The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

  But the cockroach sharks, as Tarbell thought of the crawling column now, were not to be turned. There was no nose to punch, no mass to fight against. The sheriff knew in his gut that these bugs were killers relentlessly coming after his eyes, his flesh, his bones. He ran for his life with every gulp of acid-­stinking air he sucked into his heaving lungs. It came to him that he was running not only for his own life, but possibly the lives of everyone on Yarkie! The scientists had to be told! They had to see the specimen roaches caught inside the dead rabbit . . .

  Tarbell saw Ben Dorset nearing the road. It occurred to the sheriff that if he stopped and let the roaches take him, Dorset and Homer could get away. But in the pinch, he found he did not have the ultimate courage to sacrifice himself. Not, at least, while he was still a step ahead of the creeping doom. He raced with fire under his ribs now, not daring to look back. But he had seen how swiftly those impossible insects could move. He didn’t have to remember how fast a kitchen roach skittered away, a damn streak of brown lightning, gone almost before the eye could spot it. He had long legs, but the bugs would keep gaining if he faltered for even a moment.

  In front of him he saw Ben Dorset reach the road. Hope skyrocketed in his heaving chest. But at the same moment, Russell Homer went sprawling. The sheriff tripped over him and both men lay tangled in the leaves. Fumbling frantically to regain their feet, they slipped and skidded against each other clumsily. Russell kept crying, “Sorry, sorry!” Amos Tarbell saved his breath, shoving at the man with a silent vehemence.

  A roach landed on Homer’s cheek and folded its wings. Without thinking, the sheriff brought his gloved fist against the young man’s face. The roach was mashed, but Homer bellowed angrily, “What the hell you doing?”

  Another roach landed, moving straight for Russell Homer’s eyes, and Amos Tarbell swatted the reddened, perplexed face again. The man raised his own fists, but at the same moment a roach flew onto the sheriff’s cheek, and the light dawned. Homer used his own gloved hand to flick the insect off, but its mandibles had already drawn blood. The young man had no choice but to do as Tarbell had done. He slapped hard, and squashed the roach against the sheriff’s jaw.

  Both men heard the deputy sheriff bawling for them to hurry, but more roaches were hitting the men’s open faces, and, while they headed for the road, they had to stop at every step to brush away or squash the marauders.

  The roaches were winning, sliding all over the men, too many to be dealt with. Russell Homer cried out in protest and panic against the implacable killers. The sheriff fought silently, knowing in his heart that he was losing, that this was the last battle of his life—against an inconceivable enemy.

  Until all at once the men were blinded by a searing light that scorched their eyes.

  Russell Homer froze as if hit with a hammer, but Amos Tarbell understood immediately that his deputy had swung the police car’s powerful spotlight down the forest path. He saw the roaches on Homer’s cheeks let go and fall away to the ground. The nipping stopped on his own cheek. He wanted to stay and grind the miserable insects into the earth, but he stumbled on toward the light. Thank God they needed that great light to power through the mists and fogs that often covered Yarkie.

  Tarbell pushed Homer, staggering, onto the road, and dared to look back for a moment. Yes! and praise Almighty God, the roaches were in disarray. The spotlight was anathema to them. He had wondered right from the start why even the first roaches had come out during the day, but the trap had been in a dim area. And these cockroaches were obviously all too different from what people expected, in all too many terrible ways. Thank God the searchlight had stopped them. He could see the column breaking up faster and faster, with roaches skittering crazily down into the leaves, seeking darkness now.

  They might regroup and attack again, but the men had their chance to escape.

  Ben Dorset had placed the aluminum box on the back seat, and the three men rode in front as the police car accelerated to over sixty in split seconds. Russell Homer hardly had time to close the door and was nearly thrown out as Dorset went screeching around a curve. Fortunately, Amos Tarbell had solid hold of his young friend. At the wheel, Dorset hit the siren in a crescendo of warning to anyone who might be ahead.

  The sheriff could not help turning to see whether the roach army had reformed. Dorset was speeding too fast for a good look, but the road behind seemed empty.

  The man’s eyes lowered from the rear window to the picnic case bouncing and sliding on the rear seat as the car swerved left and right with the speedometer climbing to eighty, ninety, one hundred. They hit a bump and the box flew off the seat and bounced on the floor. Horrified that the lock might spring, the sheriff reached back to press the lid down. He uttered another silent prayer of thanks when he saw that the cover had held. It seemed to him he could see right through the metal to the evil antennae inside, reaching, reaching, reaching for them all. He shuddered with the feel of the livid mandibles clamping on his cheek and the sting of the insect teeth biting for his blood. He knew too well now what was happening on Yarkie. And knowing it, he still could not bring himself to believe that it was roaches—just cockroaches!—no matter how vicious and huge a breed—that could be so infernally powerful.

  Yarkie could only trust that the two Harvard scientists could deal with the distorted insects and their unspeakable appetites.

  Now Amos Tarbell could admit to himself that he had privately deemed Elias Johnson’s phone call to Harvard too quick on the trigger. But now he was more than grateful. The cockroaches they had just so narrowly eluded were more formidable than any rats he had ever seen! If those bastards, those “crawling sharks,” ever got out of the woods into Yarkie’s homes the carnage would create a ghost island.

  For that matter, it occurred to the sheriff, if those monstrosities ever hid on a boat and got over to the mainland, they could make a ghost land of the Cape itself. And hadn’t somebody predicted it was insects that would take over the entire world in the end?

  For all his experience and ruggedness, the sheriff shivered like a child.

  The biologists would have to tackle the tumbling questions in his mind. They were in for a hellish surprise. It was the damnedest “rats” they’d find when they opened the picnic box he was still pressing firmly shut.

  At the thought of the mangled rabbit and the grisly autopsy ahead in the laboratory, Sheriff Amos Tarbell of Yarkie shouted for Ben Dorset to stop the car. He didn’t want to be sick all over everybody.

  ALERT

  ONE

  The two scientists, their crisp white lab coats now stained with red flecks, came into the kitchen. They faced the anxious Yarkie group, pale and unsettled themselves. In all their years of scalpels and dissections, neither one had come upon a gory abhorrence like the sacrificed rabbit. The giant roaches had tunneled through the corpse erratically, apparently tasting and sampling this organ and that. The body was a ruptured blob with flaps of shredded gristle and bone curdled in a vile bloody soup on the bottom of the picnic box, disgustingly mixed with the remains of Bonnie Taylor’s uneaten lunch.

  The two roaches had been recovered. Peter Hubbard had found them lying torpid in the rabbit’s torn lungs after their glut. One of the insects had been dissected immediately; the other was placed alive in a covered glass flask so its activity could be studied. Even in its lethargic state and in the undimmed laboratory lights, the roach showed signs of restlessness. Its antennae wafted about ceaselessly, and it moved steadily if slowly around the bottom of the jar, seeming to the scientists to be seeking its partner or the main column from which it had attacked the rabbit.

  Peter Hubbard stood at the head of the kitchen table rubbing his cheek as if checking whether he needed a shave. It would become a familiar gesture to the group. He measured his words, turning his head often to Wanda Lindstrom for corroboration. His report, spoken as emotionlessly as possible, sounded improbable even to his own ears. The woman biologist nodded her confirmation earnestly with each
point he brought out. The room was charged with the kind of strain pervading a surgeon’s office when a family is receiving the results of a biopsy for cancer. What kind of cancer was afflicting Yarkie?

  Hubbard came to the point directly. “To start with,” he began, “you ought to know that I told Dr. Lindstrom of certain suspicions in my mind from the moment I examined Captain Johnson’s dog’s ear.” Bonnie winced visibly. “I didn’t want to disturb the rest of you prematurely, but even without a microscope it was clear to me that something other than rats had attacked the dog.

  “Now under the microscope we see plainly that the tissue was cut by sawteeth, and—” Hubbard paused for emphasis “—we have now confirmed that the shearing action is not up and down, the way most animals bite, but side to side.”

  The scientist spaced the last words, looking squarely into the eyes of his worried listeners, and added meaningfully, “Side to side is the way insects like cockroaches chew!” He paused again. “I had considered that possibility right away, but I was put off and puzzled by the size of the bites on the ear. You see, normally, cockroaches cannot open their mouths very wide. We do have cases, especially in the tropics, where roaches have attacked animals and even humans, but it has been only a small nibbling action, like small nips on the earlobes or lips of a sleeping child. Very small bites. Tiny, in fact. Nothing like the rips I discovered on the dog’s ear.”

  Bonnie could not control the cold the man’s words stirred in her body. Elizabeth tightened her grasp around the slight shoulders.

  “Now that we have studied the two specimens the sheriff and his men brought back—” Hubbard interrupted himself to observe, “We haven’t heard that story, but I’m sure it wasn’t easy.” He paused another moment. The three men exchanged pale looks. Their mouths were grim. It was the scientist’s time to speak, not theirs.

  Hubbard resumed, but his voice lost its scientific tone and became almost grating in his own clear perplexity. “I must tell you that these cockroaches we have examined here are decidedly, and very dangerously, unlike anything ever seen or heard of.”

  Stephen Scott asked, argumentatively, “You mean they’re not just big water bugs?”

  “Decidedly not! They differ in many ways. Just to start with, they apparently have the ability to attack and kill an animal like a dog or a rabbit. These cockroaches not only have bigger mouths than would be normal relative to their size, but their jaw muscles are absolutely enormous. You may not know it, but your ordinary household roach has much more efficient muscles than we humans do, relatively speaking.” Hubbard put his fingers to his own jaw just below his ears. “Typically, the household cockroach shows no significant protrusion here. But on our specimens there are decided muscle bulges. This means the mandibles and the mouth are hooked to extremely powerful muscles, so that they can inflict the kind of damage we have seen on the dog and the rabbit.”

  The man turned to Stephen Scott, who was still eyeing him skeptically. “Mr. Scott, I wish these were just the garden variety water bug you mention. Their size alone tells a different story. The common water bug doesn’t grow to more than about two inches. Only in the tropics do we find any cockroaches approaching four-­five inches, like our specimens. Some have wing spreads of over five inches . . .”

  Elizabeth asked with a little gasp, “You mean cockroaches can fly, Peter?”

  He nodded. “When they want to. Actually, in biological terms, roaches are the most primitive form of winged insects.”

  Elizabeth whispered to Bonnie, “I never knew that!”

  Bonnie mumbled, “I’m learning a lot of things I’d rather not know!”

  Wanda Lindstrom rose. Eyes shifted expectantly to the woman as she leaned forward with her hands pressed flat on the kitchen table. She projected a sense of authority that made her seem taller than she was and, for the first time at least, put her feminine attractiveness in the shadow. It came to Elizabeth, admiringly, that the person addressing them with her sober words was not “a beautiful blond female . . .”or “. . . attractive.” She was a renowned biologist, a person of accomplishment and service, with a brilliant future. Elizabeth understood a new meaning in women’s lib. When Peter Hubbard spoke, everyone listened to him as a scientist not a man. When Wanda Lindstrom spoke, she should be heard as a scientist in exactly the same way, not as a woman.

  And her voice now held an objective, almost sterile tone. She was saying, “Dr. Hubbard and I have speculated that some ship brought in the ancestors of the cockroaches you have here. It could have been many, many years ago. These cockroaches may have been living on Yarkie for many roach generations, most likely out in the dump. They breed awfully fast, and I mean ‘awfully’ in every sense of the word. Let me explain that. Fertilization takes place when the male roach inserts the rear of his body—called the cercum—into the rear of the female. He deposits a sac of sperm.” The woman’s voice was that of a lecturer emphasizing a significant detail not to be overlooked. “The female holds this sac in her body intact, sometimes for several months. In other words, she can ‘give birth’ pretty much any time during that period. Out of the egg case, which we call oöthecae, the female can lay ten-­sixteen eggs every five days or so. Perhaps in this Yarkie roach group there are more eggs and quicker hatchings, but even in the common ordinary roach you can see that one mother may mean over a thousand new roaches a year. Given a thousand mothers—and that’s not many at all—you get a million roaches a year just from one group. And so on geometrically.”

  Elizabeth put in, respectfully, “But they don’t all survive, of course.”

  The other woman nodded. “We’d be overrun everywhere, of course. Normally, many of the young die because the environment is unfavorable—not enough food or moisture, which in turn leads adult roaches, including the parents, to eat the babies. But on this island where the dump provides endless food and shelter, cockroaches like these would thrive.”

  Elizabeth had another question, vaguely recalled from a biology course in her sophomore year. “Don’t they have natural enemies that might hold them down?”

  The woman inclined her head again. “Yes. For example, certain wasps lay eggs in adult cockroaches. The hatching eggs feed on them and kill them. Then there are symbionts that kill, like the Clostridium botulinium, a form that lives only where there is no oxygen. It develops in the hind gut of the roach . . .”

  Elizabeth noted with admiration the easy use of the scientific names and labels. Although she, better than anyone in the room but Peter Hubbard, knew the woman’s­­­­­ professional status, it still seemed unusual for a mouth as lovely as Wanda Lindstrom’s to be uttering the stiff designations. Unusual, impressive, and articulate, Elizabeth acknowledged.

  Wanda Lindstrom wasn’t finished. “We can’t draw any final conclusions from just two specimens, but we haven’t seen any sign of a natural enemy here, not so far. We have to suppose that the population of these brute roaches has simply been exploding on your island in a kind of organic flashpoint, and has now spilled out visibly.” She added, “Perhaps as a result of the new poisons you have mentioned. We will be investigating that, of course.”

  Russell Homer exclaimed shakily. “From the tree, it looked like a zillion of them coming on at us! The whole damn ground was just cockroaches!”

  Peter Hubbard answered quickly, “We’re still just guessing, mostly. But in fairness I have to tell you what we do now know. It seems plain that these roaches can attack any body opening, including the ears. I told Dr. Lindstrom what Russell and Craig said about the dump rats running around dizzily. Now I think that roaches ate their way through the middle ear which, as you know, controls balance. I have to say it,” the man went on with a scowl of his own revulsion, “these confounded creatures can kill in many ways. They can get up an animal’s nostrils and down its throat, causing suffocation. They can get at the brain, as we’ve said already. Their mandibles are so strong and their teeth so sharp they can needle through skin to veins and arteries, causing deat
h by hemorrhage.”

  Everyone was grimacing. The thought of slimy cockroaches sliding into every opening of a living animal shook them with more than disgust.

  Ben Dorset said, unexpectedly, “Just seeing that roach get into the rabbit’s eye was the most awful thing . . .”

  Reed Brockshaw was listening with a blank expression, a look of incomprehension. His ears heard what was being said, but the enormity of it was too great for his mind to accept.

  Elias Johnson voiced a question on everyone’s mind. “Why didn’t we find anything of Sharky except the ear? I mean, all right, say these roaches killed him, but how did he vanish? Craig and I looked over every inch. Even say these bastards—” the old man did not stop to apologize to the ladies “—even say these bastards came at Sharky by the thousands like the piranha fish we all know about—we’d at least find the skeleton, wouldn’t we?” His voice rose with the ire of his bafflement.

  Peter Hubbard had to tell the man, “Elias, there are insects that leave no skeletons.”

  Johnson’s widened eyes showed he couldn’t believe it. “What? These roaches eat the bones?”

  “They have teeth so sharp, and appetites so ravenous, that they can grind bones to powder and ingest them. Any bone and all bone.” Hubbard added with an expression of his own disgust, “Including the skull, when they want to.”