Her puffy lips pressed together. "You don't even believe thereis a .zombie, but -I don't give a shit."

  "Fine. Now let's go in. I'll even go first." He opened the creaky door, then-

  Oh, what the hell?

  -grabbed Ruth by the hair and shoved her in first.

  "You're a fuck, Slides! You're a lyin' piece of fuck!"

  "Yeah, yeah." He stepped in after her, looked around. At least it was cooler in here, out of the sun; the little windows were open, letting in a bit of a cross breeze.

  "See, pea brain? No zombies in here."

  Ruth gusted out a relieving sign. 'And-shit!' Her dirty bare feet thunked to the corner. "Food!"

  Some plastic bags lay on the floor, full of potato chips and cheese curls.

  At least that's somethin, Slydes thought. It was the closest he'd come to thanking the Fates. "Any sodas in them bags, any bottled water?"

  Ruth bumbled through the bags. "No. But at least we've got something to eat." She ripped open the cheese curls. A moment later, her cheeks looked stuffed as -a chipmunk's.

  If we don't get some water soon, we're gonna die, Slydes thought point-blank. He didn't dare voice this to Ruth, though. He opened a bag of chips and began munching. But if I could get that little gas grill lit outside, I could boil some of the creek water. That would kill any worms or ova. "You got a lighter on you?"

  "Fuck no," she said, crunching more curls. Her fingers and puffy lips were orange.

  "You gotta be shitting me. You smoke pot like they're cigarettes and you don't have a lighter on you?"

  Ruth glared. "Well, I had one, Slydes, but like I told you, before the zombie tried to rape me he tore off my shorts! And the lighter was in my shorts! Does it look like I got any pockets to carry a lighter in?" She faced him arrogantly in the drenched T-shirt, then flapped the damp hem up. "See any lighter, Slydes? Huh?"

  "All I see is your dirty camel toe." He pointed to the other corner: some clothes and towels. "There's a pair of shorts there. Put 'em on."

  Ruth made a face, as though the suggestion were outlandish. 'I'm not putting on some other girl's shorts! She might have crotch rot."

  "I guarantee you, Ruth, your own crotch rot'll kill anything on them shorts." And then he grabbed her hair and shoved her forward. "Now put 'em on! Every time you bend over, I gotta look at your ass hair."

  "I don't have ass hair, you fuck!"

  Slydes stared her down. "Your lips are gonna be a lot fatter in about one second-"

  Ruth smirked, and pulled on the shorts. She reached into one pocket. "Hey! Money!" She held up a small roll of cash. "And-" From the other pocket she extracted a cigarette lighter.

  "All right." Slydes snatched the lighter away from her and headed for the door.

  "What are you gonna do?"

  "Boil some of that brook water, Einstein. Kill the worms."

  "You're a genius!"

  He went back outside. He'd hoped that eating something would make him feel better, but instead it made him feel worse. Yeah, shit, we're probably dyin' of dehydration and don't even know it yet ... But maybe some luck had come his way.

  He set the grill back upright and opened the small propane cannister to high, then snapped the lighter over the element.

  The lighter worked fine, but the grill didn't catch.

  Don't tell me.-.-. He put his ear to the element.

  There was no hiss.

  God is really kicking our asses today. He chucked the lighter into the woods, disgusted.

  Some char marks seemed to sweep up the shed's wall. Must've been a fire here, he realized, but somebody managed to put it out. A logical deduction.

  Yet who was the bigger "pea brain"? Slydes walked right back into the shed and never even noticed the water hose lying at the other end.

  "Ain't no fuckin' gas in the tank," he said, back inside.

  "Fuck." Ruth sat against the wall, an orange hand to her belly. "I feel like shit, Slydes. I feel like I could croak. Maybe those worms infected us."

  Slydes wanted to throw up, in part from how he felt, and in part from remembering exactly what Jonas looked like the last time he saw him. if we got infected, we'd be turnin' yellow, like Jonas. We ain't infected, we just need water." Darker thoughts entered his head. He kept looking at Ruth ... and the stark veins standing out in her sweaty neck. He knew this:

  When hunters couldn't find water, they could drink the blood of any animals they killed. Blood was mostly water.

  In which case, Ruth was a veritable bucket of water.

  Am I that much of a scumbag? he asked himself. The question almost bothered him.

  Almost.

  He had his Buck knife right there on his belt. He'd skinned and gutted many a gator with it. And compared to gator skin, cutting Ruth's throat would be like putting his knife through mashed potatoes.

  The question appeared to be answered.

  But if he was going to kill her for the water in her blood, then-

  I just gotta have it one more time, Slydes figured. His lack of reservations, perhaps, represented his human truth, so at least he was being honest. He was going to use her mouth for his own sexual pleasure and then drink her blood. Great guy.

  He sat down and put an arm around her.

  "What-are-you doing?"

  "Cuddlin'," he said.

  Ruth rolled her eyes. "Now?"

  Now, or any time. You're always beautiful."

  Ruth was stunned by the compliment, however phony. Slydes held her tighter, caressed a breast. "Come on, baby. I've been missin' you fierce."

  Ruth's expression showed sheer befuddlement. Any other time, she'd be happy to oblige, but under these circumstances? Jonas dead along with God knew who else? Giant worms, and a zombie in the woods? Plus, she was feeling really lousy...

  "Slydes ..."She tried to push his hand away, but by now he'd already pulled her T-shirt up. "I feel like shit, like I'm gonna throw up." -- - - - - - -- -- - - -- -- -

  Slydes's beard tickled her when he kissed her neck. "Please, baby, don't leave me hanging. I'm needing you really bad."

  "I'm not in the mood, Slydes!" she outright whined.

  He had his jeans opened, and pushed her head down. "It'll only take a minute, sugar. See, Ruth, you're so beautiful, it just makes me hot for you all the time."

  Ruth frowned and shrugged. It wasn't the first time she'd performed a sex act simply because there was nothing else to do. Slydes groaned once her expertise was upon him. He obviously wasn't the most considerate of men, and given that he'd been sweating and stinking on this island for the past three days only proved more of Ruth's resilience. Yeah, she's a trooper, all right, he thought, the sensations building already. In which case she'd be a dead trooper very shortly.

  Just as Slydes would have his moment, she stopped and looked up at him. "Oh, fuck, what a couple of morons we are!"

  "What!" he shouted, outraged. He pushed her head back down. "Come on, girl! You don't stop right before a guy's going to-"

  "I just thought of where we can get water!"

  "Huh!" The distraction spun in his head. Yeah! Your neck! Again, he tried to force her head back down.

  "Would you wait a minute!' she managed to blurt.

  "We can get all the water we want at the head shacks where Jonas grows his pot. The drip lines, from that old army filter or whatever the fuck it is!"

  Slydes eyes widened. Holy shit, she's right! Unbeknownst to her, Ruth's perceptivity had just that second saved her life. "'That's good thinkin', baby!"

  'Fuck-yeah!"-

  "But finish the job." And then he shoved her head back down.

  Ruth, indeed, finished the job, treating Slydes to a potent climax, the residue of which was displaced into her mouth.

  "Aw, yeah, honey, that was great ..."

  But Ruth sat bolt upright, eyes pried open. Her lips puckered in distaste, as though she'd taken in a mouthful of turpentine.

  "What's wrong with you?" Slydes asked, refastening his pants.

  Ruth spat loudly on the floor, and when she looked at what she'd expectorated, she grimaced. "Oh, fuck! That's fuckin' gross!"

  "What'choo talking about?" Slydes leaned over and looked.

  Oh, fuck. That IS fuckin' gross, his thoughts heartily agreed. There were no other words.

  Roiling amid his spat-out semen were hundreds of tiny yellow beads, smaller versions of the ones he'd plucked off his body the other night.

  "You're infected with those worm things!" Ruth shrieked at him.

  "Bullshit! I ain't infected. They came out of you! They came up out of your belly or somewhere!"

  Ruth jumped up. "They didn't come out of my stomach, Slydes, and you know it! They came out of your pecker!"

  Slydes stroked his beard. Had they? He looked at his arms, looked under his shirt. My skin ain't yellow, he saw. Jonas said you turned yellow if you were infected. But...

  Ruth wasn't yellow, either.

  And the ova came from somewhere. "They were on the floor already, like the ones outside," he tried to convince himself.

  Ruth stomped around the shed, spitting incessantly. "I could feel 'em squirming in my mouth, Slydes!" Then glared as though he were a leper.

  Slydes didn't much care for that look.

  "You're infected! I'm getting out of here!"

  The predicament irritated Slydes ... so he decided to kill her anyway. I know it ain't me who's infected, he kept telling himself.

  What else could he believe?

  As he reached for his knife, though, he cast a glance at the semen again.

  Those little yellow worm eggs ...

  Had they doubled in size in the last two minutes?

  "I'm fuckin' sorry, Slydes, but I gotta get away from you," Ruth declared. "I don't wanna get infected with those fuckin' things."

  I'm carving her up, Slydes resolved. It was a matter of pride. He'd done a lot for her, and now she was abandoning him.

  Low-class.

  Slydes shucked his knife just as Ruth opened the door to flee the shed.

  But she didn't flee.

  She screamed and just stood there.

  Someone was blocking the door, and when she jerked backward, Slydes saw who it was ... or, not really even who anymore, but what.

  He would have no way of knowing Robb White by name, he only remembered Ruth's claim of a big yellow zombie lurking around, and then Jonas's dying revelation that the very first person to be infected by the worms continued to live through repeated mutations. He's a big guy, Jonas had related. Watch out for him. He's trompin' around here like a fuckin' zombie.

  This person/thing was a "big guy," all right. He stood huge in the open doorway, hair all gone now, replaced by mottled yellow scalp, old swim trunks essentially rotting on his pelvis. The eyes looked more like wads of spit, but somehow they seemed to recognize Ruth.

  Then the ruined, yellow face ... smiled.

  "He's come back for me!" Ruth shrieked. She dodged a swipe from a huge arm, then ducked behind Slydes. "Stick him with your knife, Slydes! He's gonna kill us! He wants to feed us to the worms!"

  Moments of consternation such as this were difficult to reckon. Slydes was scared shitless and paralyzed as he stood there, Ruth hiding behind him. His first instinct, indeed, told him to fight. But when he took a closer look at the thing that was thunking into the shed with mutated arms outstretched, he knew there was no point. He wouldn't be fighting a man, he'd be fighting an organic monstrosity.

  The face beamed back at him, yellow and runneled. A gray tongue emerged to lick segmented lips. Slydes noticed a chunk missing from the guy's cheek, revealing a sore crater in pus-rife flesh. Muscles and veins flexed beneath the shiny, runny skin, and worse than the inhuman sick-yellow hue were the blazing red spots.

  And, yes, the thing was smiling.

  It's smilin' at Ruth ...

  "Don't let him get us, Slydes!" she screamed.

  "Us?" Slydes questioned.

  This would be even better than cutting her throat.

  Ruth's screams cartwheeled around the room when Slydes turned, grabbed her by the shoulders, and threw her into the waiting arms of the college jock formerly known as Robb White.

  Was the thing giggling? Slydes thought so. It wrapped its arms around Ruth's slender physique, dragged her to the floor, then wrapped its stout legs around her too.

  "You coward piece of fuck scumbag motherfucker, Slydes!" Ruth cut loose in her loudest scream yet.

  Slydes stepped around them, and slipped out the doorway.

  "Oh, fuck, no, no, n !"

  Slydes took one last peek inside. Ruth's zombie had pulled down its rotten swim trunks, and was now yanking down her shorts. Slydes closed the door and jogged away.

  (II)

  "I've never been this far across the island," Loren said. He followed Nora through the thickening woods. Time and disuse had narrowed the trails this far in, to mere overgrown scratches; they could barely see them enough to follow them.

  "I've explored a little," Nora confirmed, "but not quite this deep. According to Lieutenant Trent, the old control center is this way."

  "You really think there's someone there?"

  Nora tried to weigh the question in concrete terms. What they'd discovered thus far almost seemed unbelievable, but then she knew she believed it all because she'd seen it all. "Actually, Loren, I really do."

  Loren gulped, and went silent.

  "Seriously," she went on. "I can't deny what we've seen. A parasitic worm that displays features and traits of multiple species? Their hydroskeletons and ova growing exponentially? That sounds like laboratoryinduced mutation."

  "I know, but-"

  "And we have found surveillance cameras all over the island. I've seen them, you've seen them. Now, you and Trent just told me that Annabelle got hauled up into a tree by a twenty-foot worm. That's an unbelievable story-but I believe it because I just saw several worms almost as long back in the trench. You and I both know worms like these can't grow this large or this fast without some kind of artificial catalyst inducing it." She paused. "And I know I saw a submarine out in that trench. It wasn't oxygen deprivation, Loren, and it wasn't hallucinosis spurred by variances in water pressure."

  "I believe you saw a sub or submersible," Loren admitted. "And I believe something really screwed up and unnatural is going on here. But aren't we asking for trouble now? Aren't we getting in too deep?"

  "One of our party is already dead," Nora reminded him, "and we know other people have been killed on this island recently. We already are in too deep."

  "I want to know what's going on, too. But if there really are people at this control center, what are we going to do? Ask them what they're doing? Invite them to lunch?"

  "No. We're going to apprehend them, with that gun you have. We're going to get to the bottom of this."

  Loren laughed hard-and nervously. "They're military, Nora! They have guns too, and the big difference is they know how to use theirs. I'm just a mildmannered polychaetologist, not Wyatt Earp."

  Nora shoved away some branches and moved on. "Relax, Loren. We're just going to take a look. You're a scientist, too-aren't you curious about what's going on here?"

  "Um-hmm, and Magellan was curious about what was going on in the Philippines ... and he got butchered by a bunch of-pissed-off natives."

  Nora shook her head. "Just come on."

  "What's that there?"

  Loren had noticed a small tin shed that seemed to be humming.

  "It's the filtration and desalinator for the island's water supply." Then Nora pointed to the black power cable and metal box it branched off from. "And that's the voltage regulator."

  Loren stared at it. "And the generator is ... where?"

  "It's over there some place," she said quickly. "Come on."

  Loren followed the cable, finding its terminus at the large slab of concrete on the ground, and the accommodating sign: KEEP AWAY! RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL IN USE!

  Loren frowned at her. "No wonder I've never heard a generator motor. There isn't one. That's an RTG, isn't it?"

  "Yeah," Nora admitted. "I found it by accident the other day; we're not supposed to know about it. Trent said I'll actually have to be debriefed by army security people just for seeing the damn thing."

  "I guess so. If terrorists knew this was here, they could use it to make a dirty bomb if they could get to the source material. Probably Cesium 137."

  "Trent said the army's not worried about it. The source is buried in the middle of fifteen tons of steelreinforced concrete."

  Loren chuckled. "Oh yeah, that makes me feel a lot more secure. Shit, Nora, maybe it's leaking. Maybe the RTG is causing the mutations."

  "That's impossible, and you know it. It's only a couple of rads heating up a thermocoupler. We've seen these things in our own field. They're safe, and their power is exaggerated."

  "We better hope so. Greenpeace would love to hear about this. Let's call Nader."

  "Just come on!"

  Another black cable paralleled another scratch of a trail. Nora and Loren followed it through a small clearing. "No anoles or iguanas," Nora said. "Have you noticed that?"

  "Unfortunately, yes." Loren pointed down, a look of disgust on his face. "And check that out."

  Another possum lay dead at the base of a tree. Bloated and quivering. Nora peered a little too closely and noticed newly hatched pink worms-not a half inch long-exiting the animal's ear and anus.

  "And look there," Loren added. "But don't get too close."

  A rusted sign stood before them on metal posts. It read U.S. ARMY MISSILE COMMAND-RESTRICTED AREA.

  At first Nora thought the quarter-sized pocks were just spots of corrosion, but then they began to move.

  "Those are the biggest ova yet," Loren noted.

  "I know. They must grow selectively, like the Polychaetes myerus. It's all in the genes. While some ova hatch early, others hatch late, to evade predators or hostile climate."

  At least ten fat, yellow ova crawled along the sign's metal face. With them this large, Nora could see that the red spots on their outer skins were oval-shaped: The spots seemed to move, too, as the outer skin very slowly throbbed.

  Nora felt cruxed. "These things are all over the place. They're in the water and on land. They're infect ing everything ... So why haven't they infected us?"