by Ben Farthing
“No!” Cessy yelled.
The tall man tugged the chainsaw loose from the tree to swing it wildly at Landis.
Cessy fired.
Blood splattered.
Landis dropped, but Cessy couldn’t tell if he’d been hurt or was dodging the attack. He lost his footing and slid downhill.
The round struck the tall man in the small of the back, missing his spine by inches. The impact of the heavy caliber was enough to send him tumbling to his knees, then down the hill. The chainsaw chewed through his shoulder. He yelled in pain.
Cessy scrambled wide around the downed lumberjack. The chainsaw spit and rattled. Landis crawled to his feet, brushed dirt off his shirt. He was uninjured.
Cessy exhaled. She didn’t need anymore guilt to lug around.
The state trooper and the local had the winch tight around the bottom log of the roadblock. A lifted Jeep drove down the embankment to pull the cable tight. Mud sprayed under tires. Branches bounced and the tree inched forward, dragging the whole roadblock with it. The muddy bank provided no friction to hold the trees.
River water splashed onto the jeep’s grill. The driver backed up, his tires spinning and then catching. The winch slowly reeled in the slack, and then he yanked the roadblock another five feet. Once more, and there’d be enough space to squeeze the cars past.
Asphalt cracked and the ground shook. The dull noise of slowed-down fingernails on a chalkboard, but now blended with sharp snaps that echoed out through the valley. It grew louder, coming from up the mountain ridge away from town.
Cessy thought of Kate loosening her shoelace, then snapping it tight through the little pile of dirt and twigs, sending them flying. She thought of an extension cord looped through a messy garage, yanked taught.
“Everyone, move!” She ran to her truck.
“What is it?” called Landis.
“A bomb, a swarm of parasites, whatever you’ll believe. We’re out of time!” She hopped into the driver’s seat.
Mom’s face was red with anger. “What are they doing to my home?”
“You’re part of this, aren’t you?” Dad demanded. He watched the approaching tidal wave, more anger than fear on his face.
Kate held Mom tight against the seat. “It’s happening. The worm has almost got its whole body out of Hamlin.”
Through the two-way radio, Lockler howled. “True patriots of Hamlin, defend your home!”
Cessy gunned the engine. The truck lurched towards the opening in the roadblock.
The jeep tugged the roadblock another five feet, opening a path. Across the river, a line of trees cracked and fell.
The Maple Table joined Locker’s rant, interrupted, overlapped. “If there was another way, that’d be the moral choice. But when you’re left with only one way to save your family...”
Dad’s forearm looped in front of Cessy’s throat. He squeezed tight, trying to crush, not just strangle. He growled through the pain of assaulting his daughter with his broken wrist.
Both Mom and Kate screamed.
Cessy jammed one hand under Dad’s arm, and the other back towards his face. The seat back blocked her reach.
Fire in Cessy’s empty lungs.
The truck swerved up the hill. Cessy righted the steering wheel to keep them from tipping over.
Mom jerked at Dad through the handcuffs. Kate unbuckled to lunge at their father. She threw a weak punch at his broken bones. Bone broke through skin.
Mom and Kate screamed at Dad as oxygen refilled Cessy’s lungs. She ignored her family to aim the truck back at the opening in the roadblock.
A wave of destruction crested over the treeline across the river. Trees snapped as they lurched upwards.
The wave broke through. The worm’s endless body writhed down the riverbank, pulled sideways as it slithered in the direction of its elongated body. It churned up mud as it yanked itself down the bank.
With one eye on the road, Cessy couldn’t focus at all on the worm’s body. She saw where it was by the destruction it caused.
The riverbank vomited up mud high enough that it splattered the high branches behind it, even reaching the opposite riverbank to smack on the jeep’s windshield.
Cessy steered her truck between the downed trees and the steep hill. A rock scraped her door. Surprise joined Dad’s moans of pain. Mom screamed. Kate yelled apologies to Dad.
The shaking earth triggered a rockslide. Rocks pelted the doors and windows. Ahead, the road grew steeper as it headed over the mountain ridge. More cracks opened in the asphalt.
They drove past the barrier.
Mom screamed over Lockler and the Maple Table’s unintelligible ranting. Kate pinned her against the front seat. Kate squeezed her eyes shut.
The worm splashed across the shallow river, an indiscriminate tidal wave kicking up water and silt.
Cessy pulled out of the way to look in her mirror for Landis. He’d come to help her; she wasn’t going to drive off and leave him.
Cars scraped through the opening in the roadblock, then gunned it up the road.
Landis waited off to the side. He’d make himself the last one through.
Cessy yelled at him over the radio. “Come on! We’re not leaving you behind!”
The state trooper and the local who’d moved the barrier struggled to get the jeep back up to the road. Landis yelled at them to abandon it. The two men scrambled up the muddy hill.
A muddy wave pursued them. The wriggling wall kicking up water and silt.
Landis waved them into his truck.
Cars and trucks inched past the roadblock and then accelerated up the mountain. The shaking earth amplified the rockslide to turn the path through the roadblock into a barrier itself. The last car before Landis bottomed out, blocking the path. Wheels spun.
It was the young teenager Cessy had seen earlier. Somehow he’d ended up in the back of the caravan.
He locked terrified eyes with Cessy.
Landis acted quickly, coming up behind him to shove the low car with his truck.
But the worm was up the riverbank, shaking loose the foundations of the mountain. Rocks thundered downhill through the trees. Dirt slid down to pile up against the teenager’s Toyota. The pine tree that the tall man had started cutting lost its roots’ grip in the mountainside. The bottom of the trunk slid downhill and the topmost branches smacked into the mountainside. Other trees followed suit, until a deluge of trees sledded towards the three remaining cars, each massive enough to crush a vehicle. The worm snapped at them from the opposite direction.
Cessy floored the accelerator. The truck lurched forward, slamming their family back in their seats.
The worm’s gray body, still resisting inspection, filled Cessy’s field of vision to the right. An irregular barrage of sliding trees and tumbling rocks from the left, racing to meet them first.
Ahead, the worm whipped across the road, like a gargantuan firehose gone wild. It tore into the sinking mountain. It cut through the earth with ease.
Cessy stomped the brake. The truck fishtailed.
A wall of impossible gray flesh swept over them. Toothy maws gaped wide.
65
Cessy wasn’t sure if her eyes were open.
She felt numb. A whim satisfied. But her hunger was unsatiated.
Pressure on her cheeks like she’d stuck her head out the car window going sixty miles per hour through a fogbank. A layer of fine sand beneath her shoeless foot, and under that, warm ground.
A soft whimpering to her left.
Cessy tried to open her eyes.
A silent torrent of disfigured tree branches and silty water swarmed around her. A black leather snake looped around her wrist, and Cessy realized she was looking at her 4Runner’s steering wheel, distorted by the worm’s passage.
Dizziness assaulted her, followed by prickling pain behind her eyes.
She squeezed her eyes shut and covered them with her hands.
The pain subsided.
“Kate?
” Cessy called. She heard her own voice, flat and dull.
“I can’t tell which way is out,” Kate whispered.
It startled Cessy how close her sister was.
“Don’t open your eyes. I was here before. You can’t open your eyes.”
“Yeah, I figured.” She reached blindly for Kate, found a rubbery mass. It jerked away.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch yourself. Keep your eyes shut. Trust me, you want to perceive as little as possible.”
Cessy withdrew her hand. The weight of her arm was all wrong. “Where are we? Did it swallow us?”
“No,” Kate said. “I think we got dragged along. Something similar happened to me already. Do you feel everything moving around us?”
“It’s all stretched out. Are we the same way?”
“Don’t think about that. If we walk in the right direction, we should be able to get out. But I feel so turned around.”
“You feel that against your skin, right?” The feeling of driving through a thick fog bank picked up. “Is that the current from the worm’s wake? We should just walk against it.”
“Maybe. But the worm doesn’t move in a straight line. We could follow that for miles, twisting in circles before finding our way out.”
“You have a better suggestion?”
“We figure it out after we find Mom and Dad. Where are they?”
Cessy didn’t ask, Will they even come with us? Instead, she asked, “Where’s Landis? And the two men in the truck with him, and the kid in the Toyota? Did they get dragged along, too?”
“They were, what, twenty, thirty feet away from us? If they got dragged, who knows how far away they are now. They’ll have to find their own way back.”
“I can’t leave Landis. He came here to help me.”
“We’ll be lucky if we can find Mom and Dad,” Kate said. She called for them again.
Cessy’s stomach ached for food. The feeling was distant. “Do you feel that hunger?”
“It’s the worm’s. Focus on something else. Something you’re sure is yours. Your impatience with me.”
That wasn’t hard.
“Mom,” Kate called. “Dad.”
The hum of nails on a chalkboard. In the distance, tree trunks cracking.
“Mom!” Kate called loudly. “She’s close. Can you hear her?”
Cessy listened. Low breathing. A woman’s angry voice in the distance, not her mother’s, but one she thought she recognized. “No, but there’s someone else.”
A sound like marbles falling onto glass and then rolling away. Kate gasped. “I tripped on something.”
“What was it?” The sandy ground was flat under Cessy’s feet. In the brief moment her eyes had been opened, she’d been too distracted by her immediate swirling surroundings to look for any landmarks.
“Don’t open your eyes!”
“I’m not. Where’s Mom?”
“You don’t hear her?”
Cessy listened closely. The woman’s voice was louder now, but she couldn’t tell from which direction it came. She caught only snippets. “...pay for their own vests...prosecutors not taking into account the full circumstances...”
“I hear someone else,” Cessy said. “Nobody who was with us.”
“No, it’s Mom,” Kate said. “Mom, come towards my voice.”
Soft vibrations in the ground beneath Cessy’s feet.
The woman grew louder until she was perfectly audible. She spoke with reasonable passion, like Cessy’s early mentor in the police department. “If we’re going to maintain the thin blue line, we need proper equipment. Some of you from wealthier counties, you’re well taken care of. But remember your brothers in blue from places like Jacobsville, Connecticut, where officers are buying their own Kevlar vests, because the standard issues vests are outdated and don’t offer real protection.”
Cessy reached toward where she’d last heard her sister. “That’s not Mom.”
Kate was in the middle of her own crisis. “I love you, too, but stop a second and listen to me.”
The police pundit drew closer. “Have some compassion for your fellow officers, and stop tolerating prosecutors, legislators, and voters who refuse to acknowledge that you’re out there every day, putting your life on the line. Remember, the thin blue line is a human shield. Anyone who won’t hold that line is a criminal.”
She let the word “criminal” slither out, like Lockler did with “vermin.” Cessy realized what was happening.
“Kate, you’re not talking to Mom.”
“I’m trying, but she won’t answer.”
“It’s not her. I’m hearing a talking head telling me cops should be better funded. They’re personalized lures.”
Cessy listened through the ranting. Finally, Kate spoke. “I want my mom back.”
She must have heard Mom speaking reasonably, like she had before the Hamlin radio waves were invaded by Lockler and the Maple Table. Cessy’s lack of a relationship with her parents made this easier for her than for Kate, who’d been their pride and joy, before they’d replaced pride and joy with vanity and paranoia.
Cessy found her baby sister. She tried to hug her, but Kate felt loose and unstable.
“Don’t touch me!”
“I’m sorry. I don’t want you to feel like this. But that’s not Mom you’re listening to.”
In another time, another situation where she hadn’t spent two days learning to fear the worm, she might have been tricked by her personalized lure. She thought of Mom and Dad, at home in the town where they grew up, where they met, where they raised their children. They came of age as the mine closed. Their adulthood started with an optimistic determination to keep their home alive, despite the economic rug being pulled out from under them. As the decades passed, that optimism morphed into stubbornness. Dad’s accounting clients went out of business, or relocated to Charleston, and then to a larger city. Mom’s therapy clients lost faith in themselves as they failed to support their families. Stubbornness surrendered to desperation as their own children had to leave home to start careers, and they realized that those few youth who stayed behind were robbed of potential by an empty town.
“Kate,” Cessy said, “stay close.”
When Lockler first came on the radio, Mom must have felt the empathetic pain of a hundred therapy clients. Dad felt the personal shame of seeing his own ledger dip further into the red each year.
Laced in with this compassion, a hunger pang like she’d smelled a cookout after she’d skipped breakfast and lunch. The worm sensed desperate grief and sensed an opportunity for a crumb of satiation.
Cessy tried to push that aside to instead embrace the compassion she’d been pushing away since she arrived.
It was tainted.
Mom and Dad were afraid for the future, wounded by the world, torn between home and safety, but so were millions of people. Mom and Dad had embraced Lockler’s hate for “vermin.” If Cessy allowed herself to be overcome with compassion for those who lacked it, she’d get promoted to desk duty and spend all day with the department shrink. Her duty was to protect her fellow man--compassion without terms was an unaffordable luxury.
Kate sniffed. “They’ve gotta be close, right?”
Kate still had that luxury. Cessy couldn’t let her baby sister abandon their parents. Cessy lacked compassion for their choice to be duped by Lockler, but she decided to believe that was a perversion of her own emotions by the worm. She’d believe the proper reaction was mercy, even if it wasn’t what she was feeling right now.
“We’ll find her,” Cessy said.
In turning a desired emotion into action, Cessy’s anger at her parents softened enough to make room for what had to come next.
“They’re still hearing their own lures, right?” Cessy suggested.
“They must be,” Kate said. “If they’re nearby--which they must be--then they can hear us. They’re ignoring us because of whatever Lockler and the Maple Table are telling them.”
“We’ll talk them out of it.” Cessy said. “Or find them and drag them home. What if I look around for just a second?”
“No,” Kate hissed.
“Then we need to guess what they’re hearing, and convince them to listen to us.” Cessy stumbled as she kicked something hard. It broke, made a sound like marbles hitting glass and rolling away. “What was that? What is this place?”
She felt around with her foot. Her toes hooked in a hole in the ground. She caught herself on Kate’s warped shoulder. “I almost fell,” she breathed. She felt around inside the hole. There was no bottom, no sides. She stretched and felt the underside of the thin shell upon which they walked.
She went stiff. “The ground could give way any second.”
Kate gently pulled Cessy along. “That means we can’t stay here. Help me find them.”
“Where are we?” Cessy stepped carefully, now paying close attention to how the ground felt under her shoeless foot. Loose sand that gave too much under her weight. “Is this the worm’s home?”
“If it has a home, I don’t think we’d survive it,” Kate said. “We’re somewhere between. Breathing oxygen the worm dragged with us.”
“And if we fall through?”
“We wouldn’t be between anymore.”
Cessy kicked something again, this time with her shoeless foot. It felt like undercooked meat stuffed full of marbles. The meat puffed into dust at the impact of her foot. Marbles scattered, the staccato bouncing incongruent with the fine sand under her feet. The steady wind whistled over the hole she’d created.
“How many times did you get dragged somewhere like this?” Cessy asked.
“Four,” Kate said.
“How did you get out.”
“I walked back the way I came. I wasn’t in a car then. I felt what direction I’d come from more.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier.”
“Now’s not the time,” Kate said.
A horrible thought occurred to Cessy. “What if Mom and Dad already fell through?”
“No. We’d have heard them yell. They’re probably nearby, listening to Lockler.”
Cessy didn’t share her sister’s faith, but she was done fighting against her. If she wanted to allow herself to feel compassion like Kate still did, she needed to act as if she already felt it. “How do we convince them to come with us?”