The Troop

The man turned his brightly burning gaze on him. It was a gaze of mindless terror and desperate longing, but what really spooked Tim was its laserlike focus: this man clearly wanted something. Needed it.

The stranger shuffled closer, pawing down the buttons of his shirt, running a quaking hand through his greasy pelt of hair. Tim suddenly understood: the man was making token efforts to render himself presentable.

“Do you have anything… to eat?”

“I might,” said Tim. “Are you here alone?”

The man nodded. A quivering string of drool spooled over his lip, hung, snapped. His skin was stretched thin as crepe paper over his skull. Capillaries wormed across his nose, over his cheeks, and down his neck like river routes on a topographical map. His arms jutted from his T-shirt like Tinker Toys. The skin was shrink-wrapped around the radius and ulna bones, giving his elbows the appearance of knots in a rope.

The man said, “Are you alone?”

It was safer to let the stranger think so. “Yes, I’m doing some geological surveys.”

The man picked up a handful of coarse soil and stuffed it in his mouth. To Tim, it looked like an involuntary reflex action, same as blinking your eyes.

“Whoa! Hey, you don’t have to… to eat that,” Tim said, struggling to maintain his calm. “I have food.”

The man smiled. A death’s-head grimace. His lips were thin bloodless fillets. His gums had receded severely, making his teeth look like yellowing tusks clashing inside his mouth, dark soil lodged in their chinks.

“Food, yes. So nice. Thank you.”

As a doctor, Tim had dealt with the human form in all its revolting variations. He’d emptied colostomy bags. Seen throbbing tumors pulled out of stomachs. But this man was sick in some unnatural way that Tim had never encountered. It sent a spike of pure dread down his spine.

Unclean, his mind yammered. This man is unclean…

The man’s stink hit Tim flush in the nose. A high fruity reek with an ammoniac undernote. Ketosis. The man’s body was breaking down its fatty acids in a last-ditch effort to keep its vital organs functioning. When burnt, ketones released a sickly sweet smell—the desperate reek of a body consuming itself. The stench coming out of the man’s mouth was like a basket of peaches rotting in the sun.

Tim tried not to inhale, certain that it would trigger his gag reflex; the man swooned, equilibrium failing, and Tim impulsively wrapped a steadying hand around the guy’s waist…

He reared back. When his hand slipped under the man’s shirt, over his stomach, he’d felt movement. Something stirring under his skin.

That’s absurd, he told himself. It was just gas. Maybe even a section of herniated intestine. God only knows what’s wrong with him.

Despite these rational protestations, he couldn’t shake the feeling. It lingered on his fingertips: a sly flex beneath the skin, as though something had reacted to his touch before settling again.

The man shuffled toward the cabin and its burning lamp with mothlike determination. His moonlight-glossed eyes were a pair of blown fuses screwed into the fleshless mask of his face. Tim stuck his arm out, palm up, stopping him—a purely instinctive gesture.

He didn’t want this man in the cabin with the boys. Not yet, maybe not at all.

“Wait a sec, hold your horses,” he said, addressing the man as he might a hyperactive child. “Are you lost? Do you even know where you are? I’ve never seen you around.”

The man pushed his body against Tim’s palm, rocking slightly so the pressure intensified, slackened, intensified again. Tim got the sense the man knew it must’ve revolted Tim—the fluctuating contact, the man’s skin weeping oily sweat like the residue on an ancient crankcase. Tim laughed as if this were all a joke, some weird misunderstanding; but there was a brittle glass-snap edge to his laughter that transformed it into a loony cackle.

“I’m lost,” the man said. “Lost and… unwell. Just a night. I’ll leave in the morning. Please—feed me.”

“Do you have a family?” Tim couldn’t explain why this seemed crucial: Was this man missed by anybody at all? “Is anyone looking for you?”

The man only repeated himself: “Just one night. Food. Please.”

Tim debated leaving him. He could bring food out, let him feed in the woods (his word choice puzzled him, yet it felt right: this wasn’t a man who wanted something to eat—this was a man who needed to feed). Tim could restrict the boys to quarters, even, eliminating all contact. Leaving the man out here went against just about every tenet of the Hippocratic Oath, but an aspect of good doctoring was triage. You couldn’t save everyone. Sad fact of life. So you saved the youngest, or the ones with the best hope of survival.

“Please.”

The man offered the most wretched smile. Could Tim possibly leave him alone and starving a few feet outside the cabin? Could he live with that stain on his soul?