Nick Cutter - The Troop

Shelley did not scream. Did not move. At one point, he did reach around and scratch at his back, as if under the belief he’d been bitten by a mosquito.

“Ug,” he said—a Neanderthal note. “Ug… uh- ug .”

The tube threaded up his spine, between the sharp wings of Shelley’s scapula. Upon reaching his neck, it thinned out, appearing to struggle—then it flexed convulsively, fattening into a bulging cord up the nape of Shelley’s neck, its scolex fat at his hairline…

“UG,” Shelley said breathlessly. His mouth opened. A clotted rope of blood jetted between his teeth.

It entered his cranial vault. Shelley was immediately suffused with comforting warmth. He sighed, curling deeper into himself. He shut his eyes.

LATER THATnight, Shelley would awake from a familiar dream—they all shared the same palette: shifting browns and blacks and olive greens, half-formed shapes melting into one another—shivering and feverish with a hammer-hard erection tepeeing his shorts. A booming voice followed him out of his dreamscape:

Rock and roll, Shelley m’man—THAT’S how it eats .

That’s the ONLY way it eats .

MAX ANDNewton rose with the drowsy half-light of dawn. The sun hummed over the sea, an orange sine wave radiating heat-shimmers against the leavening dark.

Max hadn’t slept well. He’d kept sensing strange, vaguely menacing shapes darting at the edges of the fire’s light. His skin was rubbed raw around his waist, which had shrunk somewhat over the past few days. He took a swig from his canteen and winced at the stale, ironlike taste of the water. He fingered his clothes, which he’d hung up last night. Dry enough.

Newton got up soon afterward. They tugged on their pants and socks and boots in silence. They squinted across the sea into the new sun. The dark hulls of those strange ships dotted the water toward North Point.

“We have to get Eef,” Max said.

“He may have gone back to camp,” Newt said. “Y’think?”

“We’d better check.”

They retraced their route, passing through a glade where the light hung in brilliant icicles and thousands of green silkworms hung from the tree branches.

“Is this what they make silk shirts out of?” Newt said. “How do they even stay together? It’d be like trying to sew with spider’s thread.”

The day was bright and warm, the air shot with dazzling light. A deep-seated fear picked along the edges of their thoughts. They were frightened, but that emotion rested with easy familiarity in their chests by now.

They located yesterday’s footsteps in the grass and followed them into the spruces and found Ephraim on the ground surrounded by spiky smears of blood.

“Eef, what…?” Max said, unable to understand what he was seeing.

When the carnival came to Charlottetown last year, Max and Ephraim had gone. Max’s father had driven them and bought ride tickets for both boys—a nicety Ephraim’s mother accepted with stoic gratefulness. They rode the Zipper and had their spines delightfully rearranged on the Comet, an ancient wooden roller coaster operated by a carnie with a spiderweb tattooed on his forehead—a tiny black spider descended to the tip of his nose on a strand so blue, so pale, you might mistake it for a vein. After gorging on waffle cones and funnel cake, they’d come across a freak show operating out of a small blue-and-white-striped tent at the back of the fairground. Three tickets apiece granted them entry to a cramped, dark space smelling of horse manure and another scent beyond naming. The freaks took the stage to the slightly awed, mainly disgusted ooh s of the hick crowd.

Freaks , Max remembered thinking. But why would they let themselves be called that? They weren’t that freakish looking. Tattooed and pierced, sure, but nothing that’d raise your eyebrow if you passed them on the street. But what the performers did to their bodies was truly freakish. One guy guided a power drill with a six-inch bit deep into his septum, so deep the tip must’ve tickled the brainstem, then skewered a metal hook—a meat hook, same as plucked hens hung in the butcher’s window—through the hole, drawing the hook out through his mouth. Another guy chewed lightbulbs and stuck long steel needles through his arms, skewering himself like a bug on a pin.

Max was horrified—which, he assumed, was the sought-for reaction. Ephraim, however, was mesmerized. Max had seen that look before; Ephraim was the daredevil, after all. The boy who’d jumped his bike off the seawall, mistiming it badly and fracturing his leg. Max had sat with him in the ER afterward; Ephraim’s leg hung at a crazy cockeyed angle—it hurt Max’s eyes to look at it. Ephraim, however, was fascinated. Check it out, Max , he kept saying, a weird smile on his face. Check it… owwwt . As soon as the cast came off, Ephraim was back at the seawall for another try. His mom must’ve had a constant conniption fit, but Eef had always been that way.

Max figured the crazy stunts must’ve bled away Eef’s rage—the theory of displacement, like he’d seen demonstrated in science class. Problem was, God gave you one body. What you did with it was your own business, but the truth as Max saw it was this: You throw your body at the world. The world hits back. The world wins. So you had to take great care of what God gave you. Eef had never gotten that message.

When they rounded into the sunlit clearing, Max initially thought Ephraim had been murdered.

Somebody or something had found him here all alone and set upon him in a fury. But then he saw the wounds—hacks and gouges, not stabs—and the Swiss Army knife still clutched in Ephraim’s hands. He thought: How could anyone do this to himself? But he knew Ephraim very well. He knew him better than anyone else on earth, maybe. So he knew.

The two boys hunched beside their troop-mate. Newton touched Ephraim’s chest, which rose and fell weakly. There were large, clumsy, gashing wounds in Ephraim’s hand and leg. Blood was gummed in a five-inch half-moon hacked into his side. The cut was jittery but progressively deeper, as if the person who’d done it had grown bolder after the blood started to flow. Worst of all was the long twisting slash on his face: it began near his temple where the bone sunk into a shallow divot and hacked straight down around his orbital bone, cleaving so deep through the skin of his cheek that the knife tip must have poked through into his mouth, then out again, tracing the line of his jaw before petering out in the middle of his chin. The trajectory alone was a brutal and terrifying thing to look at. A mark of madness.

Newton was breathing hard, set to hyperventilate. “Who did this?”

“He did it,” Max said, near breathless. “Eef did. To himself.”

“…Why?”

Ephraim’s eyelids fluttered. He coughed weakly and said: “They’re inside me. Or… maybe it’s just one. But it’s there . Sneeeeaky …”

Max gave Newton a helpless look. “There’s nothing inside you, Eef.”

“Wrong.” Eef’s breath stunk like sun-spoiled liver. “I’ve seen it. It’s…” He licked his lips. Horrifyingly, Max could see the root of his tongue moving through the slit in his cheek. “It’s smart. It lets me see just enough, even touch it, before it slips away. But if I make enough holes, guess what? Nowhere for it to hide.”

The mad certainty in his voice iced the sweat up Max’s spine. His eyes fell upon the walkie-talkie—its plastic casing was slicked with blood. He looked back at Ephraim, who’d followed the movement of his eyes and now turned away, refusing to meet Max’s gaze. His eyes swarmed with an emotion Max couldn’t intuit: a mixture of grief and shame and something else—something much darker.