Nick Cutter - The Troop

“Shut up, tinkle-dink,” Kent said. “Don’t get too excited or you’ll piss your pants, remember?”

WHILE THEboys horsed around, Shelley waded into a shallow tidal pool. He found a crayfish. It fit perfectly in his palm. He studied it closely. It looked weird and funny. He tried to imagine the world as seen through the black poppy seeds of its eyes, sitting on spindly stalks. What a stupid creature. What were its days like—what was its life ? Crawling around this dreary itsy-bitsy pool, choking on fish shit, eating garbage. It had no clue about the world outside its filthy puddle, did it? Dumb is as dumb does , as his mother would say—which had always struck Shelley as a dumb expression, something only a dumb person would say.

How would it feel to pull the crayfish apart? He didn’t mean how would the crayfish feel—he didn’t care about that, and anyway, with its piece-of-lint brain and elementary nerves, it may not feel anything . Distantly, Shelley considered that possibility: that this creature could watch itself be shredded like paper and feel nothing, caring not at all.

Oh, there goes my leg. Never mind. And there goes my other one. Ooops — now I can’t see. My eyes must be gone .

Shelley was something of a sensualist. He relished touch— pressure . How would it feel, physically, to take this creature apart? Would its pincers snap at his fingers as he pulled? Would its stupid crustacean anatomy fight its own dismemberment—that wonderful tension as he pulled each limb off, the sucking pip! as this or that part detached from the whole? The crayfish could fight, yes—and dimly, Shelley sort of hoped it would—but it wouldn’t matter: he wasn’t scared of being bitten or clawed, plus he was so much bigger. As usual with Shelley, if he wanted to do something—and if nobody was watching—he simply did as he liked.

He pinched one of the crayfish’s comical little eyes. It ruptured with a mildly satisfying pop . The texture was grainy—a tiny ball of honeycomb candy coming apart. The remnants were stuck on his finger like the shards of a very small and dark Christmas tree ornament. The crayfish spasmed in his palm, jackknifing open and closed. Shelley was transfixed. His eyes took on a hard sheen. Saliva collected in his mouth, a gossamer strand of spit rappelling over his quivering lower lip.

He burst the crayfish’s other eye. He carefully pulled off one of its pincers, relishing that thrilling tension. Pip! The pinky-translucent claw continued to open and close even when separated from the body. He dropped it and watched it sink, opening and closing.

“Hey, Shel,” Ephraim called over. “Newt’s going to light the one-match fire. We need you as a windbreak.”

NEWTON WASin charge of the fire. The boys were content to let him take the lead. Besides, Newton was best at almost all the basic survival skills: firecraft and orienteering and berry identification.

Newton lit the pile of old man’s beard and nursed the fledgling flickers. Fingers of flame crawled up the bleached wood. They crouched around the fire to soak in its heat. Sunlight painted a honey-gold inlay on the slack water between the waves.

“My grandma died of cancer,” Ephraim said suddenly. “Liver cancer.”

Max said: “ What? ”

Ephraim gave him a look: Just listen to me . “Her skin went yellow. All she could get down were those meal replacement things that old people drink. Ensure . Her hair came out because of the radiation chamber they stuck her in to kill the cancer.” He exhaled heavily, blowing his dark locks off his forehead. “When I saw that guy this morning, the first thing I thought about was Grandma.”

The man hadn’t entered their thoughts directly, but he’d been hovering at the margins all day. His sick-looking face. His matchstick arms and legs. The sweet smell of the cabin.

Ephraim’s streamlined and unconventionally handsome face took on a rare pensive aspect. “What do you think’s the matter with him?”

Kent grabbed a stone and hurled it into the water with a vicious sweep of his arm.

“Who knows, Eef? If it’s cancer, then it’s cancer—right? People get cancer.” Kent stared at the others with savage solemnity. “Maybe he’s got what-do-you-call-it… alpiners or whatever.”

“Alzheimer’s,” Newton said.

“What-the-fuck ever , Newt. He’s got that.”

“He’s too young,” Newton said. “That’s an old people’s disease.”

“You guys’re being babies,” Kent said, drawing the last word out: baaaaay-bies . “My dad says the most obvious conclusion is usually the right one. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the time.”

“So what’s the most obvious conclusion?” Shelley asked, his vapid face oriented on Kent. “His skin looked like it was melting .”

The boys fell silent.

“I just think the guy is sick, is all,” Max said after a while. “And I’ve been thinking about it.”

“So have I,” said Ephraim.

“And me,” Newt said.

Kent snorted. “Tim’s a doctor, isn’t he? That’s his job , isn’t it? By the time we get back, he’d better have everything sorted out.”

He kicked the fire apart, scattering bits of flaming driftwood.

Before departing, Newton gathered the still-glowing sticks and doused them in the ocean. Scout’s Law number four: Honor and protect Nature in all her abundance .

EVIDENCE LOG, CASE 518C

PIECE T-11 (Personal Effects)

Counseling Diary of Newton Thornton

Recovered from SITE T (34 Skylark Road, North Point, Prince Edward Island) by Officer Brian Skelly, badge #908

Dear Dr. Harley,

I’ll compose this like a letter, because I write a lot—I’ve got pen pals in Australia, England, and Dubuque, Iowa. Who doesn’t like opening the mailbox and finding a letter from a friend, even one you’ve never met in person?

So… a confession, huh? You think I keep things bottled up, and confession’s good for the soul. Right? I’d talk more if people—I mean the other kids at school—gave two cruds what I have to say. Most times they’ll just laugh, call me a nerd, a geek, call me fat, call me a nerdy fatty-fat geek (which is overkill, right? Nerds and geeks are pretty much the same…). So I don’t talk much, except to my teachers and my mom. And now you.

The thing is, you can be a different person in letters. On the Internet, too. Because there, you’re not YOU. Okay so yes, you are, but not the physical you. So not fat (it’s glandular), sweaty (it’s also glandular), weird (for North Point, anyway. I don’t like bow hunting or spearfishing or killing things, I’m too clumsy for stickball and I actually LIKE Anne of Green Gables … so yeah, weird!) and awkward and gawky and according to Ephraim Elliot sometimes I smell like rotten corn, like when you shuck an ear and it’s all black inside? (By the way, I hear you’re counseling Eef, too; you’re doing a good job—he hasn’t given me a Wet Willy, a Rooster Peck, or a Titty Twister in like a month.)

But online I’m not that person. I can be my very best self. According to Mom I’m a sensitive boy. Also, I’m a polymath, which means I know a little bit about everything (which, okay, IS nerdy). Online I can be my brain without my body.

So… the confession. Forgive me, Father… hah! Anyway, you won’t tell anyone. Patient-doctor confidentiality. I read about it.

A year ago my cousin Sherwood died. He lived in Manitoba. He fell asleep in a field and a combine ran him over. He tried to run but those combines are like forty feet of whirring blades. At his funeral the coffin stayed closed.