The Troop (24 page)

“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 second breed of worm, the “conqueror,” is more interesting than the “devourer.” It is, for lack of a better term, a “smart” worm.

As we know, the ability to manipulate the physical makeup of their host is a trait of some tapeworms. Take the African worm,
H. diminuta
. Their primary hosts are beetles, who frequently ingest rat droppings infected with tapeworm eggs. The first thing
H. diminuta
does upon entering a host is to locate the reproductive organs and release a powerful enzyme, sterilizing the beetle.

Why? So that the beetle does not waste any more energy on its reproductive system, allowing
H. diminuta
to further exploit the beetle’s metabolic resources.

This is one such display of the manipulative “intellect” of tapeworms.
Dr. Edgerton’s conqueror worms work in concert with the devourer worms—or, more accurately, they abet the devourer’s massive appetite.
Once the mutated hydatid enters a host, it forms a colony in the host’s intestinal tract. Once situated, a single conqueror worm emerges. The exact biology behind this is unknown; theoretically it may be similar to the method by which a bee colony selects its queen.
The conqueror worm is significantly larger than its devourer brethren. It perforates the intestinal wall and makes its way to the spinal column. From there it ascends to the base of the brainstem. Some conquerors twine around the host’s spine, climbing it in the manner of creeping ivy climbing a parapet; others infiltrate the column itself by easing through a gap in the vertebral discs and entering the host’s cerebrospinal fluid.
As it ascends, the conqueror lays eggs. These are reserve conquerors, one might say, in the event the queen expires. The conqueror larvae swim through the host’s bloodstream and infest the strata of muscle tissue in the host’s extremities; they are what account for the “bee-stung” look on several of Dr. Edgerton’s test subjects: these are nesting conquerors. This is also a sign of a full-blown, late-stage infestation.
Once the conqueror worm enters the cranial vault, it injects a powerful neurotransmitter into the host’s basal ganglia. The purpose is simple: it puts the host’s appetite into overdrive. Imagine a car with a brick wedged on the gas pedal: that’s the runaway hunger drive that a conqueror kindles in its host.
All the host wants to do is
eat.
In time what it eats ceases to matter. Whether it is nutrient-rich or even properly “food” isn’t something the host takes into account.
Anecdotal evidence taken from Edgerton’s lab indicates that the conqueror worm’s neurotransmitter may have several other hallucinogenic or psychotropic effects. Edgerton’s videos show animal subjects behaving incredibly oddly; at times they appear to be unaware what is happening to them. Perhaps there is a “masking” effect: the host views itself as healthy—even healthier than before—while the devourer worms destroy it. This may enable the hosts to maintain a positive outlook, making them more productive, therefore gathering more food, therefore prolonging the lives of the worms. Otherwise they may have simply given up and died.
The conqueror worm’s primary value to its colony may be the propagation of a positive mind-set of its host—the longer the host believes it can survive, the more the colony can feast upon it.
Testimony given by the lone survivor of the Falstaff Island tragedy seems to justify this hypothesis. The boy stated that his infected troopmates seemed, and I quote, “stronger . . . happier, even when they were falling apart. They couldn’t see themselves for what they really were.”

31

“EEf . . . EEf,
you still there?”

The knife slipped from ephraim’s hands. It kept on slipping. He couldn’t get a good grip. It was all the blood. His hands were greasy with it. It shone on his fingers like motor oil in the moonlight.

He’d seen it.
He’d cut a satisfyingly deep crescent around the knob of his ankle bone—he’d glimpsed sly movement there. A faint pulsation that on any other day he might have dismissed as the heavy beat of his heart through a surface vein—but now, today,
no.
And he’d cut too deeply. He knew this immediately. His hands had been shaking too hard in his excitement—in his
need
to find it. His skin opened up with a silky sigh, as if it had been waiting all his life to split and bleed. The inner flesh was a frosty white, as if the blood had momentarily leapt clear of the wound.
In that instant, he’d seen it.
Terror had seized his heart in a cold fist. undeniably, it was inside

THE TROOP 229
him. Feasting on him. Coiling round his bones like barbed wire around a baseball bat.

But on the heels of terror came a strange species of relief. He was
right.
It was just like Shelley promised. He wasn’t crazy.
“Shel?” He coughed. A carbolic taste slimed his tongue, in his sinuses and lungs, burrowing into his bones to infuse the marrow with the flavor of tar. “Where did you go?”
“I’ve been here all along, friend. Don’t you remember?”
“ug,” was all ephraim said. A warm, sluglike blob passed over his lips, falling to the carpet of pine needles with a wet plop. ephraim couldn’t see what it was—didn’t want to.
“Did you see it, Eef?”
“ub.”
“What did it look like?”
He’d seen only a flash. It was thicker than ephraim ever thought possible. Fat as a Shanghai noodle. Its head—he’d found the
head
—split into four separate appendages. They looked spongy but predatory, too, like the petals of a lotus blossom or a snake’s head primed to strike. It’d flinched like an earthworm when you ripped back a patch of grass to find it squirming in the dark loam; its body had whipped madly about as it withdrew into the sheltering layers of his muscle tissue.
“oh no you don’t,” ephraim had hissed.
He’d dug his fingers into the wound and tweezed with his fingertips. He felt the bare nub of his ankle bone—cold as an ice cube. His fingers closed around the worm, he was sure of that . . . almost sure. The parted lips of his flesh were rubbery and slick, gummed with the blood that was still flowing quite freely.
He’d gotten hold of it, just barely. A strand of spaghetti cooked perfectly al dente (“to the tooth,” as his mother would say): a mushy exterior with the thinnest braid of solidity running through it. Did worms have spines? maybe this one did.
Squeezing his fingers, he’d tried to pinch his nails together, praying he could decapitate the horrible thing. Afterward, he figured he could pull the rest of its limp body out using the Swiss Army knife tweezers. If he was unsuccessful, he guessed it would just rot inside of him. It

230 Nick cuTTER

might create internal sepsis. His innards could be riddled with ulcerated boils and pus-filled lesions. He might die screaming, but at least he’d die
empty
rather than infested.

He’d die totally alone.
In that moment, he’d thought:
Do I really want that, to die alone?
Where were max and newt? It was nearly dark by then and they’d promised to return. Instead they’d abandoned him. max, his best friend, had left him alone.
Friends until the end?
Bullshit. ephraim only had one friend left in the whole world.
He’d gripped it—the tips of his fingers pincering the hateful thing. For an instant it had thrashed fretfully between his fingertips  .  .  . ephraim was pretty sure, anyway. But he’d pulled too quickly. It squirted through his fingers. He’d reached again, desperately. Gone. He’d had his opportunity and lost it. It was safe inside him again.
“It gob abay, Shel,” ephraim said with despondent, childlike petulancy—marble-mouthing his words on account of the warm syrup in his mouth.
“You have to keep trying. Or are you weak . . . a sucky-baby, like everyone says?”
What? Who’d have the balls to—
nobody
said that. Did they? He pictured them on the school yard—a gaggle of boys casting glances over their shoulders, sneering and laughing. He saw
Max
laughing at him. rage tightened the flesh of his forehead. Something thorny and superheated surged against his skull, threatening to shatter through.
“I hear it all the time, friend. At school, behind the utility shed where the big boys smoke cigarettes. They say Ephraim Elliot acts tough, but he’s a pussy. He’s a cuckoo—his mommy makes him see a shrink because his head’s all messed up . . .”
ephraim’s gaze fell upon his stomach. His shirt had ridden up to expose a slip of taut flesh. It rippled as something surged beneath it.
maddening, mocking, playing peek-a-boo.
ephraim picked the knife up. The blade was still keen.
How deep could he cut?
It all depended. How deep did his enemy lie?
What would you rather?

From
Troop 52:
Legacy of the Modified Hydatid
(
as PuBlisHEd iN
GQ
MaGaziNE
)
By cHRis PackER:
“BIg” JeFF JenKS, as the locals call him, isn’t so big anymore.

The events on Falstaff Island shrunk him. he admits as much himself—and from a man like Jenks, still possessed of a larger-than-life self-image,

this is a big admission indeed.
“I stopped eating for a while there,” he tells me as we
take a spin in his cruiser down the sedate streets of north
Point. “The appetite just wasn’t there. used to be before
a shift I’d head down to Sparky’s Diner and mow through
their breakfast platter: eggs, rashers of bacon, pancakes,
toast, plenty of coffee. and this was
after
my wife had
made breakfast at home.”
nowadays Jenks’s frame might be charitably described
as utilitarian—although the word
threadbare
comes to
mind. he floats inside his old police uniform. his arms
sticking out of the XXL shirtsleeves put me in the mind of
a child trying on his father’s clothing. When he leans over
to hawk phlegm out the window I see the fresh holes he’s
punched into his old belt so that it cinches his dwarfed
waistline.
“It was the toughest thing I ever had to do,” he says
distantly. “Just sit on my hands and wait. That’s not
me,
right? When something needs doing I’d always stepped
up to get it done. around here my word is
law.
But now
here were these MPs and high army muckety-mucks saying I couldn’t go get my own damn kid.” he lapses into
silence before saying: “My love can’t save him. I remember thinking that. I think all of us—the parents, y’know?— were thinking the same. all the love in your body, every
ounce of will you possess . . . matters nothing at all.” Though he admits the decision to steal Calvin Walmack’s boat was a foolish one, he stands by it.
“you’re telling me that most every responsible, loving
father on god’s green acre wouldn’t have done the same?
now what the military won’t admit and never will, I’ll bet,
is that those MPs beat me and reggie pretty bad after they
ran us down.”
he pulls up his shirt to show me a long roping scar
running up his hips to the bottom of his rib cage. “They beat me so hard with batons that they busted
the skin wide open. right there on the deck of the boat.
They didn’t say nothing while they were at it, either. Just a
long, silent beating. reg got it just about as bad. We didn’t
think to fight back. The MPs all had guns.” his voice
drops to an agonized whisper. “Fact is, I’d never been beat
anything near that. not by
anyone, ever.
I was always the
one doling that kind of stuff out . . . but only if you forced
my hand.”
We drive up rows of old Cape Cods, their exteriors
permanently whitened by the salt spray that blows over the
bluffs. It’s a beautiful town. anne of green gables pretty.
The sort of place norman rockwell would paint. “The official report is, nobody knows exactly what happened to my son,” Jenks says. “But I’ll tell you, that boy
was a survivor. That’s the way I raised him. you can’t be
Jeff Jenks’s kid and not be a tough sonofabitch. But then,
what you’re talking about—the enemy, I guess you’d call
it.
Them.
I mean, how can you fight something like that?” he drums his fingers on the wheel. a big vein ticks up
the side of his neck.
“They never found him. never could bring my son’s
body home for us to bury. Just to give me and my wife some closure, right? Kent’s still technically considered ‘missing’—that’s how it is in the books. and I’ll tell you, man, missing can be worse than dead. Missing is like a book with the last few pages torn out or a movie missing the final
reel. Missing means you’ll never really know how it ends.” he looks as though he might break down but pulls
himself back together.
“So I guess I’ll never really know,” he says after a
while. “There’s not a lot of evidence to go by, is there? But
I’ll tell you this: my boy wouldn’t go down without a fight.
I’d bet everything I own on that.”

32

KeNT Was
a beast. He could kill at will.

For a while there, he’d thought differently. When the other boys had left him in the cellar—
abandoned
him like a whipped dog—he’d been scared. So, so scared.

He’d felt his strength seeping away like the air from a leaky tire. The things that lived in him now were awesomely hungry. He knew they were there. He’d lain on the dirt floor and felt them

sliding around inside him. A soft whisper came to his ears: a million snakes slithering across frictionless sand.

The thought occurred to him: he could die here. It didn’t quite seem possible. He was only fourteen. Didn’t God look out for drunks and children? That’s what his father always said.

At some point, Shelley had come to the cellar doors to feed him. The peanut brittle did nothing to kill his appetite. But whatever Shelley had given him next—tough and rubbery on the exterior, bursting with warm softness within—now
that
made him feel great.