Nick Cutter - The Troop

Edgerton asks me this with a pinprick of mad light dancing in each iris.

“It’s love . Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes.” He shrugs. “But that’s people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.”

EVIDENCE LOG, CASE 518C

PIECE F-44 (Personal Effects)

Preliminary Advertising copy for Thestomax (internal document only; never published)

Recovered from SITE F (Ariadne Advertising, 364 Bay Street, Toronto, ON) by Officer Stacey LaPierre, badge #992

“FIRE’S BURNING , fire’s burning; draw nearer, draw nearer; in the gloaming, in the gloaming; come sing and be meeeer-rrrrry…”

Shelley had moved back to the cabin, where he curled up under the shattered bed frames. He’d heaped the soaked mattresses into a sloppy teepee and lay in the mildewy darkness, singing. Anyone within earshot would have noted his lovely voice. It hit each register purely.

“Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya; kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya; kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya… O Lord, kumbaya…”

His voice dipped to a weak warbling note. He went silent. His body tensed. He loosed a tortured moan—the sound of a sick animal. His hands rose to his face. His nails dug into the creases of his forehead. Slowly, he dragged them downwards. His ragged fingernails tore trenches through his flesh. Blood wept from the wounds, though not very much. The sluggish trickles stopped quickly, like spigots being shut off.

In the silence, he could hear it. Them .

A tight, slippery sound like a Vaseline-coated rope pulled through a tightened fist. Coming from inside of him.

Things had turned out very bad for Shelley.

More than the other boys, Shelley was a realist. He understood how the world worked—bad things happened to good people, bad people died happy in their beds. It happened every day. So why bother being good? The word itself was attached to a series of behaviors that was, at best, an abstraction.

A person profited nothing from being good .

It wasn’t as if Shelley had a choice. Ever since he could remember, he’d seen the world this way. People were things to be used, peeled back, opened up, roughly dissected and dismissed. All creatures on earth fell under the same cold scrutiny.

The boy in the moon . That had been Shelley’s nickname; he’d overheard the teachers calling him that one afternoon as he’d lingered around their lounge. Although for a while it had been the Toucher .

He’d earned this moniker for his behavior during recess, which he spent haunting the edges of the school yard. He watched the girls play. Sometimes he’d sidle up alongside one of them—Trudy Dennison was a favorite—and reach out his arm to gather up her long, soft hair, letting it fall tricklingly between his fingers.

He did not find this arousing. Shelley was rarely aroused by anything. Girls did not excite him as they did most boys his age. Boys didn’t excite Shelley either. Not in the traditional manner, anyway.

When girls felt Shelley’s fingers passing through their hair, a look of teeming disgust came into their eyes. That disgust often shaded into an unease that held a gasping edge of fear: as if they were thinking that the world might be a better and safer place were he, Shelley Longpre, not a part of it.

Shelley was aware of their revulsion, but it did not trouble him. He enjoyed it, actually—as much as he enjoyed anything at all. Last year, Trudy Dennison squealed on him. He had to sit down with the principal, Mr. Levesque. Shelley’s father, a tire salesman, was also there. And his mother in her watered silk dress.

Shelley had been sternly warned that touching anyone without that person’s permission was bad . Shelley nodded and smiled his sullen, empty smile. On the way out of the office, he heard his father tell the principal: “It won’t happen again. Shelley’s just… he’s slow .”

Nobody made too big a deal of it. Touching was just Shelley’s thing , the way eating boogers was Neil Caruso’s thing or filching cigarettes behind the utility shed was Ephraim’s thing or playing pocket pool under the trampoline was Benjamin Rimmer’s thing . Every boy had his thing and on the grand spectrum Shelley’s wasn’t so bad—it indicated a future badness, perhaps, a “signpost” as that quack Dr. Harley might say, but right now it was harmless, if slightly troubling. His fellow Scouts didn’t give Shelley grief over it. For one, many of them probably wanted to touch Trudy Dennison’s flowing honey-scented hair, too—they simply didn’t take the next logical step. And two, the boys avoided picking on Shelley out of the sense, inexpressible yet tangible, that he might do something very wrong in retaliation. The worst they’d ever called Shelley was dumb. A real dumb bunny , as Eef would say… well, used to say, anyway.

Shelley was happy as a person such as himself could be with this perception. Let everyone think he was dull. Let their eyes fall on his beanpole body and sluggish limbs and feel nothing but a vague revulsion that they were unable to properly account for. Revulsion mixed with an odd sense of disquiet.

“Someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; O Lord, kumbaya…”

Without his being consciously aware of it, Shelley’s mouth dipped to the raw pine floor. He gnawed on it. His teeth skriiiitch ed on the wood. Splinters drove deep into his gums. Blood flowed.

Shelley used to be the Toucher. Now he was the touched , thanks to the twitchy-squirmy things inside him now. Making a home.

“Hear me crying and laughing, my Lord, kumbaya ,” Shelley warbled. “Hear me crying, my Lord, kumbaya; hear me crying, my Lord, kumbaya… O Lord, kumbaya…”

And Shelley had begun to cry. Tears squeezed from the sides of his eyes—but they ceased quickly. His body was dehydrated as a banana chip. Yesterday he’d urinated against the side of the cabin. What came was just a thin dribble, clear as spring water. Not even the slightest yellow tinge—the yellow color was from the extra vitamins and minerals he usually pissed away. But now he understood the things inside of him were helping themselves to all that extra—and more.

The feeble light of the moon cast through the shattered roof, through the sodden mattresses making up Shelley’s awful nest, falling upon his body. His trousers hung low, divulging a half inch of ass crack. His shirt was rucked up. The knobs of his spine were visible.

Had anyone been watching, that person would have seen the flesh ringing Shelley’s spine begin to lift. Something was tunneling its way through—through and up . Climbing the drainpipe of his spine, corkscrewing higher and higher.

There came a series of dim pops, like weak firecrackers going off: trapped air popping between Shelley’s vertebrae. The tunneling thing looped round the spine, tightening, burrowing through the lacework of tissue and muscle, around again, and again, and again.