First she screamed.
Then she went wild with hysteria.
Barely staying on her feet, she spun around, waving her arm up and down and to both sides to throw the thing. And as she did so, she felt more agony in her wrist. It was not just biting, it was chewing. Raging and flailing her arm, just wild with panic and pain, she managed to throw the thing. It thudded against the face of the cupboard, leaving a nasty brown-black stain like a splattered turd, and then dropped, hitting the breadbox and rolling off to the countertop.
It was not moving now.
Just sort of vibrating, trembling.
Tessa looked down at her wrist and nearly went out cold. It had eaten right through her skin to the muscles and tendons below. Blood ran down her arm, dyeing her hand red. She heard it striking the floor: plop, plop, plop.
She staggered and swayed, feeling light-headed. Whether that was from shock and trauma or loss of blood, she did not know. She tried to keep on her feet. She tried to keep conscious. She knew that everything depended on what she did now. Stumbling over to the stove, she pulled a towel from the bar and wrapped her wrist in it, then wrapped another around it until it was swaddled like a baby.
But the blood… dear God.
It was all over her. It was on the floor. There was a crazy whorl of it on the wall, spattering the needlework GOD BLESS OUR KITCHEN hanging. There was dark irony there and she knew it. She had to call an ambulance before she bled out.
The muck… the muck in the streets! They’ll never get through it… not in time.
No, but her neighbors. The Desjardins, the Mackenridges… she’d seen them out on their porches watching the flooding mud. They would help her. But she had to get to them.
She started toward the kitchen doorway, her slippered feet crunching over the remains of her mother’s tea set.
She began to get woozy right away.
Her mouth tasted dry and sweet.
Her vision was blurring.
Oh, she was feeling it now and more than just her throbbing wrist. She was seventy-seven years old and she’d been jumping around like she was fifteen. Her back was filled with needles, her knees aching, and her left hip felt like it might pop out of its socket at any minute.
The phone.
She fumbled it from its cradle, leaving a bloody smear over the stainless steel face of the oven. She leaned against the counter above the dishwasher. She thumbed a few buttons. No, dammit, try again! But she couldn’t make her mind focus. For the life of her she couldn’t remember anyone’s number. The O’Connors. Yes. Just up the block. Their number was scribbled on the edge of the dry-erase board. She had bought Girl Scout cookies from their daughters.
The phone was picked up right away.
“Fern,” Tessa managed. “Help me… I’ve been attacked…”
The phone slid from her bloody fingers.
The thing wasn’t on the counter by the sink anymore.
God, where is it? Where is that awful thing?
A dirty black trail led across the counter, past the spice rack and right over to—
It was less than six inches from her right arm.
It was no snake, she saw that much now.
A huge, fat-bodied worm that was reddish brown in color, finely segmented like a millipede, and completely eyeless… yet it seemed to be looking at her. Its rear section coiling and uncoiling, the anterior end rising like a rattlesnake preparing to strike.
Tessa took all this in within microseconds.
She saw the forward segment of the anterior end pull back like a set of lips, revealing a gaping maw that was pink as bubble gum and set with rows and rows of hooked teeth that were sharp as roofing nails. They were stained with her blood.
This was what she saw.
The worm made a hissing th-th-th-th-th-th sort of sound.
Then it vaulted up and bit into her face. The next thing Tessa knew, she was on the floor and the worm had her. As it bit down again for a better hold, the liplike segment rolled back even more and the teeth slid farther from the gums like a shark chomping down on meat until Tessa’s face was firmly impaled.
She was barely conscious by that point.
Moaning, groaning, trembling… but little more.
From somewhere distant, it seemed, she could feel the teeth digging in deeper, chewing and chewing, and the enormous suction of the worm’s mouth as her left eye was sucked from its socket with a moist popping noise.
There was no pain. Just the gulping, slobbering sounds of the worm itself as it fed on her.
8
“Pat?”
Kathleen looked back toward the truck in the driveway. She saw the sluicing river of muck surrounding it, but nothing else.
“Pat?”
Maybe he’d stepped around the other side of the truck. It rose so high on its frame that she wouldn’t have seen him. It was silent out there save for the gelatinous sound of the pooling mud flowing and sloshing. She swallowed, trying to make sense of things.
She had her back turned to him.
She was going into the house to gather up baby Jesse and whatever else she could throw together in the precious few minutes it would take Pat to back the truck up to the porch. She grasped the doorknob, let herself in… and then she heard a sort of grunting sound like he’d been kicked in the stomach, followed by a splashing.
When she’d got back out there, Pat was just… gone.
Filled with an electric, nearly hysterical energy, Kathleen jogged down the steps and into the muck, nearly losing her footing in the slippery goo. It smelled even worse when she disturbed it, hot and gaseous.
“PAT?” she cried. “PAT? PAT!”
He was nowhere to been seen and she instantly switched into panic mode. The only possible explanation was that he had slipped, fell back and struck his head against the truck and gone under. There was only about three feet of the muck, but it was more than enough to hide a body. The stuff wasn’t like water… it was thick and stagnant like river mud. He might not have floated to the surface as easily as he might have in water.
Don’t freak out. Don’t waste time, but definitely don’t freak out. Do what you have to do calmly, quickly, and efficiently.
She heard the words in her head, but they were completely lost on her. She dropped into the fetid muck on her knees and felt it seep into her pants and begin to fill her boots. It was not cold, but unpleasantly warm like something living. Frantically, she dug around through the goo. If he had indeed hit his head, she would feel him in there. He had to be right next to the truck.
But he wasn’t.
As she dug around, practically flailing at the muck now, its polluted stench filling her head and nearly making her giddy, she shouted out, “OVER HERE! I NEED SOME HELP OVER HERE! PLEASE!”
Not ten minutes before, people had been clustered on porches and now there was no one. She dug around by the truck, reaching beneath it even, nearly breaking the steaming surface of the muck with her face.
Pat wasn’t there.
He just wasn’t.
On her hands and knees, she crawled through the filth around the other side of the truck, crying out and sobbing. She dug and pawed around in the muck and then she looked up at the truck itself. It was white, pearl white, but now there were bright red rivulets running down the passenger door like an immense amount of blood had splashed against it and was only now draining away.