“Yeah, Newton: a worm. Not a night crawler or something you’d dig out of your mom’s garden. A tapeworm.”
Tim had experience with tapeworms. Any GP would. They were a common enough affliction. A person could pick them up anywhere.
As easy as petting your dog. Providing your dog had rolled in a pile of shit earlier that day—as dogs tend to do—you could get microscopic particles of said shit on your fingers without even knowing. A thousand eggs stuck between the whorls of your fingertips. And after petting ole Spot, let’s say you ate a handful of popcorn and licked the salt off your fingers. Bingo-bango-bongo. You’ve got worms.
At least once a month, he’d see a kid in the waiting room scratching his keister through the seat of his pants and say to himself: worms. One time a kid’s mother handed him an ice cream tub with one of her child’s chalky turds inside. “I thought you’d want a sample,” she’d told him solemnly. “For proof.”
Tim would prescribe an oral remedy that demolished the tapeworm colony over a few days. Tapeworms were, at most, a nuisance.
“He’s dead,” Tim said simply.
Ephraim said: “From worms?”
“No, Eef—from a worm.”
Kent said: “How the hell can a tapeworm kill someone? I had worms when I was eight. I crapped the little buggers out.”
“I know,” Tim said. “I gave your mother the medicine to do it.”
This one wasn’t the size of any regular worm, Tim thought. He’d heard that beef tapeworms—the ones you can get from eating tainted meat—could get pretty big. Twenty, thirty feet. He recalled a case study where a doctor pulled one out of a cattle rancher’s leg. It had balled up between the layers of muscle. A lump the size of a baseball. The doctor made a slit into the muscle and pulled it out of the rancher’s leg like teasing out a piece of thread. The worm was incredibly skinny, like a strand of angel hair pasta. It snapped. The rest of the worm died inside the muscle and started to rot. The rancher almost lost his leg. But even so, the longest worms weren’t really that thick.
Ephraim said: “What did it do to him?”
What could Tim tell them? The truth? The truth—which even he wanted to avoid—was that the tapeworm had done what tapeworms do: eaten everything the man was supposed to eat. Like having a furnace turned up to full blast inside of you: everything you throw into it, it burns up. No fuel left for you. Tim thought about the blood-leeched whiteness of the man’s flesh and realized the worm may’ve consumed other things, too. His blood and enzymes. That would have shut down his kidneys and liver and other organs… some kind of vampire.
But he couldn’t say this. It would terrify the boys. And yet he’d nearly told them anyway—sharing the terror seemed like the only way to defuse it, even minimally. But they were just kids. Even now, with the mainland and hospitals and help seeming so far away, Tim understood his obligation to these boys and to their parents. He must keep them safe. Scout’s honor.
“Are you okay?” Newton asked. “You and Max? Did anything… y’know, touch you?”
The boys stared at Tim, all probably wondering the same thing. Now, in the aftermath, Tim wondered why he’d done it. Not the operation itself, but involving Max. He’d told himself that he needed help—no surgeon operates alone. But now he was less sure.
“Tim?” Kent said, his eyes holding a rook’s sheen. “Did… anything… touch… you?”
Fuck off, you pushy bastard, the Undervoice spat.
“I don’t think so,” Tim said. “It happened very fast.”
Kent turned to Max. “You okay, man?”
Max nodded, eyes not leaving the ground. When Tim saw this, a cold, hard stone lodged somewhere in his diaphragm.
You made a mistake, Tim, HAL 9000 said. Don’t go compounding it.
“What happened?” Ephraim said. “Tell us.”
Tim nibbled his lip compulsively, as if his unconscious desire was to consume his own flesh. He caught himself, smiled queasily—his eyes shone in the firelight, hubbed by skin drawn tight over his sockets—and said: “I cut into the man’s stomach. The worm was in there. Nesting. It came out through the incision. It crawled up the man’s chest and wrapped around his neck. It…” He couldn’t stop swallowing. “Killed him.”
“You cut him up?” Kent asked, incredulous.
“I told you, it happened so fast.” Tim’s mouth was a dry wick, his spit all dried up. “It was like something out of a dream.”
“Amazing,” said Kent. The sneering derision was unmistakable. He sounded very much like his policeman father.
“I was scared,” Tim said. It came out as a whisper. He observed the boys’ faces clustered round the fire—all wearing matching looks of diminished respect—and wished he could take those honest words back.
“Yeah, well, this is no time to be scared, Tim,” Kent said.
Tim wanted to slap the mouthy little prick across the face, but his strength had utterly deserted him.
Mosquitoes jigged around their heads. Why aren’t they landing on me? Tim wondered. His hands were clean, yet they still felt sticky with goo; he felt it in the creases of his fingers, in his nail beds—an antic, wriggling itch. He closed his eyes and envisioned that goo drooling out of the worm’s cleaved body. The firelight glowed against his eyelids, lighting up the capillaries that braided under his skin.
“So it’s dead?” Newton said.
Max nodded. “Scoutmaster Tim cut it in half.”
“It was effectively dead before that,” Tim said. “Once the host is dead, the parasite dies, too.”
“Why would it do that?” Newton asked. “Wrap around the man’s neck and kill him? That’s like a baby strangling its mom or something.”
Tim gave a helpless shrug. “Worms don’t have any brains to speak of. Worms shouldn’t grow to that size. But that’s what happened. We saw it. You’ve got to trust the evidence of your eyes.”
Newton said: “Do we even know the guy’s name?”
His words fell like an anvil. Suddenly the man’s name seemed critical. The idea of a man dying as a stranger surrounded by other strangers struck the boys as staggeringly tragic.
“I want to go home,” Shelley said softly. “Take us home, Scoutmaster. Please.”
In the firelight, Shelley’s face molded into a beseeching expression—mock-beseeching? The expression rang hollow, inorganic and somehow clumsy, like an animal trying to replicate human endeavor: a bear riding a bicycle or a monkey playing a milk-carton ukulele. In Tim’s fevered mind, it seemed like the boy was purposefully stirring fear within the group by asking for something beyond Tim’s capacity to deliver.
“Tomorrow, Shelley. We can leave—”
“Why not tonight, Tim?” Shelley said, adopting Kent’s derisive tone. “Why can’t you get us home tonight?”
Because I’m too fucking tired, you awful little shit. Tired and hungry as hell.
“Tomorrow. I promise.”
Shelley stared at Tim—there was something insectile about his gaze. The wind gusted, blowing the flames slantways, and in that instant, Tim watched Shelley’s face liquefy like hot wax, the skin running, bones shifting and grinding like tectonic plates to arrange themselves into something infinitely more horrifying.
Kent said: “I want to see it.”
Tim said: “It?”
“The worm, Tim. I want to see the worm.”
“No.”
Kent gave his Scoutmaster a sidelong look, eyeing him down his hawklike nose the way a sniper stares down a rifle’s sights.