Bad Radio by Michael Langlois Page B

wound. One of the bag’s fists whipped out and struck Leon in the arm. I could hear the bone break. The force of the blow knocked him backwards on his ass and tore the shotgun from his hands.
    I snatched my baton from the ground and raced forward. The bag was grinning and reaching down towards Leon.
    I covered twenty feet in the time it took for the bag to bend halfway to its target, my right arm pulled back across my chest. The bag never saw me coming.
    I swept my arm outward in a rising arc like a classic tennis backhand, putting all of my strength behind it. When the baton connected, the bag’s head blew apart like a watermelon under a sledgehammer. The body jerked upright from the force of the blow, and then kept going over to topple backwards onto the ground.
    The corpse flexed and the shotgun wound heaved open. Worms spilled out in a glistening mass, covering Leon’s feet. They were gray and muscular like eels, but unlike eels they had no heads. Instead, the end of their bodies simply split into five writhing tentacles. Each tentacle had tiny black teeth on the inward-facing side which were curved like rose thorns, and at the center where the tentacles met, a dark red maw clenched and gasped. It was lined with more teeth, and the inner flesh deepened to arterial purple in the center. They twisted and whipped around in a frenzy, bouncing off of the floor with jerking motions so fast and hard that they made snapping sounds in the air.
    The larger worms, each as big around as a garden hose, struck at Leon’s legs, grabbing on with their tentacles and then looping and squeezing with their whole bodies. He screamed as blood began to well up around the tentacles. I could hear the worms sucking at the wounds.
    The corpse bucked once more and an enormous worm streaked out, as thick around as my wrist and covered with black markings that seemed maddeningly close to a pattern that your eye could never quite resolve.
    It was over Leon’s legs and around his waist in an instant, with the head tentacles spreading wide and wrapping most of the way around his chest. It rippled and tensed, and Leon threw his head back and bellowed, the tendons and veins in his neck standing out. Vertebrae broke with a dull crunch.
    I reached down and seized the thing with both hands, feeling the slimy pulse of its muscles under my palms, and it suddenly stopped squeezing. I pulled, and instead of fighting me, it gradually uncoiled and hung limply from my hands, writhing slowly, tentacles spreading and probing the air like some kind of nightmare flower.
    I stepped back from Leon and without warning the worm’s top half vanished in a black spray as Anne blew it apart with the shotgun.
    The other worms went mad all at once, unlatching from Leon and thrashing and keening with a horrible whistling sound. They became blurs as their frenzied thrashing sped up, and then seconds later, they all went limp. They were dead.
    I ducked inside of Henry’s study and dumped out the footlocker that had contained the guns and sacks and brought it outside. Together Anne and I scooped the nightmarish things up with spades that we found leaning in a corner with Henry’s gardening gear and threw them in the footlocker.
    We stayed well back from the worms themselves, as we had no idea how they got inside of people, and we weren’t eager to find out. When we were done, the box was six inches deep in limp gray coils.
    Henry came out of the door holding one of the cloth bags and a propane blowtorch.
    “I figured it would be a little harder for us to get phosphorus grenades these days, so I came up with this. Thermite powder in the bag, magnesium ribbons to get it started, and a torch to light up the magnesium.”
    “If you say so.” I ripped open the cloth bags, dumped the gray powder liberally over the slimy mass, and threw the silver ribbon on top. Henry passed me the blowtorch. It lit with a pop and a roar. I touched the blue flame to the magnesium ribbon, which