The Troop (15 page)

ANGER KEEP
CLEAR

• • •
You should
heed that warning,
his mother had said.

And ephraim
tried
to. But people were always pushing his buttons—which he had to admit were more like huge hair-trigger plungers. Whenever his emotions threatened to spill over, he’d follow his mother’s suggestion to breathe deeply and count slowly backward from ten.

10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . .3—
“Wild animals must have dragged it off while we were sleeping,” Kent said. “We should have hung it in a tree or something.”

Kent looked nothing like last night’s world beater. A dirty ring of sweat darkened his T-shirt collar; the same dark patches bloomed under his armpits. His eyes sat deep in his skull, the flesh around them netted in fine wrinkles: it looked a little like the wattle on an old biddy’s neck.

“Bull
shit,
“ said ephraim. “How would we not have heard animals making off with it?”
“I was pretty zonked,” max said.
ephraim pointed at newt. “You figure the masked Skunk made off with it, too?”
newton winced. “I was wiped last night, too. I mean, it
could
have—”
“Fuck, man—if one of you took it, just
admit it
,” ephraim said, his voice taking flight to an upper octave. “What do you think I’m going to do—go crazy? Start laying you guys out?” He raised his hands, all innocence. “You couldn’t have eaten it
all,
right? So we’ll just say you’ve had your fill and leave it at that.”
“Animals,” Kent croaked.
White-hot rage pounded at ephraim’s temples. His molars ground together so hard that he could hear them in his skull: thick plates of shale scraping against one another.
He stalked away from the campfire in the direction of the cabin . . . but he took a wide berth around it, continuing on into the sparse woods behind.
He pulled a Ziploc bag from his pocket. Three lonely cigarettes jostled inside. He’d hoped to duck away with max, sharing a smoke down by the shore while they stared at the stars. max didn’t smoke but eef planned to convince him to be his smokin’ buddy. otherwise it was just him, alone, launching off lung rockets. Snacking on cancer sticks. Which painted a pretty lame picture, actually.
He poked a cigarette into his mouth, flicked his brass Zippo, and touched the flame to tobacco. He inhaled, coughing as the gray vapor rasped his throat—at first it’d felt like swallowing fiberglass insulation, the pink kind stacked in bricks at the hardware store—hissing the smoke between his teeth. He tried to blow smoke rings, puffing out his cheeks, but the wind rose out of the west and tore them apart.
Birds called in a metallic
rhree-rhree-rhree:
a sound like a rusty axe drawn across a cinder block. The nicotine hit his system, nerve endings a-tingle.
Settle down,
he chastised himself.
So what if one of those assholes ate the food. You’ll be at your own kitchen table with a big plate of sausage and peppers in, like, what, two hours, right? Away from this island. Away from . . .
From the dead man. Which, truth be told, had freaked ephraim out more than anything in his life. Seeing the man laid out stiff with his limbs jutting at weirdo angles and his chest slicked in brown gunk— that had been the worst part: that he’d died streaked in filth—ephraim had barely managed to tamp down the high-pitched moan that had threatened to spill over his lips.
He’d never seen a dead person before. The closest he’d ever come to anything remotely like it was the time he’d been walking home from school and saw a hydro worker get blown off a power pole by a jolt of electricity. The guy had been thirty feet up in a cherry picker. A current surge must’ve ripped through the transformer. ephraim remembered the guy’s face and body lighting up like a Fourth of July sparkler. The flash was so bright that it printed everything on ephraim’s eyes in negative for a minute afterward.
The man rocketed out of the cherry picker as if there were dynamite in his boots. He hit a sapling on his way down; the limber little tree bent with his weight before snapping with a crisp green sound. By the time ephraim ran over, the workman was up and walking a dazed circle. The electricity had melted the treads of his boots: the rubber pooled around the soles as if he’d stepped in black jelly. ephraim found it painful to breathe: the dissipating electricity left a lingering acidic note. Smoke spindled out of the man’s overalls, right through the coarse orange weave of the fabric, rising off his shoulders in vaporous wings.
“Ah God ah God,” the guy was saying over and over. mincing around in stiff stutter-steps like a man walking barefoot over hot coals. “Ah God ah God ah God ah God . . .”
The flesh over his skull had melted down his forehead. The electricity had somehow loosened his skin without actually splitting it. Gravity had carried the melted skin downward: it wadded up along the ridge of his brow like the folds of a crushed-velvet curtain, or the skin on top of unstirred gravy pushed to one side of the pot. His hair had come down with it. His hairline now began in the middle of his forehead. The man didn’t seem to realize this. He kept hopping around saying “Ah God ah God . . .”
In the calm eye of horror, ephraim became aware of the tiniest details. like how the hairs on the man’s head were melted and charred, like the bristles of a hairbrush that had drawn too near an open flame. or how the skin on the man’s head—sheerer and hairless and now stretched with horrifying tension over the dome of his skull—was threaded with flimsy blue veins like the veins on a newborn baby’s skull.
He’d run to the truck and babbled into the CB radio. He was still babbling for help when the paramedics showed up.
That was the closest ephraim had ever come to death until last night. And the dead man here (
who the hell
was
he, anyway?
) had been so much worse because he had been so much more
final.
The dead man couldn’t get skin grafts and a hair weave like the workman could. All that lay in wait for the dead man was a lonely hole in the dirt.
And now Scoutmaster Tim was pretty sick, too. maybe the same way the dead man had been?
They’d locked him in that stupid closet; ephraim hadn’t quite felt right about it—he got carried away, was all. And now Kent looked like he’d been attacked by vampire bats in the night; they’d sucked a gallon of blood out of him and soon—
He inhaled deeply. Held it. let it go.
10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4. . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1
Are you angry, Eef?
came his mother’s voice.
Or are you scared?
ephraim realized that those emotions existed on two sides of a razor-thin line. one bled into the other so easily.
Anger. Keep out.
Fear . . . Keep out?
It’s always good to have a little fear, son, especially at your age,
he heard his mom say.
Fear keeps you honest. Fear keeps you safe.
ephraim stubbed the cigarette, dug a small hole in the earth—
a little grave for my coffin nail,
he thought cheerlessly—and buried the butt. He headed back to the campfire, confused in his thoughts.

From the sworn testimony of Nathan Erikson, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

Q: Dr. Erikson, please describe the discussion between Dr. Edgerton and yourself regarding the selection of a human test subject.
A: I wouldn’t really term it a discussion at all. Edgerton said he was doing it and I could come along for the ride if I wanted.

Q:And you agreed?
A: In for a penny? But I also thought . . . maybe I could help things somehow. Keep it under control.

Q:You could have kept it under control by informing the police.
A: I could have.

Q: But you didn’t.Why not?
A: It’s a tough thing to describe. Now that I’m away from it, the answers are so simple. Men like Edgerton are obsessives. Notions of right or wrong have this awful way of draining away to irrelevance with men like that.The only things that matter to them are
answers. Progress.
Unlocking doors. And if you can’t unlock them, you just kick at them until they give. I guess I was sucked up in it, too.

Q: Tell me how Dr. Edgerton went about finding Tom Padgett, the first human test subject.
A: It wasn’t so hard as you might think. It’s amazing how many people are so down on their luck they’ll take just about any offer that’s flung at them. Edgerton went to bars. Not the campus bars where the fresh-faced, rosy-futured kids drank.The scumpits on the edge of town. He . . .
trolled,
is I guess the word. Threw his bait in the water and waited for a bite.

Q: He told Padgett his plan?
A: Not right off the bat. He did it in stages. I don’t know the exact run of their conversation.You’d have to ask Edgerton.

Q: Dr. Edgerton is not an easy man to get a straight answer out of.
A: Edgerton just brought Padgett back one night. Guy smelled like he’d been marinating in a tub of Old Grouse. Edgerton explained it all calmly and evenly. He’d take the injection and sit in the room.We’d monitor him. If things got out of hand we’d call a doctor—never mind the fact that no doctor on earth had a cure for what Edgerton would stick him with. Edgerton handed him a nice fat envelope. I don’t know how much cash was in there. I guess it was enough.

20

THe cOOleR
was discovered two hundred yards down toward the shore. There was no physical evidence to indicate it had been dragged: no zigzag lines through the soft dirt or trampled weeds. This suggested it had been picked up and carried to its present spot. It lay overturned in a patch of purple-pink shrubs.

But the crude way that the food had been shredded
did
suggest an animal. The hot dog packages had been torn open. raw rags of the granular pink meat lay scattered about the cooler, alit upon by listless late-october flies. m&ms were strewn around like multicolored jewels.

ephraim kicked dirt over a half-chewed hot dog. His jaw was set at a sideways angle, his eyes hooded.
“Fuck it. Boat’ll be here soon.”
The boys walked down to the shore. They hadn’t packed their bags—none of them wanted to go inside the cabin, though none of them spoke those words. The air was crisp, with a soft undernote of peppermint. The face of newt’s Timex Ironman read 8:23. The boat was scheduled to arrive at 8:30.
Kent slumped on a boulder carpeted with moss that resembled the fuzz on a tennis ball. When he was sure nobody was watching, he pinched some moss and stuffed it into his mouth. He didn’t know why he’d do such a thing. It shamed and disgusted him.
He was just so damned hungry.
newton sidled up. Cautiously he said: “You okay, K?”
“I’m fine.”
“You look a little green.” newton gave him a chummy smile and pointed to the water. “like me when I get seasick. The rest of my family have great sea legs, but not me. When the boat gets swaying, I just toss my cookies. lose my lunch every time.”
“newt, screw off.” Kent gave newton a look more pleading than threatening. “okay? Please?”
He turned away and caught Shelley gawping at him. That same stunned look as always—was it, though?
Kent had been sure the others were asleep when he’d woken last night. The growl of his stomach had drawn him out of a deep slumber: an aching burr like a chain saw revving endlessly. He’d sat up with his hands reflexively clawing his belly.
His eyes had darted to the cooler. next he’d glanced at the other boys, scrutinizing them carefully. They were asleep, newton snoring loud as a leaf blower.
His gaze had been drawn helplessly to the cooler. The hunger was like nothing he’d ever known. Beyond an ache. more like an insistence. A
summoning.
There was a big, dark pit inside of him—something that had started out as a pinprick hole but had rapidly grown into a vortex, the equivalent of a violent tornado, but instead of the random objects that a twister pulls into its funnel—trees and mailboxes and lawn mowers—the one inside of him was sucking at his own insides, his liver and kidney and lungs and stomach, with the incredible pressure of industrial machinery.
Kent had been terrified that if he let it go on much longer, the hole would suck clean through him—
out
of him.
He’d stood silently and crept to the cooler. His heart beat a staccato high-hat behind his rib cage. His bladder was so tight he thought he might piss himself. Kent had forced himself to exhale softly—otherwise his breath would escape in shrill peeps like a baby bird calling for food. And what did baby birds eat? Worms. Their mothers chewed them up in their flinty beaks and regurgitated them. Worms just like the one that still lay on the cabin floor next to the dead man. except not that big. And not so maggot-white. It would take a million birds to eat a worm that huge.
Kent’s hands had crawled over the cooler’s lid. The pebbled plastic reminded him of summer picnics. An ice-carpeted cooler with the brown necks of Coke bottles poking up. Watermelon sliced two inches thick. He’d bite through its pink flesh and spit the black seeds . . . seeds that looked a little like blood-swollen ticks, now that he thought about it.
His hands flirted over wieners and buns and teardrops of chocolate wrapped in silver foil. Surely one couldn’t hurt? It was
his
anyway. onefifth of this food was earmarked for him. So what if Kent wanted to eat his share in the middle of the night?
He’d plucked a Hershey’s Kiss from the bag with trembling fingers. A runner of drool stretched into a glimmering ribbon in the firelight. He’d unwrapped the chocolate quickly and popped it into his mouth. Chewing and swallowing . . .
Before his mind could catch up to the mechanical movements of his fingers, the bag was empty. He’d lost track of things. His fingers and lips were streaked with brown chocolate.
Brown
—Kent’s gorge rose with quick revulsion—brown like the muck pooling out of the dead man’s stomach.
With swift, silent movements, he carried the cooler down near the shore. Things went hazy from there. Kent could only recall brief glints and flashes. Tearing and rending. Shoveling and swallowing. He may have wept while doing it.
At some point he’d glanced up and saw Shelley watching. Shelley, who should have been sleeping. Shelley, whose face had gone wolfish in the moonlight.