“So—let’s go back to Plan A, which is hauling ass out of here.” Crow crossed his legs under him and got to his feet, then bent and began slapping the dust off his trousers, glancing at the house as he did so. Newton was looking at Crow and saw his face change from annoyed to slack to a mask of total shock, and Newton whipped his head around to follow the line of Crow’s gaze. What he saw twisted his heart like a rag and together they stared in complete horror as from the cracked and shattered timbers of the broad porch roof, from each little pocket of space between beams and shingles, through all the weather-worn holes in the lumber poured a seething, bristling, boiling black mass of roaches. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands, their chitinous shells gleaming like polished coal, their million scrabbling legs skittering and hissing over the debris. The whole black festering tide of them began sweeping down the porch stairs directly at them.
Crow grabbed Newton’s coat and hauled him up, spun him roughly, and gave him a violent shove away from the house. “RUN!” he screamed.
And they ran. Both of them, very fast, as behind them a wave of insects swept after them with a hiss like foam over the hard-packed sand of a beach. They left behind the walking stick and Newton’s camera, which he had dropped again during the fall from the porch. They left behind Crow’s machete, buried now under tons of rubble through which a hundred thousand roaches were swarming.
Crow and Newton ran the wrong way at first, cutting in the most direct line across the large front yard, dashing through the patch of sunlight to the edge of the forest by the overgrown fields, tearing along the line of trees, moving fast despite the spongy ground. Crow risked a hasty glance over his shoulder. He was horrified to see that the roaches were spreading out across the field, the carpet of them covering dozens of square yards.
“Christ!” he said. They kept running until they were into the woods, then as one they realized they were heading in the wrong direction. Crow looked back again and saw that the roaches had reached the patch of sunlight. He skidded to a halt for a moment, stunned by what he was seeing. As the roaches reached the strip of sunlight, they parted neatly, going left and right around it, avoiding it completely.
He grabbed Newton’s shirt and pulled him to a stop. “Newt! Are you seeing this?”
The reporter stood there, eyes bulging, mouth working for a while until he gasped out a single word. “God!” The roaches raced around the sunlit patch, reforming into a single seething mass as they reached the end of it, and the reformed tide of black bugs scrabbled and whispered on toward them. “They’re still coming,” Newton cried.
Crow nodded sharply. He glanced around to reorient himself. “This way—come on!” Moving as fast as their legs could carry them, they tore along the edge of the woods, making a wide circle back toward the side of the house where they had first left the forest. The roaches turned, following as if guided by radar; the change in vector gave them a shorter distance to cover and they seemed to devour that distance, rolling like a sheet of oil over stone and leaf and withered grass.
“They’re going to cut us off!” yelled Newton.
“Shut up and run!” Together they raced to the entrance to the forest of old-growth trees and made radical turns, skittering on the moss and wasting valuable seconds trying to find traction. The roaches came in like a midnight tide, the gap closed to barely a few yards. Crow took the lead, his boots getting better purchase than Newton’s sneakers. He reached back and again took hold of the reporter’s shoulder and pulled him along until they ran side by side, sometimes guiding, sometimes pushing. Breath rasped and wheezed in their lungs, blood roared in the ears. They burst out of the grove into the thicker forest of diseased trees and dripping vines, running hard back up the path they had come.
Something moved at the edge of Crow’s vision and he turned his head to see a second wave of cockroaches swarming out of the back of the house. They were not racing toward them but were almost heading in the same direction. Then Crow realized what they were doing and a knife of terror stabbed him in the heart. The roaches were not paralleling their course, they were racing forward at a converging angle. In seconds the way forward was going to be completely blocked.
(2)
