The Troop

“Pull them over your mouth and nose! Hey—do it! Now!”

The boys obeyed. Their gazes were fogged with shock above their pulled-up collars—all except Shelley’s, whose eyes held an excitable glittery quality.

Tim shoved Kent. Both hands planted in the boy’s chest. Kent went down so hard his ass bounced off the floor.

“I told you to goddamn well stay out of here, didn’t I, Kent?”

Tim hunched over the fallen boy. He grabbed his shoulder roughly and shook him. Kent’s body rag-dolled in his grip.

“This is the site of a disease! Now you all run the risk of infection!”

Tim ran his hands through his hair, which stood up in smoke- and sweat-hardened spikes. His mouth hung open like a panting dog’s, the flesh drawn tight over his cheekbones.

You’re acting irrational, Tim, HAL 9000 said coolly. You’ve harmed a child now—and is it really the first time you’ve harmed a child tonight?

“Worms spread by contact,” he said, ignoring that voice. “Do you understand? If you eat something full of worms or worm eggs, then you get worms. There’s nothing for you to do, Kent. There’s nothing to be fucking fixed. If your dad, the mighty Jeff Jenks, tried his dick-swinging act here, he’d end up just like that guy over there. Okay?”

Tim pictured Jenks the senior: his blue uniform stretched over his gut, buttons taxed to their tensile limit, hairy-knuckled hands hooked through his belt loops as he surveyed the scene with a caustic eye. Wellsy wellsy wellsy, Doc, what’s the rhubarb here?

“Don’t you talk about my dad like that,” Kent said weakly.

“Shut up!” Tim slumped heavily at the kitchen table. “Just shut… up! I mean it, Kent. If you pull any more shit, I will truss you up like a Christmas turkey. Do you know one goddamn thing about contagion—any of you? We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. Could be orally borne. Could be waterborne. Jesus, it could be airborne.”

“Then why cut him open?” Shelley said, covering his mouth so his words were muffled by his fingers. “Why drag Max into it? Or us?”

Tim looked from boy to boy to boy, seeing nothing he could recognize anymore: only disdain and suspicion and slowly kindling rage. That trust he’d worked so hard to build up, an undertaking of many years, had worn down to a brittle strand. The possibility that it could snap at any moment left him paralyzed with fear.

He pointed to the cleaved segment of worm on the floor. “That is like nothing in nature, boys. Do you understand me? These things should not exist. It’s nothing God ever made. So we have to be incredibly careful. We have to step very lightly.”

“We should burn down the cabin,” Shelley mumbled.

Tim shook his head. “That could just put the contagion into the air. What we are going to do is this: Go outside. Sit by the fire.” Tim worried the ragged edge off one fingernail with his incisors and swallowed it convulsively. “We’ll wait for the boat to come the day after tomorrow. That’s all we can do.”

The fixed drone of a helicopter worked its way across the open water. It seemed to hover directly above them. Coin-bright wedges of light—the glow of a searchlight—shafted through apertures in the roof. The helicopter’s wings sent gusts of sea-scented air through gaps in the cabin’s log walls. The light dimmed abruptly as the helicopter continued out to sea.

“Will the boat even come, Scoutmaster Tim?” Newton asked.

“Of course. We’ll all go home. Your parents will be thrilled to see you. They’ll send a research team out. Now come on. Let’s… let’s… go on out… outsi—”

A wave of dizziness rocked the Scoutmaster. Gnatlike specks crowded his vision. His sinuses burnt with ozone: the same eye-watering sensation as if he’d jumped off the dock into the bay and salt water rocketed up his nose.

He licked his threadlike lips. “We have to…”

Kent hauled himself up. His eyes reflected a horrible awareness.

“You’re sick,” he said in a trembling voice. “You’re infected. You’ve got the worms.”

“I don’t—” A childlike sick feeling hived in Tim’s stomach: as if he’d eaten too much cotton candy at the Abbotsford carnival and gone on the Tilt-A-Whirl. “It’s so important that we…”

“We have to quarantine him,” Kent said to the others. “He could make us all sick. Like him.”

Kent advanced with a determined gait. Tim held his arms out. Jesus! A pair of fleshy javelins. He pushed the boy. His hands sunk harmlessly into the boy’s chest as Kent’s shoulders sagged to dampen the impact.

Tim stumbled away on legs that felt like wooden stilts screwed into his hips. “Please,” he said. He pushed again, kittenishly. Kent was smiling now. It was not a kind look.