Chapter 1
Genus Helminth
She could identify with pinpoint accuracy the exact moment in which her erstwhile blessedly predictable life came to a screeching halt. It was the precise moment when the body of the well-nourished (as the newspapers like to say), unidentified female from the 21st floor fell with a gut-wrenching splat ten feet away from her.
Some primitive part of her brain had mechanically registered the flailing limbs, the impossibly contorted body and the look of dumb horror seconds before contact was made with the uncompromising ground. She had recognized and diagnosed that last fleeting human expression – it was regret and abject terror of what was to come.
The body ricochet off the ground before landing – a mangled heap of twisted human parts swimming in an ever-rising crimson tide.
The unearthly silence that followed the fall nearly deafened her. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the universe leaving behind a vacuum. She was the only person left in the world – she and the bloody lump that used to be human. She wanted to avert her eyes, let out the scream in her head that was threatening to implode her, run from this unholy scene of carnage. She was incapable of the simplest muscular function.
The neighbors found her much later rooted to the ground in a catatonic state, staring into space. She found out later that they had tried repeatedly but were not able to rouse her from her unnatural stupor.
She had been deaf to the plaintive wails of the ambulance sirens and the murmur of the gathering crowd, ghoulishly trying to sneak a peak of the splattered gore but retreating once the sight became too much for them – ebbing and flowing like a human sea.
When she had eventually come to, they told her that she was lucky to be alive. A mere ten feet had intervened between her and an untimely (and agonizing) demise. They little knew that something had died within her that day and something else had taken seed.
They could not have known that life had still clung to the nameless woman even as her body lay battered and damaged on the concrete; that she had turned her head and locked eyes with the sole witness of her suffering for a full five minutes, a mute, pathetic appeal in them, until her ragged breathing stilled forever.
But not before the unfortunate woman’s jaw had unhitched, her mouth had widened to an impossible dimension and a muscular, pulsating monstrosity had forcibly thrust itself out from her oral cavity. The slithering giant worm was the size, shape and texture of a well-oiled bicep of a bodybuilder and had landed with a sickening plop close to her open-toed sandals.
The abomination was sentient; it has to be as it purposefully lunged at her and attached a circular row of teeth to her toes. She was screaming bloody murder and kicking hard enough to dislocate something. Her sandal went flying after the first kick, but it took her several more attempts before she was able to dislodge the unspeakable thing. It landed with a squelch on a grass patch some distance away, then burrowed into the ground before her eyes.
She never spoke of it. After multiple full body medical check-ups, x-rays, scans and the most intrusive tests which came up clean and all the doctors she had seen (twelve and counting) would tell her only that they could not find anything the least wrong with - her vitals were fantastic. They were also unanimous in exclaiming how almost unbelievably in the pink of health she was.
It drove her to distraction that they could not find anything wrong with her physically. That would have been a relief. She would have a diagnosis, a prognosis and with any luck, an end to the nightmare in the form of a pill or shot.
She lived twenty years more to the date. Outwardly, she lived a colorless and insipid version of her vibrant former life – going through the motions of devoted wife, mother and local business owner knowing all the time that her inner universe had been irrevocably and unalterably annihilated that day all those years ago.
She never spoke of her voracious appetite which only become more insatiable the more she tried to quell it, the sudden agonizing muscle spasms and twinges, the worsening psychomotor co-ordination and the daily deepening suspicion that she was losing control of mind, body and soul to something that was dictating her every thought and action. She bore these quietly with all the fortitude she could muster.
What eventually drove her to hurtle 21 floors to her death was the voice that she heard one morning when she was sitting alone at breakfast. It came from the region of her navel and told her that it was time and that unless she wanted to explode into smithereens, it would be in her best interest to dash herself to death within the next two minutes.
Although her plunge was witnessed by a solitary passer-by, police were unable to obtain any useful information and ruled it a suicide.
