The Squirming Read online

  He’s dying. You know he’s dying. He’s probably lost too much blood now to stay conscious. He’s in shock and death will be next.

  What are you going to do about that?

  With a sinking feeling of utter despair, Kurta knew there was nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t in very good shape himself by that point and the only thing that had kept him going was the idea of getting the kid back to the bunker. That was the light at the end of the tunnel for him.

  Now it had been extinguished.

  Funny, really, when you thought about it. He’d been strong all day, fighting and killing and barely surviving, and now, when he needed it the most, it just wasn’t there. It was gone. Really gone. Giggling, he opened up his suit. He found his cigarettes, lit one, and sat next to West, back up against the wall. They looked like a couple guys kicking back after a long day.

  Footsteps were coming.

  Kurta still sat there, the Ithaca across his knees. He knew he should get up, but he was just done in, physically and mentally and maybe even spiritually in that his will to fight was gone.

  The light reflecting off the opposite wall showed him a shape approaching.

  “We’re over here,” he said.

  There was a gurgling noise and a grinding of teeth. A sluggo approached. He supposed it had been a woman once by the breasts, but other than that, it was really hard to tell. She wore her skin like a baggy coat that was splattered with gore and drainage, her eyes glazed white and sightless. She was still deadly even though she couldn’t see. By the size of her slug-sack, it was obvious she wasn’t long for this world and soon the happy event would be realized: the birth of a creeper.

  “Grrrrrghhhhllllgggg,” she muttered, seeming to choke on the greenish foam and pink fluid issuing from her mouth in gobby rivers and dangling ribbons.

  “Shit, yes,” Kurta said.

  Which drew her in his direction like some terrible wind-up soldier. Her face was caked with open sores, split and lacerated, bearded with dried blood.

  Hands reaching for him, Kurta sighed, stuck the cigarette in his mouth and brought up the Ithaca. He jerked the trigger and she jerked as if she had been kicked. The round punched a hole in her chest and exploded out of her back, taking not only the fragments of her heart with it but sections of spinal vertebrae and a great, gushing quantity of fluid that splashed over the walls like an emptied pail.

  He stood up, taking one last drag from his stale cigarette and flicking it away. It sizzled out in the fleshy wreckage of the woman’s corpse. Without his helmet on, the stench was hot and putrid, unbearably gassy.

  He saw two more coming and possibly a third.

  And if his ears did not deceive him, more from the opposite direction. Well, it was high noon and time for a showdown. He figured this might be his last one, so he was going to go down shooting.

  38

  The Pole made it to the second floor, but when he got out into the corridor there were dozens and dozens of slugheads wandering about like shoppers gathering for a blue light special. Trying to shoot them all was silly. There was only one thing to do and that was to run. He charged past them, knocking more than a few aside in his mad grab at freedom. They clawed and tore at him and one little girl actually suctioned herself to his leg, but he bashed her with the butt of the riot gun. Another boy made a leap for him, and The Pole grabbed him in mid-air and used his own velocity to propel him over the railing where he splatted below.

  The escalator.

  It was the quickest way down. He knocked aside more sluggos, noticing with growing unease that dozens and dozens of them were pouring out of the stores. Most were walking. Some were crawling. Many others were writhing like worms.

  He didn’t want to know what that was about.

  He blew the head off a large sluggo and tried to quickly jog down the escalator…but the steps were slick with blood and drainage, tissue and bones and body parts from Ex-Two. About half way down, as some sluggos from above followed in hot pursuit, he stepped into the husk of a corpse, lost his footing, and went bouncing down the rest of the way. The helmet protected his head from getting split open, but he twisted his ankle.

  But even so, he moved rapidly once he got going.

  God, the place was burning down. At the far end of the corridor, everything was on fire. Burning sluggos were stumbling about, dropping, trying to get up. When they couldn’t, they crawled. The smoke was so thick he couldn’t see anything. Only the filter of his helmet kept him from going to his knees. But it would be fouled before long.

  He felt along the wall, gimping forward, searching for an EXIT sign. They were everywhere. He would find one soon. Just outside of Wet Seal, he paused, certain he heard footsteps keeping pace with him.

  He waited.

  He could hear the slugheads out there, some very close, screaming and howling in pain. Good. Let them all die. Let them all die horribly.

  “As long as I don’t die with them,” he said to himself.

  As he moved on, he was almost certain he was hearing those damn footsteps again. He followed the wall a little farther then, dammit, there they were. Every time he stopped, they stopped. It was getting under his skin. Worse, it was crawling right up his spine.

  He kept trying to rationalize it in his mind.

  His external mic was malfunctioning or just picking up a weird echo of his own footfalls. He was fatigued, ready to drop. He was practically melting in his hotsuit. The filter was probably going bad with all the damn smoke. All these things combined could have been messing with his head, making him giddy or delusional.

  But you’re not delusional, he told himself, and you know it.

  He stopped again.

  If it was just a sluggo—and what else could it be?—then why didn’t it just show itself?

  He could deal with that.

  He could wrap his brain around that.

  Trying to regulate his breathing, he realized he’d been standing there for some time, panicking, staring into the hot smoke that boiled around him in funneling clouds. He was seeing faces in it. Forms. Reaching figures. Horrible creeping shadows. All of them pressing in…tighter…and tighter…because HE WAS ABOUT TO DIE—

  “Stop it!” he said.

  He had to control his fear, master it, make it work for him as Kurta always said. That was it. Be smooth so nothing stuck to you. Be cool. Be ice. That was the thing because if he did that, then he’d walk out of this alive. He’d be the sole survivor and people at the bunker would—

  Then a shape moved past him in the smoke. A hunched-over troll-like shadow that darted in, then retreated before he could really see it.

  With a cry, he fired into the smoke.

  Something shrieked with a high-pitched wailing.

  Got you.

  He hobbled away from the wall. He was going to put this fucker down for good, blow his or her ass out through the top of their head.

  A figure jumped out at him—a crooked-backed woman whose upper body was a glistening mass of blood. He couldn’t see much of her face through her tangled grease-clotted hair, but he could see her eyes and they were like black bullet holes.

  She actually moved so quickly that she managed to get her rat-like paws on the barrel of the Ithaca about the same time he pulled the trigger, vaporizing her chest and dropping her just as fast.

  But there were others.

  The gunshots had drawn them.

  They came vaulting out of the smoke, deranged and screaming, demonic things who attacked from every side. He got off two more rounds before the riot gun was ripped from his hands. He tried to draw his Colt Python and something struck his wrist with a devastating impact. He heard the bone snap and a jolt of white-hot pain went right up his arm.

  As he cried out in agony, he saw one of them—a teenage kid, a fucking teenage kid—standing there with a baseball bat which he’d probably liberated from the display over at Pro Image.

  By then, the others had hold of him.

  He thrashe
d wildly, trying to break free, but it was just no good.

  The bat came down again, and this time it hit his face bubble, leaving a broad white scratch in the Acrylite glass. It came down again and again, spider-webbing the glass with cracks and jarring The Pole nearly senseless.

  Then they all got in on the act, kicking and stomping him, punching-in ribs and fracturing his right arm. One of them—a child—seized his twisted ankle in her teeth, biting down with punishing force on the torn, swollen tissues.

  As he screamed with raw terror and pain, they were pummeling him. They had his legs and arms and they were trying to pull him apart. With the fractured and broken bones, it was sheer agony.

  In his mind, a voice screamed, Help me! Oh Jesus Christ, somebody help me! Get them off me! Don’t let me go out like this! DON’T LET ME FUCKING DIE LIKE THIS!

  His helmet was yanked from his head and the sluggos squealed with delight. They jumped and chattered, snarled and snapped their teeth like blood-hungry baboons. Faces that were blistered and peeled, eyeless and ulcerated, cracked open and suppurating, pressed into his own. A girl with a face like a soft, rotten apple squirmed through the mass of arms and grinning faces, biting off the tip of his nose.

  His suit was torn open and they were scratching and gouging him with ragged, filthy nails, peeling him like an onion as he went in and out of consciousness. He came to in a blood-spattered reality where red-stained faces bit and tore, blinking and moaning as he rode wave after wave of agony.

  One of them yanked out a pink coil of intestine.

  By then, it couldn’t rightly be said that he was sane. The sluggos were like sharks hitting bloody meat. He felt as if everything inside him had gone liquid and was leaking from the many holes in his body.

  And through the red mist, he saw a form in a filthy Tyvek suit and helmet step forward. The others fell out of his way and those that didn’t, he cast aside. The Pole couldn’t be sure by that point of what he was seeing…it was nightmare, it was phantasm, it was dream, delusions brought about by his life force ebbing.

  Yet…

  An exterminator with an American flag sticker on his blood-speckled helmet. That could only mean—

  “MOONEY!” he cried out with the last of his strength. “HELP ME FOR GODSAKE! THEY’RE KILLING ME! THEY’RE FUCKING TEARING ME APART!”

  And then Mooney, oh dear sweet God, Mooney was hovering over him and the others were watching. There was something wrong about that, but as his life fizzled out, The Pole could no longer reason or think. He could only accept.

  Accept what his bleary eyes showed him.

  And what they showed him was literally a horror beyond comprehension.

  Mooney brought his helmet six or seven inches from The Pole’s face and beyond the bubble there was nothing human. Just an undulant fleshy mass. In his madness, The Pole was certain he was looking at thousands of grave worms in a fish bowl but what it was, of course, was a convulsive, squirming mass of flukes that multiplied and expanded until the face bubble popped free from internal pressure.

  The flukes came gushing out in a surging tide of slime like maggots bursting from the skull of a road-struck collie.

  The Pole drowned in them.

  They wriggled over his eyes and pushed up his nostrils and filled his mouth and throat like wormy, moist suet.

  It was an ugly death.

  Thankfully, he was dead before they began tunneling into his brain.

  39

  They seemed to come from everywhere and Kurta met them, knocking them down like ducks in a fairground shooting gallery. He dropped eight of them with his Ithaca and then drew his Colt Python and killed six more.

  But there were others.

  There were always others.

  Their voices filled the passage with insane shrieking and gibbering as they charged in at him. All he had left was his knife, one grenade, and the empty Ithaca. He had more shells, but they would have thoroughly gutted him by the time he even loaded a few.

  They came for him and he went into a wild killing frenzy, swinging the riot gun like a club, shattering bones, smashing faces, and splitting heads.

  And when that was taken away from him, he went at it bare-fisted, punching and kicking, knocking them out of his way and throwing them into each other and generally creating confusion that was lit by the fading lights of his helmet on the floor.

  A screaming woman got her hands on his head and made to bite him in the face. He kneed her in the stomach and head-butted her, turned and punched the lights out of a man whose face was spongy beneath Kurta’s fist. Then two of them grabbed him. He stomped a third with a kick, slid free, and when a large man seized him, Kurta did the only thing he could think of—he reached down with clawing fingers and tore open the man’s slug-sack, ripping the slimy monstrosity from its womb and dashing it against the wall.

  The guy went down as if someone had unplugged him.

  Kurta did it three more times with like results. Then he charged into a pack of them, punching and kicking, slashing their slug-sacks with his knife and breaking free.

  By then, of course, West was dead.

  They had ripped him to pieces and were feeding on him.

  Kurta ran down to the end of the passage with the pack hot on his trail. He cut to the left and then to the right again.

  Suddenly, he saw light.

  Just a sliver of it.

  He poured on the steam until he reached it. There was a ladder set into the wall and he climbed it, gasping and panting. It was one of the access hatches that West had told him about.

  This was it!

  He pressed up on it, but it wouldn’t move.

  Feel around, dummy, feel around. There’s gotta be a latch.

  The pack was bearing down on him, screeching and slavering. This was it. He either got out now or he was never getting out. Dammit! Where was that fucking latch?

  There.

  He felt it.

  But he couldn’t get it to work.

  He pulled out his cigarette lighter and flicked it. Sure, it was like a deadbolt. He pulled the bolt back and flipped the catch. This was it. With everything he had, he pushed the hatch up and it opened, clattering on its hinges to the sidewalk.

  He pulled himself up and out.

  Below, the sluggos filled the passage.

  He pulled the pin on his last grenade and gave it to them, running like hell across the lot towards the APC. There was a thundering explosion and a chorus of screaming, but he didn’t dare look back to see what had happened.

  He raced across the lot, climbed up into the APC and slid behind the wheel, locking everything down. Then and only then did he allow himself time to breathe. He saw sluggos wandering about in the lot, but he had no fear of them now. He got a bottle of water and some beef jerky from the back.

  As he replenished himself, he watched the sun sink away and darkness claim the land.

  Okay, okay.

  Time to go home. Time to go fucking home.

  He turned over the APC and turned on the headlights. There was a long drive ahead of him and he knew he would be thinking about the kid, but he steeled himself because West was not the first friend he had lost.

  Lighting a cigarette, he pulled the APC out of the lot and headed for the bunker.

  40

  Five miles out, he started to worry.

  It was a very dark night and the only illumination came from the twin beams of the APC’s headlights. By that point, he should have been able to see the lights in the bunker towers. They should have been shining like beacons. They were always manned and particularly at night. It wasn’t, of course, like the old days when you had lit-up buildings and streetlights and all the rest. Now there was nothing but the moon and stars. The lights of the bunker, the tower, and security fence should have been visible for miles.

  Tonight, they just weren’t there and that set Kurta’s skin to crawling.

  He got on the radio again. “This is Kurta from Ex-Three. I’m coming in.
Please respond.”

  He repeated the message four times over the next five minutes.

  There was nothing but static out there.

  Not good at all. In fact, it was downright scary. The most awful scenarios began to play through his mind.

  Three miles out, he tried the radio again.

  Then a mile out.

  By the time he approached the berms outside the fence and could see the black and silent towers rising against the stars, he began to feel hollow inside. This was not just bad; it had all the makings of a tragedy.

  He tried the radio one last time even though he knew it was pointless. If the guards in the towers hadn’t challenged him by then, they weren’t going to.

  His paranoia told him to stay in the APC until first light. No sense poking around out there in the darkness and walking into an ambush or a nest of slugheads. There was plenty of room to bunk down in the back, food and water and weapons…why risk it?

  Because those people in there were my friends, he thought then. At least some of them. They might need help.

  “And there are children in there,” he said in a low hurting voice.

  He clicked on the lights in the back. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it right. He stripped out of his filthy biosuit and stuffed it in a plastic containment bag along with his gloves and underclothes. Standing there naked, he sprayed himself down with aerosol wormicide that smelled awful. He pulled on a fresh pair of camo fatigues from the locker. He grabbed an M4 with a tactical light bracketed to it and three extra magazines. He took a flashlight and three road flares. He would have liked some NVGs or grenades, but there were none. Lastly, he strapped on his knife and Colt Python.

  Then it was time to see what this was all about.

  41

  He swallowed some Benzedrine to keep his edge and dropped the ramp on the APC.

  He ran out, cutting between the berms. He circled far around the compound until he found the secondary gate which was chained and locked shut. He chose it because there was no barbed wire atop it. He scrambled up and over. He crossed the blacktop at a jog, expecting he knew not what.