They had food.
They had lights.
They had arms.
They were safe.
“I got this bad feeling things are going to heat up out there,” Tony said as he loaded the four-ten.
Marv nodded. “Me, too. If it was just me, I wouldn’t be too worried… but with Fern and the girls. I don’t know. I’m scared.”
“Let’s go make sure nothing happens to them,” Tony said.
29
The mud was moving out there.
Marv watched it through the picture window. It was no longer just slowly bubbling and oozing, now it was in motion. Huge, dark waves of it were cresting and splashing through yards and slamming into houses with considerable force. A wave of water was one thing, but a wave of mud had considerable weight behind it. As first one and then another hit the house, the living room trembled. The windows rattled. A painting fell off the wall. An anniversary clock on the mantel pitched to the floor and shattered.
“Everyone just hang on!” Tony called out.
Another wave was coming and it was much bigger than the other two. The only good thing about it was that waves of mud, despite their weight and force, moved very slowly. Marv told everyone to get behind the couch and brace themselves.
“Here it comes,” Tony said.
Between the moonlight outside and the streetlight at the corner, it was fairly bright out there. The light glistened off the rolling muck. But as the wave came, it threw a huge shadow before it and by the time it crested outside the living room window, it blocked out any and all exterior light.
It hit with tremendous force.
The house more than shook; it felt like it had been moved three or four feet. Things were falling from shelves and the plaster was cracking, tiles falling from the ceiling. And then… as the wave pulled back, there was a creaking sound and the picture window collapsed in its frame, a river of mud flowing in, knocking aside a recliner and a coffee table. It winked with shards of glass.
“Back into the dining room!” Marv called.
As they scurried away, taking one of the lanterns with them, he stood in about three or four inches of black, churning muck. Right away, he could see things moving in it. And not one or two worms, but maybe a dozen or more. One of them came up out of the mud and he booted it aside, he fired at another, missed, and hit it with the second round, splitting it nearly in two.
“Watch it!” Tony cried out.
A four-foot worm came out of the sludge, its mud-slicked, heaving body thick and spiny. Its forward segment opened, pulling back and revealing a sheath of needle-sharp teeth, each of which had to be at least an inch or two in length. It moved quickly with a rolling muscular contraction and it would have bit right into his leg if Tony hadn’t jumped forward and fired on it. The worms seemed to be made of little more than slime and juice contained in a rubbery envelope of tissue. When the birdshot hit it, it literally exploded into a spray of pulp.
Two others rose up, one making the most obscene sort of croaking noise like a fat bullfrog. Tony fired. But they were everywhere. The mud was a living stew of them and their elastic forms began unwinding from it.
30
“Watch it in there!” Fern heard Marv call to her from the living room and she didn’t need to be told twice. She knew damn well what to watch out for. That worm in the drain had been no bizarre evolutionary accident, but one of many. The muck was infested with them.
Kassie was crying and Kalie told her to knock it off. Fern did her best to soothe both of them. They were trembling and so was she. Tony and Marv were shooting and shooting, trying to turn back the tide of the wriggling invaders.
Then… Donna screamed.
She fell back, kicking her leg in the air. One of the worms had gotten into the dining room. Its teeth were buried in her ankle and it was chewing, simply gnawing with a grating sound of knives against bone. Its body undulated with convulsions as it gulped down what it tore loose.
“One side!” Bertie Kalishek said, pushing past Fern and the twins. “One side!”
By then, Donna was nearly out of her mind with pain and hysteria.
Bertie took it all most calmly. She stepped forward, lighting a Lark 100 and pulling two good drags off it as she lowered herself to her knees—no easy process at her age—and took hold of Donna’s thrashing leg. When she had it still, she pulled off the cigarette again until the cherry was glowing bright orange… then she stabbed it right into the side of the worm. There was a sssstttt sort of sound and the worm reacted immediately, dropping free and writhing on the carpet.
“Don’t care for that much, do you, you little vermin,” she said, pulling herself to her feet with aid of the dining room table. When she was up and steady, she stamped down one rain boot on the worm and it burst open in a flood of cold jelly. About six inches of the tail end disengaged itself, squirming wildly about.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Bertie said and smashed it under her boot. She smashed the head end, too, which was opening and closing its fanged mouth like a fish gasping for air.
Fern called out to Marv that they were okay as she dashed into the bathroom for the first-aid kit.
By then, Donna was looking very pale and very sickly. She was laying flat on the floor, her eyes glazed and barely blinking, her mouth trembling as if she wanted to speak. She was in full view of the twins, of course, who stared down at her with wide eyes. When she made a moaning sound, they cringed and held on to each another.
Fern got back and began to dress Donna’s ankle. There was a great deal of tissue damage and she’d lost a lot of blood. About all Fern could do under the circumstances was pour some disinfectant on it—which made Donna cry out like she had been scorched with a branding iron—and wrap it up good. She needed real medical care and soon. Fern didn’t want to think of the worm’s filthy mouth and what sort of germs were already breeding in the wound site.
“Listen,” Bertie said. “You hear that?”
They were all hearing it. The worms were massing outside, hissing and making that weird hollow croaking noise. They could hear them sliding along the outer walls of the house and Fern was almost sure there was one on the roof… a really big one.
“I’m of the opinion we’re most definitely in the shit here,” Bertie said.
31
Remember when Charise called? You remember when she told you to get out? Well, you should have listened. You should have waded to higher ground or swung tree to tree like a fucking ape, but you should have gotten out.
This was what Tony was thinking as the worms pressed in from every quarter. They were not only coming in through the broken picture window and in such numbers they looked like strings of hamburger being churned out by an old meat grinder, but they were hitting the roof and the other windows like they were being fired from cannons. It made no real sense, but he was seeing it. In the glow of the lantern, they were smashing against the window by the door and with such velocity that they were exploding against the pane until the window was just dark and globby with worm goo.
“Tony!” Marv called out.