Worm

32

It was utter pandemonium, but Fern tried to keep her head.

The twins were holding on to each other so tightly she thought they might break. Donna was in a bad way. Her skin was clammy and damp with sweat. She was unresponsive and trembling. There was no doubt she was in shock or damn close to it. Fern had already raised her damaged leg up onto a chair to keep the blood supply limited to the limb and concentrated in her vital organs. That was necessary.

Tony and Marv were still killing worms, but she knew it was a losing battle. Still, there had to be a way. She was not about to let her friends, her husband, and particularly, her children, get torn up by those awful things, there was just no damn way.

“Watch it!” Bertie said.

The twins screamed.

A worm came out from under the table and darted at her, burying teeth like darning needles right into the arm of the chair next to her. If it had ideas of freeing itself, Bertie ended that when she chopped it in half with a carving knife from the kitchen. She looked perfectly ridiculous standing there with a cleaver in one hand and a knife in the other, a smoldering Lark 100 hanging from her mouth, her eyes huge and fixed behind her bifocals.

Fern turned and saw Tony and Marv backing their way to the dining room door.

Dear God.

The worms were massing before them. She saw what looked like eight or ten of them that had to be the size of pythons and tangled among them, sliding over them, were what looked like hundreds of smaller worms. They pushed forward like some immense, squirming machine, seeming not to so much crawl as roll in a worming, fleshy mass.

“Marv!” she cried out. “Get in here! The both of you get in here!”

Then there was a bolt of pain in her arm. One of them had slipped past Bertie and bitten into her left bicep. Without hesitation, she grabbed its roping, slimy tail and yanked it free, its teeth gnashing madly like the needles of an industrial sewing machine. The only plus was that it had not managed to bite through her denim jacket. She threw it against the wall and it exploded like a wet sack of meat.

They’re going to keep coming until they get the twins. What are you going to do about that? Are you going to let these fucking horrors destroy your children or are you going to take action, real action?

There had to be something, something.

And then she remembered the bleach.