The phone was picked up right away.
“Fern,” Tessa managed. “Help me…I’ve been attacked…”
The phone slid from her bloody fingers.
The thing wasn’t on the counter by the sink anymore.
God, where is it? Where is that awful thing?
A dirty black trail led across the counter, past the spice rack and right over to—
It was less than six inches from her right arm.
It was no snake, she saw that much now.
A huge, fat-bodied worm that was reddish brown in color, finely segmented like a millipede, and completely eyeless…yet it seemed to be looking at her. Its rear section coiling and uncoiling, the anterior end rising like a rattlesnake preparing to strike.
Tessa took all this in within microseconds.
She saw the forward segment of the anterior end pull back like a set of lips, revealing a gaping maw that was pink as bubble gum and set with rows and rows of hooked teeth that were sharp as roofing nails. They were stained with her blood.
This was what she saw.
The worm made a hissing
th-th-th-th-th-th
sort of sound.
Then it vaulted up and bit into her face. The next thing Tessa knew, she was on the floor and the worm had her. As it bit down again for a better hold, the liplike segment rolled back even more and the teeth slid farther from the gums like a shark chomping down on meat until Tessa’s face was firmly impaled.
She was barely conscious by that point.
Moaning, groaning, trembling…but little more.
From somewhere distant, it seemed, she could feel the teeth digging in deeper, chewing and chewing, and the enormous suction of the worm’s mouth as her left eye was sucked from its socket with a moist popping noise.
There was no pain. Just the gulping, slobbering sounds of the worm itself as it fed on her.
8
“Pat?”
Kathleen looked back toward the truck in the driveway. She saw the sluicing river of muck surrounding it, but nothing else.
“Pat?”
Maybe he’d stepped around the other side of the truck. It rose so high on its frame that she wouldn’t have seen him. It was silent out there save for the gelatinous sound of the pooling mud flowing and sloshing. She swallowed, trying to make sense of things.
She had her back turned to him.
She was going into the house to gather up baby Jesse and whatever else she could throw together in the precious few minutes it would take Pat to back the truck up to the porch. She grasped the doorknob, let herself in…and then she heard a sort of grunting sound like he’d been kicked in the stomach, followed by a splashing.
When she’d got back out there, Pat was just…gone.
Filled with an electric, nearly hysterical energy, Kathleen jogged down the steps and into the muck, nearly losing her footing in the slippery goo. It smelled even worse when she disturbed it, hot and gaseous.
“PAT?” she cried. “PAT?
PAT!”
He was nowhere to been seen and she instantly switched into panic mode. The only possible explanation was that he had slipped, fell back and struck his head against the truck and gone under. There was only about three feet of the muck, but it was more than enough to hide a body. The stuff wasn’t like water…it was thick and stagnant like river mud. He might not have floated to the surface as easily as he might have in water.
Don’t freak out. Don’t waste time, but definitely don’t freak out. Do what you have to do calmly, quickly, and efficiently.
She heard the words in her head, but they were completely lost on her. She dropped into the fetid muck on her knees and felt it seep into her pants and begin to fill her boots. It was not cold, but unpleasantly warm like something living. Frantically, she dug around through the goo. If he had indeed hit his head, she would feel him in there. He had to be right next to the truck.
But he wasn’t.
As she dug around, practically flailing at the muck now, its polluted stench filling her head and nearly making her giddy, she shouted out, “OVER HERE! I NEED SOME HELP OVER HERE! PLEASE!”
Not ten minutes before, people had been clustered on porches and now there was no one. She dug around by the truck, reaching beneath it even, nearly breaking the steaming surface of the muck with her face.
Pat wasn’t there.
He just wasn’t.
On her hands and knees, she crawled through the filth around the other side of the truck, crying out and sobbing. She dug and pawed around in the muck and then she looked up at the truck itself. It was white, pearl white, but now there were bright red rivulets running down the passenger door like an immense amount of blood had splashed against it and was only now draining away.
Oh my God, oh my God.
Kathleen dug around, searching for something,
anything,
her voice not crying out now, but breaking in her throat and coming out as a disjointed and pathetic whimpering.
Wait.
She felt something.
She gripped it.
Pat’s arm?
It felt about as big around as his lower forearm, though oddly soft and almost squishy. She yanked it up out of the muck and it was not Pat. It looked…covered in the black, dripping material…almost like an eel. It twisted and writhed in her hand.
She dropped it with a cry.
Then something bumped into her hip.
Kathleen pulled herself to her feet with the aid of the truck, leaving muddy handprints down its length as she escaped around the other side. She felt something brush against her boot. She stumbled to the porch, slipping and falling in the muck more than once.
She pulled herself up the steps.
She heard a slopping sound behind her.
Don’t look back there. Whatever you do, do not look behind you because you’ll see it—
Oblivious to her own good advice, she turned and saw the arched length of something about the size of a python rise from the mud sea and then submerge again. Like a shark showing its dorsal, she knew that whatever it was, it was coming for her now. Just as it had come for Pat.
9
Eva Jung lay in bed and waited for the end of the world the way she used to wait for Leonard to make love to her. It was a strange thing to think of and particularly now with Leonard having been gone all these years. But, maybe, as her final hour approached, it wasn’t that unusual for a woman’s heart to return to romance and things sweet and hot and long gone as the summers of her youth.
The years are leaves and they blow away one by one until there’s not a single one left in the yard.
Eva knew that the National Guard and police would never get to Pine Street. There were 5,000 people in Camberly and by the time they got organized and started rolling, it would be much too late for most everyone. She knew this because the sun was beginning to set and then it would be dark. And dark was when the monsters came out. She knew that very well. Maybe as an adult she had tried to pretend otherwise as all adults did…it was easier to sleep at night that way…but she’d always known it was true. Tonight, the monsters would get into every house and kill every man, woman, and child.
It would not be a dark night like the nights always were in the stories her mother told her as a child. No, the moon would be up, it would be luminous and fat and brilliant. The stars would be out, winking long-dead light like diamond chips.
The better to see you by, my dears. The better to eat you by.
Eva thought of her neighbors. She had heard many screams already and she would hear many more by the end of the night. But she would not listen. People would die horribly as she would die horribly and it would be none of her affair. Her neighbors avoided her and that was fine. She held no grudge over it. She was a woman, not quite old at fifty-three but certainly not young, who lived alone in a big wind-trembling house that creaked and rattled at night.
What would they say to her even if they were to talk to her?
How does it feel, Eva, to be all alone in that big house with nothing but yellow memories for company, your husband long dead, nothing to listen to but the screech of a hoot owl on the rooftop late at night? She was glad they didn’t talk to her so she wouldn’t have to answer that. Because if she did, she would have told them it was awful, simply awful to wake up at three in the morning and reach out for the strong shoulders of your husband and find only emptiness. It was awful to be lonely and listen to your own rising anguish as tears spilled hotly down your cheeks.
But tonight, she was not alone in her suffering.
The neighborhood suffered with her.
They would die together and perhaps, just maybe, be reborn into a better place that was free of suffering.
She listened to the muck flooding into her house and the slitherings of the monsters in the pipes. They would make themselves known soon and she would be waiting for them as she had once waited for Leonard. She would accept the death they brought with open arms because death was painful like love and true love was resurrection.
10
Two doors down from Eva Jung, Bertie Kalishek pulled off a Lark 100 and said, “Ah, that’s because you haven’t lived through the crap I have. You’re just a kid and you, my dear, do not know crap. Hell, you don’t even know what color it is or what it smells like.”
Donna Peppek sighed.
She was beginning to debate the logic of waiting this out with Bertie. Bertie was good for the most part. If you could get past the chain-smoking, beer-guzzling, and near constant reminiscing about older, better times. Some days Donna enjoyed her, some days she did not.
This was turning into one of those days.
Donna had gone over there because the idea of waiting this out alone was unthinkable. They kept saying on the radio that the National Guard were evacuating the town street by street, that everyone needed to sit quiet and wait. If there was a medical emergency, they were to call 911…but
only
if it was an emergency. Other than that, they advised staying out of the muck.
Don’t have to tell me twice,
Donna thought.
Between the constant Emergency Broadcast System bulletins on the radio, Bertie’s grating voice, and the clouds of pungent smoke, Donna was getting a first-class headache.
You know you didn’t want to come over here. You wanted to go see Geno.
Which was exactly why she came to Bertie’s. The idea of being in the house with him
and
Ivy was simply too much. Donna had been avoiding Ivy in every way possible…something that wasn’t too hard given Ivy was practically a shut-in. But being in her house and having to talk with her and interact with her…no, that was just too much.
Maybe fucking her husband wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Donna sighed. The guilt, the guilt, the guilt. It haunted her constantly. Yet, for all of that, she could never say no when Geno stopped by. Now wasn’t that just something?
“…so you better believe me when I say I haven’t felt anything like this since,” Bertie said.
“Since when?” Donna said, realizing she had completely tuned her out.
“Since the Cuban missile crisis. I don’t think any of us that lived through it will ever forget it. We were god-awful close to doomsday. Awful close. Those were two long weeks for the world, I tell you.” Bertie butted her cigarette. “I remember it well. That’s when I stopped smoking L & M and switched to Lark. Been with ‘em ever since.”
To prove it, she fired up another.
“I hope they get here quick,” Donna said.
“Who?”
“The National Guard. I want to get out of here.”
Bertie laughed. “Don’t be naïve, honey. We won’t be first. Not over here. The Guard will start over on the north side, that’s where all the rich yahoos live. They’ll get to us, but I bet it won’t be for hours.”
Donna peered out the window at the rising muck. “We don’t have hours.”
“Sit down and have a beer.” Bertie popped a fresh one and toasted her with it. “Way I see it, if this is doomsday and we’re all going to die, piss on it, might as well face it drunk as sober.”
11
Playing possum.
That evil little motherfucker was playing possum.
That’s what the worm had been doing, as absurd as it sounded, and Tony knew it. If he doubted it at all, there was an utter conversion of faith when the shit pipe exploded like a mortar tube and a gushing eruption of brown-black filth sprayed into the air like a sewage fountain. It covered Tony and knocked him on his ass. It sprayed up the walls and splattered the ceiling and flooded the floor. Like a hemorrhaging artery, it kept leaking, sending a surging river of muck out into the living room that washed right over him and pushed him three feet back with its rollers.