The Squirming Page 4

“I wasn’t talking to you, you little puppy.”

  “Oh, kiss my ass, big man.”

  “Fuck did you say?”

  “All right,” Kurta said, getting in-between them. “The old man wasn’t carrying a slug, so he’s not our concern. We gave him the option to come with us, he refused. He’s not our problem.”

  The Pole didn’t like it, but he sucked it up because he knew damn well that Kurta didn’t give a damn about his opinion. He glared at West through the bubble of his helmet and West glared right back.

  Go ahead, West found himself thinking. Make your move. I’ve had it right up to here with you.

  “Okay,” Kurta said. “Enough. Pole? Take the point.”

  Which The Pole did, begrudgingly.

  10

  He distanced himself from Kurta and West, getting farther ahead than he usually would have. But he wanted that space. He did not trust the relationship that was developing between them.

  The steam tunnel opened into another cellar and he called it in. “I don’t think we’ve been in here before. I’m going in for a look.”

  “Wait for us,” came Kurta’s reply. “Don’t go in there alone. Repeat: do not go in there alone.”

  Yeah, bullshit, The Pole thought.

  He popped the grating from the tunnel wall and stepped into the cellar. He saw the usual: discarded bedsprings, bikes, heaped cartons, a lot of cast-off junk.

  He stepped in further.

  He could see some kind of gigantic, antiquated boiler plant that probably predated the steam tunnel system itself. It was a real monstrosity with pipes reaching in every which direction like the tentacles of a deep-sea squid. It had an out-of-place, out-of-time look to it like some colossal, overly complex machine out of a steampunk novel. He figured this is what the reactor of Verne’s Nautilus must have looked like.

  He stepped around it carefully, knowing that Kurta was going to be pissed but not really caring. He had to squeeze between it and a huge pillar-like support beam.

  That was when the floor fell away beneath him.

  He cried out, sliding on his ass into some chasm beneath the floor of the cellar. He came to rest in standing water. The only thing that was injured was his pride. He pulled himself up, scanning about with his flashlight beam.

  What in the hell?

  Kurta was on the headset, demanding to know what was going on.

  “I fell into a fucking hole,” The Pole explained.

  “I told you to wait!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I didn’t.”

  Kurta reamed his ass over the headset, but The Pole wasn’t even paying attention by that point. His tactical light was showing him standing water, rubble…and bones. Human bones jutting up from the muck and various necrotic remains that were feverish with maggots and flies, the latter filling his flashlight beam in buzzing clouds.

  He saw light beams above as Kurta and West arrived.

  “Other side of the boiler, watch it,” The Pole told them.

  “The floor’s gone…must have dropped away into this pit.”

  Kurta grumbled over the headset.

  What the hell had happened here? That’s what The Pole was wondering. Some kind of subsidence? It was hard to say. These buildings were all old, Victorian relics that should have been torn down years ago. Before the slugs came, this entire area was a slum, a high-crime area full of whores and drug addicts, gangs and crack houses. Jesus, even if they wiped out the slugs, who was going to want to live here?

  He heard something just ahead.

  Shit.

  Gripping his riot gun, he moved around a pile of rubble, the water getting deeper. It had been up to his knees and now it was getting up to his hips. It wouldn’t be a good idea to go too far; he might fall into an even deeper pit and drown.

  There.

  More rubble and bones, the well-picked husk of a torso. The water rippled. It splashed.

  The Pole sucked in a breath and saw a form rise from the slop. It was a woman…or had been once upon a time…but now she was a crumbling, waterlogged zombie with a face of running mucus, clutching a slug to her belly like a writhing newborn. She must have been in the late stages because she seemed to be undergoing some morbid liquefaction. Her body, as it rose from the water, looked as if it was being engulfed by a jellyfish, a mass of slime and bubbling putrefaction.

  The Pole screamed at the sight of her.

  It rolled right out of him such was the horror he felt. He fumbled his riot gun, nearly dropping it into the watery slush. The light bobbled, shadows jumping wildly about him.

  She opened her mouth and a gushing sludge came pouring out like watery vomit.

  The Pole, out of his head at the sight of her, jerked the trigger, racked the pump, jerked it again, repeated this four times until she was a squirming putrescence floating before him.

  By then, the flashlight beams of the others were spearing down into the steaming hollow.

  Right away, as the woman’s blasted carcass sank, her slug emerged in the oily water. It surfaced like a trout seeking a caddisfly. It looped in the water, its fleshy, phallic bulk swimming towards The Pole like a sea snake.

  He did not hesitate.

  He blasted it to fragments.

  “We better get him out of there before more show,” West said, and for once, The Pole was in complete agreement with him.

  Staring down into the hollow, Kurta said, “Sure…but how are we going to do that?”

  The Pole wasn’t sure himself.

  The walls of the chasm seemed to be made of loose, slimy rubble and what might have been soft clay.

  “We’ll need rope,” West said. “There’s some twine back there. I’ll get it.”

  He disappeared, and The Pole found himself staring up at Kurta whose light beam was on him like a spot.

  “I told you to wait for us, dipshit,” Kurta said.

  “I thought I’d have a look.”

  “Against my orders.”

  The Pole felt sweaty and small in his hotsuit. “Yeah, my mistake, boss.”

  “You’re starting to make a lot of them.” Kurta kept the light on him. “Before the kid gets back, I want you to understand that if you disregard my orders one more fucking time, you’re off the team. You’ll be clearing corpses in the streets. You got me?”

  “Yeah. I got you.”

  West returned with twine bundled around his arm. “This should be enough. Let me unwind it.”

  “Fuck it,” Kurta said. “I decided to leave him down there.”

  He stomped away and West watched him go. “I’ll get you out, man. Just hang tight.”

  “I know you will, kid. You’re one of the good ones.”

  As the twine was tossed down to him, his feelings concerning West began to shift. But his feelings concerning Kurta only deepened. I’ll get that fucker. Sooner or later, I’ll get that fucker.

  11

  Kurta decided they wouldn’t bother backtracking into the steam tunnels. After West got The Pole out of the pit, he led them around the chasm, weaving through the dark until he saw a set of stairs leading up.

  “Let’s call it a day,” he said.

  He got no arguments on that score. They followed him up a rickety set of stairs to the first floor. The door at the top was open so they didn’t have to blast it free.

  It was dark up there. Most of the windows were boarded over. The place had been waiting for the wrecking ball long before the slugs wormed their way into existence. He led them down a corridor, came around a bend and heard someone laughing.

  Giggling.

  It unnerved him the darkness. It wasn’t a happy sound, but the low, evil cackling of a mind that was sheared right open, all the good stuff having leaked out and only the blatant psychosis of the human condition left behind.

  He told the others to hang back.

  He clutched his riot gun, duckwalking forward, his eyes wide, his mouth a pale line behind the helmet bubble. His light beam picked out a shape crouched on the
stairs. A man. Even with the light full in its face, blinding in its intensity, the figure could not stop giggling: “Eh…heh…heh…eh…heh…heh…heh…”

  “What’s your damage?” Kurta asked him, but it was obvious by that point. Here was another street person who’d probably been suffering some sort of dementia before the coming of the slugs. Like many of the others, he’d relished his new-found freedom when laws no longer existed and he could do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted. He’d hid out in the city and the slugs had found him.

  He was dressed in a natty overcoat that he’d probably swiped off a mannequin in City Centre, wool pants with grubby knees, and hiking boots with black plastic garbage bags duct-taped to them. He clutched his slug with both hands, giggling and rocking back and forth as if it were a baby he was trying to get to sleep. His face was pale, almost gray, eyeballs jutting from purple sockets. He was sweating and shaking, totally stoned on what his slug and its attendant flukes were juicing him with. Early stages for sure. The hunger had not yet set into him which meant the slug was still in the process of hot-wiring his brain.

  “I’m going to have to kill you,” Kurta said, stepping back and establishing a field of fire. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  Of course, this guy didn’t understand at all.

  It was like trying to explain string theory to a hedgehog; dude was just too far gone. And Kurta understood that part. Boy, did he ever. He remembered very well the rapture of the needle. When you had a fix, nothing else mattered. Not a damn thing. The memory of it made his scalp sweat.

  It’s still got you, he thought. Even these many years later, it’s still got you.

  Not that this was any surprise.

  In their sweeps of the city, he’d come across stashes of heroin before. The sight of it always made his palms greasy. If The Pole or any of the others were to discover his past, it wouldn’t be good. He could just about imagine how Spengler or The Pole might use it against him. The major might even have reservations if he knew that a junkie was leading Ex-3.

  But they’re not going to know. I lost my wife, my family, my job, every fucking thing because of the needle. I won’t have that happen again.

  The slughead looked up as Kurta shouldered his riot gun and pulled out the Colt Python .357. The sluggo was stoned, motor functions impaired. He jerked with spasms, making orgasmic sounds as they rolled through him. He was bovine and stupid. He giggled and licked his lips with a swollen tongue.

  “What do you got?” West asked as he approached.

  “Newbie,” Kurta said.

  The Pole laughed at the slughead’s predicament. The giggling. The spasms. The way his eyes rolled dreamily in his head. “Must be good shit he’s dosed with.”

  “What happens if you tear that slug off him?” West asked.

  The Pole laughed dryly. “Nothing good, kid. For one thing, Mr. Host here will not like you doing it. He looks placid enough, don’t he? Pissed out of his mind, shitted right out? Sure. Try and rip that slug off…it’ll take four guys to hold him down. He’ll go absolutely berserk.”

  The host stared up at the men with that look Kurta had seen when he was a teenager when some good dope was making the rounds. Hey, man, you wanna a hit? Take a toke and hold your smoke. Even as they watched, it looked like capillaries were rupturing in his face, purple-blue star blisters forming.

  “Eh…heh…heh…eh…heh…heh…heh,” went the sluggo, teeth bloodied and eyes going yellow.

  Kurta pulled the trigger.

  The round cored his left eye socket quite neatly, then kicked out the back of his head. Right away, as he slumped over, his slug began to move. Flukes tumbled from his shattered skull.

  “Burn him,” Kurta said, stepping way back with West.

  The Pole obliged, toasting Mr. Host and his attendant creepy-crawlies.

  And that’s when all hell broke loose.

  12

  As three slugheads came shambling out of the darkness, West opened up with his M4, drilling two three-shot bursts into them. He drove them back but momentarily. Suddenly, it seemed like they were everywhere—coming down the stairs, stumbling right over the burning body of the giggling man; filling the corridors, massing, shrieking and hissing, driven by the voracious parasites that rode them, demanding to be filled, to be satisfied.

  “WATCH IT!” Kurta called out.

  He brought up his riot gun and fired point-blank, splashing the face off one, racking the pump, and giving another two good shots that nearly tore her in half…still, she crawled forward.

  West, panicking, emptied his clip into a drooling, growling pack, and the only thing that saved him from being completely overwhelmed was The Pole who lit them up with his flamethrower. Fire gushed from it, enveloping them, and they screeched in agony. Still, crackling and popping, the air pungent with the oily smoke of their cremating hides and burnt hair, they stumbled forward, finally dropping, human slag.

  It gave West time to slap another magazine into his M4.

  The Pole torched the ones on the stairs and engulfed another crowd coming from the opposite corridor. The flames licked up the walls, furniture and draperies blazing away.

  The building was burning by then. He had put out so much fire that no extinguisher in the world could hope to cope with it.

  Kurta knew there was only one way out and that was to retreat right through an even dozen slugheads that were between them and the door.

  He charged forward, firing round after round, trying to disperse them. West and The Pole followed suit…but soon enough the enemy were among them and it was a deadly hand-to-hand contest.

  Kurta blew one slughead away and another leaped at him, swinging something—a chair leg, a broomstick, it was hard to be sure—and it cracked against the side of his helmet, the force of the blow nearly putting him down. He smashed the pistol-grip of his riot gun into a mucid face that seemed to be composed mainly of gray and red pulp.

  Its owner, a naked guy whose body was pocked with black ulcers, made a squealing sound and came back for more.

  Kurta obliged, sticking the barrel of the riot gun right in his face and blowing his head clean off. Two more jumped out at him, gurgling and screeching. He shot one of them, fired at the other and missed. Then hands were clawing out at him from every direction and the riot gun was plucked from his grip.

  A woman grabbed him from behind and two more charged into the fray to finish him off.

  The Pole threw off an attacker and blasted one of the sluggos away from Kurta, and as the other leaped forward, Kurta stomped him in the belly with his boot, squishing the spongy mass of his slug in its flesh-sling. That put the slughead right to his knees and Kurta punted him in the head.

  It was sheer pandemonium.

  West went down beneath three women, his M4 lost in the confusion. They straddled him, clawing at the bubble of his helmet, leaving streaks of gore over the Plexiglas.

  Kurta, .357 Python in his hand, knocked two sluggos aside, wiped a smear of brain matter from his bubble, and drilled two of the woman with headshots. Their skulls exploded, blood and tissue erupting in bright red fountains. The third came at him, and he gave her a round right in the belly that easily bisected her slug-sling and what it carried. She went down, looking up at him, agonized and deranged, her face a web of rot. He jammed the barrel into her mouth and blew her away.

  The Pole kept shooting until his riot gun was empty, then he used it as a club, smashing faces and cracking open skulls. Splashed with blood and smeared with tissue and ribbons of gore, he fought on until a big slughead—a really, really big slughead that looked like he’d been an outlaw biker in life—seized him. The sluggo gripped him by the helmet with massive hands to either side, lifting him right off the ground. Maybe it was his intention to pluck the helmet free.

  But The Pole did not give in.

  He’d been in tighter situations than this (he told himself), so he pulled his knife and went straight for the sluggo’s family jewels. In this cas
e, not his nuts but the slug-sheath webbed to his belly. The Pole jabbed the blade of his K-bar right into it again and again.

  The slug, a swollen horror that seemed to be nearly the size of his forearm, sheared itself free, cut nearly in half. It coiled and squirmed, spilling brown blood and making a sound like a shrill, whirring motor.

  The sluggo still gripped him so The Pole kept stabbing his parasite with the knife.

  The effect was instantaneous.

  Old Mr. Sluggo let go with a great howling shriek, spraying The Pole’s helmet bubble with a bloody mist.

  Then he literally came apart at the seams.

  Holy oh Jesus H. Christ did he ever.

  Somewhere in his dreaming/scheming/zombified mind, there was a memory of a guy named John Q. Schenks who pulled six years hard time at Rahway State Prison for armed robbery and was a patched blood member of the Devil’s Disciples motorcycle club.

  But that was so much psychobabble mental mulch now because it was BEFORE and not NOW.

  Now there was only a nameless servitor with an especially large leech hugging his belly, shooting him up with neuropharmaceuticals and his fluke-infested brain was rioting at terminal velocity.

  There was thunder and lightning in his skull, a perpetual drumming BOOM-BADA-BOOM-BADA-BOOM-BOOM-BAM! that made him fly like he’d never flown before. He was a bag about to pop, an adrenaline-juiced carcass stretching like elastic to the breaking point as his gray matter boiled in his skull like hot red slush and thoughts skipped through the chaos, OH YES OH YES OH YES OH MY DEAR CHRIST IT’S BIGGER IT’S BADDER THAN EVER BEFORE!

  And like The Who had said, he could see for miles and miles into the narrow fluctuating channel of his psyche and then…then it was too much, overdosed, overloaded, critical mass reached, and his spine was an electric eel writhing inside him, his organs macerating, his neurons imploding, his skin splitting open—

  And then…

  And then…

  And then his face inflated as if it had been stung by a dozen jellyfish into a purple-blue bag of meat and his eyes blew free from their sockets via some weird, immense internal hydrostatic pressure. At the same time they went, blood gushed from his mouth along with sloughed bits of his esophagus and stomach. He hit the floor, three-hundred pounds of squirming red meat that was infested with flukes.