by Nick Cutter
Bone meal, Max’s grandpa said. It’s magic, boys—nothing grows plants any better than bones.
Hearing this, Max wondered why farmers didn’t plant potato fields over cemeteries . . . the answer had dawned on him before long.
Last night, lying quietly in bed, Max wondered if Ephraim was awake, too. Was he hearing those crunching noises? If so, was he thinking what Max was thinking—that it sounded like tiny brittle bones pulverized between the steel teeth of Jaws?
AFTER DRESSING, the boys followed Kent into the kitchen.
Tim greeted them in the main room with a wan smile. The strange man lay on the chesterfield, his body covered in blankets. All they could see were the contours of his face: the sunken cheeks and eyes, teeth winking through the blanched fillets of his lips.
Crumbs lay scattered round the easy chair. Newton spotted those same crumbs on Tim’s lumberjack vest, though the Scoutmaster brushed most of them off. An econo-size box of soda crackers lay in the trash can, along with some wadded-up cellophane cracker sleeves.
Tim caught Newton’s look. “Attack of the midnight munchies, boys. I had to keep an eye on this guy.”
Newt scanned the kitchen. He couldn’t help but notice the busted radio. A pinworm of dread threaded into his chest. What if that storm rolled in? What would we do? He eyed the cabin warily—the frame seemed sturdy enough, but the roof was old. He’d seen what those late autumn storms could do. A few years ago, one of them had ripped across the mainland and dragged a car across the street into a ditch. Newt had watched it happen through the window of Dan’s Luncheonette on Phillips Street. The car was an ancient Dodge Dart—what the old-timers called “two tons of Detroit rolling iron.” The driver was equally ancient: Elgin Tate, a long-retired music teacher. Newt had watched him white-knuckled and greasy-faced behind the wheel as the wind hammered the car amidships, rocking it up on two side wheels and letting it fall with an axle-grinding thump, then gusted again and bore it steadily across both lanes into the ditch. The Dart’s tires had been pure smoking as Tate tried to muscle it back onto the road, but its hind end tipped over the edge of the ditch, its front wheels canted up and spinning uselessly. Once the storm had passed, Tate clambered out the window and staggered onto the road. His gray hair was stuck up in wild corkscrews and he was smiling like a man who’d cheated death. Hellfire! he’d shouted at nobody at all. Hellfire and damnation!
“What are we gonna do?” Newt asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Tim hooked his thumb at the stranger. “He’s obviously sick. He also, as you can see, smashed our radio. Why, I don’t know. Could be he’s in trouble—maybe with the law. I certainly don’t know who he is.”
“What about his wallet?” Ephraim said.
“I checked.” Tim’s hands groomed each other, an unconscious gesture: one hand washing the other. “His pockets are empty.”
“He looks empty,” Shelley said softly.
The boys’ eyes kept flicking to the man, then just as quickly away. Newt threw his entire head back as if the very sight repelled his gaze.
“He probably didn’t look like that all his life,” said Kent.
“Of course not,” Tim snapped, annoyed at Kent’s unalloyed disgust. “As a precaution, I’ve tied his arms and legs. Who knows what else he’d decide to bust up.”
“Yeah, good idea,” Shelley said. “I mean, he could go berserk. Kill us all with a butcher knife.”
Tim glanced at the tall, slender boy with the blank gray eyes. His brow furrowed, then he said, “I have something to ask all of you. I want you to be honest. I promise you I won’t be angry. Tell me: Did any of you bring a phone?”
Newt said: “You told us not to.”
“I know what I said, Newton. But I happen to know that teenage boys don’t always do as they’re told.” He looked at Ephraim. “What about it?”
Ephraim shook his head. “I thought about it, but . . .”
“Shit,” Tim hissed, pushing the word through his teeth on a burst of pent-up air. He tasted a weird sweetness, a saccharine tang on his tongue. “Listen, boys, we’re going to be fine. Really. This is unexpected, is all. My only concern is that this guy needs medical attention in short order. I don’t have the proper equipment.”
“You said he came by boat,” said Kent.
Tim had already been down to the dock at sunup. The boat wouldn’t start. The spark plugs were gone. Could this man have unscrewed them and . . . what? Thrown them into the ocean? Hidden them somewhere? Why do that?
“There’s a boat, yes,” Tim said for now. “Oliver McCanty’s, by the look of it. You know how small it is. We can’t all ride back in it.”
“A few of us could,” said Kent. “We could tell my dad what happened.”
Kent’s father was Lower Montague’s chief of police, “Big” Jeff Jenks: a towering six feet seven inches and two hundred and fifty pounds of prime law enforcement beef. Most afternoons he could be spotted behind the wheel of his police cruiser (looking, Tim thought, like an orangutan stuffed into a kitchen cupboard), circuiting the town. If anything, his face reflected sadness—perhaps at the fact God had given him a body so big and strong that he considered it a cosmic injustice that he couldn’t put it to use on deserving criminals. But he’d picked the wrong jurisdiction: the closest thing to a felonious mastermind in Montague County was Slick Rogers, the local moonshiner whose hillside stills occasionally exploded, burning down an acre of scrubland.
“You guys are going on your wilderness trek as scheduled. You were going to be trekking solo, anyway, as part of your merit requirement. So just fend for yourselves and navigate your way back. No help from me.”
“That’s crazy, Tim!” Kent stabbed one thick finger at the stranger. “We need to neutralize the threat”—one of his father’s pet phrases—“or else . . . or else . . .”
Kent trailed off, the words locking up in his throat. Tim dropped a hand on Kent’s shoulder. The boy’s eyes narrowed—in that instant Tim was certain he’d brush his hand off. When that didn’t happen, he said, “What we need is to remain calm and proceed with the established plan.”
“But it’s all different now. The plan is . . . it’s fucked.”
A shocked gasp from Newton. Nobody ought to speak that way in front of an adult—in front of their Scoutmaster. Tim’s eyes took on a hard sheen. His hand tensed on Kent’s shoulder, fingernails dimpling the fabric—close to but not quite a claw.
“Scout Law number seven, Kent. Repeat it.”
Kent wormed in Tim’s grip. His eyes held a bruised, hangdog cast.
“A Scout . . .” Tim said softly. “Go on, tell me. A Scout . . .”
Newt said, “A Scout obeys his—”
“Quiet, Newt,” said Tim. “Kent knows this.”
“A . . . Scout . . . obeys . . .” Kent said, each word wrenched painfully from his mouth.
“Who does he obey?”
“He obeys his Scoutmaster without . . .”
“Without what, Kent?”
“. . . without question. Even if he gets an order he does not like, he must do as soldiers and policemen do; he must carry it out all the same because it is his duty.”
“And after he has done it,” Tim continued, “he can come and state any reasons against it. But he must carry out the order at once. That is discipline.”
Tim forfeited his grip; Kent stepped back, rubbing his shoulder. Tim pointed to a pair of walkie-talkies on the table.
“You get into a jam, radio me. We’ve done plenty of orienteering together, right? This won’t be anything new. It’s a nice morning, no foul weather in today’s forecast.”
No other boy spoke against the Scoutmaster’s plan. Nobody wanted to be here, in this cabin, with . . . that. They were all too happy to invoke that particular license of boyhood, the one that stated: Let the grown-ups handle it. Events that seemed overwhelming and terrifying to their boyish brains were dispelled like so much smoke when the adults took over. Adults we
re Fixers; they were Solvers. The boys still trusted Tim, even Kent. So they would depart into the crisp autumn sunshine, their lungs filling with clean air; they would wrestle and run and laugh and enjoy their freedom from this strange responsibility, whatever it entailed. And when they returned, everything would be fine. They sincerely believed this because, up until that very point in their existence, it was a fact that had always held true.
It truly had been Tim’s intention to go with them. But he needed time to figure out what the hell was the matter with this man. The fact the spark plugs were missing was an additional worry—and not only because it cut them off from the mainland. What kind of man would incapacitate his only method of escape? A criminal? A hunted man, perhaps. Or a man on an extinction vector.
Once the boys had left, he’d go down to the ocean, roll up his pants, and search for those damn plugs. Anyway, the boys were resourceful. The island was safe. There were more hazards on the mainland: pellet guns, dirt bikes, Slick Rogers. They’d hike a few hours, complete their trail-craft requirements, and be back in time for supper—by which time he’d have this mess sorted out. He, too, believed in the power of adults.
Tim didn’t feel quite up to a hike today, anyway. He shot a quick look at the man on the chesterfield, hoping the boys didn’t catch the quiver in his eyes. The spot where the man coughed on his skin burnt with an edgeless heat; he pictured it eating right through his skin, a gaping hole in his cheek—the glistening connective tissues of his jaw, iron fillings winking in his molars—and shook his head, dispelling the image.
Could be he was coming down with something. A fever?
Starve a cold, feed a fever, right?
Yes, definitely a fever.
He picked up one of the walkie-talkies. After a short deliberation, he gave it to Max, ignoring Kent’s miffed look.
He gave the boys a curt salute. “You’ve got your marching orders, dogfaces.”
* * *
From Troop 52:
Legacy of the Modified Hydatid
(AS PUBLISHED IN GQ MAGAZINE) BY CHRIS PACKER:
THE HUNGRY MAN. Patient Zero. Typhoid Tom.
Before he was known by these names, he was known by the one his mother christened him with: Thomas Henry Padgett.
Tom was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, 1,100 miles from Falstaff Island, where he would die thirty-five years later. Birth records from St. Catharines General show that Tommy was a healthy nine and a half pounds at birth.
“He was a chubby baby,” says his mother, Claire Padgett. “Chubby kid, chubby teenager. I’d take him shopping in the Husky Boys section at the Hudson’s Bay.”
She sits in her kitchen, leafing through a photo album. Her boy lies frozen in time under the laminated pages. Sitting in the tub as an infant, his mom working baby shampoo into his hair. Halloween as a toddler, dressed as a giant pumpkin. Tom had an open smile and unruly red hair. In one photo, he is captured building a sandcastle at the beach, his stomach hanging over the band of his swim trunks.
“He was a good eater,” Claire Padgett says. “As a kid, anyway. Then he got older and the shame set in. He didn’t like being big. Kids, right? They find the easiest soft spot and pick at it.”
Claire Padgett looks nothing like her son. It strikes this observer that she may subsist entirely upon Player’s Light cigarettes—she chain-smokes them ruthlessly, lighting each fresh soldier off the ember of the dead one. But hers is a flinty, chapped-elbow leanness—a body built for a mean utility.
“Tough kid,” she says of her son. “Some boys thought that because he was fat, Tom must be a marshmallow. But he could defend himself. After Tom busted a few boys’ noses, the wisecracks about his weight stopped.”
As cutting as those schoolboy taunts had been, her son has been treated far more cruelly in death. Consider his media-given nicknames. The Edible Man. Mr. Stringbean. Consider his legacy as the man who could have kick-started a toppling-domino contagion worse than the Black Plague. Consider the fact that Dr. David Hatcher, head of the Centre for Contagious Disease, memorably labeled him “a runaway biological weapon.”
Tom Padgett has been badmouthed by scientists and politicos worldwide for—for what?
For being a pawn? For aligning himself with Dr. Clive Edgerton, who earned his own nickname: Joseph Mengele 2.0? For being the kind of scratch-ass petty criminal who might actually accept Edgerton’s offer?
No. Tom Padgett is hated in death because he ran. Because he failed to truly grasp the magnitude of what he was hosting and bolted. But mainly Tom is hated for the perception that he may have somehow thought he could prevail over the monster lurking inside of him.
Tom Padgett is hated for his ignorance of the fact that he was dead on his feet well before he reached Falstaff Island. His body just hadn’t gotten the memo yet.
“I guess some people must find it funny that Tom was a fat kid.” Claire Padgett smiles, but there’s not a drop of humor in it. “Yeah, I guess a certain type of person would find that deliciously ironic, considering how things came out in the wash.”
* * *
8
MAXIMILIAN KIRKWOOD and Ephraim Elliot had been friends since they were two years old—although Max wondered if that was precisely true.
They’d been around each other since they were two, anyway: Max’s mom would drop him off at Mrs. Elliot’s house every morning; she always paid her babysitting fee in cash, as the island’s underground economy dictated. Mrs. Elliot said Max and Eef were the very best of friends—sharing their blocks, drinking out of the same sippy cup—but Max didn’t remember that, same as he didn’t remember being born or cutting his first tooth. When his memories kicked in, though—click! like a light switch—Ephraim was right there.
You’d never find a stranger pair. Ephraim was a creature of pure momentum, pure chaos: 140 pounds of fast-twitch muscle fiber packed into a long, quivering frame. The air closest to Eef’s arms and shoulders seemed to shimmer, same way a hummingbird’s wings exist in a blur of motion. Max was stouter—not fat, solid—and possessed a preternatural state of calm unusual for his age; it wasn’t hard to picture him in the Lotus position on North Point beach, eyes serenely shut, totally Zen-ing out.
It shouldn’t have worked—the differences in the boys’ personalities should’ve repulsed one from the other, like trying to touch magnets of matching polarities—but the opposite held true.
On summer nights, Max and Ephraim would hike to the bluffs behind Max’s house, through the long, dry grass frosted white with the salt spray off the sea. They’d pitch a tent on the highest peak, the lights of Max’s home only a pinprick in the dark. Lying on their backs under the endless vault of sky—so much wider than in a city, where buildings hemmed in that same sky, light pollution whiting out the stars. They knew some of the constellations—Scoutmaster Tim had taught them, though only Newton bothered to earn a merit badge in astronomy. They could recognize the stars in their simplest alignments: the Big Dipper, Ursa Major and Minor.
“It doesn’t really look like a bear,” Max said one night.
“Why should it?” Ephraim said, sounding angry. “That’s humans trying to, like, organize the stars to our liking. You think the Big Guy, the Grand Creator, Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whoever said: Oh, guess I’d better make these flaming balls of gas look exactly like a bear or a fucking spoon so those stupid goons on rock 5,079 don’t get confused?” He lip-farted. “Ohyeahriiiight,” stringing the words all together.
They talked about the stuff best friends ought to. Stupid stuff. Their favorite candy (Max: Swedish Fish, especially the rare purple ones; Eef: Cracker Jack, which Max claimed wasn’t exactly candy but Eef said was sweet enough); who had bigger boobs, Sarah Matheson or Triny Dunlop (both agreed Triny’s were technically bigger, although Ephraim held the opinion, sadly untested, that Sarah’s were softer); whether God existed (both believed in a higher power, though Eef thought churches treated their parishioners like ATMs); and who’d win in a fight: a
zombie or a shark?
“A zombie,” Eef said. “Of course. It’s already dead, right? It’s not gonna be scared of . . . hey, what kind of shark? A sandy? A whitetip? I could win against a sandy!”
Max shook his head. “Great white. Biggest badass in the ocean.”
“Pfffffft!” Eef said. “Killer whales got it all over great whites. But anyway, I still say zombie. If it gets one bite in, it wins—the shark’s a zombie!”
“Who says sharks turn into zombies?”
“Everything turns into a zombie, Max-a-million.”
“Whatever. I say shark. You know how thick sharkskin is? I was down at the dock when a trawler came in with a dead mako. Ernie Pugg tried to cut it open on the dock—his fillet knife broke. Like trying to hack through a tire, man. Who says a zombie’s rotted old teeth won’t break, too? And anyway, what if the shark bites the zombie’s head off? A zombie can’t swim too well, its rotten-ass arms flopping around.”
Eef considered this. “Well, if it bites the zombie’s head off and swallows it, its head will be in the shark’s belly—and it’ll still be alive. Like, zombie-alive, which is really dead but whatever. So the zombie can bite the shark’s guts out from the inside.” Ephraim pumped his fist in victory. “Zombie wins! Zombie wins!”
“Ah, go to hell,” Max said, conceding.
“I been to hell,” Ephraim said, his voice pitched at a Clint Eastwood growl. “I ain’t afraid to go back.”
Sometimes their conversation meandered quite accidentally into topics of greater importance. One night both boys were in that gauzy-minded state preceding sleep when Ephraim said:
“I ever tell you that my pops busted my arm? I was like one year old, man. Can’t even remember. Guess I was screaming in my crib and he comes in, all pissed, lifts me up, and my arm gets stuck between the crib bars and he kept pulling and my arm just went kerflooey.”