Nick Cutter - The Troop

SOME NIGHTS, Max Kirkwood would climb the bluffs on the outskirts of North Point and stare out over the water toward Falstaff Island.

This was after it had all happened. After the arrival of the hungry man; the madness of the island. After he’d stood at the prow of Oliver McCanty’s boat with the glowing red dot—a sniper’s laser sight—pinned to his chest.

After the military decontamination, they had transferred him to an isolated clinic. He was toxic, after all. Infected .

Or maybe not.

They had poked and prodded, drawn pints of blood, endoscoped him, X-rayed him, done MRIs and cranial maps, dosed him with every vaccination known to mankind.

After all that, they adjudged him to be clean.

It felt strange returning to North Point. Everything was the same, but everything was different. His Scouting friends were gone. Those who’d been his friends before now kept their distance. People treated him differently. Most of them pitied him. Some, though, felt that he must have done horrible things on the island to have survived. Others crossed to the opposite side of the street when he came walking down it.

At irregular intervals, a black van would show up at his house. Men in hazmat suits would get out. More tests. More needles. They collected his blood and fluids and solids in sterile pouches. It made Max laugh to think that some scientist in a white lab coat would be picking apart his shit with tweezers, frowning and tutting as he searched for clues—well, it almost made him laugh.

MAX HADbad dreams. Those were the only dreams he had anymore—most nights it was just blackness. He closed his eyes and bang! Black. Eight hours later, the black went away. He woke up. Those were the good nights.

On the bad nights, his dreams were still black. But the blackness was infested with sounds. Squirming. Always this squirmy-squirmy noise in the blackness. And when he woke up, Max would be drooling like a baby.

His mom kissed him good night on the forehead now. Used to be on the lips.

He tried to return to the life he’d known, but that simply didn’t exist anymore.

He wasn’t allowed to go to school. The parents of many students didn’t feel right having Max in the same airspace with their kids. Nothing against Max personally. He was a good kid. A survivor.

But the things Max had encountered on the island were survivors, too. The parents had read the newspapers. One of Dr. Edgerton’s videotaped experiments had leaked online. Everyone knew what those things could do—objectively they did, anyhow. Everyone had seen things, clinically, but those things hadn’t touched them. Not in any tangible way. So people knew in their brains but not inside their skin, and there was a difference.

Everybody thought they knew what had happened on that island. Everyone was an expert. But they didn’t really know. What they thought was bad. What really happened was a lot worse.

Max studied at home. The teachers sent assignments to him in paper envelopes. He had to send his answers back via e-mail, as the teachers expressed concern over actually handling the papers he’d touched.

One morning he found a poster tacked to his front door. It was supposed to look like a carnival poster—like, for the Freak Tent.

The Amazing Worm Boy , read the blood-dripping type underneath.

His mother made sweet-and-sour pork for dinner one night. The smell was so familiar to Max—that high stinking sweetness—that he started to scream. He didn’t stop until his father tossed the pan of pork outside in a snowbank. It took him a while, on account of the fact he limped real bad; the MPs had shattered his right kneecap after he and Kent’s dad stole Calvin Walmack’s cigarette boat.

Max kept to himself. No choice, really. He wandered the woods and down by the sea.

He thought about his friends: Kent and Eef and Newt, especially. He’d recall the strangest, most trivial things, like Cub Kar rally night. One year, his car had lost to Kent’s car in the finals—except everyone thought Kent’s dad helped him build the car. Its wheels were thin as pizza cutters. Eef’s mom had said it was cheating. Newt’s mom agreed. Things got pretty heated. Kent’s dad kicked over the canteen of McDonald’s orange drink and stormed out. Eef’s mom’s eyes had popped out and she’d said: And that man is our police chief .

Max missed them all so much.

It was weird. They’d all had other friends. But now, Max couldn’t think of any friends who’d mattered as much.

He’d give anything to have one more day with them. Even one of those piss-away ones they used to have in Scouts: roaming the woods on a fall day with the smoky smell of dead leaves crunching under their boots. Playing King of the Mountain and Would You Rather? while nerdy Newt collected samples for some dumb merit badge or another. Stealing away with Ephraim to stare at the stars and dream their crazy dreams. And they would all be just like they were before. Not skinny or hungry or trying to hurt one another.

There was nothing Max wouldn’t give to have that again. Just one more day.

And Shelley? Well, Shel wasn’t in these daydreams. If Shel popped up at all, it was in his nightmares.

Max had a shrink now—the same one Newton and Ephraim used to visit. When he’d told Dr. Harley about wishing for one more day with his old friends, he’d been advised against wishing for things that couldn’t happen. Harley called this negative projection. Max thought Harley was an idiot.

If there was one thing he wanted to tell his lost friends, it was that lots of adults didn’t have a goddamn clue. It was one of the sadder facts he’d had to come to grips with. Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody.

Of course, Harley wore a face mask during their sessions, same as a doctor would wear when he’s operating—same as Scoutmaster Tim had worn, probably.

Sometimes Max wanted to rip it off and cough into his stupid sucker-fish face. The Amazing Worm Boy strikes again!

ONE EVENING, Max borrowed his uncle’s boat and piloted it toward Falstaff Island.

His heart jogged faster as the island came into view, rising against the horizon like the hump of a breaching whale. It was charred black. Nothing but the odd burnt tree spiking up from the earth. The water had the sterile chlorine smell of a public pool. It was the most desolate place he’d ever seen. It echoed the desolation inside of him.

The emptiness…

The emptiness?

Max leaned both hands on the gunwale. A nameless hunger was building inside of him. It gnawed at his guts with teeth that called his name.

Thank you to my father, who read the rough manuscript and said: “Son, you may have something here. I don’t know what that something is, to be honest, but something.” To my agent, the kick-ass Kirby Kim, who wasn’t repelled enough by the subject matter to dismiss it out of hand. He may have even said something like: “We could actually have something here… possibly.” To my editor, Ed Schlesinger, who put the manuscript through the proverbial wood chipper, gathered the shreds, and helped me put them back together, then said: “Hell, we just may have something here.” To Scott Smith, who kindly read the manuscript and offered some fantastic suggestions, all since implemented.