The Troop

24

KENT WAS dreaming.

He was on the ocean with his father. Night was coming on. The eerie smoothness of the water, not a wave or ripple, was what made Kent realize that he was dreaming.

Kent was thinking about a girl in his class. Anna Uniak. Anna was pretty and trim and he was sure his father would approve. He often looked at Anna out of the corner of his eye—she sat one seat ahead and to the left of him at school. The light would fall through the classroom window and pick up the fine downy hairs on her cheeks. It looked like peach fuzz, Kent thought. He could eat Anna’s skin just like that—just like a peach…

The sky was strung with strange clouds. A dull crimson and hanging very low, bleeding into the setting sun. Kent thought he could see shapes in them—sinuous squirmings as if the clouds were coming apart in the face of the ocean wind, or giving birth to multiples, or something else he could put no name to.

His father wore his police uniform. His badge winked in the guttering embers of the day’s light. His father’s wrists, projecting from his sleeves, were wasted looking and his fingers too skeletal.

“It’ll be a long night,” he said. “And goddamn, I’m hungry.”

A flock of birds—not the ever-present gulls but jet-black, arrow-eyed ravens—flew overhead, shadowing their boat. Kent could hear their tortured cries and see their rotted beaks. Some kind of white, cindery dust was drifting down from beneath their wings. It fell through the air in little white ribbons, just like in a ticker-tape parade.

Fear stole into Kent’s heart. He wished he wasn’t so scared—his father had taught him that fear was a useless emotion. Fear is just weakness exiting the body, he’d said to Kent on many occasions.

But there was something wrong with the whole scene: the menacing shapes lurking within the clouds, the white things drifting down… and his father. His father—

The police uniform hung off his body. He lurched toward Kent with his arms outstretched—stick arms that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a concentration camp prisoner—his fingers just clattering bone. His face was all cheekbones and bulging brow and parchment-thin skin stretched to the point of tearing.

“A long night!” this starved apparition screamed at him. “A looong and hungry night! Yummy yum yum!”

His father reached for Kent, bony hands clawing round his shoulders, digging in, piercing the skin. Jeff Jenks leaned in and his skin now came apart: rifts appeared in the fabric of his face, fine lines like cracks in bone china, and then those rifts all met and began to wriggle and suddenly Kent was staring into a face made up of hundreds of white pulsating tubes.

“Nobody loves me,” his worm-father sang sadly. Writhing alabaster worms dripped off his lips and into his mouth, thrashing contentedly on the Swiss-cheesed root of his tongue. “Everybody hates me; I’m going to the garden to eat you.”

Kent toppled into the bottom of the boat with his father atop him. His father’s face fell apart in sections. The abominations detached and squirmed down his collar, pattering onto Kent’s upturned face like warm raindrops. They found his mouth and nose and ears and eyes, infiltrating them with greedy abandon.

“This is only fear entering the body,” his father said.

NEWTON WAS the one who suggested they make a list.

His own survival instincts told him this was the wisest plan. When the world was crumbling around your ears, your best bet was to set yourself a few simple tasks to focus your attention on. While you were working on those tasks, your mind had a chance to cope with the situation. If you could just get past the initial shock—the shock of death and of sudden isolation—then maybe a better plan would come to you later.

They stood down at the shore now: Ephraim, Max, Shelley, and Newton.

“Three things,” Newt said. “First, find some food. Second, medicine for Kent.”

“Why?” Shelley said. “He’s just going to end up like Tim.”

Newton glanced up sharply. Shut up, Shel. Shut up and go away. Walk into the ocean and just sink. “We don’t know that. We don’t know that at all.”

Shelley only smiled—sadly, poisonously, impossible to tell—and wandered down to the shoreline. That’s right, Newton thought. Just keep walking, jerkoid.

“Third,” Newton went on, “we either make a raft or oars for the boat we already have.”

Ephraim doubled over, clutching his knees, and vomited on the rocks. His body vibrated like a hard-struck tuning fork. He stayed that way for a while, breathing heavily, before straightening up and wiping his lips.

“I don’t know.” He stared at the other boys. “I don’t know what to do now.”

His gaze fell to his knuckles. He rubbed them with his fingers and spread blood down to his wrist. There was something obsessive about the way he did it.

Newton said: “It’s okay—”