The Troop

23

IN TIME, the wind died down. The storm blew out to the northern sea. Water dripped all around them; it seemed terribly loud, each drop producing a watery echo. The boys huddled, shivering and soaked, in the cellar—all except Kent, who sat in isolation under the tarp.

“We ought to check on the Scoutmaster,” Newton said.

Ephraim nodded. “Kent, you stay here.”

Kent’s face was wan and ghoulish above the burlap. It looked like the wooden face of Zoltar, that mechanical sideshow oracle at the Cavendish County Fair: 25 cents to know your future! Things were stuck in his braces, too… insect parts? Yes. Thoraxes and legs and antennae bristled from his mouth-metal. He was gnawing on the moldy tarp. Working the frayed edge like an old man gumming a carrot. A faraway look in his eyes—he could have been contemplating a lovely sunset.

“Okay,” he said. “I kinda like it down here, anyway.”

“You okay, K?” Newton asked, repulsion lying heavy in his gorge.

“Sure.” A death’s-head grin. “Never better.”

A collective unease enveloped the boys—even Shelley. How long had it been? Less than twelve hours. Half a day ago, Kent Jenks had been one of them. The biggest and strongest of them all. The boy everyone in North Point forecasted great things for. Now here he was, curled in a cellar, insects gummed in his teeth, gnawing mindlessly on a tarp. Reduced and squandered in some nasty, terrifying, unquantifiable way. Whatever was wrong with him, this sickness, it was rampaging. Barnstorming through his body, devouring him. Newton sensed this: that Kent was being eaten from the inside out, his flesh loosening by degrees, the meat flensed from his bones as his body shrunk inside his skin until… until what? This sickness cared nothing for Kent—for the man he could’ve become, for the bright future that seemed so assured. It was coring him out, ruining him in unfixable ways.

They left him down there. Ephraim shut the doors and jammed a stick between the handles so Kent couldn’t escape.

THE ISLAND was still in the passing of the storm.

As they’d heard from the cellar, the huge oak—one of only five or six truly big trees on Falstaff Island—had snapped, falling upon the cabin’s interlaced log walls. The spot where it had broken looked like the butt of a trick cigar: splinters of wood stuck out of the trunk at crazy angles, perfuming the air with sap.

They inhaled the peculiar scent of the earth after a storm while surveying the cabin. The roof was cleaved in half, sagging inward like a huge toothless mouth. The door hung off its shattered hinges. Ephraim hauled it open. His gaze fell to scrutinize his fingernails. He shot a look at Shelley—who caught his eyes and held them evenly.

“Careful as we go inside,” Ephraim said, sounding very much like Kent. “Cover your mouths like before.”

The roof had collapsed in a solid flap that resembled a wave set to break. The boys walked through a corridor of shadow created by the fallen roof and found Scoutmaster Tim in the splintered remains of the closet. The tree had snapped the two-by-fours and pancaked the closet’s plywood walls. The trunk had landed on his head and shoulders.

“Tim?” Newton said in a small, disbelieving voice. “Are you…?”

The final word—okay?—died on his lips. Scoutmaster Tim was definitely not okay.

The finality of the situation assaulted Newton. It was in the way the tree trunk sat flush with the floor. It was in the crushed eggshell of the Scoutmaster’s skull, which was visible—barely but hideously visible—beneath the bark. It was in the jagged purple lines that raced all over his flesh: the pressure had bulged and ruptured his vesicles. His skin looked like some gruesome jigsaw puzzle. It was in the sweet smell that rose off his body and the darker undernote of death: a somehow rusty smell, Newton thought, like the smell that came off a seized engine block at the dump. It was in the boot that had fallen off his foot—more like ejected off when the tree came crashing down, causing his legs to spike upward in one spastic motion, flinging his boot away. It was in the pale knob of his toe poking through the woolen sock. It was in the cricket that rested in the split V of his open shirt collar, which just then began to rub its legs together to produce a high humming song.

“He looks like the witch in The Wizard of Oz,” Shelley said. “The one the house landed on, not the one that melted.”

“Shut the fuck up, Shel,” Ephraim said hoarsely.

Newton’s heart was a wounded bird flapping inside his chest. He wanted to scream, but the sound was locked up under his lungs.

“What should we do?” he said. “Is he really…?”

He found it impossible to say. Dead. The word itself was somehow unapproachable. He knelt and touched Scoutmaster Tim’s hand. The flesh was cold and dank like a rock in a fast-running river.

“It’s okay, Newt,” Ephraim said. “It must have been fast, you know? I don’t think he even felt it.”