cookies in the kitchen sink in the middle of the day, all-right people don’t shake like their insides have been vomited loose. But he couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Are you okay?”
She nodded weakly
He helped her back to the table and lowered her into the chair. She sat with her head in her hands for a long time. Willard watched her carefully, alert for any signs of recurrent nausea. Sams was silent, watching as well.
Finally, Catherine looked up. “Sorry,” she said quietly. Her voice still shook. Her breath stank. Willard could smell the sourness on her breath and felt his own stomach twist momentarily. She sipped at the orange juice in her glass. That seemed to help.
“I just remembered…” She paled again, and Willard was afraid that she was in for another bout of vomiting, but she visibly controlled her reflexes, swallowing hard a couple of times. “They were in…,” she began, seemed to choke again, then she continued, her voice breaking, “… in the bread.”
Willard understood. His stomach convulsed again at the image her words conjured. “It’s okay. There were only a couple of pieces left in the wrapper this morning. I had a piece of toast before I went to bed last night, and I left the wrapper open. Like always.”
The last was a play for humor.
Catherine didn’t laugh.
“Anyway, when I got up this morning and cleaned up in here, I could tell that the rest of the bread was all dried out. I tossed it. And got a new loaf from the freezer.” He could trace the relief as it blossomed in her face. For a moment, it seemed as if she was struggling to say something, then her expression crumbled and she burst into tears, long and hard and frightening.
“I know I saw them. I know it. I know it.”
“Come on,” Willard said finally, not really knowing how to handle the situation. “Let’s go into the living room and sit down. Relax.”
She allowed herself to be led into the other room. She dropped heavily onto the sofa. Willard returned to the kitchen and lifted Sams out of his high chair and set him on his feet. The boy toddled across the carpeting, clambered slowly and awkwardly onto the couch, and settled himself next to his mother. He carefully spread his blanket over his own legs and across part of his mother’s lap. Catherine took no notice.
Willard knelt next to her, forcibly reminded of the night before. “Look,” he said, “you two stay here and I’ll check things again. Okay?”
She nodded without speaking. Her passivity was more frightening to Willard than anything else. Catherine was nothing if not self-reliant, independent, strong. She might have an aversion to crawly, squirmy things, but Willard was well aware of how much she struggled against those weaknesses. For her to collapse this completely…
He was baffled.
Still, he began carrying out his promise. Armed with a now-familiar, half-used Raid can noticeably lighter than it had been the night before, he re-sprayed the baseboards in the kitchen. He felt Catherine’s eyes on him as the repeated the process in the living room.
Then he concentrated his efforts on the metal frame of the sliding door that opened from the house to the patio. There, it seemed to him, would be the logical place for vermin to enter. The doors might not meet exactly. Possibly there was some dirt in the tracks that…
“What the hell?”
Catherine’s head jerked up at the sound of his voice.
Willard dropped to his knees and began tugging at a loose flap of carpeting that had been tucked into the corner where the wall between the kitchen and the living room abutted against the back wall.
“What…?” he repeated.
“Willard?”
“Look at this.”
Catherine got up slowly and crossed the room.
Willard was still on his knees, slowly pulling the thick carpet back a foot or so. He glanced over his shoulder at her.
“This isn’t even tacked down. It’s just laying on top of the padding.” He leaned further over and peered into the corner. “Shit.” He leaned back and held something out to Catherine.
It was a splinter of wood, perhaps ten or eleven inches long and just over an inch wide, with needle-sharp nails protruding every half inch or so, the tips just long enough to catch in the backing of the carpet.
“This is supposed to be set into the concrete. It keeps the carpet stretched. Something broke it off.”
He turned back to the flap of carpet. Catherine looked over his shoulder. They could both see the remains of twisted, broken strips bordering the carpet pad. Willard caught the edge of the pad between his thumb and index finger and peeled the half-inch-thick green foam pad away from the concrete flooring.
Catherine screamed and nearly fainted.
5
A three-inch-wide crack in the concrete slab roughly paralleled the back wall, perhaps an inch and a half in from the baseboard and extending from the corner until it disappeared beneath the protective covering of carpeting and pad where Willard had not yet pulled them up. The crack was rough, edged with crumbling concrete.
That was bad enough.
But worse was the rippling, glistening black-brown roiling that surged inside the crack.
Roaches.
There might have been thousands-certainly hundred of the vermin swarming over each other, legs and feelers quivering as the things skittered like a repellant, oily wave breaking on grey sandy shores.
Then the edge of the wave broke over the top of the slab. First one or two, then a handful, then a dozen-the roaches spread from the crack onto the smooth but stained concrete exposed when Willard had stripped both pad and carpet.
Catherine screamed again, but Willard stared transfixed. Only when the vanguard of the wave reached him, and the lead roach crawled onto the toe of his loafer did Willard finally act. Galvanized by the presence of the thing, he reacted convulsively. His thumb jammed down on the spray nozzle of the Raid can, directing a killing jet onto the roach. The thing scrabbled helplessly at the soft leather of Willard’s shoe, then fell backward, its legs twisting frantically.
Willard shot the contents of the can across the concrete, catching all of the roaches on the slab. The force of the spray at this close a range was so strong that it spun several of them back into the crack. He followed up, spraying continually until he was at the edge of the crack. He thrust the nozzle directly against the crumbling concrete and sprayed, not looking, not wanting to see the seething mass as it contorted beneath the poison. He could hear the hisssss of the spray; he could hear Catherine’s harsh, ragged breathing-at least she wasn’t screaming any more-he could hear his own breathing, his heartbeat, the creeaak of shoe leather as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and somewhere behind him Sams own snuffling cries, vague echoes of Catherine’s.
But above all of that, he could hear the dry, horrible rustling of the roaches as they scurried frantically downward, tumbling over each other in a tumultuous mass, seeking the safely of darkness and dampness and distance from the hideous stuff that was coating their bodies and systematically destroying them.
Finally, with a sputter and spit, the Raid can ran empty.
Willard kept his thumb on the nozzle, though, shaking the can, and spraying, shaking the can and spraying, again and again even though nothing seemed to be coming out except an unsettling dry hissss, until the last possible drop of poison had penetrated the crack. Then he lifted his thumb.
His hand hurt from the strain. The plastic nozzle had impressed its serrated form deeply into the flesh of his thumb. His knuckles were white, and he was scarcely breathing. He looked into the crack.
Nothing.
Except for a few feebly struggling bodies, the mass of roaches had disappeared.
