The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

  Elizabeth stopped near the top of the climb to enjoy a stand of beach plums. How many times she had stood on this very spot, mouth and eyes wide in wonder at the sight in the flowering season. Their blooming had put to shame the celebrated Japanese cherry blossoms she later knew along the Potomac.

  She turned at the top of the hill to look back down the path she had come, taking in gratefully the variegated flowers, the neat houses, the tidy village centering on the harbor. The sky was a stretched gray canvas, but the clouds were light and slow-­moving this morning. The sea seemed calm. The well-­known streets, stores, and landmarks were reminders of her childhood security on Yarkie. Tears came to Elizabeth Carr’s eyes. How, how could the horror of the past days have happened amid this peace! Thank God it was all over.

  FIVE

  The New Place was quiet. There was much to be taken in, fresh ways to be dealt with. There was the strength of rebirth, but at the same time the weakness of lack of independent experience. There was little motion, some fluttering of antennae, but mostly it was a time to rest, to let new balances become established.

  There were no outside disturbances to mar the quiet they needed for the resting and the development of their own world, now separate and separately driven.

  The individuals in the New Colony were licking each other, as if the roaches were coated with some appetizing substance. Their antennae kept touching, and their bodies jostled softly together. In the effort to establish the necessary interconnections of the fresh society, some of the insects were even engaging in a form of anal trophallaxis, seen among certain termites. Nest-­mates exchanged chemical symbionts by eating droplets discharged from a neighbor’s anus.

  The convergence was being directed by the Dome in the center of the new Nest. It was a smaller structure than its parent; as indeed, the members of this new branch of the roach colony tended to be smaller than their brothers in the pirate cave. Usually, with insects like bees, Nature sent the older group out to establish a new Nest. Here the development had been different—as with so many other aspects of the Yarkie Island mutation.

  The Dome’s signals grew stronger and clearer with each passing hour. Soon it would be time to make known this Colony’s presence and assert its own, new territorial rights and appetites.

  SIX

  Elizabeth reached High Ridge Road just as the Hook & Ladder truck came along on its assigned precautionary patrol. It was a brand new vehicle, acquired by Yarkie as new homes rose on the island. In its red and gold majesty, the engine was the pride of the village and its crew. Its aluminum aerial ladder always shone brilliantly, polished by devoted and caring hands every day.

  The volunteer firemen stood vigilantly on the running boards, at the ready, wearing their high boots, rubber coats and fire helmets. They looked like warrior heroes on some gleaming chariot, Elizabeth thought. And they were heroes. Elizabeth knew how long and faithfully the men trained, and how many perilous times they selflessly risked their own limbs and lives to save life and property on the island. She remembered her grandfather jumping into his clothes any hour of the night to answer a fire call. It was a canard that volunteers were mostly drinking beer and marching in parades.

  With a sudden catch in her throat, Elizabeth made out Peter Hubbard sitting on the high front seat with the proud driver. He was dressed as a fireman, ready to help if they spotted a maverick burst of flame—or a patch of maverick roaches.

  It came to the woman that the scientist fit right in with these fishermen, sailors, carpenters, boat builders. Character made its own brotherhood.

  Elizabeth had never felt more set up than as she waved brightly to the man she loved among the men who had been her friends since girlhood. But she was glad the truck did not stop; it was still a time to be alone with her thoughts. She struck out in the opposite direction toward the Cannon place, knowing what she wanted to do there. It would be time enough to join Peter when the fire truck returned on its reverse patrol.

  A smile brightened the woman’s lips. She would join Peter on the front seat of the engine, and it would be like the annual Fourth of July parade in town. She might even clang the bell as she had done when she was a girl. It was forbidden usually, but her grandfather had been the chief then, and no one on Yarkie Island to tell a Johnson nay.

  The brightness faded when Elizabeth came to the Cannons’ fence. Before her stood the solid house with its hand-­split shingles, reflecting in its elegance and charm what the island people called “snug fortune.” But Hildie was gone, and her girls. So horribly gone. There had been no “snug fortune” for them against Nature’s capricious perfidy. Well, many Cannons had been lost in other natural disasters, Elizabeth told herself. Maybe it would help all the living to think of the Yarkie roaches as a natural calamity—a hurricane that swamped boats, drowned men, and tumbled trees. That is what the roaches had been—elemental havoc. She thanked God again that they were gone!

  Elizabeth proceeded into the Cannon graveyard—what old Cape Codders called the “eternity acres.”

  Her great grandmother had been a Cannon. Delilah Cannon Johnson. To a five-­year-­old girl, the then-­ninety-­year-­old lady had been a fairy queen.

  Meandering among the family gravestones, Elizabeth was struck again by how many infants had died of diseases that could now be easily treated. The world had made some “progress,” after all, she thought. But nothing would have helped the young men lost at sea. It always amazed Elizabeth that so many had been full masters of vessels on long voyages at the early ages of twenty-­one and younger, as the markers told laconically.

  Elizabeth Carr bowed her head at the gravestones of Delilah Cannon Johnson and Ezekial Scott Johnson. She wanted these two good people of her girlhood to know she was entering a new stage of life, and that she would take her marriage to Peter Hubbard as sacredly as they had taken theirs. She would enjoy modern freedoms in other ways, but in this she would hold with them.

  SEVEN

  Standing in the “eternity acres,” the woman suddenly became aware that birds were no longer singing. In the unnatural silence, there began a soft susurration from the high grass around the stones. Elizabeth’s head came up. Her eyes blinked with disbelief.

  A moment later the air brought a clear swishing noise. The emanation was all too familiar. Inwardly, Elizabeth Carr crumbled. It was not her imagination! The buzzing sound was too plain, and she could now see a visible disturbance in the leaves piled along the cemetery fence. Her heart exploded. Elizabeth knew beyond hope that her alarm was not an invention of lingering hysteria. Killer cockroaches were still roaming Yarkie, and they were coming on again! For her!

  Somewhere—and nearby!—a band of the creatures had hidden, had escaped the nest’s destruction! Peter Hubbard had been too sanguine! The insects in the jar that morning had been warnings! The admonition had been disregarded at their peril—her peril now!

  Elizabeth forced herself to concentrate on the shifting perturbation in the leaves and the grass. She was right! The surfaces were in motion though there was no breeze!

  Yes! The well-­known, disgusting brown shapes were emerging before her stricken eyes. She saw the weaving antennae and the brown-­black bodies by new thousands on their wire-­flexing feet, and the ugly mandibles reaching viciously, and the sawteeth mouths clicking in savage, seeking hunger, all as horribly as before!

  Elizabeth stampeded to the Cannon house. She prayed the kitchen door would be open for sanctuary. The hideous roach pack was scrabbling after her with terrifying swiftness.

  In her panic, Elizabeth tripped on the groove that most Yarkie homes chipped into the threshold stone to run rain off. The channel caught her toe and sent her stumbling so that she banged her head on the kitchen door. Dazed, she grabbed for the knob. If it did not turn, she was a goner. The roach mandibles would be at her feet in just moments.

  Her heart plummeted as the door did not yield. Locked! Since when did Hildie lock her damnation doors? No time to think about that! With a mutt
ered curse, Elizabeth saw the roach cadre making for her even faster. She might have just one more chance. She flew around to the buttery door. All Yarkie mansions had such a room or shed abutting the kitchen. In the old days, butter had been churned there; nowadays the space was used for potting plants, or as an extra pantry.

  Elizabeth’s fist hit the buttery door open. As she swung it hard behind her, she saw it had caught and crushed a handful of the leading roaches. She took a moment to breathe. The acid taint in the air outside was unmistakeable and sinister. She knew it would not be long before the marauders found a way into the house and were after her again. The revolting insects could squeeze even their obscenely large bodies through the narrowest of cracks. Any slight opening, any window ajar, and they would be upon her. She remembered the lighthouse.

  Elizabeth’s thoughts started to jump erratically. Part of her mind refused to accept what was happening—told her she was asleep in the safe Johnson house, dreaming out the nightmare of the past days. Part of her brain was crying out to Peter Hubbard, ironically damning the human limitations that provided her with speech instead of insect pheromones that could reach him over miles! Where was man’s much-­vaunted superiority!

  The woman took hold of herself, forced herself to concentrate. The roach odor and the sounds of the killers scratching outside were making her panic, but she had to gather her wits, she scolded herself. Taking a deep breath, Elizabeth Carr hurried on through the kitchen. She noticed with wry surprise that even in her desperate state she loved the friendly smell of Hildie Cannon’s crushed herbs on the floor. She was thankful for the momentary respite from the stench of the cockroaches.

  The woman raced upstairs, only to see that one platoon of the insects was already climbing up the shingles outside. As had happened at the lighthouse, they were coating the side of the house brown like a huge living paintbrush—a crazy, upside-­down painting of the walls with a living brush of cockroaches!

  Elizabeth ran on in blind flight rather than by directed effort. If no room was safe, what did it matter? Wherever she turned, she was only postponing the inevitable. She searched for a weapon, anything. What could she use to stave them off? The iron poker beside the bedroom fireplace? Laughable, a mockery! If only this adversary were large enough to strike at! Elizabeth did not know that other victims had wished the same thing, wanting to grapple, to collide physically with the attacker, wishing it were a wild dog, a wolf. What, she moaned like the others who had been besieged, what could she do against the thousand, the million ravening insects coming after her blood?

  She saw no fire extinguisher. She spotted a can of insect spray on the dresser. Laughable, indeed! One measly can against the oncoming drove?

  There was no way to blockade herself, no device to keep them off. To her horror, she saw the moving shadows on the window turn from what she had hoped were leaves into roach bodies. The hissing and clicking, the wheezing and puffing of the insects were loud with closing menace now. She searched wildly for a hiding place. There was none. No room was safe from them, no door could keep them out. She could only run, much good that would do!

  Abruptly, though she did not know how they had entered, roaches were thick on the floor of the bedroom, skittering greedily for her. Elizabeth choked in silent misery as she huddled against a wall. Why hadn’t she gone with Bonnie to the harbor? Why had she walked out alone? Why hadn’t she joined Peter on the fire truck? Why hadn’t Peter known there would surely be more than just stray roaches left!

  With each whipping question, Elizabeth Carr ran again from the tide of insects now moving over the bedroom floor like dirty weed covering a beach. She bounded up a staircase to the Cannons’ third-­floor guest rooms. Thankfully, she saw she had gained a respite, though it would be short. For some reason, the roaches were not climbing as quickly now. It occurred to her they looked to be smaller bugs than the lighthouse army had been. Perhaps these were not as strong, being second-­line troops since the best fighters had been decimated. But they were certainly as vicious looking, and the implacability of their avid search for human blood was morbidly the same.

  Now at the top of the house, where could she run? Elizabeth saw she had trapped herself. She had been stupid in her panic, she flagellated herself—she should have taken a chance and jumped from a lower window. True, there were attackers all over the lawn, but most of the roaches were already in the house. Her leap might have scattered the laggards and she might have gotten away.

  But the second-­guessing was too late and futile now. There was only one possible hope of safety, and that exceedingly slim. Elizabeth made for what the Yarkie people called the “chicken ladder.” In many of the old buildings, it went steeply to the attic and on to the widow walk atop the house.

  In another moment, Elizabeth was out in the open. The salty air was welcome to her lungs. The roach smell didn’t reach her here. Yet. If they found her and killed her, well, she preferred to die under the sky—now mockingly sunny and clear over Yarkie—than be devoured in the house.

  She walked cautiously around the platform, testing its long-­untrod boards. They sagged under her weight, worn as they were with generations of weather. She could only hope they would hold her and not drop her bodily into the roaches she knew were piling into the room below.

  She stepped to the railing—what people still called the “running rigging,” she didn’t know why. She took care not to lean; the old railing would give way easily, she saw. If she dropped from this height, it would be broken bones and certain disaster. The cockroach mass would be over her before she could breathe. She could see the insects below like a viscous preternatural mucilage pasting heaps of leaves around the base of the house. The roaches were climbing up the walls, climbing slowly but without pause, up and up and up to the window ledges where some entered the rooms below but more kept climbing directly to the roof, as if they knew she was up on the widow walk, trapped, no way to fend them off, no way to stop them, no way to escape except to jump to her death to them, to the waiting mouths on the ground.

  Elizabeth wailed aloud for her life. Her chin dropped to her chest in a physical acknowledgement of utter, visceral defeat. Now she wished only that she had a weapon to kill herself, to be spared the torture of being taken by the insects and eaten alive. Her horror enclosed the whole space of her life; it came to her that there was another meaning to “the fourth dimension.” In addition to time and space there was a dimension of terror, a world of its own, for dying in.

  Miraculously, the woman’s wailing moan was answered by the sound of men’s laughter. Around the curve of High Ridge Road rolled the Hook & Ladder truck. The men had been joking among themselves Elizabeth saw through her tears but they cracked-­jumped to attention at her fierce scream for help.

  EIGHT

  The truck motor roared like an angry beast and the tires smoked as the heavy engine swerved into the Cannon driveway. In another instant, the company was stamping over the lawn at Peter Hubbard’s direction, squirting dry ice everywhere. Without waiting, other men were setting the truck’s hydraulic system to raise the aerial ladder toward the building. Their procedure was fast, every move precise; they were trained for pressure and emergency.

  Elizabeth saw roaches squeezing under the crack in the roof door. She cried out for the firemen to hurry, but there was trouble maneuvering the ladder on the uneven grade of the lawn. It was taking time to adjust the hydraulic jacks that leveled the truck. Peter Hubbard was standing beside the fire engine looking up at Elizabeth. His face was livid with disbelief and self-­fury.

  More of the insects were finding their way to the woman’s last perch. She went after them with an atavistic violence, crushing and mashing to death whatever her foot could find. Dimly but thankfully she recognized that at least none of these roaches seemed to be the flying type. They were not reaching her face or eyes, only trying to climb her legs—and coming too thickly for her to handle for long. She cried out in anguish to the firemen again.

 
Peter Hubbard broke from the truck and rushed to the now-­extended ladder, which was beginning to rotate toward the roof railing. Hubbard lunged for the bottom rungs and started up. Firemen yelled at him and tried to pull him down. Despite his bandaged hand, he kept climbing desperately, while holding tightly to a dry-­ice tank he had grabbed.

  Burdened as he was, Hubbard kept slipping, once nearly fell off altogether. All he heard was Elizabeth’s cry for help. He saw the insect swarm around her and realized the ladder would not close on the building in time. The only possible chance was to throw the tank across. It was heavy and his perch precarious on the swaying ladder. If the tank did not reach Elizabeth, she was doomed.

  Holding tightly with his bandaged hand, Hubbard swung the clumsy fire extinguisher in an arc with all his muscle.

  The tank hit the roof railing, teetered for a moment as the rotten wood broke, and started to drop away. Reaching with all her strength, Elizabeth managed to catch hold of the hose. The weight of the tank nearly pulled her off her platform, but she braced herself and managed to hang on. With the surging strength of ultimate desperation, she tugged the heavy extinguisher up toward the roof by its red tube, only to blink in terror as she saw the hose threatening to pull loose from the metal body. Taking the final chance that she might fall off the roof, Elizabeth made a lunge for the container itself. Her hands closed on it, and she grabbed it up to her chest like a salvaged child.

  At once, she started the icy spray at the attacking roaches, making a circle of dead insects around her bleeding feet.

  The very smallness of the trap she had led herself into proved a help now. The roaches were unable to converge on her from many directions. They could come only from the walls—which the firemen were now spraying heavily—or from under the roof door, which she could now control.