The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  But this wasn’t a hernia. Logic told Max so. A hernia was just what his mind had feverishly cobbled together to excuse what he was seeing. A hernia didn’t move. A hernia didn’t pulsate like that.

  This thing . . .

  This thing . . .

  The loop became a pale ribbed tube roughly seven inches long. Thicker than a garden hose. Tapered slightly at its tip. It seemed to be made of millimeter-thick rings stacked atop one another. Each ring was gently rounded at its edge. Pearlescent beads squeezed from its surface, clinging to the tube like grains of sand to wet skin.

  “Get back,” Tim breathed. “Max, you get the hell back—”

  The tube paused. Max got the weirdest sense that it was presenting itself. The gaudiest belle at the debutantes’ ball. Appendages began to unglue themselves from its trunk. It reminded Max of the time he’d come upon a half-hatched bird struggling out of its egg, its wings pulling free of its body all stuck with webby strands of mucus . . . this looked much the same—or like a Swiss Army knife unfolding its many blades and attachments. These smaller appendages unkinked with the slow, showy grace of a contortionist; they unfurled tortuously in the cabin’s dim light, making gluey lip-smack noises. They looked like the fleshy leaves of desert plants—succulents, those plants were called. Max learned that in science class, too. The very tips of these appendages split in half, lolling open. Max saw tiny fishbone teeth studding each mouth—it was sickeningly beautiful.

  Peek-a-boo, Maxxie, I see you.

  There is an emotion that operates on a register above sheer terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength—a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak.

  Watching that lithe tube now hunt toward his Scoutmaster like a blind snake, Max hit that register.

  “Tim Tim TIM!”

  AS A doctor, Tim had seen plenty of things in human stomachs. Rubber bath plugs and toy cars and Baltic coins and wedding rings. Most of these could be purged using simple regurgitative or saline laxative procedures. The human form held few surprises for him anymore.

  But when that white tube threaded out of the incision and tip-tip-tipped toward him as if it were ascending an imaginary staircase, Tim squealed: a shocked piglike sound. He couldn’t get a grip on his sudden fear: it slipped through the safety bars of his mind and threaded—wormed—into the shadowy pockets where nightmares grew.

  His scalpel slashed wildly, severing the leading inch of the flickering white tube. The amputated nub fell between Tim’s feet. It writhed and leaked brown fluid. Its plantlike appendages studded with tiny mouths gawped open and shut.

  Tim’s arms pinwheeled madly as he tipped backward, landing awkwardly on his ass. The remainder of the tube sucked itself back into the incision like a strand of spaghetti going into a greedy child’s mouth, whipping and snapping and spraying stinking brown gouts.

  “Cover your mouth!” Tim screamed. “Don’t let any of it touch you!”

  Fists battering the door so hard that dust sifted down from the rafters. The boys’ massing voices, dominated by Kent’s.

  “Tim! Max! What’s going on? Open the door!”

  The stranger’s body rocked side to side. His feet slipped off the chesterfield and hit the floor with a brittle rattle.

  The tube now shot straight up out of the wound, rising in a monstrous ripple. A foot. Two feet. Three feet of oily tube weaved out of the man—the dead man, Tim prayed, the dead man who please God feels none of this—like a headless albino cobra out of an Indian fakir’s basket. It threshed like some obscene bullwhip, leaking brownish fluid. It stood quivering for a long instant, flicking bck and forth: it looked as if it was tasting the air, or hunting for smaller and weaker creatures within striking distance.

  Which was when the stranger woke up.

  His eyelids fluttered, then his eyes went wide—wider than ever should be possible. It was as if the man had awoken from a terrible dream only to find that those terrors were dwarfed by those in the waking world. He loosed a volley of piercing screams—they almost sounded like the snarls of a terrified dog.

  “Stay away, Max!” Tim yelled. “Stay back!”

  The stranger reached instinctively for the thing coming out of him—his hand died before reaching it, his fingers softening into a caress. His eyes were miserably bright and aware, bulging with pure shock and horror: the eyes of a little boy who’d come face-to-face with the nameless horror lurking under his bed.

  “Ug . . .” was the single syllable that came out of his mouth. A caveman’s grunt of disgust. “Uhg . . . ug . . .”

  “Tim!” Kent screamed. “Open this freakin’ door right now!”

  The tips of a boy’s head bobbed at the cabin’s lone high window, a pair of hands hooked on the sill—Ephraim’s hands; they had to be Eef’s—set to boost their owner up for a look inside.

  Tim realized he was watching a man die.

  He’d seen it before, of course—but Max hadn’t. Here was a man neither of them knew the first thing about. And now, in a way that was somehow obscene, Max would witness this man during the most private moment any human being would ever have: the moment of his death.

  The man’s eyes rolled back. He exhaled. Mercifully, his eyes closed.

  The tube dropped onto the man’s chest like a length of rope. It lay in a loose coil for a moment before twitching and crawling under the man’s shirt. Tim imagined it working up the man’s neck and into his mouth. Thrashing its way down his throat and back into his stomach to link up with the rest of itself. Eating its own tail—or its own head?

  Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Max reaching for the soldering iron—

  “Don’t!” Tim said. “Don’t you fucking dare, Max.”

  The tube wrapped around the man’s bird-thin neck, encircling it in a greasy ringlet. It elongated slightly, the many rings that constituted its body thinning with cruel, purposeful tension.

  Jesus Christ, it’s constricting, Tim’s mind yammered. It’s choking him.

  Tim tried to stand, but his legs were cramped with the sudden dump of lactic acid. He pulled himself forward. His hand slipped on the severed link of tube, which pulped under his palm like a rotten banana.

  The man’s face had turned the blue of a sun-bleached parking ticket. Tim was shocked that this thing—

  It’s a worm, the Undervoice said. A fucking WORM that’s what the fuck it is and you better wrap your head around that buddy, oh pal-o-mine

  —had the strength to do what it was doing.

  He dragged himself forward, scrabbling for the scalpel that had skittered under the chesterfield’s skirt. He hunted amid the dust bunnies and insect corpses while a thick, hopeless whimper built in his throat . . .

  Kent’s fists pounded on the door but that sound was far away now—a dream-noise not attached to the waking world. The tube flexed. The man’s neck bent at a sudden unnatural angle. His body stiffened before going limp.

  Oh no, Tim thought. His next thought was: Oh thank God.

  The tube released from the man’s throat, retreating once again into the incision. Tim grabbed at it through the man’s shirt. The thought of touching it directly brought on a mind-numbing revulsion. He pictured it feeling like a lubed length of nautical rope burning through his fingers. But when his hand closed around it, the tube was warm and pulsating and horribly smooth. Its flagellate body was already going limp as if it had a pinhole leak. He slashed the scalpel through the man’s shirt and through the thing’s body. It was like cutting through ripe stinking cheese. It took no effort at all.

  He saw inside the severed portion. There was no identifiable anatomy to the thing. No vertebrae or organs. It was full of loose brownish goo. Some massive carnivorous leech. The unsevered portion slid sluggishly back inside the wound. Its skin continued to weep those pearly p
ustules.

  The man’s stomach deflated. Brown filth bubbled out of the wound. Half-digested bits of chesterfield foam bobbed on its surface.

  Squinting, Max thought he saw something deeper inside. Two objects? Long and glinting, their angles man-made.

  Tim and Max stood breathing heavily in the dim light of the cabin. The hacked-off portion of the tube slid out of the vent in the man’s shirt, hitting the floor and wadding up like a huge tube sock. The brown goo had run over Tim’s fingers and down his knuckles like watery molasses. Overcome by instinctive revulsion, Tim wiped his fingers on his pants—and when even that closeness was too much, he unbuttoned them, yanked them down and off, wiped his hands on the fabric, and hurled the pants into the corner. He stood shivering in his underwear. His thighs were unbearably thin: knobbed sticks on a forest floor.

  “Jesus,” he said softly, then gave Max a sharp look. “Did you swallow any of that stuff? Get any in your mouth or eyes?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “No,” Max said. “I didn’t get anything in me.”

  “You kept the gauze over your mouth the whole time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay . . . okay, good.”

  Tim staggered to the table and drank scotch right out of the bottle.

  “If you drink whiskey, you’ll never get worms, Max.”

  Kent pounded on the door unrelentingly. “Tim! Tiiiiim!”

  The Scoutmaster stumbled to the sink and washed his hands. He did this for some time; the hard island water made it difficult to get a good lather going. His legs trembled like a newborn foal’s. When he was finished, his hands were a raw, nail-scraped red. Did it matter anymore? He shuffled into the bedroom, not speaking to Max, coming out with pants on.

  He kicked the chair away from the door—he had to kick three times; he seemed to lack the energy to do it properly—and flung the door open to catch Kent red-faced and fuming, his hand raised in midknock.

  “Get away from the fucking door, Kent.” Tim’s voice belonged to something recently dug from its grave. “Get your ass far, far away.”

  14

  TIM SAT at the fire and explained what he could. Most of it failed to make sense to him at all.

  “A worm?”

  “Yeah, Newton: a worm. Not a night crawler or something you’d dig out of your mom’s garden. A tapeworm.”

  Tim had experience with tapeworms. Any GP would. They were a common enough affliction. A person could pick them up anywhere.

  As easy as petting your dog. Providing your dog had rolled in a pile of shit earlier that day—as dogs tend to do—you could get microscopic particles of said shit on your fingers without even knowing. A thousand eggs stuck between the whorls of your fingertips. And after petting ole Spot, let’s say you ate a handful of popcorn and licked the salt off your fingers. Bingo-bango-bongo. You’ve got worms.

  At least once a month, he’d see a kid in the waiting room scratching his keister through the seat of his pants and say to himself: worms. One time a kid’s mother handed him an ice cream tub with one of her child’s chalky turds inside. “I thought you’d want a sample,” she’d told him solemnly. “For proof.”

  Tim would prescribe an oral remedy that demolished the tapeworm colony over a few days. Tapeworms were, at most, a nuisance.

  “He’s dead,” Tim said simply.

  Ephraim said: “From worms?”

  “No, Eef—from a worm.”

  Kent said: “How the hell can a tapeworm kill someone? I had worms when I was eight. I crapped the little buggers out.”

  “I know,” Tim said. “I gave your mother the medicine to do it.”

  This one wasn’t the size of any regular worm, Tim thought. He’d heard that beef tapeworms—the ones you can get from eating tainted meat—could get pretty big. Twenty, thirty feet. He recalled a case study where a doctor pulled one out of a cattle rancher’s leg. It had balled up between the layers of muscle. A lump the size of a baseball. The doctor made a slit into the muscle and pulled it out of the rancher’s leg like teasing out a piece of thread. The worm was incredibly skinny, like a strand of angel hair pasta. It snapped. The rest of the worm died inside the muscle and started to rot. The rancher almost lost his leg. But even so, the longest worms weren’t really that thick.

  Ephraim said: “What did it do to him?”

  What could Tim tell them? The truth? The truth—which even he wanted to avoid—was that the tapeworm had done what tapeworms do: eaten everything the man was supposed to eat. Like having a furnace turned up to full blast inside of you: everything you throw into it, it burns up. No fuel left for you. Tim thought about the blood-leeched whiteness of the man’s flesh and realized the worm may’ve consumed other things, too. His blood and enzymes. That would have shut down his kidneys and liver and other organs . . . some kind of vampire.

  But he couldn’t say this. It would terrify the boys. And yet he’d nearly told them anyway—sharing the terror seemed like the only way to defuse it, even minimally. But they were just kids. Even now, with the mainland and hospitals and help seeming so far away, Tim understood his obligation to these boys and to their parents. He must keep them safe. Scout’s honor.

  “Are you okay?” Newton asked. “You and Max? Did anything . . . y’know, touch you?”

  The boys stared at Tim, all probably wondering the same thing. Now, in the aftermath, Tim wondered why he’d done it. Not the operation itself, but involving Max. He’d told himself that he needed help—no surgeon operates alone. But now he was less sure.

  “Tim?” Kent said, his eyes holding a rook’s sheen. “Did . . . anything . . . touch . . . you?”

  Fuck off, you pushy bastard, the Undervoice spat.

  “I don’t think so,” Tim said. “It happened very fast.”

  Kent turned to Max. “You okay, man?”

  Max nodded, eyes not leaving the ground. When Tim saw this, a cold, hard stone lodged somewhere in his diaphragm.

  You made a mistake, Tim, HAL 9000 said. Don’t go compounding it.

  “What happened?” Ephraim said. “Tell us.”

  Tim nibbled his lip compulsively, as if his unconscious desire was to consume his own flesh. He caught himself, smiled queasily—his eyes shone in the firelight, hubbed by skin drawn tight over his sockets—and said: “I cut into the man’s stomach. The worm was in there. Nesting. It came out through the incision. It crawled up the man’s chest and wrapped around his neck. It . . .” He couldn’t stop swallowing. “Killed him.”

  “You cut him up?” Kent asked, incredulous.

  “I told you, it happened so fast.” Tim’s mouth was a dry wick, his spit all dried up. “It was like something out of a dream.”

  “Amazing,” said Kent. The sneering derision was unmistakable. He sounded very much like his policeman father.

  “I was scared,” Tim said. It came out as a whisper. He observed the boys’ faces clustered round the fire—all wearing matching looks of diminished respect—and wished he could take those honest words back.

  “Yeah, well, this is no time to be scared, Tim,” Kent said.

  Tim wanted to slap the mouthy little prick across the face, but his strength had utterly deserted him.

  Mosquitoes jigged around their heads. Why aren’t they landing on me? Tim wondered. His hands were clean, yet they still felt sticky with goo; he felt it in the creases of his fingers, in his nail beds—an antic, wriggling itch. He closed his eyes and envisioned that goo drooling out of the worm’s cleaved body. The firelight glowed against his eyelids, lighting up the capillaries that braided under his skin.

  “So it’s dead?” Newton said.

  Max nodded. “Scoutmaster Tim cut it in half.”

  “It was effectively dead before that,” Tim said. “Once the host is dead, the parasite dies, too.”

  “Why would it do that?” Newton asked. “Wrap around the man’s neck and kill him? That’s like a baby strangling its mom
or something.”

  Tim gave a helpless shrug. “Worms don’t have any brains to speak of. Worms shouldn’t grow to that size. But that’s what happened. We saw it. You’ve got to trust the evidence of your eyes.”

  Newton said: “Do we even know the guy’s name?”

  His words fell like an anvil. Suddenly the man’s name seemed critical. The idea of a man dying as a stranger surrounded by other strangers struck the boys as staggeringly tragic.

  “I want to go home,” Shelley said softly. “Take us home, Scoutmaster. Please.”

  In the firelight, Shelley’s face molded into a beseeching expression—mock-beseeching? The expression rang hollow, inorganic and somehow clumsy, like an animal trying to replicate human endeavor: a bear riding a bicycle or a monkey playing a milk-carton ukulele. In Tim’s fevered mind, it seemed like the boy was purposefully stirring fear within the group by asking for something beyond Tim’s capacity to deliver.

  “Tomorrow, Shelley. We can leave—”

  “Why not tonight, Tim?” Shelley said, adopting Kent’s derisive tone. “Why can’t you get us home tonight?”

  Because I’m too fucking tired, you awful little shit. Tired and hungry as hell.

  “Tomorrow. I promise.”

  Shelley stared at Tim—there was something insectile about his gaze. The wind gusted, blowing the flames slantways, and in that instant, Tim watched Shelley’s face liquefy like hot wax, the skin running, bones shifting and grinding like tectonic plates to arrange themselves into something infinitely more horrifying.

  Kent said: “I want to see it.”

  Tim said: “It?”

  “The worm, Tim. I want to see the worm.”

  “No.”

  Kent gave his Scoutmaster a sidelong look, eyeing him down his hawklike nose the way a sniper stares down a rifle’s sights.

  Without another word, Kent stood and strode off toward the cabin. Tim was dismayed to find he lacked the voice to stop him.