The Troop (10 page)

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 gone 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 a busy beaver. 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 vaporhalogen 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 them 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 their favorite movie. 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 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 stole 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 the 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 longpre 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.
He 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 blanket 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.
max said, “Is it such a good idea?”
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 it 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 sheep’s 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 was 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.