"They're not, trust me. I just saw them a little while ago--

  She was shaking her head. "You don't understand. Those little yellow things are all over the place. They'll fall on you from the trees if you're not careful. And some of the worms are really big. I'm not going back into those woods; I'm lucky enough to have made it this far without one getting me." She paused, eyeing him. "Why don't you and I leave right now?"

  "That's impossible," Loren told her. "My friends aren't infected. I guarantee it. But I can't just leave without them."

  "I think you should," she said, fingering the gun.

  Oh no. This is going to be a problem, Loren realized. Should he go for the gun? Loren knew his karma didn't work that way. I'd get my skull parted . . . "Okay, look. You stay here and wait for me to get back with the others. Will that work?"

  The lost gaze searched his face. "Yeah, I guess. I'll be able to tell if any of them are infected."

  Loren assessed her comment. Interesting. "How can you tell, by the way? You seem to know a lot about this. If a person's infected initially, how do you know?"

  "By looking at him," she said. "My boyfriendHowie-he turned real fast. Had to have been less than an hour before the signs started showing."

  "What are the signs?"

  "Your skin turns to this mucky yellow-same color as the eggs. After a while you even develop red specks along with the yellow."

  More information of interest. She's talking about the mutagenic element. Contagion would depend on the level of viral admission, and also antibody resistence of each infectee. And Loren also knew-based on his knowledge of the Trichinella order itself-that a positive infection could bring about much, much more than a change in skin pigmentation. No need to tell her that part, he considered. Then he remembered Annabelle. Hopefully Trent's already found her by now. I'll just go grab Nora, and then we can get the hell off this island. But-as- he was about to do so he thought he noticed ...

  Wait a minute ...

  Her dull gaze came alert. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

  Loren was looking at the crotch of her bikini bottoms. "What's ... what's that? Down there?" He pointed.

  The girl slowly looked down at herself. An uneven crescent of skin emerged right at her bikini line.

  The crescent was yellow, almost like a stain, or a rash.

  Then dread seemed to bloom over her head like a halo. "Oh no, no, no!" she groaned.

  She yanked up her T-shirt.

  "No, she whispered.

  Her abdomen had turned yellow, with bloodred specks. Her eyes welled with tears as, next, a dozen motile ova began to inch out of her bikini bottoms.

  Loren didn't even have time to lunge for the gun-or even implore her not to do it-when she put the revolver's barrel to her head and-

  Bam!

  Leona's horror was gone, along with the side of her head. Loren could do little more than stare through the shock. The woods froze around the lagoon, the silence now somehow more deafening than the discharge of the bullet.

  Shit, was all he could think.

  He quickly pushed her body overboard, then picked up the gun and made a swift exit off the boat ...

  (III)

  Darkness was beginning to sift into the woods when Trent heard the shot.

  He froze in place, eyes snapped open.

  Yes, it sounded like a single, distant gunshot.

  No. It couldn't be. He patted his gun belt, felt the butt of his army-issue 9mm strapped snugly into the holster. There's only one person on this island who's armed, he reminded himself. Me.

  The mainland was only a mile or two away; sounds could carry in strange ways, especially over water. Probably a truck backfiring, he considered. Or maybe a sonic boom from a jet flying back to the air force base.

  Yes. Maybe.

  He stomped through most of the island's western end, but still no sign of Annabelle. This shit is getting old, he thought with a gripe. I don't care how goodlooking she is. I'm tired of bushwhacking through these woods ...

  And in the back of his mind he remained all too aware of Nora's and Loren's concerns. Maybe this worm stuff really is serious, too. They seem to think so, and they're experts.

  But during his annoying trek, he hadn't encountered any worms, nor their accommodating ova.

  Trent began to feel like an idiot before long. A wildgoose chase, only the goose is a brick shit-house blonde. His watch told him it was almost time to be heading back. Nora would have more information about the dead body out in the water-If there really IS a dead body. The kid could've been mistaken. Annabelle was probably back at the campsite by now ...

  Probably drunk, he added the thought, from that flask full of rum. And I'm running around out here looking for her ... More irritation bristled.

  Yeah, he thought. I'll bet she's passed out drunk somewhere, so to hell with this. I'm going back to the camp.

  Just as Trent turned to abandon his search-

  whap-

  Something landed on his head. He flinched away, aghast, swatting about his head. What the fuck was that! Did one of those worms just land on me?

  He flung something long and stringy off his neck.

  "I thought that might get your attention," a sultry voice said from somewhere. Trent's shock faded when he saw what had hit him in the head ...

  Not a worm. A white G-string.

  Annabelle grinned coyly at him. She leaned against a tree, stark naked, her tan lines raving at him.

  "Where the hell have you been?" he almost yelled.

  "Just wandering around. Where have you been?"

  "Looking for you!"

  Her eyes narrowed a little, she pouted at him. "You sound mad."

  "I am mad! We've been looking for you for almost two hours! Nora and Loren think these worms might be dangerous to humans. We all need to stick together and think of a way to leave the island."

  "Oh, let's not leave yet." Her voice remained singsongy, flirtatious. Trent noticed her beach bag at her feet, and the uncapped and obviously empty flask. Just as I thought. "Come on, you're drunk. Something serious might be going on, and you're out here getting loaded."

  "There is something serious going on," she said. "Me and you. Right now."

  Trent couldn't help it, but at least he was fairly sure that no other red-blooded man could either. His anger dissolved and then he was walking right up to her. Here we go again ... His gaze slid up over her body, lingering over every perfect curve. Suddenly, worms, dead bodies in the water, and inexplicable electronic jamming were the furthest things from his mind.

  He just couldn't help it.

  The image of her body and its accommodating promise dragged him to her as effectively as a chain around his neck.

  "That's better," she whispered when they embraced. Her hot hands seemed impatient when she lifted his T-shirt over his head, and a moment later he was back in his lustful heaven, his bare skin pressed against the warm, plenteous bosom. Oh God, I am so pussywhipped! Trent gave up altogether. Nature was calling again, and he simply didn't have the will to say no.

  He could feel the turgid nipples pressing against him, could feel the heat radiating off her body and surrounding him, pulling him. Trent was none too daintily sucking her neck when he felt her fingers teasing around his groin. The sexual energy between the two of them was merging into a cocoon of antsy, hot static.

  She was about to unfasten his gun belt and delve into his trunks when she suddenly nudged him back.

  "Let's get kinky," she whispered.

  "Huh?"

  Annabelle picked up the beach bag and slipped out the drawstring. Now her fingers spidered across his chest. "Tie me up."

  Trent was thrown off guard. lie her up? In the woods? I just want to get laid again. Trent had never really been into such things but ...

  "You really are buzzed," he said.

  "Um-hmm." Her big, wanton eyes blinked. "Makes me hotter." She put the drawstring in her hand and offered her wrists.

  What a nut ... but I guess I don't really care. He lashed her wrists together, and thought, What now? but she pointed just above her.

  "Lift me up. Right there."

  The crook of a broken bough stuck out of the tree. Annabelle held her arms up, elucidating her breasts, as Trent palmed her hips, raised her enough to get the lash hooked on the bough, then released her. Now she stood before him on her tiptoes, stretched out like something for display. Her breathing grew heavier at once.

  She's really into this kooky stuff, he realized, but scarcely cared. He began kissing her breasts and tonguing around her neck. Words weren't necessary now, just primal action. Her stretched body trembled as Trent's mouth embarked on a hot, wet trek from the dimple of her throat, and down ...

  "Lower," was the only word she breathed.

  The officer knew what she wanted, and took his time getting to it. His mouth sucked fresh sweat off her skin, between the valley of her breasts, then more tan skin, then her navel. Her body was quivering now. Trent lingered at the navel, knowing that it only maximized her expectations; now he was toying with her, a notion that seemed ultimately satisfying.

  After minutes more of excruciating mouth-play on her abdomen, he finally lowered himself to his knees.

  She breathed through hisses, then quickly raised her legs, splaying everything before his face. The bottoms of her thighs rested on his shoulders.

  Trent tinkered further with her angst, refusing to ar rive at the mark. She was truly hanging now, her arms straight as rods, her bare heels thunking his back, trying to pull his mouth closer. Trent just kissed and sucked ever more along the insides of her thighs.

  The way she began to shudder, he would've thought she was climaxing even before his mouth finally found her sex.

  Annabelle let out a delicious moan. If Trent had been able to see her face, surely her eyes would've been squeezed shut in the most potent pleasure, and every muscle in her flawless body flexing beneath the tan skin.

  Her moans rose to repeated crescendoes, her flesh quaking, then-

  Just as he expected her climax to let loose-

  "Get me down!" she shrieked. "There's someone behind you!"

  Trent heard an unpleasant metallic clack! of some sort, and before he realized it might have been the sound of something hitting him on the back of the head, his vision began to blur. It seemed that black ink had been dumped over his consciousness, and-

  Trent collapsed flat on his back.

  Only one second of awareness ticked by before he'd fully blacked out, and in that second, he saw two things:

  Annabelle hanging helpless and naked against the tree.

  And a man in a decon suit, gas mask, and hood reaching out for her.

  CxnrrExWErr[y

  (I)

  Nora corkscrewed in the water as the pulsing, pink worm tightened its coil around her waist. Somehow her instinct turned off her panic and turned on her defensive mechanisms; as the worm coiled in one direction, she violently flailed her body in the opposite, hoping to retard the thing's efforts to fully encircle her.

  She thrashed, wielding her knife. No thoughts of horror or fear filled her head-only reaction. The worm seemed the width of a garden hose, but it had to have been ten feet long. Eventually it wrapped around her body several times, then began to constrict.

  Its strength was dizzying, as though two hefty men were pulling on each end of a rope looped about her waist. Had it gotten around her neck, she knew she'd be strangling now, but this wasn't much better. The worm was trying to squeeze all the air out of her body ...

  Her free hand clamped just under the tapered cone of flesh that was the worm's head; this was all that kept it from slithering about her throat .. .

  Nora was running out of air. Her flippers kicked to the surface, but the worm's posterium-its tail endraveled around her legs, tightening more.

  Meanwhile, unvented carbon dioxide began to swell in her lungs .. .

  Through her mask she viewed the worm's eyeless head and the sphincter of muscle that composed its frontal duct. The fleshy ring opened and closed akin to a heart valve, driven to attach itself to her mouth through which it would either empty its digestive enzymes-to feed-or empty its ovarial reservoirs-to plant its eggs.

  The mouth had no jaws-just the grotesque, pulsing ring-and no teeth, but instead something worse: a circle of "stylets" that would sink into the meat of her back throat like fishhooks, to keep the worm's body securely attached to the host. The most revolting sensation of Nora's life was the feel of the worm's own throat clamped in her hand, its skin-or hydrostatic sheath-moving back and forth-like the foreskin over an erect penis.

  At that moment, she thought: I'm going to die now ...

  She felt something tear through her swimsuit-and her skin. Seawater burned into a six-inch-long gash down her abdomen. The worm was now a belt tightened around her waist ...

  Nora's knife had shot down, then, and cut the belt in half.

  She'd done it without thinking, cutting herself in order to cut the creature ...

  Half of the worm's length drifted away, dead.

  But this left the top half, still alive and squirming.

  Nora's blade blurred across her eyes, and severed the worm's head. It floated away, a squirming, pink lump.

  The rest of the body unraveled, the clipped end re leasing a plume of tea-colored digestive enzymes as well as a slew of underdeveloped ova. In a split second, Nora watched those same corrosive enzymes burn up any ova it came in contact with.

  She managed to kick away, as still more of the acids came only inches away from drifting into her face.

  Her legs kicked independently from her mind. To escape the corrosive ooze, she'd kicked backward, farther into the trench, and then her back collided with something .. .

  A moment of thinking passed.

  Then she shot up to the surface, where her head broke the water only a few heartbeats away from the point in which she would've drowned ...

  I'm alive! was her first genuine thought.

  She was slowly treading water, to stabilize her metabolism out of shock. Her chest heaved as she sucked in breaths.

  I have to get back to the others, she knew. But ...

  But...

  What had that been?

  Not the worm, but the abutment she'd backed into just after decapitating the worm?

  Something not right .. .

  Her confusion waylaid her. She was swimming back down to the trench, knife in one hand, flashlight in the other.

  What the hell was that!

  She had to know. A culvert of some sort? An oil pipeline? But what purpose could such things serve twenty feet beneath the Gulf of Mexico near a useless island? She knew there were more worms down there, yet her curiosity seemed fevered. The worms had more than likely swum away, and the enzymes from the one she'd killed would have dispersed in the current. So...

  I just have to see. She felt driven. What was that thing I backed up against?

  Her flippers pumped furiously; she swam back down to the trench. Crystalline water glittered, prism-bright. Ys and Ws of coral branched out from the bank, skeletal fingers that seemed to be pointing to secrets.

  Nora slowed her descent, then stopped.

  The trench stretched onward, probably several hundred feet, and widened to thirty. The sun's angle kept the underwater gouge blotched in cool, teeming darkness. She couldn't see what she'd touched, and only knew that it felt out of place, but .. .

  Something's there, she noticed through a squint.

  She'd have to surface for more air in another minute, but not till she got a look.

  She reached back out into the inkiness and felt it again: a smooth, flat surface, slightly curved. Like metal.

  That's when Nora-mildly alarmed-veered the waterproof flashlight around.

  She became severely alarmed when her eyes registered what she was seeing, and then she shot herself back to the surface, gulping air.

  That's-that's-that's ... CRAZY! she thought.

  What she'd seen lying in the trench was an object that could only be a naval submarine ...

  (II)

  He was supposed to be here an hour ago, the sergeant thought. He checked all of the rooms in the old control station. Where the hell is he?

  The sergeant wasn't the overexcitable type. When something went wrong, he simply fixed it, with a calm professionalism. He'd sent the corporal out a while ago, to retrieve the climate sensors and the little bit of field equipment that had been posted outside, but there was no sign of him. Just what I need. A man away from his post when the mission's winding down .. .-

  He was about to check the monitors when he heard footsteps coming down the hall.

  The major walked in. "Good news, Sergeant. All of the project's findings have been logged and processed, and every duty protocol has been completed. It's time to leave. The colonel's very pleased with the mission's success."

  "That is good news, sir."

  "Looking forward to getting back to the post?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Get the collection and security gear ready to take out. I'll be securing the specimen data. We'll debark tonight."

  "Yes, sir."

  The major eyed him. "You seem ... reserved, Sergeant. Is something wrong?"

  The sergeant sighed, his shoulders slumping. "Yes, sir, it appears that there is."

  "It appears ..." The ranking officer looked around the room. "Where's the corporal?"

  "I sent him out in the field earlier to take the climate sensors off-line. He should have returned by now."

  "So he's away from his post without authorization, is what you're saying?"

  "Yes, sir, at this point, I'd make that conclusion."

  The major muttered something under his breath, then leaned over the security monitors. "He's not in any of the surveillance sectors. I know he was thoroughly screened before this assignment. Do you think he abandoned the mission?"

  The sergeant was sweating now. "No, sir. I just can't see that. He knows that we'd find him."

  "Does he have any abuse problems?"

  "I don't think so, sir. Things like that are usually easy to detect on missions like these. But ..."

  "But what, Sergeant?" the major asked sternly.

  "He may have a problem with unauthorized interaction."