The boy dropped his own body over his sister’s, trying to shield her. The bloodthirsty insects crawled between them, now tearing and ripping at both juvenile bodies. Kim’s silken corn hair was ropy with her blood and her brother’s. Their empty-socketed eyes stared at each other face to frail face as they perished in this storm more horrible than the sea had ever hurled at Yarkie.
It was not a field of battle, only a rapine slaughter of innocents, because there had been no way to fight back.
FOUR
Reed Brockshaw screeched to a stop on High Ridge Road near the path to Dickens Point. There was no sound except the thundering storm, but the man imagined he could hear his children entreating him for help. From his car, he grabbed a handful of the flares he had taken from the lighthouse and made for the trees. Running as fast as he could, he tried to tell himself there was no serious danger. The Tub would be managed safely, one way or another. As for Tarbell’s warnings of man-eating roaches in the woods, well, Amos had to be exaggerating. Anyway, if any of those insects came at him, he’d teach them a hot lesson.
The man slowed to catch his breath. He didn’t want to get too winded. The climb was rougher than he remembered—well, he hadn’t been this way since high school days. The leaves had certainly lumped up all around. The going was hard, almost like plowing through deep snow.
Why did he have a feeling as if animals were watching him come?
The brittle leaves. The sound of the leaves. What had the fellows told of their search for Sharky at the picnic grove? Those demon roaches had come out of the leaves, heading for the rabbit in the trap. Heading for the men themselves. All three of them wouldn’t be blowing it up. Brockshaw halted. He might as well take heed. Stop, look, listen. And make sure of the flares. As Amos had said, they were pretty damn stale.
The man looked around, and saw nothing but the trees bending and shaking in what was now a full, howling gale. He listened harder, and heard nothing but echoing thunder rolling itself out in space over the sea. He could not see the ocean from the forest, but this sailor knew in his every breath how the storm would look and sound, and how it would frighten even Yarkie children, on the water.
Reed Brockshaw lit a match and carefully touched it to a flare. It sputtered and refused. Old in the lighthouse for years. His mind was jerking around like a fish on a line, he thought with annoyance. He needed to concentrate, but instead he was thinking how Elizabeth Carr and her friend had done such a great job of cleaning the musty old building. It reminded him of the way Doreen kept house. In the midst of the Yarkie forest, under the blowing storm, trying uselessly to light flare after stale flare, Reed Brockshaw was overtaken with a burst of love for his wife, for his way of life, for the cleanliness of his home, the orderliness of his island, his friends, the predictability of the future.
It made the intrusion of the alien cockroaches the more unbearable. He wished the damned flares would catch. He’d like to have one in his fist and see one of those damnation bugs. He’d gladly cook it to hell.
And he had his chance, all at once.
With a grunt of horror, Reed Brockshaw became aware that while he had been concentrating on matches and fuses, a file of the great roaches had emerged from the leaves only about twenty feet away, and was creeping toward him steadily now. The insects were coming on like a single machine driven by an invisible power source, almost as if they were on a conveyor belt. The roach antennae were stiff and straight, as if they were taking in their energy from an outside current. The leaves were crackling as more and more of the insects emerged out of some secret tunnel. Their hissing was like a soft whistling, a deadly harmony underneath the high pitch of the wind in the now-twisting trees.
The roach chittering was for his blood, Reed Brockshaw knew at once. It was almost as if the insects were whetting knives. He could hear a faint clicking that must be their teeth and mandibles. They were closing the distance quickly. In seconds it would be too late for him to turn back.
And his flares were still resisting the matches. Another try, and another match was blown out by a wind gust. The motions of the cockroaches fascinated him. Had someone—Russell?—said they looked like mechanical toys, harmless windup gewgaws—plastic imitations of the small crabs he played with when he was David’s age?
But Brockshaw knew these were real, not toys. He’d better get the hell back to his car or be quick with these matches now!
The roaches were hissing their warning closer and louder. Brockshaw was shivering with more than the storm’s cold air. This was what Amos and Ben and Russ had been trying to tell! He owed them an apology for thinking they were laying it on. Watching this crawling, hissing, feral, clicking army marching at him now, the man could not doubt they could kill Sharky, or anything else they found in their path, including him.
He backed slowly away from the sinister formation to make one more effort at lighting a flare. The vibration of his step was all the roaches needed. The column seemed to twitch and shudder balefully—just the way a larger animal would crouch to spring. Insect wings quivered in the storm gloom. Could he make it back to his car, Brockshaw wondered in a heartstopping panic. Why had he waited so long? Why hadn’t he heeded Tarbell’s warning?
The miserable flare must catch now, or he was in unspeakable peril!
Fire sputtered in fingers he could not keep from trembling. The flame died, as if the hissing of the roaches had blown it out. Flinging the match away with disgust, Reed Brockshaw pivoted to run. A fluttering body struck his nose. Christ, they were flying! Now he couldn’t get away!
With a cough of desperation, the man steadied himself. The flying roach was stinging his forehead, and he wanted to slap it away before it got to his eyes, but that would end his one last chance. Gnawing his lip, he struck another match.
The flare caught!
The hot swoosh of crimson-orange flame burst from the stick like a great chorus singing hallelujah! The flame apparently startled the roach on his head. It loosened its grip and dropped away. Reed brushed the back of his hand to his forehead and saw blood on it. He would surely have been a goner if the flare had failed. He aimed the flame at the roach battalion, and cried out with pure joy when the column broke up in disorder, with roaches scattering into the leaves for their own lives.
Good! He wished they wouldn’t be rushing to hide, would stay and give him the chance he wanted, to burn them all to ashes. But he had other business! He headed for the shore again. But he had to stop once more; this time to stamp out little blazes his flare had started in the dry brush. He looked up. All this storm and no damn rain! It often happened that way, but those clouds were black bags swollen with a torrent. They had to let go some time, he thought angrily as he pushed on to the Point.
He was nearing the eastern edge of the woods now. He could see the sand dunes from which he would look down on the shore—find his children who, he was certain, would be safely on land with all the others safe and sound too.
Reed Brockshaw wanted Kim and David in his arms more than he had ever yearned for anything in his life.
No more roaches stopped the man. He burst out of the woods at just the spot he figured he would be. There was the one familiar high dune just before him. He started to climb it. The loose sand gave way under his eager feet, and he slipped back. He lunged upward, grabbing at the tall Phragmites grass that grew reed-like on this side of the island. He pulled himself up to the top of the dune, and could see immediately the wreck of the Tub against the outer Dickens Rocks. The boat was listing badly, and visibly breaking up as the unrelenting waves pounded it against the immovable boulders.
The sight that met him when he turned his eyes to the beach drilled Reed Brockshaw’s brain and sucked out his sanity.
His first impression was that there was nothing on the beach but some kind of foreign brown seaweed washed ashore by the storm. The man’s eyes lifted again to the Tub. The kids could still be on her, but he guessed that George Kinray would have had them climb th
e chain of rocks to the shore. The Tub was too broken up for the minister to risk keeping his charges on board.
The group had come off, Reed Brockshaw’s churning mind told him, and they were somewhere in the woods now enjoying their picnic after all. It was smart of the minister to get the children off the beach quickly, because the tide came in so fast here. At least the man had learned that much.
The father’s eyes were drawn to the beach once more. Dazed, he felt the truth torrenting over him, like waves sweeping over a drowning man.
The children were not in the woods.
There was no picnic party.
No one was on the Tub.
Those who had not drowned and been buried by the sea, were below him, their bodies on the beach.
His mind sizzled with the terrible, incomprehensible question that was at the same time an accursed certainty.
He was not looking at seaweed. That brown spreading blanket, so dense that not a grain of sand showed, was not seaweed but a living mass of insects. It was the enemy, the cockroaches. It was a living carpet of the barbarian roaches and they were feeding.
His eyes closed against the sight, but there was a bright flame inside his head that lit up what had taken place, as plainly as if he were watching a film: He could imagine children coming off the breaking ship, struggling along the rocks. Reaching shore, they romped and jumped all over the beach in their happiness and relief at being safe and sound. The vibrations signaled their presence to the roving roaches. He could only hope there had been a mass drowning first. It would be at least more natural.
It came to Brockshaw that his own Kim and David lay there savaged, buried alive, or dead already, beneath the cover of filth!
The father’s cry of anguish was an animal’s roar. It defeated the thunder that crashed over the scene, and the lightning that eerily lit the gory carnage. It was the eruption of the man’s exploding brain, the sound of a soul’s dynamite blasting every nerve, leaving nothing but the echo of Reed Brockshaw’s breaking apart. There was no way a man could witness the abomination and continue human.
The man beat at his face with his fists, he tore at his cheeks with his nails. In his unspeakable grief and fury he did not want to have a face. He did not want to belong to any world in which this torment could happen.
The insects were insatiable over the bodies. The bugs were red with human blood. Their shells gleamed in the lightning flashes with the slime of their destruction. To the funereal pounding of the waves rising higher on the shore, lightning kept disclosing more and more horror—lacerated flesh, severed limbs, a child’s head rolling to the water’s edge, being lifted by a wave and carried ghoulishly away.
Pieces and flakes of skeletons were floating on the sea now. The shore was a viscid spread of inert refuse, a roach-turbulent repository of misery beyond agony.
There was no way for a mind to encompass the atrocity. It was the excrescence of Nature gone evil. Evil beyond barbarism, beyond cruelty. It was deed beyond excoriation, curse or damnation. It was Damnation itself.
It was an apocalypse of Nature’s mindless enormity, and Reed Brockshaw’s own Gethsemane.
Fish would feed on strange fruit this day.
Reed Brockshaw gnashed his teeth and wailed.
The incoming tide was reaching for more of the mangled bodies. Each lashing wave carried more of the carnage out to sea as it broke over the roach-encrusted shore. The insects near the red-foaming water line began to scramble for their own safety. Roaches nearer the trees paused in their abysmal repast to test the charged air, receiving sudden signals of alarm. Their antennae marked acute danger and they started away from the children’s corpses, scurrying for the dark dry safety of the trees.
Reed Brockshaw’s unutterable anguish pulled the corners of his mouth back into a plastic grin of death. He was beyond mourning, he wanted only vengeance and requital. He lit a flare. His thumping heart knew what he planned. His delirium led him striding off the dune down to the beach, boldly stamping into the torrent of roaches now fleeing the oncoming ocean. Roach leaders made for him at once. Their antennae went high, an arrogance of superiority—how did this Enemy dare to come among them, they who could butcher him in moments! The insect teeth clicked, their mandibles scissored, they hissed and puffed new commands to attack, slaughter, devour.
They waited menacingly for Brockshaw . . .
The man understood, and laughed, and bellowed his maledictions with his first thrust of the flare at their malignant bodies. The flare sent the cockroaches scuttling crazily, their bodies bouncing in the fire, as if they were popping in a hot pan.
Reed Brockshaw laughed insanely at the gratifying debacle. He swept his fiery torch around as if he were scything a field. Circle after circle of burning roach bodies curled and twitched and burst in the fierce immolation.
Soon the man realized he could not get all the roaches while on the beach, and he wanted them all, every killer of them! And, ah, he could be as cunning as they! They would follow him into the woods, because the ocean was chasing them, and because he was more food, and because he had attacked them. Whatever drew or drove them, the insects flocked after him into the trees. Brockshaw was jubilant as he saw them filling the earth behind him, sheets and sheets of cockroaches, a pouring cascade of cockroaches filling the forest floor after him.
Brockshaw paid no attention to the lacerations on his feet, the roaches now sucking blood from the deep bites on his ankles. He rejoiced, knowing his intention. He was impatient, but he forced the time. He wanted them all in his power, every villainous murderer wet with the blood of the drowned children on that beach of horror. He turned to wait for them. He held the flare before his face, though the light hurt his eyes. He fended off the roaches that flew at his head. He kept stamping and shouting in invitation. He laughed. They thought they were the attacker! Hah! They’d see! Soon now! He slapped more flying roaches away. They weren’t going to blind him, not yet! He wanted to see, to have the bursting joy of witnessing what he was about to accomplish.
Reed Brockshaw shook his head madly from side to side to splatter his own blood out to the roaches to make them more avaricious for him, to keep them signaling for more of their brothers to hasten to the new feast where he stood in the forest.
Words jostled and echoed in his head. He heard the Harvard man saying you couldn’t hate the cockroaches any more than you could hate a runaway locomotive. Wrong, Reed Brockshaw snarled. It might be true that Mother Nature was a Crazy Old Lady with evil appetites, who programmed her bastard robots, but to him the cockroaches were palpable enemies, personal enemies, despicable enemies he was to kill with his own hands. He wished they were man-size so he could grip them in his fingers and choke them to death. He wanted to hear them wheeze and cry out, hear their dying moans as if pleading for mercy . . .
No, these brown-black, hard-shelled crawling and flying scum were no impersonal forces of nature to him. They were criminals, murderers, worse. They had butchered his children. They would pay! Intolerable that these little beasts should have made his innocent children suffer as they must have in that slaughterhouse on the shore!
Brockshaw laughed maniacally again. The cockroaches, in their tumbling droves coming through the leaves, expected to get him because his torch could kill only a few thousand and they were millions. In a moment now they would learn that for all their “mutation” and fancy ganglia, they were no match for a human brain and its cleverness.
The man swept the forest with his eyes. As far as he could see there were cockroaches coming. They were like a filthy, moving scab on the earth. They covered trees and leaves like disgusting, shuddering berries of brown and black. Their wings buzzed a hellish threat through the woods. He knew they would launch a concerted attack at him any moment. It was time, it was the time, the final moment for his plan, his purpose, and resolve.
Reed Brockshaw stretched out the flare and deliberately held the searing flame to a dry tree branch on his right. He whirled
and did the same on his left. He circled into the brush, running and setting fire everywhere.
The woods sparked, ignited, exploded. Flames shot up furiously. The conflagration was fed by the storm winds and engulfed the area in moments. There was a cascade of firecracker bursts as the fire popped to the tops of the trees and raced down into the sere leaves. The blaze ran along the ground like a pouring torrent of molten death.
From the cockroaches there was a spitting and chittering and scraping as their bodies caught and fried. Their cooked insides set up a staccato sputtering like hot grease as the forest became a bizarre griddle, an exploding stove, a volcanic furnace. Thick, stinking smoke rose up into the black skies over the inferno.
Reed Brockshaw crumpled to the ground. His hair and clothes were afire. Maddened roaches were feeding on him even as they burned. Deranged, and choking in the smoke of his torment, he felt not drowning in hell’s lake of fire but rising with the smoke of the trees and the dying cockroaches to the heaven that, something in him rejoiced, was waiting, clear and cool and beautiful, with his children, above the horrendous turmoil below.
The forest fire burned higher. The clouds of the man’s self-cremation rose blacker than the storm sky to signal catastrophe to the people on Yarkie Island.
In the Nest, the atmosphere was dense not only with the acridity of caustic smoke, but with a kind of nervousness that had all the insects quivering. Sometimes housewives see cockroaches “dancing” after an application of the insecticide pyrethrum. It is a death dance, to be sure, but a frenzy of motion while it lasts, caused by the chemical-nervous reaction of the insects. Now there was something delivering an unclear but powerfully disturbing message: Enemy outside has exterminated whole armies of our Nest.
The Dome shook with spasms of preternatural energy, trying to comprehend fire and the death it had brought, interrupting an innocent feast of the band of insects near the water.
The Nest Page 18