Brian Keene - The Conqueror Worms

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch’s oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Satanists were surfing down Pratt Street when I found Jimmy’s head floating outside the fifteenth floor of the Chesapeake Apartments.

Earlier that day, a jellyfish almost stung me while I was paddling off the roof of the Globe Capital building. It was a good place for scavenging since the top floors were still above water. I went in from the roof, looking for guns, food, cigarettes, disposable lighters—anything that might be useful. While untying the raft from the roof, I was busy wishing the National Guard Armory wasn’t at the bottom of the ocean, and didn’t notice the jellyfish until it was almost too late.

All in all, between the rain, the Satanists, and the jellyfish, it was a bad day to be outside.

I’d always hated rainy days. They brought me down.

I hadn’t been happy in a long, long while.

Finding Jimmy’s head did nothing to improve my mood. I barely managed to keep from screaming. I bit through my lip, tasting blood and stifling a yell, while the Satanists whooped and shouted to each other in the distance. Their surfboards were painted black.

I turned back to Jimmy.

There he was. My best friend. The guy I’d grown up with, reduced now to a severed head floating on the crests of the misplaced Atlantic Ocean.

“Shit, Jimmy. What the fuck did they do to you?”

I grabbed him by the hair before the tide could take him.

His pallid skin felt like cottage cheese and his mouth was frozen in an expression of surprise, as if he’d died saying, “Oh!” But it was his eyes that really got to me. I shut mine, but I could still see that death stare, floating in the darkness.

I opened my eyes and closed his.

Blood and water dripped from his neck, pooling around my rubber boots. It didn’t matter. I was wet anyway. I hadn’t been dry in so long that I’d forgotten what being dry actually felt like. Most of us had developed rashes, and we’d lost about two-dozen people to pneumonia and colds. My uncle used to talk about jungle rot, something they got in Vietnam from having damp feet. We had a new type of fungus, a version that covered your entire body in white fuzz. In fact, that’s what we called it: the White Fuzz. It ate at you until there was nothing left—a horrible way to die.

Choking off my emotions and trying to be clinical about things, I turned over Jimmy’s head in my hands. It didn’t appear severed. Rather, the windpipe and neck were pinched and flattened like the end of a toothpaste tube. It looked like his attacker had squeezed the head off his body. I couldn’t be sure, of course. I’m not a medical examiner or crime scene investigator or anything like that. I’m just a guy who worked at a video store—until the rain started.

The thing on his cheek was the worst, a reddishpurplish sore, open and leaking. It looked like Jimmy’s killer had given him a hickey and gnawed through his face at the same time.

I knew who’d done it. The Satanists. Who else?

My mind flashed back to fourth grade. Spending the night at Jimmy’s house, reading comic books until his parents went to sleep, and then sneaking a peek at his father’s porno magazines, staring at the pictures of naked women and reading the letters, and trying to figure out what it meant when a woman said “eat me.” Summers spent inner-tubing down the Codorus Creek, and buying more comic books at the flea market, and camping out in my backyard, and riding bikes all over town.

We got our driver’s licenses at sixteen, and our bikes were replaced with muscle cars. About the same time, the girls from the magazines were replaced by flesh and blood, and we learned exactly what a woman meant when she said “eat me.”

We’d planned on joining the Marines together, but then Jimmy got his DUI after a car wreck just over the border in York, Pennsylvania, and I got Becky pregnant. For our nineteenth birthdays, Jimmy went to jail for manslaughter (his girlfriend hadn’t survived the crash) and I got a job at Crown Video & DVD in Cockeysville, just outside of Baltimore. I’ve often thought that life is like a Bruce Springsteen song, and looking back on those days always reinforces that in my mind.

Jimmy did three years at Cresson State up in Pennsylvania. Thanks to overcrowding, they let him out on parole. While he was gone, Becky and the baby ran off with some Lexus-driving yo-boy she met at a club. Secretly, I was relieved. But it still hurts sometimes, knowing there’s a kid out there somewhere who looks like me.

Well—probably not anymore.

We had a welcome-home party, and Jimmy readjusted to civilian life. He landed a job at the casket factory. Things were good. We chilled, marveling over the fact that our five-year high school reunion was coming up.

Then the rain started, washing it all away.

I wouldn’t cry. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. There were many times since the rain started that I’d wanted to cry, especially now. I felt like screaming, ranting at the gray haze that had replaced the once blue sky. I wanted to collapse, cradling my best friend’s head, and just stay there, not moving or thinking ever again.

I couldn’t cry because I’m incapable of it. Sure, when I was a little kid, I cried when I skinned my knee or didn’t get my way. But I’ve never been able to do it over death. I used to think there was something wrong with me. When I was twelve, my grandmother died. At the funeral, I couldn’t cry, and I felt like a complete dick. My parents were crying, my sister, my aunts and uncles—but not me. I just stood there with a stupid look on my face. Sure, I was sad . I grieved. I loved my grandma. But when the time came, the tears were absent and I couldn’t summon them, no matter how hard I tried.

I looked up at the sky, letting the rain beat against my face and pretended the drops of water were tears. They were phony tears, but it was the best that I could do.

Voices carried over the roaring waves. Ducking down so the Satanists wouldn’t see me, I quickly took stock. The Globe Capital building had been a complete bust (except for the jellyfish), but the Chesapeake Apartments had yielded a dozen bottles of spring water. It seemed obscene that with so much water falling from the sky, fresh water was like gold. But the rain had a high salt content, at least in our area. I’m not sure why. Don’t know if it was some freak ecological occurrence or what. We’d heard from passersby that it was better in other places. I’d also found some canned goods, a flashlight that still worked, a fifth of Jim Beam, a half empty bottle of vodka, two dry cartons of smokes (almost as valuable as the bottled water), a few paperbacks and magazines that hadn’t begun to mold yet, a box of crayons, and most importantly, a houseplant, a bag of potting soil, and three little envelopes of seeds—carrots, marigolds, and sunflowers.

And Jimmy’s head.

Sighing, I placed the loot inside one of the nylon backpacks I carried with me, so that it would all stay dry during the trip back home. Then I dropped the backpack into a garbage bag for extra insulation. Finally, I wrapped Jimmy’s head in a plastic bag and stuffed it inside the backpack as well. The pockets of my raincoat bulged with smaller items: cigarette lighters, waterproof matches, vitamins, silverware, toothpaste, aspirin and other medicines, pens, batteries, candles—anything I thought our group could use. The only thing I left behind was cash. That was good for starting fires, and then only if the bills were dry.