Behind him, he heard another cry of alarm. A flying roach was attacking Bonnie Taylor’s face. Craig Soaras trained his extinguisher her way before realizing he could not spray the dry ice without injuring the woman herself. He dropped the tank to rush to her side. The roach came off in his hand. Thankfully he saw only a small spot of crimson on her dark cheek. Her eyes were safe. “Craig,” she moaned. Just his name, but in it he heard not only her gratitude for his risk but a tenderness he had not dared to dream about.

In the moment Soaras stood beside Bonnie Taylor without his protective tank, a quick crescent of the cock­roaches got at his feet. They struck as a gang, as if at one command, so that the man had no time to regain his tank. He gagged with the pain of the knife-­like incisions. Desperate, Bonnie made a precipitate decision and triggered carbon dioxide at his feet. He might be hurt by the dry ice, but the roaches were worse.

As if maddened by Bonnie’s attack after tasting Craig’s blood, a flight of roaches zoomed at his unprotected head. They were like small savage bats arrowing toward his eyes. There was no way Bonnie could help without blinding him or killing him with her dry ice. His own flailing arms could not keep off all the swarm.

In torment, Bonnie watched helplessly as more insects landed on Craig’s head. One rested obscenely on his mustache, lifting its body as if to crow cockily. Its companions had already started their terrible destruction of eyes and flesh. One huge roach aimed for and reached Craig Soaras’s jugular. His blood spurted onto Bonnie Taylor’s arm as she tried to come to his rescue.

The woman took the man’s dying agony into herself. His groans of pain were hers as he kept trying to yank the clinging insects off his skin, out of his ears, away from his clenched mouth. Bonnie wanted to embrace the man, tell her love, hold him for the life they could never now have together.

She could not move to save him, or herself. She was paralyzed with the horror of his murder as the killer roaches took his face to pieces before her eyes. Her own dry ice tank dropped from her fingers in her anguished defeat. She prayed that the roaches would end her too, and fast. She hardly heard Elizabeth Carr screaming, “Come out, Bonnie! Hurry!”

Amos Tarbell stamped to Bonnie with his tank spraying roach death fiercely. He kept the killers away from the woman, but she was blind with her loss, with the devastation of the impossible raid. Not her flesh but her mind and heart were being despoiled.