Hellbenders

The thought of this caused Doc to snap out of his reverie. It was curious that it should be Theophilus Tanner, but on consideration, perhaps not so strange. Doc was used to drifting in and out of states where the real and the imaginary interacted and overlapped, leaving him in a space where it was difficult to judge the real. So when a real state that seemed hallucinatory occurred, then why should it not be Doc who would instinctively grasp the nature of the real?

None of which mattered to him then, although he would perhaps ponder it later. Now all that he could do was to take action to try to save his life, and the lives of his companions.

Doc moved with a swiftness remarkable in someone who appeared so old. He reached across to Mik, who was carrying a supply bag, and took it from him. Mik had been placed in charge of carrying spare ammo, grens and plas-ex. Doc opened the bag and picked out a gren. For good measure, he took a lump of plas-ex and wrapped it around the gren, hoping its sticky properties would make it hold to the smooth gren surface for long enough.

Scrambling to his feet, Doc launched himself toward the monster mutie. Somehow, the creature detected the movement and turned toward them, seeming to focus on the moving Doc. Its head section tilted, the teeth moving with a fearful viciousness within the otherwise bland and expressionless mouth, and the keening note changed again with the shape of the creature against the darkened skyline.

Crying out with the effort, Doc pulled the pin on the gren, drew back his arm and threw the explosive toward the open mouth. The head section lifted slightly as it detected the motion of the gren through the air, moving with the arc of the small object as the mouth opened and welcomed it.

The gren, still with the plas-ex wrapped around it, entered the mouth of the giant mutie worm, the sudden appearance of a foreign object changing once again the note emanating from its body.

“Down—duck and cover!” Doc yelled, dragging the phrase from somewhere within his unconscious, from something he had once heard.

All the members of the recce party threw themselves onto the desert floor, covering their heads from the rain that would inevitably follow, and to stop the noise making their eardrums ring too much.

The gren exploded inside the body of the giant mutie worm, the plas-ex wrapped around it boosting the power of the explosion so that it was at least doubled in intensity.

If they had been facing it, they would have marveled at the fact that one second the worm seemed to be rearing up in all its awesome glory, and the next it had simply disappeared, to be replaced by a rain of white, luminous flesh and mucus that seemed to radiate from one central point. The explosion spread down the worm, the shrapnel in the gren ripping the segments in such a way that it would make it impossible for them to survive as anything other than the smallest creatures. Even if they did possess a mutated version of the older worm genetics that would enable a chopped-up worm to regenerate into smaller, separate entities, then these would be so small as to not cause the recce party any problems. As the explosion spread, so the particles of exploded mutie worm rained out, too small to cause harm but uncomfortable as the flesh and mucus landed on their legs, backs and arms.

As the gren exploded, the noise was at first contained within the body, a dull roar that grew within a fraction of a second into a deafening clap as the wet, sickly sound of flesh slapping on flesh with extreme force blended into the sounds of destruction. The last high, keening notes of the undulating voice were also blended in with this before being subsumed by the sounds of the gren and the plas-ex.

It was over as quickly as it began, the last echoes of the explosion dying away on the night air, the last, far-flung particles of worm flesh falling to earth. Lonnie raised his head.