The split-second thought told her she had no choice but to take the chance. Had the other two figures returned to their vessel?

  Or were they standing right outside in the hall, no doubt with weapons beyond her imagination?

  She flung the door open.

  The hall stood empty.

  Nora jogged for the exit door. It was closed but she whipped out the object she now knew was a key. Her fingers felt around the face of the bizarre dead bolt, found the tiny slot, then she put the key in and instinctively turned it-

  Snap!

  The end of the key-broke- off in the keyhole.

  Nora shuddered. She hadn't pushed it in far enough, and she'd forgotten to not turn the key itself.

  I just broke the key off in the fucking lock!

  She banged her hands against the door.

  Of course, it didn't budge.

  Oh my God, I just locked myself in an alien lab, and one of the aliens is still here!

  Even if she'd killed the one in the room with the girl, the other two would certainly be back for him, if they weren't already.

  Nora knew the door wasn't opening unless she found a way to push the broken tip all the way into the keyhole.

  But with what?

  She felt imbecilic trying to blow on it. Then she banged it with her fist. Nothing happened. The one she'd knocked out would probably have a key, but that would mean searching this body ...

  And with her luck, that's when he'd wake up.

  She didn't know if it were a prayer or just a figure of desperate speech when she pleaded: Holy shit, God, please help me find a way!

  The idea snapped in her mind.

  Her cross ...

  She broke the fragile chain off her neck, felt the body of the gold cross between her fingers. The post of the cross felt just about the same width as the key .. .

  Nora-stuck-it in the slot, closed her eyes, and pushed.

  The door clicked open.

  Thank you, God, she thought and ran off into the woods.

  (III)

  Loren jogged the trail back toward the campsite. Lieutenant Trent better be there, he thought. And Nora better not be too far behind .. .

  Nora.

  Shit.

  Suddenly, he was grimly aware of the pistol in his waistband. I should've left the gun with her ...

  The bulk of the desalinator and purification machines caught his eye, then slowed him to a stop. The RTG, he remembered. It was just a few yards away from all that. He turned and followed the power cable, where it ended at the concrete slab.

  And there it is, he thought. At once came a sensation like ice water in his belly.

  He was looking at the bomb ...

  The small black disk sat propped up on the rod, just as he'd seen on the surveillance screen back at the station. Is that thing really a bomb? he questioned. How do we really know?

  Then his certainties returned the instant he recalled everything else they'd seen, particularly the hundred foot-long vessel levitating out of the sea and moving toward the island, changing color to match the terrain. Perfect camouflage.

  A fucking spaceship. Shit.

  Then a glance back down to the puck-sized disk. A border of light was flashing on it, as if counting off seconds. Like a timer, he realized.

  Loren dropped to one knee, took a breath, then grabbed the disk with both hands. He pulled with all his might but the disk didn't move.

  Christ! What did he do? Drill the damn rod into solid concrete? Loren had watched the entire process on the screen, and there'd been no sign of a drill or any other kind of impacting tool that would be able to drive the rod through the cement.

  What if I. ..

  He put the barrel of the pistol against the rod ...

  On second thought that's a really BAD idea.

  Loren couldn't figure a way to remove the disk. It's not my problem, he tried to rationalize. It's beyond my control.

  The easy way out.

  Maybe I can pry it off, he considered, then sprinted into the woods. If he could find a branch sturdy enough to wedge between the slab and the disk ...

  "Holy Mother!" he yelled when the worm-in the space of a blink-shot out from under the thicket and began to coil about his legs.

  Loren tried to kick but the worm's hoselike body encircled his thighs tight as a metal clamp. Loren collapsed.

  His heart squirmed as more glistening pink coils raveled up his body. The worm had hooked his ankles with its tail end and was working upward, now past the waist. Its efforts were turning him into a mummy of pink coils. The musculature of its coelum made Loren feel like he was being swallowed by a pulsing mouth ...

  His left arm flailed free, but the right had been caught under the coils. How much sooner till it got to his neck?

  Loren couldn't think. His adrenaline pumped uselessly through his body; the harder he tried to move, the more he couldn't.

  Then the worm's head loomed.

  Loren nearly lost consciousness at the sight: the eyeless pink cone. A tiny, meaty hole at the end suddenly expanded, revealing a pulsating throat. Stylets like transparent fishhooks emerged. Loren knew that the hooks would seek his mouth so that the worm could secure a grasp before it would start pumping its acidlike digestive enzymes down his esophagus, whereupon his innards would be liquefied and then sucked back into the worm's body, for nourishment. After the hearty meal the creature would fill Loren's emptied body cavity with ova, to incubate. --- - - - -- - - --- - -

  His right hand had managed to slither to the pistol in his waistband, but the coils were too tight to drag it out. Even in this revolted paralysis, his subconscious knew that there was nothing to lose in firing anyway-

  Bam!

  Did the worm actually squeal? Loren felt the gun kick beneath the mummifying coils, felt a bullet blow through the side of his swim trunks.

  It also blew a hole in the worm, midbody.

  The gun barrel burned against Loren's thigh, but he didn't feel it. He'd managed to squeeze off the shot just as the worm's head was lowering to his face. Worm blood and stored seawater flooded Loren's legs; then the coils began to loosen, shuddering in their own pain.

  Gotcha, you fucker! he thought when he grabbed the head with his left hand, pressed it to the dirt. Only now was he able to drag his gun hand out.

  He pressed the barrel to the worm's skull-less head, and-

  Bam!

  Chunks of pink meat speckled Loren's face. In the other direction, more seawater, white blood, and a teacolored ichor flew. The plume hit a tree and-

  Shit!

  Loren began to frantically wipe his face off, remembering that the worm's enzyme duct was in the head. He could see spatters on the tree smoking, sizzling, those same fluids burning through the bark. It was Loren's very good fortune that none had gotten on his face.

  The worm limpened in death after a few reflexive spasms. Loren shrugged out of the coils.

  He got up and looked closer at the tree. The enzymes became impotent after a minute, but not before eating a crater into the hard tropical wood.

  As the sizzling from the acid died down, a thought began to sizzle in his head.

  He grabbed the worm's neck, clamping hard with the ring of his thumb and forefinger, leaving eight inches of exploded head hanging off. Loren dragged the-dead-thing back toward the RTG.

  Can't hurt to try ...

  It was like dragging a great length of hose. When he arrived at the slab, he carefully held the worm's ruptured head right against the black rod on which the disk had been mounted.

  Loren squeezed a few feet of worm ...

  More fluids evacuated, mostly the tea-tinged slime.

  The cement around the rod-

  It's working.-. .

  -began to sizzle and smoke.

  Loren jiggled the disk as the acids worked deeper. Moments later, he yanked it out of the cement slab, like dragging the stick out of a thawing Popsicle.

  The enzymes liquefied the cement!

  He'd gotten the bomb off the RTG but-

  Holy shit .. .

  Now Loren found himself in the most bizarre predicament of his life. I'm standing here in the middle of the woods, holding a bomb from another planet ...

  He looked at the blinking border of light around the disk.

  With each blink-he noticed now-that border got infinitesimally smaller.

  Loren shook his head.

  Question of the day, he thought. How the HELL do you get rid of an alien bomb?

  No answers were forthcoming. He at least knew that he had till the border ran out to think of something. -- -- - - - - - -- -

  With nothing else to do, he put the bomb in his pocket and headed back to the campsite to find Trent ...

  (IV)

  Robb was strong, all right. His mottled yellow hands turned Ruth upside down, and hauled her shorts off. The terror merged with the stifling heat, and of course, the "zombie's" stench of rot and metamorphosis. The fetor in the room could be likened to fresh-ground beef, sperm, and a restaurant Dumpster in the sun. Ruth landed on her head when Robb shucked her out of the shorts, which dangled off one ankle. She saw proverbial stars as Robb's hands began to wring her implants like dishwashing sponges.

  When she was able to see through gaps in some of the stars, her scream ground down to a disgusted gag. Robb had shed his own shorts previously, to reveal a groin that looked more like an open wound. There was no penis, for instance, just a rot-gnarled nub with a hole in it, and a bloated yellow scrotum. Were small things moving in the scrotum?

  Ruth was too racked with horror to ponder the ques tion very deeply, but given the circumstances, a passerby might beg another question: With no penis, what did Robb intend to rape her with?

  Muscles flexed beneath yellow, red-spotted skin. In Robb's infection and sequent decomposition, aspects of his college-athlete physique remained: pillars for thighs, bulging biceps, pectorals, and lats. Ordinarily, Ruth might even have been turned on by the flexing washboard abdominals.

  But not when they were covered by red-spotted yellow monster skin.

  All 110 pounds of Ruth put up a formidable fight, hands slapping at the mindless, wedgelike face, fingers poking at the eyes, which looked so watery they might somehow have aspirated their inner humors. The big chunk she'd bitten out of his cheek was now covered by something that looked more like a wart than a scab.

  One big wet hand pinned her chest to the floor, while the other, now, wriggled for her groin. Ruth's legs moved like fifty miles an hour on a stationary bike; she was going nowhere, but her body was trying anyway.

  Her senses disconnected. None of her brain bothered to curse Slydes-that big hairy redneck coward-for leaving her here. None of her brain wasted any synaptic energy on the useless regret that if she'd stayed in school, never done drugs, and never gotten involved with creeps like Jonas and Slydes, then maybe she wouldn't be pinned to the floor in this infernal toolshed by a sex-crazed zombie with no penis. Maybe, just maybe, if she'd kept going to church instead of opting out for strip joints and coke at age eighteen, and pennyante tricks in between sugar daddies ...

  It seemed likely that she would never have had occasion to meet her noxious death on an island full of giant pink worms.

  Ruth didn't bother thinking about any of that.

  Instead, she thought this: The fuckin' barbecue fork!

  She'd brought it in from outside, hadn't she? More senses shut down as stout fingers began to play inside her womanly orifice. Her auditory faculties didn't register Robb White's ruined efforts to speak:

  "Bluckin' blig-tit butch! Gublunna pull bloor gluts out frew bloor plussy!"

  Whatever.

  Ruth's eye had already caught sight of the barbecue fork, lying not three feet beyond her reach. If I can get this big zombie fucker's hand off me just for ONE SECOND, she realized, I could get that fork!

  Something unexpected happened then, almost in synchronicity with the thought. The yellow lids on Robb's glop-for-eyes shot open. His body stiffened as if seized by a sudden pain, and his gestures of molestation ... stopped.

  He pulled away. When he pulled his hand out from Ruth's spread legs, it didn't all come out.

  The yellow, red-spotted skin peeled off like a rubber glove.

  Robb held up the hand in mute, zombie astonishment. His hand was now a raving, shining pink.

  He stood up in haste, shaking through a confusion. Then he began to take his skin off like someone taking off clothes.

  The "shirt" of yellow skin crinkled wetly as it was removed from Robb's back. The sleeves turned inside out; then the entire mess was tossed away. What existed beneath was more of the same brand-new, clean, raving pink.

  The same color as the worms.

  The new pink arms, in fact, looked more like fat, sturdy worms themselves. No nipples or navel adorned the chest, just a remnant human musculature covered by fresh-pink- skin.

  Even in this utter madness, Ruth was able to think: What the fuckin' FUCK is happening?

  A transformation was happening, not that she could've been technically aware of that. After all, she still thought Robb was a zombie. He was actually now a late-cycle mutant. His robust health had allowed him to survive a full mutagenic conversion, his altered genes bidding this successful wedding of human DNA with genetically transfected worm DNA.

  Next, Robb pulled off what was left of his scalp, revealing a glistening pink head with an aperture at the top. His head seemed to collapse, the skull cracking heartily, and then that aperture expanded and expelled the chunks of Robb's cranium. Without the support of bones now, the mass of pink flesh on Robb's shoulders distended and looked a lot like one of the eyeless conical heads of the worms.

  Two species were merging into one before Ruth's eyes. But there was still the yellow skin from the waist down...

  Robb stepped out of it, like stepping out of a pair of pants.

  Gleaming pink legs stood V'd over Ruth. What covered Robb now, clearly, was worm skin. Even his toes looked more like the ends of worms than human toes.

  But Ruth couldn't have cared less about the toes.

  Her eyes shot to Robb's crotch.

  What hung there was purely and simply a fat, teninch worm.

  Oh, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, Ruth thought.

  Now Robb had something to rape her with, and worse still was the fact that the worm ... was erecting.

  That's when Ruth grabbed the barbecue fork and hooked it right into the pulsing column.

  Blood that was white shot out on hot jets, painting Ruth's determined face. The sound that Robb made in objection bore no semblance to anything human now. More like stabbing a barbecue fork into a rhino's penis.

  The shed shuddered around the concussive sound.

  Ruth became a blond maniac dynamo. The fork blurred as she jammed it in and out of Robb's abdomen. Then more jabs in the neck, then a few more in the boneless sack that used to be his head.

  Dust rose from the wood floor's seams when the fully mutated Robb White collapsed. Ruth jabbed the now-flaccid penis-thing one more time, then ran like a banshee out the door.

  Her brain still registered very little. All she knew was that she was no longer in that Shed from Hell, and she was breathing fresh air, not monster-stink.

  Her shorts still rung her foot. She pulled them on and sprinted off down the first trail she saw. She only knew that she was going to run straight to the beach and start swimming.

  It was worth the chance, even with the sharks.

  (V)

  First Nora checked the camp. They're not here, she thought in the biggest disappointment. That meant she'd have to go looking, and there was precious little time for that. She found another can of repellent in Trent's tent, then sprayed herself down liberally. For all the good it'll do against those things, she told herself, remembering just how big the worms could get.

  Frustration overwhelmed her now. She jogged down the trail. That was stupid! Her heart still hadn't let up. Maybe God really had saved her. But for what? she wondered.

  Did she really deserve to be saved? How different would her life be if she survived this mess? Even amid the chaos and all the impossibilities, some recess of her mind seemed to dwell on that.

  Try to do some good, she told herself.

  She veered off back toward the RTG.

  I'll find a way to disarm it ...

  But when she got there ...

  "How the hell?" she muttered.

  It was gone.

  She squinted down at the cement slab. The area where the black disk had been seemed blemished, even corroded somehow. Well, that's sure some shit ...

  Then it occurred to her, One of the guys in the masks must've moved it. They must know we're onto them ...

  So what now?

  When she turned she almost shrieked.

  A dead worm lay like limp rope across the clearing. End to end, it must've been thirty feet long.

  She felt caught in a cross fire of confusion. Back to the campsite, was the only recourse she could think of. She took back off running ...

  An unseen impact slammed her chest and plowed all the air from her lungs. It happened too fast for her to think. Had she run into a branch?

  Her back slammed the ground.

  Consciousness began to fizzle, her peripheral vision going from gray to black.

  Nora had been clotheslined, but not by a branch.

  By a girthy arm.

  A bearded face hovered over her.

  Echoic words floated from slow-motion lips. "Hey, baby. My name's Slydes. What's yours?"

  Then a knuckly fist to the forehead knocked her out cold.

  (VI)

  Loren stood dumbfounded at the campsite. Yeah, I need this headache! Trent was not to be found.

  He foolishly checked all the tents, if only because he could think of nothing else to do. Right, he thought. Like the lieutenant's going to be taking a nap.... He was about to start calling out, but thought better of it. Trent's out there somewhere ... but so are those guys. Loren had no choice but to think of them as that: those guys. Those men in the masks and black hooded suits. He simply didn't have it in him to use the more specified label:

  Alien research technicians.

  But it was true and he knew that. And he knew they were still on the island. He'd seen a total of three of them on the surveillance screens.