The Troop

by Nick Cutter

Silence. Then: “Really?”

  Ephraim sniffed. His sinuses were full of snot, like when he used to cry—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. When he’d seen that repairman blown off his cherry picker by a burst of electricity, maybe?

  “They had to get food. I was holding them back.”

  The air crackled, full of static. “Real friends wouldn’t leave you. Sorry, Eef, but that’s the truth.”

  “Would you have left, Shel?”

  Silence again. Then: “I’m not really a friend, Eef—am I?”

  Ephraim stared at his pointer finger. The milky crescent under the nail—the lunate, that part is called. How did he know that?

  “No, Shel. I guess you’re something else.”

  “How you feeling? You don’t sound too hot.”

  There was something ghastly, something monstrously and soulsuckingly awful about Ephraim’s situation: alone and full of things, his only confidant a brooding, toxic boy—Creepy Shel, the girls at school called him; the Creepazoid; the Toucher—on a crackly walkie-talkie. A sense of despondency settled into him, marrow-deep.

  “Eef, you still there?”

  “Uh.”

  “You hungry?”

  Oh, fuck YOU, Shel. Rage boiled up Ephraim’s gorge—then transmuted swiftly into a fear so profound that beads of sweat squeezed from the skin of his brow, pop-pop-pop like salty BBs. Hugging his arms tight across his body, chest hitching, Ephraim rocked side to side. His dearest wish was to be home, safe in bed, with his mother humming downstairs as she cooked: meatballs, sausage and peppers, or even lobster, which he thought of as sea bugs and totally loathed. But the surety and safety, the calm cadence of his mother’s voice—yes, he missed that terribly.

  The things. He felt them. Massing behind his eyeballs. Infesting his corneal vaults, twining round his ocular stems. Packing his sinuses, a wriggling white multitude, squeezing through his aqueous humors like tears. Spilling down his nose, down the back of his throat, million upon million gorging themselves, growing fat on him. Ephraim was crying now—yet he barely realized this.

  “I can help you, Eef.”

  Ephraim sucked back snot. “W-w-what?”

  “I said—are you listening? Really, really listening? I said I can help.”

  “H-how?”

  In the still tranquillity of the island woods, wind stirring gently in the treetops, Shelley began to speak. His words were soft, honeyed, washing over Ephraim like a tropical zephyr. It all made so much sense.

  Ephraim pulled his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket. His mother had bought it for him. It hadn’t been his birthday or Christmas—she got it for him just because. She never did that. Never enough money in the kitty. He’d sat on his bed, gazing at it in disbelief. He’d slipped his thumbnail into the crescent divot in each attachment and pulled them out. He’d loved the crisp snick they made clicking into place.

  “Are you doing it?” Shelley asked. His voice sounded far away, ignorable.

  “Yeah,” Ephraim snapped irritably. “Shut up, just shut up for a sec.”

  Carefully, he unfolded the can-opener blade. He sat poised, the wickedly curved blade hovering a quarter inch above his skin, a few inches from the cigarette burn. His skin seemed to jump and shiver—as if things were tunneling beneath his flesh like roaches under a blanket. Bastards.

  He dug the sharp silver sickle into the puffy flesh of his knuckles and drew it along the phalange bone on the back of his hand. The blade opened his skin up rather easily, leaving a dully sizzling line of pain. For a moment, the incision shone pale white like the flesh of a deboned trout. Next it turned pink before running red with blood.

  The anger racing through his veins dissipated with the appearance of that blood, and with it went some of the fear—just like Shelley said it would. Which was good. Very good.

  “Do you see it, Ephraim? You must see it, don’t you?”

  Ephraim watched the blood trickle down his hand. He squinted. He was positive he’d seen something wriggle as the can opener cleaved through his flesh: a flicker of squiggling white, just like Shelley promised he’d see.

  If he cut deeper next time, and faster, could he catch it? Pinch it, tug it out? It may be very big. Not as big as the one that had come out of the strange man’s gut but still, big.

  He’d have to twist it around his fingers like fishing line and pull very carefully. He imagined tugging on the end coming out of his hand and feeling a dim secondary tug down by his foot, where its head was rooted. Tricky work. If it snapped before he got its head out, it would just wriggle away and respawn. He had to get the head. Once he got it, he’d squeeze it between his thumb and finger and squeeze. He’d shiver with delight as it burst with a meaty sploosh.

  “Do it, Ephraim. Do it. Don’t be scared. There’s nothing to be scared of. You’re almost there.”

  The squirming in his ears was maddening. He unfolded the knife’s corkscrew attachment. He idly raised it to his ear, edging the tip into his ear canal. The cold metal tickled the sensitive hairs—the cilia, they were called; he remembered that from science class. Lunate, too, he realized—God bless science class.

  Ephraim imagined pushing the corkscrew into his ear and giving it a good solid twist or two, like he’d seen his mother do when opening bottles of cheap Spanish red. She’d drunk a lot of those after his father stepped out. He pictured pulling the corkscrew out and finding a thick white tube threaded round the coils. Gotcha. But there could be other things on those coils, too.

  Still, it might be worth it. The human brain didn’t actually have any sensory receptors—yet another thing he’d learned in science class. You could stab a naked brain with a steak knife and the person wouldn’t even feel it. They might piss their pants or forget their best friend’s name all of a sudden—but they wouldn’t feel any pain.

  Shelley’s voice, at one with the wind: “What would you rather, Eef? Put up with a little pain or get your eyes eaten out by worms? That’s what they do, you know—they save the eyes for last.”

  Ephraim took the corkscrew out of his ear. He folded it back inside the knife and set it on his lap. It sat there: a long red lozenge with the insignia of the Swiss cross on it. He figured a guy could tear himself apart pretty easily with such a knife. Use its every attachment to pinch and pull and pry his own raging flesh until he fell to pieces. It would hurt like hell, except for the brain, of course—but maybe it would be worth it.

  Ephraim sat under the spruces in the thinning light of afternoon. The walkie-talkie went silent. Run out of batteries? He already missed Shelley’s helpful voice.

  His fingers picked along his arms, plucking at the downy hairs there. A small, timid smile sat on his face. His gaze was set in a misty, vacant stare—as though his eyes themselves were not connected to his mind at all, but were just sitting loose in their sockets like a couple of green marbles.

  What would you rather?

  His twitching fingers set themselves to new purposes he could not discern. Slowly and without being fully aware of it, Ephraim reached again for the knife.

  30

  MAX AND Newton hiked nearly an hour before coming across a patch of wild blueberries. They clung to bushes that grew in the shade of a rocky parapet. Many berries were so withered they almost looked freeze-dried; many more had rotted to hunks of bluish fuzz. But a few bushes must have bloomed late in the season—these ones were clung with overripe but edible berries.

  The boys picked them with trembling fingers, not believing their luck. They gorged on berries until their lips and fingers were stained a pale blue.

  Afterward they sat with their backs against the parapet. Newton belched loudly and shot Max a slightly embarrassed glance. His shirt was stretched across his stomach. His belly button peered out from the tight fabric like a sightless eye.

  Newton pulled his knees up and encircled them with his arms. He closed his eyes and found himself back in the cabin where they had discovered Scoutmaster Tim. As he’d watched those wor
ms waver back and forth making those pfft! pfft! sounds, he’d been sure things would only get worse. The odds were very sharply aligned against them, weren’t they? But he remembered something his mother once said: The only way you’ll ever really know people is to see them in a crisis. People do the worst things to each other, Newton. Just the worst. Friendships, family, love and brotherhood—toss it all out the window . . .

  And though he’d desperately wished he were home, some deeper part of his psyche recognized that rescue was not an immediate probability. Something bad had happened and they were trapped in the middle of it. All they could do was hang tight until the adults figured things out.

  That was the biggest part of survival, Newton realized: maintaining a belief in the best-case scenario. It was when you started to believe the worst-case one that you were doomed.

  The boys gathered an extra pint of berries to take back to Ephraim. Max rolled them up in a kerchief and stashed them in Newton’s backpack.

  The land dipped gradually. The gentle downslope led into a narrow valley. Pine trees bent over facing precipices, casting long shadows. The lowering sun burnt without heat behind gunmetal clouds. A cold breeze skated through the natural wind tunnel to pebble their arms with gooseflesh.

  Newton crouched next to a lightning-cleaved tree. The stump was ringed with toadstools. Pale orange in color, each stem shaped like tiny moose antlers.

  “Coral mushrooms,” Newton said. “They’re safe to eat, but also a powerful laxative.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They give you the shits.”

  “Not poisonous?”

  “The antler-shaped ones are okay. Those do look like antlers, yeah?”

  Max squinted. “Yeah.”

  Newton picked a few and put them in his pack. “When we get back to camp, we can boil them. Make a tea. Then Kent can drink it. Clear him right out.”

  “You think?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  Max smiled. “You know what? You’re a real fun guy.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a joke Mr. Lowery told in science class. What did one mushroom say to the other? You’re a real fungi.”

  A slow smile broke over Newton’s face. “Oh, I get it. Fungi. Fun guy. That’s funny. That’s really, really funny.”

  Max frowned, and Newton immediately felt bad. It was just like him to suck all the funny out of a joke. He was a humor vampire. He thought about his Facebook persona, Alex Markson. Cool, handsome, suave Alex Markson. What Would Alex Markson Do—WWAMD? Not what Newton had just done, that’s for sure.

  Max said: “Mr. Walters told another joke that he got in trouble for.”

  “What?”

  “How do you make a hormone?”

  “How?”

  “You refuse to pay her.”

  Newton cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I. But Shelley repeated it to his mother. That got Mr. Walters in some deep shit for a few days.”

  Max squinted at an area about ten yards past the tree stump. A trail was tamped through the grass.

  “Animal trail,” he said.

  Only a foot wide, maybe less, so it couldn’t have been made by a very big animal. A fox or a marten or a porcupine.

  “How did animals even get on this island?” Max wondered aloud. “You figure someone built an ark?”

  “The Department of Game and Wildlife might have dropped them off,” Newton said. “They would have surveyed the land and, y’know, figured out what species would live best.”

  “How’s it feel carrying around that big-ass brain of yours all day?”

  Newton’s eyes darkened. “Don’t make fun of me, Max. Not now.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Yes, you were. You were starting up on it, anyway. Just quit it, okay?”

  Newton huffed back snot and raked the back of his hand over his nose. Was he about to cry? Max had never seen Newton cry. Not even after the most merciless teasing sessions. Not after an endless round of “Keepaway” with his Scout beret—a game that often ended out of pure apathy: someone would simply drop Newton’s beret and the jeering circle would dissolve, leaving Newton to grope pink-faced in the dirt for his hat.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Max.” Newton’s eyes blazed from the reddened flesh of his sockets. “Not now.”

  Max took a step back as if Newton had physically struck him. He held his hands out in a penitent and pleading gesture.

  “Really, Newt, I wasn’t—”

  The following words came out of Newton in a hot rush, like a bottle of soda that had been shaken so hard and for so long that the cap had finally blown off.

  “I like weird stuff, okay? So what? And I’m fat. I know that, obviously. I wish I wasn’t but it’s not like I eat like a pig. I mean, yeah, I like ice cream but so do lots of guys. Mom says it’s glandular. A slow metabolism. She even ordered me a pack of Deal-A-Meal cards from that guy on TV who wears those glittery short-shorts.”

  Max was stunned. Newton had never spoken this way to him—to anyone, as far as he knew.

  “You know what’s hilarious?” Newt said. “I was skinny as a baby. Like, I-could’ve-died skinny. I couldn’t put on weight. A total shrimp. I slipped four percentiles, Mom said. The pediatrician told her to feed me butter—pure warm butter.”

  Max wanted to apologize. To say, more than anything, that it wasn’t really Newton’s fault. Max and the other boys didn’t pick on him because they despised him . . . it was more a case of boys needing someone to single out. A fatted calf to sacrifice. They had to turn someone into that bottom rung on the ladder if only so they didn’t have to occupy it themselves. Boys weren’t very inventive, either. The simplest flaw would do. A lisp. An overbite. Dental braces. Being fat. Add to it a few glaring idiosyncrasies—such as being a know-it-all bookworm who was fascinated with mushrooms—and presto! One made-to-order sacrificial lamb.

  Max gave Newt a look of cautious empathy. “Sorry, okay? I wasn’t trying to, like, be a shithead or anything.”

  Newton set his jaw off-kilter and touched his lip to his nose. “Okay. Forget it. It was nothing.”

  THE TRAP proved a lot harder to build than they had figured.

  Newton had found a diagram for a “sapling spring snare” in his field book. He claimed to have built one in his backyard—Scoutmaster Tim had come over and certified it, awarding Newton his Bushcraft badge.

  But the saplings in his backyard were limber. The trees edging the game trail were old or dead: they snapped as soon as the boys bent them. When they finally found one that might do and tried to bow it down—the “spring” part of the trap—the natural tension of the wood was simply too much.

  “This might make an okay wolf trap,” Newton said with a shake of his head. “But a small animal would get catapulted into the sky.”

  They retired to the bluffs overlooking the game run. They sat with their feet dangling over the bluffs. The air smelled of creosote. The clouds lowered like a gray curtain coming down.

  Newton said: “You don’t feel sick, do you?”

  Max said: “I don’t know what sick should feel like.”

  “Hungry.”

  “Well, okay yeah, I am hungry.”

  “Yeah,” said Newton, “but not hungry-hungry, right?”

  “I guess not. I guess it’s bearable.”

  Newton looked relieved. “Good. I mean if we were really that hungry—that crazy—we’d know it . . . right?”

  Max rubbed his chin, wondering if Ephraim’s knuckles would leave a bruise—wondering, more gloomily, if he’d live long enough for that bruise to heal. He gave no answer to Newt’s question. What was there to say? If that particular hunger fell upon them, crazy hunger, nothing would really matter anymore. It’d be far too late.

  Night birds sang in the trees: haunting, melancholy notes. Newton’s foot went to sleep. He stood to walk the tingles out of it, wandering to the edge of the valley where the soil gave way to
a flat expanse of shale. Gentle waves slapped the shore. The water was the gray of a dead tooth, liquefying into a sky of that same unvarying gray.

  Newton squinted into a tide pool. Something popped up on its placid surface. Whatever it was, it had the coloring of an exotic bird’s egg. It vanished again.

  “Max! Come over here.”

  They peered down. Their breath was trapped expectantly in their lungs. There—whatever it was popped up again. Bubbles burst all around it. Then it was gone.

  “It’s a sea turtle,” Newton said.

  THEY CREPT down to the shore. The tide pool was hemmed by honeycombed rock. How had the turtle gotten in? Maybe there was a gap in the rocks underwater. More likely it had gotten carried in with the high tide and was trapped until the tide came in again.

  “Could we eat it?” Max said. His voice was raspy with excitement.

  “We could.” Newton’s voice held the same anxious rasp. Something about the idea of meat—even turtle meat—was insanely appealing.

  They doffed their boots and socks and rolled their pant legs up past their knees. A light wind scalloped the water, spitting salt water at their naked legs.

  The tide pool sloped steeply to a bottom of indeterminate depth. The turtle’s shell was the size of a serving platter—they could just make out its contours when the turtle poked itself above the surface. Its head was a vibrant yellow shaded with dark octagon-shaped markings. Its eyes were dark like a bird’s eyes. It had a wise and thoughtful look about it, which was pretty typical of turtles.

  The boys patted their knives in their pockets. Max had a Swiss Army knife. Newton had a frame-lock Gerber with a three-inch blade.

  “How should we do it?” Newton whispered with a giddy, queasy smile.

  “We have to do it fast. Grab it and drag it out and kill it, I guess. Fast as we can.”

  “Do they bite?”

  “I don’t know. Do they?”

  Newton pursed his lips. “It might if we aren’t careful.”

  They waded gingerly into the pool. The water was so cold it sapped the air from their lungs. The water rose to the nubs of their kneecaps.

  The turtle was a darker shape in the already dark water. It swung around lazily, unconcerned. As it rose up the boys caught sight of its shell: a mellow green patina flecked with streaks of magenta. Strands of sea moss drifted off it like streamers on a parade float.