The Troop

Newton spoke with his head down. “You think so?”

Max sincerely hoped it was so. He felt sick. His Scoutmaster—the adult he’d known longer than anyone besides his own parents—had died in a closet. The one person with the best ideas for getting them off this island was gone, and he’d left five dumb, piss-scared kids behind.

“Should we bury him?” Ephraim said.

Before any of them had a chance to respond, Scoutmaster Tim’s stomach began to move.

At first it was barely visible; it seemed as if weak fingers were pawing at it from the inside. Max watched, his mouth unhinged. It was sickeningly mesmerizing.

“What…” Ephraim breathed, “…is that?”

A fragile white tube broke the surface of the skin an inch above the Scoutmaster’s navel. It pushed through insistently, twisting around as if tasting the air. It was followed quickly by another and another. Soon there were seven or eight: it looked like the legs of an albino spider struggling to escape its spider hole.

Each tube was slightly pebbled—they seemed to be studded with something. Max squinted closer. They were… oh God, they were mouths. Little mouths like the ones on a sucker fish.

The Scoutmaster’s stomach split soundlessly, like Saran Wrap, groin to rib cage. Hundreds of worms came boiling out, all much smaller versions of the single massive abomination that had come out of the other man—the stranger. Some were the thickness of butcher’s twine, but most were frail and wispy, as insubstantial as the clipped threads of a spiderweb. They twisted and roiled and spilled down the Scoutmaster’s papery flesh: his skin empty of blood and nutrients, just a soft white covering like dry fatback.

Max noticed that the worms didn’t appear to be singular entities. Rather they were twisted together—a pulpy white ball radiating dozens or hundreds. It was as if something had gathered them up and tied them all into a bulging knot, like that ball they saw yesterday in the rocks—a knot of fucking snakes. These spiky worm-balls tumbled over one another, squirming and shucking. A horrible low hissing noise emanated from the Scoutmaster’s chest cavity.

“No,” Newt said, his head snapping side to side. “No no no no…”

The hissing noise stopped. Slowly, achingly, the worms stretched as a single unit—a cooperative hive-mind—toward the sound of Newton’s voice.

“Jesus,” said Ephraim.

Then the worms swung in his direction.

Some of them swelled menacingly, a small bead crowning at their tips. There came a series of dim, pop-gun percussions. Delicate strands wafted through the air, sunlight falling along their ghostly wavering contours.

Ephraim stepped back. He swatted at the strands with a helpless look on his face. He stared at his knuckles, which were broken open and still weeping slug-trails of blood from his fight with Kent.

Max knew Ephraim so well that he could almost see the crazed thought forming in the other boy’s head.

They can get inside of me through there. These wounds are basically wide-open doors in my body…

Through an aperture in the cleaved roof, Max spotted a slit of perfectly blue sky—that scintillating blue that comes on the heels of a bad storm—and below, a scrim of gray marking the mainland. His parents would be there. Why hadn’t they come yet? His folks, and Newt’s and Eef’s and Kent’s and Shelley’s, too? Fuck old man Watters—if he couldn’t get his ancient ass in gear, why wouldn’t their folks show up? Kent’s dad could use the police patrol boat—special dispensation, right? An emergency. But no, they’d left their kids alone on this killing floor of an island. Two men were dead already, and Kent was bad off. Death warmed over, as Max’s mom would say. Except for Kent, death might come as a relief. A shudder fled down Max’s spine—the very thought of Kent, dead, his body invaded by these things…

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