“Look,” he said, indicating the object, “what that?”
Lonnie followed the line of the albino’s arm to where the object lay on the desert floor.
“Fucked if I know,” he murmured. “It’s not in our path, though, so why bother?”
“Because whatever make it mebbe is,” Jak answered.
Lonnie indicated his grudging agreement with a shrug. “Mebbe take a look, then,” he grunted, leading the party off their chosen course.
“Aw, c’mon, is this really necessary?” Mik moaned, his ratlike features contorted into mock agony. “We really need to make camp.”
“I don’t want to detour any more than you do,” Lonnie retorted hotly, “but Jak’s right, dammit. We can’t take risks out here.”
He led the group toward the object that Jak had questioned. It would waste little time and effort, in truth, as the object was only a short detour from their objective, and so would still enable them to make camp before the rapidly cooling night became too cold.
As they approached the object, they realized that it was much taller than it at first appeared. It was about ten feet in height, and seemed to be made of a spiral of round earth, damp and somehow molded together, that wound its way up from a broad base to a point that seemed to end arbitrarily. They gathered around the bottom of it, and at a gesture from Lonnie spread out so that they encircled it.
“What you reckon?” Lonnie rasped. “How far around does this damn thing go?”
“Got to be twenty-five, thirty feet,” Dean answered. “Shit, what makes something this big? And how?” Tilly asked tremulously.
“That ain’t difficult to answer,” Danny said with a sad shake of his head. “Think about it, Tilly. What do we know that’s this big?”
“You have got to be kidding me,” she replied. “Not all the way out here?”
“My dear girl,” Doc chided softly, “just because you think of those rather large worms as always burrowing through the depths of what you have taken as your home, it doesn’t mean that they exist purely within the confines of that area alone. Good Lord, they are, after all, in transit. Where, pray tell, do you think they have come from, or indeed where they are going?”
“Yeah,” Mik interjected, “but you never see anything like that down in the tunnels, for Chrissakes…just what the fuck is it, exactly?”
“A cast,” Dean answered him in a matter-of-fact tone. “It’s what the worm shits out after it’s eaten its way through the earth.”
Mik stepped back. “So this is worm shit?” he screeched.
Dean allowed himself a laugh. “Yeah, good as.”
Mik spit on the ground, and was about to say something when Lonnie cut him short.
“If it’s leaving this here,” the recce leader stated flatly, “then it means that it must have surfaced near here.”
Jak nodded. “Wonder how long that take you,” he muttered. “Check it long gone, yeah?”
Lonnie restrained himself from attacking Jak for what he saw as the latter’s insolence in the face of his position as recce leader, and nodded briefly. “Fan out and search,” he said sharply.
“What the fuck are we looking for?” Mik whined. “And will it take long?”
“Look burrow,” Jak stated, breaking across Lonnie.
“Yeah, and it shouldn’t be hard to miss,” Dean added.
The party spread out, fanning backward around the cast, which stood like some mute monument to mutie nature.
It was Doc who found the hole, following a trail in the dust.
“This way,” he called. “The desert wind has covered the impression, but if the light was better I think you might notice that it has left a trail. It must be remarkably light for its size, as it has not impressed much, but I fear it has left its burrow here.”
Doc prodded around with his foot as the others all turned toward him. He seemed to be probing the earth with his toes and the end of his cane, as though something didn’t make sense.
Jak quickened his pace, breaking into a run. Dean did likewise when he saw the albino increase his speed, but he didn’t realize why Jak had taken such action. Seeing Doc’s apparently aimless motions, Jak had realized that the giant mutie worm had left some cast behind it to cover the hole it had made at the entry to the burrow. But this was just to cover its tracks—the majority of the cast was aboveground, as they had seen. On the assumption that the worm couldn’t produce more than it had ingested from the earth, that meant that there wasn’t enough cast left for the hole to be covered deeply.