THREE

Amos Tarbell moved up alongside Peter Hubbard. “I suppose we can burn them out once and for all . . . ?”

“Let’s find them first.”

Tarbell said, “But we ought to go back for gasoline, kerosene now . . . ?”

Johnson overheard and intervened. “Amos, you aren’t thinking. These woods are still hot. You’d blow us all to hell.”

Hubbard counseled the sheriff. “Amos, there’ll be time. If I’m right, those cockroaches are so scared they aren’t going to move out of their nest for days.”

The sheriff was insistent. “Craig and Ben have the dry ice with us. We have the flares. We could freeze them or fry them right now!” He let his imagination jump ahead, overlooking the fact that they had not yet even found a roach retreat. He wanted to see the insects burn, freeze, go up in smoke, melt in a great combustion of death. He hoped they would make noises, squeal or shriek or whistle in agony. It would help drown the cries of the children he kept imagining in his head.

Wanda Lindstrom said to the sheriff patiently, “We talked about this before. If I’m right about the way they cluster, fire would get only the top layers. Most of the brood would get clean away.”

The man’s anger would not let him rest. “We’d have them trapped, wouldn’t we?” he argued.

“No,” she told him, with an edge of impatience. “They would have many tunnels in and out. We would only defeat our own purpose!”

Peter Hubbard confirmed, “There would be too many left. I did think of gasoline, of course, but it’s far too dangerous today, and wouldn’t do the job anyway . . .”

The sheriff remained upset. “Then what did we bring all this stuff for?”

“For protection!” Elias Johnson was irritated. “Now quit fussing, Amos. This isn’t easy for anybody . . .”

As the group resumed its slow hunt, none of them realized that a few steps into the opposite trail would have brought them to the burned skeleton of a man. In the instance, it did not matter to either Reed Brockshaw or his friends that it would be days before his remains were discovered.

It took only minutes more, however, for the group to discover they were on a false trail. Whatever purpose the trench had once served, it now ran into a dead end at a great boulder. The men dug far enough around to see that the trail went nowhere.

Elizabeth spoke with sudden spirit. “Peter, I remember a deep kettle hole somewhere out this way. They might be nesting there!”

Elias Johnson’s head came around hopefully. “Liz, I think you have got an idea!”

Amos Tarbell’s vexed face uncreased. “I remember that one, Liz! My father had it boarded over when I nearly fell in myself!” The sheriff grabbed his shovel and started away.

Elizabeth stopped him. “Not that way, Amos! The hole I mean is out behind the Cannon place.”

Tarbell accepted the correction, and the dogged procession resumed. In minutes, the Cannon house was visible in its clearing through the fire-­denuded trees. To Peter Hubbard, seeing the mansion for the first time, the building was stern-­looking. Its windows were small—harking back to glass taxes in the colonies?—and seemed to be disapproving the strangely-­costumed parade emerging out of the trees.

Elizabeth went directly to a small mound of earth. No one needed to be told to be quiet. Breaths were held as the sheriff tiptoed behind the woman. They both kneeled carefully. And both nodded.

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.