The Troop Read Online Free PDF Page B

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. His 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 squirrely, squealing face of terror. That man’s nightmarish face. Then it was gone.
Tim slipped into an uneasy sleep. Sometime before dawn