Slither (37 page)

Or were they standing right outside in the hall, no
doubt with weapons beyond her imagination?

She flung the door open.

The hall stood empty.

Nora jogged for the exit door. It was closed but she
whipped out the object she now knew was a key. Her
fingers felt around the face of the bizarre dead bolt,
found the tiny slot, then she put the key in and instinctively turned it-

Snap!

The end of the key-broke- off in the keyhole.

Nora shuddered. She hadn't pushed it in far enough,
and she'd forgotten to not turn the key itself.

I just broke the key off in the fucking lock!

She banged her hands against the door.

Of course, it didn't budge.

Oh my God, I just locked myself in an alien lab, and
one of the aliens is still here!

Even if she'd killed the one in the room with the girl,
the other two would certainly be back for him, if they
weren't already.

Nora knew the door wasn't opening unless she found
a way to push the broken tip all the way into the keyhole.

But with what?

She felt imbecilic trying to blow on it. Then she
banged it with her fist. Nothing happened. The one
she'd knocked out would probably have a key, but that
would mean searching this body ...

And with her luck, that's when he'd wake up.

She didn't know if it were a prayer or just a figure of desperate speech when she pleaded: Holy shit, God,
please help me find a way!

The idea snapped in her mind.

Her cross ...

She broke the fragile chain off her neck, felt the
body of the gold cross between her fingers. The post of
the cross felt just about the same width as the key .. .

Nora-stuck-it in the slot, closed her eyes, and pushed.

The door clicked open.

Thank you, God, she thought and ran off into the
woods.

Loren jogged the trail back toward the campsite. Lieutenant Trent better be there, he thought. And Nora better not be too far behind .. .

Nora.

Shit.

Suddenly, he was grimly aware of the pistol in his
waistband. I should've left the gun with her ...

The bulk of the desalinator and purification machines caught his eye, then slowed him to a stop. The
RTG, he remembered. It was just a few yards away
from all that. He turned and followed the power cable,
where it ended at the concrete slab.

And there it is, he thought. At once came a sensation
like ice water in his belly.

He was looking at the bomb ...

The small black disk sat propped up on the rod, just
as he'd seen on the surveillance screen back at the station. Is that thing really a bomb? he questioned. How
do we really know?

Then his certainties returned the instant he recalled
everything else they'd seen, particularly the hundred foot-long vessel levitating out of the sea and moving toward the island, changing color to match the terrain.
Perfect camouflage.

A fucking spaceship. Shit.

Then a glance back down to the puck-sized disk. A
border of light was flashing on it, as if counting off seconds. Like a timer, he realized.

Loren dropped to one knee, took a breath, then
grabbed the disk with both hands. He pulled with all
his might but the disk didn't move.

Christ! What did he do? Drill the damn rod into
solid concrete? Loren had watched the entire process
on the screen, and there'd been no sign of a drill or any
other kind of impacting tool that would be able to
drive the rod through the cement.

What if I. ..

He put the barrel of the pistol against the rod ...

On second thought that's a really BAD idea.

Loren couldn't figure a way to remove the disk. It's
not my problem, he tried to rationalize. It's beyond my
control.

The easy way out.

Maybe I can pry it off, he considered, then sprinted
into the woods. If he could find a branch sturdy enough
to wedge between the slab and the disk ...

"Holy Mother!" he yelled when the worm-in the
space of a blink-shot out from under the thicket and
began to coil about his legs.

Loren tried to kick but the worm's hoselike body encircled his thighs tight as a metal clamp. Loren collapsed.

His heart squirmed as more glistening pink coils raveled up his body. The worm had hooked his ankles with
its tail end and was working upward, now past the
waist. Its efforts were turning him into a mummy of
pink coils. The musculature of its coelum made Loren
feel like he was being swallowed by a pulsing mouth ...

His left arm flailed free, but the right had been caught
under the coils. How much sooner till it got to his neck?

Loren couldn't think. His adrenaline pumped uselessly through his body; the harder he tried to move,
the more he couldn't.

Then the worm's head loomed.

Loren nearly lost consciousness at the sight: the eyeless pink cone. A tiny, meaty hole at the end suddenly
expanded, revealing a pulsating throat. Stylets like
transparent fishhooks emerged. Loren knew that the
hooks would seek his mouth so that the worm could
secure a grasp before it would start pumping its acidlike digestive enzymes down his esophagus, whereupon his innards would be liquefied and then sucked
back into the worm's body, for nourishment. After the
hearty meal the creature would fill Loren's emptied
body cavity with ova, to incubate.
--- - - - -- - - --- - -

His right hand had managed to slither to the pistol in
his waistband, but the coils were too tight to drag it
out. Even in this revolted paralysis, his subconscious
knew that there was nothing to lose in firing anyway-

Bam!

Did the worm actually squeal? Loren felt the gun
kick beneath the mummifying coils, felt a bullet blow
through the side of his swim trunks.

It
also
blew
a
hole
in
the
worm,
midbody.

The gun barrel burned against Loren's thigh, but he
didn't feel it. He'd managed to squeeze off the shot just
as the worm's head was lowering to his face. Worm
blood and stored seawater flooded Loren's legs; then
the coils began to loosen, shuddering in their own pain.

Gotcha, you fucker! he thought when he grabbed the
head with his left hand, pressed it to the dirt. Only now
was he able to drag his gun hand out.

He pressed the barrel to the worm's skull-less head,
and-

Bam!

Chunks of pink meat speckled Loren's face. In the
other direction, more seawater, white blood, and a teacolored ichor flew. The plume hit a tree and-

Shit!

Loren began to frantically wipe his face off, remembering that the worm's enzyme duct was in the head. He
could see spatters on the tree smoking, sizzling, those
same fluids burning through the bark. It was Loren's
very good fortune that none had gotten on his face.

The worm limpened in death after a few reflexive
spasms. Loren shrugged out of the coils.

He got up and looked closer at the tree. The enzymes
became impotent after a minute, but not before eating
a crater into the hard tropical wood.

As the sizzling from the acid died down, a thought
began to sizzle in his head.

He grabbed the worm's neck, clamping hard with
the ring of his thumb and forefinger, leaving eight
inches of exploded head hanging off. Loren dragged
the-dead-thing back toward the RTG.

Can't hurt to try ...

It was like dragging a great length of hose. When he
arrived at the slab, he carefully held the worm's ruptured head right against the black rod on which the
disk had been mounted.

Loren squeezed a few feet of worm ...

More fluids evacuated, mostly the tea-tinged slime.

The cement around the rod-

It's working.-. .

-began to sizzle and smoke.

Loren jiggled the disk as the acids worked deeper.
Moments later, he yanked it out of the cement slab, like
dragging the stick out of a thawing Popsicle.

The enzymes liquefied the cement!

He'd gotten the bomb off the RTG but-

Holy shit .. .

Now Loren found himself in the most bizarre predicament of his life. I'm standing here in the middle of
the woods, holding a bomb from another planet ...

He looked at the blinking border of light around the
disk.

With each blink-he noticed now-that border got
infinitesimally smaller.

Loren shook his head.

Question of the day, he thought. How the HELL do
you get rid of an alien bomb?

No answers were forthcoming. He at least knew that
he had till the border ran out to think of something.
-- -- - - - - - -- -

With nothing else to do, he put the bomb in his pocket
and headed back to the campsite to find Trent ...

Robb was strong, all right. His mottled yellow hands
turned Ruth upside down, and hauled her shorts off.
The terror merged with the stifling heat, and of course,
the "zombie's" stench of rot and metamorphosis. The
fetor in the room could be likened to fresh-ground
beef, sperm, and a restaurant Dumpster in the sun.
Ruth landed on her head when Robb shucked her out
of the shorts, which dangled off one ankle. She saw
proverbial stars as Robb's hands began to wring her
implants like dishwashing sponges.

When she was able to see through gaps in some of
the stars, her scream ground down to a disgusted gag.
Robb had shed his own shorts previously, to reveal a
groin that looked more like an open wound. There was
no penis, for instance, just a rot-gnarled nub with a
hole in it, and a bloated yellow scrotum. Were small
things moving in the scrotum?

Ruth was too racked with horror to ponder the ques tion very deeply, but given the circumstances, a passerby might beg another question: With no penis, what
did Robb intend to rape her with?

Muscles flexed beneath yellow, red-spotted skin. In
Robb's infection and sequent decomposition, aspects
of his college-athlete physique remained: pillars for
thighs, bulging biceps, pectorals, and lats. Ordinarily,
Ruth might even have been turned on by the flexing
washboard abdominals.

But not when they were covered by red-spotted yellow monster skin.

All 110 pounds of Ruth put up a formidable fight,
hands slapping at the mindless, wedgelike face, fingers
poking at the eyes, which looked so watery they might
somehow have aspirated their inner humors. The big
chunk she'd bitten out of his cheek was now covered
by something that looked more like a wart than a scab.

One big wet hand pinned her chest to the floor, while
the other, now, wriggled for her groin. Ruth's legs
moved like fifty miles an hour on a stationary bike; she
was going nowhere, but her body was trying anyway.

Her senses disconnected. None of her brain bothered
to curse Slydes-that big hairy redneck coward-for
leaving her here. None of her brain wasted any synaptic
energy on the useless regret that if she'd stayed in
school, never done drugs, and never gotten involved
with creeps like Jonas and Slydes, then maybe she
wouldn't be pinned to the floor in this infernal toolshed
by a sex-crazed zombie with no penis. Maybe, just
maybe, if she'd kept going to church instead of opting
out for strip joints and coke at age eighteen, and pennyante tricks in between sugar daddies ...

It seemed likely that she would never have had occasion to meet her noxious death on an island full of giant pink worms.

Ruth didn't bother thinking about any of that.

Instead, she thought this: The fuckin' barbecue fork!

She'd brought it in from outside, hadn't she? More
senses shut down as stout fingers began to play inside
her womanly orifice. Her auditory faculties didn't register Robb White's ruined efforts to speak:

"Bluckin' blig-tit butch! Gublunna pull bloor gluts
out frew bloor plussy!"

Whatever.

Ruth's eye had already caught sight of the barbecue
fork, lying not three feet beyond her reach. If I can get
this big zombie fucker's hand off me just for ONE SECOND, she realized, I could get that fork!

Something unexpected happened then, almost in synchronicity with the thought. The yellow lids on Robb's
glop-for-eyes shot open. His body stiffened as if seized
by a sudden pain, and his gestures of molestation ...
stopped.

He pulled away. When he pulled his hand out from
Ruth's spread legs, it didn't all come out.

The yellow, red-spotted skin peeled off like a rubber
glove.

Robb held up the hand in mute, zombie astonishment. His hand was now a raving, shining pink.

He stood up in haste, shaking through a confusion.
Then he began to take his skin off like someone taking
off clothes.

The "shirt" of yellow skin crinkled wetly as it was removed from Robb's back. The sleeves turned inside
out; then the entire mess was tossed away. What existed beneath was more of the same brand-new, clean,
raving pink.

The same color as the worms.

The new pink arms, in fact, looked more like fat,
sturdy worms themselves. No nipples or navel adorned the chest, just a remnant human musculature covered
by fresh-pink- skin.

Even in this utter madness, Ruth was able to think:
What the fuckin' FUCK is happening?

A transformation was happening, not that she
could've been technically aware of that. After all, she
still thought Robb was a zombie. He was actually now
a late-cycle mutant. His robust health had allowed him
to survive a full mutagenic conversion, his altered
genes bidding this successful wedding of human DNA
with genetically transfected worm DNA.

Next, Robb pulled off what was left of his scalp, revealing a glistening pink head with an aperture at the
top. His head seemed to collapse, the skull cracking
heartily, and then that aperture expanded and expelled
the chunks of Robb's cranium. Without the support of
bones now, the mass of pink flesh on Robb's shoulders
distended and looked a lot like one of the eyeless conical heads of the worms.