The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  “Well, maybe I’m sick already too. Who cares? They can cure us.”

  Newton shook his head knowingly. “If you were sick, you’d feel it.”

  Max came over and set a hand on Newton’s shoulder. The heat radiated through his clothes. That awful sweetness wasn’t so bad coming off Newton. It smelled a little like Toll House cookies.

  “I’m scared, Max,” Newton said softly.

  “So am I, Newt.”

  Max was afraid that if he left without Newt, they—whoever they were—wouldn’t allow him to come back. Which meant Newton would die here. Curled up inside the cabin, perhaps, or in the cellar, like an animal that sought the darkness to die. He would die in pain, but more important and much worse, he would die alone. Newt didn’t deserve that. Newt was a good person. He should live a long time. Marry and have kids. Teach them all the nerdy things he knew. Be happy. That was the only fair outcome.

  But if Max left without Newt, he was positive he’d never see him again.

  This fear of abandoning Newt was more profound, if less visceral, than that which he’d experienced back in the cavern: if Newton died, it meant all the terror and frustration and rage they’d both experienced had been for nothing.

  If they couldn’t leave together, what had they done any of it for?

  Max said: “You sit at the front of the boat, okay? I’ll sit at the back. We won’t touch. They won’t have any reason not to take me.”

  Newton smiled gratefully. “That sounds like a very good plan, Max.”

  48

  IT WAS dark by the time Max eased the boat off the beach into the slack tide.

  It took a few hard cranks to get the motor going. Smoke belched from the engine housing. For one heart-stopping instant, it seemed the bearings would fry and the motor might seize . . . but after a few rough revolutions, it settled into an even cadence.

  Max goosed the throttle and piloted toward the distant lights of North Point. He’d driven boats before: his uncle was an oysterman and he’d often let Max take the helm of his boat while he dragged in the lines. It’s a lot easier than driving a car, he’d told Max. The ocean’s just one big lane, plenty of room for everyone.

  Newton sat at the bow. He was wearing his Scouts sash adorned with the badges he’d earned. He wasn’t sure why he’d put it on—maybe he wanted to show whoever was waiting for them that he was a responsible person. An individual of value.

  “Hey, Max?” Newt called out over the motor.

  “Yeah?”

  “I had this dream today. While you were gone. It was pretty weird.”

  “Okay, so spill it.”

  Wind whipped off the water. Newton nearly had to shout to be heard—the effort drained him.

  “So, well, I was with my mom. We were on this trip. I didn’t know the city. We were in this hotel lobby. Very swanky, which is weird because we don’t have enough money to stay at swanky hotels. But we come through those rotating doors—those doors always kind of scare me, actually; I think they’re going to suck me between the glass and squash me—through those doors and there’s a couple arguing outside. A man and a woman.”

  The swells grew larger as the shore receded. The boat skipped over the waves, salt spray licking up over the gunwales. Max squinted over the night water. Shapes loomed against the horizon.

  “The man started hitting the woman. Right there on the street. Her head was snapping back. Blood was painted on her cheeks. Then this van stops on the sidewalk. These guys get out and start yelling at the other guy, saying he can’t do that. The guy says he wasn’t really hurting her, only teaching her something. So he wraps his hands around her neck as if to demonstrate, he wraps his hands round her neck and starts choking her right in front of these guys . . .”

  The shapes were beginning to coalesce. A loose group clustered where the water met the night sky, blocking out the lights of home.

  “One of the guys from the van puts the guy in a headlock. They drag him away from the woman and over to the van, like they’re going to throw him into it. Suddenly people are pouring out of doorways and out of office buildings. Carpenters and lawyers and deliverymen. The woman who was being choked starts screaming at the guys from the van, telling them to leave the guy who was choking her alone. Then one of the guys from the van punches the choker guy in the face. He goes down in a tangle, unconscious before he even hits the ground. He was wearing loose pants, I remember, and they fell down so I saw his underwear, which were blue and droopy with holes like mice had chewed them.”

  Boats. Squat ones that had chased down Calvin Walmack’s cigarette boat. They were painted with some kind of special black paint that prevented the moonlight and starlight from reflecting off them. They floated silently, motionlessly.

  “Things sped up. Everyone was getting punched or punching. Fights were spilling all over the street. I remember a tricycle getting crushed under the wheels of a speeding car. Then the choker guy who got punched out gets up and looks around all embarrassed and says, ‘Oh hell no!’ and he wades into this big huge fight—which was everywhere by then—hitching up his pants. And there were fires burning at the tops of the skyscrapers and sirens everywhere and I could tell, in that weird way dreams have of telling you things, that the violence was everywhere. Like a virus, Max. Everywhere.”

  The boat drew nearer to the floating vessels. Max cut the motor and drifted with the current. Figures were massed along the decks.

  Newt’s voice dropped as the wind dipped. “My mom got her hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. I didn’t want her touching me. And if she put her hand back on my shoulder—and I was thinking she might do that, Max, for the same reason that I wanted to shrug it off—then I might shove it off. Or bite her fingers. Violence was in the air, Max. We were all breathing it.”

  A searchlight snapped on, pinning them in its cool glare.

  The boys raised their hands slowly, like robbers who’d gotten caught inside a bank vault.

  “We need help!” Max yelled.

  Nobody answered.

  “We’re okay!” He tried to smile. His filthy clothes flapped in the wind. “We made it. Tell them, Newt. Tell them we’re okay!”

  Newton seemed unsure of where he was. One eye stared without recognition. He laughed—a weird, jittery laugh that bounced off the water and fled into the empty vault of sky.

  Max thought: Oh no oh please don’t laugh like that, Newt . . .

  Newton stood up in the boat. He held his hands out toward the light: a gesture of supplication.

  “I’m fine! I’m aces! But there is one thing.”

  No Newt—

  “I am very . . .”

  No Newt no Newt—

  “. . . so very very . . .”

  No no nononono—

  The wind rose to a shriek that sucked that final word out of Newton’s mouth.

  A hole appeared in the back of Newton’s neck. A small hole that appeared as if by magic. Presto! The torn edges of his flesh blew back, creating a perfect little starfish.

  Newton pitched over the side. He lay on the sea’s surface for an instant—like a water skimmer, those bugs that danced across the water’s skin—before the sea claimed him; Newt’s body went headfirst, bubbles trailing up from the new hole in his throat as he sank swiftly beneath the boat.

  Max barely had time to cry out. He was staring down at the bright red dot hovering on his own chest.

  * * *

  From the sworn testimony of Lance Corporal Frank Ellis, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

  Q: “Hungry.”

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: That’s the word you heard Newton Thornton say before you shot him?

  A: Yes, sir, it was. He said he was hungry.

  Q: He said it just like that?

  A: No, sir. I suppose he said it more quietly. And there were some pauses in his speech. He said something like: I’m very very . . . hungry.


  Q: If he said it so quietly, are you certain he said it at all? It was night, on the ocean. The weather reports for that evening indicated high winds.

  A: That’s all true, sir. It was windy and choppy. But the Big Ears picked his voice up loud and clear.

  Q: I’m sorry?

  A: The Big Ears is what we call it. It’s a parabolic listening device: a big dish, basically. Looks like a satellite dish. It’s for long-range acoustical assessment, which is really just a prissy way of saying it helps us hear what we wouldn’t be able to hear naturally.

  Q: And the Big Ears told you that Newton Grant said: I’m hungry?

  A: Correct.

  Q: So what?

  A: Repeat that, sir?

  Q: I said, so what? He was hungry. He’d been on an island for days. Nothing to eat. Wasn’t it reasonable that the boy might be hungry?

  A: Yes, sir, he may have been. I suppose it was the way he said it.

  Q: The way?

  A: Yes, sir. He said it in a way that sounded like he was somehow more than just hungry. Hungry as you or I would know it, anyway. Maybe those starving kids you see on TV pledge drives might know that kind of hunger. But even them, I’m not sure. He sounded like he’d eat his own arm off if he could just bring himself to cross that line.

  Q: Pardon me, Lance Corporal Ellis, but that sounds paranoid.

  A: I suppose it does. I think a lot of us were jumpy. We kept hearing things.

  Q: Out on the boat?

  A: No, I mean internally. Rumors. Stuff was starting to leak out about that psycho doctor’s lab. They’d found some of those awful videos. The one with the poor gorilla or whatever. We were jumpy. That sort of stuff you can’t just aim a gun at and eliminate.

  Q: But you did.

  A: I did, yes. But the boy said one of our trigger words.

  Q: Explain that.

  A: We’d been given orders. The chief petty officer came into the snipers’ bunks and told us if anybody came off that island and spoke one of those trigger words, we had authority to open fire. Hungry was one of them.

  Q: Any others?

  A: I can’t entirely remember. Worm, I’m sure was one. Infected.

  Q: And so because a very hungry boy on a boat said he was hungry, he got himself shot.

  A: He was infected, sir. That much was made clear in the aftermath. And from what I’ve heard about some of the others, a bullet was an easy way to go.

  Q: You didn’t answer my question.

  A: With all due respect, you didn’t ask a question, sir. You made a statement, sir. I’ll tell you this: I never trained as a combat sniper thinking one day I’d shoot a young boy on a boat. That’s not why men join up. We’re supposed to be doing it for God and country and . . . Jesus. It haunts me. I heard people use that phrase and I never quite understood. Honestly, I thought it was a bit histrionic. But I get it now. I know what it is to be haunted. That boy’s face haunts me, sir, and it will until the day I depart this world for whatever’s waiting for me.

  * * *

  * * *

  From Troop 52:

  Legacy of the Modified Hydatid

  (AS PUBLISHED IN GQ MAGAZINE) BY CHRIS PACKER:

  MAX KIRKWOOD IS the oldest-looking fifteen-year-old you’ll ever see.

  His eyes fade into his head and their edges are knitted with wrinkles. His hair has a stripped-out, mousy aspect. There is a pronounced stoop when he sits down: his shoulders are rounded and hunched in a gait one associates with the elderly. He looks like someone who has been subjected to unimaginable pressures and now, that pressure withdrawn, his body still bears the weight.

  You have to remind yourself that Max is still a boy. But he’s a boy who has seen far more than most others his age.

  We speak through an impermeable barrier at the clinic. It is not unlike the way inmates speak to their spouses in jail. There are phones on each side of the Plexiglas. After I finish, an orderly will wipe down the earpiece with a powerful germ-killer. The clinic operates at the highest levels of precaution. It took months of wrangling and compromise to secure a brief interview with Max.

  The clinic itself is a gargantuan boxy structure far removed from any population center. The things inside the clinic are potentially lethal to humankind. The humans who reside in the clinic aren’t dangerous—what may be thriving inside of them, though, are very dangerous. The viruses and contagions and parasites. The worms.

  Max is in good spirits today. He’s wearing a paper gown and slippers. He tells me that everything is burned after he wears it, as a precaution.

  “When you get a whole new wardrobe every day, I guess it’s best that they’re made out of paper,” he says with a wry smile.

  Max Kirkwood was spared. His fellow troop-mate Newton Thornton was not. Why? That is as yet unknown. Recent revelations at the tribunal trial of Admiral Stonewall Brewer—chief tactical commander of the Falstaff Island event—indicate that the thinking may’ve been that Max would be a good candidate for study. There is a possibility he was spared because if not, there would have been nobody left to gauge the effectiveness of the worm. It is shocking to believe such thinking may prevail at the upper echelons of the military establishment.

  Max is well clear of that now. In fact he seems to remember little of his experience on Falstaff Island. It is entirely possible, of course, that he doesn’t want to remember—that his mind, seeking peace, has simply jettisoned these memories. Who could blame him if that is the case?

  He speaks about the others in clipped, jagged sentences. They are the only aspects of the ordeal that he claims to truly recall, and by and large he recalls them with great fondness and care.

  Of Tim Riggs, his Scoutmaster: “Dr. Riggs was the coolest adult I ever knew. But he didn’t try hard to be cool. He was actually sort of not-cool, with the way he dressed and his fussiness. But he was cool because he treated us the way he’d treat grown-ups.”

  Of Ephraim Elliot: “Eef was my best friend. You could count on Eef. He always stuck up for you. He had a really big heart. I just think that, on the island, something crawled into his head and he couldn’t get rid of it.”

  Of Kent Jenks: “I still have a hard time believing he’s gone. I mean, he was like Superman—really, he was. If anyone could have swum back to North Point, it was Big K.”

  Of Shelley Longpre: “There was something the matter with him. I’m not so sad about Shel, to be honest. That’s a shitty thing to say, but whatever.”

  Of Newton: “Newt would have been a great dad. The best, I just know it. He knew so much. The strongest of any of us. I really wish we hadn’t ragged on him so bad.”

  When I ask him what else he can remember, his face grows distant, as if his mind is sprinting away from my question.

  “There was a turtle,” he says finally.

  He grows silent. Then the words pour out in a shocking flood.

  “Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it’s hopeless. It’s like the end is always there, you can’t escape it, but things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything’s been stripped away. Their bodies and happiness and hope. Things just don’t know when to die. I wish they did. I wish my friends had known that. Sort of, anyway. But I’m glad they tried. That’s part of being human, right? Part of being any living thing. You hold on to life until it gets ripped away from you. Even if it gets ripped away in pieces. You just hold on.”

  He grows silent. His head dips. When he looks up again his eyes are red at their edges and he’s near tears.

  “I killed a turtle,” he says simply.

  It seems the most wretched admission he’s ever made. I want to reach out and hug him—but I can’t because a thick barrier prevents it and anyway, there may still be something inside of Max that could kill me.

  An orderly leads me away shortly after this. Max has been overstimulated. He needs to cool down.

  I walk out
to my car. The sky is gray with the threat of rain. I try to put myself in Max’s shoes on that island. I picture being confronted with a faceless hungering threat that he never truly understood. And it amazes me that he—that all the boys—hung tough together. They didn’t abandon each other—maybe it never entered their minds that they could. Those ideas come with the dawn of adulthood, and all the cruelties implicit in that stage of life.

  * * *

  To:

  Alex Markson

  Subject:

  Hi . . .

  Message:

  Hey Alex,

  We don’t even know each other really, so maybe this is weird. But I don’t know what’s happened to you—you vanished off Facebook! I hope you’re not gone for good. :( I’d miss all your great posts. So weird, I know, because you’re a stranger. But it doesn’t feel that way. I guess I was just thinking about you, maybe even a little worried, because of what’s been happening lately in my little town. It’s been crazy. Not good crazy. Scary-crazy. Anyway, this is silly. I’m sure you’re just taking a break. But still, I hope you’re OK. Sincerely (is that weird?), Trudy Dennison.

  49

  SOME NIGHTS, Max Kirkwood would climb the bluffs on the outskirts of North Point and stare out over the water toward Falstaff Island.

  This was after it had all happened. After the arrival of the hungry man; the madness of the island. After he’d stood at the prow of Oliver McCanty’s boat with the glowing red dot—a sniper’s laser sight—pinned to his chest.

  After the military decontamination, they had transferred him to an isolated clinic. He was toxic, after all. Infected.

  Or maybe not.

  They had poked and prodded, drawn pints of blood, endoscoped him, X-rayed him, done MRIs and cranial maps, dosed him with every vaccination known to mankind.

  After all that, they adjudged him to be clean.

  It felt strange returning to North Point. Everything was the same, but everything was different. His Scouting friends were gone. Those who’d been his friends before now kept their distance. People treated him differently. Most of them pitied him. Some, though, felt that he must have done horrible things on the island to have survived. Others crossed to the opposite side of the street when he came walking down it.