Slither - Edward Lee [43]
"I'm sleeping here!" she insisted.
"Cool." Jonas stuffed his bag of pot in his shorts pocket. "Thanks for the piece of ass. I'll see ya back at the boat in the morning."
Jonas left the shed.
A piece of ass. Prick! So much for romance. It didn't matter, though. She felt so good right now, she wasn't going to let his selfishness spoil the mood.
She lay back down, sated and high. That pot was strong as hash; the warm buzz pulsed from her heart to her toes.
She snapped the light off and let the grainy darkness come down like the softest blanket. At least the sex had been decent this time-it wasn't always that way with Jonas. The beer he'd been drinking all day gave him some much-needed endurance. Five minutes is better than two, she reminded herself. With two lovers, the situation could've been worse. What Jonas failed to provide in the way of her womanly needs, Slydes usually took care of, and vice versa.
Jonas had left the door open, which permitted a trace breeze. The moon came in like an accidental guest, and the sounds of the forest began to pulse along with her buzz. She lolled in the dark, decided not to even put any clothes back on, and in her sleepy mind she saw her dreams with Slydes and Jonas come true. One great big happy family. More and more money coming in each month. A new washer and dryer, and one of those big fancy flat-screen TVs where she could sit between her two lovers every night and watch wrestling ...
Warm semen trickled between her bare legs, but she felt too tranquilized to even move, much less wipe herself. Her eyes closed, and her unusually large lips turned up into a contented smile. Sleep carried her away oh so deeply .. .
She never even felt the thin, foot-long pink worm that slithered into her body through her vaginal canal.
CHAPTER NINE
(I)
The sergeant and the corporal watched the longhaired man leave the shed. He's leaving the woman, he realized, which seemed odd. But that was better for the field analysis. The woman would be much more vulnerable sleeping alone in the shed.
"How long till you think one of them gets her?" the corporal's voice issued through the earphone.
"Could be hours, could be minutes. No way to tell. The worms' sensory organs are supersensitive, and the ovum too. They'll seek out the largest heat signature as well as the most profound pheromonic emanations."
"Pheromonic?"
The sergeant couldn't believe the deficient level of tech training the younger NCOs were getting these days. "Airborne glandular emissions of bombykol molecule groups that come out of the skin, particularly the skin of genitalic regions. They're picked up by ol factory VMO receptors and stimulate pleasure centers in the brain. Chemical triggers, you know, from the tech classes you passed to get this duty assignment. They trigger innate reproductive responses."
The corporal clearly remembered nothing of these classes. "Fine, but since you just said it might take hours for one of the specimens to get her, I think we should go in there right now and have some fun. We'll get her pheromones going, all right."
The sergeant glared at him through the visor of his protective mask. "Any more comments like that, I'll write you up."
"You're not serious, Sarge."
"Try me." The sergeant would not have that sort of thing going on while he was ranking NCO in the field. It didn't matter that all the subjects would eventually die, it was protocol. That sort of thing could get out of hand. "She's probably got all kinds of diseases. I don't want to have to be quarantined when we get back to the post."
The corporal grumbled.
I really don't trust these new kids at all, the sergeant thought. "We're done for now," he said. "Let's get back."
"What about the two men on the boat that came in tonight?"
"They'll be infected by morning, if they're not already."
They slipped away from the shed, then turned on their low-light lenses to refind the trail back to the field HQ. They passed one corpse along the way, one of the women infected by the ovum. She hadn't released the brood yet, but the dead belly quivered