rest stop: chapters 9 - 11

KARYN CARPENTER

In her bed in her parents' house, eight miles away, Karyn had a vivid dream. In it, Todd was climbing into a cigar tube. She tried to tell him how silly that was, because cigar tubes only opened on one end.

"So do condoms," he replied, which was true, but what did that have to do with anything?

"If you go in there, I'm not coming in after you," she warned him, but he brushed her aside, now wearing a motorcycle helmet and a jumpsuit Elvis would have envied. As he climbed into the tube, he shrank like Alice, and dwindled away to nothing.

"He's right, you know," said the giant worm at her side. It smiled wickedly. "You've got to go in to get out."

"You're the whole reason we're in this mess," she reminded it, whereupon it climbed into the tube, too, and pulled the cap closed after it.

In her sleep, Karyn moaned and woke herself up. She lay there for a moment, thinking…

this is the last night before they'll know, the last night when everything is still okay

…but that wasn't true, because things had already changed - she had already changed - and they were going to change a lot more in the coming months.

She suddenly felt so lonesome for Todd that she began to cry, muffling her sobs with a pillow, lest her mother hear.

The sun was just above the horizon when she wiped her eyes and got up to pee, the robins already hard at their morning choir practice. No one else was stirring yet, not even her little brothers, and she went back to bed afterward and listened to the house wake up, savoring every sound, counting down the hours and the minutes until Todd arrived and they told her family the secret that would change their lives forever.

BILL HIGGINS

One of the down sides of living in Michigan, thought Bill Higgins as he loaded his fishing gear into his Boston Whaler, is the weather. He had lived in the Thumb all his life, but Lake Huron could still surprise him by throwing up hail one minute and sunshine the next, with temperature swings of as much as forty degrees just to keep you on your toes.

Case in point: this morning.

Oh, it had dawned all things bright and beautiful, the heat already radiating up from the ground as he bent down to get the paper off the porch. But by the time he’d had breakfast and gotten dressed, the wind had shifted to the north, the sky had darkened and the temp had to be mid-fifties now at best.

None of which would keep him from going fishing, of course. Ever since retirement from teaching - science at the middle school, then biology at the high school - not even snow could do that. But it meant an extra six-pack was required (purely for insulation, you understand) and, if it rained, probably no smokes.

“You’re not taking any cigarettes with you, right?” asked his wife Maureen, as she handed him the plastic bag full of sandwiches.

“Woman, didn’t you hear what the doctor said?” he grumbled.

She looked him dead in the eye. “The question is, did you hear what he said? You’ve got to last me.”

“How can I smoke when it’s gonna rain cats and dogs?”

His wife hugged herself against the chill. “Isn’t it supposed to clear up?”

Bill shrugged. He put the bag in the boat, covered it with the all-weather tarp, and tied it down against the rising wind.

Maureen grabbed his hat on each side of his head and pulled him in for a kiss. It was a long one, something else that had changed since retirement.

“Be careful,” she said. “Come home if it gets bad. No sense getting sick over a few sunfish.”

“Prob’ly won’t get any,” he said, and that was true – he hadn’t caught a thing all week. He normally did his fishing in Black River under the I-94 bridge. Maybe it was time to investigate the canals and see if he had any better luck there.

“What time do you think you’ll be home?” asked Maureen, heading for the screen door.

“Late enough for you and the milkman to do your business,” he said. “But probably not to squeeze in the mail man, too.”

“They don’t have milk men anymore,” Maureen reminded him for the umpteenth time. She never got the joke, or maybe she did and didn’t find it funny. Not after thirty years of marriage, anyway.

“I know,” he sighed, climbing into his old Tercel. “I know, I know, I know.”

He pulled the door shut. It squealed in protest.

“I know just how you feel,” he told it.

HAYDEN GREEN

Hayden Green was watching a dog sack.

He had made up the ‘dog sack’ name himself, because that’s what it looked like to him and, being eleven, he tended toward the literal.

The dog sack smelled. Bad.

During summer break, his parents kicked him out of the house when they went to work and didn’t expect him back before dusk, a rare thing in these electronic times. Hayden didn’t mind, even though all the other kids were playing video games at home or at camp or whatever other kids did. He was used to solitude. In fact, he preferred it.

He liked to ride his bike down to the woods near Black River. It was quiet there. Sometimes he brought a banana and a book, sometimes a sandwich, but he always brought his magnifying glass.

Carpenter ants looked like monsters under it, covered with hairs you couldn’t otherwise see. And when he discovered how to focus the light through the lens to burn stuff, he would pretend that he was Superman using his heat vision to burn messages into green leaves or kill the monster ants before they could overrun Metropolis.

Burned ants smelled just like burned popcorn, curiously enough, and they wouldn’t stand still to die - you had to cripple them first. Then, under the blinding light, they would suddenly stop moving, smoke, and pop.

Frogs moved too much, he found, and they died if you tried to stun them with a board, but you could get them to hold a firecracker or a small smoke bomb in their mouths if you were patient enough, a trick that worked with garter snakes, too. He would blow them up or burn them, meticulously inspect the damage, and come back the next day to watch the crows eat whatever was left. It was the circle of life in action.

But he had never seen a dog sack before.

There it lay, at the edge of the river, a bag of skin and fur with a collar where he guessed its neck must have been, but the bag seemed curiously empty. For one thing, it was flat as a pancake. Even if the dog somehow got run over, it was Hayden’s experience that the bones tended to shoot out through the skin. They didn’t magically disappear. And there was obviously no meat in the sack; despite the fact that it reeked, the crows wouldn’t touch it.

What could do that? he wondered. Would Drano do that? He wondered if his parents would let him get a dog.

He hunted around along the bank until he found a good solid stick, and used it to gently poke what was left of the dog. The corpse wasn’t all dried out, like he expected; the skin was supple and gave in an odd way. He got the stick under the edge of the collar and used it to flip the dead animal’s tag so he could see the name. It read Riley.

Something under the skin, or inside it, moved.

Hayden stepped back, stick upraised. There were rats all along the river, living off dead fish and sewage and whatever else they could find, and he had learned that they had no fear of him. He slid the stick under the edge of the dog sack, ready to run, and flipped the skin over.

The back side of the skin was soaking wet, and smelled worse, if that was even possible, but there was no rat. Instead, there was what he first thought was a fist-sized black rock, until it flattened out like a bloodworm, trying to flee to the water.

“Wicked,” said Hayden. He used the stick as a barrier, blocking its path. The front of it reached out and touched his stick, tried to go over it, so he raised the stick and it tried to go under it, so he stopped it from doing that, too.

Suddenly, the end of it squeezed out a long tube capped by something that looked like a flower, black on the outside and pink inside, which waved back and forth like a cobra. When he moved his stick, the flower whipped out and grabbed the stick right out of his hand. For something so small, it had a hell of a grip.

“Fuckin’ wicked,” said Hayden, who stood up and backed away a few steps as it wormed its way back into the water. It had to be some kind of leech, right? Some kind he hadn’t seen before. That meant scientific study was called for, under controlled conditions. If he could catch it and put it in his fish tank at home, he could observe how it hunted and stuff.

I’ll need my jar, he thought, trotting back to his bike. My jar and my fish net. Didn’t leeches carry some kind of disease? He would need the rubber gloves that he’d taken from under the sink, too.

Who needed video games when there was science to do?

rest stop: chapters 6 - 8

HARVEY LEE

For the benefit of those who believe in near-death experiences, Harvey Lee Osborne's final moments:

The tire iron was a surprise. He didn't actually feel it, but he felt off-balance, somehow. His breathing stopped. What was left of his heart gave up the ghost.

It was very quiet and very dark.

He felt hot, prickly heat his mama used to call it, as the tenderizer continued to do its work. Normally, prey animals were taken by the head as they drank, the tenderizer going to work immediately on the brain, before the food could fight back. The soft Y tentacles would attach under the chin or high on the throat, gentle as a mother's kiss, and the prey hooks would pump their load into major blood vessels, to let the heart do the work of carrying the tenderizer to the rest of the body.

Harvey Lee's brain dissolved, and the darkness gave way to a bright tunnel, just as he had heard it would on TV. And there was his mama, coming to greet him, a big smile on her face.

Mama! cried Harvey Lee, glad to see her after so long. Now that he was dying, he would finally have her all to himself, just like he had always wanted.

Then Harvey Lee remembered how his mama had died, and what he had done to her afterward.

Her smile spread past her ears as she came to do what he had always known she someday would, lifting her dress so the thing between her legs could eat him, screaming.

CATONINE

It lay curled in on itself in the cool wet, dozing as all predators do, most of the time. Almost two weeks earlier it had been great with food, stretched as tight within its skin as a drumhead left out in the rain. Now, it resembled an empty trash bag. It was mindless in these in-between times, and little more than that at any other time.

It was hermaphroditic, so no part of its life need be wasted on pursuit, acquisition, or defense of a mate. It was also cannibalistic – indeed, it had consumed most of its brood-mates before leaving the egg case – so it had no need of communication or the ability to differentiate among family members.

Nature could be creative, but it could also be conservative. When it found something that worked, it left well enough alone. Sharks had been sharks for more than one hundred million years. Its kind, too, had dined on saurian flesh – digging into burrows and sucking the life from the unborn, or floating just below the surface of the mud around drinking holes to slide prey hooks into the legs of passing herds.

They came for a drink, and learned too late that they were the beverage.

TODD

Todd almost immediately slipped on the puke on his shoes and tore the knees out of his jeans and the skin off his knees hitting the parking lot. He risked a look back toward the car as he got up, saw that it was empty, and put everything he had into sprinting across the asphalt toward the highway, spitting fishflies as he went.

God, it’s dark.

There was no sound except for the cars on the highway, the insects, and his shoes slapping asphalt. Running felt good, felt right. He looked back, but couldn't see anyone following. Maybe they hadn't known he was there.

Maybe they were all dead, too.

He thought of Karyn again, and put on a burst of speed as his feet left the pavement for the grass. The highway was maybe sixty feet away. He could flag down a car or, if no one would stop, run along the road the mile or two to the next exit, and call his folks from the gas station there. What a story he would have to tell.

He risked one more look back. He was just at the edge of the light from the streetlight on the highway, a clear target, and he wanted to be sure no one was going to take a shot at him.

The ground giving way under his feet was completely unexpected, and he went down hard on his belly, the wind knocked out of him, biting his tongue hard enough to taste blood.

Shit! he thought, as he slid backward into the hole. And then panicked as he realized it was a deep hole, ladies and gentlemen, deep enough that his hands disappeared down into it, and he was gone, gone, gone.

He lay in mud and worse. It was dark, except for the little bit of light spilling down into the hole from the highway. The edge of the hole seemed impossibly far away, high above his head.

I'm in a fucking sewer pipe, he thought, and it was true. The pipe was one of the big capacity ceramic jobs, designed to carry rainwater and sewage to the water treatment plant up in Port Huron. Unfortunately, it was cracked and crumbling from age, stress, and earthquakes, for all Todd knew. It was also easily nine feet across, which meant the hole was well above Todd's head when he was standing up, which he intended to do right now, thank you very much.

What the hell is that?

Ten feet away lay something that looked a little bit like a garbage bag in the murk, except that it was very obviously alive. It was maybe four feet long, and pear-shaped. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Todd saw that its texture was something like a worm, or maybe a slug. It was a mottled grey-brown, with big black pores that expanded and contracted rhythmically. It was slightly transparent, like a tadpole's belly. Todd could see things moving inside.

He started when the end of it closest to him stretched out, wormlike and tumescent. Like a cartoon cat pushed through a drainpipe, the mouth parts bloomed at the tip like a flower opening.

Oh my God, thought Todd. Is it a leech? He was too shit-scared to move. The four transparent hooks at the corners of the mouth spread wide, the tiny pink tentacles between them fanned out in pulsing waves. The hooks were wicked-looking, each as long as Todd's fingers.

As far as he could see, it didn't have any eyes, but it obviously knew he was there.

Waiting for me to move, he thought. Maybe it can feel the air movement, or it can sense my body heat, like the alien in that movie. Only if that was true, wouldn't it have attacked before now?

Todd lay as flat as he could. He watched it, and waited, and wondered how quickly it could move. He wondered how to stay alive.

The questing mouth parts waved back and forth in the air, stretching up, its photosensitive organ seeking patches of dark against the light from above. Fully extended, it almost touched the top of the pipe.

It paused, mouth parts and tip retracting, then reached out again just above the surface of the mud, sweeping broadly from side to side like a snake, seeking. Something, something there, but no movement, no big shadows.

Very, very slowly, Todd pulled the tire iron toward himself with his left hand. The head (if it had a mouth, it must be the head, right?) ducked down to inspect his hand. He froze again. It was almost touching him. And then it did, delicately brushing the back of his left hand.

The reaction on both sides was instant.

Instantly, gently, the soft cilia wrapped around his hand. They were cool and wet to the touch. Todd saw the preyhooks arch back like the hammer in a pistol, all four of them oozing some kind of clear liquid. He thought of the bag of melted meat in the parking lot, and yanked his hand back, but the tentacles were stronger than they looked, and the tube they were attached to stretched to accommodate his movement.

He wiggled his hand frantically, not wanting it to get a good enough grip that it could bite him, and beat the wet ceramic for the tire iron with his right hand. He closed on it and brought it around in one motion, aiming for the tube, to knock it away. It hit and rebounded as if it had struck a taut rubber band, but the grip only tightened and little jets of fluid squirted from the four fangs.

Where do I hit it? he panicked. Where can I kill it?

Anywhere, anywhere!

Todd swung.

It was not as graceful as the first swing, but it had the advantage of connecting with the sharp end of the crowbar. A tear opened up in the thing's side.

Something spilled out, and it let go of him immediately and recoiled, writhing against the floor of the pipe. It rolled and rolled and, when it was done rolling, it rolled some more.

Todd didn't wait. He ran like hell. The wrong way.

The part of the sewer system that ran alongside the highway and into which Todd ran was the spillway into which feeder tubes from homes, businesses, and rain gutters flowed. Even at noon, it was almost completely black down there, because rain and sewage don't need nightlights.

After running into his first wall, Todd remembered the tiny light on his keychain, intended for nothing more than making sure you got the key in the keyhole. He fished it out, listening for movement, hearing only water.

The light it provided was a mere pinprick, but in the blackness it seemed like a flare. At least it was enough to keep his feet under him and spot branching tunnels. Provided he ran bent over - there wasn't enough light to reach all the way to the floor.

What if there isn't any other way out? he wondered.

Now THERE’S a happy thought, answered the other voice. Are you always this fucking cheerful?

He pointed the light back down the tunnel, but couldn’t see far enough to tell if the thing was following or not. Maybe he had killed it.

Maybe it’s waiting, just beyond the light, and it’ll get you the minute your back’s turned.

Fuck you. Fuck. You.

He turned, staring into the darkness that ran under the road. It had to come out somewhere. Sewer guys needed to get in and out, right? It was just a matter of following a straight line, as straight as the pipes allowed, until he hit an exit point. Because no matter what, he wasn’t going anywhere near that thing again.

The longer I wait, the closer it might be getting, he thought. There was no disagreement from the other voice, much as he’d hoped for it. With a swift and silent prayer to whomever might be listening, he set off into the maze.