Newt’s voice dropped as the wind dipped. “My mom got her hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. I didn’t want her touching me. And if she put her hand back on my shoulder—and I was thinking she might do that, Max, for the same reason that I wanted to shrug it off—then I might shove it off. Or bite her fingers. Violence was in the air, Max. We were all breathing it.”
A searchlight snapped on, pinning them in its cool glare.
The boys raised their hands slowly, like robbers who’d gotten caught inside a bank vault.
“We need help!” Max yelled.
Nobody answered.
“We’re okay!” He tried to smile. His filthy clothes flapped in the wind. “We made it. Tell them, Newt. Tell them we’re okay!”
Newton seemed unsure of where he was. One eye stared without recognition. He laughed—a weird, jittery laugh that bounced off the water and fled into the empty vault of sky.
Max thought: Oh no oh please don’t laugh like that, Newt…
Newton stood up in the boat. He held his hands out toward the light: a gesture of supplication.
“I’m fine! I’m aces! But there is one thing.”
No Newt—
“I am very…”
No Newt no Newt—
“…so very very…”
No no nononono—
The wind rose to a shriek that sucked that final word out of Newton’s mouth.
A hole appeared in the back of Newton’s neck. A small hole that appeared as if by magic. Presto! The torn edges of his flesh blew back, creating a perfect little starfish.
Newton pitched over the side. He lay on the sea’s surface for an instant—like a water skimmer, those bugs that danced across the water’s skin—before the sea claimed him; Newt’s body went headfirst, bubbles trailing up from the new hole in his throat as he sank swiftly beneath the boat.
Max barely had time to cry out. He was staring down at the bright red dot hovering on his own chest.
From the sworn testimony of Lance Corporal Frank Ellis, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:
Q: “Hungry.”
A: Yes, sir.
Q: That’s the word you heard Newton Thornton say before you shot him?
A: Yes, sir, it was. He said he was hungry.
Q: He said it just like that?
A: No, sir. I suppose he said it more quietly. And there were some pauses in his speech. He said something like: I’m very very… hungry.
Q: If he said it so quietly, are you certain he said it at all? It was night, on the ocean. The weather reports for that evening indicated high winds.
A: That’s all true, sir. It was windy and choppy. But the Big Ears picked his voice up loud and clear.
Q: I’m sorry?
A: The Big Ears is what we call it. It’s a parabolic listening device: a big dish, basically. Looks like a satellite dish. It’s for long-range acoustical assessment, which is really just a prissy way of saying it helps us hear what we wouldn’t be able to hear naturally.
Q: And the Big Ears told you that Newton Grant said: I’m hungry?
A: Correct.
Q: So what?
A: Repeat that, sir?
Q: I said, so what? He was hungry. He’d been on an island for days. Nothing to eat. Wasn’t it reasonable that the boy might be hungry?
A: Yes, sir, he may have been. I suppose it was the way he said it.
Q: The way?
A: Yes, sir. He said it in a way that sounded like he was somehow more than just hungry. Hungry as you or I would know it, anyway. Maybe those starving kids you see on TV pledge drives might know that kind of hunger. But even them, I’m not sure. He sounded like he’d eat his own arm off if he could just bring himself to cross that line.
Q: Pardon me, Lance Corporal Ellis, but that sounds paranoid.
A: I suppose it does. I think a lot of us were jumpy. We kept hearing things.
Q: Out on the boat?
A: No, I mean internally. Rumors. Stuff was starting to leak out about that psycho doctor’s lab. They’d found some of those awful videos. The one with the poor gorilla or whatever. We were jumpy. That sort of stuff you can’t just aim a gun at and eliminate.
Q: But you did.
A: I did, yes. But the boy said one of our trigger words.
Q: Explain that.
A: We’d been given orders. The chief petty officer came into the snipers’ bunks and told us if anybody came off that island and spoke one of those trigger words, we had authority to open fire. Hungry was one of them.
Q: Any others?
A: I can’t entirely remember. Worm, I’m sure was one. Infected.
Q: And so because a very hungry boy on a boat said he was hungry, he got himself shot.
A: He was infected, sir. That much was made clear in the aftermath. And from what I’ve heard about some of the others, a bullet was an easy way to go.
Q: You didn’t answer my question.
A: With all due respect, you didn’t ask a question, sir. You made a statement, sir. I’ll tell you this: I never trained as a combat sniper thinking one day I’d shoot a young boy on a boat. That’s not why men join up. We’re supposed to be doing it for God and country and… Jesus. It haunts me. I heard people use that phrase and I never quite understood. Honestly, I thought it was a bit histrionic. But I get it now. I know what it is to be haunted. That boy’s face haunts me, sir, and it will until the day I depart this world for whatever’s waiting for me.
MAX KIRKWOOD IS the oldest-looking fifteen-year-old you’ll ever see.
His eyes fade into his head and their edges are knitted with wrinkles. His hair has a stripped-out, mousy aspect. There is a pronounced stoop when he sits down: his shoulders are rounded and hunched in a gait one associates with the elderly. He looks like someone who has been subjected to unimaginable pressures and now, that pressure withdrawn, his body still bears the weight.
You have to remind yourself that Max is still a boy. But he’s a boy who has seen far more than most others his age.
We speak through an impermeable barrier at the clinic. It is not unlike the way inmates speak to their spouses in jail. There are phones on each side of the Plexiglas. After I finish, an orderly will wipe down the earpiece with a powerful germ-killer. The clinic operates at the highest levels of precaution. It took months of wrangling and compromise to secure a brief interview with Max.
The clinic itself is a gargantuan boxy structure far removed from any population center. The things inside the clinic are potentially lethal to humankind. The humans who reside in the clinic aren’t dangerous—what may be thriving inside of them, though, are very dangerous. The viruses and contagions and parasites. The worms.
Max is in good spirits today. He’s wearing a paper gown and slippers. He tells me that everything is burned after he wears it, as a precaution.