Edward Lee - Slither

No, he decided. I won't kill her. I'll leave her for the worms instead.

He was about to make tracks back to the station, but stopped cold. He thought he'd heard a sound.

A metallic click.

Then came the last sound he'd ever hear.

Bam!

The corporal collapsed right on top of the blonde, dead from the bullet that had slammed into the middle of his back.

(N)

Gun smoke stung Loren's eyes. He couldn't believe what he'd just done; he hadn't even given it a thought.

Holy fuck! I just shot a guy in the back!

Only after the pistol pumped out its round did Loren remember he'd never fired a gun in his life. The weapon kicked so hard, it flew out of his hand…

He stared through vertigo for several moments, listening to his heart beat. Annabelle's rapist had collapsed right on top of her. When Loren snapped out of it, he rushed over, yanked off the motionless assailant, and tended to Annabelle.

Ohno…

Her hands were tied and lay limp over her head. Her legs were disarrayed. Loren felt encased by dread when he put a finger to her throat to check for a pulse. After what seemed a minute, he found one and sighed in relief. He jostled her around, gently slapped her face, but she remained out cold.

"Goddamn, what the hell happened?" Lieutenant Trent had just come to. He sat up, a hand to his head, then stared in disbelief at the scene.

"That guy in the suit raped Annabelle," Loren's voice cracked. "So I…"

Trent saw the revolver on the ground. "You shot him?"

"Yeah. Uh, in the back."

Trent instinctively checked his gun belt, found his own pistol intact, then leaned over the man in the suit. "Man, this is really fucked up. Who is this guy?"

"I don't know but that gear he's wearing looks military to me," Loren said. "We need to get out of here right now and find Nora. That guy's got colleagues who are going to be looking for him."

"You're right…" Trent grabbed the gas-masked man's shoulder, to look at him. "He's military, all right, but I can't tell what branch." The mask's eye portals were mirrored. Trent yanked at the hood but couldn't get it off.

"Help me with her," Loren said. "We need to leave." He picked the revolver up and stuck it in his waistband.

"Where'd you get that?"

"Long story, I'll tell you on the way."

They each shouldered one of Annabelle's arms and stalked off.

"This is crazy," Trent muttered. "Military personnel in decontamination suits?"

"Yeah, and surveillance cameras in the woods and our cell phones and your radio being electronically jammed. Plus a parasitic worm that looks like a genetic hybrid, a damn gene-splicing experiment or something-all on an island nobody knows about."

"I'll bet that guy's with the Army Research Command. We walked right into the middle of one of their black projects by accident."

It sounded too coincidental, but after he thought about it, Loren had no choice but to agree. "I can't think of anything else it could be," he said. "We're in the middle of it, all right, and now we have to get out before we wind up dead. Other people have died on this island-"

"The body you said you saw in the water-"

"Not just that. This pistol I have I took off a dead college girl. She'd committed suicide with it, after telling me that other people have been killed by the worms."

"What?"

Loren sighed. "Just wait till we find Nora. I'll tell you the whole story."

They huffed through more brush. Annabelle didn't weigh much, but under these circumstances, the burden-was wearing both men out.

"Stop!" Trent said in a sharp, sudden whisper.

"What?"

The lieutenant stared at Loren. "Did you hear that noise?"

Loren looked desperately about, listening. "I… I don't think so…"

"Something rustling." Trent seemed sure. He looked up into the trees. "It sounded like it was above us."

Loren looked up, too. "Probably, uh, probably one of those big iguanas, or a tree-nesting bird."

"Yeah," Trent muttered back. "You're… probably right."

Before Loren's perceptions could register, something fell from the tree, as if unraveling. He thought of a hose being dropped: pink hose, and that's essentially all he could think before the two-inch-wide, twenty-foot-long worm unfurled from unseen branches, deftly coiled about Annabelle's chest, and began to lift her upward.

"Holy shit!" Trent yelled.

"Hold on to her!"

Annabelle's unconscious body was being lifted as if on a towline. Trent lashed his arms around a thigh, while Loren grabbed her feet, but then-

"Fuck!" Trent shouted.

They began to rise too; the worm was lifting all three of them. Trent and Loren, out of futility, dropped back to the ground. Trent drew his service weapon and fired several stray shots higher into the branches. "It's like trying to shoot a piece of rope!"

Annabelle's nude body disappeared upward.

Loren shook off his shock and still not really thinking jumped up for some branches. His flip-flops scuffed against bark as he tried to hoist himself up.

Trent grabbed his shoulder. "Forget it, man."

"We can't just leave her!"

"She's gone. There's nothing we can do to help her. What? Climb the tree? You'd never get up there, and even if you could, how are you going to shoot a worm that moves faster than a sidewinder?"

Loren knew he was right, but he still couldn't break his instincts. He tried to pull himself up again: useless. He hung off a short branch like a kid trying to do a pull-up.

"Forget it, man," Trent repeated.

The realities began sinking in all at once. Loren didn't know what to think, but he did know that Annabelle was gone.

He dropped back down, and the two men ran off as fast as they could.

Nora, pondering some bizarre realities of her own, stumbled back to the campsite just as Loren and Trent sprinted into the clearing. The three of them nearly collided with one another.

"I found the dead body in the water," Nora announced. "And it was full of worms. At least now we know. These things do attack and infect humans."

Trent sat down at the picnic table, winded. "You can say that again."

"Annabelle's… gone," Loren said.

"What do you mean?"

"A worm got her," Trent said.

Nora tried to cogitate. "I saw four of them in the water, and they were all over ten feet long."

"This one was twenty, at least," Trent confirmed.

Loren was getting his breath back. "It could've been longer than that. It was impossible to tell how far it went up the tree."

Here goes, Nora thought. "I also found a submarine."

Loren and Trent stared at her.

She recited the experience in detail.

"I saw that trench," Trent said. "A submarine couldn't fit in it."

"No, no," Nora explained. "Not like a nuclear submarine full of missiles. It was a lot smaller-"

"Like a submersible?" Loren said. "A research submersible? The military uses those all the time. They use them to map transport routes for the navy."

"That's more like what I'm talking about," Nora said. "And I'm certain it wasn't a pipeline or anything like that. It was a submarine. It even had some fins on the side."

"Were there windows?" Trent asked.

"I didn't have time to look over every inch. There were still plenty of worms down there. One of them almost got me… till I cut off its head."

And, next, Loren and Trent explained their own encounter.

"A man in a decontamination suit and gas mask?" Nora questioned. "Every new thing we discover looks more and more like a military experiment of some kind."

"And you can bet there are more of those guys on the island somewhere," Trent offered.

"But where?" Loren questioned. "On the submersible?"

"Maybe, but I'd guess they've got their own field station set up out here somewhere," Trent said. "And another thing you can bet on. Whatever this experiment is they're doing, it's definitely a top-secret project. They're not giving a flying fuck about any civilians who get killed. It's almost like they're hoping for that-"