"Because it's too fucked up," she didn't hesitate to profane. "Us not knowing what this worm is would be like a military history professor not knowing the date of the Battle of Hastings."
"October fourteen, 1066," Loren said. "The English were winning the battle until their king, Harold the First, caught a flaming arrow in the face."
"Oh, Loren. You really are a hopeless nerd."
"1 know, but your point is well taken. These worms are big-time super-duper screwed up. They shouldn't even be in an environment like this. They look like land-dwelling worms, but we know they're marine because they attacked a lobster. And that means their motile ova are water-dwelling, too, but we found a much larger version of the same ova in the shower and on Trent's shirt-hundreds of yards away from the closest seawater. Which means they're obviously land dwellers."
Nora sprang up in her seat. "Wait a minute. We took samples of the shower ova, didn't we?*
"Yeah. I vialed a bunch of them up.7
'Let's compare them directly to the ova from the lobster."
'Why didn't I think of that?"
"Because I'm the boss."
They both hustled to one of the other tables where they'd placed their specimens. The small plastic saltwater tanks Loren had hooked up for the scarlet bristleworms bubbled away from their air pumps. Loren's hand eagerly reached for the vials he put the ovum in, but-
"What the hell!"
Nora stared.
The small vials were all empty.
Loren held several up to the overhead lights. "They're burned through at the bottoms. It's like the ova melted the plastic and got out."
"There's a few of them there." Nora pointed.
Several of the grotesque yellow nodes were inching up the wall. "The ova must possess the same corrosive enzymes of the worms that bred them."
"Chitin-penetrating and plastic-penetrating," Loren remarked. His mouth fell open when he turned his head. "Hey, Nora…"
"What?"
"Look at the tanks."
Nora lowered her face to the pair of mini aquariums. "Holy shit!" she yelled. "They've infected the bristleworms!"
In the farthest tank, all of the scarlet bristleworms had at least one yellow ovum attached to their bodies. The worms themselves shuddered. But events had progressed further in the closer tank.
Several ova lay dead on the tank's floor. But the bristleworms they'd attacked seemed to throb, and were bloated from within. The worms were still alive but barely moving. Then one of them-
"Unbelievable!" Loren exclaimed.
The bristleworm began to disgorge a slew of much tinier worms.
Within a few minutes, the other bristleworms in the tank did the same, until the water was tinted pink with so many tiny worms.
Nora was flabbergasted.
"Like the Tessae worms in central Africa," Loren murmured. "And the-"
"And some of the Trichinella family. Our little pink parasite has the ability to attack a different annelid species with free-ranging ovum and force it to bear its young."
But the revelations didn't stop there. Nora and Loren squinted harder as the minuscule newborn worms began to slither en masse up the face of the tank. Eventually they were twitching out over the side.
I'm starting to get a little freaked," Loren said in a low drone. "They're coming out of the friggin' water, Nora."
"Just wait a minute. It won't take them long to die. They have to suffocate…"
They waited for another minute, then another.
"Jesus…"
Ten minutes later, the newborn worms hadn't died. They were all out of the tank and moving across the table.
"Well, how many impossibilities can we take for one day?"
"A marine worm with air-breathing capabilities," Nora said very slowly. "Every worm in the world that can do this has been exhaustively catalogued." Her face felt hot in aggravation. "There's no way-no fucking way in the world-that an annelid like this could remain uncatalogued."
"No fucking way in the world, huh?" Loren directed his displeasure in the obvious direction of the mass of worms. They were moving toward them on the table. And the bean-sized ova that had crawled up the wall, too, had changed direction now, once Loren and Nora had come over to the table.
"They're detecting our presence," Loren said.
"Fibrotic sensory pores," Nora guessed. "They're reading the carbon dioxide we exhale-which triggers their instinct ganglia that a potential host is near."
"Uh-huh, and I -don't want to find out what happens if one of those little things gets on me."
Nora sloughed that one off. "If one of them got into your bloodstream, your immune-system. would kill it."
"Yeah? I'm not going to wait for my immune system to do the job." Loren picked up a can of mosquito spray. Nora was about to object-they were specimensbut…
Not a bad idea, she recanted. The chlordane and diethyl-meta groups in the repellent would kill the worms just as it had killed the ova in the shower stall. The just-hatched worms on the table were so tiny yet so abundant that they looked more like spilled pink lemonade-lemonade that moved of its own instincts.
Loren smirked as he sprayed down the table and wall. He sprayed more directly into the tanks.
In a few moments, the ova on the wall dropped off dead, and the worms shriveled and died.
"So much for them," Loren said.
"Loren the Worm Killer. But we're going to have to preserve some of these and take them to Florida Natural Resources. I guarantee you, they don't know about this. Chitin-penetrating parasites like these? That reproduce this actively and can attack multiple hosts? If these things broke out, they could decimate the gulf's crustacean harvest."
"Well, at least only one lobster was infected," Loren noted, calmed down now. "This could be a fluke infection, you know."
Could be, Nora thought. Maybe it was a lucky hit on the part of the worm. But if they wiped out these bristleworms that easily, it could wipe out an entire food chain.
Loren had used the lab's forceps to place one of the dead shower ovum under his microscope. "These are the same, Nora. Just a lot bigger."
Nora had figured as much. The hunch wouldn't let go. She took Loren's slide and placed it under her own dual-lensed scope, to properly compare the dead ova against the smaller ones mixed with the worms from the lobster. When she switched on both fields…
"Oh my God."
"What"
"See for yourself," Nora said.
Loren looked in the comparator scope. He only looked for a second before he lifted his eyes away.
"Oh my God is an understatement," he said.
Nora had seen it first, and wanted clarification.
The tiny worms from the lobster weren't so tiny anymore. They filled the entire space of the slide's viewing perimeter now, and the ova in their proximity could now easily be detailed.
Loren stood erect, dumbfounded. Confusion made his eyes looked glazed. "This can't be."
"Tell me about it," Nora said. "Those things are ten times bigger than they were twenty minutes ago."
Loren nudged her back to the microscope. "Look back in there," he said, a little jittery now. "Keep your eye on them fora full minute, then tell me your observations."
Nora did so.
She knew what he was driving at in significantly less than a minute.
She could actually see the worms and ova growing before her eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
(I)
"What do you make of it, Sergeant?" the colonel asked, having made a rare appearance from his makeshift field office. The sergeant had logged the observed activity at the old head shack, believing it to be "atypical."
We must be getting ready to leave, the sergeant pondered. Why's he so interested in a bunch of civilians all of a sudden?
The corporal was manning the monitor controls, zooming the military's very best lenses, but he seemed more fixed on the slender woman with frizzed hair. Have to get that kid's mind out of the garbage, the sergeant thought.
"Look at that," the colonel said. The image onscreen lurched forward from the zoom: a closer shot of the slender woman in the dark one-piece swimsuit. She was leaning over a computer now, typing something. The colonel added, "I don't like it. It looks like she's recording data. Data on what?"