Free The Troop by Nick Cutter Page B

pointed to the sea. “The water always turns red before a storm. not quite bloodred, but close. The electricity in the air as a storm brews, right, it causes tiny little plankton protozoans to lift up off the seabed; these tiny little creatures—like, the tiniest living things on earth—inflate with oxygen and turn deep red, covering the whole sea and making it red, too.”
ephraim slapped a butterfly bandage on his elbow.
“Holy shit, dude. Your brain’s too big. Why doesn’t it ooze out your ears?” His eyes went wide. “Actually  .  .  . fuck me! I see it oozing out right now!”
ephraim licked his finger and went to screw it into newt’s ear—a classic Wet Willy. His finger stopped just short, though, a runner of saliva clung to a whorl of his fingerprint. It seemed a heartless thing to do, considering.
He wiped the spit on his pants, bounded to his feet, and raced off to join the other boys.
“Saved your life, newt! You owe me one!”
    THe TRail descended to a pebbled shoreline lapped by the ocean. The boys doffed their boots and rolled up their pants, wading in the icy october sea. Their ankles turned pig-belly pink. They hunted for the smoothest stones and had a skipping contest, which Kent won with ten skips by his count.
    “Hey guys,” ephraim said. “Check this out.”
    He directed them to a deep cut within the shore rocks, fringed with sea moss. The boys gathered round. Flashes of shining skin made oily in the guttering light; unknown shapes humping over one another. Silky syllabant esses— husssss, husssss.
    “It’s a snake ball,” newton said.
    How many snakes? Impossible to tell. Their bodies were entwined, a writhing network of tubes like an elastic-band ball. Their bodies were dark—sea serpents?—and wet like living, livid oil; that peculiar reptile smell met their noses: wet and fetid like a dewy field spread with dead crickets.
    “What are they doing?” said ephraim.
“They’re . . .” newt’s face went pink. “ . . . y’know . . .” “Fucking?” ephraim made a gagging noise. “That’s how snakes fuck,
    all twisted up in a ball? like . . . a snake orgy?”
Kent and max laughed. ephraim was so perverted. A snake orgy.
Inevitably someone tried to push newton into the snake ball, make
him touch it—Shelley in this case. newt squirmed free of Shelley’s long simian arms, out of his smooth rubbery grip—almost like tentacles
without the suction cups—and screamed at him to stop.
“Quit it, Shel! lay off!”
The other boys watched idly. There was something off-putting—
sickening, really—about the scene. A bit like watching a blind boa constrictor pursue a plump mouse around a cage: the chase might go on a
while but the snake was dogged, plus it was a natural predator. Sooner
or later it’d eat the fat little fucker.
“Stop it, Shel,” Kent said in a bored tone. “You’re gonna make him
piss his pants again.”
Shelley quit abruptly, turned and wandered toward the shore. newton smoothed his untucked shirt over his pendulant belly, turned to
Kent all stiff-spined, and said:
“Thanks, Kent . . . but I only did it the one time, and I was six years
old and we were on that bus trip to moncton that went on forever and
okay, I drank too much mcDonald’s orange drink but—”
“Shut up, tinkle-dink,” Kent said. “Don’t get too excited or you’ll
piss your pants, remember?”
    WHile THe boys horsed around, Shelley waded into a shallow tidal pool. He found a crayfish. It fit perfectly in his palm. He studied it closely. It looked weird and funny. He tried to imagine its life as seen through the black poppy seeds of its eyes, sitting on spindly stalks. What a stupid creature. What were its days like—what was its life ? Crawling around this dreary itsy-bitsy pool, choking on fish shit, eating garbage. It had no clue about the world outside its filthy puddle, did it? Dumb is as dumb does, as his mother would say—which had always struck Shelley as a