The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  Tim let out a ragged exhale that ended as a mirthless laugh. His hands were sticky with pulped insects. He thought about Gulliver tied down by thousands of Little People—a scene that had never stirred fear in him until now. The prospect of being beset by thousands, millions, of tiny assailants was actually quite terrifying.

  In the new silence, he heard a steady drone rolling across the water—the sound of an outboard motor. An emergency on the mainland? No. Someone would have radioed him first.

  He went inside and checked the shortwave radio. It gave off a low hiss that indicated a functioning frequency. Outside, the motor’s burr intensified.

  Tim lit a Coleman lamp and sat on the porch. He clawed at the whitened bumps on his neck, wrists, and hands. A shiver rolled up his legs and through his gut, which clenched painfully as gooseflesh broke out on his arms. He laughed—a confused, gooselike whoonk!—and smoothed his hands over his skin, which was pebbled like orange rind. His bladder tightened with piss as the pleasant scotch taste soured in his mouth.

  It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

  Carl Jung. Undergrad psychology. Jung, Tim would later conclude, was a blowhard and a crank and anyway, his theories were of limited value to a small-town GP whose day-to-day consisted of administering flu shots and excising ingrown nails from the toes of windburnt fishermen. As such, Tim had forgotten the name of Jung’s book and the name of the professor who’d taught it—but the quote came to him whole cloth, the words leaping from a dark cubbyhole in his memory.

  The wickedness of others becomes our own . . .

  Tim Riggs stood in the screened patio, vaguely uneasy for no reason he could lay a finger on—the wind called a mordant note through the sickly trees while other, less explicable sounds scraped up the beachhead toward him—waiting for that unknown wickedness to arrive.

  3

  EAT EAT—

  Dark. So dark.

  Empty.

  Before, there had been light. He’d been following it. Moth to a flame. Now it was gone. Just this insane eye-clawing darkness . . . and the hunger.

  The man crawled up a stony beach, skidding on the water-smooth pebbles. The rocks were slick with cold, snotlike algae. He scooped it up and shoveled it into his mouth, sucking the dark green strings through his lips like a child slurping egg noodles.

  There! Skittering along, its exoskeleton glossed in the moonlight. A sand crab. His hand closed over it—its ocean-coldness wept into his flesh—and stuffed it between his lips. He felt it dancing along his tongue with its hairy little legs. He bit down. A gout of salty goo squirted in his mouth. Its pincer snipped the tip of his tongue in a death spasm, bringing the penny-bright taste of blood; he swallowed the twitching bits convulsively, the spiny exoskeleton tearing into the soft tissues of his throat—which felt so thin now, nothing but a fleshy drainpipe, the skin stretched tight as crepe paper over his esophageal tube.

  A path materialized, tamped down through the waist-high grass. A black-bodied spider sat on a blade of grass. He pinched it between his fingers before it could get away and ate it up. Very nice, very nice. Succulent.

  He squinted. A box sat angled at the hillside, its shadow tilting against the shapeless night. Its geometries were too perfect for it to be anything but man-made.

  A feeble pinprick of light emanated from within.

  4

  “YOU GUYS ever hear about the Gurkhas?”

  Ephraim Elliot’s face hovered in the flashlight’s glow like the disembodied head of a sideshow oracle. The other boys lay propped up on their elbows, listening intently.

  “They’re these elite soldiers, right, from Nepal? Little guys. Five foot tall. Munchkins, practically. Crazy buggers. They’re trained from the time they’re infants to do one thing and do it well—to kill. The Gurkhas are crack-shots with a rifle. They can peg the pollen off a bumblebee’s ass at a hundred yards. They are masters with the kherkis, too—a long curved knife they keep wicked sharp. They can split a human hair with their knives . . . split it into thirds.”

  “Seriously, Eef ?” said Newton Thornton, his pillow-messed hair sticking up in tufts.

  “You bet,” Ephraim said soberly. “What hardly anyone knows is that a planeload of Gurkha warriors went down off the coast. They were on their way home after a very hairy mission—trench warfare, heads spiked on sticks, that sort of thing. These guys were driven half-crazy by the blood, right? The government of Nepal would probably have locked them up in a funny farm so they wouldn’t kill and maim anybody . . . but they never made it home. The plane went down over the ocean right around here.”

  Shelley Longpre listened intently. The usual gray of his eyes—which most often resembled chunks of dirty ice—were now hard and bright with interest.

  Ephraim said, “They could even be here. This island. It’s isolated, quiet. Hardly anyone comes to Falstaff Island except the odd fisherman or, well . . . us. The scouts of Troop Fifty-Two.”

  Max Kirkwood raised three fingers of his right hand and recited solemnly: “I promise to do my best, to do my duty to God, the queen, and to obey the laws of the Eagle Scout troop.”

  “Their bodies were never found,” Ephraim said, smiling at Max. “If they’re still alive, they would be total batshit madmen by now. But even if they were here, stalking this island, there’s a way to save yourself. The Gurkhas attack at night, okay? Always. They sneak into your cabin silent as death. They hover over your bed and feel your bootlaces. If they’re laced over and under . . .” Ephraim drew his thumb across his throat, a slitting motion. “But if they’re laced straight across, same way the Gurkhas lace them, they’ll let you live.” He yawned. “Well, good night, guys.”

  His flashlight snapped off. Soon afterward, a body thumped onto the floor. Ephraim’s flashlight pinned Newton in a halo of stark light, lying in a heap beside his boots.

  Ephraim said: “I knew you’d crack, Newt!”

  Newton sat up awkwardly, rubbing his knees. His skin was even pinker than usual in the flashlight’s glow: piglet-pink.

  “Jeez, well . . .” Newton bowed his head, rubbing his eye sockets. “You ought to be ashamed, Eef, telling that creepy stuff . . .”

  Kent Jenks cried, “Newt, you bed-wetter!”

  Shelley merely watched with an owlish expression, large yellow-tinted eyes staring from the milky oval of his face. Not smiling or laughing with the others—a blank test pattern of a face, expressive of nothing much at all.

  “Boys, hey! Come on, now,” Scoutmaster Tim said, stepping into the room. “It’s all fun and games until someone falls out of bed. What say we call it quits for the night, okay?”

  Newton stood, still rubbing his eyes, and heaved his bulk into the top bunk—but not before checking his bootlaces to make sure they were laced straight across.

  “Go to sleep, fellas,” Scoutmaster Tim said. Newton thought he could glimpse signs of strain on his Scoutmaster’s face: a vaguely panicked cast to his eyes. “Big day tomorrow.”

  The door shut. Wind raced over the sea, howling around the cabin’s edges. The logs groaned, a melancholy note like the hull of an old Spanish galleon buffeted by ocean waves. The boys lay in their bunks, breathing heavily. Ephraim whispered:

  “Gurkhas gonna get you, Newt.”

  5

  TIM HEARD the man before he arrived. Heard him coming at a tortured shamble like a disoriented bear stirred from hibernation.

  By nature, Tim was calm and unflappable—a valuable personality trait for a doctor, whose day could swing from soothing and treating a boy with a simple case of measles to inserting a tracheal stent in the throat of a girl who’d gone into anaphylactic shock following a bee sting. He’d spent nearly a year in Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders—had he been rabbity by nature, there was no way he’d have lasted that long. His mind naturally gravitated to the most likely causes, and from there coolly cataloged the possible effects.<
br />
  Fact One: a boat had arrived. Could be one of the boys’ parents—had Newton forgotten his asthma inhaler? Likely not, seeing as Newt rarely forgot anything. Could be a ship had gone down—had a trawler capsized while netting pollack in the westerly seas?—and the boat contained its bedraggled survivors.

  Tim’s mind snapped into triage mode: if that were the case, they’d need medical attention; he’d stabilize them here, on the beachhead if need be, and radio for a medevac chopper.

  Or it could be a drunk from the mainland who’d lost his way on a night-fishing jaunt. Unlike the drunks in Tim’s hometown who’d hit the fleshpits once the bars shut down, the good ole boys around here hit the water. Slewing across the ocean in open-motor skiffs, bellowing like bulls as they skipped across the waves—that, or they’d drop a fishing line and low-cycle the motor, trawling at a leisurely pace. A few years ago, a winebag named Lester Hamms froze to death on his boat; Jeff Jenks, North Point’s chief of police, discovered Lester seven miles off the cape, skin crystalline with frost like a piece of unwrapped steak in a freezer, his ass ice-welded to the seat, a pair of frozen snot-tusks poking out his nostrils. Lester’s boat was still puttering along; before long it would’ve hit the tidal shelf and been carried out to sea—Tim pictured his frozen corpse bumping along the shore of Greenland like a grisly bit of driftwood, a polar bear giving it a curious sniff.

  Whoever it was, Tim was sure he or she posed little threat . . . ninety-nine percent sure.

  Fact Two: he and the boys were on an isolated island over an hour from home. No weapons other than their knives—blades no longer than three and a half inches, as outlined in the Scout Handbook—and a flare gun. It was night. They were alone.

  Tim eased the porch door open with his boot. It issued a thin squeal—eeeee-ee-eee—like a rusty nail pried out of a wet plank.

  He edged around the cabin, heartbeat thrumming in the veins down his neck. Mosquitoes wet themselves in his beading sweat. He should’ve brought the lamp, but a signal broadcasting from deep within his reptile cortex said: No light. Don’t make yourself visible.

  Unsheathing his Buck knife, he pressed it flat along his thigh—his sensible self thinking: This is ridiculous; you’re being idiotic, totally paranoid. But the primal and instinctive part of him, the part ruled by the lizard brain, issued only a mindless buzz like a hive of Africanized bees.

  Wind howled along the earth, attaining a voice as it gusted around the rocks and spindly trees: a low muttersome sound like children whispering at the bottom of a well. It whipped up the back of Tim’s legs, icy tongues chilling him to the core. He squinted at the tree line, sensing something, the shadows coalescing to attain a certain weight and permanence.

  A shape materialized from the tangled foliage. Tim inhaled sharply. By the light of an uncommonly bright moon, he beheld a creature stepped fully formed from his blackest childhood nightmares: a rotted monster who’d dragged itself from the sea.

  It wasn’t much more than a skeleton lashed by ropes of waterlogged muscle, its flesh falling off its bones in gray, lace-edged rags. It lumbered forward, mumbling dully to itself. Tim’s terror pinned him in place.

  The thing shambled through a shaft of moonlight that danced along the tall grass; the light transformed the nightmare into what it truly was: a man so horrifyingly thin it was a miracle he was still alive.

  Tim stepped from cover without thinking, driven by the instinctive urge to offer aid. “Hello? You all right?”

  The man turned his brightly burning gaze on him. It was a gaze of mindless terror and desperate longing, but what really spooked Tim was its laserlike focus: this man clearly wanted something. Needed it.

  The stranger shuffled closer, pawing down the buttons of his shirt, running a quaking hand through his greasy pelt of hair. Tim suddenly understood: the man was making token efforts to render himself presentable.

  “Do you have anything . . . to eat?”

  “I might,” said Tim. “Are you here alone?”

  The man nodded. A quivering string of drool spooled over his lip, hung, snapped. His skin was stretched thin as crepe paper over his skull. Capillaries wormed across his nose, over his cheeks, and down his neck like river routes on a topographical map. His arms jutted from his T-shirt like Tinker Toys. The skin was shrink-wrapped around the radius and ulna bones, giving his elbows the appearance of knots in a rope.

  The man said, “Are you alone?”

  It was safer to let the stranger think so. “Yes, I’m doing some geological surveys.”

  The man picked up a handful of coarse soil and stuffed it in his mouth. To Tim, it looked like an involuntary reflex action, same as blinking your eyes.

  “Whoa! Hey, you don’t have to . . . to eat that,” Tim said, struggling to maintain his calm. “I have food.”

  The man smiled. A death’s-head grimace. His lips were thin bloodless fillets. His gums had receded severely, making his teeth look like yellowing tusks clashing inside his mouth, dark soil lodged in their chinks.

  “Food, yes. So nice. Thank you.”

  As a doctor, Tim had dealt with the human form in all its revolting variations. He’d emptied colostomy bags. Seen throbbing tumors pulled out of stomachs. But this man was sick in some unnatural way that Tim had never encountered. It sent a spike of pure dread down his spine.

  Unclean, his mind yammered. This man is unclean . . .

  The man’s stink hit Tim flush in the nose. A high fruity reek with an ammoniac undernote. Ketosis. The man’s body was breaking down its fatty acids in a last-ditch effort to keep its vital organs functioning. When burnt, ketones released a sickly sweet smell—the desperate reek of a body consuming itself. The stench coming out of the man’s mouth was like a basket of peaches rotting in the sun.

  Tim tried not to inhale, certain that it would trigger his gag reflex; the man swooned, equilibrium failing, and Tim impulsively wrapped a steadying hand around the guy’s waist . . .

  He reared back. When his hand slipped under the man’s shirt, over his stomach, he’d felt movement. Something stirring under his skin.

  That’s absurd, he told himself. It was just gas. Maybe even a section of herniated intestine. God only knows what’s wrong with him.

  Despite these rational protestations, he couldn’t shake the feeling. It lingered on his fingertips: a sly flex beneath the skin, as though something had reacted to his touch before settling again.

  The man shuffled toward the cabin and its burning lamp with mothlike determination. His moonlight-glossed eyes were a pair of blown fuses screwed into the fleshless mask of his face. Tim stuck his arm out, palm up, stopping him—a purely instinctive gesture.

  He didn’t want this man in the cabin with the boys. Not yet, maybe not at all.

  “Wait a sec, hold your horses,” he said, addressing the man as he might a hyperactive child. “Are you lost? Do you even know where you are? I’ve never seen you around.”

  The man pushed his body against Tim’s palm, rocking slightly so the pressure intensified, slackened, intensified again. Tim got the sense the man knew it must’ve revolted Tim—the fluctuating contact, the man’s skin weeping oily sweat like the residue on an ancient crankcase. Tim laughed as if this were all a joke, some weird misunderstanding; but there was a brittle glass-snap edge to his laughter that transformed it into a loony cackle.

  “I’m lost,” the man said. “Lost and . . . unwell. Just a night. I’ll leave in the morning. Please—feed me.”

  “Do you have a family?” Tim couldn’t explain why this seemed crucial: Was this man missed by anybody at all? “Is anyone looking for you?”

  The man only repeated himself: “Just one night. Food. Please.”

  Tim debated leaving him. He could bring food out, let him feed in the woods (his word choice puzzled him, yet it felt right: this wasn’t a man who wanted something to eat—this was a man who needed to feed). Tim could restrict the boys to quarters, even, eliminating all contact. Leaving the man out here went
against just about every tenet of the Hippocratic Oath, but an aspect of good doctoring was triage. You couldn’t save everyone. Sad fact of life. So you saved the youngest, or the ones with the best hope of survival.

  “Please.”

  The man offered the most wretched smile. Could Tim possibly leave him alone and starving a few feet outside the cabin? Could he live with that stain on his soul?

  No. He could figure this out. He must take every available precaution, but it could be managed. The man’s eerie thousand-yard smile persisted. Was it some kind of ailment Tim was unfamiliar with—a wasting-away disorder? Or just a commonplace malady run amok?

  “You’ll do exactly as I say,” he told the man in his no-BS GP voice.

  “Ugn,” the man said.

  “If you don’t, you can’t come inside.”

  The man’s body butted Tim’s palm—the hardness of bone through the thinnest veneer of flesh; to Tim, it felt like a plastic tarp draping a pile of shattered bricks.

  “Come on, then.”

  6

  TIM INSTRUCTED the man to lie on the moth-eaten chesterfield and retrieved the lamp from the porch.

  The man looked worse in the lamplight. His skin washed of pigment. Tim’s mind conjured a weird image: the last few sips at the bottom of a Slurpee cup, the color all sucked out, only the tasteless ice crystals left.

  The guy’s pants were inexplicably cinched with an orange extension cord. How much did he used to weigh? Tim turned the man’s T-shirt collar out. XL, the tag read. Lord. His clothing appeared to be draping a heap of jackstraws in the rough shape of a human being.

  The bottom of his shirt rode up. The skin of his stomach was folded over on itself, reminding Tim of a shar-pei dog. People who had undergone lap-band surgery followed by drastic weight loss looked much the same. They often opted for a dermal tightening procedure: a plastic surgeon hacked a sheet of skin the size of a dish towel off their midsection and stitched the loose ends back together.