Nick Cutter - The Troop

Headline from The Weird News Network, online edition, October 19:

Fearsome news, dear readers, from one of our loneliest outpoststhe tiny fishing community of Lower Montague, Prince Edward Island. A forlorn, foreboding spike of rock projecting into the Atlantic Ocean.

The perfect location for devilry, methinks? Thankfully for you, we have eyes and ears everywhere. We see all, we hear all.

Sadie Adkins, waitress at the Diplomat Diner in Lower Montague, had her late-model Chevrolet truck stolen from the restaurants lot last night by an unnaturally emaciated thief. Adkins placed a call to our toll-free tip line after her entreaties to local deputy dawgs were cruelly and maliciously rebuffed, deemedand we quoteludicrous and insane.

I know who stole my damn truck, Adkins told us. Starvin Marvin.

An unidentified male, with close-cropped hair and baggy clothing, entered the Diplomat at 9 p.m. According to Adkins, the man was in a severe state of malnourishment.

Skinny! You wouldnt believe, Adkins told our intrepid truth-gatherers. Never in my life have I seen a man so wasted away. But hungry.

Adkins reports that the unidentified male consumed five Hungry Man Breakfast platterseach consisting of four eggs, three buttermilk pancakes, five rashers of bacon, sausage links, and toast.

He ate us out of eggs, Adkins said. Just kept shoveling it in and asking for more. His belly must have swelled up tight as a drum. He well, he when I came back with his third platter, or maybe it was his fourth, I caught him eating the napkins. Ripping them out of the dispenser, chewing and swallowing them.

The unidentified man paid his bill and left. Shortly thereafter Adkins went outside to find her truck stolenyet another malicious indignity!

I cant say I was too surprised, she said. The man seemed desperate in every way a man can possibly be desperate.

She fell silent again before adding one final grisly detail:

I could hear something coming from inside himIm saying, under his skin. I know that sounds silly.

The unidentified man remains at large. Who is he? Where did he come from? The people who knowand longtime readers know who were talking about: the government, the Secret Service, the Templars, the Illuminati, the usual shady suspectsarent forthcoming with info but were beating the bushes and scouring secret files, investigating every legitimate tip that arrives at our tipline.

Something evil is afoot in sleepy Prince County. No man can be that hungry.

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The boat skipped over the waves, the drone of its motor trailing across the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The moon was a bone fishhook in the clear October sky.

The man was wet from the spray that kicked over the gunwale. The outline of his body was visible under his drenched clothes. He easily could have been mistaken for a scarecrow left carelessly unattended in a farmers field, stuffing torn out by scavenging animals.

Hed stolen the boat from a dock at North Point, at the farthest tip of Prince Edward Island, reaching the dock in a truck hed hotwired in a diner parking lot.

Christ, he was hungry. Hed eaten so much at that roadside diner that hed ruptured his stomach liningthe contents of his guts were right now leaking through the split tissue, into the crevices between his organs. He wasnt aware of that fact, though, and wouldnt care much anyway in his current state. Itd felt so good to fill the empty space inside of him but it was like dumping dirt down a bottomless hole: you could throw shovelful after shovelful, yet it made not the slightest difference.

Fifty miles back, hed stopped at the side of the road, having spotted a raccoon carcass in the ditch. Torn open, spine gleaming through its fur. It had taken great effort to not jam the transmission collar into park, go crawling into the ditch, and

He hadnt done that. He was still human, after all.

The hunger pangs would stop, he assured himself. His stomach could only hold so muchwasnt that, like, a scientific fact? But this was unlike anything hed ever known.

Images zipped through his head, slideshow style: his favorite foods lovingly presented, glistening and overplumped and too perfect, ripped from the glossy pages of Bon Apptita leering parody of food, freakishly sexual, hyperstylized, and lewd.

He saw cherries spilling from a wedge of flaky pie, each one nursed to a giddy plumpness, looking like a mess of avulsed bloodshot eyeballs dolloped with a towering cone of whipped cream

Flash.

A porterhouse thick as a dictionary, shank bone winking from fat-marbled meat charred to crackly doneness, a pat of herbed butter melting overtop; the meat almost sighs as the knife hacks through it, cooked flesh parting with the deference of smoothly oiled doors

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

What wouldnt he eat now? He yearned for that raccoon. If it were here now, hed rip the hardened rags of sinew off its tattered fur; hed crush its skull and sift through the splinters for its brain, which would be as delicious as the nut-meat of a walnut.

Why hadnt he just eaten the fucking thing?

Would they come for him? He figured so. He was their failurea human blooper reelbut also the keeper of their secret. And he was so, so toxic. At least, thats what he overheard them say.

He didnt wish to hurt anyone. The possibility that he may already have done so left him heartsick. What was it that Edgerton had said?

If this gets out, itll make Typhoid Mary look like Mary Poppins.

He was not an evil man. Hed simply been trapped and had done what any man in his position might do: hed run. And they were coming for him. Would they try to capture him, return him to Edgerton? He wondered if theyd dare do that now.

He wasnt going back. Hed hide and stay hidden.

He doubled over, nearly spilling over the side, hunger pangs gnawing into his gut. He blinked stinging tears out of his eyes and saw a dot of light dancing on the horizon.

An island? A fire?

Situated fifteen kilometers off the northern point of the main landmass. Highest point: 452 meters above sea level. 10.4 kilometers in circumference.

Two beachheads: one on the west-facing headland, one on the northeastern outcrop. A granite cliff dominates the northern shore, dropping some 200 meters into a rocky basin.

Terrain consists of hardy brush-grasses, shrubs, jimsonweed, staghorn sumac, and lowland blueberry. Vegetation growth stunted by high saline content in the islands water table. Topsoil eroded by high winds and precipitation.

Home to thriving avian, marine, mammal, reptile, and insect life. Pelicans, gulls, and other seafowl congregate on the northern cliffs. Chief stocks: salmon, cod, bream, sea bass. Sea lions bask off the island in the summer, drawing pods of orcas. Small but hardy indigenous populations of raccoon, skunk, porcupine, and coyote. These specimens are likewise smaller and leaner than their mainland counterparts.