Slither (15 page)

Disappointment overwhelmed Ruth, something she
was used to with this pair. "I thought we were going to
sleep here. Let's cuddle!"

Jonas frowned. "Come on, put your clothes on and
let's go back to the boat."

She leaned up on her hands. Why couldn't he or Slydes ever do anything she wanted? It would be romantic
to sleep here.

"I'm sleeping here!" she insisted.

"Cool." Jonas stuffed his bag of pot in his shorts
pocket. "Thanks for the piece of ass. I'll see ya back at
the boat in the morning."

Jonas left the shed.

A piece of ass. Prick! So much for romance. It didn't
matter, though. She felt so good right now, she wasn't
going to let his selfishness spoil the mood.

She lay back down, sated and high. That pot was
strong as hash; the warm buzz pulsed from her heart to
her toes.

She snapped the light off and let the grainy darkness
come down like the softest blanket. At least the sex had
been decent this time-it wasn't always that way with
Jonas. The beer he'd been drinking all day gave him
some much-needed endurance. Five minutes is better
than two, she reminded herself. With two lovers, the
situation could've been worse. What Jonas failed to
provide in the way of her womanly needs, Slydes usually took care of, and vice versa.

Jonas had left the door open, which permitted a
trace breeze. The moon came in like an accidental
guest, and the sounds of the forest began to pulse along
with her buzz. She lolled in the dark, decided not to
even put any clothes back on, and in her sleepy mind
she saw her dreams with Slydes and Jonas come true.
One great big happy family. More and more money
coming in each month. A new washer and dryer, and
one of those big fancy flat-screen TVs where she could
sit between her two lovers every night and watch
wrestling ...

Warm semen trickled between her bare legs, but she felt too tranquilized to even move, much less wipe herself. Her eyes closed, and her unusually large lips
turned up into a contented smile. Sleep carried her
away oh so deeply .. .

She never even felt the thin, foot-long pink worm
that slithered into her body through her vaginal canal.

The sergeant and the corporal watched the longhaired
man leave the shed. He's leaving the woman, he realized, which seemed odd. But that was better for the
field analysis. The woman would be much more vulnerable sleeping alone in the shed.

"How long till you think one of them gets her?" the
corporal's voice issued through the earphone.

"Could be hours, could be minutes. No way to tell.
The worms' sensory organs are supersensitive, and the
ovum too. They'll seek out the largest heat signature as
well as the most profound pheromonic emanations."

"Pheromonic?"

The sergeant couldn't believe the deficient level of
tech training the younger NCOs were getting these
days. "Airborne glandular emissions of bombykol molecule groups that come out of the skin, particularly
the skin of genitalic regions. They're picked up by ol factory VMO receptors and stimulate pleasure centers
in the brain. Chemical triggers, you know, from the
tech classes you passed to get this duty assignment.
They trigger innate reproductive responses."

The corporal clearly remembered nothing of these
classes. "Fine, but since you just said it might take
hours for one of the specimens to get her, I think we
should go in there right now and have some fun. We'll
get her pheromones going, all right."

The sergeant glared at him through the visor of his
protective mask. "Any more comments like that, I'll
write you up."

"You're not serious, Sarge."

"Try me." The sergeant would not have that sort of
thing going on while he was ranking NCO in the field. It
didn't matter that all the subjects would eventually die,
it was protocol. That sort of thing could get out of hand.
"She's probably got all kinds of diseases. I don't want to
have to be quarantined when we get back to the post."

The corporal grumbled.

I really don't trust these new kids at all, the sergeant
thought. "We're done for now," he said. "Let's get back."

"What about the two men on the boat that came in
tonight?"

"They'll be infected by morning, if they're not already."

They slipped away from the shed, then turned on
their low-light lenses to refind the trail back to the field
HQ. They passed one corpse along the way, one of the
women infected by the ovum. She hadn't released the
brood yet, but the dead belly quivered from all the immature larva that bloated it.

"She hasn't been dead long," the corporal said after
lancing a dead arm with the portable chromatograph.
It had been calibrated to read serum levels of putrefactive gases. "A few hours maybe."

"A 'few' hours isn't good enough." The sergeant
passed his troop the lance thermometer. "Check the
drop-fall time against the mean-to-zero brain temperature."

The corporal looked lost. `I've never done that."

Damn. The sergeant snapped the gauge away and
uncapped the lance. "I can't believe they're graduating
you kids through this occupational specialty. This is
supposed to be one of the first things you learn." He
turned the unit on, input the readout of the air temperature, then-

Crunch.

-jammed the lance into the corpse's nostril. The
breasts seemed to quiver a moment, but that was just reflexive. When the thermometer beeped, the sergeant slid
the lance back out. "Hour and eleven minutes," he read.

`How's it work?"

By comparing the brain's temp against the air temp
and calculating the drop time."

"Oh."

Yeah. Oh. The sergeant snapped some digital pictures for the file. The mutation element is incredible.
Look at her skin."

"Yeah. Neat," the corporal remarked.

The woman's skin had fully turned now, to the same
translucent yellow, peppered by bright red spots. But the
sergeant couldn't help but notice how his underling's
eyes were fixed on the cadaver's swollen breasts. "You're
an animal. You're gaping at a dead woman's breasts. If I
weren't here, you'd probably be having sex with it."

The corporal shrugged.

What can you do? The sergeant guessed he was just
getting old. It wasn't the victim's former beauty that captivated him, it was the level of mutagen-transmission.

The Transfection Unit that made these specimens really knew what it was doing.

"Take a tissue sample so we can get out of here," he
ordered. "I think the colonel's going to be really pleased
about this."

"I slept great last night," Loren enthused, picking out
his Sigma flippers and snorkel. The clean, fresh air of
the great outdoors, I guess."

"Me too." Annabelle appeared just as lively, blond
hair shining in the morning sun. Today she wore a
bright parrot-green bikini that seemed to cover even
less of her body than yesterday's apparel. "I got to sleep
pretty late," she said, inadvertently looking around for
Trent, "but slept very well. I'm surprised how quiet the
forest is at night."

"Quiet?"

"Oh, sure. You should hear the racket the woods
make in Brazil and Southeast Asia. Ten times louder
than this."

"Wow, you've been all-over the place."

"Indeed I have. My job's sent me on shoots all over
the world, from the Sahara to the Arctic Circle."

"What about the Arctic Circle?" Trent asked. He
looked exhausted when he came out to the narrow
strip of beach, his uniform crumpled and circles under
his eyes.

Loren found his diving mask. "Annabelle's a world
traveler, from her job."

"A world traveler, huh? I believe it."

Annabelle gave him a sultry smile. "This little island's more like a vacation to me."

Trent rubbed his eyes. "Yeah, me too."

The blonde untopped a tube of waterproof suntan lotion. "Would one of you mind putting some of this on
my back?"

When Trent stepped forward to take the tube, she
gave it to Loren. Trent frowned.

"You'll definitely need this," Loren said, hands already shaking as he smoothed the lotion over her skin.
"Shallow water magnifies UV rays. You'll have to reapply this all day; waterproof means it won't wash off for
ten or fifteen minutes."

"Where's Professor Craig?" Trent asked.

"She's already out in the water"

Trent gazed out into the Gulf of Mexico, arms
crossed. 'So today's the big hunt for the scarlet bristleworm, huh?"

"Yuh-yep," Loren confirmed. His hands gingerly
spread the lotion around the strap of Annabelle's bikini
top, then shakily slid lower.

"Loren, since you're down there, would you mind
doing the backs of my legs?"

"Shuh-sure," Loren said. Now he knelt to find himself face-level with Annabelle's derriere.

Trent frowned again.

Annabelle glanced over her shoulder. "That's
enough, Loren. Thanks.-

His hands continued to shake when he gave her back
the tube. Annabelle fitted on her diving mask, then
propped it up on her forehead. 'I'm ready when you
are, Loren.'

"Damn, I forgot my collection bag. It's back at the
head shack-I'll be right back." He jogged off into the
trail.

Trent laughed when Loren was gone. 'You really
made that kid's day. See how he was shaking?"

"Well, I wasn't trying to intimidate him."

"It's probably the first time he's ever had his hands
on a woman."

Annabelle grinned but didn't look at him. "Your
hands were doing all right last night."

The comment caused Trent to stall. "That's good to
know."

"I hate to tell you this but what's-her-name saw us."

"Who? Professor Craig?"

"Um-hmm."

The lieutenant mulled it over, then shrugged. "Doesn't
bother me what she saw. I couldn't care less about her.
You're the one I'm interested in."

Annabelle coyly tapped his nose. "Oh, don't get all
mushy on me. Last night was just one of those spontaneous things, you know.7

"Yeah, well, we need a lot more of those spontaneous things."

"We'll see," she said, still not looking at him. Now
she checked the underwater housing for her camera.
"And I'll bet seeing us last night made her day."

"She and the kid are a real pair."

Annabelle chuckled. "Geek Patrol."

"You really have to wonder about people who devote
their lives to studying worms."

"She and Loren are peas in a pod, I'm afraid."

Trent nodded smugly. "Right, and now that you've
changed the subject, I want to see you again tonight.
And I want your number."

"Oh, the assertive type, I like that. But you don't
need my number. It's not practical for us to continue
seeing each other. I live in New York."

"They have these things called planes."

"We'll see," she said.

"One way or another, before this worm thing is over,
I'll get your number."

"Shhh! He's coming back."

Loren reappeared with a net bag full of plastic specimen tubes. "Got 'em."

Now Annabelle was checking her snorkel. "I really
can't wait to see one of these worms. I'll be credited with having the most recent photographs of it. Loren,
how long till you think it'll take to find one?"

The young man had regained his composure after
having had his hands on her preeminent body. 'Well,
keep in mind that Pritchard's Key is the only known
place in North America to have them. It's very rare, because of the shifting water temperature, like I was saying yesterday. It might take all day to find a scarlet
bristleworm. It might even take all week. You don't just
turn over the first rock you see and, bam, there it is."

Nora trudged up to them in her flippers, dripping
water. She pushed up her mask and handed Annabelle
a specimen tube. "Here's your scarlet bristleworm."

"You gotta be kidding me," Loren said, amazed.
"How did you-"

"I turned over a rock and there it was," Nora told
them, unimpressed.

Trent was laughing. "Outstanding. The rarest worm
in North America and Professor Craig finds one in five
minutes."

Annabelle held the clear tube toward the sun, peering
at its brilliant bristly contents. "It's really disgustinglooking but it's also ... incredible. The color-it's so
bright, like a glowing ember."

"I just swam out to about a ten-foot depth," Nora explained, shaking off more water, "found a cool-flow,
and started turning over rocks. There're lots of them
out there. You'll see a narrow trench cutting down near
that cool-flow. At the tip of the trench, there's a big
chunk of reef about the size of a bus-that's where the
nest is."

"This I gotta see!" Loren exclaimed, visibly excited.
He dorkily plopped down the beach in his flippers and
waded into the water.

Trent was still chuckling. "The kid acts like he just
won the lottery."

"He's never seen a live one before," Nora said. "To a
polychaetologist, that's like a coin collector finding a
two-headed Buffalo nickel. Oh, and we'll be having
spiny lobster and stone crab for dinner. I've never seen
so many in one area before."

"Outstanding," Trent said again. "Professor Craigyou are one squared-away polychhhh-polywhatever.
I'll let you two finish the big worm hunt while I go look
for more pot plants to burn. Have fun."

Nora stopped him. "Oh, Lieutenant? I wanted to ask
you something. Didn't you tell us yesterday that the
army took all the surveillance cameras off the island
when they closed down the missile site in the eighties?"

Trent seemed piqued by the question. "Yeah, sure.
This used to be a high-security military reservation.
Why do you ask?"

"I think I found a camera, last night." Nora pointed
back toward the edge of the forest. it was on this side,
somewhere between the campsite and the head
shacks."

"I guess they could've missed one," Trent supposed.