Edward Lee - Slither

"There is something serious going on," she said. "Me and you. Right now."

Trent couldn't help it, but at least he was fairly sure that no other red-blooded man could either. His anger dissolved and then he was walking right up to her. Here we go again… His gaze slid up over her body, lingering over every perfect curve. Suddenly, worms, dead bodies in the water, and inexplicable electronic jamming were the furthest things from his mind.

He just couldn't help it.

The image of her body and its accommodating promise dragged him to her as effectively as a chain around his neck.

"That's better," she whispered when they embraced. Her hot hands seemed impatient when she lifted his T-shirt over his head, and a moment later he was back in his lustful heaven, his bare skin pressed against the warm, plenteous bosom. Oh God, I am so pussywhipped! Trent gave up altogether. Nature was calling again, and he simply didn't have the will to say no.

He could feel the turgid nipples pressing against him, could feel the heat radiating off her body and surrounding him, pulling him. Trent was none too daintily sucking her neck when he felt her fingers teasing around his groin. The sexual energy between the two of them was merging into a cocoon of antsy, hot static.

She was about to unfasten his gun belt and delve into his trunks when she suddenly nudged him back.

"Let's get kinky," she whispered.

"Huh?"

Annabelle picked up the beach bag and slipped out the drawstring. Now her fingers spidered across his chest. "Tie me up."

Trent was thrown off guard. lie her up? In the woods? I just want to get laid again. Trent had never really been into such things but…

"You really are buzzed," he said.

"Um-hmm." Her big, wanton eyes blinked. "Makes me hotter." She put the drawstring in her hand and offered her wrists.

What a nut… but I guess I don't really care. He lashed her wrists together, and thought, What now? but she pointed just above her.

"Lift me up. Right there."

The crook of a broken bough stuck out of the tree. Annabelle held her arms up, elucidating her breasts, as Trent palmed her hips, raised her enough to get the lash hooked on the bough, then released her. Now she stood before him on her tiptoes, stretched out like something for display. Her breathing grew heavier at once.

She's really into this kooky stuff, he realized, but scarcely cared. He began kissing her breasts and tonguing around her neck. Words weren't necessary now, just primal action. Her stretched body trembled as Trent's mouth embarked on a hot, wet trek from the dimple of her throat, and down…

"Lower," was the only word she breathed.

The officer knew what she wanted, and took his time getting to it. His mouth sucked fresh sweat off her skin, between the valley of her breasts, then more tan skin, then her navel. Her body was quivering now. Trent lingered at the navel, knowing that it only maximized her expectations; now he was toying with her, a notion that seemed ultimately satisfying.

After minutes more of excruciating mouth-play on her abdomen, he finally lowered himself to his knees.

She breathed through hisses, then quickly raised her legs, splaying everything before his face. The bottoms of her thighs rested on his shoulders.

Trent tinkered further with her angst, refusing to ar rive at the mark. She was truly hanging now, her arms straight as rods, her bare heels thunking his back, trying to pull his mouth closer. Trent just kissed and sucked ever more along the insides of her thighs.

The way she began to shudder, he would've thought she was climaxing even before his mouth finally found her sex.

Annabelle let out a delicious moan. If Trent had been able to see her face, surely her eyes would've been squeezed shut in the most potent pleasure, and every muscle in her flawless body flexing beneath the tan skin.

Her moans rose to repeated crescendoes, her flesh quaking, then-

Just as he expected her climax to let loose-

"Get me down!" she shrieked. "There's someone behind you!"

Trent heard an unpleasant metallic clack! of some sort, and before he realized it might have been the sound of something hitting him on the back of the head, his vision began to blur. It seemed that black ink had been dumped over his consciousness, and-

Trent collapsed flat on his back.

Only one second of awareness ticked by before he'd fully blacked out, and in that second, he saw two things:

Annabelle hanging helpless and naked against the tree.

And a man in a decon suit, gas mask, and hood reaching out for her.

CxnrrExWErr[y

(I)

Nora corkscrewed in the water as the pulsing, pink worm tightened its coil around her waist. Somehow her instinct turned off her panic and turned on her defensive mechanisms; as the worm coiled in one direction, she violently flailed her body in the opposite, hoping to retard the thing's efforts to fully encircle her.

She thrashed, wielding her knife. No thoughts of horror or fear filled her head-only reaction. The worm seemed the width of a garden hose, but it had to have been ten feet long. Eventually it wrapped around her body several times, then began to constrict.

Its strength was dizzying, as though two hefty men were pulling on each end of a rope looped about her waist. Had it gotten around her neck, she knew she'd be strangling now, but this wasn't much better. The worm was trying to squeeze all the air out of her body…

Her free hand clamped just under the tapered cone of flesh that was the worm's head; this was all that kept it from slithering about her throat…

Nora was running out of air. Her flippers kicked to the surface, but the worm's posterium-its tail endraveled around her legs, tightening more.

Meanwhile, unvented carbon dioxide began to swell in her lungs…

Through her mask she viewed the worm's eyeless head and the sphincter of muscle that composed its frontal duct. The fleshy ring opened and closed akin to a heart valve, driven to attach itself to her mouth through which it would either empty its digestive enzymes-to feed-or empty its ovarial reservoirs-to plant its eggs.

The mouth had no jaws-just the grotesque, pulsing ring-and no teeth, but instead something worse: a circle of "stylets" that would sink into the meat of her back throat like fishhooks, to keep the worm's body securely attached to the host. The most revolting sensation of Nora's life was the feel of the worm's own throat clamped in her hand, its skin-or hydrostatic sheath-moving back and forth-like the foreskin over an erect penis.

At that moment, she thought: I'm going to die now…

She felt something tear through her swimsuit-and her skin. Seawater burned into a six-inch-long gash down her abdomen. The worm was now a belt tightened around her waist…

Nora's knife had shot down, then, and cut the belt in half.

She'd done it without thinking, cutting herself in order to cut the creature…

Half of the worm's length drifted away, dead.

But this left the top half, still alive and squirming.

Nora's blade blurred across her eyes, and severed the worm's head. It floated away, a squirming, pink lump.

The rest of the body unraveled, the clipped end re leasing a plume of tea-colored digestive enzymes as well as a slew of underdeveloped ova. In a split second, Nora watched those same corrosive enzymes burn up any ova it came in contact with.

She managed to kick away, as still more of the acids came only inches away from drifting into her face.

Her legs kicked independently from her mind. To escape the corrosive ooze, she'd kicked backward, farther into the trench, and then her back collided with something…

A moment of thinking passed.

Then she shot up to the surface, where her head broke the water only a few heartbeats away from the point in which she would've drowned…