getting something from the house and the yard now, but a second ago, it was only from the house.”
“Bags don’t just appear out of nowhere.”
“You’re the goddamn expert, you tell me.”
Henry said, “Looks like they can hide themselves somehow.”
I grimaced. There’s no such thing as a good surprise in a fight. “That’s new.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t recall us ever coming across one trying to sneak around.”
“Shit.”
“Hey Abe,” said Anne, “they’re both outside now, moving around.” The sound of a trunk slamming made everyone look at the door. Ten long seconds passed. “Guys? Is it just my nose, or can everyone else smell gas?”
That’s the great thing about life, it’s never so bad that it can’t get worse.
Leon sniffed the air. “They can’t burn us out. This building is made of sheet metal. It won’t burn.”
The door crashed open, propelled by the foot of the massive bag that killed Carlos. Instead of a shotgun, his hands now held a red plastic milk crate full of clear glass bottles. The bottles were full of a pale pink liquid. Gasoline.
He heaved the crate, but held onto it, launching the bottles through the door. They shattered on the concrete floor, spraying everything between us and the door with fuel and shards of glass.
A split second after launching the crate, he moved to the side to allow the man behind him to step up holding a single bottle in his hand. The bottle had a burning rag stuffed in the top, the flames barely visible in the strong sunlight. The larger man was already picking up a second crate.
Leon saved us. His hand snapped up, and he fired twice. The bottle exploded in the man’s hand, engulfing him in a halo of flame.
Leon, Henry, and Anne all started shooting. The bag that was on fire was screaming and frantically flailing at himself to put out the flames.
His skin and shirt began writhing and twitching. The worms were feeling the heat as well. He dropped to the ground and started rolling, and I lost sight of him as he moved out of the doorframe to the right.
The larger one dodged nimbly off to the other side, also out of sight. Leon put two more rounds through the sheet metal to the left, hoping to get lucky. Everyone stopped shooting.
“We have to move. They can throw some fire in here any second, or more likely, the fumes will get thick enough that we’ll light them off ourselves with the guns. I’ll go out first and draw their attention, you guys count to three and follow. Run for a car. Anyone have their keys?”
“Mine are in the house, in my purse.”
“I’ve got mine,” said Leon. “But when I get to the car, I’m going for the trunk, not the driver’s seat.”
“Don’t argue with me, get in the car and drive away. They won’t follow you, I have the piece.” Leon started to say something, but there wasn’t time to listen. He was going to do what he was going to do, and I wasn’t going to change his mind.
I ran for the door and leaped out into the sunlight as I crossed the threshold. A shotgun bellowed but missed me. I hit the ground next to Carlos. The next blast wouldn’t miss.
I dropped my baton and grabbed Carlos’s body by the collar of his shirt, which was sticky and wet, and his belt, and surged to my feet. The man with the shotgun was standing next to the corner of the building, maybe twenty feet away.
Leon was coming out of the doorway. I apologized to Carlos and hurled the body across the intervening space. The shotgun went off again, and then there was a meaty thud as the two-hundred-pound corpse slammed into the baitbag, knocking him to the ground.
Leon immediately changed course and ran for the downed bag, or more accurately, the shotgun now lying on the ground a few feet away from it. The bag surged to his feet, effortlessly throwing Carlos’s body to the side, but it was too late. Leon already had the shotgun.
He fired at point-blank range, catching the bag in the side and tearing open a gaping wound. One of the bag’s fists whipped out and struck Leon in the arm. I could hear the bone break. The force of the blow knocked him backwards on his ass and tore the shotgun from his hands.
I snatched my baton from the ground and raced forward. The bag was grinning and reaching down towards Leon.
I covered twenty feet in the time it took for the bag to bend halfway to its target, my right arm pulled back across my chest. The bag never saw me coming.
I swept my arm outward in a rising arc like a classic tennis backhand, putting all of my strength behind it. When the baton connected, the bag’s head blew apart like a watermelon under a sledgehammer. The body jerked upright from the force of the blow, and then kept going over to topple backwards onto the ground.
The corpse flexed and the shotgun wound heaved open. Worms spilled out in a glistening mass, covering Leon’s feet. They were gray and muscular like eels, but unlike eels they had no heads. Instead, the end of their bodies simply split into five writhing tentacles. Each tentacle had tiny black teeth on the inward-facing side which were curved like rose thorns, and at the center where the tentacles met, a dark red maw clenched and gasped. It was lined with more teeth, and the inner flesh deepened to arterial purple in the center. They twisted and whipped around in a frenzy, bouncing off of the floor with jerking motions so fast and hard that they made snapping sounds in the air.
The larger worms, each as big around as a garden hose, struck at Leon’s legs, grabbing on with their tentacles and then looping and squeezing with their whole bodies. He screamed as blood began to well up around the tentacles. I could hear the worms sucking at the wounds.
The corpse bucked once more and an enormous worm streaked out, as thick around as my wrist and covered with black markings that seemed maddeningly close to a pattern that your eye could never quite resolve.
It was over Leon’s legs and around his waist in an instant, with the head tentacles spreading wide and wrapping most of the way around his chest. It rippled and tensed, and Leon threw his head back and bellowed, the tendons and veins in his neck standing out. Vertebrae broke with a dull crunch.
I reached down and seized the thing with both hands, feeling the slimy pulse of its muscles under my palms, and it suddenly stopped squeezing. I pulled, and instead of fighting me, it gradually uncoiled and hung limply from my hands, writhing slowly, tentacles spreading and probing the air like some kind of nightmare flower.
I stepped back from Leon and without warning the worm’s top half vanished in a black spray as Anne blew it apart with the shotgun.
The other worms went mad all at once, unlatching from Leon and thrashing and keening with a horrible whistling sound. They became blurs as their frenzied thrashing sped up, and then seconds later, they all went limp. They were dead.
I ducked inside of Henry’s study and dumped out the footlocker that had contained the guns and sacks and brought it outside. Together Anne and I scooped the nightmarish things up with spades that we found leaning in a corner with Henry’s gardening gear and threw them in the footlocker.
We stayed well back from the worms themselves, as we had no idea how they got inside of people, and we weren’t eager to find out. When we were done, the box was six inches deep in limp gray coils.
Henry came out of the door holding one of the cloth bags and a propane blowtorch.
“I figured it would be a little harder for us to get phosphorus grenades these days, so I came up with this. Thermite powder in the bag, magnesium ribbons to get it started, and a torch to light up the magnesium.”
“If you say so.” I ripped open the cloth bags, dumped the gray powder liberally over the slimy mass, and threw the silver ribbon on top. Henry passed me the blowtorch. It lit with a pop and a roar. I touched the blue flame to the magnesium ribbon, which started burning with a fierce white light that was painful to look at. Immediately after, the thermite powder caught with an eruption of heat and sparks that filled the entire box.
I backed away from the nauseating smell of the black greasy smoke billowing out of the charred and melted container. Henry and Anne had moved to crouch over Leon’s supine form.
“We can’t move him. I think his back is broken,” said Anne.
“If we leave him out here, he’s a sitting duck for the other one,” replied Henry.
Leon spoke through chattering teeth. “Carlos. Where’s Carlos?”
Henry leaned down and peered into his eyes, one after the other. “He’s going into shock. Anne, run back into my barn and get some blankets, they’re inside the door to your left. Don’t bother looking for a clean one.”
