Tim Curran - Worm

Two others rose up, one making the most obscene sort of croaking noise like a fat bullfrog. Tony fired. But they were everywhere. The mud was a living stew of them and their elastic forms began unwinding from it.

“Watch it in there!” Fern heard Marv call to her from the living room and she didn’t need to be told twice. She knew damn well what to watch out for. That worm in the drain had been no bizarre evolutionary accident, but one of many. The muck was infested with them.

Kassie was crying and Kalie told her to knock it off. Fern did her best to soothe both of them. They were trembling and so was she. Tony and Marv were shooting and shooting, trying to turn back the tide of the wriggling invaders.

Then… Donna screamed.

She fell back, kicking her leg in the air. One of the worms had gotten into the dining room. Its teeth were buried in her ankle and it was chewing, simply gnawing with a grating sound of knives against bone. Its body undulated with convulsions as it gulped down what it tore loose.

“One side!” Bertie Kalishek said, pushing past Fern and the twins. “One side!”

By then, Donna was nearly out of her mind with pain and hysteria.

Bertie took it all most calmly. She stepped forward, lighting a Lark 100 and pulling two good drags off it as she lowered herself to her knees—no easy process at her age—and took hold of Donna’s thrashing leg. When she had it still, she pulled off the cigarette again until the cherry was glowing bright orange… then she stabbed it right into the side of the worm. There was a sssstttt sort of sound and the worm reacted immediately, dropping free and writhing on the carpet.

“Don’t care for that much, do you, you little vermin,” she said, pulling herself to her feet with aid of the dining room table. When she was up and steady, she stamped down one rain boot on the worm and it burst open in a flood of cold jelly. About six inches of the tail end disengaged itself, squirming wildly about.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Bertie said and smashed it under her boot. She smashed the head end, too, which was opening and closing its fanged mouth like a fish gasping for air.

Fern called out to Marv that they were okay as she dashed into the bathroom for the first-aid kit.

By then, Donna was looking very pale and very sickly. She was laying flat on the floor, her eyes glazed and barely blinking, her mouth trembling as if she wanted to speak. She was in full view of the twins, of course, who stared down at her with wide eyes. When she made a moaning sound, they cringed and held on to each another.

Fern got back and began to dress Donna’s ankle. There was a great deal of tissue damage and she’d lost a lot of blood. About all Fern could do under the circumstances was pour some disinfectant on it—which made Donna cry out like she had been scorched with a branding iron—and wrap it up good. She needed real medical care and soon. Fern didn’t want to think of the worm’s filthy mouth and what sort of germs were already breeding in the wound site.

“Listen,” Bertie said. “You hear that?”

They were all hearing it. The worms were massing outside, hissing and making that weird hollow croaking noise. They could hear them sliding along the outer walls of the house and Fern was almost sure there was one on the roof… a really big one.

“I’m of the opinion we’re most definitely in the shit here,” Bertie said.

Remember when Charise called? You remember when she told you to get out? Well, you should have listened. You should have waded to higher ground or swung tree to tree like a fucking ape, but you should have gotten out.

This was what Tony was thinking as the worms pressed in from every quarter. They were not only coming in through the broken picture window and in such numbers they looked like strings of hamburger being churned out by an old meat grinder, but they were hitting the roof and the other windows like they were being fired from cannons. It made no real sense, but he was seeing it. In the glow of the lantern, they were smashing against the window by the door and with such velocity that they were exploding against the pane until the window was just dark and globby with worm goo.

“Tony!” Marv called out.

Tony avoided a darting worm and almost stepped into the embrace of a much larger one that raised itself from the muck with open jaws. He fired with the shotgun and blew it into fragments that continued to writhe. He had been momentarily distracted by the sound of other worms punching into the front door, trying to chew their way through.

Together, he and Marv began to back their way toward the dining room.

If this was a battle, then it was one they couldn’t hope to win. He was getting low on shells for the shotgun and he figured Marv couldn’t have had much more than five or six rounds left for the 30-06.

A huge worm, maybe six or seven feet in length, bashed through one of the few unbroken side panes of the picture window. It was like an immense, swollen tube, segmented and bulging, its mouth as wide as an open coffee can. Tony fired at it, killing it and several smaller ones that clustered around it.

They were going to be buried alive.

There were just too damn many of them.

There was no way in hell they could fight against those kinds of numbers without anything less than a machine gun. And that’s when he began to wonder if there wasn’t some sort of strategy behind the assault. In a human wave attack, the point was not only to overwhelm defenses and breach perimeters, but to get the defenders to waste the majority of their ammunition.

What if, by some absolute perversion of logic, that’s what the worms were doing?

It was utter pandemonium, but Fern tried to keep her head.

The twins were holding on to each other so tightly she thought they might break. Donna was in a bad way. Her skin was clammy and damp with sweat. She was unresponsive and trembling. There was no doubt she was in shock or damn close to it. Fern had already raised her damaged leg up onto a chair to keep the blood supply limited to the limb and concentrated in her vital organs. That was necessary.

Tony and Marv were still killing worms, but she knew it was a losing battle. Still, there had to be a way. She was not about to let her friends, her husband, and particularly, her children, get torn up by those awful things, there was just no damn way.

“Watch it!” Bertie said.

The twins screamed.

A worm came out from under the table and darted at her, burying teeth like darning needles right into the arm of the chair next to her. If it had ideas of freeing itself, Bertie ended that when she chopped it in half with a carving knife from the kitchen. She looked perfectly ridiculous standing there with a cleaver in one hand and a knife in the other, a smoldering Lark 100 hanging from her mouth, her eyes huge and fixed behind her bifocals.

Fern turned and saw Tony and Marv backing their way to the dining room door.

Dear God.

The worms were massing before them. She saw what looked like eight or ten of them that had to be the size of pythons and tangled among them, sliding over them, were what looked like hundreds of smaller worms. They pushed forward like some immense, squirming machine, seeming not to so much crawl as roll in a worming, fleshy mass.

“Marv!” she cried out. “Get in here! The both of you get in here!”

Then there was a bolt of pain in her arm. One of them had slipped past Bertie and bitten into her left bicep. Without hesitation, she grabbed its roping, slimy tail and yanked it free, its teeth gnashing madly like the needles of an industrial sewing machine. The only plus was that it had not managed to bite through her denim jacket. She threw it against the wall and it exploded like a wet sack of meat.