The Conqueror Worms Read online

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Sarah! A fucking manatee? Come on. You saw it just like I did. You were there. It controlled you for a second, too, the same as the rest of us. Pull your head out of your ass! If it wasn’t a mermaid that killed Nate, then what was it?”

  She didn’t have an answer for him. Instead, she turned away and stared out into the mist.

  “Forget about the mermaid for a minute,” Kevin continued. “What about everything else we’ve seen? What about those worms outside? You believe in those, don’t you?”

  “I’m afraid to believe,” Sarah whispered. “Because I’m afraid of what that will mean.”

  Now, it was Kevin’s turn to stay silent.

  “Well,” I said, trying to ease the tension, “I do believe in the good book, and I’ve let the Lord guide me all of my life—especially now. But I don’t think the rain or those worms out there or anything else that’s happened is a form of divine judgment. God just doesn’t work that way.”

  Kevin scoffed, his laughter short and sharp. “Hello? Sodom and Gomorrah? The great flood? Any of that ring a bell with you, man?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Maybe He did in the Old Testament, but not anymore. That’s why He gave the world His son. But look, I don’t want to preach or get into a theological discussion here. This ain’t the time or place for that, and we’re all pretty tired.”

  “Sorry.” Kevin held up his hands in apology. “You’re right. But if this isn’t a manmade ecological disaster, God’s final judgment, or some form of black magic holocaust, then what is it?”

  “I don’t know about the rain,” I said. “But I do think that those worms are natural.”

  Kevin sighed. “Then where did they come from, Teddy? Why haven’t we encountered them before?”

  I took a sip of coffee and fought back another nicotine craving. “I’m no expert, but I’ve read about scientists finding worms in some awfully strange places. At the bottom of the Marianas Trench, feeding on whale bones, and even inside of volcanoes. Who knows what lies at the center of our planet? They discover new species every year. Maybe we didn’t know about them before, but these particular worms have probably been around for a lot longer than we have. Maybe they’ve been hiding deep below the surface. Now, conditions have finally forced our two species to encounter each other for the first time.”

  “But there would have been some kind of fossil record,” Sarah said. “Something to let us know they were here.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. But they’re here now. And I don’t even reckon we’ve seen the really big ones yet.”

  Carl stiffened, his soup spoon hovering halfway to his mouth. “What do you mean, Teddy? That thing at the crash site was big as a bus.”

  “You saw that mess out there on my carport. All those night crawlers? At first, I assumed the rain had driven them to the surface like that. Now, I think it might have been their big brothers that forced them topside instead. Animals behave strangely before an earthquake or a tsunami. Maybe this is something like that. Maybe they were fleeing the larger ones. And if those big worms we encountered today pushed the little worms above ground, then what do you suppose is forcing the bigger ones up now?”

  “Something like Leviathan?” Kevin asked.

  I nodded. “Exactly. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  Sarah looked surprised. “I didn’t take you for a Shakespeare fan, Teddy. You’ve read Hamlet?”

  “Only three times. I prefer The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, myself. I was always partial to Puck. He was a funny one.”

  “Damn nonsense,” Carl said. He sat his spoon down and stared at his half-full bowl of stew. “So, if you’re right, Teddy, and there’s an even bigger worm somewhere out there, then how do we fight it?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I reckon we ought to start planning for it now. The Bible says Leviathan was big enough to swallow Jonah whole, and from what you’ve told us, I’d say that’s so. Just like the worm that swallowed Salty and Earl today. But as huge as that thing was, there’s bound to be something bigger on the way. And I don’t want to be here when it shows up. The problem is, I don’t know where we can go. We’re on top of the mountain. Everything below us is flooded. Only place higher than here is the ranger station up on Bald Knob, and we don’t know what the situation is there. It could be worse than here. Those worms could be all over the place—or worse than the ones here.”

  The others didn’t have any ideas, either. Carl picked his teeth, Sarah looked at her broken nails, and Kevin stared at the coffee mug in his hands, the one with world’s greatest grandpa emblazoned on it, that the kids had gotten me for Father’s Day five years ago.

  After a moment, I asked Sarah to continue with her story, if only to take our minds off the present situation for a little while.

  “Well, like I said, we drifted on the raft for two days. None of us slept very much, and the salt in the air started to blister our skin and lips. We were cold and wet and miserable, and we didn’t have anything to keep the rain off of us except for our raincoats, and all three of us got sick. Salty developed a really nasty cough, deep down inside his chest. Kevin and I started to worry that it might be pneumonia. He started running a fever. Became delirious, babbling about Krakens and sea gods and something he called the soul cages. He said they existed at the bottom of the sea, and held the souls of sailors who’d died. He begged us not to let him end up in one. Then, on the third day, Cornwell found us.”

  “That’s the fella who was piloting the chopper?” I asked, remembering how the seatbelt had cut him into three pieces.

  “Yeah. He was a traffic reporter for a television station in Pittsburgh. He’d been flying from place to place, wherever he could find fuel and dry land, mostly. Most helicopters need to refuel every two hours, but his was specially equipped to stay in the air during media emergencies. It held enough fuel for a five-hour flight, and he had maps of every fueling station along the East Coast.”

  “Is there much dry land left?” Carl asked.

  “Mountaintop islands like this,” Sarah said. “But that’s about it.”

  I tried picturing our mountain as an island, seen from above, and found that I couldn’t.

  Sarah continued. “Cornwell’s brother, Simon, was with him. They were looking for fuel when they spotted us in the water. By then, we’d drifted far from any recognizable landmark, but there were still occasional rooftops or antennae sticking up from the ocean. We paddled over to a water tower and climbed on top, and they managed to get the helicopter in close enough to pick us up.”

  Kevin grinned. “Remember how Salty was scared of the rotors? He thought they’d cut our heads off.”

  “He crouched down as low as he could go,” Sarah smiled, remembering, “and scrambled onboard. Turns out he was afraid of flying. I think he would have been happier to stay on the raft. But him and Cornwell hit it off, and pretty soon he got over it. We wasted a lot of fuel, just flying around and looking for survivors, but Cornwell had the luck of the devil, because he kept finding refueling stations that were still above water. Eventually, we decided to try for Norfolk, Virginia. Obviously, the city wasn’t there anymore. It’s gone, along with the rest of the coastline. But Salty figured that all of those ships docked in Norfolk and Little Creek and Yorktown would have to go out to sea when the water started rising. Otherwise, they’d have been bashed against the piers. Now that the wave threat was over, he thought they’d still be in the area. Salty said that if we could find an LPD or an LPH that was still seaworthy, we could land on their flight deck. Maybe even a big carrier, like the Coral Sea or the Ronald Reagan. I guess Cornwell wasn’t the best navigator, because we ended up way off course. Instead of being over Maryland and Virginia, we ended up in West Virginia. We were almost out of fuel and supplies when we found a dry spot on top of Cass Mountain.”

  “That’s where the Greenbank Observatory is,” Carl said. “We’ve gon
e hunting up there a few times. Teddy’s from there, originally.”

  Sarah arched her eyebrows in surprise. “Really?”

  “I was born in Greenbank,” I told them. “Lived there all my childhood, in a little Jenny Lynd type house with a lean-to kitchen. Of course, it’s not there anymore. The old home place burned down years ago, and Greenbank’s a lot bigger place these days. But it’s nice to know that the town survived the flood and is still there.”

  Sarah scowled. “No offense to your birthplace, but I wish it wasn’t there. We got stuck at the observatory for two weeks. There’s this weird cult that has taken over there. They call themselves the B’nai Elohim. I think that means ‘divine beings’ in Hebrew. At least, that’s what their leader said. I thought we’d left the crazies behind us, but I was wrong. They’re everywhere these days. The B’nai Elohim weren’t like the Satanists back in Baltimore. They didn’t worship sea monsters. But they were just as crazy.”

  “How so?” Carl asked.

  “They believed that an alien race of superintelligent geneticists from outer space created humans by fooling around with primate DNA. And they insisted that flying saucers were going to land at Greenbank and rescue them and that we could go along for the ride. They said that this had happened on earth once before and that an alien named Noah rescued everybody in his spaceship.”

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  “They didn’t try to hurt us,” Sarah continued. “Not at first, anyway. We knew they were whacked, crazy I mean, but we needed food and fuel and they had it and were willing to share. There was awful stuff going on. Incest and possibly child abuse, though we couldn’t confirm it. But we stayed, desperate circumstances and all that. Then three of the men tried to…”

  She sighed, clasping Rose’s sweater around her.

  I tried to soothe her. “Listen, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s okay.” She took a deep breath. “Three of them tried to rape me. They came into my room in the middle of the night, and when I woke up, they were leaning over me. They had my arms and legs pinned to the bed and all three of them were naked. I don’t remember their faces, but I can still hear their voices.” She paused. “Their voices are burned into my mind. One of them had a really hairy back and he had a tattoo of a snake. A king cobra. Isn’t it weird? I don’t remember what they looked like, but I remember that. I managed to get loose and I broke one of their noses and fractured the arm of another. But they had guns and mine was sitting in the corner of the room, out of reach. It might as well have been back in Baltimore. And I screamed for help. Simon and Kevin came to help me.”

  “Simon?” Carl asked.

  “Cornwell’s brother,” she reminded him. “They busted into the room, and the men shot Simon while Kevin got me away from them. There was nothing we could do. They shot him in the stomach, and the blood was pouring out. He put his hands over the wound, and the blood started bubbling between the cracks of his fingers.”

  She shuddered with the memory.

  “Simon told us to go on—that he’d hold them off. But then he was dead, just like that, and the men were jumping over his body. Kevin killed all three of them as they were chasing us. We found Salty and Cornwell, and made it to the chopper, but just barely. Salty shot one of the guards, and we took off.”

  Carl asked, “While ya’ll were on Cass Mountain, you didn’t see anything like those worms outside?”

  “Not at all,” Kevin said. “That’s why I thought maybe all the weirdness was just confined to the ocean. Obviously, it’s not.”

  “We left the observatory,” Sarah continued. “We didn’t have much fuel, but Cornwell had been studying a tourist map during our stay. He figured we could land at some place called Bald Knob, if it was still above water, hole up in the Ranger tower, and figure out what to do next. But right before we reached Bald Knob, we crashed in your backyard instead.”

  “Courtesy of crazy old Earl Harper,” I muttered. “May he rot in pieces.”

  “Rose wouldn’t want you to speak ill of the dead,” Carl said, “but then again, she didn’t have no love for Earl, either.”

  “Who was he, anyway?” Kevin asked.

  “Earl?” I whistled through my false teeth, leaned back in the chair, and drained my coffee. “Earl was a local. What you’d call a good old boy, except that there wasn’t anything good about him. He lived over yonder in that shack his whole life, except for a brief stint in the Marines. He got kicked out about two months after boot camp. Never did find out for certain what he did, but I’ve heard he kept threatening suicide and that he even cut his wrists a few times; little, superficial cuts that didn’t amount to anything. Basically, he just wanted attention.

  “Anyway, Carl and I had a friend named Hobie Crowley. Hobie smoked all his life and got lung cancer about ten years ago. He didn’t have much family, so he checked into the V.A. hospital over in Beckley. Died there, too, and now he’s buried up at Arlington. While he was in the hospital, Hobie met a fella who had served with Earl in the army, and Hobie told us about it when Carl and I went to visit. According to this guy, Earl’s unit got tired of his fake suicide attempts. He was disrupting things, and all of them were paying the price for his foolishness. Their master sergeant told them to handle it for themselves, so that’s what they decided to do. One night in the barracks, they all got a hold of Earl, dragged him into the showers and cut his wrists for real. He was back here soon after that, living with his parents until they died and staying on over there ever since.

  “He lived off welfare mostly, just like half the rest of this state’s population. See, there’s just not much work in West Virginia, unless you can farm or fix cars. That’s what Earl did. He fixed junked cars and sold them for beer money, poached a deer or two or five to put grub on the table. He was your standard redneck hillbilly. Except that Earl was crazy, too.”

  “If he was so crazy, how’d he live this long?” Kevin asked. “I’m surprised somebody didn’t try to help him, have him committed. Or else put him out of his misery for good.”

  “Oh, folks have tried.”

  “They did?” Kevin snorted. “Not hard enough, then.”

  “Rose and I, and Carl, and most of the other folks in Punkin’ Center tried to help Earl at one time or another. But we gave up. It was like feeding a stray dog. You’re nice to him until he bites your hand, and then you don’t feed him anymore. The sheriff was out at Earl’s place off and on for the last ten years or so, straightening him out on one thing or another. The Secret Service even paid him a visit one time.”

  Kevin sat up straight. “For what? Was he one of these militia nuts or something? The Sons of the Constitution? Did he post something threatening online?”

  “No, nothing like that,” I chuckled, “though it wouldn’t have surprised me. I know that Earl thought Timothy McVeigh got a raw deal; thought he was a real patriot. And Earl wouldn’t have known how to use a computer if his life had depended on it.”

  “Well what was the Secret Service checking him out for?”

  “Monica Lewinsky, believe it or not.”

  “Monica Lewinsky?” Sarah’s brow crinkled. “The girl that banged President Clinton in the Oval Office?”

  “The same. During that whole big stink, when Ken Starr was investigating the White House and all of that, Earl became convinced that Bill Clinton was the Antichrist. Said he even had the Bible verses to prove it. Now mind you, before President Clinton, Earl swore up and down that it was Gorbachev. Remember that birthmark on top of Gorbachev’s head? Earl thought that wine stain hid the number of the beast.”

  “Six-six-six,” Kevin whispered.

  “Wasn’t there a movie about that?” Sarah asked. “The Omen?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Never much cared for those horror movies. I was big on John Wayne, and Laurel and Hardy. And a few of—”

  Something splattered against the window with a wet thump and Sarah skittered away from the door. It w
as a wad of slime, clear and viscous. It clung to the glass like phlegm and slowly started to dribble down the pane.

  All four of us stared at the slime, and then at each other. In the silence, we heard that now familiar hissing sound—the whistling of a worm, and somewhere close by, too. Kevin and I both ran to the window, but the fog concealed everything.

  “Do you see any worms?” Kevin whispered.

  “Nope.” My heart hammered in my chest. I turned to Sarah. “Did you see anything come up to the window?”

  “No, there was nothing. Just the rain and the fog.”

  “Then they can spit, apparently,” Kevin mused. “Maybe that slime is like acid or poison or something.”

  I shook my head. “No, I’ve touched some it, had it on my fingers, and it didn’t do anything to me.”

  “Sure smelled awful, though,” Carl added, making a face. “Stank to high heaven.”

  “That it did,” I agreed. “Like fish and chlorine, put in a blender and mixed together.”

  We listened for a while longer, but the noise didn’t repeat itself and there were no more spit attacks. I took Sarah’s place at the door and continued with my story.

  “Anyway, Earl reckoned that Bill Clinton was the Antichrist, and before him, Gorbachev. He figured the birthmark on Gorbachev’s forehead was hiding a six-six-six. And before that, it was Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan. His troubles with the Secret Service started in the middle of the Clinton impeachment hearings. One night, Earl showed up drunk down at the VFW post in Lewisburg, claiming that if Clinton weren’t stopped, God would destroy America for its wickedness. That got him some applause from the hard-line Rush Limbaugh junkies that do their drinking in there, but not much else. So then Earl wrote an angry letter to Clinton and mailed it off to the White House. He even included his return address. I don’t know for sure what he said, but I guess he made some threats and I guess they took it seriously, because one sunny morning in April, two black SUVs came cruising through Renick, crossed over the Greenbrier River, and started up the mountain to Punkin’ Center. We all got on the horn with each other as they passed by, because everybody knew who they were. You can tell, if only by the official government plates on the back of the cars. They cruised up the dirt road out yonder and eight federal agents knocked on Earl’s door, paying him a less than friendly visit. I guess that eventually they decided he wasn’t a threat, because nothing else ever happened. For a while after that, Earl calmed down, but soon, he was back to normal. He started up again when Gore and Bush ended up in court over the election, and some folks called the Secret Service, but they must have determined he was harmless. Just a lot of hot air.”