Nick Cutter - The Troop

“We should burn down the cabin,” Shelley mumbled.

Tim shook his head. “That could just put the contagion into the air. What we are going to do is this: Go outside. Sit by the fire.” Tim worried the ragged edge off one fingernail with his incisors and swallowed it convulsively. “We’ll wait for the boat to come the day after tomorrow. That’s all we can do.”

The fixed drone of a helicopter worked its way across the open water. It seemed to hover directly above them. Coin-bright wedges of light—the glow of a searchlight—shafted through apertures in the roof. The helicopter’s wings sent gusts of sea-scented air through gaps in the cabin’s log walls. The light dimmed abruptly as the helicopter continued out to sea.

“Will the boat even come, Scoutmaster Tim?” Newton asked.

“Of course. We’ll all go home. Your parents will be thrilled to see you. They’ll send a research team out. Now come on. Let’s… let’s… go on out… outsi—”

A wave of dizziness rocked the Scoutmaster. Gnatlike specks crowded his vision. His sinuses burnt with ozone: the same eye-watering sensation as if he’d jumped off the dock into the bay and salt water rocketed up his nose.

He licked his threadlike lips. “We have to…”

Kent hauled himself up. His eyes reflected a horrible awareness.

“You’re sick ,” he said in a trembling voice. “You’re infected. You’ve got the worms .”

“I don’t—” A childlike sick feeling hived in Tim’s stomach: as if he’d eaten too much cotton candy at the Abbotsford carnival and gone on the Tilt-A-Whirl. “It’s so important that we…”

“We have to quarantine him,” Kent said to the others. “He could make us all sick. Like him.”

Kent advanced with a determined gait. Tim held his arms out. Jesus! A pair of fleshy javelins. He pushed the boy. His hands sunk harmlessly into the boy’s chest as Kent’s shoulders sagged to dampen the impact.

Tim stumbled away on legs that felt like wooden stilts screwed into his hips. “Please,” he said. He pushed again, kittenishly. Kent was smiling now. It was not a kind look.

This transgression had been building in Kent—it enfolded him with a cold sense of assurance. He was right to act against his elder. If you exerted your will and held fast to that course of action, things inevitably worked out. All the gifts that came to you—gifts befitting your inflexible strength of character—would be rightfully earned.

He pushed his Scoutmaster. Tim fell comically: arms outstretched and mouth open like a fish in its dying gasp. He hit the floor with a spine-jangling thud. His intestines jogged in the loosening vault of his gut. He did a very natural but terribly unfortunate thing.

Tim passed gas. A reedy trumpeting note that daggered through the shocked silence. A ripe reek wafted through the room.

“I’m sorry,” Tim said. “I don’t—”

Shelley snickered. “You stink .”

Kent pinned Tim with that rifle-sights look. “Lock him in the closet.”

“No,” Tim said, the word escaping his mouth as a sob.

The boys were held in a dimple of tension. Many possibilities tiptoed along the edge of that moment.

Next they were upon him. Shelley went first. Kent followed. They surged down upon their Scoutmaster, leapt on him, screaming and grabbing. Ephraim next. Then Max, with a low, agonized moan. They were filled with a giddy exuberance. All of them felt it—even Newton, who came last, regretfully, mumbling “No, no, no,” even as he fell into the fray, unable to fight the queasy momentum. They were carried away on a wave of thick, urgent, blind desire.

It happened so swiftly. The pressure that’d been building since last night, collecting in drips and drabs: in the crunch of the radio shattering in a squeal of feedback; in the black helicopter hovering high above them; in the snake ball squirming in the wet rocks; in the sounds emanating from the cabin as Tim and Max operated on the man; and most of all in the horrifying decline of their Scoutmaster, a man they’d known nearly all their lives reduced to a human anatomy chart, a herky-jerky skeleton. It brewed within them, a throbbing tension in their chests that required release—somehow, by any means necessary—and now, like a dark cloud splitting with rain, it vented. The boys couldn’t fight it; they weren’t properly themselves. They were a mob, and the mob ruled.

It’s just a game , a few of the boys thought. It was a game as long as they could ignore the look of sick terror in their Scoutmaster’s eyes. The helpless fear of an adult—which ultimately looked not much different than the helpless fear of an infant. It was a game as long as they could ignore the dead man on the chesterfield leaking brown muck.

A game, a game, a game…

They dragged Tim to the closet. He unleashed a series of shrill yipping shrieks. He was terrified of forfeiting control—of how fast it had happened. Terrified of that closet. But mostly he was terrified of whatever might very well be inside of him.

“Please, boys,” he whimpered. “Please no—I need help —”

They would not listen. The wave reached its mad crest. They pulled the Scoutmaster with ease. With his weight distributed among the five boys, he weighed no more than a child. Ephraim’s hands slipped under Tim’s shirt. He felt the abrupt cliff where the flesh fell off his lowest rib. His body was divoted and warped. Ephraim’s hands fell upon Tim’s stomach… he reared back, shocked by the fretful lashings that met his fingers.

Shelley’s lips skinned back from his teeth. He looked like a hyena prowling among the corpses on a battlefield. Kent flung the closet door open. It was empty save a few jangling coat hangers. They barrel-rolled Tim inside. The Scoutmaster’s quivering fingers stuck out through the doorjamb. Ephraim gently folded them into the darkness of the closet.

They set their weight against the door. Their breath came out in jagged gusts. Kent dashed into the bedroom, returning with a combination lock. He fastened it through the lock hasp and clipped it shut.

The boys came back to themselves with a jolt. Max and Ephraim passed nervous unsmiling looks. Their Scoutmaster’s whimpers carried under the door.

“When do we let him out?” Newton said.

“When the boat gets here,” Kent said coldly. “No sooner.”

“What if it doesn’t show up?”

Kent said: “Shut up, Newt.”

Nobody bothered asking for the combination; they knew Kent wouldn’t tell them. The bottle of scotch stood uncapped on the table. A man’s drink. General George Patton drank a shot of cheap scotch before battle , Kent’s dad always said, and a glass of good scotch after a victory .

What was this if not a victory? When the boat arrived tomorrow, his quick thinking would be hailed.

“Go on, Kent,” Shelley told him. “Have a drink.”

Max said, “No— don’t —”

But Kent had already raised the bottle to his lips. It went down like molten iron. He sawed his arm across his mouth. His grimace became a broad grin.

“Everything’s going to be okay, guys.”

From the sworn testimony of Nathan Erikson, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

Q: Mr. Erikson, state how you came to be associated with Dr. Clive Edgerton.

A: I was just out of school. A few guys who graduated with me caught on as associate profs, but they were the creme de la creme. I was more like the flotsam.

Q: At loose ends?

A: You could say so. Not a lot of companies have much use for a theoretical molecular biologist whose doctoral dissertation was “The Human Aging Process as Relating to the C. elegans worm.”