The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  Q: Tell me how Dr. Edgerton went about finding Tom Padgett, the first human test subject.

  A: It wasn’t so hard as you might think. It’s amazing how many people are so down on their luck they’ll take just about any offer that’s flung at them. Edgerton went to bars. Not the campus bars where the fresh-faced, rosy-futured kids drank. The scumpits on the edge of town. He . . . trolled, is I guess the word. Threw his bait in the water and waited for a bite.

  Q: He told Padgett his plan?

  A: Not right off the bat. He did it in stages. I don’t know the exact run of their conversation. You’d have to ask Edgerton.

  Q: Dr. Edgerton is not an easy man to get a straight answer out of.

  A: Edgerton just brought Padgett back one night. Guy smelled like he’d been marinating in a tub of Old Grouse. Edgerton explained it all calmly and evenly. He’d take the injection and sit in the room. We’d monitor him. If things got out of hand, we’d call a doctor—never mind the fact that no doctor on earth had a cure for what Edgerton would stick him with. Edgerton handed him a nice fat envelope. I don’t know how much cash was in there. I guess it was enough.

  * * *

  20

  THE COOLER was discovered two hundred yards down toward the shore. There was no physical evidence to indicate it had been dragged: no zigzag lines through the soft dirt or trampled weeds. This suggested it had been picked up and carried to its present spot. It lay overturned in a patch of purple-pink shrubs.

  But the crude way that the food had been shredded did suggest an animal. The hot dog packages had been torn open. Raw rags of the granular pink meat lay scattered about the cooler, alit upon by listless late-October flies. M&Ms were strewn around like multicolored jewels.

  Ephraim kicked dirt over a half-chewed hot dog. His jaw was set at a sideways angle, his eyes hooded.

  “Fuck it. Boat’ll be here soon.”

  The boys walked down to the shore. They hadn’t packed their bags—none of them wanted to go inside the cabin, though none of them spoke those words. The air was crisp, with a soft undernote of peppermint. The face of Newt’s Timex Ironman read 8:23. The boat was scheduled to arrive at 8:30.

  Kent slumped on a boulder carpeted with moss that resembled the fuzz on a tennis ball. When he was sure nobody was watching, he pinched some moss and stuffed it into his mouth. He didn’t know why he’d do such a thing. It shamed and disgusted him.

  He was just so damned hungry.

  Newton sidled up. Cautiously he said: “You okay, K?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look a little green.” Newton gave him a chummy smile and pointed to the water. “Like me when I get seasick. The rest of my family have great sea legs, but not me. When the boat gets swaying, I just toss my cookies. Lose my lunch every time.”

  “Newt, screw off.” Kent gave Newton a look more pleading than threatening. “Okay? Please?”

  He turned away and caught Shelley gawping at him. That same vapid look as always—was it, though?

  Kent had been sure the others were asleep when he’d woken last night. The growl of his stomach had drawn him out of a deep slumber: an aching burr like a chain saw revving endlessly. He’d sat up with his hands reflexively clawing his belly.

  His eyes had darted to the cooler. Next he’d glanced at the other boys, scrutinizing them carefully. They were asleep, Newton snoring loud as a leaf blower.

  His gaze had been drawn helplessly to the cooler. The hunger was like nothing he’d ever known. Beyond an ache. More like an insistence. A summoning. There was a big, dark pit inside of him—something that had started out as a pinprick hole but had rapidly grown into a vortex, the equivalent of a violent tornado, but instead of the random objects that a twister pulls into its funnel—trees and mailboxes and lawn mowers—the one inside of him was sucking at his own insides, his liver and kidneys and lungs and stomach, with the incredible pressure of industrial machinery.

  Kent had been terrified that if he let it go on much longer, the hole would suck clean through him—out of him.

  He’d stood silently and crept to the cooler. His heart beat a staccato hi-hat behind his rib cage. His bladder was so tight he thought he might piss himself. Kent had forced himself to exhale softly—otherwise his breath would escape in shrill peeps like a baby bird calling for food. And what did baby birds eat? Worms. Their mothers chewed them up in their flinty beaks and regurgitated them. Worms just like the one that still lay on the cabin floor next to the dead man. Except not that big. And not so maggot-white. It would take a million birds to eat a worm that huge.

  Kent’s hands had crawled over the cooler’s lid. The pebbled plastic reminded him of summer picnics. An ice-carpeted cooler with the brown necks of Coke bottles poking up. Watermelon sliced two inches thick. He’d bite through its pink flesh and spit the black seeds . . . seeds that looked a little like blood-swollen ticks, now that he thought about it.

  His hands flirted over wieners and buns and teardrops of chocolate wrapped in silver foil. Surely one couldn’t hurt? It was his anyway. One-fifth of this food was earmarked for him. So what if Kent wanted to eat his share in the middle of the night?

  He’d plucked a Hershey’s Kiss from the bag with trembling fingers. A runner of drool stretched into a glimmering ribbon in the firelight. He’d unwrapped the chocolate quickly and popped it into his mouth. Chewing and swallowing . . .

  Before his mind could catch up to the mechanical movements of his fingers, the bag was empty. He’d lost track of things. His fingers and lips were streaked with brown chocolate. Brown—Kent’s gorge rose with quick revulsion—brown like the muck pooling out of the dead man’s stomach.

  With swift, silent movements, he carried the cooler down near the shore. Things went hazy from there. Kent could only recall brief glints and flashes. Tearing and rending. Shoveling and swallowing. He may have wept while doing it.

  At some point he’d glanced up and saw Shelley watching. Shelley, who should have been sleeping. Shelley, whose face had gone wolfish in the moonlight.

  Go on, he’d mouthed to Kent. Keep eating. Enjoy it.

  When Kent came back to himself, the cooler was empty. The persistent internal suck had ebbed to a muffled quaver in his gut. It was more than he’d eaten in his entire life. Guilt settled into his bones like lead. He pictured his father hovering over the scene with an accusatory eye.

  You don’t get it, Daddy, he’d wanted to say. You don’t understand what I’m going through.

  I understand weakness, son. Prisons are full of weak-willed men.

  Afterward, Kent had stepped into the ocean to clean his hands and face. The cold water pinkened his fingers. Even at that hour, the mainland was a flurry of light and motion. He cupped water in his hands and walked back to the cooler, wiping his chocolaty fingerprints off the handles.

  On the way back to the fire, he’d found Shelley lingering beneath the leaves of a weeping willow. Kent curled a fist and settled it under Shelley’s chin.

  “Say anything and I’ll kick the shit out of you,” he whispered.

  “If you say so.”

  Kent took a step back. Something in Shelley’s placid expression nearly made his knees buckle.

  “You know what, Kent?” Shelley said. “Your breath stinks like shit. Like cotton candy that someone took a big piss on. Can’t you smell it?”

  Kent could smell it. The treacly-sweet stink with its ammoniac undertone nearly made him gag.

  “I mean it, Shel. Keep your lip zipped.”

  Kent plodded back to the fire and struggled into his sleeping bag. But by morning, despite his devouring the cooler’s entire contents, the hunger pangs had already returned.

  NEWTON GLANCED at his Timex again: 9:02.

  Stanley Watters’s skiff should have puttered up to the wharf a half hour ago. It was not like Mr. Watters to be late. Before his retirement, he’d been the logistics coordinator at the local FedEx depot; the time of day was practically imprinted in his blood. Watters’s
favorite parlor trick was to look at his bare wrist when you asked what time it was—Watters never wore a watch—and give it to you to the very minute. Freaky. He might be a minute or two off nowadays but still, for him to be a half hour late? That was a rare occurrence indeed.

  “You think something happened?” Newton said. “Mr. Watters is what, seventy?”

  “Do you think we could swim back?” Ephraim said.

  Newton scoffed. “Are you nuts? With these currents? They run the Atlantic Ironman Triathlon off Baker Beach.” He pointed in the general direction of North Point. “I went with my mom once to watch it. Guys were staggering out of the ocean. Their teeth were bashing together so hard I could hear it. Most of them puked, they were so exhausted. And those were athletes. Grown-ups. And it was only a thousand meters. From here to shore is three miles.”

  “There are sharks, too,” said Shelley.

  Their heads swiveled. Shelley’s vulpine face was pointed toward the slate-gray water, his expression unreadable.

  “Oh, bullshit,” said Ephraim.

  Shelley’s scarecrow shoulders joggled up and down. “Whatever. My uncle’s seen plenty of sharks. He said one time a couple of oystermen caught a great white down around Campbellton. It swum into Cascumpec Bay after a storm. He says when the oystermen slit its belly open, two full wine bottles slid out onto the dock.”

  Shelley’s uncle was a lobsterman, so it could be true.

  Ephraim made a fist and slugged his thigh. “Could we make a raft or something?” He pointed at Oliver McCanty’s boat. “Or try to get the motor working on that? What do you think, Max?”

  “Why wouldn’t we just chill out?” Max said. “He’s only a half hour late—”

  “Almost forty-five minutes, now,” Newton said.

  “It’s probably nothing,” said Max. “Maybe he’s constipated.”

  This earned a laugh from the others. Ephraim said: “Old man Watters is a total tight-ass.”

  Thunderheads advanced. The boys watched the sky, enrapt. Thunder rolled across the water and echoed back on itself: a sound that was somehow feathery and alive. The clouds shaded purple to jet-black and then whitely incandescent, creased with lightning, billowing up like huge lungs inflating themselves. They spread across the water like a determined battalion. Rain washed down from the leaden clouds to tint the air beneath them a misty gray.

  “Maybe old man Watters knew a storm was coming,” said Max. “Maybe that’s why he hasn’t shown up.”

  Newton said: “Why not just come early then? He knew what time to come. Why leave us out here with a big storm coming through?”

  “We don’t know it’s a big storm . . .” Max said uncertainly.

  Soon they spotted the silvery shroud rolling across the water—which itself had taken on a brooding hue. It stretched over the ocean in a menacing canopy, pushing back the blue sky and blotting out the sun. The water bloomed deep red.

  “Shit, it’s bad,” Kent said thickly. “We have to take cover.”

  They picked their way up the beach toward the cabin. Newton cast a panicky glance over his shoulder. The silvery pall was advancing at a terrific pace. Its contours had settled into a definite shape. A diaphanous funnel connected the water’s surface to the corpulent black thunderclouds above; it rocked side to side like a hula dancer’s hips.

  A cyclone.

  Newton recalled that one of those had touched down in Abbotsford a few years ago. It tore through the saltbox shacks lining the shorefront cliffs, smashing them to matchsticks. It picked up million-dollar yachts owned by rich American cottagers and flung them about like a child tossing his toys during a playroom tantrum.

  “We’ve got to get inside!” he shouted over the banshee wind. “Or underground. Fast!”

  By the time they reached the cabin, the shaker shingles were slapping against the roof—a brittle racck! racck! like the clatter of dry bones.

  As one, they hesitated at the door. The dead man was in there. Scoutmaster Tim was locked in the closet. It was like revisiting the scene of a murder—one they’d all sworn in a pact to never talk about.

  Lightning daggered through a bank of roiling purple clouds and forked sharply into the ocean. The water lit with a mushrooming sheen as if a tiny atom bomb had gone off below the surface.

  Newton said: “We have to get inside. It’s going to hit us any minute.”

  “We need to take cover, but not in there,” said Kent. His face was bleach-white except for the jaundiced flushes painting his cheekbones. “I don’t want to see that man again.”

  Ephraim jeered: “You wanted to see him bad enough last night, didn’t you?”

  “Scoutmaster’s in there, too,” said Newton.

  Kent set his body in front of the door. A trivial gesture, like having a scarecrow guard a bank vault. The wind rose to a breathless whistle that ripped around the hard angles of the cabin, making an ululating note like a bowstring drawn across a musical saw.

  “They’re sick,” Kent said simply.

  “Sick?” said Newton. “Kent, one of them is dead.”

  “Him, then. Tim. He’s sick. The whole place is sick.”

  “How about this, Kent? How about you’re sick.”

  It was Shelley who spoke. The boys almost missed it: the wind tore the words out of his mouth and carried them away over the whipsawing treetops.

  Newton said: “What? Who’s sick?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Shelley said, louder now. “Kent. He’s sick as a dog. Last night I saw him—”

  “Shut up!” Kent almost sobbed. “You shut your dirty mouth, Shel!”

  “Last night,” Shelley said, enunciating each word with utmost care, “I caught Kent eating the food. He stole the cooler and took it down to the water. By the time I got there, he’d eaten it. He—”

  Shelley was opening his mouth to say something more when Kent strode forward and dealt him an openhanded slap to the face.

  “You shut your lying fucking mouth. I’ll kill you, you crazy little fuck.”

  Shelley just stood there. A trickle of blood ran from his split lip like heavy sap from a tapped maple tree. Did he even notice, or care? The empty vaults of his eyes filled with vaporous white, reflecting the lightning that flashed over the bluffs. They became the glass eyes of a toy clown.

  “He did it,” Shelley said softly. He didn’t have to speak very loud anymore: the boys were attuned to his every word. “Yes, he did. Ate all our food. He couldn’t help himself—could you, Kent? That’s why I didn’t say anything at first—I felt sorry for you, Kent. You’re sick. You’ve got the worms.”

  Kent sagged against the door. The effort it had taken to slap Shelley seemed to drain his meager power reserves.

  “We’re not going . . . in,” he said haltingly.

  “Listen, Kent.” Ephraim spoke with cold menace. A brick-hued flush was draining down his cheeks to pinken his neck. “You ate our food. Fine, whatever, it’s been done. But I’m not standing out here waiting to get crisped by lightning. So I’ll tell you what—take a quick count of the teeth in your mouth. Then get ready to kiss about half of them good-bye, because if you don’t get out of my way in about two seconds, you’re going to be picking your pearly whites off the ground.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Ephraim laid his shoulder into Kent’s chest. Kent folded like a lawn chair. Ephraim barreled through into the cabin. The sickening sweetness hammered him in the face—the air inside a decayed beehive could smell much the same.

  Wind screamed through the gaps in the walls—the sound of a thousand teakettles hitting the boiling point. A swath of shingles tore off the roof to reveal the angry sky above: bruised darkness lit with shutter flashes of lightning. The wind curled in through the new aperture to swirl scraps of bloody gauze around the cabin like gruesome snowflakes.

  “We have to get to the cellar!” Newton said.

  “What about Scoutmaster?” Max shouted back.

  They all turned to Kent, who had just dragge
d himself up off the floor. Lightning lit the sky and seethed through every crack and slit in the cabin.

  “He’s sick,” Kent said.

  Ephraim said: “You’re sick, too!”

  “I’m not!” Kent held out his hands—they did not make for compelling evidence of his claim. “I’m not fucking sick!”

  “Max,” Ephraim said. “Is Kent sick or not?”

  “I think maybe so,” said Max—not because he wanted it to be so, but because there was no other answer for what he was seeing. “I’m sorry, Kent.”

  “What a fucking shock!” Kent snarled. “The Bobbsey Twins agree!”

  The wind hit a momentary lull. In that dead calm, the boys heard Tim’s voice calling them from the closet.

  “I am sick.”

  Kent pointed at the door. An expression of smug elation was plastered on the strained canvas of his face. “You see? You see now?”

  Max knelt at the closet and tore the strip of duct tape off. Who the hell had put it there? He started yanking the tea towels stoppered under the door—then stopped abruptly. What if something squiggled out from under the door? The Scoutmaster’s fingers, even, gone thin and witchy like long pointed wires?

  “There’s a big storm coming,” he said to the door, to the Scoutmaster. “It’s already here.”

  “I can hear it.” Tim’s voice was weird. “What you should do is get some candles and blankets and head down to the cellar.”

  “What about you?”

  “I think . . . I’ll stay right here, Max.”

  The hopelessness in his voice sent a volley of cold nails into Max’s chest.

  “Why?”

  “You know why, Max. Are any of the other boys looking bad?”

  “Yeah, I think Kent is.”

  “I’m not sick!” Kent screeched pitifully.

  “You shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you,” Ephraim said with calm contempt.

  The wind dropped to a brief lull. Tim’s voice could be heard clearly.

  “You have to be careful,” he said, sounding immensely tired. “Whatever this is, it’s catching. I don’t know how. But it can be passed around . . . round and round . . . I’m so hungry, Max.”