Edward Lee - Slither

Somehow, she wasn't surprised.

In the bright, magnified circle, it was almost stunning the way the hundreds of tiny ova poured forth. The cilia on each yellow egg roved vigorously. To a person in her field, this spectacle was fascinating.

And potentially horrifying.

Now-… don't take your eye off, she ordered herself. Don't even blink…

It wasn't her imagination. Very minutely, the ova were growing.

She barely noticed Trent coming in behind her.

"Ready for something weird?" he asked.

I'm LOOKING at something weird, she thought. "What's that?"

"I still can't get a call out on my cell phone, and now I can't even get out on this."

Nora saw that he was holding up a clunky green radio, antenna extended. "You're kidding me. Are the batteries dead?"

"Nope. Full charge. All I get is that same static that wavers in and out."

"I kept getting the same thing on my cell phone just a few minutes ago. I even went out to the far end of the beach facing the mainland."

"Like I said before," he told her. "It sounds like a military jammer. What do you make of that?"

Trent distracted her. She wanted to continue with her dissection. "Why would the army jam this island?"

"There's no reason that I can imagine, and that's what bothers me. I just have this funny feeling that something's going on here-that-they didn't tell me."

Nora thought about it. "You know, it could simply be some other kind of interference." She pointed to the door. "Or maybe there's some naval ship out in the gulf, testing its jammers."

"That's an idea," he agreed. "Or it could be the air force base in Tampa, or the National Guard on maneuvers somewhere."

These were logical explanations, so…

Why is he paranoid? she wondered.

"What's this?" he asked next, spying the dead possum in the box.

"I found a nest of them, all dead. And-well-I guess I should tell you this now-but they were killed by the same parasite that was in Annabelle's lobster. And it's the same species of worm that she found in the shower yesterday."

The information jolted him. "But that thing was as long as my forearm. The worms from the lobster were tiny."

"They grow fast," was all she could say, and when she looked back in the microscope, she saw that the ova had doubled in size. "We could have a bit of a problem here. These worms can infect mammals, and…"

"We're mammals," Trent said very dryly. He stared off through his next contemplation. "And we don't have any way to get off the island, and to make matters worse-"

"No way to call out to someone," Nora realized. "But we shouldn't overreact. Small mammals are one thing, but humans are much more sophisticated, not to mention we have much more efficient immune systems." It seemed an appropriate thing to say, but there still wasn't much consolation. "But we'll still have to safeguard ourselves."

"What do you mean?"

Her eye was back at the microscope. "We don't know what this is, but if it's anything like what we think it is we shouldn't take chances." The ova continued to grow under the microscope, a shimmering, yellow spectacle.

"What's the worst-case scenario?" 'Dent asked. "What are the chances of these things actually being able to kill humans?"

A lanky shadow crossed the room. "They may have already done that…"

It was Loren who'd come in.

Nora was almost shocked by his appearance: dripping wet and trembling.

"You look like you've just seen a ghost," Trent said.

"Not a ghost, a corpse," Loren replied.

"What?"

Loren dropped his gear. "I went back out to the bristleworm nest. The parasite's infected everything-I couldn't believe how fast it tore through the area. Then I found a dead body."

Trent squinted. "Are you sure? The three of us were out there an hour ago. There was no body."

"It was in the trench."

Nora stood up and faced him. "Loren, this is very important. Was the body infected by the parasite we've found?"

He sat down, brushed wet hair out of his eyes. "I couldn't tell, it was too decomposed."

"So it's been there a long time," Trent figured.

"Not necessarily. In water this warm, plus bottom feeders? A body wouldn't last long at all," Nora said.

"And who the hell's body is it?" Trent asked next. "We're the only ones on the island."

Nora looked to Trent. "Go find Annabelle and bring her in here. We're going to have to have a group discussion. Her little photo shoot isn't important anymorewe don't know what we might be up against, and with no boat and all our phones inoperable, we might be in some serious trouble."

"What about the phones?" Loren asked with some alarm. "My cell phone worked fine yesterday."

".ny it now,. Trent suggested. "Nothing's been getting through all day, not even my radio."

'Lieutenant Trent says the interference sounds like a jammer," Nora added.

Loren's brow creased at the comment. "That's ridiculous." And he dug his cell phone out of his bag, dialed some numbers.

"You're right," he muttered a minute later.

The dilemma trebled with each thought. Can't get off the island-no boat. Can't call for help-the phones and radios aren't working for some unknown reason. There's a parasite on the island that might be able to infect humans… oh, and by the way, we've also got a dead body in the water, and nobody knows who it is…

"Wasn't Annabelle with you when you found this dead body you think you saw?" Trent said.

Loren clearly didn't care for the structure of the sentence. "I saw a body. I don't think I saw one, I saw one."

Trent held up his hands. "Fine, but how do you know the body isn't her?"

The question silenced them all.

"Couldn't be," Loren insisted. "You and Annabelle went back to the beach when the three of us were looking for bristleworms. I stayed out. That's when I found the corpse."

Nora tried to rein in some reason. "One thing at a time. Forget about corpses and jammers and parasites right this minute. Lieutenant, I think the best idea is for you to find Annabelle, while Loren and I do some more tests on this worm."

Trent didn't seem overly pleased, but he agreed, "All right," and left the head shack.

"So you were right-it can infect mammals," Loren said when he noticed the dead possum. He looked into the scope. "Jesus. Some of the ova are still growing, while others have already hatched."

"You're kidding…" Nora hadn't seen that. Another fluke. "It looks like a Trichinella, and it's acting like a number of species from the order, but-"

"Nora, this worm is acting like a whole bunch of different worms," he said, "and we both know that."

When Nora took another look herself, she saw that some of the tiny ova had already hatched into worms that were already a half inch long. "This is going to become a mess real fast. They're growing off the slide."

"Isolate one ovum and one worm, then-"

"Kill everything else," she finished his thought. She placed a worm and an unhatched ovum in a petri dish, then scraped everything else into a plastic container and sprayed it with repellent. "I want to see what this ovum's going to do."

"It might be an infertile mutagen carrier," Loren speculated.

"That's what I was thinking." But it was also what she was fearing. Once a species got this big, who knew what effect it would have on humans? "And we're going to keep this worm alive-to see just how big it gets." She left the ovum in the dish and forceped the now inch-long worm into a glass beaker. "Why don't you check out the mother possum?"

Loren slid the box over and pulled up the other microscope. "At least it doesn't stink yet. The only thing grosser than a possum is a rotten possum."

"It had already given birth to the babies," Nora told him. "It's obvious it hasn't been dead more than a few hours."