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  WORM

  Anthony Neil Smith

  Published by Blasted Heath, 2015

  copyright © 2015, Anthony Neil Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the author.

  Anthony Neil Smith has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

  Visit Blasted Heath at

  www.blastedheath.com

  ISBN: 978-1-908688-78-1

  Version 2-1-3

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About This Book

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Special Thanks

  Other novels by Anthony Neil Smith

  About Blasted Heath

  About This Book

  In the Bakken oil field of North Dakota, they call the new guys “worms.”

  Ferret is a worm from Alabama, trying to kickstart a new life for his family, while back home his in-laws whisper break-up songs in his wife Dee Dee’s ear.

  His boss, a shadowy old guy called Pancrazio, drags in Ferret, Gene Handy, and two roustabouts from Oklahoma to deal with a new meth empire on the prairie. Meanwhile, a reservation cop keeps a close eye on the big picture.

  All Ferret wants is some easy money and the love of his family. But he quickly finds out that there’s danger around every corner, in every drill, truck and train car. And if the machines or chemicals don’t get him, then the other roughnecks will. Because beneath the dirt and grease, nobody is what they seem.

  SUMMER

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ferret told Gene Handy that when the hot prairie wind whipped across the oil field here, it was like the Devil scraping his dick across your face. Gene Handy barely laughed. It was a funny joke. Ferret thought of it all on his own, but Handy never laughed at much of anything. He would give you one of those lopsided grins, sure, but an out-loud laugh? Nope.

  Whenever Ferret called his folks back home in South Alabama, they thought he must be either dying from exposure to the cold or wishing he had brought a heavier coat. He kept telling them that North Dakota in the summertime was just as brutal as it was down there, maybe more so because he didn’t have breezes off the Gulf of Mexico. Only hot, dry winds full of grit. But Ferret was sure he would get his ass handed to him come his first winter. Until then, he would keep complaining about the goddamned hot wind.

  When he called his wife back home, well, it was hard enough to keep her on the phone five minutes let alone talk about the weather. Unless it had to do with him sending the money for her and the baby girl, she didn’t want to hear it. She had been against him going so far for this job, but where else could he cash in like this?

  Gene Handy was the newest guy on the rig a week ago, but since more and more men were flooding in every day for jobs on the oil fields, he might as well have been a veteran, and Ferret might as well have been Vice President of the whole company. All these guys were just happy to be working, hauling in big paychecks, not even thinking about tomorrow or next month or next year. They knew the ground would run dry eventually. For now it was nice to pretend the crude would keep flowing forever.

  A couple hours after Ferret told Handy the Devil’s dick joke, a lot of the guys on the derrick crowded around and watched these three bikers who had driven up the dirt road but stopped fifty yards short of the rig and wouldn’t come any closer. The driller was on his way out to talk with them. You couldn’t stop work because some tough-looking guys drive up with expensive cowboy boots and cowboy shirts and black hair slicked back, the lead biker with a long ponytail. It wasn’t right, but with this many young guys bored and full of piss, that’s what happened.

  Ferret was shorter than most of the guys and had to climb some steps to see over their heads. He looked up and there was Gene Handy, who was tall and built like a Frankenstein, seriously—bulging arm and neck veins, skin tight like it might split. He was scarred all over like nobody’s business. He’d seen real trouble, not just the inside of a gym. Handy had got his build from hard work, for better or worse.

  Everybody watched the driller talking to the bikers, whoever they were. The lead one looked like an Indian. They all knew the driller wasn’t keen on Indians. He wasn’t keen on most skin colors that weren’t like his. The driller’s name was Aldo Pancrazio and he was from back East. Jersey, maybe. He was silver-haired with a droopy silver mustache but never seemed to get a drop of oil on the hair, even when his face and arms were filthy, but no one doubted he was a hard-working, hard-driving son of a bitch who smiled as little as Gene Handy and had a demeaning nickname for every last bastard on the rig, like “Ferret” for Finn, which was fine because the guys called the driller “Pancrazy” anyway.

  Out there with the bikers, Pancrazio was calm and collected, gloved fists on his hips, spitting and nodding at the ground. The Indian biker would talk, then Pancrazio, then the biker. It was obvious he was the important one of the three. After a few minutes of that, it was over. The other two bikers hadn’t said a word. One of them was a white man with a gut spilling over his too-tight black jeans, and the other, whatever race he was, looked like a furless cat. All three wore black leather vests, the logo on back hard to read from this distance, but some guys were whispering that they were from the “Sons of Silence,” some real shitty lowlifes right there. Pancrazio finished and walked back to the rig.

  Up top, the boys peppered him with “What do they want?” and “We gonna kick some ass?” and “What do they want?”

  Pancrazio waited until they were mostly quiet and said, “They want to talk to Gene Handy. That’s all. Gene Handy.”

  All heads turned until they found him, up on the steps. Ferret climbed down and melted into the crowd because even though Gene Handy was a friend of his, sort of, he still didn’t like all those eyes on Handy putting them together at a time like this. He slinked away. Good Ferret. Safe Ferret.

  Pancrazio walked over to Handy, who hadn’t moved an inch, and everyone could hear them, even over engines whirring and pumps pumping.

  Pancrazio said, “You okay with that, son? You know these men?”

  Handy shook his head.

  “You don’t have to talk to them, you know. I mean, we can wait them out. Call someone to—”

  “S’alright, boss. Let me see what they want.”

  “You sure? Any one of our boys here would be happy to go with you.”

  Gene Handy clanged down the steps and clapped the driller on
his shoulder. “Thanks, but no use getting anyone else into this shit.”

  He waded through the hardhats, gave Ferret a quick wink and climbed off the rig. Pancrazio found a spot on the rail to get a firsthand view of Gene Handy walking nice and slow across the cracked prairie dirt, kicking up dust, and Ferret settled in right beside the bossman.

  Not too many of them knew much about Handy because he didn’t talk about himself like the others talked about themselves—the girls they fucked in town, the wives and kids back home, and the guys they fought, and how they got loaded up on booze and speed so they could fuck and fight some more. Handy kept to himself, friendly enough but very quiet. There were plenty of quiet guys mixed in with the blowhards, sure. Usually older guys, working past when they said they’d retire, stuck here because so many companies were into shitty moves like canning the oldsters and cutting their pensions, so where else could they go? Up to Bakken. Barely There, USA, covering an ocean of crude. Then imagine that ocean sucked up into a sponge that you have to fill full of water in order to squeeze the oil out. That’s fracking. That’s money.

  A couple of hardhats on the other side of Pancrazio laughed, said maybe Handy was about to bop them on the head like a Three Stooges movie. Maybe he would send these boys back to their MC with a bad case of road rash.

  Pancrazio said, “Shut up or get back to work, both you Russells.”

  He had nicknamed one “Good Russell” and the other “Bad Russell” because they were old friends who came up together, inseparable, and dumb as bricks. Only Good Russell was a Russell. The other one was Hunter or something. They shut their mouths. No one wanted to go back to work. Pancrazio probably didn’t care if they did or not. He seemed as curious as everyone else about Handy and his bikers.

  Handy finally got to them and shook hands with the Indian biker and then the other two. Some more talking back and forth, nodding. The boys on the derrick were getting bored. Even Pancrazio shook his head, spit over the rail, and was about to tell them all the show was over when it happened.

  The Indian stepped back, mounted his Harley, and revved up. The other two bikers got in Handy’s face. Handy didn’t move. He didn’t move a lot, Ferret had noticed over the past few weeks.

  The fat one head-butted Gene Handy, sent him reeling. The furless cat stepped behind Handy, grabbed his arms and held tight, as the fat one then proceeded to kick the shit out of Gene Handy something fierce. Handy grunted and yipped as the boot landed over and over again. The furless cat threw him to the ground and got some of his own kicks in—back of the head, all down the spine.

  Ferret felt himself death-gripping the rail in front of him. But what was he going to do, right? If a big guy like Handy couldn’t even take care of himself out there, Ferret wouldn’t last ten seconds. But Handy had gotten him out of trouble the night before, and none of these other meatheads were making moves to help. It was quiet except for Handy’s shouts and cursing as the next wave of kicks rained down.

  So Ferret did it. He let go of the rail and pushed through the hardhats to the ladder and climbed down. Pancrazio shouted behind him, “Leave it! I don’t have time to send two of you to the goddamned ER!”

  Ferret kept going, though. He hit the ground running and grabbed himself a heavy clamp along the way, figured he could get in one good swing before getting his ass kicked. He shouted, “The fuck out of here! Gonna fuck you up!”

  If they heard or saw Ferret and his clamp, they didn’t show it. They had quit kicking Handy, now curled up on the ground like a doodlebug, and were heading back to their bikes. They hiked their legs and settled onto their saddles. Sure enough, right there on their backs, Sons of Silence MC. A big eagle flying through an “A”, and then some foreign-looking words under that.

  Ferret wasn’t going to catch up. He gave the clamp a whirl and let it go, not thinking about what the hell he would raise if it actually hit somebody. Or something. It came close, sure enough. Inches. Landed on the ground between the two Harleys and stirred up a dust cloud. The bikers looked at him funny, then kickstarted the hogs. They got going and U-turned out of there, and that was that. Ferret got down on his knees beside Gene Handy, hand on his shoulder, and said, “You alright?”

  The dirt had already sucked in some of the man’s blood. Handy’s face was...goddamn! Like a raw steak. Dude was rolling back and forth, clenching his teeth and seething, but he told Ferret, “I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”

  By then, the others had come down off the derrick to get a closer peek. Some of the stupid ones had even grabbed pipes and sledgehammers. Lots of whispers, lots of “fucked him up”, and such, but then Pancrazio slid between all those shoulders and squatted beside Gene Handy and Ferret.

  Handy was coming back to life, breathing fine, sitting up. His shirt was torn, and there were huge bruises swelling all over his back and chest and arms. Black tribal tattoos, all the rage twenty years ago, made the bruises look worse.

  Pancrazio went right to, “What was that all about?”

  Handy shook his head. “They had the wrong guy.”

  That made Pancrazio smile. The caterpillar on his lip curled. “Son, come on.”

  “Misunderstanding. They owed me one.”

  “You owed them something first?”

  “Maybe.” He let out a long breath, then coughed. He wiped blood off his nose and cheeks. “A long time ago. One day I’m going to need to clear it up.”

  “Hm,” Pancrazio said. Let it sit there. Then “Hm.”

  Gene Handy looked at Ferret through squinted, purpled eyes and said, “Thanks for having my back.”

  “Aw, man, I didn’t—”

  “It was enough.”

  Pancrazio stood and shouted, “Show’s over! Back to work, assholes!”

  Which made the stupid ones with the pipes and sledgehammers feel even stupider. They’d missed out on the fun, which meant there would be some drunk-ass fights in town that night to make up for it.

  Of course there were always drunk-ass fights in town. Just like there were last night. But last night Gene Handy had kept a few guys from slicing up Ferret, almost as easy as breathing. So where was that Gene Handy today?

  Ferret gave Gene Handy a helping shoulder and walked him over to the driller’s trailer. It was awkward since Handy was so much taller than Ferret, but he sure as hell needed a crutch right then. The whole walk, all those slow, staggered steps, Ferret was thinking about last night. The Gene Handy he saw then would’ve kicked those bikers’ asses even after the head-butt.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Last Night

  Ferret hadn’t been away from the man camp for three days—he had fit a double-shift in—and he needed a break. He got a ride into town with both Russells in a pick-up truck packed full of off-duty men. Pancrazio was going to meet them there. But heading into town was a little like heading into Hell. Thousands of working men, as well as the ones who were out of work but crossing their fingers every day, had descended en masse, so small towns like Williston and several others scattered across the plain had undergone big changes. Big, big changes.

  Some were expected—where were these guys going to stay? Quickie trailer rentals, quickie rooms and basements turned into “apartments”. Rents shooting higher and higher, all paid without any bitching. Pretty soon, they ran out of existing spots and had to build new apartment complexes, but those would take a while. Then came the man camps. They were prefab, like army barracks or dorms, but at least they were cheap and clean, with a cafeteria, rec rooms, and decent beds. Ferret had gotten lucky and been hired on before they ran out of rooms there, too. Plenty of others had ended up on the streets or sleeping in their cars. The camps weren’t far from the derricks so the men could get off the long shifts, fall right into bed, then wake up, eat, take a shit, and get back to work as fast as possible. No women were allowed at this particular camp. No outside visitors. No booze, drugs, guns, none of the fun stuff. You lived here because you worked here. Period.

  When these new workers�
��the other guys called them “worms”—couldn’t take the rules or cramped quarters anymore, they looked for other possibilities. Should they rent houses or apartments in town? Then they could move their families here, but what a shitty thing to do to their families, especially wives and daughters. There was a “shortage” of women here, which meant the men were on the prowl constantly.

  Maybe some rented a room from townfolks looking to make some extra money, who might also cook some decent meals and do the guy’s laundry. The flyers on the bar wall were layered three or four deep, sometimes more, even in the rest room. IT’S GOING TO GET COLD SOON, AND WE’LL THROW IN THE HEAT FOR FREE. Or, TIRED OF CAMP FOOD? HOW ABOUT HOMEMADE FRIED CHICKEN AND BEER? Like that.

  The bars, yeah, those bars. The town had a few to begin with for a population of only thirteen thousand a few years ago. As soon as everyone realized that would not be enough, nine more opened nearly overnight. We’re talking literally nailed together in garages, hooking together a long line of outdoor sheds, buying booze at the off-sale and selling it three dollars over what it would cost anywhere else, but the workers bought it like it cost a penny. After all, these dumbasses were making more money than they had ever had before, and they didn’t care how much and on what they spent it, as long as they could show off a wad of cash when they did so.

  Some of the new bars had strippers. Sure as hell, girls from out of town who knew that following the booms always paid off. Then some local girls wanted in on it, too. Didn’t matter if you had a pretty face or small tits or were in your thirties with stretch marks or had all sorts of blubber shaking like Jell-O. Naked was naked. That led to more than stripping. Everybody knew it would.

  The population this year was closer to thirty thousand, with more men flowing in. Building sites everywhere—apartments, strip malls, new fast food joints. Jobs for anyone who wanted them. Overcrowded schools. An overworked power grid. STDs. Girls needing abortions. Cops needing more jail space. Shit, cops needing more cops. Meth, crack, more weed than usual, high demand. It was like the Wild West all over again, but with smart phones and better guns. The problems got bigger every day. The town couldn’t build fast enough to keep up with them.