Squirm
Page 15
Roger must have realized that the only way to effectively dispose of Mick was to pry loose Mick’s fingers and toss him down into the hissing mass below. Mick was puzzled by the moment’s hiatus in the awful thrashing, for in another few seconds he would have lost consciousness. Then it came to him: Roger was going to kick his fingers.
He pulled his fingers away just as the boot swished through the air. Roger’s foot cut an arc between two bannister braces and he shinned himself on the bannister itself. Mick, as much to keep his balance as anything else, grasped for Roger’s leg and got it and held it like a drowning man. Roger brayed and kicked, trying to make Mick release his foot. Mick would no sooner have done that than volunteered to swan-dive into the worms below.
Frantic, Roger stooped over to pry Mick’s hands loose from his leg. He lost his balance and waved his hands like a semaphore signalman. In that fraction of an instant when Roger hovered over the stairs, Mick felt a strange compassion. This man wanted to destroy him, yet Mick could not allow him to suffer the horrible fate that lay below. Mick grabbed for his shoe but missed as Roger tumbled past him and somersaulted head-first into the living, teeming sea below.
Mick was too busy scrambling for safety to see it all, but he heard the enormous PLOP as Roger fell like a bellywhopper on the surface, then a sucking noise as he submerged. The five foot thick bed of worms convulsed as a single individual, like a starved beast sinking its teeth into a large chunk of raw meat. When Mick finally gained his foothold, he looked over his shoulder to see Roger submerged to the neck, his face a portrait of unmitigated pain. He flailed with his arms as if trying feebly to wade back toward the stairs, looking like a swimmer walking out of the sea against an outrushing wave.
Mick turned away. Several times today he’d felt his gorge rise and this time it all but overwhelmed him. He swallowed back bitter acid, rose shakily to his feet, and wobbled to the foot of the ladder, where he found one of the candles and relit it.
Rung by rung he ascended the ladder, muscles tensed either to propel him forward for attack or backward for retreat, depending on what he found up there. Suppose Geri was up there, maddened by brain-devouring worms as Roger had been. Would he be able to watch passively as she sank beneath the roiling surface of a sea of worms, to be indifferent to her agony as twenty thousand little fangs buried themselves into every pore on her body?
Cautiously he raised the candle into the blackness of the attic and peered over the top.
Geri lay on her stomach, arms and legs tied together behind her back, mouth gagged.
She was alive.
There were no worms up here. Yet.
He rushed to her and loosened the gag and ropes. “Are you all right?”
For a second she just gasped, nodding her head. Then she fell into his arms, panting and weeping quietly. Mick held her tenderly for a moment, wishing he could do this for the rest of the night. But a rumble from below reminded him that there would be no respite. The worms were throwing division after division into their assault, as the Vandals and Goths must have done once the walls of Rome were breached. Soon they would arrive at the second floor, and would probably advance on the third.
He rushed to the window in the attic and raised it. “I can’t see a damn thing.” That wasn’t completely true. In the bluish aura of starlight that filtered through the thin cloud cover, he could see the ground below—except it wasn’t ground. Geri rummaged through a chest of drawers and found a flashlight for him. He shined it out the window onto the ground.
His fear was confirmed.
There was no ground. It was worms, worms too numerous to count, worms too numerous even to conceive of. The world was worms. No prophet of doom, Biblical or modern, had ever faintly imagined that the world might end this way. But it appeared to be happening.
He turned his light on an object near the window.
“How are you at climbing trees?” he said. A limb ran close to the window.
Geri nodded distractedly, but she was looking down the trap door. Her face was distorted with apprehension. “Mick, where’s Alma? And my mother?”
She seemed to shudder and Mick realized she was on the verge of hysteria. He took her tightly by the shoulders. “You can’t go down there. The worms are halfway up the stairs already. We have to get out of here. Now!”
Geri shook her head and tried to free herself from Mick’s hold. “No, I have to help them. Let me go.”
She struggled with surprising ferocity, but Mick was determined to clutch her until her grief passed. “It’s too late,” he finally yelled. “They’re dead!” It was cruel but it was the only course under the circumstances. Geri gave one last convulsive jerk, then went limp. She buried her face in her hands and began sobbing.
He carried her to the window and helped her onto the limb outside. It swayed precariously and dipped at an angle that made Mick wonder gravely about its ability to support two people. Well—he’d find out soon enough.
He grasped the limb with one hand and hurled one leg over the windowsill. He was about to boost himself out when he heard a shuffle on the attic floor behind him. He turned just in time to see—oh God, that eyes were made to see this!—the form of Roger staggering toward him. It was only a form. There were no features recognizable as human. There were only worms. It was a human-shaped mass of worms. They hung in festoons from his outstretched arms.
Roger’s hand enclosed Mick’s arm as Mick rushed back into the room to confront the menace squarely. He shook his arm loose and brought the flashlight down with all his might on Roger’s head. The first blow was cushioned by the layer of worms on his scalp and didn’t seem to deter this monster, but Mick struck again, and again, and again.
His grip relaxed. Then he released Mick and slumped to the floor. His body twitched horribly as the worms bored into his brain and heart. Then he ceased to move.
Mick brushed several worms off his wrist and all but dived out the window to the limb of the tree. It dipped precariously and cracked, and in a night of terrifying noises this was by for the most terrifying. Mick could almost feel the million jaws of death fastening on his hide as he plummeted into the bed of forms at the base of the tree. But the branch held and he scrambled closer to the crotch of the tree where Geri sat huddled, eyes bugged with the terrors she had endured and still endured.
Mick beamed the flashlight at the foot of the tree to discourage any assault up the trunk. He remembered those ads for long-lasting flashlight batteries that had carried stranded campers through nights of danger. He hoped that brand of battery was in his flashlight, and that the advertiser’s claims were true. It must be early morning. There was still plenty of darkness left, and no end of worms waiting to take advantage of failing batteries.
CHAPTER
XVIII
After what they had been through, cramped limbs seemed like a minor nuisance and a cheap price to pay for survival. Like a pair of squirrels stretching after a storm, Mick and Geri untwined and tested their arms and legs. The sun shone bright and warm in their eyes.
They looked down. Except for the flattened grass and a thin pebbly layer of worm-leavings, there was no sign that anything had happened at all. At first light the worms had retreated into the bowels of the earth from whence they had come.
“Hey—uh, excuse me?”
They looked down at the friendly face of a man in a work uniform, yellow helmet, and utility belt. There was a GP&L emblem on his sleeve—Georgia Power and Light.
“I thought you two love birds might want to know that the power’s back on. Tower’s all fixed up, good as new.”
Mick and Geri stared dumbly at him. He returned the stare at the couple sitting for no apparent reason in a tree.
“Oh, by the way—which way’s town?”
Mick pointed in the direction of Fly Creek.
“I hope they got some nice hot coffee ready,” he said, ambling back to his truck. Then he stopped. “Strangest thing. All the lines are back up but nobody seems to be an
swering the damn phones around here.” He got back into his truck and waved goodbye. “Damn nice place,” he said to himself, starting the engine. “Wouldn’t mind livin’ around here.”
Geri and Mick descended and entered the house. The destruction wreaked by the worms was fantastic. In her mother’s chair sat the skeleton of Naomi Sanders, in repose. Geri looked at it but could make no association with the human that had been her mother. And perhaps that was just as well.
They ascended the staircase, still slippery with the slime of a million worms. They reached the second floor and looked around the storage room, bedrooms, and bathrooms. There was no sign of . . .
Suddenly there was a squeak, like a badly oiled hinge opening. It came from the direction of the huge steamer trunk outside the bathroom. Mick tensed, looking for a weapon.
Then two platform shoes emerged from the trunk, followed by the legs and bedraggled body of Alma. She smiled a crooked smile, and the three embraced.
They went outside and stood in the sun, warming themselves. The world sparkled like an emerald in its bright light.
They said a silent prayer for Mrs. Sanders and the others who had perished in this freak of malevolent nature. Then they went back into the house again to pick up the pieces of their lives.
Table of Contents
Back Cover
Preview
Movie
Copyright
SQUIRM
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII