Inside the Worm by Robert Swindells

street in front of the shop. Did they get arrested?’
    â€˜Well no, but they were advertising something, weren’t they?’
    â€˜Exactly!’ Trot smiled. ‘And so are we. If anybody asks, we’re advertising our play, right?’
    Ellie-May shook her head. ‘I’m not sure, Trot. I don’t know if we’d get away with it.’
    â€˜â€™Course we would. And anyway, nobody’s going to ask. Come on.’
    Fliss was making her way towards the checkout with a three-pack of Snickers in her basket. The narrow aisle was thronged with trolley-pushing shoppers and their children. Just in front of Fliss, a kneeling youth was taking tins of peas from a trolley and stackingthem on a shelf. The trolley blocked off half of the gangway, creating a bottleneck into which impatient customers were funnelled, pushing and shoving one another in their eagerness to progress.
    Fliss was being swept towards this bottleneck and wishing she’d gone home with Vicky, when she became aware of some sort of commotion between the checkout line and one of the exits. She couldn’t see very well because the stacked goods on the shelves were higher than she was and because people were craning to see, but there seemed to be violent movement in the crowd over there and she could hear exclamations of anger or maybe surprise.
    Seconds later, the forward momentum of the crowd she was in ceased. For a moment, Fliss and those about her stood absolutely still. Then somebody screamed and the surge went violently into reverse as those at the front recoiled from whatever it was they could see. Fliss back-pedalled desperately as a tidal wave of shoppers threatened to overwhelm her. To her left, an old lady cried out and toppled, clawing at a pyramid of cans in a useless bid to stay on her feet. The pyramid collapsed, pelting the woman with cans as she fell. Other shoppers, skidding and stumbling through scattered cans, abandoned their trolleys, which became rolling barriers against those who came after. A child fell and was snatched by its mother from the jaws of certain death.
    Fliss turned and fought her way to the top of the aisle where she clung to a freezer-cabinet. Bodies cannoned into her, threatening to sweep her away, but she hung on, and as she clung there, limpet-like, she saw the worm. It was coming along the walkway between the tops of the aisles and the fixtures which lined the back wall of the store. It was moving quite rapidly for a thing its size, scattering shoppers as it came. It passed within a metre of her, heading for the last, wide aisle which would lead it back to the end of the checkout line. Fliss watched as it swung round the bend, dragging its iridescent green tail, and disappeared from view. Then she turned with a moan and threw up over a hill of turkey parts.

CHAPTER THIRTY
    STAN MORRIS HAD the biggest milk round in Elsworth. Seven days a week he was up at four-thirty and out delivering by five, and he’d work till ten at night, loading up his float for the next day. He followed this punishing routine the year round except for two weeks each January when he took Mrs Morris off to Florida. Renowned throughout the town for his addiction to hard work (some called him a workaholic), Stan would never win any prizes for the size of his imagination. In all of his forty-six years he had never seen a ghost or a UFO or a fairy and he never expected to, and he felt only scorn for those who claimed they had. So when a dragon crossed the road in front of the float atfive-fifteen that Sunday morning, it came as a bit of a shock. He braked hard, causing the stack of crates on the flatbed to hit the back of his cab, and sat staring at the gap in the fence through which the apparition had vanished.
    Mebbe the wife’s right, he told himself. P’raps I have been working too hard. When a man starts seeing things it’s time to slow down a bit.
    Stan recovered his composure after a few minutes