The Troop (19 page)

He took a simple planarian worm and unlocked its genetic code. In doing so he allowed it to modify its basic anatomic and gastric substructure in ways heretofore thought impossible for
any
life-form. He enabled the hydatid worm to adapt to its environment on the fly. His
stated
aim was to rob the worm of its natural defenses in the interests of quarantining it within its host . . . what he accomplished was the exact opposite.

He opened a genetic Pandora’s box.
When his hydatid was confronted with a cliff, it grew wings. Confronted with an unbridgeable sea, it grew gills. Its adaptability enabled it to mutate in a dizzying variety of ways. Just like snowflakes, no two of Dr. Edgerton’s hydatids were exactly alike.
His worms broke down into two broad categories. In the interests of distinction let’s call them “devourer worms” and “conqueror worms.”
Some species of tapeworm will enter into a parasitic symbiosis with their hosts; they can live in the host for years, eating only enough to survive. But even unmutated hydatids do not behave this way: their genetic imperative is to populate and eventually overrun their hosts, overtaxing their immunodeficiency systems and essentially starving them to death.
This rarely happens; even the worst hydatid infestation can be flushed out with proper medication. But the video footage recovered from the Edgerton lab indicates that the modified hydatid is both extremely hardy and extremely aggressive: it spawns far faster, devours far more, and grows far larger.
As such, it is the equivalent of a Kamikaze pilot: its appetite quickens its own extinction cycle.
The mutated “devourer” hydatid does two things: eats and reproduces. After the infestation reaches critical mass it begins to consume the living tissues of its host—this behavior distinguishes it from the common hydatid, which is incapable of digesting anything beyond waste matter. A devourer will consume protein, fat, muscle tissue, even bone marrow and the vitreous jelly of a host’s eyes. This accounts for much of the “wasting” effect on its host: they come to look like longtime starvation victims in a matter of hours.
The devastation is intensified by the fact that every molecule of nourishment a devourer consumes serves a singular purpose: to make more of itself. A devourer eats and lays eggs. It is not uncommon for a devourer colony to reach a critical state after an incubation period of only a few hours.
It is simply impossible for a host to take in enough nourishment to satisfy a devourer colony—whatever the host eats produces more creatures seeking more nourishment . . .

24

KeNT Was
dreaming.

He was on the ocean with his father. night was coming on. The eerie smoothness of the water, not a wave or ripple, was what made Kent realize that he was dreaming.

Kent was thinking about a girl in his class. Anna uniak. Anna was pretty and trim and he was sure his father would approve. He often looked at Anna out of the corner of his eye—she sat one seat ahead and to the left of him at school. The light would fall through the classroom window and pick up the fine downy hairs on her cheeks. It looked like peach fuzz, Kent thought. He could eat Anna’s skin just like that—just like a peach . . .

The sky was strung with strange clouds. A dull crimson and hanging very low, bleeding into the setting sun. Kent thought he could see shapes in them—sinuous squirmings as if the clouds were coming apart in the face of the ocean wind, or giving birth to multiples, or something else he could put no name to.
His father wore his police uniform. His badge winked in the guttering embers of the day’s light. His father’s wrists, projecting from his sleeves, were wasted looking and his fingers too skeletal.

“It’ll be a long night,” he said. “And goddamn, I’m hungry.”

A flock of birds—not the ever-present gulls but jet-black, arroweyed ravens—flew overhead, shadowing their boat. Kent could hear their tortured cries and see their rotted beaks. Some kind of white, cindery dust was drifting down from beneath their wings. It fell through the air in little white ribbons, just like in a ticker-tape parade.

Fear stole into Kent’s heart. He wished he wasn’t so scared—his father had taught him that fear was a useless emotion.
Fear is just weakness exiting the body,
he’d said to Kent on many occasions.

But there was something wrong with the whole scene: the menacing shapes lurking within the clouds, the white things drifting down . . . and his father.
His father—

The police uniform hung off his body. He lurched toward Kent with his arms outstretched—stick arms that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a concentration camp prisoner—his fingers just clattering bone. His face was all cheekbones and bulging brow and parchmentthin skin stretched to the point of tearing.

“
A long night!”
this starved apparition screamed at him.
“A looong and hungry night! Yummy yum yum!”
His father reached for Kent, bony hands clawing round his shoulders, digging in, piercing the skin. Jeff Jenks leaned in and his skin now came apart: rifts appeared in the fabric of his face, fine lines like cracks in bone china, and then those rifts all met and began to wriggle and suddenly Kent was staring into a face made up of hundreds of white pulsating tubes.
“nobody loves me,” his worm-father sang sadly. Writhing alabaster worms dripped off his lips and into his mouth, thrashing contentedly on the Swiss-cheesed root of his tongue. “everybody hates me; I’m going to the garden to eat
you
.”
Kent toppled into the bottom of the boat with his father atop him. His father’s face fell apart in sections. The abominations detached and squirmed down his collar, pattering onto Kent’s upturned face like warm raindrops. They found his mouth and nose and ears and eyes, infiltrating them with greedy abandon.
“This is only fear entering the body,” his father said.

NeWTON Was
the one who suggested they make a list.

His own survival instincts told him this was the wisest plan. When the world was crumbling around your ears, your best bet was to set yourself a few simple tasks to focus your attention on. While you were working on those tasks, your mind had a chance to cope with the situation. If you could just get past the initial shock—the shock of death and of sudden isolation—then maybe a better plan would come to you later.

They stood down at the shore now: ephraim, max, Shelley, and newton.
“Three things,” newt said. “First, find some food. Second, medicine for Kent.”
“Why?” Shelley said. “He’s just going to end up like Tim.”
newton glanced up sharply.
Shut up, Shel
.
Shut up and go away. Walk into the ocean and just sink.
“We don’t know that. We don’t know that at all.”
Shelley only smiled—sadly, poisonously, impossible to tell—and wandered down to the shoreline.
That’s right,
newton thought.
Just keep walking, jerkoid.
“Third,” newton went on, “we make a raft or oars for the boat we already have.”
ephraim doubled over, clutching his knees, and vomited on the rocks. His body vibrated like a hard-struck tuning fork. He stayed that way for a while, breathing heavily, before straightening up and wiping his lips.
“I don’t know.” He stared at the other boys. “I don’t know what to do now.”
His gaze fell to his knuckles. He rubbed them with his fingers and spread blood down to his wrist. There was something obsessive about the way he did it.
newton said: “It’s okay—”
“It’s
not
okay,” said ephraim. “The Scoutmaster’s
dead.
He . . . oh my God, his belly split open and a bunch of worms fell out.
Worms.
How the hell did they
get
there?”
max said, “We have to stay away from the cabin. Do what newt said. Get some food. make a raft or something. Find a way back home.”
Shelley called from the beachhead: “You sure we’ll be able to get back home?”
He was crouched by the shore, stirring the water with a stick. He pushed the tip of it against the fat body of a sea slug. He exerted slow pressure until the slug’s body burst like a snot-filled bath bead.
The boys hadn’t seen what he’d done? Did it matter, anyway? Part of him—a growing part—wanted to shed the mask that shielded his under-face. This possibility put a warm lump in his belly.
“What are you talking about, Shel?” ephraim said.
He pointed across the water at the squat shapes on the horizon. “Those aren’t trawlers. They aren’t fishing boats. Those are
ships
—like, military stuff.”
“So?”
“So think about it, eef,” he said. “That guy who showed up the other night. What was that
thing
that came out of him? And then Scoutmaster, then Kent. Whatever it is, it’s spreading—right? That means it’s a disease. Something that hops from person to person.” He cocked his head at ephraim, who kept rubbing his knuckles against the coarse weave of his pants. “It gets inside of you somehow and starts . . . doing what it does, I guess.”
ephraim’s hands clenched into fists. Blood was streaked down his pants.
“What are you saying, Shel?”
“I’m saying maybe they won’t
let us
leave. even if we build a raft. They’ll keep us right here because we’re contagious. We’re
contaminated
.”
“Shut up,” max said. “That’s stupid bullshit. nobody’s going to keep a bunch of kids on an island, Shel. our folks wouldn’t let it happen. They’re
adults.
Adults don’t do stuff like that.”
As his words echoed into silence, max realized that he’d held the exact opposite viewpoint only minutes ago, inside the cabin. His mind wasn’t centered anymore—it spun on confused, worrisome tangents.
“Can you explain those ships?” ephraim asked max hopefully.
“They
could be
army ships. All I’m saying is they’re not going to stop us from going home.”
“Then why aren’t they coming to get us?” Shelley said.
max had no answer for that. newton said: “They could have a million reasons for staying away.
If
it’s something contagious, maybe they have a cure. Then they’ll be here quick as quick. But max is right— they’re adults. If they’re making us wait, I’m sure there’s a good reason. until then we have to make due. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it? We’re Scouts, aren’t we?”
“So what are we going to eat?” max said.
newton said: “There’s berries and fungi. We should be able to catch something, don’t you think? Scoutmaster showed us how to string a foot-trap, and there’s rope in the cabin.”
“Are you gonna get that rope?” Shelley asked.
“If I have to,” newton told him evenly.
ephraim said: “What about Kent? If he’s sick—”
“If? He
is
sick,” Shelley said.
“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to put your head through a tree,” ephraim said.
“Save your energy, eef,” Shelley said in a voice gone silky soft.
“Kent needs to throw it all up,” newton said. “That’s the best way to get what’s inside of him out. There are plants that can do that pretty safely. It’s in my field book, which is still in the cabin. So I’d better—”
A boat motor kicked up beyond the spit of headland that projected from the southern tip of the island. The boys could just barely make out a boat streaking toward them.
“Hey, check it out—that’s mr. Walmack’s cigarette boat,” ephraim said.
Calvin Walmack was one of the town’s few summer people. He showed up every June with a mahogany tan, bleached white teeth, and his shrill wife, Tippy. mr. Walmack owned a vintage cigarette boat that was moored down at the jetty. The Ferrari of boats, max’s father called it: pretty much just a huge motor strapped to strips of polished teak.
mr. Walmack’s boat hammered over the water, hitting the waves and skipping dangerously. It looked to be on the verge of hydroplaning. Two other boats were in pursuit: stockier and painted a dusty black. Gun turrets were mounted on their bows.
The cigarette boat skiffed off a big wave and came down with a
smack.
The engine cut out. A thin ribbon of smoke coiled up to smudge the sky. newton could see two men in the boat, but they were too far off for him to make out faces. They were waving their arms.
The pursuing vessels cut around the cigarette boat in a scissoring move. men moved swiftly about on deck. ephraim thought he saw the sun glinting down their arms—glinting off the weapons they were carrying.
The boats bobbed on the surf. The boys watched with their hands canopying their eyes. The black boats returned the way they had come. The cigarette boat remained afloat but looked empty.
When the black boats were well clear, a small explosion rocked mr. Walmack’s boat. A gout of flame shot up from the engine. A sound like a shotgun blast trailed across the sea.
“What the hell?” ephraim’s face settled into an expression between bafflement and fear. “What just happened right now?”
nobody had an answer—not for what happened to mr. Walmack or his boat, or for
anything
that’d happened since that strange man staggered out of the sea two nights ago.
nothing made sense anymore. everything existed beyond logic.
The cigarette boat sank and was gone in a matter of seconds.

25

befORe THeY
entered the woods, newton stepped inside the cabin. He needed his field book and the rope. His heart was beating like a tom-tom. Fat beads of sweat popped along his brow before he even walked through the shattered doorframe.

Don’t do this,
his mother’s voice chimed in his head.
Please. This is so very dangerous, Newt
.
newton’s mom had always been protective of her only son. elizabeth Thornton was crowned miss Prince edward Island the day after she’d fallen pregnant with newton. “Fallen pregnant” was a common phrase on the island: as if local women were constantly toppling off things—stools, ladders, cliffs—and getting knocked up on the way down. The man who’d done it was a “contest stylist”: a fey grifter who mentored unwitting contestants. For a fee, he’d teach them to Vaseline their teeth to a pearly shine or strap packing tape around their breasts to give the proper “uplift.” Such men trailed along the pageant circuit like gulls following in the wake of a crab trawler, picking up scraps.
This particular stylist put a bun in elizabeth’s oven the night before the Charlottetown Spud Fest. He was gone the next day, no different from the itinerant potato pickers who descended on the island like locusts in the fall only to blow back to the mainland on the first winter wind. newton never asked after his father. He and his mother made a tiny perfect circle, and he was happy within its circumference—and as for those skills a father might’ve taught, well, there was Scoutmaster Tim, who struck newt as a far better (surrogate) dad than a contest stylist could ever be.
Complications during the delivery led to severe scarring of her uterine walls. newton would be the only child elizabeth would ever have.
Some people around here have lots of kids,
she’d tell her son.
It’s like they’re trying to get it
juuuust
right—the perfect child. Well, I got that right off the bat! I guess this was God’s subtle way of telling me I didn’t have to try anymore. I can always find another man, but I’ll never be able to find another son.
oh hell, and
could
elizabeth find another man. All she’d have to do is step outside and whistle: they’d come running from all directions with flowers and heart-shaped boxes of chocolate clasped in their callused hands. elizabeth Thornton was a pure stunner. Another common phrase—“Island women are like Christmas trees: nobody wants them after the twenty-fifth”—didn’t apply to her: her face had taken on a luminous haunted quality as she’d aged. It only intensified her beauty. She had no shortage of suitors despite being saddled with a teenager—even one as oddball as newton.
But she resisted all advances and lived alone with her son in a small house on the edge of town. She was happy. Her son was happy. But elizabeth was a perpetual worrywart. much to newt’s chagrin, she wanted to drape him in bubble wrap before sending him out into the world. She didn’t even approve of him being in Scouts. But it was the only social outlet he had—the kids at school could be so cruel; the sons of lobstermen and potato farmers didn’t understand her sensitive boy. At least Scouts was better than newt spending his afternoons in the woods alone, cataloging ferns and tubers.
“You be careful,” she’d told newton at the boat launch before he’d left for Falstaff. She kissed his forehead and mussed up his hair. “Don’t eat any funny mushrooms or chase after things that might bite you.”
“mom,
please,
” newton had said, mortified.
Her voice was in his ear even now, ever present, as he made his way through the storm-splintered cabin.
Newt—oh Newt my baby boy, this is not a good idea.
What choice did he have? His books were in here. The rope, too. Without them they might starve. And Kent may die just like the Scoutmaster had.
For a fleeting instant, newton had a very un-newtlike fantasy: he pictured himself stepping into a throng of well-wishers, his fellow Scouts sitting gratefully in oliver mcCanty’s boat, which newt had fixed and piloted back to the mainland. next the mayor would pin a badge on newt’s chest in a ceremony at town hall, Scoutmaster Tim’s portrait in a gilt-edged frame, his mom waving from the crowd, max and ephraim safe and thankful—his
friends
now—newt demurring when the mayor called him a true hero, saying only: “It was all due to my Scouts training, sir.” This silly self-obsessed fantasy left him feeling a little embarrassed.
The cabin roof bowed in a rotted arc to touch the floor—or
nearly
so. There was still a portion where it failed to reach: a jagged lip where the fungal-encrusted shingles didn’t quite touch the floorboards. newton knew that on the other side of that lip—maybe only a foot away— lay Scoutmaster Tim’s body. And the last time he’d seen Tim, he’d been writhing with . . . newton didn’t want to think about it. But the first real threads of terror had now begun to squirm into his belly. An awful silence sat heavy within his chest—it was mirrored by the same awful silence on the other side of the roof where the Scoutmaster lay.
or was it entirely? newton was almost positive he could hear
something
.
Newton, oh my baby get out of there get out of there this instant!
He thought of Sherwood, his cousin. Tall, stout-shouldered Sher, all roped in farm-boy muscle. Which made him think about Alex markson, the boy he’d made up on Facebook—a fusion between Sherwood and himself?
What would Alex Markson do?
newton wondered. He turned it into an acronym:
WWAMD?
So  .  .  . WWAmD in this situation? Alex wouldn’t be afraid—no, Alex
would
be afraid, because Alex was most certainly a sane person with the correct instincts for self-preservation. But Alex would do whatever was needed. He’d do the right thing.
How could the worms still be alive if their host was dead? Shouldn’t be possible, right? newton stared at the lip between the shingles and the floor. A fleeting band of light traced along its edge . . .
Yes,
there
, he swore he saw movement. Tiny wavering shadows flirted through the light.
Then he heard the noises like cockroaches scuttling and shucking in a bowl of not-quite-solidified Jell-o. Saliva squirted into his mouth, bitter and tangy as the chlorophyll in a waxy leaf. He felt faint with fear. His stomach flooded with cold lead as his testicles drew up into his abdomen.
Get out of here right NOW!
It wasn’t his mother anymore—this was the lizard brain speaking, the cold voice of survival. He went jelly-legged: the bones felt as if they had been reduced to marrow soup. Pure fear invaded his mind, creating a carnival of terrifying images. Visions of clean-picked skulls and empty sockets, huge white worms barreling out of inflamed tunnels like hellish bullet trains, long, tubelike hands slipping from the shadows reaching for . . . for . . .
A shuddering groan escaped newton. He put his hand over his face and stumbled back. His ass hit the cabin wall and he yelped in surprise.
“newton?” max called out anxiously. “You okay?”
newton swallowed with difficulty. It was so good to hear max’s voice—to remember that the world was bigger than this cabin with its collapsing angles and alien sounds that made newton’s skin scream.
“I’m okay. Just stay outside. Be out in a sec.”
newton realized that he
could
just get the hell out—it was one of the perks of being a kid, wasn’t it? Kids could abandon anything at any time with no real repercussions.
except there were no adults around anymore. And he had work to do.
He edged down the wall into the bedroom. There, his books were on the far side. A sleeping bag lay five feet beyond his right foot. He hunkered down and crab-crawled toward it. He heard those distant popgun pops—
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
—and imagined those weightless ribbons surging through the air toward him. He crawled faster, a desperate moan swelling in his chest.
He reached the sleeping bag and pulled it over him. Just before he did, he saw the air above him shimmering with luminous squiggles. He lay under the bag, inhaling the scent of its owner: stale sweat and pine sap and illicitly smoked cigarettes, so it must’ve been eef’s.
newton rose with the bag tucked over his head.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
He oriented himself, swallowed his fear—a plum stone lodged in his throat—and shuffled toward the closet with the bag held up like a shield. The squirming was very loud now, even through the cloth of the bag; it sounded eager and agitated at once.
even though his heart was beating hard enough to shudder every bone in his body and adrenaline-rich sweat was dumping out of every pore, newton advanced patiently and cautiously. God, somehow the worms were still alive, still firing off their
pfft!
fusillade. newton figured they must be spores or eggs or something—a way for the worms to infect you from far away. on the peripheries of his vision, he could see the odd ribbon go floating past.
Don’t breathe them in don’t breathe in at all get out of here now now NOW NOW NOW
His toes hit the edge of the collapsed closet. The tip of Scoutmaster Tim’s index finger lay beside his right foot. He flung down the sleeping bag and backpedaled madly as it settled over the Scoutmaster’s body.
The
pfft!
s were muffled by the bag. The Scoutmaster’s arm jutted from beneath it. Frozen at an unnatural angle, fingers like craggly bits of driftwood washed up on the beach.
newton hustled over to his knapsack and made sure the nylon rope was still inside. His field book was a little water-fattened after the downpour, but still legible. He quickly checked to see if any of the ribbons had gotten on anything. no, he was clean. He stuffed the book in his knapsack, gave everything a final once-over, and hightailed it outside.