The Squirming

by Jack Hamlyn

  THE SQUIRMING

  By

  Jack Hamlyn

  1

  It was the little ones that bothered Kurta the most. The idea that there might be a tear in his hazmat suit and one of them would crawl inside and bore into him. That, more than anything, filled his guts with cold jelly and kept him awake far into the watches of night.

  The others didn’t know about that and he wasn’t about to tell them. They weren’t exactly the sensitive, compassionate types. At least on the surface. Underneath, of course, they were all terrified. Even Spengler and The Pole who had hearts like black ice. They all had their phobias and the greatest of them all was the idea of admitting to them.

  “What’s it gonna be, Kurt?” Spengler asked.

  Kurta realized he’d been daydreaming again. The others stood around in their shiny green biosuits―hotsuits as they were known―awaiting his order. He looked from Spengler to Mooney to The Pole and West. Their faces were invisible behind the bubbles of their helmets and he was glad for that. They couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see them. Whatever they were thinking, he didn’t know and none of them could see the anxiety etched into his face.

  In front of them was another house in a row of them, all two-story clapboard, same design. Company houses. This one was painted green, the one next door blue.

  “Same bit,” he said. “Speng? You and The Pole go in the back way. We’ll take the front. Call out when you’re in position.”

  “Will do, Chief,” Spengler said.

  He led The Pole around the side through the uncut grass that came up above the ankles of their boots. Kurta stood there, waiting until they were in position while something in his guts went warm and runny. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun was warm and bright. It gave him no sense of hope, no optimism. All he had to do was look around the neighborhood at all those houses lined up.

  Jesus.

  Once, people had lived here. They had fallen in love and raised families, watched their children playing on the green lawns and skipping up the sidewalks. They had marched their kids out trick-or-treating and shoveled snow and hung Christmas lights from the eaves and laughed as their sons and daughters lit off fireworks on warm Fourth of July evenings. The neighborhood had been alive and they lived with it, aged with it, grew old and content until the day came when life passed them by and they sat happily on their porches, no longer active participants, knowing they had done their best.

  Now…now it was not a neighborhood.

  It was a graveyard and the houses were tombstones. The only things that lived behind their walls were too horrible to contemplate, not human beings but pack animals, dumb beasts, mindless hosts caught in a dance of corruption with the crawling horrors that had enslaved them.

  “Well?” West said. “We going in or what?”

  Ah, young and stupid, bite your tongue.

  Kurta almost laughed at his naïveté.

  Poor, silly little puppy. Testosterone primed, adrenaline juicing, full of the kill-happy military brainwashing that got a lot of boys bagged in a lot of wars.

  West was new.

  He’d only been with the unit three days. He’d seen some minor league slugification yesterday, but today was the day when he’d wade through it, hip-deep in human wreckage. Then he wouldn’t be so goddamn anxious.

  He replaced Stiv whom Kurta liked a lot. A punk rock, edgy, narcissistic asshole that wiped his ass with the flag, Stiv had been young and tough. Anytime somebody saluted Kurta—something Kurta hated with a passion—Stiv would unzip his pants and give a counter-salute with his dick. That drove the patriotic lemmings shit-crazy which made Stiv laugh all that much harder.

  Inside his helmet, Kurta frowned.

  Stiv was gone now. He’d gotten blown away accidentally as he rescued The Pole and Mooney who’d been besieged by a gang of randy slugheads. Spengler had done it. He lost his nerve and opened up. Friendly fire. Something Kurta would never let him forget, G.I. Joe Spengler whose old man had been a full colonel in the Marines before the good old U S of fucking A had dropped its pants, bent over, and got sodomized by the slugs.

  Now there was no Marines, no Army, no Navy, nothing but a ragtag collection of exterminators (as they were known), trying to quell the infestation. Town to town, house to house to house.

  It’s a fucking joke, Stiv used to tell the newbies. Like the old days, War on Terror and all that—a waste of time. We ain’t stopping the slugs any more than we stopped the extremists. All the bullets and firepower couldn’t change the way those pricks thought, and we can’t stop the slugs from breeding. That’s what nature designed them to do. They eat, they fuck, they enslave us.

  Kurta sighed. Goddamn Stiv.

  West was getting excited and Kurta could feel it. Mooney said that Spengler and The Pole had breached the back door. They were calling on the headset.

  “Well?” West said again.

  Kurta nodded. “Okay, let’s do this. Moon, take the point.” He tried to say this authoritatively like some old school dipfuck of the Chuck Norris variety. Inside, he felt a lot more like Don Knotts.

  2

  “On your right,” Kurta called over the headset.

  Mooney dropped back, tripped over his own boots in his clumsy biosuit and went down on his ass.

  The slughead came waltzing down the stairs, hissing and gnashing his yellow teeth, his contorted face a bad Halloween mask that was melting like wax. He was pregger, all right, one arm cradling his swollen parasite in its webby flesh-sling. He would mother that horror until there was nothing left of him and the slug molted into something worse.

  West panicked, opening up with his M4 and stitching the ceiling with rounds. Kurta cursed under his breath, shoved West aside, and blasted the slughead with his riot gun, giving him two rounds point blank.

  It got ugly then.

  The slughead was nearly cut in half, gushing fluids and slug-slime, legs wanting to go one way while his torso tried to go the other. The whole time, he was thrashing and jerking violently, his organs spilled down the stairs, a knob of spine poking out of his back like a snapped broomstick.

  “GYAAAHHHHH!” he squealed.

  “GYAAAAAAHHHHHGG—”

  In the process, a rat from a sinking ship (in this case, one that was horribly staved-in and bilged), the slug emerged from its protective sling. It was about seven inches long, looking oddly like some well-greased swollen phallus, fleshy and spouting copious amounts of lucite-clear gunk. Its gestation had been interrupted and it wasn’t too happy about it. Its head split open in a star-shaped mouth which spat a glob of phlegm at West that missed and struck the wall. Immediately, it attached itself to the paneling, sprouting wiry tendrils that juiced the veneer with neurotoxins.

  “Burn it!” Kurta said over the headset. “Goddammit, Mooney, you fucktard! Burn it!”

  Mooney was on his feet by then. He brought the gun of the flamethrower up and it gushed out a tongue of burning napalm that engulfed the slughead and his attendant parasite. The slughead writhed for a few seconds and then went still, burning and popping.

  Kurta held up a gloved hand, counting off, one, two, three, four—

  “Okay, West,” he said. “Hose him down.”

  West shakily stepped forward. He wore a backpack similar to the flamethrower except his tanks were filled with a Halogen derivative. He aimed the hose at the fire and the foamy white chemical extinguished the flames on contact.

  He turned back towards Kurta. “Guess…guess I fucked up back there.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kurta reassured him.

  On the stairs, there were only blackened remains glistening with white foam now. They used to use an acid composite, but it was hard to get these days so they went back to the old flamethr
owers. They worked, but they created an ugly mess. The remains were still smoking. Now and again, something would pop like a coal in a campfire.

  Kurta was glad he had a mask on so he didn’t have to smell the stink.

  There was gunfire from the back of the house.

  “You got some?” he asked over the headset.

  “Two of ‘em,” The Pole said. “And pretty fucking randy. Spengler is toasting ‘em. Get the kid back here or this place’ll go up.”

  “You heard ‘em,” Kurta said. “Go with him, Moon.”

  Mooney led West towards the back of the house and Kurta stood there alone, wondering what kind of shit they were going to get into upstairs. He hated houses because the rooms were small and the hallways narrow. It was easy to get bottled-up in them. Buildings were better: bigger rooms, bigger corridors.

  He looked around.

  The house was dim, shadowy, claustrophobic. He didn’t like it. In fact, it made his scalp crawl inside his helmet.

  Hell was that?

  Not from above. Over beyond the stairs. Sure, he hadn’t seen it when they first came in but there was a doorway there, an archway really, that led into a dining room maybe. He knew he should have waited for the team, but, hell, the sooner they cleaned this house out, the sooner they could get back to the bunker and get loaded.

  There was inspiration in that.

  Swallowing, his Ithaca 37 riot gun raised, tactical light on it peeling back the shadows, he waited for something to spring out at him, but there was nothing.

  He moved quietly, sweating inside his suit. His mouth was dry. His instincts were sharp, hot pins inside him.

  The archway.

  He panned his light over it, saw nothing that worried him. Okay. The archway didn’t lead into a dining room as he thought; there was a set of steps beyond it leading down into the darkness. The basement. The steps were carpeted. Probably a rec room down there with a bar and pool table. A man cave.

  The question was: did he go down alone?

  Chances were, there’d be nothing down there, but you never really knew. The fool hero thing was to go down alone. His skin crawled at the idea. His imagination gave him a little tour of Hell in which dozens of slugheads came charging out at him, burying him in their numbers.

  No, he would wait.

  It was the reasonable thing to do.

  He heard a bumping and thumping sound above. There was someone up there. Slugheads were too stupid for stealth, their brains gone to Silly Putty.

  “We’re coming in,” Mooney said.

  It was important to announce your presence when there was an exterminator with his finger on the trigger. The tendency to shoot first was a given when slugheads were around.

  Mooney showed with West in tow. The Pole and Spengler filed in behind them.

  “Okay,” Kurta told them. “I heard someone moving upstairs and someone, I think, down below. Spengler, you and The Pole go upstairs. Moon, you go with them. Don’t bunch up. West? You’re with me.”

  The Pole led the way up the stairs. Spengler waited until he was half way up before he started after him. Then Mooney followed.

  “All right, kid,” Kurta said. “Stay with me.”

  “Okay.”

  Kurta noticed that he didn’t sound quite so anxious now. There was something about your first real contact with the enemy that took the stuffing out of you.

  3

  There was no handrail, so Kurta moved slowly down the carpeted steps. He didn’t like carpeting under his boots; he liked good old wood. Carpeting got slippery. So he moved very carefully.

  At the bottom, he paused, scanning about with his light. Sure, it was just as he thought. A rec room spread out before him. There was even a bar and the obligatory pool table. A sofa, a few chairs. An antique Pac-Man arcade game in the corner, dartboard on the wall. Old Spuds MacKenzie mirrors on the wall. Very 1980s, very retro.

  “Hang back until I tell you different,” he told West.

  He stepped away from the stairs. This was going to be a bust. At least, he hoped it would be. The thing he didn’t like was all the shadows. He wished he had some night-vision gear, but it was hard to get these days. When Supply got some, he’d probably get three pairs. That’s how they worked. Feast or famine. When he requisitioned a new pair of boots, they sent him a pair and an extra boot. What the hell was he supposed to do with one right boot and two left ones? They think he had three feet?

  Over beyond the bar, there was another doorway. Maybe a junk room or a bedroom. He moved to the side to look behind the couch and a slughead stepped out of the corner, growling and gurgling. His eyes were like juicy pink scabs.

  “Shit,” Kurta said under his breath, backing away.

  The slughead, nursing its parasite as they did with one hand, charged. It wasn’t that he saw Kurta as the enemy so much as he saw him as food. Anything that walked, hopped, skittered, or crawled was food to them. That was their job. As host to the slugs, they had to keep them well-fed so their appetites were voracious.

  Kurta fired.

  The slughead’s face went to hamburger, his teeth scattering across the bar top. He spun around in a circle. It looked like he was going down, then, at the last possible moment, he changed trajectory.

  He leaped out at Kurta.

  Kurta fired, but the slughead’s hand knocked the barrel aside and the buckshot shattered a Spuds MacKenzie from its hook. The slughead rammed into Kurta and knocked him on his ass. Bleeding and groaning, his face hanging from a thread like a particularly rancid cutlet, he aimed a wild kick and caught Kurta in the helmet.

  Then West fired, drilling six rounds into him.

  He jerked with the impact, going down, his loose, meaty face slapping off the felt of the pool table in his downward descent, leaving a greasy smear.

  “Nice shooting,” Kurta said.

  Something slithered up his hotsuit and he realized it was the guy’s slug free from its sling. It inched up his leg and he smashed it with the butt of the riot gun again and again until it let go and dropped to the floor, squirming and leaking a foul brown juice like the blood of a spider. He brought his boot down on it, smashing it to a pool of viscous goo. It made a sort of high-pitched whirring sound as it died.

  The Pole came over the headset, wanting to know what was going on and if they needed backup.

  “We just greased a slughead,” Kurta explained. “We got this―”

  Then West let out a cry that was half-terror and half-surprise. Kurta swung around, bringing his light to bear and five or six slugheads came surging out of the back room, fluid and dark and menacing.

  West opened up, capping slugs into them.

  He hit three of them, ripped some holes in the wall, but that was about it. The slugheads kept coming. Without proper headshots to drop them, they were nearly unstoppable, Kurta knew. Even missing limbs would not slow them because their parasites wanted meat and the hosts lived only to provide it.

  West was practically screaming over the headset: “THEY’RE EVERYWHERE! SLUGGOS FUCKING EVERYWHERE!”

  As Kurta started popping rounds from the riot gun, he wasn’t honestly sure what he was more afraid of―the slugheads or West’s shooting.

  One of the slugheads made it around the pool table. He was a large man, though emaciated as they all were from the slugs sucking the nutrients out of them. His slug was particularly huge, riding in its sling against his belly like an especially fat summer sausage. The guy clawed out, pink and white foam bubbling from his mouth in stringy gouts.

  “Eyuuuuughllll,” was about the best he could do for speech.

  Kurta gave it to him at close range.

  His head exploded like a pus-filled boil, soggy gray matter and skull fragments spattering against the walls and ceiling. He hit the floor, jumping and jerking.

  His slug emerged from its sling immediately, shearing through the gauzy flesh like a python bursting through rotten wicker.

  It coiled on the floor.

  It
located a host immediately and wasted no time in procuring it. It convulsed and spat a gob at Kurta who wasn’t fast enough to get away. The gob splatted against the bubble of his helmet, wiry tendrils trying to dig into the Acrylite and inject a brain cocktail that would drop him to his knees where he would happily pick up Mr. Slug and attach him to his soft white underbelly.

  Fuck that.

  Kurta blasted it to sauce, brushed the gob away, and began firing in the direction of the massing slugheads. West dropped one of them with a headshot when he was mere feet from Kurta, blood and brain goo splattering against Kurta’s bubble, blinding him.

  Jesus!

  He tried to wipe it clear with his sleeve, but he only managed to smear it into a paste-like emulsion. He fought blind, firing in the direction of the slugheads, screaming out for backup. When his riot gun was empty, he swung it like a club, feeling it mashing into soft faces and splintering bone.

  He fell back, knowing he was in the shit, stumbling back towards the bar, guided by the light bars on his helmet. He grabbed the first bottle he found which was Absolut vodka and poured it right over his bubble. The alcohol dissolved the brain emulsion and the vodka washed away the mess.

  He saw West in some kind of hand-to-hand battle with a slughead. He was punching his attacker in the face with the awful, soft sound of a fist sinking into a rotting pumpkin. The slughead had both hands on his helmet and it looked as if he was trying to pull it off.

  Kurta pulled the .357 Colt Python from its holster on his web belt and blew the slughead’s noggin almost entirely from his neck. Blood sprayed over West’s faceshield, but it was better than the alternative.

  By then, another one was coming at Kurta.

  He fired wildly, missing sluggo’s head and punching a fist-sized hole in his throat. He went down and Kurta kicked him the face. It was like sponge cake and exploded off the skull beneath. Another round finished him.

  Kurta turned and one of them rocketed out of the darkness and tackled him. He hit the floor, the .357 flying from his grip.