Nick Cutter - The Troop

The turtle turned to face them. Its head was tucked defensively into its shell. It struggled forward on its front flippers, aiming to return to the tide pool.

Max stepped in front of it. The turtle’s head darted out to snap at his toes. Max pulled his foot away with a strangled squawk. The turtle had taken a V-shaped bite: the wound went a quarter inch into his toe, almost to the nail.

Max felt very little—his toes were still numb and his system was awash with adrenaline—but as his blood pissed into the sand he sensed all the threads inside his body gathering up, tightening, and committing themselves to a steely purpose.

He’d kill this thing. He wanted it dead.

Max found a bit of driftwood and hooked it under the turtle’s shell. It wheeled and snapped off three inches of bleached wood. Max jammed the remaining portion under its front flipper and levered it up savagely.

The turtle flipped onto its back. It uttered a pitiful squall that sounded too much like the cry of a human infant for Newton’s ears.

“ There .” Max’s chest heaved. “ There , you fucking tough guy— there you go .”

With one trembling finger, he flicked open the largest blade of his Swiss Army knife. Moonlight lay trapped along its honed edge. His anger and fear helixed into each other. Things were speeding up and yet everything was held in a bubble of crystalline clarity: the tide swelling over the rain-pitted sand and smoothing everything with a layer of silver; the shriek of gulls overhead that seemed to urge him toward an act of savagery he’d already settled his mind around.

Max pressed the knife to the turtle’s stomach, which was the off-beige color of the rubberized mat in his bathtub at home. The tip slipped into one of the grooves in the turtle’s shell as if guided by its own inner voice.

Max had never killed anything. Oh, maybe bugs—but did they really count? He’d never stabbed anything, that was for sure. Newton stared at him with eyes that shone like cold phosphorus. Max wished he’d look away.

He bore down, unsure at first but steadily applying more force. The blade slipped and skittered along the turtle’s belly, leaving a milky scratch on its shell. The turtle mewled. Its flippers oared in crazy circles. Its helplessness made it look stupid, comical. Max could do whatever he wanted to it.

He refolded the knife and pulled out the leather awl: just a simple metal spike. He held the knife in both hands as if it were the T-handle on a TNT detonator box. He took a rough guess at where the turtle’s heart might lie, then hunched his shoulders and bore down with all his weight.

The spike pierced the turtle with the sound of a three-hole punch going through a thick sheaf of paper. Blood poured from the perfectly round hole, darker than Max had ever imagined. The turtle’s back flippers clenched and unclenched spastically. Something dribbled out between those flippers: pearlescent roe that had the look of delicate soap bubbles.

Max punched the leather tool through a second time. The turtle’s body compressed under Max’s weight, its chest buckling like when you press down on a plastic garbage can lid. Its flippers beat helplessly at the air. Blood burst out of the wound in a startling syrupy gout. The smell was profoundly briny, as if the turtle’s organs were encrusted with salt.

Max punched the spike through again, again… again. The turtle gurgled, then made a fretful stuttering sound: icka-icka-icka , as if it had a bad case of the hiccups.

Max moaned and sawed his arm across his eyes—he’d begun to cry without being aware of it—and stared at the turtle with eyes gone swimmy with tears. Blood was coming out of it all over. It rocked side to side frantically. A low venomous hiss came out of the punctures; it was as if the turtle’s organs had vaporized into steam that was now venting through those fresh holes.

“Please,” Max said. He punched the spike through again. It went in so goddamn easy now, as if the turtle’s skin had relinquished its prior rights of refusal. “Please won’t you just die .”

But it would not. Stubbornly, agonizingly, it clung to life. Its head craned up to take in the bloody wreckage of its own body. Its eyes were set in nets of wrinkles, inexpressive of any emotion Max could name. Its will to live was terrifying, as it rejected the notion of an easy death.

Why had he done this— why? Jesus, oh Jesus.

On TV it was always so quick and easy, almost bloodless: the detective shot the murderer and he collapsed, clutching his heart. Or the knife slid in soundlessly and some guy went down clutching his stomach, venting a sad sighing note—“ Eeoooogh …”—before he died. But it didn’t work that way in real life. Suddenly Max understood those awful stories he’d seen on the national news, the ones where a reporter grimly intoned some poor person had been stabbed forty times or whatever. Maybe the stabber would have stopped after a single stab if that was all it took. But most living things don’t want to die. It took a lot to kill them. Events take on a vicious momentum. All of a sudden you’re stabbing as a matter of necessity. You’re hoping that if you just put enough holes into a body, the life will drain out and death will rapidly flow in…

“Newt,” he pleaded. “Newt, please .”

The boys knelt in the sand, wet and shivering. Sand stuck to the pads of their feet. Max was shaking and sobbing. He could never, ever be hungry enough to kill something if this was what it meant. The turtle was still hiccuping, but now those sounds were interspersed with frantic peeps , like a baby bird calling from its nest.

Newton grabbed blindly for the turtle’s head. He slashed wildly with his knife, trying to hack through its throat. But the turtle withdrew into its shell and Newton’s knife only cut a deep trench around its jawbone. WWAMD? Not this. Alex would never have done this. Newton burst into a freshet of tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his chest hitching uncontrollably. “I thought that might be the quickest way. Y’know, cut its head off. Like a guillotine. A terrible thing to do but still better than…”

The turtle peered out from the leathery cave where its head now resided. Its eyes blinked slowly. Its mouth opened and closed like a man at the end of a long run. Blood filled the lower hub of its shell and dripped onto the sand. It kept peeping and peeping.

The boys knelt with their shoulders bowed as the turtle bled to death. It took so, so long.

At one point, its head poked out of its shell. Its blood-slicked eyes stared around as if in hopes that its tormentors had grown bored of their sport and left it alone. Maybe it thought it could still return to the tide pool and be carried back into the ocean. Animals never gave up hope, did they? But its glazed eyes found them, blinked once, and resignedly returned to the darkness of its shell.

The great wave of the tide moved farther inland. The water lifted. The surf sucked at the boys’ bare feet. The turtle’s flippers went stiff all at once, then relaxed. Tiny translucent creatures that looked like earwigs crawled out from the deep folds of its skin to trundle over its cooling body. Aquatic parasites looking for a new host.

“I’m not huh-huh-hungry anymore,” Newton said.

“Me neither.”

“My muh-muh… my muh-muh… my mother says you can’t really love yourself if you hurt animals.”

“I didn’t mean to. Not like this. If I’d known—”

“I know. It’s over now anyway.”

The water lapped at their feet with a dreadful languidness. The gulls hurled down shrill shrieks from high above. The wind whispered in a language they could not name.