ONE

When Hilda Cannon left her house for a lunch date at twelve-­forty-­five, her daughters grabbed their field glasses and hurried through High Ridge Woods toward the cliff from which the cove could be viewed.

“Momma’ll kill us if she ever finds out,” Ruth said nervously.

Rebecca put on a studious expression. “We’re allowed to go bird-­watching, aren’t we?”

Ruth flushed. “Not for these kinds of birds.” She held back. “Becky, the fire truck said to stay out for the spraying.”

Rebecca sniffed the air. “They haven’t reached here yet.” She went faster through the trees. “I hope old Amos Tarbell doesn’t chase those fellows before we get there!”

“We should have had the goshdarn glasses before!”

“I got a good look anyway. Did you ever see the one with the beard?”

“I wasn’t looking at his beard . . .”

The girls’ exchange tinkled through the trees as they plunged on, breathing hard with both their exertion and their anticipation.

Ruth stopped abruptly. “Hey, wait! What’s that?”

Rebecca pushed ahead impatiently. “You’re gonna make us miss them!”

Ruth called after her sister with fear shaking her voice. “Becky, stop!”

Rebecca shouted back through the trees, “Amos is going to chase them away!” But she skidded to a halt at the sight to which her sister was pointing in horror.

In this elevated section of the woods, the ridge was only sparsely covered. On a stony ledge before the girls, the wind-­blown pines were dwarf-­size and twisted like Japanese bonsai. The open platform was swarming with rats. They were large, fat brutes, disgusting with their swollen bellies, narrow rodent faces, and snaking tails. That was revolting enough, but the freakish spectacle was the dance the rats seemed to be doing.

One after another, rats leaped into the air. Their thin legs kicked wildly, their long tails whipped madly, their heads jerked from side to side. In the macabre ballet, scores of rats were in the air at one time, colliding, snarling, snapping with squeals of fury.

In their berserk acrobatics, many rats flung themselves off the cliff, as if their maddened brains imagined they could fly like birds. They plummeted to their death in the sea below, to be scavenged by quickly gathering fish and birds.

“Let’s get out of here!” Ruth trembled.

Rebecca had her binoculars up. She screamed in surprise and horror. “It’s roaches!”

“Roaches?” Ruth was incredulous.

“Cockroaches! Millions of them! Great big King King cockroaches!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Big cockroaches all over the rats!”

Ruth had trouble focusing her glasses. Her sister was all too horribly right! Every writhing, “dancing” rat was literally coated with cockroaches. The brown color of the rats was not their fur, but the shells of the insects. And, as the glasses showed in their amplification, the roaches were clearly eating at the rats as they clung to them. The girls could make out the dark spots on the rocks now—pools of red rat blood dripping from the mayhemed animals. The girls could see clearly, too—all too terribly clearly—that heavy roaches were gouging out the rats’ eyes, crawling up the rats’ nostrils, and disappearing into their ears.

The girls’ revulsion could not help but be tinged with something akin to pity. The rats, loathsome as they might be, were still living creatures that could feel pain. It was beyond human capacity to watch them being eaten alive this nightmare way.

Held mesmerized by the view enclosed in their field lenses, the girls did not observe that some frantic rats, still free of the roaches, were streaking into the trees. Their racing line of terror headed them blindly to where the two were standing.

Too late, Ruth and Rebecca heard the chittering noise of the pack. In an instant, sharp rodent mouths were gashing the girls’ feet, gulping the quick human blood. The frenzied jaws of leaping rats were tearing the white throats before the panicked girls realized what was occurring. The binoculars went flying. Without even time to scream, the Cannon girls were rolling on the ground, punching and tugging at the assaulters. Streams of blood now poured from the young faces, arms, their gnawed fingers. Chunks of flesh were ripped from their breasts, bellies, and thighs. Narrow raping snouts shoved hungrily into their genitals, in a terrible mockery of the girls’ careful innocence.

Neither the expiring Cannon daughters nor their rat attackers saw the swelling legions of great roaches that were advancing toward them. The roaches moved across the ground like a monstrous organism. Each roach was like a single tooth in a huge maw. In minutes, the myriad of insects had stripped the flesh of both rats and girls to bone—and then razored the skeletons to powder. Then the huge mass rested, pulsing quietly as with one communal breath, before ­disappearing en masse in a single wavelike motion beneath the heavy leaves.

Stillness and silence remained in the forest.