The Troop

Max fell in behind Ephraim… then he checked up. Dark clouds massed overhead, throwing them into a sudden night. Lightning lit the twitching contours of their faces.

“Eef, man,” Max said. “Can’t we at least find someplace safer for him?”

The two boys stood face-to-face, shirts rain-stuck to their chests, heartbeats shivering their skin. Something passed between them—a subtle split, an inelegant falling away. Maybe it was necessary, maybe not, but it happened. Both boys felt it.

Eef said: “Do you have any idea how stupid you are, Max?”

“Don’t lock the door,” Max said, holding Ephraim’s gaze. “We’re coming back. Come on, Kent.”

THREE BOYS skirted the cabin’s edge. The wind blew with such gale force that it elicited shrieks from everything it touched. The logs shrieked as it lashed at their unflexing angles; the trees shrieked as gusts threatened to uproot them from the ground; even the grass shrieked—a thin and razor-fine whistle—as the wind danced between every blade. Rain needled down so hard that they felt as though their faces and arms would be sliced open: like walking through a storm of paper cuts.

Kent stumbled, arms outflung. Max reached impulsively—Newton’s hand manacled his wrist. Newton shook his head and mouthed: You can’t touch him.

Kent dragged himself out of the muddy stew, his boots slipping—they looked too big all of a sudden, his feet swimming in them—and followed Newton to the woodpile. It was rung by stacked cinder blocks and edged by trees; the wind wasn’t quite so bad.

“Stay here!” Newton had to holler to make himself heard.

Kent knelt, too tired to argue. The boys folded the woodpile tarp and settled it over Kent’s shivering shoulders. Earwigs and millipedes and wood lice and deer ticks squirmed from the dead logs, startled by the storm. Crawling and twitching through the mud, they skittered up the tarp. Max reached out to brush them away, revolted at the thought of touching them but even more revolted at the possibility they’d alight on Kent’s skin and hair. Newt grabbed his hand again.

Kent didn’t seem to mind. His eyes darted, charting the course of those milling bugs.

Newton said: “We’ll come get you soon!”

Kent’s head swiveled. A mechanical motion, like a toy abandoned in the rain. Lightning creased the sky and seemed to penetrate his flesh, igniting his bones in skeletal relief. His lips split in a grin that sent gooseflesh up the nape of Max’s neck.

An earwig squirmed round the cup of Kent’s ear, tracked across his face, and hung like a squirming fat raindrop from the boy’s lower lip.

“Kent,” Max breathed, horror twining up his spine like a weed. “There’s a…”

Kent’s tongue snaked between his teeth, curled lovingly around the earwig, and drew it into his mouth. His eyes never left theirs.

22

WHEN EPHRAIM was eight, his mother took him to visit the mausoleum where his grandmother was kept. He remembered feeling slightly curious beforehand. Back then, Ephraim still held a healthy curiosity about death.

He remembered the thin acrid smell that had attended their entrance into the granite rostrum. The sterilized smell of death. It wasn’t the flyblown battlefield reek with its sweetness that was kissing cousin to a truly good smell—barbecued pork, maybe—a sensual similarity that made it all the more sickening. This was sanitized and tolerable. An ammoniac mothball smell overlying subtle decay.

Ephraim caught that same pungent smell as he’d crept down the cabin’s cellar steps. His heart made a giddy leap—what had died down here?

Ephraim had watched as Max and Newton guided Kent behind the cabin, wind snapping their clothes against their frames like flags flapping on a pole. A thin needle of regret had lanced through his heart. He’d argued with Max about abandoning Kent—and they never argued. Rage had pounded at Ephraim’s temples as his neck flushed with heat. No fists had been swung, but it’d been a fight all the same.

That bothered and confused him. Ephraim possessed a keen sense of fairness. He’d inherited that from his father; the only phrase he could ever recall him saying was: You pay what you owe. And his dad was paying now, in prison. Kent had earned his ills, hadn’t he? He needed to pay what he owed.

But where did that leave Ephraim now? In a cellar with Shelley Longpre—the last alignment he’d ever seek.

He pulled the doors shut, latching them from the inside. The wind and rain roared and bashed the cabin above. The swaybacked steps groaned under his feet. Long, straggly tendrils trailed lightly across Ephraim’s face: they felt like the dangling, unnaturally long limbs of a daddy longlegs spider.

He lit one of the candles he’d scavenged. It illuminated Shelley’s face—his skin seemed to radiate a light all its own, a greasy luminescence as if glowworms were stitched under it. Shadows, made misshapen and monstrous by the wavering candlelight, scurried along the cellar walls. The root systems of trees and plants dangled down from the roof.