Worm Read online

  First Edition

  Worm © 2013 by Tim Curran

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  1

  Like most days, it began badly.

  Before Charise left for work, she told Tony to remember to walk Stevie. To take him out for a brisk run through the park to get his heart going and his blood pumping because it was good for his health and longevity. Not Tony’s, of course—hell, he was just her husband—but the dog. Stevie. Which was a perfectly gay sort of name for a dog as far as Tony was concerned, but then again Stevie was perfectly gay sort of dog: half-Pomeranian and half-poodle. Something dog-loving Charise called a lapdog and something Tony himself called simply embarrassing.

  Lapdog? No, it’s a boot-dog. In that when it starts yipping in its gay little voice you give it a kick.

  Charise did not find that funny at all. She also didn’t find it amusing when he asked her to get rid of the ugly little carpet-crawler and get a real dog: a Lab or a collie or shepherd.

  No, she scooped the little mutt up and kissed its homely pushed-in face. “But mama loves her little puppy, her little baby, her little Stevie-weevie.” Kiss, kiss, smooch-smooch. Jesus. It was enough to make you fucking sick.

  When Tony finally got his ass out of bed from his afternoon nap, stretched and yawned, the little beggar was waiting for him. And, oh boy, the look in his eyes. It was almost as if Stevie understood exactly how things worked. That Mama Charise tugged the purse strings and Tony was an unemployed slob, a second-class citizen, a subservient domestic that washed the floor and answered the phone, scrubbed the toilet and made casseroles and walked little Stevie-weevie and cleaned up his accidents on the living room carpet. That Mama Charise wore his balls on a choker chain around her throat and when she said jump, Tony asked not only how high but if he should do a fucking backflip and a double pirouette while he was up there.

  God, it was like the damn dog understood.

  “Okay, mutt,” Tony said. “Let me work the kricks out of my back and take a leak and then we’ll go.”

  Stevie barked…well, it was more of a little yip. If Gollum were a dog, he’d bark like that.

  Stevie stared at him. Okay, you lazy slob, but make it quick because I ain’t getting any younger here and my bladder ain’t what it once was, capiche?

  “Fuck you,” Tony said, aiming a kick at the mutt.

  Stevie dodged and glared his teeth. Then he made with the staring eyes again. You wanna watch it, you useless slug. I tell Mama about this and Mama will throw your dead ass out into the street. You don’t wanna make her choose between us. You don’t want that at all.

  The phone rang. Sighing, Tony grabbed up the cordless. “Yeah?” he said.

  “Hey, Tony.” Stephani from next door, she of the perfect body and blonde hair, the liquid green eyes that made his knees feel weak. “This is Steph. Charise told me to call you. Remind you to walk the dog.”

  “How considerate of her.”

  “Oooh, you sound cranky. Well, don’t shoot the messenger.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So what’s on your busy schedule today besides walking Stevie?”

  The sarcasm, the sarcasm. “I’m wide open today. Tonight, I got a date with a pool cue.”

  “Ooooo,” she said. “I’d like a date with a pool cue.”

  “Like it would be the first time.”

  “Ha. Well, I just got out of the shower and I can’t stand here naked, dripping all over everything, now can I?”

  Shameless little flirt. “I could bring over a towel,” he said, imagining it, picturing it in all its pornographic glory.

  “You wish. No, not this time. I’ll rub myself dry.”

  “You had your chance.”

  She laughed.

  Click.

  Ah, yes. Little Miss Perfect Stephani Kutak. She knew he wanted her as all men wanted her and it amused her. She was a little tease. Yet, for all of that, her little flirty phone calls were about the only bright spot in his somewhat dull existence. At least they broke up the monotony.

  Tony stumbled off into the bathroom, noticing that Charise had left a list of chores for him to do and errands to run. It wasn’t like the old days. No little heart drawn at the bottom of the list or Love ya, honey. Char! No, she knew his place and treated him as such. Just get it done, will ya? Tony sighed and made his way to the head. Christ, she left her curling iron out again, cans of hairspray and gel and facial goo, a dozen long, dark hairs in the sink he scrubbed out yesterday. It looked like something hairy was trying to claw its way up out of the drain.

  Sighing again, he freed his manhood, which didn’t look particularly manly today…kind of like a snail that was afraid to come out of its shell. He directed his stream, wondering what to make Her Highness for supper tonight. Stevie yipped impatiently again and Tony scowled.

  Then the house began to tremble.

  What the hell is that?

  Pissing was suddenly of little interest. The house shook enough to rattle the mirror over the sink. Right away, he thought maybe it was a big truck passing by—a very big truck—but that didn’t explain it. No, as absurd as it sounded, it was like a fist gripped the house and shook it like a snow globe.

  When it happened again, he knew it wasn’t coming from outside.

  It was coming from far below where the bad things grow.

  2

  Three doors down, Tessa Saldane gripped the arms of her recliner as a low-level rumbling shook everything up, knocking knickknacks off shelves and pictures off hooks. The windows rattled. A Currier & Ives print thudded to the hardwood floor of the dining room, its glass face shattering.

  This more than anything got her out of the recliner. She originally thought it was one of those damn jets again, coming in low on its approach to the Price County airport. Now and again, whether by design or accident, they liked to swoop down and set things to rattling as they passed over the rooftops of Pine Street and Twenty-first Avenue.

  But this was no jet.

  In fact, Tessa didn’t know what in the hell it was.

  When she got to her feet—and sometimes when she was settled in like that, it took some doing—it felt like the house was…well, wobbling. Like it wasn’t sitting on solid terra firma but something loose and rolling like Jell-O. As Tessa stood there, not daring to move, everything seemed to be in motion and she was sure she would be spilled to the floor violently. And when you’re on the wrong side of seventy like Tessa, an impact of that sort had a way of dislocating your knees and breaking your hips, neither of which would knit up quite the same again…if at all.

  So she stood there, feeling a disturbing fright down low in her belly that pushed cold, reaching fingers up into her chest.

  The house shook again and, dammit, she heard her mother’s Haviland eggshell tea set hit the kitchen floor and break into pieces.

  Lord, what now? Whatever now?

  Of course, she was thinking earthquake…but whoever heard of an earthquake in Camberly, which sat smack-dab in the middle of solid green-grassed, blue-skyed, hay-mowed Price County? This was the Midwest for godsake. Things like that might happen out in California and god-awful places like that—and Tessa wouldn’t have been the one to say they didn’t have it coming with the way they carried on out there—but not here.

  Now the rumbling, which sounded oddly like a very hungry belly, had ceased and was re
placed by a glub-glub-glub sort of noise. It reminded her of wet cement poured into a well-tamped sidewalk frame. Only it sounded not so much like it was poured, but gurgling up from a drain.

  By the time Tessa made her way to the picture window that looked out on green, serene Pine Street, the vilest sort of sewer smell filled the house. It definitely stank of drains, the backed-up kind. It was a rank odor of decay, subterranean drainage, and hot rotten egg sulfur. Gah.

  At the window, she felt herself deflate.

  So much for green and serene Pine Street. There was some kind of black muck oozing up through cracks in the street, flowing up and over curbs and washing into yards. As she watched, dumbfounded, the green grass was drowned in a sluicing black, fetid flow and a great mound began to rise from Bertie Kalishek’s front yard across the street. It was like a great bubble expanding beneath the grass. It had to be twelve or fifteen feet across.

  It kept rising like a cake, the sod splitting open above it like the flesh of a diseased sore, black muck draining from it like pus. About the time the bubble, or whatever it was, had the circumference of a child’s wading pool and stood tall as a man…it burst. Like a boil, it popped open, exploding with a spray of black goo that spattered the exterior of the Kalishek house.

  It looked like a giant had thrown a handful of loose, runny shit right at the neat white clapboarding.

  The black muck that built up under the bubble flowed through the yard, slopping up against the porch steps. Like an open wound, it continued to bleed in copious quantities until the Kalisheks’ yard was…gone, drowned under a good two or three feet of gushing black foulness.

  Tessa didn’t know what it was.

  She thought at first it was oil.

  But this wasn’t Oklahoma and this stuff was too thick, too congested, too much like plain old mud from a river bottom…smelled like it, too, only worse. It occurred to her—and not without some humor—that it looked much like diarrhea, black and sloshing and even foul (though foul isn’t the word she thought originally but unclean).

  God only knew what diseases and contaminates the stuff might carry.

  The very idea made her shudder.

  As Tessa continued to watch, the spit drying up in her mouth, she noticed more bubbles rising. Immense things that expanded with a rubbery, tearing sort of sound as they split open lawns. One of them—at the Desjardins’ down the block—rose up an easy ten or fifteen feet and another—at the Jungs’—was twice that size, like an immense cancerous blister on the good old earth. It lifted up most of the Jungs’ front yard, the sidewalk and driveway cracking open like sheets of ice. A rickety potting shed in the side yard tipped over and shattered.

  You should call somebody, you should do something, Tessa thought as the Kalisheks’ front porch was turned into scrap wood by yet another bubble. Black goo flooded through the neighborhood in a rising tide. There was another low rumble and the ground shook.

  Pressure was building below.

  One after the other, more bubbles popped like suppurating wounds, their blood splashing out in dark, fluid tangles. There was a thudding, creaking noise and a manhole cover exploded into the air and hit the curb with a clanging sound, gouging out a chunk of concrete. Instead of sinking into the goo, it rolled right through the Mackenridges’ front yard, splitting Kathleen’s wishing well right in two before smashing into the porch. Though the mouth of the manhole itself was underneath the black, boggy river now, its location was marked by a constant glub-glub-glub as more of that filth bubbled out, gushing and rippling.

  Two doors down, Tessa saw Mr. Green waddle through the slop to his car and jump in. He backed out into the street and became instantly mired. He tried rocking the car back and forth; then it stalled. He jumped out, swearing and shouting, slipping beneath the muck and coming up looking like he’d been tarred.

  Tessa couldn’t help giggling under her breath at that.

  Glub-glub-glub.

  She turned. This time it was coming from inside not outside. It made her shiver…it was a very bad sort of sound.

  A piercing scream echoed outside, somewhere down the block, and Tessa tensed with terror. The scream came again, then faded off into a lot of yelling and shouting. She tried to see through the window where it was coming from, but couldn’t.

  “God, what now?”

  When she looked back for Mr. Green, he was nowhere to be seen. His car looked like an island out there in the fuming cesspool of mud. One door was still open. People were gathered on porches but no other fools were willing to join him for a dip in the slimy muck.

  Glub-glub-glub.

  Dammit. There it was again.

  Tessa crossed the living room and traced the sound to the bathroom. The sink was half-full with bubbling black sludge. The toilet water looked like ink. And again, using bathroom analogies, she decided it looked like the mother of all messy dumps.

  Glub-glub-glub.

  From the kitchen!

  Pained and distressed, Tessa arrived to see glops of chunky black ooze dropping from the faucet into her shiny clean stainless steel sink. Plop, plop, plop. More of it dropped, looking almost like it was ejected from pressure.

  Oh, not my new sink, not my new sink.

  She instinctively grabbed the spigot, hoping to wash that filth down into the drain. No water came out, just more of the glistening ebon slush.

  And this was all bad enough with the mess and the stink that reamed out her nose, but in the three or so inches of slop, she saw movement.

  Not bubbling.

  Something else.

  A weird, almost serpentine shape.

  There was something alive in the sink.

  3

  Sitting on his porch, Geno Desjardins watched the muck flowing in sluicing, gelid channels through the neighborhood. It was already lapping up to the third stair on the porch. The mess and the smell were bad enough, but the cleanup would be very expensive, astronomical even. It would drive everyone’s insurance rates right through the roof and the time it would take…not good.

  He’d just gotten off his cell with his brother on the other side of Camberly and the muck was in the streets over there, too, filling them like a cup.

  What a fucked-up mess.

  Ivy came out and handed Geno a beer that he nearly emptied on the first swallow. She sat down, nervously puffing on a cigarette, a Benson & Hedges 120. It looked like a long, sleek white missile, afterburners blazing as she puffed on it.

  “It’s getting worse,” she said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Should we try and drive out of it?”

  “In that?”

  Exasperated, scared, smoke fuming from her nostrils like foundry stacks, she said, “Well, anything would be better than drowning in it…don’t you think?”

  “It won’t rise much more.”

  “Says you.”

  Geno ignored her. It was a hobby of his. He’d already been on the phone with Public Works and they were responding to similar incidents all over town. The mayor had contacted the governor and the National Guard was being mobilized to set up temporary structures outside of town for those forced from their homes. The Army Corps of Engineers was on its way.

  All of which was great, Geno figured. He was glad to see his tax dollars at work. But none of it answered one very basic question: what in the hell was this stuff? It wasn’t sewage exactly or mud or gray water or seepage, but maybe some weird combination of all those things and a few others to boot.

  Disgusting, that’s what.

  “We’ll wait it out for the time being. If it gets too deep, we’ll make a run for it.”

  But Ivy didn’t like that in the least.

  She was far too hyper and far too neurotic to sit around waiting. She paced from one end of the porch to the other, mumbling under her breath and chain-smoking. She favored Virginia Slims 120s. They were as long as No. 2 pencils. She’d smoke one halfway down, frantically puffing at it, then toss it over the railing and fire up another one
. In the fifteen minutes she’d been on the porch, she’d killed three of them.

  Geno knew better than to mention the fact.

  “Look,” she said.

  He turned and peered across the street.

  Mr. Green was backing out into the sludge, trying to make a break for it. His car dogged out almost instantly. Geno chuckled low under his breath as Green got out, slipped and went under, came up swearing and snorting.

  “Aren’t you going to help him?” Ivy wanted to know.

  “Let me think about it,” he said. Then: “No.”

  Why the hell would he help Green? The guy was a prying, spying, nosey asshole who constantly called the police on his neighbors for everything from backyard bonfires to loud music to their garages not being up to code.

  No, this was entertainment. He wasn’t about to help that tubby sonofabitch.

  Green kept slipping and sliding, covered in black mud now.

  Everyone in the neighborhood was watching, but nobody was helping. The comedy was too rich, like discovering Buster Keaton for the first time.

  Ivy was mad, of course. She stalked into the house and slammed the screen door. She would go back into the kitchen now, Geno knew, and reorganize the cupboards for the fifth or sixth time, making sure all the spices were arranged alphabetically.

  He finished his beer, giggling at Green.

  Then Ivy screamed.

  4

  Eva Jung sat at the kitchen table, studying her fingers on the tablecloth. They were the one thing she took great comfort from, those long, slender fingers of hers. Though the knuckles were now arthritic and swollen, the fingers themselves were still quite handsome, she thought, the nails smooth and manicured.

  Though she was by all appearances a frail woman and most on Pine Street believed she wasn’t exactly baking with a hot oven, Eva’s mind was quite sharp. Sharp enough to know her neighbors were conspiring against her. They disliked her because her grass was often too long and her weeds unplucked, her fence falling over and the house badly in need of painting…but these things were not her fault. Leonard was no longer here and he had always taken care of such things. She hired a boy to attend to the yard work in the summer, but only once a month.