Words jostled and echoed in his head. He heard the Harvard man saying you couldn’t hate the cockroaches any more than you could hate a runaway locomotive. Wrong, Reed Brockshaw snarled. It might be true that Mother Nature was a Crazy Old Lady with evil appetites, who programmed her bastard robots, but to him the cockroaches were palpable enemies, personal enemies, despicable enemies he was to kill with his own hands. He wished they were man-­size so he could grip them in his fingers and choke them to death. He wanted to hear them wheeze and cry out, hear their dying moans as if pleading for mercy . . .

No, these brown-­black, hard-­shelled crawling and flying scum were no impersonal forces of nature to him. They were criminals, murderers, worse. They had butchered his children. They would pay! Intolerable that these little beasts should have made his innocent children suffer as they must have in that slaughterhouse on the shore!

Brockshaw laughed maniacally again. The cockroaches, in their tumbling droves coming through the leaves, expected to get him because his torch could kill only a few thousand and they were millions. In a moment now they would learn that for all their “mutation” and fancy ganglia, they were no match for a human brain and its cleverness.

The man swept the forest with his eyes. As far as he could see there were cockroaches coming. They were like a filthy, moving scab on the earth. They covered trees and leaves like disgusting, shuddering berries of brown and black. Their wings buzzed a hellish threat through the woods. He knew they would launch a concerted attack at him any moment. It was time, it was the time, the final moment for his plan, his purpose, and resolve.

Reed Brockshaw stretched out the flare and deliberately held the searing flame to a dry tree branch on his right. He whirled and did the same on his left. He circled into the brush, running and setting fire everywhere.

The woods sparked, ignited, exploded. Flames shot up furiously. The conflagration was fed by the storm winds and engulfed the area in moments. There was a cascade of firecracker bursts as the fire popped to the tops of the trees and raced down into the sere leaves. The blaze ran along the ground like a pouring torrent of molten death.

From the cockroaches there was a spitting and chittering and scraping as their bodies caught and fried. Their cooked insides set up a staccato sputtering like hot grease as the forest became a bizarre griddle, an exploding stove, a volcanic furnace. Thick, stinking smoke rose up into the black skies over the inferno.