Slither - Edward Lee [85]
"You're right," he muttered a minute later.
The dilemma trebled with each thought. Can't get off the island-no boat. Can't call for help-the phones and radios aren't working for some unknown reason. There's a parasite on the island that might be able to infect humans ... oh, and by the way, we've also got a dead body in the water, and nobody knows who it is...
"Wasn't Annabelle with you when you found this dead body you think you saw?" Trent said.
Loren clearly didn't care for the structure of the sentence. "I saw a body. I don't think I saw one, I saw one."
Trent held up his hands. "Fine, but how do you know the body isn't her?"
The question silenced them all.
"Couldn't be," Loren insisted. "You and Annabelle went back to the beach when the three of us were looking for bristleworms. I stayed out. That's when I found the corpse."
Nora tried to rein in some reason. "One thing at a time. Forget about corpses and jammers and parasites right this minute. Lieutenant, I think the best idea is for you to find Annabelle, while Loren and I do some more tests on this worm."
Trent didn't seem overly pleased, but he agreed, "All right," and left the head shack.
"So you were right-it can infect mammals," Loren said when he noticed the dead possum. He looked into the scope. "Jesus. Some of the ova are still growing, while others have already hatched."
"You're kidding ..." Nora hadn't seen that. Another fluke. "It looks like a Trichinella, and it's acting like a number of species from the order, but-"
"Nora, this worm is acting like a whole bunch of different worms," he said, "and we both know that."
When Nora took another look herself, she saw that some of the tiny ova had already hatched into worms that were already a half inch long. "This is going to become a mess real fast. They're growing off the slide."
"Isolate one ovum and one worm, then-"
"Kill everything else," she finished his thought. She placed a worm and an unhatched ovum in a petri dish, then scraped everything else into a plastic container and sprayed it with repellent. "I want to see what this ovum's going to do."
"It might be an infertile mutagen carrier," Loren speculated.
"That's what I was thinking." But it was also what she was fearing. Once a species got this big, who knew what effect it would have on humans? "And we're going to keep this worm alive-to see just how big it gets." She left the ovum in the dish and forceped the now inch-long worm into a glass beaker. "Why don't you check out the mother possum?"
Loren slid the box over and pulled up the other microscope. "At least it doesn't stink yet. The only thing grosser than a possum is a rotten possum."
"It had already given birth to the babies," Nora told him. "It's obvious it hasn't been dead more than a few hours."
"And just more proof of a parasite that can live on land and in water."
"Um-hmm."
Loren wasted no time in making a transabdominal incision on the adult possum. When he parted the rive with dissection probes, he simply stared. "I don't even have to put any tissue samples under the scope to see that this possum is seriously fucked up."
"Huh?" Nora leaned over and looked.
"There's nothing inside. All internal organs are absent."
"That's impossible. It hasn't been dead long enough to suffer that level of putrefaction."
"I'm not even smelling putrefaction, Nora, not a trace. Somehow the entirety of its organ systems was removed before any cellular deterioration could take place."
"Eviscerated by a predator?"
"The body was intact," he objected. "No cuts on it, no bite marks. If a skunk or another possum ate this thing's innards, there'd be bite marks on the abdomen."
Now Nora could see what he meant. "And it couldn't be a bacterial infection or a corruptive stomach virus because there'd still be signs of decomposition."
"And there isn't any," Loren finished, frustrated. He pushed away from the table, arms crossed in thought. "So you know what I'm thinking now?"
Nora nodded. "This is the same way that chitinpenetrating