(I)
Campfire light shifted on their faces. Nora had dragged the pot off the coals to serve directly, and by now the four of them sat back in the sand, stuffed.
"That's the best lobster I've ever had in my life," Lieutenant Trent proclaimed. Empty shells formed a pile of bright red debris in front of him. "To hell with the C rations."
"Yeah, Nora, they really were good," Loren said, occluding a burp with his fist.
Nora felt stuffed herself. "Freshness is everything."
The only one not to compliment the night's cuisine was Annabelle. Still in her bikini, she sat in a lotus position finicking with a plump tail. "How come these lobsters don't have claws?" she seemed to complain.
"These are spiny lobsters," Nora answered. "Ah, let's see-Panulirus…"
"Panulirus argus, " Loren finished.
"Warm-watered species don't have claws. In fact, most of the world's commercially harvested lobsters are clawless. The meat's all in the tail."
Loren slipped a tube of white meat from his last lobster. "And that's what I call a piece of tail."
"Hilarious," Nora said. She'd also thrown some stone crabs and sunray clams into the pot, all of which were readily devoured.
"You think we could have this again tomorrow night, Professor?" Trent asked.
Annabelle, as might be expected, frowned.
Nora sighed at the weary title. "Sure, and please stop calling me Professor, okay?"
"Why? You earned it. Must've been a lot of hard work."
"Yeah," she admitted, "but it's just the word that bothers me. Professor. Every time I hear it, I think of that guy on Gilligan's Island. Just call me Nora."
Trent and Loren laughed.
"There's still one more." Nora indicated the pot. She tonged out the last of the crustaceans. "I'm too full to even look at it."
Annabelle grabbed the lobster. "I don't usually make a pig of myself, but…" She smiled, sitting erect in an obvious pose that highlighted her roll-free stomach. "I live on Atkins. No crrbs, keeps me brimming with energy."
Keeps you brimming with pretentiousness, Nora interpreted. Why don't you eat my shorts, too? They're low-carb.
Loren and Trent were doing a bad job concealing their gaze at the blonde's body.
Jesus. Nora was just about to settle back in the sand when Annabelle screamed.
Trent and Loren went bug-eyed, and Nora lurched up as if stung. What the hell's she screaming about?
Annabelle had just broken the lobster open at the carapace, then flung it away in disgust. "Oh my God, that's so gross!"
"What?" Loren exclaimed, surging toward the blonde.
"Worms!" Annabelle shrieked.
Worms? Nora moved around the fire as Loren picked up the opened shell. She could see in the firelight-the lobster meat seemed pink and squirming.
Instead of disgust, Loren's face registered excitement. "Aha! Looks like we've got a decapod-targeting parasitic marine annelid."
Annabelle was shaking, she was so repelled. She looked like she was about to be sick in the fire. "It's a bunch of fucking worms in my lobster! Oh, Jesusthey look like dog-shit worms!"
There was an image Nora didn't need. Closer examination showed her a pack of the tiny worms churning within the red carapace.
"Most of them are dying," Loren noted.
"The cooking process," Nora said. But something bothered her. "But the worms closer to the center are still kicking. They don't look right for a nonsegmented parasite, do they?"
Loren agreed. "The hydroskeletons are all wrong. And they don't look like Polychaetes, either, or anything gastropoda."
Annabelle's beautifully suntanned face looked sapped of all color. When the silence settled, she looked dismayed at Loren and Nora as they continued to examine the nest of tiny parasites.
"I could've eaten those disgusting things," the blonde complained. "Are they poisonous?"
"No, no," Loren assured her.
'Then why are you looking at them like you just found the Holy Grail?"
Good question, Nora realized. 'Because we've never seen a parasitic marine worm like these, which is disturbing because…"
Loren finished the statement for her. "Because we're America's leading authorities on the subject. We've never even seen a marine worm body configuration like this-not a chitin-penetrating species."
"Chitin-penetrating?" Trent queried.
"The ability to penetrate a chitinous exoskeleton-,an insect shell, or a lobster shell, in this case." Nora was transfixed. "Chitin penetrators that live in seawater are always segmented, yet these don't appear to be."
Loren continued with the late-night worm lesson. "Certain types of marine worm parasites attack crustaceans by disgorging a corrosive digestive enzyme onto the host's shell. The enzyme burns a hole through which the worm can either consume the innards of the host or inject eggs, or-" He and Nora looked at each other with raised brows.
"Or what?" Trent asked.
"Or inject fertilized ovum," Nora said. Like the ova we found in the shower…
"How can you even see them?" Annabelle asked next. "They're tiny."
"You're right," Loren said. He stood up with the lobster, and Nora got up right next to him.
"Which is why we're going to go look at these under the microscope." Transfixed now, she and Loren stalked away to their field lab.
The fire crackled. Trent smiled and slipped his arm around Annabelle. "How do you like that? All of a sudden you and I have this cozy campfire to ourselves."
The grotesquery of the parasites she'd nearly eaten vanished. She grabbed Trent's hand and urged him up. "I'm not interested in romance, Lieutenant. While those too nerds are looking at their worms, you and I are going to find a place to fuck."
Trent followed Annabelle-and the rest of his good fortune-down another trail.
The fire crackled some more, painting the trees and surrounding brush with lines of light that squirmed, almost like worms.
(II)
"They're resilient, that's for sure," Loren said, gunning up his microscope. "The cooking process didn't kill them all, and this lobster looks pretty well cooked."
The fact didn't impress Nora much. "There are worms that live in underwater thermal vents that survive at hundreds of degrees. I just want to find out what these damn things are."
Neither of them said anything at first. Nora adjusted the comparator microscope, while Loren sat at the table beside her, changing stages on a smaller scope. Each had placed several of the tiny pink worms under their lenses. "I'm seeing something else immersed in the fluidity between each worm."
"Me too," Nora admitted. "Could it be mesenteric debris from the lobster?"
"Lobsters don't have mesentery. They have semisolid blood-processing organs that are green. This carrier fluid's clear. And there are specks in the fluid. You got those on yours or am I seeing things?"
"You're not seeing things," Nora said. "The specks are off-yellow."
"Just like those ova we saw in the shower stall."
It was difficult for Nora to frame words, but she knew Loren was thinking along the same lines. "The shower ova were the size of jelly beans and these are so small they're practically microscopic. You and I both know the size differentiation means that these specks came from a completely different species."
"A worm ovum this small couldn't grow to the size of a jelly bean. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the shower ova have red spots on their sheaths?"
"Yes," Nora grimly replied. "And I'm sure you just did the same thing I did, Loren, and upped your magnification."
"There are red spots on these too."
"Which means that these and the shower ovum did come from the same species of worm-"
"A conclusion that's zoologically impossible," Loren finished.
Nora sighed at the table. One thing at a time. We've gotsome chitin-penetrating worms that are fluxed with some accessory debris that looks like motile ova. "Let's focus on the worms," she ordered.
The microscope's light stage showed Nora another world, a circular world of brilliant colors, vibrant details, and stunning light. She had several of the worms on her slide; each one, if extended, might stretch a quarter of the perimeter's border.
The worms shimmered, squirming with vigor. Their fresh pink bodies glistened like squiggles of some bizarre molten metal.
"No segmentation," Loren said.
"And no striations on the skin, either. No plating, so we know it can't be a gastropod or anything from the molluska line. It almost looks like a shipworm-"
"But shipworms are really clams in tubular casings, and this… ain't that," Loren added to her observations.
Nora sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. "Conclusions? Hypotheses?"
"Either we're not as smart as we thought," Loren said, "or we've stumbled on an undiscovered species of parasite."
"Um-hmm, and if this were a channel in Antarctica, that would be a reasonable deduction. But in the Gulf of Mexico, North America's nucleus of warm-water marine biology?"
"The chances of this particular research community missing this is impossible."
Finally they'd both given voice to the gravity of the dilemma. "I wish these worms were a little bigger. Then we could dissect one even with these small scopes," Nora said.
"This will have to do." Loren cast his boss an odd look. "Both of us should be really jazzed about this. How come we're not?"
"Because it's too fucked up," she didn't hesitate to profane. "Us not knowing what this worm is would be like a military history professor not knowing the date of the Battle of Hastings."
"October fourteen, 1066," Loren said. "The English were winning the battle until their king, Harold the First, caught a flaming arrow in the face."
"Oh, Loren. You really are a hopeless nerd."
"1 know, but your point is well taken. These worms are big-time super-duper screwed up. They shouldn't even be in an environment like this. They look like land-dwelling worms, but we know they're marine because they attacked a lobster. And that means their motile ova are water-dwelling, too, but we found a much larger version of the same ova in the shower and on Trent's shirt-hundreds of yards away from the closest seawater. Which means they're obviously land dwellers."
Nora sprang up in her seat. "Wait a minute. We took samples of the shower ova, didn't we?*
"Yeah. I vialed a bunch of them up.7
'Let's compare them directly to the ova from the lobster."
'Why didn't I think of that?"
"Because I'm the boss."
They both hustled to one of the other tables where they'd placed their specimens. The small plastic saltwater tanks Loren had hooked up for the scarlet bristleworms bubbled away from their air pumps. Loren's hand eagerly reached for the vials he put the ovum in, but-
"What the hell!"
Nora stared.
The small vials were all empty.
Loren held several up to the overhead lights. "They're burned through at the bottoms. It's like the ova melted the plastic and got out."
"There's a few of them there." Nora pointed.
Several of the grotesque yellow nodes were inching up the wall. "The ova must possess the same corrosive enzymes of the worms that bred them."
"Chitin-penetrating and plastic-penetrating," Loren remarked. His mouth fell open when he turned his head. "Hey, Nora…"
"What?"
"Look at the tanks."
Nora lowered her face to the pair of mini aquariums. "Holy shit!" she yelled. "They've infected the bristleworms!"
In the farthest tank, all of the scarlet bristleworms had at least one yellow ovum attached to their bodies. The worms themselves shuddered. But events had progressed further in the closer tank.
Several ova lay dead on the tank's floor. But the bristleworms they'd attacked seemed to throb, and were bloated from within. The worms were still alive but barely moving. Then one of them-
"Unbelievable!" Loren exclaimed.
The bristleworm began to disgorge a slew of much tinier worms.
Within a few minutes, the other bristleworms in the tank did the same, until the water was tinted pink with so many tiny worms.
Nora was flabbergasted.
"Like the Tessae worms in central Africa," Loren murmured. "And the-"
"And some of the Trichinella family. Our little pink parasite has the ability to attack a different annelid species with free-ranging ovum and force it to bear its young."
But the revelations didn't stop there. Nora and Loren squinted harder as the minuscule newborn worms began to slither en masse up the face of the tank. Eventually they were twitching out over the side.
I'm starting to get a little freaked," Loren said in a low drone. "They're coming out of the friggin' water, Nora."
"Just wait a minute. It won't take them long to die. They have to suffocate…"
They waited for another minute, then another.
"Jesus…"
Ten minutes later, the newborn worms hadn't died. They were all out of the tank and moving across the table.
"Well, how many impossibilities can we take for one day?"
"A marine worm with air-breathing capabilities," Nora said very slowly. "Every worm in the world that can do this has been exhaustively catalogued." Her face felt hot in aggravation. "There's no way-no fucking way in the world-that an annelid like this could remain uncatalogued."
"No fucking way in the world, huh?" Loren directed his displeasure in the obvious direction of the mass of worms. They were moving toward them on the table. And the bean-sized ova that had crawled up the wall, too, had changed direction now, once Loren and Nora had come over to the table.
"They're detecting our presence," Loren said.
"Fibrotic sensory pores," Nora guessed. "They're reading the carbon dioxide we exhale-which triggers their instinct ganglia that a potential host is near."
"Uh-huh, and I -don't want to find out what happens if one of those little things gets on me."
Nora sloughed that one off. "If one of them got into your bloodstream, your immune-system. would kill it."
"Yeah? I'm not going to wait for my immune system to do the job." Loren picked up a can of mosquito spray. Nora was about to object-they were specimensbut…
Not a bad idea, she recanted. The chlordane and diethyl-meta groups in the repellent would kill the worms just as it had killed the ova in the shower stall. The just-hatched worms on the table were so tiny yet so abundant that they looked more like spilled pink lemonade-lemonade that moved of its own instincts.
Loren smirked as he sprayed down the table and wall. He sprayed more directly into the tanks.
In a few moments, the ova on the wall dropped off dead, and the worms shriveled and died.
"So much for them," Loren said.
"Loren the Worm Killer. But we're going to have to preserve some of these and take them to Florida Natural Resources. I guarantee you, they don't know about this. Chitin-penetrating parasites like these? That reproduce this actively and can attack multiple hosts? If these things broke out, they could decimate the gulf's crustacean harvest."
"Well, at least only one lobster was infected," Loren noted, calmed down now. "This could be a fluke infection, you know."
Could be, Nora thought. Maybe it was a lucky hit on the part of the worm. But if they wiped out these bristleworms that easily, it could wipe out an entire food chain.
Loren had used the lab's forceps to place one of the dead shower ovum under his microscope. "These are the same, Nora. Just a lot bigger."
Nora had figured as much. The hunch wouldn't let go. She took Loren's slide and placed it under her own dual-lensed scope, to properly compare the dead ova against the smaller ones mixed with the worms from the lobster. When she switched on both fields…
"Oh my God."
"What"
"See for yourself," Nora said.
Loren looked in the comparator scope. He only looked for a second before he lifted his eyes away.
"Oh my God is an understatement," he said.
Nora had seen it first, and wanted clarification.
The tiny worms from the lobster weren't so tiny anymore. They filled the entire space of the slide's viewing perimeter now, and the ova in their proximity could now easily be detailed.
Loren stood erect, dumbfounded. Confusion made his eyes looked glazed. "This can't be."
"Tell me about it," Nora said. "Those things are ten times bigger than they were twenty minutes ago."
Loren nudged her back to the microscope. "Look back in there," he said, a little jittery now. "Keep your eye on them fora full minute, then tell me your observations."
Nora did so.
She knew what he was driving at in significantly less than a minute.
She could actually see the worms and ova growing before her eyes.