The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  As Hughes said, Edgerton appears to feel no remorse for the events on Falstaff Island. If anything, his abstract theorizing on the fate of the boys of Troop 52 is deeply chilling.

  “How would you rather die,” he asks himself, “from a chopping axe or a little blade? A tiny blade that makes the thinnest ribbon of a cut. Only enough to draw a single bead of blood from the skin. But it cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts. It doesn’t stop cutting. It takes days. It is relentless. It doesn’t matter how big or strong or resourceful you are: sooner or later that tiny blade will shred right through you. And it’s not one blade but a million blades inside you, cutting their way out, replicating themselves, slicing and gashing and mincing you up—or slowly whittling you down like a scalpel taking delicate curls off a giant redwood. You’ll get to see yourself change. It’s that slow progression. You’ll see your strength get sapped, see your body take on terrifying new parameters. Your mind will probably snap well before your body caves in. Personally? I’d take the axe.”

  Ultimately the question of whether or not Edgerton is insane becomes a moot point. He is a sociopath. It doesn’t take a clinical degree to understand that. He is as remorseless and unthinking as his beloved worms.

  “Do you want to know the best, most effective transmitter of contagion known to man?”

  Edgerton asks me this with a pinprick of mad light dancing in each iris.

  “It’s love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes.” He shrugs. “But that’s people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.”

  * * *

  PART 3

  CONTAGION

  * * *

  EVIDENCE LOG, CASE 518C

  PIECE F-44 (Personal Effects)

  Preliminary Advertising copy for Thestomax (internal document only; never published)

  Recovered from SITE F (Ariadne Advertising, 364 Bay Street, Toronto, ON) by Officer Stacey LaPierre, badge #992

  * * *

  34

  “FIRE’S BURNING, fire’s burning; draw nearer, draw nearer; in the gloaming, in the gloaming; come sing and be meeeer-rrrrry . . .”

  Shelley had moved back to the cabin, where he curled up under the shattered bed frames. He’d heaped the soaked mattresses into a sloppy teepee and lay in the mildewy darkness, singing. Anyone within earshot would have noted his lovely voice. It hit each register purely.

  “Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya; kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya; kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya . . . O Lord, kumbaya . . .”

  His voice dipped to a weak warbling note. He went silent. His body tensed. He loosed a tortured moan—the sound of a sick animal. His hands rose to his face. His nails dug into the creases of his forehead. Slowly, he dragged them downwards. His ragged fingernails tore trenches through his flesh. Blood wept from the wounds, though not very much. The sluggish trickles stopped quickly, like spigots being shut off.

  In the silence, he could hear it. Them.

  A tight, slippery sound like a Vaseline-coated rope pulled through a tightened fist. Coming from inside of him.

  Things had turned out very bad for Shelley.

  More than the other boys, Shelley was a realist. He understood how the world worked—bad things happened to good people, bad people died happy in their beds. It happened every day. So why bother being good? The word itself was attached to a series of behaviors that was, at best, an abstraction.

  A person profited nothing from being good.

  It wasn’t as if Shelley had a choice. Ever since he could remember, he’d seen the world this way. People were things to be used, peeled back, opened up, roughly dissected and dismissed. All creatures on earth fell under the same cold scrutiny.

  The boy in the moon. That had been Shelley’s nickname; he’d overheard the teachers calling him that one afternoon as he’d lingered around their lounge. Although for a while it had been the Toucher.

  He’d earned this moniker for his behavior during recess, which he spent haunting the edges of the school yard. He watched the girls play. Sometimes he’d sidle up alongside one of them—Trudy Dennison was a favorite—and reach out his arm to gather up her long, soft hair, letting it fall tricklingly between his fingers.

  He did not find this arousing. Shelley was rarely aroused by anything. Girls did not excite him as they did most boys his age. Boys didn’t excite Shelley either. Not in the traditional manner, anyway.

  When girls felt Shelley’s fingers passing through their hair, a look of teeming disgust came into their eyes. That disgust often shaded into an unease that held a gasping edge of fear: as if they were thinking that the world might be a better and safer place were he, Shelley Longpre, not a part of it.

  Shelley was aware of their revulsion, but it did not trouble him. He enjoyed it, actually—as much as he enjoyed anything at all. Last year, Trudy Dennison squealed on him. He had to sit down with the principal, Mr. Levesque. Shelley’s father, a tire salesman, was also there. And his mother in her watered silk dress.

  Shelley had been sternly warned that touching anyone without that person’s permission was bad. Shelley nodded and smiled his sullen, empty smile. On the way out of the office, he heard his father tell the principal: “It won’t happen again. Shelley’s just . . . he’s slow.”

  Nobody made too big a deal of it. Touching was just Shelley’s thing, the way eating boogers was Neil Caruso’s thing or filching cigarettes behind the utility shed was Ephraim’s thing or playing pocket pool under the trampoline was Benjamin Rimmer’s thing. Every boy had his thing and on the grand spectrum Shelley’s wasn’t so bad—it indicated a future badness, perhaps, a “signpost” as that quack Dr. Harley might say, but right now it was harmless, if slightly troubling. His fellow Scouts didn’t give Shelley grief over it. For one, many of them probably wanted to touch Trudy Dennison’s flowing honey-scented hair, too—they simply didn’t take the next logical step. And two, the boys avoided picking on Shelley out of the sense, inexpressible yet tangible, that he might do something very wrong in retaliation. The worst they’d ever called Shelley was dumb. A real dumb bunny, as Eef would say . . . well, used to say, anyway.

  Shelley was happy as a person such as himself could be with this perception. Let everyone think he was dull. Let their eyes fall on his beanpole body and sluggish limbs and feel nothing but a vague revulsion that they were unable to properly account for. Revulsion mixed with an odd sense of disquiet.

  “Someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; O Lord, kumbaya . . .”

  Without his being consciously aware of it, Shelley’s mouth dipped to the raw pine floor. He gnawed on it. His teeth skriiiitched on the wood. Splinters drove deep into his gums. Blood flowed.

  Shelley used to be the Toucher. Now he was the touched, thanks to the twitchy-squirmy things inside him now. Making a home.

  “Hear me crying and laughing, my Lord, kumbaya,” Shelley warbled. “Hear me crying, my Lord, kumbaya; hear me crying, my Lord, kumbaya . . . O Lord, kumbaya . . .”

  And Shelley had begun to cry. Tears squeezed from the sides of his eyes—but they ceased quickly. His body was dehydrated as a banana chip. Yesterday he’d urinated against the side of the cabin. What came was just a thin dribble, clear as spring water. Not even the slightest yellow tinge—the yellow color was from the extra vitamins and minerals he usually pissed away. But now he understood the things inside of him were helping themselves to all that extra—and more.

  The feeble light of the moon cast through the shattered roof, through the sodden mattresses making up Shelley’s awful nest, falling upon his body. His trousers hung low, divulging a half inch of ass crack. His shirt was rucked up. The knobs of his spine were visible. />
  Had anyone been watching, that person would have seen the flesh ringing Shelley’s spine begin to lift. Something was tunneling its way through—through and up. Climbing the drainpipe of his spine, corkscrewing higher and higher.

  There came a series of dim pops, like weak firecrackers going off: trapped air popping between Shelley’s vertebrae. The tunneling thing looped round the spine, tightening, burrowing through the lacework of tissue and muscle, around again, and again, and again.

  Shelley did not scream. Did not move. At one point, he did reach around and scratch at his back, as if under the belief he’d been bitten by a mosquito.

  “Ug,” he said—a Neanderthal note. “Ug . . . uh-ug.”

  The tube threaded up his spine, between the sharp wings of Shelley’s scapula. Upon reaching his neck, it thinned out, appearing to struggle—then it flexed convulsively, fattening into a bulging cord up the nape of Shelley’s neck, its scolex fat at his hairline . . .

  “UG,” Shelley said breathlessly. His mouth opened. A clotted rope of blood jetted between his teeth.

  It entered his cranial vault. Shelley was immediately suffused with comforting warmth. He sighed, curling deeper into himself. He shut his eyes.

  LATER THAT night, Shelley would awake from a familiar dream—they all shared the same palette: shifting browns and blacks and olive greens, half-formed shapes melting into one another—shivering and feverish with a hammer-hard erection tepeeing his shorts. A booming voice followed him out of his dreamscape:

  Rock and roll, Shelley m’man—THAT’S how it eats.

  That’s the ONLY way it eats.

  35

  MAX AND Newton rose with the drowsy half-light of dawn. The sun hummed over the sea, an orange sine wave radiating heat-shimmers against the leavening dark.

  Max hadn’t slept well. He’d kept sensing strange, vaguely menacing shapes darting at the edges of the fire’s light. His skin was rubbed raw around his waist, which had shrunk somewhat over the past few days. He took a swig from his canteen and winced at the stale, ironlike taste of the water. He fingered his clothes, which he’d hung up last night. Dry enough.

  Newton got up soon afterward. They tugged on their pants and socks and boots in silence. They squinted across the sea into the new sun. The dark hulls of those strange ships dotted the water toward North Point.

  “We have to get Eef,” Max said.

  “He may have gone back to camp,” Newt said. “Y’think?”

  “We’d better check.”

  They retraced their route, passing through a glade where the light hung in brilliant icicles and thousands of green silkworms hung from the tree branches.

  “Is this what they make silk shirts out of?” Newt said. “How do they even stay together? It’d be like trying to sew with spider’s thread.”

  The day was bright and warm, the air shot with dazzling light. A deep-seated fear picked along the edges of their thoughts. They were frightened, but that emotion rested with easy familiarity in their chests by now.

  They located yesterday’s footsteps in the grass and followed them into the spruces and found Ephraim on the ground surrounded by spiky smears of blood.

  “Eef, what . . . ?” Max said, unable to understand what he was seeing.

  When the carnival came to Charlottetown last year, Max and Ephraim had gone. Max’s father had driven them and bought ride tickets for both boys—a nicety Ephraim’s mother accepted with stoic gratefulness. They rode the Zipper and had their spines delightfully rearranged on the Comet, an ancient wooden roller coaster operated by a carnie with a spiderweb tattooed on his forehead—a tiny black spider descended to the tip of his nose on a strand so blue, so pale, you might mistake it for a vein. After gorging on waffle cones and funnel cake, they’d come across a freak show operating out of a small blue-and-white-striped tent at the back of the fairground. Three tickets apiece granted them entry to a cramped, dark space smelling of horse manure and another scent beyond naming. The freaks took the stage to the slightly awed, mainly disgusted oohs of the hick crowd.

  Freaks, Max remembered thinking. But why would they let themselves be called that? They weren’t that freakish looking. Tattooed and pierced, sure, but nothing that’d raise your eyebrow if you passed them on the street. But what the performers did to their bodies was truly freakish. One guy guided a power drill with a six-inch bit deep into his septum, so deep the tip must’ve tickled the brainstem, then skewered a metal hook—a meat hook, same as plucked hens hung in the butcher’s window—through the hole, drawing the hook out through his mouth. Another guy chewed lightbulbs and stuck long steel needles through his arms, skewering himself like a bug on a pin.

  Max was horrified—which, he assumed, was the sought-for reaction. Ephraim, however, was mesmerized. Max had seen that look before; Ephraim was the daredevil, after all. The boy who’d jumped his bike off the seawall, mistiming it badly and fracturing his leg. Max had sat with him in the ER afterward; Ephraim’s leg hung at a crazy cockeyed angle—it hurt Max’s eyes to look at it. Ephraim, however, was fascinated. Check it out, Max, he kept saying, a weird smile on his face. Check it . . . owwwt. As soon as the cast came off, Ephraim was back at the seawall for another try. His mom must’ve had a constant conniption fit, but Eef had always been that way.

  Max figured the crazy stunts must’ve bled away Eef’s rage—the theory of displacement, like he’d seen demonstrated in science class. Problem was, God gave you one body. What you did with it was your own business, but the truth as Max saw it was this: You throw your body at the world. The world hits back. The world wins. So you had to take great care of what God gave you. Eef had never gotten that message.

  When they rounded into the sunlit clearing, Max initially thought Ephraim had been murdered.

  Somebody or something had found him here all alone and set upon him in a fury. But then he saw the wounds—hacks and gouges, not stabs—and the Swiss Army knife still clutched in Ephraim’s hands. He thought: How could anyone do this to himself? But he knew Ephraim very well. He knew him better than anyone else on earth, maybe. So he knew.

  The two boys hunched beside their troop-mate. Newton touched Ephraim’s chest, which rose and fell weakly. There were large, clumsy, gashing wounds in Ephraim’s hand and leg. Blood was gummed in a five-inch half-moon hacked into his side. The cut was jittery but progressively deeper, as if the person who’d done it had grown bolder after the blood started to flow. Worst of all was the long twisting slash on his face: it began near his temple where the bone sunk into a shallow divot and hacked straight down around his orbital bone, cleaving so deep through the skin of his cheek that the knife tip must have poked through into his mouth, then out again, tracing the line of his jaw before petering out in the middle of his chin. The trajectory alone was a brutal and terrifying thing to look at. A mark of madness.

  Newton was breathing hard, set to hyperventilate. “Who did this?”

  “He did it,” Max said, near breathless. “Eef did. To himself.”

  “. . . Why?”

  Ephraim’s eyelids fluttered. He coughed weakly and said: “They’re inside me. Or . . . maybe it’s just one. But it’s there. Sneeeeaky . . .”

  Max gave Newton a helpless look. “There’s nothing inside you, Eef.”

  “Wrong.” Eef’s breath stunk like sun-spoiled liver. “I’ve seen it. It’s . . .” He licked his lips. Horrifyingly, Max could see the root of his tongue moving through the slit in his cheek. “It’s smart. It lets me see just enough, even touch it, before it slips away. But if I make enough holes, guess what? Nowhere for it to hide.”

  The mad certainty in his voice iced the sweat up Max’s spine. His eyes fell upon the walkie-talkie—its plastic casing was slicked with blood. He looked back at Ephraim, who’d followed the movement of his eyes and now turned away, refusing to meet Max’s gaze. His eyes swarmed with an emotion Max couldn’t intuit: a mixture of grief and shame and something else—something much darker.

  “Who were
you talking to?” Max said. When Ephraim didn’t answer, Max said: “You’re not any skinnier. You still look the same, Eef.”

  Mostly the same, he thought queasily.

  Fact was, Ephraim appeared more or less as he had when the boat first dropped them off. He’d lost a few pounds, but so had Newton and Max.

  “It’s inside of me,” Ephraim said.

  Newt said: “How do you know for sure?”

  “A little birdie told me, okay?” Ephraim spat pure red. “I know.”

  There was a tone of Stage 5 acceptance in Ephraim’s voice; he could have been telling them he had inoperable brain cancer. Max figured it wasn’t worth fighting. As his father said: You can’t argue with someone who’s already made up his mind. He exchanged a knowing look with Newton; a silent pact was settled upon. If this was what Eef believed—that he had a worm inside of him—okay, they’d accept it for now. Anything to stop him from cutting himself.

  Newton rummaged the first aid kit from his pack. Swabs of peroxide and iodine no bigger than the Sani-Cloth wipes you get after a messy meal, butterfly bandages, a spool of gauze no bigger than a roll of quarters. Pitiful, really, when facing bodily devastation like this.

  Max attempted to paste a bandage over the gash in Ephraim’s cheek. Eef screamed—a shocked bleat—so loud that Max’s hands fled from his face.

  “What do you want, Eef?”

  Ephraim fixed Max with a pleading look. “Get it out of me.”

  “How?”

  “Newt, you’ve got a better knife than mine. It’s burrowed deep. It’ll take a longer blade.”