Slither

  Lee, Edward

  Leisure Books (2006)

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  SUMMARY:

  A species of worms that can reach thirty feet long has begun attacking--and feeding on--the residents of a remote island.

  The trichinosis worm is one of nature's most revolting parasites. Certain types of this tiny worm alter a host's DNA by injecting a virus which mutates the reproductive system. This forces the host to bear the worm's young. Typically these worms are never longer than a few millimeters. But guess what? Now there's a subspecies that's thirty feet long...

  When Nora and her team arrive at the island, she expects a routine zoological excursion...but it doesn't take her long to realize they're not alone. Are her lurid sexual dreams making her paranoid...or is she being watched? The dead bodies they find are bad enough, but then her own team members begin to disappear, and when they return, they've...changed. Indeed, there are other people on the island...along with something else far worse.

  HIGH PRAISE FOR EDWARD LEE!

  "The living legend of literary mayhem. Read him if you dare!"

  -Richard Laymon, author of The Cellar

  "Edward Lee's writing is fast and mean as a chain saw revved to full-tilt boogie."

  -Jack Ketchum, author of Off Season

  "Lee pulls no punches."

  Fangoria

  "The hardest of the hardcore horror writers."

  -Cemetery Dance

  "Lee excels with his creativity and almost trademark depictions of violence and gruesomeness."

  -Horror World

  THE SLITHERING THING

  "I found the hose!" Howie bellowed, running back around the corner. He held the long length in one hand. "fiam it o-" But then he stopped.

  "Howie," Leona said with the sickest feeling in her life churning in her belly. "That isn't the hose..."

  It hung limp until the moment she'd said that, almost as if it had sensed the trigger of Howie's fear. His eyes snapped down...

  Then the "hose" began to move...

  Vaguely pink, glistening skin. About an inch thick. It extended from his hand, behind him, its other end still on the other side of the shack. Howie tried to drop the grotesque thing but it was already too late for that. In the space of that synaptic second, the creature energized and wrapped around Howie's upper torso-

  Then Howie was dressed in the thing, wearing it like a corselet. His scream was severed when more of its length coiled about his neck. Howie fell over.

  His eyes still registered images as his vision clouded, and then the thing's head made itself plain: slightly tapered, less like asnake and more like a worm.

  A pink hole dilated-a mouth opening?-then a thinner pink tube of something fleshy slipped out and-

  "Howie!" Leona screamed.

  -slithered down Howie's throat.

  Other Leisure books by Edward Lee:

  THE BACKWOODS

  FLESH GOTHIC

  MESSENGER

  INFERNAL ANGEL

  MONSTROSITY

  CITY INFERNAL

  SLITHER

  EDWARD LEE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to: Mike Anthony and Michael Kennedy for my wonderful Header movie, Bob Strauss for indefatigable proofing; Cedric Perez for tech stuff; Shay Prentiss and Christine Torres; Noel and Lance at X Ray Productions; Jen and Monica from Rue Morgue; Kelli and Kelly from Horror Web; Sascha Mamczak and Francis Hoch; Juan Carlos Poujade; Barry Anderson, Thomas Deja, Aaron Williams, Christine Morgan, Nick Yak. Also Kathy, Mindi, Pam, Tess, and Wendy.

  PROLOGUE

  When Carol noticed the two ticks attached to her nipples, she very understandably screamed.

  She screamed right into Howie's face.

  Parrots screeched, lifting off from palm trees; other animals tore away through the brambles. Were he not so shocked himself, it might even have occurred to Howie that Carol's scream barely sounded human. It sounded, instead, machinelike: a bad bearing in a highrpm motor.

  "Ticks!" Carol shrieked after the scream.

  Howie stared at the breasts he'd been dying to see all month, and then his mouth fell open. He thought: Holy Jesus God Almighty! What are those THINGS?

  And the things-barely the size of jelly beansseemed to be quivering.... .

  Are they ... are they really ticks?

  "Get them off, get them off, get them off, Howie!" She shuddered against the tree, her smart and very expensive Victoria's Secret "tankini" top on the ground. All that remained in the way of apparel were stylish hot-pink Converse tennis shoes and the tiny floral bikini bottom. Howie had spent the entirety of his junior year yearning to see her like this ...

  But not while she's screaming bloody murder with two-two-two THINGS on her nipples!

  She slid down to the ground, probably close to clinical shock now. "Relax, relax!" He tried to calm her. "Don't pass out! I don't think they're ticks and I don't think they're leeches...."

  What, then?

  Slugs?

  Carol's face was paling. Her body began to convulse like slow electrocution.

  Oh, shit! Howie hunkered down, gingerly cupped one tangerine-firm breast, and tweezed one of the things off her left nipple.

  It didn't let go at first, and he couldn't help but imagine the tiniest mandibular hooks sunk into the tender nipple-tip, drawing out blood. When it finally came off, a few minute specks of blood welled up. The bug, tick, slug, or whatever it was felt akin to a cooked pea, only this "pea" was shiny, as if wet, and a strange yellowish white, while its outer sheath possessed scarlet dots. Howie turned the thing over, pinched between his fingertips, and squeezed ...

  Oh, Jesus, that's gross!

  There were no mandibles-no hooks-but he thought he did detect the tiniest follicles retreat back into the thing's body. Some kind of parasitic slug or something, he guessed. When he tweezed it harder between his fingers, blood did indeed effuse, along with threads of some milky liquid.

  He pulled the other one off Carol's right nipple and flicked it away.

  "Carol?"

  She'd already passed out, a shock of brandy-colored hair falling over her eyes.

  Some weekend island shindig, he thought. What a bust. Got to get her back to the shack, got to tell Alan and Leona. And then, ever the gallant college student, Howie picked her up and carried her back down the trail.

  For about twenty feet.

  Oh, man!

  She wasn't fat at all, but the opposite: trim, svelte, a pixie. Carrying away damsels in distress, however, was only easy in the movies. I'll never be able to get her back to the shack like this....

  So he left her.

  And he ran.

  It had been Alan's idea to bring the girls out to Pritchard's Key. "It's the perfect party place," he assured Howie. "Nobody goes there. The island's surrounded by big-ass rocks, and there's no beachfront. No place to dock a boat."

  "Then how are we going to dock there?" Howie asked.

  "I know where the inlets are," Alan answered, and there're only a few, but if we get there at high tide, we motor the Whaler right in neat as a pin, and no one can run us off-not even cops."

  It sounded great to Howie, and what Alan told him next sounded even greater: "Carol finally dumped that jock she was dating, and now she's hot for you, man. She even said you were cute!"

  Howie nearly choked on his Corona Light. "How do you know?"

  "Leona told me the other night when I was done giving her the best sex of her life," Alan proudly revealed, and Leona and Carol are best friends. Buddy-bro, we'll get those girls out to Pritchard's Key, get 'em all pissy drunk on Jaeger Bombs, and ball their brains out. They'll probably even do that little lezbo thing they do-and let us watch."

  That was all Howie needed to hear.

  There was a cabin in the middle of the island that Alan already knew about. "Party Central, man." It looked more like some kind of old maintenance shed when Howie finally saw it. "What the hell is this building doing on an island that's inaccessible?" he asked.

  "It used to be some kind of army post," Alan informed him, "but I mean, like, a long time ago, in the fifties or something. They finally closed it down. Anyway, this building was some kind of storage shed."

  Howie couldn't have cared less.

  Alan and Leona had been setting up the Coleman stove when Carol winked Howie over. "Let's go for a walk," she whispered.

  It had been a long walk.

  Howie knew he was good-looking, and had a certain style that women liked, but Carol was a dish-anda-half. All long lines and curves, sleek tan legs, broadhipped and flat-bellied. She's the best-looking hunk of stuff I've ever been out with, he realized with some incredulity. And she's ALL OVER me! Once they'd had a nice, long hand-holding walk across the island ...

  ... that was it.

  One second they'd been traipsing along, and the next second they were lip-locked.

  "I don't usually lust after guys," she confessed through a pant, "but I've been lusting after you for a year...."

  And that's when she'd taken her top off-

  -and started screaming at the two ticklike things stuck to her nipples.

  As he ran, Howie found that the island was bigger than he'd thought. Where's the damn trail? He got lost very quickly, tramping through the lush, tropical woodland. If only he'd brought his cell phone. He wended his way farther and suddenly found himself standing in a bloom of sunlight, looking at water. The inlet, he realized, where they'd moored off Alan's Boston Whaler. But-

  Wait a minute...

/>
  There was a boat tied off to some mangrove roots right there in front of him....

  That's not our boat....

  It was just a skiff with a little outboard in back. This must be one of the other inlets Alan was talking about, Howie realized. The small boat rocked gently in the water. So ...

  There was someone else on the island.

  Howie stepped aboard the skiff, hoping dismally to find a radio, a cell phone, even a flare gun, but there was nothing. He picked up a small card on the floor.

  CENTRAL FLORIDA WEST COAST TIDE TABLE, it read.

  Makes sense, Howie thought. Someone else came out to the island to party, just like we did. Naturally they'd have a tide table because you couldn't get a boat in here during anything but high tide.

  Howie frowned at the card. It was last month's table.

  He picked up a slip of paper in the console. Credit card receipt. Herbster's Marine Exxon. The captain of the skiff had obviously filled his tank there. Same place Alan filled up this morning, Howie remembered. But this receipt was dated three weeks ago. The card holder's name was Robb White.

  The gears of Howie's brain turned. Robb ... White ... Recognition. That guy on the football team, a senior, he recalled with a rising dread.

  Dread because Robb White and some of his friends had been reported missing ...

  Three weeks ago.

  Not cool, Howie thought. But this was just more to process; Carol was the priority. Howie scanned the skiff one last time for a radio or cell phone, came up with nothing, then turned to step off the craft.

  Awwwwww, SHIT!

  The corpse of a young woman floated languidly just beyond the bow. The way her sable-hued hair fanned out over the water was almost pretty.

  The rest of her wasn't so pretty.

  She was probably naked, but that couldn't be totally discerned for what was wrapped around her like a pink garden hose: something that had to have been a snake. It coiled about her upper thighs, waist, and bosom, then her neck, and it glistened intricately. Sickening enough as it was, what sickened Howie more was the creature's color: pink, like the inside of someone's cheek. The woman's eyes no longer existed within their sockets but instead floated free, suspended by tendrils of optic nerves. The thing's tail roved listlessly between her wax-white legs, while its head ...

  Howie gaped.

  The thing's head burrowed into the woman's mouth, and its elongated body seemed to pulse ... as if pumping something down through her esophagus.

  Howie had had enough. Gotta-get-OUT OF HERE! But as he leaped off the skiff, something snagged his vision on the other side of the quiet inlet.

  His eyes flicked up-

  A man was standing between some trees. He wore some sort of black jumpsuit with integrated mittens.

  And a gas mask and hood.

  Military, Howie thought.

  When he blinked, the man was gone.

  Howie ran back into the woods as if he were being chased by demons.

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Would somebody explain to me just exactly why this Pritchard's Key place is so special as far as scarlet bristleworms go?" the bikini'd blonde at the end asked. Her name was Annabelle Omart-noon-blue eyes, and a body like a game show hostess's. She hailed from New York, the National Geographic editorial offices. Her body suggested a dedicated regimen of exercisemost likely in upscale fitness salons. The only thing missing was a preeminent suntan. The woman sat demurely, seat-belted in to the helicopter's muster bench.

  "It's because of something called a counterstropic rivulet," Nora answered with absolutely no interest. When she didn't elaborate further, Loren Fredrick, her associate, continued, "Which is actually just an uncharacteristic surge of runoff water from the mainland. Gravity and the terrain siphons this water to a single point and a gradient underwater current in the gulf pushes it outward. Pritchard's Key just happens to exist at the same point where the surge begins to disperse."

  The army guide wasn't listening, and neither was the cabin master, a gruff warrant officer. They were both looking at the blonde. Every so often, even the pilots glanced back from the cockpit to ogle her.

  Professor Nora Craig simply sat there and frowned.

  She lapsed back against the cabin wall as Loren attempted to dazzle the others with information about the remarkable scarlet bristleworm. Nora herself let the helicopter's rotor noise lull her away from the creeping trickle of low self-esteem. Why am I letting that blond calendar girl posing as a photographer make me feel insecure? Perhaps it was just a case of raging hormones.

  She let her eyes move across the cabin, trying to consider everyone in objective terms. Lieutenant Trent looked more like one of those guys who work in a department store appliance section. Pushing forty, smirking, not much going on behind the eyes except a lack of enthusiasm. Evidently he was assigned to the army's public relations unit, the "PR mouthpiece between the military and the civilian contingent," he'd explained. "Whenever civvies need to be shown around army property, I'm the guy they send." Trent's fatigues were crumpled, which might indicate how often this desk driver wore them. If it weren't for the distraction of the blond photographer's cleavage, he would probably be asleep.

  Loren Fredrick was Nora's teaching assistant at the university. Totally unsocialized like many professional academics, he sat as gawkily as a textbook nerd. Tall beanpole physique, knobby knees, and a long neck that showcased what had to be one of the biggest Adam's apples in human evidence. Buckteeth, too, and a mop of wiry dark hair. He sat at the edge of his cabin seat, animatedly explaining the evolution of bristleworms in general and their unique "parapodic" means of loco motion more specifically. He's boring them silly, Nora thought, and he doesn't even realize it.

  The army warrant officer was a typical Neanderthal with his green helmet and ham-hock-sized jaw, and the two pilots up front were little different. Somebody peed in the pool, Nora mused over their brute, caveman features. The gene pool, that is. They clearly bore no interest in this excursion, and if they were even listening to Loren's grueling dissertation, it was to look at the blonde sitting next to him. They're just here for the ride and the eye candy, Nora realized.

  "Right, Nora?" Loren asked.

  Nora blinked, reined her attention back in. "Oh ... what?"

  "I was telling Annabelle about the reproductive habits of some bristleworms, such as the Eunice didacta."

  Annabelle, Nora thought through the bored daze. Oh, right. The blonde. He's calling her by her first name, like they're best buds. "The female didacta will actually ingest the entire posterium of the male."

  'Posterium?" Annabelle pronounced.

  "'The rearmost tip of the worm's body," Nora defined.

  "Which, in the case of this species, also contains the spermatic reservoir-its penis, if you will," Loren finished, grinning. "That's how the Eunice didacta has sex."

  Annabelle's eyes grew wide. "How fascinating!"

  The huge-jawed warrant officer elbowed Trent. "Ain't that somethin', Luey? The chick worm eats the dude worm's works. That's how it gets knocked up!"

  "Charming."

  The warrant laughed along with the two pilots, while Trent simply frowned at the image.

  "It sounds like such a specialized subject," Annabelle said. She perkily pointed to Loren's T-shirt, which read POLYCHAETOLOGISTS DO IT BETIER! "That word you keep using. Polych-"

  "Polychaetes," Loren was happy to reply. "That's the class of worm that your employers have sent you all this way to photograph."

  Nora felt negligent by not contributing to the conversation. "The scarlet bristleworm, for example. Scarlata is the genus, or type, Polychaete is the class, and it comes from the phylum known as annelida-which covers all segmented worms." ---- -- - -- - -- - -- -

  "Oh," the blonde said, then returned her attention to Loren. "So that word on your shirt-"

  "Polychaetologist," Loren explained, "is a scientist, such as myself and Professor Craig, who- specifically studies this type of worm. That's our job."

  "Great job," Trent said, dimly astonished.

  The WO called to the pilot, chuckling, "Hey, Flappy, you hear that? These two here are worm scientists!"

  "And the overall study of worms," Loren continued, "is called helminthology."