Slither - Edward Lee [98]
Loren looked up, too. "Probably, uh, probably one of those big iguanas, or a tree-nesting bird."
"Yeah," Trent muttered back. "You're ... probably right."
Before Loren's perceptions could register, something fell from the tree, as if unraveling. He thought of a hose being dropped: pink hose, and that's essentially all he could think before the two-inch-wide, twenty-foot-long worm unfurled from unseen branches, deftly coiled about Annabelle's chest, and began to lift her upward.
"Holy shit!" Trent yelled.
"Hold on to her!"
Annabelle's unconscious body was being lifted as if on a towline. Trent lashed his arms around a thigh, while Loren grabbed her feet, but then-
"Fuck!" Trent shouted.
They began to rise too; the worm was lifting all three of them. Trent and Loren, out of futility, dropped back to the ground. Trent drew his service weapon and fired several stray shots higher into the branches. "It's like trying to shoot a piece of rope!"
Annabelle's nude body disappeared upward.
Loren shook off his shock and still not really thinking jumped up for some branches. His flip-flops scuffed against bark as he tried to hoist himself up.
Trent grabbed his shoulder. "Forget it, man."
"We can't just leave her!"
"She's gone. There's nothing we can do to help her. What? Climb the tree? You'd never get up there, and even if you could, how are you going to shoot a worm that moves faster than a sidewinder?"
Loren knew he was right, but he still couldn't break his instincts. He tried to pull himself up again: useless. He hung off a short branch like a kid trying to do a pull-up.
"Forget it, man," Trent repeated.
The realities began sinking in all at once. Loren didn't know what to think, but he did know that Annabelle was gone.
He dropped back down, and the two men ran off as fast as they could.
Nora, pondering some bizarre realities of her own, stumbled back to the campsite just as Loren and Trent sprinted into the clearing. The three of them nearly collided with one another.
"I found the dead body in the water," Nora announced. "And it was full of worms. At least now we know. These things do attack and infect humans."
Trent sat down at the picnic table, winded. "You can say that again."
"Annabelle's ... gone," Loren said.
"What do you mean?"
"A worm got her," Trent said.
Nora tried to cogitate. "I saw four of them in the water, and they were all over ten feet long."
"This one was twenty, at least," Trent confirmed.
Loren was getting his breath back. "It could've been longer than that. It was impossible to tell how far it went up the tree."
Here goes, Nora thought. "I also found a submarine."
Loren and Trent stared at her.
She recited the experience in detail.
"I saw that trench," Trent said. "A submarine couldn't fit in it."
"No, no," Nora explained. "Not like a nuclear submarine full of missiles. It was a lot smaller-"
"Like a submersible?" Loren said. "A research submersible? The military uses those all the time. They use them to map transport routes for the navy."
"That's more like what I'm talking about," Nora said. "And I'm certain it wasn't a pipeline or anything like that. It was a submarine. It even had some fins on the side."
"Were there windows?" Trent asked.
"I didn't have time to look over every inch. There were still plenty of worms down there. One of them almost got me ... till I cut off its head."
And, next, Loren and Trent explained their own encounter.
"A man in a decontamination suit and gas mask?" Nora questioned. "Every new thing we discover looks more and more like a military experiment of some kind."
"And you can bet there are more of those guys on the island somewhere," Trent offered.
"But where?" Loren questioned. "On the submersible?"
"Maybe, but I'd guess they've got their own field station set up out here somewhere," Trent said. "And another thing you can bet on. Whatever this experiment is they're doing, it's definitely a top-secret project. They're not giving a flying fuck about any civilians who get killed. It's