On the Retreat - pt 1

By Jack Swan

I crawled back out of the tent, marshmallows in hand, to find the conversation had turned to the werms. Ethel was saying, wide-eyed, how cool she thought they were; Logan, naturally, was having none of it.

“They’re disgusting,” he said, taking a swig of Fosters. “Eth, there’s nothing nice about them at all, and you can ask my dad for proof. He saw 'em chew up his mates in Argentina. Said it was one of the most horrific things he’s ever seen. They drool blood, and pus, and they stink like runny shit.”

“Well yeah, I mean, physically they’re gross,” Ethel said, as I skewered a marshmallow. “But I mean other than that, the stuff they do is just so weirdly cool. And they’re clever, you know. They built a whole brain to coordinate themselves, like, two hundred miles across, in Brazil. And they can’t be all that bad, because –”

“Of course they’re bad!” Logan said. “They made that brain-thing of theirs out of recycled human brains! That’s what they do! They kill humans, animals, whatever, and they turn the corpses into – what do they call it –”

“Suelo,” I said.

“Suelo. Organic mush made out of people. That they live in.”

“I know – but just the way that happens, it’s just so... fascinating.”

“Not if you’ve heard my dad’s stories,” Logan said darkly. Ethel shrugged and looked at me.

“Your dad fought the werms in South America didn’t he, Ollie?”

I shrugged too. “He was too old to fight, he was a non-com on the transport fleet they had evacuating people from Rio de Janeiro to Ascension Island. He doesn’t speak about the werms, anyway; doesn’t even let us talk about them.” As I thought about it, it was nice to be able to discuss the werms with people; you need to be able to discuss world-changing things like the Werm War every now and then.

The light from the campfire didn’t travel far; I could barely see Trace’s face, though the tiny orange flare of her fag flared up clearly enough in the darkness. “Why’d they even call ‘em ‘werms’, anyway?”

“Mistranslation from Portuguese,” Ethel said, “I think their word for worm is ‘werme’ or ‘verme’ or something. Either way it got misspelled in some news bulletin or whatever and the name stuck. And obviously they look like worms. Or slugs. Or pretty much whatever they twist themselves into.”

“Can’t you get flying ones?” I asked, recalling a blurred image of mid-air werms I had seen long ago, in the midst of the Werm War.

“Oh god yeah, they’ve got whole ones as big as airships, and then there’s the ones that...”

I swear Ethel knows everything, or at least when it comes to living things. The only way she avoids being stigmatised as a nerd is, well, through putting all that phenomenal brainpower of hers into being very sassy and the smartest smart-alec you’ll ever come across. Most teachers puzzled over and bemoaned her lack of self-application to their subjects; I had seen some of Eth’s interim reports and pretty much all of them read along the lines of ‘it’s a real shame that such a smart young girl is a half-assed tearaway’. Of course, that all changed when it came to biology and learning physiotherapy in PE – Ethel was completely and utterly committed to becoming a doctor and would put aside even the most witty insult opportunity to get the grades to open that job up to her. Being fascinated by squishy biological stuff, and the more morbid matters like surgery, it’s no surprise that she’s obsessed by the strange mysteries of the werms.

She couldn’t half go on about them, and she certainly didn’t mind doing so. The conversation pretty much devolved into a Q&A about werms with Ethel fielding and answering every one of our stupid questions. These ranged from whether or not there were werms which spat acid (true) to the fact that their Suelo sometimes formed strange structures that looked like willies (not true). Naturally, just as Ethel was happy to answer our questions, Logan was equally happy to chime in with snarky remarks about how werms were considerably more horrific than Ethel made them out to be. This in turn devolved into Logan and Ethel ripping into one another with their respective powers of stubbornness and sass, while Trace and I enjoyed our respective vices of cigarettes and marshmallows. Only when their argument turned from banter to genuine maliciousness did I step in, telling Logan he had had too much to drink and to shut the hell up before he ruined our camping trip. Peace was restored.

After we had tired of watching Trace sharpening her hunting knife (Trace being the rare kind of girl to carry around a hunting knife – she was basically an overgrown tomboy who had never been told ‘time you start acting like a lady’) Logan and Ethel settled back and whipped out their mobiles, illuminating their faces with harsh white light.

“Oh, surprise surprise,” Logan murmured, and held the phone up to Ethel. She rolled her eyes.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Tanya Rey is single again.”

“She was going out with someone?” asked Trace.

“For like three weeks,” Ethel said, voice dripping with condescension.

“Was it three? I swear it was two,” I said.

“Nope, three.”

“Damn,” I said, because that meant I had lost a bet with Mo Medvjed over how long Tanya’s latest fling would last. We boys had discovered that such ‘relationship sweepstakes’ – especially ones focused on the sluts of the year – were a form of gambling almost as fun as strip poker (and knowing Tanya’s reputation either game involved a blatant element of sex). That was two quid down the drain.

But I didn’t really care. It was two days until I would even see Mo again back home, and in the meantime this campsite would still be peaceful and overall pretty sweet.

It was near a little village called Shotley, sandwiched between Essex and Suffolk. It sat on a little headland where two big rivers met and joined the North Sea. Looking out over the water you could easily see the massive port of Felixstowe, cranes and containers basking in golden glow as dockworkers toiled twenty-four hours to load and unload the freighters that shuttled through the port. Some nights, if the wind was blowing from the port to the campsite, the sounds of the work – sirens, the metal rattle of cranes, the rumbling of ship engines, the calls of workers – would be carried right across the water. While they wouldn’t keep you awake, they would certainly be noticeable and give you a rough idea of what was going on over at the port. Tonight, though, the breeze was much more gentle, and rolling out towards the west, and to the sea.

If only it had been blowing in from Felixstowe; then we would have had plenty of warning for the disaster that would follow.

----

That's the first part of the story so far, the remainder will be posted up over the next few days. Feedback is welcome, criticism is welcome, compliments are definitely welcome, heh heh!