“Tony? Tony? Is Stevie okay?”
No, some gerbils beat the hell out of him and then gang-fucked him. Sorry, hon. Now how’s about we get a real dog? One that I don’t have to feel ashamed of?
“He’s fine. He’s pussying up in the corner as usual.”
“Tony!”
“Be nice if you asked about me sometime.”
“Be serious,” she said.
“I thought I was.”
She sighed heavily. “Well, just sit tight. They’re supposed to be evacuating people.”
“Tell ’em to hurry. The only meat in the house is your fucking hamster and he’s going on the barbie at five sharp.”
“Tony! You can’t—”
Crackle, crackle.
“Charise? Char?”
Nothing. No bars. No service. For once, he was thankful for their shitty cell provider.
Stevie yipped and Tony threw the phone at the miserable little rat-dog. More yipping. More hopping and nails scratching over the tile floor. Keep it up, you little fairy. Mama ain’t nowhere around. You get out of line and you’re going out into the muck. Stevie seemed to understand; he quieted right away.
Well, since there was nothing to do but wait it out, Tony lit a cigarette and sighed with satisfaction. Charise didn’t allow smoking in the house. Too fucking bad. What did it matter now? Goddamn place was sinking like a brick.
Glug, glug.
As he watched, some oily black ooze dripped from the faucet and splatted into the sink. Not good. Well, Charise was right then: it was coming up from below.
Pulling off his cigarette, Tony went over to the head to drain the vein. Maybe circumstances were dire, but there was no need to suffer with a full bladder. He pulled himself out and started to pee. There. That was better. When he finished, he flushed… and left the seat up. Most men generally forgot, he knew, and pissed off their wives. Then there were the other guys who did it on purpose because their wives were infatuated with butt-ugly dogs and—
What the fuck now?
The toilet flushed, making a weird gurgling sound like it was choking on what it had swallowed… then it barfed up something: a black, shifting mass. It was stuffed into the siphon hole at the bottom rear of the tank. Something shiny like wet rubber. His first thought was that Charise dropped a real bomb and it had come slinking its way back up, but, no, it wasn’t that at all.
Hell is that?
Stevie yipped.
“Quiet,” Tony grumbled.
Now, if it was your ordinary large but inoffensive turd down there, it would slowly, through suction, be drawn farther into the siphon. But the reverse was true. This… object… was pushing its bulk into the tank, not being pulled out. It had to be more of that crap coming through the lines. The water began to darken like India ink.
The mass at the very bottom continued to expand.
Tony’s eyes widened.
That shiny mass began to look very much like a blunt snout.
He stepped back as the snout pushed its way into the bowl with a slow, oily, corkscrewing motion. It was alive. It was moving. Not being moved by the water or suction, but moving on its own accord.
Shit.
He thought of those stories about snakes getting into the plumbing. Maybe they weren’t urban legends after all.
The thing… snake, worm… whatever in the hell it was, twisted itself out of the siphon. Tony tripped over his own feet and fell backward, thumping the back of his head against the tub and seeing a few stars.
Flat on his back, he heard Stevie come padding in.
Stevie looked down at him as the thing splashed around in the bowl. What’d you do this time, fool? the look in Stevie’s eyes seemed to say, but Tony was not very interested in what Stevie was thinking or not thinking because he saw the snout of the thing peeking up over the rim of the toilet like a cobra rising from a snake charmer’s basket.
Stevie cocked his little head and yipped.
Tony made a gasping sound in his throat, pulled himself up on his ass and shoved Stevie back into the living room. By the time he found his feet, scrambling to them with white fear breaking loose in his chest, the thing had filled the toilet… and then the toilet exploded.
It went off like a bomb with a thundering eruption, porcelain flying in shards, water and filthy goo spraying up the walls and flooding the bathroom floor.
The thing was loose.
Tony saw it coiled among the remains of the bowl. He figured it was probably an easy three or four feet in length, stout and evil-smelling. It writhed and looped like an earthworm in the sun, dirty brown going to slate gray, its segmented body exuding a clear slime.
It had no eyes.
But it did have a mouth.
With a hissing sound, the mouth opened, seeming to shrivel back from pink jaws lined with long, needlelike teeth… many, many teeth. So many, they were like the spokes of a bike tire.
It was getting ready to strike.
With a cry, Tony tossed the clothes hamper at it just as it moved. It bought him bare seconds but no more. It was not stopped by the hamper, not in the least. In fact, it drilled right through it, corkscrewing with immense velocity and punching through the wicker in a cloud of fragments.
Tony managed to throw the door shut behind him.
But he had no time to secure the lock.
The creature hit the inside of the door with such force that it slammed shut. It hit it again and put a dent in it, the wood splintering as it split lengthwise. Then, from the other side, a sound like the claws of a dozens rats scratching manically… but Tony knew it was not claws but teeth. The thing was chewing right through the fucking door.
Stevie was yipping.
Tony was speechless.
He stood there uneasily, tense with fear and anxiety, his own voice droning in his head: Am I seeing this? Am I really fucking seeing this? A monster from the toilet? A beast from the bowl? But by then those teeth on the other side had eaten through, tearing a hole right through the door. The hole wasn’t big enough for it to fit through, not just yet.
But it was determined.
Unbelievably, savagely determined.
Tony knew he had to keep pressure against the door or the damn thing would knock it right off its hinges, but there was no way he was pressing his back against it. He could just about imagine what that thing would do to his unprotected back if it went through the hamper that quickly and chewed a hole in the door itself.
Christ, he didn’t want to think about it.
Stevie continued to yip and Tony shouted at him to shut up, which, as usual, only got him yipping that much louder and that much more shrilly.
The worm—Jesus, it had to be a worm because it sure as hell wasn’t a snake—kept hitting the door with maximum thrust. The door was only a cheap panel job. Something designed to look nice, but with absolutely no tensile strength. It was cracking open. Chips of paint and wood splinters were flying in the air.
It gnawed another hole through.
Tony was glad he pissed or he would have gone right down his leg by that point.
Think! Think! Think! There’s gotta be something you can do!