The Last Warm Place

by Barry Napier

  We ate a small breakfast (more oatmeal) and walked out of the Dunn’s house for the last time just shy of nine o’ clock.

  I carried the heavier bags on my back and the baby in the sling across my chest. He seemed happy enough, staring at me and then out to the driveway. He had to crane his little chubby neck to get a good glimpse either way but he didn’t seem to mind.

  As for me, it was a bit alarming to know that I had a baby strapped to my chest and an assault rifle slung over my back.

  Kendra carried the lighter bags, with our valuable odds and ends stuffed into her fanny pack. We had taken three steps up the driveway when she reached out and took my hand. Her palms were clammy and I could feel her hands shaking.

  “Thank you,” she said in a voice that verged on tears.

  “For what?”

  “Everything. Finding me, caring for me, helping us survive. I trust you. I do. And I don’t know that I can say that about anyone else I have ever known. Not really.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I only nodded.

  “I trust you,” she repeated. “And I know you’ll get us to Virginia safely. I know this is going to work. Don’t you?”

  I kept my smile thin as I nodded at her again. I didn’t want to seem too hopeful when I said, “I actually do.”

  And with that, we covered the rest of the driveway and were back on the road after six months of tentative safety.

  9

  The roads looked different once we got off of the back road that hid away the Dunn’s house. There was still an unnatural sort of heat in the pavement, something I assumed was the result of the nukes, but there was something else, too. When we had ventured across a good portion of the eastern US several months ago, the roads had seemed alive somehow. There had been the potential for recovery in an odd sort of way, their lines still mostly yellow and white, and their interconnectedness to everything absolute. They had served as a reminder when people were always in a hurry and was a paved and marked hope that some of those roads might lead back to the lives that had been taken away from us—lives of air travel and iPhones, of Netflix binging and Mexican takeout.

  But the roads no longer held these hopes now. The roads, like the world they all connected, were dead. That same slate gray sky sat above us and now that we were out in the open, I could easily imagine it disintegrating into ash and falling on us like poisonous snow.

  And what would be beyond that ruined sky?

  Perhaps the place the creatures had come from? Honestly, given the state of our current world, it wasn’t too hard to imagine.

  We made it an hour and a half before Kendra asked to stop for a moment. She took off her left shoe and rubbed at her foot. I readjusted the weight of the packs on my back and made a few goofy faces at the baby. He had been quiet for the entire trip. His eyes were wide most of the time as he took in the new surroundings. He craned his little neck upwards to take in the trees and the large expanse of unnatural sky above us.

  I tried to imagine being a baby and thinking this was what the world was supposed to look like. It depressed the hell out of me.

  We’d stopped on another two-lane, about four miles away from the house. There was nothing to see but dead trees and blacktop. Peering through the stripped trees, I could see the ruins of a mobile home further back but it certainly didn’t seem worth scavenging over for anything we might need.

  “Sorry,” Kendra said as she put her shoe back on. “I’m a little out of shape.”

  “Me too. But if we can, I’d really like to keep walking until we can get off of these back roads.”

  This, of course, contradicted what I had said the previous day. I couldn’t explain why this was important to me, but I think Kendra understood. There was something about being surrounded by nothing but dead trees that made me feel trapped and vulnerable. But more than that, we were still too close to the Dunn’s house. If we chickened out and decided that we didn’t want to go looking for the fabled Safe Zone, the house was just a few miles behind us. It was too tempting to turn back.

  We carried on, seeing nothing but blackened trees and the asphalt beneath our feet. Some of the trees seemed to have rotted, perhaps surviving the nuclear fallout initially, but then dying from whatever the blasts had left behind. It didn’t paint a pretty picture of what it might have done to the humans that survived.

  We walked for three hours straight and saw nothing along those back roads with the exception of an old stripped car. I checked it over for anything of use and found nothing. There was a lone photograph of a family sitting along the steering console. A husband, wife, two young boys and a bulldog all glared at the camera. Waves crashed in the ocean behind them.

  I got out of the car quickly, feeling as if I was visiting ghosts that didn’t want me there.

  When my watch read 2:11, the back road finally came to a marked two lane highway. At the intersection, there was a burned down convenience store on the left corner. A traffic light hung uselessly overhead, staring down with blank eyes.

  “Left or right?” Kendra asked.

  “Right.” I had memorized our route all the way into Virginia. I did not want to have to keep pulling the map out time and time again as we walked.

  We went to the right, headed northeast. Kendra was slowing a bit and the baby still rested against my chest. I had no sure way to tell, but we had likely walked thirteen miles. Knowing that there were at least four hundred more to go made me feel exhausted.

  The two-lane was in the same shape as the back road. Dead, flat, and featureless. The only difference was the depressing scenery. There were houses that had not quite been flattened by the force of a nuclear bomb that had gone off sometime in the recent past. Several picket fences had been toppled and looked like dead teeth and pieces of forgotten classroom chalk sticking out of the ground. We passed a car that had a chunk of blackened picket fence sticking out of its windshield.

  A mile or so down the two-lane, a rotted body lay in the right hand lane. It lay face down, it’s left arm outstretched. Had there been any heat from the sun in these last few months, I assumed the state of the body would have been much worse. The stench was still pretty bad, though; we walked to the other lane, against the white strip on the side, to avoid it.

  Shortly before my watch read 5:30, the baby woke up whimpering. Before he had time to get into his full-on “feed me” wails, we stopped, unlatched him from the sling, and fed him. Kendra and I ate lightly on stale crackers and dry cereal. The baby breastfed until he was content and then wanted to play. Kendra and I washed dinner down with meager portions of the water I carried in four twenty ounce bottles in one of my packs.

  That was actually the one thing that terrified me about being on the road again. Water would be scarce and we had left behind what seemed like an endless supply at the Dunn’s house. It had a rusty taste and was slightly brown about half of the time, but beggars can’t be choosers. We’d been running through it a filter we found in a neighboring house and thought it had helped, it was still like drinking a liquified pipe.

  We sat on the edge of the road, snacking and playing with the baby. One of Kendra’s requests was that we try to make this experience as normal for the baby as we could. He seemed excited to be out, to be experiencing new things. He obviously knew something was going on, but he showed no signs of fear or anxiousness...especially not when we were playing with him.

  When we got back to our feet (and the baby back in his sling), I knew that we only had another two hours before it would be dark enough to hinder our walking. And here we were, still without any sort of covering except for the sheet and the blanket that were folded tightly inside one of Kendra’s bags.

  I felt a creeping fear in that moment but I was able to push it away. There was something about being in that great wide open space, away from the Dunn house and those black trees that resembles prison bars. We were in the middle of some town that I didn’t know the name of. I didn’t care what the name of it was. Our first planned
stop would be in Monroe, a small town (but bigger than this one) where I hoped we might be able to start looking for a vehicle of some kind.

  We meandered outside of the little town and found ourselves on a straight two-lane road that ran through more blackened trees. I kept my eyes peeled for any sort of culverts or drainage pipes along the edge of the road, hoping to find some sort of shelter for the night.

  Maybe it was beginner’s luck or God feeling that he owed us for our resilience but just as real darkness began to fall, I caught sight of a house sitting just off of the road. It was a simple white house that was hidden relatively well in the trees. It was one of those properties that would have been absolutely drowned out by the golds and browns of fallen leaves from the surrounding trees in autumn. The driveway was round and empty. From where we stood, there seemed to be no real damage to its structure aside from the collapse carport.

  “Might as well give it a try,” Kendra said. She’d noticed that I had slowed and was eyeing the place.

  We walked down the short driveway towards the house. I handed Kendra the baby and walked slowly inside to check the place out before we decided to call it home for the night. A quick sweep found nothing more than the smell of rotten food coming from the fridge in the kitchen. I saw no dead bodies, nor any sign of where other passersby had used the place for lodging.

  We settled down for the night in the living room. We had no candles and only a few batteries for the single flashlight we had packed. So we sat in the darkness of the living room with aches in our feet and hope in our hearts.

  The world was dead quiet all around us. I rubbed Kendra’s feet as she fed the baby.

  In the dark, I looked to my watch and saw that it was shortly after nine o’ clock. The baby was asleep on one of the blankets on the floor. I lay next to him as Kendra took the couch. I opened my mouth to ask Kendra if she still thought this was a good idea but sleep stole the words away before I could voice them.

  10

  The baby woke us up shortly after five in the morning. Kendra fed him a small breakfast of peaches and crushed up dried cereal before taking him to her breast. I knew she had concerns about her milk running low and I tried not to broach the topic unless she mentioned it first. It didn’t seem to me like anything a man should be talking about unless it was first brought up by a woman.

  As the baby ate, I rummaged through the house for anything of use. I found two individual packages of Saltines in the kitchen. I checked them over for mold and any sort of insects but found none. I tested one and found it very stale, but passable. Besides, twenty crackers was a pretty big score for so early in the day.

  Everything else in the kitchen was either spoiled or had gone way past its expiration date, but I took a can of chicken broth that was only four months gone. I found batteries in a junk drawer, but they were C and we needed AA.

  I was looking through the bedroom closet when I heard the noise. It was coming from a great distance away, but it was recognizable: an engine.

  And it was getting closer.

  I ran into the living room where Kendra was wiping the baby down with a cloth. She had heard the engine noise, too. She was looking towards the single window in the living room, her eyes wide. I knew that we were both thinking the same thing.

  If that vehicle belongs to someone looking for supplies, they’ll stop by this house if they see it.

  “Stay down,” I told her and went to the window.

  I could see the road clearly from the window. It sat less than fifty yards from the house in a slight bottom that was partially hidden by the trees. As I looked out, the engine grew louder. After a while, I could see the glow of headlights cutting through the lightless dawn. I could tell by their approach that the vehicle was moving fast. I thought the likelihood of them stopping at the house was very small due to their speed.

  Seconds later, a beat up 80s model pickup truck went roaring by. It did not slow as it passed. Still, its presence meant that there could be people in the area. And we had learned a long time ago that you could not trust anyone anymore.

  With that slight scare in us, we packed up. I added the crackers and broth to our bags as well as one more blanket I found in the top of one of the bedroom closets. We waited for some semblance of sunlight and then headed back out onto the road.

  11

  Shortly after eleven o’ clock, we passed a sign that read: Welcome to Monroe. On the other side of the sign sat a town that looked to have been mostly spared by nuclear fallout, but had been victimized by arson. It made me think of the scene in New York where I had watched Ma die in the chaos of one of the riots.

  That seemed like a lifetime ago, watching Ma fall to the street. Countless people had trampled her before the army truck had come through. I had watched the truck plow through numerous participants of the riot and it didn’t even dawn on me that they wouldn’t see Ma until the front wheels caught her.

  I shook the memory away as Kendra and I walked into Monroe. I held the rifle out in front of me, ready to fire if needed. Kendra was wearing the baby sling and softly held his head to her chest as we walked on. She carried our pistol in her free hand but I could tell from the way she held it that she was absolutely did not want to use it.

  Monroe was quiet. The air smelled faintly of smoke and an earthy smell that reminded me of thick red mud. I started looking for a car dealership, hoping we’d catch a break that was even bigger than finding that house at the last minute the previous night.

  As it turned out, we didn’t need to locate a dealership. Two blocks into Monroe, we came by an abandoned car. It was a 2007 Ford Eclipse, its headlights busted and its windshield cracked. I looked inside and, amazingly, saw keys hanging from the ignition. There was also blood in the floorboard, on the dash, and splattered in the driver’s seat.

  From the looks of it, the owner had been injured and abandoned the car in a hurry.

  “It’s got to be out of gas, right?” Kendra asked. “We can’t be that lucky, can we?”

  “Let’s see,” I said, opening the driver’s side door.

  When I opened the door, glanced up at the little dome light, sure the battery was dead and it would not come on. But it shone down its weak light as if everything was completely normal outside.

  The blood was dried on the driver’s seat and the steering column. It was also splattered along the panel that held the gas gauge. It struck me as odd that there was this much dried blood in the car, but no damage to the windows. There was no evidence of a body. Something bad must have happened to the driver and they apparently had not been able to make it any farther than Monroe.

  The fact that there was no body in the car made me certain there would be no gas in its tank. Still, I reached over and tried the keys. There was a hiccup in the engine before it finally caught. The engine sounded like it might be straining a bit. I watched the gas gauge and was surprised when I saw that it hovered just over the E.

  “Not much, but there’s some,” I said. The fact that the low gas indicator light wasn’t on yet was enough for me. We had enough gas for at least thirty miles; depending on the car’s mileage and our luck, maybe as much as sixty or so.

  I popped the trunk and found the spare tire, a few empty bottles of engine oil, and a dried up roll of Armor All wipes. I took the wipes and did my best to clean up the blood; being that the wipes were dried out, I wasn’t very successful. Still, it was enough to not gross me out when I sat in the driver’s seat.

  It felt odd to be behind the wheel of a car again but I wasted no time in shifting into drive once we tossed our things into the back seat. I drove through the main thoroughfare of Monroe, watching the husks of businesses and houses as they passed. Monroe was a featureless town. Even before the world went to hell, it had probably been dead most of the time.

  We saw four bodies on one of the streets, lying side by side. Two of them had their hands interlocked. They all looked to have been shot. We passed a McDonald’s, a Subway, a Dollar General and a superm
arket that had burned to the ground. Less than two miles later, we were out of the town’s main hub. The road along the outskirts of the town was clear. There were no wrecked cars or debris in the road, although we did see the broken shapes of two more bodies lying in a small front yard of a quaint white house.

  Then, just before we left the town, we passed a strange banner on the side of the road. Someone had tied it between two trees along the ditch. The banner read: NOW LEAVING MONROE. NEVER COME BACK. A man, presumably the artist, sat propped against one of the trees with a rifle in his lap and most of the side of his head missing.

  It unnerved me to realize just how much the sight didn’t bother me.

  A few minutes later, Kendra surprised me when she reached out and rubbed my arm. When I looked to her, she was smiling. I hadn’t seen her smile like that in a very long time. The baby was asleep against her chest, cradled in the sling with a faint smile of his own on his slumbering face.

  “What?” I asked her.

  There was something in her eyes that excited me. It was something hopeful and almost joyous. When she smiled at me again, her eyes narrowed and the smile became something else entirely. I thought it might be what her face would look like in those weighty and anxious few seconds before a first kiss. Realizing where my head was going, I forced it to take a detour.

  “If it’s going to be this easy,” she said, “I wish we would have left a long time ago.”

  I wanted to tell her that it was far too soon to be making such assumptions. I was sure we would run out of gas within an hour or so. It would save us some walking, sure, but that was about it. It might shave two days off of our total trip time.

  I said nothing, though. I simply returned her smile, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with her.

  We fell into a comfortable silence. It was so quiet that I could hear the baby’s little breaths against Kendra’s chest.