The Troop (18 page)

From the sworn testimony of Nathan Erikson, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

Q: Let’s clarify for the record just what we’re talking about. You were working on a diet supplement?
A: It was to be a pill.That’s the grail, right? A pill you can pop before bed.A little white pill.That was the idea.

Q:And this pill would be made of . . . ?
A: Compressed dextrose. You know those candy hearts you get on Valentine’s Day? Same stuff. Basically it’s sugar pressed into a mold using pneumatic pressure.

Q:You mean a placebo?
A: Sugar pills are the classic test of the placebo effect—but no, these were fully loaded.

Q:Why a sugar pill then?
A:Any delivery system would work—why not go with something sweet? Fact is, the mutagenic strain of the hydatid worm developed by Dr. Edgerton was incredibly hardy.They could have been packed into a dextrose pill and shot into space. If a creature with a humanlike digestive system were to find those pills floating out in space a thousand years later and swallow them, those worms would hatch and thrive. Nothing beats a worm in terms of survivability.

Q: So these worms were packed into a candy pill—
A: The eggs were. Freeze-dried, like the Sea Monkeys kids used to buy in the back pages of old G.I. Joe comics.The dormant-state eggs would become larvae and later full-stage hydatids.

Q: And the expectation was that people would be desperate enough to consume these pills to lose weight? That was what Dr. Edgerton and his silent partner–slash–bankroller pharmacy concern expected?
A: People are
already
desperate enough. You’ve never heard of the tapeworm diet? You’ve got people eating tainted beef to
give themselves
worms. It’s not nearly as uncommon as you’d think—it’s illegal in North America, sure, but Mexican diet clinics are doing a brisk business.

Q:What made your method a better option?
A:A beef tapeworm is a great diet aid . . .
if
it stays in your gut. Problem is, tapeworms are wanderers.They go on walkabout inside your body.They’ll swim out of your intestines—or needle through your intestinal wall—and encyst in your liver or brain or eyes or spinal cord. An encysted worm in your brain shows up the same as a tumor on a CAT scan. It can do the same level of damage, too. But the modified hydatid we were working on would be corralled in the host’s intestines.You know those electric fences cattle ranchers use to keep their cows in their fields? Dr. Edgerton was working on reconstructing the worm’s basic DNA sequence so that it would die as soon as it perforated the intestinal wall. It was a matter of weakening its natural immunities, making it more susceptible to white blood cell attack.White blood plasma would eat through Dr. Edgerton’s worms like acid.Anyway, that was the idea.

Q:And when a person reaches his target weight?
A: An oral antibiotic flushes out the worm colony in a matter of days.The twopill solution, we’d bill it. One pill to give you worms, the other to flush them out.

Q:And in between?
A:You’d lose those troublesome pounds.

Q: But the worm you helped Dr. Edgerton develop didn’t act according to plan, did it?
A: I’d say that is somewhat of an understatement.

23

iN Time,
the wind died down. The storm blew out to the northern sea. Water dripped all around them; it seemed terribly loud, each drop producing a watery echo. The boys huddled, shivering and soaked, in the cellar—all except Kent, who sat in isolation under the tarp.

“We ought to check on the Scoutmaster,” newton said. ephraim nodded. “Kent, you stay here.”
Kent’s face was wan and ghoulish above the burlap. It looked like

the wooden face of Zoltar, that mechanical sideshow oracle at the Charlottetown Fair:
25 cents to know your future!
Things were stuck in his braces, too . . . insect parts? Yes. Thoraxes and legs and antennae bristled from his mouth-metal. He was gnawing on the moldy tarp. Working the frayed edge like an old man gumming a carrot. A faraway look in his eyes—he could have been contemplating a lovely sunset.

“I kinda like it down here, anyway.”
“You okay, K?” newton asked, repulsion lying heavy in his gorge. “Sure.” A death’s-head grin. “never better.”

A collective unease enveloped the boys—even Shelley. How long had it been? less than twelve hours. Half a day ago, Kent Jenks had been one of them. The biggest and strongest of them all. The boy everyone in north Point forecasted great things for. now here he was, curled in a cellar, insects gummed in his teeth, gnawing mindlessly on a tarp. reduced and squandered in some nasty, terrifying, unquantifiable way. Whatever was wrong with him, this sickness, it was
rampaging.
Barnstorming through his body, devouring him. newton sensed this: that Kent was being eaten from the inside out, his flesh loosening by degrees, the meat flensed from his bones as his body shrunk inside his skin until . . . until
what
? This sickness cared nothing for Kent—for the man he could’ve become, for the bright future that seemed so assured. It was coring him out, ruining him in unfixable ways.

They left him down there. ephraim shut the doors and jammed a stick between the handles so Kent couldn’t escape.
THe islaNd
was still in the passing of the storm.

As they’d heard from the cellar, the huge oak—one of only five or six truly big trees on Falstaff Island—had snapped, falling upon the cabin’s interlaced log walls. The spot where it had broken looked like the butt of a trick cigar: splinters of wood stuck out of the trunk at crazy angles, perfuming the air with sap.

They inhaled the peculiar scent of the earth after a storm while surveying the cabin. The roof was cleaved in half, sagging inward like a huge toothless mouth. The door hung off its shattered hinges. ephraim hauled it open. His gaze fell to scrutinize his fingernails. He shot a look at Shelley—who caught his eyes and held them evenly.

“Careful as we go inside,” ephraim said, sounding very much like Kent. “Cover your mouths like before.”
The roof had collapsed in a solid flap that resembled a wave set to break. The boys walked through a corridor of shadow created by the fallen roof and found Scoutmaster Tim in the splintered remains of the closet. The tree had snapped the two-by-fours and pancaked the closet’s plywood walls. The trunk had landed on his head and shoulders.
“Tim?” newton said in a small, disbelieving voice. “Are you . . .?” The final word—
okay?
—died on his lips. Scoutmaster Tim was definitely not okay.
The finality of the situation assaulted newton. It was in the way the tree trunk sat flush with the floor. It was in the crushed eggshell of the Scoutmaster’s skull, which was visible—barely but hideously visible— beneath the bark. It was in the jagged purple lines that raced all over his flesh: the pressure had bulged and ruptured his vesicles. His skin looked like some gruesome jigsaw puzzle. It was in the sweet smell that rose off his body and the darker undernote of death: a somehow
rusty
smell, newton thought, like the smell that came off a seized engine block at the dump. It was in the boot that had fallen off his foot—more like
ejected
off when the tree came crashing down, causing his legs to spike upward in one spastic motion, flinging his boot away. It was in the pale knob of his toe poking through the woolen sock. It was in the cricket that rested in the split V of his open shirt collar, which just then began to rub its legs together to produce a high humming song.
“He looks like the witch in
The Wizard of Oz,
” Shelley said. “The one the house landed on, not the one that melted.”
“Shut the fuck up, Shel,” ephraim said hoarsely.
newton’s heart was a wounded bird flapping inside his chest. He wanted to scream, but the sound was locked up under his lungs.
“What should we do?” he said. “Is he really . . .?”
He found it impossible to say.
Dead.
The word itself was somehow unapproachable. He knelt and touched Scoutmaster Tim’s hand. The flesh was cold and dank like a rock in a fast-running river.
“It’s okay, newt,” ephraim said. “It must have been fast, you know? I don’t think he even felt it.”
newton spoke with his head down. “You think so?”
max sincerely hoped it was so. He felt sick. His Scoutmaster—the adult he’d known longer than anyone besides his own parents—had died in a closet. The one person with the best ideas for getting them off this island was gone, and he’d left five dumb, piss-scared kids behind.
“Should we bury him?” ephraim said.
Before any of them had a chance to respond, Scoutmaster Tim’s stomach began to move.
At first it was barely visible; it seemed as if weak fingers were pawing at it from the inside. max watched, his mouth unhinged. It was sickeningly mesmerizing.
“What . . .” ephraim breathed, “. . .
is
that?”
A fragile white tube broke the surface of the skin an inch above the Scoutmaster’s navel. It pushed through insistently, twisting around as if tasting the air. It was followed quickly by another and another. Soon there were seven or eight: it looked like the legs of an albino spider struggling to escape its spider hole.
each tube was slightly pebbled—they seemed to be studded with something. max squinted closer. They were  .  .  . oh God, they were
mouths.
little mouths like the ones on a sucker fish.
The Scoutmaster’s stomach split soundlessly, like Saran Wrap, groin to rib cage. Hundreds of worms came boiling out, all much smaller versions of the single massive abomination that had come out of the other man—the stranger. Some were the thickness of butcher’s twine, but most were frail and wispy, as insubstantial as the clipped threads of a spiderweb. They twisted and roiled and spilled down the Scoutmaster’s papery flesh: his skin empty of blood and nutrients, just a soft white covering like dry fatback.
max noticed that the worms didn’t appear to be singular entities. rather they were twisted together—a pulpy white ball radiating dozens or hundreds. It was as if something had gathered them up and tied them all into a bulging knot, like that ball they saw yesterday in the rocks—a knot of fucking snakes. These spiky worm-balls tumbled over one another, squirming and shucking. A horrible low hissing noise emanated from the Scoutmaster’s chest cavity.
“no,” newt said, his head snapping side to side. “no no no no . . .”
The hissing noise stopped. Slowly, achingly, the worms stretched as a single unit—a cooperative hive-mind—toward the sound of newton’s voice.
“Jesus,” said ephraim.
Then the worms swung in his direction.
Some of them swelled menacingly, a small bead crowning at their tips. There came a series of dim, pop-gun percussions. Delicate strands wafted through the air, sunlight falling along their ghostly wavering contours.
ephraim stepped back. He swatted at the strands with a helpless look on his face. He stared at his knuckles, which were broken open and still weeping slug-trails of blood from his fight with Kent.
max knew ephraim so well that he could almost see the crazed thought forming in the other boy’s head.
They can get inside of me through there. These wounds are basically wide-open doors in my body . . .
Through an aperture in the cleaved roof, max spotted a slit of perfectly blue sky—that scintillating blue that comes on the heels of a bad storm—and below, a scrim of gray marking the mainland. His parents would be there. Why hadn’t they come yet? His folks, and newt’s and eef’s and Kent’s and Shelley’s, too? Fuck old man Watters—if he couldn’t get his ancient ass in gear, why wouldn’t their folks show up? Kent’s dad could use the police patrol boat—special dispensation, right? An emergency. But no, they’d left their kids alone on this killing floor of an island. Two men were dead already, and Kent was bad off.
Death warmed over,
as max’s mom would say. except for Kent, death might come as a relief. A shudder fled down max’s spine—the very thought of Kent, dead, his body invaded by these things . . .
“We need to go,” he said. “
Now.
”

“Devourer versus Conqueror Worms: The Dual naTure of The moDifieD hyDaTiD”

Excerpt from a paper given by Dr. Cynthia Preston, MD, Microbiology and Immunology, at the 27th International Papillomavirus Conference and Clinical Workshop at the University of Boston, Massachusetts.

The evidence found in Dr. Edgerton’s laboratory is breathtaking both in the groundbreaking nature of what he was able to accomplish and in the savage expediency of his methods.

Edgerton was viewed by his contemporaries as pathologically secretive. Conversations with him, according to the few who spent time in his presence, were narrowly focused on his work or the work of his rivals.

Edgerton was an only child. His parents passed away in an automobile accident while he was attending graduate school. By all outward signs he lived for his work.

His fellow researchers remember him as a hardliner known to play fast and loose with scientific ethics. One oft-reported incident— especially telling in light of the events at Falstaff Island—recounts an evening when Edgerton was discovered by campus police at his alma mater. He’d snuck into the lab using a stolen passkey and was discovered in the process of destroying the work of his closest rival, a senior by the name of Edward Trusskins. Trusskins had been working on a skin graft technique involving lab mice. Edgerton was caught red-handed, as they say, with a syringe of strychnine.

Despite this infraction and the chilling mind-set it signaled, he was soon pursuing his work at another institute. He was simply too talented. He also could be convincingly sincere when circumstances compelled it.

There are those who say the best scientists occupy that dangerous headspace teetering at the edge of madness. By this definition Dr. Edgerton was most certainly a world-class scientist.

Edgerton’s work with the hydatid worm rivaled what Dr. Jonas Salk did for immunology in the 1950s—not in terms of its immediate social benefit (all Edgerton
actually
created was the most adaptable and survivable parasite known to mankind), but in his successful genetic manipulation of this planet’s simplest life-form.