Slither - Edward Lee [61]
"Most of them are dying," Loren noted.
"The cooking process," Nora said. But something bothered her. "But the worms closer to the center are still kicking. They don't look right for a nonsegmented parasite, do they?"
Loren agreed. "The hydroskeletons are all wrong. And they don't look like Polychaetes, either, or anything gastropoda."
Annabelle's beautifully suntanned face looked sapped of all color. When the silence settled, she looked dismayed at Loren and Nora as they continued to examine the nest of tiny parasites.
"I could've eaten those disgusting things," the blonde complained. "Are they poisonous?"
"No, no," Loren assured her.
'Then why are you looking at them like you just found the Holy Grail?"
Good question, Nora realized. 'Because we've never seen a parasitic marine worm like these, which is disturbing because ..."
Loren finished the statement for her. "Because we're America's leading authorities on the subject. We've never even seen a marine worm body configuration like this-not a chitin-penetrating species."
"Chitin-penetrating?" Trent queried.
"The ability to penetrate a chitinous exoskeleton--,an insect shell, or a lobster shell, in this case." Nora was transfixed. "Chitin penetrators that live in seawater are always segmented, yet these don't appear to be."
Loren continued with the late-night worm lesson. "Certain types of marine worm parasites attack crustaceans by disgorging a corrosive digestive enzyme onto the host's shell. The enzyme burns a hole through which the worm can either consume the innards of the host or inject eggs, or-" He and Nora looked at each other with raised brows.
"Or what?" Trent asked.
"Or inject fertilized ovum," Nora said. Like the ova we found in the shower .. .
"How can you even see them?" Annabelle asked next. "They're tiny."
"You're right," Loren said. He stood up with the lobster, and Nora got up right next to him.
"Which is why we're going to go look at these under the microscope." Transfixed now, she and Loren stalked away to their field lab.
The fire crackled. Trent smiled and slipped his arm around Annabelle. "How do you like that? All of a sudden you and I have this cozy campfire to ourselves."
The grotesquery of the parasites she'd nearly eaten vanished. She grabbed Trent's hand and urged him up. "I'm not interested in romance, Lieutenant. While those too nerds are looking at their worms, you and I are going to find a place to fuck."
Trent followed Annabelle-and the rest of his good fortune-down another trail.
The fire crackled some more, painting the trees and surrounding brush with lines of light that squirmed, almost like worms.
(II)
"They're resilient, that's for sure," Loren said, gunning up his microscope. "The cooking process didn't kill them all, and this lobster looks pretty well cooked."
The fact didn't impress Nora much. "There are worms that live in underwater thermal vents that survive at hundreds of degrees. I just want to find out what these damn things are."
Neither of them said anything at first. Nora adjusted the comparator microscope, while Loren sat at the table beside her, changing stages on a smaller scope. Each had placed several of the tiny pink worms under their lenses. "I'm seeing something else immersed in the fluidity between each worm."
"Me too," Nora admitted. "Could it be mesenteric debris from the lobster?"
"Lobsters don't have mesentery. They have semisolid blood-processing organs that are green. This carrier fluid's clear. And there are specks in the fluid. You got those on yours or am I seeing things?"
"You're not seeing things," Nora said. "The specks are off-yellow."
"Just like those ova we saw in the shower stall."
It was difficult for Nora to frame words, but she knew Loren was thinking along the same lines. "The shower ova were the size of jelly beans and these are so small they're practically microscopic. You and I both know the size differentiation means that these specks came from a completely different species."
"A worm ovum this small couldn't grow to the size of a jelly bean.