The Troop (21 page)

sHelleY WalKed
past the remains of the campfire and cut around the side of the cabin to the cellar. He crouched and tapped gently on the cellar door.

“Kent,” he called in a sing-song voice. “oh
Keeeeennnn-tah.
”

Something clawed up the steps at the sound of his voice—it sounded like a huge sightless crab. There came the hollow
thip
of bone on wood. Dust sifted down from the hinges. Shelley inhaled a gust of sweet air that stunk of rotted honeycomb. For an instant, Shelley saw a creature between the cellar slats: a thing composed of famished angles and horrible bone, the raw outcroppings of its face standing out in razored points.

Fingers slipped through the gap between the doors. They did not look like anything that ought to be attached to a human being: shockingly spindly and so awfully withered, like ancient carrots that had been left in a cold, dark fridge so long that they’d lost their pigment. none of them had fingernails—just bloody sickles rimmed by shreds of torn cuticle. Shelley assumed Kent had eaten them, one after another.
This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home . . .

“I’m so hungry.”

The voice was ancient, too. Shelley pictured an ineffably old manboy crouched on the stairs: a wrinkled horror with snowy hair and incredibly ancient eyes, the corneas gone a sickly yellow like a cat’s eyes—like Trixy’s eyes?

Shelley said: “You’re still hungry? even after you ate all our food?” He
tsk
ed. “Do you think I should let you out?”
“I don’t know,” Kent said, sounding confused. A sulky child.
“I think you deserve to be there. Don’t you think, Kent? You made us lock the Scoutmaster up. So we locked you up. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
Silence.
“I asked you a question. Isn’t it fair, Kent?”
“Yes,” Kent said in a petulant tone.
“Tit for tat, right?”
“Yes.”
“The Scoutmaster’s dead.”
Silence again.
“Whose fault is that, Kent?”
The silence persisted.
“Hey!” Shelley chirped sunnily. “remember the helicopter? It dropped a care package.
Food.
Juicy meat and buttery bread and candy and—”
“Please.”
Shelley had never heard a word
wept
before. But that’s what Kent had done. He’d actually wept the word
please.
“Please what, Kent?”
“Please . . . feed me.”
“I
could
. But first, Kent, you need to answer my question. I’ll ask again: whose fault is it that the Scoutmaster is dead?”
“It’s . . . it’s my fault. It’s all my fault. But I didn’t mean—I never meant to—”
“It doesn’t matter what you
meant,
Kent. It only matters what happened.” Shelley’s voice was silky soft. “So think about this. He died very badly. A tree fell on his head, you know. His skull got crushed like an eggshell. So yes, Kent, it’s really, truly, totally all your fault.”
Faint, beautiful weeping. Shelley drank up the sound the way a succulent plant drinks up the sunlight. His jaws were strangely elongated, the lower part at least an inch longer than the upper to reveal a wet ridge of teeth. He looked like a salmon in rut.
“Thank you for answering my question, Kent. now, what would you like to eat?”
“Anything.
Anything.
”
“I mean, there’s so much. I can’t carry it all back here. So you’ll have to tell me. We have apple pie and chocolate-glazed doughnuts and big steaks and—”
“meat.
Meat.
”
“You wait here,” Shelley said, as if Kent had a choice. “I’ll be right back.”
Shelley stole through the cabin’s shattered door. early afternoon sunlight fell through the roof’s broken latticework, quilting the floor in honey-colored bars.
The roof sagged down before him. He unscrewed an old glass light fixture that now sat at eye level—amazingly, it hadn’t been smashed during the storm. Inside the frosted glass bowl were several dozen insect carcasses. Flies mostly, along with a few dragonflies and moths. He shook the crackly remains into his palm and went back to the cellar.
“Here’s the first course, Kent. It’s . . . peanut brittle.”
Shelley placed a desiccated dragonfly corpse in Kent’s fingers. They disappeared through the crack into the darkness. eager crunching sounds. The fingers reappeared.
“More.”
Shelley hand-fed Kent dead bugs as if he were feeding a goat at a petting zoo. Kent made pitiful groveling sounds as he ate. Shelley couldn’t believe his good fortune. This island, the isolation, this distracting illness—it was the ultimate playground.
His eyeballs felt tacky in their sockets; a dry saltlick taste lay thick on his tongue. His penis throbbed fiercely inside his trousers; he pushed it with the heel of his palm, squashing it against his thigh to achieve a dizzying, elating pleasure.
Quit playing pocket pool!
mr. Turley would’ve said if he’d caught Shelley doing it in gym class. But mr. Turley wasn’t here, was he?
No
adult was here—except the dead ones in the cabin— meaning Shelley could do exactly as he wished  .  .  . but he
must
be careful. It would be so easy to make a mistake—to “blow it,” his father might say—ruining his lovely game. He mustn’t get carried away.
“
More,
” Kent whispered.
“All gone,” Shelley said. “no more. You ate it all.”
“Please.”
“Tell me how it feels, Kent. Tell me and I’ll give you something else.”
“It feels
empty.
There’s a hole and it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Forever and ever and ever. It wants me, Shel—and it wants you, too. Wants all of you.”
Shelley crouched for a moment, gnawing on the inside of his cheek. Kent sounded bad—seriously bad.
Bugfuck nuts,
as the island phrase went. A pang of concern snuck into Shelley; at first he didn’t know what it was, seeing as he didn’t experience emotions the way others did. An uncomfortable nibbling in his belly, like hungry baby mice.
Shelley returned to the cabin. The dead man, or what was left of him, had fallen off the sofa during the storm. His limbs were ramrodstraight with rigor mortis. His legs stuck out straight with his toes pointed up. Patches of bright green fungus bloomed around his eye sockets and the edges of his mouth.
The man’s nose had fallen into his face. Shelley watched a beetle crawl out of his sunken septum. It climbed to the crest of one nostril rim—just a hardened hole of cartilage like a little manhole in the man’s face—and hung there unsteadily.
The interlocked halves of its exoskeleton came apart. A high pressurized hiss: it sounded like a steam valve blowing from very far away. The beetle cracked open. Shelley could see white things wriggling inside of it.
A subspecies of some raw emotion—not fear, but something hovering at its edges—spider-scuttled into Shelley’s chest.
He knelt beside the big dead worm on the floor. It had hardened and toughened like an earthworm sizzled on a summer sidewalk. He scraped it up with the edge of his knife. Its insides were still mushy and gelatinous. Custardy-yellow goo squeezed through slits in its skin.
A new, wildly intriguing idea formed in Shelley’s mind.
He returned to the cellar. Kent’s fingers wriggled at the slit.
“Supper’s on, Kent,” Shelley said.
The leathery strap of the dead worm disappeared through the slit— jerked with sudden violence, it slipped between the slats with a breathless zippering hiss. next: sucking sounds. Contented babyish coos. The fingers appeared again, streaked with yellow slime.
“I’m sorry,” Shelley said, although of course he’d never been sorry for a single thing his entire life. “no more food. Kent, you went and ate it all. You greedy pig, you ate it all.”
Shelley walked away. He’d become bored with Kent, whose throaty cackle followed him back to the firepit.

“
You promised!
” Kent shrieked.
“You promised me
meat
! Come back! Pleeeease!”
Shelley sat beside the dead fire, stirring the ashes with a stick. He drew squiggles. Worms on the brain, must be. He felt like one of those circus performers who spun plates atop long bamboo poles. lots of irons in the ole fire, as his dad would say.
next up: ephraim. Stupid, angry eef. eef the fatherless freak. eef the cuckoo bird who went to Dr. Harley’s office to babble about his
feelings.
When Shelley’s homeroom teacher suggested that perhaps
he
could benefit from a session or two with Dr. Harley—this after she’d caught Shelley poking the class hamster, Puggins, with a pencil, the tip of which he’d scrupulously sharpened—his mother had scoffed, outraged.
My son doesn’t need to see a damn headshrinker, thank-you-verymuch-good-day.
earlier, back in the cellar, Shelley spotted eef staring at his hands. His knuckles had broken open when he punched Kent—an incident Shelley had enjoyed immensely because it meant group dynamics were shifting. Changes made people unsure, especially boys his age, because routines were important. When you took away routines, things went haywire. And Shelley liked haywire, because then anything could happen.
Shelley could tell that ephraim was afraid that whatever was in Kent had gotten into him—it’d leapt between their bodies, from Kent’s lips to ephraim’s hand, swimming in on the rush of blood. Shelley knew ephraim was scared and he foresaw a great profit in nursing that fear along. It would be easy. ephraim was so predictable—so predictably stupid.
of course, Shelley hadn’t seen the teeny-tiny worms at that point— but he’d understood that the sickness, whatever it was, scurried inside of you, It ate you from the inside out. That’s what made it so scary. This wasn’t a bear or a shark or a psycho axe murderer; those things were bad, sure, but you could get away from them. Hide.
How could you hide from a murderer who lived under your skin?
After the storm, when they went in the cabin and saw the Scoutmaster’s rotting body, saw those threadlike worms squirming in his chest—Shelley couldn’t believe it. everything was coming up aces.
now it was simply a matter of keeping all those plates spinning.
Shelley had a method of probing, of opening doors in people that was uncanny. He rarely used this gift—it could get him in trouble. But he was able to spy the weak spots the way a sculptor saw the seams in a block of granite; one tap in the right spot and it’d split right open.
I saw something, Eef.
That was all it had taken. The smallest seedling—he’d slit ephraim’s skin, just the thinnest cut, slipping that seed in. If Shelley did some additional work, well, maybe that seed would squirm into ephraim’s veins, surf to his heart, and bloom into something beautiful. or horrible. It didn’t matter which to Shelley.
reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the walkie-talkie. He’d slipped the other one into ephraim’s backpack this morning, while the other boys had been busying themselves for the hike. He fiddled with the button, not quite ready to put his plan into action.
After all, how much good luck did one boy deserve?

28

sOmeTime aROuNd
midafternoon, ephraim sat down and refused to get up.
“That’s it. I’m not walking anymore.”
They had come to a copse of spruce trees. The air was dense with the scent of pine: it smelled like the car air fresheners drivers hung off their rearview mirrors.
ephraim sat on a moss-covered rock with his fingers knit together in his lap. His body position mimicked a famous roman sculpture that newton had seen in a history book:
The Pugilist at Rest.
ephraim looked a bit like a statue himself. His skin had an slick alabaster hue, except for around the lips and the rims of his nostrils where it had a bluish-gray tint. newton had a scary premonition: if they left ephraim here and came back years later, he was sure eef’s body would remain in this fixed position—a statue of calcified bone.
“Come on,” newt said gently. “It’s gonna be okay. We’re going to find food soon.”
“not hungry,” ephraim said.
“Well, that’s sort of good news. It means you’re not sick, right?” “It doesn’t mean anything.” There was an undernote of liquid menace in ephraim’s voice. “We don’t really know anything, do we?”
“We have to keep moving, man,” said max. “If we can find a good place to set a trap, then—”
“Then
what,
max?” ephraim’s chin was cocked at its customary challenging jut. “We catch a skunk? Great! Wonderful! let’s all chow down on skunk burgers that’ll taste like skunk ass.”
newt said: “We can’t just give up.”
“Hey, you guys do whatever you want. I’m not stopping you.”
newton looked at max as if he should say something. They were best friends, after all—other than ephraim’s own mother, max was the only person on north Point who could reliably get eef to calm down and stop acting crazy. But more and more even max felt powerless to address ephraim’s mounting mania.
ephraim kept rubbing his fingers over his knuckles. The skin around the raw wounds was inflamed.
“Do you see anything?” he asked nobody in particular.
max said: “See what, man?”
ephraim said: “nothing. It’s nothing.”
max and newton exchanged a glance. neither of them wanted to leave ephraim, but they both knew they couldn’t force him to come. If they pressed too hard he’d lash out, maybe even hurt one of them. The group was casting off all inessential members, winnowing down to an unlikely core.
“What would you rather,” max said. “Keep hiking and find some food or stay here alone, sitting on a rock—pouting?”
ephraim shot to his feet, fists balled, chest butting into max’s; he was so close that their chins touched, their noses, too—so close that max could smell eef’s breath, which was bad, yeah, but not sweet: just the regular bile-and-stomach-acid smell of a boy who hadn’t eaten properly in days. He saw the familiar fire in ephraim’s eyes: less a flame, really, than jags of blue electricity crackling outward from his irises; it reminded max of the plasma globe at the Science Center.
ephraim’s fist rose with sudden swiftness, knuckles striking max’s chin. It wasn’t a hard punch, but hard enough to snap his teeth together with an audible
click.
It didn’t hit max’s knockout button, his legs didn’t even tremble—ephraim took most of the steam off it—but it was a punch all the same.
ephraim pushed max away, as if their closeness might prompt him to lash out again. max’s heart shuddered in his chest. He could feel the lingering imprint of his best friend’s knuckles on the underside of his chin: three perfect points still burning into his skin.
ephraim’s jaw worked, his teeth grinding side to side; it appeared he might burst into tears.
“I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean that, max.”
max rubbed his jaw. He’d never been punched before. “I know, eef. It’s okay.”
ephraim shook his head. “no it’s not. no. It’s.
Not.
”
The three boys stood in the greenish, claustrophobic light. ephraim slumped back on the rock.
“We have to go, eef,” newton said softly. “Are you sure you don’t want to—”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“But so . . . you’ll stay right here?” newt asked.
“I’m not going anywhere,” ephraim repeated.
“okay. We’ll be back soon.”
“Do whatever you want.”
max and newton left him. They slipped under the canopy of spruce fronds into the clearing beyond.