Worm

12

When Ivy screamed—and she screamed absolute bloody murder—Geno jumped out of his chair out on the porch, nearly broke his ankle tripping over the stoop, banged his hip on the door frame, and scrambled into the kitchen swearing under his breath.

He had no idea what he was going to see.

But by the time he got there, he was pissed off.

Ivy was backed up against the wall by the table. She had a rolling pin in her hand, of all things, and it was raised to strike like some incensed housewife in an old movie, preparing to brain her husband.

The floor was flooded in the black mud. There was only maybe an inch or two at most where he was standing, but over near the appliances and particularly in front of the sink, it was at least a foot deep.

“Holy oh shit,” he said. “What a fucking mess.”

The doors under the sink looked like they’d been nearly blown from their hinges and that’s where the stinking muck had come from: under there. It had flowed and sprayed in gouts, by the look of it. And that left only one possible explanation. The waste pipe had burst.

These were the things he saw within his first few seconds of entering the kitchen. It was ugly and smelling and a real mess, but none of it, of course, explained Ivy, who looked like she’d just found a head in the refrigerator.

“It’s under the sink!” she said. “Right under the fucking sink!”

Geno just looked at her. “What’s under the sink?”

It seemed like a perfectly rational sort of question, but it was lost on Ivy. She could only stare in the direction of the sink itself, moonstruck, her eyes looking almost swollen in their sockets, unblinking and bloodshot, a sheen of saliva on her chin. She still held the rolling pin high. She was absolutely frozen with it like some kind of classical Greek sculpture… sans the rolling pin, of course.

He was going to ask her again when one of the doors under the sink swung shut with a thud, dangling from its hinge. The other one was jammed, it seemed, halfway open.

Well, whatever it was, it was still in there.

Right away, Geno figured it was a rat. What else could it be? If the waste pipe had burst, bringing that sludge up with it, then it wasn’t that surprising to him that it might bring a rat up, too, from the sewers below.

A weapon was what was needed.

He saw the broom in the corner. Better than nothing. The handle was stout and heavy, more than enough to brain a fucking rat and especially one that had been shot up from the sewers in that tidal flow of muck and regurgitated under the sink.

“Geno… don’t…” Ivy managed.

But by that point, he was pretty much ignoring her because she looked like she was completely losing it, shaking and quaking, eyes wide and blanked with fear, a string of drool hanging from her lower lip. She was a mess, not that he was surprised. It didn’t take much to strip her gears; they were already worn precariously smooth.

This was a man’s job, Geno figured, and he would handle it, the way he handled most things with a wife that lived in a near-constant state of progressive mania. When the phone rang, she moaned, thinking somebody had died. When a car she didn’t recognize was parked across the street, it was criminals casing the joint for a robbery. The ache in her left arm was certainly an oncoming major coronary. Kids walking by were dealing drugs. When a chain letter came in the mail, there was a conspiracy being launched against her. Christ, she rarely left the house anymore because she was afraid of a) catching some horrible communicable disease like bird flu, and b) that she would be beaten and raped in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly.

That one always made him laugh. Sure, hon, they might try to rape you, but they’ll never finish. Take my word on that one. Fucking you is like fucking an ice cube tray.

Not that he would ever have said anything so cruel, crude, and degrading like that to her… even if it was true.

Which is why you stop by Donna Peppek’s house twice a week.

But he didn’t have time to be thinking of the guilt involved in that or the sheer joy of Donna herself. Friends with bennies, that’s all.

“Geno… don’t do this.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll bash its head in.”

She licked her lips, shaking her head. “It’s a worm.”

A worm? Is that what she fucking said?

Jesus, this was good. He was arming himself for a first-class rat battle when all he needed was a boot to step on it with. He went over to the sink and used the broom handle to pry the door open.

He heard a gurgling sound.

It sounded like an upset stomach. That’s what flashed through his mind very quickly and then… then both doors flew open and a gout of black, syrupy fluid spewed out in a frothing surge, spraying over his shoes and fouling his pant legs. It looked to be equal parts shit, mud, and black subterranean gunk. It splashed to the floor in a spreading, steaming pool. It was as if the cupboard had vomited on him.

“Fuck,” he said under his breath.

And it was as he said this that he saw two yellow eyes staring up at him from the darkness under the sink. He took one step backward and jabbed the broom handle at whatever in the hell was under there, which was certainly no rat and couldn’t possibly be a worm. The broom handle did not hit it exactly, it skated off it like it was greased.

He saw then that what was under there did not have yellow eyes at all.

In fact, it had no eyes. What he had seen was the overhead light reflecting off it. But that brought him precious little comfort as the thing came out, striking at the broom handle like a pissed-off water moccasin… only it was no water moccasin, but a monstrous shit-brown worm that was big around as his thigh and looked to be about the size of a very large boa constrictor.

Geno stumbled back, slipping on the muck and falling on his ass as Ivy totally lost it and began to cry, “Geno! Geno! Oh my God, get away from it, get away from it!”

Which he knew, in the back of his mind, made perfect sense.

The doors slammed back shut as the thing retreated, or at least as shut as they could get in their condition, and he had a truly crazy idea that the worm had set up housekeeping under the sink and needed a little privacy. That was insane. But that’s exactly what passed through his mind in those few seconds of peace right before the worm came out again like a snake from a rabbit hole, taking one of the doors right off its hinges and rising up above him like a serpent that was ready to strike.

Ivy really let go with a cry then.

She dropped to the floor on her knees, wailing with the sound of a mind that had been torn right open.

Geno had been afraid of very little in his life, but as the worm hovered over him, dirty brown, dropping clots of black muck, its bullet-shaped head moving from side to side in some obscene rhythm, he felt a very real need to crap his pants out of sheer terror.

He drove himself away from it, scuttling on his ass over the floor.

He thought the worm would strike, but it didn’t.

It kept moving its head back and forth on its neck… hell, it was all neck… and Geno would have kept backing away in sheer primal horror and revulsion, but his shoulders made contact with the face of the refrigerator. The worm had allowed him a bit of backward scuttling, but he seriously doubted whether it would let him turn and crawl the six feet he would need to get out of the fucking kitchen.

And he couldn’t just abandon Ivy to that monster.

The hell you can’t—she’s already abandoned herself.

But that was the kind of thing a coward would say to justify his actions, Geno knew, trying to prove to himself that he didn’t have a slit between his legs after all.

The worm moved right past Ivy as if she was inconsequential, just a shivering white bag of neuroses and that’s pretty much what she was. It zeroed in on Geno because it knew that’s where the action was. Geno wouldn’t go down easy and maybe it sensed that.

Geno watched it come, playing possum, which wasn’t too hard because everything inside him—from bones to muscle, tendon to ligament—had gone to pudding now. The worm was composed of multiple segments, each covered in a membranous, glistening red-brown flesh that looked nearly pulpous. They seemed to move independently of one another, inflating and deflating as if they were breathing, exuding a viscous mucuslike slime as it pulled itself forward over the floor. Each was set with fine, wiry bristles that dug into the tiles and pushed it along with a scraping sound like forks scratched over tabletops.

Geno knew nothing of worms.

He did not know that what he was looking at was a gigantic, monstrous annelid like a rag worm or a leech or that the flexing, convulsive roll of its segments was due to a type of ditaxic locomotion caused by the extension and contraction of its muscles. He only knew it was a monster. When it got close, close enough to raise its head off the floor, he saw the forward segment peel back like parting lips from a circular fleshy pink mouth as large as the opening of a coffee can. It was filled with rows of hooklike teeth that would have been called specules in a tiny worm, but looked more like shining hypodermic needles in this beast. They were set in spongy gums that seemed to jut two or three inches from the mouth itself.

He saw what looked like droplets of venom drip from the teeth.

A grayish slime hung from the mouth in ropes.

That god-awful mouth was the most horrible thing he had ever seen in his life and within seconds, he knew, it would be on him, those teeth peeling his face right from the skull below.

So he did the only reasonable thing: he swung the broom. And it was no girly, limp-wristed, halfhearted attempt, but a double-handed swing that would have popped a ball right over the stadium fence.

Whack!

He put all his strength and weight behind it. He was almost sure it would take that fucking worm’s head right off, but that’s not what happened. The annelid primarily consisted of liquid and it took the blow like a water balloon might have—when the broom handle knocked its neck (for lack of a better word) aside, lacking bony structures, it merely squished, then burst with a gush of sewer-stinking fluid that sprayed against the faces of the cupboards.

And as Geno watched, the fore and aft segments merely closed the gap left by burst one.

It can’t die! Can’t you see that? You can’t beat it to death!

But damned if he wasn’t going to try. As the head came back around, he made it to his feet and swung the broom handle, knocking the worm back and away. The mouth peeled open, hissing at him, and he clearly felt the slime spray against his face like spit. Some of it got into his left eye and it burned. He blinked it away and swung at the worm, kept swinging. Knocking it hard this way and that, fluid spraying around the kitchen.

It was getting pissed.

Its segments were ballooning, the mucus oozing from them coming out in a brown, gushing foam. It coiled. It wormed. It bulged like a bicep.

But in the end it wasn’t as stupid as he had hoped for.

Gasping, nearing the end of his strength and clearly no closer to victory or even to driving it off, he swung the broom handle, trying to brain it, to smash its head to sauce… but the worm had secreted so much mucus by that point it was pointless: the broom handle glanced harmlessly off it. No matter how he hit it and at what angle, it simply glanced off the thing as if it was coated with cooking spray.

With his last valiant effort, the broom handle once again skated over the worm… and flew from his hands.

Shit… oh shit… oh fuck…

The lips peeled back, the teeth slid out and Geno felt piss run down his leg as the worm darted at him, teeth slashing. He ducked out of its way once, then twice… then he tried to seize it in his hands, but it was like trying to take hold of a canned ham thick with aspic jelly… his fingers just slid over its bloated, slimed segments, its bristles cutting into the palms of his hands.

He thought it would bite him, tear his face off, but it didn’t. The mouth closed and the bulblike head snapped forward like a fist, striking him in the chest and flattening him. The wind knocked out of him, he hit the floor, dazed and confused. It felt like his sternum had been split open like a dry sheaf of corn.

When he opened his eyes, the mouth was inches from his face.

The teeth were gleaming like scalpels.

A hot, toxic steam blew out of the worm’s throat, coating his face with a greasy, rancid mist that stank of the sunless, necrotic, polluted holes it had crawled up from.

Geno managed a weak scream.

Then out of the mouth came a yellow, stringy tangle of thrashing cords that must have been tongues. The ends were sharp like tent stakes and they jabbed right into him. They went into his throat, his lips, they impaled his tongue… right away, he was numb. The worm had paralyzed him, anesthetized him and he just sat there, back against the fridge, limbs limp, eyes glassy and rolling in their sockets.

I won’t feel it… at least I won’t feel it.

And that was the best he could hope for. The head arched back and went right at his left kneecap, the teeth sliding from the pushed-out, glossy-pink gums. They pierced his knee like ice picks, sinking in a good inch or more. He was aware of the impact of the mouth, the pressure of the teeth… but that was about it. When his kneecap came off in a bloody spray of tissue and ligament, he felt only the pulling and the snapping, but none of the pain. In fact, he didn’t even realize his knee was gone until he saw the beast spit it from its mouth in meaty, clotted mass.

It was as it went for his face that Ivy started to shriek.

Then she attacked it.