Nick Cutter - The Troop

Ephraim screamed—the sound of a nail levered out of a wet plank of wood. What a colossal fucking idiot . Trying to reason with these things . May as well reason with the tide, with a fucking salamander. He wondered if the Scoutmaster had resorted to that—if in the final hours and minutes he’d sobbed out an entreaty, wishing for mercy. What the fuck would it matter?

Ephraim wished they’d just go away. Could he flush them out? Could he dig them out?

“Eef?… Ephraim?”

His name, coming from his backpack. He lifted the flap and found the walkie-talkie. Dazedly he said: “Yeah?”

“You guys left without me.”

“We couldn’t find you, Shel.”

“It’s okay, I’m not angry. How’s it going?”

“I’m by myself. Max and Newt left.”

Silence. Then: “ Really? ”

Ephraim sniffed. His sinuses were full of snot, like when he used to cry—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. When he’d seen that repairman blown off his cherry picker by a burst of electricity, maybe?

“They had to get food. I was holding them back.”

The air crackled, full of static. “Real friends wouldn’t leave you. Sorry, Eef, but that’s the truth.”

“Would you have left, Shel?”

Silence again. Then: “ I’m not really a friend, Eef — am I? ”

Ephraim stared at his pointer finger. The milky crescent under the nail—the lunate , that part is called. How did he know that?

“No, Shel. I guess you’re something else.”

“How you feeling? You don’t sound too hot .”

There was something ghastly, something monstrously and soulsuckingly awful about Ephraim’s situation: alone and full of things , his only confidant a brooding, toxic boy—Creepy Shel, the girls at school called him; the Creepazoid; the Toucher—on a crackly walkie-talkie. A sense of despondency settled into him, marrow-deep.

“Eef, you still there?”

“Uh.”

“You hungry?”

Oh, fuck YOU, Shel . Rage boiled up Ephraim’s gorge—then transmuted swiftly into a fear so profound that beads of sweat squeezed from the skin of his brow, pop-pop-pop like salty BBs. Hugging his arms tight across his body, chest hitching, Ephraim rocked side to side. His dearest wish was to be home, safe in bed, with his mother humming downstairs as she cooked: meatballs, sausage and peppers, or even lobster, which he thought of as sea bugs and totally loathed. But the surety and safety, the calm cadence of his mother’s voice—yes, he missed that terribly.

The things . He felt them. Massing behind his eyeballs. Infesting his corneal vaults, twining round his ocular stems. Packing his sinuses, a wriggling white multitude, squeezing through his aqueous humors like tears. Spilling down his nose, down the back of his throat, million upon million gorging themselves, growing fat on him. Ephraim was crying now—yet he barely realized this.

“I can help you, Eef.”

Ephraim sucked back snot. “W-w-what?”

“I said — are you listening? Really, really listening? I said I can help.”

“H-how?”

In the still tranquillity of the island woods, wind stirring gently in the treetops, Shelley began to speak. His words were soft, honeyed, washing over Ephraim like a tropical zephyr. It all made so much sense .

Ephraim pulled his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket. His mother had bought it for him. It hadn’t been his birthday or Christmas—she got it for him just because. She never did that. Never enough money in the kitty. He’d sat on his bed, gazing at it in disbelief. He’d slipped his thumbnail into the crescent divot in each attachment and pulled them out. He’d loved the crisp snick they made clicking into place.

“ Are you doing it? ” Shelley asked. His voice sounded far away, ignorable.

“Yeah,” Ephraim snapped irritably. “Shut up, just shut up for a sec.”

Carefully, he unfolded the can-opener blade. He sat poised, the wickedly curved blade hovering a quarter inch above his skin, a few inches from the cigarette burn. His skin seemed to jump and shiver—as if things were tunneling beneath his flesh like roaches under a blanket. Bastards .

He dug the sharp silver sickle into the puffy flesh of his knuckles and drew it along the phalange bone on the back of his hand. The blade opened his skin up rather easily, leaving a dully sizzling line of pain. For a moment, the incision shone pale white like the flesh of a deboned trout. Next it turned pink before running red with blood.

The anger racing through his veins dissipated with the appearance of that blood, and with it went some of the fear—just like Shelley said it would. Which was good. Very good.

“Do you see it, Ephraim? You must see it, don’t you?”

Ephraim watched the blood trickle down his hand. He squinted. He was positive he’d seen something wriggle as the can opener cleaved through his flesh: a flicker of squiggling white, just like Shelley promised he’d see.

If he cut deeper next time, and faster, could he catch it? Pinch it, tug it out? It may be very big. Not as big as the one that had come out of the strange man’s gut but still, big.

He’d have to twist it around his fingers like fishing line and pull very carefully. He imagined tugging on the end coming out of his hand and feeling a dim secondary tug down by his foot, where its head was rooted. Tricky work. If it snapped before he got its head out, it would just wriggle away and respawn. He had to get the head . Once he got it, he’d squeeze it between his thumb and finger and squeeze. He’d shiver with delight as it burst with a meaty sploosh .

“Do it, Ephraim . Do it. Don’t be scared. There’s nothing to be scared of. You’re almost there.”

The squirming in his ears was maddening. He unfolded the knife’s corkscrew attachment. He idly raised it to his ear, edging the tip into his ear canal. The cold metal tickled the sensitive hairs—the cilia , they were called; he remembered that from science class. Lunate , too, he realized—God bless science class.

Ephraim imagined pushing the corkscrew into his ear and giving it a good solid twist or two, like he’d seen his mother do when opening bottles of cheap Spanish red. She’d drunk a lot of those after his father stepped out. He pictured pulling the corkscrew out and finding a thick white tube threaded round the coils. Gotcha . But there could be other things on those coils, too.

Still, it might be worth it. The human brain didn’t actually have any sensory receptors—yet another thing he’d learned in science class. You could stab a naked brain with a steak knife and the person wouldn’t even feel it. They might piss their pants or forget their best friend’s name all of a sudden—but they wouldn’t feel any pain.

Shelley’s voice, at one with the wind: “ What would you rather, Eef? Put up with a little pain or get your eyes eaten out by worms? That’s what they do, you know — they save the eyes for last .”

Ephraim took the corkscrew out of his ear. He folded it back inside the knife and set it on his lap. It sat there: a long red lozenge with the insignia of the Swiss cross on it. He figured a guy could tear himself apart pretty easily with such a knife. Use its every attachment to pinch and pull and pry his own raging flesh until he fell to pieces. It would hurt like hell, except for the brain, of course—but maybe it would be worth it.

Ephraim sat under the spruces in the thinning light of afternoon. The walkie-talkie went silent. Run out of batteries? He already missed Shelley’s helpful voice.