FIVE

Harvey Tinton’s ears felt plugged with the same cotton that was filling his mouth, but he thought he heard a voice calling his name. Blanche? He jerked to a sitting position, expecting his head to protest with hangover pain, but the ardor of his returning fantasy swept everything else away. Hearing his wife’s footsteps almost upon him, he swallowed with sexual agitation. Oh, she was going to get a screw to remember!

He chortled to himself. He realized he was still drunk, but the stiffness between his legs said the alcohol wasn’t cheating him this time and he had a full-­blown erection when his wife halted a step away. “Harvey? You shouldn’t be out here! You heard they’ve sprayed the forest!” He heard more concern than anger in her voice. Ah, at heart she was a dear woman. He did love her always. He wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything in life.

But he held himself quiet. It was a luscious game! In the silence of the forest he heard only a hazy sound, leaves rustling a little. Breeze in the leaves, yes. Pleasant. Romantic. Suitable background for a rendezvous with his love . . .

Harvey Tinton reached out from the shadows and grabbed his wife’s leg.

The woman screamed in terror and tumbled to the ground, shaking pine needles and leaves all about.

It was just as the man fantasized, except that his wife recovered herself at once and slapped his groping hands away. Understanding his intent, she scolded, “Not here! Come in the house, Harvey!”

But he was not about to be circumvented or deprived of his dream sex. He pulled her down again roughly, shaking the ground.

“Oh, Harvey!” But her protest held half a submissive laugh. What the devil, the woman thought, it might be fun at that. It hadn’t been fun for so long! She’d be darned if her husband’s hot fingers spreading her thighs weren’t turning her on. She could feel the unfamiliar wetness, and it made her squirm in anticipation. He was panting with whiskey and lust. She began to moan with her own images of pleasure. Let him. Let him, let him, let him do it!

But in their mutual heat, neither of the Tintons heard the rustling and hissing coming rapidly closer. Under the magnificent juniper red cedar where Harvey Tinton had hid, husband and wife grasped each other in the starry night in the pine-­scented island paradise, moaning with their play and pleasure, until Blanche Tinton commanded sharply, “Harvey, stop doing that!”

Her husband’s voice was innocent, totally without guile. “Doing what?”

“You know I don’t like you touching me there!”

His voice, bewildered: “Touching you where?”

Hers, reprimanding: “That place!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“You stop it this instant!”

“But I’m not doing anything!”

“Harvey Tinton, you take your finger away from there right now!”

The man sat up, grievously wounded. Drunkenly he lifted both hands in the air and waved his fingers before his wife’s eyes.

Blanche Tinton shrieked in horror. “My God, what is it then?”

The man scrambled to his feet, pants open, his sex shrinking, furious at the interruption that was stealing his pleasure. “What the holy hell is with you? Are you drunk?”

The woman began to roll on the earth, scissoring her thighs. She seemed to be in the throes of sexual climaxing, but her screams were of shock and anguish. “Ouch! Harvey, what’s at me?”

The man peered at his wife’s tortured face doubtfully, not comprehending. For a moment he thought it was her game, her way of punishing him for drinking too much this night. But a moment later his eyes were blinking at the impossible sight of a million huge cockroaches spreading over her body. Up from between her now bleeding thighs, roaches were blanketing her entire undressed flesh. They made a cloak of crawling death, a cloak sequined loathsomely with their roach carapaces and folded wings that glinted evilly in the shafts of moonlight on the struggling, bleeding woman.

The man reeled on his feet. He smiled at what he was seeing, knowing at once the incontrovertible truth: He was still drunk as a pig, and imagining it all! He’d had his share of worse nightmares. What about the time he had fallen out of the airplane and kept tumbling head over heels over head over heels in time with the screams of Blanche looking out of the plane at him tumbling to hell, as she was screaming at him now in this tumbled air that was thick with a rotten smell of something acid? His own bile coming up. Good, if he vomited his head would clear, Blanche would stop screaming, and his feet wouldn’t be sliding out from under him on the slippery pools of blood trickling from the jerking body beside which he thumped, losing his balance. Without her eyes, Blanche Tinton could not see the quick ravaging of her husband’s face, his own blinding, and the quick, precise stripping of his flesh. She was screaming so loud in her own agony that she could not hear, even without the roaches eating through her ears to her tender brain, the cries of the sobered man realizing his incomprehensible doom and hers.

The distant screams of Blanche and Harvey Tinton reached Hilda Cannon only faintly. She was nearly asleep at the wheel. She needed to get some sleep, badly. The foul episode from which she had finally run was the last straw. She had been prancing around the island like a harpooned whale all day and night. She had to guess the girls had simply taken one of the Cannon boats and gone fishing, deciding to spend the night on the water. Meantime not to worry. The girls knew the sea and handling boats. The weather would hold until late afternoon. As for the beast in the woods, she could set Amos Tarbell after him first thing in the morning.

Mrs. Cannon was glad she could now see the start of her own new white picket fence. It was spanking fresh, had cost a bundle, like everything else these inflation days, but the old one hadn’t been mended for fifty years, and had been broken down all around the Cannon family graves. Beyond the plot, the woman could make out the high chicken wire that protected her precious herb garden. She particularly liked the Cape Cod custom of dropping herbs on the kitchen floor for people to walk on. It sent a fresh sachet fragrance through the whole house. This year she had santolina and dill, lavender and fennel, basil and sage, savory and thyme. Next season she planned tarragon and bee balm, with more varieties of thyme for the prettiness of the border they made.

For now she wanted not herbs or herb tea, but a solid drink of rum—the black rum tonight, to settle her stomach and unaddle her brain after all the strange happenings. There was nothing more she could do, she said silently again just before the shouting penetrated her consciousness.

Hilda Cannon’s car jerked to a screeching stop even before she realized she had slammed her foot on the brake.

She backed up slowly, wide awake. What in the devil was Yarkie coming to!

Yes! Some kind of groaning, a strangling kind of sound, was issuing from the woods beside the Tinton house.

That man she had seen awhile ago!

That miserable no-­good had come out of the woods after his abominable act, and he had got at Blanche Tinton!

Grimly, Hilda Cannon snapped open her glove compartment and grabbed her gun. She was licensed after her constant complaints to the sheriff and selectmen about the rabbits and other nuisances in her gardens. She shot only occasionally, and then less to kill than to scare away with the noise, but now she was glad that the pistol was fully loaded. She would teach that despicable character to assault decent folks!

The woman hopped out of her car and moved cautiously into the shadows of the trees, gun extended. She half hoped the degenerate would come at her. She wouldn’t shoot to kill, no, she’d aim for his family jewels and hope he’d live a long life without them! Castration was the fate all rapists deserved!

She halted to listen for sounds of struggling. There was total quiet in the trees, except for a kind of sighing sound she couldn’t identify. To her ears, it was more a strange puffing noise than a hissing, and then it was what she could only think of as a sibilance. It was like the sound she had heard earlier, but no animal she ever knew made such a disturbance. The woman hid behind a great bay-­leaved willow her ancestors had planted. She could see that the Tintons had their house lights on, but there was no movement through any of the windows. If she knew Harvey Tinton, the man was sprawled drunk asleep upstairs after Stephen’s party. She had been invited, of course, but was too upset about her girls to go. But the scream had been a woman’s, and where was Blanche?

The disturbing noise became clearer, combined with a raking of leaves. It was exactly like a rake, she thought with amazement. Who would be in the woods cleaning at this hour? She moved forward stealthily, her jowls quivering over her gun.

Hilda Cannon’s eyes fell upon what they could not deal with, could not accept for translation to her brain.

In the paralysis of her shock and revulsion, the gun dropped unnoticed from her hand. The scene before her, too plain in the flickering moonlight, was beyond the worst imaginings of even an Hieronymus Bosch, fouler than the most infernal depths of satanic demons.

On the forest path just yards away she saw a floor of seething malignancy. Roaches enormous beyond all experience were a livid carpet of putrefaction, exuding a sharp stink that curdled the air. The insects seemed not individual creatures but connected organs of a huge, reaching, blotchy beast. They flowed over the torn bodies of Blanche and Harvey Tinton like a living lava. A lava of clicking teeth and mandibles and grasping legs. A lava erupting from some maggoty, satanic pit.

But the unbelievable was real. The spiky-­legged roaches were devouring everything, everything. Incredibly, the woman saw that they were gobbling not just the flesh and bone and blood but the very clothes of the ravished couple. Hilda Cannon saw giant insects ripping at the man’s rubber sneakers, eating at his leather belt, the woman’s sandals.

The bodies themselves, soaked in their own blood, were maimed and mangled almost beyond recognition by now. The putrid horde of insects was slashing and cutting the flesh into pieces that a squad of even larger roaches was carrying away. Hilda Cannon tasted bile. Pieces of the Tinton bodies were being carted off, there was no other phrase for it. More unbelievably, hundreds of the larger roaches had somehow bound themselves together, as if by some gluey secretion, to form a kind of platform, sordidly like the bed of a truck. Gruesomely, pieces of flesh were being loaded onto it! Fingers were recognizable, toes, ears, small bones and larger, splintered ones. In obscene sumps of darkening blood all around lay flesh and whitish bone and soaked pink gristle and recognizable organs—mangled liver, torn heart. A whole ankle was being dismembered from one leg by a cluster of great roaches gnawing away at the bone with loud clicking noises that sounded to Hilda Cannon like fiendish knitting needles.

In a climax of the staggering, repellent horror, Hilda Cannon made out one band of insects picking clean a skull that had been severed from the neck. She couldn’t tell whether it was Harvey or Blanche. The head was a stark bloodstained bowl of death lying accusingly on blood-­red leaves. It was the ghastly centerpiece of the unholy feast. As more roaches climbed over the skull and ate away the last of the face muscles and tissue, the jaw fell open. The gaping skull seemed to be beseeching heaven for help, for justice, for reprieve from this vandalization of everything human.

Then an even more sickening image wracked Hilda Cannon’s heart. What appeared to be another type of creeping animal was moving among the roaches, inching slowly up the path away from the massacre. It seemed at first to be an unusually bloated centipede, a bizarre remnant of the dinosaur past. It was a yard long, with thousands of legs on each side of its disgusting body—legs scurrying like frantic cilia beneath the pallid, slimy thing.

It took a minute before Hilda Cannon realized she was watching a gang of cockroaches moving off a dismembered section of the intestine of one of the Tintons.

She wanted to faint, but instinctively knew that would be stupid as well as cowardly. It would allow the cockroach demons to turn on her. She had to remain silent, steady, and try to see the end of this living malediction on her island.

Despite her resolution, the scene of the hideous butchery was too much for her. Vomit rushed up her throat and exploded from her mouth, and she saw in an instant that she had drawn the vermin. A band of the giants was already racing to her hot stinking mess. Their relish at the new feast kept them momentarily from her, and she turned to plow through the trees toward her auto. Now it was doubly imperative that she find Amos Tarbell! Never mind her own nausea, the smell of vomit on her clothes, her disgust and abhorrence. There was an unspeakable terror loose on Yarkie that no one suspected! In her sickened heart, Hilda Cannon was miserably sure now that her own daughters had somehow been caught in the woods and destroyed by the unbelievable monster roaches. No one knew how many others had already been killed, but it had to be stopped. She would waken Tarbell and Johnson and Scott and—

The woman stumbled, grabbed for a tree to steady herself, and felt her skin scrape. Her hand was quickly wet with blood. And just as quickly she felt a sting and a needle-­like bite on her palm. She went faster. In the dim light she made out a roach biting the back of her hand. She swung her fist against a tree, not caring how much it hurt her, wanting only to mash the insect. The mess dripped from her skin, and she impatiently brushed the blood off on her dress as she ran. She kept praying that the great body of roaches in the woods were still too busy with the Tintons—long beyond hope or help—to come after her. She had no idea how fast they might be though she had once heard that some roaches could fly. Those might reach her . . .

The stout woman fled with a speed she did not know she possessed, driven by more than fear. A sigh of relief burst from her lips as she saw her car just ahead. But the few paces to the open road and safety seemed like miles. Her lungs burned with each gasping breath; her throat was on fire; her lips were bleeding from where her own teeth had bitten through. But she would make it now!

Just steps from the road, Hilda Cannon felt a fluttering around her head. Instinctively, she threw her hands up, circling them wildly. If these were bats, she didn’t want them in her hair. She knew bats didn’t really do that, but she was hysterical with fright. And the more so with the realization that the fluttering wings were not of bats but belonged to flying roaches seeking her blood.

Forms of giant cockroaches were sweeping the air all around her now. It flashed in her head that they resembled the plagues of locusts she had seen in movies so thick they darkened the sky.

In the ­same way that Tony Carlucci had known his doom, and Bo Leslie too, Hilda Cannon understood she would never take the last few steps to the road and the waiting car.

She went down helplessly under the terrible assault, blinded immediately by the avidly seeking mandibles. Even as she fell, two small rivers of blood came from the emptying eye sockets, tears of defeat, loss, disaster, death rolling down what was left of her cheeks.

The nerves behind the woman’s eyes and ears exploded with internal fireworks, and as had happened with the others, an aurora borealis flared within. Her hands moved spastically over the ground seeking some weapon, out of an indomitable spirit that refused to concede. As with sailor kin of old, stubbornly holding breath in their lungs while drowning until the overpowering sea claimed what they could no longer withhold, Hilda Cannon had no weapon, no hope. The waves of roaches were the lashing seas of wild storm, the boat breached, the winds ripping the hair out of one’s head, forcing open the clenched mouth and funneling the water of death into the unwilling chest. Except that Hilda Cannon was drowning not in salt water of the ocean but in the froth of her own sluicing blood.

Blind and deaf, she still struggled, with a thrust for life that came from the deepest spirit. She felt the thousands of knife-­teeth having their way at her face, her neck, her breasts. She felt the thousands of mandibles tugging and clinging, ripping her living skin from her sinking, sweating body. She knew horribly the sensation of the cockroaches crawling into every orifice, her nostrils, and unthinkably, her privates, front and rear.

Hilda Cannon’s prayer for a quick death, her giving up at last, was granted by the organized fierceness of her assailants.

Even before she had perished, swift scout roaches were off to the Great Nest to signal another capture of the new prey the Colony now voraciously sought. Having partaken of human meat and drunk human blood, the new cockroach breed was ravenous for more. No longer would they eat of the dump’s garbage or of Yarkie rat carcasses, or the vegetation, or other Yarkie animals. They could not get enough of the human taste and would seek it endlessly, implacably, and with many more victories.

Meantime, there was peace and contentment all around the Dome. Only the Warrior Guard roaches surrounding the center were in motion, and even they moved listlessly. All were well-­fed, and there were no alarm signals of any kind coming into the Nest.

A few of the drab females were laying their egg sacs. This could be a time of delicate balance. When eggs were deposited in a disturbance, the mothers would almost certainly eat them. But in the quietude reigning now there was no cannibalism. The paludal, marsh-­like odor made a kind of comforting atmospheric blanket for all, young roach and old.

“Cozy” was the anthropomorphic word humans would use to describe the insect home. The mood extended even to the many bands of roaches still out in pockets through the Yarkie forest—roaches not summoned back. These had made comfortable waiting places in their own camps, from which they could respond at a moment’s signal—chemical or physical—in rampaging hordes.