Worm

6

“What is it now?”

“Down here!” Kathleen cried. “Hurry for godsake!”

Pat Mackenridge sighed. He looked out the window at his Dodge Ram sitting in the driveway. Then he turned and went down the hallway. “Where the hell are you?”

“I’m down here! Hurry it!”

God, this better be good. This better be something real good, something applicable. If he got down there and she was panicking because a stupid fucking spider had crawled out from under the dryer, he was going to lose it. Really lose it.

“Are you coming or what?”

She sounded frantic now.

He jogged down the steps, stopping about just before he reached the basement floor. “What?”

She grumbled in her throat. “Can you be bothered to come down all the way or do I have to come over there and guide you by the hand?”

Oh, that mouth.

He stepped down into the basement and smelled it right away, the same stink as outside but concentrated down here… an almost violent stench of moist rot, corruption, and sewer slime. The black gunk was foaming up out of the floor drain by the hot water heater, a slushy filth that popped with greasy-looking bubbles. To Pat, it smelled the way he imagined animal carcasses might when stranded by the receding waters of a flood.

Wrinkling his nose, he said, “Screw it. Let’s just get out of here.”

“Our house,” Kathleen lamented. “Our… home.”

He put an arm around her. She was stiff as a plank. It was like trying to comfort a fencepost. “We’ll come back when this is over and fix everything up. The important thing is to get out of here.”

“Do you think it’ll really get that bad?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“Maybe we should wait,” she suggested.

“No.”

“No?”

“No, Kathleen. That shit is getting deep in the streets. I think it’s still rising. If we wait too long, even my truck won’t go through it. I think we can clear it right now, but in another hour… I just don’t know.”

“I don’t like the idea of getting trapped out there, Pat. It’ll be dark in an hour. And with the baby…”

“We don’t have a choice.”

He didn’t wait for any more arguments.

He mounted the stairs and as he started to climb them, Kathleen coming after him for another round of debate, there was a sound from within the cellar wall like somebody had cracked an egg. It got louder. It became a grinding, tearing sound. The seam between two concrete blocks split and black ooze bubbled out like crude oil.

“Oh shit,” Kathleen said.

They rushed up the stairs.

“The ground’s saturated,” Pat told her, pulling on his rubber hip waders. “I read once that during floods, the water doesn’t come in under the door or through the walls so much as it just seeps up through the foundation. That’s what’s happening now.”

Kathleen started to argue again, but closed her mouth.

Abandoning her home did not come easy to her, but she knew he was right. They just couldn’t wait around. Maybe if it had just been the two of them, but baby Jesse changed all that. They couldn’t afford to take chances.

Pat pulled on his raincoat—he wasn’t really sure why—and stepped out onto the porch.

As he moved down the steps, Kathleen grabbed his arm. “No,” she said.

“What?”

“I’ve got a really bad feeling. Don’t go out there.”

He wasn’t in the mood for her premonitions. Now of all goddamn times. He went down and stepped into the muck. It was oddly warm, thick and slopping like oatmeal. It seemed to have the same degree of thickness. He trudged through it over to the Dodge. He would back it up to the porch and Kathleen and the baby could get in and off they’d go. A simple plan, really.

By the time he got to the truck, the muck was up to his thighs.

The Dodge was high-profile, but even so the mud was up over the tires. Maybe it was too late. Maybe they would have to wait it out. Get upstairs and hope for the best.

No, dammit. They had to get out.

Kathleen was on the porch.

“Get Jesse ready,” he said.

At the moment he said that, he felt something move against his leg. There were probably all kinds of things bobbing in the muck, but this one moved. It brushed against his knee, then against the side of his other leg. The muck moved with secret eddies and ripples like a moat in a fairy tale.

What the hell?

He was about to call out to Kathleen when something hit his right ankle, gripping it in a crushing embrace, twisting it. He made a grunting sound and dropped into the mud, submerging in it. It flowed into his mouth and down his throat. He fought and thrashed in unbelievable panic as he was towed away with a violent jerking underneath the truck.

Something seized his right arm, then his left bicep.

And something else bit into his throat, shearing his carotid. In a dreamlike haze, he remembered nearly drowning out at Black Lake when he was a kid… as he gagged on mud and his own dark, pulsing blood.