The Troop (12 page)

14

Tim saT
at the fire and explained what he could. most of it failed to make sense to him at all.
“A
worm
?”
“Yeah, newton: a worm. not a night crawler or something you’d dig out of your mom’s garden. A tapeworm.”
Tim had experience with tapeworms. Any GP would. They were a common enough affliction. A person could pick them up anywhere.
As easy as petting your dog. Providing your dog had rolled in a pile of shit earlier that day—as dogs tend to do—you could get microscopic particles of said shit on your fingers without even knowing. A thousand eggs stuck between the whorls of your fingertips. And after petting ole Spot, let’s say you ate a handful of popcorn and licked the salt off your fingers. Bingo-bango-bongo. You’ve got worms.
At least once a month, he’d see a kid in the waiting room scratching his keister through the seat of his pants and say to himself:
worms.
one time a kid’s mother handed him an ice cream tub with one of her child’s chalky turds inside. “I thought you’d want a sample,” she’d told him solemnly. “For proof.”
Tim would prescribe an oral remedy that demolished the tapeworm colony over a few days. Tapeworms were, at most, a nuisance.
“He’s dead,” Tim said simply.
ephraim said: “From
worms
?”
“no, eef—from
a
worm.”
Kent said: “How the hell can a tapeworm kill someone? I had worms when I was eight. I crapped the little buggers out.”
“I know,” Tim said. “I gave your mother the medicine to do it.”
This one wasn’t the size of any regular worm, Tim thought. He’d heard that beef tapeworms—the ones you can get from eating tainted meat—could get pretty big. Twenty, thirty feet. He recalled a case study where a doctor pulled one out of a cattle rancher’s leg. It had balled up between the layers of muscle. A lump the size of a baseball. The doctor made a slit into the muscle and pulled it out of the rancher’s leg like teasing out a piece of thread. The worm was incredibly skinny, like a strand of angel hair pasta. It snapped. The rest of the worm died inside the muscle and started to rot. The rancher almost lost his leg. But even so, the longest worms weren’t really that
thick.
ephraim said: “What did it do to him?”
What could Tim tell them? The
truth
? The truth—which even he wanted to avoid—was that the tapeworm had done what tapeworms do: eaten everything the man was supposed to eat. like having a furnace turned up to full blast inside of you: everything you throw into it, it burns up. no fuel left for you. Tim thought about the blood-leeched whiteness of the man’s flesh and realized the worm may’ve consumed other things, too. His blood and enzymes. That would have shut down his kidneys and liver and other organs . . . some kind of vampire.
But he couldn’t say this. It would terrify the boys. And yet he’d nearly told them anyway—sharing the terror seemed like the only way to defuse it, even minimally. But they were just kids. even now, with the mainland and hospitals and
help
seeming so far away, Tim understood his obligation to these boys and to their parents. He must keep them safe. Scout’s honor.
“Are you okay?” newton asked. “You and max? Did anything . . . y’know,
touch
you?”
The boys stared at Tim, all probably wondering the same thing. now, in the aftermath, Tim wondered why he’d done it. not the operation itself, but involving max. He’d told himself that he needed help— no surgeon operates alone. But now he was less sure.
“Tim?” Kent said, his eyes holding a rook’s sheen. “Did  .  .  . anything . . .
touch
 . . . you?”
Fuck off, you pushy bastard,
the undervoice spat.
“I don’t think so,” Tim said. “It happened very fast.”
Kent turned to max. “You okay, man?”
max nodded, eyes not leaving the ground. When Tim saw this, a cold, hard stone lodged somewhere in his diaphragm.
You made a mistake, Tim,
HAl 9000 said.
Don’t go compounding it.
“What happened?” ephraim said. “Tell us.”
Tim nibbled his lip compulsively, as if his unconscious desire was to consume his own flesh. He caught himself, smiled queasily—his eyes shone in the firelight, hubbed by skin drawn tight over his sockets—and said: “I cut into the man’s stomach. The worm was in there. nesting. It came out through the incision. It crawled up the man’s chest and wrapped around his neck. It . . .” He couldn’t stop swallowing. “Killed him.”
“You cut him up?” Kent asked, incredulous.
“I told you, it happened so fast.” Tim’s mouth was a dry wick, his spit all dried up. “It was like something out of a dream.”
“Amazing,” said Kent. The sneering derision was unmistakable. He sounded very much like his policeman father.
“I was scared,” Tim said. It came out as a whisper. He observed the boy’s faces clustered round the fire—all wearing matching looks of diminished respect—and wished he could take those honest words back.
“Yeah, well, this is no time to be scared, Tim,” Kent said.
Tim wanted to slap the mouthy shit across the face, but his strength had utterly deserted him.
mosquitoes jigged around their heads.
Why aren’t they landing on me?
Tim wondered. His hands were clean, yet they still felt sticky with goo; he felt it in the creases of his fingers, in his nail beds—an antic, wriggling itch. He closed his eyes and envisioned that goo drooling out of the worm’s cleaved body. The firelight glowed against his eyelids, lighting up the capillaries that braided under his skin.
“So it’s dead?” newton said.
max nodded. “Scoutmaster Tim cut it in half.”
“It was effectively dead before that,” Tim said. “once the host is dead, the parasite dies, too.”
“Why would it do that?” newton asked. “Wrap around the man’s neck and kill him? That’s like a baby strangling its mom or something.”
Tim gave a helpless shrug. “Worms don’t have any brains to speak of. Worms shouldn’t grow to that size. But that’s what happened. We saw it. You’ve got to trust the evidence of your eyes.”
newton said: “Do we even know the guy’s name?”
His words fell like an anvil. Suddenly the man’s name seemed critical. The idea of a man dying as a stranger surrounded by other strangers struck the boys as staggeringly tragic.
“I want to go home,” Shelley said softly. “Take us
home,
Scoutmaster.
Please.
”
In the firelight, Shelley’s face molded into a beseeching expression—
mock-beseeching?
The expression rang hollow, inorganic and somehow clumsy, like an animal trying to replicate human endeavor: a bear riding a bicycle or a monkey playing a milk-carton ukulele. In Tim’s fevered mind, it seemed like the boy was purposefully stirring fear within the group by asking for something beyond Tim’s capacity to deliver.
“Tomorrow, Shelley. We can leave—”
“Why not tonight, Tim?” Shelley said, adopting Kent’s derisive tone “Why can’t you get us home tonight?”
Because I’m too fucking tired, you awful little shit. And tired and hungry as hell.
“Tomorrow. I promise.”
Shelley stared at Tim—there was something insectile about his gaze. The wind gusted, blowing the flames slantways, and in that instant, Tim watched Shelley’s face liquefy like hot wax, the skin running, bones shifting and grinding like tectonic plates to arrange themselves into something infinitely more horrifying.
Kent said: “I want to see it.”
Tim said: “It?”
“The worm, Tim. I want to see the worm.”
“no.”
Kent gave his Scoutmaster a sidelong look, eyeing him down his hawklike nose the way a sniper stares down a rifle’s sights.
Without another word, Kent stood and strode off toward the cabin. Tim was dismayed to find he lacked the voice to stop him.

EVIDENCE LOG, CASE 518C
PIECE B-13 (Personal Effects)
Lab journal of Dr. Clive Edgerton
Recovered from SITE A (220 Makepeace Road, Summerside,

Prince Edward Island) by Officer Brian Skelly, badge #908
PAGES 122–126:

Test subject 4. Beta series.
GUINEA PIG (Zoologix, Inc; breeding batch EE-76-2) Subject’s pre-test weight: 1350 grams

/Date: 07.19/
07:00 Introduced modified hydatid (Genetic Recombination M3-11) via injection. Between 100 and 250 post-embryonic-stage eggs delivered via liposome vehicle. Subject is alert and energetic. Eyes are clear. Evidencing no overt signs of distress or pain.
08:00 Subject unchanged.
09:00 Subject unchanged.
10:00 Subject unchanged.
10:13 Subject emits series of squeals.
10:47 Subject appears disoriented. Bumping into bars of its enclosure. Emitting distressed squeals at a significantly higher pitch and with increased frequency.
11:07 Subject is observed chewing bars of its enclosure.
11:09 Subject is observed consuming cedar shavings lining its enclosure.
11:15 Subject is observed consuming own fecal matter.
11:22 Sizable evacuation of larval-stage hydatid via excretory tract.
11:41 Subject emits squeals reaching a prolonged high pitch before ceasing. [post-test note: subject vocalizations cease at this point]
11:56 Subject is observed consuming portion of left front paw. Eyes glazed. Breathing rapid. Overall bodily torpor. Subject appears either unaware of its actions or beyond pain. Bleeding is minimal.
12:03 First gastrointestinal rupture observed. Occurs along transmedial cleft. Fissure observed to be 1/8in. Quantity of adolescent-stage hydatid worms observed exiting the subject’s body.
12:08 Subject exhibiting signs of late-stage morbidity. Noticeable stiffening of joints, labored breathing, milky film developing on eyes. Subject’s mouth opening and closing repeatedly. Appears to be chewing on the air.
12:16 Second gastrointestinal rupture observed. 1/2in below original fissure. Large quantity of adolescent-stage hydatid worms observed extruding from subject’s stomach cavity.
12:19 Subject/host deceased.
12:22 Remaining hydatids deceased. Test concludes.

Test duration: 5 hours 22 minutes Subject’s post-test weight: 490 grams Total weight loss: 860 grams

15

fifTeeN miNuTes
later, Scoutmaster Tim would be locked and shivering inside the cabin’s utility closet.

It would be Kent’s idea. He would suggest that the boys lock their Scoutmaster up for a rational reason—but ultimately he would do it simply because he
could.
There was something thrilling about leading the others in such an enormous act of rebellion.

KeNT seT
off from the fire at a determined clip. He figured Tim may try to stop him, but more and more it seemed he lacked the resolve. Tim was scared. He’d said so, practically blubbering his guts out around the fire.

Kent wasn’t scared though. Hell, no. It wasn’t any part of his character. They needed a proper leader right now, not a big ole ’fraidy-cat.
The other boys would follow. Kent was positive. All it required was for him to take that first step. Who the hell was Tim, anyway? In the view of Kent’s father, mr. Timothy riggs was a lonely middle-aged fairy. not a pedo—Jeff Jenks would cut his own balls off before he’d leave his kid in the woods with one of
those.
no, according to “Big” Jeff, Tim riggs was probably just a willowy, sorrowful queer who lived alone in his big house on the bluffs.
You’ve got every right to see what’s inside that cabin, son—every
legal
right!
Kent heard his father saying.
Don’t let this noodle-wristed flamer make that decision for you. Not now, with the stakes this high. Don’t you see what he’s done? The quack’s cut open a complete stranger—
gutted
him, field-dressed the poor bastard like a five-point buck; he’s admitted as much—and now he wants to cover up his act. A man is
dead,
son! It’s up to you to get this under control. What, Tim’s going to stop you?
“listen, Kent, it’s a total mess in there,” max said from behind. “I mean, a
dead
guy. no joke. Why the hell do you want to see it so bad?”
“I wanna see it, too,” came Shelley’s voice from someplace in the dark.
Kent laid his hands on max’s shoulders the same way his father did when one of his deputies got a case of the jitters.
“max,
I
need to see. okay? If I don’t see what the problem is, how can you expect me to deal with it?”
max’s brow furrowed. “Yeah, but—”
“But nothing. We have every right.”
“okay, but you better put gauze over your mouth and eyes.”
“Why?”
“Infection.”
Kent nodded somberly. “Yeah. Good thinking.”
Tim had nearly caught up. Kent heard his labored breathing like a sick Pekingese. “Kent Jenks! If you set one foot inside that—”
Kent shouldered his way through the door. The smell hit him like a ball-peen hammer. Sweetly fruity top notes, rancid decay lurking underneath.
The man lay on the chesterfield with his wrists and ankles bound. His shirt was slashed open, his white flesh glazed with sludge. He would look almost peaceful if not for those skinned-back lips setting his mouth in a horrible leer. He looked like a man holding a carnal secret.
A segment of the worm lay on the floor. To Kent, it looked like a much bigger version of the condom he and Charlie Swanson had once found under the football bleachers at montague High. Charlie had poked the condom with a stick. Sluggish late-summer flies took flight, their drone thick in Kent’s ears.
What is it?
he’d said. Charlie said:
You’ve never seen a ’domer? You pull it over your wick before you screw a chick so you don’t get her preggers.
Charlie had two older brothers. He
knew
things. Kent remembered feeling vaguely ashamed of his innocence. Also, a little sick.
But the sight of the man stunned him now. He was
dead
. maybe Kent had expected it to be like his grandmother’s funeral: Grandma lying restfully in a mahogany coffin in the beige parlor while a pianist played “nearer my God to Thee.” Serene with her eyes closed and her cheeks gently rouged.
This man was graceless in death. A ring of purple bruises ringing his neck. A brown shitlike mess leaking out of his side. one eye wide open, the other at half-mast like he was tipping a dirty wink. Fruit flies shimmering over his wound to drink the sweet filth. The man had died unloved and without dignity
.
Kent wished he could act as his father would have right now. He’d cordon off the area and call for a forensic appraisal. He’d grab a bullhorn and calmly say:
Disperse, people. Nothing to see here.
But that wasn’t true, was it? Jesus, there was
everything
to see here.
Fear stole into Kent’s heart like a safecracker. It embarrassed him— he’d pushed for this outcome, hadn’t he?—but right then he wanted to take it all back. He wished he were on the mainland, safe in his bed with his labrador retriever, Argo, sleeping soundly beside him. He wished for that with every atom of his body.
Tim plowed through the throng of boys, splashing rubbing alcohol on the fronts of their shirts.
“Pull them over your mouth and nose! Hey—do it!
Now!
”
The boys obeyed. Their gazes were fogged with shock above their pulled-up collars—all except Shelley’s, whose eyes held an excitable glittery quality.
Tim shoved Kent. Both hands planted in the boy’s chest. Kent went down so hard his ass bounced off the floor.
“I told you to goddamn well stay out of here, didn’t I, Kent?”
Tim hunched over the fallen boy. He grabbed his shoulder roughly and shook him. Kent’s body rag-dolled in his grip.
“This is the site of a
disease
! now you all run the risk of infection!”
Tim hurled the boy to the ground. Kent landed badly, barking his hip on the hard floor and drawing his knees into his chest.
Tim ran his hands through his hair, which stood up in smoke- and sweat-hardened spikes. His mouth hung open like a panting dog’s, the flesh drawn tight over his cheekbones.
You’re acting irrational, Tim,
HAl 9000 said coolly.
You’ve harmed a child now—and is it really the first time you’ve harmed a child tonight?
“Worms spread by
contact,
“ he said, ignoring that voice. “Do you understand? If you eat something full of worms or worm eggs, then you
get
worms. There’s nothing for you to
do,
Kent. There’s nothing to be fucking
fixed.
If your dad, the mighty Jeff Jenks, tried his dick-swinging act here, he’d end up just like that guy over there. okay?”
Tim pictured Jenks the senior: his blue uniform stretched over his gut, buttons taxed to their tensile limit, hairy-knuckled hands hooked through his belt loops as he surveyed the scene with a caustic eye.
Wellsy wellsy wellsy, Doc, what’s the rhubarb here?
“Don’t you talk about my dad like that,” Kent said weakly.
“Shut up!”
Tim slumped heavily at the kitchen table. “Just
shut
 . . .
up!
I mean it, Kent. If you pull any more shit, I will truss you up like a Christmas turkey. Do you know one goddamn
thing
about contagion— any of you? We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. Could be orally borne. Could be waterborne. Jesus, it could be airborne.”
“Then why cut him open?” Shelley said, covering his mouth so his words were muffled by his fingers. “Why drag max into it? or us?”
Tim looked from boy to boy to boy, seeing nothing he could recognize anymore: only disdain and suspicion and slowly kindling rage. That trust he’d worked so hard to build up, an undertaking of many years, had worn down to a brittle strand. The possibility that it could snap at any moment left him paralyzed with fear.
He pointed to the cleaved segment of worm on the floor. “That is like nothing in nature, boys. Do you understand me? These things should not
exist.
It’s nothing God ever made. So we have to be incredibly careful. We have to step very lightly.”
“We should burn down the cabin,” Shelley mumbled.
Tim shook his head. “That could just put the contagion into the air. What we are going to do is this: Go outside. Sit by the fire.” Tim worried the ragged edge off one fingernail with his incisors and swallowed it convulsively. “We’ll wait for the boat to come tomorrow. That’s all we
can
do.”
The fixed drone of a helicopter worked its way across the open water. It seemed to hover directly above them. Coin-bright wedges of light—the glow of a searchlight—shafted through apertures in the roof. The helicopter’s wings sent gusts of sea-scented air through gaps in the cabin’s log walls. The light dimmed abruptly as the helicopter continued out to sea.
“Will the boat even come, Scoutmaster Tim?” newton asked.
“of course. We’ll all go home. Your parents will be thrilled to see you. They’ll send a research team out. now come on. let’s . . . let’s . . . go on out . . . outsi—”
A wave of dizziness rocked the Scoutmaster. Gnatlike specks crowded his vision. His sinuses burnt with ozone: the same eye-watering sensation as if he’d jumped off the dock into the bay and salt water rocketed up his nose.
He licked his threadlike lips. “We have to . . .”
Kent hauled himself up. His eyes reflected a horrible awareness.
“You’re
sick,
“ he said in a trembling voice. “You’re infected. You’ve got the
worms.
”
“I don’t—” A childlike sick feeling hived in Tim’s stomach: as if he’d eaten too much cotton candy at the Abbotsford carnival and gone on the Tilt-A-Whirl. “It’s so important that we . . .”
“We have to quarantine him,” Kent said to the others. “He could make us all sick. like him.”
Kent advanced with a determined gait. Tim held his arms out. Jesus! A pair of fleshy javelins. He pushed the boy. His hands sunk harmlessly into the boy’s chest as Kent’s shoulders sagged to dampen the impact.
Tim stumbled away on legs that felt like wooden stilts screwed into his hips. “Please,” he said. He pushed again, kittenishly. Kent was smiling now. It was not a kind look.
This transgression had been building in Kent—it enfolded him with a cold sense of assurance. He was
right
to act against his elder. If you exerted your will and held fast to that course of action, things inevitably worked out. All the gifts that came to you—gifts befitting your inflexible strength of character—would be rightfully earned.
He pushed his Scoutmaster. Tim fell comically: arms outstretched and mouth open like a fish in its dying gasp. He hit the floor with a spine-jangling thud. His intestines jogged in the loosening vault of his gut. He did a very natural but terribly unfortunate thing.
Tim passed gas. A reedy trumpeting note that daggered through the shocked silence. A ripe reek wafted through the room.
“I’m sorry,” Tim said. “I don’t—”
Shelley snickered. “You
stink.
”
Kent pinned Tim with that rifle-sights look. “lock him in the closet.”
“no,” Tim said, the word escaping his mouth as a sob.
The boys were held in a dimple of tension. many possibilities tiptoed along the edge of that moment.
next they were upon him. Shelley went first. Kent followed. They surged down upon their Scoutmaster, leapt on him, screaming and grabbing. ephraim next. Then max, with a low, agonized moan. They were filled with a giddy exuberance. All of them felt it—even newton, who came last, regretfully, mumbling “no, no, no,” even as he fell into the fray, unable to fight the queasy momentum. They were carried away on a wave of thick, urgent, blind desire.
It happened so swiftly. The pressure that’d been building since last night, collecting in drips and drabs: in the
crunch
of the radio shattering in a squeal of feedback; in the black helicopter hovering high above them; in the snake ball squirming in the wet rocks; in the sounds emanating from the cabin as Tim and max operated on the man; and most of all in the horrifying decline of their Scoutmaster, a man they’d known nearly all their lives reduced to a human anatomy chart, a herky-jerky skeleton. It brewed within them, a throbbing tension in their chests that required release—somehow,
anyhow
—and now, like a dark cloud splitting with rain, it vented. The boys couldn’t fight it; they weren’t properly themselves. They were a mob, and the mob ruled.
It’s just a game,
a few of the boys thought. It was a game as long as they could ignore the look of sick terror in their Scoutmaster’s eyes. The helpless fear of an adult—which ultimately looked not much different than the helpless fear of an infant. It was a game as long as they could ignore the dead man on the chesterfield leaking brown muck.
A game, a game, a game . . .
They dragged Tim to the closet. He unleashed a series of shrill yipping shrieks. He was terrified of forfeiting control—of how
fast
it had happened. Terrified of that closet. But mostly he was terrified of whatever might very well be inside of him.
“Please, boys,” he whimpered. “Please no—I need
help
—”
They would not listen. The wave reached its mad crest. They pulled the Scoutmaster with ease. With his weight distributed among the five boys he weighed no more than a child. ephraim’s hands slipped under Tim’s shirt. He felt the abrupt cliff where the flesh fell off his lowest rib. His body was divoted and warped. ephraim’s hands fell upon Tim’s stomach . . . he reared back, shocked by the fretful lashings that met his fingers.
Shelley’s lips skinned back from his teeth. He looked like a hyena prowling among the corpses on a battlefield. Kent flung the closet door open. It was empty save a few jangling coat hangers. They barrel-rolled Tim inside. The Scoutmaster’s quivering fingers stuck out through the doorjamb. ephraim gently folded them into the darkness of the closet.
They set their weight against the door. Their breath came out in jagged gusts. Kent dashed into the bedroom, returning with a combination lock. He fastened it through the lock hasp and clipped it shut.
The boys came back to themselves with a jolt. max and ephraim passed nervous unsmiling looks. Their Scoutmaster’s whimpers carried under the door.
“When do we let him out?” newton said.
“When the boat gets here,” Kent said coldly. “no sooner.”
“What if it doesn’t show up?”
Kent said: “Shut up, newt.”
nobody bothered asking for the combination; they knew Kent wouldn’t tell them. The bottle of scotch stood uncapped on the table. A man’s drink.
General George Patton drank a shot of cheap scotch before battle,
Kent’s dad always said,
and a glass of good scotch after a victory.
What was this if not a victory? When the boat arrived tomorrow, his quick thinking would be hailed.
“Go on, Kent,” Shelley told him. “Have a drink.”
max said, “no—
don’t
—”
But Kent had already raised the bottle to his lips. It went down like molten iron. He sawed his arm across his mouth. His grimace became a broad grin.
“everything’s going to be okay, guys.”