The Last Warm Place

by Barry Napier

  Our last discovery was a small janitor’s closet that was tucked away beside the check-in counter in the lobby. It was locked but we found the key easily after trying a few we found behind the counter. The inside of the closet was neatly stocked and I saw the hand wipes right away. I swiped them up and was already imagining how it would feel to wipe myself down with them. The discovery also meant we wouldn’t have to be creative or stingy with how we wiped the baby’s bottom from now on.

  As we gathered our findings, Kendra collected the few sporadic hand towels we came across. The towels that so many overnight guests often took for granted and asked for multiples of on occasion were like gold to us. Each time Kendra found one, she’d speak cheerfully to the baby and say, “A clean booty for my baby.” The baby found this hysterical and laughed heartily. With the two in our room and the three she found behind the check-in counter, we had enough diapers to maybe make it to the Blue Ridge Safe Zone without making the baby go without any cover below his waist.

  We went back to the room where Kendra promptly changed the baby’s makeshift diaper for another makeshift diaper. I took the bath towel from the rack in the bathroom and tore it into four pieces, giving us four more diapers.

  The whole process made me feel domesticated beyond belief. It made me wonder again what a normal life might have been like with Kendra and the baby. And how much easier would it be to put actual diapers on him? I thought of what his nursery would look like as moonlight came through the windows as I set him in his crib. What would Kendra look like, standing in the doorway, propped against the frame, watching me as I did it?

  Lost in these thoughts, I smiled. It felt good on my face. Kendra saw me smiling and she smiled, too. We sat together on one of the beds, enjoying the security and silence. The baby lay on the bed between us, drifting off for his afternoon nap.

  Kendra and I went into the bathroom and used the baby wipes. While I had seen her topless on multiple occasions as she fed the baby, she still tried to keep some semblance of modesty as she wiped herself down. She asked me to get her back and I did so gratefully, as she crossed her arms over her chest. I wiped her sweaty skin slowly, my fingers drifting along the hollow in the center of her back.

  As I wiped my face and then my arms, I was amazed at how much of a difference it made. I smelled the lotion of the wipes and even that small sensation was enough to temporarily forget what the world was like outside. Kendra wiped down my back and even helped with my feet. We giggled at one another, caught up in this brief moment of simple luxury. I desperately hoped it would turn into something—even if just another speedy kiss—but there was nothing. But I honestly didn’t care. To be laughing with her and sharing the moment was enough.

  We walked back out into the room where the baby was sleeping. We started sorting through our things, the distraction of becoming somewhat clean now slowly fading.

  “I was wondering,” Kendra said. “Is it morbid that I want to look through Vance’s computer?”

  I looked to the case which I had propped against the wall with our other bags. “No. I want to, too. I’m just not sure I want to see the videos of the others that they sent into the nests.”

  “I want to see it all.” She spoke as if she was giving confession to a priest. “If Riley was right and there are answers about the monsters and what happened to the world, I want to see it.”

  “Now?”

  “It’s as good a time as any. I have a feeling that when we get to the Safe Zone, the computer might get confiscated. I’d like to get all the information I can.”

  She had a good point. I took the laptop from the case and noticed right away that there were two pouches along its interior sides that held square devices that I assumed were some sort of batteries. I checked the bag but found no form of electronic cords or wall plugs. All I found was the piece of paper Riley had indicated with all of Vance’s passcodes on it.

  I opened the computer’s top shell and pushed the power button. The screen flickered for a moment and then a blue progress bar popped up in the left-hand corner. I had never seen a computer boot up as fast as this one. The home screen and a pop-up asking for a password were up immediately.

  I typed in the passcode that was labeled login 1 on Riley’s list. The computer accepted it and Vance’s desktop icons popped up. There were only four and I didn’t recognize any of them. In the bottom corner I saw a few numbers that, for some reason, made me go cold.

  It was the date. If the computer was accurate, it was October 7th. I had lost track of the date just before moving into the Dunns’ house. To have some sort of record of things beyond my questionable watch made me feel empty in a way I can’t properly explain.

  I shook it off as best as I could by distracting myself. “You were a receptionist, right?” I asked Kendra.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re probably better with computers than I am. Why don’t you drive?”

  She took over and found Vance’s video archives within a few clicks. It turned out that Vance was as meticulous as he was crazy. He had the videos archived neatly and in order of their dates. He had them filed into two folders, one titled MILITARY and the other NEST EXP.

  Kendra opened the MILITARY folder first and we found seven video files. She opened the first one and when the video screen popped up and began playing military surveillance footage, it felt like we were peeking into a different world. Aside from the split screens on the very same laptop, it had been far too long since I’d watched anything on a screen.

  On the video, we were given a bird’s eye view of a large city. There was a droning sound in the background of the footage that sounded like a motor of some kind. I assumed the footage was being captured from a helicopter or plane. As my eyes focused on the angle and grainy colors, Kendra gasped and leaned back away from the computer like it had bitten her. Before I could ask her what was wrong, I saw it, too.

  A large shape was taking up most of the right side of the screen. It took a while before I recognized it as being similar to the large creatures I had seen twice on the news before all broadcasts had been terminated. The shape had made no sense to me at first because its height went above the source of the camera. I could see nothing beyond what I assumed was its torso.

  The creature’s hide was as I remembered it from the news reels. It was actually fairly similar to the flesh that had been on the tentacles that had come shooting out of the nest. If it had legs or appendages of any kind, I could not see them. As it came closer into view, it started to lose definition because it basically blocked out the camera.

  I tried to get an idea of the where this was being filmed, but it was impossible. On the ground, around the perimeter of the creature’s base, I saw tiny flickers that I assumed were explosions as the city went to hell beneath it.

  A male voice hissed in, clearly coming through some sort of radio communications. “Effort One-Seven-Six failed,” it said. “Ineffective.”

  “Roger,” came the reply. “Be advised, Fire will be deployed in thirty seconds. Retreat.”

  With that, the camera angle shifted as the plane took off at a greater speed and climbed higher. Even then, we could not see the top of the creature. I saw what I assumed was a bulged-out chest of some kind, but it was impossible to tell.

  The screen was a blur of motion as grays, blacks, and a fading blue swept by. We watched on waiting to see if we would witness what had been meant by “fire will be deployed.” We saw it thirty seconds later. A soft tinged streak of white crept in on the right side of the screen, accompanied by what sounded like a hollow drum being banged through the laptop’s speakers.

  The white spread, the camera shook a bit, and the plane moved on. The grays and blacks of a night sky were all that was left to see.

  “A nuke?” Kendra said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  She shut that video down and opened another. They were really all the same. Some showed the destruction prior to the blast while two others showed
the blasts occur; on these, the footage was promptly terminated.

  Perhaps the most terrifying video was one that showed one of the monsters in the ocean. Like all of the others, it was shot from overhead but the depth of the ocean allowed for a better view of the creature. We could actually see the top of its head in this one. The head of the creature curved outward in the same way an elephant’s trunk began to sprout out from the rest of its face. There were hook-like shapes all over its head, overlapping and often merging into a single shape. It reminded me of depictions of a triceratops from my childhood dinosaur book, only with about a hundred of those protruding horns.

  In terms of eyes or a mouth, the angle of the camera kept them hidden. Still, seeing more of a defined shape to it was terrifying. I waited for further action—probably a nuke being dropped—but Kendra shut the video down before it happened.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t take it. I was wrong. I don’t want to see it.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  Neither of us moved for several moments. Kendra finally summoned up her nerves and clicked on the folder labeled NEST EXP. There were five files in the folder. One of them had been created three days ago. This was the footage my little headpiece had filmed during the time I was in the nest.

  I pointed to it and said, “Let’s see it.”

  But I wasn’t sure I really wanted to.

  “This...this isn’t a file. It’s some sort of link, I think. This is a thumbnail for a program icon.”

  “A link to what?”

  She shrugged and clicked it. We were greeted with another log-in prompt. We found the appropriate password on the sheet and Kendra logged us in. As soon as she pressed enter, a box popped up and read: Connecting...

  “Wait...this is connecting us to something,” she said. “Some program.”

  “But isn’t it three days old?”

  A knowing sort of look popped up inside her eyes and it haunted me for a moment. “Yeah, but it’s connecting. Whatever it’s connecting to started three days ago. Like a livestream, I think.”

  “But there’s no internet...”

  “Might not need it with this sort of military technology,” she pointed out. I didn’t know how true this was, so I said nothing.

  The box that said connecting went away, the screen flickered for a moment, and I saw a familiar split-screen setup.

  The screen was still split down the middle by a single white bar, as it had been when Vance had showed it to me in the back of the dump truck. On the left side, a small indicator text read: NO SIGNAL. The entire left side of the screen was a black sheet. On the right, there was an image of a dark concrete wall. I stared at it for a while, trying to make sense of it. As I studied it, the picture began to move.

  The concrete wall became a street that was shrouded in pitch black. A few jostling motions indicated that the camera was moving. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing and when I did, my heart felt like it was melting.

  “My God. It can’t be, right?

  “Seems like it,” she said. “It’s Mike. This is him right now. He’s still alive...and still in the nest.”

  30

  We watched Mike’s movement for a good fifteen minutes. I kept looking into the darkness on the screen, looking for more of those shapes that had eluded me while I had been inside. I stared at that on-screen darkness until I could nearly differentiate each pixel. I tried to tell myself that this was simply the footage that had continued to record from Mike’s headset after I had run away.

  But Kendra seemed positive that we were watching things occur in real time. The fact that I’d seen her log-in and then a program work to connect made me hesitantly agree with her.

  On occasion, Mike would speak to himself. Most of it was rambling, but on one occasion, he clearly said, “Ain’t no thing, sweetie. Just another day at the beach. Pass me another beer, would you?”

  “This is too sad,” Kendra said after a while. “He’s gone crazy. I feel like a voyeur watching this.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Kendra stopped the video and closed the laptop.

  “What do you think it means?” she asked. “Why is Mike still alive? Why did he not die? Didn’t Vance and his goons say that Mike had survived a nest before this one?”

  “Yeah. Mike said it, too. I wonder if maybe Vance and his boys had it wrong. Maybe going into the nest doesn’t necessarily mean that you die. We know they don’t understand what happens in there. They told us that themselves.”

  I again thought about how those tentacles had seemed not to care that I existed until I had a gun in my hand and had intended to fire. Yet, on the heels of that, it was impossible for me to believe that the nests were inherently harmless. How could they be if it felt like death to step inside of them?

  But even then, I thought of Mike telling me the nests sometimes showed you things you wanted to see—how he had described them as hiding the last warm place in the world.

  “When you were in there, did you feel like your life was in danger?” Kendra asked.

  “Absolutely. Stepping into the thing felt like death. Whether or not you die inside, it’s not something you want to go venturing into.”

  “Do you...do you think dying in there would be painful?”

  It was an odd question and took me by surprise. “I don’t know,” I answered finally. But in my mind I saw Watts smeared on the road and Greenbriar trapped between the pavement and the side of the fire truck as it was dragged into the nest.

  “And I don’t care,” I added. “For right now, all I’m thinking about are the Blue Ridge Mountains and that gate we saw in the picture.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

  I have no idea why, but I didn’t really believe her.

  And that was somehow scarier than anything we’d seen on Vance’s computer.

  31

  We rested for nearly an entire day. I think I would have slept through the whole day if the baby hadn’t woken us up off and on. He was being quite fussy today, despite the comfort we’d been able to provide it in the form of an actual mattress. Kendra fed him and seemed pleased that her body was balancing itself out again. Still, I noticed that she looked worried as she fed him. I nearly asked her what was wrong but thought better of it. Despite all we’d been through, I still felt that talking about breast feeding and milk flow was a little too personal.

  When she and the baby were done, we made no rush to leave. In fact, unable to resist temptation, we decided to check the other rooms in the hotel for supplies. We gathered up all of the keys from behind the check-in counter and went from room to room, hoping to hit the jackpot.

  The whole process was eerie. Opening each new room was like opening the door into an empty life. I thought of all of the people that had slept in these rooms, all of the lives that had passed through here, and now there was nothing. Just stillness, silence, and the perfectly square shapes of everything, right down to the generic bars of soap on the sinks.

  We gathered up a good number of towels for making more diapers and two blankets, but there wasn’t much of anything else. Even the rooms that seemed to have been occupied had either been thoroughly packed up just before the world had come screeching to a halt, or they had already been ransacked at some earlier date.

  On the second floor, we opened one door and saw two people lying in bed. I jumped back right away, nearly shouting. But we realized at once that the bodies were dead. It was an elderly couple—husband and wife if the rings on their hands were any indication. The man slept in a pair of sweatpants and a tank top; the woman was in a cotton nightgown. They were laying face to face, their noses almost touching. The man’s arm was at his wife’s waist.

  On the bedside table, two bottles of pills had been opened. Only a few pills remained. A glass sat beside the bottles, holding just a bit of water.

  I wondered how it had happened, given that the front doors had been locked. I supposed there were any number of scenarios,
but I dashed all of them. It was grim, sure, but there was something beautiful about it, too. I didn’t want to spoil it with my own rampant thoughts.

  Kendra started crying and left the room quickly. The scene almost brought me to tears, too. I suddenly felt miserable for having walked in on their final resting place. I said a quick prayer for them as I backed out of the room, shutting the door softly behind me.

  32

  We waited until the following morning to set out again. Even the baby seemed well rested when we left the hotel. He was speaking to us in his gibberish and although it made me nervous that we might be attracting attention if anyone was nearby, I found it hard to shush him. We put one of the pacifiers in his mouth on a few occasions, but he promptly spit it out.

  We checked the streets of Rudduck for a car. We found one easily—a red Saturn that had been parked on the street just two blocks away from the hotel. Its gas gauge was sitting just below a quarter of a tank. It took a few attempts to get it to crank and when it did, I drove to a gas station to check the pumps, hoping for a miracle. I was not too disappointed when the pumps were non-responsive.

  We’d gotten a bed and another car in the past twenty-four hours so I didn’t really feel I had the right to complain. I guess gasoline on top of all of that was just too much to hope for.

  We decided that we would head back just a bit, into the outskirts of Greensboro to see if it had been as miraculously untouched as Rudduck. I got back on the interstate and took the first Greensboro exit. Within two miles, we could tell that we were going to be out of luck in this regard, too. Cars were scattered in the roads as we reached the outskirts of the city. We saw the shapes of countless bodies on the sides of the road, and buildings burned to the ground.

  “Let’s just forget it,” Kendra said. “Let’s just go. No more stops unless we have to.”

  I did as she asked, turning back around and looking for the exit back out onto the interstate. Hearing her state such a command made me think about how close we actually were to pulling this off. Fretting over it at the Dunns’ kitchen table seemed like ages ago.