I had damaged myself. The blood was caked about my hand and wrist and had made the cuff of my maroon cotton shirt a moist mat of dark material. I lifted the tissue paper I had grabbed at the time of the incident, and it refused to detach, stuck to the sliced, loose skin on my hand, glued by the forming clot.
“Jim, I don’t think I need the hospital, it’s not that bad,” I pleaded, turning to him as he drove into the feeder road with signs pointing toward the A&E department. “I’m not going to die from this…” I laughed.
Jim was my research colleague, but more than that, he was an old friend. When it happened, he marched me to his car on a mission for treatment despite my feeble protests and embarrassment.
The pain was reduced to a dull ache, nothing more.
He shook his head.
“Everyone dies from something unexpected. Anyway, we’re here now, and that is a nasty cut, Mark. It’ll need stitches.”
We had left our laboratory in a mess of glass shards and steaming puddles at the monolithic cube of a building at the soulless business estate on the outskirts of town. When there’s blood there’s haste. We had been diligently studying the strange biological samples extracted from the fracking sites that circled the quaint, slightly boring townscape of Toniton. I had forgotten to wear gloves for once, that was true, but I had also stood up quickly and that’s when the room turned into fuzzy purple fog in my decaying vision as I passed out, smashing into the assortment of glassware like a sack of coal.
Jim was worried the sample had caused it, assuming it was some chemical reaction. I believed that was nonsense, but it was hard to dissuade him. I felt in my bones that the reason for my collapse was because I had not been sleeping or eating properly. It was simple. I was exhausted. It wasn’t just the relentless work keeping me awake, I was fretting. I didn’t like the corporation, ReEnergy funding our research, they didn’t want us to reveal findings to anyone but themselves. I was used to working at the university, with the flow of student energy and rock music around every corner. At the private lab, they had a lot of weird gloomy meetings that felt like bad job interviews. They drove us hard for answers, but sometimes the questions were cryptic as if they were hiding something from us. It felt unethical and corrupt, and I didn’t want to be a part of that. They had discovered ragged tubular air pockets in the rock and were very concerned about it for some reason. They weren’t extinct lava tubes, they weren’t old at all. But so far, we were only good at saying what they weren’t, and that was not enough for our grey-faced, all-business, paymasters.
I pondered on how our unlikely partnership had come about. The corporation had found out that we were coming to the end of a research programme on food security and harvests – a project we called Decline. I was proud of that project, it had earned us a little local fame and equal measures of praise and cynicism from peers – always a sign of something spicy and interesting. The ReEnergy managers had read our work, which made us feel important, and they knew we were hungry for another project and the salaries that came with that. To be fair, it was three years of good income, handed to us on a plate. Still, something was awkward, something was off. It felt different this time, it felt dirty – ‘grubby’ like our filthy soil samples.
Jim parked his ageing ocean-blue Nissan Micra in a way that almost took two spaces – it was bound to irritate someone – he didn’t care about irritating strangers, and that was him all over.
When I crossed the road from the carpark to the tall A&E entrance doors, I noticed a solitary seagull performing a determined two-step dance with its webbed feet on the grass clearing near the parking ticket machine, trying to mimic the rhythm of rain to entice worms to the surface. It was nothing unusual and yet the scene looked dream-conjured. The pale, thirsty greenery around it was not right. Large unsightly mole hills around the gull seemed out of place. They seemed disproportionate. I noticed one had a feather on its cratered top, a single, ragged, red-tipped feather. Weird.
We found a terse, transactional lady at reception, told her about the accident and were instructed to take some seats amongst the dishevelled mob of injured and coughing patients.
The permanently-on news channel was on a large wall-mounted screen in front of us, and the story was about pollution, as most stories were these days. I nudged Jim to get his face out of his phone’s TikTok reels, to watch the story unravelling.
“The soil quality around the world has become so poor, that crops are not growing. Harvests are failing everywhere, could this be a crisis ministers are asking,” said the anchorman with that calm robotic cadence that news broadcasters had in abundance.
“Seems like more people have been reading our old research…” said Jim, only half joking. He was a scientist but didn’t rate any mainstream news anymore.
Jim was younger than me by a decade, and media meant something different to him.
“It’s worrying. Maybe that’s why our investor wants us ‘stum’…” I whispered loudly, motioning with my good hand as if pulling an invisible zip across his lips. “Maybe we are too well informed, too much in the trench-end of this…”
“Nah…”, he sneered. “It’s not that. The last ‘suit’, what was his name, Smithe – that guy that asked us all those stupid questions? He said… What was it?… They suspected something physically interfering with their machinery, something that happened when they hit the air pockets. He was holding back, but he didn’t sound worried about food security or legal stuff about ruining the environment. Fracking firms don’t tend to give a shit about that…”
An assertive female nurse with a clipboard called out: “Mark Harris… Come this way please.”
We both stood and walked with the nurse, trailing a few steps behind her, like her children. She gave a false smile, realising we were both coming, I guessed, irritated.
“You don’t have to come…” I said to Jim.
“I’ll get bored…” said Jim, “And I need to know it’s not something odd related to the sample. I mean – are they digging out poison or something?”
I shrugged and held my injured hand like it could shatter if dropped.
We passed open wards, choc-full of every type of injury and illness, disgruntled people lying in beds, perched on seats, barely hidden behind plastic curtains and cage-like hospital bed frames. There were the self-harmers, the cancer-riddled, the infected, the slowly dying, the diseased and distraught, the haemorrhaging, the cut and crushed – every type of vulnerability parked in allotted, labelled recovery areas in a corridor.
We arrived at the assigned vacant cubical of a room with a bed, two chairs and a shelf full of trays brandishing dressings and bags of medical gear. The nurse closed the door behind us for privacy. She was a young woman, draped in the usual white hospital-garb, but with rebellious pink socks and well-used crocs. She had an etched expression of disinterest or disdain, as if time was too long to enjoy anymore. She took my hand gently but firmly and inspected it like a 3D puzzle.
“We need to clean it. It will need a few stitches.”
“Really?” I said, disappointed.
“Told you so!” smirked Jim, putting his hands behind his head to dominate the moment.
There was a chorus of ringtones, three trilling high-pitched electronic alarms. It was our phones, rising in unison.
Jim whipped his mobile out first, unmuffling the vibrating handset.
“It’s a national alert,” he reported. “The last time we had one of these was for Storm Harry… Maybe the weather is changing again.”
“What does it say?” asked the nurse, flicking her eyes to Jim’s screen in curiosity.
“Just says: ‘this is a national emergency broadcast on behalf of the Government: Stay indoors, or go indoors immediately if you are outside. Await further instructions…’ See – must be a weather event. Climate change, eh?!”
We stopped fidgeting and looked at each other in a mutual pause to wonder.
“What is going on?” I blurted.
The nurse’s name was Abigail Kemp, it said so on her displayed identification badge. She was twenty-something, had tight black pigtails, a swarm of freckles, no makeup and looked fresh out of college, yet despite her newness she was completely in control. Hospitals made world-weary, seen-it-and-done-it souls out of staff quickly
She continued to neatly stitch my wound with black crosses, pushing the two cloth-thin open flaps of flesh together after a quick squirt of soap and water.
“Let me finish up and I will ask the ward manager if they know anything…” she said with a pained grin again.
That’s when the first scream of terror rebounded up the hospital corridor, seeming to originate from the triage area. Beyond the horror, it was disbelieving and disgusted in resonance and expression.
We froze again instinctively, as if we’d been paralysed by an invisible ray. Something very peculiar was happening, something innately frightening.
Abigail broke the spell and moved first, she dropped my hand curtly
“Stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.”
We watched her bundle through the door and heard her footfalls grow fainter down the corridor toward the source of the noise. She remained calm, as if nothing could truly rattle her and this, whatever this was, was ultimately another daily inconvenience in a working day to be tackled professionally.
That all changed in a matter of moments.
Minutes later, she was back, but this time animated, with eyes bulging. She seemed twice as alive, as if she had been rudely slapped.
She swung the door open and beckoned us to follow her out.
“We have to move…” she said, shooting us a fierce gaze, not to question her.
We followed Abigail at pace, deeper into the hospital’s white-walled labyrinth, our nostrils filling with the smell of disinfectant.
There were sounds new to us now. They were distant, strange, following us as we ran.
“What did you see?” I finally pleaded to Abigail, but she was silent and kept running, like she dared not say.
She pulled us both by the arms violently into a brightly lit operating theatre, and backed herself into a wall, nudging a silver trolley as she staggered.
Beside us, on an operating table lay a motionless elderly man, facing the ceiling, unconscious, in a transparent hair cap and barely concealing hospital gown. He had been put under with anaesthetic but was abandoned, his only guardian a steadily bleeping monitor. He had exposed skin on his belly, where black felt pen markings made guidelines for scalpels. I guessed the surgical team had fled. Above him were dustbin-lid sized bright circular lamps on angulated metal arms, pouring their light on his skin, showing the room he was ready to be cut.
“What. Did. You. See?” I repeated, now impatient to get something, anything, on the predicament that was unravelling.
“It’s hard to believe…Creatures… They were wrapping themselves around the patients….”
“What kind of creatures?!” quizzed Jim.
We drew in close to hear her sharp whispers.
“… I don’t know what they were… They looked a lot like giant worms … Muscular… Nobody could move, and they were wrapping around people, smothering them and dragging them… Into the ground…”
Jim made a noise between a laugh and a moan, like he was exasperated. Abigail responded with a hard stare, offended.
She continued: “Everybody received that alert on their phones, so they went outside and looked up at the sky. I suppose they were expecting a hurricane or something, a weather event. These things, they came up through the ground and in just moments they were attaching to people… The worms were sniffing the air, like they were attracted to the wounded.”
“…Worms…” I said, deadpan, putting it together in my head, because knowing what we had studied, it did make some kind of crazy sense. I had been holding that biological sample, retrieved from the tunnels, something that looked like a scale, when I had passed out earlier.
“Were people fainting when these things touched them?”
Abigail grimaced, and nodded gently: “They did, but soon after they seemed to come to their senses. I yelled to them, but they just stared at me. By then, it was too late. I didn’t know what to do, so I ran. I just ran back to you both, to get you away…”
“Their skin, the creatures’ skin, it secretes a sedative moisture. This must be an ancient predator, something from deep in the earth, maybe released by the fracking, and the weak soil.”
“A what?” said Jim but I could see him processing the information and coming to the same conclusion, if reluctantly. Despite being the one team looking hard at those tunnels, it never seriously seemed possible they were made by animals, the tubes were too big.
The idea, like a spark in grassland, lit Jim’s imagination and I saw his eyes processing, taking the baton to unravel it further: “Worms!” he declared, “They create tunnels to oxygenate soil, to make it fertile again. The other thing worms do is process decaying flesh and fauna, which makes soil richer. Worms are at the top of the food chain, basically an apex predator, we all end up as worm food in the end… So, these worms are reviving the soil by feeding it…With us.”
From the corner of the room I heard a scraping noise, like the sound of something large dragged along the flooring. I shifted and sure enough, there was a ragged hole in the wall behind the operating table, low down. As I moved to inspect it, I managed to catch the sight of a white sleeved arm being tugged through. The surgical team had not fled, after all.
Under my shoes I could sense vibrations, and something rushing up from beneath us. The floor began to crack, at first micro splits and then an eruption tearing open the lino, ripping and fragmenting it with the churning rubble of the concrete. The head of the animal was like a cone upon its thick python-like body of grey ribbed flesh, which, despite a lack of obvious features, seemed to sniff the air for prey, as Abigail had observed. It pointed towards us for the briefest moment, acknowledging it had located us, then turned its ugly featureless head toward the operating table and the sedated patient. He appeared as if a sacrifice, offered up on the metal bed.
We edged toward the exit doors and to our shock, the animal’s head-end peeled open like a flower’s petals curling back, revealing circular rows of barbed teeth lining red-raw gums. I could see the neat scales on its body, like the one I had handled in the laboratory, likely used for traction when moving at pace underground. As we frantically fumbled with the theatre’s double doors, we watched the beast’s mouth parts attach to the neck of the hapless man. With a couple of determined shunts, it dragged him from the table, till each of the tubes and wires attached to his limbs popped free, triggering the flatlining whine of alerts on monitors.
The creature wrapped around his frail torso with one tight lasso of its tubular body and retreated into the pit where it had invaded the room. The old guy did not wake, but as it took him beneath the floor, I heard his shoulders and ribs crack and buckle from the restrictive aperture.
We barged back into the corridor. The floor was moving, rippling like wind on the surface of a lake.
“Up, to the roof!” Jim screeched, “Take the stairs.”
We bounded upward, pounding the cold stone steps of the echoing stairwell. I was sure there would be people hiding and afraid on the floors as we passed them, but we didn’t dare waste time to check. We ascended three steps at a leap without stopping until the steps ran out, and when we arrived on the flat, puddle-pooled roof terrace, we moved to the edge near the guttering, desperate to know if the event was occurring beyond the building.
“We can shout for help, let people know…” But she stopped mid-sentence with the vision confronting her.
It was four flights up, a reasonable height to evade the disturbing earth-dwelling monsters we assumed. Looking out at the panorama of the hospital grounds, the creatures were emerging everywhere at once. There were dead bodies too, covered in slithering animals, and people stumbling about bewildered and screaming.
The worms seemed to single out the slow-moving, indecisive people, the elderly and the young, picking off the weak, easy food. We were witnessing a cull.
“Is this it…?” drooled Jim, sinking to his knees. “The end of the world?”
“Look!” screeched Abigail, pointing to the churchyard nearby, where the lichen-infected church tower cast a long shadow over a writhing hill of worms. The graveyard sank, it had buckled into a sinkhole, collapsing with the weight of the animals’ bodies. It appeared to be a feeding frenzy. The worms had created an abhorrent mass of wriggling flesh, piled metres high. A plume of dirt spat into the air as the rows of gravestones gave way, to be swallowed by a cavernous opening.
Scanning the townscape, we could see large structures leaning and collapsing, their foundations torn with the burrowing. A block of offices descended into a dust cloud in the town centre with a deafening roar of destruction. Beyond, on the horizon lip, I made out the looming lattice work for a ReEnergy fracking drill as it keeled and crashed into the ground. It was like a falling tree whose roots had withered away and without losing its integrity it slammed with tremendous force into the rock it had been hammering.
The town’s buildings, for years so still, proud and immortal, were burying themselves.
And we were on top of one of the highest.
“We’re not safe here,” cried Jim.
Vibrations shook the hospital’s foundations.
The horizon seemed to change, slant, and then descend, and the rooftop cracked into slabs, like patchwork ice floe in the Arctic Sea. Steel reinforcement rods broke and reached through the concrete as if dirty metal fingers were twisting up to try and hold the rubble in place.
Abigail grabbed my sleeve. Our solid world, our reliable world, it was imploded. The rooftop disintegrated, and we violently dropped. Before the dust became blinding, I watched Jim tumble backward into a concrete crevasse that had yawned open. The dirt closed over him, churning in the collapse, and his leg popped in a red mist as heavy chunks of debris viced him. The noise was deafening, like the end of everything, as we tumbled and rolled in the hospital-sized washing machine of concrete, steel and glass.
The sense of falling abruptly stopped and pains shot up my sides. I was amongst the broken walls. I felt like I had become almost a part of the structure in its collapse, with Abigail’s hand fixed on my arm. I could feel the grip of her fingers still and the pressure of her squeezed white knuckles, but I could not see her, just a cloud of dust, broken only by a thin, vivid line of blood where my hand’s wound had reopened.
I waited, tried to clear my throat of grit, and tried to move but could not. I could hear the worms spiralling about the slabs and the scree and broken chunks nearby, edging closer toward me. They could smell my leaking blood, they could taste my mortality, it was magnetic for their senses.
Abigail’s clutching fingers pulled my arm, and the rest of my body followed. I kicked free of the masonry that had made a blanket on top of me.
We scrambled away from the slithering noises and collected ourselves again in a pocket of less disturbed space in the chaos. I realised I was in the car park. A familiar sight appeared in the dusty haze, it was Jim’s now heavily dented blue Nissan. There were bloody handprints smeared about the door handle and when I squinted through the swirling grey, I could see an outline of a man slumped in the back seat, with half a leg, tied with makeshift tourniquet, raised high and propped against the back window.
The worms were nearby following the trail of blood. Abigail dumped me, picked up a brick and flung it at the nearest one. It bounced off the scaled body, but the creature turned and wriggled back into the debris.
We clambered into the car to be inside and not exposed. It was obvious, these worms could burrow into it without a problem, but it felt like our best option, and there was no way I was leaving Jim alone to this.
“I thought you were dead!” and with that I clutched hold of Jim’s hand which was shaking in shock. “Have you stopped the bleeding?”
“For now… It’s OK, I’m at the hospital,” he croaked, somehow finding a sense of humour in Hell.
Abigail was already tidying up the stump dressing with anything she could find as he whimpered and swore intermittently.
“I was right you know, earlier. I think I know… what happened…”, drooled Jim though the pain. His brain was firing hard – creating a needed distraction. “I read this paper, where they defrosted a forty-thousand-year-old worm in Siberia and brought it back to life. It was in a state called cryptobiosis – no real metabolic activity occurs in that state – it just waits to be revived. This was a weird looking thing… The earth is warming up and then they drill – and hey presto, you unleash these sleeping dinosaurs…”
I looked back outside through the smeared windscreen and to my utter relief and surprise the worms were moving away from us, heading back into the rubble, or corkscrewing into the ground.
“I think it’s over…” I said. “They must have finished whatever they were doing.”
“The whole town,” croaked Jim remorsefully, “…Is gone. It looked like a ploughed field from the rooftop. They’ve remade the earth, smashed it up and fed it with blood. They’ve done what all worms do…”
“… I think you’re right, they’re making the soil fertile… It’s so simple…”
Few people were screaming out there in the broken bricks, and it was eerie. There was just a voice or two in the distance shouting out names or incoherently babbling – some confused survivors in a landscape of fragments. Most of the townsfolk were gone permanently. Earlier today, they had been drinking coffee, driving to work, talking about the weather, watching daytime TV, holding their loved ones in between the daily routines.
No one expects to die, not really, certainly no one, not truly, believes their destiny is food for the worms and food for the soil.
“Will they come back?” said Abigail, wiping her brow.
“They’re worms… They’re always just underneath our feet, waiting for us…” said Jim.
The ground stopped shaking, but it occurred to us, sitting in that cage of a little car, there was nothing left and nowhere to escape to.
The End
Dystopian Days 