Wuftoom by Mary G. Thompson

slightly green. Without thinking, he rushed after Olen, the liquid still sliding off him harmlessly.
    Evan wondered if he could ever like being like this. At that moment he hoped he would. Life would be so much better if he could only like it and not want to go back. “So you like it now? Being a worm?” he asked.
    Olen whirled around on him, churning the water. “I am
not
a
worm!
” he growled. Evan stepped backward, but Olen closed in. “We are Wuftoom! We are the strongest in the dark places. We are the smartest and the longest lived. Long after the rest have been destroyed and the trees have withered into ashes, we will still be here.”
    Evan shrank back farther in the face of Olen’s wide-open mouth and sharp, pitiless fangs. “What about the bugs?” he stammered.
    â€œThey are numerous,” Olen spat. The spittle hit Evan’s cheek and slid down, but it rolled off him like the water.
    â€œIt said they eat you . . . us,” Evan said. “Do they get many?”
    Olen pursed his shriveled lips. “No. They aspire to eat us. We are a delicacy among dark creatures.” He gave a humorless chuckle. “But they do not get us.”
    â€œIt said that they want to destroy you. That you want to destroy them.”
    Olen examined Evan. Evan could feel the thing’s eyes on him like lasers. The stare lasted an eternity. Suddenly, Olen sat down in the mucky stream. Since he had no proper waist or joints, he simply bent in two, his legs sticking out in front of him, pressed together underwater.
    â€œYou are one of us now. You need to know,” he said.
    Slowly, Evan sat down in front of Olen. They sat in the middle of the stream, now covered up to the tops of their arms. Yet Olen did not appear to notice the flow of sewage rolling over his body.
    Although Evan could not smell it, he could imagine its smell. As he remembered Olen’s stink, it seemed to waft into his brain.
Stop,
he thought.
It isn’t there. This is natural for me. Just like it used to be natural to take a bath.
He tried to breathe calmly as the muck flowed over his body.
    â€œWuftoom are ancient. We have lived since the earliest men came to this place. No one knows how the first one appeared. But we spread through the greed of men. In killing and eating the first one, they made more of our kind. Until they stopped eating us, and we had to find another way. Now we bury our dead in the open and wait.”
    â€œBut why do you do it in a field? Why not in the middle of the town where everyone would step in it?” Evan asked.
    Olen grunted. “We only wish to replace those who have died. We could not feed any more,” he said, pursing his shriveled lips again. “The bugs—they are called Vitflys—grow more numerous each day. Their insatiable appetites belie their diminutive size.”
    Evan thought that at a foot long, they were hardly diminutive. He had seen their fangs and their glowing yellow eyes. He believed that they could eat a lot. He rubbed his arms together uncomfortably and was again aware of the sewage flowing over him.
    â€œDo you both eat the same things?” he asked.
    Olen nodded. “There are those who would make more of us now, the better to destroy them. But if we should do that, the whole clan would weaken and starve. So we must destroy them with what we have. The water and the walls listen, so I can speak no more of that.” Olen inclined his head, and Evan looked but saw nothing except slimy walls and slowly drifting sewage.
    â€œYou said things would be better,” said Evan. “That we were going to leave the sewers.”
    â€œI did not lie,” said Olen. “Once the Vits are gone, we will have no need to hide here in the water. We will go wherever we please, live how our ancestors intended.”
    Evan did not ask where that was, or how they were supposed to live. All he could think of were the Vits. “But what