Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

They listened to the rain coming down as the candle burned low. It was a nice sound. He pulled the blanket up tighter and realized he was getting too comfortable. He couldn’t afford to sleep right now.

“Why did you want to stay out there?” he asked her.

Maria looked at him, then looked away. “I wanted the worms to get me.”

“Why?”

Now she did not look away. “Do you know what life has been like for me?”

He nodded. “Still…rising back up as a dead thing isn’t much of a plan.”

“It sounded okay to me.”

The rain kept falling and they could hear it sluicing in rivers and creeks, expanding into ponds and muddy bogs that would become lakes in time. Thunder boomed off and on. Water dripped from the roof.

“Listen,” Maria said.

Slaughter did. He heard nothing at first and then: plink, plink, plink. It was either a hailstorm, which he had not seen in years, or a worm rain. No, too soft for hail. It was worms, all right. He could hear their small, soft bodies smashing against the shed. Out there in the distance, people were crying out, either trapped in the rain or just terrified at the idea of it.

Maria was shivering. “I hate worms. I hate all worms.”

“And you were going to give yourself to them?”

“I wasn’t thinking straight.”

The sound of the worms falling seemed to go on interminably and Slaughter was thankful for the candle. Being in the dark and not being able to see them if they breached the shack would have brought him a little too close to out-and-out madness. Plink-plink, plink, plink, plink, plink-plink, plink, plink, plink… on and on it went and then Maria let loose with a little scream and Slaughter saw why. A worm had gotten through the tiny hole in the roof and landed on his blanketed lap. He flicked it off and crushed it under his boot.

But another fell, and another.

Tearing a strip off the blanket, he stood on the chair and wadded the material into the hole so no more could get in. When it was tight and impenetrable, he jumped down and smashed the intruders. They were only about an inch long, immature as all the worms that fell were, but fat and soft. Repulsive.

He sat back down and Maria clung to him. She was shivering. He pulled her tight against him and she molded right into his body, but she did not stop shaking.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“No, no I’m not.”

An hour later, the rain had stopped.

No more worms.

That part of the downfall only lasted ten or fifteen minutes and then it was pure rain again. When they stepped outside, it was still daylight. A grainy uneven daylight, but daylight all the same. The sky was pink streaked by red and scudded with indigo clouds, but it was clear, no storms on the horizon. The landscape looked like Flanders in 1915 during the height of the Great War: a great bubbling swamp of mud with corpses trapped in it, hands and limbs and sightless staring faces rising from the muck. Slaughter saw at least a dozen dead, but figured there were probably many more sunken beneath the mire.

Tomorrow night they would rise up.

“It’ll be dark before long,” Maria said. “We better find a place to hide.”

He looked at her. “The wormboys?”

“There’s other things out here,” was all she would say.

They saw a few stragglers dragging themselves through the mud, but no armed bands of Ratbags. They were either dead or scattered or lying low. And that was okay. Slaughter had already checked the load on his weapon and he had no more than ten or twelve rounds at best.

They were down in the lowest part of the compound, he saw. Almost a bowl hemmed in by rising hills. He figured none of it was natural. The Army or whoever built this place had landscaped it to resemble a battlefield of sorts. The hills rose in tiers, each set having a few tin shacks or bunkers dug into them with perimeters of barbwire. He decided they needed to get up and out of the slop so, Maria behind him, they followed a greasy trail up and out to the next tier where there was a flattened walkway. The bunkers looked empty and he checked them one by one. Maybe the Red Hand were in the other encampments. He saw a few corpses, skittering rats, some standing water in the bunkers, but not much else.

“That one over there,” Maria suggested.

It was a wood-framed hut built right into the hillside. It was much larger than the shack and looked somewhat defensible. As they made their way over there, a low warm wind began to blow. The world was silent, a dim light laying over it.

There was a red cross on the door of the hut and it must have been some kind of aid station for war games. For reasons he did not even fully understand, Slaughter knocked on the door a few times before opening it and going in low with the M-16 held out before him. It was warm and dry inside. There were a couple of cots, a few empty drug cabinets. A woman with glazed eyes was sitting in a chair before a folding table.

“Don’t mind us,” he said.

She didn’t mind them at all. In fact, she seemed utterly oblivious to their presence. She mumbled under her breath, chattered her teeth, and shook with sudden quick spasms. Her teeth were bad, her face pockmarked with sores. She looked like a meth freak.

Slaughter looked over at Maria and she shook her head, twirled her finger next to her temple to indicate this lady was crazy. They sat together on one of the cots and watched the crazy woman, intrigued by her own closed world of madness.

She was clutching something to her breast with muddy fingers and then she revealed it, setting it on the table: a jelly jar. A jelly jar about a third way full with squirming red worms. Slaughter and Maria just watched. They said nothing, appalled, but not really surprised. Still humming and mumbling, the woman pulled a baggie of brown powder from the pocket of her flannel shirt. Slaughter thought it looked like low-grade Mexican brown heroin cut with something. From between her legs came a little vinyl fanny pack. She unzipped it and took out a spoon and a hypodermic needle, a Bic lighter and something like a small set of blunt tongs that he knew was a garlic press. Then a set of medical forceps.

Bitch is going to spike up right in front of us, he thought.

With shaking hands she searched around, patting herself, and then pulled a length of rubber hose from inside her shirt. It was dirty and well-used, as was the needle. She rolled up her sleeve and tied off the rubber hose at her bicep. Her forearm was bruised and ugly with needle tracks.

Maria took his hand, tried to pull him up so they could leave.

But he would not leave.

He had to see this. He had heard about this shit but he had always thought it was some kind of half-baked urban legend. Now that the tourniquet was tied off, the woman spilled some powder carefully into the spoon, patting it down with the tip of one finger. Setting the spoon aside gently…very gently…she took up the forceps and dug around in the jar of worms until she had a real good fat one. Most of them were sluggish or dead. But the worm she chose was quite lively. She brought it out and captured it in the garlic press. Licking her lips, her humming rising higher and higher, she crushed the worm with the press, the pale pink juice dripping into the powder on the spoon. She set it aside and, taking up the spoon, brought the flame of the lighter beneath it until the powder and worm juice became a bubbling liquid mass.

Her humming sounded like erotic joy by this time.

“Let’s go,” Maria said. “Please.”

Slaughter ignored her. There was a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches on the window sill. He helped himself, smoking and watching, transfixed.

Using the syringe, the haggard woman sucked up the pale brown fluid and, breathing heavily, selected a vein that wasn’t collapsed. She jabbed the needle into it, gasping with pleasure, sucked up some blood, then injected the syringe of fluid into her vein.