Nick Cutter - The Troop

Long, liquid noises: slllllrp… slllllrp… sllllrp…

“Flashlight,” Newton said. The word came out as a compressed nugget of sound.

Max flicked it on. Stark whiteness washed over the cavern.

Slllllrp… slllllrp… slllllrp…

The boys’ faces were eggshell-white: it was as if fear had blown the blood right out of their skin. Their necks and arms were rashed with gooseflesh. The clammy rock trapped the sweet stink, making the boys dizzy with it.

They were in a small antechamber. A hollow bubble in the rock.

“There,” Newton said, pointing.

The spark plugs sat in a shallow saltwater puddle in the middle of the chamber. Could it really be so simple? Max scanned the puddle for white wriggles. It was clear. He picked his way over, grabbed the spark plugs, and turned to Newton with a tentative, hopeful smile. The flashlight in his hands shone on the rock behind the other boy.

He caught a sly flinching movement to the left of Newton’s waist. The spark plugs slipped from his numbed hands.

Newton’s forehead creased as Max’s hand rose, one quivering finger pointing to the spot behind him. He wheeled suddenly, stumbling, and watched in horror as it emerged.

The thing that once went by the name of Shelley Longpre unfolded itself from a dark chalice in the rock. Crawling out like a spider, folding each of its long, pale limbs out, unpacking itself from its hiding spot with the showy grace of a contortionist.

“Yessssss…” it lisped, the hiss of an adder that crested and eddied.

“…sssSSSeeeeeYeeeessssssss…”

It was long in its extremities and bulbous at its middle. It was naked and translucent and webbed with huge blue veins that snaked over its body. Its arms and legs were nothing but bone wrapped in a thin sheath of skin. Trapped in the eye of terror, Max found himself thinking of the Christmas just passed. His folks had bought him a trombone. They’d wrapped it and put it under the tree. Of course Max knew what it was: a trombone wrapped in shiny paper looked practically the same as a trombone not wrapped in paper.

That was how its legs looked: like bones wrapped in skin-colored Christmas paper.

“EeeeeeYYYEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSS…”

Its voice was the lonely squeal of a hermit. It scrabbled toward them with a leer of hideous glee, hideous hunger, hideous need . Its left eye was completely white: something had sucked the pigment out of the eyeball the way a child sucks the red stripes off a peppermint candy. Its right eye was as shriveled as a dehydrated pea; white threads licked and lashed in the wide raw socket, making a whish sound, sort of like wind-swayed grain in a farmer’s field.

Max noticed clearly in its nakedness that its stomach was an obscenely pendulous appendage. The size of a beach ball, it swayed between its legs with a quivering expectant weight. Its rib cage jutted in monstrous fingers. Huge knobs of flesh seeped filth all over its shoulders; a belt of ulcerated boils encircled its hips. Max’s mind reeled—scant days and hours ago this thing had been a boy, not much different from him.

Sllllrppp… sllllrppp…

Its lips hung down like the lips of an old horse. Its teeth were gone; its gums hung in whitish rags from the roof of its mouth like the pith inside a pumpkin. It reached for Newton with extremely long fingers. It had nibbled its own skin off the tips. Its voice lost its sibilance as it rose to an insane gibber.

“YEEEEEEEE!”

Snapping out of his torpor, Newton managed to lash out with the spear. He struck the thing across its face; its skin tore apart in crepey rags. It mewled piteously and crab-walked around the edge of the chamber, its gut dragging along the rocks. The skin mooring its belly to its abdomen stretched and tore in thin fissures. Max was horrified at the possibility that it would burst apart. What in God’s name would spill out?

“Go!” Newton yelled at Max.

Max pressed his back to the wall and swung round. The Shelley-thing’s tongue darted out of its mouth: a gnarled root. Max wondered if it was trying to taste his scent the way snakes do.

It scuttled toward Max with horrid speed and ferocity. He caught a glance of its back. Something was twined around its spine, like an electrical cord.

One of its bony claws manacled round his ankle, and Max’s bladder let go. Warm wetness drained down his leg. The Shelley-thing seemed to sense that, too—it stared up with those alabaster eyes, keening and snuffling at Max’s calves. Max screamed and kicked it off. The flashlight slipped from his hands and hit the ground, spinning in lazy circles.

Max caught hold of Newton’s arm and dragged him back toward the chamber’s mouth. His mind was yammering; soon the terror would weld it shut…

The flashlight spun to a stop. Its glow climbed Newton’s madly backpedaling legs—then the Shelley-thing darted out of the darkness, squealing with the high excitement of a pig who’d found a truffle, clamping onto Newton’s right leg.

“Let go!” he shrieked. “Get off me!”

It kept squealing and clawing up Newton’s body. Newton felt the warm weight of its gigantic belly pressing between his own thighs. Beneath the sucking sounds, he could hear squirming ones—coming from the wet black hole of its mouth.

“Oh Jesus Max it’s gonna—”

When the Shelley-thing’s stomach ruptured, it did so with a moist ripping tear. Newton’s thighs and abdomen were washed in a warm broth of desiccated organs and shrunken intestines and untold multitudes of writhing alabaster.

Newton screamed in terrified disgust as the Shelley-thing’s face relaxed into an expression of extreme contentedness.

Newton kicked free and skated his heels over the slippery rock. The Shelley-thing toppled face-forward onto the cavern floor. It landed with a sickening crunch that collapsed all the tortured bones of its face.

From the sworn testimony of Stonewall Brewer, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

Q: Admiral Brewer, I’d like to ask about your methods regarding Tim Riggs and the five boys who were on Falstaff Island when Tom Padgett arrived.

A: Fire away.

Q: I’d like to know why, during the entire course of the containment, you never tried to contact Mr. Riggs. Or, after his passing, why you didn’t make contact with the boys.

A: For what reason?

Q: To tell them what was happening. To let them know, if nothing else, that their parents were being forcefully detained as opposed to purposefully leaving them there.

A: These points were duly considered and dismissed. We felt— I felt—it was best to institute a “look but don’t touch” policy.

Q: You could have dropped a care package. Food and aid. Or notes written by their parents. That wouldn’t be “touching,” would it?

A: If you’ll check the record of our conversation here today, you’ll recall that I said: Nothing comes, nothing goes .

Q: But does that apply to information , Admiral? A virus cannot be borne on information.

A: But hysteria can. Information isn’t always power. Information can do harm just as easily as ignorance. Say we’d told those boys what they were up against, okay? They may have gone—pardon my French—batshit.

Q: Wouldn’t you concur, Admiral, that based on the evidence of the events as we now know them, that some of those boys went batshit anyway?

A: Hindsight being twenty-twenty and all, yes, I surely can. Listen, tribunals like this get held because of men like me.