The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  He’d die totally alone.

  In that moment, he’d thought: Do I really want that, to die alone? Where were Max and Newt? It was nearly dark by then and they’d promised to return. Instead they’d abandoned him. Max, his best friend, had left him alone. Friends until the end? Bullshit. Ephraim only had one friend left in the whole world.

  He’d gripped it—the tips of his fingers pincering the hateful thing. For an instant it had thrashed fretfully between his fingertips . . . Ephraim was pretty sure, anyway. But he’d pulled too quickly. It squirted through his fingers. He’d reached again, desperately. Gone. He’d had his opportunity and lost it. It was safe inside him again.

  “It gob abay, Shel,” Ephraim said with despondent, childlike petulancy—marble-mouthing his words on account of the warm syrup in his mouth.

  “You have to keep trying. Or are you weak . . . a sucky-baby, like everyone says?”

  What? Who’d have the balls to—nobody said that. Did they? He pictured them on the school yard—a gaggle of boys casting glances over their shoulders, sneering and laughing. He saw Max laughing at him. Rage tightened the flesh of his forehead. Something thorny and superheated surged against his skull, threatening to shatter through.

  “I hear it all the time, friend. At school, behind the utility shed where the big boys smoke cigarettes. They say Ephraim Elliot acts tough, but he’s a pussy. He’s a cuckoo—his mommy makes him see a shrink because his head’s all messed up . . .”

  Ephraim’s gaze fell upon his stomach. His shirt had ridden up to expose a slip of taut flesh. It rippled as something surged beneath it.

  Maddening, mocking, playing peek-a-boo.

  Ephraim picked the knife up. The blade was still keen.

  How deep could he cut?

  It all depended. How deep did his enemy lie?

  What would you rather?

  * * *

  From Troop 52:

  Legacy of the Modified Hydatid

  (AS PUBLISHED IN GQ MAGAZINE) BY CHRIS PACKER:

  “BIG” JEFF JENKS, as the locals call him, isn’t so big anymore.

  The events on Falstaff Island shrunk him. He admits as much himself—and from a man like Jenks, still possessed of a larger-than-life self-image, this is a big admission indeed.

  “I stopped eating for a while there,” he tells me as we take a spin in his cruiser down the sedate streets of North Point. “The appetite just wasn’t there. Used to be before a shift I’d head down to Sparky’s Diner and mow through their breakfast platter: eggs, rashers of bacon, pancakes, toast, plenty of coffee. And this was after my wife had made breakfast at home.”

  Nowadays Jenks’s frame might be charitably described as utilitarian—although the word threadbare comes to mind. He floats inside his old police uniform. His arms sticking out of the XXL shirtsleeves put me in the mind of a child trying on his father’s clothing. When he leans over to hawk phlegm out the window I see the fresh holes he’s punched into his old belt so that it cinches his dwarfed waistline.

  “It was the toughest thing I ever had to do,” he says distantly. “Just sit on my hands and wait. That’s not me, right? When something needs doing I’d always stepped up to get it done. Around here my word is law. But now here were these MPs and high army muckety-mucks saying I couldn’t go get my own damn kid.” He lapses into silence before saying: “My love can’t save him. I remember thinking that. I think all of us—the parents, y’know?—were thinking the same. All the love in your body, every ounce of will you possess . . . matters nothing at all.”

  Though he admits the decision to steal Calvin Walmack’s boat was a foolish one, he stands by it.

  “You’re telling me that most every responsible, loving father on God’s green acre wouldn’t have done the same? Now what the military won’t admit and never will, I’ll bet, is that those MPs beat me and Reggie pretty bad after they ran us down.”

  He pulls up his shirt to show me a long roping scar running up his hips to the bottom of his rib cage.

  “They beat me so hard with batons that they busted the skin wide open. Right there on the deck of the boat. They didn’t say nothing while they were at it, either. Just a long, silent beating. Reg got it just about as bad. We didn’t think to fight back. The MPs all had guns.” His voice drops to an agonized whisper. “Fact is, I’d never been beat anything near that. Not by anyone, ever. I was always the one doling that kind of stuff out . . . but only if you forced my hand.”

  We drive up rows of old Cape Cods, their exteriors permanently whitened by the salt spray that blows over the bluffs. It’s a beautiful town. Anne of Green Gables pretty. The sort of place Norman Rockwell would paint.

  “The official report is, nobody knows exactly what happened to my son,” Jenks says. “But I’ll tell you, that boy was a survivor. That’s the way I raised him. You can’t be Jeff Jenks’s kid and not be a tough sonofabitch. But then, what you’re talking about—the enemy, I guess you’d call it. Them. I mean, how can you fight something like that?”

  He drums his fingers on the wheel. A big vein ticks up the side of his neck.

  “They never found him. Never could bring my son’s body home for us to bury. Just to give me and my wife some closure, right? Kent’s still technically considered ‘missing’—that’s how it is in the books. And I’ll tell you, man, missing can be worse than dead. Missing is like a book with the last few pages torn out or a movie missing the final reel. Missing means you’ll never really know how it ends.”

  He looks as though he might break down but pulls himself back together.

  “So I guess I’ll never really know,” he says after a while. “There’s not a lot of evidence to go by, is there? But I’ll tell you this: my boy wouldn’t go down without a fight. I’d bet everything I own on that.”

  * * *

  32

  KENT WAS a beast. He could kill at will.

  For a while there, he’d thought differently. When the other boys had left him in the cellar—abandoned him like a whipped dog—he’d been scared. So, so scared.

  He’d felt his strength seeping away like the air from a leaky tire.

  The things that lived in him now were awesomely hungry.

  He knew they were there. He’d lain on the dirt floor and felt them sliding around inside him. A soft whisper came to his ears: a million snakes slithering across frictionless sand.

  The thought occurred to him: he could die here. It didn’t quite seem possible. He was only fourteen. Didn’t God look out for drunks and children? That’s what his father always said.

  At some point, Shelley had come to the cellar doors to feed him. The peanut brittle did nothing to kill his appetite. But whatever Shelley had given him next—tough and rubbery on the exterior, bursting with warm softness within—now that made him feel great.

  Still, Shelley had been a bad boy. Shelley had promised meat. And Kent would soon get what he was owed.

  Fresh energy percolated through him. His blood zitzed with adrenaline. He felt as though he’d eaten a raw steak—Shelley should have brought me steak; you should never go back on your word, Shelley you scumbag—as he inhaled the scent of blood that was not his own.

  Kent was powerful. Oh yes.

  He stood in the cellar, shoulders hunched. He could feel new bones growing up his back. They clawed through muscle and tendon before breaking through the skin on both shoulders. It was perfectly painless: he imagined this was what a caterpillar felt like when it emerged from its chrysalis as a beautiful butterfly.

  Brand-new strength shot through him. Pounds of fresh muscle were slabbed onto his arms and legs. His chest cracked apart and widened as his shoulders grew broader and thicker. He did not feel pain or fear anymore. Was this how a superhero felt—or a god? Was that what he was now?

  Weak light streamed through chinks in the floor, falling across his new contours. His body was a mass of fast-twitch muscle fibers and vein-riven flesh. He laughed: a low baritone. He could smash through the cellar door if he
wanted to. He could find the boys who’d locked him up and tear their bodies apart like paper dolls. Find Ephraim, son of the no-good jailbird, and crush his skull to splinters.

  Perhaps he would. Or perhaps he would be merciful.

  But for now he’d wait. They would see him soon enough. Although their tepid hearts might burst at the sight of him.

  WHEN THE other boys didn’t return by nightfall, Shelley decided to kill Kent.

  That was the thing about spinning so many plates—inevitably, one would topple off the pole. But the prospect of watching those plates shatter excited Shelley enormously.

  He’d found a dead sheepshead on the beach. It had washed in with the afternoon tide, rotted and picked at by sunfish. He skewered it on a sharpened stick and carried it back to the campfire.

  It was near dark when he stole around to the cellar with the dead fish. His breath came heavily, like a moose in rut. A dank musk dumped out of Shelley’s pores: sour adrenaline mixed with something else, something fouler.

  Shelley jimmied the stick loose from the cellar doors and flung them open. The granular light of dusk sifted down the steps. Shadows twisted on the warped wood. Shelley took a cautious step forward, hunting for movement in the gloom.

  “Kent?”

  Shelley’s prey dragged himself up the steps tortuously, a ghoul crawling out of a shattered coffin. For an instant, Shelley thought he had no skin: it was just a shambling, jerking Kent-skeleton advancing upon him. As he drew closer, Shelley realized that the thinnest stretching of skin still clad Kent’s wasted frame. He was covered in bulging boils: they looked like halved golf balls under his flesh. His eyes were cored sockets: Shelley was amazed they hadn’t fallen out of his head to dangle by their glistening ocular stalks . . .

  . . . Kent rose from the cellar, exultant. The newly crowned king. His body shone like rippled steel in the moonlight. Power and strength coursed through him. He was unstoppable. He came slowly, savoring it. His feet echoed on the steps like distant thunder. He curled his hands into fists and watched heatless lightning crackle and pop between his knuckles. He could kill a man with a look—with a simple thought. He had eaten the godhead and taken its power . . .

  . . . Shelley stepped back in wonderment. He couldn’t believe that Kent was still able to move. The boy’s eyes were yellow and diseased. His lips had receded into the gauntness of his face. He shuffled out of the cellar with sickening animation, a gleeful marionette in the hands of a spastic puppeteer. The fleshless pinworms that were his lips skinned back to disclose a dizzying grotesquerie: his gums had been eaten back from his teeth, and all but one—his left front incisor—had loosened and fallen from their gum beds; yet they remained connected by Kent’s braces, gray teeth linked like charms on a gruesome bracelet, clicking and clacking in the dark vault of his mouth, all hanging by that one tenacious tooth . . . which, as Shelley watched, slid from Kent’s gums with a slick sucking sound, a bracelet of teeth bouncing over his lips, his chin, tumbling to the cellar steps. Kent stepped on them, oblivious to his own teeth shattering like ribbon candy.

  “Wha arr ooo loogin aaa?” the boy-thing croaked.

  What are you looking at?

  “Almost nothing,” Shelley said in a tone of pure awe.

  The Kent-thing held out its driftwood arms, fleshless fingers outstretched toward the rotted meat in Shelley’s hands . . .

  . . . The weakling cowered at the sight of him! Shelley had glimpsed Kent’s newfound beauty and power and he was quailing in fear. As it should be. This puling wretch, Shelley, held out an offering with one quaking hand. A hunk of braised meat dripping with juices. Perhaps Kent would be merciful. Perhaps Shelley would be spared . . .

  . . . Shelley led the Kent-thing past the fire. The thing shambled awkwardly, staggering and collapsing and dragging itself up. It made the sucky-drooling sounds of a revolting starved infant. Saliva dripped from its flapping gums to slick its filthy Scout uniform. Moonlight glossed the dome of its skull, which was covered in bloody patches. My God, it must have torn out its own hair and eaten it.

  “Come on, Kent,” Shelley cooed. “There’s a good boy . . .”

  The Kent-thing loosed a high gibbering cackle. Night birds screeched from their roosts in the trees stitching the shore. They were down at the water now. Shelley waded in. The Kent-thing blundered in after, slipping on the rocks while Shelley stared with sick wonder.

  “What are you?” he said.

  Shelley tossed the dead fish into the surf. The Kent-thing shambled after it. Its bonelike fingers punctured the rotted flesh. Its toothless mouth tore a stinking strip off.

  “So gooo . . . sank ooo . . . so gooooo . . .”

  Shelley knelt beside the Kent-thing. He was aware of the danger but couldn’t help himself: he craved this closeness. He petted its head the way you’d pet a dog. His rock-hard penis pressed urgently against the wetted fabric of his trousers. A tenacious chunk of Kent’s hair came away in Shelley’s hand—it pulled free with no resistance at all, like wiping cat hair off a velour cushion.

  “Show me,” he said softly.

  Kent turned to regard him. Flecks of rotted fish clung to his jaws. His mouth hung open at a quizzical angle.

  “Wha . . . ?”

  Shelley gripped Kent’s head and lowered it into the water. It didn’t require much effort at all. He caught the stunned expression on Kent’s face as he went under. His arms flailed. His legs kicked weakly. Air bubbles stormed to the surface, bursting with liquid pops. His uniform rode up his back. Shelley saw the pulsing tube running next to his spinal column—it looked like an awful second spine.

  Kent’s struggles weakened. Shelley hauled his head up. The Kent-thing’s eyes were foggy. White worms had pierced the skin of his neck, writhing furiously.

  “Show me,” Shelley said anxiously. “I want to see . . .”

  . . . The illusion shattered abruptly. The mental scaffolding fell away and Kent saw himself as he was. When that happened he prayed—a quick, fervent prayer—that the sight would drive him insane. Better to be mad than to witness the devastation of his body from a sane person’s perspective. To see the skin stretched like parchment over the warped sticks of his bones. His body hilled with huge lumps, white worms twisting out of them in a frenzy . . .

  . . . “Show me,” Shelley said again.

  The Kent-thing’s eyes hung at half-mast. He coughed wretchedly. Something burst from his mouth, a fine mist spraying Shelley’s face. Something fluttered against his nose and lips like the beat of a moth’s wings. Shelley stuck his tongue out involuntarily to clear it away—realizing, in some dim chamber of his mind, the terrible danger he was in, but the fear was washed away on the tide of his awful, powerful needs.

  “Show me.”

  Shelley wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. Did he want to watch Kent’s soul depart his body? Would it slip away behind the convex curve of the Kent-thing’s eyes like smoke through a glass bowl?

  He dunked Kent’s head underwater casually. He hummed an off-key note while Kent thrashed and bucked. Shelley felt insistent wriggles on his tongue and swallowed without quite realizing it.

  The Kent-thing’s limbs settled. Shelley turned him over so that he faced the sky. His eyes stared glassily through the salt water.

  . . . Either Kent had been fooled or he’d fooled himself. He gazed at the airless vault of the heavens stretching above the ocean. The stars were white-hot, encircled by gauzy coronas. So lovely. The unfairness of it all came crashing down. He’d never tell a girl he loved her. Never see his parents’ faces again. Never sprint across the outfield at the Lions Club Park tracking a long fly ball. This fact leapt straight out at him. The world was not a fair place. His father had lied—or he’d just been plain ignorant. He’d never see his father again to tell him just how wrong he was. Never never never . . .

  . . . A look of terror and loss came across the Kent-thing’s face. Shelley’s heart trembled. Joy washed over him in an awesome wave. Yes. Yes. This wa
s what he’d been looking for.

  Shelley set a hand on Kent’s chest and pushed him under, hoping to lock that expression on his face. Bubbles detached from the insides of Kent’s nostrils and floated up. A bigger bubble passed over his lips and burst on the surface with a wet pop.

  In the final moments, Kent’s face settled into a calm and beatific expression.

  The joy burst like a glass globe inside Shelley’s chest. His fingers dug into Kent’s waterlogged uniform while he waded deeper into the sea, pulling the grotesquely buoyant Kent-thing past the breakwater, infuriated for reasons he could not name.

  Shelley grabbed the stupid thing by its hair—it was dead now, and dead things relinquished their names—dragging it into the surf. It weighed almost nothing. The salt water held it up; its heels bumped over the rocks for thirty-odd feet, but once Shelley had gotten far enough from shore it floated freely, like a piece of wood.

  The tide clutched greedily at the body. Shelley hesitated, not wishing to release it just yet. He was enraged—vaporous, cresting surges of anger rocked through him.

  He’d expected so much more. Some kind of revelation. A sign of the gears that meshed behind the serene fabric of this world—a glimpse of its seething madness. But no. In the end he’d seen only mocking resignation—and, finally, bliss.

  He continued to drag the dead thing through the water. If he’d been paying closer attention—and usually he would’ve been; Shelley was a preternaturally aware boy, coolly observant of everything around him—he would have seen the thing’s scalp detach from its skull. The skin had winnowed to a sheer, raglike substance that peeled as easily as the papery bark off a birch tree . . .

  If he’d not been off in his own little reverie, he would have heard the sound of the dead thing’s scalp tearing free of the bone: a watery sucking noise, little bubbles popping as the sea flooded in to kiss the naked skullbone . . .

  If he’d not been zoned-out and oblivious, he’d surely have seen the thousands of white threads twisting out of the dead thing’s head—its skull, which was networked in fissures where the connective plates of bone had drawn thin and detached. They came out in snowy gouts, fanning out in numberless profusion, encircling Shelley’s hips in a wavering nimbus . . .