Slither - Edward Lee [83]
In the water, it looked like a long black gouge in the sea floor. Can't hurt to go in just a little, he told himself. He knew his earlier warnings of moray eels and sharks were exaggeration; both creatures rarely attacked humans. Loren wanted to see if their odd pink parasite had ventured into the trench, too.
He entered slowly and turned on his flashlight.
A one-second glance was all it took.
Bubbles erupted from his lips. He shot to the surface and immediately began to swim to shore.
What he'd seen lying in the mouth of the trench was a human corpse with slabs of dough-white flesh hanging off its bones.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
(I)
Nora tried to make calls on her cell phone for the rest of the day-to no avail. I've never heard interference like that before ... The odd, throbbing static over the line. When she went out toward the very end of the beach, hoping fora clearer track to the mainland ...
The same throbbing buzz.
Trent said it sounded like a jammer, she recalled, but she knew he wasn't serious. Jammers were used by the military, and this site was of no importance to the army anymore. The lieutenant's later suspicions were something else altogether, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized how ludicrous the idea was.
"No phone calls today," she muttered to herself and snapped her phone off. She headed back. Where is everyone? She hadn't seen any of the others for hours. If they're still out in the water looking for bristleworms, that's one long swim. Actually she was more interested in their newest discovery as far as worms went..-.
Nora couldn't deny her first impressions. Both the newborn hatchlings from the tanks as well as their foot-and-a-half long specimen looked like trichinosis worms.
And there's no trichinosis worm like that ... unless Loren's right about us discovering an entirely new species.. .
More exciting things had happened in her field, just not to her. She posed questions to herself as she walked back to the camp, a number of what-ifs.
What if this worm really could infect higher mammals?
The most famous of the Trichinella species did exactly that: the Trichinella spiralis, notorious by its ability to infect all carnivores and omnivores. But that's an inborn worm, she reminded herself, almost microscopic. And it's NOT a marine parasite.
That's when Nora spotted the nest of possums at the foot of an old pine tree.
Possums were common in Florida, a clumsy rodentlike marsupial mostly known for waddling into the middle of highly trafficked roadways, but they actually flourished in tropical woodlands. Nora leaned over to look at the nest of animals.
They're all dead .. .
It was a mother, with a half dozen young. The adult lay askew, mouth and eyes opened, little legs stiff. It appeared to have died recently-no sign of flies, maggots, or other parasites. Nora got down on one knee to look closer ...
The infant possums weren't moving either, but they seemed ...
Bloated, she saw.
So young they remained hairless, the newborns all possessed bellies that looked distended.
Nora quickly retrieved a box from the head shack, returned, and transferred the adult possum and one baby back to her lab.
It didn't take her long to get one of the infants under the microscope. Oh no, she thought the instant she sectioned the hairless abdominal wall.
Somehow, she wasn't surprised.
In the bright, magnified circle, it was almost stunning the way the hundreds of tiny ova poured forth. The cilia on each yellow egg roved vigorously. To a person in her field, this spectacle was fascinating.
And potentially horrifying.
Now-. . . don't take your eye off, she ordered herself. Don't even blink ...
It wasn't her imagination. Very minutely, the ova were growing.
She barely noticed Trent coming in behind her.
"Ready for something weird?" he asked.
I'm LOOKING at something weird, she thought. "What's that?"
"I still can't get a call out on my cell phone, and now I can't even get out on this."
Nora saw that he was holding up a clunky green radio, antenna extended. "You're kidding me. Are the