Tim Curran - Worm

Then it was loose.

Its obscene weight fell in her lap and it attacked immediately. She thought it would go for her face, her eyes, or her throat. But it did none of these things. What it did was that much more appalling: it brushed between her legs like an immense and flaccid penis, then darted its head upward, sliding under her hoodie and up over her belly, the bristles of its skin tearing into her navel. Its swollen length slid between her breasts the way her husband once had.

The effect was nauseating.

Her breasts were heavy with milk and the worm seemed to know it.

She cried out, falling on her ass in the black slop. She yanked and pulled at the worm but it looped in her fingers, thick gouts of foaming slime issuing from it. She could not hold it or tear it away. Its mouth flexed open, shearing through her bra, and enveloped her left breast. She screamed. Its mouth was cool. She could feel its teeth scrape against her like piercing needles. She beat at it, her nails cutting trenches in its flesh, but the teeth bit right into her.

Kathleen let go with a wild, shrieking cry.

The worm’s teeth slid into her breast, impaling deep into her mammary glands, bringing forth blood and warm milk as the ducts were pierced. She fought all that much harder, but the teeth held on. The mouth shriveled to a puckered hole, suckering to her nipple. She could feel its length pulsating as it drained her with unbelievable pain. It was like being hooked up to a milking machine. But the real agony was not that, but when it tore her nipple loose from its intense, vigorous suction.

At the same moment it did, its teeth lost their traction and she yanked it free, jerking it out from beneath her hoodie and tossing it across the room. She was doubled over with incredible, devastating waves of pain, her hoodie soaking red with her blood.

But the worm was not done.

It was coming to finish her.

It slithered through the muck and vaulted at her. She snatched its writhing form in midair with two blood-spattered fists. She squeezed it, trying to tear it apart but it was elastic and fluid. Then with a manic cry, she brought it up to her mouth and bit into it, her teeth rupturing its membrane. This combined with the force of her hands pulling it in opposite directions sheared it. She bit it in half, her mouth filled with an eruption of gurgling slime and gushing worm jelly.

She went over, vomiting, emptying herself. The heaving was agonizing with her injured breast. Before she passed out, she knew she had to get free, she had to get out of the house.

She ran stumbling out the door, leaving the wriggling worm sections behind her. Screaming and sobbing, she waded out into the thigh-high muck that bubbled and coursed around her legs… vile, yet almost soothing with its warmth.

There was something floating out there.

“My baby,” she said picking it up. “My… baby…”

Tony tried two more houses in the neighborhood and found destruction. Not just the destruction from the muck and the houses themselves coming apart, but destruction from the worms that had tunneled into each and every one of them like maggots into bad meat, feeding on what they found there.

As he slogged through the muddy sludge in the streets, he heard screams from time to time.

What kind of fucking nightmare was this?

He was just glad Charise wasn’t here. He hoped she was safe. The worms were using the muck as a vector, he knew, to bring them to their prey, and it was working pretty well thus far. The city streets were supposed to be man’s turf. It was his element. But the muck had changed all that and what had once been familiar and safe was now deadly and alien. The muck was swimming with monsters. Like sharks in a sea of blood, they were circling, closer and closer.

Which is why you need to get to shelter. You have to find somewhere they can’t get you or you won’t last the night.

But where was that? An attic? A roof? The mud was still rising and safety was beginning to become something of an abstract term.

He had to relax. He had to get somewhere safe, but he couldn’t panic in the process because if he panicked, he would make mistakes. And if that happened, the worms would take advantage of it.

One of these houses had to have people in it.

People he could stand and fight with.

Tony stopped as he heard a splashing sound and ripples moved through the mud sea. Something was out there. Something was moving beneath the surface and it could only be one thing. He needed to move but it was the thing he feared most. Instinct told him to run and it told him to stay still. The worms weren’t the brightest lights on the tree. Very skilled predators as far as that went, but not real smart. If he moved, they would seek him out. If he stayed still, they might pass on by.

Carefully, very carefully, he snaked a hand into his hoodie and dug his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He lit one and dragged deep off it.

See? See how fucking calm you can be when you have to?

Pulling off his cigarette, he waited there, still as a post.

Now and again, there were ripples around him. The muck roiled, splashed. Eventually, there was nothing. He sighed and let his back slump.

It was then he saw a form moving in his direction.

Death would be love’s last enduring kiss, Eva Jung decided. It would come in the night and its lips would be the heat that lit one last fire in the cooling embers of her heart here on this darkest of all dark nights in this bed where her husband had once made love to her.

The neighborhood was coming apart out there. She could hear houses crashing and walls falling and roofs collapsing. Her own house shook. Its foundation cracked open, black muck filling low places like dark arterial blood, pooling and shifting and rising, ever rising. She could hear pipes bursting and looping forms sliding down hallways and up stairwells.

But she was barely even aware of it. She felt only the years pressing down on her and the emptiness that described them which was hollow and without form. She was lying under the sheets, naked, her flesh covered in a slight dew of perspiration—the sweat of fear and the sweat of anticipation. In her soul, she was a virgin untried, her overripened fruit unplucked and untasted but juicy and full. Soon, very soon now, she would not be alone.

She heard a sound out in the hallway beyond her partially open door: a secretive sliding like skin against satin sheets.

Leonard? Leonard, is that you?

Though she knew somewhere in the vacant corridors of her brain that Leonard was dead, still she waited for him and would not have been surprised if his dark shape filled the doorway. She could almost smell his cologne, which always reminded her of well-oiled leather and green, needling pine forests. What she smelled then, what filled the room in dark fumes, was not that but something else. Her breathing increased as the door swung open and she could smell the foul sweetness of her lover. He had come unbidden, hungry and virile. She would be his meat and his wine and he would grow drunk upon her taste, giddy with what she had to offer.

Bring me your love. Bring me the filth and dirt of it. Let me squirm in it.

Her lover approached the bed with that same satiny swish-swish that was pre-seduction. Her heart throbbed in her chest. Her breath came quickly. Her skin was prickled with gooseflesh. She could smell what had come to take her. Its stink filled the room with a gassy foulness of rotting drainage ditches, but she was unaware of it. She smelled only the cologne: pine forests and pipe tobacco and worn leather. Her madness here on this last night of her life was complete and seamless; dream obscured reality and fantasy shrouded fact.