The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  “That’s what I mean, I guess. Maybe they are the worst things on earth. But that would make them perfect, wouldn’t it? Perfect at being what they are and doing what they do. Perfect killers.”

  “They haven’t killed everyone. We don’t know about Kent.”

  Newton’s eyes pinched up at the edges. “I hope he’s still alive. Really, I hope so.”

  “He could have swum back.”

  Max stared out over the slatey water and wondered if he really believed that.

  “If anyone could have, it would be Big K,” Newton agreed, if only for Max’s sake.

  “Maybe he’ll talk to the adults. They’ll finally come for us.”

  “Anything is possible.”

  AROUND NOON, Newton told Max he was having a hard time seeing out of his left eye.

  “It’s all fuzzy around the sides.” His laugh held a lacy filigree of hysteria. “It’s like staring at the world from inside a peach or something.”

  Max leaned over and inspected Newton’s eye.

  “It looks okay.”

  Newton scratched at the purple stains on his legs from the poison sumac. He’d been scratching all morning. The flesh was raked open and bloody in spots.

  “It does? Okay, well . . . jeez, it hurts. Maybe it’s not my eye. I don’t think there are any nerves in an eyeball. Maybe it’s behind it. You think?”

  Max knelt closer. Terror was building in his chest, gaining a keener edge.

  “Spread your eyelids with your fingers. I’ll look.”

  “Okay,” Newton said dreamily. “Yeah. Good idea.”

  Max held one hand up to shield his own eyes from the sun and squinted closely. Nothing. Just bloodshot whiteness.

  “It’s fine, Newt. I can’t see . . .” His breath caught. “. . . can’t see . . .”

  “What? What is it?”

  It was nothing. Just a teeny-tiny quill. No bigger than an itty-bitty claw on a baby mouse’s paw. It sat at the bottom of Newton’s eye. It was probably just a trick of the light or a sty or something—until it moved.

  “What is it, Max? I can feel it.”

  The minuscule writhing worm lashed side to side as if stretching itself out in its new digs. Max reached out to grab it. Maybe he could tease it out of Newton’s eye the way his grandfather used to pull coddling worms out of a crabapple . . . until Max realized it was inside Newton’s eye. Swimming in the jelly.

  No. The word ran through his head on an endless loop. No no no no—

  It all at once went still. Then it seemed to flex toward Max—as if it knew, in the single vile atom it called a brain, that it was being watched.

  “What is it, Max? Tell me. Tell me!”

  46

  AN HOUR later, Max was back at the cavern.

  Newton had asked him not to go. Begged him. What if something happens, Max? Then we’ll both be alone.

  Max simply waited until Newton fell asleep—the smallest kindness he could now afford. He’d found a signal flare in the cabin. The ones Scoutmaster Tim brought had gotten drenched in the storm, but this one—which Newton had brought personally, in a Ziploc bag—might still be okay.

  Max prayed it would work. If not, it meant going down in the dark with the Shelley-thing still there. He’d have to paw around blindly for the spark plugs. What if he touched it instead?

  Max had been happy enough to leave the plugs and try to figure out some other method of escape, but now, with Newt as sick as he was, he had no choice.

  Listen, it’ll be no big deal, he thought, bucking himself up. Go on down, grab the plugs, and get the heck out of Dodge. It’s not even that far down: it just felt that way yesterday because you were in the dark. It’s probably not much farther down than the basement stairs at home.

  The sun had fallen a few degrees in the sky. It shone brightly through the tree branches and into the cavern mouth. Bright as it was, after a few yards the sunlight turned spotty and that awful darkness took over.

  He tore the strike strip. The flare burst alight with a heat so unexpected that it singed the hairs on his arms. They’d been standing on end, along with those on the nape of his neck.

  He nudged his foot into the cave mouth. The shadow of the overhang cleaved across his boot. He tried to take the next step—but his back leg wouldn’t move. It may as well have been glued to the ground. The muscle fibers twitched down his hamstrings: antic, fluttering waves under the skin.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “Come on.”

  An act of profound concentration and willpower was required to budge his back leg. He finally threw it out in front of him in an awkward stagger-step that nearly sent him tumbling down the steep grade of the cave, but he checked his forward momentum in time.

  “Don’t be a baby,” Max said to himself, though he had every legitimate reason in the world to act like one. Scout Law number three: A Scout’s duty is to be useful and help others, and he is to do his duty before anything else, even though he gives up his own pleasure, or comfort, or safety to do it.

  The temperature dipped by ten degrees as soon as he entered the cave. The air came out of his lungs in short, popping breaths—it almost sounded like he was hiccuping, or on the verge of having a good cry. The fear was as strong as ever: that disembodied ball of baby fingers relentlessly tickling his guts.

  One foot in front of the other, he told himself. You can always run. You can pelt out of here like your ass is on fire.

  It amazed him that the voice in his head—confident, jokey—could be so different from the piss-scared boy it resided within.

  At least he had a flare. The journey was much less disorienting with a light to go by. Salt sparkled on the sea-eaten rock, tinted bloodred by the flare light.

  The rocky shelves were overgrown with patches of sickly yellow moss. Colonies of huge white toadstools jutted from the cave walls at lunatic angles; they hung like fleshy ears, their undersides frilled with soft gills—or in some cases, little spikelike teeth. Max’s neck came in contact with one as he rounded a sharp bend in the descent, and it felt horridly clammy and bloated, like the flesh of a waterlogged body coughed up from the sea.

  The air was still sweet but didn’t seem as cloying. His breath came shallowly. He could hear the blood beat in his ears. The flare sputtered.

  Don’t you go out, Max thought—prayed. Oh don’t you dare go out.

  He came to the mouth of the chamber. The smell was strangely enticing: sweet plums packed in salt. The air was alive with sounds, curiously stealthy, over the drip of water. He held the flare aloft. The chamber’s ceiling was clad in the same yellow moss; tendrils of witchgrass draped down. Trundling over the moss, clinging to its spongy folds, was an army of sea creatures: sand crabs and pulpy slugs and huge sightless beetles Max had never seen before. The clicking of their pincers and other appendages created a mammoth chittering above his head.

  The Shelley-thing lay to the side of the chamber. Its limbs were spiked out at odd angles; it looked like a dead spider pressed flat between the pages of a dictionary. So small. Death did that, didn’t it? Shrunk everything. It lay in the same position as it had yesterday . . . didn’t it?

  He wasn’t so sure now. Maybe it had inched away from the cave wall—but how could it have done that? He pictured the things inside of Shelley doing that . . . somehow pulling Shelley’s lifeless body along the cave floor.

  Max wondered if the chamber was fed by an aquifer leading out to sea. The tide might have rolled in, flooding the chamber. That would explain the sea life on the ceiling: he didn’t think they’d been there before. It would also explain the Shelley-thing’s positioning: the body would’ve floated up with the tide, bumping around the chamber, brushing into the walls, becoming saturated with seawater before settling on the floor as the tide flowed out.

  Had some of those worms flowed out with the tide? Max imagined them wriggling through the water, latching on to a codfish, which got eaten by a seal, which got eaten by a shark, which got caught in a drift net and h
auled on board a trawler and slit open on the dock, billions of worms spilling out in front of the perplexed crewmen . . .

  Or maybe Shelley’s body was in the exact same position. It’d been dark and crazy. Yes, Max figured. It was in the same spot. Yes.

  He squinted past the sputtering flare light. Was anything else moving? He thought he saw floating flickers in the air—but no, no, those were just vapor contrails from the nearby seabed. He could hear the seethe of the sea seeping through the rock.

  The flare had already sputtered well down the paper tube—that shouldn’t happen, should it? Maybe it was an old flare. Its glow had diminished alarmingly.

  He set one foot inside the chamber. His leg appeared to stretch out as if made of flesh-toned rubber, pulling the rest of his body with it. His throat was dusty-dry, filled with the ozone taste of the rock. The peripheries of his vision were blown out huge—he could see almost around the back of his head. His pupils were so dilated that they’d overtaken his corneas, turning them black.

  He inched around Shelley’s body. A brittle strand of witchgrass brushed the back of Max’s neck. He bit back a scream but still, a breathless little moan came out of him.

  Which is when he noticed them.

  They were on the stick—the long one he’d sharpened yesterday, the one Newton abandoned in the madness. It jutted from beneath Shelley’s body at a weird angle. All along it, stuck to the wet wood, were tiny nodules. Clustered in white bunches that looked like tiny albino grapes. Tens of thousands of them. Others were larger. They dotted the stick like curlicues of white icing on a cake.

  A sea slug fell from the ceiling, going plop in a puddle near the stick. The white nodules stirred in unison. The larger ones uncoiled and stood stiff.

  The sea slug sucked its way out of the puddle. Its eyes swiveled lazily on stalks. The large worms jettisoned off the stick, drifting with horrible languor. They settled atop the slug and swiftly coiled around it. The smaller nodules launched next: a shimmering flotilla settling around and atop the slug. Only its stalked eyes were visible amid the banded whiteness; soon, they, too, were cocooned.

  Max felt something bursting up inside him, a fearsome bubble packed with razor blades and fishhooks and shattered lightbulbs that strained against the heaving walls of his chest.

  He inched around the Shelley-thing, hugging the cave wall. Several more large worms went rigid—they followed him the way a compass needle follows magnetic north, but they didn’t detach from the wood.

  The spark plugs weren’t where he thought they’d be—he swore he’d last seen them next to the body. But then maybe the body had moved . . .

  Or something had moved the body . . .

  Or something else had moved the spark plugs.

  For an instant he was seized by a terrible possibility: that something else was in the cave with him. An image formed in his head: something huge and pulsating-white and gently, sensuously ribbed, gliding up behind him making the soft suck-suck of a fat, toothless infant mewling for its mother’s breast.

  There. Thank God, right there. He spotted the plugs in a shallow pool farther into the chamber. He must’ve flung them there the last time he was here, when the Shelley-thing had reached for him.

  He edged around carefully, his butt scraping the wet rock. His eyes hunted through the dwindling, smoky light for threats—they were all around him now. The flare was hot in his hand: the phosphorus was burning the last of its stores, heating through the cardboard tube.

  The plugs lay at the bottom of a weirdly ridged pool: it looked like the fossilized remains of a giant clamshell. He reached toward them, then suddenly flinched back.

  The dark, festering ooze ringing the puddle—a rotted mulch of witchgrass and kelp—was studded with white specks. They’d stirred agitatedly as his hand had reached for the spark plugs.

  How had they known to surround this particular pool?

  But as Max’s eyes dodged around in the ebbing light, he realized they were everywhere.

  They coalesced around him: specks of white nestled in the ooze, clustered in the rocks, above him, to the sides of him.

  Everywhere.

  A deep vein of terror threatened to cleave him in half. He felt that tickle inside his skull now, those little fingers trying to unmoor his sanity.

  Almost absently, Max brought the flare down, singeing the edges of the puddle. The ooze sizzled; the worms exploded with little pops.

  He reached into the puddle, grabbed one spark plug—

  The flare went out. Max’s heart seized.

  It sputtered alight again. The top was wet now; water dripped down into the tube, dousing the phosphorus. He reached for the other plug, wrapped his fingers around it—

  The flare went out again.

  Something dropped from the cave ceiling, crawling and clacking on the nape of his neck. Max let out a choked sound of disgust before the flare caught again. He knocked the thing off his neck. One of those huge black beetles. As soon as it hit the floor, it was lit upon by white strands. Max looked for the chamber mouth and—

  The flare went out. Jesus oh Jesus no—he stood blindly, tripping, slipping on a patch of slime in the dark. He stumbled back and nearly fell—his arm reached out for balance and collided with something that felt like waterlogged fatback . . .

  The flare sputtered alight. In the bloodlike luminescence, he saw he’d touched the Shelley-thing. His fingers had sunk into the flesh of his back. Its skin was flabby, greasy, seeping nameless noxious fluid.

  The skin cracked slightly down the Shelley-thing’s spine. Max saw something flex underneath.

  He turned to flee. The air was alive with floating strands. He waved the flare desperately, catching a few: they sizzled up like ghost fuses.

  He heard a hideous skin-crawling sound. A splitting, rending sound. He froze. He pictured it being made by the Shelley-thing as it pulled itself up. It was the sound of its body disconnecting from the rocks, its burst-open chest cavity dangling syrupy strings of ichor, twisting with worms while it lisped Yeeeeeesssssss . . .

  Max couldn’t bear to turn around. He feared if he turned and saw that, all would be lost. The terror would crystallize into a hot barbed nut in his brain. Maybe it would just be better to go mad and have done with it for good and all.

  With the greatest courage he’d ever summon, Max wrenched his head slowly around.

  The Shelley-thing’s body was moving, but the movement was coming from inside.

  One foot in front of the other, Max.

  It wasn’t Max’s own voice in his head now: it was Newton’s.

  It’s just five steps. Four maybe, if you take long strides. Go on now. It’s okay.

  Max obeyed, moving quickly and silently. Every nerve ending was on fire and every synapse in his brain was on the brink of rupture, but he managed to slip around the chamber walls until his ass hit the tunnel mouth.

  The last thing Max saw in the glow of the sputtering flare before racing up the incline was the skin cracking and splitting down the Shelley-thing’s back. A huge white tube, just like the one that ripped out of the stranger a lifetime ago, was twisted round the gleaming spine bone: it looked like a flag that had gotten blown round a pole in a high wind.

  Max watched it unfurl with slow elegance and rise into the dark air. It stood stiff as a bloodhound’s tail with the hunt running hot in its blood.

  47

  WHEN MAX got back, Newton was awake. A patch of gauze was taped clumsily over his eye. The other eye stared at Max balefully.

  “You left,” he said reproachfully.

  “I got the spark plugs.”

  “That’s good, I guess.”

  Newton looked thinner already. A jarring sight: Newton Thornton, the pudgiest boy in school, with winnowed cheekbones that looked as if they’d been carved out of basalt. The wind blew his loose clothes around his body.

  “Who needs Deal-A-Meal cards,” he said, catching Max’s look. “Richard Simmons is a . . .” Newt managed to smile
. “. . . a fucking pussy.”

  He sat on a rock, humming a tuneless song, while Max fiddled with the boat’s motor. Night was already coming down; the cold seeped under their collars and iced the skin cladding their spines.

  “I’m hungry like you wouldn’t believe, Max.”

  “You should try sucking on a pebble. My mom says that’s how the Indians used to control their hunger. When they were on a vision quest or whatever.”

  Newton plucked a pebble off the shore and popped it into his mouth.

  “Salty,” he said. “And stony.”

  They laughed a little. Max turned back to the motor. He screwed the spark plugs into their holes and snapped the covers shut.

  “I swallowed the pebble,” Newton said. “Oooops.”

  “Suck on another one,” Max said, struggling to maintain a casual tone of voice.

  The jerry can of gasoline was where he’d dropped it yesterday. He unscrewed the motor’s gas cap and let the gasoline glug-glug down, making sure he didn’t spill any. He could hear grinding sounds over his shoulder. He was very worried they were being made by Newton chewing on a pebble.

  “You should gather whatever you need,” he said, not daring to look. “We should leave soon.”

  “You don’t even know that the motor will start,” Newton said tiredly. “It probably won’t.”

  “Why would you say that, Newt? Why wouldn’t it start—why wouldn’t you hope it’ll start?”

  Max turned and saw Newton regarding him with tragic eyes.

  “All I mean is,” Newton said, dropping his chin and staring down, “even if it does start, you should go alone.”

  “What a stupid— Why would I do that?”

  “Because I’m sick, Max. And if I’m sick, maybe they won’t let you go back home. Because they’ll think you’re sick, too.”

  “They meaning who?”

  Newton shrugged. “Come on, don’t be dumb. Whoever’s out there. The police. The army. The guys in the helicopter. Whoever is making sure nobody comes to rescue us.”