The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  It swam right up to them, totally unperturbed. Maybe it was curious—or maybe it was hungry, too, and thought the boys might make an easy meal. It swam between Newton’s split legs. He trembled from the cold and from the fear that the turtle might snap at his thighs. But it swam through serenely enough.

  It had four flippers. The two at the front were long sickles, sort of like the wings on a plane. The two at the back looked like bird talons, except with webs of tough connective tissue. The skin on all four flippers was iridescent yellow overlaid with dark scaling. It was a beautiful creature.

  Max gritted his teeth and plunged his hands into the water. His fingers closed around the edge of the turtle’s shell, which was as slimy as an algae-covered rock. The turtle kicked forcefully—its strength was incredible. Suddenly Max was on his knees in the freezing surf. The rocks raked his shins. The turtle’s small ebony claws dug into his thighs. He opened his lips to cry out and when he did the sea washed in, leaving him choking and sputtering.

  The turtle slipped out of his grip. He splashed after it blindly.

  “Newt! Get it before it gets away!”

  Newton hobble-walked to where the turtle was throwing itself against the tide pool barrier. He grabbed one of its rear flippers. It was slippery and tough like a radial tire slicked in dish soap. The turtle swung around and snapped wildly at Newton. Its head telescoped out on its wrinkled neck farther than he’d thought possible: it reminded him of that game Hungry Hungry Hippos. Newton let out a fearful holler as its jaws went snack-snack-snack inches from his face. He caught the briny smell of the turtle’s breath and another, more profound scent: something hormonal and raw.

  He reeled back and nearly tumbled face-first into the water. The turtle went back to flinging itself at the rock. Max was breathing heavily through gritted teeth. Water hissed between the chinks with harsh hsst! sounds. The bitter tang of fear washed through Newton’s mouth. This situation had developed horrible potential, though he wasn’t quite sure how that had happened.

  “You grab one flipper,” Max said, his eyes squeezed down to slits. “I’ll grab the other. We’ll get it up on shore. It won’t be so tough on land.”

  They took hold of its back flippers and dragged it out. The turtle’s front flippers paddled in useless oarlike circles. Its head thrashed, sending up fine droplets of water. Max’s whitened lips were skinned back from his teeth—more a funhouse leer than a smile. A look of horrible triumph had come into his eyes.

  They heaved the turtle up onto the sickle of rain-pitted sand. It tried to scuttle up the beachhead but it was hemmed in by steep shale. The boys hunched over with their hands on their knees—their kneecaps chapped red with cold—to collect their breath. The sky had gone dark: an icy vault pricked with isolated stars. A fingernail slice of the moon cast a razored edge of brightness over the sea.

  “We should build a fuh-fuh-fire,” Newton said, his teeth chattering.

  “First we have to kill it.”

  A painful tension had sunk into Max’s chest: the pressure of a huge spring coiled to maximum compression. He was angry at the turtle for its mute will to survive and for its defiance of his own needs. He was frustrated that the turtle had scared him. He’d have to kill it for that transgression alone.

  The turtle turned to face them. Its head was tucked defensively into its shell. It struggled forward on its front flippers, aiming to return to the tide pool.

  Max stepped in front of it. The turtle’s head darted out to snap at his toes. Max pulled his foot away with a strangled squawk. The turtle had taken a V-shaped bite: the wound went a quarter inch into his toe, almost to the nail.

  Max felt very little—his toes were still numb and his system was awash with adrenaline—but as his blood pissed into the sand he sensed all the threads inside his body gathering up, tightening, and committing themselves to a steely purpose.

  He’d kill this thing. He wanted it dead.

  Max found a bit of driftwood and hooked it under the turtle’s shell. It wheeled and snapped off three inches of bleached wood. Max jammed the remaining portion under its front flipper and levered it up savagely.

  The turtle flipped onto its back. It uttered a pitiful squall that sounded too much like the cry of a human infant for Newton’s ears.

  “There.” Max’s chest heaved. “There, you fucking tough guy—there you go.”

  With one trembling finger, he flicked open the largest blade of his Swiss Army knife. Moonlight lay trapped along its honed edge. His anger and fear helixed into each other. Things were speeding up and yet everything was held in a bubble of crystalline clarity: the tide swelling over the rain-pitted sand and smoothing everything with a layer of silver; the shriek of gulls overhead that seemed to urge him toward an act of savagery he’d already settled his mind around.

  Max pressed the knife to the turtle’s stomach, which was the off-beige color of the rubberized mat in his bathtub at home. The tip slipped into one of the grooves in the turtle’s shell as if guided by its own inner voice.

  Max had never killed anything. Oh, maybe bugs—but did they really count? He’d never stabbed anything, that was for sure. Newton stared at him with eyes that shone like cold phosphorus. Max wished he’d look away.

  He bore down, unsure at first but steadily applying more force. The blade slipped and skittered along the turtle’s belly, leaving a milky scratch on its shell. The turtle mewled. Its flippers oared in crazy circles. Its helplessness made it look stupid, comical. Max could do whatever he wanted to it.

  He refolded the knife and pulled out the leather awl: just a simple metal spike. He held the knife in both hands as if it were the T-handle on a TNT detonator box. He took a rough guess at where the turtle’s heart might lie, then hunched his shoulders and bore down with all his weight.

  The spike pierced the turtle with the sound of a three-hole punch going through a thick sheaf of paper. Blood poured from the perfectly round hole, darker than Max had ever imagined. The turtle’s back flippers clenched and unclenched spastically. Something dribbled out between those flippers: pearlescent roe that had the look of delicate soap bubbles.

  Max punched the leather tool through a second time. The turtle’s body compressed under Max’s weight, its chest buckling like when you press down on a plastic garbage can lid. Its flippers beat helplessly at the air. Blood burst out of the wound in a startling syrupy gout. The smell was profoundly briny, as if the turtle’s organs were encrusted with salt.

  Max punched the spike through again, again . . . again. The turtle gurgled, then made a fretful stuttering sound: icka-icka-icka, as if it had a bad case of the hiccups.

  Max moaned and sawed his arm across his eyes—he’d begun to cry without being aware of it—and stared at the turtle with eyes gone swimmy with tears. Blood was coming out of it all over. It rocked side to side frantically. A low venomous hiss came out of the punctures; it was as if the turtle’s organs had vaporized into steam that was now venting through those fresh holes.

  “Please,” Max said. He punched the spike through again. It went in so goddamn easy now, as if the turtle’s skin had relinquished its prior rights of refusal. “Please won’t you just die.”

  But it would not. Stubbornly, agonizingly, it clung to life. Its head craned up to take in the bloody wreckage of its own body. Its eyes were set in nets of wrinkles, inexpressive of any emotion Max could name. Its will to live was terrifying, as it rejected the notion of an easy death.

  Why had he done this—why? Jesus, oh Jesus.

  On TV it was always so quick and easy, almost bloodless: the detective shot the murderer and he collapsed, clutching his heart. Or the knife slid in soundlessly and some guy went down clutching his stomach, venting a sad sighing note—“Eeoooogh . . .”—before he died. But it didn’t work that way in real life. Suddenly Max understood those awful stories he’d seen on the national news, the ones where a reporter grimly intoned some poor person had been stabbed forty times or whatever. Maybe the stabber would
have stopped after a single stab if that was all it took. But most living things don’t want to die. It took a lot to kill them. Events take on a vicious momentum. All of a sudden you’re stabbing as a matter of necessity. You’re hoping that if you just put enough holes into a body, the life will drain out and death will rapidly flow in . . .

  “Newt,” he pleaded. “Newt, please.”

  The boys knelt in the sand, wet and shivering. Sand stuck to the pads of their feet. Max was shaking and sobbing. He could never, ever be hungry enough to kill something if this was what it meant. The turtle was still hiccuping, but now those sounds were interspersed with frantic peeps, like a baby bird calling from its nest.

  Newton grabbed blindly for the turtle’s head. He slashed wildly with his knife, trying to hack through its throat. But the turtle withdrew into its shell and Newton’s knife only cut a deep trench around its jawbone. WWAMD? Not this. Alex would never have done this. Newton burst into a freshet of tears.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his chest hitching uncontrollably. “I thought that might be the quickest way. Y’know, cut its head off. Like a guillotine. A terrible thing to do but still better than . . .”

  The turtle peered out from the leathery cave where its head now resided. Its eyes blinked slowly. Its mouth opened and closed like a man at the end of a long run. Blood filled the lower hub of its shell and dripped onto the sand. It kept peeping and peeping.

  The boys knelt with their shoulders bowed as the turtle bled to death. It took so, so long.

  At one point, its head poked out of its shell. Its blood-slicked eyes stared around as if in hopes that its tormentors had grown bored of their sport and left it alone. Maybe it thought it could still return to the tide pool and be carried back into the ocean. Animals never gave up hope, did they? But its glazed eyes found them, blinked once, and resignedly returned to the darkness of its shell.

  The great wave of the tide moved farther inland. The water lifted. The surf sucked at the boys’ bare feet. The turtle’s flippers went stiff all at once, then relaxed. Tiny translucent creatures that looked like earwigs crawled out from the deep folds of its skin to trundle over its cooling body. Aquatic parasites looking for a new host.

  “I’m not huh-huh-hungry anymore,” Newton said.

  “Me neither.”

  “My muh-muh . . . my muh-muh . . . my mother says you can’t really love yourself if you hurt animals.”

  “I didn’t mean to. Not like this. If I’d known—”

  “I know. It’s over now anyway.”

  The water lapped at their feet with a dreadful languidness. The gulls hurled down shrill shrieks from high above. The wind whispered in a language they could not name.

  They buried the turtle in the forgetting sand of the beach.

  * * *

  “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 second breed of worm, the “conqueror,” is more interesting than the “devourer.” It is, for lack of a better term, a “smart” worm.

  As we know, the ability to manipulate the physical makeup of their host is a trait of some tapeworms. Take the African worm, H. diminuta. Their primary hosts are beetles, who frequently ingest rat droppings infected with tapeworm eggs. The first thing H. diminuta does upon entering a host is to locate the reproductive organs and release a powerful enzyme, sterilizing the beetle.

  Why? So that the beetle does not waste any more energy on its reproductive system, allowing H. diminuta to further exploit the beetle’s metabolic resources.

  This is one such display of the manipulative “intellect” of tapeworms.

  Dr. Edgerton’s conqueror worms work in concert with the devourer worms—or, more accurately, they abet the devourer’s massive appetite.

  Once the mutated hydatid enters a host, it forms a colony in the host’s intestinal tract. Once situated, a single conqueror worm emerges. The exact biology behind this is unknown; theoretically it may be similar to the method by which a bee colony selects its queen.

  The conqueror worm is significantly larger than its devourer brethren. It perforates the intestinal wall and makes its way to the spinal column. From there it ascends to the base of the brainstem. Some conquerors twine around the host’s spine, climbing it in the manner of creeping ivy climbing a parapet; others infiltrate the column itself by easing through a gap in the vertebral discs and entering the host’s cerebrospinal fluid.

  As it ascends, the conqueror lays eggs. These are reserve conquerors, one might say, in the event the queen expires. The conqueror larvae swim through the host’s bloodstream and infest the strata of muscle tissue in the host’s extremities; they are what account for the “bee-stung” look on several of Dr. Edgerton’s test subjects: these are nesting conquerors. This is also a sign of a full-blown, late-stage infestation.

  Once the conqueror worm enters the cranial vault, it injects a powerful neurotransmitter into the host’s basal ganglia. The purpose is simple: it puts the host’s appetite into overdrive. Imagine a car with a brick wedged on the gas pedal: that’s the runaway hunger drive that a conqueror kindles in its host.

  All the host wants to do is eat. In time, what it eats ceases to matter. Whether it is nutrient-rich or even properly “food” isn’t something the host takes into account.

  Anecdotal evidence taken from Edgerton’s lab indicates that the conqueror worm’s neurotransmitter may have several other hallucinogenic or psychotropic effects. Edgerton’s videos show animal subjects behaving incredibly oddly; at times they appear to be unaware what is happening to them. Perhaps there is a “masking” effect: the host views itself as healthy—even healthier than before—while the devourer worms destroy it. This may enable the hosts to maintain a positive outlook, making them more productive, therefore gathering more food, therefore prolonging the lives of the worms. Otherwise they may have simply given up and died.

  The conqueror worm’s primary value to its colony may be the propagation of a positive mind-set of its host—the longer the host believes it can survive, the more the colony can feast upon it.

  Testimony given by the lone survivor of the Falstaff Island tragedy seems to justify this hypothesis. The boy stated that his infected troop-mates seemed, and I quote, “stronger . . . happier, even when they were falling apart. They couldn’t see themselves for what they really were.”

  * * *

  31

  “EEF . . . EEF, you still there?”

  The knife slipped from Ephraim’s hands. It kept on slipping. He couldn’t get a good grip. It was all the blood. His hands were greasy with it. It shone on his fingers like motor oil in the moonlight.

  He’d seen it.

  He’d cut a satisfyingly deep crescent around the knob of his ankle bone—he’d glimpsed sly movement there. A faint pulsation that on any other day he might have dismissed as the heavy beat of his heart through a surface vein—but now, today, no.

  And he’d cut too deeply. He knew this immediately. His hands had been shaking too hard in his excitement—in his need to find it. His skin opened up with a silky sigh, as if it had been waiting all his life to split and bleed. The inner flesh was a frosty white, as if the blood had momentarily leapt clear of the wound.

  In that instant, he’d seen it.

  Terror had seized his heart in a cold fist. Undeniably, it was inside him. Feasting on him. Coiling round his bones like barbed wire around a baseball bat.

  But on the heels of terror came a strange species of relief. He was right. It was just like Shelley promised. He wasn’t crazy.

  “Shel?” He coughed. A carbolic taste slimed his tongue, in his sinuses and lungs, burrowing into his bones to infuse the marrow with the flavor of tar. “Where did you go?”

  “I’ve been here all along, friend. Don’t yo
u remember?”

  “Ug,” was all Ephraim said. A warm, sluglike blob passed over his lips, falling to the carpet of pine needles with a wet plop. Ephraim couldn’t see what it was—didn’t want to.

  “Did you see it, Eef?”

  “Ub.”

  “What did it look like?”

  He’d seen only a flash. It was thicker than Ephraim ever thought possible. Fat as a Shanghai noodle. Its head—he’d found the head—split into four separate appendages. They looked spongy but predatory, too, like the petals of a lotus blossom or a snake’s head primed to strike. It’d flinched like an earthworm when you ripped back a patch of grass to find it squirming in the dark loam; its body had whipped madly about as it withdrew into the sheltering layers of his muscle tissue.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Ephraim had hissed.

  He’d dug his fingers into the wound and tweezed with his fingertips. He felt the bare nub of his ankle bone—cold as an ice cube. His fingers closed around the worm, he was sure of that . . . almost sure. The parted lips of his flesh were rubbery and slick, gummed with the blood that was still flowing quite freely.

  He’d gotten hold of it, just barely. A strand of spaghetti cooked perfectly al dente (“to the tooth,” as his mother would say): a mushy exterior with the thinnest braid of solidity running through it. Did worms have spines? Maybe this one did.

  Squeezing his fingers, he’d tried to pinch his nails together, praying he could decapitate the horrible thing. Afterward, he figured he could pull the rest of its limp body out using the Swiss Army knife tweezers. If he was unsuccessful, he guessed it would just rot inside of him. It might create internal sepsis. His innards could be riddled with ulcerated boils and pus-filled lesions. He might die screaming, but at least he’d die empty rather than infested.