Edward Lee - Slither

Ruth was too racked with horror to ponder the ques tion very deeply, but given the circumstances, a passerby might beg another question: With no penis, what did Robb intend to rape her with?

Muscles flexed beneath yellow, red-spotted skin. In Robb's infection and sequent decomposition, aspects of his college-athlete physique remained: pillars for thighs, bulging biceps, pectorals, and lats. Ordinarily, Ruth might even have been turned on by the flexing washboard abdominals.

But not when they were covered by red-spotted yellow monster skin.

All 110 pounds of Ruth put up a formidable fight, hands slapping at the mindless, wedgelike face, fingers poking at the eyes, which looked so watery they might somehow have aspirated their inner humors. The big chunk she'd bitten out of his cheek was now covered by something that looked more like a wart than a scab.

One big wet hand pinned her chest to the floor, while the other, now, wriggled for her groin. Ruth's legs moved like fifty miles an hour on a stationary bike; she was going nowhere, but her body was trying anyway.

Her senses disconnected. None of her brain bothered to curse Slydes-that big hairy redneck coward-for leaving her here. None of her brain wasted any synaptic energy on the useless regret that if she'd stayed in school, never done drugs, and never gotten involved with creeps like Jonas and Slydes, then maybe she wouldn't be pinned to the floor in this infernal toolshed by a sex-crazed zombie with no penis. Maybe, just maybe, if she'd kept going to church instead of opting out for strip joints and coke at age eighteen, and pennyante tricks in between sugar daddies…

It seemed likely that she would never have had occasion to meet her noxious death on an island full of giant pink worms.

Ruth didn't bother thinking about any of that.

Instead, she thought this: The fuckin' barbecue fork!

She'd brought it in from outside, hadn't she? More senses shut down as stout fingers began to play inside her womanly orifice. Her auditory faculties didn't register Robb White's ruined efforts to speak:

"Bluckin' blig-tit butch! Gublunna pull bloor gluts out frew bloor plussy!"

Whatever.

Ruth's eye had already caught sight of the barbecue fork, lying not three feet beyond her reach. If I can get this big zombie fucker's hand off me just for ONE SECOND, she realized, I could get that fork!

Something unexpected happened then, almost in synchronicity with the thought. The yellow lids on Robb's glop-for-eyes shot open. His body stiffened as if seized by a sudden pain, and his gestures of molestation… stopped.

He pulled away. When he pulled his hand out from Ruth's spread legs, it didn't all come out.

The yellow, red-spotted skin peeled off like a rubber glove.

Robb held up the hand in mute, zombie astonishment. His hand was now a raving, shining pink.

He stood up in haste, shaking through a confusion. Then he began to take his skin off like someone taking off clothes.

The "shirt" of yellow skin crinkled wetly as it was removed from Robb's back. The sleeves turned inside out; then the entire mess was tossed away. What existed beneath was more of the same brand-new, clean, raving pink.

The same color as the worms.

The new pink arms, in fact, looked more like fat, sturdy worms themselves. No nipples or navel adorned the chest, just a remnant human musculature covered by fresh-pink- skin.

Even in this utter madness, Ruth was able to think: What the fuckin' FUCK is happening?

A transformation was happening, not that she could've been technically aware of that. After all, she still thought Robb was a zombie. He was actually now a late-cycle mutant. His robust health had allowed him to survive a full mutagenic conversion, his altered genes bidding this successful wedding of human DNA with genetically transfected worm DNA.

Next, Robb pulled off what was left of his scalp, revealing a glistening pink head with an aperture at the top. His head seemed to collapse, the skull cracking heartily, and then that aperture expanded and expelled the chunks of Robb's cranium. Without the support of bones now, the mass of pink flesh on Robb's shoulders distended and looked a lot like one of the eyeless conical heads of the worms.

Two species were merging into one before Ruth's eyes. But there was still the yellow skin from the waist down…

Robb stepped out of it, like stepping out of a pair of pants.

Gleaming pink legs stood V'd over Ruth. What covered Robb now, clearly, was worm skin. Even his toes looked more like the ends of worms than human toes.

But Ruth couldn't have cared less about the toes.

Her eyes shot to Robb's crotch.

What hung there was purely and simply a fat, teninch worm.

Oh, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, Ruth thought.

Now Robb had something to rape her with, and worse still was the fact that the worm… was erecting.

That's when Ruth grabbed the barbecue fork and hooked it right into the pulsing column.

Blood that was white shot out on hot jets, painting Ruth's determined face. The sound that Robb made in objection bore no semblance to anything human now. More like stabbing a barbecue fork into a rhino's penis.

The shed shuddered around the concussive sound.

Ruth became a blond maniac dynamo. The fork blurred as she jammed it in and out of Robb's abdomen. Then more jabs in the neck, then a few more in the boneless sack that used to be his head.

Dust rose from the wood floor's seams when the fully mutated Robb White collapsed. Ruth jabbed the now-flaccid penis-thing one more time, then ran like a banshee out the door.

Her brain still registered very little. All she knew was that she was no longer in that Shed from Hell, and she was breathing fresh air, not monster-stink.

Her shorts still rung her foot. She pulled them on and sprinted off down the first trail she saw. She only knew that she was going to run straight to the beach and start swimming.

It was worth the chance, even with the sharks.

(V)

First Nora checked the camp. They're not here, she thought in the biggest disappointment. That meant she'd have to go looking, and there was precious little time for that. She found another can of repellent in Trent's tent, then sprayed herself down liberally. For all the good it'll do against those things, she told herself, remembering just how big the worms could get.

Frustration overwhelmed her now. She jogged down the trail. That was stupid! Her heart still hadn't let up. Maybe God really had saved her. But for what? she wondered.

Did she really deserve to be saved? How different would her life be if she survived this mess? Even amid the chaos and all the impossibilities, some recess of her mind seemed to dwell on that.

Try to do some good, she told herself.

She veered off back toward the RTG.

I'll find a way to disarm it…

But when she got there…

"How the hell?" she muttered.

It was gone.

She squinted down at the cement slab. The area where the black disk had been seemed blemished, even corroded somehow. Well, that's sure some shit…

Then it occurred to her, One of the guys in the masks must've moved it. They must know we're onto them…

So what now?

When she turned she almost shrieked.

A dead worm lay like limp rope across the clearing. End to end, it must've been thirty feet long.

She felt caught in a cross fire of confusion. Back to the campsite, was the only recourse she could think of. She took back off running…

An unseen impact slammed her chest and plowed all the air from her lungs. It happened too fast for her to think. Had she run into a branch?

Her back slammed the ground.

Consciousness began to fizzle, her peripheral vision going from gray to black.