The Squirming Page 6

  “I SEE!” The major contemplated it. “WHAT DO YOU HAVE IN MIND?”

  “Sir, though it pains me to say this, I just don’t think Kurta’s up to it anymore. I’d like you to consider replacing him. At least temporarily.”

  “WITH WHO?”

  “Me, sir. I’ve been with the team a long time. I know how things work and how they should work. My old man was a leader, sir, and it’s in my blood to lead. I’m the one you need leading Three, sir.”

  Major Trucks thought it over. “INTERESTING, INTERESTING! LET ME THINK ON IT A SECOND!”

  This was it, this is what Spengler had been waiting for for some time. He could practically feel Daniella’s pink, wet mouth sliding up and down on his dick. Wait until Kurta got a load of this. He deserves it, that’s all. He’s not fit to lead, not like me. Spengler watched the major pace back and forth. It was practically a done deal.

  Major Trucks got in close, probably to congratulate his new team leader. Spengler beamed.

  “I’VE COME TO A DECISION,” he announced with his usual volume.

  “Yes?” Spengler said.

  The major nodded. “I DECIDED THAT I DON’T GIVE ONE HAIRY SHIT WHO YOUR OLD MAN WAS! HE WAS JUST ANOTHER DUMBFUCK JARHEAD! KURTA’S IN CHARGE! DO WHAT HE SAYS, YOU SILLY FUCK, OR I’LL HAVE YOU SHOVELING SHIT AND SUCKING SLUG-SLIME! NOW GET YOUR PISSING FACE OUT OF MY SIGHT! YOU MAKE ME SICK TO MY MOTHERFUCKING STOMACH!”

  So that’s how Spengler’s promotion went.

  It was some time before he could work up the nerve to return to the party. By the time he got there, of course, everyone knew what had happened. Daniella had lost interest in him and was actively courting three guys from Five. To make matters worse, everyone was ignoring Spengler…though he did hear a few people giggling behind his back. Apparently, the major had broadcast the entire exchange over the intercom.

  All in all, the party was over and the sun had set on his ambitions. There was nothing left to do but get totally shit-faced with The Pole and plot Kurta’s overthrow as they did almost nightly.

  16

  Kurta was glad to be out on the streets with Ex-3 again. Whenever the shit got heavy, he always wanted to be at the bunker, kicking back with a beer in his hand. But after a couple days in that fucking bughouse with that self-deluded, self-indulgent bunch of wingnuts, he was more than ready to get on a one-to-one basis with the slugheads again. At least their behavior was understandable. They weren’t a bunch of idiots who traipsed about in a fairy tale la-la land where everything was bunnies and rainbows, avoiding the very real possibility that they were an endangered species poised on the edge of extinction.

  He understood now why soldiers coming back from foreign wars could not relate to society in general. After seeing the true nature of darkness and wading through the bleak swamp of the human condition, how could you go back to infantile, mindless, escapist nonsense like backyard barbecues and the NBA, celebrity bullshit and which corporate knob politicians were sucking, Sundays in church and the latest franchise crapfest spawned by Hollywood?

  After exterminating sluggos day after day and nearly getting exterminated himself again and again, the people of the bunker made no sense to him.

  They were a bunch of scurrying rats in a trap, feigning compassion and unity while their real objectives were filling their bellies and getting their rocks off. But that, he supposed, was the human race laid bare: gimme, gimme, gimme, fuck you, I got mine.

  Case in point, where they were now headed: the Southgate Mall. Once a gluttonous enclave of mass consumerism and now a seething nest of slugheads. He wondered sourly what the difference was. Regardless, this was going to be a good one. He felt it right down into his bones.

  Pulling off his cigarette, he said, “Okay, you know the scoop. We got a Class-A nest here and the major wants it cleaned out.”

  That got a few grunts from Ex-3 and more than a few obscenities from The Pole as he drove the APC into the massive parking lot of the mall.

  “We’re going in through the west entrance,” Kurta said. “Ex-Two will take the north and Ex-Five the east. We all have light bands on our helmets. If you see a light band, do not fucking shoot at it. I’ll be in contact with the team leaders of Two and Five at all times, coordinating our efforts…but in case we come into contact with each other, don’t pull triggers until you know what you’re shooting at.”

  He was expecting some smart-assed comment on that, but he got nothing. Nobody was saying much today. Especially Spengler. Everyone knew what he had done last night—the intercom broadcast left nothing to the imagination. He was keeping pretty quiet about it all. He refused to meet Kurta’s eyes, something Kurta found more than a little amusing.

  Tried to shoot me in the back and shot yourself in the foot, eh?

  No matter. Kurta had seen it coming. After Spengler bagged the creeper and rescued them from the slugheads, his ego got so big that his head would barely fit into the APC. Kurta wasn’t angry about any of it; he expected nothing less. For Spengler to do anything else would have been going against character.

  And Kurta didn’t want that.

  He liked his boys to be predictable and good old Speng was certainly that.

  The Pole stopped the APC just outside the west side entrance. Kurta told everyone to get their helmets on. They checked each other’s suits for containment breaches or fatigued material. Everything was a go. Kurta made one last check of everyone’s equipment as he always did.

  “This is going to be a bad one, isn’t it?” West said.

  “Let’s just say I’m expecting rain,” Kurta told him, “and chances are, we’re going to get wet.”

  “I like that,” The Pole said.

  Mooney gave Kurta the thumbs up and Spengler just brooded. Behind the glass bubble, his face was blank, unreadable.

  “You got something on your mind?” Kurta asked him.

  The question made the others stop what they were doing because this could be good; this could be high drama and they weren’t going to miss out on it.

  “No,” Spengler said. “Nothing.”

  The Pole started laughing. “Ah, go ahead, Speng, tell him what’s on your mind. Tell him what you really think about him. Don’t hold back like last night.”

  “That’s enough,” Mooney said.

  “Ain’t nothing on my mind,” Spengler said.

  Kurta didn’t comment on that. He didn’t like Spengler acting withdrawn like this. He was hardly his favorite person in the world, but to see him beaten down and lifeless like this was just no good.

  “Whatever’s on your mind, Speng, stow it until later.”

  Spengler nodded. It was obvious he didn’t give a shit about anything. He was depressed.

  Yeah, Kurta thought, well boo-fucking-hoo. Welcome to the club, shit-fer-brains.

  He got on the headset and called out to Ex-2 and Ex-5 that they were preparing to engage via the western entrance. He got a “roger” on that.

  The ramp dropped on the APC and Kurta led them out. The doors were open beneath the massive KOHL’S sign, so in they went. It looked like a bomb had gone off in there. Merchandise was scattered everywhere, the aisles a tangled mess of shattered glass display cases, dismembered mannequins, clothes and shoes and household wares. It looked like an angry mob had been looking for something and, not finding it, decided to destroy the place.

  As Kurta moved forward in the dimness, he noticed that a lot of the clothing was not only very dusty but shredded. Rats and mice must have been having a field day. Immense cobwebs were spun from dangling sale banners overhead to the tops of shelves and racks. He saw rodent droppings scattered about and what he was certain was more than one pile of human excrement.

  According to the major, there had been some sort of commune hiding out in the mall, taking advantage of not only the shelter but the abundance of everything from clothes and boots to hardware and sporting goods. They’d been in the mall for months before the slugs showed up, probably brought into their insular littl
e community by an outsider. Once established, the slugs infested as they were wont to do.

  Now, this was sluggo central.

  Kurta didn’t doubt it.

  He could almost feel them here waiting. Yes, the rain was definitely going to fall today.

  “Get ready,” he said over the headset. “I think we’re about to step in it.”

  17

  Kurta was the one that heard it—a low, busy slurping punctuated by an occasional crunching sort of noise. It was an awful thing to hear there in the even deadness of that huge store. The noise went on and on. He was reminded of a hound chewing on a meaty steak bone.

  “Hang back,” he told the others over the headset. “Let me get a look at this before we get caught in it.”

  By then, of course, they were all hearing it and they had no problem following his order. He stalked forward, sweat beading his brow. He felt afraid and anxious. First contact was always like that. Better to initiate and get it over with than to exist in a perpetual state of anxiety, fearing the unknown.

  He was in Housewares.

  Dirty, cobwebbed displays of Rachel Ray cookware and Calphalon pots and pans. Shelves of plates and flatware. Islands of Waterford crystal. A chic working kitchen for demonstrations. Relics of a culture long dead now. All of it flaked with dust and spider dirt.

  Kurta moved forward, circling around the kitchen, debris crunching under his boots. He paused. Waited. The slurping sound continued unabated. He cut down aisles of small appliances—electric fry pans, blenders, food processors, and roasters—until he was practically on top of the sounds.

  Swallowing, he stepped around a service counter and put the tactical light of his Ithaca pump on a shape that squatted at the foot of a Kohl’s charge card display. A sexy woman held up a credit card in her long, lovely fingers…something in direct contrast to the slughead at her feet.

  What the light showed him was a naked, middle-aged woman with narrow, pendulous breasts and stringy gray hair hanging in her face. Her sallow skin was baggy like an old sack, set with purple sores and glaring black contusions. With her left arm, she cradled the distended slug-sling at her belly which was livid and engorged. It glistened with foul drainage, pulsating like a breathing lung. The slug inside it must have been enormous, maybe not a fully-molted creeper yet but damn close. She cradled it lovingly, rocking it like a fussy infant.

  Kurta had seen such obscene motherly devotion in slugheads before, particularly women, as if the parasitization had activated some latent maternal instinct.

  Regardless, it was sickening.

  But what she was doing was even worse. Set before her was a heap of dead rats she’d apparently collected up. All of them were twisted and broken. He almost felt sorry for them. As he watched, revolted yet curious, she picked up one by the tail with her free hand, bit into its lower belly, then—drawing it savagely down—literally unzipped it with a wet, tearing sound. Then, grunting like a rooting hog, she pressed her face into the aperture and proceeded to suck the rat’s entrails and organs free.

  It was disgusting.

  In fact, disgusting didn’t even cut it. This was brutally fucking appalling.

  She sucked the guts out of it with a sound not unlike someone slurping up Jell-O shots. Then, her corrugated, graying face wet with dripping gore, she chewed away at the carcass, snapping bones in her teeth. Then she tossed the rat into a death pile of others that had been similarly emptied.

  As she reached for another, still oblivious to the light in her face, Kurta (who couldn’t bear to watch her eat another rat), said through his helmet’s external speaker, “Psssst…sluggo…over here…”

  Her head snapped in his direction instantly.

  Her face twisted into a blood-spattered fright mask, glazed eyes luminous with hate, lips peeled back from bared, crusty teeth. She rose uneasily to her feet, never letting go of her beloved slug. Making a growling sound, she charged.

  She made it maybe four feet before the Ithaca in Kurta’s hands barked and her head exploded in an eruption of meat, gray matter, and bone splinters.

  She hit the floor with a splatting sound.

  Kurta flipped her over with his boot.

  Her slug-sack was trembling, flexing like the belly of a pregnant woman whose fetus had just rolled over. The slug was working its way free. It didn’t take them long to realize the party was over.

  And this was going to be a big one.

  A real monster.

  “Hell’s going on, Kurt?” Mooney said over the headset. “You in one piece over there?”

  “Yeah, but a sluggie isn’t. You boys might as well join me. You’ll find me in Housewares.”

  18

  When they finally arrived, the slug had just made its appearance. It sheared a hole in the sack and pushed itself free like a graveworm from a dead man’s eye socket. It was over a foot in length, a worming muscular mass that bulged as it inched forward. It was a washed-out gray-blue, corded with arteries thick as malted straws.

  “Want me to toast it?” The Pole asked.

  “It’s a big one,” West said. “Doc Dewarvis said he wants the big ones.”

  “I got a big one for him,” The Pole said.

  Mooney laughed.

  Kurta just shook his head. “Fuck him. You got any idea how many specimens I’ve brought in for that asshole? Gotta be two dozen slugs, four or five creepers, jars of fucking wigglers, and half a dozen specimen bags full of eggs. What has he done with them? Nothing. More exhibits for his fucked up zoo down in Bio.”

  Mooney laughed again. “You remember that time he wanted a brain?”

  Kurta remembered all right.

  He listened while Mooney told the story. Dewarvis wanted to study the chemical transmission from flukes into a host’s brain, so Kurta cut the brain out of the skull of a freshly-killed sluggo…complete with the flukes that infested it.

  “What does he do with all that nasty shit?” West asked.

  “Nobody knows for sure,” The Pole said. “Bio is off limits to everyone but the doc, his techs, and the major. I heard he’s got shit that would turn your stomach. Human guinea pigs, you name it.”

  “Shit, I’d like to see that.”

  “No way. It’s biohazard level four, kid. Nobody gets in there,” Mooney explained. “And if they do, they don’t get out again.”

  Kurta had heard it all before. Maybe it was bullshit, but then, maybe not. He stepped back a few feet as the slug started to crawl in his direction. “Well,” he said, “Doc ain’t getting this one. Unless you want to bag it for him, Speng.”

  Spengler just said, “No, never again.”

  Why did you do that? Kurta asked himself. Guy’s already down, do you gotta keep kicking him?

  The truth was, he didn’t know why he said it. He just didn’t know. Maybe it was like Lisa Hilsson had said, he was a miserable, pessimistic piece of shit who wasn’t happy unless he brought everyone down to his level.

  The slug was getting closer. It spat a gob of psychotropic goo at Kurta and missed. It wanted a new mother in the worst possible way, but it wasn’t going to get one. He racked the pump on the Ithaca and blew it into slimy fragments.

  The Pole sighed. “Too bad. It was such a pretty one, too.”

  19

  After Kohl’s, they got out into the mall proper and they could hear the gunfire of Ex-2 and Ex-5 making contact, the former on the other end of the mall down towards J.C. Penney and the latter upstairs. Kurta was on the com with them and it was getting hot and heavy, but Janis D and Pennworthy (the team leaders of Ex-5 and Ex-2, respectively), were not requesting backup.

  Not just yet.

  Kurta led the others forward, past Sephora, Hot Topic, and Starbucks. The corridor was a mess, trashcans tipped over, benches covered with bird shit, filth and debris and loose garbage everywhere. Plate glass windows were shattered or streaked with grime. There was a fountain at the end which, of course, had long since ceased to run. In the tepid, green-slimed water, the rem
ains of two or three bloated white corpses bobbed, flies rising from them like clouds of soot. There were a couple of skeletons sunken to the bottom. They looked like they belonged to children. Pigeons cooed from their new digs in Old Navy. Weeds had actually sprouted from cracks in the floor, fed by the sunlight streaming in from the skylights high above where swifts and rooks dipped and circled.

  It was insane, perfectly insane.

  Kurta had been there many times back in the day when it was still a functioning entity. He knew if they walked on for a time, the corridor would split off to Sears on one side and the food court on the other, which was a massive, airy space meant to resemble a town square with its little shops, statuary, flowers and plants growing everywhere. He thought of Sbarro and Orange Julius, Dairy Queen and Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs and Baskin-Robbins…all that junk food he’d loved and would never, ever taste again.

  There was something more than a little sad about that.

  “Shouldn’t we be checking out these shops?” West asked.

  “Clearing them out?”

  Kurta stopped and looked at him. “Those places are dark rat holes, kid. You want to charge in there, tripping over merchandise, squeezing in-between the aisles with slugheads jumping out at you?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Trust me, if they’re here, they’ll come for us. They won’t be able to help themselves.”

  “I say we let the kid go in by himself,” The Pole said. “Use him as bait. Then when he comes running out with thirty of ‘em on his ass, we’ll fucking toast ‘em.”

  “Fuck that,” West said.

  The Pole laughed. “Come on, kid. Think of my entertainment here.”

  “Let’s do it my way,” Kurta said.

  And his way worked, because not five minutes later, they got some action.

  20

  It came from Build-a-Bear Workshop of all places.

  Six or seven of them charged, drooling and hissing, eyes like glimmering silver coins. They were driven forward by the voracious appetites of their slugs which had already drained them down to walking skeletons.