His thrashing about was in vain. His skin, his muscles, his organs, his brains, his limbs, were being carved. Beneath the pulsating streams of blood carrying his life out of him, the man felt as if metal saws were ripping across his body, not so much devouring him as a jungle animal might, but slicing him apart.

Dimly, Bo Leslie saw himself in a mad magician’s crate, with sharpened swords slashing his viscera. Or, he was a side of beef on a butcher hook, and cleavers were hacking his carcass into small chunks. The man wanted to curse and howl, but there was no sound except hissing air because his throat was gone. It happened so quickly that the man’s body was still shuddering with his orgasm when his final breath issued, a crimson foam out of his decapitated torso. There was one last glimmer inside the man’s skull before his brainlight went out forever. It was a flashing black humor: This was like dying in the saddle—he had always joked that that was the only way to go.

The Yarkie cockroaches, in obedience to commands encoded in their preternatural genes, mounted the new food supply Nature had bounteously furnished again. After they satisfied their own hunger, much prey was left. Their reflex now was to apply their teeth and mandibles to splitting the carcass and its bones into pieces that could be handled by the worker roaches their scouts had already raced to the Nest to summon.

Pulling, pushing, tugging, rolling, the multitude of roaches carried away the remaining fragments of Bo Leslie’s flesh—as they had carried away the dog Sharky and the day’s bonanza of slaughtered rats—to the larder chambers that digger roaches had prepared surrounding their new Home Nest on Yarkie.

The only thing left of the man when the insects were done was the metal handcuffs. With an inner organic compulsion like that of magpies, some of the roaches pushed these, too, along with the food, although it was plain that this hard shining substance was not meat nor bone nor blood, was not edible like the rest.

Then, in a coda that Nature enforced upon them each time, squads of roaches remained behind the transport forces to push at the forest leaves with their bodies. Using their legs, wings, and mandibles much as dogs use their hind legs after defecating, the insects spread leaves and soil over the scene of their own saturnalia. In short order, the rustling and bustling movements ended, the last of the monstrous cockroaches vanished into the leaves, and no disarray was to be seen in that part of the forest.