The Troop

Headline from The Weird News Network, online edition, October 19:

1

EAT EAT EAT EAT

The boat skipped over the waves, the drone of its motor trailing across the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The moon was a bone fishhook in the clear October sky.

The man was wet from the spray that kicked over the gunwale. The outline of his body was visible under his drenched clothes. He easily could have been mistaken for a scarecrow left carelessly unattended in a farmer’s field, stuffing torn out by scavenging animals.

He’d stolen the boat from a dock at North Point, at the farthest tip of Prince Edward Island, reaching the dock in a truck he’d hotwired in a diner parking lot.

Christ, he was hungry. He’d eaten so much at that roadside diner that he’d ruptured his stomach lining—the contents of his guts were right now leaking through the split tissue, into the crevices between his organs. He wasn’t aware of that fact, though, and wouldn’t care much anyway in his current state. It’d felt so good to fill the empty space inside of him… but it was like dumping dirt down a bottomless hole: you could throw shovelful after shovelful, yet it made not the slightest difference.

Fifty miles back, he’d stopped at the side of the road, having spotted a raccoon carcass in the ditch. Torn open, spine gleaming through its fur. It had taken great effort to not jam the transmission collar into park, go crawling into the ditch, and…

He hadn’t done that. He was still human, after all.

The hunger pangs would stop, he assured himself. His stomach could only hold so much—wasn’t that, like, a scientific fact? But this was unlike anything he’d ever known.

Images zipped through his head, slideshow style: his favorite foods lovingly presented, glistening and overplumped and too perfect, ripped from the glossy pages of Bon Appétit—a leering parody of food, freakishly sexual, hyperstylized, and lewd.

He saw cherries spilling from a wedge of flaky pie, each one nursed to a giddy plumpness, looking like a mess of avulsed bloodshot eyeballs dolloped with a towering cone of whipped cream…

Flash.

A porterhouse thick as a dictionary, shank bone winking from fat-marbled meat charred to crackly doneness, a pat of herbed butter melting overtop; the meat almost sighs as the knife hacks through it, cooked flesh parting with the deference of smoothly oiled doors…

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

What wouldn’t he eat now? He yearned for that raccoon. If it were here now, he’d rip the hardened rags of sinew off its tattered fur; he’d crush its skull and sift through the splinters for its brain, which would be as delicious as the nut-meat of a walnut.

Why hadn’t he just eaten the fucking thing?

Would they come for him? He figured so. He was their failure—a human blooper reel—but also the keeper of their secret. And he was so, so toxic. At least, that’s what he overheard them say.

He didn’t wish to hurt anyone. The possibility that he may already have done so left him heartsick. What was it that Edgerton had said?

If this gets out, it’ll make Typhoid Mary look like Mary Poppins.

He was not an evil man. He’d simply been trapped and had done what any man in his position might do: he’d run. And they were coming for him. Would they try to capture him, return him to Edgerton? He wondered if they’d dare do that now.

He wasn’t going back. He’d hide and stay hidden.

He doubled over, nearly spilling over the side, hunger pangs gnawing into his gut. He blinked stinging tears out of his eyes and saw a dot of light dancing on the horizon.

An island? A fire?

2

TIM RIGGS—Scoutmaster Tim, as his charges called him—crossed the cabin’s main room to the kitchen, fetching a mug from the cupboard. Unzipping his backpack, he found the bottle of Glenlivet.

The boys were in bed—not asleep, mind you; they’d stay up telling ghost stories half the night if he allowed it. And often, he did allow it. Nobody would ever label him a killjoy, and besides, this was the closest thing to a yearly vacation a few of these boys ever got. It was a vacation for Tim, too.

He poured himself a spine-stiffening belt of scotch and stepped onto the porch. Falstaff Island lay still and tranquil under the blanket of night. Surf boomed against the beachhead two hundred yards down the gentle grade, a sound like earthbound thunder.

Mosquitoes hummed against the porch screen. Moths battered their powdery bodies against the solitary lightbulb. The night cool, the light of the moon falling through a lacework of bare branches. None of the trees were too large—the island’s base was bare rock pushed up from the ocean, a sparse scrim of soil on its surface. The trees had a uniformly deformed look, like children nourished on tainted milk.

Tim rolled the scotch around in his mouth. As the sole doctor on Prince Edward Island’s north shore, it wasn’t proper that he be caught imbibing publicly. But here, miles from his job and the duty it demanded, a drink seemed natural. Essential, even.

He relished this yearly trip. Some might find his reasoning strange—wasn’t he isolated enough, living alone in his drafty house on the cape? But this was a different kind of isolation. For two days, he and the boys would be alone. One cabin, a few trails. A boat dropped them off with their supplies earlier this evening; it would return on Sunday morning.

It almost hadn’t happened. The weekend forecast was calling for a storm; weather reports had it rolling in off the northern sea, one of those thunderhead-studded monsters that infrequently swept across the island province—half storm, half tornado, they’d tear shingles off houses and snap saplings at the dirt line. But the latest Doppler maps had it veering east into the Atlantic, where it would expend its fury upon the vast empty water.

As a precaution, Tim had ensured that the marine radio was fully charged; if the skies began to threaten, he’d radio the mainland for an early pickup. In truth, he disliked the necessity of the shortwave radio. Tim had strict rules for this outing. No phones. No portable games. He’d made the boys turn out their pockets on the dock at North Point to ensure they weren’t smuggling any item that’d link them to the mainland.

But considering the weather, the shortwave radio was a necessary evil. As the Scout handbook said: Always be prepared.

A bark of laughter from the bunkroom. Kent? Ephraim? Tim let it go. At their age, boys were creatures of enormous energy: machines that ran on testosterone and raw adrenaline. He could barge in there, shushing and tut-tutting, reminding them of the long day ahead of them tomorrow—but why? They were having fun, and energy was never in short supply among that group.

Fact was, this trip was as necessary for Tim as it was for his charges. He was unmarried and childless—a situation that, at forty-two, in a small town harboring precious few dating prospects, he didn’t expect to change. He’d grown up in Ontario and moved to PEI a few years after his residency, buying a house on the cape, learning how to string a lobster trap—See? I’m making a genuine effort!—and settling into the island rhythms. Hell, his voice had even picked up a hint of the native twang. Yet he’d forever be viewed as a “come-from-away.” People were unfailingly friendly and respectful of his skills, but his veins swam with mainlander blood: he bore the taint of Toronto, the Big Smoke, the snobby haves to PEI’s hardscrabble have-nots. Around here, it’s as much a case of who you’re from as where you’re from: bloodlines ran thick, and the island held close its own.

Mercifully, his Scouts didn’t care that Tim was a “come-from-away.” He was everything they could possibly want in a leader: knowledgeable and serene, exuding confidence while bolstering their own; he’d learned the native flora and fauna, knew how to string a leg snare and light a one-match fire, but most crucially, he treated them with respect—if the boys were not quite yet his equals, Tim gave every impression that he’d welcome them as such once they’d passed the requisite boyhood rituals. Their parents trusted Tim; their families were all patients at his practice in North Point.

The boys were tight-knit. The five of them had come up together through Beavers, Cubs, Scouts, and now Venturers. Tim had known them since their first Lodge Meeting: a quintet of five-year-olds hesitantly reciting the Beaver pledge—I promise to love God and take care of the world.

But this would be their last hurrah. Tim understood why. Scouts was… well, dorky. Kids of this generation didn’t want to dress in beige uniforms, knot their kerchiefs, and earn Pioneering badges. The current movement was overpopulated with socially maladjusted little turds or grating keeners whose sashes were festooned with merits.

But these five boys under Tim had remained engaged in Scouting simply because they wanted to be. Kent was one of the most popular boys in school. Ephraim and Max were well liked, too. Shelley was an odd duck, sure, but nobody gave him grief.

And Newton… well, Newt was a nerd. A good kid, an incredibly smart kid, but let’s face it, a full-blown nerd.

It wasn’t simply that the boy was overweight; that was a conquerable social obstacle, no worse than a harelip or pimples or shabby clothes. No, poor Newt was simply born a nerd, as certain unfortunates are. Had Tim been in the delivery room, he’d’ve sensed it: an ungrippable essence, unseen but deeply felt, dumping out of the babe’s body like a pheromone. Tim pictured the obstetrician handing Newton to his exhausted mother with a doleful shake of his head.

Congratulations, Ms. Thornton, he’s a healthy baby nerd. He’s bound to be a wonderful man, but for the conceivable future he’ll be a first-rank dweeb—a dyed-in-the-wool Poindexter.

All boys gave off a scent, Tim found—although it wasn’t solely an olfactory signature; in Tim’s mind it was a powerful emanation that enveloped his every sense. For instance, Bully-scent: acidic and adrenal, the sharp whiff you’d get off a pile of old green-fuzzed batteries. Or Jock-scent: groomed grass, crushed chalk, and the locker room funk wafting off a stack of exercise mats. Kent Jenks pumped out Jock-scent in waves. Other boys, like Max and Ephraim, were harder to define—Ephraim often gave off a live-wire smell, a power transformer exploding in a rainstorm.

Shelley… Tim considered between sips of scotch and realized the boy gave off no smell at all—if anything the vaporous, untraceable scent of a sterilized room in a house long vacant of human life.

Newton, though, stunk to high heaven of Nerd: an astringent and unmistakable aroma, a mingling of airless basements and dank library corners and tree forts built for solitary habitation, of dust smoldering inside personal computers, the licorice tang of asthma puffer mist and the vaguely narcotic smell of model glue—the ineffable scent of isolation and lonely forbearance. Over time a boy’s body changed, too: his shoulders stooped to make their owner less visible, the way defenseless animals alter their appearance to avoid predators, while their eyes took on a flinching, hunted cast.

Newton couldn’t help it. A trait burdened to his DNA helix, inexcisable from his other attributes—which, Tim gloomily noted, were numerous but not valuable at his age: Newton was unfailingly kind and polite, read books, and made obvious attempts at self-betterment—the equivalent of an air-raid siren blaring in a tranquil neighborhood: NEeeeerd-AleeeRT! NEeeeerd-AleeeRT! Tim felt incredibly protective of Newton and was saddened by his inability to help… but an adult protecting a boy only opened that boy up to further torments.

Tim stepped down from the porch to turn off the generator. Mosquitoes zeroed in; he felt them at the back of his neck like drunks at the bar set to guzzle their fill. He slapped them as he walked around the back of the cabin, his fingers brushing the log wall for balance—he’d drank that scotch too fast…

Here they came, the mosquitoes alighting on every bare inch of skin, sinking in their proboscises and injecting itchy poison. He stumbled upon the generator, barking his shin on its metal housing, fumbling for the switch while swatting at the hovering bloodsuckers; after an increasingly distracted search—he paused to wave at what felt like a massing sheet of insects—he thumbed it off.

The porch light dimmed. In the new darkness, the mosquitoes seemed to multiply exponentially; Tim felt them everywhere, their bloodless legs dancing on his flesh, the maddening whine of their papery wings filling his ears. He slapped wildly, barely tamping down the sudden yelp that rose in his throat. A semisolid wall pulsed on every side—a buzzing, biting, poisonous shroud. In his ears, tickling his nose, fretting at the edges of his eyes.

“Bloodthirsty bastards…”

Grasping blindly for the door, Tim flung it open and staggered into the screened-in porch. He slapped himself down the way a ranch-hand whaps the dust off after tumbling from a horse, relishing the soft crumple of the mosquitoes’ bodies.

Tim let out a ragged exhale that ended as a mirthless laugh. His hands were sticky with pulped insects. He thought about Gulliver tied down by thousands of Little People—a scene that had never stirred fear in him until now. The prospect of being beset by thousands, millions, of tiny assailants was actually quite terrifying.

In the new silence, he heard a steady drone rolling across the water—the sound of an outboard motor. An emergency on the mainland? No. Someone would have radioed him first.

He went inside and checked the shortwave radio. It gave off a low hiss that indicated a functioning frequency. Outside, the motor’s burr intensified.

Tim lit a Coleman lamp and sat on the porch. He clawed at the whitened bumps on his neck, wrists, and hands. A shiver rolled up his legs and through his gut, which clenched painfully as gooseflesh broke out on his arms. He laughed—a confused, gooselike whoonk!—and smoothed his hands over his skin, which was pebbled like orange rind. His bladder tightened with piss as the pleasant scotch taste soured in his mouth.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

Carl Jung. Undergrad psychology. Jung, Tim would later conclude, was a blowhard and a crank and anyway, his theories were of limited value to a small-town GP whose day-to-day consisted of administering flu shots and excising ingrown nails from the toes of windburnt fishermen. As such, Tim had forgotten the name of Jung’s book and the name of the professor who’d taught it—but the quote came to him whole cloth, the words leaping from a dark cubbyhole in his memory.

The wickedness of others becomes our own…

Tim Riggs stood in the screened patio, vaguely uneasy for no reason he could lay a finger on—the wind called a mordant note through the sickly trees while other, less explicable sounds scraped up the beachhead toward him—waiting for that unknown wickedness to arrive.

3

EAT EAT—

Dark. So dark.

Empty.

Before, there had been light. He’d been following it. Moth to a flame. Now it was gone. Just this insane eye-clawing darkness… and the hunger.

The man crawled up a stony beach, skidding on the water-smooth pebbles. The rocks were slick with cold, snotlike algae. He scooped it up and shoveled it into his mouth, sucking the dark green strings through his lips like a child slurping egg noodles.

There! Skittering along, its exoskeleton glossed in the moonlight. A sand crab. His hand closed over it—its ocean-coldness wept into his flesh—and stuffed it between his lips. He felt it dancing along his tongue with its hairy little legs. He bit down. A gout of salty goo squirted in his mouth. Its pincer snipped the tip of his tongue in a death spasm, bringing the penny-bright taste of blood; he swallowed the twitching bits convulsively, the spiny exoskeleton tearing into the soft tissues of his throat—which felt so thin now, nothing but a fleshy drainpipe, the skin stretched tight as crepe paper over his esophageal tube.

A path materialized, tamped down through the waist-high grass. A black-bodied spider sat on a blade of grass. He pinched it between his fingers before it could get away and ate it up. Very nice, very nice. Succulent.

He squinted. A box sat angled at the hillside, its shadow tilting against the shapeless night. Its geometries were too perfect for it to be anything but man-made.

A feeble pinprick of light emanated from within.

4

“YOU GUYS ever hear about the Gurkhas?”

Ephraim Elliot’s face hovered in the flashlight’s glow like the disembodied head of a sideshow oracle. The other boys lay propped up on their elbows, listening intently.

“They’re these elite soldiers, right, from Nepal? Little guys. Five foot tall. Munchkins, practically. Crazy buggers. They’re trained from the time they’re infants to do one thing and do it well—to kill. The Gurkhas are crack-shots with a rifle. They can peg the pollen off a bumblebee’s ass at a hundred yards. They are masters with the kherkis, too—a long curved knife they keep wicked sharp. They can split a human hair with their knives… split it into thirds.”

“Seriously, Eef ?” said Newton Thornton, his pillow-messed hair sticking up in tufts.

“You bet,” Ephraim said soberly. “What hardly anyone knows is that a planeload of Gurkha warriors went down off the coast. They were on their way home after a very hairy mission—trench warfare, heads spiked on sticks, that sort of thing. These guys were driven half-crazy by the blood, right? The government of Nepal would probably have locked them up in a funny farm so they wouldn’t kill and maim anybody… but they never made it home. The plane went down over the ocean right around here.”

Shelley Longpre listened intently. The usual gray of his eyes—which most often resembled chunks of dirty ice—were now hard and bright with interest.

Ephraim said, “They could even be here. This island. It’s isolated, quiet. Hardly anyone comes to Falstaff Island except the odd fisherman or, well… us. The scouts of Troop Fifty-Two.”

Max Kirkwood raised three fingers of his right hand and recited solemnly: “I promise to do my best, to do my duty to God, the queen, and to obey the laws of the Eagle Scout troop.”

“Their bodies were never found,” Ephraim said, smiling at Max. “If they’re still alive, they would be total batshit madmen by now. But even if they were here, stalking this island, there’s a way to save yourself. The Gurkhas attack at night, okay? Always. They sneak into your cabin silent as death. They hover over your bed and feel your bootlaces. If they’re laced over and under…” Ephraim drew his thumb across his throat, a slitting motion. “But if they’re laced straight across, same way the Gurkhas lace them, they’ll let you live.” He yawned. “Well, good night, guys.”

His flashlight snapped off. Soon afterward, a body thumped onto the floor. Ephraim’s flashlight pinned Newton in a halo of stark light, lying in a heap beside his boots.

Ephraim said: “I knew you’d crack, Newt!”

Newton sat up awkwardly, rubbing his knees. His skin was even pinker than usual in the flashlight’s glow: piglet-pink.

“Jeez, well…” Newton bowed his head, rubbing his eye sockets. “You ought to be ashamed, Eef, telling that creepy stuff…”

Kent Jenks cried, “Newt, you bed-wetter!”

Shelley merely watched with an owlish expression, large yellow-tinted eyes staring from the milky oval of his face. Not smiling or laughing with the others—a blank test pattern of a face, expressive of nothing much at all.

“Boys, hey! Come on, now,” Scoutmaster Tim said, stepping into the room. “It’s all fun and games until someone falls out of bed. What say we call it quits for the night, okay?”

Newton stood, still rubbing his eyes, and heaved his bulk into the top bunk—but not before checking his bootlaces to make sure they were laced straight across.

“Go to sleep, fellas,” Scoutmaster Tim said. Newton thought he could glimpse signs of strain on his Scoutmaster’s face: a vaguely panicked cast to his eyes. “Big day tomorrow.”

The door shut. Wind raced over the sea, howling around the cabin’s edges. The logs groaned, a melancholy note like the hull of an old Spanish galleon buffeted by ocean waves. The boys lay in their bunks, breathing heavily. Ephraim whispered:

“Gurkhas gonna get you, Newt.”

5

TIM HEARD the man before he arrived. Heard him coming at a tortured shamble like a disoriented bear stirred from hibernation.

By nature, Tim was calm and unflappable—a valuable personality trait for a doctor, whose day could swing from soothing and treating a boy with a simple case of measles to inserting a tracheal stent in the throat of a girl who’d gone into anaphylactic shock following a bee sting. He’d spent nearly a year in Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders—had he been rabbity by nature, there was no way he’d have lasted that long. His mind naturally gravitated to the most likely causes, and from there coolly cataloged the possible effects.

Fact One: a boat had arrived. Could be one of the boys’ parents—had Newton forgotten his asthma inhaler? Likely not, seeing as Newt rarely forgot anything. Could be a ship had gone down—had a trawler capsized while netting pollack in the westerly seas?—and the boat contained its bedraggled survivors.

Tim’s mind snapped into triage mode: if that were the case, they’d need medical attention; he’d stabilize them here, on the beachhead if need be, and radio for a medevac chopper.

Or it could be a drunk from the mainland who’d lost his way on a night-fishing jaunt. Unlike the drunks in Tim’s hometown who’d hit the fleshpits once the bars shut down, the good ole boys around here hit the water. Slewing across the ocean in open-motor skiffs, bellowing like bulls as they skipped across the waves—that, or they’d drop a fishing line and low-cycle the motor, trawling at a leisurely pace. A few years ago, a winebag named Lester Hamms froze to death on his boat; Jeff Jenks, North Point’s chief of police, discovered Lester seven miles off the cape, skin crystalline with frost like a piece of unwrapped steak in a freezer, his ass ice-welded to the seat, a pair of frozen snot-tusks poking out his nostrils. Lester’s boat was still puttering along; before long it would’ve hit the tidal shelf and been carried out to sea—Tim pictured his frozen corpse bumping along the shore of Greenland like a grisly bit of driftwood, a polar bear giving it a curious sniff.

Whoever it was, Tim was sure he or she posed little threat… ninety-nine percent sure.

Fact Two: he and the boys were on an isolated island over an hour from home. No weapons other than their knives—blades no longer than three and a half inches, as outlined in the Scout Handbook—and a flare gun. It was night. They were alone.

Tim eased the porch door open with his boot. It issued a thin squeal—eeeee-ee-eee—like a rusty nail pried out of a wet plank.

He edged around the cabin, heartbeat thrumming in the veins down his neck. Mosquitoes wet themselves in his beading sweat. He should’ve brought the lamp, but a signal broadcasting from deep within his reptile cortex said: No light. Don’t make yourself visible.

Unsheathing his Buck knife, he pressed it flat along his thigh—his sensible self thinking: This is ridiculous; you’re being idiotic, totally paranoid. But the primal and instinctive part of him, the part ruled by the lizard brain, issued only a mindless buzz like a hive of Africanized bees.

Wind howled along the earth, attaining a voice as it gusted around the rocks and spindly trees: a low muttersome sound like children whispering at the bottom of a well. It whipped up the back of Tim’s legs, icy tongues chilling him to the core. He squinted at the tree line, sensing something, the shadows coalescing to attain a certain weight and permanence.

A shape materialized from the tangled foliage. Tim inhaled sharply. By the light of an uncommonly bright moon, he beheld a creature stepped fully formed from his blackest childhood nightmares: a rotted monster who’d dragged itself from the sea.

It wasn’t much more than a skeleton lashed by ropes of waterlogged muscle, its flesh falling off its bones in gray, lace-edged rags. It lumbered forward, mumbling dully to itself. Tim’s terror pinned him in place.

The thing shambled through a shaft of moonlight that danced along the tall grass; the light transformed the nightmare into what it truly was: a man so horrifyingly thin it was a miracle he was still alive.

Tim stepped from cover without thinking, driven by the instinctive urge to offer aid. “Hello? You all right?”

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?

No. He could figure this out. He must take every available precaution, but it could be managed. The man’s eerie thousand-yard smile persisted. Was it some kind of ailment Tim was unfamiliar with—a wasting-away disorder? Or just a commonplace malady run amok?

“You’ll do exactly as I say,” he told the man in his no-BS GP voice.

“Ugn,” the man said.

“If you don’t, you can’t come inside.”

The man’s body butted Tim’s palm—the hardness of bone through the thinnest veneer of flesh; to Tim, it felt like a plastic tarp draping a pile of shattered bricks.

“Come on, then.”

6

TIM INSTRUCTED the man to lie on the moth-eaten chesterfield and retrieved the lamp from the porch.

The man looked worse in the lamplight. His skin washed of pigment. Tim’s mind conjured a weird image: the last few sips at the bottom of a Slurpee cup, the color all sucked out, only the tasteless ice crystals left.

The guy’s pants were inexplicably cinched with an orange extension cord. How much did he used to weigh? Tim turned the man’s T-shirt collar out. XL, the tag read. Lord. His clothing appeared to be draping a heap of jackstraws in the rough shape of a human being.

The bottom of his shirt rode up. The skin of his stomach was folded over on itself, reminding Tim of a shar-pei dog. People who had undergone lap-band surgery followed by drastic weight loss looked much the same. They often opted for a dermal tightening procedure: a plastic surgeon hacked a sheet of skin the size of a dish towel off their midsection and stitched the loose ends back together.

Low murmurs from the bunkroom. The boys must’ve woken up. Tim needed to get a handle on the situation; he didn’t fancy the idea of five groggy boys rubbing sleep-crust out of their eyes while gazing at the human boneyard on the chesterfield.

“Boys, listen up,” he said, easing the door open and closing it swiftly to maintain that barrier. “Something’s come up. It’s nothing major”—was it?—“but it’s best you stay here, in your beds.”

“What’s wrong, Tim?”

This from Kent, who’d taken to calling him “Tim” of late. He’d dropped the Scoutmaster part. Kent sat on the edge of his bed, hands clasped, shoulders rounded like a wrestler awaiting his call to the mat. Kent—even the name had a pushy, aggressive quality. An alpha-male moniker, of a piece with Tanner and Chet and Brodie, names parents bestow upon a boy they’ve prefigured as a defense attorney or a lacrosse coach. No parent harboring the hope for a sensitive, artistic child names that child Kent.

“It’s a guy,” Tim said. “Nobody from around—I’ve never seen him. He just showed up.”

“Does he have a tent?” Newt asked, his thick chin flattened across the mattress. “Like, a hiker or something—an adventurer?”

“Not that I can see.” Tim knelt in the ring of boys. “He seems sick.”

Ephraim whispered, “Sick how?”

Tim sucked in his lips, thinking. “Sick like a fever, something like that. He’s very thin. He’s been asking for food.”

“Maybe he’s a Gurkha,” said Shelley, the words hissing between his teeth.

“He’s not a Gurkha,” Tim said, jaw tight to hold back a mounting queasiness—the man’s funk was seeping under the door, perfuming the room with its rotten-peach stink. “He’s… it could be a lot of things, okay? He could’ve been in some other country, some other part of the world, picked up a virus and carried it back with him.”

Kent said: “We should call the mainland, Tim.”

Tim gritted his teeth so hard that his molars squeaked in their gum beds.

“Yes, Kent. I’ve thought about that, and yes, I’ll do it. In the meantime, I need you boys to stay here. Is that clear?”

“You don’t need help?”

“No, Kent, I don’t,” Tim went on. “I’m a doctor, yes? I’m this guy’s best chance right now. But we don’t know what’s the matter yet, so this is the safest place for you.”

Tim opened the door. The frail light of the lantern fell upon a quartet of pinched, anxious expressions—all except Shelley, who stared listlessly at the canopy of cobwebs on the ceiling. He closed the door, debated a moment, then tilted a chair and jammed it under the doorknob.

Tim crossed the main room to the shortwave radio and clicked through the frequencies in search of the mainland emergency band. All he had was a tricked-out medical kit with a few more bells and whistles than your standard wilderness survival kit—items plucked from his own private stockpile. But if he radioed it in, they could send the medevac chopper in from Charlottetown and—

“Reeeeaaagh!”

The man staggered up, careening toward Tim like a sailor on a storm-tossed boat. With one swift motion he ripped the shortwave radio off the table, raised it above his head, and brought it down. It smashed apart in a squeal of feedback. A string of sparks popped inside the busted casing, issuing forth gouts of stinking electrical smoke.

The man brought his foot down on it, stomping with crazed strength. Tim put his arms out to stop him, tipping the lantern over and extinguishing the flame.

He grappled with the man in the dark. It was like wrestling a bag of snakes or steel cables coated in granular grease: cold, oily, and revolting.

“Goddamn it! Stop!”

The man snarled, a cruel silver sound that ripped through the dark like a band saw blade. He coughed something up; wet warmth splashed Tim’s face. Tim squealed thinly—he couldn’t help it—and wiped furiously at his cheek.

The man’s body suddenly went slack. Tim fought the urge to drop him, the way you might a fat-smeared tackling dummy.

Unclean! UNCLEAN!

The bunkroom knob squeaked, followed by a sequence of jarring thumps as the door shuddered against the chair. Tim pictured Kent hammering his shoulder against it, aiming to splinter it to pieces.

“Tim! Tim, open this door!”

Navigating clumsily in the dark, Tim guided the man back to the chesterfield. He felt around for the lamp, found it, relit it. Fetched the medical kit. He tore open packets of sterile wipes and furiously swabbed down every place the man had touched him, specifically his face. Whatever he’d spat up lingered on Tim’s skin—he could feel the dissipating sting, his flesh flushed red as if he’d been slapped.

“Tim!” Kent bellowed. “Open this door right now!”

“Stay inside!” Tim yelled—screeched, more like, his voice elevating to a teakettle shriek. “Try to open that door again, Kent Jenks, and I’ll make damn sure your father hears about it.”

Kent’s sullen footsteps retreated; the bedsprings squeaked as he slid back under the covers.

Tim filled a hypodermic needle with 100 mg of doxylamine. The man’s veins were easy to locate: a rail yard’s worth of blue tubes snaked at the crook of each elbow. After the injection, the man’s breathing normalized.

Greenish matter oozed out the side of his mouth. Is that what he’d spit up? Had he actually been eating rock slime?

Algae. Okay, it’s just algae. Algae’s not infectious. Algae’s just… gross.

Tim’s hand dropped to the man’s stomach—he felt it again. A subtle movement like an adder resettling itself under a warm blanket.

It’s just peristalsis. The man has a severe blockage in his intestines; all you’re feeling is a protracted flex as he tries to pass whatever it is.

Tim’s testicles drew up. He swooned with sudden unexplainable fear, his belly packed with cold lead. Who was this man? What in God’s name was the matter with him? Why the hell had he thought it right or appropriate to let him in here? Private hospitals can refuse treatment if a person’s condition is deemed a threat to others—what in God’s name had he done, turning a cabin on an isolated island into a trauma ward?

He reached for the man’s T-shirt, guided by a horrible impulse: pull it up. But even his morbid sense of curiosity resisted it. He didn’t want to see. Not now, at night, alone in this dark.

Except he wasn’t alone, was he? He swung the lamp toward the bunkroom door, the chair still wedging it shut.

“It’s okay,” Tim said, after moving the chair aside and stepping softly inside with the boys. “Please go back to sleep.”

“Who is that?” Kent’s voice had forfeited its thunder: he asked as a boy who was scared and too far from home.

“Like I said—a stranger. Someone who needed help, so I’m giving it to him. I don’t know where he’s from. He couldn’t even give me his name. He can barely talk. He’s asleep now.”

Tim saw his answer only intensified their worry, but found it impossible to offer anything more concrete. It was like one of those TV medical dramas where patients roll into the ER with mysterious ailments—the towheaded boy who weeps tears of blood; the high school prom queen whose head swells up like a beach ball—and only the brilliant pill-popping MD can suss it out: a hairline rip in the aqueous humor; the remains of a parasitic twin resting deep in the thalamic folds. Problem being, Tim was just a small-town sawbones, unremarkable and generally unambitious—none of which had been a problem until now.

Max said: “Well, how sick is he?”

Tim found it difficult to meet their searching eyes—fact was, he had no earthly idea. But he was the adult here, the authority—moral and otherwise—and it was his responsibility to tell them something if only to allay their fears, even as his own mounted.

“He seems manageable, guys. I’ve seen worse.” This lie came so smoothly that it shocked him. “We’ll get him to a hospital and let them deal with it.”

“The radio?”

“I can’t see right now,” Tim told Ephraim. “It may be broken.”

Kent said: “How did that…? It’s our only—”

“He got here in a boat, okay? If we need to get back to the mainland, we’ll take that. Now… go… to… bed.”

Tim turned and shut the door. The man breathed tortuously off to his right. His face radiated an unearthly light all its own, as if his veins ran with phosphorus. His features gave off the sick light of those poisonous mushrooms that grew in dank island caves.

An image came to Tim, plucked from the deepest recesses of his memory. A man’s face in a parking garage. Tim’s mother had taken him grocery shopping. He was five. The underground lot was nearly empty. They’d passed a huge cement stanchion, the load-bearing ones that kept the supermarket from collapsing, burying them under shelves of creamed corn and Frosted Flakes. A shape leaned against it. A pile of water-fattened trash bags? The pile stirred, shifted, and a face materialized. Tim told himself—he told himself today—that the man must’ve fallen prey to the commonplace decays, drink and drugs and disease… but his younger eyes, his boyhood eyes, had seen something else entirely.

The man’s face had been black, but that was not its birth color: it was the lumpen, withery, rotted black of a banana forgotten at the bottom of a fruit bowl. Had he touched that face, Tim was certain his fingers would’ve sunk into it. The man’s nose looked as though it had been subjected to enormous pressures, or else eaten away by something: a caved-in pit above his lips, which were cracked and bloated and coated in unknowable glaze.

Tim’s breath had locked in his lungs, his upflung eyes finding his mother—who was obviously scared, too, a fact that deepened his own fear.

The man had been sick in a way that didn’t seem possible—nothing on this earth, not disease nor the elements nor the tortures of mankind, could do that. He looked like a man who’d been abducted by a vengeful alien race who’d done terrible things, reduced him in some unspeakable way, then delivered him back to earth in order to examine how the rest of his species would react.

He’s seen hell, was Tim’s childish thought.

Worst of all were the man’s eyes—always the eyes, wasn’t it? A calm ongoing shade of brown, and the most awful part was that something continued to live in them—because normally there’d be nothing, right? Defeated and foggy and unthinking, to match the body. But these eyes harbored a remote intellect, a keen awareness. Which was the scariest part: this man had to confront the devastation of his body. He was cognizant of his own ruin. How could he possibly cope with that?

The man didn’t ask for anything. He simply watched, those coolly considering eyes socked in that tragedy of a face, until they passed from sight.

As he remembered this, the veil of disquiet that had settled over Tim shifted and something terrible peered through from the other side—the squirrelly, squealing face of terror. That man’s nightmarish face. Then it was gone.

Tim slipped into an uneasy sleep. Sometime before dawn and without quite realizing it, he rose out of the chair and stumbled to the cupboards.

News item from the Montague (PEI) Island Courier, October 21:

7

THE BOYS rose with the drowsy half-light of dawn. The moon hung in its western altar like the last melancholy guest at a dinner party, who was too lonely to leave.

None of them had slept well. They’d heard Scoutmaster Tim come inside with the man—the man hadn’t spoken, but they could smell him: a syrupy foulness like the juice at the bottom of an amusement park trash can. As the Scoutmaster busied himself beyond the bunkroom door, Kent had sat up on his elbows.

“I better check it out.”

Kent Jenks always had to check “it” out. Made no difference what “it” happened to be; Kent was suffused with the unshakable conviction that things would be better if he intervened—as if, by dint of his presence, the situation would come under control. He’d been this way since Beavers, and because Kent was bigger and carried an air of prepossession that could come off as menacing, the other boys typically bowed to his will.

It was the same at school. Kent was the kid who’d butt in front of you at the water fountain—literally butting, a solid hip-check that’d send you flying—saying I got cuts with a chummy backslap, his voice a full octave lower than anybody else’s. The boy who’d grab your sandwich off the waxed paper your mom wrapped it in, take a humongous bite, and go You mind?, flecks of egg salad spraying between his lips. He wasn’t truly mean-spirited, though. Max thought of him as a Saint Bernard: big and slobbery, a bit dumb and oblivious to his own strength, but his heart was usually in the right place. Kent constantly threw down these gauntlets, though, and dared you to run them. Most days it was easier to surrender your spot in line or bite of sandwich.

Lately Kent had been testing how far he could challenge adults. He’d raise his hand in class, grinning sunnily while asking the teacher: Are you suuure? He’d started to call teachers by their first names, too. It wasn’t Mr. Reilly in homeroom anymore—it was Earl. The boys were waiting for the day when Kent sauntered into the teachers’ lounge, took a bite of the gym teacher’s lunch, and said, You mind, George?

When Kent had gotten out of bed and crossed the bunkroom to the door, only Newton had spoken up.

“Better not, Kent. The Scoutmaster—”

“Shut up, flapjack,” Kent had shot back, so casually that you couldn’t even call his tone dismissive: more like how you’d shush a yappy dog. “If I wanted your opinion, I’d—”

“For real, bro,” Ephraim had said. “Don’t go out there.”

Kent blinked, his head cocked at an inquisitive angle. Ephraim was the only boy who worried him—there was something a bit crazy about Eef, this jittery powder-keg quality that made Kent uneasy.

“Gimme one reason why not, man.”

Ephraim just said: “Because.”

“That’s it? That’s the reason—because?”

“Yep,” Ephraim had said.

“Thanks, Eef,” said Newt.

Ephraim said: “Shut up, pork chop.”

Next Scoutmaster Tim had entered the bunkroom and told them that their asses better remain in bed. Soon after came the commotion: the stranger’s scream—“Reeeeaaagh!”—followed by a scuffle, a crash, and the acrid smell of smoke wafting into their room, mingling with the sweetly rotten stench.

Kent had leapt out of bed, attacking the door with savage shoulder-butts; it wouldn’t budge, but Kent kept flinging his body at it, the way he always did—hurling his unthinking bulk at any obstacle with the ironclad surety it’d eventually buckle. He’d only quit when the Scoutmaster threatened to tell his father; Kent stepped away from the door breathing like a bull, his wide-set and faintly bovine eyes reflecting dull smokeless hate.

Around four in the morning, Newton had sat bolt upright in bed. He’d been awoken by the noise of cupboard doors opening and slamming shut. Next had come… crunching sounds? Monotonous, plodding, softly grinding.

“Max?” he’d whispered. “Max, you awake?”

“Go to bed, Newt,” Max said from the bunk below, his voice so thick with sleep that his words ran together: GotobedNewt.

Newton had been shocked that Max and the others were able to sleep with those smells and awful noises beyond the door… maybe Max was just pretending to sleep to avoid talking about them. Maybe he’d thought sunlight was a cure-all.

HOURS LATER, sunlight filtered through the sap-yellowed window, sparkling the dust motes that hung in the stagnant air. The boys rose and dressed silently, pulling on bulky sweaters and lacing their boots. Ephraim caught Max’s eye, raised a quizzical eyebrow, and mouthed the words:

You okay?

Max shrugged, smiled wanly, finished double-knotting his boots. Like the others, he’d caught a whiff of the rank sweetness drifting in from the main room, where the Scoutmaster slept. He’d heard the crunching sounds, too.

Max’s grandfather was a farmer. The past few summers he’d paid Max and Ephraim seventeen dollars a day to dump chicken bones into “Jaws,” a stainless steel industrial grinder in the barn. He purchased the bones from a poultry processing plant in Summerside, a dollar a sack. Legally it was called “animal byproduct,” same as cowflops, hog shit, and hen feathers. Max and Ephraim would slit the woven-fiber sacks and dump the clattering bones into Jaws’s hopper. It was gross, mildly disturbing work—Island work, wearying and melancholic, and there was an expectation that all boys should enjoy it.

At least they got to do it together. Max and Eef were best friends. They’d been so for years informally, but a few months ago they’d cemented it: they’d both notched a shallow cut in their thumbs with Ephraim’s Swiss Army knife, pressed them together, and solemnly intoned: Forever friends. They were one better than BF’s—they were FF’s.

Once the bones were in the hopper, Max’s grandfather would switch the machine on. The gears made quick work of them; when the collection receptacle popped open, inside was a drift of fine white powder.

Bone meal, Max’s grandpa said. It’s magic, boys—nothing grows plants any better than bones.

Hearing this, Max wondered why farmers didn’t plant potato fields over cemeteries… the answer had dawned on him before long.

Last night, lying quietly in bed, Max wondered if Ephraim was awake, too. Was he hearing those crunching noises? If so, was he thinking what Max was thinking—that it sounded like tiny brittle bones pulverized between the steel teeth of Jaws?

AFTER DRESSING, the boys followed Kent into the kitchen.

Tim greeted them in the main room with a wan smile. The strange man lay on the chesterfield, his body covered in blankets. All they could see were the contours of his face: the sunken cheeks and eyes, teeth winking through the blanched fillets of his lips.

Crumbs lay scattered round the easy chair. Newton spotted those same crumbs on Tim’s lumberjack vest, though the Scoutmaster brushed most of them off. An econo-size box of soda crackers lay in the trash can, along with some wadded-up cellophane cracker sleeves.

Tim caught Newton’s look. “Attack of the midnight munchies, boys. I had to keep an eye on this guy.”

Newt scanned the kitchen. He couldn’t help but notice the busted radio. A pinworm of dread threaded into his chest. What if that storm rolled in? What would we do? He eyed the cabin warily—the frame seemed sturdy enough, but the roof was old. He’d seen what those late autumn storms could do. A few years ago, one of them had ripped across the mainland and dragged a car across the street into a ditch. Newt had watched it happen through the window of Dan’s Luncheonette on Phillips Street. The car was an ancient Dodge Dart—what the old-timers called “two tons of Detroit rolling iron.” The driver was equally ancient: Elgin Tate, a long-retired music teacher. Newt had watched him white-knuckled and greasy-faced behind the wheel as the wind hammered the car amidships, rocking it up on two side wheels and letting it fall with an axle-grinding thump, then gusted again and bore it steadily across both lanes into the ditch. The Dart’s tires had been pure smoking as Tate tried to muscle it back onto the road, but its hind end tipped over the edge of the ditch, its front wheels canted up and spinning uselessly. Once the storm had passed, Tate clambered out the window and staggered onto the road. His gray hair was stuck up in wild corkscrews and he was smiling like a man who’d cheated death. Hellfire! he’d shouted at nobody at all. Hellfire and damnation!

“What are we gonna do?” Newt asked.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Tim hooked his thumb at the stranger. “He’s obviously sick. He also, as you can see, smashed our radio. Why, I don’t know. Could be he’s in trouble—maybe with the law. I certainly don’t know who he is.”

“What about his wallet?” Ephraim said.

“I checked.” Tim’s hands groomed each other, an unconscious gesture: one hand washing the other. “His pockets are empty.”

“He looks empty,” Shelley said softly.

The boys’ eyes kept flicking to the man, then just as quickly away. Newt threw his entire head back as if the very sight repelled his gaze.

“He probably didn’t look like that all his life,” said Kent.

“Of course not,” Tim snapped, annoyed at Kent’s unalloyed disgust. “As a precaution, I’ve tied his arms and legs. Who knows what else he’d decide to bust up.”

“Yeah, good idea,” Shelley said. “I mean, he could go berserk. Kill us all with a butcher knife.”

Tim glanced at the tall, slender boy with the blank gray eyes. His brow furrowed, then he said, “I have something to ask all of you. I want you to be honest. I promise you I won’t be angry. Tell me: Did any of you bring a phone?”

Newt said: “You told us not to.”

“I know what I said, Newton. But I happen to know that teenage boys don’t always do as they’re told.” He looked at Ephraim. “What about it?”

Ephraim shook his head. “I thought about it, but…”

“Shit,” Tim hissed, pushing the word through his teeth on a burst of pent-up air. He tasted a weird sweetness, a saccharine tang on his tongue. “Listen, boys, we’re going to be fine. Really. This is unexpected, is all. My only concern is that this guy needs medical attention in short order. I don’t have the proper equipment.”

“You said he came by boat,” said Kent.

Tim had already been down to the dock at sunup. The boat wouldn’t start. The spark plugs were gone. Could this man have unscrewed them and… what? Thrown them into the ocean? Hidden them somewhere? Why do that?

“There’s a boat, yes,” Tim said for now. “Oliver McCanty’s, by the look of it. You know how small it is. We can’t all ride back in it.”

“A few of us could,” said Kent. “We could tell my dad what happened.”

Kent’s father was Lower Montague’s chief of police, “Big” Jeff Jenks: a towering six feet seven inches and two hundred and fifty pounds of prime law enforcement beef. Most afternoons he could be spotted behind the wheel of his police cruiser (looking, Tim thought, like an orangutan stuffed into a kitchen cupboard), circuiting the town. If anything, his face reflected sadness—perhaps at the fact God had given him a body so big and strong that he considered it a cosmic injustice that he couldn’t put it to use on deserving criminals. But he’d picked the wrong jurisdiction: the closest thing to a felonious mastermind in Montague County was Slick Rogers, the local moonshiner whose hillside stills occasionally exploded, burning down an acre of scrubland.

“You guys are going on your wilderness trek as scheduled. You were going to be trekking solo, anyway, as part of your merit requirement. So just fend for yourselves and navigate your way back. No help from me.”

“That’s crazy, Tim!” Kent stabbed one thick finger at the stranger. “We need to neutralize the threat”—one of his father’s pet phrases—“or else… or else…”

Kent trailed off, the words locking up in his throat. Tim dropped a hand on Kent’s shoulder. The boy’s eyes narrowed—in that instant Tim was certain he’d brush his hand off. When that didn’t happen, he said, “What we need is to remain calm and proceed with the established plan.”

“But it’s all different now. The plan is… it’s fucked.”

A shocked gasp from Newton. Nobody ought to speak that way in front of an adult—in front of their Scoutmaster. Tim’s eyes took on a hard sheen. His hand tensed on Kent’s shoulder, fingernails dimpling the fabric—close to but not quite a claw.

“Scout Law number seven, Kent. Repeat it.”

Kent wormed in Tim’s grip. His eyes held a bruised, hangdog cast.

“A Scout…” Tim said softly. “Go on, tell me. A Scout…”

Newt said, “A Scout obeys his—”

“Quiet, Newt,” said Tim. “Kent knows this.”

“A… Scout… obeys…” Kent said, each word wrenched painfully from his mouth.

“Who does he obey?”

“He obeys his Scoutmaster without…”

“Without what, Kent?”

“…without question. Even if he gets an order he does not like, he must do as soldiers and policemen do; he must carry it out all the same because it is his duty.”

“And after he has done it,” Tim continued, “he can come and state any reasons against it. But he must carry out the order at once. That is discipline.”

Tim forfeited his grip; Kent stepped back, rubbing his shoulder. Tim pointed to a pair of walkie-talkies on the table.

“You get into a jam, radio me. We’ve done plenty of orienteering together, right? This won’t be anything new. It’s a nice morning, no foul weather in today’s forecast.”

No other boy spoke against the Scoutmaster’s plan. Nobody wanted to be here, in this cabin, with… that. They were all too happy to invoke that particular license of boyhood, the one that stated: Let the grown-ups handle it. Events that seemed overwhelming and terrifying to their boyish brains were dispelled like so much smoke when the adults took over. Adults were Fixers; they were Solvers. The boys still trusted Tim, even Kent. So they would depart into the crisp autumn sunshine, their lungs filling with clean air; they would wrestle and run and laugh and enjoy their freedom from this strange responsibility, whatever it entailed. And when they returned, everything would be fine. They sincerely believed this because, up until that very point in their existence, it was a fact that had always held true.

It truly had been Tim’s intention to go with them. But he needed time to figure out what the hell was the matter with this man. The fact the spark plugs were missing was an additional worry—and not only because it cut them off from the mainland. What kind of man would incapacitate his only method of escape? A criminal? A hunted man, perhaps. Or a man on an extinction vector.

Once the boys had left, he’d go down to the ocean, roll up his pants, and search for those damn plugs. Anyway, the boys were resourceful. The island was safe. There were more hazards on the mainland: pellet guns, dirt bikes, Slick Rogers. They’d hike a few hours, complete their trail-craft requirements, and be back in time for supper—by which time he’d have this mess sorted out. He, too, believed in the power of adults.

Tim didn’t feel quite up to a hike today, anyway. He shot a quick look at the man on the chesterfield, hoping the boys didn’t catch the quiver in his eyes. The spot where the man coughed on his skin burnt with an edgeless heat; he pictured it eating right through his skin, a gaping hole in his cheek—the glistening connective tissues of his jaw, iron fillings winking in his molars—and shook his head, dispelling the image.

Could be he was coming down with something. A fever?

Starve a cold, feed a fever, right?

Yes, definitely a fever.

He picked up one of the walkie-talkies. After a short deliberation, he gave it to Max, ignoring Kent’s miffed look.

He gave the boys a curt salute. “You’ve got your marching orders, dogfaces.”

8

MAXIMILIAN KIRKWOOD and Ephraim Elliot had been friends since they were two years old—although Max wondered if that was precisely true.

They’d been around each other since they were two, anyway: Max’s mom would drop him off at Mrs. Elliot’s house every morning; she always paid her babysitting fee in cash, as the island’s underground economy dictated. Mrs. Elliot said Max and Eef were the very best of friends—sharing their blocks, drinking out of the same sippy cup—but Max didn’t remember that, same as he didn’t remember being born or cutting his first tooth. When his memories kicked in, though—click! like a light switch—Ephraim was right there.

You’d never find a stranger pair. Ephraim was a creature of pure momentum, pure chaos: 140 pounds of fast-twitch muscle fiber packed into a long, quivering frame. The air closest to Eef’s arms and shoulders seemed to shimmer, same way a hummingbird’s wings exist in a blur of motion. Max was stouter—not fat, solid—and possessed a preternatural state of calm unusual for his age; it wasn’t hard to picture him in the Lotus position on North Point beach, eyes serenely shut, totally Zen-ing out.

It shouldn’t have worked—the differences in the boys’ personalities should’ve repulsed one from the other, like trying to touch magnets of matching polarities—but the opposite held true.

On summer nights, Max and Ephraim would hike to the bluffs behind Max’s house, through the long, dry grass frosted white with the salt spray off the sea. They’d pitch a tent on the highest peak, the lights of Max’s home only a pinprick in the dark. Lying on their backs under the endless vault of sky—so much wider than in a city, where buildings hemmed in that same sky, light pollution whiting out the stars. They knew some of the constellations—Scoutmaster Tim had taught them, though only Newton bothered to earn a merit badge in astronomy. They could recognize the stars in their simplest alignments: the Big Dipper, Ursa Major and Minor.

“It doesn’t really look like a bear,” Max said one night.

“Why should it?” Ephraim said, sounding angry. “That’s humans trying to, like, organize the stars to our liking. You think the Big Guy, the Grand Creator, Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whoever said: Oh, guess I’d better make these flaming balls of gas look exactly like a bear or a fucking spoon so those stupid goons on rock 5,079 don’t get confused?” He lip-farted. “Ohyeahriiiight,” stringing the words all together.

They talked about the stuff best friends ought to. Stupid stuff. Their favorite candy (Max: Swedish Fish, especially the rare purple ones; Eef: Cracker Jack, which Max claimed wasn’t exactly candy but Eef said was sweet enough); who had bigger boobs, Sarah Matheson or Triny Dunlop (both agreed Triny’s were technically bigger, although Ephraim held the opinion, sadly untested, that Sarah’s were softer); whether God existed (both believed in a higher power, though Eef thought churches treated their parishioners like ATMs); and who’d win in a fight: a zombie or a shark?

“A zombie,” Eef said. “Of course. It’s already dead, right? It’s not gonna be scared of… hey, what kind of shark? A sandy? A whitetip? I could win against a sandy!”

Max shook his head. “Great white. Biggest badass in the ocean.”

“Pfffffft!” Eef said. “Killer whales got it all over great whites. But anyway, I still say zombie. If it gets one bite in, it wins—the shark’s a zombie!”

“Who says sharks turn into zombies?”

“Everything turns into a zombie, Max-a-million.”

“Whatever. I say shark. You know how thick sharkskin is? I was down at the dock when a trawler came in with a dead mako. Ernie Pugg tried to cut it open on the dock—his fillet knife broke. Like trying to hack through a tire, man. Who says a zombie’s rotted old teeth won’t break, too? And anyway, what if the shark bites the zombie’s head off? A zombie can’t swim too well, its rotten-ass arms flopping around.”

Eef considered this. “Well, if it bites the zombie’s head off and swallows it, its head will be in the shark’s belly—and it’ll still be alive. Like, zombie-alive, which is really dead but whatever. So the zombie can bite the shark’s guts out from the inside.” Ephraim pumped his fist in victory. “Zombie wins! Zombie wins!”

“Ah, go to hell,” Max said, conceding.

“I been to hell,” Ephraim said, his voice pitched at a Clint Eastwood growl. “I ain’t afraid to go back.”

Sometimes their conversation meandered quite accidentally into topics of greater importance. One night both boys were in that gauzy-minded state preceding sleep when Ephraim said:

“I ever tell you that my pops busted my arm? I was like one year old, man. Can’t even remember. Guess I was screaming in my crib and he comes in, all pissed, lifts me up, and my arm gets stuck between the crib bars and he kept pulling and my arm just went kerflooey.”

He rolled over and hiked up his sleeve, showing Max the pale scar below his elbow hinge.

“Bone came out right there. Anyway, he went to jail three months later. My arm was still in a cast. But here’s the weirdest thing, Max. Two years ago, I went to visit him up in the Sleepy Hollow prison. Mom came with. We’re sitting in the visitors’ room, the chairs and tables bolted down, TV in a big mesh cage. Dad’s not saying much—he never does, right?—but he looks at my arm and sees the scar and asks how I got it. Like, he thought I did it to myself.” A stiff, barking laugh. “So Mom goes: You did it, Fred. You broke his arm as a baby. And my dad just gives her this shocked look. I’m telling you, Max, I swear to God he didn’t remember. Like, there’s this empty slot in his head where that memory should be. Maybe he even remembers my arm in a cast but he doesn’t quite remember how it happened, right? For all I know his memory’s full of holes like that, just Swiss-cheesed with ’em, which is why he’s in jail. He can’t remember any of the shitty stuff he does—his mind erases it, so he just goes and does it all over again.”

In such ways are friendships built. In tiny moments, in secrets shared. The boys truly believed they would be best friends forever—in fact, as the boat had ferried them to Falstaff Island, Max had looked at the back of Ephraim’s head and thought exactly that:

Forever friends, man. Until the very end of time.

THE SKY was scudded over with clouds by the time the boys shouldered their packs and made their way to the trailhead. They walked in the same order as always: Kent heading up the pack—recently Kent had even tried to break trail ahead of the Scoutmaster—then Ephraim, Shelley, and Newt. Max pulled up the rear in his traditional sheepherding role.

Once they’d passed beyond sight of the cabin, Kent waved Max up.

“You better give me the walkie-talkie,” he said, dead serious.

It wasn’t worth fighting over—Kent might turn it into a fight. But Kent wouldn’t throw punches. Wasn’t his style. He’d put Max in a headlock and wrestle him down and simply take the walkie-talkie away. Or worse, make Max give it to him voluntarily, his head still smarting from the headlock.

Kent was old enough, fourteen years and a few months, to have lost the prominent tummy of childhood. You could see now that he might make a good linebacker, as far as width and bulkiness of shoulders went. The boys followed him for the simple reason that he was the biggest and strongest and harbored every expectation that he should be followed. It wasn’t that he had the best ideas—those were often traceable to Newt. It wasn’t that he was particularly charismatic, like Ephraim. It was that the boys were at an age where physical strength was the surest marker of leadership.

Kent had learned what little he knew of leadership from his father, who’d counseled: It’s all how you present yourself, son. Draw yourself up to your full height. Stick your chest out. If you look like you’ve got all the answers, people will naturally assume that you do.

Kent’s dad, “Big” Jeff Jenks, often bundled his son into the police cruiser and drove a circuit of town—a ride-along, he called it. Kent loved these: his father sitting erect and flinty-eyed in the driver’s seat, sunlight flashing off his badge, the dashboard computer chittering with information of a highly sensitive nature—which his father was all too willing to share. Got a call for officer assistance there a few weeks back, he’d say, pointing to a well-tended Cape Cod belonging to Kent’s math teacher, Mr. Conkwright. Domestic disturbance. Trouble in paradise. The missus was stepping out—you know what I mean by that? When Kent shook his head, his father said: Breaking her marital vows. Enjoying the warm embrace of another fellow, uh? You get me? And that other fellow happened to be George Turley, your gym teacher.

Kent pictured it: Gloria Conkwright, an enormously plump woman with bottled-platinum hair and heaving, pendulous breasts that stirred confused longing in Kent’s chest, squashing her body on top of Mr. Turley, who always wore shiny short-shorts two sizes too small—nut-huggers, as his father called them—his oily chest hair tufting in the V of his shirt collars; he pictured Mr. Turley blowing on the pea whistle that was constantly strung round his neck, the air forced out in gleeful whoofs as Gloria’s body smacked down onto his.

There’s no fate worse than being a cuckold, his father said. You can’t let some woman go stomping on your balls—you just may acquire a taste for it.

Those ride-alongs, his father enumerating the secrets and shames of their town, made Kent realize something: adults were fucked. Totally, utterly fucked. They did all the things they told kids not to do: cheated and stole and lied, nursed grudges and failed to turn the other cheek, fought like weasels, and worst of all they tried to worm out of their sins—they passed the buck, refused to take responsibility. It was always someone else’s fault. Blame the man on the grassy knoll, as his dad said, although Kent didn’t really know what that meant. Kent’s respect had trickled away by degrees. Why should he respect adults—because they were older? Why, if that age hadn’t come with wisdom?

Kent came to see that adults required the same stern hand that his peers did. He was their equal—their better, in many ways. Physically this was already so: he was a full head taller than many of his teachers, and though he’d never tested this theory, he believed himself to be stronger, too. Morally it was certainly so. Like his father said: Son, we are the sheepdogs. Our job is to circle the flock, nipping at their heels and keeping them in line. Nip at their heels until they’re bloody, if needed, or even tear their hamstrings if they won’t obey. At first the sheep will hate us—after all, we hem them in, stop them from pursuing their basest nature—but in time they’ll come to respect us and soon enough they won’t be able to imagine their lives without us.

Suffused with this sense of righteousness his father had instilled, Kent held his hand out to Max. “Give me the walkie-talkie, man. You know that’s the way it should be.”

When Max handed it over, Kent clapped him on the back.

“Attaboy, Max.” He swept his arm forward. “Tallyho!”

STUNG, MAX loafed back to his customary position. Newton tugged on his sleeve.

“You didn’t have to give it to him, you know.”

“I don’t care. I don’t need it.”

“Yeah, but Scoutmaster Tim gave it to you.”

“Oh, shut up, Newt.”

Max regretted speaking so harshly, but there was something so… exasperating about Newt. His hidebound determination to stick to “The Rules.” Like this thing with the walkie-talkie. Who gave a shit? It didn’t matter if Scoutmaster Tim had given it to Max—they were away from the adults now. Different rules applied. Boys’ rules, which clearly stated: the big and strong take from the small and weak, period.

There was just something about Newt that made Max want to snap at him. A soft, obliging quality. A whiff of piteousness wafted right out of Newt’s pores. It was like catnip to the average boy.

Max felt a deeper, more inherent need to treat Newt shabbily this morning. It had something to do with the strange man on the chesterfield and the tight unease that had collected in Max’s chest when he’d gazed at him. Something about the unnatural angularity of his face, as if his features had been etched with cruel mathematical precision using a ruler and compass.

Max’s mind inflated the details, nursing the image into a freakish horror show: now the man’s face was actually melting, skin running like warm wax down a candle’s stem to soak into the chesterfield, disclosing the bleached bone of his skull. Max’s brain probed the tiny details, fussing with them the same way his tongue might flick at a canker sore: the smashed radio (why had the man wrecked it?), the crumpled box of soda crackers in the trash (had the Scoutmaster eaten them?), and the itchy smile plastered to the Scoutmaster’s face, as if fishhooks were teasing his mouth into a grin.

Max pushed these thoughts away. Scoutmaster Tim had made the right call by sending them off. It was easier out here: the dry rustle of leaves tenaciously clinging to the trees, the slap of waves on the rock face. He glanced at Newt—his wide ass hogging the trail, each cheek flexing inside tight dungarees. He reminded Max of a Weeble, those old kiddie toys.

Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down…

Newt never did fall down. He withstood the boy’s torments with stoic determination, which made it easier—Newt could take it, right? Picking on Newt uncoiled the tension in Max’s chest. It was awfully selfish, yet awfully true.

9

“WHAT WOULD you rather,” Ephraim said, “eat a steaming cowflop or let a hobo fart in your face?”

It was one of their favorite games, a great way to pass the time on long hikes. Had Scoutmaster Tim been leading, the game would’ve been far more vanilla—What would you rather: get bit by a rabid dog or swallow a wasp in your Coke can?—but now, no adults around, it took on a saltier tone.

“What kind of hobo?” Max asked. It was common to mull these choices from several angles in order to make an informed selection.

“How many types of hobos are there?” said Ephraim. “Your run-of-the-mill smelly old hobo, I guess, the ones who hang out at the train yard.”

“How big a cowflop are we talking about?” Kent called back.

“Standard size,” Ephraim said. The boys nodded as if that was all he’d needed to say—he’d perfectly set the size of this hypothetical cowflop in their minds.

“Is this hobo diseased or anything?” Max asked. “Like, his ass rotting out?”

“His morals are diseased,” Ephraim said, after a pause to think. “But he’s been given a clean bill of health.”

“I’d eat the cowflop,” said Newton.

“What a fucking surprise,” Ephraim said.

Eventually they all agreed that, of both scenarios, scarfing a cowflop was marginally better than a strange, smelly man’s hairy ass cheeks ripping a wet grunter in their faces.

“It’d singe your eyebrows off,” Kent said to appreciative laughter. “It’d put a center part right down your hair!”

“What would you rather,” Newton said, “give a speech in front of the whole school or get your bathing suit sucked down the filter at the public pool?”

Ephraim groaned. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Newt, that’s so laaaaaaame.”

“Yeah, but,” Newton mumbled, “you’d be naked, right? Your bum hanging out.”

“Your bum?” Ephraim scoffed. “Your bum, really? Your pink little tushie?”

Ephraim pulled a cigarette out of his pack, along with a brass Zippo. He fixed the smoke between his lips and lit it with an elaborate flourish: drawing the Zippo up his thigh, popping off the lid, then swiftly running it down again, sparking the flywheel on his trousers. He touched the flame to the tobacco, inhaled, and said:

“Nothing like a smoke when you’re stuck out in nature.”

Ephraim was the only boy in their grade who smoked. A recent affectation. He bought them in singles—four, five cigarettes at a time—from a high schooler named Ernie Smegg, whose doughy carbuncled face looked like a basket of complimentary dinner rolls.

“You smoke the wrong way,” Kent said. “You’re holding it all wrong.”

“What?” Ephraim said. He pinched the cigarette between his thumb and pointer finger, the way you’d hold a pipe. “What’s the matter?”

“My dad says only Frenchmen smoke like that,” said Kent. “And fags.”

Ephraim’s jaw went stiff. “Shut your big fucking mouth, K.”

“You shouldn’t smoke,” Newton said fussily. “My mom says it turns your lungs black as charcoal briquettes.”

Ephraim’s chin jutted. “Yeah? Your mother’s so dumb she stares at an orange juice carton all day because it says: concentrate.”

“Hey!” Kent barked, bristling. “Don’t rag on his mom, man.”

Ephraim snorted but eventually said, “Sorry, Newt. So what would you rather: jerk off a donkey or fingerbang Kathy Rhinebeck?”

Kathy Rhinebeck was a sweet girl who’d been branded the class slut due to the rumor—unsubstantiated by anyone aside from Dougie Fezz—that she’d masturbated Dougie Fezz “to climax” in the back row of the North Point Cinema. Christ on a bike, she didn’t know what the hell she was doing, Fezz told a gaggle of pop-eyed boys in the school yard, his tone one of withering scorn. What, was she yanking weeds out of a garden?

“What’s a fingerbang?” Newton asked, predictably.

“I’d jerk off the donkey,” Shelley suddenly said. “Who wants sloppy seconds?”

This, the boys silently acknowledged, was precisely the sort of response you could expect from Shelley Longpre—he had this way of sucking the air out of the game; out of any game, really.

They hiked in silence around the eastern hub of the island. The trail deteriorated until it was nothing but a strip of loose shale edged by chickweed and stinging thistles. It led around a rocky outcropping facing out over the gunmetal sea.

“This the way?” Newton asked.

“Where else?” Kent said challengingly. “Tim didn’t send us on a granny walk.”

They worked their way up. The shale sat upon a base of solid granite holding the same pink hue of the outcropping. Loose stones kept pebbling away under their boots. The path—which had seemed quite solid at the outset—soon became a series of treacherous collapsing footfalls.

And it then narrowed at the midpoint of their ascent. They could barely crowd both their feet together on it. Below them lay a steep slope carpeted with the same soft shale. It was not so sheer that they risked free falling, but steep enough that they would slide painfully down, boots pumping and hands clawing for purchase. If they couldn’t stop in time, they’d hit the cold, gray sea.

Ephraim said: “Whose smart idea was this again?” When nobody answered—they lacked the energy or inclination, focused entirely on their task, which had abruptly turned very grim—his gaze zeroed in on Kent, clumsily edging his bulk around the rock face.

You big dumbfuck, Ephraim thought. You stupid shit, you.

The boys turned their faces into the outcrop, edging along the rock face with hesitant stutter-steps. Newton cried out, his nose scraping on a pitted extrusion of granite, peeling off a layer of skin. Straggly weeds grew off the bare rock, the tips of their withered leaves frosted with sea salt. How could anything survive in such a place, tilted crazily over the water?

The boys’ fingertips hummed over the rock like bugs, searching desperately for handholds. “Grab here,” Ephraim told Shelley, pulling the boy’s hand to the right spot. “That seam there. Feel it? There.”

Next Ephraim pivoted his hips and kicked one leg out, making an X with his body: one hand gripping the rock while the other was outflung in space; one leg safely moored, the other kicked out over the waves crashing a hundred feet below.

“Top o’ the world, Ma!”

“Stop it!” Newton shrieked, sagging jelly-kneed against the rock face.

“Come on, Eef,” said Max, his fingers hooked like talons into the stone.

Ephraim’s eyes narrowed, a look indicative of future devilry, but he only swung himself back against the cliff. “Keep your skin on, Newt. Don’t give yourself a heart attack.”

Ephraim became aware of the sound of his breathing as it whistled madly against the stone. The waves crashed rhythmically into the cliffs below, the water sucking back out to sea with a foamy gurgle. His arms trembled. The long tendons running down the backs of his calves jumped.

We could die—this thought cleaved Ephraim’s mind like a guillotine blade. One of us could start to fall, and someone will try to help—Scout Law number two: A Scout is ever loyal to his fellows; he must stick to them through thick and thin—then another and another until everyone gets pulled down like a string of paper dolls.

From his vantage at the head of the pack, Kent now realized this couldn’t be the right route. But whose fault was that? Tim’s, for sending them out alone. Dull metallic anger throbbed at Kent’s temples. It was stupid Tim’s fault that Kent’s mind was now paralyzed by fear. Stupid stupid stupid…

The trail widened on the other side of a tricky ledgeway. Kent held out his hand to help Ephraim across, then Shelley, then Newt and Max. They walked silently along a shallow upswell, sweating and breathing heavily. The trail emptied onto a flat rocky expanse overlooking the ocean.

Ephraim set both hands into Kent’s chest and pushed. The bigger boy staggered back.

“Great idea, brainiac.”

“It wasn’t— I didn’t do it on purpose,” Kent said, his neck bright red.

“Nobody better give you the keys to an airplane, man.” Ephraim’s chin was angled up, nearly butting into Kent’s. “With your sense of direction, you’d fly everybody into the sun.”

Ephraim’s hands curled into fists. Kent knew Ephraim wasn’t shy about throwing them. Eef had been in fights. Kent, not so much. Sure, he’d shoved other boys down and put them in headlocks—but he’d never squared off with another boy and thrown real punches. He’d never had to. Being bigger had acted as both threat and deterrent.

But here stood Ephraim, a creature of coiled muscle and quick rage, challenging him. Kent’s hair was plastered to his forehead with clammy sweat. His blood beat a hi-hat tempo inside his skull. He pictured Ephraim’s fist clocking him on the chin, saw himself falling with one leg twisted painfully beneath him. The image caused bitter saliva to squirt into his mouth.

Ephraim gave him a dismissive shove. “A fucking granny walk, eh? Bozo.”

Kent hated the sudden shameful fear that rose in his throat, choking him—hated himself for feeling it. The sheepdog had behaved weakly—he himself had become a sheep.

Baaaah. His father’s mocking voice kicked up inside his skull. Baaaah, baaaah, Kenty-sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir! Three bags full…

Kent bit down on his tongue. His father’s voice switched off like a radio as his mouth filled with the tinfoil-y taste of blood.

They stood on a stony promontory. The salt-heavy wind riffled and snapped at the boys’ clothing. At their backs lay the darkness of the forest. Kent screwed his eyes against the shivering water. Perhaps a mile away the white surf crested on the rusted bones of a sunken freighter. The sky met the sea at the horizon. Kent found it impossible to separate one from the other: sea and sky welded together without a joint.

Sudden thunder arose. A helicopter breasted the latticework of trees. Black and muscular looking: not a traffic or sightseeing helicopter.

The boys’ faces broke into delighted grins. They waved. The chopper climbed into the sky and rotated around with its nose tilted down, then dropped abruptly. The pulse of its blades burred painfully inside the boys’ skulls. Kent could smell the frictionless grease the mechanics used to lubricate its rotors: a little like cherry Certs.

The helicopter lifted up with predatory grace, swung round, and fled into the open sea. Squinting, Kent could just make out a series of squat dark shapes strung across its flight path.

“Ships out there,” Newton said. “Looks like they’re anchored. The military does maneuvers out here sometimes… but I mean, that’s an awful lot of ships.”

“Maybe they’re whaling ships,” said Kent. “You better watch out, Newt—they’re coming to harpoon your fat ass.”

As the boys’ riotous laughter washed over him, Newt’s eyes returned to the water. Kent felt better; the equilibrium reestablished and he was in control again—Newt was always good for that—but still, a bitter alkaline taste slimed his tongue, as if he were sucking on an old battery.

10

“JESUS… JESUS Christ… what is that?”

These six words cracked over the walkie-talkie clipped to Kent’s belt at four o’clock that afternoon.

“Tim?” Kent said. “Tim, what’s wrong? Do you copy?”

The boys stood in a loose circle, waiting.

“It’s nothing, guys,” came the reply. “Just sat on this goddamn thing accidentally.”

Kent glared, his eyes squeezing to slits. “What’s the matter, Tim? Come in, Tim.”

Tim’s voice—ragged, frustrated: “Why do you have the walkie-talkie, Kent? I gave it to Max. Anyway, how’s it going? Fulfilling your merit obligations?”

Ephraim snatched the walkie-talkie. “Kent almost walked us off a cliff.”

Kent made a grab for the walkie-talkie; Ephraim stashed it behind his back, his chin assuming that challenging jut again.

Silence from Tim’s end. Then: “I hope you’re joking. Where are you now?”

Newton gave Tim the compass coordinates. Tim said: “You’re a bit off-track, but it’ll be fine. Follow the path from here on out, okay?”

The sun hung low in the western sky. Its reflective rays turned the poplars and oaks into pillars of flame. The boys had rounded down from the cliffs around the northern hub of the island. Newton used his compass to keep them on track.

“None of this would’ve happened if Tim had come,” Kent sulked. “It’s his job, isn’t it?”

“Oh, bullshit.” Ephraim vented a harsh, barking laugh. “You wanted to play King Shit, Kent. Well, you played it. Now wear your crown of turds.”

The muscles humped up Kent’s shoulders—a defensive, kicked-dog posture. They walked in silence until Shelley said: “Kent’s right, the Scoutmaster should’ve come.”

Kent gave Shelley a look of pathetic gratitude. Next he was storming to the head of the line, which Ephraim was heading, elbowing the smaller boy aside to assume the lead. Shelley smiled fleetingly, nothing but a slight upturn of his lips—not that anybody noticed. Shelley had this way of hiding in a permanent pocket of shadow, that spot at the edge of your vision where your eyes never quite focused.

The boys came upon a large rock pile covered with spongy moss and decided to play King of the Mountain. It was a game they played often, but today it achieved a particular intensity—less a game and more of a fight. They played hard to dispel the jitteriness that had invaded their bones, a feeling whose root could be found back at the cabin. If they shoved and sweated and wrestled, it might just break the fear amassing inside of them, same way a good thunderstorm could break the intolerable heat of a summer afternoon.

Kent took command of the hill and repulsed their halfhearted attempts with hard shoves. He shoulder-blocked Max’s anemic challenge and flexed his biceps, his budding linebacker’s body set in a defensive stance. Dying sunlight petaled through the tree branches, glinting off his dental braces.

“Bring it on, Eef! I double-dog dare you!”

Ephraim stood at the base of the hill, arms crossed over his chest, hands cupping his elbows. A thin boy—so skinny he could slip down the drain hole, as his mom said—but his limbs were roped with powerful fast-twitch muscles, elbows and kneecaps hard as carbon. He thought about the mantra of his counselor, Dr. Harley: Don’t be a slave to your anger, Ephraim.

It was so hard. It bubbled inside him like that stupid geyser at Yellowstone Park, Old Faithful—except the geyser was, like, faithful: at least you could time it. Ephraim’s anger rose out of nowhere, this giddy charge zitzing through his bones and electrifying the marrow. His rage was a dark cloud passing over the sun where just moments before the sky had been clear blue.

“You chicken?” Kent flapped his arms. “Chicken-chicken brock-brock!”

Lips skinning from his teeth, a feral growl rising in his throat, Ephraim sprinted up the pile to tangle with Kent. He saw it in Kent’s eyes: this desperate, crawling fear. Fear of losing partially, but also fear of how far Ephraim might take it. And Ephraim saw how easily it could happen. His fist coming up over Kent’s clumsy arms, his fist hammering Kent in the mush, flattening his thick drool-flecked lips against the barbed braces, cutting the flesh open as the big boy toppled like a sack of laundry, Ephraim following him down, fists pumping like pistons to destroy the crude symmetry of Kent Jenks’s fuck-o face…

Ephraim saw all this in the elastic instant they were perched atop the pile—a silly prize, really; a mossy heap of rocks—and the possibility of violence, his easy capacity for it, drained the strength from his limbs. Kent took advantage, flinging the smaller boy down. He copped a bodybuilding pose, the flexed double crab, face set in a caricature of a despotic monarch.

“I… am… invincible!”

Ephraim frowned and rubbed his elbow—the skin torn, blood weeping sluggishly to his wrist.

“Not cool, big K.”

Ephraim found Newt scraping moss off a log. Newt was always wandering off to press stupid leaves into his stupid notebook, cataloging everything with a black Sharpie. Eastern Sumac. Indian tobacco. God, so dorky!

Ephraim wound up to give Newt a kick in the ass, feeling sort of guilty—Dr. Harley wouldn’t approve; nor would his mother—so he delivered a lighter kick than usual.

“Where’s the first aid kit, numbnuts?”

Newt rubbed the seat of his pants. “I got ears, Eef. Don’t have to kick me.”

“I figured your ears were in your ass, Newt. Looks like everything else is—I was just knocking the wax out of them. Aren’t you gonna thank me?”

Sighing, Newt dug the kit out of his knapsack.

“Sit down, Eef.”

This was Newt’s role: the nurturer, the motherer. He had a natural affinity for it, and the boys sporadically accepted his ministrations—accepted them, then returned to making Newt the object of their torments. And Newt allowed it, because it had always been so.

He tore open a peroxide swab packet, pressed it to the wound on Ephraim’s elbow. Ephraim hissed between clenched teeth.

“It’s just fizzy,” Newt said. “Shouldn’t hurt.”

Ephraim slapped Newt’s hand away. “I’ll do it.”

Newton’s eyes drifted to the sky. His nostrils dilated.

“What are you doing?”

“I think that storm’s coming,” Newt said. “You can smell it. Like, an alkaline smell, like when you rip open a bag of water-softener salt.”

“We don’t have a water softener, Richie Rich.” Ephraim bared his teeth in a mock-snarl. “We like our water haaaaard.”

“You can spot it in the water, too. See?” Newt pointed to the sea. “The water always turns red before a storm. Not quite bloodred, but close. The electricity in the air as a storm brews, right, it causes plankton protozoans to lift up off the seabed; these tiny little creatures—like, the tiniest living things on earth—inflate with oxygen and turn deep red, covering the whole sea and making it red, too.”

Ephraim slapped a butterfly bandage on his elbow.

“Holy shit, dude. Your brain’s too big. Why doesn’t it ooze out your ears?” His eyes went wide. “Actually… fuck me! I see it oozing out right now!”

Ephraim licked his finger and went to screw it into Newt’s ear—a classic Wet Willy. His finger stopped just short, though, a runner of saliva clung to a whorl of his fingerprint. It seemed a heartless thing to do, considering.

He wiped the spit on his pants, bounded to his feet, and raced off to join the other boys.

“Saved your life, Newt! You owe me one!”

THE TRAIL descended to a pebbled shoreline lapped by the ocean. The boys doffed their boots and rolled up their pants, wading in the icy October sea. Their ankles turned pig-belly pink. They hunted for the smoothest stones and had a skipping contest, which Kent won with ten skips by his count.

“Hey, guys,” Ephraim said. “Check this out.”

He directed them to a deep cut within the shore rocks, fringed with sea moss. The boys gathered round. Flashes of shining skin made oily in the guttering light; unknown shapes humping over one another. Silky sibilant esses—husssss, husssss.

“It’s a snake ball,” Newton said.

How many snakes? Impossible to tell. Their bodies were entwined, a writhing network of tubes like an elastic-band ball. Their bodies were dark—sea serpents?—and wet like living, livid oil; that peculiar reptile smell met their noses: wet and fetid like a dewy field spread with dead crickets.

“What are they doing?” said Ephraim.

“They’re…” Newt’s face went pink. “…y’know…”

“Fucking?” Ephraim made a gagging noise. “That’s how snakes fuck, all twisted up in a ball? Like… a snake orgy?”

Kent and Max laughed. Ephraim was so perverted. A snake orgy. Inevitably someone tried to push Newton into the snake ball, make him touch it—Shelley in this case. Newt squirmed free of Shelley’s long simian arms, out of his smooth rubbery grip—almost like tentacles without the suction cups—and screamed at him to stop.

“Quit it, Shel! Lay off!”

The other boys watched idly. There was something off-putting—sickening, really—about the scene. A bit like watching a blind boa constrictor pursue a plump mouse around a cage: the chase might go on a while but the snake was dogged, plus it was a natural predator. Sooner or later it’d eat the fat little fucker.

“Stop it, Shel,” Kent said in a bored tone. “You’re gonna make him piss his pants again.”

Shelley quit abruptly, turned, and wandered toward the shore. Newton smoothed his untucked shirt over his pendulant belly, turned to Kent all stiff-spined, and said:

“Thanks, Kent… but I only did it the one time, and I was six years old and we were on that bus trip to Moncton that went on forever and okay, I drank too much McDonald’s orange drink but—”

“Shut up, tinkle-dink,” Kent said. “Don’t get too excited or you’ll piss your pants, remember?”

WHILE THE boys horsed around, Shelley waded into a shallow tidal pool. He found a crayfish. It fit perfectly in his palm. He studied it closely. It looked weird and funny. He tried to imagine the world as seen through the black poppy seeds of its eyes, sitting on spindly stalks. What a stupid creature. What were its days like—what was its life? Crawling around this dreary itsy-bitsy pool, choking on fish shit, eating garbage. It had no clue about the world outside its filthy puddle, did it? Dumb is as dumb does, as his mother would say—which had always struck Shelley as a dumb expression, something only a dumb person would say.

How would it feel to pull the crayfish apart? He didn’t mean how would the crayfish feel—he didn’t care about that, and anyway, with its piece-of-lint brain and elementary nerves, it may not feel anything. Distantly, Shelley considered that possibility: that this creature could watch itself be shredded like paper and feel nothing, caring not at all.

Oh, there goes my leg. Never mind. And there goes my other one. Ooops—now I can’t see. My eyes must be gone.

Shelley was something of a sensualist. He relished touch—pressure. How would it feel, physically, to take this creature apart? Would its pincers snap at his fingers as he pulled? Would its stupid crustacean anatomy fight its own dismemberment—that wonderful tension as he pulled each limb off, the sucking pip! as this or that part detached from the whole? The crayfish could fight, yes—and dimly, Shelley sort of hoped it would—but it wouldn’t matter: he wasn’t scared of being bitten or clawed, plus he was so much bigger. As usual with Shelley, if he wanted to do something—and if nobody was watching—he simply did as he liked.

He pinched one of the crayfish’s comical little eyes. It ruptured with a mildly satisfying pop. The texture was grainy—a tiny ball of honeycomb candy coming apart. The remnants were stuck on his finger like the shards of a very small and dark Christmas tree ornament. The crayfish spasmed in his palm, jackknifing open and closed. Shelley was transfixed. His eyes took on a hard sheen. Saliva collected in his mouth, a gossamer strand of spit rappelling over his quivering lower lip.

He burst the crayfish’s other eye. He carefully pulled off one of its pincers, relishing that thrilling tension. Pip! The pinky-translucent claw continued to open and close even when separated from the body. He dropped it and watched it sink, opening and closing.

“Hey, Shel,” Ephraim called over. “Newt’s going to light the one-match fire. We need you as a windbreak.”

NEWTON WAS in charge of the fire. The boys were content to let him take the lead. Besides, Newton was best at almost all the basic survival skills: firecraft and orienteering and berry identification.

Newton lit the pile of old man’s beard and nursed the fledgling flickers. Fingers of flame crawled up the bleached wood. They crouched around the fire to soak in its heat. Sunlight painted a honey-gold inlay on the slack water between the waves.

“My grandma died of cancer,” Ephraim said suddenly. “Liver cancer.”

Max said: “What?”

Ephraim gave him a look: Just listen to me. “Her skin went yellow. All she could get down were those meal replacement things that old people drink. Ensure. Her hair came out because of the radiation chamber they stuck her in to kill the cancer.” He exhaled heavily, blowing his dark locks off his forehead. “When I saw that guy this morning, the first thing I thought about was Grandma.”

The man hadn’t entered their thoughts directly, but he’d been hovering at the margins all day. His sick-looking face. His matchstick arms and legs. The sweet smell of the cabin.

Ephraim’s streamlined and unconventionally handsome face took on a rare pensive aspect. “What do you think’s the matter with him?”

Kent grabbed a stone and hurled it into the water with a vicious sweep of his arm.

“Who knows, Eef? If it’s cancer, then it’s cancer—right? People get cancer.” Kent stared at the others with savage solemnity. “Maybe he’s got what-do-you-call-it… alpiners or whatever.”

“Alzheimer’s,” Newton said.

“What-the-fuck ever, Newt. He’s got that.”

“He’s too young,” Newton said. “That’s an old people’s disease.”

“You guys’re being babies,” Kent said, drawing the last word out: baaaaay-bies. “My dad says the most obvious conclusion is usually the right one. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the time.”

“So what’s the most obvious conclusion?” Shelley asked, his vapid face oriented on Kent. “His skin looked like it was melting.”

The boys fell silent.

“I just think the guy is sick, is all,” Max said after a while. “And I’ve been thinking about it.”

“So have I,” said Ephraim.

“And me,” Newt said.

Kent snorted. “Tim’s a doctor, isn’t he? That’s his job, isn’t it? By the time we get back, he’d better have everything sorted out.”

He kicked the fire apart, scattering bits of flaming driftwood.

Before departing, Newton gathered the still-glowing sticks and doused them in the ocean. Scout’s Law number four: Honor and protect Nature in all her abundance.

11

IT WAS dark by the time they returned to the cabin. A fire flickered in a ring of rocks. Scoutmaster Tim was sitting on the far side. The tendons on his neck stood out in sharp relief: they looked like tiny trees all tenting inward.

“Don’t go inside,” he told them.

“My warm coat’s in there,” Kent said.

“The fire’s warm. You’ll be fine.”

“I’d rather have my coat.”

“I don’t care what you’d rather have,” Tim said in a dead voice. “The man inside is sick. Sick in a way I’ve never seen before, at least not that I can diagnose here.”

The boys settled themselves around the fire. Newton said, “Sick how?”

“At first, I thought cancer. As a doctor, that’s always the first thought. But cancer is almost always typified by loss of appetite and…”

Tim saw no good reason to tell the boys that the man had stirred that afternoon—lunged upward like a heart-staked vampire from its coffin. His eyes crawling with burst vessels… his tongue a knot of sinew as if something had sucked the saliva out of it…

The man had sunk his teeth into the chesterfield and torn at the fabric with savage bites.

The mindlessness of it had horrified Tim.

Tim managed to sedate him before he swallowed too much. There was a good chance he’d choke to death on the chesterfield’s musty old foam. He’d cradled the man’s neck as he laid him down. The man’s head tilted back and his jaw hung open…

Tim had seen something. If anything, it resembled a white knuckle of bone—the bone of a greenstick fracture except curved and gleaming. Visible only for a harried instant. Lodged in his throat below the epiglottal bulb. Gently ribbed and somehow gill-like…

Next the man’s rib cage bulged in a bone-splintering flex as something settled.

“…and this man is very hungry,” Tim finished.

“So what are you going to do about it?” said Kent.

Tim ignored the boy’s cheeky defiance. “He may have some kind of internal sickness. By the time the boat picks us up, I believe he’ll be dead.”

Newton said: “Can you operate on him?”

Shelley said: “Cut him open?”

Tim said: “I haven’t done a lot of surgery, but I know the basics. Max, has your dad ever had you help him out on the job?”

Max’s father was the county coroner. Also its taxidermist: if anyone wanted his trophy bluefin mounted on a burled-oak backing, he was the one to call. An insistent voice in Tim’s head told him not to involve the boys—keep them clear of this. But a new voice, a silky whisper, told him no worries—it’d be just fine.

You’ve got it all under control, Tim…

He didn’t, though—he’d become hyperaware of this fact. This night would determine whether the man lived or died… maybe only a few hours of the night. This was why he would’ve bombed as a surgeon: Tim lacked the quick-cut instincts, that private triage room in his head. He was a thinker—an overthinker. Overthinking matters was just a harmless quirk in a GP but now, when swift action was needed, he could feel himself coming apart.

“I’ve helped taxidermy animals,” Max said.

“Helped in what way?”

“Threading needles with catgut. Shining up the glass eyes and like that.”

It’s an internship, said the voice in Tim’s head. Consider it an early residency. Max’s folks wouldn’t mind, would they? A man’s life is at risk, right? Max is smart, Max is careful—and you can protect him should anything happen.

Tim pointed at the others. “You all stay here. No arguments. This guy… I don’t know what’s the matter. He may be viral.”

Ephraim said: “Viral?”

“Like, he’s catching,” Kent said. “You know, contagious.”

“You sure, Scoutmaster?” Newt said. “I mean, Max is just a…”

Boy was the word Newton swallowed. Just a boy and Tim was taking him into a cabin occupied by a man who was sick in some unknowable way.

Tim’s left eye twitched, the nerve gone haywire. Plikka-plikka-plikka like the shutter on a camera. He squeezed his eyes shut, slowly counted to five in his head. A small, persistent, maddening voice deep within the runnels of his brain was now asking questions.

What are you doing, Tim? Are you really sure, Tim? The voice’s cold, stentorian tone reminded him of HAL 9000, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It wouldn’t shut up, kept nattering on with icy certainty.

Just what do you think you’re doing, Tim?

He was dimly terrified that this was the voice of common sense—the logical voice that he’d listened to all his adult life—and that he was gradually abandoning it.

“You don’t have to do this, Max,” Ephraim said. His gaze fell upon the Scoutmaster. “He doesn’t have to, does he?”

Tim swallowed. He’d begun to do so compulsively—it felt like a pebble had gotten lodged in his throat. “No… no. But I don’t think I can do it alone. And we will take all precautions.”

Max said: “It’ll be safe?”

Tim swallowed, swallowed…

Are you sure, Tim? Is this really—

It will be FINE. You can HANDLE it.

A new voice rose over HAL 9000’s prissy hectoring. A louder, more imposing voice, belonging to a man of action. It crowded out the other voice, which was just fine—Tim was tired of listening to it.

“It’s safe,” Tim said.

The new voice said, It’s safe enough, anyway.

Tim hooked his thumb at Max. “Now come on.”

12

THE AIR inside the cabin was sickly sweet. Closing his eyes, Max could picture himself under a canopy of tropical fronds hung with fruits swollen with decay.

Tim splashed rubbing alcohol on a long strip of gauze. “Press this over your mouth and nose. No matter what happens, Max, don’t take it off.”

“Aren’t you wearing one?”

“I don’t know if that matters so much now.”

Tim had been busy. He’d already set up a crude operating theater on the table: suture needles threaded with filament, scalpels, hypodermic needles and vials, a bottle of scotch, and a soldering iron.

“I scrounged that out of Oliver McCanty’s boat,” Tim said, pointing to the iron. “I might be able to cauterize the bigger blood vessels with it.”

The cupboards hung open. Max saw empty hot dog wrappers and bun bags in the trash. A huge sack of oatmeal was torn open and most of it was gone. The trail mix… the beef jerky… their food for the entire weekend.

Tim rubbed his palm over his face, gave Max a sheepish smile, and pointed at an orange plastic cooler.

“The food in there I haven’t touched. Take it outside, please. Right now.”

Max did as he was told, the numbness growing inside. He overheard Newton saying “What would our folks say about it?” and saw the questioning looks on his fellow Scouts’ faces; he put the cooler down and turned, ignoring them, heading back to Tim. A gust of wind pulled the cabin door shut behind him. He dug his feet into the floor—he didn’t want to be anywhere near the stranger.

“Prop a chair under the doorknob,” Tim said, pouring scotch into a jelly glass. “I don’t want them coming in.”

In the cabin’s light, Max now saw how much the Scoutmaster had changed in the hours they’d been gone. His chest was sucked inward where his rib cage met. His shoulders arrowed down and his neck stuck between them like a bean plant threading up a bamboo pole. His fingers spider-crept over the bottle—they looked spiderish themselves.

Max remembered something his father had said about Tim: Dr. Riggs has GP hands. Real meat hooks! He doesn’t have surgeon’s hands. A surgeon’s hands are weirdly delicate. Like they’ve got extra joints. Nosferatu hands—the sort of pale and freaky things you could imagine reaching out of the shadows to grab you!

Well, Scoutmaster Tim had surgeon’s hands now.

Tim caught the question in Max’s eyes. He said: “Yeah… I think so, buddy. He coughed something up on me last night. Rock slime, I figured, but since then I’ve lost… twenty pounds? In a day?” He spoke dreamily, with awestruck bafflement. “At least twenty. More every minute.”

Max could tell his Scoutmaster was trying to stay calm—to look at this situation as a doctor—but his diminished body was trembling with insuppressible, jackrabbit fear. A single word looped through Max’s head: RunRunRunRunRun.

He didn’t, though. Perhaps it had something to do with their long history, the innate trust he placed in his Scoutmaster. Maybe it was Pavlovian: when an adult asked for help, Max offered it. A man would have to be pretty desperate to ask a kid, wouldn’t he?

Scoutmaster Tim upended the glass. Rivulets of scotch spilled down the sides of his mouth. He stared radish-eyed at the boy.

“This is not just for me, Max. It’s for you and the others, too.”

Max thought back to a night years ago when his father had gotten hurt on the softball diamond. His team was playing the police union’s team, captained by Kent’s father. Max’s father was the catcher and, on the final play of the ninth inning, score tied at ten-all, “Big” Jeff Jenks steamed around third base, chugging hard for home. The cutoff man got the ball to Max’s dad a good ten yards ahead of Jenks’s arrival—league softball rules stated the catcher didn’t need to apply a tag, so there was no earthly reason for a runner to plow into the catcher in hopes of popping the ball loose.

That hadn’t stopped Jenks from smashing his 250 pounds into Max’s dad—who weighed 160 soaking wet—pancaking him at home plate.

Max heard the high sweet crack! which lingered under the vapor-halogen spotlights. His father stood woozily, his arm hanging at a funny angle: bent back at the elbow, the lower half dangling like a cooked noodle. A shard of bone protruded from the joint, shining wetly under the lights.

The second baseman had driven his father’s car to the ER. Max sat in the backseat, his father in front. He leaned over the seat rest, smiling gamely. It’s okay, Maximilian. It’s just a flesh wound, he said, repeating a line from one of their favorite movies. At the hospital, Max’s dad sat on a bed encircled by a white curtain. Max wasn’t allowed to sit with him because, as his dad said, This is bound to be gross. So he’d only heard the rattle of the bone-setter’s tray and the crisp, blood-jangling click! as his father’s broken bone was set back in place. When the curtain withdrew, there he was, his arm in a sling and a tired, doped-up smile on his face.

Jeff Jenks showed up to say he was sorry but not really—some men are incapable of offering a sincere apology, Max realized; something in their nature refuses it, so instead they frame it as an accident, a misunderstanding, or a “sorry you’re so upset” sort of thing that placed subtle blame on the other person for making such a big deal. Kent was there, too, and told Max he was sorry about what’d happened—which wasn’t an apology, either. Max would always remember that glint of pride in Kent’s eye.

Afterward Max’s father drove them home. Can you drop the transmission into drive, son? I can’t manage it. They drove through streets wrapped in darkness, his father palm-guiding the wheel. Getting old, kiddo. His father smiled. And I’m barely hanging on to the “getting” part. A sudden fear had stolen over the crown of Max’s skull—fear and sadness intermingled, so powerful he wanted to cry. Up until that night, he’d sincerely believed that his father was invincible. He was mammothly strong, capable of reshingling a house or chopping down trees with a sharp axe. But that night he’d looked frail, tired, and vaguely spooked. Vulnerable—something Max had never seen. All bodies fail, he realized. They fall to pieces in pieces, bit by torturous bit, and a man had to watch it fall apart around him.

Max now thought of this as he looked at the Scoutmaster, and shivered.

“I’LL NEED your help, Max. I’ll need it quite a lot in the next few minutes.”

Max said: “Um, what do you want me to do?”

At fourteen, Max was a little smaller than average, but there was a wideness to his shoulders and a thickness to his chest. He moved with a litheness that was not at all common for boys his age—most of them were made of knees and elbows all held together with scabs. His face was Rockwellian: the bristle-brush red hair and star-spray of freckles over his cheeks. He looked like a more compact and muscular Opie.

What set Max apart from the other boys was his reservoir of remoteness and cool self-control. Tim didn’t believe his father had inculcated this into him: Reggie Kirkwood was a good man but flighty as a hummingbird, prone to gossip and drink. Tim had seen the same cool quality in some of his classmates at med school who’d gone on to become the top “blades” at Johns Hopkins and Beth Israel. It wasn’t exactly cockiness: more an absence of panic or hesitation. They trusted their instincts and they trusted their hands to carry those instincts into action.

Tim would try to not ask too much of the boy during the coming operation—but even asking him to be here at all was a terrible request. HAL 9000’s maddeningly reasonable voice echoed this.

Tim, I think you’re losing it. Tim could see HAL in his mind’s eye: a reflective glass eye, very dark, a dot of redness expanding and contracting like a dilated pupil. And now you’re taking a child down the rabbit hole with you.

Don’t listen to that bullshit, the other, more comforting voice boomed. This is your duty as a doctor—what other choice, just watch this man die? And you can’t do this alone, can you?

He couldn’t. It was that simple. Tim switched on the soldering iron to let it heat. “I’ve doped him up.”

It wasn’t true anesthetic—two crushed Vicodin discovered in a forgotten pocket of his backpack; he’d been prescribed it years ago while recuperating from a calf infarction. It could very well be expired, but what the hell, better than nothing.

“He shouldn’t wake up.” Tim gripped the blankets gathered at the man’s throat. “Ready?”

Max nodded. Tim pulled the blankets away.

MAX COULDN’T keep the look of horror off his face. It was instinctive, what most would feel when faced with a member of humankind who no longer looked like he belonged to the species.

The stranger didn’t wholly resemble a man anymore. More like something a dull-witted child might have drawn with a crayon. His body was lines. His arms were scribbles. His fingers were calligraphic spiders. The skin draped his rib cage with terrible intimacy, pinching around each rib to show the striation of muscle. His sternum was a knot, his pelvis a gruesome hinged wishbone. The skin of his face had the patina of old copper and was sucked so tight to his skull that Max could see the glaring rings of bone around his eye sockets. His ears protruded like jug handles, so thin that they curled inward, like charring paper.

“Unbelievable. My God. Even his cartilage is disintegrating,” Tim said in horrified awe.

He looks like the oldest man who’s ever lived, Max thought.

His stomach was the only robust thing about him. A tightly swollen bulge. It looked like he’d swallowed a volleyball.

“I’m going to do something called a gastrostomy,” Tim said. “I’ll make a small incision over the outer third of the left rectus muscle. So basically here.” He drew his finger below the edge of the man’s lowest rib. “It should be a short trip into his stomach. Very little visceral or abdominal fat to get through.”

“Is there any fat?”

Tim said: “His body must have started eating its muscle a while ago. I have to worry about the liver… but I can pretty much see it right now.” He pointed to a soft ridge along the man’s side. “It has probably shut down its function. It’s in a state of premortification and it’s hardening fast.”

“Can you save him?”

To Max, it seemed impossible. This man already belonged less to Max’s world, the living one, than to his father’s: the world of the motionless dead in the mortuary vaults.

“I can’t say. It’s some kind of voodoo that he’s still alive. But we have to do something, Max.” Tim stared searchingly at the boy, his eyelid going plikka-plikka. “Don’t we?”

Max wasn’t sure. Why was it their responsibility? Maybe this man had done it to himself—a result of bad luck or bad decisions.

Tim tried to smile but couldn’t quite get his muscles to cooperate: more the leer of a crazed loon. His face kept shifting polarities, giddy to mortified, great forces working beneath its surface. Max wondered: Did the Scoutmaster really want to save the man, or only investigate for symptoms of his own condition? He contemplated the selfishness of that as the soldering gun sent up pin curls of smoke.

“What do you think it is?” Max asked softly.

Tim picked up the scalpel. He stared at his hand until it stopped trembling.

“I’ve stopped trying to guess, Max. I’ll open him up a little. Just a little, okay?”

TIM THOUGHT back to med school, an operating theater where a doctor-instructor leaned over his patient and said: This is the God moment, folks. You hold it all in your hands right now. So honor the body beneath your blade.

Tim would do his best to honor this man’s body… what was left of it.

“Ready, Max?”

The boy nodded.

“Just follow my instructions. Don’t be scared if I yell or get demanding—it won’t be your fault.” He offered a strained and cheerless smile. “I’ll try not to raise my voice.”

Tim positioned the scalpel over the man’s flesh, which was stretched so tight that he could see the individual pores: a million tiny mouths stretched into silent screams. He lacked the cool confidence of a true “blade”—you could wake one of those guys out of a dead sleep, shove him into the operating theater and stick a knife in his hand, and he’d say I’ve got it from here and get down to cutting.

That was a rare gift. Tim had been given a smaller gift, which was why he’d ended up as a small-town GP wielding tongue depressors and blood pressure cuffs. He’d always been okay with that, too—but as the scalpel hummed over the man’s flesh, he dearly wished for the unerring self-belief of his med-school pals.

The man’s skin opened up as if it had been aching to do that very thing. A V of split flesh followed the blade as it sliced below the ribs, widening out like the wake of a yacht. Everything inside existed in shades of white: the silver skin draping the man’s ribs and the layers of muscle.

“Soldering iron, Max.”

Tim cauterized the severed veins. Medical instruments were often just precision variations of the same tools handymen used.

“Gauze,” he said.

Tim dabbed the blood out of the half-inch-deep slit in the man’s torso—then absentmindedly dabbed the sweat off his forehead. The stranger’s breathing was unaltered. Tim wasn’t surprised. A single baby aspirin would be enough to knock him on his ass. He already may have slipped into a starvation coma.

HAL 9000 spoke up: Timothy Ogden Riggs, are you sure you’re making the right decision? I think you should stop.

The new, conflicting voice—the Undervoice, as Tim now thought of it—boomed back: How could you stop now, even if you wanted to? Don’t you want to know, Tim? Don’t you NEED to know?

The blade slit through bands of taut sinew to reveal the stomach lining. Milky-pale and fingered with blue veins. Tim was reminded of childhood trips to his Scottish grandmother’s home and the boiled sheeps’ stomachs she’d laid out on the kitchen counter, waiting to be made into haggis: they had looked like deflated, overthick birthday balloons.

Jesus… Jesus Christ.

Tim wished so dearly that he were in a hospital right now, a sterilized surgical suite with nurses and orderlies buzzing about like helpful bees. Most desperately of all, he wished the blade weren’t in his hand.

It doesn’t have to be, Tim, HAL 9000 said softly. Just put the blade down. Take Max’s hand—or maybe you shouldn’t touch him, just in case. Stitch this poor man up and leave the cabin. Both of you. Just go.

The Undervoice, nasty and baiting: You fucking coward. Grow a set of balls, man! In for a penny, in for a pound—and you’re neck-deep now, sonny boy!

Tim drew the blade along the stomach lining. A gout of gray ichor oozed around the lips of the incision like congestive mucus. Then… more white. Another layer of tightened white flesh.

“…gauze,” Tim said tentatively.

Max put a square in his hand. Tim dabbed away the warm ichor. The smell was horrible, like rancid grease. This made no sense. He’d cut into the stomach, hadn’t he? He hadn’t expected to find a dark vault, but he had expected a cavity, an expulsion of pressurized stomach gas… something.

It seemed as if he’d simply sliced into a secondary layer of stomach lining—which was impossible. Was this man’s stomach the equivalent of a Russian doll, stomach inside stomach inside stomach?

Something very disturbing is happening here, Tim. HAL 9000’s voice, indistinct and watery. Something is horribly, drastically wrong…

Tim felt a species of fear enter his heart that he hadn’t felt since his stint as a foreign aid doctor in Afghanistan. Although he’d been scared most of his time there, it had at least been a coherent fear: fear that a bomb might come whistling out of the chalky desert sky and through the canvas roof of his jury-rigged triage ward, or fear that some human grenade might dash inside their compound and pull the pin on himself.

But the fear he felt now was childlike, dreamy. There was no reference point to it. The man was just sick—that was all. He didn’t have multiple stomachs. There had to be a rational cause for all of this. It was a serious occlusion, of course… but there was no reason, really no reason, for his eyes to be drawn to that ribbed whiteness within the duller whiteness of the stomach’s lining and for his mind to fuse shut at the possibilities…

…Jesus, he was hungry.

Why had he given the boys all that food? They would be fine until the boat came. But he needed it. Now. He’d packed it and paid for it. By rights it was his.

Tim stared at his patient. The man’s lips were so thin that they’d twisted into a permanent grin. He seemed to be laughing at Tim. Mocking his hunger.

Hey, buddy, the Undervoice piped up. What would you do for a Klondike bar?

“Shut up,” Tim croaked.

Whoa! No need to get testy. The voice had gone vile and poisonous. You deserve a break today, pal. Two all-beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun…

“Scoutmaster Tim…”

Tim couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s face. Lying there like a ghoul. Smiling.

“Tim? Tim! Tim!”

Tim turned dazedly toward Max. The boy’s eyes were bulging out of the whitened mask of his face. His nostrils were dilated like a bull’s before it charged at a red cape.

“Wha…?”

Which was when Tim felt something touch his hand. Which was when he looked down.

Which was when he saw it.

Which was when he screamed.

13

MAX SAW it first. A white stub protruding where Scoutmaster Tim had made the incision.

It looked silly. Like a balloon, maybe: one of those long, skinny ones that the clowns made balloon animals with at the Cavendish County Fair. Max had gotten one last year—a giraffe. The clown who’d made it had approached Max near the Shetland pony pen. He’d been short and dumpy, in slappy red shoes with the toes all squashed like they’d been stamped on by an elephant. The greasepaint on the clown’s face had been badly applied over his stubbled cheeks; the red circles around his eyes were melting down his face in the heat, making him look like a sick beagle. His clown suit was dingy, with yellow patches under the armpits. When he smiled, Max saw brown grime slotted between his teeth. When he blew up the balloon, Max got a good whiff of him: rank sweat and something odder, scarier—a hint of shaved iron. The clown gave the balloon cruel twists with his nublike fingers; the balloon squealed as if in pain. The giraffe was all neck: a bulb of a head, thumblike legs. Max pictured the poor thing dragging its neck through the dirt across the Serengeti…

What now came out of the man’s stomach reminded Max of that.

A balloon. Or as though the man’s belly had blown a funny little bubble. Except this bubble was solid—Max could tell that immediately—solid and weirdly muscular.

Whatever it was, it relaxed back inside the man. The balloon or cord or tube—which was maybe the closest corollary: a thick shiny tube, like an inner tube but white instead of black, filled not with air but with some kind of thick pulsing fluid—the tube flattened back into the incision. Tim and Max watched, transfixed in the perfectly still eye of horror. The tube curved around in the man’s stomach; it seemed to be made of different parts, different elements—it reminded Max of the snake ball Eef had found that afternoon. A few dozen snakes twisted into a ball, having sex.

Copulating, as his health teacher, Mrs. Fitzhue, would say, stringing the word out—coppp-hugggh-late-ting.

The thing flexed, constricting; the man’s spine curled up as if parts of the thing were twined all through him—when the tube constricted, his body did, too. The idea that this tube could be spread out into every part of the man was terrifying.

“Scoutmaster Tim…” Max’s words came out in a papery whisper, his mind tightening shut in baffled horror. “What…?”

Tim didn’t answer. The only sound was the creak of the floorboards beneath the man. A few of the cauterized veins split open; dark arterial blood wept down the man’s pale skin.

The tube swelled monstrously, pushing itself out of the rubbery slit in a sudden surge. It emerged incredibly fast, its whiteness stretching to a milky translucence. Tim and Max shielded their faces instinctively, petrified it would explode, splattering them with the contents of its alien body—what could possibly be inside such a thing? Its guts were visible through that sheer web: crazed threshings and phantom pulsations—Max felt as if he were staring through a lard-streaked window into… God, into what? His fear was whetted to such a fine edge that he could actually feel it now: a disembodied ball of baby fingers inside his stomach, tickling him from the inside. That’s what mortal terror felt like, he realized. Tiny fingers tickling you from the inside.

The tube deflated back inside the man’s stomach for an instant, inflated even more so, and deflated again: its movement echoed a huge lung inhaling and exhaling. Only a few seconds had ticked off the clock, but Max felt as if a minor eternity had passed. Everything moved in slow motion…

Then, with a brutal whiplash, the world sped up.

The tube propelled itself out of the man’s side in a series of fierce pulsations, or what Max’s science teacher, Mr. Lowery, would have called peristaltic flexes. It came with a sly squishing noise, like very wet clay squeezed in a tightened fist.

The balloon or tube or whatever it was became something else. It twisted and split and became a thick white loop: it looked a little like the U-magnets Max used to push around iron filings in Mr. Lowery’s class.

Could it be a hernia? Max’s uncle Frank had one of those. He’d taken off his truss at a family picnic and showed it to him. It had looked like a fist pushing against the flatness of his stomach. I tried to pick up two sacks of cement, Maximilian, Uncle Frank had told him. One sack too many. The pressure forced a little-bitty bit of my innards to squeeze right through the muscle. Uncle Frank had then made a rude farting noise. Out she come, slick as goose poop! It’s peeking through like a clown nose, huh? See it there? Peek-a-boo, Maxxy, I see you! Uncle Frank had given the herniated intestine a little squeeze. Honk, honk! Oh! I feel my lunch moving through… yup, there goes the corn bread. Uncle Frank had not been invited to the following year’s picnic.

But this wasn’t a hernia. Logic told Max so. A hernia was just what his mind had feverishly cobbled together to excuse what he was seeing. A hernia didn’t move. A hernia didn’t pulsate like that.

This thing…

This thing…

The loop became a pale ribbed tube roughly seven inches long. Thicker than a garden hose. Tapered slightly at its tip. It seemed to be made of millimeter-thick rings stacked atop one another. Each ring was gently rounded at its edge. Pearlescent beads squeezed from its surface, clinging to the tube like grains of sand to wet skin.

“Get back,” Tim breathed. “Max, you get the hell back—”

The tube paused. Max got the weirdest sense that it was presenting itself. The gaudiest belle at the debutantes’ ball. Appendages began to unglue themselves from its trunk. It reminded Max of the time he’d come upon a half-hatched bird struggling out of its egg, its wings pulling free of its body all stuck with webby strands of mucus… this looked much the same—or like a Swiss Army knife unfolding its many blades and attachments. These smaller appendages unkinked with the slow, showy grace of a contortionist; they unfurled tortuously in the cabin’s dim light, making gluey lip-smack noises. They looked like the fleshy leaves of desert plants—succulents, those plants were called. Max learned that in science class, too. The very tips of these appendages split in half, lolling open. Max saw tiny fishbone teeth studding each mouth—it was sickeningly beautiful.

Peek-a-boo, Maxxie, I see you.

There is an emotion that operates on a register above sheer terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength—a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak.

Watching that lithe tube now hunt toward his Scoutmaster like a blind snake, Max hit that register.

“Tim Tim TIM!”

AS A doctor, Tim had seen plenty of things in human stomachs. Rubber bath plugs and toy cars and Baltic coins and wedding rings. Most of these could be purged using simple regurgitative or saline laxative procedures. The human form held few surprises for him anymore.

But when that white tube threaded out of the incision and tip-tip-tipped toward him as if it were ascending an imaginary staircase, Tim squealed: a shocked piglike sound. He couldn’t get a grip on his sudden fear: it slipped through the safety bars of his mind and threaded—wormed—into the shadowy pockets where nightmares grew.

His scalpel slashed wildly, severing the leading inch of the flickering white tube. The amputated nub fell between Tim’s feet. It writhed and leaked brown fluid. Its plantlike appendages studded with tiny mouths gawped open and shut.

Tim’s arms pinwheeled madly as he tipped backward, landing awkwardly on his ass. The remainder of the tube sucked itself back into the incision like a strand of spaghetti going into a greedy child’s mouth, whipping and snapping and spraying stinking brown gouts.

“Cover your mouth!” Tim screamed. “Don’t let any of it touch you!”

Fists battering the door so hard that dust sifted down from the rafters. The boys’ massing voices, dominated by Kent’s.

“Tim! Max! What’s going on? Open the door!”

The stranger’s body rocked side to side. His feet slipped off the chesterfield and hit the floor with a brittle rattle.

The tube now shot straight up out of the wound, rising in a monstrous ripple. A foot. Two feet. Three feet of oily tube weaved out of the man—the dead man, Tim prayed, the dead man who please God feels none of this—like a headless albino cobra out of an Indian fakir’s basket. It threshed like some obscene bullwhip, leaking brownish fluid. It stood quivering for a long instant, flicking back and forth: it looked as if it was tasting the air, or hunting for smaller and weaker creatures within striking distance.

Which was when the stranger woke up.

His eyelids fluttered, then his eyes went wide—wider than ever should be possible. It was as if the man had awoken from a terrible dream only to find that those terrors were dwarfed by those in the waking world. He loosed a volley of piercing screams—they almost sounded like the snarls of a terrified dog.

“Stay away, Max!” Tim yelled. “Stay back!”

The stranger reached instinctively for the thing coming out of him—his hand died before reaching it, his fingers softening into a caress. His eyes were miserably bright and aware, bulging with pure shock and horror: the eyes of a little boy who’d come face-to-face with the nameless horror lurking under his bed.

“Ug…” was the single syllable that came out of his mouth. A caveman’s grunt of disgust. “Uhg… ug…”

“Tim!” Kent screamed. “Open this freakin’ door right now!”

The tips of a boy’s head bobbed at the cabin’s lone high window, a pair of hands hooked on the sill—Ephraim’s hands; they had to be Eef’s—set to boost their owner up for a look inside.

Tim realized he was watching a man die.

He’d seen it before, of course—but Max hadn’t. Here was a man neither of them knew the first thing about. And now, in a way that was somehow obscene, Max would witness this man during the most private moment any human being would ever have: the moment of his death.

The man’s eyes rolled back. He exhaled. Mercifully, his eyes closed.

The tube dropped onto the man’s chest like a length of rope. It lay in a loose coil for a moment before twitching and crawling under the man’s shirt. Tim imagined it working up the man’s neck and into his mouth. Thrashing its way down his throat and back into his stomach to link up with the rest of itself. Eating its own tail—or its own head?

Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Max reaching for the soldering iron—

“Don’t!” Tim said. “Don’t you fucking dare, Max.”

The tube wrapped around the man’s bird-thin neck, encircling it in a greasy ringlet. It elongated slightly, the many rings that constituted its body thinning with cruel, purposeful tension.

Jesus Christ, it’s constricting, Tim’s mind yammered. It’s choking him.

Tim tried to stand, but his legs were cramped with the sudden dump of lactic acid. He pulled himself forward. His hand slipped on the severed link of tube, which pulped under his palm like a rotten banana.

The man’s face had turned the blue of a sun-bleached parking ticket. Tim was shocked that this thing—

It’s a worm, the Undervoice said. A fucking WORM that’s what the fuck it is and you better wrap your head around that buddy, oh pal-o-mine

—had the strength to do what it was doing.

He dragged himself forward, scrabbling for the scalpel that had skittered under the chesterfield’s skirt. He hunted amid the dust bunnies and insect corpses while a thick, hopeless whimper built in his throat…

Kent’s fists pounded on the door but that sound was far away now—a dream-noise not attached to the waking world. The tube flexed. The man’s neck bent at a sudden unnatural angle. His body stiffened before going limp.

Oh no, Tim thought. His next thought was: Oh thank God.

The tube released from the man’s throat, retreating once again into the incision. Tim grabbed at it through the man’s shirt. The thought of touching it directly brought on a mind-numbing revulsion. He pictured it feeling like a lubed length of nautical rope burning through his fingers. But when his hand closed around it, the tube was warm and pulsating and horribly smooth. Its flagellate body was already going limp as if it had a pinhole leak. He slashed the scalpel through the man’s shirt and through the thing’s body. It was like cutting through ripe stinking cheese. It took no effort at all.

He saw inside the severed portion. There was no identifiable anatomy to the thing. No vertebrae or organs. It was full of loose brownish goo. Some massive carnivorous leech. The unsevered portion slid sluggishly back inside the wound. Its skin continued to weep those pearly pustules.

The man’s stomach deflated. Brown filth bubbled out of the wound. Half-digested bits of chesterfield foam bobbed on its surface.

Squinting, Max thought he saw something deeper inside. Two objects? Long and glinting, their angles man-made.

Tim and Max stood breathing heavily in the dim light of the cabin. The hacked-off portion of the tube slid out of the vent in the man’s shirt, hitting the floor and wadding up like a huge tube sock. The brown goo had run over Tim’s fingers and down his knuckles like watery molasses. Overcome by instinctive revulsion, Tim wiped his fingers on his pants—and when even that closeness was too much, he unbuttoned them, yanked them down and off, wiped his hands on the fabric, and hurled the pants into the corner. He stood shivering in his underwear. His thighs were unbearably thin: knobbed sticks on a forest floor.

“Jesus,” he said softly, then gave Max a sharp look. “Did you swallow any of that stuff? Get any in your mouth or eyes?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“No,” Max said. “I didn’t get anything in me.”

“You kept the gauze over your mouth the whole time?”

“Yes.”

“Okay… okay, good.”

Tim staggered to the table and drank scotch right out of the bottle.

“If you drink whiskey, you’ll never get worms, Max.”

Kent pounded on the door unrelentingly. “Tim! Tiiiiim!”

The Scoutmaster stumbled to the sink and washed his hands. He did this for some time; the hard island water made it difficult to get a good lather going. His legs trembled like a newborn foal’s. When he was finished, his hands were a raw, nail-scraped red. Did it matter anymore? He shuffled into the bedroom, not speaking to Max, coming out with pants on.

He kicked the chair away from the door—he had to kick three times; he seemed to lack the energy to do it properly—and flung the door open to catch Kent red-faced and fuming, his hand raised in midknock.

“Get away from the fucking door, Kent.” Tim’s voice belonged to something recently dug from its grave. “Get your ass far, far away.”

14

TIM SAT at the fire and explained what he could. Most of it failed to make sense to him at all.

“A worm?”

“Yeah, Newton: a worm. Not a night crawler or something you’d dig out of your mom’s garden. A tapeworm.”

Tim had experience with tapeworms. Any GP would. They were a common enough affliction. A person could pick them up anywhere.

As easy as petting your dog. Providing your dog had rolled in a pile of shit earlier that day—as dogs tend to do—you could get microscopic particles of said shit on your fingers without even knowing. A thousand eggs stuck between the whorls of your fingertips. And after petting ole Spot, let’s say you ate a handful of popcorn and licked the salt off your fingers. Bingo-bango-bongo. You’ve got worms.

At least once a month, he’d see a kid in the waiting room scratching his keister through the seat of his pants and say to himself: worms. One time a kid’s mother handed him an ice cream tub with one of her child’s chalky turds inside. “I thought you’d want a sample,” she’d told him solemnly. “For proof.”

Tim would prescribe an oral remedy that demolished the tapeworm colony over a few days. Tapeworms were, at most, a nuisance.

“He’s dead,” Tim said simply.

Ephraim said: “From worms?”

“No, Eef—from a worm.”

Kent said: “How the hell can a tapeworm kill someone? I had worms when I was eight. I crapped the little buggers out.”

“I know,” Tim said. “I gave your mother the medicine to do it.”

This one wasn’t the size of any regular worm, Tim thought. He’d heard that beef tapeworms—the ones you can get from eating tainted meat—could get pretty big. Twenty, thirty feet. He recalled a case study where a doctor pulled one out of a cattle rancher’s leg. It had balled up between the layers of muscle. A lump the size of a baseball. The doctor made a slit into the muscle and pulled it out of the rancher’s leg like teasing out a piece of thread. The worm was incredibly skinny, like a strand of angel hair pasta. It snapped. The rest of the worm died inside the muscle and started to rot. The rancher almost lost his leg. But even so, the longest worms weren’t really that thick.

Ephraim said: “What did it do to him?”

What could Tim tell them? The truth? The truth—which even he wanted to avoid—was that the tapeworm had done what tapeworms do: eaten everything the man was supposed to eat. Like having a furnace turned up to full blast inside of you: everything you throw into it, it burns up. No fuel left for you. Tim thought about the blood-leeched whiteness of the man’s flesh and realized the worm may’ve consumed other things, too. His blood and enzymes. That would have shut down his kidneys and liver and other organs… some kind of vampire.

But he couldn’t say this. It would terrify the boys. And yet he’d nearly told them anyway—sharing the terror seemed like the only way to defuse it, even minimally. But they were just kids. Even now, with the mainland and hospitals and help seeming so far away, Tim understood his obligation to these boys and to their parents. He must keep them safe. Scout’s honor.

“Are you okay?” Newton asked. “You and Max? Did anything… y’know, touch you?”

The boys stared at Tim, all probably wondering the same thing. Now, in the aftermath, Tim wondered why he’d done it. Not the operation itself, but involving Max. He’d told himself that he needed help—no surgeon operates alone. But now he was less sure.

“Tim?” Kent said, his eyes holding a rook’s sheen. “Did… anything… touch… you?”

Fuck off, you pushy bastard, the Undervoice spat.

“I don’t think so,” Tim said. “It happened very fast.”

Kent turned to Max. “You okay, man?”

Max nodded, eyes not leaving the ground. When Tim saw this, a cold, hard stone lodged somewhere in his diaphragm.

You made a mistake, Tim, HAL 9000 said. Don’t go compounding it.

“What happened?” Ephraim said. “Tell us.”

Tim nibbled his lip compulsively, as if his unconscious desire was to consume his own flesh. He caught himself, smiled queasily—his eyes shone in the firelight, hubbed by skin drawn tight over his sockets—and said: “I cut into the man’s stomach. The worm was in there. Nesting. It came out through the incision. It crawled up the man’s chest and wrapped around his neck. It…” He couldn’t stop swallowing. “Killed him.”

“You cut him up?” Kent asked, incredulous.

“I told you, it happened so fast.” Tim’s mouth was a dry wick, his spit all dried up. “It was like something out of a dream.”

“Amazing,” said Kent. The sneering derision was unmistakable. He sounded very much like his policeman father.

“I was scared,” Tim said. It came out as a whisper. He observed the boys’ faces clustered round the fire—all wearing matching looks of diminished respect—and wished he could take those honest words back.

“Yeah, well, this is no time to be scared, Tim,” Kent said.

Tim wanted to slap the mouthy little prick across the face, but his strength had utterly deserted him.

Mosquitoes jigged around their heads. Why aren’t they landing on me? Tim wondered. His hands were clean, yet they still felt sticky with goo; he felt it in the creases of his fingers, in his nail beds—an antic, wriggling itch. He closed his eyes and envisioned that goo drooling out of the worm’s cleaved body. The firelight glowed against his eyelids, lighting up the capillaries that braided under his skin.

“So it’s dead?” Newton said.

Max nodded. “Scoutmaster Tim cut it in half.”

“It was effectively dead before that,” Tim said. “Once the host is dead, the parasite dies, too.”

“Why would it do that?” Newton asked. “Wrap around the man’s neck and kill him? That’s like a baby strangling its mom or something.”

Tim gave a helpless shrug. “Worms don’t have any brains to speak of. Worms shouldn’t grow to that size. But that’s what happened. We saw it. You’ve got to trust the evidence of your eyes.”

Newton said: “Do we even know the guy’s name?”

His words fell like an anvil. Suddenly the man’s name seemed critical. The idea of a man dying as a stranger surrounded by other strangers struck the boys as staggeringly tragic.

“I want to go home,” Shelley said softly. “Take us home, Scoutmaster. Please.”

In the firelight, Shelley’s face molded into a beseeching expression—mock-beseeching? The expression rang hollow, inorganic and somehow clumsy, like an animal trying to replicate human endeavor: a bear riding a bicycle or a monkey playing a milk-carton ukulele. In Tim’s fevered mind, it seemed like the boy was purposefully stirring fear within the group by asking for something beyond Tim’s capacity to deliver.

“Tomorrow, Shelley. We can leave—”

“Why not tonight, Tim?” Shelley said, adopting Kent’s derisive tone. “Why can’t you get us home tonight?”

Because I’m too fucking tired, you awful little shit. Tired and hungry as hell.

“Tomorrow. I promise.”

Shelley stared at Tim—there was something insectile about his gaze. The wind gusted, blowing the flames slantways, and in that instant, Tim watched Shelley’s face liquefy like hot wax, the skin running, bones shifting and grinding like tectonic plates to arrange themselves into something infinitely more horrifying.

Kent said: “I want to see it.”

Tim said: “It?”

“The worm, Tim. I want to see the worm.”

“No.”

Kent gave his Scoutmaster a sidelong look, eyeing him down his hawklike nose the way a sniper stares down a rifle’s sights.

Without another word, Kent stood and strode off toward the cabin. Tim was dismayed to find he lacked the voice to stop him.

15

FIFTEEN MINUTES later, Scoutmaster Tim would be locked and shivering inside the cabin’s utility closet.

It would be Kent’s idea. He would suggest that the boys lock their Scoutmaster up for a rational reason—but ultimately he would do it simply because he could. There was something thrilling about leading the others in such an enormous act of rebellion.

KENT SET off from the fire at a determined clip. He figured Tim may try to stop him, but more and more it seemed he lacked the resolve. Tim was scared. He’d said so, practically blubbering his guts out around the fire.

Kent wasn’t scared, though. Hell, no. It wasn’t any part of his character. They needed a proper leader right now, not a big ole ’fraidy-cat.

The other boys would follow. Kent was positive. All it required was for him to take that first step. Who the hell was Tim, anyway? In the view of Kent’s father, Mr. Timothy Riggs was a lonely middle-aged fairy. Not a pedo—Jeff Jenks would cut his own balls off before he’d leave his kid in the woods with one of those. No, according to “Big” Jeff, Tim Riggs was probably just a willowy, sorrowful queer who lived alone in his big house on the bluffs.

You’ve got every right to see what’s inside that cabin, son—every legal right! Kent heard his father saying. Don’t let this noodle-wristed flamer make that decision for you. Not now, with the stakes this high. Don’t you see what he’s done? The quack’s cut open a complete stranger—gutted him, field-dressed the poor bastard like a five-point buck; he’s admitted as much—and now he wants to cover up his act. A man is dead, son! It’s up to you to get this under control. What, Tim’s going to stop you?

“Listen, Kent, it’s a total mess in there,” Max said from behind. “I mean, a dead guy. No joke. Why the hell do you want to see it so bad?”

“I wanna see it, too,” came Shelley’s voice from someplace in the dark.

Kent laid his hands on Max’s shoulders the same way his father did when one of his deputies got a case of the jitters.

“Max, I need to see. Okay? If I don’t see what the problem is, how can you expect me to deal with it?”

Max’s brow furrowed. “Yeah, but—”

“But nothing. We have every right.”

“Okay, but you better put gauze over your mouth and eyes.”

“Why?”

“Infection.”

Kent nodded somberly. “Yeah. Good thinking.”

Tim had nearly caught up. Kent heard his labored breathing like a sick Pekingese. “Kent Jenks! If you set one foot inside that—”

Kent shouldered his way through the door. The smell hit him like a ball-peen hammer. Sweetly fruity top notes, rancid decay lurking underneath.

The man lay on the chesterfield with his wrists and ankles bound. His shirt was slashed open, his white flesh glazed with sludge. He would look almost peaceful if not for those skinned-back lips setting his mouth in a horrible leer. He looked like a man holding a carnal secret.

A segment of the worm lay on the floor. To Kent, it looked like a much bigger version of the condom he and Charlie Swanson had once found under the football bleachers at Montague High. Charlie had poked the condom with a stick. Sluggish late-summer flies took flight, their drone thick in Kent’s ears. What is it? he’d said. Charlie said: You’ve never seen a ’domer? You pull it over your wick before you screw a chick so you don’t get her preggers.

Charlie had two older brothers. He knew things. Kent remembered feeling vaguely ashamed of his innocence. Also, a little sick.

But the sight of the man stunned him now. He was dead. Maybe Kent had expected it to be like his grandmother’s funeral: Grandma lying restfully in a mahogany coffin in the beige parlor while a pianist played “Nearer My God to Thee.” Serene with her eyes closed and her cheeks gently rouged.

This man was graceless in death. A ring of purple bruises encircling his neck. A brown shitlike mess leaking out of his side. One eye wide open, the other at half-mast like he was tipping a dirty wink. Fruit flies shimmering over his wound to drink the sweet filth. The man had died unloved and without dignity.

Kent wished he could act as his father would have right now. He’d cordon off the area and call for a forensic appraisal. He’d grab a bullhorn and calmly say: Disperse, people. Nothing to see here.

But that wasn’t true, was it? Jesus, there was everything to see here.

Fear stole into Kent’s heart like a safecracker. It embarrassed him—he’d pushed for this outcome, hadn’t he?—but right then he wanted to take it all back. He wished he were on the mainland, safe in his bed with his Labrador retriever, Argo, sleeping soundly beside him. He wished for that with every atom of his body.

Tim plowed through the throng of boys, splashing rubbing alcohol on the fronts of their shirts.

“Pull them over your mouth and nose! Hey—do it! Now!”

The boys obeyed. Their gazes were fogged with shock above their pulled-up collars—all except Shelley’s, whose eyes held an excitable glittery quality.

Tim shoved Kent. Both hands planted in the boy’s chest. Kent went down so hard his ass bounced off the floor.

“I told you to goddamn well stay out of here, didn’t I, Kent?”

Tim hunched over the fallen boy. He grabbed his shoulder roughly and shook him. Kent’s body rag-dolled in his grip.

“This is the site of a disease! Now you all run the risk of infection!”

Tim ran his hands through his hair, which stood up in smoke- and sweat-hardened spikes. His mouth hung open like a panting dog’s, the flesh drawn tight over his cheekbones.

You’re acting irrational, Tim, HAL 9000 said coolly. You’ve harmed a child now—and is it really the first time you’ve harmed a child tonight?

“Worms spread by contact,” he said, ignoring that voice. “Do you understand? If you eat something full of worms or worm eggs, then you get worms. There’s nothing for you to do, Kent. There’s nothing to be fucking fixed. If your dad, the mighty Jeff Jenks, tried his dick-swinging act here, he’d end up just like that guy over there. Okay?”

Tim pictured Jenks the senior: his blue uniform stretched over his gut, buttons taxed to their tensile limit, hairy-knuckled hands hooked through his belt loops as he surveyed the scene with a caustic eye. Wellsy wellsy wellsy, Doc, what’s the rhubarb here?

“Don’t you talk about my dad like that,” Kent said weakly.

“Shut up!” Tim slumped heavily at the kitchen table. “Just shut… up! I mean it, Kent. If you pull any more shit, I will truss you up like a Christmas turkey. Do you know one goddamn thing about contagion—any of you? We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. Could be orally borne. Could be waterborne. Jesus, it could be airborne.”

“Then why cut him open?” Shelley said, covering his mouth so his words were muffled by his fingers. “Why drag Max into it? Or us?”

Tim looked from boy to boy to boy, seeing nothing he could recognize anymore: only disdain and suspicion and slowly kindling rage. That trust he’d worked so hard to build up, an undertaking of many years, had worn down to a brittle strand. The possibility that it could snap at any moment left him paralyzed with fear.

He pointed to the cleaved segment of worm on the floor. “That is like nothing in nature, boys. Do you understand me? These things should not exist. It’s nothing God ever made. So we have to be incredibly careful. We have to step very lightly.”

“We should burn down the cabin,” Shelley mumbled.

Tim shook his head. “That could just put the contagion into the air. What we are going to do is this: Go outside. Sit by the fire.” Tim worried the ragged edge off one fingernail with his incisors and swallowed it convulsively. “We’ll wait for the boat to come the day after tomorrow. That’s all we can do.”

The fixed drone of a helicopter worked its way across the open water. It seemed to hover directly above them. Coin-bright wedges of light—the glow of a searchlight—shafted through apertures in the roof. The helicopter’s wings sent gusts of sea-scented air through gaps in the cabin’s log walls. The light dimmed abruptly as the helicopter continued out to sea.

“Will the boat even come, Scoutmaster Tim?” Newton asked.

“Of course. We’ll all go home. Your parents will be thrilled to see you. They’ll send a research team out. Now come on. Let’s… let’s… go on out… outsi—”

A wave of dizziness rocked the Scoutmaster. Gnatlike specks crowded his vision. His sinuses burnt with ozone: the same eye-watering sensation as if he’d jumped off the dock into the bay and salt water rocketed up his nose.

He licked his threadlike lips. “We have to…”

Kent hauled himself up. His eyes reflected a horrible awareness.

“You’re sick,” he said in a trembling voice. “You’re infected. You’ve got the worms.”

“I don’t—” A childlike sick feeling hived in Tim’s stomach: as if he’d eaten too much cotton candy at the Abbotsford carnival and gone on the Tilt-A-Whirl. “It’s so important that we…”

“We have to quarantine him,” Kent said to the others. “He could make us all sick. Like him.”

Kent advanced with a determined gait. Tim held his arms out. Jesus! A pair of fleshy javelins. He pushed the boy. His hands sunk harmlessly into the boy’s chest as Kent’s shoulders sagged to dampen the impact.

Tim stumbled away on legs that felt like wooden stilts screwed into his hips. “Please,” he said. He pushed again, kittenishly. Kent was smiling now. It was not a kind look.

This transgression had been building in Kent—it enfolded him with a cold sense of assurance. He was right to act against his elder. If you exerted your will and held fast to that course of action, things inevitably worked out. All the gifts that came to you—gifts befitting your inflexible strength of character—would be rightfully earned.

He pushed his Scoutmaster. Tim fell comically: arms outstretched and mouth open like a fish in its dying gasp. He hit the floor with a spine-jangling thud. His intestines jogged in the loosening vault of his gut. He did a very natural but terribly unfortunate thing.

Tim passed gas. A reedy trumpeting note that daggered through the shocked silence. A ripe reek wafted through the room.

“I’m sorry,” Tim said. “I don’t—”

Shelley snickered. “You stink.”

Kent pinned Tim with that rifle-sights look. “Lock him in the closet.”

“No,” Tim said, the word escaping his mouth as a sob.

The boys were held in a dimple of tension. Many possibilities tiptoed along the edge of that moment.

Next they were upon him. Shelley went first. Kent followed. They surged down upon their Scoutmaster, leapt on him, screaming and grabbing. Ephraim next. Then Max, with a low, agonized moan. They were filled with a giddy exuberance. All of them felt it—even Newton, who came last, regretfully, mumbling “No, no, no,” even as he fell into the fray, unable to fight the queasy momentum. They were carried away on a wave of thick, urgent, blind desire.

It happened so swiftly. The pressure that’d been building since last night, collecting in drips and drabs: in the crunch of the radio shattering in a squeal of feedback; in the black helicopter hovering high above them; in the snake ball squirming in the wet rocks; in the sounds emanating from the cabin as Tim and Max operated on the man; and most of all in the horrifying decline of their Scoutmaster, a man they’d known nearly all their lives reduced to a human anatomy chart, a herky-jerky skeleton. It brewed within them, a throbbing tension in their chests that required release—somehow, by any means necessary—and now, like a dark cloud splitting with rain, it vented. The boys couldn’t fight it; they weren’t properly themselves. They were a mob, and the mob ruled.

It’s just a game, a few of the boys thought. It was a game as long as they could ignore the look of sick terror in their Scoutmaster’s eyes. The helpless fear of an adult—which ultimately looked not much different than the helpless fear of an infant. It was a game as long as they could ignore the dead man on the chesterfield leaking brown muck.

A game, a game, a game…

They dragged Tim to the closet. He unleashed a series of shrill yipping shrieks. He was terrified of forfeiting control—of how fast it had happened. Terrified of that closet. But mostly he was terrified of whatever might very well be inside of him.

“Please, boys,” he whimpered. “Please no—I need help—”

They would not listen. The wave reached its mad crest. They pulled the Scoutmaster with ease. With his weight distributed among the five boys, he weighed no more than a child. Ephraim’s hands slipped under Tim’s shirt. He felt the abrupt cliff where the flesh fell off his lowest rib. His body was divoted and warped. Ephraim’s hands fell upon Tim’s stomach… he reared back, shocked by the fretful lashings that met his fingers.

Shelley’s lips skinned back from his teeth. He looked like a hyena prowling among the corpses on a battlefield. Kent flung the closet door open. It was empty save a few jangling coat hangers. They barrel-rolled Tim inside. The Scoutmaster’s quivering fingers stuck out through the doorjamb. Ephraim gently folded them into the darkness of the closet.

They set their weight against the door. Their breath came out in jagged gusts. Kent dashed into the bedroom, returning with a combination lock. He fastened it through the lock hasp and clipped it shut.

The boys came back to themselves with a jolt. Max and Ephraim passed nervous unsmiling looks. Their Scoutmaster’s whimpers carried under the door.

“When do we let him out?” Newton said.

“When the boat gets here,” Kent said coldly. “No sooner.”

“What if it doesn’t show up?”

Kent said: “Shut up, Newt.”

Nobody bothered asking for the combination; they knew Kent wouldn’t tell them. The bottle of scotch stood uncapped on the table. A man’s drink. General George Patton drank a shot of cheap scotch before battle, Kent’s dad always said, and a glass of good scotch after a victory.

What was this if not a victory? When the boat arrived tomorrow, his quick thinking would be hailed.

“Go on, Kent,” Shelley told him. “Have a drink.”

Max said, “No—don’t—”

But Kent had already raised the bottle to his lips. It went down like molten iron. He sawed his arm across his mouth. His grimace became a broad grin.

“Everything’s going to be okay, guys.”

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:

16

TOWARD MIDNIGHT, Max stood down by the shore. The sky was salted with remote stars. The beach was a bonelike strip unfurling to the shoreline. The sea advanced up the shore with a series of minute sucking inhales. It sounded like a huge toothless creature swallowing the island.

Newton joined him. His hand thrummed against Max’s bare arm. His fear leapt the threshold between their bodies—Max felt it now, too.

“We shouldn’t have done that to the Scoutmaster.”

“He’s sick, Newt.”

“I saw that. But not a closet. Am I wrong? Not that way.”

“You did it, too,” Max said tiredly.

Newton swallowed and nodded. “I did. It could have been what my mom calls a coping mechanism. You know, when things get rough, we do things to make it better. Or just to distract ourselves. Do you think that’s what it was, Max?”

“We got carried away, Newt. That’s all.”

Last summer, Max had shared his house with a family of shearwaters—a much fleeter version of a puffin. They colonized the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, nesting in the rocks. But due to a population explosion, shearwaters had begun to nest in the houses of North Point. They’d chip away the Gyprock exterior, tugging loose Styrofoam and pink insulation to make room for their nests.

A family of shearwaters made one above Max’s bedroom window. In the morning he’d crane his neck and see the daddy shearwater poke his head out of the hole he’d chipped in the house’s facade, darting it in both directions before arrowing out over the water to hunt.

Max’s father, however, wasn’t impressed. The lawn was covered in Styrofoam and pink rags of insulation. The birds would wreck the home’s resale value, he griped—despite the fact that he’d lived in North Point his whole life and would likely die in this house. He drove to the Home Hardware, returning with a bottle of insulating foam sealant. He clambered up a ladder to the nest, shooed the birds away, stuck the nozzle into the hole, and pumped in sealant until it billowed out and hardened to a puffy crust. He climbed back down with a self-satisfied smile.

But the shearwaters were back the next day. They’d torn away at the sealant, ripping it off in chunks with their sickle-shaped beaks. Now the lawn was covered in Styrofoam, insulation, and sealant. Max’s father repeated the procedure, believing the birds would relent. But shearwaters are cousins to homing pigeons—they always come back. I should shoot them, Max’s father groused, though he could never do such a thing.

Still, he was angry—that particular anger of humans defied by the persistence of nature. He drove back to Home Hardware, returning with another can of sealant and a few feet of heavy-duty chicken wire. Using tin snips, he cut the wire into circles roughly the size of the hole. Clambering up the ladder, he made a layer cake of sorts: a layer of sealant, then chicken wire, sealant, wire, sealant, wire. Okay, birds, he’d said. Figure that out.

Max returned from school the next day to find a dead shearwater in the bushes. The daddy—he could tell by its dark tail feathers. It lay with its neck twisted at a horrible angle. Its beak was broken—half of it was snapped off. Its eyes were filmy-gray, like pewter. It’d made a mess: shreds of sealant dotted the lawn. But his father’s handiwork held strong. The daddy bird must’ve broken its neck—had it become so frustrated, so crazy, that it’d flown into the barrier until its neck snapped?

When Max’s father saw the dead bird, his jaw tightened, he blinked a few times very fast, then quietly he said: I just wanted them to find someplace else to live.

In the middle of the night Max had been woken by peeping. The sound was coming from the walls. Max padded into his parents’ room. His father rubbed sleep crust from his eyes and followed Max back to his bedroom. When he heard those noises, his face did a strange thing.

At three o’clock in the morning, Max’s dad climbed the ladder. His housecoat flapped in the salt breeze. Using a screwdriver and vise grips, he tore out the sealant and chicken wire, working so manically that he nearly fell. By the time he’d ripped it away the peeps had stopped. He reached deep inside the hole, into a small depression he’d not realized was there. He placed whatever he’d found in the pockets of his housecoat with great reverence.

In the kitchen, his face white with shock, he laid them on the table: the mama bird and two baby birds. The mama bird’s wing was broken. The babies were small and gray-blue, still slick with the gummy liquid inside their eggs. All three were still.

I didn’t know, was all Max’s dad could say. If I’d known I’d’ve never… I got carried away.

Max thought of this now, in relation to what they’d done to Scoutmaster Tim.

They’d gotten carried away, was all. It happened to adults, too. When you got angry and frustrated and scared enough, it was so, so easy to get carried away.

“I never seen a dead person before,” said Newton. “My hamster died. Yoda. He got out of his cage and got his neck broke by getting caught in a sliding closet door. He was just a hamster but man, he died in my hands. His neck hung all funny. I couldn’t stop crying.” Newton swabbed his wrist across his eyes and fetched a deep sigh. “We buried him in a shoe box in the backyard. I made a cross out of Popsicle sticks. That’s kinda dumb. Jeez. Don’t tell the other guys, huh? They’ll rag me a new one.”

Max’s father had buried the birds in a shoe box, too, lining it with lush coffin velvet. “It’s not dumb, Newt. It was the right thing to do, I think.”

“Yeah?” Newt smiled, but his expression darkened by degrees. “Do you think we could let the Scoutmaster out?”

“Kent’s the only one who knows the lock combination.”

The boys squinted at the pinpricks of light on the mainland. There appeared to be more than usual. Smaller lights zipped back and forth beneath its awning like phosphorescent ants pouring out of a neon anthill. A remote sense of calm settled over Max. A sense of Zen forbearance, even, as his body marshaled its remaining strength—as if it knew, in advance of his mind, that he’d need every ounce of it over the coming hours and days. Distantly, Max wondered if this was how men felt in a war. Even more distantly he wondered about his parents: in bed, probably, sleeping soundly with no earthly idea what was happening.

“Do you really think the boat will show up?”

“Shut up, Newt. Please.”