WORMS

 

1

Later on, Scott Reed could not be sure what he’d been thinking when he drove the bus straight through the barrier and down into the flooded streets of Bethany. But as it happened, as he saw those barriers smash to kindling and felt the terrible, greasy roll of the bus as it skidded down that curving hill into the water, he kept telling himself it was not his fault. That none of this was his fault. Busing the kids over to Park Falls for that fucking soccer game—and with the Black River Valley at flood stage, every goddamn river in the state bursting its banks—was not his idea. Witcham was going underwater and they wanted him to bus the kids seventy miles back and forth.

Not my fault, not my goddamn fault.

Famous last words.

The kids, fourth and fifth graders, started screaming soon as the bus blew through the orange striped sawhorses and Reed told them to hang on, hang on, but it was sheer pandemonium and he was just glad they were all belted in. It was all just a mistake. The rain had been coming down in gray sheets and visibility was squat, just gray and hazy, raindrops the size of quarters exploding against the windshield. Reed had been maybe going too fast for conditions and instead of turning onto the Broad Street overpass which would have carried them around the northern edge of Bethany and into Elmwood, he had turned two blocks too soon onto Coogan Avenue and down into the sea that was Bethany at high tide.

The bus careened madly as he rode the brake down the hill, Coogan Avenue just as greasy as a skillet. When he rounded the sharp turn near the bottom, almost taking out two parked cars and a fire hydrant, the water opened up before him. The bus hit it doing better than forty-miles-an-hour. Water sprayed up, inundating the bus and making it rock wildly. It tipped first to the left, then the right, steadying itself as the deeper water found it and kept right on going until it struck a flatbed truck abandoned in the street. There it came to rest in that deserted, flooded section of the city, lost from view from above.

The kids were either crying or shouting or just holding tightly to their seats in silent shock.

Reed scrambled out of his seatbelt harness and fell right on his face. “Everyone take it easy,” he said, pulling himself up. “We’re okay now, we’re okay. Is anyone back there hurt?”

Over the sobs and exclamations of surprise that finally leaked out, several children said everyone was okay, okay. Reed went back there to be sure and it was like climbing a low incline going up the aisle. The front of the bus was submerged right up to the hood, water leaking in through the bifold door and flooding the floor near the dash. The back of the bus was up higher, though, so Reed figured they were lucky they’d hit that flatbed before they got into the real deep stuff. What he didn’t know was that the front wheels of the bus had come to rest in a crevice created by a section of pavement that had washed away. The same crevice that had snared the flatbed.

Reed checked on the kids, telling them all to unbelt.

“Are we sinking?” Cal Woltrip asked. “Are we going under?”

“No, of course not,” Reed said.

Thing was, he’d asked himself the same thing, but the bus had sunk as much as it was going to. The front of the cab was flooded now, but that was about as bad as things were going to get, he figured.

Cal looked disappointed.

No surprise there. Reed didn’t know many of the kids on the bus, but he did know two of the boys—Cal and his brother Kyle. Cal was in fifth and Kyle in fourth. They were good boys for the most part, Reed knew, just excessively morbid. They watched too many horror movies and got their biggest thrills by scaring the shit out of other kids. Something Reed sure as hell did not need right now.

Once he saw to the kids, he went up front, feeling that chill water entering his shoes and then lapping up around his shins. He tried the radio and it was dead. Again, no surprise. The engine compartment was flooded and the battery was out of commission along with the rest of the electrical system. Some of the kids had cellphones, but they weren’t working either.

“Help is on the way,” he called back to the kids.

Yeah, my ass it is.

Christ, what a situation. Nobody even knew they were in the city. Last time he’d radioed in they were twenty miles out. So now he was stuck down in this goddamned flooded ghost town with fifteen kids, the oldest of which hadn’t even seen twelve yet. Shit and shit. There were no other adults on board. Lucy Costigan, the coach, had not made the ride back from Park Falls. She’d decided to spend the night there with her sister.

Goddamn bitch, that was just great.

Most days, Reed had nothing but good things to say about Lucy. True, she was a stuck-up bitch generally disliked by the faculty of Fair Street Elementary over in Elmwood Hills. But she was a very attractive stuck-up bitch. She was only twenty four or five, something like that, tall and shapely with long smooth muscled legs that led up to a high, well rounded ass that Reed just couldn’t keep his eyes off. But, Jesus, how was he supposed to? She always wore those tight little shorts with COACH printed across the ass and how were you not supposed to look? Whenever Lucy caught him doing so, she gave him a dirty look, and spun away, her little blonde ponytail bobbing along with her hard little titties.

Reed was thinking if she had been here and the kids weren’t, it would have been just like one of his fantasies where he was stranded somewhere with her. Not exactly like the elevator fantasy—they were trapped alone in the car for like six hours and, well, after a time, they had to do something to relieve the boredom and tension—but it would do in a pinch.

Truth was, Lucy Costigan would never have gotten that desperate.

Even on a deserted island and Reed knew it.

Lucy was shacked up with some rich guy in Elmwood who owned a bunch of car lots in the city. Guy was pushing fifty with thin hair, but he had a full wallet and that’s what Lucy liked. She had a shiny red convertible and a wardrobe unthinkable on her salary. Her sugar daddy bought her the things she wanted and he owned the girl he wanted, put his hands all over those long legs and flat belly, and his dick went around smiling all the time. Unlike Reed, who was the same age as Lucy’s sugar daddy and divorced and hadn’t seen a fine piece of ass like her since—

“Mr. Reed?”

He turned, realizing he’d been fantasizing again about Lucy while unbolting the emergency kit from under the dash. “Yes?” he said, going back with the kit. “What is it?”

It was a girl named Tara Boyle. “How long are we going to be stuck here?”

Until the good Lord sends a boat, he wanted to say, but didn’t. Help would come, sure, but it might take time in the storm. The bus was due back at the school at 6:30, just about sundown, and when it didn’t show, all the parents waiting there for their kids would sound the alarm. But, shit, that was almost an hour away according to Reed’s watch which meant they’d made much better time than he’d figured they would. So either they sat here for a few hours and waited for rescue or he got off his ass and did something about it. Because, realistically, once it got dark, it was going to take time to find the bus. Maybe hours and he didn’t like the idea of being cooped up with these kids that long.

“Not long, honey, don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll be out to get us in a little while.”

He quickly took a head count making sure he still had fifteen kids. He did. That was something. Nobody was injured. That was something else.

“Why did we crash down here?” Tara wanted to know.

Reed swallowed, but a lie managed to work itself up his throat regardless. “I think…I think a car sideswiped us in the rain. Next thing I knew, we went through the barrier and ended up here.”

Oh, it sounded good and who could possibly disprove it? Even after the bus was winched out?

Reed set the emergency kit on an empty seat.

He didn’t know many of the kids. A few of them had rode on his regular daily run, but not many. Cal and Kyle Woltrip, of course. He’d been hauling those two since kindergarten. But the others? Just a few. He recognized Tara Boyle. She was a little princess and a not-so little whiner. Always had been. Her old man owned the Dairy Queen over in Elmwood. Owned lots of things. Chuck Bittner was there. He was the unisex team’s high scorer and an uppity little shit from way back. He’d grow up to be the same stuffed-shirt real estate mogul his old man was. Reed wondered if the kid knew his old man was gay like everyone else in Elmwood did. Bobby Luce was there. Another high scorer, but down to earth, an okay kid. Dependable. Kayla Summers was sitting behind Tara Boyle. Kayla was a good athlete, but she was a crier. Word had it she burst into tears every time she had to do an oral report. She was real quiet and adults made her nervous. Reed gave her a wide berth. He saw Lacee Henderson, she of the long blonde hair and brilliant blue eyes, who was already striking at ten and would go on, Reed figured, to be a knockout of the Lucy Costigan sort. Hopefully, not that big of a bitch, though. Alicia Kroll. Brian Summers.

The others, Reed simply did not know.

When they’d loaded up that morning at Fairstreet Elementary, he’d smiled to each and every one as they climbed into the bus with their gym bags and Fairstreet Flyers jerseys on. But that had been his only interaction with them, really. Lucy Costigan was their coach and she handled them. All the way to Park Hills she’d sat right behind Reed, driving him nuts. He could almost feel her body heat seeping through the seat, kept imagining those long tanned legs and muscular thighs. Every time she bumped the back of the seat with her knee, his dick had woken up and stretched like a hungry tomcat.

Chuck Bittner, true to form, was telling everyone how his old man was going to raise hell about this.

Reed wanted to tell him that when his old man wasn’t home, he was out raising things in other men’s pants, but he figured he didn’t need to lose his job.

“Okay, kids,” Reed said. “It may take time for them to find us down here in Bethany, so what I’m going to do is to wade out into the water and find help. There’s got to be somebody around. If I don’t see anyone, I’ll head back up the hill to the road, flag a car down.”

“But…but what about us?” Tara Boyle wanted to know.

Sure, kid, Reed thought, get used to saying that because you’ll be saying it your whole life: What about me? What about me? What about me? Way he was seeing it, Tara would have climbed over the bones of the others to save her own ass and the way she probably saw it was that Reed had one job above all others and that was getting her to safety.

“’I want to get out of here’,” Alicia mocked in a petulant voice.

There were a couple stifled laughs.

“Quit worrying, Tara,” Cal told her. “Mr. Reed’ll be back in no time. I’m sure he’ll make it in time. If not…well, we’ll just keep sinking and sinking and—”

“Okay, Cal,” Reed said. “That’ll do.”

“Maybe we should go with you,” Bobby Luce said.

But Reed shook his head. “No, Bobby. I need you kids to stay here and sit tight. That water’s too deep. In fact, I want to put you in charge until I get back and I expect the rest of you to do what Bobby says. If you don’t, you’ll be locking horns with me.” He glared at Chuck Bittner. “And that goes double for you, missy.”

More laughter.

“You better watch it,” Chuck told him.

And, oh, dear God, how Reed would have loved to slap that little shit right across the face, tell him a thing or two about his old man. How he spent his free time. But if the kid hadn’t figured that out yet, then he was just plain stupid. Reed was willing to bet that Chuck’s old man had that queer cowboy movie on DVD. Wouldn’t have surprised him any. Reed had heard there were men fucking in it and that showed you where the world was headed, Sodom and Gomorrah all over again.

“I’m just ribbing you, Chuck.”

Chuck just looked away.

Hard one to figure sometimes. Uppity little braggart one moment, brooding and silent the next. Reed had heard that Chuck’s mom had died a month ago. It didn’t seem to be bothering the kid, though. At least that you could see. But word had it she had left him and his old man years back, wasn’t much but a barfly with an expressway between her legs.

Reed opened the emergency kit and showed Bobby the first aid kit, the flashlights they could use if it got dark. He didn’t bother explaining the road flares or the rest of the equipment. Things went well, he’d be back in twenty minutes anyway.

“So sit tight, kids. I’ll be back in a flash.” He moved to the front of the bus and back into the water. “And nobody goes outside. Stay in your seat or in the back of the bus. And I mean it.”

He took one look back at those faces, some excited and some worried and some genuinely upset, and holding onto the rail, started down the steps into that chill gray water. An empty water bottle went floating by.

There was some laughter in the bus and Bobby told somebody to knock something off.

“Just you wait,” Chuck Bittner said.

Reed stepped into the drink and felt for the street. By the time he found it, the water was up above his bellybutton.

“This is great,” Cal Woltrip was saying. “Just like that movie…Lord of the Flies. We’ll be here for weeks.”

“Yeah, we’ll go savage,” his brother Kyle added. “Who gets to be ‘Piggy’?”

Then Reed was out of earshot, making his way around the bus. Well, this is just going swimmingly, he thought and then giggled despite himself. Flooded empty houses and dark buildings stared back at him. And that dark water lapped around him, filled with unseen things.

 

2

When Mitch first met Chrissy it was on the public beach up at Black Lake.

He’d just come off a pretty nasty relationship and he hadn’t been doing much but drinking and feeling sorry for himself for weeks, calling in sick a lot at work. Then, one Saturday morning, hungover and feeling pretty much like shit, he’d decided to lay off the booze and the pity parties and drive up to the beach and take a swim.

That’s how he met Chrissy.

Just a little slip of a girl with huge dark eyes and a mischievous grin, glossy dark hair reaching down the center of her back. She was sitting in the sand near the water, trying to build a castle with shovel and pail, using dry sand that kept falling apart on her.

Mitch had looked around, brushing a buzzing fly from his neck. He wanted to tell this little girl that she shouldn’t talk to strangers and all that business, but just looking at her in that little pink swimsuit, he didn’t have the heart. She was sweet and honest and cute…how could he not help her? Of course, right away he was wondering what her mom would say when she saw her little girl talking to this strange man.

“I’m Chrissy,” the girl said. “And I have to build the wall to keep the ants out. If the ants get in, I can’t build the castle. Because the ants will eat everyone.”

Mitch had felt a sharp pain in his belly at that. This girl didn’t have a dad and the idea of him being gone, being dead, was just part of her little world. There was something terribly wrong about that.

“Are you gonna help, Mitch?” she said.

Swallowing, feeling emotional depths he’d never knew existed, Mitch kneeled in the sand, wanting to protect this little girl from the pain of life itself. He showed Chrissy how to dip wet sand from the water’s edge and create a wall of blocks, wetting them down and cementing them into place. Chrissy was fascinated by his engineering process. Just a wonderful, easy kid that smelled of sunscreen and wet sand.

So as they amassed a wall that was easily three feet in height and four feet in length and topped it with a battery of sticks and reeds, Mitch found himself talking about building things when he was a kid. How he and Tommy used to build things from sand, clubhouses from scrap wood, how they’d dug forts under the ground and tree houses high in the air. And as he told her about it, he found that he really liked telling her. There was no bullshit to kids, he soon realized. They really were interested in things. They did not pretend interest. Up until that day, Mitch hadn’t given kids much thought. They were little people that skipped up the sidewalk, hollered and screamed like they knew you drank too much the night before, and banged on your door for candy come Halloween.

But suddenly it was all different.

Sitting there, Chrissy just fascinated by him, he wished she were his daughter. That he could take her to carnivals and movies, pick her up after school and cook hot dogs in the backyard for her and all her friends. Regale her with the silly stories of his own youth which she seemed just enrapt by.

But Mitch was staring into Lily’s deep green eyes and wanting to swim in them and knowing, somehow, that he was going to get the chance. He liked Lily and she seemed to like him and isn’t that just the way it worked sometimes? Love just found you purely by accident and took you away?

“Mama,” Chrissy said. “We have work to do.”

So then the three of them spent the next two hours working on the wall and building a fine castle behind it, listening to the waves and the gulls and the incessant monologues of a five year-old girl who could speak at dizzying length about the secret lives of butterflies, Popsicle sticks, and the shapes of clouds in the sky. And, the nefarious activities of giant ants, of course.

 

3

That afternoon in Witcham, there was a seeping grayness that was gunmetal, quicksilver, and leaden. Gray rain fell and gray mist rose from the puddles and sluicing pools of debris and that uniform grayness flooded the city, keeping it and holding it with a gravestone stillness, a waiting, and an expectancy. It pressed itself against rain-specked windows and slid over roofs with a sly whispering and climbed stripped trees in dingy coils. Leaves fell before its dead breath and covered the ponds and leechfields in a multicolored mantle that went first brown and then ultimately gray as everything else.

Deke Ericksen, dressed in dripping foul-weather gear that belonged to his father, arrived on Kneale Street by foot, struggling through puddles until finally he stood at the door of the Barron house and knocked. Standing there, feeling the damp down into his bones, he listened for sounds of life and heard not a one. He might as well have been knocking at the door of a tomb.

C’mon, Chrissy, he thought, I walked six blocks in this to see you.

Somebody had to be home…didn’t they? Sure, a lot of people were abandoning the city with what was going on, but Chrissy would have said something to him…wouldn’t she?

Deke looked around, seeing nothing but rain and dripping trees, lots of houses that looked empty. He shook the water from himself and tried the knob. It was open. He stepped into the house, feeling the warm dryness in there reaching out to him.

Deke hung his rain gear from the coat tree by the door. He stepped out of his boots and went through the archway. Chrissy’s mom, Lily, was sitting on the sofa, knees pulled up, a slightly puzzled expression on her face. Damn, she wasn’t looking right. She looked thin, thinner even, and pale like her blood had been sucked out. Her red hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she was staring off into space.

Deke had not seen her since the funeral of Chrissy’s aunt Marlene, but the physical change since then was almost spooky. There was no substance to her, like she was a shadow cast by someone else.

“Hi, Mrs. Barron,” Deke said. “Just popped around to see Chrissy. She around?”

Lily blinked a few times, then looked at him. “No…no, she’s gone, Deke. She went out with Heather and Lisa, hasn’t come home yet. Mitch went to look for her. I’ve been waiting and listening.”

Deke licked his lips. The bait had been tossed out, but did he want to bite it? Did he really want to know why she had been listening? No, he certainly did not. But it would have been childish and rude to simply say, okay, gotta go, see ya bye. So he sat down in the rocking chair opposite her and got used to feeling damn uncomfortable.

“What are you listening to?” he said, soul of naiveté.

But Lily shook her head. “Oh, it’s not what I’m listening to, but what I’m listening for.”

“And what’s that?”

“I’m not sure,” Lily said.

Deke wasn’t liking this. Uncomfortable? No, that was listening to your best friend talk about his penis or overhearing your parents discussing their sex life. That was uncomfortable, this was just spooky. And in his mind he could hear Chrissy’s voice, I know I’m a rotten person and a worse daughter, yada, yada, but my mother is totally wigged out. You touch her and she’s cold, she looks at you and her eyes are even colder. She’s like a mannequin pretending to be mom, you know? At the time, Deke had not known, no. He was sixteen and maybe sixteen-year-old boys weren’t known for the level of their compassion, but he had thought that Chrissy was being a little harsh about her mother. After all, her sister had killed herself and all, you had to feel sorry for her.

But now?

Oh, he felt pity still, but Lily also made him feel…crawly. Like maybe she was nuts or about to go that way. And those eyes, damn, like there was something hiding behind them, something tensing that wanted to scream hysterically at you.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Barron? Are you all right?”

He said this and meant it, because deep down he was very concerned. Maybe it was because he knew tragedy when he saw it and maybe it was because he was in love with Lily’s daughter. Regardless, he was concerned. Had his own mother seen it, she wouldn’t have believed it. Once upon a time, before Deke’s little brother had died and ripped the guts out of the family, his mother would have said: Deke? My Deke? His whole world is his stomach, his karate lessons, and that awful music he listens to that sounds like a soundtrack to hell with singers that always sound like Cookie Monster’s deranged brother trying to vomit all over the microphone, she would have said. Are you sure we’re talking the same Deke here? He has no compassion, un-huh. He laughs when his little brother hurts himself, calls the kid “Butt-Wienie” on a good day and simply “The Discharge” on a bad day. As in keep The Discharge out of my room, mom. No, you’re talking a different Deke here. That’s what she would have said. But therein lay the rub. Children could often be callous beasts at home, but perfect angels around strangers. Because at home they were always accepted. Parents might shout and stomp their feet, but in the end they never turned their young away. But with strangers you had to prove your worth. You had to show them you were not selfish and immature, that you actually had a heart beating in your chest.

And particularly the mothers of girls you were wild about.

So Deke, who was as sixteen as any boy ever had been, was worried. Creeped-out maybe, but worried, too. Sitting there in his Slipknot T-shirt with his shaven head, the piercing in his left eyebrow, and the little goatee under his lower lip, he was worried.

When he didn’t get an answer, he said, “I mean, I know this is none of my business and all, but you don’t look real good, Mrs. Barron. You been eating okay?”

She stared off into space. “Last night I dreamt that all the people that ever died were living underneath us,” Lily told him. “That there was a world beneath us. A whole world under the streets and that’s where the dead people went. Down there, down in the sewers and drains.”

“Wow,” Deke said, knowing it was stupid, but at a real loss for words.

“Down there, Deke, they’re all down there waiting for us. That’s what I dreamed. Down below.”

Deke wasn’t up to this noise.

Maybe Chrissy was right and Lily should have been renting rooms upstairs on account of all that extra space in her head. He knew it wasn’t nice thinking shit like that, but how could you not? A whole world under the streets and that’s where the dead people went. That was not just disturbing, it was just this side of freaky. And especially for Deke. And especially because almost two years before his kid brother Nicky went through the ice on the Black River and drowned. When she said that, Deke immediately thought of Nicky down there, pictured him as he’d looked in the silver casket with the little gray burial suit and tie on. And why in the Christ did they bury kids looking like that? Nicky had never worn that suit but once a year at Christmas Mass…they should’ve buried him in a baseball cap and that fruity tiger-striped Frosted Flakes shirt. That was Nicky. That was what he had been about, not suits and ties and all that nonsense.

Lily had been talking right along, but Deke had tuned her out. “…down there, I think of them down there. It’s a nice thing to think about.”

Deke just stared at her until common sense told him to look away. He tried to think of something to say and this is what came to him: “There’s lots of room down there, Mrs. Barron. I know because we had to do a report on it a couple years ago in school.”

Lily was interested now. There was a wet mist in her eyes. “Really? What’s it like below, Deke?”

And then he was telling her, even though a voice told him that she was terribly distraught and possibly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He told her about the elaborate system of drains beneath the city that were for the most part a combined system of sewage and rainwater. That much of it had been designed back in the mid-19^th century and updated and added to as the population of the city grew until nobody was sure what led where and the maps were outdated and it was anyone’s guess where all the tunnels led. Then in the 1970’s, he explained, Witcham had gotten a federal grant to install the Deep Tunnel system which was a series of interconnecting tunnels two-hundred feet down. Lot of people didn’t even know about it. Deke had interviewed a guy from public works about it. He said the tunnels went on for miles and were like thirty feet deep and forty feet wide. Like a sea down there. It was connected to the regular drains by a series of vertical shafts and controlled by a series of pumps and valves and flues.

“They did it because Witcham sits on the flood plain and it’s been flooding for years,” Deke told her, finding it easier to talk about these things than the nature of her problems.

Lily seemed interested. “Can you go down there?”

Deke swallowed. “Um…you mean the regular sewers? Sure, you just go down the manholes in the streets. I went down there with the public works guy. Lots of pipes are only big enough to crawl through and some even smaller than that, but they all connect up with the main drain lines that are big enough to walk around in.”

“But what about those Deep Tunnels? That sea down there?”

Deke knew he should stop right there, because where this was leading was nowhere good. “Yeah…I mean, there are shafts that connect to the Deep Tunnel system. They’re in the main drain lines, a whole bunch of them. Sometimes guys in special wet suits go down there to clean blockages and work on the pumps.”

“The public works guy said the sewers are full of rats. Sometimes they find bodies down there. Bums sometimes pry a manhole cover off or yank the grating off an outlet pipe and go live down there.”

Lily got up and went to the window. She stared out into the drab streets at the water bubbling at a storm drain. “They’re down there now.”

“Who?” Deke said, brushing sweat from his brow.

“All of them. All of them we lost through the years, they just went below into that secret sea and that’s where they are now. All the brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children, they’re all down below in those secret tunnels waiting for us.” Lily turned from the window, her face as colorless as the streets outside. Just as cool, just as damp. “I dreamed I saw my sister, I saw Marlene, but she didn’t look like she did before she died. She didn’t look sick and worn-out with gray in her hair and that awful hollow look in her eyes. She looked different, she looked younger, like when we were teenagers. When she was Chrissy’s age. She said I should come below. That everyone was below. That mom and dad were down there. And Grandpa Joe and Gramma Bridgette and Aunt Helen and even Joey Spalten who drowned in the quarry when we were kids. They were all down there and they were asking about me, when would Lily come down, when would Lily come down. Marlene said there were places down there, seas and rivers and creeks to swim in and hidden ravines to run through. She asked me…she asked me if I remembered the story Aunt Ilene had read to us. The Ray Bradbury story where a woman’s lover went down into the sewers and how he was dead down there, waiting for her. And you know what, Deke? I did remember! And that story was true because now it’s happened here, hasn’t it? All down there, all down below waiting for me and I suppose I’ll have to go, too, because I shouldn’t disappoint them.”