Worm

16

Snarling like an animal, Ivy launched herself at the worm.

Geno saw her do it, but he was numb and helpless from worm toxins and the loss of blood. It was all like a dream to him. He was beyond the point where he even knew what day it was or where he was or how he had come to be there.

Ivy seized the worm with a murderous fury and tore it away from his knee. She gripped it right behind the head with both hands like it was a poisonous snake and right away, the worm began to writhe and squirm with muscular contortions and boneless gyrations. It was a powerful, sinuous creature that did not like to be grabbed. Its fanged mouth hissed, its head segment snapped from side to side, its body looped, but she held on with an impressive strength and determination.

“You fucking thing!” she shrieked at it. “You don’t come into my fucking kitchen with your filth and disease!”

The section she gripped seemed to sag and deflate.

The worm had a hydrostatic skeleton pressurized by fluid. The tighter she gripped it, the more the fluid was drained into other segments. But that hardly meant it was going to submit without a fight. Its body began to whip in her hands with violent contractions, the segments oozing out a thick, gelid mucus until she could barely hang on to it. They flattened. They elongated. They swelled with fluid.

It was like trying to hang on to a high-pressure hose.

Ivy did not give in.

Even though its bristles cut into her fingers like pins, she increased her hold, gripping different segments. The mucus made her hands slide from segment to segment as the muscles of the worm contracted and relaxed in fluidic waves.

Its tail flailed wildly, knocking things off the counter and she was thrown this way and that by it. Its body curled around her with a crushing embrace, its thorny bristles digging into her skin. Then its head slid free and Geno, through dimming eyes, saw its pulsating length coiling around his wife, the segments fattening with hydrostatic pressure until there was the clear sound of things bursting inside her, ligaments popping and bones dislocating.

A moaning sound in his throat, he reached out one flaccid hand in her direction.

But by then, the worm had already torn off her right arm like a chicken wing with a gristly, grinding noise.