The stout woman fled with a speed she did not know she possessed, driven by more than fear. A sigh of relief burst from her lips as she saw her car just ahead. But the few paces to the open road and safety seemed like miles. Her lungs burned with each gasping breath; her throat was on fire; her lips were bleeding from where her own teeth had bitten through. But she would make it now!

Just steps from the road, Hilda Cannon felt a fluttering around her head. Instinctively, she threw her hands up, circling them wildly. If these were bats, she didn’t want them in her hair. She knew bats didn’t really do that, but she was hysterical with fright. And the more so with the realization that the fluttering wings were not of bats but belonged to flying roaches seeking her blood.

Forms of giant cockroaches were sweeping the air all around her now. It flashed in her head that they resembled the plagues of locusts she had seen in movies so thick they darkened the sky.

In the ­same way that Tony Carlucci had known his doom, and Bo Leslie too, Hilda Cannon understood she would never take the last few steps to the road and the waiting car.

She went down helplessly under the terrible assault, blinded immediately by the avidly seeking mandibles. Even as she fell, two small rivers of blood came from the emptying eye sockets, tears of defeat, loss, disaster, death rolling down what was left of her cheeks.

The nerves behind the woman’s eyes and ears exploded with internal fireworks, and as had happened with the others, an aurora borealis flared within. Her hands moved spastically over the ground seeking some weapon, out of an indomitable spirit that refused to concede. As with sailor kin of old, stubbornly holding breath in their lungs while drowning until the overpowering sea claimed what they could no longer withhold, Hilda Cannon had no weapon, no hope. The waves of roaches were the lashing seas of wild storm, the boat breached, the winds ripping the hair out of one’s head, forcing open the clenched mouth and funneling the water of death into the unwilling chest. Except that Hilda Cannon was drowning not in salt water of the ocean but in the froth of her own sluicing blood.

Blind and deaf, she still struggled, with a thrust for life that came from the deepest spirit. She felt the thousands of knife-­teeth having their way at her face, her neck, her breasts. She felt the thousands of mandibles tugging and clinging, ripping her living skin from her sinking, sweating body. She knew horribly the sensation of the cockroaches crawling into every orifice, her nostrils, and unthinkably, her privates, front and rear.

Hilda Cannon’s prayer for a quick death, her giving up at last, was granted by the organized fierceness of her assailants.