Worm

31

Remember when Charise called? You remember when she told you to get out? Well, you should have listened. You should have waded to higher ground or swung tree to tree like a fucking ape, but you should have gotten out.

This was what Tony was thinking as the worms pressed in from every quarter. They were not only coming in through the broken picture window and in such numbers they looked like strings of hamburger being churned out by an old meat grinder, but they were hitting the roof and the other windows like they were being fired from cannons. It made no real sense, but he was seeing it. In the glow of the lantern, they were smashing against the window by the door and with such velocity that they were exploding against the pane until the window was just dark and globby with worm goo.

“Tony!” Marv called out.

Tony avoided a darting worm and almost stepped into the embrace of a much larger one that raised itself from the muck with open jaws. He fired with the shotgun and blew it into fragments that continued to writhe. He had been momentarily distracted by the sound of other worms punching into the front door, trying to chew their way through.

Together, he and Marv began to back their way toward the dining room.

If this was a battle, then it was one they couldn’t hope to win. He was getting low on shells for the shotgun and he figured Marv couldn’t have had much more than five or six rounds left for the 30-06.

A huge worm, maybe six or seven feet in length, bashed through one of the few unbroken side panes of the picture window. It was like an immense, swollen tube, segmented and bulging, its mouth as wide as an open coffee can. Tony fired at it, killing it and several smaller ones that clustered around it.

They were going to be buried alive.

There were just too damn many of them.

There was no way in hell they could fight against those kinds of numbers without anything less than a machine gun. And that’s when he began to wonder if there wasn’t some sort of strategy behind the assault. In a human wave attack, the point was not only to overwhelm defenses and breach perimeters, but to get the defenders to waste the majority of their ammunition.

What if, by some absolute perversion of logic, that’s what the worms were doing?