It was Tony who finished it off.
His last two rounds from the Mossberg made an unsightly, liquid mess of the worm. But even rent and splattered and pulverized, shining pieces of it still wriggled in the slime, refusing death.
35
The Hilex bleach worked as good as fire, it turned out. They poured it under both of the doors. The one leading into the living room was the real danger spot. It was weakening, beginning to split in places from the relentless hammering of the very determined worms. Once the bleach was poured under it, there was a flurry of motion from the other side—the sound of soft bodies sliding over one another in a desperate attempt to escape.
Within five minutes, the house was silent.
Completely silent.
The dining room, of course, didn’t smell too pretty. The bleach smell reamed out noses and made heads spin, but it was still much better than the alternative.
The survivors waited in the dining room for something else to happen, but nothing did. The only weird thing was that the house trembled once, its timbers creaking as if it was being constricted. In Tony’s mind, he thought a very large elephant had just leaned against it. But whatever it was, it never came again.
An hour later, Bertie said, “Must be gone. Quiet out there.”
To be on the safe side, they waited another thirty minutes and it was then that they heard what sounded like a helicopter in the distance. It didn’t come too close, but close enough to cue everyone in that it was searching for survivors.
“We’re going to have to chance it,” Marv said.
Tony didn’t like the idea, but what he liked even less was the idea of being left behind by a search party and having to spend an entire night waiting for the worms to come.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Be careful,” Fern told them.
“I’ll keep an eye on them,” Bertie said.
Tony felt a need to be heroic and tell her she was too damned old to be facing danger like this, but from what he’d already seen of her, she was more than capable. Probably a lot more capable than he himself was.
Marv unlocked the door and they all tensed, just waiting for a tidal wave of worms to come flooding into the room. But that didn’t happen. He swung the door open and other than the sewer stink and the muck itself, there was nothing.
Nothing at all.
He looked over at Tony and shrugged.
With Bertie trailing behind them, they stepped into the living room. There were no worms anywhere, just a few odd remains. Just to be on the safe side, Marv kept his rifle raised and Tony held a bottle of bleach for quick splashing if it came to that.
“Listen,” Bertie said.
Tony expected the very worst, but what he heard was a helicopter. In fact, from his position over near the shattered picture window as he stared out into the muck-drowned neighborhood, he could see a searchlight in the distance scanning above the trees.
“Open that door,” Bertie said.
“What?”
“Open it, I said.”
She grabbed the lantern as Tony and Marv forced the door open against the muck. She stepped out onto the porch and waved the lantern back and forth. “OVER HERE!” she shouted. “OVER HERE, GODDAMMIT!”
She was making a good effort of it, that was for sure.
Marv was at the picture window and Tony was right behind her. The night was dim, the moon hidden in a pocket of dark clouds. Things were quiet out there, save the sound of the chopper’s rotors. Bertie waved her lantern back and forth. But as to whether she was seen was anybody’s guess. The helicopter banked to the right and disappeared.
“Ah… you useless sonsofabitches,” she said.
Tony heard a splashing like waves breaking on a beach and a stink wafted in through the door like that of a cesspool at high summer… moist and green and almost fruiting with filth.
“Get back inside! Get back inside!” Marv cried in a frantic voice. “Bertie, get the fuck back inside!”
Tony looked out past Bertie into the night which was backlit somewhat by the streetlamp across the street. He saw a shape. An unbelievably huge shape moving out of the darkness with a juicy, rubbery sort of sound like a wet intestine pulled from a belly. For one insane moment, he was not really sure what he was looking at… it was like the darkness was splitting open to reveal a glistening black tunnel… but then he saw and he knew: it was the immense maw of an absolutely colossal worm.
That was why Marv cried out, why he was making a mad dash toward the door where Tony stood in moonstruck terror.
The mouth yawned open and a set of spongy pink shining gums jutted forth, mammoth teeth sliding from them like switchblades. It took but a fraction of a second for Tony to see this and for it to register in his mind. By the time Marv got within feet of him, the monster worm had taken Bertie, who had about enough time to say, “Oh, shit,” and then blood exploded in Tony’s face like a summer squall, blinding him and making him cry out.
It happened so fast he thought the worm had just struck at her like an adder, but that’s not what happened at all. By the time she realized the worm was even there, it was maybe ten feet from her. Its mouth opened and for one insane moment it looked like it had vomited out a dozen yellow, gleaming cobras. They were in fact tongues that moved with a squirming peristalsis, their razored tips spearing into her like hypodermic needles, impaling her completely and this was what made the blood spray out of her like a hydrant had been opened.
About the time Tony hit the floor, the tongues yanked Bertie into the worm’s jaws and the teeth came down, splitting her open like a piñata, her bones cracking like walnuts. Her upper torso dangled from its mouth and the incredible pressure of the jaws made her dentures fly from her mouth along with a mist of blood. Her eyes popped from their sockets and her guts were forced up her throat. Then it sucked her all the way in and she was gnawed and chewed before being drawn down the canalicular tunnel of its throat.
As Marv got to the door, Bertie was pulled up and away.
The moon came out from behind a cloud and showed him the thing in all its hideous grandeur. Rising up thirty feet from the muck, it was a cyclopean and shivering thing like a row of train cars standing on end, a monstrous tower of pale, pink, pulsating flesh composed of multiple ringlike segments, each of which were inflated as big around as the opening of a train tunnel… in fact, as he watched, they expanded until they were even much larger, secreting a sea of foaming slime that spread out over the muck.
It rose up against the full moon, its mouth yawning ever wider into a vast dark hole shining with rows upon rows of spikelike teeth, dripping copious amounts of black bile in six-foot elastic ribbons that swung back and forth with its awful boneless, corkscrewing motion.
Tony didn’t see as much of it as Marv did—he was busy pawing Bertie’s blood from his face—but he saw enough to know they were in serious trouble because it was easily big enough to flatten a two-story house with its surging, gelatinous bulk. Maybe it had risen up thirty feet and perhaps more, wavering from side to side over the rooftops and trees, but there was a lot more of it still in the muck and probably more yet in whatever fusty crawl space it had slithered up from.
Marv had his rifle in his hands, but he felt entirely impotent.
He didn’t think even a .50-caliber machine gun would do much damage to the thing. But the rifle was all he had.