Nick Cutter - The Troop

“Animals,” Kent croaked.

White-hot rage pounded at Ephraim’s temples. His molars ground together so hard that he could hear them in his skull: thick plates of shale scraping against one another.

He stalked away from the campfire in the direction of the cabin… but he took a wide berth around it, continuing on into the sparse woods behind.

He pulled a battered old Sucrets cough drop tin from his pocket. Three lonely cigarettes jostled inside. He’d hoped to duck away with Max, sharing a smoke down by the shore while they stared at the stars. Max didn’t smoke, but Eef planned to convince him to be his smokin’ buddy. Otherwise it was just him, alone, launching off lung rockets. Snacking on cancer sticks. Which painted a pretty lame picture, actually.

He poked a cigarette into his mouth, flicked his brass Zippo, and touched the flame to tobacco. He inhaled, coughing as the gray vapor rasped his throat—at first it’d felt like swallowing fiberglass insulation, the pink kind stacked in bricks at the hardware store—hissing the smoke between his teeth. He tried to blow smoke rings, puffing out his cheeks, but the wind rose out of the west and tore them apart.

Birds called in a metallic rhree-rhree-rhree: a sound like a rusty axe drawn across a cinder block. The nicotine hit his system, nerve endings a-tingle.

Settle down , he chastised himself. So what if one of those assholes ate the food. You’ll be at your own kitchen table with a big plate of spaghetti in, like, what, two hours, right? Away from this island. Away from…

From the dead man. Which, truth be told, had freaked Ephraim out more than anything in his life. Seeing the man laid out stiff with his limbs jutting at weirdo angles and his chest slicked in brown gunk—that had been the worst part: that he’d died streaked in filth—Ephraim had barely managed to tamp down the high-pitched wail that had threatened to spill over his lips.

He’d never seen a dead person before. The closest he’d ever come to anything remotely like it was the time he’d been walking home from school and saw a hydro worker get blown off a power pole by a jolt of electricity. The guy had been thirty feet up in a cherry picker. A current surge must’ve ripped through the transformer. Ephraim remembered the guy’s face and body lighting up like a Fourth of July sparkler. The flash was so bright that it printed everything on Ephraim’s eyes in negative for a minute afterward.

The man rocketed out of the cherry picker as if there were dynamite in his boots. He hit a sapling on his way down; the limber little tree bent with his weight before snapping with a crisp green sound. By the time Ephraim ran over, the workman was up and walking a dazed circle. The electricity had melted the treads of his boots: the rubber pooled around the soles as if he’d stepped in black jelly. Ephraim found it painful to breathe: the dissipating electricity left a lingering acidic note. Smoke spindled out of the man’s overalls, right through the coarse orange weave of the fabric, rising off his shoulders in vaporous wings.

“Ah God ah God,” the guy was saying over and over. Mincing around in stiff stutter-steps like a man walking barefoot over hot coals. “Ah God ah God ah God ah God…”

The flesh over his skull had melted down his forehead. The electricity had somehow loosened his skin without actually splitting it. Gravity had carried the melted skin downward: it wadded up along the ridge of his brow like the folds of a crushed-velvet curtain, or the skin on top of unstirred gravy pushed to one side of the pot. His hair had come down with it. His hairline now began in the middle of his forehead. The man didn’t seem to realize this. He kept hopping around saying “Ah God ah God…”

In the calm eye of horror, Ephraim became aware of the tiniest details. Like how the hairs on the man’s head were melted and charred, like the bristles of a hairbrush that had drawn too near an open flame. Or how the skin on the man’s head—sheerer and hairless and now stretched with horrifying tension over the dome of his skull—was threaded with flimsy blue veins like the veins on a newborn baby’s skull.

Ephraim had run to the truck and babbled into the CB radio. He was still babbling for help when the paramedics showed up.

That was the closest Ephraim had ever come to death until last night. And the dead man here ( who the hell was he, anyway? ) had been so much worse because he had been so much more final . The dead man couldn’t get skin grafts and a hair weave like the workman could. All that lay in wait for the dead man was a lonely hole in the dirt.

And now Scoutmaster Tim was pretty sick, too. Maybe the same way the dead man had been?

They’d locked him in that stupid closet; Ephraim hadn’t quite felt right about it—he got carried away, was all. And now Kent looked like he’d been attacked by vampire bats in the night; they’d sucked a gallon of blood out of him and soon—

He inhaled deeply. Held it. Let it go.

10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1

Are you angry, Eef? came his mother’s voice. Or are you scared?

Ephraim realized that those emotions existed on two sides of a razor-thin line. One bled into the other so easily.

Anger. Keep Out.

Fear… Keep Out?

It’s always good to have a little fear, son, especially at your age , he heard his mom say. Fear keeps you honest. Fear keeps you safe .

Ephraim stubbed the cigarette, dug a small hole in the earth— a little grave for my coffin nail , he thought cheerlessly—and buried the butt. He headed back to the campfire, confused in his thoughts.

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: Dr. Erikson, please describe the discussion between Dr. Edgerton and yourself regarding the selection of a human test subject.

A: I wouldn’t really term it a discussion at all. Edgerton said he was doing it and I could come along for the ride if I wanted.

Q: And you agreed?

A: In for a penny? But I also thought… maybe I could help things somehow. Keep it under control.

Q: You could have kept it under control by informing the police.

A: I could have.

Q: But you didn’t. Why not?

A: It’s a tough thing to describe. Now that I’m away from it, the answers are so simple. Men like Edgerton are obsessives. Notions of right or wrong have this awful way of draining away to irrelevance with men like that. The only things that matter to them are answers. Progress . Unlocking doors. And if you can’t unlock them, you just kick at them until they give. I guess I was sucked up in it, too.

Q: Tell me how Dr. Edgerton went about finding Tom Padgett, the first human test subject.

A: It wasn’t so hard as you might think. It’s amazing how many people are so down on their luck they’ll take just about any offer that’s flung at them. Edgerton went to bars. Not the campus bars where the fresh-faced, rosy-futured kids drank. The scumpits on the edge of town. He… trolled , is I guess the word. Threw his bait in the water and waited for a bite.

Q: He told Padgett his plan?

A: Not right off the bat. He did it in stages. I don’t know the exact run of their conversation. You’d have to ask Edgerton.

Q: Dr. Edgerton is not an easy man to get a straight answer out of.

A: Edgerton just brought Padgett back one night. Guy smelled like he’d been marinating in a tub of Old Grouse. Edgerton explained it all calmly and evenly. He’d take the injection and sit in the room. We’d monitor him. If things got out of hand, we’d call a doctor—never mind the fact that no doctor on earth had a cure for what Edgerton would stick him with. Edgerton handed him a nice fat envelope. I don’t know how much cash was in there. I guess it was enough.