The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  “What . . .” Ephraim breathed, “. . . is that?”

  A fragile white tube broke the surface of the skin an inch above the Scoutmaster’s navel. It pushed through insistently, twisting around as if tasting the air. It was followed quickly by another and another. Soon there were seven or eight: it looked like the legs of an albino spider struggling to escape its spider hole.

  Each tube was slightly pebbled—they seemed to be studded with something. Max squinted closer. They were . . . oh God, they were mouths. Little mouths like the ones on a sucker fish.

  The Scoutmaster’s stomach split soundlessly, like Saran Wrap, groin to rib cage. Hundreds of worms came boiling out, all much smaller versions of the single massive abomination that had come out of the other man—the stranger. Some were the thickness of butcher’s twine, but most were frail and wispy, as insubstantial as the clipped threads of a spiderweb. They twisted and roiled and spilled down the Scoutmaster’s papery flesh: his skin empty of blood and nutrients, just a soft white covering like dry fatback.

  Max noticed that the worms didn’t appear to be singular entities. Rather they were twisted together—a pulpy white ball radiating dozens or hundreds. It was as if something had gathered them up and tied them all into a bulging knot, like that ball they saw yesterday in the rocks—a knot of fucking snakes. These spiky worm-balls tumbled over one another, squirming and shucking. A horrible low hissing noise emanated from the Scoutmaster’s chest cavity.

  “No,” Newt said, his head snapping side to side. “No no no no . . .”

  The hissing noise stopped. Slowly, achingly, the worms stretched as a single unit—a cooperative hive-mind—toward the sound of Newton’s voice.

  “Jesus,” said Ephraim.

  Then the worms swung in his direction.

  Some of them swelled menacingly, a small bead crowning at their tips. There came a series of dim, pop-gun percussions. Delicate strands wafted through the air, sunlight falling along their ghostly wavering contours.

  Ephraim stepped back. He swatted at the strands with a helpless look on his face. He stared at his knuckles, which were broken open and still weeping slug-trails of blood from his fight with Kent.

  Max knew Ephraim so well that he could almost see the crazed thought forming in the other boy’s head.

  They can get inside of me through there. These wounds are basically wide-open doors in my body . . .

  Through an aperture in the cleaved roof, Max spotted a slit of perfectly blue sky—that scintillating blue that comes on the heels of a bad storm—and below, a scrim of gray marking the mainland. His parents would be there. Why hadn’t they come yet? His folks, and Newt’s and Eef’s and Kent’s and Shelley’s, too? Fuck old man Watters—if he couldn’t get his ancient ass in gear, why wouldn’t their folks show up? Kent’s dad could use the police patrol boat—special dispensation, right? An emergency. But no, they’d left their kids alone on this killing floor of an island. Two men were dead already, and Kent was bad off. Death warmed over, as Max’s mom would say. Except for Kent, death might come as a relief. A shudder fled down Max’s spine—the very thought of Kent, dead, his body invaded by these things . . .

  * * *

  “DEVOURER VERSUS CONQUEROR WORMS: THE DUAL NATURE OF THE MODIFIED HYDATID”

  Excerpt from a paper given by Dr. Cynthia Preston, MD, Microbiology and Immunology, at the 27th International Papillomavirus Conference and Clinical Workshop at the University of Boston, Massachusetts.

  The evidence found in Dr. Edgerton’s laboratory is breathtaking both in the groundbreaking nature of what he was able to accomplish and in the savage expediency of his methods.

  Edgerton was viewed by his contemporaries as pathologically secretive. Conversations with him, according to the few who spent time in his presence, were narrowly focused on his work or the work of his rivals.

  Edgerton was an only child. His parents passed away in an automobile accident while he was attending graduate school. By all outward signs he lived for his work.

  His fellow researchers remember him as a hardliner known to play fast and loose with scientific ethics. One oft-reported incident—especially telling in light of the events at Falstaff Island—recounts an evening when Edgerton was discovered by campus police at his alma mater. He’d snuck into a lab using a stolen passkey and was discovered in the process of destroying the work of his closest rival, a senior by the name of Edward Trusskins. Trusskins had been working on a skin graft technique involving lab mice. Edgerton was caught red-handed, as they say, with a syringe of strychnine.

  Despite this infraction and the chilling mind-set it signaled, he was soon pursuing his work at another institute. He was simply too talented. He also could be convincingly sincere when circumstances compelled it.

  There are those who say the best scientists occupy that dangerous headspace teetering at the edge of madness. By this definition Dr. Edgerton was most certainly a world-class scientist.

  Edgerton’s work with the hydatid worm rivaled what Dr. Jonas Salk did for immunology in the 1950s—not in terms of its immediate social benefit (all Edgerton actually created was the most adaptable and survivable parasite known to mankind), but in his successful genetic manipulation of this planet’s simplest life-form.

  He took a simple planarian worm and unlocked its genetic code. In doing so he allowed it to modify its basic anatomic and gastric substructure in ways heretofore thought impossible for any life-form. He enabled the hydatid worm to adapt to its environment on the fly. His stated aim was to rob the worm of its natural defenses in the interests of quarantining it within its host . . . what he accomplished was the exact opposite.

  He opened a genetic Pandora’s box.

  When his hydatid was confronted with a cliff, it grew wings. Confronted with an unbridgeable sea, it grew gills. Its adaptability enabled it to mutate in a dizzying variety of ways. Just like snowflakes, no two of Dr. Edgerton’s hydatids were exactly alike.

  His worms broke down into two broad categories. In the interests of distinction let’s call them “devourer worms” and “conqueror worms.”

  Some species of tapeworm will enter into a parasitic symbiosis with their hosts; they can live in the host for years, eating only enough to survive. But even unmutated hydatids do not behave this way: their genetic imperative is to populate and eventually overrun their hosts, overtaxing their immunodeficiency systems and essentially starving them to death.

  This rarely happens; even the worst hydatid infestation can be flushed out with proper medication. But the video footage recovered from the Edgerton lab indicates that the modified hydatid is both extremely hardy and extremely aggressive: it spawns far faster, devours far more, and grows far larger.

  As such, it is the equivalent of a Kamikaze pilot: its appetite quickens its own extinction cycle.

  The mutated “devourer” hydatid does two things: eats and reproduces. After the infestation reaches critical mass it begins to consume the living tissues of its host—this behavior distinguishes it from the common hydatid, which is incapable of digesting anything beyond waste matter. A devourer will consume protein, fat, muscle tissue, even bone marrow and the vitreous jelly of a host’s eyes. This accounts for much of the “wasting” effect on its host: they come to look like longtime starvation victims in a matter of hours.

  The devastation is intensified by the fact that every molecule of nourishment a devourer consumes serves a singular purpose: to make more of itself. A devourer eats and lays eggs. It is not uncommon for a devourer colony to reach a critical state after an incubation period of only a few hours.

  It is simply impossible for a host to take in enough nourishment to satisfy a devourer colony—whatever the host eats produces more creatures seeking more nourishment . . .

  * * *

  24

  KENT WAS dreaming.

  He was on the ocean with his father. Night was coming on. The eerie smoothness of the water, not a wave or ripple, was what made Kent realize that he
was dreaming.

  Kent was thinking about a girl in his class. Anna Uniak. Anna was pretty and trim and he was sure his father would approve. He often looked at Anna out of the corner of his eye—she sat one seat ahead and to the left of him at school. The light would fall through the classroom window and pick up the fine downy hairs on her cheeks. It looked like peach fuzz, Kent thought. He could eat Anna’s skin just like that—just like a peach . . .

  The sky was strung with strange clouds. A dull crimson and hanging very low, bleeding into the setting sun. Kent thought he could see shapes in them—sinuous squirmings as if the clouds were coming apart in the face of the ocean wind, or giving birth to multiples, or something else he could put no name to.

  His father wore his police uniform. His badge winked in the guttering embers of the day’s light. His father’s wrists, projecting from his sleeves, were wasted looking and his fingers too skeletal.

  “It’ll be a long night,” he said. “And goddamn, I’m hungry.”

  A flock of birds—not the ever-present gulls but jet-black, arrow-eyed ravens—flew overhead, shadowing their boat. Kent could hear their tortured cries and see their rotted beaks. Some kind of white, cindery dust was drifting down from beneath their wings. It fell through the air in little white ribbons, just like in a ticker-tape parade.

  Fear stole into Kent’s heart. He wished he wasn’t so scared—his father had taught him that fear was a useless emotion. Fear is just weakness exiting the body, he’d said to Kent on many occasions.

  But there was something wrong with the whole scene: the menacing shapes lurking within the clouds, the white things drifting down . . . and his father. His father—

  The police uniform hung off his body. He lurched toward Kent with his arms outstretched—stick arms that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a concentration camp prisoner—his fingers just clattering bone. His face was all cheekbones and bulging brow and parchment-thin skin stretched to the point of tearing.

  “A long night!” this starved apparition screamed at him. “A looong and hungry night! Yummy yum yum!”

  His father reached for Kent, bony hands clawing round his shoulders, digging in, piercing the skin. Jeff Jenks leaned in and his skin now came apart: rifts appeared in the fabric of his face, fine lines like cracks in bone china, and then those rifts all met and began to wriggle and suddenly Kent was staring into a face made up of hundreds of white pulsating tubes.

  “Nobody loves me,” his worm-father sang sadly. Writhing alabaster worms dripped off his lips and into his mouth, thrashing contentedly on the Swiss-cheesed root of his tongue. “Everybody hates me; I’m going to the garden to eat you.”

  Kent toppled into the bottom of the boat with his father atop him. His father’s face fell apart in sections. The abominations detached and squirmed down his collar, pattering onto Kent’s upturned face like warm raindrops. They found his mouth and nose and ears and eyes, infiltrating them with greedy abandon.

  “This is only fear entering the body,” his father said.

  NEWTON WAS the one who suggested they make a list.

  His own survival instincts told him this was the wisest plan. When the world was crumbling around your ears, your best bet was to set yourself a few simple tasks to focus your attention on. While you were working on those tasks, your mind had a chance to cope with the situation. If you could just get past the initial shock—the shock of death and of sudden isolation—then maybe a better plan would come to you later.

  They stood down at the shore now: Ephraim, Max, Shelley, and Newton.

  “Three things,” Newt said. “First, find some food. Second, medicine for Kent.”

  “Why?” Shelley said. “He’s just going to end up like Tim.”

  Newton glanced up sharply. Shut up, Shel. Shut up and go away. Walk into the ocean and just sink. “We don’t know that. We don’t know that at all.”

  Shelley only smiled—sadly, poisonously, impossible to tell—and wandered down to the shoreline. That’s right, Newton thought. Just keep walking, jerkoid.

  “Third,” Newton went on, “we either make a raft or oars for the boat we already have.”

  Ephraim doubled over, clutching his knees, and vomited on the rocks. His body vibrated like a hard-struck tuning fork. He stayed that way for a while, breathing heavily, before straightening up and wiping his lips.

  “I don’t know.” He stared at the other boys. “I don’t know what to do now.”

  His gaze fell to his knuckles. He rubbed them with his fingers and spread blood down to his wrist. There was something obsessive about the way he did it.

  Newton said: “It’s okay—”

  “It’s not okay,” said Ephraim. “The Scoutmaster’s dead. He . . . oh my God, his belly split open and a bunch of worms fell out. Worms. How the hell did they get there?”

  Max said, “We have to stay away from the cabin. Do what Newt said. Get some food. Make a raft or something. Find a way back home.”

  Shelley called from the beachhead: “You sure we’ll be able to get back home?”

  He was crouched by the shore, stirring the water with a stick. He pushed the tip of it against the fat body of a sea slug. He exerted slow pressure until the slug’s body burst like a snot-filled bath bead.

  The boys hadn’t seen what he’d done. Did it matter, anyway? Part of him—a growing part—wanted to shed the mask that shielded his under-face. This possibility put a warm lump in his belly.

  “What are you talking about, Shel?” Ephraim said.

  He pointed across the water at the squat shapes on the horizon. “Those aren’t trawlers. They aren’t fishing boats. Those are ships—like, military stuff.”

  “So?”

  “So think about it, Eef,” he said. “That guy who showed up the other night. What was that thing that came out of him? And then Scoutmaster, then Kent. Whatever it is, it’s spreading—right? That means it’s a disease. Something that hops from person to person.” He cocked his head at Ephraim, who kept rubbing his knuckles against the coarse weave of his pants. “It gets inside of you somehow and starts . . . doing what it does, I guess.”

  Ephraim’s hands clenched into fists. Blood was streaked down his pants.

  “What are you saying, Shel?”

  “I’m saying maybe they won’t let us leave. Even if we build a raft. They’ll keep us right here because we’re contagious. We’re contaminated.”

  “Shut up,” Max said. “That’s stupid bullshit. Nobody’s going to keep a bunch of kids on an island, Shel. Our folks wouldn’t let it happen. They’re adults. Adults don’t do stuff like that.”

  As his words echoed into silence, Max realized that he’d held the exact opposite viewpoint only minutes ago, inside the cabin. His mind wasn’t centered anymore—it spun on confused, worrisome tangents.

  “Can you explain those ships?” Ephraim asked Max hopefully.

  “They could be army ships. All I’m saying is they’re not going to stop us from going home.”

  “Then why aren’t they coming to get us?” Shelley said.

  Max had no answer for that. Newton said: “They could have a million reasons for staying away. If it’s something contagious, maybe they have a cure. Then they’ll be here quick as quick. But Max is right—they’re adults. If they’re making us wait, I’m sure there’s a good reason. Until then we have to make do. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it? We’re Scouts, aren’t we?”

  “So what are we going to eat?” Max said.

  Newton said: “There’s berries and fungi. We should be able to catch something, don’t you think? Scoutmaster showed us how to string a foot-trap, and there’s rope in the cabin.”

  “Are you gonna get that rope?” Shelley asked.

  “If I have to,” Newton told him evenly.

  Ephraim said: “What about Kent? If he’s sick—”

  “If? He is sick,” Shelley said.

  “If you don’t shut up, I’m going to put your head through a tree,” Ephraim sa
id.

  “Save your energy, Eef,” Shelley said in a voice gone silky soft.

  “Kent needs to throw it all up,” Newton said. “That’s the best way to get what’s inside of him out. There are plants that can do that pretty safely. It’s in my field book, which is still in the cabin. So I’d better—”

  A boat motor kicked up beyond the spit of headland that projected from the southern tip of the island. The boys could just barely make out a boat streaking toward them.

  “Hey, check it out—that’s Mr. Walmack’s cigarette boat,” Ephraim said.

  Calvin Walmack was one of the town’s few summer people. He showed up every June with a mahogany tan, bleached white teeth, and his shrill wife, Tippy. Mr. Walmack owned a vintage cigarette boat that was moored down at the jetty. The Ferrari of boats, Max’s father called it: pretty much just a huge motor strapped to strips of polished teak.

  Mr. Walmack’s boat hammered over the water, hitting the waves and skipping dangerously. It looked to be on the verge of hydroplaning. Two other boats were in pursuit: stockier and painted a dusty black. Gun turrets were mounted on their bows.

  The cigarette boat skiffed off a big wave and came down with a smack. The engine cut out. A thin ribbon of smoke coiled up to smudge the sky. Newton could see two men in the boat, but they were too far off for him to make out faces. They were waving their arms.

  The pursuing vessels cut around the cigarette boat in a scissoring move. Men moved swiftly about on deck. Ephraim thought he saw the sun glinting down their arms—glinting off the weapons they were carrying.

  The boats bobbed on the surf. The boys watched with their hands canopying their eyes. The black boats returned the way they had come. The cigarette boat remained afloat but looked empty.

  When the black boats were well clear, a small explosion rocked Mr. Walmack’s boat. A gout of flame shot up from the engine. A sound like a shotgun blast trailed across the sea.