The Troop

The boys stared at Tim, all probably wondering the same thing. Now, in the aftermath, Tim wondered why he’d done it. Not the operation itself, but involving Max. He’d told himself that he needed help—no surgeon operates alone. But now he was less sure.

“Tim?” Kent said, his eyes holding a rook’s sheen. “Did… anything… touch… you?”

Fuck off, you pushy bastard, the Undervoice spat.

“I don’t think so,” Tim said. “It happened very fast.”

Kent turned to Max. “You okay, man?”

Max nodded, eyes not leaving the ground. When Tim saw this, a cold, hard stone lodged somewhere in his diaphragm.

You made a mistake, Tim, HAL 9000 said. Don’t go compounding it.

“What happened?” Ephraim said. “Tell us.”

Tim nibbled his lip compulsively, as if his unconscious desire was to consume his own flesh. He caught himself, smiled queasily—his eyes shone in the firelight, hubbed by skin drawn tight over his sockets—and said: “I cut into the man’s stomach. The worm was in there. Nesting. It came out through the incision. It crawled up the man’s chest and wrapped around his neck. It…” He couldn’t stop swallowing. “Killed him.”

“You cut him up?” Kent asked, incredulous.

“I told you, it happened so fast.” Tim’s mouth was a dry wick, his spit all dried up. “It was like something out of a dream.”

“Amazing,” said Kent. The sneering derision was unmistakable. He sounded very much like his policeman father.

“I was scared,” Tim said. It came out as a whisper. He observed the boys’ faces clustered round the fire—all wearing matching looks of diminished respect—and wished he could take those honest words back.

“Yeah, well, this is no time to be scared, Tim,” Kent said.

Tim wanted to slap the mouthy little prick across the face, but his strength had utterly deserted him.

Mosquitoes jigged around their heads. Why aren’t they landing on me? Tim wondered. His hands were clean, yet they still felt sticky with goo; he felt it in the creases of his fingers, in his nail beds—an antic, wriggling itch. He closed his eyes and envisioned that goo drooling out of the worm’s cleaved body. The firelight glowed against his eyelids, lighting up the capillaries that braided under his skin.

“So it’s dead?” Newton said.

Max nodded. “Scoutmaster Tim cut it in half.”

“It was effectively dead before that,” Tim said. “Once the host is dead, the parasite dies, too.”

“Why would it do that?” Newton asked. “Wrap around the man’s neck and kill him? That’s like a baby strangling its mom or something.”

Tim gave a helpless shrug. “Worms don’t have any brains to speak of. Worms shouldn’t grow to that size. But that’s what happened. We saw it. You’ve got to trust the evidence of your eyes.”

Newton said: “Do we even know the guy’s name?”

His words fell like an anvil. Suddenly the man’s name seemed critical. The idea of a man dying as a stranger surrounded by other strangers struck the boys as staggeringly tragic.

“I want to go home,” Shelley said softly. “Take us home, Scoutmaster. Please.”

In the firelight, Shelley’s face molded into a beseeching expression—mock-beseeching? The expression rang hollow, inorganic and somehow clumsy, like an animal trying to replicate human endeavor: a bear riding a bicycle or a monkey playing a milk-carton ukulele. In Tim’s fevered mind, it seemed like the boy was purposefully stirring fear within the group by asking for something beyond Tim’s capacity to deliver.

“Tomorrow, Shelley. We can leave—”

“Why not tonight, Tim?” Shelley said, adopting Kent’s derisive tone. “Why can’t you get us home tonight?”

Because I’m too fucking tired, you awful little shit. Tired and hungry as hell.

“Tomorrow. I promise.”

Shelley stared at Tim—there was something insectile about his gaze. The wind gusted, blowing the flames slantways, and in that instant, Tim watched Shelley’s face liquefy like hot wax, the skin running, bones shifting and grinding like tectonic plates to arrange themselves into something infinitely more horrifying.

Kent said: “I want to see it.”

Tim said: “It?”

“The worm, Tim. I want to see the worm.”

“No.”

Kent gave his Scoutmaster a sidelong look, eyeing him down his hawklike nose the way a sniper stares down a rifle’s sights.

Without another word, Kent stood and strode off toward the cabin. Tim was dismayed to find he lacked the voice to stop him.

________