The Troop by Nick Cutter Page A

voluntarily, his head still smarting from the headlock.
    Kent was old enough, fourteen years and a few months, to have lost the prominent tummy of childhood. You could see now that he might make a good linebacker, as far as width and bulkiness of shoulders went. The boys followed him for the simple reason that he was the biggest and strongest and harbored every expectation that he should be followed. It wasn’t that he had the best ideas—those were often traceable to newt. It wasn’t that he was particularly charismatic, like ephraim. It was that the boys were at an age where physical strength was the surest marker of leadership.
    Kent had learned what little he knew of leadership from his father, who’d counseled: It’s all how you present yourself, son. Draw yourself up to your full height. Stick your chest out. If you look like you’ve got all the answers, people will naturally assume that you do.
    Kent’s dad, “Big” Jeff Jenks, often bundled his son into the police cruiser and drove a circuit of town—a ride-along, he called it. Kent loved these: his father sitting erect and flinty-eyed in the driver’s seat, sunlight flashing off his badge, the dashboard computer chittering with information of a highly sensitive nature—which his father was all too willing to share. Got a call for officer assistance there a few weeks back, he’d say, pointing to a well-tended Cape Cod belonging to Kent’s math teacher, mr. Conkwright. Domestic disturbance. Trouble in paradise. The missus was stepping out—you know what I mean by that? When Kent shook his head, his father said: Breaking her marital vows. Enjoying the warm embrace of another fellow, uh? You get me? And that other fellow happened to be George Turley, your gym teacher. Kent pictured it: Gloria Conkwright, an enormously plump woman with bottled-platinum hair and heaving, pendulous breasts that stirred confused longing in Kent’s chest, squashing her body on top of mr. Turley, who always wore shiny short-shorts two sizes too small— nut-huggers, as his father called them—his oily chest hair tufting in the V of his shirt collars; he pictured mr. Turley blowing on the pea whistle that was constantly strung round his neck, the air forced out in gleeful whoof s as Gloria’s body smacked down onto his.
    There’s no fate worse than being a cuckold, his father said. You can’t let some woman go stomping on your balls—you just may acquire a taste for it.
    Those ride-alongs, his father enumerating the secrets and shames of their town, made Kent realize something: adults were fucked. Totally, utterly fucked. They did all the things they told kids not to do: cheated and stole and lied, nursed grudges and failed to turn the other cheek, fought like weasels, and worst of all they tried to worm out of their sins—they passed the buck, refused to take responsibility. It was always someone else’s fault. Blame the man on the grassy knoll, as his dad said, although Kent didn’t really know what that meant. Kent’s respect had trickled away by degrees. Why should he respect adults—because they were older? Why, if that age hadn’t come with wisdom?
    Kent came to see that adults required the same stern hand that his peers did. He was their equal—their better, in many ways. Physically this was already so: he was a full head taller than many of his teachers, and though he’d never tested this theory, he believed himself to be stronger, too. morally it was certainly so. like his father said: Son, we are the sheepdogs. Our job is to circle the flock, nipping at their heels and keeping them in line. Nip at their heels until they’re bloody, if needed, or even tear their hamstrings if they won’t obey. At first the sheep will hate us—after all, we hem them in, stop them from pursuing their basest nature—but in time they’ll come to respect us and soon enough they won’t be able to imagine their lives without us.
    Suffused with this sense of righteousness his