The Adventures of Lewis Warth

C1E6 - Honey I ate the kids!

Wounded dog with fleas. Tired, beaten. Seemingly manifested with the scent of death. Just put em down, will ye? It's the kindest thing to do. Lewis thought otherwise.

He sat back down, his head back down into the zone of heat, and stared down at his legs. The skin was still squirming like before - although slightly larger than the initial squirms.
He pulled the fabric of his pants up as high as he could, rolling them up to his thigh so they would stay still during the surgery.

"Nurse?" He called out. "Hurry up with the scalpel, will you?" He stared at the wound on his right leg, the one on the area just above his kneecap. Thank goodness he had cut the spread up before - the worms were pushing at the closed skin under the knotted sleeve impatiently.

He held a hesitant hand over the wound. It had healed over enough that it a glowing white scab. A small area around it, was the squirming. He placed his hand on the wound, and almost threw up. There was so much movement, senile wriggling under his skin.

"Oh kids." He felt lightheaded. "Oh my god."

He shook his head. Fast enough to hurt his neck and slap him back into reality. He formed his right hand into a C shape with his pointer-finger, and held in on either side of the scab as if he were to unscrew it. In a way, he was.

"Fuck this." He mumbled. He forced himself into a fit of rapid breaths,
before he dug his nails under the scab.

He screamed, forming a fist with his left hand and smashing it into the iceberg.

"Nurse!" He yelled, finding out that he was beginning to laugh. "Stay with me nurse! The surgery ain't over 'till the fat lady starts singing!"

With a quick jerk, he pulled the scab completely off.

His jaw bit down in a wince. He screamed, feeling as if someone was actually listening to him. He fought the urge to pass out, as well as a subtle urge to flop over off of the ice and into the sand, letting the worms do what they pleased.
"Johnston." he pointed at a random direction in the desert. "Don't you start laughing, you're in this as well."

The wound was beginning to fill up with white blood. Lewis, without even thinking, reached his fingers deep into it, feeling around at the sides.

In my opinion, a subtle pain can last your whole life, a pain a few days, agony an hour, and excruciation a few minutes before you begin losing your grip on sanity. It's a pity Lewis didn't have a lot of sanity left to lose.
He maintained a smile as he felt around, his eyes blurring with tears. The pain. The pain!

( MAKE IT STOP!)
But still, he felt around until he gripped something. A kind of something that had a wriggling body made slippery with his own life-juice. After a few attempts of losing his grip
(THE PAIN NAKE IT STOP!)
and searching around for it again, he finally had a hold of the lil' sucker.

He began to slowly pull, feeling its body trying to squirm away from under his system, it's body hitting every pain nerve it could find from under there.
(Please, please just stop. Mr? We can figure this out!)
His fingers progressed out of the wound, covered in that same dreaded hot toothpaste from the initial bite like a dentist's paint. Thick, white and glowing
(hey jackass hey jackass where's the extra coat? Huh? What do I pay you for?!)

"Check the tins." Lewis grunted. Bottom of the worm was rearing it's ugly rear - turns out there's only 1 in there, just a long, skinny annoying one. You better not have eaten your siblings. It was playing pinball on his nervous system, squirming around in a frenzy from being grabbed. Half of it was out, dripping in the white goo, it's leg-like paddles writhing in terror, trying to find some flesh to burrow into.

He gave a yank, and with a glass-stab of pain, the worm's head emerged, snapping and growling at the open air with unrelenting fangs. Back and forth, swinging like a pendulum.

"I think..." Lewis began. Hammers of nausea ran blows on his head, his temples were so pent with stress that his head felt like a tightening vice.
(I just had that in me, I just had that in me.)
Repetition often doesn't help the situation. "I think I'll call you Henry."

If the worm had tried to respond then and there, it did it by hissing quietly, the thick blood still dripping freely from it. If it hadn't been coated white, it would have been a dandelion yellow, reflective in the afternoon sun.

Lewis looked around him. It felt like the millionth time he had succumbed to the habit - expecting there to be something other than the barren wasteland he had grown to know so well. He fixed his gaze back on the worm and gulped, painful from the dryness of his throat. Yet his mind felt electric! Buzzing around as if it was being tazed, desperate to justify why he shouldn't do what he was about to do. And if the answer to that train of thought presented itself in the 1950s, a young woman (short dress, tight red lipstick and a delicate curl of ginger hair) holding blank paperwork would have walked up to him - failing his expectation of a coffee delivery - and said 'I'm sorry sir, we couldn't find anything.'

As a result of this, he pinched the worms head with his other hand, closed his tired eyes, placed the worms head in the mouth... and bit down hard.
There was a crunch, more of a pop. Biting into thick and juicy grape except the juice was senile blood of a worm's exploded head. Lewis kept biting, feeling himself tear up at the wall of revulsion stinging into his tastebuds.
Without a doubt, Henry was dead. Squirming still; the circuit board of its brain had sent out its final command.

"It's like sour milk," Lewis said. Not even he could manage a smile at how this thing tasted. A bit past your due date, weren't you Henry?

Or before it. His mind insisted. It was still his kid after all (In a very sick and deluded way). A little worm who would never grow up.
Lewis would never be able to be there for its first bite... its first day under the sand... why did these thoughts depress him as much as they did?

He forced more of the worm into his mouth, feeling the crushed up teeth of his head scrape their way down his dry throat. Now that is a pleasant feeling. He recited the words 'keep on chewing' in his head. The main strategy for downing a worm is to not think about it too much. Those who don't think, get the protein they need - Lewis is a great example of that, almost the whole worm down, what a trooper! -, those who think about it end up with their breakfast racing up their throat.

The alien kept it down, and it's a fair statement to make, that it wasn't the best welcoming-meal into his new life. If you could even call it that.

With a whimper and a sore throat, he stared at his other leg. The calf still writhed with life.