But attacked…?
It was crazy.
It was no easy thing getting over to her house. Tessa lived at the very end of the block and that was a long, slow slog when the muck was up above your thighs. Marv was wearing his rubber chest waders or he would have been soaked to the skin with the filth which was not just mud and muck but sewage as well, judging by the vile stink of it.
After a good twenty minutes of chugging along, he finally got to Tessa’s.
He dragged himself up the porch and pounded at the door. His legs felt weak and weightless after pushing through the mud for so long.
“Tessa!” he called. “Tessa! It’s me, Marv O’Connor!”
There was no response. He threw the door open and charged in, calling her name and clicking on lights as he went. He got a bad feeling right away and wished he had brought something to defend himself with. Even a penknife. Anything. All he had was a flashlight.
It was the smell in the air that bothered him.
It wasn’t the gaseous, noisome stench of the black muck, but a smell that he was all too familiar with as a deer hunter: blood. The house was a ripe, reeking envelope of it. It smelled the way the gut shed up at hunting camp smelled in November… like a slaughterhouse. The stink of bowels and marrow, animal fat and oceans of draining blood.
But here… in Tessa’s house?
He moved faster until he reached the kitchen. Then he came to a dead halt as he reached for the light switch and clicked it on. The smell was so bad in there, so concentrated, that it brought his stomach up the back of his throat.
Then, in the light, he saw.
Tessa was dead. In fact, she was more than dead. She looked like she had been torn right open. She was laying in a pool of blood, more of it splattered against the counters and smeared on the cupboards and appliances.
Marv turned away.
When he turned back, something moved.
What the fuck?
It crawled out from beneath Tessa’s corpse, parting her hair like a comb… a worming, fleshy thing that seemed to be composed of ringlike segments, each of which seemed to be pulsating. It looked like some kind of millipede. More so, like some flesh-eating nightmare worm from a B-movie. It crawled free of Tessa, hitting the blood-puddled floor with a soft thud.
Then it raised its anterior end off the floor and showed him a perfectly oval cavity of a mouth with perfectly sharp teeth.
It hissed.
Marv took two shuffling steps backward, his hand blindly—and instinctively—reaching out for some kind of weapon, because he had no doubt this thing was a fucking killer. Maybe it was only two or three feet long, but it was thick around as his arm, muscular and evil with teeth made for shredding. His fingers fumbled across cutting boards and canisters of flour and salt.
The worm lowered its head/mouth back to the floor.
It began to vibrate. Then it began to move in his direction… slowly, slowly, but he had the oddest feeling that if it wanted to, it could fly right across the room at him with dizzying speed.
The butcher block. He yanked a carving knife free.
The worm came at him, not slowly now, but with amazing speed. He knew he could have dashed through the door, but the idea of turning his back on that monster was scary. He could just about imagine it climbing his spine and sinking its teeth into the back of his neck.
It leapt.
It was four feet away and Marv was brandishing a carving knife that could gut a pig, still it leapt… fearless, remorseless, almost manic with its need to attack. It made it to within a foot of him before he swung the blade and missed, his wrist knocking the worm to edge of the counter where it hung, the spiny protrusions jutting from its segments scratching to gain a hold.
Marv let out a cry and slashed at it with the knife.
He missed the head (if head it could be called) and slashed open a couple of its segments, that pissed out a vile, watery discharge that could not possibly be blood. The worm turned to fight. It struck at him and he slashed it again, laying it open. It made a weird trilling sound that might have been a cry of pain.
It knew then he was dangerous.
Like most predators, it was basically cowardly. Fattened and sluggish from feeding on Tessa, it wanted to kill, but it wanted an easy kill. So as he hacked at it again, it fled. It slithered over the counter with great speed and unstoppable power. It knocked aside dishes, overturned a flour canister, sliding behind the breadbox when he stabbed at it, jumping up and clinging to the underside of the cupboards when he brought the knife around.
It oozed copious amounts of foaming brown slime that left a dirty, greasy trail behind it. The fluid practically gushed from its segments.
Marv knew what it was trying to do.
The sink was full of black muck and that’s where it had come from and that’s where it was going now. It was retreating with a full belly. It did not want to fight; it wanted to hide.
It moved, it slinked, it slithered and wriggled.
He kept slashing at it, making damn sure it knew he meant business so it would not get any bright ideas in its little wormy brain and decide to counter-attack. He had to keep it on the defensive.
When it reached the sink, it turned and bared its teeth, hissing again.
The mouth darted at him, the segments elongating so its strike was fast and elastic.
Marv kept away from it, only slashing at it when it pulled back.
It tried to get into the left basin of the sink where the black goo was still bubbling and slopping. He slashed it, cutting it open. It tumbled into the right basin, twisting and writhing, its spines scraping over the shiny metal trying to get some kind of a grip and finding it nearly impossible.
Marv struck.
He brought the knife down and speared it just behind the head, slime and brown goo flooding the basin in a discharge of jelly. The worm hissed and flopped, but he had it and he knew it. But he wouldn’t have it long. He had it pinned to the sink, but he could feel its strength. It was flexing like a huge muscle, pulsing and straining, pouring out mucus, its body inflating and convulsing.
It would work itself loose and he knew it.
Kill it, kill this motherfucker!
“No, you don’t,” he said under his breath as its whipping tail tried to wrap around his wrist, its spines tearing open the back of his hand. He turned on the garbage disposal, the Insinkerator, and it began to whir and gurgle, a few bubbles of black goo coming up out of the drain cup.
The worm fought manically.
But Marv was determined.
He forced it into the drain, pushing it down with the knife until he heard the blades bite. The worm went stiff like a penis, throbbing and straining, then loose and limp and whipping. The Insinkerator blades chewed into it. He used his free hand to shove the bulk of the worm down into the drain.
More goo came bubbling up… but this was pink and meaty with foaming slime. The Insinkerator kept whirring.
Finally, Marv shut it off.
He stumbled away, refusing to look at the remains of Tessa and refusing to think about what had just happened.
16
Snarling like an animal, Ivy launched herself at the worm.
Geno saw her do it, but he was numb and helpless from worm toxins and the loss of blood. It was all like a dream to him. He was beyond the point where he even knew what day it was or where he was or how he had come to be there.
Ivy seized the worm with a murderous fury and tore it away from his knee. She gripped it right behind the head with both hands like it was a poisonous snake and right away, the worm began to writhe and squirm with muscular contortions and boneless gyrations. It was a powerful, sinuous creature that did not like to be grabbed. Its fanged mouth hissed, its head segment snapped from side to side, its body looped, but she held on with an impressive strength and determination.