The Troop (20 page)

News item from the montague (Pei)
Island Courier,
October 22:
MEN ARREsTEd AFTER bREACHING MIlITARY’s qUARANTINE zONE

Two men were placed under arrest following an incident that occurred several miles off the northern coast of North Point.

Reginald Longpre, 45, and Jeffrey Jenks, 43, both of Lower Montague County, were taken into custody by military police officers shortly after 10 a.m. this morning. Both were charged with Grand Larceny and direct contravention of a State of Emergency Order. The former charge carries a minimum sentence of five years under the Canadian Criminal Charter.

According to eyewitness accounts, Jenks—the town’s police chief—and Longpre, its county coroner, stole a boat belonging to Mr. Calvin Walmack. Mr. Jenks piloted the boat across the 12-mile stretch separating the mainland from Falstaff Island, which remains under quarantine due to the potential presence of an unknown biological threat.

Exact details remain undisclosed, but available evidence suggests their boat experienced mechanical difficulties that hindered their progress. The boat was chased down by a pair of military patrol boats and both men were taken into custody.

Due to the proximity to the island and the potential for biological transfection, the boat was scuttled using an incendiary device.

The arrestees are the fathers of Kent Jenks and Maximilian Kirkwood, members of Scout Troop 52—which also includes Shelley Longpre, Newton Thornton, and Ephraim Elliott, all 14 years of age. They were accompanied to Falstaff Island by their Scoutmaster, Tim Riggs, 42, North Point’s

resident MD, last Friday evening for a weekend field trip. They have been isolated on Falstaff Island since the quarantine zone was established.

Calls to the military attaché’s office went unreturned as of press time.

26

THeY seT
out just after noon. Three boys: max, ephraim, and newton.
max checked on Kent beforehand. Still huddled in the cellar under

the tarp—his body looked like it was vanishing into the cellar wall, oozing into the hard-packed dirt, as if the wall had grown a mouth and was consuming Kent the way a spider eats a fly: injecting corrosive poison, dissolving the guts, and sucking them out with a long, needlelike proboscis.

“We’ll be back soon.” max told him. He stood on the final step before the cellar floor, keeping his distance. “We’ll find something to make you better, okay?”

Kent said nothing, just watched with eyes hard and dry as pebbles.

Shelley was missing. They called his name a few times, halfheartedly. no response.
“Should we go anyways?” newton said.
“Why shouldn’t we?” said ephraim.
If the boys felt a vague uneasiness over Shelley’s whereabouts— more and more it seemed best to keep him in plain sight—his disappearance gave them an easy excuse to leave without him. What harm could it bring?
Maybe he really
did
walk into the sea,
newton thought, not unhopefully, then quickly chastised himself for it.
newton took the lead. max and ephraim didn’t question this. After seeing him emerge from the cabin sweaty and near delirious with fear, his knapsack slung triumphantly over his shoulder . . . it was tough not to measure him a little differently.
The afternoon was bright but cool. most of their clothing was inside the cabin, damp and unwearable. ephraim had a Windbreaker. newton only had one dry T-shirt.
They walked along the southern skirt of the island following the shore. Strands of kelp washed up on the rocks, looking like disembodied green hands clawing their way out of the sea. ephraim peeled a strand and looked questioningly at newton.
“Yeah, it’s edible, eef.”
ephraim nibbled an edge. “Holy crap, newt!”
“I said it was edible,” newton said. “I didn’t say it was any good.”
max peeled a strip off a flat rock. “Hey, it’s not bad,” he said, chewing. “Salty. like beef jerky from the sea.”
ephraim took another crackly bite and chewed morosely. “Whatever. I’m hungry enough to eat a bear’s asshole.”
Soon after saying this, ephraim lapsed into a moody silence. He kept rubbing his knuckles on his pants.
“You okay, man?” max said.
He put a hand on his shoulder. ephraim shivered as if a spider had crawled down his back. At first max thought it was because of what’d happened outside the cellar—that awful
snap
between them, something max had felt to his core. But that wasn’t it, was it? A cold species of relief washed over max, only to be replaced with dread. Was eef . . .? max gave newton a worried look as his hand slid off ephraim’s shoulder.
“Feeling real weird, man.” ephraim’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. “I’m not really feeling like myself.” “Yeah, none of us are,” max assured him.
“max is right, eef. With what happened to the Scoutmaster and now Kent  .  .  . we just got to hold it together a little while longer, is all.”
ephraim gave newton a bemused and slightly shaken look. “newton Thornton, professional pep-talker,” he said bleakly.
They climbed a hillside that crested to a flat rise studded with boulders and hardy tufted shrubs. The air was perfumed by the salt wind that gusted across the table rock. The ground was pockmarked with holes. each hole was dug down to a tight gooseneck bend that obscured its occupants from view.
“Prairie dogs?” max asked.
“Are we on a prairie?” said ephraim. “Where are the cowboys, Tex?”
“Shut up,” max said irritably. “Cowboys aren’t all on the prairies anyway.”
ephraim laughed and scratched his elbows. He’d scratched through his Windbreaker. max noticed blood dotting the torn nylon.
“not prairie dogs,” said newton. “
Birds.
I’ve read about them. Instead of making nests in trees, they burrow underground.”
max said: “Can we catch one?”
newton looked doubtful. “I’ve never seen a rope trap for birds—you need box traps for those, with chicken wire. I don’t think it’d be worth it. They’re pretty much just bones and feathers, right?”
max thought about those dead shearwaters on his kitchen table and said: “let’s not bother, okay?”
“Whatever we do eat out here, you can bet it’s going to be a bit weird,” newton said. “We ought to be prepared for that.” He smiled gamely. “Just think of it all like chicken or something.”
They crossed the plateau to a granite shelf overlooking the sea. The clean mineral smell of the rock hit their noses. Sunlight filled in the slack water between the waves in mellow gold. White osprey took flight from their cliff-side nests, arcing over the water.
ephraim kicked a stone over the edge. It clattered down the cliff and nearly crushed an osprey nest sitting on a jagged outcrop. ephraim pointed at the trio of brown-specked eggs in the nest and said:
“You want to climb down for those? I could go for a three-egg omelet.”
newton looked dubious. “There’s nowhere to tie the rope. If you slip, it’s a long way down.”
ephraim picked his tongue along his upper teeth, still considering it. “I’d have to share the eggs with your fat ass, newt—wouldn’t I? I do all the work and you horn in on the reward.”
“You can have them,” newton said stiffly. “I just don’t think it’s worth getting hurt over.”
With the prospect of eggs fading, they wandered down a switchback descent that emptied into a salt marsh to the east of the cliff. The ocean water leached into a mucky terrain of buckled trees and diseasedlooking hummocks. A rotten stench boiled up from the long grass, which was exactly the sort newton hated: the serrated-edge kind that raked your shins when you walked through it in shorts.
They trudged through, trying to avoid soakers. Their boots cracked through skeins of crusted bile-colored salt that looked like the scum topping a pot of boiled meat. late-season grasshoppers flung themselves off the grass and stuck to the boys’ clothes with their barbed legs. newton flinched every time one pinged off his hips.
His gaze kept drifting to those hummocks. They looked like halfsubmerged rodents—giant mole rats suckled on plutonium-enriched water that had somehow quadrupled their normal size. They dotted the marsh like hairy icebergs, the worst parts hidden underwater. newton pictured what might lurk below the surface: long, narrow faces and thin black lips studded with sharp rat-teeth that protruded at busted-glass angles . . . ringed pink tails sweeping through the filthy water waiting to wrap around an unsuspecting ankle.
They came upon a rotted tree stump. newton dug his field book out, riffled through the pages, and skimmed a passage. He grabbed a flap of bark hanging loosely from the stump and pried it back. It snapped with a puff of dust. The boys knelt and stared inside. Things wriggled in the loose wood pulp. They wriggled just like worms.
“Grubs,” newton anounced. He opened his book and read: “
Witchetty grubs are the large, white, wood-eating larvae of moths.
“
The grubs were a speckled white with a wrinkled exterior that resembled the skin of an apple that had sat in the fruit bowl too long. Their bodies were as big as a toddler’s finger and crimped like beads on a necklace. Their back ends tapered to a pooched orifice. They moved in frantic wriggling paroxysms: they resembled creatures in a perpetual state of being born.
“
The raw witchetty grub tastes like almonds,
“ newton read.
“When cooked, the skin becomes crisp like roast chicken, while the inside becomes light yellow like a fried egg.”
max blanched. “Jesus. You’re kidding, right?”
“Didn’t I say that whatever we ate, it’d be weird?”
“Yeah, but . . . you can’t eat a grub, man.” max replied. “You’d be depriving that young moth of its life goal of bashing into a lightbulb all night.”
newton plucked one out of the stump. It writhed in his palm like a section of intestinal tract trying to pass a stubborn lump of food.
max said: “I
dare
you. Double dog, man.”
newton popped it into his mouth. Pulped between newton’s molars, the grub made an audible
squelch.
Watery pus-colored fluid seeped between his teeth.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” ephraim said, awestruck.
“ooh,” newton gagged. “
Bitter.
It’s not almondy!” He dropkicked the book. It sailed across the marsh, pages fluttering like the wings of a crippled bird. “It’s not
almondy at all
!”
ephraim and max doubled over laughing. newton refused to spit it out—he seemed to hold the grub’s revolting taste against it. He chewed with dour discipline, clenching his fists as he swallowed.
“Wait a sec,” max said, nervousness replacing mirth. “Did you say it tasted like bitter almonds? Isn’t that like,
poison
?”
newton rolled his eyes. A bit of the grub was still stuck to his lip. It looked like a bleached shred of tomato skin. “no, that’s cyanide. This didn’t taste like almonds at all. It tasted like bitter . . .
shit.
A bitter nugget of shit.”
“How do you know what shit tastes like?” said ephraim, swiping a tear off his cheek.
“How about
you
shut up,” newton said, stooping to retrieve his field book. “At least I’m trying, eef.” He held his arms out, an all-encompassing gesture. “You see a Burger King out here?”

27

sHelleY WaiTed
until the boys had humped around the island’s southern breakwater before starting his games in earnest.

He’d hid in the high brush east of the cabin. The boys called his name without much gusto. The sun slanted through a bank of silvery knife-blade clouds, hitting his skin and buzzing unpleasantly—Shelley didn’t care for the sun. His favorite time of day was twilight, that gray interregnum where the shadows drew long.

His fingers fretted with his lip, which Kent had split. Squeezing the wound, the cleaved flesh only semihealed. Blood squirted, running down his knuckles. Shelley didn’t feel it much at all.

newton’s voice had drifted over to him. “Should we go anyway?”
Yes,
thought Shelley, playing with the blood.
Just go. Leave, now. Enjoy your hike.
He’d followed newton, max, and eef to the south shore, skulking through the brushes on the low side of the trail. He disguised his presence well—Shelley was a natural chameleon; it was one of his more undervalued talents.
He was intrigued by newton’s belly and back flab. It spilled over the waist of his pants like soft-serve ice cream over the edges of a cone. He wondered how it would look if the fat boy got worms. He imagined the buttery folds of skin lapping up on themselves like those ugly-looking dogs—what were they called? Shar-peis. newton would have a shar-pei body. Inside all those yards of empty skin, his bones would be left to rattle around like pennies in a jar. Boy, that would be something to see.
once the boys were gone he backtracked to the cabin. He was
excited.
oh so excited. It took events of precipitous magnitude to pierce the Teflon plating surrounding Shelley’s emotional core and make him feel much of anything.
But there was much to hold his interest today.
The dead men in the wrecked cabin. The ships offshore and the black helicopter that swept occasionally overhead. The sheer fact that there was nobody of consequential authority around for miles. He didn’t have to wear his mask so tightly. He could loosen the straps and let the things underneath twist their way into the light.
But mostly there was Kent Jenks—Johnny Football, mr. Big Shot, the uncrowned king of north Point—locked up in the root cellar.
oh my God, the
fun
they were going to have.
The last time Shelley could recall feeling this level of elation was the afternoon he’d killed Trixy, the kitten his mother adopted after finding her under their porch.
Shelley had been killing things for a while by then—although he didn’t think of it as killing, per se. other creatures, even people, were empty vessels. of course, not
physically
empty: all living things were packed full of guts and bones and blood that leapt giddily into the air when it was released from a vein. But none of them had an essential . . . well,
essence.
They were just ambulatory sacks of skin. That was really it. Shelley honestly felt no more remorse tearing another living thing apart than he would ripping the limbs off a wooden marionette.
He’d gotten started with bugs. He’d found these two big stag beetles entangled in a territorial battle in the crotch of the backyard maple. He’d gathered them up and, after some preparation, pulled most of their legs and antennae off—he used his mother’s tweezers for this delicate work, the same ones she plucked her eyebrows with—and put them in a matchbox. He was surprised and delighted to discover that beetles were cannibals: when he’d opened the box a few days later, he found one of them flipped helplessly on its back and the other one devouring its gooey insides.
He’d promptly filled the matchbox with his mother’s nail polish remover and lit it with a match. The beetles’ organs popped and crackled inside their black exoskeletons as they roasted.
He soon graduated to bigger, more impressive conquests. He caught deer mice in sticky traps and painted liquid Borax onto their eyeballs with a Q-tip—it was mesmerizing to watch their black eyes shrivel and sputter like fat in a fire.
Shelley found that animals adjusted to their physical diminishments much better than people. If you burned a man’s eyes out, he would shriek and bleat, of course, and he’d need a cane and a seeing-eye dog the rest of his moaning, miserable days. A mouse just stumbled around in pain for a few minutes, pawed at its cored-out eye sockets, squeaked and twitched its nose, and carried on with what it was doing before. Animals were incredibly flexible that way.
Shelley had gone to work on Trixy during an evening when his parents were off at a silent auction for their church. He was at the kitchen table eating a Creamsicle. Trixy twined round his socked feet, brushing against his calves.
“Hello, kitty-kitty.”
She hopped up on his lap. Her little claws pierced his sweatpants and dug lightly into his thighs. Shelley chewed on the Popsicle stick while petting the kitten. She arched her back to accept his soft strokes. Her fur was downy like the hair on a baby’s head. He could feel her small, thin bones beneath her coat.
He carried her upstairs. She was purring quite loudly—such big, satisfied noises from such a small thing. Her body was a power plant, kicking off a lot of heat. Shelley’s mother hadn’t had her spayed yet.
He went into the bathroom and locked the door. He put Trixy on the toilet lid, where she kneaded the macramé seat cover. His mom said this was a sign of separation anxiety—kittens would knead their mothers’ bellies to stimulate milk, so they could nurse. But kittens who’d been separated too early kneaded anything. Sweaters and sofa cushions and toilet seats—as if any of those had the ability to squirt milk. They were confused, according to Shelley’s mother. A real heartbreaker, she said. Shelley just nodded as if he felt the same way, too. He found that if you nodded—slowly, deeply, your chin almost touching your chest to indicate sincerity—people would think you shared their feelings. It was one of the many tricks he’d learned in order to blend in; hiding in clean sight was a beneficial skill.
Shelley plugged the bathtub drain and ran the water, glancing back to the toilet. Trixy was still there, purring. Good. As the tub filled, his hand crept under the elasticized hem of his sweats to toy absently with his privates. He wasn’t surprised to find that he was erect—a throbbing, urgent hardness that seemed to drain the blood out of his arms and legs and focus it all on his penis. He stood with his mouth unhinged, eyes alight with unspeakable excitement, an oily sweat breaking out over his long, milky body.
He opened the cabinet under the sink and donned the long plastic gloves draped over a canister of Ajax: his mother’s cleaning gloves. His fingertips went cold while the rest of him burnt with a steady eager heat.
He sat Trixy on the edge of the tub. The kitten stared up at him with round yellow-edged eyes as her paws slipped for purchase on the porcelain. Another thing about animals: they had no conception that the creatures who fed them might be the same ones who could do them such great harm.
Scout law number eight:
A Scout is a friend to animals . . .
Shelley grabbed Trixy by her scruff and plunged her into the water.
It was as if raw electrical current had been pumped into Trixy’s body: her limbs went rigid and scrabbled against the porcelain. She almost screwed out of his grip, but he grabbed her throat—his hand manacled easily around the furry drainpipe of her neck—and shoved her back down.
After twenty seconds, her struggles lessened. After about a minute, her struggles ceased. Shelley gave it another few seconds just to be certain.
He let go of her motionless body. A dry, dusty taste filled his mouth—it was like he’d swallowed a mouthful of the chalk they spread into white lines on a baseball diamond. But already the elation was subsiding. It was over so fast. The kitten had almost no fight in her at a—
Trixy shot straight up out of the water. She looked so damn scraggly with her hair soaked and matted to her skin. Shelley almost laughed. Trixy yowled and scrabbled up the sloped side of the bathtub. Shelley reached in and lovingly collected her four little legs into a bundle, clasping them all in one hand. She bit feebly at his gloves with her needle teeth. She let out a desperate
reeeeeooowl
and beheld him with tragically confused eyes.
He dunked her under the water. His face was expressionless, but the sweat had now soaked through his shirt. His penis was painfully hard and he felt the excruciating yet somehow pleasant need to urinate.
He pulled Trixy out of the tub. Her head lolled comically between her shoulder blades. He dunked her once more, absentmindedly, the way an old biddy dips her bag of earl Grey in a teacup.
She may still be alive,
he thought. He considered letting her live. That could be interesting. Shelley figured Trixy might act like Timmy Higgs, who as a boy had swum out beyond the shore markers and nearly drowned. now Timmy spent his days in an old rocker in front of the Hasty convenience store saying “Hi! Hi! Hi!” to everything: customers, random passersby, delivery trucks, pigeons, the clear blue sky. one time Shelley put a tack on Timmy’s rocker when he was using the toilet, waiting until nobody was watching. Timmy’s reaction amazed and amused him: he sat heavily, gulping from a can of Yoo-hoo, just rocking and rocking, blabbing “Hi! Hi! Hi!” He didn’t register it at all. Shelley had lingered, intrigued, and when Timmy got up he’d seen the brass head of the tack flush with Timmy’s wide, flat ass, the surrounding fabric dark with blood.
unfortunately, Shelley figured a stumblebum kitten might raise his mother’s eyebrows. The safest option was the one that most compelled him, anyway.
When it was done, Shelley drained the tub and made sure everything was dried with a bath towel from the rack. He draped the plastic gloves back over the Ajax. Then he went downstairs and got an orange trash sack and put Trixy inside.
Before Trixy, Shelley had never killed anything that might be missed. ultimately, he decided to burn her. He stuffed her in the pellet stove in the basement. Trixy went up in a burst of whiteness behind the grate. Shelley was fleetingly concerned that the smell of burnt hair would rise through the vents to permeate the house, but any suspicious odors were well gone by the time his parents got home.
It was here that Shelley had an epiphany: proper disposal was its own alibi. The kitten was gone. It wasn’t necessarily
dead.
It may have run away. Cats did it all the time. Cats were stupid and ungrateful.
When Trixy disappeared, his mother was in a
state.
She mooned around the house, gazing forlornly into the backyard—which made life harder for Shelley, as he conducted business in the yard and didn’t want his mom to see him at work. “Isn’t it
awful
about Trixy?” she asked. “The poor thing.” Shelley nodded deeply, sincerely, chin touching his chest. every so often he’d catch his mother looking at him—not accusingly, exactly, but . . .
questioningly.
As if the son she’d given birth to had been poached in the night, replaced with an exact physical duplicate. This duplicate spoke in her son’s voice and aped his intellect and abilities, but there was something
worrisome
about this new one. He—
it?
—was a step outside of humankind, looking in. Did it like what it saw?
But if his mother indeed felt this, she’d never given voice to it. Parents held an intrinsic need to believe in the essential goodness of their offspring—their kids were a direct reflection of themselves, after all.
A week after murdering Trixy, Shelley lay in bed, a wedge of cold moonlight slanting through the curtains to plate his pasty, wasplike face. He replayed the scene in his head: Trixy, waterlogged and wild-eyed, rocketing from the tub. It brought the tingle back to his privates—the bedsheet tented at his crotch—but the sensation was pitifully diminished, a watery imitation of that galvanic rush. Shelley pondered: if he’d felt that rush with something so pitiful as a kitten, imagine how it’d feel with something bigger, stronger, more intelligent. The risk would only intensify the euphoria, wouldn’t it?