Worm

11

Playing possum.

That evil little motherfucker was playing possum.

That’s what the worm had been doing, as absurd as it sounded, and Tony knew it. If he doubted it at all, there was an utter conversion of faith when the shit pipe exploded like a mortar tube and a gushing eruption of brown-black filth sprayed into the air like a sewage fountain. It covered Tony and knocked him on his ass. It sprayed up the walls and splattered the ceiling and flooded the floor. Like a hemorrhaging artery, it kept leaking, sending a surging river of muck out into the living room that washed right over him and pushed him three feet back with its rollers.

“Jesus H. Christ!” he cried out, sitting up as the discharge kept flowing out of the bathroom, thick as syrup, warm and glopping like vomit.

Tony tried to climb to his feet, slipped and fell, madly brushing it from his face. A banner of toilet paper was hooked around his boot, a turd rolled off his lap as he scrambled to his knees. Drenched with piss water and just about everything else from the sewers, he gagged at the stench, dry heaves convulsing his stomach.

On his hands and knees, it was no longer dry-heaving but the real thing. He spewed out some bile until he was panting and gagging. Stevie stood there watching him. He was skinny as a drowned rat now that he was drenched in the muck, a streamer of toilet paper around his throat like a necklace.

Tony almost laughed at him, but he knew he looked worse.

This was just a fucked-up nightmare from beginning to end.

There was well over ten inches of the percolating, bubbling goo on the floor. Wait until Charise gets a load of this. The stink of rot and methane made his head swim. He had to get out of there before he was completely overcome by the fumes.

And the worm, dummy, don’t forget about the worm.

But he didn’t have to worry about that because just as the thought passed through his mind, the worm rose from the muck in the bathroom. Though it had no eyes, it directed its nodulelike head in his direction, a low, barely perceptible vibration coming from it.

Stevie started yipping at it right away.

The vibrating got louder. The entire worm was trembling with it, sending out tiny ripples through the muck. Its segments were pulsating. The head opened like the bulb of a flower, peeling back to reveal all those teeth that looked like shards of the sharpest bone. There was no denying that this thing was designed by nature to grab and hold on, to tear into flesh and glut itself on blood.

Very carefully, very quietly, Tony began to get up, keeping his eyes locked on the worm.

Stevie had stopped yipping now.

He was leaning forward on three legs, the fourth cocked like a pointer. Tony grimaced. This was a hell of a time for him to begin acting like a real dog.

“No, Stevie,” he said in almost a whisper.

The dog began to growl low in his throat. Of all things. Tony had never, ever seen him act this way. The worm was a threat and he was becoming territorial, drawing on some long-submerged instinct.

The worm was hissing now, gouts of fluid hanging from its mouth.

Stevie began to inch forward, stalking slowly.

“Goddammit, Stevie! Stop it!”

The dog was about four feet from him. He knew Stevie very well. That dog was very fast when he needed to be. Tony had a very ugly feeling that if he tried to grab him, he’d go racing right at the worm to engage in combat that he would never ever win.

Stevie stalked forward.

Tony knew he needed a weapon. Any old thing would do. Just something to throw at the worm to distract it, to buy him enough time to grab the dog and make it out the door.

“Stevie,” he tried again.

It was pointless. Stevie was completely territorial. He was overwhelmed by atavistic genetic memory, channeling his evolutionary ancestors and their primal, savage need to protect what was theirs and destroy any and all invaders.

Goddamn dumb mutt, now’s not the time!

The worm’s hissing was very loud.

It accepted the contest and was ready to fight. It was a thick-bodied thing, only now it was even thicker, having compressed each coil until it looked like a very fleshy, mucus-dripping Slinky, its mouth wide, jaws extended, teeth like a ring of spikes.

Tony reached for the first thing he could find that had any true weight: a James Patterson novel in hardcover lying in Charise’s rocking chair. It was thick and heavy. He had read a Patterson once at Charise’s bidding and quickly went back to Elmore Leonard. If he could peg the worm with the book, then he would quickly change his opinion that Patterson’s books were of little use except as doorstops.

He got his hand on it, hefted it… then with a shrill barking, Stevie launched himself right at the worm.

“STEVIE, NO!”

The dog charged in and the worm did not move until he was well within striking distance. It waited there like a coiled spring and when Stevie came in for the kill, it moved… it rocketed forward like one of those gag snakes in a can. Its bunched and compressed segments released their muscular pressure and it shot out at Stevie like a bullet, moving with the same blurring corkscrewing motion it had used when it drilled through the wicker clothes hamper.

Stevie literally exploded in a Technicolor blur of blood, bones, and tissue.

The worm punched right through him in an eruption of red, scattering his remains in four directions. The dog had time to let out one pathetic squeal before he was disemboweled and nearly turned inside out. Meat and blood spattered the bathroom walls, tufts of hair drifting down like pillow fluff.

“STEVIE!” Tony shrieked as the worm bored through him.

Then it was coming for him, spinning like an ice auger and he threw the James Patterson book. It hit the worm dead-on, knocking it to the side and into the muck, the book nearly torn in half by the time it fell.

By then, Tony was running.

He grabbed his softball bat and went slipping and sliding through the living room, knowing the worm would be coming for him now and knowing he didn’t stand a chance. His best escape route was through the kitchen so that’s where he went. With any luck—gah—the worm would feed off Stevie and that would buy him some time.

Nearly drunk with terror and fear, he launched himself out the back door, flying right off the porch into the muck where there were far worse things waiting.