Worm

29

The mud was moving out there.

Marv watched it through the picture window. It was no longer just slowly bubbling and oozing, now it was in motion. Huge, dark waves of it were cresting and splashing through yards and slamming into houses with considerable force. A wave of water was one thing, but a wave of mud had considerable weight behind it. As first one and then another hit the house, the living room trembled. The windows rattled. A painting fell off the wall. An anniversary clock on the mantel pitched to the floor and shattered.

“Everyone just hang on!” Tony called out.

Another wave was coming and it was much bigger than the other two. The only good thing about it was that waves of mud, despite their weight and force, moved very slowly. Marv told everyone to get behind the couch and brace themselves.

“Here it comes,” Tony said.

Between the moonlight outside and the streetlight at the corner, it was fairly bright out there. The light glistened off the rolling muck. But as the wave came, it threw a huge shadow before it and by the time it crested outside the living room window, it blocked out any and all exterior light.

It hit with tremendous force.

The house more than shook; it felt like it had been moved three or four feet. Things were falling from shelves and the plaster was cracking, tiles falling from the ceiling. And then… as the wave pulled back, there was a creaking sound and the picture window collapsed in its frame, a river of mud flowing in, knocking aside a recliner and a coffee table. It winked with shards of glass.

“Back into the dining room!” Marv called.

As they scurried away, taking one of the lanterns with them, he stood in about three or four inches of black, churning muck. Right away, he could see things moving in it. And not one or two worms, but maybe a dozen or more. One of them came up out of the mud and he booted it aside, he fired at another, missed, and hit it with the second round, splitting it nearly in two.

“Watch it!” Tony cried out.

A four-foot worm came out of the sludge, its mud-slicked, heaving body thick and spiny. Its forward segment opened, pulling back and revealing a sheath of needle-sharp teeth, each of which had to be at least an inch or two in length. It moved quickly with a rolling muscular contraction and it would have bit right into his leg if Tony hadn’t jumped forward and fired on it. The worms seemed to be made of little more than slime and juice contained in a rubbery envelope of tissue. When the birdshot hit it, it literally exploded into a spray of pulp.

Two others rose up, one making the most obscene sort of croaking noise like a fat bullfrog. Tony fired. But they were everywhere. The mud was a living stew of them and their elastic forms began unwinding from it.