The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

  Tony Carlucci’s final sob of helplessness was that of a small child falling into a bottomless black abyss. “Mama—Mama, mia!”

  The teeming cockroaches ate steadily, voraciously, stripping the body like piranha, and worse—chewing the bones to powder.

  SIX

  On the beach, the rescued man was breathing steadily, though still in a stupor. The sheriff called toward the woods, “Ben, what’s up?”

  His deputy came out of the trees, shaking his head. “Dunno. It’s the damndest thing. Those two guys must have had one hell of a fight. There’s blood all over, but not a sign of where they went.”

  Amos Tarbell followed Ben Dorset back into the woods. Dorset pointed to a place where a body had plainly pressed the leaves into a mat. “He made a track to just about here.” Signs of a struggle were clear. Low branches were snapped off. There were fresh tangles of leaves smeared with blood.

  The sheriff found himself swallowing hard. “How the hell could they have had this kind of a fight with their hands locked?”

  Ben Dorset was pointing up through the trees. “One of them went up that way, looks like. But there’s only one track, right?”

  The sheriff made his inspection and agreed.

  “Then where the hell is this other guy?” Ben Dorset asked both the sheriff and the forest.

  There was no answer from either.

  Finally the sheriff shook his head. There were no other clues than the ones that made no sense. He said hoarsely, “We have to get back out. The boat will be here soon. We’ll send some men to check this later.”

  The deputy hung back. “Amos,” he asked in a whisper, “do you think this fellow—might it be like what happened to Elias Johnson’s dog?”

  The sheriff spoke sharply. “It was a bad trip, like I said! We’ll find both those creeps on top, bet you a month’s pay!”

  Amos Tarbell plowed out of the forest back to the beach, angry and confused. He did not really believe he would find the men on the ridge, but whatever else was happening was beyond his experience and comprehension. Where could two naked men have got to? How could they have bloodied each other as savagely as the scene suggested? It was inexplicable—unless.

  Unless.

  Sheriff Amos Tarbell was compelled to let the odious thought take form in his troubled mind. Crazed rats might be running the woods. Packs of wild rats with festering rabies! That would be worse for Yarkie than even the sharks some years back.

  This was more than he could handle alone. He glanced at his watch. Twelve-­thirty. Reed Brockshaw should be on the Bertram to Chatham by now. The scientist from Harvard would be on the island soon.

  The sheriff shook his head unhappily. It looked like they could use all the help they could get. And it had started out such a quiet, sunny day on Yarkie this morning.

  SUSPICIONS

  ONE

  When Hilda Cannon left her house for a lunch date at twelve-­forty-­five, her daughters grabbed their field glasses and hurried through High Ridge Woods toward the cliff from which the cove could be viewed.

  “Momma’ll kill us if she ever finds out,” Ruth said nervously.

  Rebecca put on a studious expression. “We’re allowed to go bird-­watching, aren’t we?”

  Ruth flushed. “Not for these kinds of birds.” She held back. “Becky, the fire truck said to stay out for the spraying.”

  Rebecca sniffed the air. “They haven’t reached here yet.” She went faster through the trees. “I hope old Amos Tarbell doesn’t chase those fellows before we get there!”

  “We should have had the goshdarn glasses before!”

  “I got a good look anyway. Did you ever see the one with the beard?”

  “I wasn’t looking at his beard . . .”

  The girls’ exchange tinkled through the trees as they plunged on, breathing hard with both their exertion and their anticipation.

  Ruth stopped abruptly. “Hey, wait! What’s that?”

  Rebecca pushed ahead impatiently. “You’re gonna make us miss them!”

  Ruth called after her sister with fear shaking her voice. “Becky, stop!”

  Rebecca shouted back through the trees, “Amos is going to chase them away!” But she skidded to a halt at the sight to which her sister was pointing in horror.

  In this elevated section of the woods, the ridge was only sparsely covered. On a stony ledge before the girls, the wind-­blown pines were dwarf-­size and twisted like Japanese bonsai. The open platform was swarming with rats. They were large, fat brutes, disgusting with their swollen bellies, narrow rodent faces, and snaking tails. That was revolting enough, but the freakish spectacle was the dance the rats seemed to be doing.

  One after another, rats leaped into the air. Their thin legs kicked wildly, their long tails whipped madly, their heads jerked from side to side. In the macabre ballet, scores of rats were in the air at one time, colliding, snarling, snapping with squeals of fury.

  In their berserk acrobatics, many rats flung themselves off the cliff, as if their maddened brains imagined they could fly like birds. They plummeted to their death in the sea below, to be scavenged by quickly gathering fish and birds.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Ruth trembled.

  Rebecca had her binoculars up. She screamed in surprise and horror. “It’s roaches!”

  “Roaches?” Ruth was incredulous.

  “Cockroaches! Millions of them! Great big King King cockroaches!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Big cockroaches all over the rats!”

  Ruth had trouble focusing her glasses. Her sister was all too horribly right! Every writhing, “dancing” rat was literally coated with cockroaches. The brown color of the rats was not their fur, but the shells of the insects. And, as the glasses showed in their amplification, the roaches were clearly eating at the rats as they clung to them. The girls could make out the dark spots on the rocks now—pools of red rat blood dripping from the mayhemed animals. The girls could see clearly, too—all too terribly clearly—that heavy roaches were gouging out the rats’ eyes, crawling up the rats’ nostrils, and disappearing into their ears.

  The girls’ revulsion could not help but be tinged with something akin to pity. The rats, loathsome as they might be, were still living creatures that could feel pain. It was beyond human capacity to watch them being eaten alive this nightmare way.

  Held mesmerized by the view enclosed in their field lenses, the girls did not observe that some frantic rats, still free of the roaches, were streaking into the trees. Their racing line of terror headed them blindly to where the two were standing.

  Too late, Ruth and Rebecca heard the chittering noise of the pack. In an instant, sharp rodent mouths were gashing the girls’ feet, gulping the quick human blood. The frenzied jaws of leaping rats were tearing the white throats before the panicked girls realized what was occurring. The binoculars went flying. Without even time to scream, the Cannon girls were rolling on the ground, punching and tugging at the assaulters. Streams of blood now poured from the young faces, arms, their gnawed fingers. Chunks of flesh were ripped from their breasts, bellies, and thighs. Narrow raping snouts shoved hungrily into their genitals, in a terrible mockery of the girls’ careful innocence.

  Neither the expiring Cannon daughters nor their rat attackers saw the swelling legions of great roaches that were advancing toward them. The roaches moved across the ground like a monstrous organism. Each roach was like a single tooth in a huge maw. In minutes, the myriad of insects had stripped the flesh of both rats and girls to bone—and then razored the skeletons to powder. Then the huge mass rested, pulsing quietly as with one communal breath, before ­disappearing en masse in a single wavelike motion beneath the heavy leaves.

  Stillness and silence remained in the forest.

  TWO

  Amos Tarbell had just returned from the jail infirmary where the near-­drowned man was recovering when Hilda Cannon rocketed into his office again. She was more distraught than e
arlier, and had trouble speaking through her fresh anger. “I came home from lunch and saw that man in my garden! Without a stitch on his filthy body! Not down on the beach, but in front of me in my garden! And . . .” she let her voice peak to the height of her new anxiety, “. . . I can’t find Ruth or Becky anywhere! That man has raped them and killed them, Amos!” She was trying not to break into tears.

  The sheriff came around his desk and held the woman’s shoulders. “Hildie, how could a man rape someone with his hands locked behind his back?”

  Hope appeared in the woman’s twitching face. “He was handcuffed?”

  “Handcuffed,” the sheriff repeated.

  “But where are my girls, then? It’s almost two o’clock!”

  Amos Tarbell sat down to the papers on his desk. “Visiting some friends, or out fishing, or bird-­watching.”

  “I told them strictly to wait home till I got back from Beatrice Scott’s!”

  The man said soothingly, “We’ll pick that fellow up. Don’t worry. Incidentally, did he talk to you or anything?”

  “Come to think of it, yes, he did!”

  The sheriff looked up. “What was that?”

  “He said—” The woman thought for a moment to get it exact. “He said, ‘Take me to your sheriff.’ ”

  Her words echoed in the office before they both burst into laughter. The creature from outer space had spoken.

  Tarbell asked, “Well, why didn’t you bring him in?”

  The woman coughed. “Me? A naked man?”

  “You could have given him a blanket or a robe . . .”

  “I suppose it was foolish,” the woman added. “I was just too upset.” She managed a dry smile. “It isn’t every day I find something like that in my garden . . .”

  “I guess not,” the sheriff smiled back sympathetically.

  Mrs. Cannon started out, her lips working with inner confusions. “I’ll ask around after Ruth and Becky.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find them safe and sound,” Tarbell said.

  When the door closed, he let out another blurt of laughter. That must have been the funniest damn most hilarious spectacle anywhere, anytime—that bearded fellow in front of none other than Mrs. Hilda Digges Cannon in his birthday suit. “Take me to your sheriff!” Tarbell slapped his desk in a paroxysm of delight and relief. If the one man had showed up, the other would. Ben Dorset had been foolish to bring up the question of the rats . . .

  But when Amos Tarbell answered his ringing telephone, his laughter and his assurance faded fast.

  THREE

  In the woods around the picnic grove, Elias Johnson and Craig Soaras were baffled. They had faithfully searched the area described by Bonnie Taylor, and there was no dog body or sign of one.

  “I’d think Bonnie was mistaken, except she’s so dang bright,” Johnson muttered. “She said to the left of the path, which should be just about here.” The old man went to his knees with a grunt of stiffness. “Nothing. She must have got the place wrong in her excitement.”

  Craig shook his head strongly. “That’s one lady knows her right from her left, as you say.”

  Johnson gave his friend an approving smile. “There are still some folks are surprised that blacks think and talk as if they were human.” The old man knew Craig Soaras wasn’t one of them. Craig’s own people were bravas, from the Cape Verde Islands back many generations, a place where the Portuguese and Africans had intermarried freely.

  The old man realized he had been yattering to himself to cloak the doubts piling up in a sinister way. Sharky was a brave dog but not a stupid one. If there had been an attacker in the woods, he would have stalked it carefully before exposing himself to danger. Yet, there was no indication of a struggle, and no track suggesting Sharky had followed some spoor and was now perhaps asleep himself in one of the island’s many caves.

  A whoop from Craig Soaras startled Johnson out of his thoughts. His mate was pointing up a tree. The old man wondered why. Craig of all people knew dogs don’t climb trees. This whole damned business was full of mysteries. The captain made his way to the elm where Soaras was standing. The tree was considerably to the left of the trail the men had searched earlier, and it stood in a knee-­high stack of old leaves. Johnson still heard the crackling sound with pleasure. Way, way back when he himself was a kid he had tumbled and bounced in leaf heaps like this.

  He stopped suddenly, brought up by a sound strange to his Yarkie-­tuned ears.

  Craig called, “Over here, Elias!”

  “Quiet!” Johnson commanded. His hand was cupped to his head. His friend understood at once. Old Elias had heard something he had missed. And there it was! A rustling in the leaves around a stand of white birches. Both men squinted in that direction.

  “Mice,” Craig decided. Then impatiently, “Look here, Elias!”

  The old man stood rigidly, listening hard. “No mice till night!”

  “Might be the poison at the dump has got everything upside-­down.”

  “Might be.” The rustling had stopped. Johnson gave his attention to his friend. “What’ve you got there?” He moved to the tree and looked up where the man was pointing.

  Craig asked, “Think that’s bird feathers?”

  Johnson said, “Looks more like, I dunno, rabbit fur, maybe.” On a branch above there was something like a piece of stained cloth.

  “What the hell would a rabbit be doing up a tree?”

  Johnson again made his abrupt motion demanding silence. Now both men heard the hissing sound, more distinct and persistent. It was somehow menacing, the way the clicking of a rattlesnake’s coils is chilling even to someone who does not know the threat.

  “What the hell is that?” Craig whispered.

  “Not any damn mouse I ever heard of,” the captain observed sharply.

  The young man took a step toward the unusual sound. “Let’s go see.”

  “Get that thing off the tree first,” Johnson directed.

  It wasn’t easy. For all his strength and agility, Soaras had to make several attempts before he caught a branch and could swing himself up. He stretched and reached for the white object.

  “God Almighty!” he cried.

  “What did you find?”

  “Catch this!”

  One of his dog Sharky’s ears dropped into the stunned hands of Elias Johnson.

  At the same moment, a huge rat, almost two feet long, sprang with a blood-­curdling squeal from a nearby leaf mound.

  Craig Soaras yelled, “Up anchor!” and tumbled from the tree. “Let’s get out of here!”

  But Elias Johnson was mesmerized by the rat’s arabesque. It whirled and contorted its body in the air again and again, and neither man saw the large insect form that dropped like a shadow from the rat’s flank, to scuttle away into the leaves.

  Weaving drunkenly on the ground, the rat spied the men. Its eyes malevolently took them in as its tormenters. The animal lowered itself to spring at Elias Johnson’s throat. Its lips were drawn back in a venomous snarl, its dripping fangs livid for human flesh.

  Craig jumped in front of Johnson, sweeping up a branch to use as a club. The rat launched itself at him. Craig brought the club back like a bat and swung with all his muscled might. He caught the leaping rat squarely on the head. The men heard the animal’s skull splinter, its back break. The rat, with an expression of almost human amazement, went sailing away through the air, a grotesque home run for Craig Soaras.

  When the animal fell, its legs still clawing the air, the whole pile of leaves heaved.

  Craig yelled at Johnson urgently, “There’s more of them in there!” He pulled the old man around unceremoniously, and they took off.

  Had they looked back, they would have seen the rat’s broken body suddenly disappear, yanked down into the leaves by something waiting beneath, something invisible but a force of power. A force that hissed hungrily over the rat’s body, letting the promise of the other prey go this time.

  Captain Elias Johnson curs
ed to himself as he ran alongside Craig Soaras. So it was rats had got Sharky!

  His foot hurt, but he wasn’t about to slow down. His head hurt, but he wasn’t about to give up on Yarkie. Mad rats like this one, obviously rabid, were hellishly dangerous. Where there was one, there would be more. Thank God Craig had batted that bastard away. Those leaves were full of them, that was plain. Russ Homer was right, dammit!—a new kind of rat was loose on Yarkie. They could only hope the young scientist, Dr. Peter Hubbard, would know what to do.

  There wasn’t time as Johnson ran painfully away from the once-­tranquil picnic grove to ponder how Sharky’s ear had gotten up on a tree. Or where the rest of his dog was.

  The balance at the village dump had indeed been upset. Insects and rodents that had lived peacefully amidst the plentiful garbage were suddenly at odds. Massive doses of pyrethrum had imposed a paradoxic effect on the mutated roach population.

  A temporary excitant even in ordinary situations, the pyrethrum jolted the new roach breed into a frenzy of new activity and, more important, new hungers.

  The Yarkie rats were the first victims. When chance brought larger prey to the crawling mandibles and jaws, an even stronger taste and relish developed. At the same time, The Nest was throbbing with new vigor, as if the fresh nutrition was itself speeding and amplifying the mutation. Warriors and foragers had multiplied to the many millions. Soon the Colony would be ready for the necrotic raids that would make them masters of all that their swift legions could reach, encompass, engulf.

  FOUR

  By two-­thirty, a meeting was in progress at Elias Johnson’s home. Elizabeth and Bonnie had served sandwiches for a late lunch. Elizabeth was glad she could busy herself. It was disquieting to be in the same room with Peter Hubbard. She had tried to keep her greeting casual. She never wanted him to know of the sixteen-­year-­old crush she had on him when he had appeared in Cambridge to be her father’s laboratory chief.