The Troop

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.