The Troop (22 page)

29

afTeR THeY
were gone, ephraim sat motionless. The wind stirred the treetops, blowing pinecones off the boughs. reaching into his pocket, he retrieved one of two remaining cigarettes, lighting it with the Zippo. It tasted disgustingly sweet, like the tobacco had been drenched in rancid syrup.

He tweezed obsessively at the swollen flesh edging his knuckles. He picked and twisted until fresh blood flowed. It dripped off his fingertips and pattered onto the brown needles. He scrutinized it for
wriggles.

The pain was sharp but bearable. It felt really good. really
necessary.
Idly, not really aware of his actions, ephraim angled the cigarette until its burning ember drew near the flesh of his wrist. He felt the heat but wasn’t alarmed by it. Touching his skin, the ember made a sizzling sound like bacon in a fry pan. The stink of burnt hair, the vaguely sugary smell of crisped skin. The ember left a blackened divot, pain radiating from it like the rays of a cartoon sun. endorphins and adrenaline washed through ephraim, calming him somewhat—but the feeling didn’t last.

They were inside of him. Somehow he both knew and didn’t know this unavoidable fact—or he
knew
and yet hoped with every ounce of belief that he was wrong.

I saw something, Eef. Under your fingernail.
Shelley’s words drilled into his head, blistering his brain like a branding iron. How could Shelley see
anything
? Dark in the cellar, a storm shaking the earth. But Shelley’s words had only reinforced ephraim’s own belief: they’d gotten inside.
Simple math: Kent was sick. He’d punched Kent. They’d shared blood. ephraim may as well have thrown open a door and said:
Welcome to the party!
At first there had only been one  .  .  . a tiny, white, hungry guest squirming contentedly in the half-moon of his fingernail. And ephraim would’ve permitted it to live in his fingernail, if it promised to stay under the nail like a pet in a glass bubble. ephraim was generous—he could give up that much of his body. He’d even show it to his friends to gross them out:
Look, guys, I’ve got a new friend.
He’d let it have his whole finger, even; plenty of men back home on the island were missing fingers—they’d get pulled off on factory lines, shredded in tractor gears—so okay, no big loss.
But these
things
weren’t content with a fingernail, a finger, a hand, or an arm. They wanted the whole enchilada.
ephraim thought about those little white tubes bending toward him in the cabin. He’d stood mesmerized, swooning in fear as those shimmery strands floated toward him. ephraim’s heart-blood had seized, veins feeling like they’d been pumped full of quick-dry cement. He hadn’t moved an inch. none of the other boys had stepped in to save him, either. Scout law number two:
A Scout is loyal to the king, his country, and his fellow Scouters.
Well, fuck that. ephraim’s fellow Scouters hung him out to dry, even his so-called forever friend.
But he wasn’t mad at them, really. Would
he
have stepped in if those threads had drifted toward newton—even max? He blamed himself for acting like a stupid stunned cow. That inward-looking anger crystallized into rage, which then transformed quite suddenly into fear.
ephraim was as terrified as he’d ever been in his life. Something was inside of him—he was almost positive of that now. locked up behind his skin. Incubating. That something had become
somethings.
multiplying and feeding and
breeding.
That was how any living entity increased its numbers, wasn’t it? They were having
sex
inside of him, like those disgusting snakes in the rocks. Things were fucking inside his skin right this instant.
He’d never had sex himself. Sure, he’d gotten his hand up Becky Scott’s skirt on the baseball bleachers behind the lions Club before she’d protested about being a good Baptist girl—of course, she’d
taken
his hand and
put
it there in the first place. ephraim realized girls couldn’t be understood the way boys could be, but still, he’d been looking forward to touching a girl again, to reexperience that lightheaded sensation of his heartbeat shivering every inch of his skin. But that seemed less likely now. Because of the stranger, and the Scoutmaster. And Kent. And now himself?
Their sly squirming infested his ears. The surface of his flesh trembled as they moved beneath it—or was that just the dappling of the sunlight on his arms? no: they were
there.
But they were being sneaky about it. Burrowing inside of him like rats in the walls. Chewing away at the insulation and gnawing at the foundation.
He stared at the crook of his elbow. A fat blue vein pulsed there. He put his thumb on it to stop the blood flow. The beat of blood through his vein seemed out of line with the beat of his own heart. like something else had commandeered it.
We could share.
ephraim directed this desperate plea into his body like a phantom radio signal.
Share ME—my body. Okay? But like, you can’t do to me what you did to Scoutmaster Tim. You really shouldn’t have done that. Maybe you can’t help yourselves? I get it. I have control issues, too. We could—what’s the word? Like, live together. But you can’t . . . you better not . . . don’t you fucking eat me!
ephraim screamed—the sound of a nail levered out of a wet plank of wood. What a colossal fucking
idiot.
Trying to reason with these
things
. may as well reason with the tide, with a fucking salamander. He wondered if the Scoutmaster had resorted to that—if in the final hours and minutes he’d sobbed out an entreaty, wishing for mercy. What the fuck would it matter?
ephraim wished they’d just go away. Could he flush them out? Could he
dig
them out?
“Eef? . . . Ephraim?”
His name, coming from his backpack. He lifted the flap and found the walkie-talkie. Dazedly he said: “Yeah?”
“You guys left without me.”
“We couldn’t find you, Shel.”
“It’s okay, I’m not angry. How’s it going?”
“I’m by myself. max and newt left.”
Silence. Then: “
Really?
”
ephraim sniffed. His sinuses were full of snot, like when he used to cry—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. When he’d seen that repairman blown off his cherry picker by a burst of electricity, maybe?
“They had to get food. I was holding them back.”
The air crackled, full of static.
“Real friends wouldn’t leave you. Sorry, Eef, but that’s the truth.”
“Would you have left, Shel?”
Silence again. Then: “
I’m not really a friend, Eef—am I?
”
ephraim stared at his pointer finger. The milky crescent under the nail—the
lunate,
that part is called. How did he know that?
“no, Shel. I guess you’re something else.”
“How you feeling? You don’t sound too hot.”
There was something ghastly, something monstrously and soulsuckingly
awful
about ephraim’s situation: alone and full of
things,
his only confidant a brooding, toxic boy—Creepy Shel, the girls at school called him; the Creepazoid; the Toucher—on a crackly walkie-talkie. A sense of despondency settled into him, marrow-deep.
“Eef, you still there?”
“uh.”
“You hungry?”
Oh, fuck YOU, Shel.
rage boiled up ephraim’s gorge—then transmuted swiftly into a fear so profound that beads of sweat squeezed from the skin of his brow,
pop-pop-pop
like salty BBs. Hugging his arms tight across his body, chest hitching, ephraim rocked side to side. His dearest wish was to be home, safe in bed, with his mother humming downstairs as she cooked: meatballs, sausage and peppers, or even lobster, which he thought of as sea bugs and totally loathed. But the surety and safety, the calm cadence of his mother’s voice—yes, he missed that terribly.
The
things.
He felt them. massing behind his eyeballs. Infesting his corneal vaults, twining round his ocular stems. Packing his sinuses, a wriggling white multitude, squeezing through his aqueous humors like tears. Spilling down his nose, down the back of his throat, million upon million gorging themselves, growing fat on him. ephraim was crying now—yet he barely realized this.
“I can help you, Eef.”
ephraim sucked back snot. “W-w-what?”
“I said—are you listening? Really, really listening? I said I can
help.
”
“H-how?”
In the still tranquility of the island woods, wind stirring gently in the treetops, Shelley began to speak. His words were soft, honeyed, washing over ephraim like a tropical zephyr. It all made so much
sense.
ephraim pulled his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket. His mother had bought it for him. It hadn’t been his birthday or Christmas—she got it for him just because. She
never
did that. never enough money in the kitty. He’d sat on his bed, gazing at it in disbelief. He’d slipped his thumbnail into the crescent divot in each attachment and pulled them out. He’d loved the crisp
snick
they made snapping into place.
“
Are you doing it?
” Shelley asked. His voice sounded far away, ignorable.
“Yeah,” ephraim snapped irritably. “Shut up, just shut
up
for a sec.”
Carefully, he unfolded the can-opener blade. He sat poised, the wickedly curved blade hovering a quarter inch above his skin, a few inches from the cigarette burn. His skin seemed to jump and shiver—as if things were tunneling beneath his flesh like roaches under a blanket.
Bastards.
He dug the sharp silver sickle into the puffy flesh of his knuckles and drew it along the phalange bone on the back of his hand. The blade opened his skin up rather easily, leaving a dully sizzling line of pain. For a moment, the incision shone pale white like the flesh of a deboned trout. next it turned pink before running red with blood.
The anger racing through his veins dissipated with the appearance of that blood, and with it went some of the fear—just like Shelley said it would. Which was good. Very good.
“Do you see it, Ephraim? You must see it, don’t you?”
ephraim watched the blood trickle down his hand. He squinted. He was positive he’d seen something wriggle as the can opener cleaved through his flesh: a flicker of squiggling white, just like Shelley promised he’d see.
If he cut deeper next time, and faster, could he catch it? Pinch it, tug it out? It may be very big. not as big as the one that had come out of the strange man’s gut but still, big.
He’d have to twist it around his fingers like fishing line and pull very carefully. He imagined tugging on the end coming out of his hand and feeling a dim secondary tug down by his foot, where its head was rooted. Tricky work. If it snapped before he got its head out, it would just wriggle away and respawn. He had to get the
head.
once he got it, he’d squeeze it between his thumb and finger and squeeze. He’d shiver with delight as it burst with a meaty
sploosh.
“Do it, Ephraim.
Do it.
Don’t be scared. There’s nothing to be scared of. You’re almost there.”
The squirming in his ears was maddening. He unfolded the knife’s corkscrew attachment. He idly raised it to his ear, edging the tip into his ear canal. The cold metal tickled the sensitive hairs—the
cilia,
they were called; he remembered that from science class.
Lunate,
too, he realized—God bless science class.
ephraim imagined pushing the corkscrew into his ear and giving it a good solid twist or two, like he’d seen his mother do when opening bottles of cheap Spanish red. She’d drunk a lot of those after his father stepped out. He pictured pulling the corkscrew out and finding a thick white tube threaded round the coils.
Gotcha.
But there could be other things on those coils, too.
Still, it might be worth it. The human brain didn’t actually have any sensory receptors—yet another thing he’d learned in science class. You could stab a naked brain with a steak knife and the person wouldn’t even feel it. They might piss their pants or forget their best friend’s name all of a sudden—but they wouldn’t feel any pain.
Shelley’s voice, at one with the wind: “
What would you rather, Eef? Put up with a little pain or get your eyes eaten out by worms? That’s what they do, you know—they save the eyes for last.
”
ephraim took the corkscrew out of his ear. He folded it back inside the knife and set it on his lap. It sat there: a long red lozenge with the insignia of the Swiss cross on it. He figured a guy could tear himself apart pretty easily with such a knife. use its every attachment to pinch and pull and pry his own raging flesh until he fell to pieces. It would hurt like hell, except for the brain, of course—but maybe it would be worth it.
ephraim sat under the spruces in the thinning light of afternoon. The walkie-talkie went silent. run out of batteries? He already missed Shelley’s helpful voice.
His fingers picked along his arms, plucking at the downy hairs there. A small, timid smile sat on his face. His gaze was set in a misty, vacant stare—as though his eyes themselves were not connected to his mind at all, but were just sitting loose in their sockets like a couple of green marbles.
What would you rather?
His twitching fingers set themselves to new purposes he could not discern. Slowly and without being fully aware of it, ephraim reached again for the knife.

30

max aNd
newton hiked nearly an hour before coming across a patch of wild blueberries. They clung to bushes that grew in the shade of a rocky parapet. many berries were so withered they almost looked freeze-dried; many more had rotted to hunks of bluish fuzz. But a few bushes must have bloomed late in the season—these ones were clung with overripe but edible berries.

The boys picked them with trembling fingers, not believing their luck. They gorged on berries until their lips and fingers were stained a pale blue.

Afterward they sat with their backs against the parapet. newton belched loudly though and shot max a slightly embarrassed glance. His shirt was stretched across his stomach. His belly button peered out from the tight fabric like a sightless eye.