The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

  “Be careful!” Elizabeth couldn’t help blurting. The image of scuttling insects in the can was nightmarish.

  There was a sudden lull in the wind beyond the windows, and the rattling of the giant cockroaches against the can could be plainly heard.

  “Can I help?” Johnson wanted to know.

  “Just stand by,” Hubbard said tensely. “Wanda and I will handle this.”

  Before Peter Hubbard could take tools to the project, the roar of a wildly racing automobile stopped him. Brakes shrieked, a car door slammed, the lighthouse door was banged open, and Amos Tarbell pounded into the room. His face was ghostly. His big body was shaking like a boy’s. He didn’t know which of his terrible messages to tell first. “On my radio just now! The Tub is on the rocks! Off Dickens Point. They can’t raise the Coast Guard station in the storm! Call Chatham on the phone!” The man’s heavy voice broke. The news of the Laidlaws must wait.

  Reed Brockshaw, coming in just behind the sheriff, turned to stone. His question was an unbelieving whisper, “The Tub?—The rocks off Dickens Point?”

  Amos Tarbell nodded in misery, and turned to Elias Johnson. “Can we use your boat to get over there?”

  “Sure! Craig has the Bertram, so we can take the Jessica! What are we waiting for?” The old man was limping to the door.

  Reed Brockshaw cracked. He thundered at Johnson, “The Jessica will take an hour to get around the island in this storm!” He ran to his car. “We have to use the shortcut over High Ridge!”

  Amos Tarbell grabbed at his old friend. ‘“You can’t go through those woods, Reed!”

  “Get your hands off of me!”

  “Those roaches are out there today! I just saw them!”

  Reed beat at the sheriff with hard fists. “Damn the roaches! My kids are on that boat!”

  Tarbell held on to him despite the painful blows. “The roaches! They’re all over everything in the woods! You’ll never get through!”

  “My KIDS!” the man kept yelling. He broke violently from the sheriff’s grasp and darted to a pile of old flares Elizabeth and Bonnie had stacked neatly in a corner of the room. Good!—These were the Roman candle type, Brockshaw knew, not the fireworks rockets. He shouted at Amos Tarbell. “I’ll use these. I’ll get through!”

  The sheriff pleaded as the man grabbed the flares like kindling. “These are awful old, Reed! They won’t light!”

  Tarbell desperately needed to tell Reed, tell them all, the horror he had just seen in the Laidlaw jeep. He needed to tell everyone that Yarkie was in more calamitous and gruesome danger than anyone had dreamed. He needed to set in motion the complete evacuation of High Ridge and every house anywhere near the trees. But this shipwreck emergency had to come first. He raced after Reed Brockshaw and tackled him. Brockshaw kicked out. Tarbell swung his own sea-­hardened fists. The man had to be stopped, didn’t realize the peril he was heading for.

  His face bleeding from the sheriff’s blows, Reed Brock­shaw lowered his head like a football player and rammed his friend. The sheriff went sprawling. His large body struck the garbage can and knocked it over. It was only Peter Hubbard’s reflex pouncing on the cover that kept the captive cockroaches from spilling out all over the laboratory.

  By the time the dust of the confusion settled, Reed Brockshaw’s car was burning rubber toward High Ridge and the shortcut he planned to take to Dickens Point.

  The commotion in the laboratory kept the people from noticing how the introduction of the garbage can into the room had galvanized the roach in the glass jar. Its wings were buzzing frantically. It kept flying up against the glass cover. The lid held fast, which seemed to infuriate the insect more.

  At the same time, a heavier odor seemed to be coming from the insect through the airholes in the flask. It was faint in the laboratory air, but with a definite scent of its own—vaguely caustic, intermixed with a loamy or even herbal aroma. Without realizing it, the people were taking it in with nervous exhalations of their own breath.

  Had the people not been racing about in their own new urgency, they would have heard the sharp repeated cracking of the captive roach’s shell on the glass, hitting the sides and the top harder and harder blows. Fortunately, the glass was shatterproof, and held.

  TWO

  When one of the Tub’s ancient engines failed, George Kinray realized too late that even prayers would not save the boat from disaster on Dickens Rocks. The gale winds and the staggering waves were too powerful for the remaining motor. The minister did not have to tell the children to be quiet, to avoid panic as the slashing sea sluiced the deck. They were all experienced enough to know they were in dire trouble. Squinting against the salt spray, the older among them helped with the life jackets.

  Using whatever power he could muster against the deck-­washing waves and the beating winds, the minister desperately steered toward Dickens Cove. His hope was that the storm would beach the craft past the rocks. True, the tide was coming in fast, and there would be no beach at all in a little while, but with luck he would have time to get everyone off safely and into the nearby woods. Then the trek home would be familiar through the safety of the trees.

  The curling combers had other plans for the Tub. Heavier and heavier seas broke mercilessly over the deck, threatening to sweep children overboard. The youngsters clung tightly to whatever was at hand, and to each other, in a chain of silent terror. A great sea would dance the ship up a heaving wave, only to chute it down with a timber-­shaking thud in the trough between seas. The winds boiled up mountains of water that avalanched down on the Tub, surging across the children, and straining the human chain of small arms to the breaking point.

  It was all the more terrible, the distraught minister wept inwardly, because not even the smallest of the clenched faces uttered the slightest whimper. These Yarkie children showed their inheritance of bravery, he saw with new admiration, and heartbreak. Kneeling in prayer, he watched the jagged rocks coming closer and closer, like iron shark jaws waiting to crunch them to bits. Even with life jackets, few children could survive the pounding seas and the erratic tides. They would almost certainly be swept out to eternity.

  David Brockshaw clasped his sister, Kim, to him in an embrace so tight that it made her wince. But she did not make a noise. She saw the smile he had fixed on his lips, and took comfort from it, as she had been comforted by her father when he had lifted her to his chest in the woods. Inwardly, David was sick with fright. He had sailed this shore enough times with his father to know for certain that in this storm the crippled Tub would never make it to the beach. More clearly than the minister, he saw that their only hope was, paradoxically, to be wrecked on the line of rocks extending from the shore. Unless the Tub broke up at once, they ought to be able to climb on to the boulders, even though many of the lower rocks were already awash. The boy saw the minister calling frantically on the radio, and expected there would be help when they reached the beach and started through the forest.

  The ripping, grinding crash of the Tub against the outermost rocks sent children tumbling head over heels across the wet, listing decks. There were jolting cracks like pistol shots as brute waves pitched the ship up and thudded it down again and again. In the raging, egg-­beater torrents, the old boat looked like a great horse lifting, rearing up on hind legs and crashing down furiously. Each time the Tub landed on the anvil of the boulders, great holes were ruptured in her groaning timbers and the whole boat creaked and shuddered through the shattering hull.

  But the youngsters were agile, and trained to emergency. In a matter of seconds, senior boys had formed a body chain from the cracking ship to the solid rocks. Quickly they followed the youngest children, to help guide them over the slippery, sharp-­edged ledges. The minister, searching the Tub, made sure everyone was safely off. He himself jumped to safety just as a rearing sea lifted the old boat and smashed her down with a final splitting of her worn and weary planks.

  The children were washed by waves and spray as they made their
way gingerly toward the strip of sand that promised sanctuary. Blasts of wind slammed and turned them. Some slid off the slippery surfaces into the deep turbulent waters, to be yanked back by strong companion arms.

  By the time they neared the shore, none of the youngsters was without painful bruises and livid scratches. The sea water kept washing away the dripping blood, but David saw that Kim had a large open slash down one leg. He could not stop to stanch the flow. He needed a hand to help keep his own footing, and the other to clasp his sister’s trembling little body as they fought their way along with the others. He tried to get Kim to drop the doll she had insisted on taking to the picnic, but she hugged it as tightly as he was hugging her.

  Clambering and slipping over the uneven boulders, the children, followed by the scarecrow figure of the minister, made a forlorn procession of disaster silhouetted against glowering clouds. With thunder and lightning splitting the sky and ocean, the children looked like pathetic puppets in a tragic storm painting.

  Despite the hazards of the rocks, waves, and storm the whole party reached the shore. Jumping off the last rock onto the sand, George Kinray fell to his knees in a new prayer, of thanksgiving. The storm had carried them to the brink of death, but the same boulders that had wrecked their boat had been like a strong arm of the Lord stretched into the sea to shepherd them to solid ground.

  The minister rose and assessed the situation. The wet children were shivering in the wind. First things first—Kinray sent a squad of older youths to gather wood. They couldn’t make a fire in the trees because of the drought, but they could dry off nicely on the beach. He judged there was still time before the tide covered the strand entirely. Then they could make it home safely. The sheriff’s office had acknowledged his SOS, so help was probably already on the way. The good Lord had indeed saved the day.

  The minister watched with pride as his young charges scattered to find wood. Others, without being ordered or instructed, were digging a large hole in the sand, in which a fire could be built out of the wind. The children were beginning to smile, even laugh. The terror of the shipwreck had not taken them. They were sorry for the Tub, more than sorry. But they were safe, and that was what mattered to a sailor in the end.

  When the older children had dug the pit, the younger children began to construct a sand wall around it. The minister, regarding them fondly, thought how typical it was of the young heart to be wracked with life-­and-­death suspense one moment and in another be resiliently building castles in the sand.

  He would have a proud story to tell their parents, the minister thought, even though the day had brought disaster to the Tub—and, he considered grimly, to whatever reputation he might have hoped to earn as a good sailor in this community of seamen. He’d stick to his pulpit from now on, George Kinray decided, leaning against the wind on Dickens Beach in the ever-­increasing storm.

  THREE

  Young Brockshaw started into the woods when he noticed that his sister was not in the group huddled around the minister. He looked about frantically. The girl was back on the rocks, on her hands and knees. The boy understood at once that she must have dropped her precious doll. Under his breath he muttered a curse he had heard from his father but would never dare say aloud. Voices were calling to him impatiently from the woods. The afternoon was growing steadily darker, the winds more furious. In the forest, it would be almost too dark to see. But Kim was climbing farther out on the boulders, unaware of her danger. The ocean was pouring in faster by the minute. Already it had engulfed some of the distant ledges they had traversed. A menacing wave towered above Kim and swept her half way along before she managed, with a bird-­like cry of terror, to catch hold and save herself. She would not escape the next breaker already gathering its slashing height only yards from her.

  David flung himself toward his sister without another moment’s thought. He reached her just as a torrent of ocean avalanched over them both, crashing them to the hard surface, dragging them scratched and bruised until David caught a precarious hold and strained with all his young muscles to sustain it.

  Filled with anger, he grabbed Kim roughly, and started her back to the others, not caring that she was crying he was hurting her.

  Except that now he could not reach the others. In the minutes he had been on the rocks with Kim, his companions had come fleeing amuck out of the forest, empty-­handed, wild-eyed pursued by an army of cockroaches.

  David heard the hysterical before he saw the attackers. Totally unprepared, he did not understand what he was looking at even while he viewed the scene. The mind requires reference points, accustomed concepts; it cannot deal with something totally outside its experience, beyond its ken.

  The carnage created its own experience in its incredible reality. Except at the foot of the rocks where David and Kim were standing, paralyzed with terror, the narrow beach was suddenly alive with giant cockroaches. They streamed out of the trees without stop. To David Brockshaw they looked like small tanks rumbling steadily on in their assault on the children.

  George Kinray was rushing every which way, stamping, jumping and slipping on the roaches he crushed. The children were in a turmoil. As they perceived the terrible threat of the insect onslaught, they raced away from the roaches into the sea. They were driven, without thinking, by a primal, elementary certainty within: The beach meant death now. The ocean held at least the promise of survival.

  But the tempest on the waters seemed in conspiracy with the insect storm rushing out of the forest onto the sand. Just as the last of the children splashed to seeming safety in the ocean, leaving only the minister in a kind of rear-­guard action, a battering ram of a breaker roared in, shooting over the tops of the highest rocks, engulfing the children. It walloped them off their feet, and pulled them under in an overpowering, drowning maelstrom of colliding winds and tides.

  Most of the drowned children were swept at once deeply out to sea, but the erratic waves tumbled some of the small, wracked bodies back on the sand. They lay still there. Like broken dolls, David Brockshaw thought dimly. His mind was reeling before the impossible sights. He tried to cover Kim’s eyes, but his small sister stood as if hypnotized and he saw that no hand could ever erase from her young soul what had already carved it with unforgettable horror.

  The minister, still trying to protect his charges, lost his balance and, arms waving wildly, slid down beside the bodies already sheeted with the invading, boundless creatures.

  David Brockshaw saw the insects attack his friends, some snaking over the small corpses, others flying for their eyes. Stains of blood appeared on every face.

  The rampaging attack had been so swift, so unreal, that no one in the Sunday School group had comprehended what was happening. It was as if life had abruptly presented a new element, beyond earth, air, fire, and water—an element of havoc beyond imagining, beyond the mind.

  George Kinray again struggled to his feet, drawing on the superhuman power of his despair and guilt. He was already blind, with his cheeks stripped away. He was only a bleeding skull, but he kept trying to lift the drowned bodies away from the reach of the roaches. The children dropped from his arms when the insects gnawed through his tendons and bit through his bones. He fell again, into a new pool of his own gushing blood.

  The beach was soon red everywhere. Crimson patches stained the sand darkly and rivulets of blood channeled through the sand to the sea. The spreading foam left by each rising wave was pink with the blood of the ravishment of the corpses in the unholy necropolis.

  Still watching, his eyes glazed with panic, young Brockshaw saw he might have one chance to save himself and his sister. There was a narrow roach-­free aisle from the rocks to the trees. He grabbed Kim, who uttered another cry of protest, and bounded headlong into the forest. When Kim tugged back, he had no choice but to slap her face. She howled louder, but he plunged on until, to his despair, he found he had run directly into a seething legion of oncoming roaches.

  Without conscious thought, he booste
d Kim up to a tree branch, and high-­jumped after her. From the beach he could hear the earsplitting screams of the minister, but they were growing fewer and feebler. Cowering in the tree, he held on to Kim with all his strength. She was trembling as he was. He was quaking with his growing understanding. He had never heard of cockroaches attacking people. He had never heard of cockroaches as scary-­big as these. He had never seen such gore. He had never seen anything killed besides fish.

  And it seemed the roaches were strong enough to kill a full-­grown man like the minister himself! The boy could understand the drownings, even accept them despite his bursting grief at the loss of his friends, because drowning was part of a world he knew. But he could not take in the roach scourge.

  Shaking harder, David Brockshaw wondered whether these fearsome cockroaches could crawl up trees, could come after him and his sister.

  He was answered too quickly by the terrifying sight of a file of the swollen insects marching steadily up the tree trunk toward him. He shoved Kim higher up, panting with fresh panic. Roaches were reaching his shoe. He could feel bites on his ankle. He kicked in a fury, only to see brown bodies—like funny little flying cigars!—aiming at Kim’s white face, settling on her round cheeks. Her eyes widened in terror.

  “Shut your eyes!” her brother shrieked. He had seen how the roaches went for the drowned. “Cover your eyes, Kim!”

  Petrified, the girl obeyed. It was as if David were now her father and her only hope in this bad dream was to do exactly what he said.

  But in raising her arms to her eyes, the girl lost her grip on the tree limb, and tumbled to the ground. She landed on her head, and David heard the sickening thud, and the snap of bones. A mass of cockroaches was on the crumpled little girl in an instant. David heard Kim whimpering and knew she wasn’t dead. He leaped down from the tree, trying to scatter the roaches with his hands and feet. He stamped madly about, but there were too many to disperse.