“Do you have anything… to eat?”
“I might,” said Tim. “Are you here alone?”
The man nodded. A quivering string of drool spooled over his lip, hung, snapped. His skin was stretched thin as crepe paper over his skull. Capillaries wormed across his nose, over his cheeks, and down his neck like river routes on a topographical map. His arms jutted from his T-shirt like Tinker Toys. The skin was shrink-wrapped around the radius and ulna bones, giving his elbows the appearance of knots in a rope.
The man said, “Are you alone?”
It was safer to let the stranger think so. “Yes, I’m doing some geological surveys.”
The man picked up a handful of coarse soil and stuffed it in his mouth. To Tim, it looked like an involuntary reflex action, same as blinking your eyes.
“Whoa! Hey, you don’t have to… to eat that,” Tim said, struggling to maintain his calm. “I have food.”
The man smiled. A death’s-head grimace. His lips were thin bloodless fillets. His gums had receded severely, making his teeth look like yellowing tusks clashing inside his mouth, dark soil lodged in their chinks.
“Food, yes. So nice. Thank you.”
As a doctor, Tim had dealt with the human form in all its revolting variations. He’d emptied colostomy bags. Seen throbbing tumors pulled out of stomachs. But this man was sick in some unnatural way that Tim had never encountered. It sent a spike of pure dread down his spine.
Unclean, his mind yammered. This man is unclean…
The man’s stink hit Tim flush in the nose. A high fruity reek with an ammoniac undernote. Ketosis. The man’s body was breaking down its fatty acids in a last-ditch effort to keep its vital organs functioning. When burnt, ketones released a sickly sweet smell—the desperate reek of a body consuming itself. The stench coming out of the man’s mouth was like a basket of peaches rotting in the sun.
Tim tried not to inhale, certain that it would trigger his gag reflex; the man swooned, equilibrium failing, and Tim impulsively wrapped a steadying hand around the guy’s waist…
He reared back. When his hand slipped under the man’s shirt, over his stomach, he’d felt movement. Something stirring under his skin.
That’s absurd, he told himself. It was just gas. Maybe even a section of herniated intestine. God only knows what’s wrong with him.
Despite these rational protestations, he couldn’t shake the feeling. It lingered on his fingertips: a sly flex beneath the skin, as though something had reacted to his touch before settling again.
The man shuffled toward the cabin and its burning lamp with mothlike determination. His moonlight-glossed eyes were a pair of blown fuses screwed into the fleshless mask of his face. Tim stuck his arm out, palm up, stopping him—a purely instinctive gesture.
He didn’t want this man in the cabin with the boys. Not yet, maybe not at all.
“Wait a sec, hold your horses,” he said, addressing the man as he might a hyperactive child. “Are you lost? Do you even know where you are? I’ve never seen you around.”
The man pushed his body against Tim’s palm, rocking slightly so the pressure intensified, slackened, intensified again. Tim got the sense the man knew it must’ve revolted Tim—the fluctuating contact, the man’s skin weeping oily sweat like the residue on an ancient crankcase. Tim laughed as if this were all a joke, some weird misunderstanding; but there was a brittle glass-snap edge to his laughter that transformed it into a loony cackle.
“I’m lost,” the man said. “Lost and… unwell. Just a night. I’ll leave in the morning. Please—feed me.”
“Do you have a family?” Tim couldn’t explain why this seemed cruciaclass="underline" Was this man missed by anybody at all? “Is anyone looking for you?”
The man only repeated himself: “Just one night. Food. Please.”
Tim debated leaving him. He could bring food out, let him feed in the woods (his word choice puzzled him, yet it felt right: this wasn’t a man who wanted something to eat—this was a man who needed to feed). Tim could restrict the boys to quarters, even, eliminating all contact. Leaving the man out here went against just about every tenet of the Hippocratic Oath, but an aspect of good doctoring was triage. You couldn’t save everyone. Sad fact of life. So you saved the youngest, or the ones with the best hope of survival.
“Please.”
The man offered the most wretched smile. Could Tim possibly leave him alone and starving a few feet outside the cabin? Could he live with that stain on his soul?
No. He could figure this out. He must take every available precaution, but it could be managed. The man’s eerie thousand-yard smile persisted. Was it some kind of ailment Tim was unfamiliar with—a wasting-away disorder? Or just a commonplace malady run amok?
“You’ll do exactly as I say,” he told the man in his no-BS GP voice.
“Ugn,” the man said.
“If you don’t, you can’t come inside.”
The man’s body butted Tim’s palm—the hardness of bone through the thinnest veneer of flesh; to Tim, it felt like a plastic tarp draping a pile of shattered bricks.
“Come on, then.”
6
TIM INSTRUCTED the man to lie on the moth-eaten chesterfield and retrieved the lamp from the porch.
The man looked worse in the lamplight. His skin washed of pigment. Tim’s mind conjured a weird image: the last few sips at the bottom of a Slurpee cup, the color all sucked out, only the tasteless ice crystals left.
The guy’s pants were inexplicably cinched with an orange extension cord. How much did he used to weigh? Tim turned the man’s T-shirt collar out. XL, the tag read. Lord. His clothing appeared to be draping a heap of jackstraws in the rough shape of a human being.
The bottom of his shirt rode up. The skin of his stomach was folded over on itself, reminding Tim of a shar-pei dog. People who had undergone lap-band surgery followed by drastic weight loss looked much the same. They often opted for a dermal tightening procedure: a plastic surgeon hacked a sheet of skin the size of a dish towel off their midsection and stitched the loose ends back together.
Low murmurs from the bunkroom. The boys must’ve woken up. Tim needed to get a handle on the situation; he didn’t fancy the idea of five groggy boys rubbing sleep-crust out of their eyes while gazing at the human boneyard on the chesterfield.
“Boys, listen up,” he said, easing the door open and closing it swiftly to maintain that barrier. “Something’s come up. It’s nothing major”—was it?—“but it’s best you stay here, in your beds.”
“What’s wrong, Tim?”
This from Kent, who’d taken to calling him “Tim” of late. He’d dropped the Scoutmaster part. Kent sat on the edge of his bed, hands clasped, shoulders rounded like a wrestler awaiting his call to the mat. Kent—even the name had a pushy, aggressive quality. An alpha-male moniker, of a piece with Tanner and Chet and Brodie, names parents bestow upon a boy they’ve prefigured as a defense attorney or a lacrosse coach. No parent harboring the hope for a sensitive, artistic child names that child Kent.
“It’s a guy,” Tim said. “Nobody from around—I’ve never seen him. He just showed up.”
“Does he have a tent?” Newt asked, his thick chin flattened across the mattress. “Like, a hiker or something—an adventurer?”