Nick Cutter - The Troop

“That’s okay,” Ephraim said, pulling out his Zippo. “I’ve got my own.”

Ephraim picked up the jar and held it over his head. It hung there a moment. His face shuddered as if under the pressure of deep internal forces, then it went slack.

“Thank you, Shelley,” he said. “You’re the only one who gets it.”

Ephraim’s hand tipped downward to saturate his flesh with gasoline.

BY THEtime Newton and Max ran back to the cabin, Ephraim was on fire.

A towering cone of flame enveloped the body of a boy who suddenly looked small, shrunken, and trapped within it.

They bolted into the clearing only to check up by degrees: their feet lagging like cars rolling to an awkward stall. Their horror inspired inertness.

Ephraim was on fire .

A swiftly charring effigy. Their minds collectively yammered at them to do something but dear God, what could they do ? The idea of shouting at him to stop, drop, and roll seemed quaintly absurd.

The flames swept up from Ephraim’s shoulders in orange wings. He was glowing and ephemeral: he might lift off the ground like an ember swirling up from an open fire. His flame-robed arms oared in lopsided circles. The sound of his legs scissoring the air was like sheets of very fine silk being ripped apart. Horribly, Max could see that he was inhaling the fire: flames were crawling down into his lungs, igniting them.

Ephraim crumpled to the ground. His legs kept kicking as if he were trying to step over a low obstacle.

When they finally acted, it was too late—had it ever not been too late? Max dashed into the cabin, heedless of the men lying dead inside, grabbed a sleeping bag, ran back, and dropped it over Ephraim, where he lay curled in a thatch of crabgrass. Plumes of meaty smoke drifted around the bag’s edges. One of Ephraim’s feet jutted from under the bag. The soles of his boots had fused into a smooth black sheen that resembled a slick drag-racing tire. A single point of flame danced on the tip of his boot.

When Max pulled the sleeping bag back, it was obvious at first glance that Ephraim was dead. The heat had curled his body up like when you toss a cellophane packet into a fire: his thighs were tucked tight to his chest like a child in the fetal position. His kneecaps appeared to be heat-welded to his forehead. His clothes were either burned off or fused through grisly alchemical processes to his skin. He was charred all over like something left too long in the oven. His features were erased the same way a mannequin’s would be if someone had taken a blowtorch to its head.

“Oh, Jesus,” Newton said. “Oh, Eef, Eef…”

Merciless bands of iron clapped around Max’s chest. His breath came in shallow jaggedy bursts. The shock was such that he could only stare at the body, coring a hole into it with his eyes.

“Where the hell’s Shelley?” Max said.

Max’s left eyelid developed a weird tic: the muscles kept clenching and releasing; it looked like he was trying to wink but couldn’t quite get his face to cooperate. He felt the anger boiling out of him—which was how he figured it must always happen. Pressure turned fear into rage as surely as pressure turns coal into a diamond. Fear was an internal emotion: it got trapped inside of you. You had to let it out. For that you turned to rage, the ultimate external emotion.

All rage ever needed was something to focus on—was this how Eef had gone through life, fighting this rage that was a kissing cousin to pure madness?

Shelley rounded the cabin. Seeing him, Max’s chest hitched in sudden shock— hic!

Max thought Shelley looked as if someone had located a hidden zipper down his back, tugged it down, and skinned thirty-odd pounds of meat from his bones before zippering the sagging shell back up again. He couldn’t help but notice the blood on his hands.

“Hey, guys.” Shelley waved chummily. The tone of his voice was faintly mocking.

“You.” Max leveled a finger at Shelley. “Where were you?”

“No place special.”

Shelley’s gaze fell upon Ephraim. If he exhibited any emotion at all, it was dry revulsion: the look a passing motorist might give roadkill.

“Where the fuck …” Max said, his words coming out in great livid gasps, “…were you?”

Shelley shrugged with his hands in his pockets: a carefree, maddening gesture. Huge boils the size of cherry bombs throbbed on his neck where his adenoids should’ve been.

“Stay away from him,” Newt whispered to Max. “He’s sick with it.”

But Max’s rage was all-consuming. The reek of gasoline wafted off Shelley. He’d done something.

“What did you do, Shel?”

Max thought: What did any of them really know about Shelley? He was a lanky, furtive boy who kept to himself with an inner intensity of evasion and secrecy. The other boys tolerated him but nobody would call him a friend. They didn’t make sport of him—not because he wasn’t mockable, with his thick-lipped vacancy and stunned inability to comprehend the simplest jokes.

“Stay away from him,” Newt told Max, a little louder.

Max continued to advance. He’d never really been in a fight. Eef got into scraps all the time. He was good at it, too. He was fearless— had been fearless . Ah, Jesus. This felt like more than a fight to Max; the acid boiling through his veins told him so.

He reached for Shelley. He’d wrap his hands round his throat and squeeze until his windpipe collapsed. There were no adults to tell him no—besides, who says an adult wouldn’t act just the same?

One of Shelley’s hands released from his pocket. A quicksilver flash. Next, pain was sizzling along Max’s sternum just above his hipbones.

Both boys stared down. An inch of Shelley’s Buck knife was inserted into Max’s abdomen.

Max stared at it quizzically, his dizzied mind thinking: Now , that doesn’t belong there . The strangest thing in the world, being stabbed. Had he even been stabbed—or had Shelley simply held the knife out defensively and let Max impale himself on the blade?

He glanced at Shelley with a panicky grin that showed too many teeth. It was a grin that said: This was an accident, right? Things haven’t gotten this bad, have they? But Max saw the rancid emptiness in Shelley’s eyes and saw his own cheese-white reflection in Shelley’s dilated pupils and knew that yes, yes, things had gotten this bad.

Shelley’s arm flexed stealthily. Max pulled away but still a half inch of the blade divided the red sheets of muscle. Shelley’s expression was impassive, marginally curious. He could have been carving a roast or dissecting a pickled pig in science class.

A stick of wood whistled down and struck Shelley on the back of his skull. It landed with a solid whock! —the sound of a baseball struck with the sweet spot of a bat.

The knife slipped from Shelley’s hands. His knees buckled. His eyes rolled back so far in his skull that Max saw the quivering whites.

The wood slipped from Newton’s trembling hands.

“I had to,” he said. “He was gonna kill you, Max.”

SHELLEY STAGGEREDup. A goose egg swelled on the back of his head: it was so huge that it stretched the hairs on his scalp apart to reveal the vein-snaked skin. A crazed, curdled light shone in the pit of each iris. He took a step forward, swooned like a man on the deck of a storm-tossed ship before falling down on his ass. He laughed—a thin, warbling titter that tapered to a drone.