The Troop (32 page)

THe sKY
was the color of a bone-deep bruise when max caught the first traces of a high sweet stink.
“You smell that?” max whispered.
newton nodded. “Where’s it coming from?”
They held their noses up, zeroing in on the location where it seemed to emanate from: a cavern set into a shale-strewn hillside.
They retired out of earshot to formulate a plan.
max said: “Should we yell down to him?”
“maybe he’s sleeping. Why wake him up? We can just pluck them off him.”
“right out of his pocket?”
“If that’s where he’s keeping them, I guess we’ll have to.”
“okay, fine,” max said, expelling a few rabbity breaths. “But what if he’s awake? What if he fights back?”
“Are you asking if we should hurt him?”
“I don’t know. I guess so. I mean, you already cracked him over the head, so . . .”
newton bit his lip. “let’s just hope he’s asleep. rock, paper, scissors for who goes in first?”
newton’s hand came down clenched in a fist. max’s hand came down flat. Paper covered rock.
“Forget it,” max said. “We go down side by side.”
newton shook his head. “It looks too narrow and anyway, fair’s fair.”

44

THe caveRN
floor dipped just past the cave mouth, plunging them into darkness. A sticky, coagulated darkness that coated their skin like oil. It was as if the rods and cones in their eyes had been shut off like flicking a light switch:
click!

newton was in the lead, clutching the crude spear max had made with both hands. He figured this was the blackness that must exist at the bottom of the sea—a blackness prowled by sightless things whose skin was so pale and gelatinous you could see the inner workings of their bodies. Things with nightmare anatomies that would evoke cries of horror were they ever glimpsed in sunlight: blind eyes bulging atop skinny stalks, rubbery mouths big enough to swallow a Hyundai, rows of tiny needlelike teeth. Such creatures could only survive in the deeps: their bodies had no protection against the sun—their skin would roast and disintegrate to mush before they even reached the surface. But they had learned to adapt to their lack of sight. They jostled and bumped with the other creatures that lived beneath the light, occasionally lashing out with barbs or tentacles or teeth.

WWAMD?
he thought. The answer came swiftly:
Alex Markson would be scared shitless. Anyone else on earth ought to be scared shitless, too.

The boys’ collective breath came hot in their ears. Their boots sent little avalanches of shale skittering down the cavern slope. Water trickled over the rocks somewhere below—a sea-seeking tributary. The air was laden with the smell of sweet corruption.

max’s hand was wrapped tightly around newton’s flashlight. He had not switched it on yet. newton would tell him when. Darkness pushed at his eyeballs. Steady fear pulsed behind them: a monstrous pressure massing behind his eyes. With darkness pressing from the front and fear pressing from behind, he was terrified his eyeballs would burst like grapes in a vise. This was the strongest evidence yet that something must be terribly the matter with Shelley: no sane human being would want to hide out down here.

They inched their way down the incline, hands outflung so they wouldn’t run face-first into the rock. The cavern walls were slick with some viscid substance: algae, maybe? max pictured tiny albino crabs scuttling along the gluey stuff, their pincers
tik-tik-tikking.
He imagined millions of them forming a chittering umbrella above their heads. His cheek came into contact with a shelf of slimed rock: it felt like a giant raspy tongue. That he didn’t scream out in terror had to count as a minor miracle.

The darkness was disorienting. nothing could moor itself to it: not even their breathing, which seemed to float out only to hit some unseen barrier and rebound back at them. It could make a person go mad simply because it consumed them: creeping into their mouths and into their ears and up their noses and behind their eyes, invading every part until they were one with it.

The boys moved deeper into the silent cavern . . . and then came the sounds.
Those horrible sounds, from God only knew what.

• • •
sHelleY HeaRd
them coming. His ears were very keen now. oh yes. Very keen indeed.

He could not see the boys yet. The boys who’d come to collect their little prizes. The silly little boys who wanted to get back to their stupid homes, their stupid lives.

He couldn’t see them—but he would soon be able to
feel
them.
EAT EAT EAT
oh yes. Shelley would eat. The fat one first, then the skinny one.

eat their eyes so they couldn’t see. eat their feet next so they couldn’t run away.

It would be a paradise. A beautiful new world. everyone would be so much happier down here. It would be an adjustment, of course. But they could be useful.

They could be daddies, too. Yes, they could
all
be daddies. What a lovely idea.

THe sOuNds
caused the ventricles of newton’s heart to seize up. He could actually
feel
them constricting with a painful squeeze. long, liquid noises:
slllllrp . . . slllllrp . . . sllllrp . . .
“Flashlight,” newton said. The word came out as a compressed nugget of sound.
max flicked it on. Stark whiteness washed over the cavern.
Slllllrp . . . slllllrp . . . slllllrp . . .
The boy’s faces were eggshell-white: it was as if fear had blown the
blood right out of their skin. Their necks and arms were rashed with
gooseflesh. The clammy rock trapped the sweet stink, making the boys
dizzy with it.
They were in a small antechamber. A hollow bubble in the rock. “There,” newton said, pointing.
The spark plugs sat in a shallow saltwater puddle in the middle of
the chamber. Could it really be so simple? max scanned the puddle
for white wriggles. It was clear. He picked his way over, grabbed the
spark plugs, and turned to newton with a tentative, hopeful smile. The flashlight in his hands shone on the rock behind the other
boy.
He caught a sly flinching movement to the left of newton’s waist.
The spark plugs slipped from his numbed hands.
newton’s forehead creased as max’s hand rose, one quivering finger
pointing to the spot behind him. He wheeled suddenly, stumbling, and
watched in horror as it emerged.
The thing that once went by the name of Shelley longpre unfolded
itself from a dark chalice in the rock. Crawling out like a spider, folding
each of its long, pale limbs out, unpacking itself from its hiding spot
with the showy grace of a contortionist.
“Yessssss . . .” it lisped, the hiss of an adder that crested and eddied. “. . . sssSSSeeeeeYeeeessssssss . . .”
It was long in its extremities and bulbous at its middle. It was naked
and translucent and webbed with huge blue veins that snaked over its
body. Its arms and legs were nothing but bone wrapped in a thin sheath
of skin. Trapped in the eye of terror, max found himself thinking of the
Christmas just passed. His folks had bought him a trombone. They’d
wrapped it and put it under the tree. of course max knew what it was:
a trombone wrapped in shiny paper looked practically the same as a
trombone not wrapped in paper.
That was how its legs looked: like bones wrapped in skin-colored
Christmas paper.
“eeeeeeYYYeeeeeeSSSSSSSSSSS . . .”
Its voice was the lonely squeal of a hermit. It scrabbled toward
them with a leer of hideous glee, hideous hunger, hideous
need.
Its left
eye was completely white: something had sucked the pigment out of
the eyeball the way a child sucks the red stripes off a peppermint candy.
Its right eye was as shriveled as a dehydrated pea; white threads licked
and lashed in the wide raw socket making a
whish
sound, sort of like
wind-swayed grain in a farmer’s field.
max noticed clearly in its nakedness that its stomach was an obscenely pendulous appendage. The size of a beach ball, it swayed between its legs with a quivering expectant weight. Its rib cage jutted in
monstrous fingers. Huge knobs of flesh seeped filth all over its shoulders; a belt of ulcerated boils encircled its hips. max’s mind reeled—scant days and hours ago this
thing
had been a boy, not much different from
him.
Sllllrppp . . . sllllrppp . . .
Its lips hung down like the lips of an old horse. Its teeth were gone;
its gums hung in whitish rags from the roof of its mouth like the pith
inside a pumpkin. It reached for newton with extremely long fingers. It
had nibbled its own skin off the tips. Its voice lost its sibilance as it rose
to an insane gibber.
“Yeeeeeeee!”
Snapping out of his torpor, newton managed to lash out with the
spear. He struck the thing across its face; its skin tore apart in crepey rags.
It mewled piteously and crab-walked around the edge of the chamber, its
gut dragging along the rocks. The skin mooring its belly to its abdomen
stretched and tore in thin fissures. max was horrified at the possibility
that it would burst apart. What in God’s name would spill out? “
Go!
” newton yelled at max.
max pressed his back to the wall and swung round. The Shelleything’s tongue darted out of its mouth: a gnarled root. max wondered if
it was trying to taste his scent the way snakes do.
It scuttled toward max with horrid speed and ferocity. He caught a
glance of its back. Something was twined around its spine, like an electrical cord.
one of its bony claws manacled round his ankle, and max’s bladder
let go. Warm wetness drained down his leg. The Shelley-thing seemed
to sense that, too—it stared up with those alabaster eyes, keening and
snuffling at max’s calves. max screamed and kicked it off. The flashlight
slipped from his hands and hit the ground, spinning in lazy circles. max caught hold of newton’s arm and dragged him back toward
the chamber’s mouth. His mind was yammering; soon the terror would
weld it shut . . .
The flashlight spun to a stop. Its glow climbed newton’s madly
backpedaling legs—then the Shelley-thing darted out of the darkness,
squealing with the high excitement of a pig who’d found a truffle,
clamping onto newton’s right leg.

“
Let go!
” he shrieked.
“Get off me!”

It kept squealing and clawing up newton’s body. newton felt the warm weight of its gigantic belly pressing between his own thighs. Beneath the sucking sounds, he could hear squirming ones—coming from the wet black hole of its mouth.

“Oh Jesus Max it’s gonna—”

When the Shelley-thing’s stomach ruptured, it did so with a moist ripping tear. newton’s thighs and abdomen were washed in a warm broth of desiccated organs and shrunken intestines and untold multitudes of writhing alabaster.

newton screamed in terrified disgust as the Shelley-thing’s face relaxed into an expression of extreme contentedness.
newton kicked free and skated his heels over the slippery rock. The Shelley-thing toppled face-forward onto the cavern floor. It landed with a sickening crunch that collapsed all the tortured bones of its face.

From the sworn testimony of Stonewall Brewer, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

Q:Admiral Brewer, I’d like to ask about your methods regarding Tim Riggs and the five boys who were on Falstaff Island when Tom Padgett arrived.
A: Fire away.

Q: I’d like to know why, during the entire course of the containment, you never tried to contact Mr. Riggs. Or, after his passing, why you didn’t make contact with the boys.
A: For what reason?

Q:To tell them what was happening.To let them know, if nothing else, that their parents were being forcefully detained as opposed to purposefully leaving them there.
A:These points were duly considered and dismissed.We felt—
I
felt—it was best to institute a “look but don’t touch” policy.

Q:You could have dropped a care package. Food and aid. Or notes written by their parents.That wouldn’t be “touching,” would it?
A: If you’ll check the record of our conversation here today, you’ll recall that I said:
Nothing comes in, nothing gets out
.

Q: But does that apply to
information,
Admiral? A virus cannot be borne on information.
A: But hysteria can. Information isn’t always power. Information can do harm just as easily as ignorance. Say we’d told those boys what they were up against, okay? They may have gone—pardon my French—batshit.

Q:Wouldn’t you concur,Admiral, that based on the evidence of the events as we now know them, that some of those boys went batshit anyway?
A: Hindsight being twenty-twenty and all, yes, I surely can. Listen, tribunals like this get held because of men like me.

Q: Define for our purposes “men like you,” Admiral.
A: I’m talking about men who take a line and hold to it. Some people think that makes men like me inflexible. Hard-assed. At worst, inhuman. It’s true that the decisions men like me make can seem, from an outward perspective, to be that:
inhuman.
People will always second-guess you.Why did those people have to die? Why those forty-four in the SARs outbreak? Why those kids on the island? Well, that’s fine and I accept all that—the second-guessing, I mean, not the fact that every epidemic is going to have its fair share of deaths. It’s my hope and goal to have zero fatalities. But the fact is that unless men like me make those decisions, the questions asked in the aftermath might be a whole lot different. Instead of why did those forty-four have to die, it’s why did five million have to die? Why did the whole eastern seaboard have to die? At that point, nobody has the luxury of a tribunal.At that point, everyone’s just trying like hell not to get sick.

Q: So you’re saying—
A: I’m saying that the decisive actions of men like me make second-guessing possible.We’re the first-guessers.And sometimes that’s all it is: educated guesswork. We don’t know how bad it might get. We assess the risk, gauge what the collateral damage might be, try to minimize it, and then hold that course. I’m not saying it doesn’t make for some uneasy nights. But it’s what you have to do.