She seemed very proud of the fact and Donna could only sigh.
What was that?
Donna stopped them there in the muck. For a few seconds, she barely breathed.
A great rippling passed through the mud just ahead of them as if something quite large had passed beneath it.
“Well, what the hell now?” Bertie asked.
“Just wait a minute.”
“I don’t have a minute to wait. I’m near dead now.”
Donna ignored her.
She heard the rippling again.
This time it was behind them. Now off to her right. It was like they were being circled by something under the mud. And as crazy as it seemed, the first thing that jumped into her mind was shark, even though that was perfectly ridiculous. Sharks didn’t swim in mud and they sure as hell didn’t live in fucking Wisconsin.
Yet… that eerie sense that they were being circled did not lessen. It increased.
Behind them, there was splashing… as if something had surfaced and then dove again.
“C’mon, Bertie, we have to get over there. It’s not far.”
“Isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”
Donna tried to move faster in the mud, but that only got Bertie bitching at her all the more. They had to move fast. Donna couldn’t explain it—and she sure as hell did not have the time to—but something out there was closing in on them.
Something very big.
Above, the full moon came out.
27
Tony wanted to pull Marv aside and say, that’s not a baby she has, that’s not Jesse, it’s a fucking plastic baby doll. Kathleen’s carrying a fucking baby doll. Don’t you see that? But, of course, he didn’t because he couldn’t and he figured he really didn’t need to; Marv was fully aware that Kathleen was crazy. And like Tony himself, he did not want to know the details of what had sent her wandering through the sludge with a baby doll.
Tony was thinking about Fern and the twins.
Did they really want to bring this crazy woman back with them? But then, what choice was there? They couldn’t leave her wandering. Fern would know what to do. Women always did. Tony was almost beginning to wish Charise were there. Even Stevie.
But he didn’t want to think about Stevie.
Kathleen had stopped.
By the time they became aware of it, she was fifteen feet behind them. She was just standing there, making a deep moaning sound that was nearly erotic in tone like she was quite near to getting off.
“Oh… oh… oh,” she said in a voice filled with confusion and delight. “It’s so warm. It’s so very warm. Can’t you feel it? It’s almost hot. I can feel it all over my legs, all over my… my…”
“Kathleen,” Marv said. “We have to go.”
She just stood there, hip-deep in the muck that seemed to be rising by the hour, struck senseless like she was in some kind of religious rapture. Marv called out to her and she started moving again, very slowly, plodding along like she had been wound up with a key.
She stopped again, went stiff as a pillar. She looked like a toy soldier in the moonlight. “Oh… oh… oh,” she said again. “It feels like it’s boiling, like it’s… it’s…” She never got farther than that. Her mindless rambling became a gasp of surprise, then one of pain.
Her hand had been trailing in the mud.
She jerked it free and there was a worm hanging onto it. It was a huge, bristled monster that looked to have the circumference of a wastepaper can. It had bitten into her hand and now it bit once again. Tony clearly heard the bones snapping under intense pressure. Kathleen whipped her head from side to side, screaming and flailing her arm, trying to rid herself of the thing, but it wasn’t working.
“Shit!” Tony shouted out into the night. “It’s got her! One of those fucking things has got her!”
He stumbled forward into the muck but Marv grabbed him, pulled him back. “No,” he said. “You can’t help her.”
Tony was ready to swing at him.
He could help her, but he goddamned well needed to get to her first… but then the worm rocketed up out of the muck and this time, it swallowed her entire arm right up to the shoulder blade. It retreated just as fast, its teeth peeling not only the sleeve of her raincoat free, but her skin as well. It peeled her arm right down to red meat and tendons.
“KATHLEEN!” he cried out.
She disappeared beneath the muck.
By then, Marv was dragging him off and Tony just didn’t have the strength to fight him.
Behind them, the muck roiled and sluiced and splashed upward in great foaming gouts. “Help me!” Kathleen cried out as she surfaced, her face black with mud. “Oh dear God somebody please help me! IT’S GOT ME! IT’S GOT MEEEE—”
She thrashed in the bubbling sludge, but was beyond help. Absolutely beyond it. The worm kept biting at her, taking more of her with each strike. Its teeth gleaming like surgical knives, it scraped across her chest taking not only most of her coat away but her breasts, too. Great segmented loops of it wound her up, squeezing her until her screams became a choked, gurgling sound. Her bones were crushed with a sound not unlike dry autumn leaves under boots. Her head thrashed from shoulder to shoulder like some grisly puppet, a gout of dark arterial blood ejecting from her between her lips with incredible hydrostatic force.
Then she went limp, her insides bulging from her mouth.
One bloody hand still slapping at the gelid flesh of the worm, maybe out of reflex action, it towed her under the surface. Both Tony and Marv could clearly see a slow-cresting torpid wave moving down the street as the worm dragged her away to unknown depths to be fed on at its leisure.
“C’mon, Tony,” Marv said. “We have to go…”
But Tony just stood there, staring dejectedly back to where she had been in the muck. There was nothing there now, not so much as a ripple. No… there was something floating there and for one panicked moment he thought it might be one of her limbs.
But it was nothing like that.
Just the filthy baby doll floating on the surface of the muck.
28
Holed up in the O’Connor house were all the survivors of Pine Street: Fern and Marv O’Connor, the twins—Kassie and Kalie—and Tony Albert, Donna Peppek and Bertie Kalishek. As far as they knew, there was no one else. The mud sea outside was rising and soon it would be completely impassable. Marv figured if the goddamn National Guard didn’t arrive real soon, things were not only going to get desperate but downright ugly.
But as Fern had said, they were together and they were alive.
That was true, he figured. Unlike the other houses on Pine, he knew his was much older and had actually been a farmhouse back when there were no other houses on the street (which was then just a dirt drive). The point being, it was solid brick and it had weathered a lot of years. So far, it was weathering the mud sea, too, unlike a lot of the other prefabs that had nearly completely collapsed. He figured they were safe. And Fern, God bless her, kept a very well-stocked pantry, so nobody would go hungry.
Donna Peppek was doing her best to keep Bertie Kalishek under control and Fern had engaged the twins in a game of Crazy Eights. This by candlelight, of course, now that the power was out. Something which made little sense, because the lights were on across the street. Go figure.
Marv went down into the basement with Tony and grabbed the lanterns from the camping equipment. They were battery powered, but that was no problem because like food and toilet paper, Fern had stockpiled them. When they had the living room lit up nicely, they went into Marv’s little den at the back of the house and unlocked the gun cabinet. He had three weapons: a Mossberg four-ten, a bolt-action Remington 30-06 with a scope, and a .38 Special that had belonged to his dad. There was no ammo for the .38, but there were fifteen rounds for the Mossberg bird gun and ten for the Remington deer rifle.