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His eyes flicked open. They swept the walls. One hundred seventy-nine, he counted. One hundred seventy-eight. It still worked. One hundred seventy-seven.
Counting… recounting, every bloody fist print, foot mark, panicked, frantic forehead indentation. One hundred seventy-six.
This is what happens when you lose it. Do NOT go there again!
It always worked, although it always seemed to take a little bit longer. The last time he’d counted down to forty-one. This time was thirty-nine.
You deserve a drink.
Getting up was painful. His lower back ached. His knees ached. His thighs and calves and ankles burned a little bit. His head swam. That’s why he’d given up morning stretches. Dizziness was worse than anything. That first time he’d shot up too quickly; the bruise on his face still throbbed from the fall. This time he thought he’d gotten up slowly enough. Thought wrong, moron. Fred dropped back to his knees. That was safer. He kept his head turned to the right; from this angle you always looked to the right! One hand on the rim to steady himself. The other dipped the plastic coke bottle into the reservoir. The water was only a few degrees colder, but was enough to jolt him back to full consciousness. I need to drink more, not just for dehydration, but when I start to drift.
Four sips. He didn’t want to overdo it. The plumbing was still on. For now. Better to conserve though. Better to be smart. His mouth was dry. He tried to swish. Another bad idea. All the pain washed over him at once; the cracks in his lips, the sores on his soft palate, the staff infection at the end of his tongue he’d gotten while unconsciously trying to suck out any last particles of food between his teeth. Lotta fuckin’ good that did.
Fred shook his head in disgust. He wasn’t thinking. He’d left his eyes open, and that’s when he made the biggest mistake of the day. He looked left. His eyes locked on the floor-length mirror.
A sad little weakling stared back at him. Pale skin, matted hair and sunken, bloodshot eyes. He was naked. His janitor uniform didn’t fit anymore. His body was living off its own fat.
Loser. No muscle, just fat.
Pussy. Hairy skin hung in blotched, deflated rolls.
Pathetic piece of shit!
Behind him, on the opposite wall were the other marks he’d made. Day Two, when he’d stopped trying to widen the twelve-by-twelve-inch window with fingernails and teeth. Day Four, when he’d taken his last solid crap. Day Five, when he’d stopped screaming for help. Day Eight when he’d tried to eat his leather belt because he’d seen some Pilgrims do it in a movie. It was a nice thick belt, birthday present from-
No, don’t go there.
Day Thirteen, when the vomiting and diarrhea had ended. What the hell was in that leather? Day Seventeen, when he became too weak to masturbate. And every day, filled with crying and begging, silent deals with God and whimpering calls for-
Don’t.
Every day that ended, fittingly, huddled in the fetal position because there wasn’t any room to stretch out.
DON’T THINK ABOUT HER!
But of course he did. He thought about her every day. He thought about her every minute. He talked to her in his dreams, and in the no-man’s-land between dreams and reality.
She was okay. She had to be. She knew how to take care of herself. She was still taking care of him, wasn’t she? That’s why he was still living at home. He needed her, not the other way around. She would be fine. Of course she would.
He tried not to think about her, but he always did, and of course, the other thoughts always followed.
Failure! Didn’t listen to the warnings! Didn’t get out when you could!
Failure! Let yourself get trapped in this little room, not even the whole bathroom, just the closet-sized toilet box, drinking out of the goddamn shitter!
Failure! Didn’t even have the fuckin’ balls to break the mirror and do the honorable thing you should have done! And now if they get in, you don’t even have the fuckin’ strength!
Failure, FAILURE!
“FAILURE!”
He’d said that out loud. Fuck.
The loud thumping against the door sent him crumpling against the far corner. There were more of them; he could hear their moans echoing back down the hall. They matched those coming from the street below. They’d looked like an ocean down there, the last time he’d stood on the toilet to look. Nine floors down they roiled like a solid mass, stretching almost out of sight. The hotel must be entirely infested now, every floor, every room. The first week he’d heard shuffling through the ceiling above him. The first night, he’d heard the screams.
At least they didn’t understand how to open a pocket door. He’d been lucky there: If it had been the kind of door that swung instead of slid shut; if the wood had been hollow instead of solid; if they’d been smart enough to figure out how to open it; if the doorway had been in the back of the outer bathroom, instead of off to the side…
The more the ones in the bedroom pushed, the more they pi
He was safe. They couldn’t get in, no matter how much they clawed and struggled and moaned… and moaned. The toilet paper in his ears wasn’t working as well anymore. Too much wax, too much oil had flattened them against the sides of the canals. If only he’d saved some more, and not tried to eat it.
Maybe its not the worst thing. He reassured himself, again. When a rescue comes, you need to hear the chopper.
It was better this way. When the moans got too bad, Fred reached for the book, one more bit of good luck he’d found by ru
It was getting dark. He’d stop this time before his head hurt too much. Then maybe a few sips of water, and he’d make it an early night. Fred’s thumb found the dog-eared page.
“There’s too many of them!” Naomi shrieked, the sound perfectly matching the skidding of the motorcycle’s tires.
The Rapeworm by Charles Coleman Finlay
Charles Coleman Finlay is the author of the novels The Prodigal Troll, The Patriot Witch, A Spell for the Revolution, and The Demon Redcoat. Finlay’s short fiction-most of which appears in his collection, Wild Things-has been published in several magazines, such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Black Gate, and in anthologies, such as The Best of All Flesh and my own By Blood We Live. He has twice been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has also been nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Sidewise Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
Radiation, a new and exotic phenomena for much of the twentieth century, was seized on by writers as a pretext for all ma
The idea of extraterrestrial influence being responsible for an exponentially expanding plague that transforms ordinary people into a sinister menace is an old one in science fiction. Perhaps the best known example is Jack Fi