The Conqueror Worms Read online

  “Boy,” Sarah said, “did they miss the call on that one or what?”

  “They sure did.” Carl nodded. “Earl got away with talking crazy like that, but I have to fill out a damn stack of forms and wait three days every time I buy a new hunting rifle for deer season. There’s no justice in this world.”

  I grinned at Sarah and Kevin. “Don’t mind Carl. He’s just mad because they wouldn’t renew his hunting license last year, on account of his eyesight.”

  “That’s because they’re a pack of idiots.” He frowned. “Ain’t nothing wrong with my eyes, and I can see fine to shoot.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “Because something tells me there’ll be plenty of shooting before this thing is done.”

  Carl’s face grew sullen and grim. I’d never seen him look older than he did at that moment. Or more frightened.

  The conversation was sporadic after that, and we remained on topics other than the weather and what the rains had brought with them. I needed a dip bad, and I had to fight to stay awake. I was exhausted, that type of weariness that creeps into your bones and makes your eyes itch. The coffee wasn’t doing anything to help me, either. My daughter, Tracy, had given me some coffee and chicory that she picked up while on vacation in New Orleans. I hadn’t touched the stuff, because it made me jittery, and the doctor had told me to stay off of it. But I seemed to recall that it had more caffeine than regular instant coffee did, and wondered if I could rig up some way to brew it on top of the heater. Doctor’s orders be damned. And I was already jittery. The can was down in the cellar’s pantry.

  I grabbed the halogen flashlight, clicked it on, and opened the door that led downstairs to the cellar. Darkness greeted me, along with a familiar smell. That wet, fishy stench was in my basement now, although more muted than it had been outside.

  I swallowed and suddenly Sarah was there behind me with the pistol in hand.

  “Need any help?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, a bit too eagerly. “But let’s be careful. You smell it too, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “You think they’re inside the house?”

  “Not yet. But I reckon they’re close.”

  We started down, and my joints creaked along with the old wooden stairs.

  An inch of water covered the concrete floor, and pretty much everything that hadn’t been sitting up on pallets was now ruined. Forgetting that Sarah was with me, I cursed, and then blushed when she giggled.

  I walked around, shining the light into corners and surveying the damage. A three-inch crack had appeared in one cinder block wall. The fissure ran the entire length of the wall, floor to ceiling. The floor was cracked, too, and the washing machine leaned to one side. I noticed that the concrete had begun to sink beneath it.

  Sarah chuckled. “I hope you have flood insurance.”

  “Reckon they’ll pay up?” I tried to play along, though my heart wasn’t in it. The damage was new, and hadn’t been here the day before. With the amount of water that was seeping in, I’d have my very own indoor swimming pool within a matter of days. The loss of some of the personal items that had been stored downstairs was hard to take as well—boxes of toys from when the kids were young, old photo albums, and holiday decorations. All of it was waterlogged and damaged. The word processor that the kids had given me was still safe, but the particle-board desk it sat on was starting to puff up. That fake wood stuff soaks up water like a sponge.

  “You okay, Teddy?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right. Just makes me mad, is all. Some of this stuff was junk, but a lot of it was irreplaceable. Wish we’d had an attic here, rather than a basement.”

  Other than the cracks in the floor and the water, I didn’t see any damage. The basement still seemed relatively sturdy. We made our way over to the root cellar, which was separated from the rest of the cellar by plywood and panel walls and a sturdy wooden door. The floor inside the root cellar was just dirt and I had a bad moment as we opened the door. I was expecting to shine the light on an earthworm, sticking up from a hole in the floor. But it was clear, and we stepped inside.

  “What do we need, anyway?” Sarah asked.

  “There’s a can of chicory coffee down here. I just wanted to grab that. It’s got more caffeine in it than the stuff we’ve been drinking.”

  “You needed me to help you carry a can of coffee?”

  “No,” I admitted, lowering my voice. “I needed you to come along because I’m a scared old man who wasn’t sure what he’d find down here.”

  Sarah smiled and gave my hand a squeeze. “That’s okay, Teddy. Don’t be embarrassed. I’m scared too.”

  “It wasn’t just that. You make for a lot prettier company than Carl or Kevin do. So I let you come along.”

  She laughed, and the basement seemed to brighten with the sound. “I like you, Teddy. You remind me of my grandfather.”

  I smiled. “Then he must have been a marvelous man. And like I said already, you remind me a lot of my granddaughter. She’d have liked you.”

  “It feels good to be here. After all Kevin and I have seen, this feels…normal.”

  “Well, I’m awfully glad you folks are here, too. I mean, I’m sorry about the circumstances, and about what happened to your friends. But you don’t know how grateful I am to be around people again. I was so lonely. Thought I might be the last man on earth.”

  I cleared my throat before she could reply, and tried to change the subject. I shined the flashlight beam over the rows and rows of jars. Rose had canned every autumn since we’d been married, and during the Y2K craze, she’d canned even more, convinced that civilization was going to collapse and we’d run short on food.

  “Your wife’s handiwork?” Sarah asked.

  “Oh, yes. Rose loved to can. I always had to have a garden, just so she could can vegetables every fall. Reckon we might as well take some food back up with us.”

  I grabbed mason jars full of green beans, beets, strawberries, peas, collard greens, corn, and squash, all grown in our garden, and applesauce made from the fruit grown on the tree in our backyard—the tree that the rains had now uprooted. The cans I’d taken from Dave and Nancy Simmons’s place were still upstairs, and I figured these would supplement them well. I found the coffee and chicory, too, and put everything in a cardboard box. Sarah reached down into the potato bin and pulled out a few big ones that hadn’t rotted yet and then grabbed a jar off the shelf and looked at me in a mixture of puzzlement and disgust.

  “Is this what I think it is?”

  “Deer meat.” I nodded. “From a six-point buck I got last year. You should have seen how long it took Carl and me to drag it out of the woods. Don’t know if you noticed, but we’re not exactly spring chickens.”

  “I’ll bet you were tired,” she said, and as if to stress her point, she yawned.

  “You can go on back upstairs if you want. I’ll finish things down here.”

  “I don’t mind. I can wait.”

  I grabbed a few more items, and then we waded through the ankle deep water and made our way back up the stairs. The flashlight beam started to falter, and I reminded myself to change the batteries. Wouldn’t do to be without light if those things attacked us during the night.

  Could they get in? I wondered. They could certainly tunnel well enough; Carl and I had seen proof of that. But could they dig through a concrete floor? I thought about what we’d found at Dave and Nancy’s house, remembering the destruction and that bright red smear of blood on the wall. Then I recalled Steve Porter’s hunting cabin and Carl’s own missing house. Yes, I decided, they could indeed tunnel through concrete—or at least, dig around it enough so that a building collapsed into the ground.

  How did you protect yourself against something like that? The answer was that you didn’t. There was no way.

  So I tried to put it out of my mind.

  When Sarah and I got back to the kitchen, Carl had assumed watch duties again and was telling Kevin about how he’d gotten poison
ivy over every inch of his body after he lay down in a patch of it with Beverly Thompson back when we were teenagers. Both of them were laughing, and Kevin had tears streaming down his face as he clutched his stomach. The sound of it chased my fears away.

  I fashioned a crude filtering system out of paper towels and used it to brew the chicory. It was nasty stuff, sort of like drinking hot tar mixed with cat piss, but Kevin and Sarah seemed to enjoy it. Carl took one sip, made a face, and left his mug untouched.

  We agreed that it was pretty much pointless to stand at the window and keep watch. The darkness outside was overwhelming, and we couldn’t see more than a few feet beyond the carport. The little worms were still there and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw their growing numbers. They were two feet deep in most places now, the pile so high that the ones on the edges of the carport spilled out into the wet grass. The ones around my truck came up over the tires, and were working on covering the bumper.

  “If things ever get back to normal,” I laughed, “I’m going to gather those things up and open a bait and tackle shop down by the river.”

  “Not me,” Carl said. “After what we saw today, I’m never baiting a hook again.”

  I wondered again where they were all coming from and what could be chasing them to the top. Was I right in my hypothesis? Was it something worse than what we’d already seen?

  We moved into the living room and talked for a bit more, but the yawns were contagious and soon we were all rubbing our eyes. Exhausted, we agreed that we seemed to be relatively safe for the moment and decided to discuss our escape plans in detail in the morning, and try to come up with some other options. Then we all retired for the night. Carl took one bedroom and Sarah took the other. Kevin sprawled out on the couch and I fixed him up comfy with some extra blankets and pillows. We posted a watch, just in case.

  Carl drew the first shift, which was uneventful. I relieved him at midnight. I didn’t want to disturb Kevin, so I sat in the kitchen doing my crossword puzzle in the soft light of the kerosene lantern. I was still stuck on a three-letter word for peccadillo, something with an “i” in the middle, when I heard the soft whisper of flannel behind me.

  “Sin,” Sarah said over my shoulder. “S-I-N. Three letter word for peccadillo.”

  “Well I’ll be,” I whispered, grinning in the lantern’s glow. “I would have never figured that out for myself. Been trying for days. I’m mighty glad you folks dropped in.”

  We both laughed quietly, and then a troubled shadow passed over her face. She stared out the window, in the direction of the crash site. We couldn’t see the wreckage. It was too dark. But it was there, just the same.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a bad joke. I didn’t mean ‘dropped’ of course.”

  “No, don’t apologize. It’s okay.”

  In the living room, Kevin stirred uneasily on the couch. He called out for Lori and then turned his head and went back to sleep.

  “Poor guy,” I muttered. “He’ll live with that for the rest of his life.”

  Sarah nodded.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the rain because there was nothing else to listen to, except for the occasional snore from Carl, drifting down the hallway like a ghost.

  “Why don’t you go back to bed,” Sarah said gently. “I’ll take watch for awhile.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” I replied. “I haven’t been sleeping too good anyway. It’s the nicotine withdrawal. Gives me nightmares.”

  “I can’t sleep, either. I dreamed about Salty and Cornwell and the crash.”

  “Well, I reckon we can keep each other company then.”

  “It’s quiet,” Sarah said. “You’d think the sound of the rain would lull us to sleep, but it doesn’t.”

  “Nothing friendly or comforting about that rain,” I agreed. “It’s unnatural.”

  “So you definitely agree with Kevin’s theory?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it some more since dinner. I agree that these events weren’t the result of global warming or some other ecological disaster. As for the spell book he mentioned, it could be, I guess. There’s weird stuff in this world. We’ve all seen it. Goes back to prehistory. People in the Bible practiced black magic. I don’t pretend to understand everything in our universe, but I know there are things that science can’t explain. Call it paranormal or supernatural or whatever, but it exists. My own mother had a book called The Long, Lost Friend. Lots of folks in the Appalachian Mountains had a copy back in the old days. It was a spell book, but mostly harmless stuff—how to cure warts and deworm your cattle and protect yourself from the evil eye—things like that. Folks back then, even God-fearing Christians, swore by it. All I know is the stuff worked. I remember one time, when I was little, we were all out chopping wood. My granddaddy cut his leg with the ax and my grandmother put her hands over the wound, said a few words out of the book, followed them with a prayer, and the bleeding stopped—just like that. So it did work. You don’t see it much these days, because now everything is explained and cured by science. Maybe that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in now—because of our reliance on science. Maybe we lost touch with something else. Our spiritual side. The part that still believes in—and needs—magic.”

  Sarah stared at me with a bemused look. “Why Teddy, I didn’t know you were a philosopher, too.”

  I laughed quietly. “Only one in Punkin’ Center, unless you count young Ernie Whitt or Old Man Haubner down in Renick—and he ain’t been the same since his horse kicked him in the head.”

  “And where are they now?” she asked. “Ernie and Haubner?”

  I shrugged. “Gone off with the National Guard. Dead, maybe. I don’t know. During your travels from Baltimore to here, did you see any signs that our government was helping folks? FEMA settlements or tent cities or anything like that?”

  “No. There was nothing. There’s not a lot of dry ground left, at least in the places we flew over. Like I said earlier, just the mountaintops. Everything is flooded.”

  “And it’s still raining,” I said. “Guess it’s just a matter of time before the waters reach us.”

  “Unless the worms do first.”

  “Well, I don’t think much else will happen tonight, but just in case, you ought to get some sleep.”

  “You need it more than I do,” she said. “Why don’t you go to bed? Let me take over?”

  “No. If I go to bed now, I’ll just lay there having a nicotine fit.”

  She laughed softly. “I thought Salty had been bad when it came to needing a cigarette.”

  I stopped breathing. During his story, Kevin had mentioned that Salty was a smoker, but I’d forgotten all about it.

  Could there be cigarettes outside?

  “I reckon he ran out of them, too.” I was on the edge of my seat, waiting for her response.

  “Salty? Oh no. We raided a gas station in Woodstock that was still above water, and he hauled out as many cartons as he could carry.”

  “Huh. Good for him. He thought ahead. Wish I’d done that.” I kept up the small talk and tried not to give myself away, to reveal what I was thinking. Because what I was thinking wasn’t just crazy. It was downright suicidal.

  And I was going to attempt it anyway.

  I waited a few minutes and then I said, “Begging your pardon, Sarah, but I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

  “Out there?”

  “Well, just out onto the back porch. Don’t want to use the carport, on account of all those worms on it. But the back porch is close enough to the house. It should be safe.”

  “Couldn’t you just pee in the sink or something?”

  “At my age? Shoot, I’d be lucky if I could aim it that high. Besides, that’s just downright unsanitary.”

  “Well,” she said reluctantly, “just be careful. I’ll wait here and stand guard.”

  “Okay. Be back in a bit. This might take me a few minutes. And no peeking. It doesn’t always work as quick
as it did when I was younger. I think he gets stage fright sometimes. Especially if there’s a pretty young woman staring at him from the window.”

  She giggled. “I’ll watch through the window pointing out at your carport. How’s that?”

  “Much better.”

  I put on my rain gear and walked to the back door. The fog was thick and I couldn’t see more than a few feet away from the house. I listened, but the only sound was the rain. I checked the rifle and made sure a round was chambered.

  Taking a deep breath, I stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind me. It wasn’t just black outside. It was obsidian. With no power or lights, and with the stars and the moon blocked out by the perpetual haze, the darkness was a solid thing—a living creature. It seemed to cling to me. Combined with the fog, it made sight almost impossible. I’d forgotten the flashlight on purpose, because I didn’t want Sarah to know what I was doing—and because I didn’t want to attract the attention of anything lurking out there in the night. Now I wished for the flashlight, for a lighter, for anything to push the darkness back.

  “Teddy Garnett,” I said to myself under my breath, “you are a damned old fool, and you’re about to get yourself killed.”

  I stepped off the porch and my boots sank into the mud with a squelching sound.

  “Well, I’m tired of being old and I always was a fool.”

  I started for the crash site.

  “And I don’t have much of a life left anyway.”

  The raindrops echoed in my ears.