The Worm Returns Read online

  “Exactly,” she said, answering his thought. “So, now what are you going to do, assuming there is such a sealed-off wormhole segment?”

  “Do?” he asked blankly.

  “We have to get those bugs.”

  “But we’d have to go back into a worm tunnel!”

  “I don’t relish the thought myself. But is there any other way?”

  He thought about it. The worms couldn’t touch him physically. If he went down there, he’d just punch out the worms and do his own thing, looking for a sealed-off tunnel that was bound to be the one. “How would I catch any bugs?”

  Dia produced a transparent bag from somewhere. “I use this to forage in the forest. It could be used for bugs, too, which I believe I could sense, if they were in range. I’d fly out and catch them, then fly back to you, where I’m safe, because the worms can’t get me when I’m right up against you.”

  “You ain’t scared?”

  “Terrified! But you’ve got enough bravery for both of us.”

  What could he do? He suspected that she was nudging him mentally in the direction she wanted to go. But how could he oppose such a pretty little magical creature who might soon enough be a big magical creature? “Okay, I guess. But how do we get into another tunnel?”

  “I think they have solved that particular problem for us.”

  “They have?”

  “You’re like a bug, BB. They can’t handle you, so they want to get rid of you. And now I think we know how.”

  “How?” he asked somewhat blankly.

  “By sealing you off the same way they sealed the bugs. That’s what they’ve been waiting for. It’s probably the same tunnel they sealed off before, with the bugs, or at least leads to it. That’s why it’s complicated for them to get its aperture here.”

  Bad Buffalo opened his mouth, then closed it. There before them was forming the biggest, hugest, baddest wormhole of them all, big enough to take in a man his size without choking. The worms had held him here while they’d brought the big one.

  But if they sealed him off, how could he return with the bugs?

  The hole irised open wide. It advanced slowly on them.

  Then he got a notion. “Maybe they could seal me off, but there ain’t nothing that can stop Horse when he has a mind to get somewhere. He’s coming too.”

  “But he’s too big for the hole!”

  “Then we’ll just make it fit. You stay on Horse. Tell him to jump when it’s time.” He reached into his pocket and picked her up, setting her on the steed’s noble head. Then he jumped off, right at the advancing hole.

  It opened wide to engulf him. But he didn’t go in; instead, he spread his arms and legs, bracing them against its edges as he squatted. Then he slowly straightened up, heaving the sphincter farther apart. It opened in an enlarging circle, until it was a good six or seven feet in diameter. Big enough for a careful horse.

  “Now!” he called.

  Horse leaped. He brushed by Bad Buffalo as he passed, throwing him clear of the sphincter and on into the tube, but that was fine. They all wound up inside as the hole closed behind them.

  Bad Buffalo mounted Horse again. He picked Dia up and returned her to his pocket. “Easy,” he said.

  “Just so,” she echoed faintly.

  Now all they had to do was find the bugs.

  “Show me the way,” he told Dia.

  Chapter 7: The Way

  So far, Dia wasn’t picking up anything.

  Bad Buffalo didn’t like traveling along foreign terrain. He liked to know the lay of the land. In particular, he liked to know ambush points, both for himself and for others. So far, the tunnel was open and tubular, much like the mining shafts that Bad Buffalo often used as hideouts. But unlike those mining shafts, these walls were smooth and pinkish, and, if Bad Buffalo wasn’t mistaken, seemed to give off a slight luminescence. As if the walls themselves were glowing. The outlaw noted the many shafts branching off the main tunnel.

  As they traveled, Bad Buffalo did his best to understand what he was up against. He always knew his enemy. Sometimes better than his enemy knew themselves.

  “The holes lead to tunnel openings,” he said.

  “Which the worms or tentacles travel along,” said Dia.

  “So the holes themselves are not nefarious,” said Bad Buffalo, certain he’d used the word correctly, a word that was often whispered behind his back. “They just act as a transport system for the worms, like train tracks.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Except the worms can control when and where the holes appear.”

  “Like when it corralled us,” said Dia. “So, how did it know where we were?”

  Bad Buffalo knew something about lookouts. “Each tentacle acts as eyes for the creatures.”

  “Or perhaps it sniffed us out.” Dia gave a sniff near Bad Buffalo’s armpit, brave girl. “Which wouldn’t be too hard to do.”

  The outlaw ignored her. He was quite certain he had plugged more than a few people for commenting on his body odor. “Perhaps it uses the same tunnels over and over again, but can control where the holes appear.”

  Dia made a small movement in his chest pocket. She was, Bad Buffalo was certain, nodding her little head. “Makes sense. Unless it can create these tunnels at will, too.”

  Bad Buffalo didn’t think so. The tunnel seemed solid enough. He said as much.

  “If that’s true, then the worm or worms are using established tunnels, and then orienting the openings when and where they want.”

  That seemed about right to Bad Buffalo. He might not be the smartest guy in the West, but he knew how to assess an enemy. Speaking of which, where was the worm that had opened this tunnel?

  “Good question,” said Dia, reading his mind.

  “But I didn’t say—”

  “You didn’t have to, you big oaf. I suspect the worm that created this tunnel retracted instantly, perhaps down one of these side tunnels.”

  The outlaw didn’t like the thought of his enemy moving so quickly. He decided to change the subject. “Have you picked up on the bugs?”

  “Not yet.”

  Bad Buffalo was certain the tunnel was meant to be a trap, but so far, it just continued on. Maybe they were never meant to escape. Maybe they were meant to travel the corridors endlessly, lost and confused. Which gave him pause for thought. If the bugs had been sealed off in a tunnel, how had they survived? Buffalo had seen the drunk stranger maybe two weeks ago, in Carson City. Bugs usually lived for only a few days, let alone a few weeks. Maybe these were special bugs.

  How these tubes connected to planets, Bad Buffalo didn’t have a clue. What a planet exactly was, he didn’t know that either. But from what he was gathering, planets were out there...in the night sky. Space, as he’d heard it called. Maybe all those twinkling stars were planets. Bad Buffalo was quite sure the moon was such a planet. In fact, he had heard that people lived on the moon.

  While they continued following the pinkish tunnel that glowed, Dia, who had been following the outlaw’s train of thought, filled him in about how the Moon orbited the Earth, and how the nine planets in the solar system orbited the Sun, and how the sun orbited the Milky Way, and how the Milky Way orbited the Universe. She described other suns and other planets, too, some of which supported life. When Bad Buffalo asked Dia how she knew all of this, she reminded the gunslinger that she was connected to Nature, and that Nature was connected to the Earth, and the Earth was connected to everything in the Galaxy and beyond.

  Bad Buffalo was still confused. After all, he lived on the Earth, too, didn’t he?

  Dia picked up on his confusion. “True, BB. But, unlike you, my mother is Mother Nature. Myself and others like me come from her womb, born whole and complete, with all the knowledge of the Universe.”

  “So, you have no parents?”

  “Only Mother.”

  “And this Mother Nature...she’s a real damsel?”

  “Not a damsel, although she can
take on the form of a person. She is all of nature. She is, quite frankly, the soul of the world.”

  The gunslinger was quite certain the little fairy was mad. Then again, all of this was mad. Heck, maybe he was dying of heatstroke out in the desert.

  Something pinched his chest good and hard and for the first time in his life, Bad Buffalo let out a girl-like yelp. “Hey!”

  “Pain is real. And this is real, too, BB.”

  He grumbled and rubbed his chest, and found himself wishing like crazy he’d never left Carson City. But then, he wouldn’t have met Dia, and he kind of liked Dia, even if she did things like pinch him and boss him around. As he rubbed the little spot where he was certain she had pulled free some hair, too, he found himself thinking of the bugs.

  “What about the bugs?” asked Dia, reading his mind, which the outlaw still wasn’t used to, and didn’t think he would ever get used to.

  “Well, I think they’re goners. Ain’t nothing can live in these tunnels for very long, not without food and water. And I don’t see any of either. I don’t care what planet they’re from. A body needs food, and a body needs water.”

  He felt Dia cross her arms inside his pocket. He flinched involuntarily.

  “I think you might be right, BB. Maybe this is a fool’s errand.”

  He felt his hackles rise. “Who are you calling a fool?”

  “Relax, BB. I’m just afraid I might not have thought this through.”

  He hadn’t either. Then again, the attacking worm had given them precious little time to think anything through. In fact, their only real option had been to jump into this tunnel. Which gave him pause for thought. Why this tunnel, and where did it go?

  “They led us here for a reason,” said Dia, picking up on his thoughts. “And probably not for a very good reason, either.”

  If Bad Buffalo wasn’t already on high alert, he was so now, more so. He made sure the well-used handle of his six-shooter was easily accessible, and he rode forward on Horse, patting the proud creature’s neck, a gesture he always did right before a gunfight.

  They continued on, deeper into the wormhole, to where they did not know. What awaited them, they didn’t know that either. Bad Buffalo suspected the further they went down the hole, the farther they were from home. He wondered if he would ever see his Earth again, and hoped he would. He had grown rather fond of the place, even if it seemed like there was trouble everywhere he went. Which gave him pause for thought: was there the smallest of chances that he was the cause of the trouble? Something to ponder.

  As they rounded another bend, Bad Buffalo had an idea. “Say, even if the bugs are dead in the tunnel, the planet they are from is still out there. And one of these tunnels surely leads straight to their planet.”

  “Good thinking, BB, but how do we find the right tunnel?”

  He thought about that, and as he did so, two things happened nearly simultaneously. The first was that Bad Buffalo said, “Didn’t you say you were connected to Mother Nature?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she is connected to the entire cosmos?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ask her!”

  The little fairy was about to reply when the second thing happened. From around the bend, something made a noise. A clicking sound. Or perhaps a snapping sound. Bad Buffalo didn’t like the sound, whatever it was. He was tempted to turn back, but Bad Buffalo had never run from a fight, and he wasn’t about to now.

  He took a deep breath and aimed his weapon at whatever was about to emerge from around the bend...

  Chapter 8: Caterpillar

  And there was a monster so enormously huge that it entirely filled the tunnel. Its front end was armored, with an impressive an array of clubs, knives, spears, guns, shields, and other exotic weapons. It seemed as surprised to see them as they were to see it. It halted in place, nothing moving, maybe deciding how best to destroy them without getting too much blood on its surface.

  Horse skidded to a halt.

  “Whoa!” Bad Buffalo exclaimed, not to the steed but to himself. It was obvious that his trusty six-shooter was more like a peashooter against this behemoth. “What’s this?”

  “I think it’s a tank,” Dia said, impressed.

  “You mean to store water?”

  “Oops, I’m getting anachronistic again. The tank hasn’t been invented yet. It’s a big armored vehicle with caterpillar treads and—”

  “A caterpillar?”

  “A mechanical one, maybe,” she said.

  He looked at the base of the thing. It did seem to have a number of little caterpillar feet. “A big caterpillar,” he agreed.

  “It—I’m trying to read its mind. It’s alive, after a fashion, but it’s alien, not on my wavelength. I think it’s not hostile, just job oriented.”

  “What’s its job?”

  She focused, interpreting the alien thoughts with difficulty. “It is a—a maintenance worker. It patrols the tunnels, scrubbing grime off their walls, cleaning up worm droppings, compacting trash for disposal. Routine repairs of the framework so the vacuum doesn’t get in. It’s been doing it for hundreds of centuries. So it’s got a scoop and a flip-top can for rubbish. That’s what we heard.”

  Bad Buffalo was getting a glimmer. “What trash?”

  “Anything that litters the tunnels. Like dead bodies.”

  The glimmer brightened into a suspicion. “Like our dead bodies? So they won’t stink up the tunnel?”

  “Yes.” She continued reading the alien mind. “Things get in, and get lost, and have nothing to eat or drink, and die of hunger and thirst, and become litter. Trash. So it picks it up and squashes it into organic blocks and dumps it out on some passing planet as fertilizer.”

  Now he saw that the swords were actually scrapers, the clubs were peg pounders, and the guns were the ends of hoses to spray paint or glue. Not that it made a huge difference. “That’s what the worms have in mind for us,” he said. “Raw fertilizer. There’s probably no way out.”

  “No way we can negotiate,” she agreed. “It’s an ugly business.”

  “So the caterpillar’s not our enemy, just a creature doing its job.”

  “Yes, I think that’s it. Maybe it’s waiting for us to die so it can clean up the mess.”

  Bad Buffalo thought about that. “That’s not the kind of mess I have in mind for us.”

  “I’m not sure what we can do. We can’t get around it, and it’s not going to back up until its job is finished.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Its job is never finished. Eventually it will retire and another caterpillar will take its place.”

  Bad Buffalo wasn’t good at pondering, but he seemed to have no choice. He put his rusty mind to work. They had either to deal with the caterpillar, or retreat back to Earth, their mission unaccomplished. The word “retreat” was not in his limited lexicon. In fact, “lexicon” wasn’t in it either.

  Horse snorted.

  “You what?” Bad Buffalo demanded. He did not have Dia’s telepathy, but he generally knew what was on Horse’s mind, because it was so similar to his own.

  Horse snorted again.

  “That’s what I thought you said. Well, if you must, you must. Go ahead.” He tended to give his steed leeway that he wouldn’t give a man, because he trusted Horse.

  Horse stepped forward and sniffed noses with the caterpillar.

  “Well, now,” Dia said. “That gesture of friendliness wowed the caterpillar. No one’s sniffed noses with her in two hundred years.”

  “Her?”

  “Caterpillars have genders too, it turns out. Any century now she’ll go home and breed.”

  “Not with Horse!”

  “Uh, no. That would be miscegenation. With a male caterpillar, so they can merge into a cocoon and some millennium, hence transform into the universe’s largest and loveliest butterfly, if I understand it correctly. I may have a detail or two wrong, but that’s the essence.”

  “So it’s mor
e like being just friends with Horse.”

  “Yes. It’s nice to have company every century or so, even that of an alien creature, just to pass the time.”

  That gave him an idea. “Friends do things for friends.”

  “They do,” she agreed. “But we did not sniff noses. We’re not friends.”

  He thought about sniffing noses with the caterpillar. It did not appeal; it might blow a barrel of snot on him. “Is there any other way to get to be friends?”

  She concentrated, reading a bit more of the caterpillar’s mind. “Well, it’s not quite the same, but the worms mesmerize the caterpillar.”

  “They do what?”

  “They—they hypnotize it.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? How?”

  “I’m not sure. Her mind is somewhat foggy. She’s not clear exactly what they do, but it works. That’s why they can get the caterpillar to do things they want, like opening new branches on Earth so they can go suck out the magic.”

  Bad Buffalo pondered again. He felt his poor brain heating with the effort, but he was making progress. “I heard tell, once, of a swampy in Ink who hypnotized a, well, I guess a kind of thick-necked rattlesnake.”

  “Let me look at that memory,” she said. “Aha: you are thinking of a swami in India who played his flute to hypnotize a cobra in a basket.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Real big poisonous snake, but it didn’t bite him because of the music.”

  “I have heard of it. It’s not the music, because snakes are tone-deaf. It’s the motion. The swami sways constantly back and forth, and the snake sways with him, and gets dizzy, and entranced.”

  “Yeah. So maybe if we sway enough, the caterpillar will like us.”

  “I wonder. If she liked us, or at least felt obliged to respond to us, she might do what we say, just as she does for the worms.”

  “And we’d tell her to take us to the bug planet. She’s got to know the way, and she can open a porpoise there.”

  “A portal there,” Dia said patiently. “BB, I think your genius has scored again.” She kissed her hand, then threw the kiss up to his face. It scored on his mouth, leaving a nice taste of sweetness.