by Curran, Tim
It felt about as big around as his lower forearm, though oddly soft and almost squishy. She yanked it up out of the muck and it was not Pat. It looked…covered in the black, dripping material…almost like an eel. It twisted and writhed in her hand.
She dropped it with a cry.
Then something bumped into her hip.
Kathleen pulled herself to her feet with the aid of the truck, leaving muddy handprints down its length as she escaped around the other side. She felt something brush against her boot. She stumbled to the porch, slipping and falling in the muck more than once.
She pulled herself up the steps.
She heard a slopping sound behind her.
Don’t look back there. Whatever you do, do not look behind you because you’ll see it—
Oblivious to her own good advice, she turned and saw the arched length of something about the size of a python rise from the mud sea and then submerge again. Like a shark showing its dorsal, she knew that whatever it was, it was coming for her now. Just as it had come for Pat.
9
Eva Jung lay in bed and waited for the end of the world the way she used to wait for Leonard to make love to her. It was a strange thing to think of and particularly now with Leonard having been gone all these years. But, maybe, as her final hour approached, it wasn’t that unusual for a woman’s heart to return to romance and things sweet and hot and long gone as the summers of her youth.
The years are leaves and they blow away one by one until there’s not a single one left in the yard.
Eva knew that the National Guard and police would never get to Pine Street. There were 5,000 people in Camberly and by the time they got organized and started rolling, it would be much too late for most everyone. She knew this because the sun was beginning to set and then it would be dark. And dark was when the monsters came out. She knew that very well. Maybe as an adult she had tried to pretend otherwise as all adults did…it was easier to sleep at night that way…but she’d always known it was true. Tonight, the monsters would get into every house and kill every man, woman, and child.
It would not be a dark night like the nights always were in the stories her mother told her as a child. No, the moon would be up, it would be luminous and fat and brilliant. The stars would be out, winking long-dead light like diamond chips.
The better to see you by, my dears. The better to eat you by.
Eva thought of her neighbors. She had heard many screams already and she would hear many more by the end of the night. But she would not listen. People would die horribly as she would die horribly and it would be none of her affair. Her neighbors avoided her and that was fine. She held no grudge over it. She was a woman, not quite old at fifty-three but certainly not young, who lived alone in a big wind-trembling house that creaked and rattled at night.
What would they say to her even if they were to talk to her?
How does it feel, Eva, to be all alone in that big house with nothing but yellow memories for company, your husband long dead, nothing to listen to but the screech of a hoot owl on the rooftop late at night? She was glad they didn’t talk to her so she wouldn’t have to answer that. Because if she did, she would have told them it was awful, simply awful to wake up at three in the morning and reach out for the strong shoulders of your husband and find only emptiness. It was awful to be lonely and listen to your own rising anguish as tears spilled hotly down your cheeks.
But tonight, she was not alone in her suffering.
The neighborhood suffered with her.
They would die together and perhaps, just maybe, be reborn into a better place that was free of suffering.
She listened to the muck flooding into her house and the slitherings of the monsters in the pipes. They would make themselves known soon and she would be waiting for them as she had once waited for Leonard. She would accept the death they brought with open arms because death was painful like love and true love was resurrection.
10
Two doors down from Eva Jung, Bertie Kalishek pulled off a Lark 100 and said, “Ah, that’s because you haven’t lived through the crap I have. You’re just a kid and you, my dear, do not know crap. Hell, you don’t even know what color it is or what it smells like.”
Donna Peppek sighed.
She was beginning to debate the logic of waiting this out with Bertie. Bertie was good for the most part. If you could get past the chain-smoking, beer-guzzling, and near constant reminiscing about older, better times. Some days Donna enjoyed her, some days she did not.
This was turning into one of those days.
Donna had gone over there because the idea of waiting this out alone was unthinkable. They kept saying on the radio that the National Guard were evacuating the town street by street, that everyone needed to sit quiet and wait. If there was a medical emergency, they were to call 911…but only if it was an emergency. Other than that, they advised staying out of the muck.
Don’t have to tell me twice, Donna thought.
Between the constant Emergency Broadcast System bulletins on the radio, Bertie’s grating voice, and the clouds of pungent smoke, Donna was getting a first-class headache.
You know you didn’t want to come over here. You wanted to go see Geno.
Which was exactly why she came to Bertie’s. The idea of being in the house with him and Ivy was simply too much. Donna had been avoiding Ivy in every way possible…something that wasn’t too hard given Ivy was practically a shut-in. But being in her house and having to talk with her and interact with her…no, that was just too much.
Maybe fucking her husband wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Donna sighed. The guilt, the guilt, the guilt. It haunted her constantly. Yet, for all of that, she could never say no when Geno stopped by. Now wasn’t that just something?
“…so you better believe me when I say I haven’t felt anything like this since,” Bertie said.
“Since when?” Donna said, realizing she had completely tuned her out.
“Since the Cuban missile crisis. I don’t think any of us that lived through it will ever forget it. We were god-awful close to doomsday. Awful close. Those were two long weeks for the world, I tell you.” Bertie butted her cigarette. “I remember it well. That’s when I stopped smoking L & M and switched to Lark. Been with ‘em ever since.”
To prove it, she fired up another.
“I hope they get here quick,” Donna said.
“Who?”
“The National Guard. I want to get out of here.”
Bertie laughed. “Don’t be naïve, honey. We won’t be first. Not over here. The Guard will start over on the north side, that’s where all the rich yahoos live. They’ll get to us, but I bet it won’t be for hours.”
Donna peered out the window at the rising muck. “We don’t have hours.”
“Sit down and have a beer.” Bertie popped a fresh one and toasted her with it. “Way I see it, if this is doomsday and we’re all going to die, piss on it, might as well face it drunk as sober.”
11
Playing possum.
That evil little motherfucker was playing possum.
That’s what the worm had been doing, as absurd as it sounded, and Tony knew it. If he doubted it at all, there was an utter conversion of faith when the shit pipe exploded like a mortar tube and a gushing eruption of brown-black filth sprayed into the air like a sewage fountain. It covered Tony and knocked him on his ass. It sprayed up the walls and splattered the ceiling and flooded the floor. Like a hemorrhaging artery, it kept leaking, sending a surging river of muck out into the living room that washed right over him and pushed him three feet back with its rollers.
“Jesus H. Christ!” he cried out, sitting up as the discharge kept flowing out of the bathroom, thick as syrup, warm and glopping like vomit.
Tony tried to climb to his feet, slipped and fell, madly brushing it from his face. A banner of toilet paper was hooked around his boot, a turd rolled off his lap as he scrambled to his knees. Drenched with
piss water and just about everything else from the sewers, he gagged at the stench, dry heaves convulsing his stomach.
On his hands and knees, it was no longer dry-heaving but the real thing. He spewed out some bile until he was panting and gagging. Stevie stood there watching him. He was skinny as a drowned rat now that he was drenched in the muck, a streamer of toilet paper around his throat like a necklace.
Tony almost laughed at him, but he knew he looked worse.
This was just a fucked-up nightmare from beginning to end.
There was well over ten inches of the percolating, bubbling goo on the floor. Wait until Charise gets a load of this. The stink of rot and methane made his head swim. He had to get out of there before he was completely overcome by the fumes.
And the worm, dummy, don’t forget about the worm.
But he didn’t have to worry about that because just as the thought passed through his mind, the worm rose from the muck in the bathroom. Though it had no eyes, it directed its nodulelike head in his direction, a low, barely perceptible vibration coming from it.
Stevie started yipping at it right away.
The vibrating got louder. The entire worm was trembling with it, sending out tiny ripples through the muck. Its segments were pulsating. The head opened like the bulb of a flower, peeling back to reveal all those teeth that looked like shards of the sharpest bone. There was no denying that this thing was designed by nature to grab and hold on, to tear into flesh and glut itself on blood.
Very carefully, very quietly, Tony began to get up, keeping his eyes locked on the worm.
Stevie had stopped yipping now.
He was leaning forward on three legs, the fourth cocked like a pointer. Tony grimaced. This was a hell of a time for him to begin acting like a real dog.
“No, Stevie,” he said in almost a whisper.
The dog began to growl low in his throat. Of all things. Tony had never, ever seen him act this way. The worm was a threat and he was becoming territorial, drawing on some long-submerged instinct.
The worm was hissing now, gouts of fluid hanging from its mouth.
Stevie began to inch forward, stalking slowly.
“Goddammit, Stevie! Stop it!”
The dog was about four feet from him. He knew Stevie very well. That dog was very fast when he needed to be. Tony had a very ugly feeling that if he tried to grab him, he’d go racing right at the worm to engage in combat that he would never ever win.
Stevie stalked forward.
Tony knew he needed a weapon. Any old thing would do. Just something to throw at the worm to distract it, to buy him enough time to grab the dog and make it out the door.
“Stevie,” he tried again.
It was pointless. Stevie was completely territorial. He was overwhelmed by atavistic genetic memory, channeling his evolutionary ancestors and their primal, savage need to protect what was theirs and destroy any and all invaders.
Goddamn dumb mutt, now’s not the time!
The worm’s hissing was very loud.
It accepted the contest and was ready to fight. It was a thick-bodied thing, only now it was even thicker, having compressed each coil until it looked like a very fleshy, mucus-dripping Slinky, its mouth wide, jaws extended, teeth like a ring of spikes.
Tony reached for the first thing he could find that had any true weight: a James Patterson novel in hardcover lying in Charise’s rocking chair. It was thick and heavy. He had read a Patterson once at Charise’s bidding and quickly went back to Elmore Leonard. If he could peg the worm with the book, then he would quickly change his opinion that Patterson’s books were of little use except as doorstops.
He got his hand on it, hefted it…then with a shrill barking, Stevie launched himself right at the worm.
“STEVIE, NO!”
The dog charged in and the worm did not move until he was well within striking distance. It waited there like a coiled spring and when Stevie came in for the kill, it moved…it rocketed forward like one of those gag snakes in a can. Its bunched and compressed segments released their muscular pressure and it shot out at Stevie like a bullet, moving with the same blurring corkscrewing motion it had used when it drilled through the wicker clothes hamper.
Stevie literally exploded in a Technicolor blur of blood, bones, and tissue.
The worm punched right through him in an eruption of red, scattering his remains in four directions. The dog had time to let out one pathetic squeal before he was disemboweled and nearly turned inside out. Meat and blood spattered the bathroom walls, tufts of hair drifting down like pillow fluff.
“STEVIE!” Tony shrieked as the worm bored through him.
Then it was coming for him, spinning like an ice auger and he threw the James Patterson book. It hit the worm dead-on, knocking it to the side and into the muck, the book nearly torn in half by the time it fell.
By then, Tony was running.
He grabbed his softball bat and went slipping and sliding through the living room, knowing the worm would be coming for him now and knowing he didn’t stand a chance. His best escape route was through the kitchen so that’s where he went. With any luck—gah—the worm would feed off Stevie and that would buy him some time.
Nearly drunk with terror and fear, he launched himself out the back door, flying right off the porch into the muck where there were far worse things waiting.
12
When Ivy screamed—and she screamed absolute bloody murder—Geno jumped out of his chair out on the porch, nearly broke his ankle tripping over the stoop, banged his hip on the door frame, and scrambled into the kitchen swearing under his breath.
He had no idea what he was going to see.
But by the time he got there, he was pissed off.
Ivy was backed up against the wall by the table. She had a rolling pin in her hand, of all things, and it was raised to strike like some incensed housewife in an old movie, preparing to brain her husband.
The floor was flooded in the black mud. There was only maybe an inch or two at most where he was standing, but over near the appliances and particularly in front of the sink, it was at least a foot deep.
“Holy oh shit,” he said. “What a fucking mess.”
The doors under the sink looked like they’d been nearly blown from their hinges and that’s where the stinking muck had come from: under there. It had flowed and sprayed in gouts, by the look of it. And that left only one possible explanation. The waste pipe had burst.
These were the things he saw within his first few seconds of entering the kitchen. It was ugly and smelling and a real mess, but none of it, of course, explained Ivy, who looked like she’d just found a head in the refrigerator.
“It’s under the sink!” she said. “Right under the fucking sink!”
Geno just looked at her. “What’s under the sink?”
It seemed like a perfectly rational sort of question, but it was lost on Ivy. She could only stare in the direction of the sink itself, moonstruck, her eyes looking almost swollen in their sockets, unblinking and bloodshot, a sheen of saliva on her chin. She still held the rolling pin high. She was absolutely frozen with it like some kind of classical Greek sculpture…sans the rolling pin, of course.
He was going to ask her again when one of the doors under the sink swung shut with a thud, dangling from its hinge. The other one was jammed, it seemed, halfway open.
Well, whatever it was, it was still in there.
Right away, Geno figured it was a rat. What else could it be? If the waste pipe had burst, bringing that sludge up with it, then it wasn’t that surprising to him that it might bring a rat up, too, from the sewers below.
A weapon was what was needed.
He saw the broom in the corner. Better than nothing. The handle was stout and heavy, more than enough to brain a fucking rat and especially one that had been shot up from the sewers in that tidal flow of muck and regurgitated under the sink.
“Geno…don’t…” Ivy managed.
But by tha
t point, he was pretty much ignoring her because she looked like she was completely losing it, shaking and quaking, eyes wide and blanked with fear, a string of drool hanging from her lower lip. She was a mess, not that he was surprised. It didn’t take much to strip her gears; they were already worn precariously smooth.
This was a man’s job, Geno figured, and he would handle it, the way he handled most things with a wife that lived in a near-constant state of progressive mania. When the phone rang, she moaned, thinking somebody had died. When a car she didn’t recognize was parked across the street, it was criminals casing the joint for a robbery. The ache in her left arm was certainly an oncoming major coronary. Kids walking by were dealing drugs. When a chain letter came in the mail, there was a conspiracy being launched against her. Christ, she rarely left the house anymore because she was afraid of a) catching some horrible communicable disease like bird flu, and b) that she would be beaten and raped in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly.
That one always made him laugh. Sure, hon, they might try to rape you, but they’ll never finish. Take my word on that one. Fucking you is like fucking an ice cube tray.
Not that he would ever have said anything so cruel, crude, and degrading like that to her…even if it was true.
Which is why you stop by Donna Peppek’s house twice a week.
But he didn’t have time to be thinking of the guilt involved in that or the sheer joy of Donna herself. Friends with bennies, that’s all.
“Geno…don’t do this.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll bash its head in.”
She licked her lips, shaking her head. “It’s a worm.”
A worm? Is that what she fucking said?
Jesus, this was good. He was arming himself for a first-class rat battle when all he needed was a boot to step on it with. He went over to the sink and used the broom handle to pry the door open.
He heard a gurgling sound.
It sounded like an upset stomach. That’s what flashed through his mind very quickly and then…then both doors flew open and a gout of black, syrupy fluid spewed out in a frothing surge, spraying over his shoes and fouling his pant legs. It looked to be equal parts shit, mud, and black subterranean gunk. It splashed to the floor in a spreading, steaming pool. It was as if the cupboard had vomited on him.