The Troop (11 page)

13

max saW
it first. A white nubbin protruding where Scoutmaster Tim had made the incision.

It looked silly. like a balloon, maybe: one of those long, skinny ones that the clowns made balloon animals with at the Cavendish County fair. max had gotten one last year—a giraffe. The clown who’d made it had approached max near the Shetland pony pen. Short and dumpy, in slappy red shoes with the toes all squashed like they’d been stamped on by an elephant. The greasepaint on the clown’s face had been badly applied over his stubbled cheeks; the red circles around his eyes were melting down his face in heat, making him look like a sick beagle. His clown suit was dingy, with yellow patches under the armpits. When he smiled, max saw brown grime slotted between his teeth. When he blew up the balloon, max got a good whiff of him: rank sweat and something odder, scarier—a hint of shaved iron. The clown gave the balloon cruel twists with his nublike fingers; the balloon squealed as if in pain. The giraffe was all neck: a bulb of a head, thumblike legs. max pictured the poor thing dragging its neck through the dirt across the Serengeti  .  .  .

What now came out of the man’s stomach reminded max of that. A balloon. or as though the man’s belly had blown a funny little bubble. except this bubble was solid—max could tell that immediately—solid and weirdly muscular.
Whatever it was, it relaxed back inside the man. The balloon or

cord or tube—which was maybe the closest corollary: a thick shiny tube, like an inner tube but white instead of black, filled not with air but with some kind of thick pulsing fluid—the tube flattened back into the incision. Tim and max watched, transfixed in the perfectly still eye of horror. The tube curved around in the man’s stomach; it seemed to be made of different parts, different elements—it reminded max of the snake ball eef had found that afternoon. A few dozen snakes twisted into a ball, having sex.

Copulating,
as his health teacher, mrs. Fitzhue, would say, stringing the word out—
coppp-hugggh-late-ting.
The thing flexed, constricting; the man’s spine curled up as if parts of the thing were twined all through him—when the tube constricted, his body did, too. The idea that this
tube
could be spread out into every part of the man was horrifying.
“Scoutmaster Tim . . .” max’s words came out in a papery whisper, his mind fusing shut in baffled horror. “What . . .?”
Tim didn’t answer. The only sound was the creak of the floorboards beneath the man. A few of the cauterized veins split open; dark arterial blood wept down the man’s pale skin.
The tube swelled monstrously, pushing itself out of the rubbery slit in a sudden surge. It emerged incredibly fast, its whiteness stretching to a milky translucence. Tim and max shielded their faces instinctively, horrified it would explode, splattering them with the contents of its alien body—what could possibly be
inside
such a thing? Its guts were visible through that sheer web: crazed threshings and phantom pulsations—max felt as if he were staring through a lard-streaked window into . . . God, into
what
? His fear was whetted to such a fine edge that he could actually feel it now: a disembodied ball of baby fingers inside his stomach, tickling him from the inside. That’s what mortal terror felt like, he realized. Tiny fingers tickling you from the inside.
The tube deflated back inside the man’s stomach for an instant, inflated even more so, and deflated again: its movement echoed a huge lung inhaling and exhaling. only a few seconds had ticked off the clock, but max felt as if a minor eternity had passed. everything moved in slow motion . . .
Then, with a brutal whiplash, the world sped up.
The tube propelled itself out of the man’s side in a series of fierce pulsations, or what max’s science teacher, mr. lowery, would have called
peristaltic flexes.
It came with a sly squishing noise, like very wet clay squeezed in a tightened fist.
The balloon or tube or whatever it was became something else. It twisted and split and became a thick white loop: it looked a little like the u-magnets max used to push around iron filings in mr. lowery’s class.
Could it be a hernia? max’s uncle Frank had one of those. He’d taken off his truss at a family picnic and showed it to him. It had looked like a fist pushing against the flatness of his stomach.
I tried to pick up two sacks of cement, Maximilian,
uncle Frank had told him.
One sack too many
.
The pressure forced a little-bitty bit of my innards to squeeze right through the muscle.
uncle Frank had then made a rude farting noise.
Out she come, slick as goose poop! It’s peeking through like a clown nose, huh? See it there? Peek-a-boo, Maxxie, I see you!
uncle Frank had given the herniated intestine a little squeeze.
Honk, honk! Oh! I feel my lunch moving through . . . yup, there goes the corn bread.
uncle Frank had not been invited to the following year’s picnic.
But this wasn’t a hernia. logic told max so. A hernia was just what his mind had feverishly cobbled together to excuse what he was seeing. A hernia didn’t move. A hernia didn’t pulsate like that.
This thing . . .
This
thing
 . . .
The loop became a pale ribbed tube roughly seven inches long. Thicker than a garden hose. Tapered slightly at its tip. It seemed to be made of millimeter-thick rings stacked atop one another. each ring was gently rounded at its edge. Pearlescent beads squeezed from its surface, clinging to the tube like grains of sand to wet skin.
“Get back,” Tim breathed. “max, you get the hell
back
—”
The tube paused. max got the weirdest sense that it was
presenting
itself. The gaudiest belle at the debutante’s ball. Appendages began to unglue themselves from its trunk. It reminded max of the time he’d come upon a half-hatched bird struggling out of its egg, its wings pulling free of its body all stuck with webby strands of mucus . . . this looked much the same—or like a Swiss Army knife unfolding its many blades and attachments. These smaller appendages unkinked with the slow, showy grace of a contortionist; they unfurled tortuously in the cabin’s dim light, making gluey lip-smack noises. They looked like the fleshy leaves of tropical plants—
succulents,
those plants were called. max learned that in science class, too. The very tips of these appendages split in half, lolling open. max saw tiny fishbone teeth studding each mouth—it was sickeningly beautiful.
Peek-a-boo, Maxxie, I see you.
There is an emotion that operates on a register above sheer terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength—a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak.
Watching that lithe tube now hunt toward his Scoutmaster like a blind snake, max hit that register.
“Tim Tim TIM!”

as a
doctor, Tim had seen plenty of things in human stomachs. rubber bath plugs and toy cars and Baltic coins and wedding rings. most of these could be purged using simple regurgitative or saline laxative procedures. The human form held few surprises for him anymore.

But when that white tube threaded out of the incision and tiptip-tipped toward him as if it were ascending an imaginary staircase, Tim squealed: a shocked piglike sound. He couldn’t get a grip on his sudden fear: it slipped through the safety bars of his mind and threaded—
wormed
—into the shadowy pockets where nightmares grew.

His scalpel slashed wildly, severing the leading inch of the flickering white tube. The amputated nub fell between Tim’s feet. It writhed and leaked brown fluid. Its plantlike appendages studded with tiny mouths gawped open and shut.

Tim’s arms pinwheeled madly as he tipped backward, landing awkwardly on his ass. The remainder of the tube sucked itself back into the incision like a strand of spaghetti going into a greedy child’s mouth, whipping and snapping and spraying stinking brown gouts.

“Cover your mouth!”
Tim screamed.
“Don’t let any of it touch you!”

Fists battering the door so hard that dust sifted down from the rafters. The boy’s massing voices, dominated by Kent’s.
“Tim!
Max!
What’s going on? open the door!”
The stranger’s body rocked side to side. His feet slipped off the chesterfield and hit the floor with a brittle rattle.
The tube now shot straight up out of the wound, rising in a monstrous ripple. A foot. Two feet. Three feet of oily tube weaved out of the man—
the dead man,
Tim prayed,
the dead man who please God feels none of this
—like a headless albino cobra out of an Indian fakir’s basket. It threshed side to side like some obscene bullwhip, leaking brownish fluid. It stood quivering for a long instant, flicking side to side: it looked as if it was tasting the air, or hunting for smaller and weaker creatures within striking distance.
Which was when the stranger woke up.
His eyelids fluttered, then his eyes went wide—wider than ever should be possible. It was as the man had awoken from a terrible dream only to find that those terrors were dwarfed by those in the waking world. He loosed a volley of piercing screams—they almost sounded like the snarls of a terrified dog.
“Stay away, max!” Tim yelled. “Stay back!”
The stranger reached instinctively for the thing coming out of him—his hand died before reaching it, his fingers softening into a caress. His eyes were miserably bright and aware, bulging with pure shock and horror: the eyes of a little boy who’d come face-to-face with the nameless horror lurking under his bed.
“ug . . .” was the single syllable that came out of his mouth. A caveman’s grunt of disgust. “uhg . . . ug . . .”
“
Tim!
” Kent screamed. “open this fucking
door
right
now
!”
The tips of a boy’s head bobbed at the cabin’s lone high window, a pair of hands hooked on the sill—ephraim’s hands; they had to be eef’s—set to boost their owner up for a look inside.
Tim realized he was watching a man die.
He’d seen it before, of course—but max hadn’t. Here was a man neither of them knew the first thing about. And now, in a way that was somehow obscene, max would witness this man during the most private moment any human being would ever have: the moment of his death.
The man’s eyes rolled back. He exhaled. mercifully, his eyes closed.
The tube dropped onto the man’s chest like a length of rope. It lay in a loose coil for a moment before twitching and crawling under the man’s shirt. Tim imagined it working up the man’s neck and into his mouth. Thrashing its way down his throat and back into his stomach to link up with the rest of itself. eating its own tail—or its own head?
out of his peripheral vision, he saw max reaching for the soldering iron—
“Don’t!” Tim said. “Don’t you fucking dare, max.”
The tube wrapped around the man’s bird-thin neck, encircling it in a greasy ringlet. It elongated slightly, the many rings that constituted its body thinning with cruel, purposeful tension.
Jesus Christ, it’s constricting,
Tim’s mind yammered.
It’s choking him.
Tim tried to stand, but his legs were cramped with the sudden dump of lactic acid. He pulled himself forward. His hand slipped on the severed link of tube, which pulped under his palm like a rotten banana.
The man’s face had turned the blue of a sun-bleached parking ticket. Tim was shocked that this thing—
It’s a worm,
the undervoice said.
A fucking WORM that’s what the fuck it is and you better wrap your head around that buddy, oh pal-o-mine
—
had the strength to do what it was doing.
He dragged himself forward, scrabbling for the scalpel that had skittered under the chesterfield’s skirt. He hunted amid the dust bunnies and insect corpses while a thick, hopeless whimper built in his throat . . .
Kent’s fists pounded on the door but that sound was far away now—a dream-noise not attached to the waking world. The tube flexed. The man’s neck bent at a sudden unnatural angle. His body stiffened before going limp.
Oh no,
Tim thought. His next thought was:
Oh thank God.
The tube released from the man’s throat, retreating once again into the incision. Tim grabbed at it through the man’s shirt. The thought of touching it directly brought on a mind-numbing revulsion. He pictured it feeling like a lubed length of nautical rope burning through his fingers. But when his hand closed around it, the tube was warm and pulsating and horribly smooth. Its flagellate body was already going limp as if it had a pinhole leak. He slashed the scalpel through the man’s shirt and through the thing’s body. It was like cutting through ripe stinking cheese. It took no effort at all.
He saw inside the severed portion. There was no identifiable anatomy to the thing. no vertebrae or organs. It was full of loose brownish goo. Some massive carnivorous leech. The unsevered portion slid sluggishly back inside the wound. Its skin continued to weep those pearly pustules.
The man’s stomach deflated. Brown filth bubbled out of the wound. Half-digested bits of chesterfield foam bobbed on its surface.
Squinting, max thought he saw something deeper inside. Two objects? long and glinting, their angles man-made.
Tim and max stood breathing heavily in the dim light of the cabin. The hacked-off portion of the tube slid out of the vent in the man’s shirt, hitting the floor and wadding up like a huge tube sock. The brown goo had run over Tim’s fingers and down his knuckles like watery molasses. overcome by instinctive revulsion, Tim wiped his fingers on his pants—and when even that closeness was too much, he unbuttoned them, yanked them down and off, wiped his hands on the fabric, and hurled the pants into the corner. He stood shivering in his underwear. His thighs were almost unbearably thin: knobbed sticks on a forest floor.
“Jesus,” he said softly, then gave max a sharp look. “Did you swallow any of that stuff? Get any in your mouth or eyes?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“no,” max said. “I didn’t get anything in me.”
“You kept the gauze over your mouth the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“okay . . . okay, good.”
Tim staggered to the table and drank scotch right out of the bottle.
“If you drink whiskey, you’ll never get worms, max.”
Kent pounded on the door unrelentingly. “Tim!
Tiiiiim!
”
The Scoutmaster stumbled to the sink and washed his hands. He did this for some time; the hard island water made it difficult to get a good lather going. His legs trembled like a newborn foal’s. When he was finished, his hands were a raw, nail-scraped red. Did it matter anymore? He shuffled into the bedroom, not speaking to max, coming out with pants on.
He kicked the chair away from the door—he had to kick three times; he seemed to lack the energy to do it properly—and flung the door open to catch Kent red-faced and fuming, his hand raised in midknock.
“Get away from the fucking door, Kent.” Tim’s voice belonged to something recently dug from its grave. “Get your ass far, far away.”