Slither - Edward Lee [115]
Gotcha, you fucker! he thought when he grabbed the head with his left hand, pressed it to the dirt. Only now was he able to drag his gun hand out.
He pressed the barrel to the worm's skull-less head, and-
Bam!
Chunks of pink meat speckled Loren's face. In the other direction, more seawater, white blood, and a teacolored ichor flew. The plume hit a tree and-
Shit!
Loren began to frantically wipe his face off, remembering that the worm's enzyme duct was in the head. He could see spatters on the tree smoking, sizzling, those same fluids burning through the bark. It was Loren's very good fortune that none had gotten on his face.
The worm limpened in death after a few reflexive spasms. Loren shrugged out of the coils.
He got up and looked closer at the tree. The enzymes became impotent after a minute, but not before eating a crater into the hard tropical wood.
As the sizzling from the acid died down, a thought began to sizzle in his head.
He grabbed the worm's neck, clamping hard with the ring of his thumb and forefinger, leaving eight inches of exploded head hanging off. Loren dragged the-dead-thing back toward the RTG.
Can't hurt to try ...
It was like dragging a great length of hose. When he arrived at the slab, he carefully held the worm's ruptured head right against the black rod on which the disk had been mounted.
Loren squeezed a few feet of worm ...
More fluids evacuated, mostly the tea-tinged slime.
The cement around the rod-
It's working.-. .
-began to sizzle and smoke.
Loren jiggled the disk as the acids worked deeper. Moments later, he yanked it out of the cement slab, like dragging the stick out of a thawing Popsicle.
The enzymes liquefied the cement!
He'd gotten the bomb off the RTG but-
Holy shit .. .
Now Loren found himself in the most bizarre predicament of his life. I'm standing here in the middle of the woods, holding a bomb from another planet ...
He looked at the blinking border of light around the disk.
With each blink-he noticed now-that border got infinitesimally smaller.
Loren shook his head.
Question of the day, he thought. How the HELL do you get rid of an alien bomb?
No answers were forthcoming. He at least knew that he had till the border ran out to think of something. -- -- - - - - - -- -
With nothing else to do, he put the bomb in his pocket and headed back to the campsite to find Trent ...
(IV)
Robb was strong, all right. His mottled yellow hands turned Ruth upside down, and hauled her shorts off. The terror merged with the stifling heat, and of course, the "zombie's" stench of rot and metamorphosis. The fetor in the room could be likened to fresh-ground beef, sperm, and a restaurant Dumpster in the sun. Ruth landed on her head when Robb shucked her out of the shorts, which dangled off one ankle. She saw proverbial stars as Robb's hands began to wring her implants like dishwashing sponges.
When she was able to see through gaps in some of the stars, her scream ground down to a disgusted gag. Robb had shed his own shorts previously, to reveal a groin that looked more like an open wound. There was no penis, for instance, just a rot-gnarled nub with a hole in it, and a bloated yellow scrotum. Were small things moving in the scrotum?
Ruth was too racked with horror to ponder the ques tion very deeply, but given the circumstances, a passerby might beg another question: With no penis, what did Robb intend to rape her with?
Muscles flexed beneath yellow, red-spotted skin. In Robb's infection and sequent decomposition, aspects of his college-athlete physique remained: pillars for thighs, bulging biceps, pectorals, and lats. Ordinarily, Ruth might even have been turned on by the flexing washboard abdominals.
But not when they were covered by red-spotted yellow monster skin.
All 110 pounds of Ruth put up a formidable fight, hands slapping at the mindless, wedgelike face, fingers poking at the eyes, which looked so watery they might somehow have aspirated their inner humors. The big chunk she'd bitten out of his cheek was now