The Troop

S
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The Troop
Nick Cutter

______________________________________

BE PREPARED FOR THE MOST TERRIFYING THRILLER OF THE YEAR
It begins like a campfire story:
Five boys and a grownup went into the woods. . . . It ends in madness and murder.

Andworse.

Once a year, scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a three-day camping trip—a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story and a roaring bonfire. But when an unexpected intruder stumbles upon their campsite—shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry— Tim and the boys are exposed to something far more frightening than any tale of terror. The human carrier of a bioengineered nightmare. An inexplicable horror that spreads faster than fear. A harrowing struggle for survival that will pit the troop against the elements, the infected . . . and one another.

Part
Lord of the Flies
, part
28 Days Later
—and all-consuming—this tightly written, edge-of-your-seat thriller takes you deep into the heart of darkness and the edge of sanity.

MARKETING

National Advertising Campaign
National Online Advertising, Including Shelf Awareness and Goodreads National review outreach * Online and print publicity
Feature at Fall 2013 Regional Trade Shows
SimonandSchuster.com home page feature * Dedicated website: thetroopbook.com Prepublication buzz campaign, including Early Consumer Reads and Serial Excerpt Campaign
Library Marketing, Including ARC Mailings
ARC's for wide mailing to chains and indies * ARC giveaway on Goodreads.com Author appearance and ARC giveaway at the World Horror Convention Feature title and ARC giveaway at San Diego Comic-Con 2013 ___________________________________
NICKCUTTER
is a pseudonym for an acclaimed author of novels and short stories. He lives in

Toronto, Canada.
Fiction ∙ Gallery ∙ January 2014
978-1-4767-1771-5 ∙ $25.00 U.S./$28.99 Can. 352 pages

Publicity contact: Jennifer Robinson ∙ 212-698-2719
[email protected]
Nonmerch 9781476739601

THE

TROOP Nick c u TTER

THE

TROOP

GallERy BOOks

NEw yORk lONdON TORONTO sydNEy NEw dElHi

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Craig Davidson

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Designed by ruth lee-mui
manufactured in the united States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cutter, nick.

The troop / nick Cutter.—First Gallery Books trade paperback edition. pages cm
1. Boy Scouts—Fiction. 2. Suspense fiction. I. Title. PS3603.u883T76 2014
813'.6—dc23

2013011673
ISBn 978-1-4767-1771-5
ISBn 978-1-4767-1775-3 (ebook)

For my brother, Graham
“Adults are obsolete children.”
—Dr. SeuSS
“This head is for the beast. It’s a gift.”
—WIllIAm GolDInG,
Lord of the Flies

PaRT 1
THE

HuNGRy MaN

Headline from The Weird News Network, online edition, October 19:
THE HUNGRY MAN OF PRINCE COUNTY!

By Huntington Mulvaney

Fearsome news, dear readers, from one of our loneliest outposts—the tiny fishing community of Lower Montague, Prince Edward Island. A forlorn, foreboding spike of rock projecting into the Atlantic Ocean.

The perfect location for devilry, methinks? Thankfully for you, we have eyes and ears everywhere. We see all, we hear all.

Sadie Adkins, waitress at The Diplomat Diner in Lower Montague, had her late-model Chevrolet truck stolen from the restaurant’s lot last night by an unnaturally emaciated thief. Adkins placed a call to our toll-free tip line after her entreaties to local deputy dawgs were cruelly and maliciously rebuffed, deemed—and we quote— “ludicrous” and “insane.”

“I know who stole my damn truck,” Adkins told us. “Starvin’ Marvin.”
An unidentified male aged 38–44, with close-cropped hair and baggy clothing, entered the Diplomat at 9 p.m. According to Adkins, the man was in a severe state of malnourishment.
“Skinny! You wouldn’t believe,” Adkins told our intrepid truth-gatherers. “Never in my life have I seen a man so wasted away. But
hungry.
”
Adkins reports that the unidentified male consumed five Hungry Man Breakfast platters—each consisting of four eggs, three buttermilk pancakes, five rashers of bacon, sausage links and toast.
“He ate us out of eggs,” Adkins said. “Just kept shoveling it in and asking for more. His belly must have swelled up tight as a drum. He  .  .  . well, he  .  .  . when I came back

with his third platter, or maybe it was his fourth, I caught him eating the napkins. Ripping them out of the dispenser, chewing and swallowing them.”

The unidentified man paid his bill and left. Shortly thereafter Adkins went outside to find her truck stolen—yet another malicious indignity!

“I can’t say I was too surprised,” she said. “The man seemed desperate in every way a man can possibly be desperate.”

She fell silent again before adding one final grisly detail:
“I could hear something coming from inside him—I’m saying, under his skin. I know that sounds silly.”
The unidentified man remains at large. Who is he? Where did he come from? The people who
know
—and longtime readers know who we’ re talking about: the government, the secret service, the Templars, the Illuminati, the usual shady suspects—aren’ t forthcoming with info  .  .  . but we’ re beating the bushes and scouring secret files, investigating every legitimate tip that arrives at our tipline.
Something evil is afoot in sleepy Prince County. No man can be
that
hungry.

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1

EAT EAT
EAT EAT

The boat skipped over the waves, the drone of its motor trailing across the Gulf of Saint lawrence. The moon was a bone fishhook in the clear october sky.

The man was wet from the spray that kicked over the gunwale. The outline of his body was visible under his drenched clothes. He easily could have been mistaken for a scarecrow left carelessly unattended in a farmer’s field, stuffing torn out by scavenging animals.

He’d stolen the boat from a dock at north Point, at the farthest tip of Prince edward Island, reaching the dock in a truck he’d hotwired in a diner parking lot.

Christ, he was hungry. He’d eaten so much at that roadside diner that he’d ruptured his stomach lining—the contents of his guts were right now leaking through the split tissue, into the crevices between his organs. He wasn’t aware of that fact, though, and wouldn’t care much anyway in his current state. It’d felt so good to fill the empty space inside of him . . .

6 Nick cuTTER
but it was like dumping dirt down a bottomless hole: you could throw shovelful after shovelful, but it made not the slightest difference.

Fifty miles back, he’d stopped at the side of the road, having spotted a raccoon carcass in the ditch. Torn open, spine winking through its fur. It had taken great effort to not jam the transmission collar into park, go crawling into the ditch, and . . .

He hadn’t done that. He was still human, after all.
The hunger pangs would stop, he assured himself. His stomach could only hold so much—wasn’t that, like, a scientific fact? But this was unlike anything he’d ever known.
Images zipped through his head, slideshow style: his favorite foods lovingly presented, glistening and overplumped and too
perfect,
ripped from the glossy pages of
Bon Appétit
—a leering parody of food, freakishly sexual, hyperstylized, and lewd.
He saw cherries spilling from a wedge of flaky pie, each one nursed to a giddy plumpness, looking like a mess of avulsed bloodshot eyeballs dolloped with a towering cone of whipped cream . . .
Flash.
A porterhouse thick as a dictionary, shank bone winking from fatmarbled meat charred to crackly doneness, a pat of herbed butter melting overtop; the meat almost sighs as the knife hacks through it, cooked flesh parting with the deference of smoothly oiled doors . . .
Flash.
Flash.
Flash.
What
wouldn’t
he eat now? He
yearned
for that raccoon. If it were here now, he’d rip the hardened rags of sinew off its tattered fur; he’d crush its skull and sift through the splinters for its brain, which would be as delicious as the nut-meat of a walnut.
Why hadn’t he just eaten the fucking thing?
Would they come for him? He figured so. He was their failure—a human blooper reel—but also the keeper of their secret. And he was so, so
toxic.
At least, that’s what he overheard them say.
He didn’t wish to hurt anyone. The possibility that he may already have done so left him heartsick. What was it that edgerton had said?