The Troop

“We’ve got to get inside!” he shouted over the banshee wind. “Or underground. Fast!”

By the time they reached the cabin, the shaker shingles were slapping against the roof—a brittle racck! racck! like the clatter of dry bones.

As one, they hesitated at the door. The dead man was in there. Scoutmaster Tim was locked in the closet. It was like revisiting the scene of a murder—one they’d all sworn in a pact to never talk about.

Lightning daggered through a bank of roiling purple clouds and forked sharply into the ocean. The water lit with a mushrooming sheen as if a tiny atom bomb had gone off below the surface.

Newton said: “We have to get inside. It’s going to hit us any minute.”

“We need to take cover, but not in there,” said Kent. His face was bleach-white except for the jaundiced flushes painting his cheekbones. “I don’t want to see that man again.”

Ephraim jeered: “You wanted to see him bad enough last night, didn’t you?”

“Scoutmaster’s in there, too,” said Newton.

Kent set his body in front of the door. A trivial gesture, like having a scarecrow guard a bank vault. The wind rose to a breathless whistle that ripped around the hard angles of the cabin, making an ululating note like a bowstring drawn across a musical saw.

“They’re sick,” Kent said simply.

“Sick?” said Newton. “Kent, one of them is dead.”

“Him, then. Tim. He’s sick. The whole place is sick.”

“How about this, Kent? How about you’re sick.”

It was Shelley who spoke. The boys almost missed it: the wind tore the words out of his mouth and carried them away over the whipsawing treetops.

Newton said: “What? Who’s sick?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Shelley said, louder now. “Kent. He’s sick as a dog. Last night I saw him—”

“Shut up!” Kent almost sobbed. “You shut your dirty mouth, Shel!”

“Last night,” Shelley said, enunciating each word with utmost care, “I caught Kent eating the food. He stole the cooler and took it down to the water. By the time I got there, he’d eaten it. He—”

Shelley was opening his mouth to say something more when Kent strode forward and dealt him an openhanded slap to the face.

“You shut your lying fucking mouth. I’ll kill you, you crazy little fuck.”

Shelley just stood there. A trickle of blood ran from his split lip like heavy sap from a tapped maple tree. Did he even notice, or care? The empty vaults of his eyes filled with vaporous white, reflecting the lightning that flashed over the bluffs. They became the glass eyes of a toy clown.

“He did it,” Shelley said softly. He didn’t have to speak very loud anymore: the boys were attuned to his every word. “Yes, he did. Ate all our food. He couldn’t help himself—could you, Kent? That’s why I didn’t say anything at first—I felt sorry for you, Kent. You’re sick. You’ve got the worms.”

Kent sagged against the door. The effort it had taken to slap Shelley seemed to drain his meager power reserves.

“We’re not going… in,” he said haltingly.

“Listen, Kent.” Ephraim spoke with cold menace. A brick-hued flush was draining down his cheeks to pinken his neck. “You ate our food. Fine, whatever, it’s been done. But I’m not standing out here waiting to get crisped by lightning. So I’ll tell you what—take a quick count of the teeth in your mouth. Then get ready to kiss about half of them good-bye, because if you don’t get out of my way in about two seconds, you’re going to be picking your pearly whites off the ground.”

Without waiting for an answer, Ephraim laid his shoulder into Kent’s chest. Kent folded like a lawn chair. Ephraim barreled through into the cabin. The sickening sweetness hammered him in the face—the air inside a decayed beehive could smell much the same.

Wind screamed through the gaps in the walls—the sound of a thousand teakettles hitting the boiling point. A swath of shingles tore off the roof to reveal the angry sky above: bruised darkness lit with shutter flashes of lightning. The wind curled in through the new aperture to swirl scraps of bloody gauze around the cabin like gruesome snowflakes.

“We have to get to the cellar!” Newton said.

“What about Scoutmaster?” Max shouted back.

They all turned to Kent, who had just dragged himself up off the floor. Lightning lit the sky and seethed through every crack and slit in the cabin.

“He’s sick,” Kent said.

Ephraim said: “You’re sick, too!”

“I’m not!” Kent held out his hands—they did not make for compelling evidence of his claim. “I’m not fucking sick!”

“Max,” Ephraim said. “Is Kent sick or not?”

“I think maybe so,” said Max—not because he wanted it to be so, but because there was no other answer for what he was seeing. “I’m sorry, Kent.”

“What a fucking shock!” Kent snarled. “The Bobbsey Twins agree!”

The wind hit a momentary lull. In that dead calm, the boys heard Tim’s voice calling them from the closet.

“I am sick.”

Kent pointed at the door. An expression of smug elation was plastered on the strained canvas of his face. “You see? You see now?”