“They’re coming across the floor,” Chrissy said. She was a long-time detractor of anything crawly or slinking and these things filled her with horror.
More worms unknotted themselves from the central mass. No less than fifty or sixty of them were moving at Mitch’s group.
“What do they want? Why are they doing this?” Deke wanted to know. “They’re worms. Worms don’t hunt people.”
“It’s that fucking Weerden, Mitch,” Tommy said. “This is one of his little tricks, you know? A funny little game to him.”
“Grab the last of those flares,” Mitch said.
Chrissy refused to do anything but press herself up against the wall. She knew that fear of such things like these was a cliched female thing, but she honestly did not care. Let the men handle it. She just didn’t do worms.
Tommy, Mitch, and Deke popped the flares and guttering red flames shot out, spraying sparks and lazy clouds of smoke.
“Come on, wormy. Got something for you,” Tommy said.
Maybe the worms were driven by Weerden, but they were still essentially worms, regardless of their apparent mutation. And worms did not understand fire. They did not understand what it was like to burn. Not until they got too close. Then they understood, all right.
Tommy gave them the first taste.
Not that Mitch was surprised. Even as a kid, Tommy had been practically fearless. The first kid to step on an especially large and ugly spider. The first guy to shoot some growling, strange dog with his slingshot. The first one to pick up a snake or swing a dead rat around by the tail. The first guy into a fistfight and the last one out. He was in his element here. Maybe it was not especially smart under the circumstances, but he figured that if clowns from hell didn’t scare him, worms weren’t about to.
Two or three got within range of his boot and he put the flame to them. The flare burned especially hot and it sliced them right in half. Their severed bodies writhed on the floor.
“Just fucking worms,” Tommy said.
Mitch and Deke were at it, too, by then. On their knees, they passed the flares before them in wide arcs and the heat drove most of the worms back. Those that didn’t retreat, were fried. Within five minutes, there had to be a hundred smoking, blazing worm carcasses.
“God, that stinks,” Chrissy said.
Mitch laughed almost automatically.
“This works good,” Deke said, seeming to enjoy himself.
“Sure, until you guys run out of flares.”
Then what? Then what happened? The worms kept coming and Mitch and his little crew tap-danced around, trying to squash as many as they could before the little buggers got up their pants and started biting, started tunneling like borer worms? Because if those things got them down, they’d be buried in their numbers.
“Hey!” Tommy called out into the night. “This ain’t working, Weerden, you fucking scab! Try something else!”
Mitch was going to tell him that you didn’t challenge something like Alardus Weerden, something dead yet alive, something that was practically immortal if you believed the regeneration stories they’d heard at the Army base. You didn’t go and piss off something like him that had been on both sides of the grave and many times. Jesus Christ, he was a warlock for chrissake. What if he could call up a storm or raise a demon or something like that?
But he didn’t do any of those things.
And maybe Weerden had nothing to do with what came next, but nobody believed that for a moment.
The dead were still out there, but there was something with them now. Some huge, amorphous shape that crept up to the windows like a spreading hood of shadow. Maybe crept wasn’t the right word, for this moved like a wave, a great dark wave heading ashore and when it hit the building, the classroom shook.
And Mitch thought: Oh good God, what is that coming at us? What is that?
His first sensation was the stink it brought with it: a high, almost yeasty smell of fermentation like apples that had gone bad, gone to a soft decaying pulp. That was the smell. Only amplified a thousand times into a low, black stench that got down in his belly and tried to yank his guts out. His second sensation was its size. How it seemed to literally absorb the dead that waited in its path. And his third was when it struck the building: everything shook like a train had just tried to bash through the wall.
Chrissy was actually pitched onto her ass.
“What is it? What is it? What is it?” she kept saying.
But they all saw soon enough. It was a great wave of gray-white jelly, an immense creeping mass that filled the windows, pulsating and oozing and horribly alive. It struck the building, great blobs of itself pressing through the windows like moist, greasy dough forced through holes with incredible pressure. It spilled into the room, fleshy and convulsing, its outer skin transparent so that you could see things like coiling roots and thick red and green arteries that throbbed beneath. Its surface was set with great pustules and trembling mounds, a ropy cobwebbing of white and undulant fibers growing over it like a net.
Somebody screamed and Mitch was pretty sure it was himself.
Though they couldn’t see outside because it blocked the windows, they did not doubt its colossal bulk. For the walls were creaking as was the entire orphanage. That thing could maybe have swallowed it alive.
“What the fuck?” Tommy said.
As it came into the room, it fell over the worms and vacuumed them right up into its mass. Whatever it was, it would absorb and assimilate anything that it came into contact with. Anything of flesh and blood.
“It looks…it looks like that thing in the pit,” Mitch said. “At the base.”
And it did. That quivering mass of shapeless flesh that Osbourne had shown them. That massive undulating horror that they had grown from Weerden’s tissue. Perhaps it was that very thing, Mitch thought. When the dam broke, it probably flattened Fort Providence like everything else. The base would have been right in its path. The research compound there was probably stripped away and this horror was set loose, to devour and consume and engorge itself. Maybe this wasn’t that thing, but it was something pretty damn close.
“A fucking blastema,” Tommy said.
It poured into the classroom, massing in front of the windows. It did not flood forward and overwhelm Mitch and the others. Instead, it began to grow, to divide, to do something. White pulsing tendrils emerged from the mass and began snaking over the floor, up the walls, spreading over the ceiling like albino rootlets as seen via time-lapse photography. Yes, the walls, the ceiling, the floor was thick with them. But before any of those seeking growths reached Mitch and the others, something else happened. It looked like the thing was germinating. All those great pustules and lumps and cancerous looking mounds began to split open and out came…people. Or parts of them. Perfectly white hands erupted and clutched at the empty air. Arms came out, fingers wiggling at their ends. And then faces. A hundred faces, a thousand faces. So many albino faces that they crowded in for space. All of them were a ghastly white like the walking dead themselves. All were hairless. Most were fetal and unformed. None had eyes, just contorted, gasping mouths. And everyone of those mouths began to scream with the high, agonized wailing of the damned.
More limbs sprouted.
Not just faces now, but entire heads.
And then entire bodies, marble-white mockeries of men, women, children, even infants. They began to emerge from the central crawling mass, screeching and moaning, trying to pull themselves free with their hands. They were not just white, but perforated with tiny holes and grotesque nodules that popped and spilled that black blood. Their skins were set with a pale green and blue vein tracery. More of them sprouted all the time. Some growing from the bellies of the previous or sheering others asunder as they flowered with a moist, ripping sound. Bodies divided into two and three and four, single heads split into twos and threes with sprays of gray slime. Faces were overrun by other faces. Embryonic things like mutant babies emerged. Multi-headed things. Things with dozens of limbs. All of them connected to the central mass.
And all along the flowing, rippling mass of tissue, more things were born and more and more and more. A forest of reaching hands and thrashing limbs and sightless screaming faces.
