Nick Cutter - The Troop

“Bleh,” he said, letting the half-chewed mess fall out of his mouth. His tongue was a blackened root. He looked like a ghoul who’d been eating his way down to a coffin.

“Noooooobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going to the garden to eat worms—to eat worms…”

Shelley began to laugh. A high, piercing sound like the scream of a gull. It stripped out over the water, touching not one pair of human ears.

SHELLEY SATthat way for a few hours. He did not speak. He was motionless—except for a brief spell where he shook uncontrollably, unable to control his limbs.

When the sky reached its deepest ebony, Shelley began to feed in earnest.

NEWTON BUILTa fire on the beach using the driftwood he and Max gathered. It took quite a while to get it lit: his fingers were shivering badly.

After it was going, they huddled on the sand with their shoulders touching lightly. Both of them had stripped to their skivvies—Newton’s field book advised against staying in wet clothes. The water dried on their naked flesh, leaving a whitened sheen of salt. Their internal temperatures inched back up.

They hadn’t spoken since burying the turtle, which they’d done before building the fire. Every so often, their gazes drifted to the spot on the beach where the sand had been smoothed by their trembling palms.

Newton’s eyes found Max’s above the fire. “Do you think it will go to Heaven?”

“The turtle?” Max’s shoulders lifted imperceptibly. “I really don’t know. It could. If there is a Heaven, I guess it ought to—I mean, right? What would that turtle ever have done to deserve not to go to Heaven?”

Newton’s shoulders relaxed, then stiffened again as a worried cast came over his face.

“What about the Scoutmaster?”

Max frowned. “Why are you asking me?”

“Your dad’s the county coroner. He works with the priests and pastors, yeah? I figured he’d know.”

For all of Newton’s smarts, he could be incredibly thickheaded. “I don’t know , Newt. I’m not the one who makes those choices, am I? Nobody really knows. Not my dad or the priests or anyone. I guess when we die, we’ll know who was right about everything.”

“But Scoutmaster Tim was a good person.”

Max blew a lock of damp hair off his forehead. “Sure he was. He was a doctor. He helped people. I guess… yeah. He’d go to Heaven.”

“Do you think he’s there now? Looking down?”

“Depends how long it took him to get there. Maybe he had a few stopovers.” Max saw the look of dread on Newton’s face and said: “Yes. He’s up there. He’s happy now.”

“I never saw a dead person before, Max.”

“I never saw a dead person like that, either.”

“Were you scared?”

Max nodded.

“You didn’t look scared.”

“Well, I was.”

The night’s silence stretched over the immensity of the ocean—an impossibly quiet vista that stirred fear in Max’s heart. Would death be like that: endless liquid silence?

Newton grabbed a piece of wood from the pile, inspecting it by the fire’s glow. A black spider picked its way across it. Newton let it crawl onto his fingers.

“Careful,” Max said. “What if it’s poisonous?”

“Poisonous ones have red bells on their abdomens. This one is pure black.”

It climbed off his fingertip. Newton watched it go with a dreamy look. “A spider used to live inside Mom’s car,” he said. “She parked it under the oak in our driveway. Every time she took the car out, she’d see a web hanging between the side-view mirror and the windshield. She would snap it. The next time she looked it’d be back. Finally she tilted the side-view mirror as far as it would go and looked into the compartment behind. A little white spider was living in there. Every night it came out and strung a web. Mom would come out and snap it. So it would just build it again.”

“Did she kill it?” Max said.

“Absolutely not,” Newton said fiercely. “Who was it hurting? She even left its web alone from then on. But then one day we were driving and I spotted the spider on the windshield. We were doing, like, eighty, tooling down the highway to Charlottetown. It was trying to build another web— on the windshield while the car was ripping down the road. I thought it would blow away. I could see the sunlight glinting on the web it had managed to lay down. Crazy, right? Mom pulled over. We took the spider and put her in an apple tree along the road. Her new home.”

Newton smiled. Max figured he was reliving the memory: on the roadside on a wet spring day, the cree-cree of crickets in the long grass as his mother let the little spider slip off her finger onto the branch of an apple tree clung with pink blossoms. It was a nice image.

“After we got back on the road, Mom said, ‘Insects can make a home for themselves almost anywhere. They say that about cockroaches: if there’s ever a global Armageddon, they’ll be the only things left. You can’t beat a bug for adaptability.’ I think humans can be the same, too—don’t you think, Max? If we really need to, we can survive almost anywhere.”

Knotholes popped in the fire. Max’s ears became attuned to another sound: febrile cracking noises coming from the darkness where the rocks met the beach, near the spot where they had buried the turtle.

“You hear that, Max?”

“Hear what?”

Newton got up and crept toward the noises. His mind conjured up an absurd image that was nonetheless chilling: the reanimated sea turtle clawing itself up from its sandy grave, blood dripping from its puncture wounds, its bonelike mouth snap-snapping.

The fire threw wandering sheets of light upon the rock. The cracking noises grew louder. They were joined by other sounds overhead: the rustle of wings in the cliffs.

“Oh my God.”

A clutch of pale green eggs—the patina of the sea—were buried in the sand. Each about half the size of a chicken egg. They had been covered in a fine carpet of sand. The boys had totally missed them.

Each egg was struggling with minute hectic life. Shards of shell broke off. The tiny limbs of unknown creatures were pushing themselves out.

“What are they?” Max said.

They didn’t have to wait long to find out. When the first flipper appeared, Newton whispered: “They’re turtles.”

The scenario played out in Max’s mind: a mama turtle swims in with the high tide to lay her eggs. She gets stuck in a tide pool. Next a pair of horrible two-legged things blunder into the pool, heave her onto the sand, and…

The baby turtles didn’t even look like turtles, the same way those baby shearwaters on the kitchen table hadn’t really looked like birds. They had no real shell, only a translucent carapace draping their grape-size bodies. You could see through their skin as if through a greasy fast-food bag: the dark pinbone of their spines, the weird movement of their organs. For all their newborn freshness, they still looked ineffably old. Max reached to touch one. Newton grabbed his wrist.

“You can’t. If it gets human smell on it, its mom won’t take it back.”

It took a moment for it to sink in.

“Let’s just get them into the water,” Max said softly.

Newton nodded. “I guess it’s okay to touch them for that.”

With infinite care, the boys picked up the baby turtles and carried them across the sand. They tenderly picked the shards of eggshell off their bodies. They knelt at the shore and let them go. Their flippers paddled as they made a beeline for the open sea.