Worm

27

Tony wanted to pull Marv aside and say, that’s not a baby she has, that’s not Jesse, it’s a fucking plastic baby doll. Kathleen’s carrying a fucking baby doll. Don’t you see that? But, of course, he didn’t because he couldn’t and he figured he really didn’t need to; Marv was fully aware that Kathleen was crazy. And like Tony himself, he did not want to know the details of what had sent her wandering through the sludge with a baby doll.

Tony was thinking about Fern and the twins.

Did they really want to bring this crazy woman back with them? But then, what choice was there? They couldn’t leave her wandering. Fern would know what to do. Women always did. Tony was almost beginning to wish Charise were there. Even Stevie.

But he didn’t want to think about Stevie.

Kathleen had stopped.

By the time they became aware of it, she was fifteen feet behind them. She was just standing there, making a deep moaning sound that was nearly erotic in tone like she was quite near to getting off.

“Oh… oh… oh,” she said in a voice filled with confusion and delight. “It’s so warm. It’s so very warm. Can’t you feel it? It’s almost hot. I can feel it all over my legs, all over my… my…”

“Kathleen,” Marv said. “We have to go.”

She just stood there, hip-deep in the muck that seemed to be rising by the hour, struck senseless like she was in some kind of religious rapture. Marv called out to her and she started moving again, very slowly, plodding along like she had been wound up with a key.

She stopped again, went stiff as a pillar. She looked like a toy soldier in the moonlight. “Oh… oh… oh,” she said again. “It feels like it’s boiling, like it’s… it’s…” She never got farther than that. Her mindless rambling became a gasp of surprise, then one of pain.

Her hand had been trailing in the mud.

She jerked it free and there was a worm hanging onto it. It was a huge, bristled monster that looked to have the circumference of a wastepaper can. It had bitten into her hand and now it bit once again. Tony clearly heard the bones snapping under intense pressure. Kathleen whipped her head from side to side, screaming and flailing her arm, trying to rid herself of the thing, but it wasn’t working.

“Shit!” Tony shouted out into the night. “It’s got her! One of those fucking things has got her!”

He stumbled forward into the muck but Marv grabbed him, pulled him back. “No,” he said. “You can’t help her.”

Tony was ready to swing at him.

He could help her, but he goddamned well needed to get to her first… but then the worm rocketed up out of the muck and this time, it swallowed her entire arm right up to the shoulder blade. It retreated just as fast, its teeth peeling not only the sleeve of her raincoat free, but her skin as well. It peeled her arm right down to red meat and tendons.

“KATHLEEN!” he cried out.

She disappeared beneath the muck.

By then, Marv was dragging him off and Tony just didn’t have the strength to fight him.

Behind them, the muck roiled and sluiced and splashed upward in great foaming gouts. “Help me!” Kathleen cried out as she surfaced, her face black with mud. “Oh dear God somebody please help me! IT’S GOT ME! IT’S GOT MEEEE—”

She thrashed in the bubbling sludge, but was beyond help. Absolutely beyond it. The worm kept biting at her, taking more of her with each strike. Its teeth gleaming like surgical knives, it scraped across her chest taking not only most of her coat away but her breasts, too. Great segmented loops of it wound her up, squeezing her until her screams became a choked, gurgling sound. Her bones were crushed with a sound not unlike dry autumn leaves under boots. Her head thrashed from shoulder to shoulder like some grisly puppet, a gout of dark arterial blood ejecting from her between her lips with incredible hydrostatic force.

Then she went limp, her insides bulging from her mouth.

One bloody hand still slapping at the gelid flesh of the worm, maybe out of reflex action, it towed her under the surface. Both Tony and Marv could clearly see a slow-cresting torpid wave moving down the street as the worm dragged her away to unknown depths to be fed on at its leisure.

“C’mon, Tony,” Marv said. “We have to go…”

But Tony just stood there, staring dejectedly back to where she had been in the muck. There was nothing there now, not so much as a ripple. No… there was something floating there and for one panicked moment he thought it might be one of her limbs.

But it was nothing like that.

Just the filthy baby doll floating on the surface of the muck.