The Troop (17 page)

Test duration: 15 hours 40 minutes Subject’s post-test weight: 44.3lbs Total weight loss: 60.7lbs

21

befORe THe
boys entered the cellar, a fight broke out.
ephraim ransacked the cabin cupboards for candles and a pack of
matches. He picked nimbly around the dead man, whose limbs had
stiffened at tragic angles and whose body now shimmered with fruit
flies.
newton dashed down to the fire pit and grabbed their sleeping
bags. He cast a fearful glance at the ocean. The water was in complete
turmoil. With the wind whipping about, newton’s feet didn’t feel entirely moored to the earth anymore.
He raced around the side of the cabin to meet the others. ephraim
had thrown the cellar doors open, the plywood trembling in the wind.
Snapped spiderwebs blew like the flimsiest lace over the yawning entryway. The fermented smell of the earth rose up. The sky had gone the
color of blood blister—only a weak sickle of light shone into the cellar.
The first few dusty wooden steps were visible, but the remainder of the
staircase was overtaken in pooling shadows.
ephraim pointed at Kent. “Sorry, man. You aren’t coming down
with us.”
Kent’s face somersaulted from shock to rage to speechless terror at
the prospect of being left alone outside.
“You can’t . . .” He held out his hands in a wordless plea. “You can’t
just—”
ephraim crossed his arms. “You did it to the Scoutmaster.” max saw the strange electricity running behind ephraim’s face:
cruel voltages quivered his skin.
“That was different,” Kent said feebly.
“I don’t think so. I think it was smart.” ephraim’s hands spanked
together in a polite golf-clap. “Very
smart.
”
“We can’t just leave him out here, eef.”
ephraim wheeled on newton. “You want to get sick next? Want to
be sneaking off in the middle of the night to eat everyone’s food?” “I’m sorry,” Kent whispered.
ephraim cupped a hand to his ear. “What’s that? Can’t hear you.” “I’m
sorry.
” Tears brimmed in the cups of Kent’s eyelids. He held his
trembling hands out in supplication. “Just let me come down with you.
Please.
Don’t leave me out here.”
“no can do,” ephraim said coldly.
“What are we going to do, eef?” max said, gesturing to the storm set
to make landfall. “Just leave him?”
“He can go back inside the cabin,” said eef. “It doesn’t matter n—” Which was when Kent tried to bull past ephraim into the cellar.
Yesterday that confrontation would have been a coin flip. now it was
pitifully one-sided.
ephraim pushed Kent—an instinctual move. His face wrenched
with quick revulsion as he shoved Kent aside as one might a squirming
sack of beetles. Kent went sprawling.
newton said: “eef, come on . . .”
ephraim’s lips curled back. “Stay out of this, you fat shit.” Kent crawled up and came again. For an instant, it looked as though
ephraim would step aside—this tormented expression came over him,
stuck between confrontation and flight—but his rage took over. He punched Kent in the belly. His fist sunk into Kent’s gut in some terrifying way: it was as if Kent’s body shaped itself around ephraim’s fist,
welcoming it. Kent’s breath came out in a gust.
“Stay down,” ephraim told him.
Instead Kent dragged himself up. He looked like some bloodless
creature risen from his grave. His face had the pallid sheen of a dengue
fever victim. The other boys ranged into a silent ring around ephraim
and Kent, the same ring that seems to form organically in school yards
whenever a fight’s brewing. rain pelted down to soak them through to
their skivvies.
ephraim struck out impulsively at Kent. If his mother had seen
him, she’d have noticed the quick, reckless anger in his eyes—so much
like his father.
eef’s fists zipped out and back rapidly, as if repelled by Kent’s yellowed flesh. In short order, he’d raised a goose-egg on Kent’s forehead
and bloodied his nose and smacked him squarely in the left eye—a
wound that would blacken nicely before long. Kent held his arms out,
fingers squeezing and opening convulsively. His skin tore like crepe
paper, stretched too tight over the flinty outcroppings of his face. Blood
leaked out of his wounds only to be rinsed away by the heavy rain. Kent kept trying to speak as ephraim’s fists peppered him. “I’m
sorry,” he said penitently, his voice unheard amid the peals of thunder.
“I’m sorry, sorry, sorry . . .”
ephraim’s fist sheared off Kent’s jaw. Blood leapt through the electrified air. ephraim’s knuckles had split open. It went on forever, and
then it stopped. ephraim’s eyes remained wild, his nostrils dilated. “You can stay out here with him,” he told newton. “Your choice.
But he’s
not
coming down.”
The hardest-hearted part of both boys realized that Kent had
earned this. If you call the tune, you also have to pay the piper when he
begs his due.
“We can’t just leave him, eef.”
ephraim rounded on newton. “We can, and we’re gonna. or I’m
gonna—and max, too. And Shelley, I guess.”
Shelley was already halfway down the cellar stairs. The other boys remained in the pelting rain, lightning spearing over the trees. ephraim
turned to max.
“Come on, man. let’s go.”
max fell in behind ephraim . . . then he checked up. Dark clouds
massed overhead, throwing them into a sudden night. lightning lit the
twitching contours of their faces.
“eef, man,” max said. “Can’t we at least find someplace safer for
him?”
The two boys stood face-to-face, shirts rain-stuck to their chests,
heartbeats shivering their skin. Something passed between them—a
subtle split, an inelegant falling away. maybe it was necessary, maybe
not, but it happened. Both boys felt it.
eef said: “Do you have any idea how stupid you are, max?” “Don’t lock the door,” max said, holding ephraim’s gaze. “We’re
coming back. Come on, Kent.”

THRee bOYs
skirted the cabin’s edge. The wind blew with such gale force that it elicited shrieks from everything it touched. The logs shrieked as it lashed at their unflexing angles; the trees shrieked as gusts threatened to uproot them from the ground; even the grass shrieked—a thin and razor-fine whistle—as the wind danced between every blade. rain needled down so hard that they felt as though their faces and arms would be sliced open: like walking through a storm of paper cuts.

Kent stumbled, arms outflung. max reached impulsively—newton’s hand manacled his wrist. newton shook his head and mouthed:
You can’t touch him.

Kent dragged himself out of the muddy stew, his boots slipping— they looked too big all of a sudden, his feet swimming in them—and followed newton to the woodpile. It was rung by stacked cinder blocks and edged by trees; the wind wasn’t quite so bad.

“Stay here!” newton had to holler to make himself heard.

Kent knelt, too tired to argue. The boys folded the woodpile tarp and settled it over Kent’s shivering shoulders. earwigs and millipedes and wood lice and deer ticks squirmed from the dead logs, startled by the storm. Crawling and twitching through the mud, they skittered up the tarp. max reached out to brush them away, revolted at the thought of touching them but even more revolted at the possibility they’d alight on Kent’s skin and hair. newt grabbed his hand again.

Kent didn’t seem to mind. His eyes darted, charting the course of those milling bugs.
newton said: “We’ll come get you soon!”
Kent’s head swiveled. A mechanical motion, like a toy abandoned in the rain. lightning creased the sky and seemed to penetrate his flesh, igniting his bones in skeletal relief. His lips split in a grin that sent gooseflesh up the nape of max’s neck.
An earwig squirmed round the cup of Kent’s ear, tracked across his face, and hung like a squirming fat raindrop from the boy’s lower lip.
“Kent,” max breathed, horror twining up his spine like a weed. “There’s a . . .”
Kent’s tongue snaked between his teeth, curled lovingly around the earwig, and drew it into his mouth. His eyes never left theirs.

22

WHeN ePHRaim
was eight, his mother took him to visit the mausoleum where his grandmother was kept. He remembered feeling slightly curious beforehand. Back then, ephraim still held a healthy curiosity about death.

He remembered the thin acrid smell that had attended their entrance into the granite rostrum. The sterilized smell of death. It wasn’t the flyblown battlefield reek with its sweetness that was kissing cousin to a truly good smell—barbecued pork, maybe—a sensual similarity that made it all the more sickening. This was sanitized and tolerable. An ammoniac mothball smell overlying subtle decay.

ephraim caught that same pungent smell as he’d crept down the cabin’s cellar steps. His heart made a giddy leap—what had died down here?

ephraim had watched as max and newton guided Kent behind the cabin, wind snapping their clothes against their frames like flags flapping on a pole. A thin needle of regret had lanced through his heart. He’d argued with max about abandoning Kent—and they
never
argued. rage had pounded at ephraim’s temples as his neck flushed with heat. no fists had been swung, but it’d been a fight all the same.

That bothered and confused him. ephraim possessed a keen sense of fairness. He’d inherited that from his father; the only phrase he could ever recall him saying was:
You pay what you owe.
And his dad was paying now, in prison. Kent had earned his ills, hadn’t he? He needed to pay what he owed.

But where did that leave him? In a cellar with Shelley longpre— the last alignment he’d ever seek.
He pulled the doors shut, latching them from the inside. The wind and rain roared and bashed the cabin above. The swaybacked steps groaned under his feet. long, straggly tendrils trailed lightly across ephraim’s face: they felt like the dangling, unnaturally long limbs of a daddy longlegs spider.
ephraim lit one of the candles he’d scavenged. It illuminated Shelley’s face—his skin seemed to radiate a light all its own, a greasy luminescence as if glowworms were stitched under it. Shadows, made misshapen and monstrous by the wavering candlelight, scurried along the cellar walls. The root systems of trees and plants dangled down from the roof.
ephraim walked the perimeter. empty, barren. A musty boat tarp was heaped in one corner. The heap seemed to expand and contract in the fitful light.
“Sit down, eef.”
Shelley sat cross-legged on the dirt. With his long limbs folded, knees and elbows kinked, he looked vaguely insectile, like a potato bug curled into a protective ball, only its gray exoskeleton showing . . . or one of those cockroaches that would scuttle up the drains during island storms—the ones that hissed when you squashed them.
“nah, I’m good.”
“You were right,” Shelley said. “About Kent. He deserved it. He brought it down on himself.”
Something unshackled in ephraim’s chest. He didn’t hate Kent—it was a question of fairness, was all.
You pay what you owe.
“max will understand,” Shelley said softly. “even newton. Before long they’ll see how right you were.”
There was something oddly narcotic about Shelley’s monotone drawl. ephraim felt sluggish and just a bit queasy—that happy-sick feeling he got in his belly after riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the montague Fair.
“Come,” Shelley patted the dirt.
“Sit.”
It seemed less a request, more a subtle directive. ephraim sat. Shelley’s body kicked off ambient warmth, moist and weirdly salty like the air wafting from the mouth of a volcanic sea cave. He slid one pale, whiplike arm over ephraim’s shoulder—an oily, frictionless, hairless appendage slipping across, smooth and dense like a heavy rubber hose. His fingers thrummed on ephraim’s bare flesh; ephraim wanted to brush them away, their tacky warmth making him mildly revolted, but that narcotic sluggishness prevented him from doing so. Shelley’s arm constricted just a little—he was stronger than he looked—pulling ephraim close.
“You’re in charge now, eef. Isn’t that just awesome? That’s how it should’ve been all along, isn’t it?”
“I don’t . . . don’t really care about that.”
Shelley smiled—a knowing expression. “Sure you don’t.”
“I don’t. Sincerely.” rage crept up ephraim’s throat, burning like bile. “Shut your fucking mouth, Shel.”
Shelley’s smile persisted. The edgeless grin of a moron. His teeth were tiny—ephraim had never noticed before. like niblet corn. Bands of yellow crust rimmed each tooth. Did Shelley ever brush his teeth? Did something like Shelley even think about stuff like that?
Some
thing
like Shelley?
ephraim thought.
Someone, I mean. Some
one
.
“relax, eef. I’m on your side.”
Where the hell were max and newt? ephraim wished like hell they were here now; anything was better than being cooped up
(
trapped?
)
in his dank cellar with Shelley. lightning flashed, igniting the slit where the cellar doors met in camera-flash incandescence. Thunder boomed with such force that it seemed to bulge the planks overhead, rattling ephraim’s heart in its fragile cage of bone.
“Jesus, eef . . .”
Shelley was staring at ephraim—at his hands.
“What?”
Shelley’s arm slid off ephraim’s shoulder. He leaned away, swallowing hard, his eyes riveted on ephraim’s hands. His torn, bloody hands.
“What the hell are you looking at, Shel?”
“nothing. It’s . . . no, it’s nothing.”
ephraim’s arm shot out, snatching Shelley’s collar. Shelley issued a mewling noise of disgust, heels digging into the dirt as he propelled himself away. He knocked the candle over, snuffing it.
“Your fingernails!” he said—a blubbery, spittle-flecked shriek. “I think I saw something moving under your fingernails, eef.”
ephraim’s hand fell away from Shelley’s collar, his fingers knitting into a ball under his trembling chin. The darkness closed in, strangling, suffocating, squeezing the air from his lungs. The skin under his fingernails—skin he’d never even considered as a discrete part of his body— buzzed at a hellish new frequency.
“Wh-what did you see?”
“Something,” was all Shelley would say. “. . .
something.
”
next fists were pounding on the cellar doors. “eef! open up, man!”
ephraim tried to stand. He couldn’t. The strength had fled his body. He curled into a ball, knees drawn tight to his stomach.
“Eef!”
Shelley hesitated for a long moment before mounting the cellar stairs. newt and max came down, windblown and dripping wet. ephraim’s heart swelled at the sight.
“You okay, man?” max said.
Yes,
ephraim thought, shivering with cold anger.
It’s nothing
.
Not a goddamn thing at all. Fuckin’ Shel
.
I’ll
kill
him.
“It was nothing, eef,” Shel said, grinning greasily in the dark. “I was wrong, probably.”
newt said, “Wrong about what?”
“nothing!” eef shouted—and in the next instant there came a ripping and rending crash as the big oak cracked almost directly above them. The splintering mash of wood as the tree crashed through the cabin roof.
BOOM!
The air inside the cellar seemed to condense and turn to cold lead in the boy’s lungs. The tree struck the floor with a terrible impact and bounced once. The cellar roof splintered—shafts of cold light streamed through the shattered slats. next it bulged down threateningly.
“oh God,” max said. “The Scoutmaster . . .”
uncertainty flickered on the boys’ faces. As the rain and wind hit a momentary lull, they could hear Kent outside at the cellar doors.
“Please—
please
!” he begged, the words coming out in hysterical yelps. He scratched on the doors like a dog pleading to come inside on a cold night.
ephraim caught max’s eye, holding it. no words were spoken. Finally ephraim bowed his head, blew at the hanging fringe of his hair, and tromped determinedly up the steps. The fear in his heart morphed into something else, at least temporarily—a breed of unflexing resolve. It seemed the best, perhaps only way to keep a lid on his terror.
He unlatched the door and threw it open. rain arrowed through the entryway. lightning lit the planes of Kent’s twitching, horrible face.
“Get in,” ephraim said. “But you have to sit away from us. I’m sorry.”
Kent nodded pathetically and dragged himself to the corner with the boat tarp, pulling it over him. max caught ephraim looking at Kent’s wounds, then at his own split knuckles. It wasn’t hard to guess what he was thinking.