(I)
Nora tried to make calls on her cell phone for the rest of the day-to no avail. I've never heard interference like that before… The odd, throbbing static over the line. When she went out toward the very end of the beach, hoping fora clearer track to the mainland…
The same throbbing buzz.
Trent said it sounded like a jammer, she recalled, but she knew he wasn't serious. Jammers were used by the military, and this site was of no importance to the army anymore. The lieutenant's later suspicions were something else altogether, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized how ludicrous the idea was.
"No phone calls today," she muttered to herself and snapped her phone off. She headed back. Where is everyone? She hadn't seen any of the others for hours. If they're still out in the water looking for bristleworms, that's one long swim. Actually she was more interested in their newest discovery as far as worms went…-.
Nora couldn't deny her first impressions. Both the newborn hatchlings from the tanks as well as their foot-and-a-half long specimen looked like trichinosis worms.
And there's no trichinosis worm like that… unless Loren's right about us discovering an entirely new species…
More exciting things had happened in her field, just not to her. She posed questions to herself as she walked back to the camp, a number of what-ifs.
What if this worm really could infect higher mammals?
The most famous of the Trichinella species did exactly that: the Trichinella spiralis, notorious by its ability to infect all carnivores and omnivores. But that's an inborn worm, she reminded herself, almost microscopic. And it's NOT a marine parasite.
That's when Nora spotted the nest of possums at the foot of an old pine tree.
Possums were common in Florida, a clumsy rodentlike marsupial mostly known for waddling into the middle of highly trafficked roadways, but they actually flourished in tropical woodlands. Nora leaned over to look at the nest of animals.
They're all dead…
It was a mother, with a half dozen young. The adult lay askew, mouth and eyes opened, little legs stiff. It appeared to have died recently-no sign of flies, maggots, or other parasites. Nora got down on one knee to look closer…
The infant possums weren't moving either, but they seemed…
Bloated, she saw.
So young they remained hairless, the newborns all possessed bellies that looked distended.
Nora quickly retrieved a box from the head shack, returned, and transferred the adult possum and one baby back to her lab.
It didn't take her long to get one of the infants under the microscope. Oh no, she thought the instant she sectioned the hairless abdominal wall.
Somehow, she wasn't surprised.
In the bright, magnified circle, it was almost stunning the way the hundreds of tiny ova poured forth. The cilia on each yellow egg roved vigorously. To a person in her field, this spectacle was fascinating.
And potentially horrifying.
Now-… don't take your eye off, she ordered herself. Don't even blink…
It wasn't her imagination. Very minutely, the ova were growing.
She barely noticed Trent coming in behind her.
"Ready for something weird?" he asked.
I'm LOOKING at something weird, she thought. "What's that?"
"I still can't get a call out on my cell phone, and now I can't even get out on this."
Nora saw that he was holding up a clunky green radio, antenna extended. "You're kidding me. Are the batteries dead?"
"Nope. Full charge. All I get is that same static that wavers in and out."
"I kept getting the same thing on my cell phone just a few minutes ago. I even went out to the far end of the beach facing the mainland."
"Like I said before," he told her. "It sounds like a military jammer. What do you make of that?"
Trent distracted her. She wanted to continue with her dissection. "Why would the army jam this island?"
"There's no reason that I can imagine, and that's what bothers me. I just have this funny feeling that something's going on here-that-they didn't tell me."
Nora thought about it. "You know, it could simply be some other kind of interference." She pointed to the door. "Or maybe there's some naval ship out in the gulf, testing its jammers."
"That's an idea," he agreed. "Or it could be the air force base in Tampa, or the National Guard on maneuvers somewhere."
These were logical explanations, so…
Why is he paranoid? she wondered.
"What's this?" he asked next, spying the dead possum in the box.
"I found a nest of them, all dead. And-well-I guess I should tell you this now-but they were killed by the same parasite that was in Annabelle's lobster. And it's the same species of worm that she found in the shower yesterday."
The information jolted him. "But that thing was as long as my forearm. The worms from the lobster were tiny."
"They grow fast," was all she could say, and when she looked back in the microscope, she saw that the ova had doubled in size. "We could have a bit of a problem here. These worms can infect mammals, and…"
"We're mammals," Trent said very dryly. He stared off through his next contemplation. "And we don't have any way to get off the island, and to make matters worse-"
"No way to call out to someone," Nora realized. "But we shouldn't overreact. Small mammals are one thing, but humans are much more sophisticated, not to mention we have much more efficient immune systems." It seemed an appropriate thing to say, but there still wasn't much consolation. "But we'll still have to safeguard ourselves."
"What do you mean?"
Her eye was back at the microscope. "We don't know what this is, but if it's anything like what we think it is we shouldn't take chances." The ova continued to grow under the microscope, a shimmering, yellow spectacle.
"What's the worst-case scenario?" 'Dent asked. "What are the chances of these things actually being able to kill humans?"
A lanky shadow crossed the room. "They may have already done that…"
It was Loren who'd come in.
Nora was almost shocked by his appearance: dripping wet and trembling.
"You look like you've just seen a ghost," Trent said.
"Not a ghost, a corpse," Loren replied.
"What?"
Loren dropped his gear. "I went back out to the bristleworm nest. The parasite's infected everything-I couldn't believe how fast it tore through the area. Then I found a dead body."
Trent squinted. "Are you sure? The three of us were out there an hour ago. There was no body."
"It was in the trench."
Nora stood up and faced him. "Loren, this is very important. Was the body infected by the parasite we've found?"
He sat down, brushed wet hair out of his eyes. "I couldn't tell, it was too decomposed."
"So it's been there a long time," Trent figured.
"Not necessarily. In water this warm, plus bottom feeders? A body wouldn't last long at all," Nora said.
"And who the hell's body is it?" Trent asked next. "We're the only ones on the island."
Nora looked to Trent. "Go find Annabelle and bring her in here. We're going to have to have a group discussion. Her little photo shoot isn't important anymorewe don't know what we might be up against, and with no boat and all our phones inoperable, we might be in some serious trouble."
"What about the phones?" Loren asked with some alarm. "My cell phone worked fine yesterday."
".ny it now,. Trent suggested. "Nothing's been getting through all day, not even my radio."
'Lieutenant Trent says the interference sounds like a jammer," Nora added.
Loren's brow creased at the comment. "That's ridiculous." And he dug his cell phone out of his bag, dialed some numbers.
"You're right," he muttered a minute later.
The dilemma trebled with each thought. Can't get off the island-no boat. Can't call for help-the phones and radios aren't working for some unknown reason. There's a parasite on the island that might be able to infect humans… oh, and by the way, we've also got a dead body in the water, and nobody knows who it is…
"Wasn't Annabelle with you when you found this dead body you think you saw?" Trent said.
Loren clearly didn't care for the structure of the sentence. "I saw a body. I don't think I saw one, I saw one."
Trent held up his hands. "Fine, but how do you know the body isn't her?"
The question silenced them all.
"Couldn't be," Loren insisted. "You and Annabelle went back to the beach when the three of us were looking for bristleworms. I stayed out. That's when I found the corpse."
Nora tried to rein in some reason. "One thing at a time. Forget about corpses and jammers and parasites right this minute. Lieutenant, I think the best idea is for you to find Annabelle, while Loren and I do some more tests on this worm."
Trent didn't seem overly pleased, but he agreed, "All right," and left the head shack.
"So you were right-it can infect mammals," Loren said when he noticed the dead possum. He looked into the scope. "Jesus. Some of the ova are still growing, while others have already hatched."
"You're kidding…" Nora hadn't seen that. Another fluke. "It looks like a Trichinella, and it's acting like a number of species from the order, but-"
"Nora, this worm is acting like a whole bunch of different worms," he said, "and we both know that."
When Nora took another look herself, she saw that some of the tiny ova had already hatched into worms that were already a half inch long. "This is going to become a mess real fast. They're growing off the slide."
"Isolate one ovum and one worm, then-"
"Kill everything else," she finished his thought. She placed a worm and an unhatched ovum in a petri dish, then scraped everything else into a plastic container and sprayed it with repellent. "I want to see what this ovum's going to do."
"It might be an infertile mutagen carrier," Loren speculated.
"That's what I was thinking." But it was also what she was fearing. Once a species got this big, who knew what effect it would have on humans? "And we're going to keep this worm alive-to see just how big it gets." She left the ovum in the dish and forceped the now inch-long worm into a glass beaker. "Why don't you check out the mother possum?"
Loren slid the box over and pulled up the other microscope. "At least it doesn't stink yet. The only thing grosser than a possum is a rotten possum."
"It had already given birth to the babies," Nora told him. "It's obvious it hasn't been dead more than a few hours."
"And just more proof of a parasite that can live on land and in water."
"Um-hmm."
Loren wasted no time in making a transabdominal incision on the adult possum. When he parted the rive with dissection probes, he simply stared. "I don't even have to put any tissue samples under the scope to see that this possum is seriously fucked up."
"Huh?" Nora leaned over and looked.
"There's nothing inside. All internal organs are absent."
"That's impossible. It hasn't been dead long enough to suffer that level of putrefaction."
"I'm not even smelling putrefaction, Nora, not a trace. Somehow the entirety of its organ systems was removed before any cellular deterioration could take place."
"Eviscerated by a predator?"
"The body was intact," he objected. "No cuts on it, no bite marks. If a skunk or another possum ate this thing's innards, there'd be bite marks on the abdomen."
Now Nora could see what he meant. "And it couldn't be a bacterial infection or a corruptive stomach virus because there'd still be signs of decomposition."
"And there isn't any," Loren finished, frustrated. He pushed away from the table, arms crossed in thought. "So you know what I'm thinking now?"
Nora nodded. "This is the same way that chitinpenetrating nematodes eat."
"Yeah, but they don't eat five-pound mammals, they eat quarter-ounce crustaceans and mollusks." He looked over at Nora's microscope. "What's your ovum doing now?"
Nora eyed the scope. "Shit, it's about half the size of a marble now. A half hour ago it was smaller than a pencil point."
Trent came back in, looking just as flustered as Nora and Loren. "What's wrong with you two? You looked pissed."
.Not pissed," Loren offered. "More like aggravatedly confounded."
Trent frowned. "I can't find Annabelle anywhere."
"That's not good," Loren said. "Especially if we've got the kind of trouble we think we might have."
"What are you talking about?" Trent demanded, losing some patience.
"Well, Lieutenant," Nora began, "we seem to have a tiny parasitic worm that lives on land and sea and may be able to grow to unheard-of proportions. Big enough, at least, to attack, and kill, that." And she pointed to the possum on the table.
"Before you started cutting on it, it didn't look attacked," Trent said.
"Something sucked this thing's guts out for food," Loren specified.
Nora tacked on, "And then laid eggs in all its babies. And the eggs were the same yellow things we saw in the shower stall the other day."
"You can't be serious," Trent dismissed.
"Look familiar, Lieutenant?" Nora picked up the microscope slide and showed him what was on it: a yellow ovum with bloodred spots, the size of a pea.
"Holy shit…"
"This thing's probably increased in size a hundredfold in less than an hour."
Trent rubbed his brows. "How is that possible?"
"We don't know," Loren said. "High infantile growth rates among worms and other soft-bodied invertebrates aren't uncommon. But motile ova like this are another story. They always stay the same size before they hatch."
Trent eyed the ticklike pod. It was moving about very slightly via its cilia. "So that thing's going to hatch into a worm."
"Maybe, maybe not," Nora said. "Certain types of ova-like certain types of sperm cells-aren't always fertile."
"That one's big enough to dissect now, Nora," Loren reminded her.
"Good idea." She placed the slide back under the scope, then carefully wielded forceps with one hand, and one of the microscalpels with the other.
"Ten to one there's no embryo in it," Loren said.
"I'm not following any of this now," Trent admitted. "I thought an ovum and an egg were the same thing."
.Not quite," Loren offered. "An egg always carries an embryo, while ova sometimes have dual purposes."
"I still don't get it."
"Be patient… Nora held the yellow bud down with the tines of the forceps, then gingerly cut into the rubbery outer hull. The ovum popped more than split, and out issued a dollop of jellylike muck laced with something like white threads.
"You were right," she said. "There's no worm larva inside, just some white strands. Probably a mutagenic protein." Next she plucked up several of the previously killed ova and similarly cut them open. "Looks like half of these have infantile worms in them-"
"And the other half contain the mutagen," Loren already knew. "Just like a lot of the Trichinellas."
Trent shook his head. "Would somebody please explain what you're talking about?"
Nora sat back and began, "Motile ova-in other words, egg carriers that move about independently are part of this worm's reproductive system. Typically a parasitic worm will lay its ova in a living host. The nonfertile ova release a mutagen that genetically alters the host's own reproductive systems to make it a more compatible natal environment. Later, the fertile ova hatch. The mutagenesis has occurred in order to force the host to bear the worm's young."
"Yuck," Trent remarked.
"Sure, but a perfect system that increased the odds of positive reproduction. A similar thing happens in many mammals including humans, believe it or not. Not with ova but with sperm cells. Most people don't know that only about half of a man's sperm exist to fertilize a female egg. The remaining sperm have alternate duties: to kill sperm from other males, for instance, to run interference against bacteria that possess spermicidal traits. Some sperm even release protein secretions that fool another male's sperm into believing it to be an egg, wasting its potential. All for the sake of increasing the chances of reproductive success."
"You're right," Trent admitted. "I didn't know that. I thought all sperm was the same."
"Well, it's not, and neither are ova. This worm's ova have multiple purposes, too: to genetically adapt a hostcrab, mollusk, shrimp, and in this case even a possum-to become an unwilling reproductive vessel. And that's exactly what alarmed Loren and me about this worm. It looks a lot like an order of roundwormor nematode-called Trichinella and Trichina."
"That sounds familiar for some reason," Trent said after a pause.
"Sure," Loren said. "Everyone's heard of trichinosis."
More recognition in Trent's eyes. "The stuff you get from eating uncooked pork."
"Right. That worm-the Trichinella spiralis-and others like it can mutagenically change a host to make it more habitable to its own young, too. But the difference is-"
Nora took it from there. "Those kinds of worms never grow more than a few millimeters in length-but look how big this one's gotten just in the last hour."
She held up the beaker.
"Christ!" Trent exclaimed.
The worm inside was now eight inches long and squirming vigorously.
.The similarities are interesting," Nora continued, "but so are the differences. The Trichinella spiralis is an inborn worm-meaning it doesn't live on land or in water. The species exists entirely in hosts, transferring from one to another through food and excrement."
"Lovely," Trent said, making a nauseated smirk.
"But there are plenty of Trichinella-like nematodes that live on land as free-ranging worms, and plenty more that are marine and freshwater species. None of them, however, can do both."
"But this one can," Loren said.
"The most alarming thing about this worm is that it actually resembles several totally different types of worm all in one."
Loren: "It's almost like this thing is part earthworm, part leech, part clam worm, and part trichinosis worm."
"A mutation?" Trent attempted. "From chemicals in the water or something?"
"No mutation could cross-breed multiple species," Nora informed him. "We've seen evidence that it's a chitin penetrator-like a clam worm."
"From the lobster," Trent remembered.
"Exactly. The worm initially infected the lobster by burning a hole in its shell with its digestive enzymes and then injecting its ova through the hole. These kinds of worms also eat the same way."
"Eat?" Trent questioned.
Loren indicated the dead possum. "By filling a host's abdominal cavity with the same corrosive enzymes. The enzymes dissolve the internal organs, and then the worm sucks it back out. A liquefied meal. Lots of worms eat this way, and lots of insects too. Flies are the best-known example."
Trent was staring at the possum. "Wouldn't it take, like, a really big worm to eat all the organs in that possum?"
"It sure would," Nora admitted. "And that's another reason we're worried about this." She held up the beaker again. The worm was now pushing ten inches. "We've seen how big this thing has gotten in less than an hour. How big will it be after a full day?"
"Or a full week?" Loren posed. He gulped at the thought. "A worm that could successfully attack a possum this size and be able to consume probably a full pound of internal organs…"
Now it was Trent's turn to gulp. "How… big… would a worm like that have to be?"
Nora took a guess after a few moments of uncomfortable silence. "Two or three inches in diameter, at least. And at least ten feet long."
Priorities, Nora was thinking now. We've got a few.
"All this talk of worms," Trent remarked. He brushed his arm as if there might be bugs on it. "It's making me paranoid."
"I keep looking over my shoulder," Loren added, "thinking there might be worms behind me, or ova."
They were back at the campsite now, sitting solemnly at the old picnic table. There was nothing more they could do in the lab.
Nora grabbed her snorkeling gear. "We have to identify some priorities. If it turns out this worm can infect humans, we could be in a heap of trouble, especially since we can't seem to get off the island right now.*
"What should we do?" Trent asked. He was the group's official leader, but now he seemed to be showing some insecurities. "We have to find Annabelle."
'Right," Nora agreed. "And that's what you and Loren should do."
"You're going back in the water?" Loren asked.
"I have to. You said you saw a dead body out there near the trench. I hate to say it, but are you absolutely sure it wasn't Annabelle?"
"Impossible." Loren felt certain. it was too decomposed. She'd been with me and Lieutenant Trent less than an hour before."
"And she came back ashore with me," Trent added.
Nora looked at him. "Where did she go then?"
"I… don't know."
"The body did appear to be female," Loren admitted. "There was still some blond hair hanging off the scalp."
"Shit!" Trent said.
"But there was almost nothing left," Loren went on. "The flesh was hanging off the bones. The body's probably been out there for days."
"Sharks, eels, and a variety of bottom dwellers can reduce a human body to next to nothing real fast," Nora reminded. "I have to have a look, to make sure it's not her. And I also need to examine it as closely as possible. Whoever's body it is, I need to see if the worms could be responsible."
"We should go with you," Loren said.
"No, we need to maximize our time. You two look for Annabelle. Split up, check everywhere. And keep trying your cell phones-and your radio, Lieutenant."
Trent seemed unsure, even shaky. "What do we do if we can't find Annabelle?"
I don't know, Nora thought truthfully. I'm more worried about what we DO find. More worms. BIG ones. "You'll find her. Let's meet back here in two hours exactly. And good luck."
The two men branched off while Nora trudged down the trail toward the beach. Now she knew what Trent and Loren meant about being paranoid. With every step she looked to her sides, half expecting to see some very large pink nematodes squirming in wait. She couldn't pass a tree trunk without inspecting it for signs of the yellow motile ova. I just cannot BELIEVE what we've stumbled on, she thought.
On the beach she noticed the tide was coming up, with a rougher chop than usual. She took an uncomfortable glance at the sun. In another few hours there wouldn't be enough light to snorkel at all…
She pulled on her flippers, lowered her mask, and waded in.
Skimming along the bottom, she knew it was her imagination when she began to feel inhibited. The water wasn't really murkier, and there weren't really fewer fish about-she simply imagined it. Farther out, she snorkeled a deep breath and dove.
Several sea urchins lay upside down-dead. Next, she picked up an upside-down stone crab and looked at its hard-shelled underside. There was a hole in it.
She wended around a large boulder, then stopped. Another dozen crabs lay similarly upside down. They've all got holes in them! she saw.
Evidence of a chitin-penetrating parasite.
Another sea urchin quivered in a small crevice. Nora flipped it over and recoiled.
Fixed to the urchin's mouth was a six-inch-long pink worm.
Nora thrust away with her flippers, repulsed. The worms are killing everything…
The next outcropping of boulders was crawling with yellow ova…
I have to be real friggin' careful! she yelled at herself.
When she got to the magnificent coral deposits that flagged the trench, she saw nothing but a carpet of dead scarlet bristleworms. They lay curled up like red litter, tossing slightly in the current.
The entire nest has been routed…
The impulse to leave couldn't have been stronger, but there was still one more thing she had to do.
The corpse.
Maybe he imagined it, she wished. Maybe it was a dolphin skeleton or something… She skimmed by more clumps of coral, and there it was: the darkening decline that marked the tip of the trench. Deeper than I thought, she realized, flipping downward. And it was darker. She kicked out and glided another dozen feet.
Nora stared through the prism of her mask.
The arrangement of flesh and bones lay before her almost as if it expected her. Scraps of fabric around the hips indicated shorts too skimpy for a man, and another band of fabric about the rib cage was clearly a bikini top. It was orange.
Does Annabelle have an orange bikini? She couldn't recall.
Nora felt haunted as she hovered over the remnants of a living person. Eyeless sockets looked back at her, and something like a grin struggled through the waxen, swollen traces of flesh around the mouth. White teeth glimmered through. A flap of white skin floated off the chest, darkened by the circle of a nipple. Nora found herself fingering her own gold cross as she hovered closer. Bones were all that remained of the feet, and off the femurs and shins, more white flesh wobbled like jelly. White hipbones broke through the skin of the pelvis.
She heard her own teeth grinding when she peered again to the flesh-specked face. Loren was right; clumped tresses of hair floated tentacle-like off the scalp, too light to be brunet, but it seemed longer than Annabelle's hair.
I'm pretty sure this isn't her.
But if it wasn't Annabelle… who was it?
The intense grotesquerie of what she was looking at felt as palpable as a gust of current. She wanted to leave now, but…
She knew she'd have to look closer for another moment, for any evidence that the worms might have done this.
There were no ova on the body, but what about inside?
Aw, shit, I don't want to do this!
The cadaver's bare abdomen was stretched across the hips tight as a drum skin, and as white. The belly button was a concise pock against the bloodless flesh. The idea of pulling the corpse ashore for a makeshift autopsy was out of the question; it would fall apart at the joints from the turbulence.
I'll part the belly a little, take a look inside…
She shone down her flashlight, while her other hand unsheathed her utility knife. She thought of grave robbing when she brought the tip of the blade to the corpse's abdomen.
The sharp steel tip hadn't penetrated more than an inch before three long pink ropes flew out of the cadaver's mouth.
Nora's heart felt stabbed. For a moment, she blacked out from the shock of what she'd witnessed, dozens of feet under water, in dead silence.
But there was her evidence.
The worms were a yard long each. They cork screwed away from her, their grotesque bright pink skin shimmering.
Holy, holy, holy SHIT! she thought.
Then she froze in the water when a fourth, longer worm shot out of the knife hole and wrapped around her waist so quickly it was on her before she even saw it-