The Troop

32

KENT WAS a beast. He could kill at will.

For a while there, he’d thought differently. When the other boys had left him in the cellar—abandoned him like a whipped dog—he’d been scared. So, so scared.

He’d felt his strength seeping away like the air from a leaky tire.

The things that lived in him now were awesomely hungry.

He knew they were there. He’d lain on the dirt floor and felt them sliding around inside him. A soft whisper came to his ears: a million snakes slithering across frictionless sand.

The thought occurred to him: he could die here. It didn’t quite seem possible. He was only fourteen. Didn’t God look out for drunks and children? That’s what his father always said.

At some point, Shelley had come to the cellar doors to feed him. The peanut brittle did nothing to kill his appetite. But whatever Shelley had given him next—tough and rubbery on the exterior, bursting with warm softness within—now that made him feel great.

Still, Shelley had been a bad boy. Shelley had promised meat. And Kent would soon get what he was owed.

Fresh energy percolated through him. His blood zitzed with adrenaline. He felt as though he’d eaten a raw steak—Shelley should have brought me steak; you should never go back on your word, Shelley you scumbag—as he inhaled the scent of blood that was not his own.

Kent was powerful. Oh yes.

He stood in the cellar, shoulders hunched. He could feel new bones growing up his back. They clawed through muscle and tendon before breaking through the skin on both shoulders. It was perfectly painless: he imagined this was what a caterpillar felt like when it emerged from its chrysalis as a beautiful butterfly.

Brand-new strength shot through him. Pounds of fresh muscle were slabbed onto his arms and legs. His chest cracked apart and widened as his shoulders grew broader and thicker. He did not feel pain or fear anymore. Was this how a superhero felt—or a god? Was that what he was now?

Weak light streamed through chinks in the floor, falling across his new contours. His body was a mass of fast-twitch muscle fibers and vein-riven flesh. He laughed: a low baritone. He could smash through the cellar door if he wanted to. He could find the boys who’d locked him up and tear their bodies apart like paper dolls. Find Ephraim, son of the no-good jailbird, and crush his skull to splinters.

Perhaps he would. Or perhaps he would be merciful.

But for now he’d wait. They would see him soon enough. Although their tepid hearts might burst at the sight of him.

WHEN THE other boys didn’t return by nightfall, Shelley decided to kill Kent.

That was the thing about spinning so many plates—inevitably, one would topple off the pole. But the prospect of watching those plates shatter excited Shelley enormously.

He’d found a dead sheepshead on the beach. It had washed in with the afternoon tide, rotted and picked at by sunfish. He skewered it on a sharpened stick and carried it back to the campfire.

It was near dark when he stole around to the cellar with the dead fish. His breath came heavily, like a moose in rut. A dank musk dumped out of Shelley’s pores: sour adrenaline mixed with something else, something fouler.

Shelley jimmied the stick loose from the cellar doors and flung them open. The granular light of dusk sifted down the steps. Shadows twisted on the warped wood. Shelley took a cautious step forward, hunting for movement in the gloom.

“Kent?”

Shelley’s prey dragged himself up the steps tortuously, a ghoul crawling out of a shattered coffin. For an instant, Shelley thought he had no skin: it was just a shambling, jerking Kent-skeleton advancing upon him. As he drew closer, Shelley realized that the thinnest stretching of skin still clad Kent’s wasted frame. He was covered in bulging boils: they looked like halved golf balls under his flesh. His eyes were cored sockets: Shelley was amazed they hadn’t fallen out of his head to dangle by their glistening ocular stalks…

…Kent rose from the cellar, exultant. The newly crowned king. His body shone like rippled steel in the moonlight. Power and strength coursed through him. He was unstoppable. He came slowly, savoring it. His feet echoed on the steps like distant thunder. He curled his hands into fists and watched heatless lightning crackle and pop between his knuckles. He could kill a man with a look—with a simple thought. He had eaten the godhead and taken its power…