The Last Warm Place

by Barry Napier

  “You’ll keep us safe, right?” she asked. “Me and the baby?”

  No one had ever asked something so monumental of me. Even for the seven months or so Kendra and I had spent together, she’d never vocalized such a question. Hearing it made me feel slightly ill. I had never been athletic, never had one of those builds you see on the fronts of men’s health magazines. Before the world went to hell, I’d had the beginnings of a beer gut, minor irritable bowel syndrome, and a flare of carpal tunnel in my wrists from time to time. Not exactly an intimidating physical specimen.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Of course.”

  Things were different now. The version of myself that had spent eight hours a day behind a computer as a graphic designer was gone. He had taken with him the version of me that spent his free time at home watching TV, snacking on chips, maybe reading the latest Stephen King or Dean Koontz novel. That version of me had been replaced by a creature that would kill without question if it was necessary and then burn the bodies behind a house that did not belong to him.

  I felt Kendra against me and was aware of the familiar yet troublesome stirring beneath my waist. I wanted her. I had wanted her almost from the moment I had met her. But it was evident that she did not feel the same. I almost preferred that. Romance and sex would complicate things during the end of the world, I supposed.

  Besides, she was asking me to protect her now. That was a whole different kind of wanting, and I’d take whatever I could get.

  6

  All of our belongings fit into five plastic grocery bags, a busted backpack, and an old diaper bag we had been carrying with us before we had set up camp in the Dunn’s house. We set the bags by the front door when we were done packing. I looked at the backpack sadly; half of its contents made up our food supply. It consisted mainly of canned fruit, a few cans of Spam and Vienna Sausages, and the rest of our oatmeal. While it was far from culinary greatness, it would feed us for about two weeks if we rationed it properly.

  Kendra also had a fanny pack that she had clipped around her waist the moment we started packing. It contained a peculiar assortment: the six additional rounds for David Giuilano’s pistol, two lighters, two pacifiers for the baby, and four AA batteries which, the last time we checked, worked.

  In terms of weapons, we could have done a lot worse. I ventured to guess that most other poor souls wandering the roads only wished to be armed as heavily as we were. There was our rifle and the AK 47 we acquired from the trespassers yesterday, propped up on the other side of the door. There was also the pistol that we took from David Giuilano.

  I hated that my mind went there, but adding up the ammo we had on us did make us a deadly pair. It made me a bit more confident about heading out into a dangerous and lethal world we no longer knew.

  I thought of the ruined cities we’d seen before we hunkered down at the Dunn residence. It was far too easy to recall the smell of charred buildings and bodies. I could still remember the thousands of bodies we’d seen scattered on the roads and throughout the husks of cities. I hope it might not be as unsightly this time around. I assumed the bodies had gone to rot, or had been picked over by whatever scavenging creatures still roamed the land. Either way, the fact remained that it was still the sort of world that waited for us at the end of the Dunns’ long driveway.

  We were sitting in the living room, looking at the small pile of our belongings, when Kendra held a large folded sheet of paper out to me. It was the map that we had yet to pack up. We’d need to look over it to figure out the best route. I intended to stick to the back roads for sure, especially if we planned to find a car somewhere (which I still thought might not be the best idea).

  “Any ideas yet?” she asked as I took the map from her.

  “Back roads for sure. Although, if we get into a situation where we need more supplies, we may have to leave them.”

  We set the map down on the sofa and plotted our course. The baby slept peacefully in the bedroom as we traced out the best route between Kempry, Georgia and where the Blue Ridge Mountains etched their way across Virginia. It would be a long trek, but it was certainly doable. We located a few small-to-medium sized towns to head into in search of supplies if necessary. These were towns that weren’t likely to have boasted large populations before the end of it all and had hopefully not attracted much attention afterwards.

  We hunkered over the map for about an hour. It was a reminder of how meticulous of a planner Kendra could be. She would have probably looked the map over even longer if the baby’s cries hadn’t interrupted us. I listened to her speaking to him from the bedroom as I looked at the path we had traced out on the map with a pencil. It was scary to know that the jagged line we’d drawn was essentially going to be the next few weeks of our lives.

  In going over the map, we’d come up with other hard facts, too.

  Tomorrow, during our first day out, we’d have to find something to serve as a shelter—a tent, a tarp, or something. On occasion, it rained a dark sort of precipitation. It was rain, of course, but it now smelled like chemicals and rust. It was not something I wanted to get caught in.

  We could both use new coats, too. The temperature was a fickle thing now. The nuclear assault that had been intended to save humanity from the “outside threat” (a term used by news affiliates that I still find laughable), had not brought about the nuclear winter I had read about in all the doomsday books of my childhood. But it did get very cold from time to time.

  For about two months after the last bomb dropped, the sky had been a shale color. There were no clouds. Some days, night seemed to last nearly twenty hours at a time. During others, all twenty four hours of the day had been consumed by an odd chalk-like gray tint. Currently, thirteen months after that last nuke had been launched by the US military onto its own soil, Kendra and I would spot small tufts of daring clouds overhead. The sky is far from blue now, but there are days where it holds a peculiar shade that makes me think that its natural blue can’t be too far behind.

  Without any sort of proper news or media to inform us, we can only speculate about how it all went down. Based on the nuclear attacks that occurred before most of the country lost any sort of connection with news media or other outlets, the bombing had not been on a full-out scale. That was why, when Kendra and I had been walking across portions of the country before arriving at the Dunn’s house, there were still sections of the country that seemed to have been untouched by the attacks. Miles of beautiful green trees and fields would roll by slowly, only to give way to the ruin that had been meant as our salvation.

  Of course, the looting and resulting violence among the public following the bombs was another issue altogether.

  All of this rolled through my head as I set the map aside and looked out of the Dunn’s tattered screen door. I looked up the course of their driveway. It was a relatively overcast day (again, not due to clouds, but the lack of direct natural sunlight) and I could not see the thin black line that was the road. The trees—some dead and toppled over, some still standing like phantoms—blocked it from me.

  I wondered if there were still sections of the American highways that were burning as they had months before.

  It was morbid, but I was more willing than ever to get out of the Dunns’ house and start our way back across the handful of states that separated us from Virginia. I was curious how much the landscape had changed in the six months or so we had been holed up in this house.

  I started to think about the idea of using a car to get back and forth. On the three different occasions we had been forced to kill people that had attempted to come into the house, none of them had been driving a vehicle. They had always been on foot. It made me wonder if the roads were really that bad or if maintaining a car with the world the way it was might just be too much trouble.

  While all of these speculations confirmed my original feeling, I couldn’t help but think that using a car might not be such a bad idea. Even if we did attract attention, those that would hear
us would likely be on foot. We could easily outrun them in a car.

  But what if they had guns? What if they shot out the tires and—

  There were too many ifs for my liking. I figured we’d just play it by ear. But yes, the more I thought about using a car to cover the distance between us and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—a distance I estimated to be just shy of four hundred and fifty miles—the more appealing it became.

  I glanced to my wristwatch. It was 3:30. I had suspected for a while now that it was off; I’m pretty sure I missed a daylight savings time in the course of all of the turmoil. But I had come to rely on the time that it gave me. I had a feeling the rest of the day was going to be very long.

  Kendra entered the room behind me. She was carrying the baby on her hip. In her other hand, she gripped the old baby sling we had stolen from an SUV not too long before finding the Dunns’ house. I looked at it and then to the few bags of our things sitting by the front door. I grinned when I realized that when we left tomorrow, I was going to end up looking like one of those old prospectors with several bags strapped to my back, clicking and clanging along the road.

  Yes, a car might just be worth risking.

  “I think he knows something is going on,” Kendra said, hefting the baby, “He’s excited.”

  She was right. He was looking around the house with bright expectant eyes. A thin and shiny river of drool ran down his chin.

  “I am, too,” she added. “It might sound corny, but this feels right. It’s like this is what we are supposed to do.”

  I was starting to feel the same way. The more I thought about finding the paper and photo in David Giuilano’s pants pocket, the more predestined it all seemed. I wasn’t quite ready to say it was what we were supposed to do, but I did think it would be foolish to not at least make the effort.

  I looked back up to where I could sometimes see the dark line of the rural road the Dunn family had once lived on. Kendra approached me from behind and placed her head on my shoulder. The baby swatted at my hair and made a cooing noise.

  It was the first time since the bombs had fallen that I felt that everything was going to be okay.

  7

  Although we turned in early that night, I didn’t get much sleep. I kept unwinding the memories of the last year and a half in my head. I did not try to make sense of it all—that would have been a waste of time—but I did try to pinpoint the one instant where humanity had no longer dared to hope for survival.

  I find myself doing that a lot. It’s one thing to know that what you had known as the world was no longer a reality. But when you can look back and find that one spot where everything changed, it at least makes it sensible. And given the nature of our lives right now, any way to apply sense and logic to the situation provides the slightest spark of hope.

  The first thing that happened was a massive earthquake hit Madagascar, essentially destroying the entire island. The 9.5 quake also leveled a lot of land in southern Africa. The tsunami that followed less than half a day afterwards was probably the worst thing I have ever seen on the news. Entire cities were washed away. Boats from very far out at sea were pushed nearly twenty-five miles inland. When it was all said and done, estimates indicated that with the quake and the tsunami combined, more than 400,000 people lost their lives.

  The worst part came two days later when rescue crews saw the creatures for the first time.

  No one knew where the creatures came from. People appeared to be afraid to even guess, and the faintest of ideas didn’t come until just before the airwaves became a thing of the past. All we knew for sure was that they were enormous, larger than any creature ever known to mankind.

  It was speculated that the creatures came from deep within the earth and had been stirred awake by the earthquake. There was some argument among experts as to how old they might be if this was the case, but most thought they pre-dated the dinosaurs. The other theory was that the creatures were from some other dimension. It was funny to hear news reporters try to explain this theory. They usually had some representative from CERN, mainly because there was public speculation that some experiment with the Large Hadron Collider had caused it all.

  I had always personally gone with the “other dimension” theory because the creatures are just too damned unreal to have ever walked the face of this planet. If they had, there’s no way human would have ever thrived. Near the end of it all, when it was clear that these things were likely going to bring about the end of the world, the media started referring to them as beasts. I even heard one station call them Leviathans.

  The first ones that appeared in the Madagascar wreckage were roughly one hundred and twenty feet tall. They appeared to have no legs and moved with the speed and gait of a snail. Most of their bodies consisted of white bellies that looked like the underside of a snake. The bodies were adorned with an assortment of appendages that were somewhere between a tentacle and a very long and malformed arm. The heads had rarely been seen but were slightly amphibian or reptilian, with features that were unlike any animal I have ever seen. When they roared, it sounded like a large diesel engine had exploded in a very small space.

  By the time the world’s militaries tried taking action against the original eight creatures that appeared, other creatures made themselves known. In these cases, there were no quakes or natural disasters to warn of their arrival. They just showed up, seemingly out of nowhere—which is another reason I stake my claim in the “another dimension” theory.

  There was a YouTube video that showed a severe thunderstorm in Czechoslovakia that became a massive electrical storm. After the storm died down, two of the creatures appeared. The video showed them literally materializing out of nowhere, as if the storm had parted some invisible curtain for their arrival. This footage quickly spread to news platforms all around the world, and as far as I could tell, that was when humans lost hope.

  When the internet went down for good and television and radio became spotty at best, a global count of the creatures reached over eighty. They were destroying entire cities; one of the first in America to go was Miami. Then Boston, Dallas, and Chicago. They were popping up everywhere.

  The general public seemed surprised that severe military action took so long to be enforced. After the creatures demolished Paris, Moscow, and then New York, the first nuclear assault was issued. They were issued quickly and the warnings that went out to the public were brief and depressing. Very few had time to seek shelter; some of what was heard on the air basically indicated that the lives of tens of thousands had to be considered not as vital as the millions would be saved by wiping out the creatures.

  Those that survived the carnage of the creatures and the nuclear bombs were able to catch updates on hijacked AM stations, ham radio broadcasts, and a surprisingly strong network of CB radio users spread across the country.

  It’s those last broadcasts that still haunt me to this day. The military was also using them sporadically, sending personal messages to their loved ones and apologizing for having to take such drastic measures. The last radio broadcast I heard had originated from Albany, New York. In it, a deputy sergeant of the US military informed everyone that it had been estimated that roughly eighty percent of the American population had been lost or unaccounted for due to the combination of the creature attacks, nuclear strikes, fallout from the nukes, and the resulting civilian chaos. The good news, however, was that there seemed to be no further reports of the creatures. We had wiped them all out.

  The deputy sergeant then ended the broadcast with an announcement that he could not carry on knowing what had happened to the world and the part he had played. The last sound from that broadcast was the sound of a gunshot, muffled by the mouth around the barrel.

  I spent our last night in the Dunn’s former house thinking about the deputy sergeant and that figure of eighty percent. From what I had been able to tell since the last bomb dropped thirteen months ago, that remaining twenty percent had no problems with killing othe
r survivors in order to survive. I had also seen that many of them had no problems with rape or cannibalism.

  Furthermore, there weren’t that many people roaming the roads. If there was truly twenty percent of the population still out there, they were apparently holed up in bunkers rather that rummaging around the barren landscape that had been left behind. It made me think the sergeant’s estimate had been a little on the bright side.

  Eventually, I drifted off to sleep. As I did, I did my best to get better acquainted with the side of me that was excited to get on the road, to get moving towards the hope of something better. But in the stale darkness of a starless night, that sergeant’s last broadcast kept ringing out in my head and that excited part of me seemed to have stepped out for the moment.

  The last thing I heard before sleep snagged me down was the baby shifting slightly on the bed beside Kendra.

  8

  Before we headed out the next morning, I did a quick perimeter check outside of the house and along the edges of the driveway. With our newly acquired AK-47, I walked up the long driveway and to the edge of the road. The little strip of two-lane was empty and the day was deathly quiet. I looked from one end to the other and saw nothing. The trees along the sides looked menacing, like the twisted naked frames of bizarre alien architecture.

  I looped back around to ensure that there were no lurking scavengers on the interconnected series of back roads that wound out behind the Dunn’s house. Those roads were just as dead and I saw no reason to be immediately alarmed. Walking down them in the desolate quiet of the Georgia woods, it was all too easy to imagine that I was the only person on the planet. The entire hike took about an hour and forty-five minutes and it made me want to get out on the roads even more.