Free The Troop by Nick Cutter Page A

afternoon.
Kent took command of the hill and repulsed their halfhearted attempts with hard shoves. He shoulder-blocked max’s anemic challenge and flexed his biceps, his budding linebacker’s body set in a defensive stance. Dying sunlight petaled through the tree branches, glinting off his dental braces.
“Bring it on, eef! I double-dog dare you!”
ephraim stood at the base of the hill, arms crossed over his chest, hands cupping his elbows. A thin boy— so skinny he could slip down the drain hole, as his mom said—but his limbs were roped with powerful fast-twitch muscles, elbows and kneecaps hard as carbon. He thought about the mantra of his counselor, Dr. Harley: Don’t be a slave to your anger, Ephraim.
It was so hard. It bubbled inside him like that stupid geyser at Yellowstone Park, old Faithful—except the geyser was, like, faithful: at least you could time it. ephraim’s anger rose out of nowhere, this giddy charge zitzing through his bones and electrifying the marrow. His rage was a dark cloud passing over the sun where just moments before the sky had been clear blue.
“You chicken?” Kent flapped his arms. “Chicken-chicken brockbrock!”
lips skinning from his teeth, a feral growl rising in his throat, ephraim sprinted up the pile to tangle with Kent. He saw it in Kent’s eyes: this desperate, crawling fear. Fear of losing partially, but also fear of how far ephraim might take it. And ephraim saw how easily it could happen. His fist coming up over Kent’s clumsy arms, his fist hammering Kent in the mush, flattening his thick drool-flecked lips against the barbed braces, cutting them open as the big boy toppled like a sack of laundry, ephraim following him down, fists pumping like pistons to destroy the crude symmetry of Kent Jenks’s fuck-o face . . .
ephraim saw all this in the elastic instant they were perched atop the pile—a silly prize, really; a mossy heap of rocks—and the possibility of violence, his easy capacity for it, drained the strength from his limbs. Kent took advantage, flinging the smaller boy down. He copped a bodybuilding pose, the flexed double crab, face set in a caricature of a despotic monarch.
“I . . . am  . . . invincible!”
ephraim frowned and rubbed his elbow—the skin torn, blood weeping sluggishly to his wrist.
“not cool, big K.”
ephraim found newt scraping moss off a log. newt was always wandering off to press stupid leaves into his stupid notebook, cataloging everything with a black Sharpie. Eastern Sumac. Indian tobacco. God, so dorky!
ephraim wound up to give newt a kick in the ass, feeling sort of guilty—Dr. Harley wouldn’t approve; nor would his mother—so he delivered a lighter kick than usual.
“Where’s the first aid kit, numbnuts?”
newt rubbed the seat of his pants. “I got ears, eef. Don’t have to kick me.”
“I figured your ears were in your ass, newt. looks like everything else is—I was just knocking the wax out of them. Aren’t you gonna thank me?”
Sighing, newt dug the kit out of his knapsack.
“Sit down, eef.”
This was newt’s role: the nurturer, the motherer. He had a natural affinity for it, and the boys sporadically accepted his ministrations— accepted them, then returned to making newt the object of their torments. And newt allowed it, because it had always been so.
He tore open a peroxide swab packet, pressed it to the wound on ephraim’s elbow. ephraim hissed between clenched teeth.
“It’s just fizzy,” newt said. “Shouldn’t hurt.”
ephraim slapped newt’s hand away. “I’ll do it.”
newton’s eyes drifted to the sky. His nostrils dilated.
“What are you doing?”
“I think that storm’s coming,” newt said. “You can smell it. like, an alkaline smell, like when you rip open a bag of water-softener salt.”
“We don’t have a water softener, richie rich.” ephraim bared his teeth in a mock-snarl. “We like our water haaaaard. ”
“You can spot it in the water, too. See?” newt