BooksBarbecue
Back The Nest
Chapters (82)
  1. Cover
  2. Copyright page
  3. Introduction by Will Errickson
  4. Acknowledgements
  5. TREMORS
  6. 1
  7. 2
  8. 3
  9. 4
  10. 5
  11. 6
  12. SUSPICIONS
  13. 1
  14. 2
  15. 3
  16. 4
  17. 5
  18. DREAD
  19. 1
  20. 2
  21. 3
  22. 4
  23. 5
  24. 6
  25. WITNESS
  26. 1
  27. 2
  28. 3
  29. ALERT
  30. 1
  31. 2
  32. 3
  33. 4
  34. 5
  35. ENCOUNTER
  36. 1
  37. 2
  38. 3
  39. 4
  40. 5
  41. 6
  42. HAVOC
  43. 1
  44. 2
  45. 3
  46. 4
  47. 5
  48. 6
  49. SEARCH
  50. 1
  51. 2
  52. 3
  53. 4
  54. 5
  55. CLASH
  56. 1
  57. 2
  58. 3
  59. 4
  60. 5
  61. 6
  62. 7
  63. COUNTERATTACK
  64. 1
  65. 2
  66. 3
  67. 4
  68. 5
  69. 6
  70. 7
  71. VICTORY
  72. 1
  73. 2
  74. 3
  75. 4
  76. 5
  77. 6
  78. 7
  79. 8
  80. 9
  81. EPILOGUE
  82. About the Author

Tom Laidlaw pointed to the floor beside the woman’s shoe. A roach was resting there.

Deirdre Laidlaw said calmly, “Look at the size of that goddamn cockroach!”

Her husband made a flipping gesture with the back of his large, freckled hand. “Scrootch it out of here.”

The woman screwed up her face. “You do it, hero mine!”

Her husband leaned across her lap.

“Don’t get fresh.” She slapped at his hand. “You won’t respect me in the morning.”

“Ouch!” Tom Laidlaw cried out, clutching his ear. He came up so suddenly he banged his head on the steering wheel. “What the hell!”

“My God!” Deirdre Laidlaw shrieked at the same time. Blood was running down the side of her husband’s face and she saw an enormous cockroach, easily four inches long, disappearing, disappearing into her husband’s right ear!

The woman swiveled to him with a gesture of help, but her hands remained frozen, with her fingers curved before his face as if she were holding an invisible bowl. She was looking at another huge roach biting into her husband’s right eye.

In the next instant, she was screaming with a different horror. First there was a fluttering at her forehead like a large moth’s wings; then an excruciating needle going through her face, a fire lasering into her skull.

While she could see out of one eye, Deirdre Laidlaw had to live with the inconceivable sight of great cockroaches coating her husband’s face, a vicious, quivering crust of filth. Feeling blood on her own face, she knew the misshapen creatures were eating at her flesh just as she witnessed them shearing away her husband’s nose. She did not want to die, but she was grateful for death’s release from the horror.

6

SIX

Sheriff Amos Tarbell heard the cries before he saw the cars. What he witnessed as he swerved into the Tinton driveway hit him like a hammer, so that the police car skidded out of control and banged into a tree opposite the Laidlaw jeep. His head hit the wheel and he felt blood starting. He was too stunned even to reach for his handkerchief. He sat there with blood streaming onto his tan uniform, watching with bulging eyes the impossible spectacle of Deirdre and Tom Laidlaw being devoured by cockroaches.

Sitting upright in the jeep, the two looked like unnatural wax figures out of a horror museum. Their eyes were gone. They stared back at the sheriff from blank sockets from which gore was trickling. Right before his eyes, their skulls were being cleaned of muscle and flesh by a thousand scurrying bugs. Still-­living shreds of their skin quivered with raw nerves, looked like white worms squirming over the bone-­white of their scalped skulls.

The Laidlaws, before Sheriff Amos Tarbell’s eyes, looked like two cadavers in an anatomy class held in hell. The bloodied bones made a gruesome tableau of skeletons driving a jeep.