Worm

22

At the O’Connor household, Fern waited.

She waited in the kitchen, peering out into the darkness.

Marv’s been gone an awful long time, she thought as she stared down into the drain, wrinkling her nose at the smell coming up which was enough to curl the hairs in her nose. He should have been back by now.

There was no point in calling over to Tessa’s. She’d already done that three times now and there was no answer.

Fern didn’t know for sure what she was afraid of, but the fear would not leave her. It existed inside her, cold and slow-crawling, casting a shadow over her rational mind. There were a lot of things that could have happened. Marv could have been washed under and drowned. That seemed unlikely because he was a very sturdy, strong sort of man. He could have been overcome by the gases. But again, that didn’t seem plausible either. The houses in the neighborhood were coming apart and he could have been caught in a fall of wreckage. The only thing that had saved their house thus far, she figured, was that it was made of brick and would have probably outlasted the others by many decades if not a century.

When Tessa called earlier, she claimed she had been attacked. Attacked. But by whom or what? This was what Fern feared most, that whatever had gotten Tessa had also gotten Marv.

Oh, why hadn’t he taken his rifle with him?

Fern listened to the girls in the other room. They had uplinked their Nintendo DS systems and were having some kind of war. They were laughing, teasing each other, squealing with joy and growling with derision. Kids were really something. They could adapt very quickly. Thank God the Internet was still working or they’d have to play a board game or (gasp) read a book.

Barbaric, perfectly barbaric.

The smell coming out of the drain was getting worse.

So bad it made Fern almost woozy.

“Well, there’s only one cure for this,” she said under her breath. She went into the broom closet and came back with a jug of Hilex bleach. There wasn’t anything down there bleach couldn’t handle.

At least, she hoped not.