Edward Lee - Slither

"You gotta be shittin' me!" he muttered and stuck his hand down his pants in the back. He fished around and, sure enough, pulled another one of the things out.

It had crawled right down into the cleft of his buttocks. Another one in my ass crack!

In truth, though, Slydes had to feel sorry for the bug.

Dumbfounded, he checked his entire body and found no more of the things.

Some squirmy kind of leech or slug, he reasoned. He'd picked it up in the woods, so that meant Jonas and Ruth probably had too.

He thunked down the steps to the cabin.

"Jonas! Ruth! The two of you's better check yourselfs for bugs. I just picked two off me."

But when he looked around, no one was there.

Belowdecks reeked of pot smoke. He'd seen them down here earlier, toking up some of the stash they'd brought off the island.

Slides climbed back up and popped the cap off another beer. He looked out toward the island's massive tropical forest. I wonder where the hell they went…

(III)

The warm bare wood beneath Ruth's nakedness felt weirdly luscious; in fact, her entire body felt that way-cocooned in the wonderful, lulling buzz. Jonas took them to this old shed when they'd left the boat; he'd seen it on previous trips, just an old storage shed of some kind. A lot better than doing it in the woods, she thought, with God knows what kind of bugs crawling around. Not to mention that snake that had jumped on her earlier…

Jonas was already up and had his clothes back on. "Want another toke, baby?" He hoisted his favorite carved-wood pipe.

She grinned and shook her head, hair disarranged and skin teeming with sweat.

Jonas took a few more hits, then popped a brow. "I swear my stuff gets better and better. No wonder my bagmen are screamin' at me to grow more."

Ruth slowly sorted her thoughts. "A year from now, you'll be rich, Jonas. When we start more plants in the other head shacks."

"Damn straight." Something seemed to catch his eye in the corner. "What's this?"

Ruth felt too lazy now to even lean up and look.

They hadn't noticed it before, but Jonas picked up a drawstring bag. He curiously inventoried the contents: "Swimmin' trunks, towels, suntan lotion…" Then he looked at her. "Shit, Ruth, someone left their shit here."

"The photographers?"

"Naw, they're keeping their stuff at the campsite."

"Slydes said that college kids come out here sometimes," Ruth recalled. She had her flashlight set on end, shining at the ceiling. It brought down a murky umbrella of ringed light that Ruth found fascinating. "They must've left it."

"Hmm. Yeah. Guess so." He seemed satisfied with the conclusion. Another conclusion might've occurred to him had he been observant enough to notice the portable grill outside, and the beer cooler full of melting ice.

"Let's get going, I'm tired."

Disappointment overwhelmed Ruth, something she was used to with this pair. "I thought we were going to sleep here. Let's cuddle!"

Jonas frowned. "Come on, put your clothes on and let's go back to the boat."

She leaned up on her hands. Why couldn't he or Slydes ever do anything she wanted? It would be romantic to sleep here.

"I'm sleeping here!" she insisted.

"Cool." Jonas stuffed his bag of pot in his shorts pocket. "Thanks for the piece of ass. I'll see ya back at the boat in the morning."

Jonas left the shed.

A piece of ass. Prick! So much for romance. It didn't matter, though. She felt so good right now, she wasn't going to let his selfishness spoil the mood.

She lay back down, sated and high. That pot was strong as hash; the warm buzz pulsed from her heart to her toes.

She snapped the light off and let the grainy darkness come down like the softest blanket. At least the sex had been decent this time-it wasn't always that way with Jonas. The beer he'd been drinking all day gave him some much-needed endurance. Five minutes is better than two, she reminded herself. With two lovers, the situation could've been worse. What Jonas failed to provide in the way of her womanly needs, Slydes usually took care of, and vice versa.

Jonas had left the door open, which permitted a trace breeze. The moon came in like an accidental guest, and the sounds of the forest began to pulse along with her buzz. She lolled in the dark, decided not to even put any clothes back on, and in her sleepy mind she saw her dreams with Slydes and Jonas come true. One great big happy family. More and more money coming in each month. A new washer and dryer, and one of those big fancy flat-screen TVs where she could sit between her two lovers every night and watch wrestling…

Warm semen trickled between her bare legs, but she felt too tranquilized to even move, much less wipe herself. Her eyes closed, and her unusually large lips turned up into a contented smile. Sleep carried her away oh so deeply…

She never even felt the thin, foot-long pink worm that slithered into her body through her vaginal canal.

(I)

The sergeant and the corporal watched the longhaired man leave the shed. He's leaving the woman, he realized, which seemed odd. But that was better for the field analysis. The woman would be much more vulnerable sleeping alone in the shed.

"How long till you think one of them gets her?" the corporal's voice issued through the earphone.

"Could be hours, could be minutes. No way to tell. The worms' sensory organs are supersensitive, and the ovum too. They'll seek out the largest heat signature as well as the most profound pheromonic emanations."

"Pheromonic?"

The sergeant couldn't believe the deficient level of tech training the younger NCOs were getting these days. "Airborne glandular emissions of bombykol molecule groups that come out of the skin, particularly the skin of genitalic regions. They're picked up by ol factory VMO receptors and stimulate pleasure centers in the brain. Chemical triggers, you know, from the tech classes you passed to get this duty assignment. They trigger innate reproductive responses."

The corporal clearly remembered nothing of these classes. "Fine, but since you just said it might take hours for one of the specimens to get her, I think we should go in there right now and have some fun. We'll get her pheromones going, all right."

The sergeant glared at him through the visor of his protective mask. "Any more comments like that, I'll write you up."

"You're not serious, Sarge."

"Try me." The sergeant would not have that sort of thing going on while he was ranking NCO in the field. It didn't matter that all the subjects would eventually die, it was protocol. That sort of thing could get out of hand. "She's probably got all kinds of diseases. I don't want to have to be quarantined when we get back to the post."

The corporal grumbled.

I really don't trust these new kids at all, the sergeant thought. "We're done for now," he said. "Let's get back."

"What about the two men on the boat that came in tonight?"

"They'll be infected by morning, if they're not already."

They slipped away from the shed, then turned on their low-light lenses to refind the trail back to the field HQ. They passed one corpse along the way, one of the women infected by the ovum. She hadn't released the brood yet, but the dead belly quivered from all the immature larva that bloated it.

"She hasn't been dead long," the corporal said after lancing a dead arm with the portable chromatograph. It had been calibrated to read serum levels of putrefactive gases. "A few hours maybe."

"A 'few' hours isn't good enough." The sergeant passed his troop the lance thermometer. "Check the drop-fall time against the mean-to-zero brain temperature."

The corporal looked lost. `I've never done that."