The Troop (33 page)

Q:Admiral, I’d like to change course.
A: It’s your circus.You can call the tune.

Q:Wonderful.Admiral, did you know about Dr. Clive Edgerton and his experiments with the modified hydatid worm?
A: Before all this? No.

Q: Remind me: you did sit on the panel of the Board of Safety in the Fields of Communicable Diseases and Epidemiology, did you not?
A: I have, as I’m required to by duty.

Q: So then I find it odd that . . .
A:Yes?

Q: I find it odd you’d have no knowledge of Dr. Edgerton. I say so because the board—the board you sit on—is very aware of Dr. Edgerton.Two years ago, his name was brought up in conjunction with several other doctors. According to the board, the work of those doctors should be subject to a higher degree of oversight and scrutiny, seeing as their research could pose a significant risk.
A: I don’t go to every meeting.

Q: But they send you the minutes?
A:Yes. I read them as thoroughly as I can, but my schedule is busy.

Q: Admiral, what are your thoughts on the effectiveness of the mutated hydatid as it applies to warfare?
A: I think it’s monstrous. It’s a monstrous question.

Q: Yes, I’m afraid it is, but such questions need to be posed. You say it’s monstrous.
A: I do indeed.

Q:That’s not the question I asked you.
A: I suppose it would be effective as a weapon. In certain, very prescribed situations.

Q: Like on an island?
A:What’s your name?

Q: [name redacted]
A:Well [name redacted], if you are suggesting that I dragged my feet and somehow used those kids as—as what? Test subjects? If you’re suggesting
that—

Q:Admiral, does the name Claude Lafleur ring a bell?
A: No.Why should it?
Q: Master Seaman Claude Lafleur was one of your men.
A:The entire navy is
my
men.

Q: Master Seaman Claude Lafleur was stationed at the same base you operated out of. Lafleur’s daughter often babysat your children.You’re saying you don’t know Claude Lafleur?
A:That’s right.

Q: Claude Lafleur was a locksmith before entering the navy.
A:You want to hurry this up?

Q: As you already noted, this is my circus, Admiral. I’ll choose the pace. Some time ago, Claude Lafleur was given a four-day executive leave.That leave started the day before Tom Padgett escaped from Dr. Edgerton’s facility.
A:Yes? So?

Q:Are you aware that you signed Claude Lafleur’s leave papers,Admiral?
A: I sign plenty of leave papers. I spend half the day signing papers.

Q: Are you aware, Admiral, that Claude Lafleur’s fingerprints were found on the rear access door of Dr. Edgerton’s lab?
A:You’ll have to speak to someone else about that.

Q: Are you aware that we presently have Claude Lafleur in custody? Are you also aware that Lafleur has some fairly damning things to say?
A:You’ll have to talk to my superiors about that.

Q:Admiral, who
are
your superiors?
A: [Witness maintains silence]
Q:Are you saying that even admirals take orders from someone?
A: [Witness maintains silence]

Q: Admiral, just earlier you used a term I’d like to revisit.
Monstrous.
Perhaps you’d agree,Admiral Brewer, that purposefully releasing a contagion would be
monstrous
? And if Tom Padgett were that contagion,Admiral, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that Falstaff Island could be seen as no less than a giant petri dish, and the events that occurred there no less than an unsanctioned experiment—on children?
A: [Witness maintains silence]

Q:Wouldn’t that just be absolutely
monstrous,
Admiral? Wouldn’t that be the most inhuman thing you could ever imagine?
A: [Witness maintains silence]

45

NigHTfall gReeTed
the boys as they stumbled out of the cavern. In the silvery fall of moonlight, newton saw that he was soaked in gore from the waist down. revulsion swept over him in a dizzying wave.

When max approached with a handful of leaves—all he could find for newton to clean himself off—newton held his hand out.
“Don’t come near. It’s too late—they’re all over me.”
He could feel them inside his pants, prickling his skin with strange heat. They wriggled in the hairs he’d just started to grow down there.
max said: “What can we do?”
“Get back to camp. I’ll wash up in the ocean. See if that helps.”

THeY mOved
through the woods without a flashlight. Chilling noises emanated from the lacework of tall trees: hoots and scufflings and a frenzied cackle that rose up and up until it dropped to an ongoing buzz like an enormous hummingbird trapped in a rain barrel. Whatever was making those sounds couldn’t possibly be any worse than the Shelley-thing back in the cavern.

When they got back, max made a fire using shingles that had blown off the cabin roof. newton went down to the water to wash. max could just make him out past the moon-glossed shore. He sat cross-legged in the surf, scrubbing and scrubbing. He returned in only his underwear, which sagged wetly around his hips. There was a defeated hunch to his shoulders that freaked max out.

“I’m hungry, max.”
“I’m hungry, too, newt.”
“I think I’m hungrier than you.”

sOmeHOW, THeY
slept. In the witching hours, newton sat bolt upright. His insides were alive and seething. He bit down on his lip until blood came.

An hour later, max awoke as newton puked into a thicket of poison sumac. He was curled up on his side, breathing in rapid little bursts.

“I took the mushrooms,” he said. “They do the trick.”
newton pointed at the puddle of vomit. nothing but a thin smear of liquid tinged purple from the berries they’d eaten. It was alive with
wriggling whiteness.
“I figure one of the little buggers swum up my . . . my piss-hole.” He realized there was a better word for it, a scientific word that he
probably even knew, but he was too dog-tired to think of it. Besides,
pisshole
summed it up best. It was a
hole
that your
piss
came out of.
newton laughed to himself. Hah! For whatever reason, he found it
deliciously funny.
Pisshole.
Hil
aaaa
-rious! WWAmD? He’d laugh at
pisshole,
too, because it was the funniest word on earth!
maybe he was delirious. That, or those mushrooms had mindbending properties. He tore out a clump of poison sumac and rubbed it
on his leg.
“What are you doing?” max said.
“It’ll give me something else to focus on. I can itch myself silly.”
• • •

NeWTON aTe
the rest of the mushrooms and was violently, frighteningly ill. He vomited with such force that the capillaries burst in his eyes and even his nose. By the time the sun came up, he looked washedout and haggard, as though his innards had all been wrung out like wet washcloths.

They lay together by the fire. Anytime max moved closer, newton waved him back tiredly.
“You’re going to catch it,” he warned.
“I don’t care anymore.”
Heat kindled in newt’s eyes. “You
should
care. Don’t be stupid.
You should care.
”
max withdrew, wounded for reasons he couldn’t quite process.

sOmeTime THaT
morning, the black helicopter cut across the postcard-pretty sky. It dipped low, rotors throbbing, panning a circle around them. It was so close that max could see the sunlight flashing off the pilot’s visor.

“Help us!” he yelled as the blades whipped debris all around. “He’s sick! Can’t you see that? We need help!”
The pilot’s face remained impassive. max picked up a rock, threw it on a pitiful trajectory. It wasn’t even close. The helicopter banked southward and returned toward north Point.
“Fuck you!” max screamed as it retreated. “Go fuck yourself!”
Afterward he collapsed. The adults were supposed to act in the best interests of the children. They had to know what was happening. Yet stubbornly, they did nothing but stand idly by.
The adults were content to watch them die.
“I wonder who built them,” newton murmured.
max wiped his eyes. “Built what?”
“The worms.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean,” newton said, “they seem too
perfect.
”
“They don’t seem perfect at all, newt. They’re like the worst things on earth.”
“That’s what I mean, I guess. maybe they
are
the worst things on earth. But that would make them perfect, wouldn’t it? Perfect at being what they are and doing what they do. Perfect killers.”
“They haven’t killed everyone. We don’t know about Kent.”
newton’s eyes pinched up at the edges. “I hope he’s still alive. really, I hope so.”
“He could have swum back.”
max stared out over the slatey water and wondered if he really believed that.
“If anyone could have, it would be Big K,” newton agreed, if only for max’s sake.
“maybe he’ll talk to the adults. They’ll finally come for us.”
“Anything is possible.”

aROuNd NOON,
newton told max he was having a hard time seeing out of his left eye.

“It’s all fuzzy around the sides.” His laugh held a lacy filigree of hysteria. “It’s like staring at the world from inside a peach or something.”
max leaned over and inspected newton’s eye.
“It looks okay.”
newton scratched at the purple stains on his legs from the poison sumac. He’d been scratching all morning. The flesh was raked open and bloody in spots.
“It does? okay, well . . . jeez, it hurts. maybe it’s not my eye. I don’t think there are any nerves in an eyeball. maybe it’s behind it. You think?”
max knelt closer. Terror was building in his chest, gaining a keener edge.
“Spread your eyelids with your fingers. I’ll look.”
“okay,” newton said dreamily. “Yeah. Good idea.”
max held one hand up to shield his own eyes from the sun and squinted closely. nothing. Just bloodshot whiteness.
“It’s fine, newt. I can’t see . . .” His breath caught. “. . . can’t see . . .”
“What? What is it?”
It was nothing. Just a teeny-tiny quill. no bigger than an itty-bitty claw on a baby mouse’s paw. It sat at the bottom of newton’s eye. It was probably just a trick of the light or a sty or something—until it moved.
“What is it, max? I can
feel
it.”
The minuscule writhing worm lashed side to side as if stretching itself out in its new digs. max reached out to grab it. maybe he could tease it out of newton’s eye the way his grandfather used to pull coddling worms out of a crabapple  .  .  . until max realized it was
inside
newton’s eye. Swimming in the jelly.
No.
The word ran through his head on an endless loop.
No no no no—
It all at once went still. Then it seemed to flex toward max—as if it
knew,
in the single vile atom it called a brain, that it was being watched.
“What is it, max? Tell me.
Tell me!
”

46

aN HOuR
later, max was back at the cavern.
newton had asked him not to go. Begged him.
What if something
happens, Max? Then we’ll both be alone.
max simply waited until newton fell asleep—the smallest kindness
he could now afford. He’d found a signal flare in the cabin. The ones
Scoutmaster Tim brought had gotten drenched in the storm, but this
one—which newton had brought personally, in a Ziploc bag—might
still be okay.
max
prayed
it would work. If not, it meant going down in the dark
with the Shelley-thing still there. He’d have to paw around blindly for
the spark plugs. What if he touched
it
instead?
max had been happy enough to leave the plugs and try to figure out
some other method of escape, but now, with newt as sick as he was, he
had no choice.
Listen, it’ll be no big deal,
he thought, bucking himself up.
Go on
down, grab the plugs, and get the heck out of Dodge. It’s not even that far down: it just felt that way yesterday because you were in the dark. It’s prob
ably not much farther down than the basement stairs at home.
The sun had fallen a few degrees in the sky. It shone brightly
through the tree branches and into the cavern mouth. Bright as it was,
after a few yards the sunlight turned spotty and that awful darkness
took over.
He tore the strike strip. The flare burst alight with a heat so unexpected that it singed the hairs on his arms. They’d been standing on end,
along with those on the nape of his neck.
He nudged his foot into the cave mouth. The shadow of the overhang cleaved across his boot. He tried to take the next step—but his
back leg wouldn’t move. It may as well have been glued to the ground.
The muscle fibers twitched down his hamstrings: antic, fluttering waves
under the skin.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Come
on.
”
An act of profound concentration and willpower was required to
budge his back leg. He finally threw it out in front of him in an awkward stagger-step that nearly sent him tumbling down the steep grade
of the cave, but he checked his forward momentum in time. “Don’t be a baby,” max said to himself, though he had every legitimate reason in the world to act like one. Scout law number three:
A
Scout’s duty is to be useful and help others, and he is to do his duty before
anything else, even though he gives up his own pleasure, or comfort, or safety
to do it.
The temperature dipped by ten degrees as soon as he entered the
cave. The air came out of his lungs in short, popping breaths—it almost
sounded like he was hiccupping, or on the verge of having a good cry.
The fear was as strong as ever: that disembodied ball of baby fingers
relentlessly tickling his guts.
One foot in front of the other,
he told himself.
You can always run. You
can pelt out of here like your ass is on fire.
It amazed him that the voice in his head—confident, jokey—could
be so different from the piss-scared boy it resided within.
At least he had a flare. The journey was much less disorienting with a light to go by. Salt sparkled on the sea-eaten rock, tinted bloodred by
the flare light.
The rocky shelves were overgrown with patches of sickly yellow
moss. Colonies of huge white toadstools jutted from the cave walls at
lunatic angles; they hung like fleshy ears, their undersides frilled with
soft gills—or in some cases, little spikelike teeth. max’s neck came in
contact with one as he rounded a sharp bend in the descent, and it
felt horridly clammy and bloated, like the flesh of a waterlogged body
coughed up from the sea.
The air was still sweet but didn’t seem as cloying. His breath came
shallowly. He could hear the blood beat in his ears. The flare sputtered.
Don’t you go out,
max thought—prayed.
Oh don’t you
dare
go out.
He came to the mouth of the chamber. The smell was strangely
enticing: sweet plums packed in salt. The air was alive with sounds,
curiously stealthy, over the drip of water. He held the flare aloft. The
chamber’s ceiling was clad in the same yellow moss; tendrils of witchgrass draped down. Trundling over the moss, clinging to its spongy folds,
was an army of sea creatures: sand crabs and pulpy slugs and huge sightless beetles max had never seen before. The clicking of their pincers and
other appendages created a mammoth chittering above his head. The Shelley-thing lay to the side of the chamber. Its limbs were
spiked out at odd angles; it looked like a dead spider pressed flat between the pages of a dictionary. So
small.
Death did that, didn’t it?
Shrunk everything. It lay in the same position as it had yesterday . . .
didn’t it?
He wasn’t so sure now. maybe it had inched away from the cave
wall—but
how
could it have done that? He pictured the things inside of
Shelley doing that . . . somehow
pulling
Shelley’s lifeless body along the
cave floor.
max wondered if the chamber was fed by an aquifer leading out to
sea. The tide may have rolled in, flooding the chamber. That would explain the sea life on the ceiling: he didn’t think they’d been there before.
It would also explain the Shelley-thing’s positioning: the body would’ve
floated up with the tide, bumping around the chamber, brushing into the walls, becoming saturated with seawater before settling on the floor
as the tide flowed out.
Had some of those worms flowed out with the tide? max imagined
them wriggling through the water, latching on to a codfish, which got
eaten by a seal, which got eaten by a shark, which got caught in a drift
net and hauled on board a trailer and slit open on the dock, billions of
worms spilling out in front of the perplexed crewmen . . .
or maybe Shelley’s body was in the exact same position. It’d been
dark and crazy. Yes, max figured. It was in the same spot.
Yes.
He squinted past the sputtering flare light. Was anything else moving? He thought he saw floating flickers in the air—but no,
no,
those
were just vapor contrails from the nearby seabed. He could hear the
seethe of the sea seeping through the rock.
The flare had already sputtered well down the paper tube—that
shouldn’t happen, should it? maybe it was an old flare. Its glow had
diminished alarmingly.
He set one foot inside the chamber. His leg appeared to stretch out
as if made of flesh-toned rubber, pulling the rest of his body with it.
His throat was dusty-dry, filled with the ozone taste of the rock. The
peripheries of his vision were blown out huge—he could see almost
around the back of his head. His pupils were so dilated that they’d
overtaken his corneas, turning them black.
He inched around Shelley’s body. A brittle strand of witchgrass
brushed the back of max’s neck. He bit back a scream but still, a
breathless little moan came out of him.
Which is when he noticed them.
They were on the stick—the long one he’d sharpened yesterday, the
one newton abandoned in the madness. It jutted from beneath Shelley’s body at a weird angle. All along it, stuck to the wet wood, were
tiny nodules. Clustered in white bunches that looked like tiny albino
grapes. Tens of thousands of them. others were larger. They dotted the
stick like curlicues of white icing on a cake.
A sea slug fell from the ceiling, going
plop
in a puddle near the stick.
The white nodules stirred in unison. The larger ones uncoiled and stood
stiff.
The sea slug sucked its way out of the puddle. Its eyes swiveled
lazily on stalks. The large worms jettisoned off the stick, drifting with
horrible languor. They settled atop the slug and swiftly coiled around
it. The smaller nodules launched next: a shimmering flotilla settling
around and atop the slug. only its stalked eyes were visible amid the
banded whiteness; soon, they, too, were cocooned.
max felt something bursting up inside him, a fearsome bubble
packed with razor blades and fishhooks and shattered lightbulbs that
strained against the heaving walls of his chest.
He inched around the Shelley-thing, hugging the cave wall. Several
more large worms went rigid—they followed him the way a compass
needle follows magnetic north, but they didn’t detach from the wood. The spark plugs weren’t where he thought they’d be—he swore
he’d last seen them next to the body. But then maybe the body had
moved . . .
or something had moved the body . . .
or
something else
had moved the spark plugs.
For an instant he was seized by a terrible possibility: that
something
else
was in the cave with him. An image formed in his head: something
huge and pulsating-white and gently, sensuously ribbed, gliding up behind him making the soft
suck-suck
of a fat, toothless infant mewling for
its mother’s breast.
There.
Thank God, right
there.
He spotted the plugs in a shallow
pool farther into the chamber. max must’ve flung them there when the
Shelley-thing had reached for him.
He edged around carefully, his butt scraping the wet rock. His eyes
hunted through the dwindling, smoky light for threats—they were all
around him now. The flare was hot in his hand: the phosphorus was
burning the last of its stores, heating through the cardboard tube. The plugs lay at the bottom of a weirdly ridged pool: it looked like
the fossilized remains of a giant clamshell. He reached toward them,
then suddenly flinched back.
The dark, festering ooze ringing the puddle—a rotted mulch of
witchgrass and kelp—was studded with white specks. They’d stirred
agitatedly as his hand had reached for the spark plugs.
How had they
known
to surround this particular pool? But as max’s eyes dodged around in the ebbing light, he realized
they were everywhere.
They coalesced around him: specks of white nestled in the ooze,
clustered in the rocks, above him, to the sides of him.
Everywhere.
A deep vein of terror threatened to cleave him in half. He felt that
tickle inside his skull now, those little fingers trying to unmoor his sanity.
Almost absently, max brought the flare down, singeing the edges of
the puddle. The ooze sizzled; the worms exploded with little pops. He reached into the puddle, grabbed one spark plug— The flare went out. max’s heart seized.
It sputtered alight again. The top was wet now; water dripped down
into the tube, dousing the phosphorus. He reached for the other plug,
wrapped his fingers around it—
The flare went out again.
Something dropped from the cave ceiling, crawling and clacking
on the nape of his neck. max let out a choked sound of disgust before
the flare caught again. He knocked the thing off his neck. one of those
huge black beetles. As soon as it hit the floor, it was lit upon by white
strands. max looked for the chamber mouth and—
The flare went out.
Jesus oh Jesus no
—he stood blindly, tripping,
slipping on a patch of slime in the dark. He stumbled back and nearly
fell—his arm reached out for balance and collided with something that
felt like waterlogged fatback . . .
The flare sputtered alight. In the bloodlike luminescence, he saw
he’d touched the Shelley-thing. His fingers had sunk into the flesh of his
back. Its skin was flabby, greasy, seeping nameless noxious fluid. The skin cracked slightly down the Shelley-thing’s spine. max saw
something flex underneath.
He turned to flee. The air was alive with floating strands. He waved
the flare desperately, catching a few: they sizzled up like ghost fuses. He heard a hideous skin-crawling sound. A splitting, rending sound.
He froze. He pictured it being made by the Shelley-thing as it pulled itself up. It was the sound of its body disconnecting from the rocks, its burst-open chest cavity dangling syrupy strings of ichor, twisting with
worms while it lisped
Yeeeeeesssssss
 . . .
max couldn’t bear to turn around. He feared if he turned and saw
that,
all would be lost. The terror would crystallize into a hot barbed
nut in his brain. maybe it would just be better to go mad and have done
with it for good and all.
With the greatest courage he’d ever summon, max wrenched his
head slowly around.
The Shelley-thing’s body
was
moving, but the movement was coming from inside.
One foot in front of the other, Max.
It wasn’t max’s own voice in his head now: it was newton’s.
It’s just five steps. Four maybe, if you take long strides. Go on now. It’s
okay.
max obeyed, moving quickly and silently. every nerve ending was
on fire and every synapse in his brain was on the brink of rupture, but
he managed to slip around the chamber walls until his ass hit the tunnel
mouth.
The last thing max saw in the glow of the sputtering flare before
racing up the incline was the skin cracking and splitting down the Shelley-thing’s back. A huge white tube, just like the one that ripped out of
the stranger a lifetime ago, was twisted round the gleaming spine bone:
it looked like a flag that had gotten blown round a pole in a high wind. max watched it unfurl with slow elegance and rise into the dark
air. It stood stiff as a bloodhound’s tail with the hunt running hot in its
blood.