Slither - Edward Lee [1]
Oh, Jesus, that's gross!
There were no mandibles-no hooks-but he thought he did detect the tiniest follicles retreat back into the thing's body. Some kind of parasitic slug or something, he guessed. When he tweezed it harder between his fingers, blood did indeed effuse, along with threads of some milky liquid.
He pulled the other one off Carol's right nipple and flicked it away.
"Carol?"
She'd already passed out, a shock of brandy-colored hair falling over her eyes.
Some weekend island shindig, he thought. What a bust. Got to get her back to the shack, got to tell Alan and Leona. And then, ever the gallant college student, Howie picked her up and carried her back down the trail.
For about twenty feet.
Oh, man!
She wasn't fat at all, but the opposite: trim, svelte, a pixie. Carrying away damsels in distress, however, was only easy in the movies. I'll never be able to get her back to the shack like this....
So he left her.
And he ran.
It had been Alan's idea to bring the girls out to Pritchard's Key. "It's the perfect party place," he assured Howie. "Nobody goes there. The island's surrounded by big-ass rocks, and there's no beachfront. No place to dock a boat."
"Then how are we going to dock there?" Howie asked.
"I know where the inlets are," Alan answered, and there're only a few, but if we get there at high tide, we motor the Whaler right in neat as a pin, and no one can run us off-not even cops."
It sounded great to Howie, and what Alan told him next sounded even greater: "Carol finally dumped that jock she was dating, and now she's hot for you, man. She even said you were cute!"
Howie nearly choked on his Corona Light. "How do you know?"
"Leona told me the other night when I was done giving her the best sex of her life," Alan proudly revealed, and Leona and Carol are best friends. Buddy-bro, we'll get those girls out to Pritchard's Key, get 'em all pissy drunk on Jaeger Bombs, and ball their brains out. They'll probably even do that little lezbo thing they do-and let us watch."
That was all Howie needed to hear.
There was a cabin in the middle of the island that Alan already knew about. "Party Central, man." It looked more like some kind of old maintenance shed when Howie finally saw it. "What the hell is this building doing on an island that's inaccessible?" he asked.
"It used to be some kind of army post," Alan informed him, "but I mean, like, a long time ago, in the fifties or something. They finally closed it down. Anyway, this building was some kind of storage shed."
Howie couldn't have cared less.
Alan and Leona had been setting up the Coleman stove when Carol winked Howie over. "Let's go for a walk," she whispered.
It had been a long walk.
Howie knew he was good-looking, and had a certain style that women liked, but Carol was a dish-anda-half. All long lines and curves, sleek tan legs, broadhipped and flat-bellied. She's the best-looking hunk of stuff I've ever been out with, he realized with some incredulity. And she's ALL OVER me! Once they'd had a nice, long hand-holding walk across the island ...
... that was it.
One second they'd been traipsing along, and the next second they were lip-locked.
"I don't usually lust after guys," she confessed through a pant, "but I've been lusting after you for a year...."
And that's when she'd taken her top off-
-and started screaming at the two ticklike things stuck to her nipples.
As he ran, Howie found that the island was bigger than he'd thought. Where's the damn trail? He got lost very quickly, tramping through the lush, tropical woodland. If only he'd brought his cell phone. He wended his way farther and suddenly found himself standing in a bloom of sunlight, looking at water. The inlet, he realized, where they'd moored off Alan's Boston Whaler. But-
Wait a minute...
There