Chapter 14: Maggot Mayhem

Douglass liked the girl. So, sure, he had pulled some maybe-a-little-sleazy tricks to get her to sleep next to him instead of the inbred oaf, but as he sat there, feeling the gentle rise and fall of her breasts against his back, he totally felt like it was worth it.

Besides. It was the end of the world, alien larvae were raining from the sky, and he was blind as a bat in a KISS concert. If he was going to die a virgin, he’d rather at least get a little feel for what life as a college kid would have been like if he hadn’t been falling asleep over his lattes throughout his premed and then residency programs. People, he had decided, were complicated, with complicated problems, and in order to best help them solve those problems, they needed his full attention. Girls, he had always figured, could come later.

Now, blind and trapped on a mountainside with a beautiful psychic and her bestie the conspiracy nut, the whole of the human race most likely dead or dying, the joke was totally on him. After graduating top of his class, having the choice of any hospital in the nation, he’d been relegated to an inconvenient sack of extra weight that a reeking hillbilly had to hump across a whole mountain range, with the added bonus of being turned into one of those freaks that saw sounds as colors.

As far as he could determine, ever since that strange blast from the alien ship, about the only thing he could see was a chaotic cacophony of sounds, magnetics, and—for some reason—he could see aliens like they were outlined with black Sharpie on a white chalkboard.

Thinking again of the mass of maggots that the hillbilly had insisted on gathering like acorns and stuffing into his bugout bag like a good little squirrel, Douglass lifted his head again to make sure the aliens had stayed put.

The bag was on fire.

He could tell the bag was on fire because the moment he lifted his head, his face got blasted with a surge of heat that probably singed off his eyebrows. That, and there was a glowing violet ball where the mass of maggots had been, and there was a paste of maggots with a lone, much bigger maggot sliming around in it like a barracuda in a goldfish bowl, ripping the last smaller maggots in half and gobbling them up like Pacman.

“Shit!” Douglass yelled. “Guys!”

His companions continued snoring, worn out by their hardass trek through the mountains when they could’ve done something nice like just let him die. “Guys!”

Nothing. As he watched, the bigger maggot grew in size, until it was almost the size of his arm.

Then the arm-sized maggot, which looked more like a beetle grub with six stubby little legs at this point, turned towards him and scampered across the pit and up over the blanket, heading right at him, four-pronged jaws wide open and clicking.

“Get back!” Douglas screamed and threw the blanket aside, launching the beetle-thing into the snow beyond the camp, where it immediately burrowed out of sight. Then he felt the heat on his feet and realized that the blanket was on fire where the beetle had smeared the juices of its fallen foes. Because the lazy bastards were still sleeping and he was on fire and they were on fire, he lost it and started to scream. Manfully, of course.

#

“Help me!” Douglass shrieked like a little girl, so much so that it blended perfectly into Envy’s dream of a child in a bright red life-vest clawing at the edge of a boat, gasping for air. “Help!”

It was when he started kicking her that Envy realized she was dreaming. She blearily opened her eyes to the sound of more high-pitched screaming.

The doctor was flailing backwards away from a searing purple-white glow at the center of their snow-pit, not surprisingly where Rusty’s ill-fated duffel had been. No sooner than Envy’s sleep-deprived mind realized that, she also recognized the glow was emanating a heat so hot it was setting the blanket on fire around their feet. “Put it out!” Douglass was screaming, back pressed to the edge of the wall of snow as he tried to ineffectually crawl out of their pit. “For the love of God, fire! Fire!”

Rusty, who had still been busy sawing dildos, started awake with a snort, immediately reaching for his knife. Then, seeing that the blanket was on fire, he forewent the knife and scrambled backwards, holding up his arm up to protect his face against the scorching heat. “What the fuck, Douglass!” he shouted.

“Oh sure, blame me, asshole!” Even as he spoke, the heat was becoming more intense, until it hurt just to be inside her rapidly-melting ring of snow.

“Get Douglass out of the pit!” Envy cried. “I’ll get the blanket.” Even though she could feel the intense heat singing the hairs on her arms and face, she ducked forward to grab the blanket and tugged it away from the writhing ball of purple-white fire, desperate to save their last defense against the elements. Rusty, bless his beefy heart, had done exactly as she told him and had thrown Douglass bodily into the snow on the other side of the berm, then climbed up with him.

“The bag!” Rusty cried, turning to look back at their camp.

“Leave it!” Envy snapped, clambering over the snow berm, smoldering blanket in tow. She started beating it on the snow to put out the flame. Thankfully, the blanket had been made of some California-approved fire-retardant material, one of the few times Envy had been thankful for those little political warning stickers she always ripped off the moment she bought them.

“My stuff!” Rusty bemoaned, looking dangerously close to going back into their snow-pit to retrieve his gear. “It’s melting!”

“That’s gonna be your bones melting if you get close to that,” Envy said, grabbing the big man and pushing him backwards. The heat on her back was excruciating, and she could feel it drying out her exposed skin. Thankfully, Rusty moved backwards in time for her not to be roasted alive.

It quickly became too hot to stand at the edge of their camp and they had to move backwards even further as the snow around them dissolved away, creating a wide ring of dry earth around the searing glow.

Rusty turned on Douglass, who was standing to one side, his snow-covered clothes steaming, looking numb. “What the hell happened?!”

“I don’t know, Rusty,” Douglass snapped, “maybe it was the aliens you stuffed in your backpack.”

Rusty opened his mouth to argue, realized it really was his fault, then shut his mouth and turned to watch the purple-white fireball in silence as it slowly melted a hole into the ground, setting the steaming dirt on fire. “Huh.”

“Christ!” Douglass snapped, grabbing the blanket from Envy and throwing it out of the range of the heat as he finally lost his cool. “There goes our matches, our bag, one of our only knives, and everything else we still owned.” He turned to scowl directly at Rusty, but the furious effect was muted somewhat by the fact his gaze was approximately six inches too far to the left. “Anything else you wanna lose, burn, or otherwise blow up while you’re at it?”

“How about our only can of kerosene?” Rusty shot back.

“Eat the balls off a walrus, you inbred nutjob.”

“Hey,” Rusty shouted, “I was asleep. You’re the one who didn’t notice they were catching fire.”

Douglass’s jaw fell open.

“Okay guys,” Envy interrupted as she saw the will to do violence cross Douglass’s face. Behind her, the violet-hot ball of molten maggot had sunk out of sight entirely. “Everybody calm down,” she said, trying to be as rational and logical as possible in the face of so much testosterone. “We learned something tonight: These things make great heat sources, but they shouldn’t be stored in groups. No need to blame anyone. We needed to figure it out sooner or later, and this way nobody got hurt.”

“My legs got baked!” Douglass cried.

“They’re not even singed,” Rusty shot back. “I was the one you let sleep while you were getting yourself to safety.” He pulled back a sock, the dim moonlight showing a hole burned into the white fabric, which in turn displayed an angry red wound underneath.

Douglass opened his mouth to retort.

“Guys?” Envy said. “Shut up.” They were standing in the snow, in the dark, with the only light coming from the melted remnants of their last campsite. She was tired, hungry, and she basically just wanted to punch them both in the face. She said as much. “We’re all in trouble, here, and this bullshit is just going to get the three of us killed. Knock it off or I’ll knock you off.” She hoped it sounded as badass as she felt saying it, because, at that moment in time, exhausted and running on fumes, she really felt like she could put her knuckles through a bearded Neanderthal face, given the proper inclination.

Both the guys seemed to reluctantly accept that, because they both muttered and looked to find something else to do, sulking as their campsite continued to burn. Douglass sat down in the now-steaming mountain shrubs and scowled at where their ‘fire’ had been. Rusty went to go check his snares.

“So what happened?” Envy ventured, sidling up to Douglass once the big man was out of earshot.

Douglass seemed to consider that. “You ever seen crocodiles at a watering hole?”

Envy thought of the thrashing, rolling massacres and immediately recoiled. “They couldn’t even bite down with those jaws. Like they were vestigial limbs or something.”

“They sure as hell can,” Douglass muttered. “They were ripping each other in half and rolling in it.”

“In half,” she said, struggling with disbelief. As far as she had seen, the jaws were more show than anything else, weak, maybe made for a mating display like a moose’s antlers or something.

“Like butter,” Douglass said. “Snip.”

And, considering how much force it had taken to break the maggots’ outer skin with sharpened sticks, that probably meant they could bite fingers and toes in half, too.

“Okay, that’s not good,” Envy said, glancing at Rusty where he was walking out through the snow. “What do we do now? He’s gonna wanna keep using them for fires.” She knew Rusty well enough that he wasn’t about to give up his newest toy because it had almost killed them all. Nonsense! He’d just find a better way to store hundreds of them at a time.

“I think they’re okay for fires,” Douglass said, though he looked anxious about something. “Hey Envy… Maybe I was imagining it, but I think one of them was doing most of the damage. Eating the others. Getting bigger… Like, in seconds.”

Envy didn’t like the sound of that. “Tell me you’re joking.”

Douglass shook his head. “Maybe tripled in size as I watched. I think it was the one that killed the rest of them. Feasted on them—drank them—like a homeless guy at a wine banquet. Got real big. Like arm’s length…” He hesitated, and his blind eyes searched for her face. “And then it came after me…”

Envy’s heart gave a startled pound. “It did what?”

“Jumped on the blanket, ran straight towards my throat with those jaws of its gnashing. I threw it off before it had a chance to grab me.”

Envy’s world narrowed to a thin margin as she imagined what he meant by that. “Say that again?”

“It tried to eat me,” he repeated. “If it hadn’t been on the blanket, it would’ve sliced open my throat.”

Envy glanced back over at Rusty, who was now just a dim shape in the distant darkness. “How big did you say it was?”

Douglass held up an arm, then touched his elbow.

That sense of dread was back. “Your forearm?”

Douglass nodded, and his solemn, pinched face told her he knew just how bad that was just as well as she did.

“They’re getting bigger,” Envy said quietly. “They’re babies.”

Douglass nodded.

They digested that in silence for a moment. Then, down at the willow grove, Rusty started howling.

“Rusty!” Envy shouted, jumping to her feet and scrambling down the mountain towards her friend. “Hold on!” Beside her, Douglass tensed, but he didn’t try to follow.

Envy was several bounds down the hill, moving as quickly as gravity could carry her, when Rusty swiveled, holding up two rabbits by the back legs. “Told you guys I’d get all three!” he crooned.

Envy slowed to a halt, heart hammering as her mind tried to digest what she’d just seen.

Then, behind her, Douglass cried out, “Oh shit, it’s under the snow, shit!” and started to flail. Turning, Envy thought the creature was after him, then she realized he was calculatedly scrambling towards her, intent on something under her feet…

A moment later, a sleek alien barricuda emerged from the snow underneath her and took her boot in its four-pronged jaws.