but he landed on an inert human body. He saw no sign of Fluke or the rest of his gang. Everyone in the hangar ran around like ants in a flooded nest, so he ran as fast as he could for the exit.
Outside, the work crews gathered into bunches and counted off. A fire spread over the back of the hangar. The tanker trucks pulled away from their depot, and the wail of sirens spread over the wasted plain.
Stan ran for a dump truck and curled up behind a wheel taller than he was. The noise and violence continued to escalate. Stan studied the fleeing hordes of gleaners in their masks and jumpsuits like a lost child searching for his mother. When someone came and took his arm and led him at a dead run off into the wastes, he was too relieved to care if he was being saved or arrested.
Out of sight of the hangar, Fluke tore off his hood and mask. “Won’t ever be that easy, again.”
“What was that shit all about?”
“Simple chemistry,” Fluke told him. “Acids and bases, dude. Stop the stopping stoppers. You look kinda sick. You wanna get something to eat?”
Stan looked at the hills of succulent trash all around them. He was ravenous, but after the shock of what he’d seen, he had to reassert some kind of control. “I need to find my daughter. I’m sorry, but I. . . I don’t care about anything else that’s happening here, man. It’s—I just—”
Fluke took a step back and foraged in a trash-mound. “It’s cool, brother. I’ll help you, no problem.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would you help me?”
This was the first thing he’d said that hadn’t amused or confused the moldy terrorist. “Because we’re the same. What’s inside us. . . hell, it practically makes us a whole other species. We gotta look out for each other.”
“What about your gang?”
“Gang? Who, those other guys? I just met them a couple hours before I met you. We all work for the Worm, now, man.” Fluke climbed onto a hill of surgical waste and stared into the smoke pouring out of the hangar. “Dogs are coming. We better go.”
Stan saw them coming, before he made sense of the sound. Engulfed like a hand by a glove, the sirens were enveloped by a chorus of howling. They came running on all fours, dragging gleaners by leashes, but they were not dogs. No natural animal could be made to function in this new world, but men could be found in abundance, to do a dog’s job. Fluke didn’t have to drag him back to the fence.
•
Back in town, they ditched the gleaners’ uniforms and went to the mall dressed as Drug Czar pharmers. Fluke wore a boonie hat with mosquito netting. Nobody looked at anybody.
It only took an hour to confirm the worst.
Fluke talked to someone he knew behind the counter at Drug Czar. She ran down Sharon and Morgan by their socials. Sharon’s apartment was in the Bekin warehouse. “At least it’s a place,” Fluke said. “She must have skills.” Stan tried not to laugh.
When the sun went down, the wind whistled through the curfew-cleared streets, chilling the pavement so fast it crackled and hissed. Fluke led Stan past the guards and jimmied a booby trap on the stairwell door that would’ve dropped a bedframe studded with rusty spikes onto his back if he forced it.
The heat inside was sweltering, the rank, dull, stale funk of four dozen summers made every breath of air a punishing struggle.
“This place is a pinworm farm,” Fluke whispered, as he handed Stan something. “Cranials, man. Eat holes in your head. Don’t trust them.” He vanished into the stairwell before Stan realized he was holding a gun.
He knocked on a door with a bar code on it. Stan stood there holding the gun. . . but a gun is not a magic wand. It doesn’t get you what you want, if no one believes you’re going to use it. The door opened on darkness. Two chains hung from a plywood door held together with termite shit. But Stan couldn’t see inside. “I’m looking for Sharon Haffner,” he said.
Rasping, bubbling breathing was the only response. The door started to close. Stan pushed into the shrinking gap, threw his shoulder into the door and brought up the gun. “Larry, let me in. I’ve come for Morgan.”
Larry kicked at him and tried to slam the door, but the chains ripped out of the rotten wood and the door flew wide open. Staggering into the dark, windowless apartment, he felt for a light switch, but found none. “I’ll shoot you,” he said, uncertainly.
“So do it,” came the wet, wheezing voice from behind him, “please.”
Stan whirled and raised the gun, but a heavy hand chopped his forearm. His hand went numb but somehow clung to the gun. Backing away, Stan tried, even then, to defuse the situation. “I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
From the depths of the apartment, he heard a piercing scream. “Daddy!”
A hand reached out to grab his arm. He felt a steak knife in Larry’s hand jab at his belly.
Stan closed his eyes and fired the gun. The terrible flash of light fried his eyeballs through the lids.
Stainless steel slid into him before he could recoil or even fall. Batting at Larry’s hand, he tripped on his own feet and fell against a countertop. He raised the gun to fire again, but this time, his nerveless hand let it fly across the room.
Larry backed up to the far corner of the room and turned on the light.
Skeletal, Larry looked less like he was smuggling a twenty-foot anaconda under his skin and more like a snake in an ill-fitting human costume. The loops of fat, luxuriant worm tumbled and wriggled around anxiously in his abdomen, which sagged halfway to his knees. Larry’s withered yellow husk stumbled drunkenly as it shifted inside him. Clearly, Larry had problems enough, before Stan shot him in the throat.
He felt like it’d be kind of petty to complain about the knife up to its rusty hilt in his belly, but he couldn’t seem to get up. When he pulled the knife out, it didn’t hurt or bleed so much as it ought to.
Larry leaned back against the wall and slid down it to rest on the floor. His mouth worked, trying to say something that might have been, “I always loved her,” or, “I never touched her.”
Larry’s head nodded, then rocked, then shook until it seemed it must tear itself off. Blood blurted out the ragged wound in his neck and spilled down his wifebeater tanktop. His eyes rolled back in his head, totally vacant. His throat swelled and his belly quivered like a sack of wet cats.
Stan tri
ed to back away, but he only pulled the hot plate and a coffeepot down on his head. His stab wound suddenly began to hurt very much, and blood splashed in his lap in a horrible parody of ejaculation.
It had to force its way out of Larry’s mouth, dislocating the jaw and flattening the tongue so it protruded from his slack, cyanotic lips. Then it came out all at once, spilling into the valley between Larry’s knobby knees. Triangular mouth working, jaws flexing needle-teeth, bloody as a newborn, the worm thrust its flaccid bulk into the air and lunged for Stan.
He flattened against the wall even after it flopped to the stained concrete floor and inched along on a cushion of blood and bile, ever closer to his helpless body.
Larry flopped onto his face as the worm kept coming and coming out of his mouth. Stan felt his hatred oozing out like pus from a lanced boil. He still despised Larry, but he really only hated the empty space that Larry or any other guy could easily have stepped into, because it was under his roof, beside his wife and daughter. He had come here to take her away, and in the end, had killed a man for no good reason. He deserved what was coming to him, to die here on the floor, but Morgan didn’t deserve to lose her father.
His wound throbbed with fresh pain so profound it crushed out all thoughts. He reflexively tried to curl up, but was quite paralyzed when his abdomen tore itself open.
The head of his worm was studded with gnarled thorny teeth like enormous rose thorns. Its mouth was only a puckered sphincter lined with bony rings. It looked like nothing more than a length of intestine with a toilet brush at one end. The blood slicked down its length and pooling on the floor was not all his. The knife had also punctured his worm; blood and foaming jelly oozed from its wound to scorch the floor. Rippling with shivers of agony, it dragged itself out of the tear in his belly, reared up into the air between Stan and his dead rival, even as the giant nematode heaved itself off the floor.
For just a moment, they floated in the air like cobras poised to strike, trembling in air thickened to water’s density by Stan’s pain-warped senses. Larry’s worm dwarfed Stan’s many times over, but his worm darted round the fluted neck of the larger parasite and latched onto its tender flesh with its exterior teeth.
They curled and tangled like Xmas lights, thrashing and rolling across the kitchen floor. From where his worm had attached itself to Larry’s, they zipped together with a pungent, gummy secretion. As more of his tapeworm paid out of his gut, Stan fought to stay conscious. He wanted to tear the parasite out of himself, but he had no idea what he was witnessing. They were totally different species. . . they couldn’t be mating. . . could they?
“Daddy! Daddy, I heard you. . .”
“Baby, don’t come out here. . .”
She came through the bead curtain from the bedroom, hovered just outside the kitchen’s weak yellow light.
“Baby, please. . . stay away. . .”
It wasn’t Morgan.
“Hey, Sharon. . .” You’re looking great. Can I use your phone? I left mine in my car, or in my pants, which I left in a basement somewhere. . . This isn’t what it looks like. . .
He might need to explain to her what it looked like. She had no eyes.
Her figure was pudgy and droopy, he noted with some reflex twitch of guilty satisfaction, her skin pasty and almost translucent, like Tricky’s. She wore a maternity gown, and her belly bulged suggestively, but so had Larry’s. And her eyes—
The holes in her head where her gold-green eyes belonged were bloodless, spongy sockets. Her terse, overplucked eyebrows made elegant parentheses over the empty cavities that somehow made him think of mouseholes. “Stan?”
She fumbled around with a purpose until she found Larry’s body. “We were trying to start over. Is that why you came in here like this? To stop us from moving on?”
“She was sick, Sharon. Is she better off now, living here like this?”
Sharon knelt on the floor beside Larry, but she didn’t touch him. “Don’t start, Stan. Neither of us is good for her. Nothing in this world is good for her.” Something wriggled in the shadows under her deeply creased forehead. “This is only temporary. It’s all going to change, once she. . . once we. . .”
Stan wanted to move, but his parasite held him fast, coiled round Larry’s nematode until it hung almost taut from the hole in his abdomen. “What did you do to her?”
From Sharon’s eyesockets, tens of thousands of tiny, feathery pinworms stretched out to waft on the stifling fever-breeze from the fan. Some other unintended side effect of Calexico’s applied evolutionary boom, they seemed to help her see at least as well as what they ate away.
Smiling, Sharon found the gun and pointed it at Stan. “You could have kept her. Would have, if you really cared about her. Why did you come down here, Stan, really?”
He started, desperately, to speak.
“No, fuck it, I don’t want to know.” She pointed and shot until the gun was empty.
Stan held his breath until he saw spots, but didn’t die. Sharon just stood there with the gun extended, like she’d expected it to bring Larry back, or to at least kill her ex-husband.
He wasn’t sure if she missed him on purpose, but the worms lay shredded and smeared across the floor. The severed heads wrestled between them for a long, awkward minute before they finally came to rest.
“This wasn’t all his idea, was it?”
“It was the only job he could get. . . testing their. . . products. But we all got infested. Morgan. . . she’s carrying something special. We need them more than they need us. We’re the parasites now, I guess. . .”
She laughed hysterically, then choked up with the empty gun pointed accusingly at him. The anemone-clusters of worm-eyes dilated in alarm or arousal. “I don’t want to argue anymore, Stan. Are you going to take her away? Far away from here?”
He nodded. She turned off the light. Queasy sickness threatened to unseat him as he pulled the dead length of tapeworm out of his belly. Less than a foot of it slithered out of his wound before it broke off, the remainder of it slipping back into his gut with a feeble galvanic twitch.
He couldn’t really feel them, but his legs obligingly came back to agonizing life and lifted him to lean against the counter.
“Daddy, why is it dark? Eeew, something smells.”
Morgan clutched her Hannah Montana suitcase tight against her chest. Sharon nudged her into the hall, but said nothing as he limped over and led his daughter out of the apartment.
She was sleepy, so he didn’t have to explain anything. His car was out in front of the building. A Drug Czar uniform smock dusted with purple spores lay in the gutter. She didn’t notice the safety glass he brushed off the seats, and it was a hot night, so she didn’t ask what happened to the windows.
At the highway, he turned east, away from the city. Home had nothing left for him, now, and the road, the world, had everything they needed to survive.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am extremely grateful to the editors of these works––Michael Kazepis, J. David Osborne, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Jason V. Brock, Boyd Harris, Ellen Datlow, Cameron Pierce, Richard Chizmar, Brian Freeman, Scott Nicolay, Lois Gresh, Joe S. Pulver, Sr., Rose O’Keefe and Jeff Burk. And I’m grateful for the people who never edit me: all the attendees of Bizarro Con, Adam Barnes, Rob Winfield, Kristen Tinderholt, Matt Carter, Darius Shahmir, Zak Jarvis, Nick Gucker, Aaron Vanek, Andrew Kasch, John Skipp and the whole Clowntown cast & crew. . . and Butch and Carolyn Carter and my splendid daughters, Hailey and Madeline, who will probably never read this, and my sister Mara.
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Strategies Against Nature Page 25
