His left arm flailed free, but the right had been caught under the coils. How much sooner till it got to his neck?
Loren couldn't think. His adrenaline pumped uselessly through his body; the harder he tried to move, the more he couldn't.
Then the worm's head loomed.
Loren nearly lost consciousness at the sight: the eyeless pink cone. A tiny, meaty hole at the end suddenly expanded, revealing a pulsating throat. Stylets like transparent fishhooks emerged. Loren knew that the hooks would seek his mouth so that the worm could secure a grasp before it would start pumping its acidlike digestive enzymes down his esophagus, whereupon his innards would be liquefied and then sucked back into the worm's body, for nourishment. After the hearty meal the creature would fill Loren's emptied body cavity with ova, to incubate. -- – - – - – - -- – -
His right hand had managed to slither to the pistol in his waistband, but the coils were too tight to drag it out. Even in this revolted paralysis, his subconscious knew that there was nothing to lose in firing anyway-
Bam!
Did the worm actually squeal? Loren felt the gun kick beneath the mummifying coils, felt a bullet blow through the side of his swim trunks.
It also blew a hole in the worm, midbody.
The gun barrel burned against Loren's thigh, but he didn't feel it. He'd managed to squeeze off the shot just as the worm's head was lowering to his face. Worm blood and stored seawater flooded Loren's legs; then the coils began to loosen, shuddering in their own pain.
Gotcha, you fucker! he thought when he grabbed the head with his left hand, pressed it to the dirt. Only now was he able to drag his gun hand out.
He pressed the barrel to the worm's skull-less head, and-
Bam!
Chunks of pink meat speckled Loren's face. In the other direction, more seawater, white blood, and a teacolored ichor flew. The plume hit a tree and-
Shit!
Loren began to frantically wipe his face off, remembering that the worm's enzyme duct was in the head. He could see spatters on the tree smoking, sizzling, those same fluids burning through the bark. It was Loren's very good fortune that none had gotten on his face.
The worm limpened in death after a few reflexive spasms. Loren shrugged out of the coils.
He got up and looked closer at the tree. The enzymes became impotent after a minute, but not before eating a crater into the hard tropical wood.
As the sizzling from the acid died down, a thought began to sizzle in his head.
He grabbed the worm's neck, clamping hard with the ring of his thumb and forefinger, leaving eight inches of exploded head hanging off. Loren dragged the-dead-thing back toward the RTG.
Can't hurt to try…
It was like dragging a great length of hose. When he arrived at the slab, he carefully held the worm's ruptured head right against the black rod on which the disk had been mounted.
Loren squeezed a few feet of worm…
More fluids evacuated, mostly the tea-tinged slime.
The cement around the rod-
It's working.-..
– began to sizzle and smoke.
Loren jiggled the disk as the acids worked deeper. Moments later, he yanked it out of the cement slab, like dragging the stick out of a thawing Popsicle.
The enzymes liquefied the cement!
He'd gotten the bomb off the RTG but-
Holy shit…
Now Loren found himself in the most bizarre predicament of his life. I'm standing here in the middle of the woods, holding a bomb from another planet…
He looked at the blinking border of light around the disk.
With each blink-he noticed now-that border got infinitesimally smaller.
Loren shook his head.
Question of the day, he thought. How the HELL do you get rid of an alien bomb?
No answers were forthcoming. He at least knew that he had till the border ran out to think of something. – - – - – - – - -
With nothing else to do, he put the bomb in his pocket and headed back to the campsite to find Trent…
(IV)
Robb was strong, all right. His mottled yellow hands turned Ruth upside down, and hauled her shorts off. The terror merged with the stifling heat, and of course, the "zombie's" stench of rot and metamorphosis. The fetor in the room could be likened to fresh-ground beef, sperm, and a restaurant Dumpster in the sun. Ruth landed on her head when Robb shucked her out of the shorts, which dangled off one ankle. She saw proverbial stars as Robb's hands began to wring her implants like dishwashing sponges.
When she was able to see through gaps in some of the stars, her scream ground down to a disgusted gag. Robb had shed his own shorts previously, to reveal a groin that looked more like an open wound. There was no penis, for instance, just a rot-gnarled nub with a hole in it, and a bloated yellow scrotum. Were small things moving in the scrotum?
Ruth was too racked with horror to ponder the ques tion very deeply, but given the circumstances, a passerby might beg another question: With no penis, what did Robb intend to rape her with?
Muscles flexed beneath yellow, red-spotted skin. In Robb's infection and sequent decomposition, aspects of his college-athlete physique remained: pillars for thighs, bulging biceps, pectorals, and lats. Ordinarily, Ruth might even have been turned on by the flexing washboard abdominals.
But not when they were covered by red-spotted yellow monster skin.
All 110 pounds of Ruth put up a formidable fight, hands slapping at the mindless, wedgelike face, fingers poking at the eyes, which looked so watery they might somehow have aspirated their inner humors. The big chunk she'd bitten out of his cheek was now covered by something that looked more like a wart than a scab.
One big wet hand pinned her chest to the floor, while the other, now, wriggled for her groin. Ruth's legs moved like fifty miles an hour on a stationary bike; she was going nowhere, but her body was trying anyway.
Her senses disconnected. None of her brain bothered to curse Slydes-that big hairy redneck coward-for leaving her here. None of her brain wasted any synaptic energy on the useless regret that if she'd stayed in school, never done drugs, and never gotten involved with creeps like Jonas and Slydes, then maybe she wouldn't be pinned to the floor in this infernal toolshed by a sex-crazed zombie with no penis. Maybe, just maybe, if she'd kept going to church instead of opting out for strip joints and coke at age eighteen, and pennyante tricks in between sugar daddies…
It seemed likely that she would never have had occasion to meet her noxious death on an island full of giant pink worms.
Ruth didn't bother thinking about any of that.
Instead, she thought this: The fuckin' barbecue fork!
She'd brought it in from outside, hadn't she? More senses shut down as stout fingers began to play inside her womanly orifice. Her auditory faculties didn't register Robb White's ruined efforts to speak:
"Bluckin' blig-tit butch! Gublunna pull bloor gluts out frew bloor plussy!"
Whatever.
Ruth's eye had already caught sight of the barbecue fork, lying not three feet beyond her reach. If I can get this big zombie fucker's hand off me just for ONE SECOND, she realized, I could get that fork!
Something unexpected happened then, almost in synchronicity with the thought. The yellow lids on Robb's glop-for-eyes shot open. His body stiffened as if seized by a sudden pain, and his gestures of molestation… stopped.
He pulled away. When he pulled his hand out from Ruth's spread legs, it didn't all come out.
The yellow, red-spotted skin peeled off like a rubber glove.
Robb held up the hand in mute, zombie astonishment. His hand was now a raving, shining pink.
He stood up in haste, shaking through a confusion. Then he began to take his skin off like someone taking off clothes.
The "shirt" of yellow skin crinkled wetly as it was removed from Robb's back. The sleeves turned inside out; then the entire mess was tossed away. What existed beneath was more of the same brand-new, clean, raving pink.