The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

  Elizabeth whispered excitedly to Peter Hubbard as he came up to her. “We’ve got it!”

  Hubbard looked around with sharp eyes. There were moulted cockroach shells in the grass. His heart raced, and he motioned the others back. His own whisper carried in the air. “If the roaches are down here, this is going to be extremely dangerous. I want just Amos with me!”

  The others moved cautiously to the Cannon house, stepping as lightly as possible. Everyone understood. Beneath the earth-­covered old planks might be the crucible of the Yarkie horror. They knew its power, the speed with which it could strike, the implacability of its deadliness. Hubbard was whispering to the sheriff, “We just want enough of a crack for a fast look down.” He signaled Craig Soaras to join them. “Craig, you cover both of us with the dry ice. Use it fast if you see anything!”

  “Don’t worry about that . . .” The dark Portuguese face was iron.

  On his knees, the sheriff was quietly pressing against a thick board, now visible under his gloved hand. “Just the way I remembered!” he murmured to Hubbard.

  It was a greater strain to try to nudge the board silently than if he could put all his muscle to it. The half-­buried wood yielded slightly.

  “I’ll hit them with my flashlight,” Hubbard said to his two assistants. “It should stun them a split second, but only for a second and then they’ll be coming right after us. We get out fast!”

  The men nodded.

  Amos Tarbell bent to his job again. The whole area seemed suspended in apprehension. There was an eerie lull in the wind. Behind the tense people, the forest lifted scorched spars to the air. The clouds were so low that the leafless tree seemed to be spiking down from the sky, crazily grown upside down. It seemed appropriate enough to the group. Everything on Yarkie had been somersaulted on its head in these two incredible days.

  Without warning, the wind whipped up again. It howled through the bare trees like a wounded beast. The nerve-­shattering noise punctuated the apprehension of the three men at the kettle hole and the uneasy eyes riveted on them. The searchers were frightened to their depths, yet at the same time elated. If the roach nest was below, this moment would be among the most important of their lives. For who knew what might yet happen if these mutant insects were not destroyed?

  Peter Hubbard’s jaws were clenching and unclenching as he admitted his anxiety to himself. He found it hard to fill his lungs, and it was not the constraint of his black rubber suit that was making him sweat in torrents. The responsibility was his in the end. The man’s eyes were hot marbles as he waited above the kneeling sheriff, wishing the man would hurry, but glad he was being slow and careful. Tarbell was shrewd, all right. He was making no more noise than a passing animal might in stepping over the mound—sounds the creatures below would accept as unalarming.

  If there were creatures below . . .

  The scientist became physically itchy in his craving to know.

  The sheriff bent his ear to the plank.

  “Hear anything?” Hubbard inquired in an urgent whisper.

  The sheriff shook his head doubtfully and looked up. “I’ve got a crack here, Peter! Do you need more?”

  Hubbard checked, and said, “Can you give me a half-­inch?”

  He was shivering. The crack so far was too small to let in a useful beam of light, and he had seen only blackness through the slit. But a terrible stink of death and rotting food had assailed his nose, and the acrid roach smell was unmistakable. Nothing else in the world smelled like cockroaches.

  So the giant killer roaches were down in this kettle hole! Bless Elizabeth Carr for remembering!

  He would confirm it in a moment. Hubbard held up his fingers in a new, tense warning for silence. His gesture said plainly, “This may be it!” The watchers tensed. It was a bone-­chilling moment. No one moved or breathed. Hubbard nodded to Amos Tarbell.

  Under the sheriff’s straining hands the board over the kettle hole moved a little more. Tarbell stopped and waited, listening for any disturbance below. Hubbard signaled him to go on. The board moved again, visibly a full quarter of an inch.

  “Now!” Hubbard clipped to the two men. Craig Soaras put his finger on the dry-­ice trigger. Amos Tarbell cocked his gun. Both men were crouching protectively beside the scientist.

  Peter Hubbard flashed his light into the stench coming up from the kettle hole. He wanted the first sight of the roach den. But the moment burst his tension like air out of a broken balloon. The circling beam of his flashlight showed no motion below. There was no hissing, no sound. There were no roaches.

  Hubbard stamped on the boards with anger and exasperation. The group gawked at him in amazement. They had never seen the scientist agitated before. He shouted at them all as if they were responsible for the failure. “They did use it!” he cried out. He bent over and heaved all the planks off the kettle hole. “Look at that!”

  The others came running from the Cannon house. Pair after pair of curious eyes saw the glint of a mound of cockroach shells in Hubbard’s rotating flashlight. The pile seemed feet thick, spread widely.

  The people held their breath against the stink.

  Wanda Lindstrom was saying;, “They shed their exo-­skeletons as they grow. Usually they eat the remains, but these roaches have had so much other food—”

  She did not have to go on. The stench told the story. The sickened eyes were looking into a cavern of death. The people could see chambers cut into the sides of the pit. The niches were loaded with chunks of maggoty meat, broken limbs, internal organs, cracked skulls from which the brains had been sucked.

  Rat skulls.

  Human skulls!

  This pit was not just a nest, it was a cemetery, hellish catacombs of ultimate foulness.

  Gagging and choking, the people moved haggardly away. As they left, Peter Hubbard grunted, defeated, “We’ve missed them!”

  Soaras asked glumly, “Was it the forest fire that chased them?”

  “I don’t know,” the scientist gritted. He sat down heavily, wishing he could yank off the constraining suit, wishing he had never heard of Yarkie. But he had to share whatever little he did know. “There doesn’t seem to be any fresh moulting, so they probably left some time ago. That hole probably became too small for them as the colony kept growing . . .”

  Wanda Lindstrom observed, “But they didn’t take their stores along . . .”

  Hubbard answered, “They kept finding plenty of fresh food, unfortunately.”

  Amos Tarbell was walking in a circle, eyes hard on the ground. “Wouldn’t they leave some sign, some track?”

  “I doubt they’d travel on the surface,” Hubbard said. “Not if they have a tunnel down there under that mess.”

  Tarbell’s face crumpled in sheer disgust. “You mean somebody has to go down there to see?”

  “If we want to be sure.”

  The sheriff uttered a sigh of concession. “Okay, somebody go get me a rope.”

  Peter Hubbard regarded Amos Tarbell with new respect. There were many forms of bravery. This task was worse than Hercules cleaning the Augean stables, and the sheriff was taking it to be the responsibility of his badge.

  Elias Johnson stepped forward, putting a hand of comfort on his friend’s shoulder. “Before you need to do that, Amos, there’s another place we might check. What about that old pirate cave between the dump and Dickens Point? You know the one . . .”

  Life came back into all the Yarkie faces. “Hey! Could be!”

  “Well, let’s go see!” Russell Homer started running as fast as he could.

  An explosion of flame in the trees blasted him back. The return of the blustering storm winds had fanned hidden embers to a new blaze. In only a moment, there was a wall of percussive, roaring fire, impenetrable, between the group and the cave Johnson had recollected.

  The new home of the killers, if it was out there at all, would have to wait.

  Racing back to the road, Craig Soaras grabbed at the sheriff’s radio to call
out the volunteer firemen again. Among the Task Force there was a quick council. Russell Homer wanted to stay and use their carbon dioxide tanks on the new fire. Ben Dorset scoffed, without regard for the presence of the women, “Might as well piss on it!” The fresh blazes had raced up the trees, which had hardly been moistened by the sparse earlier rainfall. Fire was leaping higher than a three-­story house. Johnson gave quick orders, mindful of how puzzling the diving outfits would be to the firemen, who had been told nothing of the roaches. “Back to the lighthouse and change! Then we can come up again and lend a hand!” the captain commanded.

  FOUR

  When the haggard group entered the lighthouse, the telephone was ringing insistently. Amos Tarbell ran for it, and handed it over to Johnson. “It’s the Coast Guard, Elias. Commander Schweitzer wants to talk to you.”

  Johnson took the instrument quickly. Schweitzer was an old friend, one of the savviest sailors on the Coast, a gold braid man all around.

  The officer reported that his Coast Guard ship had checked the Tub and couldn’t do anything for it in the storm. Nobody seemed to be aboard. The passengers must have made it safely to shore—or it was possible that all hands had been lost.

  Johnson nodded as he listened, then said only that he would give the appropriate officials a full report on the Tub as soon as he could.

  When the commander asked if Yarkie wanted Coast Guard help with the forest fire they could see from their ship, Elias Johnson thanked him but said they had enough men to handle it. He agreed with Scott that at this point there was no need to broadcast the roach problem.

  FIVE

  Peter Hubbard motioned privately to Wanda Lindstrom, arid they moved to a corner of the laboratory, whispering. Elizabeth noticed, but went to the kitchen to put up coffee. They could all use a hot brew.

  Hubbard was telling his colleague he thought the new circumstances called for the “Plan B” which the two of them had prepared. It involved risks and it might not work at all, so there was no sense telling any of the others, Hubbard urged. It would be premature and cruel to arouse hopes in these people who had already suffered too many setbacks.

  Wanda Lindstrom agreed. Making sure they were alone, Hubbard went to the carton that Craig Soaras had received specially from the Chatham police chief that morning. The scientist tore open the red container. A small red box in heavy packing lay safely inside. Its warning label seemed to stare back at Peter Hubbard.

  The scientist nodded to Wanda Lindstrom. Assuming the storm and the fire would be over by the next morning, they could put the plan into action then.

  CLASH

  ONE

  Johnson joined the men changing their clothes. From the distance they heard the wailing sirens of the Chemical Engine and the Hook & Ladder Truck speeding to High Ridge. The pulsing sound still stirred the blood, though the evacuation had left nobody to warn, and the volunteers’ mission would be one of containment only. They would wet down threatened houses, and pray hard for a bigger rain. Mostly, the fire would have to burn itself out.

  The men in the lighthouse were at last voicing a question each had held silently. They had wondered from the start where Reed Brockshaw was. No one really knew, but the sheriff believed he had caught a glimpse of the man going off on one of the evacuation ferries. Heads nodded all around. It would make sense. Reed wouldn’t want to leave his wife, Doreen, alone with the children missing.

  As the men set out to join the fire companies, Peter Hubbard asked Johnson, “No sense in my coming along, is there? I think Wanda and I ought to get on with our work here.”

  Johnson approved firmly, and turned to kiss his granddaughter with dry lips. “Nothing you and Bonnie can do up there, either. We’ll be hungry when we come down.”

  Elizabeth managed a wan smile. “Guess I’ll major in cooking next semester.”

  Bonnie joined Elizabeth in her small attempt to lighten the gloom. “Advanced Dishwashing for me.” She saw Craig Soaras glance at her appreciatively, and she let him see her lips soften for him.

  When the men were gone, Elizabeth watched Peter Hubbard and Wanda Lindstrom carefully placing the little red box in a corner. It seemed extremely heavy for its size. She could not restrain her curiosity. “What’s in that, Peter?”

  He answered without turning. “Something Wanda and I may need to use.” There was a sharp tone as he added, “You and Bonnie please stay away from it.”

  Elizabeth flushed at what she took to be a rebuke. Peter should know she would never interfere with any lab procedure. His reply had reminded her again that it was Wanda Lindstrom and not she who was his partner. She flounced toward the kitchen. He didn’t have to rub it in! she thought. And softened at once, understanding that her quick irritation wasn’t directed at him, but at the bleakness descended on her beloved island.

  Opening the kitchen door, Elizabeth gasped in dismay. The storm had blown a stone through the window. Wind was funneling in, scattering papers, rattling dishes. Bonnie hopped to help Elizabeth plug the hole as best they could with dishrags. “We’d better check the other rooms!” Elizabeth suggested. “The shape this building is in, it’ll fall over if the wind gets any worse.”

  “Can’t be any worse than this!” To Bonnie, it looked as if the gale was literally tilting the entire beach, blowing a wall of sand so dense she could hardly make out the sea beyond. The waves seemed to tower to the thundering sky. The woman gulped in amazement. “My God! Those waves must be fifty feet high!”

  Elizabeth squinted through the window. “Twenty-­five, for sure. They don’t get much more than that.”

  “High enough for me!”

  “It’s what sailors call the long fetch, you see.” Elizabeth was surprised to see Bonnie nod knowledgeably.

  Bonnie smiled, pleased. “Craig explained how the sea builds up for thousands of miles coming out of the northeast with no interruption.” Bonnie moved from the window. “Glad I’m not out in that!”

  Starting to straighten the kitchen, Elizabeth said, “I was caught in worse with my grandfather when I was a kid.”

  “What happened?”

  “We got wet.”

  “How come it can storm this way and not be raining, Liz?”

  “It squalls,” Elizabeth told Bonnie. She pointed to a black area of sea and sky in the distance. “Over there it’s coming down to drown fishes!”

  Bonnie sighed. “I thought I liked the seashore, but not this, honey. Craig tells me there’s sharks all over the place, too, especially off the east side . . .”

  “Mako and stuff, yes. You always have to be careful.” Elizabeth saw her friend’s genuine worry. “You should have gone to Chatham with the others, Bonnie.”

  “No way. The men need us here. It’s just the storm has me jittery.”

  “No, I mean, this trouble we’re having, it isn’t really your concern.”

  “Hey! I’m with you, Liz!”

  “I only mean there’s no reason for you to expose yourself to danger.”

  “I’m not in any danger.” Bonnie’s lovely, strong chin came up and she said with confidence, “Peter and Wanda will work it out, I’m sure. I just think everyone is so wonderfully brave, like the way they’re plowing into the forest fire up there . . .”

  Elizabeth said thoughtfully, “You’re talking about men who have been to sea, Bonnie. It separates the men from the boys. They can’t afford to treat anything as an ‘emergency’—they have to be cool every moment, know exactly what to do and not to do. The ocean can be a lot rougher than this, you know. Sometimes, with the wind blowing one way and the tides running differently, even the waves don’t know where they’re going! That takes sailing!”

  Bonnie allowed herself a small, confessing grin. “I never dreamed I’d be interested in a fisherman . . .” She added self-­consciously, “Of course, I mean just as a friend.”

  Elizabeth smiled to herself. Storms were unpredictable and so were people. If Bonnie liked Craig Soaras, so much the better for both of them.
>
  Checking the floor above, the women found another broken window and leaned loose boards against the opening. It did little good. The wind kept blowing sand all over the room, but no one was using it so it made little difference.

  When there was no more they could do, Elizabeth started down to the kitchen. “Vegetable-­peeling time, I’m afraid.”

  Bonnie said, “I’ll tell you a secret, Liz, I love cooking.”

  Elizabeth Carr laughed, a welcome bright sound. “Don’t ever tell my mother, but I do, too.”

  Bonnie said in a teasing tone, “And don’t think I didn’t notice the way you gave Peter Hubbard the best parts of that fish chowder, friend.”

  Elizabeth responded lightly, not wanting to be drawn into the circling confusions in her own mind. “Why, of course, Bonnie. It’s an old Yarkie custom to give a visiting scientist the red carpet treatment.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Bonnie added at once. “I think he’s absolutely super.”

  Elizabeth made herself shrug. “Yes, my father—and Wanda Lindstrom—think the world of him.”

  TWO

  In the laboratory room, Peter Hubbard and Wanda Lindstrom were making new dissections. Their gleaming steel scalpels clicked on cold glass slides as they worked with silent efficiency amid the bubbling flasks and other apparatus.

  There was a clicking from a roach container. Hubbard murmured, “I wish you had gotten the screw-­top jars.”

  “I know,” Wanda Lindstrom said. And defensively, “The stockroom sent up the wrong cartons, and I’d have missed the plane if I’d waited.”

  Hubbard glanced across the table with a quick, friendly expression. He knew how sensitive his associate was beneath her cool exterior. “I’m not scolding, Wanda. Just a bit worried whether the covers will hold those brutes.” He scrutinized the jars on the improvised shelves. The roaches were abnormally active. In the daytime, under the bright lights that Craig Soaras had rigged up, these nocturnal creatures should be sluggish, motionless. Instead, they were scuttling and scooting around the glass cages energetically. Hubbard wondered whether they might be receiving a pheromonic summons from the central domi­cile—asking where they were, calling them home. Might the group be so well-­knit, might their communications be so advanced?