“You okay?” Max said.
Yes, Ephraim thought, shivering with cold anger. It’s nothing. Not a goddamn thing at all. Fuckin’ Shel. I’ll kill him.
“It was nothing, Eef,” Shel said, grinning greasily in the dark. “I was wrong, probably.”
Newt said, “Wrong about what?”
“Nothing!” Eef shouted—and in the next instant there came a ripping and rending crash as the big oak cracked almost directly above them. The splintering mash of wood as the tree crashed through the cabin roof. BOOM! The air inside the cellar seemed to condense and turn to cold lead in the boys’ lungs. The tree struck the floor with a terrible impact and bounced once. The cellar roof splintered—shafts of cold light streamed through the shattered slats. Next it bulged down threateningly.
“Oh God,” Max said. “The Scoutmaster…”
Uncertainty flickered on the boys’ faces. As the rain and wind hit a momentary lull, they could hear Kent outside at the cellar doors.
“Please—please!” he begged, the words coming out in hysterical yelps. He scratched on the doors like a dog pleading to come inside on a cold night.
Ephraim caught Max’s eye, holding it. No words were spoken. Finally Ephraim bowed his head, blew at the hanging fringe of his hair, and tromped determinedly up the steps. The fear in his heart morphed into something else, at least temporarily—a breed of unflexing resolve. It seemed the best, perhaps only way to keep a lid on his terror.
He unlatched the door and threw it open. Rain arrowed through the entryway. Lightning lit the planes of Kent’s twitching, horrible face.
“Get in,” Ephraim said. “But you have to sit away from us. I’m sorry.”
Kent nodded pathetically and dragged himself to the corner with the boat tarp, pulling it over him. Max caught Ephraim looking at Kent’s wounds, then at his own split knuckles. It wasn’t hard to guess what he was thinking.
From the sworn testimony of Nathan Erikson, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:
Q: Let’s clarify for the record just what we’re talking about. You were working on a diet supplement?
A: It was to be a pill. That’s the grail, right? A pill you can pop before bed. A little white pill. That was the idea.
Q: And this pill would be made of…?
A: Compressed dextrose. You know those candy hearts you get on Valentine’s Day? Same stuff. Basically it’s sugar pressed into a mold using pneumatic pressure.
Q: You mean a placebo?
A: Sugar pills are the classic test of the placebo effect—but no, these were fully loaded.
Q: Why a sugar pill, then?
A: Any delivery system would work—why not go with something sweet? Fact is, the mutagenic strain of the hydatid worm developed by Dr. Edgerton was incredibly hardy. They could have been packed into a dextrose pill and shot into space. If a creature with a humanlike digestive system were to find those pills floating out in space a thousand years later and swallow them, those worms would hatch and thrive. Nothing beats a worm in terms of survivability.
Q: So these worms were packed into a candy pill—
A: The eggs were. Freeze-dried, like the Sea Monkeys kids used to buy in the back pages of old G.I. Joe comics. The dormant-state eggs would become larvae and later full-stage hydatids.
Q: And the expectation was that people would be desperate enough to consume these pills to lose weight? That was what Dr. Edgerton and his silent partner–slash–bankroller pharmacy concern expected?
A: People are already desperate enough. You’ve never heard of the tapeworm diet? You’ve got people eating tainted beef to give themselves worms. It’s not nearly as uncommon as you’d think—it’s illegal in North America, sure, but Mexican diet clinics are doing a brisk business.
Q: What made your method a better option?
A: A beef tapeworm is a great diet aid… if it stays in your gut. Problem is, tapeworms are wanderers. They go on walkabout inside your body. They’ll swim out of your intestines—or needle through your intestinal wall—and encyst in your liver or brain or eyes or spinal cord. An encysted worm in your brain shows up the same as a tumor on a CAT scan. It can do the same level of damage, too. But the modified hydatid we were working on would be corralled in the host’s intestines. Like those electric fences cattle ranchers use to keep their cows in their fields. Dr. Edgerton was working on reconstructing the worm’s basic DNA sequence so that it would die as soon as it perforated the intestinal wall. It was a matter of weakening its natural immunities, making it more susceptible to white blood cell attack. White blood plasma would eat through Dr. Edgerton’s worms like acid. Anyway, that was the idea.
Q: And when a person reaches his target weight?
A: An oral antibiotic flushes out the worm colony in a matter of days. The two-pill solution, we’d bill it. One pill to give you worms, the other to flush them out.
Q: And in between?
A: You’d lose those troublesome pounds.
Q: But the worm you helped Dr. Edgerton develop didn’t act according to plan, did it?
A: I’d say that is somewhat of an understatement.
23
IN TIME, the wind died down. The storm blew out to the northern sea. Water dripped all around them; it seemed terribly loud, each drop producing a watery echo. The boys huddled, shivering and soaked, in the cellar—all except Kent, who sat in isolation under the tarp.
“We ought to check on the Scoutmaster,” Newton said.
Ephraim nodded. “Kent, you stay here.”
Kent’s face was wan and ghoulish above the burlap. It looked like the wooden face of Zoltar, that mechanical sideshow oracle at the Cavendish County Fair: 25 cents to know your future! Things were stuck in his braces, too… insect parts? Yes. Thoraxes and legs and antennae bristled from his mouth-metal. He was gnawing on the moldy tarp. Working the frayed edge like an old man gumming a carrot. A faraway look in his eyes—he could have been contemplating a lovely sunset.
“Okay,” he said. “I kinda like it down here, anyway.”
“You okay, K?” Newton asked, repulsion lying heavy in his gorge.
“Sure.” A death’s-head grin. “Never better.”
A collective unease enveloped the boys—even Shelley. How long had it been? Less than twelve hours. Half a day ago, Kent Jenks had been one of them. The biggest and strongest of them all. The boy everyone in North Point forecasted great things for. Now here he was, curled in a cellar, insects gummed in his teeth, gnawing mindlessly on a tarp. Reduced and squandered in some nasty, terrifying, unquantifiable way. Whatever was wrong with him, this sickness, it was rampaging. Barnstorming through his body, devouring him. Newton sensed this: that Kent was being eaten from the inside out, his flesh loosening by degrees, the meat flensed from his bones as his body shrunk inside his skin until… until what? This sickness cared nothing for Kent—for the man he could’ve become, for the bright future that seemed so assured. It was coring him out, ruining him in unfixable ways.