Edward Lee - Slither

"No, no," Loren assured her.

'Then why are you looking at them like you just found the Holy Grail?"

Good question, Nora realized. 'Because we've never seen a parasitic marine worm like these, which is disturbing because…"

Loren finished the statement for her. "Because we're America's leading authorities on the subject. We've never even seen a marine worm body configuration like this-not a chitin-penetrating species."

"Chitin-penetrating?" Trent queried.

"The ability to penetrate a chitinous exoskeleton-,an insect shell, or a lobster shell, in this case." Nora was transfixed. "Chitin penetrators that live in seawater are always segmented, yet these don't appear to be."

Loren continued with the late-night worm lesson. "Certain types of marine worm parasites attack crustaceans by disgorging a corrosive digestive enzyme onto the host's shell. The enzyme burns a hole through which the worm can either consume the innards of the host or inject eggs, or-" He and Nora looked at each other with raised brows.

"Or what?" Trent asked.

"Or inject fertilized ovum," Nora said. Like the ova we found in the shower…

"How can you even see them?" Annabelle asked next. "They're tiny."

"You're right," Loren said. He stood up with the lobster, and Nora got up right next to him.

"Which is why we're going to go look at these under the microscope." Transfixed now, she and Loren stalked away to their field lab.

The fire crackled. Trent smiled and slipped his arm around Annabelle. "How do you like that? All of a sudden you and I have this cozy campfire to ourselves."

The grotesquery of the parasites she'd nearly eaten vanished. She grabbed Trent's hand and urged him up. "I'm not interested in romance, Lieutenant. While those too nerds are looking at their worms, you and I are going to find a place to fuck."

Trent followed Annabelle-and the rest of his good fortune-down another trail.

The fire crackled some more, painting the trees and surrounding brush with lines of light that squirmed, almost like worms.

(II)

"They're resilient, that's for sure," Loren said, gunning up his microscope. "The cooking process didn't kill them all, and this lobster looks pretty well cooked."

The fact didn't impress Nora much. "There are worms that live in underwater thermal vents that survive at hundreds of degrees. I just want to find out what these damn things are."

Neither of them said anything at first. Nora adjusted the comparator microscope, while Loren sat at the table beside her, changing stages on a smaller scope. Each had placed several of the tiny pink worms under their lenses. "I'm seeing something else immersed in the fluidity between each worm."

"Me too," Nora admitted. "Could it be mesenteric debris from the lobster?"

"Lobsters don't have mesentery. They have semisolid blood-processing organs that are green. This carrier fluid's clear. And there are specks in the fluid. You got those on yours or am I seeing things?"

"You're not seeing things," Nora said. "The specks are off-yellow."

"Just like those ova we saw in the shower stall."

It was difficult for Nora to frame words, but she knew Loren was thinking along the same lines. "The shower ova were the size of jelly beans and these are so small they're practically microscopic. You and I both know the size differentiation means that these specks came from a completely different species."

"A worm ovum this small couldn't grow to the size of a jelly bean. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the shower ova have red spots on their sheaths?"

"Yes," Nora grimly replied. "And I'm sure you just did the same thing I did, Loren, and upped your magnification."

"There are red spots on these too."

"Which means that these and the shower ovum did come from the same species of worm-"

"A conclusion that's zoologically impossible," Loren finished.

Nora sighed at the table. One thing at a time. We've gotsome chitin-penetrating worms that are fluxed with some accessory debris that looks like motile ova. "Let's focus on the worms," she ordered.

The microscope's light stage showed Nora another world, a circular world of brilliant colors, vibrant details, and stunning light. She had several of the worms on her slide; each one, if extended, might stretch a quarter of the perimeter's border.

The worms shimmered, squirming with vigor. Their fresh pink bodies glistened like squiggles of some bizarre molten metal.

"No segmentation," Loren said.

"And no striations on the skin, either. No plating, so we know it can't be a gastropod or anything from the molluska line. It almost looks like a shipworm-"

"But shipworms are really clams in tubular casings, and this… ain't that," Loren added to her observations.

Nora sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. "Conclusions? Hypotheses?"

"Either we're not as smart as we thought," Loren said, "or we've stumbled on an undiscovered species of parasite."

"Um-hmm, and if this were a channel in Antarctica, that would be a reasonable deduction. But in the Gulf of Mexico, North America's nucleus of warm-water marine biology?"

"The chances of this particular research community missing this is impossible."

Finally they'd both given voice to the gravity of the dilemma. "I wish these worms were a little bigger. Then we could dissect one even with these small scopes," Nora said.

"This will have to do." Loren cast his boss an odd look. "Both of us should be really jazzed about this. How come we're not?"

"Because it's too fucked up," she didn't hesitate to profane. "Us not knowing what this worm is would be like a military history professor not knowing the date of the Battle of Hastings."

"October fourteen, 1066," Loren said. "The English were winning the battle until their king, Harold the First, caught a flaming arrow in the face."

"Oh, Loren. You really are a hopeless nerd."

"1 know, but your point is well taken. These worms are big-time super-duper screwed up. They shouldn't even be in an environment like this. They look like land-dwelling worms, but we know they're marine because they attacked a lobster. And that means their motile ova are water-dwelling, too, but we found a much larger version of the same ova in the shower and on Trent's shirt-hundreds of yards away from the closest seawater. Which means they're obviously land dwellers."

Nora sprang up in her seat. "Wait a minute. We took samples of the shower ova, didn't we?*

"Yeah. I vialed a bunch of them up.7

'Let's compare them directly to the ova from the lobster."

'Why didn't I think of that?"

"Because I'm the boss."

They both hustled to one of the other tables where they'd placed their specimens. The small plastic saltwater tanks Loren had hooked up for the scarlet bristleworms bubbled away from their air pumps. Loren's hand eagerly reached for the vials he put the ovum in, but-

"What the hell!"

Nora stared.

The small vials were all empty.

Loren held several up to the overhead lights. "They're burned through at the bottoms. It's like the ova melted the plastic and got out."

"There's a few of them there." Nora pointed.

Several of the grotesque yellow nodes were inching up the wall. "The ova must possess the same corrosive enzymes of the worms that bred them."

"Chitin-penetrating and plastic-penetrating," Loren remarked. His mouth fell open when he turned his head. "Hey, Nora…"

"What?"

"Look at the tanks."

Nora lowered her face to the pair of mini aquariums. "Holy shit!" she yelled. "They've infected the bristleworms!"

In the farthest tank, all of the scarlet bristleworms had at least one yellow ovum attached to their bodies. The worms themselves shuddered. But events had progressed further in the closer tank.