The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  Shelley exited the cave. The night enveloped him. He was part of it, dark just like it.

  EAT EAT EAT

  Oh my, weren’t they so needy? So hungry. They asked so much of him, as all children must . . . but Shelley was only too happy to give.

  He came upon a diseased elm. Its trunk was pocked with tiny bore holes. He tore away a chunk of bark—his strength was immense!—and clawed inside the rotted tree. When he withdrew it, his hand was teeming with woodlice. He crunched them into paste. They fidgeted on his tongue and tickled his throat when he swallowed. He giggled hoarsely while sucking the last few lice off his fingers.

  GOOD GOOD EAT MORE MORE MORE

  Shelley caught his reflection in a pool of moonlight-sheened water. He was horribly wrinkled. It looked as if spiders with legs of thin steel wire had battened onto his flesh, curling and tightening, trenching deep lines into his face.

  His stomach was a swollen gourd. It bulged through his shirt and over the band of his trousers. Its pale circumference was strung with blue veins and sloshed with a dangerous, exciting weight . . .

  . . . in the dank wastes of his brain—his undermind, you could say—a species of mute fear twined into his thoughts. This isn’t right, a voice said. You’re being eaten alive.

  . . . a wave of acidic warmth washed through those thoughts, burning them away.

  Oh, they asked so much of him! It was tiring, feeding all those hungry mouths. And the mouths just beget more mouths and more mouths and more and more and—

  Shelley slid down the incline to the campsite. Firelight crept around the cabin’s shattered angles. He snuck around the far side and surveyed the fire pit. Max was sleeping. He imagined grabbing his hair and jamming him face-first into the white-hot coals. He pictured the silly boy’s face melting like a latex Halloween mask.

  The fat one, Newton, was staring right at him.

  His heart jogged in his chest: ba-dump. Newton sat on the far side of the fire. The flames played over his eyes, which seemed to be staring directly at him.

  EAT EAT EAT EAT

  In a moment, he thought. First I have to kill them. Then I’ll be alone. Then I can give birth in peace. Then we can all play.

  But how would he do it? He’d lost his knife. Was Newton really looking at him?

  “I see you, Shelley.”

  Newton pulled a knife out of his pocket. His knife. He unfolded it carefully and stabbed the tip into a log. The knife quivered in the wood. An invitation?

  “Go away. Get out of here. Now,” Newton whispered.

  A cold, slippery eel ghosted through the ventricles of Shelley’s heart, cinching itself tight. He retreated like a groveling animal. He wanted them dead so badly but . . . but . . . but he was so hungry.

  Shelley’s stomach swayed as he tripped sideways, whimpering softly as his belly brushed the edge of the cabin—for a moment he felt it might detach and burst like a water balloon on the forest floor. Then he’d lose everything. His children. His precious babies.

  SHELLEY WAS in the forest again. Night folded over him. The hunger was hellish, unspeakable, but one must suffer for what one loves.

  He shambled through the woods, eating whatever. It came to him in flashes. In one moment, he was hunched under a log devouring eggs, maybe—termite eggs whose sacs burst between his teeth like albino jelly beans . . .

  . . . next he was along the shoreline ankle-deep in the freezing surf, gorging himself on the decayed carapace of some creature that had once crawled in the sea. So tasty. It slipped between his numbed fingers and he collapsed into the surf, squealing like a piglet, clutching at his stinking prize . . .

  . . . later, much later, Shelley lay in the darkness with the cool trickle of the rock. He was screaming or maybe crying, he couldn’t tell. There was a watery echo down there that did funny things to his voice.

  None of that really mattered anymore, anyway. His home, his foolish parents, his teachers, the many jars buried in the backyard full of his playthings, all in various states of decomposition. That was his old life; his silly, forgettable life.

  He was going to be a great daddy.

  The best.

  * * *

  From the sworn testimony of Stonewall Brewer, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

  Q: Please state your name and rank, sir.

  A: Stonewall Brewer, admiral, Canadian navy.

  Q: Stonewall?

  A: I always tell people that my mother must have had a premonition.

  Q: Very prescient of her. Admiral, when were you made aware of the events occurring on Falstaff Island?

  A: About oh-three-hundred. Can’t recall the exact time on the display of the clock beside my bed—although the call was tracked, so we could get you that info if need be.

  Q: What were you told?

  A: That a nonspecific contagion of unknown lethality had breached containment.

  Q: Were you aware of the nature of this contagion?

  A: At the time, no.

  Q: No idea at all?

  A: You will find you’ll only have to ask me a question once, my friend. The first answer is the answer you’ll get every time.

  Q: Only seeking to clarify matters for the court, Admiral. What’s your experience, if any, with the spread or neutralization of a contagion?

  A: If I had no experience, I don’t imagine it would’ve been my phone ringing in the dead of night. I spearheaded the containment efforts on the SARS outbreak that hit metropolitan Toronto back in 2002.

  Q: If I recall, forty-four people died during that outbreak.

  A: Could have been a lot more. That was my first rodeo.

  Q: And all you knew about the contagion in North Point was—

  A: I hit the ground with the intel available at the time. We had one case of infection—

  Q: That would be Tom Padgett.

  A: That’s right, the guinea pig. Typhoid Tom. It was SOP: quarantine the area, detain all residents, set up a zone of infection. Nothing comes in and most importantly, nothing gets out. That’s how we treat icebergs.

  Q: Icebergs?

  A: That’s how threats like this are known internally. The idea is that only ten percent of an iceberg is visible. The other ninety percent is below the water. So when we’ve got a threat without set parameters, one that could be huge, we call it an iceberg.

  Q: And containment was vital?

  A: Always is, but even more so in this case. Word came down that we could be up against a three-tier bug: the virus could be carrier-borne, waterborne, or airborne. The terrible threesome.

  Q: What were your orders?

  A: I don’t take orders as a rule. It’s my duty to dole them out.

  Q: What was your agenda, then?

  A: It was full-scale. Total neutralization. Quarantine the island and all life-forms on it. Nothing comes or goes. I had to enact some very serious measures.

  Q: Such as?

  A: First off, we couldn’t do anything about the kids. That was rough, no two ways about it. But we couldn’t risk it.

  Q: Anything else?

  A: When I said nothing comes, nothing goes, I meant it. If a seagull took off from that island and tried to fly back to land, I had a recon sniper shoot it out of the sky. I had military personnel in hazmat suits fish the corpse out of the water. After the island was cleared, I ordered four million gallons of Anotec Blue to be dumped into the surrounding waters. We call that stuff Blue Death: it kills everything, indiscriminately. Marine life, plants, plankton, protozoa. The eggheads at the CDC told me I ought to make another pass just to be sure. A few earth mother types got their knickers in a twist over that. We razed the island, too. Took four separate napalm strikes—you know how hard it is to find napalm? My marching orders were to render Falstaff Island biologically sterile: not one living thing left. Maybe there’s a few amoebas still swimming around. I’m constantly amazed at the tenacity of all life on this plane
t. But if anything’s still alive, it’s not for lack of trying on my part.

  * * *

  41

  MAX DREAMED he was in the mortuary with his father. It’s the only chance he got to see him some days. People didn’t die that often in North Point, but they did like to hunt and fish, meaning his father had a backlog of taxidermy projects. The nature of taxidermy being what it is—framing the anatomies of dead animals before they begin to decay—timing is everything. Of course, the same held true for human anatomies.

  His father worked in a white-tiled room beneath the city courthouse. The air held the sharp undertone of charcoal from the air purifier that pumped away in a corner. The shelves and fixtures were stainless steel. A huge steel slab dominated the room’s center.

  Max watched his father work. He wore a long white coat—the kind pharmacists wore—and an apron of black vulcanized rubber. His dad whistled while he worked. Today it was “The Old Gray Mare.”

  “The old gray mare she ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be . . .”

  A woman’s body lay on the table. She had died at a very old age. A white sheet was draped over her hips but her chest was bare. Her breasts were long and tubular, as if something had pulled them out of shape. Her empty sockets were withered like two halves of a cored-out squash forgotten for days on a countertop.

  His father worked with his back to Max. He picked up an ocular suction cup.

  “What happens is,” he told Max in a weird singsong voice, “the eyeballs get sucked down into your head after you die. Did you know that, Maxxy?”

  His father never called him Maxxy.

  He thumbed the ocular cup into the woman’s socket. Tiny barbs on the cup attached to her naked eyeball. He pulled. The eyeball sucked back into its socket with the sound of a boot being pulled out of thick mud.

  “All better . . .”

  His father was whistling again. A sputtering, wheezing noise—it sounded as if it was being made with a different orifice altogether. Fear slammed into Max’s belly.

  His father turned. At first Max thought his head had been submitted to some incredible pressure: it was flattened, elongated, pancaked. It projected upward and curled over on itself like a lotus petal.

  “Oh Maxxy Maxxy Maxxy . . .”

  A worm’s head jutted from his father’s lab coat. It was the greasy white of a toadstool. Noxious fluid leaked from its ribbed exterior, dribbling down to form a pumicey crust on the collar.

  “Thee ole gray mare, thee ain’t what thee useth to be . . .”

  The voice was coming from a pit in the middle of its head: round and ineffably dark like the air in a caved-in mine shaft. The pit was studded with translucent teeth that looked like glassine tusks.

  “Thee ole gray mare . . .” his worm-father sang, swaying and burping up goo.

  A pair of yellow dots glowed in the direct center of the pit, looking like the headlights of a car shining up from the bottom of the ocean. Before he woke up, Max swore he could hear another voice coming from the deepest part of the worm—the ongoing scream of his own father, trapped somewhere inside of it.

  NEWTON WAS shaking him.

  “Max! Max!”

  He jerked up. The sunlight stabbed at his eyes. The dream drained thickly from his brainpan, departing his body through uncontrollable twitches and shivers.

  “You okay? You were screaming in your sleep,” Newton said.

  “Yeah. Just a bad dream.”

  It was morning. He didn’t know how long he’d slept. His spine was knotted and his gut kicked over sourly.

  They walked to the shore. The ships still charted their distant orbits. They were like the heat-shimmer on the highway: no matter how fast you drove, it didn’t get any closer or draw any farther away. Max wanted to scream at them, but why bother? A waste of his swiftly diminishing energy.

  Newton rubbed the sleep-crust out of his eyes and wandered toward Oliver McCanty’s boat. He hauled on the motor’s rip cord. The motor went wuh-wah—the same discouraging sound it’d made when they’d tried a few days before. Newton pulled it again. Again. Again. He thought about the poster in science class—Albert Einstein, shock-haired with his tongue stuck out above the quote: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Defeated, he let go of the cord, staggered back, tripped, and sat down on his ass. He cupped his hands over his eyes, lowered his head between his knees, and wept.

  “Hey,” Max said. “Hey, Newt, it’s—”

  But Newton was too far gone. The pent-up sobs ripped out of his throat. They were the most wretched noises Max had ever heard. He put an arm around Newton’s shoulders and felt the tension: like grasping a railroad track in advance of the onrushing locomotive. He didn’t tell Newton everything would be okay because it wasn’t—it would never be as it had been. The past had a perfection that the future could never hold.

  Max just let Newton cry.

  His sobs trailed off. He drew a few hitching breaths and said: “Sorry, Max. That wasn’t very . . .” He hiccupped twice, exhaled steadily, and said: “. . . wasn’t very cuh-cool of me. WWAMD?” he said, more to himself than to Max. “He sure as hell wouldn’t cry like a baby.”

  “I don’t think being cool really matters now, do you?”

  Newton let go of one more shuddery breath. “No. I guess not.”

  Max walked to the boat, cracked the motor casing. Inside were two small holes where the spark plugs should go. He thought of his dream—the two yellow dots glowing up from the dark pit . . .

  His mind jogged. Two revelations joined in his head like puzzle pieces slotting into place.

  “He must have eaten them.”

  “What?” Newton said. “Who did? Ate what?”

  “The spark plugs,” Max said softly. “The man. The stranger. He swallowed the spark plugs. Ate them.”

  “Ate them? Why would he do—?”

  Newton thought about the man—how cadaverous he’d looked, skinny as a pipecleaner. Thought about Kent and Shelley, too. Yes, he decided, the man probably was hungry enough to eat spark plugs.

  “He ate them because he was hungry, huh?”

  Max shrugged. “Could be. Or maybe he didn’t want to be found. Without spark plugs, the boat won’t start—right? Maybe he figured the best place to hide them was inside of himself.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I saw them, Newt. When the Scoutmaster cut him open to get the worm out. I saw them shining in . . . well, his stomach, I guess.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  TEN MINUTES later, they were in the cabin, standing over the dead stranger.

  They tried to not pay much attention to the state of his body. It seemed wrong, somehow—desecrating him with their eyes. They tried to focus on him abstractly: as a puzzle or a riddle. They had to solve him in the easiest and safest way.

  Still, they couldn’t help but stare.

  His elbows and knees had been eaten away by something. That was the most obvious thing. Animals, insects? How could that have happened so quickly, though? Or perhaps the skin had been so thin that the bones had worn through all on their own, the way your knees will wear through a cheap pair of jeans.

  His face had fallen into itself. It was distracting—they couldn’t drag their eyes away. Newton draped a dish towel over it.

  “Do you think the worms are all dead?”

  Max nodded. “They have to be—right? That’s what the Scoutmaster said. Once the host is dead, the worms die, too.”

  Newton still seemed doubtful. “What about eggs? They might still be there, right? Eggs don’t need food, do they?”

  Max set his fingertips lightly on the man’s wrist. “He’s cold. He’s been gone a long time.”

  “Okay, but put something on your hands first.”

  They found a pair of dishwashing gloves. Newton scrounged up two empty plastic bread bags.


  “The gloves go on first. Then the bread bags overtop. Then I’m gonna tape your shirtsleeves to the bags so nothing can get in.”

  “Good idea.”

  The sun shone brightly through the cleaved roof, glossing insects that hummed over the body. Already the island was taking over the cabin. Mold edged up the walls, fungus grew in the cracks. Soon the foundations would rot and disintegrate. Maybe that was for the best, Max thought.

  “Try not to breathe too deeply,” Newton said.

  “Okay, fine. You’re creeping me out.”

  Newton gave him a bewildered look. “Max, jeez—you’re about to reach inside a dead guy. You better be creeped out.”

  Max pushed his fingers into the pasty lips of the wound, through a thin membrane of gelatinized blood and into the dead man’s abdomen. Cold oatmeal, he told himself. You’re just rooting around in a bowl of cold oatmeal.

  The man’s insides had liquefied and turned granular; they didn’t seem to have any definition anymore, no organs or intestines—his hand moved through layers of cold, chunky tissue that felt a little like mashed bananas.

  Mashed bananas, then. You’re looking for spark plugs in a big pile of mashed bananas.

  Max’s hand slipped into a squelchy pocket. A rude farting noise. The air filled with a rotted, sulfury, swamp-gas stink. Max’s gut roiled but nothing came out—just a dry heave that filled his mouth with the taste of bitter bile. His hand closed upon something hard. He pulled it out.

  “Holy crow,” Newton said.

  The spark plug lay in Max’s cupped palm. It was smeared in pinkish-gray curds, but they could clearly make out the word Champion down its side.

  It took Max a minute to find the second one. He had to sink his hand in fairly far—almost to the elbow—ripping through some rubbery kinked hoses in the man’s abdomen to get it: tubelike things that tore up like the witchgrass growing in the shallows of North Point bay.