Slither (18 page)

Ruth didn't think about it.

The heat inside the shed wrung more sweat from her
pores, which plipped like rain on the dry wood floor,
leaving dots. Fuck! You could cook pizzas in here! Her
marijuana hangover hindered her as she pulled her
shorts and top back on. It was so hot she paused a moment and leaned against the wall.

And noticed that the spots her sweat had made on
the floor-

Ruth stared.

-were moving.

She steadied herself, squinting.

Her vision shifted further: dehydration, fatigue,
mental trauma, and now the oppressive heat all conglomerating. Was she seeing double?

More ... spots seemed to be converging on the
spots that her sweat had left. The more she stared, the
more clear it became.

The spots were moving.

Fuckin' Jonas! He must've laced that pot with PCP
or opium!

Ruth needed to know that; she needed an explanation that her mind could fathom. So she walked shakily
to the middle of the floor, put her hands on her knees,
and leaned over. She opened her eyes as wide as she
could, and focused.

Some of the spots weren't drops of sweat. They were
beetles or something-snot yellow with tiny red dots.

They encroached on the sweat drops, as if to drink.
Then some of them began to inch toward Ruth's feet.

"Fuck this shit, man!" she declared and stumbled
out of the shed.

The outside air revived her. Then, on her first stride
toward the exit trail-

Flump!

Ruth fell flat on her face.

No profanity now could allay her frustration, no
variations of her favorite transitive verb that began
with the letter F. Instead, she sobbed loudly, pounding
her small fists into the dirt. Dust from the ground
stuck to her perspiry skin, smudged her cheeks, arms,
and legs, while bits of leaves and other detritus hung
in her blond hair. She looked like the Wild Woman
of the Forest ... save for the notion that the Wild
Woman of the Forest probably wouldn't have breast
implants or a cotton-candy-pink T-shirt that read YUCK
FOO!

Ruth, in essence, was having perhaps the worst day
of her life just now. For all she knew Jonas and Slydes
had raped her in the woods last night and left the island without her. She felt nauseated, hungover, andcome to think of it-her ... private regions hurt. She
was hallucinating yellow bugs, and to top it all off,
she'd just tripped and fallen flat on her face.

Finally, she cut loose and bellowed, "Fuck-fuck-fuckfuck-fuck-fuck-Fuck!" at the top of her lungs.

The forest fell silent; the emotional release putting
her a little more at ease. But an added confusion
slapped her in the face when she looked to see what
she'd tripped over ...

A portable camping grill.

The grill lay tipped over, and several overcooked
hamburgers lay in the dirt, being feasted on by ants.

A portable grill?

And at the corner of the shed sat a cooler quite different from the one Slydes kept on the boat. Ruth
kneed her way over, opened it, and discovered several
bottles of beer and wine coolers.

This stuff hasn't been here that long ...

The last thing Ruth needed was another mystery, but
the identity of whoever owned the cooler became immaterial in the next second, when something that
could only have been a hand slammed down on the
back of her head and grabbed her hair.

She shrieked like a smoke alarm. The unseen figure
shoved her face in the dirt and sat on her back, pinning
her, and whoever he was seemed agitated by the noise
she was making because each time she shrieked, he
smacked her head into the ground.

Ruth only screamed a few times.

Dizzy now, and her vision dim, she felt herself being
dragged yet again away from the shed. She was perhaps
half conscious, her brain screaming to rebel, but any genuine attempts to fight back were enfeebled by her daze.

She was dragged into the leaves and flipped over.
The shots to the head kept her from focusing. Her
shorts were ripped open and yanked off, and then her
top was hauled up, her breasts pawed by a hot, humid
hand that seemed intent on milking out all the saline.

Something remotely similar to a human voice splat tered down into her face, uttering, "Shut up and lie
still. It won't hurt much," or something like that.

When more of Ruth's vision cleared, she noticed that
he'd dragged her back to where she'd been last night,
her legs spread wide open to the deeper woods.

"Look," the voice gargled over her like someone
with a rotten larynx. "There's more."

Before she could think, More what? Ruth looked
down between her legs and saw-

The leaves ... moving .. .

She remembered the rustling earlier, and she remembered seeing something moving beneath the leaves.

And whatever it had been began to come forth.

What Ruth saw vigorously wriggling forward was so
revolting she nearly passed out altogether. Shock riveted her so completely that she was past screaming anymore.

Churning out of the leaves were several glistening,
bright pink snakes, about the diameter of garden hose.
No eyes could be discerned on the things, just that glaring, wet pinkness. The head of each one appeared to be
tapered, even skull-less, with a small hole where the
mouth should be.

They were shivering toward her, as if even in their
blindness they sensed the presence of her body.

And they just kept coming, their tails never appearing from the underbrush.

Had she been less traumatized, she might have wondered how long they were, because right now they'd
shivered out at least fifteen feet ...

"Don't move," the phlegmatic voice ordered. it won't
take long. Just lie there and keep your legs spread."

This was not the situation where Ruth would be favorable to such a command. But her daze began to fade, and
more of her strength returned. She began to flail in the
dirt, and shove her heels at the grotesque pink things, but each time she did, her captor tightened the grip on
her hair and thumped her head back to the ground.

Don't let the fucker knock you out! she managed to
order herself. Because if she were unconscious, she
knew damn well where those snakes were going.

Instead of kicking out this time, Ruth lunged up,
grabbed her attacker's own hair, and pulled. He was
strong, though; he didn't come down, she went up,
and-

Her attacker gargled out a splattering scream.

Ruth bit a sizable chunk of upper cheek right out of
his face.

The hand released her hair, and Ruth got up and ran,
just as the first of the snakes would've entered her
vagina.

The roar of objection splattered behind her-a
hideous, barely human sound-as Ruth's feet shot her
away into the trees. She spat the chunk of cheek out of
her mouth like a chunk of hot chewing tobacco.

Get out, get out, get out!

She stopped only for a split second, and looked
around to see who the man was who'd tried to feed her
to the shivering pink things.

She screamed again-louder than she ever had-for
her attacker was barely a man at all but more like an
erect cadaver, with eyes like raw oysters and enslimed
yellow skin flecked with bright red spots.

Holy fucking shit! she thought, running. It's a fucking zombie ...

Robb White's former mind was barely functioning by
now, taken over by mutagens expelled by the aggressive ovum that were now well insinuated throughout
the island. These microscopic pieces of viral proteins common among many species of invertebrates-had
intricately mutated his instincts and motor responses
by infecting his central nervous system. In other words,
most of what existed between Robb's ears was now
mutated porridge.

He could still talk a little, and still think a little less,
but everything else was essentially overridden. He'd
lived much longer than the friends he'd brought here,
but then he was good strong stock, a jock, a college
athlete, a health and physical education major. How
could he have ever imagined that all his healthmindedness would only lengthen his life as a human
carrier for mutated worm ovum? The few synapses that
still fired dragged back the dimmest etchings of memories. Their weekend party on this little island hadn't
lasted long before the others began to disappear-

And reappear later, but not in the best of shape.

By the time he knew he had no choice but to get
back to his skiff-and abandon his friends-it was too
late. He'd already been duly infected by those little yellow beetles or ticks or whatever. He would retain
enough sentience, though, to figure that the disgusting
little things probably had some direct connection to the
ten-foot-long pink worms that had started showing up
too. Before his own infection, he watched one coil
about the voluptuous body of his latest girlfriend and
burrow its head down her throat.

Robb trudged on back toward the shed, not even
consciously aware of his mission. Neither was he aware
of the fact that his skin had mutated to an ill shade of
yellow highlighted by brilliant red specks.

Every now and then, though, some cognizance did
flare in his mush-brain and register appropriate
thoughts, like: Ugh! I'm royally fucked up! and My
fucking father's gonna kill me if I don't get the skiff
back in time! and Pretty decent set of tits on that trampy blonde. And as for that trampy blonde, he'd
promptly dragged her out of the shed to leave her
closer to one of the nests. He hadn't been consciously
aware of this; he'd simply done it because an instinct
told him to.

But when he'd returned, she'd been trying to escape.
Hence, his altercation, and, yes, after roughing her up
and popping her in the head a few times, those acts of
violence did seem to trigger some long-lost sexual reaction. But that was all for nothing now.

Robb's penis had rotted off his body a few days ago.

His yellow hand felt at the gouge she'd bitten out of
his cheek. Something like pain registered ... along
with something like defeat.

A woman had beaten him. Robb, an all-star athlete
and muscle rack, didn't care to be beaten by a woman
at anything.

He stood shakily between two palm trees, staring at
the woman's escape route with gray, runny eyes. Then
he looked down at the tiny pair of cutoff shorts he'd
pulled off her. Shhhhhhhit! his infected brain thought.

"Gonna find the bitch and really fuck her up," his
phlegmatic voice rattled aloud. "I'll stuff the worms up
her snatch myself if I have to."

The brisk snorkeling session livened her up. I feel human
again! I feel like a real, live polychaetologist in the field!

Nora had wound up snorkeling for hours, actually,
marveling at the scenery beneath the tepid, crystalclear water. Flippers pumping, she glided through
schools of pinfish, blue tang, and damsels. Fire sponge
and fernlike sea rods branched up from clumps of orange and yellow coral. The languid water caressed her,
cool and warm simultaneously, and the sunlight seemed to float above her like lightning-white lava. Sea horses
frolicked among stalks of phallic club coral, and when
Nora diverted her direction, a lustrous green and blue
parrotfish turned briefly to show her teeth like a handful of nails, then returned to eating algae off a rock.
The fish was the size of a bed pillow.

Being right back in the face of nature rejuvenated
her, reasserting her love for marine habitats. Nothing
up there is as beautiful as this, she thought. I'd probably enjoy life a lot more if 1 were a friggin' fish ...

She let these underwater spectacles enrapture her; she
got lost in all the variations of beauty. A sensation nearly
erotic titillated her when a funnel of minnows shifted directly into her; it gave her the impression that she'd just
swum into a cloud made of glitter. When she checked her
watch, she couldn't believe so much time had passed. I
came out here to catch lobsters, she reminded herself.

Within fifteen minutes, her catch bag was full.

Back on the beach, she realized it would be getting
dark soon. She trudged ashore with difficulty, dragging
the bag, and hooked the cumbersome flippers to her
belt. Out of the water, the lobster bag revealed its true
weight: over ten pounds; the creatures flapped and rustled. A trail of water dripped behind her as she marched
up the beach and entered the woods.

The bag dragged at her arm. She huffed down the
trail, but as she neared the campsite, she thought she
heard a hissing sound.

She stopped, squinted.

A gaze through some branches showed her the field
shower. Nora's squint transformed to a frown. It was
Annabelle in there, and the shower's ugly tarplike curtain was only halfway closed.

Exhibitionist floozy, Nora thought. I'll bet a million
bucks she left the curtain open on purpose. Of course:
She was hoping Trent or Loren might catch a glimpse of her body in the raw. Wants to keep them whupped
up. Earlier, Trent had sprayed the shower down with
some bug repellent, which would likely deter any more
of the bizarre yellow ovum from venturing in.

Though she only glimpsed the other woman for a moment, Nora couldn't deny the pang of jealousy. Annabelle stood angled in the cramped stall, showing the
curve of her buttocks and the edge of a breast. She
turned slowly, almost as if aware of being watched, then
stretched as the shower water pushed suds down her
breasts and abdomen.

Nora silenced her thoughts and moved off. However,
she hadn't walked far before she heard-

Snap!

She stood still, listening. Then came a quick scuffle:
someone obviously dashing off through the woods.

Nora followed the sound, peered through trees. The
sound disappeared as quickly as she'd detected it. At
first she felt alarmed, but then realized her earlier assumption must be right. Annabelle WANTED one of
the men to see her body. The escaping footfalls could
only have been from Trent or Loren.