The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

  Just steps from the road, Hilda Cannon felt a fluttering around her head. Instinctively, she threw her hands up, circling them wildly. If these were bats, she didn’t want them in her hair. She knew bats didn’t really do that, but she was hysterical with fright. And the more so with the realization that the fluttering wings were not of bats but belonged to flying roaches seeking her blood.

  Forms of giant cockroaches were sweeping the air all around her now. It flashed in her head that they resembled the plagues of locusts she had seen in movies so thick they darkened the sky.

  In the ­same way that Tony Carlucci had known his doom, and Bo Leslie too, Hilda Cannon understood she would never take the last few steps to the road and the waiting car.

  She went down helplessly under the terrible assault, blinded immediately by the avidly seeking mandibles. Even as she fell, two small rivers of blood came from the emptying eye sockets, tears of defeat, loss, disaster, death rolling down what was left of her cheeks.

  The nerves behind the woman’s eyes and ears exploded with internal fireworks, and as had happened with the others, an aurora borealis flared within. Her hands moved spastically over the ground seeking some weapon, out of an indomitable spirit that refused to concede. As with sailor kin of old, stubbornly holding breath in their lungs while drowning until the overpowering sea claimed what they could no longer withhold, Hilda Cannon had no weapon, no hope. The waves of roaches were the lashing seas of wild storm, the boat breached, the winds ripping the hair out of one’s head, forcing open the clenched mouth and funneling the water of death into the unwilling chest. Except that Hilda Cannon was drowning not in salt water of the ocean but in the froth of her own sluicing blood.

  Blind and deaf, she still struggled, with a thrust for life that came from the deepest spirit. She felt the thousands of knife-­teeth having their way at her face, her neck, her breasts. She felt the thousands of mandibles tugging and clinging, ripping her living skin from her sinking, sweating body. She knew horribly the sensation of the cockroaches crawling into every orifice, her nostrils, and unthinkably, her privates, front and rear.

  Hilda Cannon’s prayer for a quick death, her giving up at last, was granted by the organized fierceness of her assailants.

  Even before she had perished, swift scout roaches were off to the Great Nest to signal another capture of the new prey the Colony now voraciously sought. Having partaken of human meat and drunk human blood, the new cockroach breed was ravenous for more. No longer would they eat of the dump’s garbage or of Yarkie rat carcasses, or the vegetation, or other Yarkie animals. They could not get enough of the human taste and would seek it endlessly, implacably, and with many more victories.

  Meantime, there was peace and contentment all around the Dome. Only the Warrior Guard roaches surrounding the center were in motion, and even they moved listlessly. All were well-­fed, and there were no alarm signals of any kind coming into the Nest.

  A few of the drab females were laying their egg sacs. This could be a time of delicate balance. When eggs were deposited in a disturbance, the mothers would almost certainly eat them. But in the quietude reigning now there was no cannibalism. The paludal, marsh-­like odor made a kind of comforting atmospheric blanket for all, young roach and old.

  “Cozy” was the anthropomorphic word humans would use to describe the insect home. The mood extended even to the many bands of roaches still out in pockets through the Yarkie forest—roaches not summoned back. These had made comfortable waiting places in their own camps, from which they could respond at a moment’s signal—chemical or physical—in rampaging hordes.

  SIX

  Stephen Scott couldn’t help laughing aloud as he drove home after dropping Tom and Deirdre Laidlaw at the house they rented on High Ridge a mile before the Tintons. It was a sign of his party’s success, he supposed, that they were playing this game of automobile chairs. First, Harvey had left half-­smashed, taking the Tinton car. Then his wife, Blanche, borrowed the Laidlaw jeep to drive home and check on Harvey. She wasn’t back when the party broke up, so it fell to Scott to drive the Laidlaws in his Cadillac. They’d get their jeep from the Tintons the next day.

  Scott was humming in a satisfied way. Both Tinton and Tom Laidlaw had shaken hands with him on a new deal he planned near Chatham. Yarkie’s possibilities had been just about exhausted, he figured. The way to stay young was to plan ahead. Meantime, the marina here had better pay off or he’d be the laughing stock from Buzzard’s Bay to Provincetown.

  Everything would turn out all right, Scott assured himself, including this creepy business out at the dump. They should have stayed with the old poisons, but Big Brother had to keep meddling. Damn Boston, damn Washington! Yarkie could manage its own affairs without those knuckle­heads, batterbrains, and blowhards.

  He was taking the long way home, enjoyed driving the island by himself at night. In the bright moon, the High Ridge woodland was as beautiful now as he remembered from boyhood. He could recall the very trees where he and his friends had played. Approaching the Tinton house, he admired again the juniper red cedars planted by old Cannons in generations past. The trees in their height, girth, and dark foliage always seemed formal to him—trees wearing black tie and tuxedo. He wondered at the same time why the lights were still on at the Tintons. He’d have thought both Blanche and Harvey were fast asleep by now.

  Scott drove with a proprietary sense along the stands of pitch pine and pin oak, the clumps of birches, and the elms like sentries guarding a king’s preserve. He went slowly, aware of the gravel pelting up on the bottom of the car. He shouldn’t have taken the big car, he thought, but he had forgotten about the tarring of the road up here. Had a couple of drinks too many himself, he chuckled.

  Sometimes, like tonight, he felt as if he owned all of what he saw. In a way he did, because he loved it all and he could enjoy it all. And the Harvard fellow would help them get rid of the Yarkie contamination that had sprung up out of nowhere.

  Scott turned his attention to the wide bay-leaved willow tree he was driving by. Its trunk was as weather-­beaten as the Yarkie houses, and the broad circle of its branches made a crown of delicate leaves that hung in the night like the golden hair of the princesses he had loved in his childhood fairy tales—books he had hidden in these very woods to devour.

  But when the man stopped his car with a grunt of surprise, it wasn’t to admire the willow tree or any other. It was because he was flabbergasted to see Hilda Cannon’s station wagon sitting in the Tinton driveway.

  Damned funny! Hildie hadn’t come to his party because she was so worried about her girls. His mind flashed: Had she found them at the Tintons? What would they be doing there?

  Stephen Scott pulled his car up behind the station wagon and heaved his weight from behind the wheel. Riffraff were coming over to Yarkie, like those three bums yesterday. Couldn’t tell what they might be up to.

  The situation required caution, clearly.

  Scott tiptoed distrustfully to the house. The door opened to his hand. No disorder, good. But also no people, downstairs or, puffingly he found, upstairs. If Hildie was visiting Harvey and Blanche, where the hell were they? Taking a walk in the woods? They didn’t know the warning to stay out was phony. Maybe Hildie was helping Blanche help Harvey walk off the rum he had guzzled.

  Scott waddled to his car for a flashlight and moved with it into the trees. He beamed the light ahead, right and left. No Tintons. No Hildie. No nothing except his familiar woods.

  The leaves along the path did look as if a wind had disturbed them, but that wasn’t untypical up here, especially when the weather was near a big change. Gusts could blow up suddenly and puff themselves out. The only thing unusual was a bitter-­sharp odor he detected. A fire somewhere? No. It was more fetid, piercing. Scott sniffed, grimacing with distaste. A decaying mouse under the leaves? The man bent over heavily, taking short breaths and frowning deeply with the sharp unpleasantness. He tilted his large head. Had he heard something in the leav
es? Strange, unfamiliar? A whirring sound? A rustling? Like hissing? What the hell could that be? It was up the path ahead of him. Hadn’t that black girl said something about a hissing noise? Scott switched his light out and listened sharply. Nothing. His ears must be ringing, he thought. He was panting from just his short walk. His fat body was sweating.

  Switching the flashlight on again, Stephen Scott stepped forward into the leaves. He had an itchy feeling that something ahead was watching him come, waiting for him. He wiped perspiration from his cheeks. He could almost imagine beady eyes glinting at him from a copse in front. The rats? Scott’s skin goose-­pimpled. He had an animal sense that an animal was hunting him, not the other way around at all. Treacherous! He could almost see a lifted rat head sniffing with its thin snout to catch his scent. The rustling noise came again, suddenly from many directions! There was more than one rat! How could he have forgotten they roamed in packs? The man’s spine went icy. He felt under water, with sharks circling silently in tighter and tighter moves, smelling blood, coming in­exorably closer, maws open, jaws ready to slash . . .

  Stephen Scott turned in the leaves as quietly as his bulk permitted, and started to tiptoe away. Then he stopped, his lips working. He was no coward. If there were rats out here, the Tintons and Hildie might have been attacked. He ought to check it out, unlikely though it was. He chided himself. It was the damned foreign smell that was making him as nervous as a horse with a burr under the saddle. He quieted himself. It occurred to him that he ought to take a sample of the leaves to the Harvard man. The odor might be a clue for the biologist. Now he was thinking sensibly!

  Scott bent over to pick up a handful of leaves. He flinched. Something hard and cold was under his fingers. He withdrew his hand and straightened up, kicking the leaves apart to see what they were hiding. He was astonished. At the tip of his open-­toed sandal there was the last thing he might have expected—a pistol.

  The man bent down again to lift the gun, taking care not to mark it with too many of his own fingerprints. It seemed that something very much out of the ordinary was happening in these woods this night. He recognized the gun at once. All of Hildie Cannon’s friends knew she owned it, and her initials were plain on the handle. As a selectman, he himself had been one of those approving her permit. No question, no question at all.

  But what the tarnation hell was Hildie’s gun doing here?

  The disturbed man stood in the deep leaves staring at the weapon. His attention did not take in the hissing that was suddenly louder behind him. He was unaware that the “sharks” of his imagination were deadly real and close to his bare ankles, though in a form he could never conceive.

  From the house, the Tinton phone jangled in the night. Scott was galvanized at the sharp, demanding ringing. He hurried to the summons without thought, and did not hear the hissing that rose in the trees like a cry of frustration. An especially inviting feast had gotten away.

  The phone call was from the Laidlaws, wanting to arrange with the Tintons about picking up their jeep. Scott put them off, saying Blanche had gone to bed and Harvey was fixing a nightcap. He would deliver their message.

  Going thoughtfully back to his car, Scott knew his decision. It was right not to start a gossip prairie fire by telling the Laidlaws that the Tintons and Hildie Cannon seemed to be missing. And if that was right, so was his conclusion not to call in Amos Tarbell until later. Everything might be completely innocent and harmless. The gun in his pocket was a disturbing element, but that might have a simple explanation, too.

  Getting behind the wheel, Scott felt the leaves in his pocket. He tossed them out the car window with distaste. They were stinking up his clothes.

  He started his engine, only to shut it again. He stared dubiously at the Tinton house and at the Cannon wagon. Anyone driving by now would wonder about it, as he had wondered. No sense having people snooping about, tongues wagging. The man eased himself out of his car again, went into the house to shut the lights, and decided he would drive the Cannon station wagon to the Cannon house where it belonged. If Hildie was out somewhere with the Tintons—he laughed silently at the thought that the three might have gone skinny-­dipping—Blanche Tinton could drive her home.

  After parking the station wagon in the Cannon garage, Scott walked back to his own car at the Tinton’s. It was really musical chairs—and a good half-­mile now, but he enjoyed it and the hiking was good for him. He resolved to do more walking and to start a diet. His breath was too short. His own huffing was like the sounds coming from the woods. He stopped. It was that curious, alien mixture of rustling and hissing that had upset him in the Tinton trees. It was almost like a call, somehow inviting, yet repelling and, yes, frightening, at the same time.

  Did rats hiss? Cats hissed. Raccoons hissed. What else hissed and would be scuffling through the leaves at night? Should he try again to enter the forest and see? He didn’t have the flashlight now, and clouds were beginning to cover the moon. Still, he knew his way over every inch. The hissing was louder, pricking his curiosity more and more. He faced the trees and stepped off the road. The hissing increased, and a wave of pure fear swept over the man. He felt cold, bone cold, the way chill got into the marrow some winter days when the wind cut one’s lungs. The hell with it! It was way past time to be home and in bed. The man slapped his palms resoundingly against his flabby thighs and turned from the trees.

  Some sections of the road were sticky to walk on, though the cool evening air had largely hardened the tar. When he got to his car, Scott noticed that some large bug had got on the steering wheel through the open window. He could not see it clearly and didn’t want to. It seemed torpid, a kind of beetle. He grimaced picking it up. Always hated things that crawled. He flipped the bug out. His finger felt sticky. Had the damn thing bitten him? He hadn’t felt any sting. He looked at his hand, half-­expecting to find blood. But what he saw was only a small black smear. He wiped at it with a tissue. Tar. He smiled with a new thought. For rats, the whole damn road along the forest would be like a giant flypaper, wouldn’t it? Especially during the day in the hot sun. Good!

  Stephen Scott started the car and drove safely home, never aware of the fate he had unwittingly thwarted.

  WITNESS

  ONE

  The sea was running higher the next morning, but not yet threatening. Down at the harbor, Craig Soaras started the powerful engines of Elias Johnson’s workhorse boat—husky twins of 250 horsepower each. The Jessica could take any weather that might blow up sooner than expected.

  Craig had asked Bonnie Taylor—and hastily included Elizabeth Carr in his invitation—to sail to Chatham with him, but both women said there was still too much mess to clean up at the lighthouse. Elizabeth, particularly, wanted to have the building spic and span before Wanda Lind­strom arrived.

  Craig had no difficulty recognizing Dr. Lindstrom on the Chatham dock. Other women were in shorts and halters, tanned and informal. She was pale, and wearing an elegant tan linen dress, with her hair combed severely back over a sculptured face. She needed no rimmed glasses to appear the academic she was. Her no-nonsense, brisk air projected her total self-assurance.

  After an impersonal greeting and some confusion with loading the laboratory crates, Craig headed the Jessica back to Yarkie Island. His own innate shyness matched the woman’s formal reserve. From the wheel, he watched the ramrod stiffness with which she stood holding the rail. He took her manner to discourage conversation. He felt like a schoolboy with a teacher; you didn’t speak until spoken to.

  Dr. Wanda Lindstrom was a good sailor, though, he had to give her that. The boat was heading into the wind, and landlubbers could be forgiven if the spanking motion made their stomachs “bilgey,” as Cape Cod sailors put it.

  Craig regarded the straight back with an open curiosity on his weather-­creased face. The wind was draping the woman’s dress closely around her body. She really was a looker, like the slim models in the magazines. Observing the biologist’s femininity, Craig real
ized he had been expecting someone like his old teachers on Yarkie, plain as grocery bags. There was a spice in this woman’s combination of academic frostiness and the looks of a movie star. He couldn’t put his finger on which actress she reminded him of—it was the one with the high cheekbones, straightforward eyes, and wide mouth that could show a charming smile as well as the slight frown with which Wanda Lindstrom was turning to him now.

  The man could not know it, but he was accurately sensing the two aspects of the woman’s personality. She was of Polish descent on her mother’s side, which accounted for her given name and the intriguing modeling of her face. It also gave her a passionate nature hidden beneath the stern exterior, but quick to flare into either anger or love. She kept the latter well hidden under the constraints of her father’s blood. He was Swedish of the old school, class-conscious and stiff-­upper-­lip.

  Whatever the combination, Craig thought, he preferred Bonnie Taylor’s sunny smile and her flowing good nature. His regret was that Bonnie was so deeply upset by Sharky’s end. He was sharply disturbed, himself. He could only hope, with the others, that Peter Hubbard and this woman scientist would come up with the answer quickly.

  Last night on the beach with Bonnie, he had been the one to try to put Yarkie’s problem in perspective. Big fish eat little fish eat little fish eat little fish, down to the plankton—on Yarkie, something had gone wrong with the chain. It was reckless for men to forget that Nature was always a primal shark. She might seem to be swimming placidly, half-­asleep, but you always had to be wary. She could always turn and tear you to pieces, as the brewing storm might do in these waters later this very day.

  “A little rough, isn’t it?” the Harvard woman was asking.

  Craig Soaras smiled broadly at her, almost an apology, wanting her to know that he and the others on Yarkie appreciated her assistance and wanted to be friendly. “Not yet,” he said. “But it looks to be a bad one by tonight.”