The Squirming Read online

  “Eggs,” a voice said.

  Kurta nearly jumped out of his skin.

  He whirled around with the M4 and saw a very bedraggled-looking Major Trucks standing there. He wore a white Tyvek suit that was filthy with bloodstains and black smears. He looked thirty years older than the last time he had seen him.

  “Hello, Kurt,” he said.

  His intensity was gone as was his characteristic volume. He looked…emptied, shrunken.

  “What happened here?” Kurta asked him.

  Trucks found a chair and settled into it. “What you see here is the bad ending to what could have been a very good idea.”

  Kurta just stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sit down and I’ll tell you.”

  Kurta shoved some folders off a desk and sat there. He lit a cigarette but did not set aside his carbine. He wasn’t that comfortable with the situation.

  Trucks sighed. “You see, Kurt, we never could figure out the origin of the slugs other than to assume—as so many did—that it was Mother Nature kicking us in the nuts for abusing the fine, lush green world she gave us. Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, we knew something had to be done. If the human race was to survive, the slugs had to be eradicated. Hence, this bunker. You know what its function was during the Cold War so there’s no point in my going into that. As the slug menace increased and government after government was teetering on the edge of complete destruction as their populations became parasitized, the CDC, empowered by Homeland Security, stepped in. Along with WHO, these bunkers were reclaimed and refitted for a very different purpose than they had originally been designed for.”

  Kurta waited. “And what was that?”

  “Some twenty bunkers were established in this country and some sixty others across the globe. Their purpose was to establish self-supporting communities that could thrive in relative safety and security,” Trucks explained. “All of which would support the greater agenda which was bioengineering. These labs here are similar to the ones that every bunker contained and their purpose was recombinant DNA research.”

  “Genetic engineering?”

  Trucks nodded. “It was our only real weapon against the slugs. Dr. Dewarvis and his people were, in their own way, creating an antidote to the slugs. Via forced mutation and molecular cloning, they created what all creatures on Earth must have to keep their populations in check: a natural enemy. They, in effect, enhanced the creepers.”

  “And then they got out and killed everyone,” Kurta said.

  Trucks ignored that. “Do you know what oxytocin is?”

  Kurta had read about it. “It’s…I think they call it the love hormone.”

  Trucks explained that oxytocin was generated in the hypothalamus and was released during pair bonding, whether that was sexual activity, hugging, or a mother nursing her child. It stabilized emotions, creating feelings of trust and relaxation. “This new breed of creepers is born addicted to it, Kurt. Without it, they spiral into anxiety and violence and paranoia, attacking and killing one another. When a person is parasitized by a slug and its flukes enter the brain, they manufacture large amounts of oxytocin. Dangerous, addictive amounts of dopamine and oxytocin, in fact. The new creepers can sense it and they seek it out. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  Kurta did. “The megacreepers would attack the sluggos, going after the oxytocin.”

  “Exactly! The brain tissue would give them the nutrition they required for their metabolism and the oxytocin they extracted from the sluggos’ brains would feed their addiction.”

  Trucks told him that, statistically, the entire process would take about three to four weeks once a sufficient number of megacreepers were bred. They would be released in the city, anywhere there were concentrations of slugheads too large for the exterminators to handle. The slugs and their hosts would be eradicated by the megacreepers who would go after their brains. Once the slugheads were decimated, the megacreepers would suffer horrible withdrawals, attacking each other for oxytocin and eliminating their own populations. It was quite simple.

  “After the feeding frenzy, we would have to be careful, of course, because the creepers would attack anyone with oxytocin in their brains, meaning uninfected human beings. We had that worked out, too. After another three to four weeks, they would have all been gone either from feeding on one another or complete neural collapse from oxytocin starvation. They not only want it psychologically, Kurt, they have to have it from a physiological standpoint. They can’t function without it. They need it like we need iron in our blood.”

  “Then they got out,” Kurta said, seeing no point in hiding his cynicism any longer.

  Trucks shrugged. “It was Dewarvis. He lost control. He and his people were, effectively, junkies.”

  “What?”

  Trucks led the way across the room to a locked cabinet. He opened it with a key. There were little baggies of brown powder lined up, labeled and tagged.

  Kurta just stared at them. His mouth went dry. His hands shook. He felt a strange bottomless hunger inside himself. Here it was again, staring him in the face. “Heroin,” he said. Even the word was sugar on his tongue.

  “Yes.

  “Dewarvis and his people were on junk?”

  Trucks shrugged. “Crude, but true. They were using it regularly.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the megacreepers, as you call them, cannot tolerate it,” Trucks explained. “Opium, heroin, and morphine are all derived from the opium poppy. The creepers in any form, as well as their hosts and attendant flukes, are highly susceptible to opioid toxicity. Even the slightest amount can send them into devastating anaphylactic shock.”

  Kurta started giggling; he couldn’t help himself. He had all he could do not to begin laughing uncontrollably. “The only way Dewarvis and the others could safely work with these things was being stoned. That’s rich.”

  “And like most users, they needed more and more as the addiction cycle progressed,” Trucks said. “After a time, they were like any junkies. They cared less and less about what they had created and how to exploit it than they did about getting another fix. They fucked up. They got loose and sloppy, because in their drug fugues, the creepers were no threat to them. They wouldn’t even come near them. They were harmless. The creepers were, in effect, neutered.”

  “And that’s how they got out and killed everyone in this fucking place?”

  Trucks nodded. “The creepers got out, into the ventilation system, probably entering it out in the corridor away from the biocontainment area. It was like a super highway leading to every level and every room.”

  “Every corpse looked happy,” Kurta said more to himself than to Trucks.

  “Of course they did. The megacreepers didn’t savagely attack them. It’s not their way. Just like their slug form, they have the ability to spit living globules of psychotropic drugs at their victims.”

  Kurta had seen that plenty of times. The slugs, despite their slimy, shapeless appearance, could shoot those globs with unerring accuracy.

  Trucks went on to say that the slugs that attached themselves to people and unleashed flukes into their nervous systems, were addicts of a sort. The dopamine response that the flukes controlled in their hosts’ brains also fed the slugs, being that they were wired to their systems.

  “So the slugs were addicts from the very first,” Trucks said. “With that in mind, it’s not so strange that the creepers of both varieties would be as well. Dewarvis was never certain of the exact mechanics of the creepers’ opiate allergy, but when he discovered it, he used it.”

  “And it used him,” Kurta said, understanding the politics of addiction very well.

  Trucks stood up. “That’s the nature of what we’re dealing with. That’s the secret I could never tell.” He shook his head. “The point being, we should get out of here. You have an APC outside?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  Let’s go then. Still barkin
g fucking orders.

  Kurta just stood there, feeling the M4 in his hands. He despised Trucks. Maybe the original idea behind Dewarvis’ research was feasible and had potential, but it had gotten way out of control. And Trucks knew it. He knew the boys in the lab were addicts, irresponsible and reckless…yet he had done nothing. He had left them in charge of a highly dangerous, highly unpredictable biological weapon.

  Now all these people were dead.

  Kurta felt a strong desire to kill him, but what was the point?

  “Our best bet is a location in the country,” Trucks explained. “Somewhere secluded with very few slugheads. My suggestion is that we leave the bunker wide open. Let the megacreepers escape and do what they were designed to do. In a month or so, we can come back. We just have to let things run their course.”

  Kurta figured it was probably the only logical thing to do, yet he had the worst desire to feed Trucks to the megacreepers. It was what he deserved for being involved with Dewarvis and his bullshit. Even with the world’s population teetering on the edge, men like them were still trying to manipulate things. They just couldn’t stop being power brokers and lords of the Earth.

  As long as there were men, it would never change.

  47

  Kurta led the way out with his M4. He gave Trucks his .357 Python and they made it without incident up to the next level. And that’s when things went bad.

  The megacreepers were massing.

  They had fed on every brain in the bunker, stuffing themselves on gray matter and siphoning off the oxytocin that they needed to survive.

  Now, many hours later, they needed another fix.

  Trucks wasn’t kidding when he said they were addicts. By the time he and Kurta reached the upper level, the megacreepers attacked in numbers. Pushed into oxytocin starvation mode, they would do anything to get it.

  Anything.

  In less than ten minutes, Kurta had burned off the last of his ammunition. There were dozens and dozens of dead creepers lying about, many still twitching and bleeding, bubbling slime.

  But for every one of those, there were dozens that were very healthy and very determined.

  Kurta and Trucks were forced back into the stairwell leading to the lowest level. They had no choice. They barely got through the door.

  As he moved down the steps, Trucks screamed.

  One of them was hanging from the ceiling and it spat a glob at him, catching him on the throat. Within seconds, it was too late. He screamed…then he started to giggle. He sat down on the steps, a stupid, drunken look on his face.

  “TRUCKS!” Kurta shouted.

  No good.

  The glob had taken root in him, juicing him with psychotropics. He sat there, giggling, his eyes glazed over. As Kurta watched helplessly, he pissed himself and began to hum songs under his breath. He did not even seem aware that there was anyone with him.

  He was gone.

  He was literally gone that fast.

  When the megacreeper dropped on him, Kurta pulled his knife. He would slice it, cut it, peel it off Trucks, but in the end, he did nothing.

  The megacreeper clung to the back of Trucks’ neck. It made a content, murmuring sort of noise that sounded like a lazy grasshopper. It and Trucks were joined, part of something bigger than the sum of their parts. It opened its mouth, its gums—pink like raw hamburger—pulled back and that wicked-looking hook slid into view. It traced along Trucks’ scalp until it found the location it desired. Then the hook or tooth or whatever it was pierced his forehead, punching right into his skull. It was drawn back slowly, very slowly, making a wet crunching sound that nearly sent Kurta running.

  And if that was bad, once the crown of Trucks’ head was laid open—he was still humming something under his breath that sounded oddly like an old Duran Duran song, blood running down his face in a spider web pattern—it got considerably worse.

  The megacreeper’s body convulsed and vomited something into the skull. There was a bubbling/hissing sound like Pop Rocks dissolving in someone’s mouth. Then the hollow tongue slid into the skull and there began a most terrible, repulsive slurping as it ingested his softened brain matter, sucking it up like pudding.

  Kurta couldn’t take it.

  He got the hell out of there.

  He made it out into the corridor, ducking a megacreeper and reaching the biocontainment area. The creatures started coming through the door right away, inching up the walls and over the ceiling.

  Within thirty seconds, there were fifteen or twenty of them.

  There was only one thing left to do and he knew it.

  48

  Over the next few days, wasted on junk, but feeling so good, hell yes, so very good, Kurta got down to work. He began dragging the bodies out of the bunker. Once he had thirty or forty of them out on the blacktop, he torched them with a flamethrower. The burnt smell was horrible, but it was better than the stink of carrion below.

  He went on that way, snorting more and more heroin, knowing he was destroying himself as he had done before…yet, oddly empowered at the way the creepers feared him instead of the other way around.

  By the end of the week, he gave up on it all.

  He just didn’t have the energy to drag bodies around and what was the difference anyway? They were just going to rot and what was he supposed to do about it?

  Eating was a problem.

  He was never hungry anymore and he was losing weight, so he had to remember to get something in his stomach now and again. The problem was all food started tasting bad. Every few days, when he started feeling really dizzy, he would eat a can of Spaghettios or something. He rarely could get it all down. He had to force himself to eat it in the first place.

  His fourth day into it, he dragged up a mattress from downstairs and threw it in the rec room. That was enough for his needs.

  He kept the generator going because he wanted lights and he liked to be able to watch TV. He started playing Sonic and Mario again as he had when he was a teenager. It occupied most of his time.

  There were things that needed doing, but he couldn’t remember what they were most of the time so he gave up trying to.

  He lived in the rec room.

  He knew he was smelling bad and needed a shower, but he just couldn’t bring himself to take one. It was easier to lay on the mattress and snort some skag, play video games and dream. His fatigues were filthy with bloodstains and corpse drainage from hauling the bodies out, but after a while, he stopped smelling them.

  It was funny, he got to thinking, how he no longer had any purpose. He was of no use to himself or anyone else. Now that he was messed up on junk all the time, the creepers were no more threat than flies buzzing about.

  Twice he drove the APC back into the city, getting on the loudspeaker and calling out for survivors. The only response he got was a bottle thrown from a rooftop. On one of these sojourns, he decided to test the slugheads. He found a pack of them and they came after him right away. He raised his Colt Python and prepared to do some killing.

  They got within four feet of him, became confused, and moved off in the opposite direction. He followed them around, even reaching out and touching a woman. She cried out and ran off.

  It would have been easy killing them.

  But what was the point? It was no fun killing something that was no threat to you. There was no challenge in it. It was too much like shooting ducks.

  After that, he never went back into the city again.

  He laid on his mattress, playing video games.

  At least at first. By the second week, he didn’t have the energy for that either so he just laid there and watched the opening credits again and again. Sometimes he threw in a movie, but the voices drove him nuts because half the time he wasn’t sure what they were talking about. It was better to watch with the sound off. It worked good with his dreams. They came even when he was awake now and, in the whirlpool of his mind, the dreams and what was on the TV were pretty much the same thing.

>   There was irony in the fact that what had originally destroyed his life was the only thing that could save it now.

  But he no longer understood irony.

  Somewhere during the second week, his highs really started bottoming out on him. He could barely get off anymore. That’s when he went down to the infirmary for syringes.

  After that, he got really wasted.

  He lost all conception of time or how long he had been shooting up or what life had been like before. It didn’t really matter. He knew he was a really pathetic, hopeless junkie by then, but it was hard to care.

  Within a few weeks, he figured, he’d be out of heroin anyway.

  The idea of that terrified him.

  Part of him longed for it.

  By then, most of the creepers were dead. They dissolved into mucky pools once decomposition set in. Trucks was right: in the end, they had attacked each other for oxytocin. They were pathetic, addicted things and Kurta found himself feeling sorry for them.

  Junkies, nothing but worthless fucking junkies.

  The idea of that made him giggle because all life forms in the final analysis were addicted to something.

  He laid on his mattress, thinking his thoughts and dreaming his dreams, shooting up and zoning out, dirty and stinking, very often pissing himself.

  One day—he did not know how long it had been, weeks, years maybe—he heard activity outside. It really meant nothing to him. Probably some sluggos sniffing around. Come on in, my friends, fucking door is always open. He kept hearing things, but he was far too drowsy to go see what it was. He zoned out and dreamed.

  He woke some time later to the sound of voices.

  What? What? Didn’t I mute the volume?

  When he opened his bloodshot eyes, he saw three figures standing there, watching him. They were wearing Tyvek suits and carried M4 carbines. Exterminators.