It was then that he noticed the worm was not just some giant B-movie-sized vermin, but the Mother Worm: the source, the epicenter, the fucking black pupating womb of them all. Its underside, from where it rose from the rippling muck to maybe a dozen segments from the mouth, was a convulsive nursery of worms. Hundreds of them hung from it like the remoras on a shark’s belly, coiling fleshy tubes, some only a few feet in length and others six or seven feet. The large ones were dropping free and as they did so, smaller ones pushed forth from the jellied flesh of the Mother Worm. She was a great biological machine, a squirming incubator that could have drowned the world in her larvae given time.
She let go with a mewling, echoing cry that got louder and louder until it shrilled like an air-raid siren as if she were calling out her victory over the world of men.
As the house shook and everyone covered their ears and Fern cried out, wanting to know what was going on, Marv—from his position in the doorway—worked the bolt on his 30-06 and fired up at the thing, the bullet drilling into it and through it. The worm barely trembled.
“FUCK ARE YOU DOING?” Tony shouted at him.
But Marv wasn’t really sure himself, but in the back of his mind an insane, last-ditch sort of defense had occurred to him and if things had not been so tense, so surreal, so deadly with grim possibility, he would never have considered it… but desperation was the mother of invention.
The Mother Worm must have felt the round drill through her, minimal as it was in comparison to her nightmare vastness. She rippled and writhed with undulant gyrations, curling like an inchworm and striking at the house. She took out what remained of the picture window and the frame that held it. The walls cracked. Plaster fell. Bricks were pulverized to powder. The impact actually shifted the house a few feet on its foundation.
She hit the house again, striking the door this time and widening it to the girth of a garage door. One more strike and she would be in.
As she hit the door, Tony scrambled away on his hands and knees, her jutting yellow tongues stabbing out at him, brushing over the soles of his boots and slitting the sofa open.
Marv did not retreat.
It was all or nothing now.
As the Mother Worm brought her head up high above the house to cry out again, he got in position with his rifle at the missing picture window. He had a clear shot if he could just make it happen, if he could just put one round where it needed to go.
On his knees, the stock against his shoulder, he tightened the field on the scope and fired at the power line that was strung between two utility poles and was dangling above the rising coils of the worm in the mud. He fired and missed. Shit. He fired again and this time he knew he was close because he split the telecom line which dropped away harmlessly.
Breathing slow and deep, knowing the worm was about to make her last and most devastating strike, the muck around her seeping with the forms of her children, he sighted in on the power line. For a professional shooter or sniper, it would have been an easy shot… for a guy who popped a deer every few years and maybe hit the range a few weeks a year, it was tricky.
He remained calm.
He steadied his nerves.
The line was directly in his sights. Exhaling air between clenched teeth, he squeezed off a round… and it hit. The power line was easily split, throwing a shower of blue sparks and dropping directly onto the Mother Worm where it grounded itself out.
The effect was instantaneous.
The Mother Worm writhed and twisted and coiled. She snapped back and forth like a bullwhip, shattering houses across the street, turning garages into kindling and flattening cars like beer cans. And the more she struggled, the more she ensnared herself in the power line, which fed over 13,000 volts directly into her hide. The muck around her was bubbling and steaming, her young popping like ticks from the heat. She boiled from the inside out, throwing out plumes of churning steam. As she whipped and looped with spasms, huge rents split open her segments and spewed burning tissue and blazing slime until she burst into flame, rising up one last time like a blackened Fourth of July snake before crashing into the muck and breaking apart.
Then there was silence.
Silence for five or ten seconds.
Then Tony said, “I think I fucking pissed myself.”
Marv stumbled into the dining room where his wife and children were waiting for him. He pulled them close to him in a huge bear hug. He could hear the choppers coming. The remains of the Mother Worm were still smoldering and burning in the street. A few houses had lit up with her, flickering like candles.
“Are… are they gone?” Kassie asked. “Are the worms gone?”
“Yes,” Marv told her. “They’re gone.”
And though it was still dark out, night had ended on Pine Street.
About the Author
Tim Curran hails from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A full-time wage zombie in a factory, he collects vintage punk rock, metal, and rockabilly records in his spare time.
He is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, Skull Moon, The Devil Next Door, Hive 2: The Spawning, Graveworm, and Biohazard. His short stories have been collected in Bone Marrow Stew and Zombie Pulp. His novellas include Fear Me, The Underdwelling, The Corpse King, and Puppet Graveyard. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh&Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, as well as anthologies such as Flesh Feast, Shivers IV, High Seas Cthulhu, and, Vile Things. His latest book is a new novel from DarkFuse, Long Black Coffin. Upcoming projects include the novels Hag Night and Witch Born, and a second short story collection, Cemetery Wine. Find him on the web at: www.corpseking.com.
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Copyright
First Edition
Worm © 2013 by Tim Curran
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.