As the Worm Turns

by Matthew Quinn Martin

  And tonight, if they were lucky, she and Jack were going to kill another one of them.

  Early stars glowed ever more brightly against a sky that had just segued from gray to black. The moon’s twin horns breasted the treetops, ready for that nightly march across the heavens. Blood, their dog—as much theirs as a dog could be anyone’s, she supposed—was curled up in untroubled sleep under the truck’s cap.

  They came to a halt at the town’s lone stoplight in front of a roadhouse bar. Country music filled the air in a muffled wave as a drunken couple stumbled through the door. The man wore stiff blue Wranglers, a pair of worn ostrich-skin cowboy boots, and a western shirt snapped all the way up. The woman who leaned on his gallantly crooked arm was dressed in a suede skirt and a white blouse tied in a bow to show her soft midsection. Her limp blond hair hung down in damp locks. She might have been in her early twenties, just a year or so younger than Beth herself. The light turned green, and Beth silently wished them luck as the truck rumbled away. They were going to need it. Everyone in Weatherford was going to need it.

  “There’s a fissure in the rocks by an abandoned mill,” Jack said. “Both of the disappearances happened within a mile of it. The bodies of the others were discovered not far outside that same perimeter.”

  This was how it always started. Their enemy would come for the weak and the forgotten, culling the herd like any effective predator. According to the local newspaper, a couple of transients had been found at opposite ends of the rail yard, both of them gutted and drained of blood. A third had followed a week later. Already, missing-persons flyers were being hung around town. One for an elderly widow who’d decided to take a walk one day and never came back. Another for a pastor’s son with a history of drug use and partaking in a “deviant lifestyle.”

  Beth knew these flyers well. She’d hung hundreds just like them when her own best friend had been taken by one of the creatures, back before she knew the truth. Before Jack had come into her life and razed it to its foundations.

  Soon the road narrowed to a single lane of frost-heaved asphalt not much improved by the paving. Jack pulled the truck over. The mating song of cicadas filled the night air like a chain-saw symphony. The air was wet and thick with the smell of rotting leaves. The truck’s leaf springs squeaked as Jack stepped off the running board and onto the macadam.

  Beth looked at him through the foggy windshield. He was dressed in Carhartts and a simple plaid work shirt. A life beyond comprehension had aged Jack Jackson beyond his thirty-seven years. But here, silvered by moonlight, she could almost see the man he’d been before the horrors came to claim him. In full daylight, he was ruggedly handsome in his stoic way—no argument there—but tonight she caught a flash of something else. Like a gem twisted to reveal an undiscovered facet, it was there for one bare and unapologetic moment and then gone before something as base as memory could lay claim to it.

  Beth slid from the truck. She strapped on her tactical belt, checking that everything she’d need was on it: the stakes, the snap vials, the auto-snares, the road flare, the salt bag, and, most important, her pistol. All of these things had been strangers to her just a year ago, and now her survival depended on them.

  Jack unlatched the tailgate. “Up, boy,” he said to Blood, still deep in slumber. The dog rose, shedding sleep with a shake, and bounded from the truck bed. Jack squatted down and grabbed a comforting handful of scruff. “Keep watch.”

  Beth knew how special Blood was, not just to Jack but to the mission. Certain animals had the ability see the creatures for what they were. It was a rare ability. And rarer still was Blood’s loyalty. More than once, he’d put his own life on the line to protect Jack’s; Beth’s, too.

  Eventually, they reached a swath of underbrush. Just past it, a rock crevice hung there like a malicious smile.

  “We’re going to have to lure it out,” Jack said, tossing her a tin of repellent cream.

  “Lure it out with what?”

  “Me. Keep within firing range of the opening.”

  “I can do it,” she said quickly. “You’re the better shot.”

  “Maybe, but I’m bigger than you are. I’ve built up a resistance to the venom. I’d be more likely to survive a strike.”

  Beth knew better than to argue with Jack too much when it came to tactics. As quick a study as she’d been, he was still the master, she the apprentice. He’d fought these creatures for more than a decade, driven not by revenge but by an inborn need to protect those who did not even know they were prey. It was a drive the two of them now shared, if perhaps for different reasons.

  Beth twisted open the tin he’d given her and quickly smeared the cream on any exposed skin. The smell of garlic and burnt holly made her nose itch. A lot of the “vampire” legends were pure hokum. Holy water and crosses, for example, were useless. But just as many of those legends possessed kernels of truth. Sunlight wouldn’t kill them, but they avoided it at all costs. The juniper stakes that hung from her belt wouldn’t kill them either, but a strike would slow them down. And the wood, like the repellent cream, was infused with garlic, something the creatures couldn’t stand. There were only three sure ways to make sure they were dead, however: decapitation, fire, and salt.

  Ahead, the cleft yawned. “Stand there.” Jack pointed to a bare patch of earth between two scrub pines. “Aim for the head, and take it down clean,” he said. “Don’t hit the chest if you can help it.”

  The chest; that’s where their venom sacs were. Jack had told her already that he needed to extract more from their next kill. Beth had never experienced the creature’s toxin firsthand, but Jack had, often. According to him, it brought a euphoric and narcotic rush, followed swiftly by a paralysis that he described as like being buried alive in your own skin. His words. The creatures liked their prey alive, the blood fresh and free-flowing.

  “Ready?”

  She nodded and drew her pistol. Her throat was as dry as the earth beneath her. She hadn’t taken on one of those things in almost a year. She hadn’t even seen one, and who knew what this one would look like to her—or to him. She swallowed hard. The thing was close; she could smell it. The aroma of damp leaves and moldering pine needles had given way to that curious mix of raw clay and rubbed copper that belonged to them and them alone.

  Jack drew near the fissure, hands empty and hanging limply at his sides. Five feet away, he turned his back and waited. He might as well have rung a dinner bell. Beth wasn’t sure how long she stood there waiting. Time lost meaning as she kept her eyes fixed on the dark. Minutes or hours might have passed as the edges of her vision swam with imagined terrors.

  But at some point, she watched it slink from the blackness. It was as if a patch of shadow had grown legs and the power to use them. She kept her vision slack. It was instinctual, the first line of defense against the creature’s terrible pull. On her belt hung a snap vial of the gas Jack made. Breathing it in would shatter the illusion. But she had to be careful not to use it too soon. The same gas could also kill her if she held it in her lungs for too long.

  The shape grew closer. She forced herself to focus on nothing but the silhouette. When they’d fought the creatures in New Harbor, she’d seen more than one of them as Jack. And it wasn’t the first time that had happened, not the first time her unconscious desire had almost gotten them both killed. She had to be careful.

  The thing moved steadily, warily, almost as if it could sense the trap about to be sprung. It drew within three yards of Jack. It was still nothing more than a shadow, but it was coalescing into a very familiar shadow. Steady, Beth commanded herself, steady. The thing was the same size as Jack. It cast almost the same silhouette. Her hand went for the snap vial reflexively. No. Not yet. Not yet.

  Two yards. Steady, steady, just wait another—

  One yard. She took aim at the thing’s head, which was just about to break into a beam of moonlight. She squeezed the trigger. A high-pitched wail shattered the night. She saw a plume of white blood jet
ting high from the creature’s head as it sped off into the dark, still wailing. Damnit! Why hadn’t she hit it square? She had a clean shot.

  Jack ran. Beth followed. The thing drifted into and out of her sight, merging with the shadows as they chased it. She focused on the shrill steel-on-slate scream and followed that sound, not trusting her eyes, knowing they might betray her. She passed Jack and soon could hear the clomping of his boots growing fainter behind her. Her lungs burned, ready to burst. And with every step, the creature slipped farther away.

  Her gait grew herky-jerky as fatigue threatened to claim her. The creature was so far ahead now, she had all but lost it to the blackness. Even its scream had faded to a distant whine. She raised her pistol for one last Hail Mary shot, taking aim on nothing but her memory. Her finger found the trigger—

  A wash of foggy white light breached the black night. Headlights. She dived for the shoulder, rolling hard into a bramble of underbrush. Branches scraped her face and hands like cat claws. The scream of rubber on tar sang in her ears. It ended in a thick wet smack, followed by two heavy thumps. Then nothing but silence.

  Beth calmed her ragged breathing and crept back to the side of the road. She heard a throaty engine roar, and a car hurtled past her in a flash of steel and glass. The last she saw of it was its sagging bumper disappearing into the gloom.

  The air was choked with the stench of burnt brake liner, and the scream that had once been so shrill was nothing now but a sick gurgle. Two squiggling skids were on the blacktop, leading up to a squirming lump.

  Beth lifted her gun in shaking hands and took aim. She forced her watery vision into focus as she readied herself to put the creature down. Even nearly cut in half, the thing was still a threat. Even dying, it would take her with it into the black if she let it. She tried to block out the sad whine tugging at her and leveled her gun once more.

  Except it wasn’t a creature, was it? She could see that now. Her hand made it halfway to the snap vial and then dangled there, all desire to break the illusion washed to white. She gazed down at an almost-forgotten face, one only dimly recalled from the single semester of college she’d been able to afford. She remembered that face well, even if its owner’s name floated away from her like bubbles from a wand. He’d been a slip of a boy, with deep mournful eyes—seeker’s eyes. Eyes he might have one day grown into had he not been killed by a hit-and-run driver so long ago.

  Only here he was. Here he was, and he needed her. She could save him. She could gather him up—what remained—and get him to the hospital before it was too late. Then those lost years could be his again. Those seeker’s eyes could find what they were after.

  She reached out. The eyes turned to her, and they told her that what they’d been searching for was her. All these years, it had been her, had always been her. And now the quest was over. His hand brushed hers. His fingers wrapped tight. They slipped up past her knuckles, slipped up past her palm to grip her wrist. And then, with a tug that was as gentle as it was welcoming, he began to draw her down. All the while, those eyes kept her calm, kept her in their thrall. Everything will be all right, the eyes said. Beth wanted to cry. She’d failed to save him that night—they all had—but not now. I forgive you, the eyes said. The grip tightened.

  His palm was wet with slime, and it undulated as it continued to wriggle up her arm. Beth knew deep inside that this was wrong—that this was not the boy she’d known—that this was nothing but a giant leech ready to drain every last ounce of blood from her veins. But she didn’t care. Couldn’t care, not while those eyes were on her. They spoke to her in a language older than words, and she felt herself falling into them.

  The boy’s head exploded into white. The illusion shattered, falling to splinters of shame and self-doubt that Beth knew she would still be digging from her mind days from now. Reality crashed around her.

  She turned to Jack, who still held his pistol trained on the thing. “I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be.” His voice was ragged. He coughed. A wet hack from very deep in his chest. “I should have gotten here faster. Can’t run like I used to.” He holstered his pistol and knelt by the dead creature. Then he pulled a large syringe from his belt and plunged it into the thing’s chest. There was a soft wet pop as the needle breached the skin. Jack pulled on the plunger and drew in a full barrel of pale yellow fluid.

  Rising, he reached for his salt bag, then poured the contents over the corpse. Beth’s eyes watered at the acrid corrosive vapor that wafted from it. And she watched as the boy she knew from all those years ago slowly dissolved into a gelatinous gray-black mass. Soon that, too, would be gone. She shook her head, shook the memory.

  It was physics. Salt had the same effect on those things as it had on the slugs they so resembled. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier to watch, though. But watch they did. They watched until nothing remained but a vague outline left in the middle of the road.

  An unspoken thought passed between them. This was far from over.

  Two

  It had been more than eight months since she and Jack had driven west, off into the sunset, where the story was supposed to end. At least, that’s what she’d thought at the time. And perhaps, in some sense, it was true. Perhaps her story—the story of Beth Becker’s transformation from nightclub bartender to hunter of horrors—had ended the night she’d pulled Jack up onto the New Harbor riverbank. Perhaps she’d become nothing more than a supporting player in a saga much larger than her own—or Jack’s, for what it was worth. But no matter how small her part, she was determined to play it and play it well until the curtain finally descended—on them or on the creatures they hunted.

  They bounced down a rutted dirt track and into the abandoned campground. The truck’s headlights illuminated a well-used fire ring, a sagging picnic table, the simple tent they called home, and not much else. Jack killed the engine and, without ceremony, left the truck to light their propane lantern. A meager bastion against the terrors that stalked the night but welcome just the same.

  Blood followed his master. Beth stayed behind. She needed some time alone, if only just a few moments. The memory of that boy and his seeker’s eyes was still raw in her mind. She punched the glove box’s flaking latch. The door flopped open with a rusty squeak. She reached inside for a jar of Tiger Balm. Menthol and capsaicin smacked her nose hard as she rubbed the balm into her sore shoulders.

  Yesterday, like most days, had been spent training. Jack was as nearly as tough on her as he was on himself when it came to that. His regimen had, more often than not, turned her body into a single, remorseless cramp. But as punishing as it was, it had its perks. She wasn’t sure when it happened, but not long ago, she’d woken up to discover all her soft curves had been swapped for hard muscle.

  Beth kept on massaging herself until her shoulder blades no longer clicked beneath the skin, and a warm blush pushed aside the sharp aches. She got out of the truck. Blood met her with a soft bark and a nuzzle for her waiting hand. But only a quick one once he got a whiff of the balm still clinging to her palms. Instead, he offered her his flank for a pet, and she obliged.

  She and Blood had become better friends over the past few months, much better than they had been when Jack had first brought her into this life. Maybe the dog finally understood that although she was as much of an abandoned stray as he’d been, she wasn’t a threat. The three of them were a pack now, in Blood’s eyes, a family.

  Jack knelt by the fire ring with his back to her. He struck a match, lighting the bundle of wood stacked there. It erupted into a small, comforting flame. He fed more branches to the fire, which gobbled them with greedy abandon.

  Beth joined him, warming her hands on the blaze. Despite the summer heat, it offered a singular comfort. But it didn’t come without risk. Smoke and fire brought attention. And attention from the wrong source meant trouble. “Sure this is a good idea?”

  Jack nodded. “Don’t think we’ll be in town much longer. Just another day or so. Just t
o make sure. But I’m pretty sure this one was here solo. No nest.”

  “Are you positive?”

  He nodded.

  That was another relief. Jack had told her that the creatures almost always hunted alone. The nest they’d destroyed in New Harbor had been an exception. One that still haunted her dreams. The suffocating dark of the tunnel system, those horrors slithering around unseen by the hundreds, the towering egg sacs about to hatch the apocalypse. All of it buried under countless tons of rock and mortar now but reborn in her mind every night when she closed her eyes. “Thanks,” she said.

  “You earned it.” Jack sat beside her in front of the fire. Blood padded around to take his place between them, as he often did. “What did it look like?”

  “The creature?”

  Jack didn’t nod. He didn’t need to.

  Not you this time, if that’s what you want to know. It didn’t look like you, at least. “Just a boy I used to know. Someone from freshman English, I think. He died that year. Hit by a car. Just like . . . just like that thing had been.” She shuddered at the image—the illusion—still clamped pit-bull-tight on her imagination. “It was like the whole thing was replaying itself. Only this time . . .”

  “Only this time, you thought you could change the ending.” Jack’s level tone all but broadcasted that he’d been in that same spot over and over and over.

  “They can do that? They can make you see something you want to be kind to? To protect?” But even as the words slipped past her lips, she knew the answer. They didn’t make you do anything. It was her own mind that chose the illusion.

  “It never gets easier, you know?”

  Beth thought about the countless times Jack must have seen them as Sarah, his long-dead fiancée, the first casualty in his endless war and one who had died at his own unknowing hand. He’d killed her thinking she was one of the creatures. He’d killed her by believing the old vampire myths. He’d never forgiven himself, and Beth wondered if he ever would. If he would ever let himself be human again.