More… spots seemed to be converging on the spots that her sweat had left. The more she stared, the more clear it became.
The spots were moving.
Fuckin' Jonas! He must've laced that pot with PCP or opium!
Ruth needed to know that; she needed an explanation that her mind could fathom. So she walked shakily to the middle of the floor, put her hands on her knees, and leaned over. She opened her eyes as wide as she could, and focused.
Some of the spots weren't drops of sweat. They were beetles or something-snot yellow with tiny red dots.
They encroached on the sweat drops, as if to drink. Then some of them began to inch toward Ruth's feet.
"Fuck this shit, man!" she declared and stumbled out of the shed.
The outside air revived her. Then, on her first stride toward the exit trail-
Flump!
Ruth fell flat on her face.
No profanity now could allay her frustration, no variations of her favorite transitive verb that began with the letter F. Instead, she sobbed loudly, pounding her small fists into the dirt. Dust from the ground stuck to her perspiry skin, smudged her cheeks, arms, and legs, while bits of leaves and other detritus hung in her blond hair. She looked like the Wild Woman of the Forest… save for the notion that the Wild Woman of the Forest probably wouldn't have breast implants or a cotton-candy-pink T-shirt that read YUCK FOO!
Ruth, in essence, was having perhaps the worst day of her life just now. For all she knew Jonas and Slydes had raped her in the woods last night and left the island without her. She felt nauseated, hungover, andcome to think of it-her… private regions hurt. She was hallucinating yellow bugs, and to top it all off, she'd just tripped and fallen flat on her face.
Finally, she cut loose and bellowed, "Fuck-fuck-fuckfuck-fuck-fuck-Fuck!" at the top of her lungs.
The forest fell silent; the emotional release putting her a little more at ease. But an added confusion slapped her in the face when she looked to see what she'd tripped over…
A portable camping grill.
The grill lay tipped over, and several overcooked hamburgers lay in the dirt, being feasted on by ants.
A portable grill?
And at the corner of the shed sat a cooler quite different from the one Slydes kept on the boat. Ruth kneed her way over, opened it, and discovered several bottles of beer and wine coolers.
This stuff hasn't been here that long…
The last thing Ruth needed was another mystery, but the identity of whoever owned the cooler became immaterial in the next second, when something that could only have been a hand slammed down on the back of her head and grabbed her hair.
She shrieked like a smoke alarm. The unseen figure shoved her face in the dirt and sat on her back, pinning her, and whoever he was seemed agitated by the noise she was making because each time she shrieked, he smacked her head into the ground.
Ruth only screamed a few times.
Dizzy now, and her vision dim, she felt herself being dragged yet again away from the shed. She was perhaps half conscious, her brain screaming to rebel, but any genuine attempts to fight back were enfeebled by her daze.
She was dragged into the leaves and flipped over. The shots to the head kept her from focusing. Her shorts were ripped open and yanked off, and then her top was hauled up, her breasts pawed by a hot, humid hand that seemed intent on milking out all the saline.
Something remotely similar to a human voice splat tered down into her face, uttering, "Shut up and lie still. It won't hurt much," or something like that.
When more of Ruth's vision cleared, she noticed that he'd dragged her back to where she'd been last night, her legs spread wide open to the deeper woods.
"Look," the voice gargled over her like someone with a rotten larynx. "There's more."
Before she could think, More what? Ruth looked down between her legs and saw-
The leaves… moving…
She remembered the rustling earlier, and she remembered seeing something moving beneath the leaves.
And whatever it had been began to come forth.
What Ruth saw vigorously wriggling forward was so revolting she nearly passed out altogether. Shock riveted her so completely that she was past screaming anymore.
Churning out of the leaves were several glistening, bright pink snakes, about the diameter of garden hose. No eyes could be discerned on the things, just that glaring, wet pinkness. The head of each one appeared to be tapered, even skull-less, with a small hole where the mouth should be.
They were shivering toward her, as if even in their blindness they sensed the presence of her body.
And they just kept coming, their tails never appearing from the underbrush.
Had she been less traumatized, she might have wondered how long they were, because right now they'd shivered out at least fifteen feet…
"Don't move," the phlegmatic voice ordered. it won't take long. Just lie there and keep your legs spread."
This was not the situation where Ruth would be favorable to such a command. But her daze began to fade, and more of her strength returned. She began to flail in the dirt, and shove her heels at the grotesque pink things, but each time she did, her captor tightened the grip on her hair and thumped her head back to the ground.
Don't let the fucker knock you out! she managed to order herself. Because if she were unconscious, she knew damn well where those snakes were going.
Instead of kicking out this time, Ruth lunged up, grabbed her attacker's own hair, and pulled. He was strong, though; he didn't come down, she went up, and-
Her attacker gargled out a splattering scream.
Ruth bit a sizable chunk of upper cheek right out of his face.
The hand released her hair, and Ruth got up and ran, just as the first of the snakes would've entered her vagina.
The roar of objection splattered behind her-a hideous, barely human sound-as Ruth's feet shot her away into the trees. She spat the chunk of cheek out of her mouth like a chunk of hot chewing tobacco.
Get out, get out, get out!
She stopped only for a split second, and looked around to see who the man was who'd tried to feed her to the shivering pink things.
She screamed again-louder than she ever had-for her attacker was barely a man at all but more like an erect cadaver, with eyes like raw oysters and enslimed yellow skin flecked with bright red spots.
Holy fucking shit! she thought, running. It's a fucking zombie…
(II)
Robb White's former mind was barely functioning by now, taken over by mutagens expelled by the aggressive ovum that were now well insinuated throughout the island. These microscopic pieces of viral proteins common among many species of invertebrates-had intricately mutated his instincts and motor responses by infecting his central nervous system. In other words, most of what existed between Robb's ears was now mutated porridge.
He could still talk a little, and still think a little less, but everything else was essentially overridden. He'd lived much longer than the friends he'd brought here, but then he was good strong stock, a jock, a college athlete, a health and physical education major. How could he have ever imagined that all his healthmindedness would only lengthen his life as a human carrier for mutated worm ovum? The few synapses that still fired dragged back the dimmest etchings of memories. Their weekend party on this little island hadn't lasted long before the others began to disappear-
And reappear later, but not in the best of shape.
By the time he knew he had no choice but to get back to his skiff-and abandon his friends-it was too late. He'd already been duly infected by those little yellow beetles or ticks or whatever. He would retain enough sentience, though, to figure that the disgusting little things probably had some direct connection to the ten-foot-long pink worms that had started showing up too. Before his own infection, he watched one coil about the voluptuous body of his latest girlfriend and burrow its head down her throat.