The Troop

MAX COULDN’T keep the look of horror off his face. It was instinctive, what most would feel when faced with a member of humankind who no longer looked like he belonged to the species.

The stranger didn’t wholly resemble a man anymore. More like something a dull-witted child might have drawn with a crayon. His body was lines. His arms were scribbles. His fingers were calligraphic spiders. The skin draped his rib cage with terrible intimacy, pinching around each rib to show the striation of muscle. His sternum was a knot, his pelvis a gruesome hinged wishbone. The skin of his face had the patina of old copper and was sucked so tight to his skull that Max could see the glaring rings of bone around his eye sockets. His ears protruded like jug handles, so thin that they curled inward, like charring paper.

“Unbelievable. My God. Even his cartilage is disintegrating,” Tim said in horrified awe.

He looks like the oldest man who’s ever lived, Max thought.

His stomach was the only robust thing about him. A tightly swollen bulge. It looked like he’d swallowed a volleyball.

“I’m going to do something called a gastrostomy,” Tim said. “I’ll make a small incision over the outer third of the left rectus muscle. So basically here.” He drew his finger below the edge of the man’s lowest rib. “It should be a short trip into his stomach. Very little visceral or abdominal fat to get through.”

“Is there any fat?”

Tim said: “His body must have started eating its muscle a while ago. I have to worry about the liver… but I can pretty much see it right now.” He pointed to a soft ridge along the man’s side. “It has probably shut down its function. It’s in a state of premortification and it’s hardening fast.”

“Can you save him?”

To Max, it seemed impossible. This man already belonged less to Max’s world, the living one, than to his father’s: the world of the motionless dead in the mortuary vaults.

“I can’t say. It’s some kind of voodoo that he’s still alive. But we have to do something, Max.” Tim stared searchingly at the boy, his eyelid going plikka-plikka. “Don’t we?”

Max wasn’t sure. Why was it their responsibility? Maybe this man had done it to himself—a result of bad luck or bad decisions.

Tim tried to smile but couldn’t quite get his muscles to cooperate: more the leer of a crazed loon. His face kept shifting polarities, giddy to mortified, great forces working beneath its surface. Max wondered: Did the Scoutmaster really want to save the man, or only investigate for symptoms of his own condition? He contemplated the selfishness of that as the soldering gun sent up pin curls of smoke.

“What do you think it is?” Max asked softly.

Tim picked up the scalpel. He stared at his hand until it stopped trembling.

“I’ve stopped trying to guess, Max. I’ll open him up a little. Just a little, okay?”

TIM THOUGHT back to med school, an operating theater where a doctor-instructor leaned over his patient and said: This is the God moment, folks. You hold it all in your hands right now. So honor the body beneath your blade.

Tim would do his best to honor this man’s body… what was left of it.

“Ready, Max?”

The boy nodded.

“Just follow my instructions. Don’t be scared if I yell or get demanding—it won’t be your fault.” He offered a strained and cheerless smile. “I’ll try not to raise my voice.”

Tim positioned the scalpel over the man’s flesh, which was stretched so tight that he could see the individual pores: a million tiny mouths stretched into silent screams. He lacked the cool confidence of a true “blade”—you could wake one of those guys out of a dead sleep, shove him into the operating theater and stick a knife in his hand, and he’d say I’ve got it from here and get down to cutting.

That was a rare gift. Tim had been given a smaller gift, which was why he’d ended up as a small-town GP wielding tongue depressors and blood pressure cuffs. He’d always been okay with that, too—but as the scalpel hummed over the man’s flesh, he dearly wished for the unerring self-belief of his med-school pals.

The man’s skin opened up as if it had been aching to do that very thing. A V of split flesh followed the blade as it sliced below the ribs, widening out like the wake of a yacht. Everything inside existed in shades of white: the silver skin draping the man’s ribs and the layers of muscle.

“Soldering iron, Max.”

Tim cauterized the severed veins. Medical instruments were often just precision variations of the same tools handymen used.

“Gauze,” he said.

Tim dabbed the blood out of the half-inch-deep slit in the man’s torso—then absentmindedly dabbed the sweat off his forehead. The stranger’s breathing was unaltered. Tim wasn’t surprised. A single baby aspirin would be enough to knock him on his ass. He already may have slipped into a starvation coma.