Nick Cutter - The Troop

Jeff Jenks showed up to say he was sorry but not really—some men are incapable of offering a sincere apology, Max realized; something in their nature refuses it, so instead they frame it as an accident, a misunderstanding, or a “ sorry you’re so upset ” sort of thing that placed subtle blame on the other person for making such a big deal. Kent was there, too, and told Max he was sorry about what’d happened—which wasn’t an apology, either. Max would always remember that glint of pride in Kent’s eye.

Afterward Max’s father drove them home. Can you drop the transmission into drive, son? I can’t manage it . They drove through streets wrapped in darkness, his father palm-guiding the wheel. Getting old, kiddo . His father smiled. And I’m barely hanging on to the “getting” part . A sudden fear had stolen over the crown of Max’s skull—fear and sadness intermingled, so powerful he wanted to cry. Up until that night, he’d sincerely believed that his father was invincible. He was mammothly strong, capable of reshingling a house or chopping down trees with a sharp axe. But that night he’d looked frail, tired, and vaguely spooked. Vulnerable —something Max had never seen. All bodies fail, he realized. They fall to pieces in pieces, bit by torturous bit, and a man had to watch it fall apart around him.

Max now thought of this as he looked at the Scoutmaster, and shivered.

“I’LL NEEDyour help, Max. I’ll need it quite a lot in the next few minutes.”

Max said: “Um, what do you want me to do?”

At fourteen, Max was a little smaller than average, but there was a wideness to his shoulders and a thickness to his chest. He moved with a litheness that was not at all common for boys his age—most of them were made of knees and elbows all held together with scabs. His face was Rockwellian: the bristle-brush red hair and star-spray of freckles over his cheeks. He looked like a more compact and muscular Opie.

What set Max apart from the other boys was his reservoir of remoteness and cool self-control. Tim didn’t believe his father had inculcated this into him: Reggie Kirkwood was a good man but flighty as a hummingbird, prone to gossip and drink. Tim had seen the same cool quality in some of his classmates at med school who’d gone on to become the top “blades” at Johns Hopkins and Beth Israel. It wasn’t exactly cockiness: more an absence of panic or hesitation. They trusted their instincts and they trusted their hands to carry those instincts into action.

Tim would try to not ask too much of the boy during the coming operation—but even asking him to be here at all was a terrible request. HAL 9000’s maddeningly reasonable voice echoed this.

Tim, I think you’re losing it . Tim could see HAL in his mind’s eye: a reflective glass eye, very dark, a dot of redness expanding and contracting like a dilated pupil. And now you’re taking a child down the rabbit hole with you .

Don’t listen to that bullshit , the other, more comforting voice boomed. This is your duty as a doctor — what other choice, just watch this man die? And you can’t do this alone, can you?

He couldn’t. It was that simple. Tim switched on the soldering iron to let it heat. “I’ve doped him up.”

It wasn’t true anesthetic—two crushed Vicodin discovered in a forgotten pocket of his backpack; he’d been prescribed it years ago while recuperating from a calf infarction. It could very well be expired, but what the hell, better than nothing.

“He shouldn’t wake up.” Tim gripped the blankets gathered at the man’s throat. “Ready?”

Max nodded. Tim pulled the blankets away.

MAX COULDN’Tkeep the look of horror off his face. It was instinctive, what most would feel when faced with a member of humankind who no longer looked like he belonged to the species.

The stranger didn’t wholly resemble a man anymore. More like something a dull-witted child might have drawn with a crayon. His body was lines. His arms were scribbles. His fingers were calligraphic spiders. The skin draped his rib cage with terrible intimacy, pinching around each rib to show the striation of muscle. His sternum was a knot, his pelvis a gruesome hinged wishbone. The skin of his face had the patina of old copper and was sucked so tight to his skull that Max could see the glaring rings of bone around his eye sockets. His ears protruded like jug handles, so thin that they curled inward, like charring paper.

“Unbelievable. My God. Even his cartilage is disintegrating,” Tim said in horrified awe.

He looks like the oldest man who’s ever lived , Max thought.

His stomach was the only robust thing about him. A tightly swollen bulge. It looked like he’d swallowed a volleyball.

“I’m going to do something called a gastrostomy,” Tim said. “I’ll make a small incision over the outer third of the left rectus muscle. So basically here.” He drew his finger below the edge of the man’s lowest rib. “It should be a short trip into his stomach. Very little visceral or abdominal fat to get through.”

“Is there any fat?”

Tim said: “His body must have started eating its muscle a while ago. I have to worry about the liver… but I can pretty much see it right now.” He pointed to a soft ridge along the man’s side. “It has probably shut down its function. It’s in a state of premortification and it’s hardening fast.”

“Can you save him?”

To Max, it seemed impossible. This man already belonged less to Max’s world, the living one, than to his father’s: the world of the motionless dead in the mortuary vaults.

“I can’t say. It’s some kind of voodoo that he’s still alive. But we have to do something, Max.” Tim stared searchingly at the boy, his eyelid going plikka-plikka . “Don’t we?”

Max wasn’t sure. Why was it their responsibility? Maybe this man had done it to himself—a result of bad luck or bad decisions.

Tim tried to smile but couldn’t quite get his muscles to cooperate: more the leer of a crazed loon. His face kept shifting polarities, giddy to mortified, great forces working beneath its surface. Max wondered: Did the Scoutmaster really want to save the man, or only investigate for symptoms of his own condition? He contemplated the selfishness of that as the soldering gun sent up pin curls of smoke.

“What do you think it is?” Max asked softly.

Tim picked up the scalpel. He stared at his hand until it stopped trembling.

“I’ve stopped trying to guess, Max. I’ll open him up a little. Just a little, okay?”

TIM THOUGHTback to med school, an operating theater where a doctor-instructor leaned over his patient and said: This is the God moment, folks. You hold it all in your hands right now. So honor the body beneath your blade .

Tim would do his best to honor this man’s body… what was left of it.

“Ready, Max?”

The boy nodded.

“Just follow my instructions. Don’t be scared if I yell or get demanding—it won’t be your fault.” He offered a strained and cheerless smile. “I’ll try not to raise my voice.”

Tim positioned the scalpel over the man’s flesh, which was stretched so tight that he could see the individual pores: a million tiny mouths stretched into silent screams. He lacked the cool confidence of a true “blade”—you could wake one of those guys out of a dead sleep, shove him into the operating theater and stick a knife in his hand, and he’d say I’ve got it from here and get down to cutting.

That was a rare gift. Tim had been given a smaller gift, which was why he’d ended up as a small-town GP wielding tongue depressors and blood pressure cuffs. He’d always been okay with that, too—but as the scalpel hummed over the man’s flesh, he dearly wished for the unerring self-belief of his med-school pals.