“Yeah?” Damien leaned back and picked a smooth stone out of the sand. He tossed it in the air a few times to get a feel for its weight, then slung it at the shell he’d pointed out. The stone hit its mark and bounced harmlessly to the side.
Nothing happened.
“Nice shot,” Harley remarked. He packed another stone into the pit, then kept digging.
Damien glared at the shell. Had it been sentient, he was sure it would have glared back. Fiji was only big enough for one of them. It was too bad for the shell that Damien refused to be chased out of town.
“Wait for it,” Damien insisted. He held out his hand, freezing Harley in place. They watched the shell together in total silence.
At last, a tangle of freakish legs poked out of the bottom of the spiral, and the nightmare creature hiding inside dragged itself off to set up shop in a better neighborhood.
“That’s a hermit crab, Knot.” Harley braced his hands on his thighs.
“Yeah. And you know why they’re hermits? Did you evenseethat thing? It’s so disgusting that it needs to hide inside something that looks cute and innocuous.”
Harley shrugged. “I’d take hermit crabs over camel spiders.”
Damien lifted a finger to interject, but found not even he could argue with that statement. “Fuck, you’re right.”
Seeming satisfied that their conversation had reached its natural end, Harley went back to digging. Damien, however, was determined to make his point. He regrouped. “But think of it this way: if something that gross is living on the beach, then what’s hiding in the dark places you can’t see? Places like under your feet? That’s what I was trying to get at. The beach is just a dry extension of the ocean, and the ocean is one fucked-up place.”
Harley pushed another stone into the pit’s wall. “The deep ocean, sure.”
“Nope. Not letting you get out that easy. The regular ocean is terrifying, too.” Damien knew it well enough—a year ago, his younger sister Lydia had spent a good part of Christmas dinner regaling him with tales of the scariest and most disgusting creatures that lived under the sea. Not all of them had been from the deep ocean. “Case in point, the Bobbit worm.”
“The what?”
“The Bobbit worm.” By now, Harley had maneuvered around the pit, so Damien crossed his legs and planted his elbows on his thighs to lean toward him. With a theatrical arch of his brow, Damien continued. “Imagine, if you will, a millipede. A millipede with too many pointy-ended nightmare legs to count.”
Harley looked up from the pit. He narrowed his eyes. “Okay.”
“Now imagine it’s as thick as your first two fingers stuck together and ten feet long—that’s about three meters, if those beaver tails have converted your brain to the metric system. The jury’s still out on how many metric fucktons of disgusting that is, but I’m going to go out on a limb and ballpark that it’s a lot.”
“It’s a worm,” Harley replied, not in the least terrified.
The fool.
The horror was only just beginning.
“And there, my friend, is where you’re wrong.” Damien held his thumbs together and fanned his fingers in a starburst pattern. “Imagine this worm—which can be as long as double an average man’s height, might I remind you—has jaws that would make a bear trap jealous. Now imagine it moves at lightning-fast speeds and has a bite strong enough to cleave its victims in two. A bite strong enough tocut through human bone.Oh, and it’s venomous, too. Because why not?” For emphasis, Damien flared his hands, then balled his fists as quickly as he could. As a human, it was his best approximation of what a Bobbit worm looked like when it was feeling murderous, although admittedly it wasn’t half as terrifying as watching the real thing. He knew from experience—Lydia had shown him footage.
Another handful of sand joined the mountain. Once it was disposed of, Harley smoothed the bottom of the pit and assessed its depth. It was as if he didn’t care that there were hellish abominations hidden in all kinds of unexpected places.
Determined to strike fear into his heart, Damien continued. At this point, he’d forgotten how they’d gotten on the topic of evolution’s biggest what-the-fucks, but it didn’t matter—Harley’s indifference had made it personal. Damien needed to convince him that this thing was evil. “It’s out there right now in the ocean, living inside burrows made in living rocks or buried deep in the sand bed. It comes out at night to feed, only ever exposing its massive jaws or the first inch or two of its body. Not that it matters much, anyway. Even if something bigger were to come along and snap the worm in two,both halves would become their own worms.It’s a motherfucking hydra. And since it lives in the water, you can’t even burn it with fire. I, for one, will be safe on my moon colony, but for the rest of you terrestrial mortals—”
“It’s still a worm.” Harley freed another scoop of sand from the pit.
“Yeah, but if something like that can lurk in the ocean unseen, then what about here on the beach?” The point of the conversation came back to Damien. He glanced at the pit with suspicion. “You’ve been lucky so far while digging that pit of yours with your bare hands, but I’d bet fucking money that in a place like this, where even cute shells are infested with hideous creatures, there’s some nightmarish equivalent hiding in the sand, lying in wait.” Damien flared and curled his fingers several times in rapid succession, holding Harley’s gaze. “Chomp chomp, motherfucker. Say goodbye to your fingers.”
Harley paled, temporarily abandoning work on the pit. “You’re making that up.”
“Am not.”
“A nightmare worm the size of two grown men that can cut through bone? It’s not possible.”
“That’s what the Bobbit wormwantsyou to think.”
“What who wants you to think?” TD asked. He joined the two of them, sitting across the pit from Damien. His presence broke the spell of horror Damien had cast. Harley shook his head and got back to work. “Bobby? Whose real-life name is Bobby?”
