On the Retreat - pt. 2

Part one here: http://swanindustries.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/on-retreat.html

By Jack Swan

I dunno if you’ve ever slept in a tent. Once you learn to tuck in as warm as possible there’s no trouble getting to sleep. In fact, the hard part is getting up the next morning: your sleeping bag is so comfortable and warm that there’s basically nothing that can motivate you to get out of it. You have to wait until it becomes uncomfortably warm, sweaty, and you can’t snooze any longer (all difficult standards to meet as a teenager); this means that under normal circumstances you don’t get up until ten at the absolute earliest.

That night, we all got out of bed at half past three.

I seem to recall I was awake. Getting to sleep in a tent isn’t like in a normal bed: rather than being in a pitch-black, silent state of sensory deprivation where your night time thoughts morph to dreams, it works a lot differently. In a tent there’s still some light, and quite a bit of sound, and so you stay reasonably aware of what’s going on around you for quite a while. Generally the sounds of rustling leaves, passing cars, or rumbling jetliners overhead, simply serve to relax you into sleep.

But when you hear slithering, your reaction is quite the opposite.

My eyes, half-closed and tingling with tiredness, reopened. Very gradually – I was still too unworried to make significant effort – I lifted my head from the pillow, to better search for the sound. There it was again, a slithering that sounded like rolling saliva in your mouth, and the sounds of rustling grass. Every now and then there came a sound like snapping twigs and crunching leaves, but much more... malevolent. And every time that snickety sound came, it was closer, louder, and joined by a breathing that seemed to me like a paper bag groping for air. I had bugger all idea what it was but it was enough to banish any idea of sleep and replace that with thoughts of being brutally disembowelled by some strange Suffolk axe murderer.

Very, very gingerly, I reached inside my sleeping bag, retrieved my phone from my pocket and, keeping it and its bright light under the cover, called Logan’s number. I wasn’t going to speak to him – that might be too loud – I only hoped to get his attention. By now I was breathing fast and my heart was thumping loudly in the half-silence of the night, but as I saw the light of his phone come on in his tent and heard the faint whirr as it vibrated, I relaxed by about one fewer heartbeats per minute. Not that that was any real consolation. I heard him shuffle and move in his tent, and my phone stopped ringing.

“Wha-” came Logan’s muffled whisper, grumpy. But I hung up straight away; I had his attention, and couldn’t risk speaking in case we were heard. I flicked to my messenger and tapped the plastic keys.

Can you hear something?

I heard the phone vibrate, and Logan tap the keys. The slithering was getting closer.

No? Fu, im tryin 2 sleep

The slithering was so close that I could hear it as loud as my own breathing. I quickfired a text.

Cant you hear that round?

I only realised after the text was sent that my autocorrect had put in the wrong word ‘sound’ – but by god, what with how much noise it was making, Logan had to understand what I was on about.

The fuck is that?

Okay, so we were on the same page. That relaxed me a little bit but did nothing to answer the fundamental question of ‘what the sweet Jesus is that out there?!’.

There was only one way of answering that, I knew. I didn’t want to do it. I would rather have tucked myself away in the sleeping back and quiver until dawn. I had a good mind to tell Logan to do it. At night, everything unexplainable is automatically the most menacing thing possible, and you would rather do anything than face it. I was scared stiff, and I’m not easily scared. But I knew that I had to look, to do something, anything. So I reached into my bag as quietly as I could and felt for my torch. Normally when you try to do something like that quietly and without looking it takes awkwardly long, and I wouldn’t have minded that since it would have taken me longer to see what was out there. But my hand met the cool metal of the torch straight away. I gulped, and very slowly leant forward in my sleeping bag until I could reach the zip at the bottom end of the tent.

It’s just a stray dog, I told myself. Or at worst, a drunk. You can banter them away easily. But no matter which way I set the points on my mental railway, my train of thought ran straight into ‘paedophile axe murderer’ territory.

I laid a trembling finger on the zipper, leaned close, and held the torch up to my eye. Then, on the count of three, I opened the zip –

No I didn’t. Counting to three just wasn’t that simple. I held myself steady at the unopened tent flap, took five deep breaths, then got ready again. This time.

One.

Two.

Three.

The air outside was cool and drifted gently onto my single exposed eye. But it carried a strange, foul smell in with it. There was something there, poking around the fire, but the starlight wasn’t enough to see. I slid my thumb to the button on the torch, and as the crickets chirped and the strange intruder gave its twiggy snicker, I clicked it on.

A pure white beam jumped through the night air, over the grey-white ashes of the campfire, and landed on the off-white flesh of a –

“Werm!”

The word made less than a sound as it left my mouth but I could easily hear my own utter terror. There was no doubt: it was a werm, complete with the six strange ropey limbs that jutted from its gelatinous flank, and skin that looked like hundreds of egg whites pressed together. From its back quivered fleshy grey appendages – sensory nodes, pheromone receptors. My hand shook, briefly revealing the side of its bizarre head, a fatty, fleshy pink protrusion devoid of eyes but striped with strange, nauseating mouths: wheezing orifices that dragged films of grey saliva with them as they opened.

I had seen what I needed to know. I had seen more than I ever wanted to know, even from that simple glance in the night time half-light. I clicked off the torch, did the zip, and leant back down as quickly and quietly as I could. My stomach churned with the raw fear that comes from seeing something intimidatingly bizarre exactly where it shouldn’t be: metres away from you. My nose didn’t agree with its putrefying stench either.

I could barely text with my quivering fingers.

Its a werm

The silence was agonising. I passed it by making sure the phone was set to utter silence – not even to vibrate, for fear of alerting the werm. The answer came soon enough.

We r fucked

Logan pretty much mirrored my thoughts. What could we do? Should we call 999? What they even believe us? And what about the girls?

What about the girls? Do we tell them?

Outside the dreadful wooden snicketing continued, snuffling around the campfire. At one point one its limbs slapped against a guy-rope of the tent, and the whole canvas quivered. My heart hit my chest like a lorry crash.

Yer so their prepared if they have 2 b. U call trace ill call eth

The risk was obvious. Are their phones on vibrate?

Probs yer, we got 2 risk it

So I scrolled down to Trace’s number, selected it, and pressed the button. I held my breath as sick jitters filled me.

The phone said it was calling, but I couldn’t hear anything except its own muffled ringing tone. Eventually it flicked from ‘calling’ to ‘in call’; I mashed the ‘hang up’ key immediately and bashed out a text. Trace no jokes theres a werm outside i swear on my mums life its true. Be prepared if needs be

Just as the message disappeared from my screen a text appeared with unerring speed. It was Logan again.

Ollie mate i only have her old number u call her

Okay. It wasn’t a disaster. We could still safely contact Ethel. All I need to do was just repeat what I’d done for the other two and it’d be fine. I flicked through my numbers, came to ‘E’, scrolled down past various Edwards and Emmas, and hit Ethel’s number. I muffled my ringing sound, and listened out into the cold darkness to the werm’s ragged, papery breaths.

And at that point the night filled with the loud, boisterous rapping of Zeb-C (feat. Locarno).

As tinny beats filled the stillness of the night I froze utterly still, not breathing, not blinking, every single circuit in my mind filled with a primal terror of complete, life-threatening disaster. I must have stayed rigid as a statue for a full five seconds as Zeb-C was already launching into his second verse by the time I had the sense to crush the ‘end call’ button. But the deed was done – the snuffling ceased, the papery breaths increased, and the unmistakeable sound of slithering advanced on Ethel’s tent.

Catatonic fear gone, my mind was now crawling, wading through a deluge of curse words as it scrambled for a solution. Startle the werm with the torch? Could it even see? Make loud noises? Would it care? Attack it? Was that strange sheen on its skin poisonous?

I guess in the end my primal fear was solved by another primal instinct. As my mind spun in frantic circles my ears were assaulted by Ethel’s scream, which tore through the canvas, into my eardrums and straight to the decision centre of my brain. It was more than enough to boot me into action. My fear tempered by raw adrenaline, I ripped open my sleeping bag and plunged through the tent flap. My torch waved through the darkness, as I stumbled about in my socks – I hadn’t had time to put my shoes on. My feet were immediately soaked by some combination of dew and strange werm secretion, but with an eight-foot slug in front of me I couldn’t care less.

It was leaning its huge fleshy bulk onto the purple canvas of Ethel’s tent, crushing it, while it probed around with its disgusting conical head covered in quivering lips; inside, Ethel squirmed, and kicked, and screamed.

Logan was up too but just as clueless as me; I guess he was trying to remember what his dad had said he’d done in a similar situation in the Werm War, and whether or not it was safe to attack a werm bare-handed. There really was no time to consider, though, so I swung my torch around on the floor to scan for something, anything, of use.

A discarded cider bottle lay by the fire. It was covered in green slime but as I fumbled for it with tremoring hands my fingers didn’t appear to be immediately melting off with some strange werm acid so I took the gamble. I smashed the bottle on the side of the wheel hub we’d been using as a base for the fire, stumbled over in blind, shaky confusion in the darkness to the werm, and raked its fleshy flank. Or so I planned; it whipped one of its vine-like limbs at me and I staggered back at the last moment. Ethel was still screaming for help.

“Son of a BITCH!” came a sudden call. I whipped the torch up in time to see Trace flash a silver glint past her face and embed it into the rancid creature’s left flank, before ripping back and sideways. “COME ON!” she roared, stabbing with her hunting knife once again. The werm twisted to direct its cone-face at her, tasting the air for her movements with its gulping orifices. Trace reeled back; one of its limbs shot out, wrapping round her retreating arm. Trace wasn’t having any of it, though, and with a none-too-polite “FUCK OFF!” hacked off the ensnaring limb.

It was clear the beast was getting its comeback for attacking Ethel – its snickety sounds gave way to a meaty growl, as if a chainsaw were yawning; with its five remaining full-length limbs, it tried to fend us off as it slithered backwards, jetting what must have been some speed-enhancing lubricant from pores in its belly as it made its fighting retreat. But we had decided that that thing had bought it. Now Logan and I had our wits about us. I jumped on its rearmost limb, held on of its grey sensory spines for support, and attacked it with the broken bottle. Logan was standing over its head, clubbing at the fleshy cone with my discarded boots. Trace was stabbing at it with all the surgical precision of a blind doctor. The werm reeled, coiled, twisted and tried to trip and slap us with its limbs – but with each passing second its blows grew weaker, its escape efforts less spirited; its attempts to throw us off turned to mere death throes. It slithered away, helpless, while we released nine collective years of pent-up teenage desire to hit something. Finally, as it tried to crawl across a ditch by the hedge at the end of the field, it shuddered to a halt, squirmed a little more and then stopped entirely, its gasping orifices hanging limp. Lacerated by a knife on one side, filled with shards of glass on the other, and with its head bleeding from shoe-based impact trauma, it listed helplessly into the ditch.

And exploded.

Not like a dynamite combustion – no, just as if it were a meaty balloon bursting. I’ve heard that sometimes, when they try to bring fish from the bottom of the ocean to the surface, the fish were used to such high pressures that at sea level they were basically overinflated balloons and exploded. It was like that here, only rather than dealing with a football-sized angler fish, this was an eight-foot werm. We were slapped in the face with hot, stinking flesh, which had all the texture of uncooked meat and all of the stink of rotten eggs. I flicked films of flesh from my hands and rubbed clear my eyes and face, then looked at the others. Trace was brushing herself down; Logan was backing away, afraid.

I tried to say something at least mildly cheery, but nothing came except a deep desire for long, slow breaths. I compromised with myself to produce a resolute grin.

Logan was considerably more stony faced. “We all need to wash ourselves and burn our clothes, right now.”

“What?” asked Trace, inspecting her knife, “Why?”

“Don’t you know? When werms die they explode to release the chemicals that let them subvert the environment... and other living things. If we don’t clean up right now, and get rid of these contaminated clothes, we’ll be filled with retroviruses and shit that’ll mutate us into Suelo.”

Christ, he was right. Everyone knew and feared the horrific way werms subverted biomass for their own use, turning plants, animals and human beings into twisted structures to serve their own bizarre needs. My heart pace leapt back into panic mode at the thought of that happening to me, especially if the rumours about how long you stayed conscious after the retrovirus turned you to Suelo were true...

Logan was in command mode now, applying his father’s own officer skills. “Trace, get back to Ethel, cut her out of the tent. Don’t touch anything – get her to go into our tents and get a change of clothes for all of us; I can’t risk having you contaminate our clothes.” He motioned at the red ooze coating her as an explanation why. “If something happens, abandon the camp and get down to the shower block – that’s where Ollie and I will be, decontaminating ourselves. Right?” The last part was directed to me; I nodded. Thank god someone knew what to do (or at least reassured us by pretending he did). “Good. Now, come on, quick; we need to get ready and get to help. Let’s see if we can break camp by four o’clock and get out of here. See you in the showers in five, Trace.”

We broke off and Logan and I walked briskly down the hill, our torches strobing the damp grass for any possible movement. I looked down to the end of the field, and beyond, then out across the water to Felixstowe port –

“Oh my god – Logan, look at that.”

He looked up with me. There, still sheathed in golden light but now with a murky red tinge, the containers and cranes of the port still stood. Only now they were enmeshed in a gigantic crimson lattice of veins, branches of flesh, films of skin – Suelo. Pulsating bulbs and sacs were nestled inside the metal skeletons of the cranes. White things crawled like massive maggots between the subverted structures, patrolling the port. Everything was covered in Suelo to some extent, but one ship more than most was infested: ground zero of the infection, I assumed. Whatever markings it had once carried were now hidden under huge swathes of ruby flesh. The top side of the vessel looked like a single gigantic muscle; along its flanks, the containers that ship had carried had been split, twisted and shaped into interlocking armoured panels, a gigantic metal carapace forged purely by the bizarre biological ingenuity of the werms. The only opening in the carapace was at the top – where out of a wide hole strange shapes like slugs with wings and biological blimps soared into the night sky.

I was simply dumbstruck by the horrific yet fascinating subversion of it all: the werms’ beachhead in Britain. But as I watched with morbid curiosity my stomach trembled again, because while it was all very interesting from a safe distance, I knew just what those werms were like up close – and over there, there were thousands. Still, if I had been able to convince myself that the werms wouldn’t hurt me, I would’ve easily been able to stay there all night and day, watching with twisted fascination. Luckily Logan made an excellent point to keep me moving:

“Hurry up. If the government has any sense at all, it’s a matter of minutes before Felixstowe becomes the new Hiroshima.”