The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  His gaze kept drifting to those hummocks. They looked like half-submerged rodents—giant mole rats suckled on plutonium-enriched water that had somehow quadrupled their normal size. They dotted the marsh like hairy icebergs, the worst parts hidden underwater. Newton pictured what might lurk below the surface: long, narrow faces and thin black lips studded with sharp rat-teeth that protruded at busted-glass angles . . . ringed pink tails sweeping through the filthy water waiting to wrap around an unsuspecting ankle.

  They came upon a rotted tree stump. Newton dug his field book out, riffled through the pages, and skimmed a passage. He grabbed a flap of bark hanging loosely from the stump and pried it back. It snapped with a puff of dust. The boys knelt and stared inside. Things wriggled in the loose wood pulp. They wriggled just like worms.

  “Grubs,” Newton anounced. He opened his book and read: “Witchetty grubs are the large, white, wood-eating larvae of moths.”

  The grubs were a speckled white with a wrinkled exterior that resembled the skin of an apple that had sat in the fruit bowl too long. Their bodies were as big as a toddler’s finger and crimped like beads on a necklace. Their back ends tapered to a pooched orifice. They moved in frantic wriggling paroxysms: they resembled creatures in a perpetual state of being born.

  “The raw witchetty grub tastes like almonds,“ Newton read. “When cooked, the skin becomes crisp like roast chicken, while the inside becomes light yellow like a fried egg.”

  Max blanched. “Jesus. You’re kidding, right?”

  “Didn’t I say that whatever we ate, it’d be weird?”

  “Yeah, but . . . you can’t eat a grub, man,” Max replied. “You’d be depriving that young moth of its life goal of bashing into a lightbulb all night.”

  Newton plucked one out of the stump. It writhed in his palm like a section of intestinal tract trying to pass a stubborn lump of food.

  Max said: “I dare you. Double dog, man.”

  Newton popped it into his mouth. Pulped between Newton’s molars, the grub made an audible squelch. Watery pus-colored fluid seeped between his teeth.

  “I can’t believe you just did that,” Ephraim said, awestruck.

  “Ooh,” Newton gagged. “Bitter. It’s not almondy!” He dropkicked the book. It sailed across the marsh, pages fluttering like the wings of a crippled bird. “It’s not almondy at all!”

  Ephraim and Max doubled over laughing. Newton refused to spit it out—he seemed to hold the grub’s revolting taste against it. He chewed with dour discipline, clenching his fists as he swallowed.

  “Wait a sec,” Max said, nervousness replacing mirth. “Did you say it tasted like bitter almonds? Isn’t that like, poison?”

  Newton rolled his eyes. A bit of the grub was still stuck to his lip. It looked like a bleached shred of tomato skin. “No, that’s cyanide. This didn’t taste like almonds at all. It tasted like bitter . . . shit. A bitter nugget of shit.”

  “How do you know what shit tastes like?” said Ephraim, swiping a tear off his cheek.

  “How about you shut up,” Newton said, stooping to retrieve his field book. “At least I’m trying, Eef.” He held his arms out, an all-encompassing gesture. “You see a Burger King out here?”

  27

  SHELLEY WAITED until the boys had humped around the island’s southern breakwater before starting his games in earnest.

  He’d hid in the high brush east of the cabin. The boys called his name without much gusto. The sun slanted through a bank of silvery knife-blade clouds, hitting his skin and buzzing unpleasantly—Shelley didn’t care for the sun. His favorite time of day was twilight, that gray interregnum where the shadows drew long.

  His fingers fretted with his lip, which Kent had split. Squeezing the wound, the cleaved flesh only semi-healed. Blood squirted, running down his knuckles. Shelley didn’t feel it much at all.

  Newton’s voice had drifted over to him. “Should we go anyway?”

  Yes, thought Shelley, playing with the blood. Just go. Leave, now. Enjoy your hike.

  He’d followed Newton, Max, and Eef to the south shore, skulking through the brush on the low side of the trail. He disguised his presence well—Shelley was a natural chameleon; it was one of his more undervalued talents.

  He was intrigued by Newton’s belly and back flab. It spilled over the waist of his pants like soft-serve ice cream over the edges of a cone. He wondered how it would look if the fat boy got worms. He imagined the buttery folds of skin lapping up on themselves like those ugly-looking dogs—what were they called? Shar-peis. Newton would have a shar-pei body. Inside all those yards of empty skin, his bones would be left to rattle around like pennies in a jar. Boy, that would be something to see.

  Once the boys were gone he backtracked to the cabin. He was excited. Oh so excited. It took events of precipitous magnitude to pierce the Teflon plating surrounding Shelley’s emotional core and make him feel much of anything.

  But there was much to hold his interest today.

  The dead men in the wrecked cabin. The ships offshore and the black helicopter that swept occasionally overhead. The sheer fact that there was nobody of consequential authority around for miles. He didn’t have to wear his mask so tightly. He could loosen the straps and let the things underneath twist their way into the light.

  But mostly there was Kent Jenks—Johnny Football, Mr. Big Shot, the uncrowned king of North Point—locked up in the root cellar.

  Oh my God, the fun they were going to have.

  The last time Shelley could recall feeling this level of elation was the afternoon he’d killed Trixy, the kitten his mother adopted after finding her under their porch.

  Shelley had been killing things for a while by then—although he didn’t think of it as killing, per se. Other creatures, even people, were empty vessels. Of course, not physically empty: all living things were packed full of guts and bones and blood that leapt giddily into the air when it was released from a vein. But none of them had an essential . . . well, essence. They were just ambulatory sacks of skin. That was really it. Shelley honestly felt no more remorse tearing another living thing apart than he would ripping the limbs off a wooden marionette.

  He’d gotten started with bugs. He’d found these two big stag beetles entangled in a territorial battle in the crotch of the backyard maple. He’d gathered them up and, after some preparation, pulled most of their legs and antennae off—he used his mother’s tweezers for this delicate work, the same ones she plucked her eyebrows with—and put them in a matchbox. He was surprised and delighted to discover that beetles were cannibals: when he’d opened the box a few days later, he found one of them flipped helplessly on its back and the other one devouring its gooey insides.

  He’d promptly filled the matchbox with his mother’s nail polish remover and lit it with a match. The beetles’ organs popped and crackled inside their black exoskeletons as they roasted.

  He soon graduated to bigger, more impressive conquests. He caught deer mice in sticky traps and painted liquid Borax onto their eyeballs with a Q-tip—it was mesmerizing to watch their black eyes shrivel and sputter like fat in a fire.

  Shelley found that animals adjusted to their physical diminishments much better than people. If you burned a man’s eyes out, he would shriek and bleat, of course, and he’d need a cane and a Seeing-Eye dog the rest of his moaning, miserable days. A mouse just stumbled around in pain for a few minutes, pawed at its cored-out eye sockets, squeaked and twitched its nose, and carried on with what it was doing before. Animals were incredibly flexible that way.

  Shelley had gone to work on Trixy during an evening when his parents were off at a silent auction for their church. He was at the kitchen table eating a Creamsicle. Trixy twined round his socked feet, brushing against his calves.

  “Hello, kitty-kitty.”

  She hopped up on his lap. Her little claws pierced his sweatpants and dug lightly into his thighs. Shelley chewed on the Popsicle stick while petting the kitten. She arched her back to accep
t his soft strokes. Her fur was downy like the hair on a baby’s head. He could feel her small, thin bones beneath her coat.

  He carried her upstairs. She was purring quite loudly—such big, satisfied noises from such a small thing. Her body was a power plant, kicking off a lot of heat. Shelley’s mother hadn’t had her spayed yet.

  He went into the bathroom and locked the door. He put Trixy on the toilet lid, where she kneaded the macramé seat cover. His mom said this was a sign of separation anxiety—kittens would knead their mothers’ bellies to stimulate milk, so they could nurse. But kittens who’d been separated too early kneaded anything. Sweaters and sofa cushions and toilet seats—as if any of those had the ability to squirt milk. They were confused, according to Shelley’s mother. A real heartbreaker, she said. Shelley just nodded as if he felt the same way, too. He found that if you nodded—slowly, deeply, your chin almost touching your chest to indicate sincerity—people would think you shared their feelings. It was one of the many tricks he’d learned in order to blend in; hiding in plain sight was a beneficial skill.

  Shelley plugged the bathtub drain and ran the water, glancing back to the toilet. Trixy was still there, purring. Good. As the tub filled, his hand crept under the elasticized hem of his sweats to toy absently with his privates. He wasn’t surprised to find that he was erect—a throbbing, urgent hardness that seemed to drain the blood out of his arms and legs and focus it all on his penis. He stood with his mouth unhinged, eyes alight with unspeakable excitement, an oily sweat breaking out over his long, milky body.

  He opened the cabinet under the sink and donned the long plastic gloves draped over a canister of Ajax: his mother’s cleaning gloves. His fingertips went cold while the rest of him burnt with a steady eager heat.

  He sat Trixy on the edge of the tub. The kitten stared up at him with round yellow-edged eyes as her paws slipped for purchase on the porcelain. Another thing about animals: they had no conception that the creatures who fed them might be the same ones who could do them such great harm.

  Scout Law number eight: A Scout is a friend to animals . . .

  Shelley grabbed Trixy by her scruff and plunged her into the water.

  It was as if raw electrical current had been pumped into Trixy’s body: her limbs went rigid and scrabbled against the porcelain. She almost screwed out of his grip, but he grabbed her throat—his hand manacled easily around the furry drainpipe of her neck—and shoved her back down.

  After twenty seconds, her struggles lessened. After about a minute, her struggles ceased. Shelley gave it another few seconds just to be certain.

  He let go of her motionless body. A dry, dusty taste filled his mouth—it was like he’d swallowed a mouthful of the chalk they spread into white lines on a baseball diamond. But already the elation was subsiding. It was over so fast. The kitten had almost no fight in her at a—

  Trixy shot straight up out of the water. She looked so damn scraggly with her fur soaked and matted to her skin. Shelley almost laughed. Trixy yowled and scrabbled up the sloped side of the bathtub. Shelley reached in and lovingly collected her four little legs into a bundle, clasping them all in one hand. She bit feebly at his gloves with her needle teeth. She let out a desperate reeeeeooowl and beheld him with tragically confused eyes.

  He dunked her under the water. His face was expressionless, but the sweat had now soaked through his shirt. His penis was painfully hard and he felt the excruciating yet somehow pleasant need to urinate.

  He pulled Trixy out of the tub. Her head lolled comically between her shoulder blades. He dunked her once more, absentmindedly, the way an old biddy dips her bag of Earl Grey in a teacup.

  She may still be alive, he thought. He considered letting her live. That could be interesting. Shelley figured Trixy might act like Johnnie Ritson, who as a boy had swum out beyond the shore markers and nearly drowned. Now Timmy spent his days in an old rocker in front of the Hasty convenience store saying “Hi! Hi! Hi!” to everything: customers, random passersby, delivery trucks, pigeons, the clear blue sky. One time Shelley put a tack on Timmy’s rocker when he was using the toilet, waiting until nobody was watching. Timmy’s reaction amazed and amused him: he sat heavily, gulping from a can of Yoo-hoo, just rocking and rocking, blabbing “Hi! Hi! Hi!” He didn’t register it at all. Shelley had lingered, intrigued, and when Timmy got up he’d seen the brass head of the tack flush with Timmy’s wide, flat ass, the surrounding fabric dark with blood.

  Unfortunately, Shelley figured a stumblebum kitten might raise his mother’s eyebrows. The safest option was the one that most compelled him, anyway.

  When it was done, Shelley drained the tub and made sure everything was dried with a bath towel from the rack. He draped the plastic gloves back over the Ajax. Then he went downstairs and got an orange trash sack and put Trixy inside.

  Before Trixy, Shelley had never killed anything that might be missed. Ultimately, he decided to burn her. He stuffed her in the pellet stove in the basement. Trixy went up in a burst of whiteness behind the grate. Shelley was fleetingly concerned that the smell of burnt fur would rise through the vents to permeate the house, but any suspicious odors were well gone by the time his parents got home.

  It was here that Shelley had an epiphany: proper disposal was its own alibi. The kitten was gone. It wasn’t necessarily dead. It may have run away. Cats did it all the time. Cats were stupid and ungrateful.

  When Trixy disappeared, his mother was in a state. She mooned around the house, gazing forlornly into the backyard—which made life harder for Shelley, as he conducted business in the yard and didn’t want his mom to see him at work. “Isn’t it awful about Trixy?” she asked. “The poor thing.” Shelley nodded deeply, sincerely, chin touching his chest. Every so often he’d catch his mother looking at him—not accusingly, exactly, but . . . questioningly. As if the son she’d given birth to had been poached in the night, replaced with an exact physical duplicate. This duplicate spoke in her son’s voice and aped his intellect and abilities, but there was something worrisome about this new one. He—it?—was a step outside of humankind, looking in. Did it like what it saw?

  But if his mother indeed felt this, she’d never given voice to it. Parents held an intrinsic need to believe in the essential goodness of their offspring—their kids were a direct reflection of themselves, after all.

  A week after murdering Trixy, Shelley lay in bed, a wedge of cold moonlight slanting through the curtains to plate his pasty, wasplike face. He replayed the scene in his head: Trixy, waterlogged and wild-eyed, rocketing from the tub. It brought the tingle back to his privates—the bedsheet tented at his crotch—but the sensation was pitifully diminished, a watery imitation of that galvanic rush. Shelley pondered: if he’d felt that rush with something so pathetic as a kitten, imagine how it’d feel with something bigger, stronger, more intelligent. The risk would only intensify the euphoria, wouldn’t it?

  SHELLEY WALKED past the remains of the campfire and cut around the side of the cabin to the cellar. He crouched and tapped gently on the cellar door.

  “Kent,” he called in a singsong voice. “Oh Keeeeennnn-tah.”

  Something clawed up the steps at the sound of his voice—it sounded like a huge sightless crab. There came the hollow thip of bone on wood. Dust sifted down from the hinges. Shelley inhaled a gust of sweet air that stunk of rotted honeycomb. For an instant, Shelley saw a creature between the cellar slats: a thing composed of famished angles and horrible bone, the raw outcroppings of its face standing out in razored points.

  Fingers slipped through the gap between the doors. They did not look like anything that ought to be attached to a human being: shockingly spindly and so awfully withered, like ancient carrots that had been left in a cold, dark fridge so long that they’d lost their pigment. None of them had fingernails—just bloody sickles rimmed by shreds of torn cuticle. Shelley assumed Kent had eaten them, one after another. This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home . . .

  “I�
��m so hungry.”

  The voice was ancient, too. Shelley pictured an ineffably old man-boy crouched on the stairs: a wrinkled horror with snowy hair and incredibly ancient eyes, the corneas gone a sickly yellow like a cat’s eyes—like Trixy’s eyes?

  Shelley said: “You’re still hungry? Even after you ate all our food?” He tsked. “Do you think I should let you out?”

  “I don’t know,” Kent said, sounding confused. A sulky child.

  “I think you deserve to be there. Don’t you think, Kent? You made us lock the Scoutmaster up. So we locked you up. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

  Silence.

  “I asked you a question. Isn’t it fair, Kent?”

  “Yes,” Kent said in a petulant tone.

  “Tit for tat, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Scoutmaster’s dead.”

  Silence again.

  “Whose fault is that, Kent?”

  The silence persisted.

  “Hey!” Shelley chirped sunnily. “Remember the helicopter? It dropped a care package. Food. Juicy meat and buttery bread and candy and—”

  “Please.”

  Shelley had never heard a word wept before. But that’s what Kent had done. He’d actually wept the word please.

  “Please what, Kent?”

  “Please . . . feed me.”

  “I could. But first, Kent, you need to answer my question. I’ll ask again: Whose fault is it that the Scoutmaster is dead?”

  “It’s . . . it’s my fault. It’s all my fault. But I didn’t mean— I never meant to—”

  “It doesn’t matter what you meant, Kent. It only matters what happened.” Shelley’s voice was silky soft. “So think about this. He died very badly. A tree fell on his head, you know. His skull got crushed like an eggshell. So yes, Kent, it’s really, truly, totally all your fault.”

  Faint, beautiful weeping. Shelley drank up the sound the way a succulent plant drinks up the sunlight. His jaws were strangely elongated, the lower part a half-inch longer than the upper to reveal a wet ridge of teeth. He looked like a salmon in rut.