The Troop

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.