The Troop

The two boys hunched beside their troop-mate. Newton touched Ephraim’s chest, which rose and fell weakly. There were large, clumsy, gashing wounds in Ephraim’s hand and leg. Blood was gummed in a five-inch half-moon hacked into his side. The cut was jittery but progressively deeper, as if the person who’d done it had grown bolder after the blood started to flow. Worst of all was the long twisting slash on his face: it began near his temple where the bone sunk into a shallow divot and hacked straight down around his orbital bone, cleaving so deep through the skin of his cheek that the knife tip must have poked through into his mouth, then out again, tracing the line of his jaw before petering out in the middle of his chin. The trajectory alone was a brutal and terrifying thing to look at. A mark of madness.

Newton was breathing hard, set to hyperventilate. “Who did this?”

“He did it,” Max said, near breathless. “Eef did. To himself.”

“…Why?”

Ephraim’s eyelids fluttered. He coughed weakly and said: “They’re inside me. Or… maybe it’s just one. But it’s there. Sneeeeaky…”

Max gave Newton a helpless look. “There’s nothing inside you, Eef.”

“Wrong.” Eef’s breath stunk like sun-spoiled liver. “I’ve seen it. It’s…” He licked his lips. Horrifyingly, Max could see the root of his tongue moving through the slit in his cheek. “It’s smart. It lets me see just enough, even touch it, before it slips away. But if I make enough holes, guess what? Nowhere for it to hide.”

The mad certainty in his voice iced the sweat up Max’s spine. His eyes fell upon the walkie-talkie—its plastic casing was slicked with blood. He looked back at Ephraim, who’d followed the movement of his eyes and now turned away, refusing to meet Max’s gaze. His eyes swarmed with an emotion Max couldn’t intuit: a mixture of grief and shame and something else—something much darker.

“Who were you talking to?” Max said. When Ephraim didn’t answer, Max said: “You’re not any skinnier. You still look the same, Eef.”

Mostly the same, he thought queasily.

Fact was, Ephraim appeared more or less as he had when the boat first dropped them off. He’d lost a few pounds, but so had Newton and Max.

“It’s inside of me,” Ephraim said.

Newt said: “How do you know for sure?”

“A little birdie told me, okay?” Ephraim spat pure red. “I know.”

There was a tone of Stage 5 acceptance in Ephraim’s voice; he could have been telling them he had inoperable brain cancer. Max figured it wasn’t worth fighting. As his father said: You can’t argue with someone who’s already made up his mind. He exchanged a knowing look with Newton; a silent pact was settled upon. If this was what Eef believed—that he had a worm inside of him—okay, they’d accept it for now. Anything to stop him from cutting himself.

Newton rummaged the first aid kit from his pack. Swabs of peroxide and iodine no bigger than the Sani-Cloth wipes you get after a messy meal, butterfly bandages, a spool of gauze no bigger than a roll of quarters. Pitiful, really, when facing bodily devastation like this.

Max attempted to paste a bandage over the gash in Ephraim’s cheek. Eef screamed—a shocked bleat—so loud that Max’s hands fled from his face.

“What do you want, Eef?”

Ephraim fixed Max with a pleading look. “Get it out of me.”

“How?”

“Newt, you’ve got a better knife than mine. It’s burrowed deep. It’ll take a longer blade.”

Newton covered his mouth with his hand. He couldn’t imagine hacking into Eef in search of something he knew he’d never find—not after the turtle. Not ever, at all.

“I can’t do that, Eef.”

“Pussy.” Ephraim spat the word out like poison. “Max—your dad cuts people, right? You helped the Scoutmaster. You could do it.”

The best tactic was the one that stopped Ephraim from doing more damage to himself, Max figured. He’d tell him anything he wanted to hear.

“I can do it, Eef. But not here. We need a cleaner site. You could get infected.”

“I already am infected.”

“Yeah, but if I cut really deep and get it, we’ll still need to patch you up. There’s a medical kit back at camp.”

“I found some mushrooms, too,” said Newt. “They should make you throw up and… poop your pants. Maybe we can get it out without having to cut.”

Ephraim closed one eye as if he were squinting through a telescope. “Y’think?”

Max slipped Ephraim’s Swiss Army knife into his pocket. “We get you back to camp and try the mushrooms. If that doesn’t work, I’ll use the knife. Deal?”

Ephraim squeezed his eyes shut. Long, thick veins pulsed at his temples. My God, Max thought, they really do look like worms.

36

THEY RETURNED to camp to find Kent gone.

It had taken nearly three hours to half carry, half drag Ephraim back. His wounds kept tearing apart and bleeding. The rusty smell of blood clung to their clothes—could he infect them that way? Only if he was infected, which both Max and Newton couldn’t quite believe.