Slither - Edward Lee [89]
Nora stared through the prism of her mask.
The arrangement of flesh and bones lay before her almost as if it expected her. Scraps of fabric around the hips indicated shorts too skimpy for a man, and another band of fabric about the rib cage was clearly a bikini top. It was orange.
Does Annabelle have an orange bikini? She couldn't recall.
Nora felt haunted as she hovered over the remnants of a living person. Eyeless sockets looked back at her, and something like a grin struggled through the waxen, swollen traces of flesh around the mouth. White teeth glimmered through. A flap of white skin floated off the chest, darkened by the circle of a nipple. Nora found herself fingering her own gold cross as she hovered closer. Bones were all that remained of the feet, and off the femurs and shins, more white flesh wobbled like jelly. White hipbones broke through the skin of the pelvis.
She heard her own teeth grinding when she peered again to the flesh-specked face. Loren was right; clumped tresses of hair floated tentacle-like off the scalp, too light to be brunet, but it seemed longer than Annabelle's hair.
I'm pretty sure this isn't her.
But if it wasn't Annabelle ... who was it?
The intense grotesquerie of what she was looking at felt as palpable as a gust of current. She wanted to leave now, but ...
She knew she'd have to look closer for another moment, for any evidence that the worms might have done this.
There were no ova on the body, but what about inside?
Aw, shit, I don't want to do this!
The cadaver's bare abdomen was stretched across the hips tight as a drum skin, and as white. The belly button was a concise pock against the bloodless flesh. The idea of pulling the corpse ashore for a makeshift autopsy was out of the question; it would fall apart at the joints from the turbulence.
I'll part the belly a little, take a look inside ...
She shone down her flashlight, while her other hand unsheathed her utility knife. She thought of grave robbing when she brought the tip of the blade to the corpse's abdomen.
The sharp steel tip hadn't penetrated more than an inch before three long pink ropes flew out of the cadaver's mouth.
Nora's heart felt stabbed. For a moment, she blacked out from the shock of what she'd witnessed, dozens of feet under water, in dead silence.
But there was her evidence.
The worms were a yard long each. They cork screwed away from her, their grotesque bright pink skin shimmering.
Holy, holy, holy SHIT! she thought.
Then she froze in the water when a fourth, longer worm shot out of the knife hole and wrapped around her waist so quickly it was on her before she even saw it-
CHAPTER NINETEEN
(I)
But when Slydes noticed the dead worms floating in the bilge, he also noted that the bilge line seemed a little high.
This is turning into one FUCK of a shitty day, he thought. My brother's dead, a bunch of fuckin' worms somehow ate HOLES in my engine block, and now I guess they ate holes in the hull, too!
Yes, the bilge line was very slowly rising. He leaned back out of the engine compartment, veins thumping at his temples.
"The boat's sinking!" he snapped to Ruth.
"The fuck it is!" she bellowed back.
"Come on!"
"Come on where, for shit's sake?"
Slydes was beginning to see the limits of his patience. He lowered his voice, his eyes hard on her. "Ruth. I just got done telling your dumb ass that the boat's sinking. That means we need to be off the boat."
Too much stress and confusion had taken too great a toll on poor Ruth. Things just weren't working right upstairs. "I don't wane go back on the island!"
"We ain't got much of a choice, do we?"
"The snakes! The zombie!"
Those worms are so damn big she thinks they're snakes, he reminded himself. And Jonas had mentioned some big guy out there, who was all fucked up from the worms, and something about military people in gas masks. But it gave him an idea ...
"There's gotta be another boat somewhere on this island," he said.
"The photographer people!"
"Naw, they came by helicopter, but there's some other people here. Jonas