Slither (29 page)

"Sharks, eels, and a variety of bottom dwellers can
reduce a human body to next to nothing real fast,"
Nora reminded. "I have to have a look, to make sure
it's not her. And I also need to examine it as closely as
possible. Whoever's body it is, I need to see if the
worms could be responsible."

"We should go with you," Loren said.

"No, we need to maximize our time. You two look
for Annabelle. Split up, check everywhere. And keep
trying your cell phones-and your radio, Lieutenant."

Trent seemed unsure, even shaky. "What do we do if
we can't find Annabelle?"

I don't know, Nora thought truthfully. I'm more worried about what we DO find. More worms. BIG ones.
"You'll find her. Let's meet back here in two hours exactly. And good luck."

The two men branched off while Nora trudged down
the trail toward the beach. Now she knew what Trent
and Loren meant about being paranoid. With every
step she looked to her sides, half expecting to see some
very large pink nematodes squirming in wait. She
couldn't pass a tree trunk without inspecting it for
signs of the yellow motile ova. I just cannot BELIEVE
what we've stumbled on, she thought.

On the beach she noticed the tide was coming up,
with a rougher chop than usual. She took an uncomfortable glance at the sun. In another few hours there
wouldn't be enough light to snorkel at all... .

She pulled on her flippers, lowered her mask, and
waded in.

Skimming along the bottom, she knew it was her
imagination when she began to feel inhibited. The water wasn't really murkier, and there weren't really
fewer fish about-she simply imagined it. Farther out,
she snorkeled a deep breath and dove.

Several sea urchins lay upside down-dead. Next,
she picked up an upside-down stone crab and looked at
its hard-shelled underside. There was a hole in it.

She wended around a large boulder, then stopped.
Another dozen crabs lay similarly upside down.
They've all got holes in them! she saw.

Evidence of a chitin-penetrating parasite.

Another sea urchin quivered in a small crevice. Nora
flipped it over and recoiled.

Fixed to the urchin's mouth was a six-inch-long
pink worm.

Nora thrust away with her flippers, repulsed. The
worms are killing everything ...

The next outcropping of boulders was crawling with
yellow ova .. .

I have to be real friggin' careful! she yelled at herself.

When she got to the magnificent coral deposits that
flagged the trench, she saw nothing but a carpet of
dead scarlet bristleworms. They lay curled up like red
litter, tossing slightly in the current.

The entire nest has been routed ...

The impulse to leave couldn't have been stronger,
but there was still one more thing she had to do.

The corpse.

Maybe he imagined it, she wished. Maybe it was a
dolphin skeleton or something ... She skimmed by
more clumps of coral, and there it was: the darkening
decline that marked the tip of the trench. Deeper than
I thought, she realized, flipping downward. And it was
darker. She kicked out and glided another dozen feet.

Nora stared through the prism of her mask.

The arrangement of flesh and bones lay before her
almost as if it expected her. Scraps of fabric around the
hips indicated shorts too skimpy for a man, and another band of fabric about the rib cage was clearly a
bikini top. It was orange.

Does Annabelle have an orange bikini? She couldn't
recall.

Nora felt haunted as she hovered over the remnants
of a living person. Eyeless sockets looked back at her,
and something like a grin struggled through the waxen,
swollen traces of flesh around the mouth. White teeth
glimmered through. A flap of white skin floated off the
chest, darkened by the circle of a nipple. Nora found
herself fingering her own gold cross as she hovered
closer. Bones were all that remained of the feet, and off
the femurs and shins, more white flesh wobbled like
jelly. White hipbones broke through the skin of the
pelvis.

She heard her own teeth grinding when she peered
again to the flesh-specked face. Loren was right;
clumped tresses of hair floated tentacle-like off the
scalp, too light to be brunet, but it seemed longer than
Annabelle's hair.

I'm pretty sure this isn't her.

But if it wasn't Annabelle ... who was it?

The intense grotesquerie of what she was looking at
felt as palpable as a gust of current. She wanted to
leave now, but ...

She knew she'd have to look closer for another moment, for any evidence that the worms might have
done this.

There were no ova on the body, but what about inside?

Aw, shit, I don't want to do this!

The cadaver's bare abdomen was stretched across
the hips tight as a drum skin, and as white. The belly
button was a concise pock against the bloodless flesh.
The idea of pulling the corpse ashore for a makeshift
autopsy was out of the question; it would fall apart at
the joints from the turbulence.

I'll part the belly a little, take a look inside ...

She shone down her flashlight, while her other hand
unsheathed her utility knife. She thought of grave robbing when she brought the tip of the blade to the
corpse's abdomen.

The sharp steel tip hadn't penetrated more than an
inch before three long pink ropes flew out of the cadaver's mouth.

Nora's heart felt stabbed. For a moment, she blacked
out from the shock of what she'd witnessed, dozens of
feet under water, in dead silence.

But there was her evidence.

The worms were a yard long each. They cork screwed away from her, their grotesque bright pink
skin shimmering.

Holy, holy, holy SHIT! she thought.

Then she froze in the water when a fourth, longer
worm shot out of the knife hole and wrapped around her
waist so quickly it was on her before she even saw it-

But when Slydes noticed the dead worms floating in
the bilge, he also noted that the bilge line seemed a little high.

This is turning into one FUCK of a shitty day, he
thought. My brother's dead, a bunch of fuckin' worms
somehow ate HOLES in my engine block, and now I
guess they ate holes in the hull, too!

Yes, the bilge line was very slowly rising. He leaned
back out of the engine compartment, veins thumping
at his temples.

"The boat's sinking!" he snapped to Ruth.

"The fuck it is!" she bellowed back.

"Come on!"

"Come on where, for shit's sake?"

Slydes was beginning to see the limits of his patience. He lowered his voice, his eyes hard on her. "Ruth. I just got done telling your dumb ass that the
boat's sinking. That means we need to be off the
boat."

Too much stress and confusion had taken too great a
toll on poor Ruth. Things just weren't working right
upstairs. "I don't wane go back on the island!"

"We ain't got much of a choice, do we?"

"The snakes! The zombie!"

Those worms are so damn big she thinks they're
snakes, he reminded himself. And Jonas had mentioned some big guy out there, who was all fucked up
from the worms, and something about military people
in gas masks. But it gave him an idea ...

"There's gotta be another boat somewhere on this island," he said.

"The photographer people!"

"Naw, they came by helicopter, but there's some
other people here. Jonas told me about 'em. We'll rip
off their boat."

"Fuck yeah!"

There wasn't much to salvage. Slydes grabbed the
flashlight, a knife, and some tools. "We'll hide out at
the head shack till dark, then find us a boat. Let's go."

Ruth, still dressed in nothing but the long pink
T-shirt, stood hesitantly on the side ladder, peering
down. "Slydes? There might be more worms in the
water."

Slydes took a handful of her hair and-

Splash!

-heaved her over the side, then stepped down after
her.

The tide was up now, the water up to their chins.
When they struggled ashore, Slydes looked back at his
former pride and joy.

The boat sank before his eyes.

"Annabelle!"

Loren was winding himself by the constant calling
out. He'd searched the entire north point of the islandAnnabelle hadn't been found at the campsite, shower, or
head shack area, and there was no sign of her on the
beach. Her camera and snorkeling gear were stowed in
her tent.

Where the hell is she! he thought in an uncharacteristic flare of anger. We might have a serious parasitic
threat going on here, and she's out lollygagging. He
stomped through more brush, whacking branches out
of the way. Every so often he'd see an ovum or two on
the trail, which he gladly stepped on. They popped like
bubble wrap.

The farther trails were so unpronounced they barely
existed. Pretty clear no one's walked here in years.
There was no reason to, even when the missile site was
up and running.

A cigarette butt on the ground looked relatively new.
None of us smoke, he reminded himself. The knowledge gave him a creepy feeling in his gut. Then he noticed something shiny. A quarter? he guessed.

Loren picked it up.

It was a cap from a beer bottle.

This wasn't terribly surprising: Trent said that college kids sneak on the island sometimes. But like the
cigarette butt, the cap looked brand-new.

Just as he thought the trail would diminish to nonexistence, it fanned outward. Loren followed it another
hundred yards and-

How do you like that?

-found himself standing at the edge of a wellenclosed lagoon. Anchored right off the rocky shore was a long-and very new-looking-boat. A Boston Whaler,
he knew at once. .A nice, pricey little pleasure boat.

So we're not alone here after all.

Loren didn't hesitate climbing aboard. The boat was
obviously unoccupied. Storage bins lining the deck were
filled with life jackets, towels, and assorted boating gear.

Damn...

No radio. But the boat hadn't been here long. At
least we can get off the island now, he realized. All we
have to do first is find the owner of this thing.

But then another thought drummed in his head.

That is, if the owner's still alive.

For all Loren knew, the owner of this Boston Whaler
and the rot-riddled corpse he'd found in the trench
were one in the same.

He needed to think. He sat down on a rolled-up tarp
in the aft area, but-

What the SHIT!

The tarp thrashed when he sat down on it.

"Get away, get away, get away!" a muffled voice was
suddenly shrieking.

Loren stumbled back at the shock.

There's someone under the tarp!

When the tarp came unraveled, a dark-haired young
woman emerged, just as terrified as Loren. She wore
bikini bottoms, a sweat-drenched T-shirt, and sneakers.
And the nearly insane look in her eyes didn't set Loren
at ease when he noticed what was in her shaking hand:

A big revolver.

"Don't shoot," Loren's voice cracked.

"Who are you?" she wailed.

Loren hoped he hadn't had an accident in his trunks.
"Loren Fredrick," he answered in a voice as shaky as
this woman's gun hand. "I'm an associate professor at
the University of Southern Florida. I'm here as part of
an escort group for a nature photographer-it's all spon sored by the college." Sweat was dripping into his eyes.
"Now, could you please put the gun down? I'm not
going to hurt you-I'm just looking for a way off the
island."

The pistol jiggled as she stared back at him, weighing his words. Finally, her gun hand lowered.

Thank you Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! "Now that you
know who I am, who are you? And whose boat is this?"

She sat at the aft rail, her hair disheveled, stringy
from the humidity. "My name's Leona Long," she said.
Her terror finally wound down. "I came here with some
friends-Carol, Howie, and Alan-this is Alan's boat."

"Came here to party?"

She nodded, and forearmed sweat off her brow.

"We need you and your friends to take us off this island," Loren told her. "Where are they now, and ...
Why were you under that tarp? It must be hot as hell
under all that thing."

Her eyes looked dull and lost when she gazed back at
him. "My friends are all dead. I was hiding here."

"Hiding from what?"

She spared a sardonic chuckle. "You have no idea
what's going on here, do you?"

The remark seized Loren. "Well, I think I do-at little, at least. Were you hiding from the worms?"

"Yes!" she cried. "You know about them? And those
little yellow bug things?"

"They're called motile ova," Loren explained. `They're
the worm's eggs. The worm itself is a kind of parasite that
we've never encountered before. We think that these
worms as well as their ova can infect humans."

"You think right," Leona asserted.

"So your friends were killed by-"

"Yes-Jesus-yes. The worms were actually growing
inside them. And I saw other bodies too; there was a group of students who came out here several weeks
ago. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one left alive. The only
thing I could think to do was hide here; I was hoping
someone would just ... find me, eventually." She
looked around groggily. "I hid under the tarp-I didn't
want those other guys to see me."

Loren's brow shot up. "What other guys?"

"There's military people on this island, too. I think
they put those worms here to see what they'd do to humans. They've got these little cameras all over the
place-they're monitoring us, for God's sake. It's like
we're part of some scientific test."

Now, here was some news. Military, Loren thought.
Cameras ... one of the things Nora found ... "And
you've seen these military men yourself?"

"Yes, a couple of times," she murmured. "They never
confronted any of us-they just kept back in the
woods. We'd catch glimpses of them. I even saw one of
them taking pictures of one of the bodies-after it had
been infected by the worms. They're in gas masks and
black suits with hoods."