Nick Cutter - The Troop

“I guess like that, yeah. So if we smell that—”

“We’ll know Shelley’s close. Okay.”

The sun slipped lower in its western altar. Twilight piled up along the horizon in ever-darkening layers. The boys hunched their shoulders into the brisk wind.

Newton laughed and said: “You know, my mom’s going to kill me when this is all over.”

Max loved that Newton still thought that way—that he still saw a time when this would all be over. When they would be home, safe.

“Why would she, Newt? For what?”

“For all this. Getting myself into it.”

“None of this is our fault, Newt. It’s just some awful thing that happened.”

“I know, I know. My mom’s just like that sometimes. She cares too much, y’know? Makes her crazy. Remember that flour baby project we did for home ec?”

Of course Max did. Their teacher had given them each a bag of flour to take care of as if it were a baby. Some students hadn’t taken it seriously. Eef tossed his flour baby off the school’s supply shed and hooted as it detonated across the hopscotch court. Kent duct-taped the entire bag to avoid ruptures. Their teacher frowned on this. You wouldn’t duct-tape an actual baby, would you? she’d asked Kent. Are you suuuure? Kent replied with a sly smile, earning sniggers from the rest of the class.

“I really tried to take good care of that flour,” Newton said. “I drew a face on the sack and everything. But the thing is, I’ve got sweaty hands. It’s a condition. Sweaty armpits and feet, too. Can’t help it. Every time I touched it, the sack got wet. It started to come apart. I told myself to stop fussing with it, but I couldn’t help it. I kept touching it just to know it was there and safe. It ripped a little and then a little more until it finally ripped right open. My flour baby… well, died . I guess I killed it.”

“It was just a stupid sack of flour, Newt.”

Newton made a face that said: You don’t get it, man .

“I’m just saying that sometimes the more you care for something, the more damage you do. Not on purpose, right? You end up hurting the things you love just because you’re trying so hard. That’s what Mom does with me sometimes. She wants me to be so safe that it ends up hurting me in a weird way. But I get it, y’know? It must be the hardest thing in the world, caring for someone. Trying to make sure that person doesn’t come to harm.”

THE SKYwas the color of a bone-deep bruise when Max caught the first traces of a high sweet stink.

“You smell that?” Max whispered.

Newton nodded. “Where’s it coming from?”

They held their noses up, zeroing in on the location where it seemed to emanate from: a cavern set into a shale-strewn hillside.

They retired out of earshot to formulate a plan.

Max said: “Should we yell down to him?”

“Maybe he’s sleeping. Why wake him up? We can just pluck them off him.”

“Right out of his pocket?”

“If that’s where he’s keeping them, I guess we’ll have to.”

“Okay, fine,” Max said, expelling a few rabbity breaths. “But what if he’s awake? What if he fights back?”

“Are you asking if we should hurt him?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. I mean, you already cracked him over the head, so…”

Newton bit his lip. “Let’s just hope he’s asleep. Rock, paper, scissors for who goes in first?”

Newton’s hand came down clenched in a fist. Max’s hand came down flat. Paper covered rock.

“Forget it,” Max said. “We go down side by side.”

Newton shook his head. “It looks too narrow and anyway, fair’s fair.”

THE CAVERNfloor dipped just past the cave mouth, plunging them into darkness. A sticky, coagulated darkness that coated their skin like oil. It was as if the rods and cones in their eyes had been shut off like flicking a light switch: click!

Newton was in the lead, clutching with both hands the crude spear Max had made. He figured this was the blackness that must exist at the bottom of the sea—a blackness prowled by sightless things whose skin was so pale and gelatinous you could see the inner workings of their bodies. Things with nightmare anatomies that would evoke cries of horror were they ever glimpsed in sunlight: blind eyes bulging atop skinny stalks, rubbery mouths big enough to swallow a Hyundai, rows of tiny needlelike teeth. Such creatures could only survive in the deeps: their bodies had no protection against the sun—their skin would roast and disintegrate to mush before they even reached the surface. But they had learned to adapt to their lack of sight. They jostled and bumped with the other creatures that lived beneath the light, occasionally lashing out with barbs or tentacles or teeth.

WWAMD? he thought. The answer came swiftly: Alex Markson would be scared shitless. Anyone else on earth ought to be scared shitless, too .

The boys’ collective breath came hot in their ears. Their boots sent little avalanches of shale skittering down the cavern slope. Water trickled over the rocks somewhere below—a sea-seeking tributary. The air was laden with the smell of sweet corruption.

Max’s hand was wrapped tightly around Newton’s flashlight. He had not switched it on yet. Newton would tell him when. Darkness pushed at his eyeballs. Steady fear pulsed behind them: a monstrous pressure massing behind his eyes. With darkness pressing from the front and fear pressing from behind, he was terrified his eyeballs would burst like grapes in a vise. This was the strongest evidence yet that something must be terribly the matter with Shelley: no sane human being would want to hide out down here.

They inched their way down the incline, hands outflung so they wouldn’t run face-first into the rock. The cavern walls were slick with some viscid substance: algae, maybe? Max pictured tiny albino crabs scuttling along the gluey stuff, their pincers tik-tik-tikk ing. He imagined millions of them forming a chittering umbrella above their heads. His cheek came into contact with a shelf of slimed rock: it felt like a giant raspy tongue. That he didn’t scream out in terror had to count as a minor miracle.

The darkness was disorienting. Nothing could moor itself to it: not even their breathing, which seemed to float out only to hit some unseen barrier and rebound back at them. It could make a person go mad simply because it consumed them: creeping into their mouths and into their ears and up their noses and behind their eyes, invading every part until they were one with it.

The boys moved deeper into the silent cavern… and then came the sounds.

Those horrible sounds, from God only knew what.

SHELLEY HEARDthem coming. His ears were very keen now. Oh yes. Very keen indeed.

He could not see the boys yet. The boys who’d come to collect their little prizes. The silly little boys who wanted to get back to their stupid homes, their stupid lives.

He couldn’t see them—but he would soon be able to feel them.

EAT EAT EAT

Oh yes. Shelley would eat. The fat one first, then the skinny one. Eat their eyes so they couldn’t see. Eat their feet next so they couldn’t run away.

It would be a paradise. A beautiful new world. Everyone would be so much happier down here. It would be an adjustment, of course. But they could be useful.

They could be daddies, too. Yes, they could all be daddies.

What a lovely idea.

THE SOUNDScaused the ventricles of Newton’s heart to seize up. He could actually feel them constricting with a painful squeeze.