Nick Cutter - The Troop

Shelley wasn’t particularly intelligent, at least according to the methods society had developed to measure that. He’d scored low on his IQ test. In school, he earned Cs and the odd D. His teachers gazed upon his pockmarked cheeks and slug-gray eyes and pictured Shelley fifteen years later in a pair of grease-spotted overalls, his slack and pallid moonface staring up from the oil-change pit at a Mr. Lube.

Shelley was aware of their opinions, but it didn’t trouble him. Shelley was actually happy with this perception. It made it easier to engage in the behaviors that gave him pleasure—though he failed to experience pleasure in the ways others did.

Shelley was far more perceptive than most gave him credit for. His impassive face was the perfect disguise. His expression hadn’t changed when he’d seen the dead man on the chesterfield, but his practical mind had immediately aligned it with the black helicopter that had hovered overhead during the hike.

He had also aligned the thick white rope that had come out of the dead man with the thin white rope that had come out of his dog’s bum a few years ago.

Shogun, the family sheltie, had gotten into some spoiled chuck in a neighbor’s trash can. He passed a seven-foot worm weeks later. Shelley was home alone when it happened. He heard Shogun yowling in the backyard. He found the dog squatted in the zinnias. A white tube was spooling out of his butt, some of it already coiled up in the cocoa shells his father had spread over the flower beds.

Shelley crouched down, completely fascinated. He flicked at the white tube, mesmerized. The thing wriggled at his touch. Shelley giggled. He flicked it again. Shogun reared and snapped at him. Shelley waited, then touched the tube again. Flicking and flicking it gently with one finger. It was slick with the dog’s digestive juices. Shogun mewled pitifully and craned his skull over his haunches to stare at Shelley with wounded, rheumy eyes.

After shitting it out, Shogun tried to bury the worm. Shelley shooed the dog inside. He wanted to study it. It was dying very fast. Its head was a flat spoon shape. Many smaller spoon shapes branched off the biggest spoon: it looked like a Venus flytrap—the only plant Shelley found even remotely interesting. Each of the spoons had a slit down the middle studded with tiny translucent spikes. That must’ve been how it had moored to the dog’s intestines… fascinating.

Shelley thought back to that sunny afternoon in the garden, Shogun’s plaintive yipping as that greedy tube spooled out of its bottom. He was filled with a certainty as keen as he’d ever experienced.

The boat wouldn’t come. Not today. Not for a while. Maybe not ever.

And that was just fine with him. That meant he could play his games.

And if he played them patiently enough, carefully enough, he might be the only one left to greet a boat when— if? —it did show up.

He turned his vaporous test-pattern face up to the new sun. It was warm and not unpleasant. It would be an unseasonably hot day. New life could grow in this kind of heat. He walked back to the fire to rejoin the others.

WHEN THEboys awoke, the cooler was gone.

It contained all the food Scoutmaster Tim set aside. Wieners and buns. A six-pack of Gatorade. A bag of trail mix. Hershey’s Kisses. All they had left until the boat arrived. Max had placed it next to the fire the previous night. When they woke up, it was gone.

“Where the hell is it?” Ephraim said. He stamped around the campsite, knuckling sleep-crust out of his eyes. “I’m hungry, man.”

The others roused themselves slowly. Their sleep had been fitful, thanks to the ominous howls and sly scuttlings of the wild creatures lurking beyond the fire’s glow.

Newt said: “The cooler’s missing.”

“No shit, Captain Obvious,” Ephraim said. “Which one of you guys took it? Was it you, Newt, you lardo?”

Newton beheld Ephraim with bruised eyes. “Eef, why would I…?”

“Because you’re a big fat fat-ass,” Ephraim stated simply.

“Newt slept next to me the whole night,” Max said; he knew it was wise to calm his best friend down before he “lost it,” as Eef’s mom would say. “If he’d tried to take the cooler, I’d have heard him.”

Shelley came round the side of the cabin.

“Where the hell were you?” Ephraim said, the challenge clear.

“Hadda take a piss.”

“What happened to the cooler?”

Shelley set his flat-hanging face upon Ephraim’s. “Dunno, boss.”

Ephraim balled his fists. He wanted to plant one between Shelley’s cowish eyes. But he was distantly fearful that his fist would sink right into the placid emptiness of Shelley’s face. It would be like sinking into a bowl of warm dough studded with busted lightbulbs. Worst of all he got the queasy feeling that Shelley wouldn’t exactly mind it—and that his face would eat his fist. Dissolve it somehow, like acid.

Ephraim inhaled deeply, willing himself to stay calm. His mother said he had a temper just like his father’s. The father who’d headed out to catch the afternoon stakes at Charlottetown downs and never came home. The shithead who’d busted his own son’s arm and didn’t even remember. The father who was currently a guest of the province at the Sleepy Hollow correctional center following a string of convenience store thefts—one of which netted the princely sum of $5.02.

He was also the man whose footsteps many figured that Ephraim would inevitably follow. The apple never falls far from the tree , went the whispers around town. It didn’t help that Ephraim looked almost exactly like his father: the same antifreeze-green eyes and open-pored olive complexion.

And, Ephraim knew, the same temper.

One afternoon he and his mother had come across a construction site. An open sewer with a nest of hoses running down into it. Workmen had set up a large reflective warning sign. The top left side of the sign was crimped so that it read:

You should heed that warning , his mother had said.

And Ephraim tried to. But people were always pushing his buttons—which he had to admit were more like huge hair-trigger plungers. Whenever his emotions threatened to spill over, he’d follow his mother’s suggestion to breathe deeply and count slowly backward from ten.

10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3—

“Wild animals must have dragged it off while we were sleeping,” Kent said. “We should have hung it in a tree or something.”

Kent looked nothing like last night’s world beater. A dirty ring of sweat darkened his T-shirt collar; the same dark patches bloomed under his armpits. His eyes sat deep in his skull, the flesh around them netted in fine wrinkles: it looked a little like the wattle on an old biddy’s neck.

“Bull shit,” said Ephraim. “How would we not have heard animals making off with it?”

“I was pretty zonked,” Max said.

Ephraim pointed at Newt. “You figure the Masked Skunk made off with it, too?”

Newton winced. “I was wiped last night, too. I mean, it could have—”

“Fuck, man—if one of you took it, just admit it ,” Ephraim said, his voice taking flight to an upper octave. “What do you think I’m going to do—go crazy? Start laying you guys out?” He raised his hands, all innocence. “You couldn’t have eaten it all , right? So we’ll just say you’ve had your fill and leave it at that.”