Nick Cutter - The Troop

Q: C. elegans worm?

A: It’s a roundworm. About a millimeter long. Caenorhabditis elegans , but everyone just calls it C. elegans . During its lifetime it exhibits many familiar signs of human aging: reduced movement, wrinkling, tissue degradation, decreased ability to fight infection. I was trying to locate genes that might slow down the human aging process.

Q: A noble ambition.

A: Yeah, well. I was blinded by science.

Q: How did Edgerton know of you?

A: A lot of researchers sniffed around the program, right? They figured they could poach a recent grad—someone willing to do the scut work.

Q: So Edgerton sought you out?

A: It was more a situation of mutual desperation.

Q: What drew him to you?

A: Like I said, the fact that I came cheap and didn’t have any other options. But I had done work with the C. elegans worm—which bears about the same similarity to the hydatid as a minnow does to a great white shark. And neither creature is anything like what Edgerton bred.

Q: He bred? Didn’t you both work on the mutated specimen?

A: Listen… I’ll always carry the guilt. I could tell you that the outcome was unknown—that I was pursuing science—and if I’d had an inkling of what was to come I’d’ve burned that lab to cinders. After all this is over you’ll send me to prison. I deserve that. Deserve more , but for some crimes there exists no fit punishment. I was part of it, but I was the lesser part. On every level.

Q: How so?

A: Clive Edgerton is a genius. He’s also ratshit crazy, pardon my French, possibly a sociopath, but undoubtedly a genius. Even though my IQ is likely higher than most people’s in this room, I was no more than Clive’s lab monkey. I can’t see biological processes the way he does. Can’t see the chains in order to break and reorder them. So I knew what we were doing, yes—theoretically, anyway—but I didn’t create any of it. I can’t.

Q: But you knew?

A: Yes.

Q: And you told nobody?

A: That’s right.

Q: Why?

A: Trade secrets. We were working on something that, if successful, would have been a billion-dollar enterprise. Edgerton was working under a grant from a biopharmaceutical company. Secrecy was crucial.

Q: So crucial that you’d risk lives?

A: We didn’t know lives were at… We’re talking about one of the three holy grails of modern medicine: a cure for male pattern baldness, a method to reverse the aging process, and a means to lose weight without effort. If anyone invents a pill that you can pop at night and wake up with a fuller head of hair or the crow’s-feet diminished around your eyes or five pounds lighter? There’s no saying how much that could be worth. Clive used to cite that old motto: You can never be too rich or too thin . He’d say, “If I can make the rich thin, they’ll make me rich.”

TOWARD MIDNIGHT, Max stood down by the shore. The sky was salted with remote stars. The beach was a bonelike strip unfurling to the shoreline. The sea advanced up the shore with a series of minute sucking inhales. It sounded like a huge toothless creature swallowing the island.

Newton joined him. His hand thrummed against Max’s bare arm. His fear leapt the threshold between their bodies—Max felt it now, too.

“We shouldn’t have done that to the Scoutmaster.”

“He’s sick, Newt.”

“I saw that. But not a closet. Am I wrong? Not that way.”

“You did it, too,” Max said tiredly.

Newton swallowed and nodded. “I did. It could have been what my mom calls a coping mechanism. You know, when things get rough, we do things to make it better. Or just to distract ourselves. Do you think that’s what it was, Max?”

“We got carried away, Newt. That’s all.”

Last summer, Max had shared his house with a family of shearwaters—a much fleeter version of a puffin. They colonized the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, nesting in the rocks. But due to a population explosion, shearwaters had begun to nest in the houses of North Point. They’d chip away the Gyprock exterior, tugging loose Styrofoam and pink insulation to make room for their nests.

A family of shearwaters made one above Max’s bedroom window. In the morning he’d crane his neck and see the daddy shearwater poke his head out of the hole he’d chipped in the house’s facade, darting it in both directions before arrowing out over the water to hunt.

Max’s father, however, wasn’t impressed. The lawn was covered in Styrofoam and pink rags of insulation. The birds would wreck the home’s resale value, he griped—despite the fact that he’d lived in North Point his whole life and would likely die in this house. He drove to the Home Hardware, returning with a bottle of insulating foam sealant. He clambered up a ladder to the nest, shooed the birds away, stuck the nozzle into the hole, and pumped in sealant until it billowed out and hardened to a puffy crust. He climbed back down with a self-satisfied smile.

But the shearwaters were back the next day. They’d torn away at the sealant, ripping it off in chunks with their sickle-shaped beaks. Now the lawn was covered in Styrofoam, insulation, and sealant. Max’s father repeated the procedure, believing the birds would relent. But shearwaters are cousins to homing pigeons—they always come back. I should shoot them , Max’s father groused, though he could never do such a thing.

Still, he was angry—that particular anger of humans defied by the persistence of nature. He drove back to Home Hardware, returning with another can of sealant and a few feet of heavy-duty chicken wire. Using tin snips, he cut the wire into circles roughly the size of the hole. Clambering up the ladder, he made a layer cake of sorts: a layer of sealant, then chicken wire, sealant, wire, sealant, wire. Okay, birds , he’d said. Figure that out .

Max returned from school the next day to find a dead shearwater in the bushes. The daddy—he could tell by its dark tail feathers. It lay with its neck twisted at a horrible angle. Its beak was broken—half of it was snapped off. Its eyes were filmy-gray, like pewter. It’d made a mess: shreds of sealant dotted the lawn. But his father’s handiwork held strong. The daddy bird must’ve broken its neck—had it become so frustrated, so crazy, that it’d flown into the barrier until its neck snapped?

When Max’s father saw the dead bird, his jaw tightened, he blinked a few times very fast, then quietly he said: I just wanted them to find someplace else to live .

In the middle of the night Max had been woken by peeping. The sound was coming from the walls. Max padded into his parents’ room. His father rubbed sleep crust from his eyes and followed Max back to his bedroom. When he heard those noises, his face did a strange thing.

At three o’clock in the morning, Max’s dad climbed the ladder. His housecoat flapped in the salt breeze. Using a screwdriver and vise grips, he tore out the sealant and chicken wire, working so manically that he nearly fell. By the time he’d ripped it away the peeps had stopped. He reached deep inside the hole, into a small depression he’d not realized was there. He placed whatever he’d found in the pockets of his housecoat with great reverence.

In the kitchen, his face white with shock, he laid them on the table: the mama bird and two baby birds. The mama bird’s wing was broken. The babies were small and gray-blue, still slick with the gummy liquid inside their eggs. All three were still.