His eyes closed against the sight, but there was a bright flame inside his head that lit up what had taken place, as plainly as if he were watching a film: He could imagine children coming off the breaking ship, struggling along the rocks. Reaching shore, they romped and jumped all over the beach in their happiness and relief at being safe and sound. The vibrations signaled their presence to the roving roaches. He could only hope there had been a mass drowning first. It would be at least more natural.

It came to Brockshaw that his own Kim and David lay there savaged, buried alive, or dead already, beneath the cover of filth!

The father’s cry of anguish was an animal’s roar. It defeated the thunder that crashed over the scene, and the lightning that eerily lit the gory carnage. It was the eruption of the man’s exploding brain, the sound of a soul’s dynamite blasting every nerve, leaving nothing but the echo of Reed Brockshaw’s breaking apart. There was no way a man could witness the abomination and continue human.

The man beat at his face with his fists, he tore at his cheeks with his nails. In his unspeakable grief and fury he did not want to have a face. He did not want to belong to any world in which this torment could happen.

The insects were insatiable over the bodies. The bugs were red with human blood. Their shells gleamed in the lightning flashes with the slime of their destruction. To the funereal pounding of the waves rising higher on the shore, lightning kept disclosing more and more horror—lacerated flesh, severed limbs, a child’s head rolling to the water’s edge, being lifted by a wave and carried ghoulishly away.

Pieces and flakes of skeletons were floating on the sea now. The shore was a viscid spread of inert refuse, a roach-­turbulent repository of misery beyond agony.

There was no way for a mind to encompass the atrocity. It was the excrescence of Nature gone evil. Evil beyond barbarism, beyond cruelty. It was deed beyond excoriation, curse or damnation. It was Damnation itself.

It was an apocalypse of Nature’s mindless enormity, and Reed Brockshaw’s own Gethse­mane.

Fish would feed on strange fruit this day.

Reed Brockshaw gnashed his teeth and wailed.

The incoming tide was reaching for more of the mangled bodies. Each lashing wave carried more of the carnage out to sea as it broke over the roach-­encrusted shore. The insects near the red-­foaming water line began to scramble for their own safety. Roaches nearer the trees paused in their abysmal repast to test the charged air, receiving sudden signals of alarm. Their antennae marked acute danger and they started away from the children’s corpses, scurrying for the dark dry safety of the trees.