Slither - Edward Lee [41]
Just leave, she told herself. This is depressing.
She should've obeyed herself, but she chose to watch a few moments longer, and in those moments, Annabelle's face turned toward her ...
Nora's heart jolted.
In the moonlight, Annabelle's eyes met hers. Oh my God! She sees me!
Annabelle never said a word. She simply smiled.
Nora pulled herself back, turned, and ran away.
A crush of emotions buried her. She fled haphazardly back toward the campsite, images swimming in her head. By most people's standards, what she'd witnessed was of little consequence. So what? she tried to convince herself. There must've been some spontaneous attraction between the two of them, so then one thing led to another. Nora was a scientist; she should be able to understand that with no problem. But she knew what a psychologist might say: that the real reason the scene upset her was that Trent had selected Annabelle instead of her. It didn't matter that Nora felt no attraction to the army officer at all, it was merely the process of natural selection.
Being seen was the worst part. My God, she fretted. That bitch will never let me live it down. Nora knew she shouldn't care but she did anyway. The scientist in her was losing out very quickly to the human.
Just go back to the camp and go to sleep. Forget about it.
She stopped a moment to rest, that jolt to her heart finally wearing off. She placed her hand against a tree-
-then flinched.
What was that?
Her hand touched something.
A stud of some sort.
She turned the lantern up to look .. .
In the bright halo of gaslight, she couldn't have appeared more puzzled. A screw of some kind had been embedded in the tree trunk, but there wasn't a screw head at the end of it, as she expected.
Instead it was a clear glassine bulge. Like a lens.
(II)
Slydes lounged back in the fishing chair at his boat's aft. He raised his leg and farted, and found an inexplicable satisfaction in the act. He felt content now that they'd gotten in and out of the head shack without being seen, and more content in knowing that Jonas would turn that bag of pot into at least a thousand dollars in cash very quickly. It did secretly bother him, though-that Jonas made more money with his gig than Slydes did with his. Jonas believed that was proof of some intellectual superiority, but-
I'm smart too, damn it, Slydes reassured himself. He knew how to catch gator and effectively butcher it, didn't he? And he even knew how to prep and tan the hides, and that wasn't easy. Once he and his poaching buddies had thrown a gator-skinning contest (Jonas had had the audacity to not bet on his brother), but Slydes had won lickety-split. I put 'em all to shame, he remembered.
He didn't have anything to prove to anyone.
He lobbed the next beer bottle over the side. Goin' through 'em tonight ... And why shouldn't he? It was hot and he'd worked hard all day. But now all those beers were leading to the inevitable result. The deck creaked when he lumbered to the stanchion cable and opened his pants. More inexplicable satisfaction arrived when he leaned back and pulled a hard piss over the side. Ahhhhhhhhh ... -
After a couple of minutes, Slydes was still urinating. Damn! Come on, peter. I ain't got all night. He half expected to see the lagoon rise an inch or two. Bet it pisses the fish off, he allowed himself the scholarly hypothesis. But when he was shaking off, he ...
He squinted at the sensation. Not an itch, but-
Something tingled very slightly.
On his scrotum.
Not a modest man, Slydes pulled his "bag" up and looked at it in the bright moonlight.
Fuck!
A beetle or something was clinging to one of his testicles. Bean-sized ... and very disconcerting. At first he thought it might be some sort of sore-he'd had those in the