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Back The Nest Save as PDF
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

Will Errickson is a lifelong horror enthusiast. Born in southern New Jersey, he first encountered the paperback horrors of Lovecraft and Stephen King in the early 1980s. After high school he worked in a used bookstore during the horror boom of the ’80s and early ’90s, which deepened his appreciation for horror fiction. Many years later, in 2010, he revisited that era when he began his blog Too Much Horror Fiction, rereading old favorites, rediscovering forgotten titles and writers, and celebrating the genre’s resplendent cover art. With Grady Hendrix in 2017, he co-wrote the Bram Stoker Award-winning Paperbacks from Hell, which featured many books from his personal collection. Today Will resides in Portland, OR, with his wife Ashley and his ever-growing library of vintage horror paperbacks.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to novelist Eli Cantor for suggesting that an island could be as terrorized by an invasion of mutant insects as by killer sharks off its beaches.

The author gratefully acknowledges the studies in animal behavior of Dr. B. Faber of the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University; and the publications on insect sociobiology of Professor E. O. Wilson of Harvard University. Any errors of science are the author’s own, as is the fictional hypothesis of the insect mutation imagined in these pages.

—G.A.D.

TREMORS

TREMORS

1

ONE

Under a luminous moon, the garbage dump on Yarkie Island off Cape Cod began to shudder and vibrate grotesquely. It might have seemed an illusion of the moonlight on the quiet Atlantic that serene summer night, but the strange phenomenon near the beach was no mirage. It was as unmistakable as it was mysterious and ominous.

The thin topsoil over the island’s refuse was trembling with an eerie drift. It was a sluggish and sickly motion, as if the mounds had turned into a viscous muck, or were mucidly floating on a hermetic current oozing from the depths. Without seeming reason, the slimy flux would stop and then pulse again. Sometimes an unearthly bulge appeared, like a tumor or festering pustule that seemed ready to split open, almost as if a buried-alive victim were straining to push out of a mouldy grave. A viewer might, with stopped heart, expect to see the excrescence burst, and a cadaverous hand lift a bony claw into the night.

But there were no witnesses to the shifting motion, or to the maddened rats that began to fling themselves wildly out of the garbage piles.

The vermin were squealing with agony as they sprang into the night air. Their writhing bodies were as bizarre as their gyrations and screaking; they were covered not with fur but with what seemed to be shells, scintillating in the moonlight. The pinpricks of fire on their rodent bodies flashed crazily over the dump with a metallic sheen until there was a quick change to the crimson of blood. The rats were cloaked in sequins of death; a nightmare scene out of an animal hell.