The cruelty of his small world was captured and shivering on the sticky web of the dream. Holes in the endless tumbled buildings and eroded faces in the concrete revealed a mood of agony and loss. He heard something snarl, then the grind of teeth became the squeal of radials spinning through greenish wisps of smog.

He saw his wife again. Janice was dead, gray and splashed with a violet shading of wine, blood, and bruise. A derelict factory loomed over her like a squat giant. Up in the gloom, he saw the city itself, what it had become … a soulless monstrosity made of the smoke and thunder of tarnished commerce … a bone-grinder shaking mechanisms, devouring purposeless humanity.

A wall was blocking him; a wall had always blocked him. It was stone, brick, cement, and all the metal of derailed trains and freeway wrecks. Severed limbs crowned the rubbish heaps at its base. Tar and blood bubbled in the cracks. It made him think of every shallow thug he'd ever been up against, all of the nasty bosses who'd fired him, and every bastard who'd ever insulted and underrated him. It was nearly everyone. Their faces flashed, warped and ugly as fresh skin grafts. They were the stopper, they'd beat him down and turned him into a broken man. There was nothing left, and he thought that maybe his wife had been right in riding out of it on the bottle.

Wind gusted, and he was a giant, carrying all of the rage and hate of mankind as fury against the wall. Blood ran, and flesh tore as he hammered at it with his fists, but it didn't come down. It couldn't come down when it had already fallen. All it could do was boom and amplify the misery like a hollow drum.

Jeff awoke on the spit and instantly remembered getting smashed and walking out of the city. The spit wasn't much better than the alleyways he'd been sleeping in. It was a large chunk of land composed of garbage and fill, and it extended into the lake. It had its share of stunted trees, wildlife and mutant grass. It also had groundwater so poisonous it would eat your flesh like battery acid.

Waking was nearly as bad as dreaming. He was in a hobo roost, and it was early morning, the sun sailing up high and rust-tinted in the trailing greenhouse exhaust of the nearby city. A number of bums were passed out in the dirt and cardboard around him. On one side, there were shabby huts of crate-board, corrugated tin, and cardboard. Thorn bushes and stunted trees were to his left, and gulls squawked directly overhead. Across from him was a pond of industrial waste. In the distance, sailboats drifted on milky Lake Ontario.

Licks of sulfur and filaments of silver spun among green bubbles and strands of foul brown smoke. As he tried to settle his swimming head, he unwittingly focused on a blob of dark mud floating to shore. He was sure his life was over. He wasn't physically finished like the bums around him, but he was fast on his way. The binges were getting worse, and he had little to live for anyway. He'd no property left and a tax debt compounding to mind-boggling numbers. His wife was buried, and his daughter was a hooker … his son was armed and dangerous on those rare days when he got out. For Jeff, the bottle of life was empty. Now it was time to choke on the dregs at the bottom, and to be better than the rest. If you knew you were dead, killed by fate, you were better than the others who were too blind to know.

On the shore, the lump of mud began to crawl like a worm, and Jeff's negative thoughts vanished as he studied it. Sometimes it shimmered like a bluebottle fly, and at other times it was slime-green. It had a way of sliding forward that was quicksilver smooth, and it moved right up to the closest wino - a guy with a sherry face of popped veins - formed a gross sucker at its front and glued itself to the man's forehead.

For a second, Jeff was sure he'd become a hallucinating wet brain already, but when the worm oozed in the man's ear, the horror of it became the truth. It wasn't long, and the bum's eyes opened. They were lifeless eyes, a dead-as-maggots stare.

The shakes hitting him, Jeff began to rise, but before he was halfway up, a muzzle-flash caught his eye. There was a crack and a heavy, dull thud as the head of the derelict behind him became the leading edge of a slapping splash of blood and brain matter.

Throwing himself to the side, Jeff rolled and crawled off through Frisbee-sized mushrooms. Crushed cans, rotted canvas, and heaps of cigarette butts marked the edge of some thorn bushes, and while he was screened by them, a couple more shots thundered into the roost.

Reaching a mound of iron ore pellets, Jeff moved out of the brush and tried to spot the gunman. A small dump was beyond the mound, and the killer was on the far side of it, reloading in a patch of crabgrass. He was blond, Nordic, a bodybuilder wearing brown slacks and a checked hunting jacket. From his angle, he wouldn't have seen the pond worm in the man's ear, and it was some of the others he'd shot. That meant he was a pure killer, an off-duty cop or a vagrant-hater out shooting bums on the spit for Saturday morning sport; maybe even a Neo-Nazi out for practice.

Jeff felt anger convulse, close like a claw in his stomach. The killer took a new form. He became the embodiment of everything Jeff hated - the lucky, sophisticated guy who had nothing better to do than exterminate the unfortunate. A new breed of man that had emerged a few years back, when kicking the downtrodden became politically popular. Jeff swore under his breath. He intended to get even. It would be a final strike at the authority he'd always hated. It was the one thing he had left, his belief that all authority, every man, every system had to be challenged. If the enemy had taken shape as a killer, then maybe it was because it had killed his life already.

Moving from behind the ore heap, Jeff dashed through the dump, dodging decaying furniture, rusted drums, and spikes of broken glass and metal. He got halfway across before a huge spring caught his foot and threw him into the rusted-out hulk of a pickup truck.

Hearing Jeff fall, the gunman spun around and fired. The slug hit the wreck with the wham of a heavy metal fist and opened up the hood like it was the lid of a sardine can.

Jeff kept moving, ducking behind wet heaps of cardboard and newspaper, continuing his advance on the gunman. Two slugs pounded at his heels, then he saw the gunman move to reload. Favoring his weak leg, Jeff rushed into some bushes, finding cover before the gunman could trigger again.

Rays from the swollen sun glossed the sweat on the gunman's brow. His expression was intense, and he seemed about to lose his cool. It was obvious that he hadn't expected one of the bums to fight a war with him. He shuffled around nervously in the crab grass, looking for his target.

Jeff had taken note that his weapon was a three-shooter, and he began by tossing an empty Five Star sherry bottle. The gunman fired and shattered it where it landed, and then he scratched his head and moved over into the dump.

Positions were now reversed, with the gunman behind a mound of crushed bricks and Jeff near the patch of grass. It was time to take a risk; Jeff emerged from the bushes and dived at the edge of the grass, getting behind a weedy mound as a slug kicked up sod.

Risking it again, Jeff popped his head out. A slug whistled by and sawed a limb off a dead maple. And that was the three. He'd have to load another clip.

Litter, wind, and dust were flying in every alleyway, through the hard years of Jeff's life. His teeth and jaws were locked bands of iron. Limping, beaten man that he was, he pulled up strength from discarded dreams, crumpled steel, and rust. Jeff was a gaunt man, a half-crippled man; his face was scarred and creased and dark with stubble. But it was the eyes that told his story; they weren't wino dead, they were white embers, hot with fire from a life too terrible to think about.

It was too late to shoot, so the gunman tried to bash Jeff down with the barrel, and he found it was too late for that, too. Jeff plowed into him like a train, thrusting rusted metal into his belly. It penetrated like the jagged fender of a wreck, then a hot river poured between his legs, and flame was in his eyes as his intestines spilled out on the spit.

Jeff picked up the gun, finding it to be a TAR-HUNT Slug Rifle. Only a monster would hunt with such a weapon. It was like killing ants with boulders. Yet it was loaded, and Jeff figured he might need the three shots. He was going back for the poor guy with the worm eating his brain, to put him out of his misery.

There was little to contemplate other than the screech of gulls and the birthmark-colored clouds slipping over the sun. He was thirsty, and he knew there was no clean water on the spit. He would have to find a bottle. Then, as he came off the earth path leading to the roost, he forgot his thirst.

Three men had been decapitated by the TAR-HUNT slugs, and the corpses were mounds of raw flesh, crawling with ants and horseflies. The premature carrion stink was so vile that the roost was impossible to enter. The other derelicts had fled, four or five of them, and the guy with the pond worm in his brain was also gone.

Scouting for them, he doubled around to the far side of the makeshift huts. Fat drops of blood led up to the ramshackle construction. A huge peeling Pepsi sign served as a door. It had once been electric; now it shone with traces of blood.

Jeff's hunter instinct made him hesitate. He picked up a stone and heaved it at the side of the hut. There was shuffling on cardboard and a moan of pain inside.

The door began to creak open. Something felt wrong, so Jeff raised his weapon. A man came out slowly. He was dragging his feet, his arms hung limp, and his entire body was alive with bloodsucking worms. Only his mouth was clear, and it poured with blood and moaning.

As the door blew shut, Jeff squeezed the trigger, the kick of the gun hitting him like a horse hoof. He saw the man's middle disappear in a whirlpool of violet as he was thrown against the Pepsi sign. It crumpled easily as tinfoil, and the wall fell apart, a spray of gore and worms shooting in to coat the interior.

Gray light washed in, and Jeff saw the other bodies, all of them crawling with worms, except the original one. And he knew it only by the shoes, because the body was now wrapped in a milky web.

Shooting would be pointless. Fire was a better idea. He fumbled for his lighter, and as the silver flashed from his pocket, the webbing on the man's head began to split.

A green-purple tentacle waggled out. Blister-like suckers lined its underside. It got a hold of the wall and pushed out two more tentacles, and then it pulled itself the rest of the way out. Chunks of skull fell away and hung on hinges of webbing as it oozed up the wall. There were six tentacles in all; the man's brain made the body. It pulsed with several colors of ghastly liquid and had knobs of varicose veins at the bases of the tentacles. A huge blister in the center appeared to be a morbid eye.

Jeff's teeth chattered. He decided to shoot, but when he raised the rifle, he found that he couldn't will his trembling finger to pull the trigger. Throwing the gun down, he went back to the lighter and had the same problem again when he tried to start a fire.

The brain worm was now moving toward him in the same easy way it'd moved when it had been tiny. Hate was another set of tentacles emanating from it. Paralyzing hate. Jeff could feel its loathing of him, and it was a tangible thing, as real as the green wisps of poison over the place of its birth. It invaded his mind, screaming with a power of murderous extermination. Blistered tentacles shot like lightning to the roots of his soul. Razor ribbons of pain twisted in his bowels. Burrowing down, the creature found the umbilicus it needed to sever to end his existence.

And then a dam burst. Another kind of hate - fire-bright - emerged. Jeff's hate, his loathing of a world that had robbed, poisoned, and deadened him. All of the angry faces flooded up like a grotesque bubbling of blood; their hunger an inner rain of glass splinters and knives.

Jeff heard the creature scream from the pain of it. It was about to put a tentacle on his foot. He kicked it away violently and watched it retreat to the fallen hut.

Jeff's heart was thumping, its beat strengthened. The creature had crawled to the bottom of him, and he'd refused to die. Just like that, he could refuse to die for everyone else.

Running to the farthest hut, he set fire to it with his lighter and watched as the flames licked up fast. Moving around the huts, he created a circle of flame that quickly grew to a roaring column of crimson and soot. And he didn't wait around; he turned and dashed across the spit wasteland, getting a hundred yards before the screaming of the burning brain worm began. The sounds were psychic emanations, sharp bone fragments exploding in his head.

He stumbled and began to crawl on the lumpy earth, and in time, his mind cleared. The city was ahead, like another monster, with tentacles of smog. He could see that it lived out of death, greed, envy, and hate. Yet his own hate was gone, burned to ashes with the brain worm. Somehow, the creature had saved him, exorcised him, and his thirst for life had returned. He knew he would go on to a new life. He would still limp, but he'd no longer be crippled by self-pity and hate.

He thought about the worms. If monsters were growing on the spit, it was probably too late to stop it. Something terrible was on the way. Yet people had let their inner monsters thrive, and it was too late to stop them. The brain worms were something they had earned.

 . . . . . . . . . . .