Nick Cutter - The Troop

Brand-new strength shot through him. Pounds of fresh muscle were slabbed onto his arms and legs. His chest cracked apart and widened as his shoulders grew broader and thicker. He did not feel pain or fear anymore. Was this how a superhero felt—or a god? Was that what he was now?

Weak light streamed through chinks in the floor, falling across his new contours. His body was a mass of fast-twitch muscle fibers and vein-riven flesh. He laughed: a low baritone. He could smash through the cellar door if he wanted to. He could find the boys who’d locked him up and tear their bodies apart like paper dolls. Find Ephraim, son of the no-good jailbird, and crush his skull to splinters.

Perhaps he would. Or perhaps he would be merciful.

But for now he’d wait. They would see him soon enough. Although their tepid hearts might burst at the sight of him.

WHEN THEother boys didn’t return by nightfall, Shelley decided to kill Kent.

That was the thing about spinning so many plates—inevitably, one would topple off the pole. But the prospect of watching those plates shatter excited Shelley enormously.

He’d found a dead sheepshead on the beach. It had washed in with the afternoon tide, rotted and picked at by sunfish. He skewered it on a sharpened stick and carried it back to the campfire.

It was near dark when he stole around to the cellar with the dead fish. His breath came heavily, like a moose in rut. A dank musk dumped out of Shelley’s pores: sour adrenaline mixed with something else, something fouler.

Shelley jimmied the stick loose from the cellar doors and flung them open. The granular light of dusk sifted down the steps. Shadows twisted on the warped wood. Shelley took a cautious step forward, hunting for movement in the gloom.

“Kent?”

Shelley’s prey dragged himself up the steps tortuously, a ghoul crawling out of a shattered coffin. For an instant, Shelley thought he had no skin: it was just a shambling, jerking Kent-skeleton advancing upon him. As he drew closer, Shelley realized that the thinnest stretching of skin still clad Kent’s wasted frame. He was covered in bulging boils: they looked like halved golf balls under his flesh. His eyes were cored sockets: Shelley was amazed they hadn’t fallen out of his head to dangle by their glistening ocular stalks…

…Kent rose from the cellar, exultant. The newly crowned king. His body shone like rippled steel in the moonlight. Power and strength coursed through him. He was unstoppable. He came slowly, savoring it. His feet echoed on the steps like distant thunder. He curled his hands into fists and watched heatless lightning crackle and pop between his knuckles. He could kill a man with a look—with a simple thought . He had eaten the godhead and taken its power…

…Shelley stepped back in wonderment. He couldn’t believe that Kent was still able to move. The boy’s eyes were yellow and diseased. His lips had receded into the gauntness of his face. He shuffled out of the cellar with sickening animation, a gleeful marionette in the hands of a spastic puppeteer. The fleshless pinworms that were his lips skinned back to disclose a dizzying grotesquerie: his gums had been eaten back from his teeth, and all but one—his left front incisor—had loosened and fallen from their gum beds; yet they remained connected by Kent’s braces, gray teeth linked like charms on a gruesome bracelet, clicking and clacking in the dark vault of his mouth, all hanging by that one tenacious tooth… which, as Shelley watched, slid from Kent’s gums with a slick sucking sound, a bracelet of teeth bouncing over his lips, his chin, tumbling to the cellar steps. Kent stepped on them, oblivious to his own teeth shattering like ribbon candy.

“Wha arr ooo loogin aaa?” the boy-thing croaked.

What are you looking at?

“Almost nothing,” Shelley said in a tone of pure awe.

The Kent-thing held out its driftwood arms, fleshless fingers outstretched toward the rotted meat in Shelley’s hands…

…The weakling cowered at the sight of him! Shelley had glimpsed Kent’s newfound beauty and power and he was quailing in fear. As it should be. This puling wretch, Shelley, held out an offering with one quaking hand. A hunk of braised meat dripping with juices. Perhaps Kent would be merciful. Perhaps Shelley would be spared…

…Shelley led the Kent-thing past the fire. The thing shambled awkwardly, staggering and collapsing and dragging itself up. It made the sucky-drooling sounds of a revolting starved infant. Saliva dripped from its flapping gums to slick its filthy Scout uniform. Moonlight glossed the dome of its skull, which was covered in bloody patches. My God, it must have torn out its own hair and eaten it.

“Come on, Kent,” Shelley cooed. “There’s a good boy…”

The Kent-thing loosed a high gibbering cackle. Night birds screeched from their roosts in the trees stitching the shore. They were down at the water now. Shelley waded in. The Kent-thing blundered in after, slipping on the rocks while Shelley stared with sick wonder.

“What are you?” he said.

Shelley tossed the dead fish into the surf. The Kent-thing shambled after it. Its bonelike fingers punctured the rotted flesh. Its toothless mouth tore a stinking strip off.

“So gooo… sank ooo… so gooooo…”

Shelley knelt beside the Kent-thing. He was aware of the danger but couldn’t help himself: he craved this closeness. He petted its head the way you’d pet a dog. His rock-hard penis pressed urgently against the wetted fabric of his trousers. A tenacious chunk of Kent’s hair came away in Shelley’s hand—it pulled free with no resistance at all, like wiping cat hair off a velour cushion.

“Show me,” he said softly.

Kent turned to regard him. Flecks of rotted fish clung to his jaws. His mouth hung open at a quizzical angle.

“Wha…?”

Shelley gripped Kent’s head and lowered it into the water. It didn’t require much effort at all. He caught the stunned expression on Kent’s face as he went under. His arms flailed. His legs kicked weakly. Air bubbles stormed to the surface, bursting with liquid pops. His uniform rode up his back. Shelley saw the pulsing tube running next to his spinal column—it looked like an awful second spine.

Kent’s struggles weakened. Shelley hauled his head up. The Kent-thing’s eyes were foggy. White worms had pierced the skin of his neck, writhing furiously.

“Show me,” Shelley said anxiously. “I want to see…”

…The illusion shattered abruptly. The mental scaffolding fell away and Kent saw himself as he was. When that happened he prayed—a quick, fervent prayer—that the sight would drive him insane. Better to be mad than to witness the devastation of his body from a sane person’s perspective. To see the skin stretched like parchment over the warped sticks of his bones. His body hilled with huge lumps, white worms twisting out of them in a frenzy…

…“Show me,” Shelley said again.

The Kent-thing’s eyes hung at half-mast. He coughed wretchedly. Something burst from his mouth, a fine mist spraying Shelley’s face. Something fluttered against his nose and lips like the beat of a moth’s wings. Shelley stuck his tongue out involuntarily to clear it away—realizing, in some dim chamber of his mind, the terrible danger he was in, but the fear was washed away on the tide of his awful, powerful needs.

“Show me.”

Shelley wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. Did he want to watch Kent’s soul depart his body? Would it slip away behind the convex curve of the Kent-thing’s eyes like smoke through a glass bowl?

He dunked Kent’s head underwater casually. He hummed an off-key note while Kent thrashed and bucked. Shelley felt insistent wriggles on his tongue and swallowed without quite realizing it.