Edward Lee - Slither

"We're out of here,' Loren insisted, but just when they would turn to leave, a security monitor in the corner began to blink.

"What's happening now!" Nora exclaimed.

It was the screen showing the north beach. The panel's frame was suddenly bordered by a blinking red line.

The camera showed the water beyond the beach…

"That's where the trench is," Loren murmured.

"And where their sub is…'

They stared fixedly at the screen.

Nora supposed she could guess what was about to happen even before it did. In a few moments the water beyond the beach began to stir.

"Holy shit," Nora muttered.

"Uh, yeah," Loren agreed with her, because they both saw it very clearly.

The sub was surfacing.

(I)

There he is, Trent thought.

The clearing.

Then another thought: What if he's not dead?

The man whom Loren had shot lay utterly still, gloved hands outstretched, legs and booted feet sprawled. The visor of his gas mask was tinted; Trent couldn't see through it.

Probably the latest generation decon gear, he thought of the flat-black finish. He knelt and touched it-the material felt like sheer polyester. Trent tried to pull off a glove but then saw that it was fastened somehow, perhaps snaps on the inside.

He was about to pull off the mask but something dark caught his eye.

A dark gray patch over the left breast. In the U.S. Army, that's where a troop's name tag would be sewn.

But this tag bore no name, only this, in black marks against the gray:

That shit again…

Trent fished around in the man's pockets, eventually pulled out a plasticized card.

The card read:

He felt creeped out. How could that stuff be a code? he wondered.

Next, he tried to pull down the hood. He needed to get inside the suit, for the ID tags that would, by regulation, have to be around his neck.

Damn it!

The hood wouldn't detach from the mask. Was the entire suit integrated, a step-in?

Trent stood up, grabbed the lip under the mask's chin, then yanked upward.

The mask pulled off after several tugs.

Trent stared.

He doubted what his eyes were showing him at first. Was it a disease? Something from the worm?

The open-eyed face stared up at him.

Trent could see red arteries and blue veins webbed across the man's face. And he could see the skull beneath the flesh, because…

The flesh was transparent as glass.

Hands shaking-and his mentality breaking upTrent yanked open the jumpsuit's front, popping unseen snaps down the middle.

More clear, jellylike flesh, embedded with blood vessels, nerves, and the rib cage.

A lower glance to the abdomen showed more transparent flesh encasing obvious digestive organs.

Trent simply stood there looking down, a reasonable response. He tried to conceive the inconceivable, and eventually he acknowledged what lay before his eyes:

This guy's not in the navy. He's a fucking alien-

A final squint showed him what he'd been looking for all along. A small, rectangular plate on a cord around the figure's neck.

Trent leaned over and looked.

– :, the plate read.

His mind churned as he continued to stare. Then the next thing he knew, an impulse caused him to dash out of the clearing and hide.

Why?

He'd heard footsteps thrashing through the woods.

Trent prayed it was Nora and Loren… but he knew that would not be the case.

Two more figures in the same black gear entered the clearing and stopped at the corpse.

Trent held his breath, gun in sweaty hand.

The figures seemed to be communicating, yet no words could be heard. Radio gear inside their hoods? It didn't matter. They looked back and forth at each other, glancing alternately at the body of their comrade.

Then one of them produced something that looked like a pen. When he aimed it at the corpse, something issued from the "pen's" tip. Trent absurdly thought of Silly String, but this stuff was black.

The man sprayed the pen back and forth, eventually covering the corpse in a bizarre black web.

Then the two figures walked away.

Trent kept his eyes on the webbed corpse. He heard a definite hissing sound, then saw bluish, sooty smoke rising.

By the time a full minute had ticked by, the web had completely disintegrated the corpse, and itself.

Trent walked back out to look more closely.

The area where the corpse had lain was clear. It was as though the corpse had never been there at all.

(II)

Nora's and Loren's mouths hung open as they kept their eyes nailed to the monitor.

The hundred-foot-long submarine had fully surfaced now, and sat there in the frame, floating on the calm water. It shone black in the sun. Modest fins could be seen forward and aft of the perfectly cylindrical hull, yet the ends weren't rounded or pointed like typical subs. There was no conning tower. There were no windows.

And there was no propeller.

"I've never seen a submersible like that," Loren said. "No prop? Must be impeller-driven but… I don't see any intakes for the impellers."

"Loren, I don't see any anything on that. It looks like a giant black Pringles can sitting in the water."

The monitor frame continued to flash.

Then the vessel began to rise.

More slack-jawed silence as Nora and Loren tried to comprehend what their eyes were seeing on the screen.

The vessel was levitating ten feet above the water now, and a moment later it began to move forward, toward the island. As it did so it began to change color, the stark black giving over to the green blue of the water. Eventually it moved out of the confines of the frames.

Nora finally broke the silence. "You're thinking what I'm thinking, right?"

Loren's Adam's apple bobbed when he gulped. "Yeah. It's not a submarine or submersible-it's a spaceship. And it ain't one of NASA's."

"I don't believe in that kind of stuff."

"Neither do I, so what are we seeing?"

"Hallucination," Nora suggested. "Side effects of sunstroke, maybe. Maybe we have been infected by these worms, and one component of the infection is psychosis. There are many roundworms as well as ova of roundworms that can corrupt a host's DNA with a mutagenic virus. Maybe that virus is now in our brains and we don't even know it."

Loren smirked at her. "Do you believe that? That we've been having shared hallucinations because of a roundworm infection?"

Nora shook her head. She knew that she had no confidence in a single word that had just issued from her mouth.

"Aliens, then," she said.

"What else could it be?" Loren stalked around the room. "We know that the box full of worms in the other room and the ones that have overrun this island can only be the result of a gene-splicing and DNAmanipulating process that is beyond the technological capabilities of the modern scientific community." He reached up and took down one of the strange round lights on the wall. "How do you like that? A light that doesn't give off heat, doesn't have batteries, and isn't connected to a power source."

"Just like the cameras in the woods, too," Nora said.

"Sure. No power source, no electrical connections of any kind, not even an antenna, but-" He pointed to the bank of monitors. "They work better than any surveillance cameras we've ever seen." Loren was starting to get a little giddy with his acknowledgments. "Not to mention these monitors, which aren't connected to a power source either." He fiddled with the corner of one of the monitors… and eventually peeled it away from the others.