The Troop

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.”