The Troop

He brought it down to Ephraim’s face. He circled the tip around his earlobe and up around the teacup handle of his ear. The skin broke easily, just the first layer of epidermis. Blood teared up along the cut.

“Did you see it there?” Ephraim asked.

Shelley said: “In your ear, yes. It poked out for a second. I saw it wriggling.”

Ephraim’s fingers whitened around the table’s edges. “Oh God. Please, Shel. I can’t stand to have it in me.”

“Mm-hmm,” Shelley said, casually flirting the blade around the basin of Ephraim’s ear. The steel tip brushed the microscopic hairs guarding his inner ear.

“Turn your head,” he said sternly. “I need to see down.”

Ephraim shifted onto his side. His eyes stared glassily at Shelley’s swollen belly. A few buttons had popped off Shelley’s shirt. Ephraim could see his lumped-up flesh through the vent. The inflamed anthills seemed to be twitching and breathing.

Shelley gripped Ephraim’s jaw with his free hand. How would it feel to sink the knife into Ephraim’s ear? Would he encounter resistance or would it be like stabbing a brick of cold butter? He pictured Ephraim staggering up with the knife hilt protruding from his ear, his smile beatific as he screamed: Did you get it? Did you? DID YOU?

Instead, he idly slid the knife up Ephraim’s head into his thick hairline. The flesh opened up as if by magic. A pair of red lips cut through the dark mane. Shelley thought of Moses parting the Red Sea. In the middle of the incision, he could see a vein-threaded rift of skull bone. Endorphins rushed through Shelley’s system, lighting his neurons up like a pinball machine.

Ephraim didn’t cry out. Instead he trembled with an outrush of powerful emotion and whispered: “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Shelley hacked a half-moon into Ephraim’s head. Blood of a shockingly vibrant red sheeted down the boy’s face.

“Thank you,” he kept mumbling with pathetic gratefulness as the blood bubbled over his lips. “Do you see it? Oh please find it. Thank you thank you thank you…”

Shelley was remotely disgusted by Ephraim’s behavior, but also fascinated. Ephraim’s psychosis had some weird narcotizing effect. He wondered: If he cut around Ephraim’s head until he hit the initial incision, could he tear his scalp off? Just like the Indians used to do. If so, would Ephraim even care?

The notion that he could be here for hours, hacking into a willing victim, sectioning Ephraim apart piece by piece, was thrilling in the extreme… and if things kept swinging his way, he wouldn’t have to dispose of the body as he’d done with Trixy. Once he’d relished Ephraim’s death, extracted from him the secrets Kent had witheld—and once Max and Newton were dead, too, a task he foresaw as daunting but still achievable—once they were all dead, Shelley would have their bodies all to himself. He could arrange them around the fire, posing their limbs and thumbing their stiffening faces into expressions he couldn’t quite comprehend, playing with the blood that wept like treacle from their wounds… or he could cut them to pieces and reorganize them—different heads on different bodies—insulting them in death by disgracing their corpses, which would be funny, terribly funny, so funny that the giggles started to rise in his throat again. Afterward he could leave them to the insects: their bodies would become shelter and nourishment for beetles and slugs and worms. Yes, they’d be worm food.

But Shelley had to be careful—the other two would soon return. Shelley thought he could hear their voices near the fire pit. He bit his lip, thinking.

Finally he said: “Wait here, Eef. I’ll be right back.”

He shambled around to the generator, rocking it to see if any gas was left. There was. He descended into the cellar and found an empty mason jar. Then he popped the valve on the generator and drained gasoline into the jar.

He returned to Ephraim and said: “I can’t cut it out, Eef. It’s too sneaky. The only way to get it is to burn it out.”

Ephraim’s eyes were very white and wide in the bloody mask of his face. Shelley’s words came to him as a revelation. They were the most sensible words anyone had ever spoken. Fire purifies all.

Shelley set the jar next to him.

“Burn it out, Ephraim. It’s the only way, my friend.” Shelley touched Ephraim’s twitching face with great tenderness. “You know that, don’t you? You’re my very best friend.”

Ephraim swallowed. For a moment it seemed he would bat Shelley’s grublike fingers away—but they dropped of their own accord. Shelley handed Ephraim his barbecue lighter.

“That’s okay,” Ephraim said, pulling out his Zippo. “I’ve got my own.”

Ephraim picked up the jar and held it over his head. It hung there a moment. His face shuddered as if under the pressure of deep internal forces, then it went slack.

“Thank you, Shelley,” he said. “You’re the only one who gets it.”

Ephraim’s hand tipped downward to saturate his flesh with gasoline.

38

BY THE time Newton and Max ran back to the cabin, Ephraim was on fire.