by Barry Napier
We drove for forty minutes. I kept the Saturn pegged at seventy. I had to slow down on two occasions to get around car accidents. One of them had been particularly bad, having involved at least nine cars. As we passed, I could see the shapes of the drivers and passengers, one of whom hung halfway out of the shattered windshield. It was like looking at an exhibit at some ghastly wax museum.
I was looking back into the rearview at the crumpled and tangled shape of the large accident when Kendra screamed.
“Eric!”
I turned my head around and saw it instantly. I hit the brakes as my heart leaped up into my throat.
In front of us, the sky and ground had darkened considerably. We had not seen it one hundred yards back but there it was now, right in front of us.
A nest.
“Was it there the whole time?” I asked.
“I guess so. The darkness of it must just be gradual...”
“Or this is part of how they work,” I suggested. “They appear out of nowhere to lure people in.”
It was far too easy to recall the tentacles coming out of the one outside of Athens, so I wasted no time in shifting the car into reverse. When we were a good distance away from it (almost all the way back to the nine-car collision), I stopped the car.
“What are you doing?” Kendra asked.
“One second.”
I opened the door and stepped out. I stared straight ahead at the nest, trying to peer in through its pitch black shifting boundaries, but saw nothing. Just darkness and the soft shape of cloudlike structure. But there was that noise again, like distant thunder coming from inside of it. It could have been my imagination, but I thought I could feel it reverberating in the road and through my feet.
The scariest thing of all was that I felt myself wanting to go into it. I wanted to step inside and see what was in there.
I thought of the video we had seen, with Mike still alive and moving around. If death wasn’t a certainty when walking into a nest, why not explore it? After everything we had been through, maybe Vance had been on to something. Maybe there were more answers waiting inside than all of humankind had every dared to dream.
I then remembered the brief time I had spent inside the one outside of Athens. My legs buckled a bit and I leaned against the car. Still, I stared into it. It covered the width of all four lanes of the road and much of the land beyond the north-bound lanes. I looked in that direction and could see no end to it. Glancing out towards the east, I could see the darkness of it dwindling away, its borders soft and hazy like drifting smoke. But still so very dark.
I started to calculate a way around it, a way to backtrack and get off at an earlier exit. We’d have to find a new route to our destination and that meant we’d likely run out of gas before getting to the Safe Zone.
Then I heard Kendra’s door open and those thoughts dropped like stones on a glass floor.
Kendra stepped out of the car with the baby cradled to her chest. Even the baby was looking to the nest with a sick sort of fascination. He reached a hand out and flexed his little fingers, as if trying to clutch that black cloud-like texture that sat before us like a storm cloud that had sunk to the earth.
“What are you doing?” I asked her over the top of the car.
“Nothing. I just wanted to see.”
I could still feel the pull of the nest luring me in, inviting me inside with some deranged sort of gravity. Not too long ago—about three years before the creatures appeared—I had given up drinking for various reasons. On occasion, I’d pass a bar or glance at a drink menu in a restaurant and badly want a drink. That sensation was incredibly similar to what I felt as I looked into the nest.
I tore my eyes away, knowing that if I stared too long, I’d walk right up to it and walk inside. That is, if something didn’t come out and grab me first.
“Get back in the car, Kendra.”
The world was quiet except for the distant rumbling within the nest. Was it just my imagination, or was that noise getting closer? I watched the amorphous sheets of black waver and swirl slowly like a gigantic cancerous finger inviting us in.
“Kendra...”
“What....what is that?”
“What is what?” I snapped.
“That feeling. I’m terrified looking at it, absolutely horrified. But...I want to go in there.”
“Yeah. I feel it too. So get back in the car.”
She did, but slowly. Her eyes never left the nest, nor did the baby’s. When Kendra closed the door she did it softy, resentfully.
I followed her example and got in the car. I turned it around, found a median, and looked for an exit that would take us around the nest.
I’d like to say I never looked back, but I did. Several times.
33
After checking the map, we found a round-about way that would put us back on track towards the central part of Virginia. The route took us forty miles out of our way and I could only hope it was enough room to avoid the nest. We actually passed into Virginia twenty miles after taking our exit and when we did, I felt both relieved and anxious.
Yes, we were close to safety.
Yes, we were so very close to our destination.
But things would be different when we got there and I knew deep in my heart that whatever weird little dreams I had for Kendra and I becoming something would be less of a reality when we arrived at the Safe Zone. I didn’t know why this might be, but it was something I felt with certainty.
We got on a two-lane that would connect us to a highway providing a nearly straight shot to the Blue Ridge Parkway. I kept my eyes peeled the whole time for any signs of darkness, making sure we had made it safely around the nest. I even looked into the rearview when we were back on the highway, but saw no traces of it.
I then wondered if the space inside the nests was different somehow. From what I had seen, it was nothing more than a sheet of darkness that covered the area beneath it. But what if they changed the parts of the world they touched? It was an odd thought, and not something I would usually ponder. But it almost made sense, given how peculiar and unnatural the nests were. When you stayed inside a nest, was the space it covered the only space inside or did its interior eventually give way to some darker place that we, as humans, couldn’t fathom? Maybe the nests were even literal doorways into whatever world the creatures had come from.
I didn’t know why, but I speculated that thinking about such things might be dangerous. I tried to flush the thoughts from my mind. It was easier to do when I realized that the gas needle was covering the top portion of the E.
The gas warning light came on five minutes after we got on the highway again. As we started passing signs for Danville, I estimated that we had maybe twenty or thirty miles left in the car.
I didn’t dwell on this, though; instead, I started to take in the decimated land. It seemed to get worse with every mile we put behind us. In many areas, the road was nearly impassable. The pavement was gouged and cars—stranded and simply destroyed—acted as barricades. On two occasions within a single mile stretch, I had to squeeze in so tight between the wreckage that the sides of the little Saturn screeched against the wrecked cars we were passing, knocking off the driver’s side rearview mirror.
I nearly asked Kendra if she thought we were passing through one of the areas that got nuked. For the most part, the places that got that treatment were the locations where the monsters had popped up. I couldn’t remember one being in Virginia anywhere, but there was no way of telling what happened to the world after we lost all broadcast communications. I also considered that the roads leading to the Safe Zones had likely seen a lot of violent action. It certainly seemed that way and we were still about ninety miles away.
I didn’t ask Kendra any of this, though. She was staring out of the windows with sad fascination. The baby looked out too, banging on the passenger window on occasion. I wondered what he must think of this dreary world into which he had been born. I also thought (and not for the
first time) how Kendra would handle the heavy conversations with her son later on. What would she say when he asked about his father? How would she answer him when he asked how the world had come to be in this state?
It made me sad to think about those things. So instead, I drove on, swerving around destroyed areas of the road, fallen signs, and wrecked cars.
34
The road ran out before our gas did. The little Saturn was surely running on nothing but fumes when I was forced to bring the car to a stop. In front of us, the entire road looked as if it had been plowed up by an enormous piece of machinery. Chunks of tar jutted up from the ground in jigsaw fragments, barely hiding the crater-like hole in front of us. Huge mounds of rock and dirt had been scattered everywhere along with the road. A few cars had been tossed around, too; one lay on its hood, the entire back end torn away and hanging on by only the axels.
I stepped out of our car and tried to think of what might have caused this. My first thought was a bomb, but I didn’t see any charred ground anywhere near the site. Maybe one of the monsters had come through here. Or maybe something I couldn’t even begin to fathom had occurred.
The damaged section of road went beyond just the highway. To the right, an entire hillside had been leveled. Trees were pushed down, bent and cracked at their bases. The tangle of downed trees looked like some very elaborate abstract art, all fragmented wood and fallen branches. They all leaned away from the road, as if daring passersby to proceed.
There was no way to get around the scene. I was about to tell Kendra the news but she was already on my wavelength. She was positioning the baby’s sling around her chest and sitting the baby inside of it.
Maybe it was because we were so close to the Safe Zone or maybe we were just sick and tired of moving and wanted this whole ordeal over with, but we unloaded the Saturn quickly. We worked efficiently, not even speaking. The silence was odd, though. In fact, things had been mostly quiet between us ever since we’d seen that nest a few hours ago.
We were walking around the massive hole in the road within three minutes. My feet seemed to welcome the motion. It was like my feet and my brain were working closer together than ever. Get this over with, they both thought. Don’t fret about running out of gas. You’ve come this far. Let’s get there and have this all done.
We had to venture off of the road to the left, stepping into what I assume had once been an open field. The ground was in the same damaged shape as the road; in some instances, we had to climb over fallen trees and piles of debris. On more than one occasion, I saw human remains in the litter of twisted car parts, tree fragments, and chunks of the highway. I tried to steer Kendra away from the worst of it as she followed me, but it was impossible to avoid it entirely.
Once around the destroyed section of road, we got back on the highway. Everything ahead of us was featureless. Even the green highway signs that had fallen from their steel supports—one telling us that the exit for Danville was half a mile away—seemed gray. Whatever had happened here had sucked the life and color out of everything.
We walked, sometimes stopping for the baby to eat, sometimes talking about our lives before all of this. I talked about Ma and shared a story about how she had won numerous awards within upstate New York for her killer strawberry jam. Kendra, in turn, told me about the time her brother had fallen out of a pine tree at the age of eleven, trying to save a neighbor’s cat. Her brother had broken his leg and fractured his wrist in the fall. The neighbor had given him one hundred dollars for his troubles.
It was the first time I had ever heard her mention that she even had a brother. It made me realize that there was so much about this amazing woman that I didn’t know.
And it also reminded us of why we were seeking shelter at the Safe Zone. We’d had lives before this—lives that had, for the most part, made sense. The idea that that same sort of life might be possible again was too much to ignore.
I had realized even in the Dunn’s house that with each passing day, we spoke about our former lives less and less. It was almost as if we were trying to forget they ever happened. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because those reminders were too sad to think about. They were pictures on a TV that we could barely remember watching. And the lives on that screen had been good. It was best to forget those images, as they did nothing but remind us of everything we had lost.
It was better to focus on what we had. And although that wasn’t much, it began to seem like more and more with every day we survived.
But now, so close to the Safe Zone, it felt natural and almost encouraging to think about such things.
The first day of walking went by quickly. We were forced to walk through a good portion of the night before we found any sort of shelter. It came in the form of an eighteen wheeler that had crashed into a culvert. I had to remove the driver—long ago dead—so we could climb in. As I slept jammed into the rear of the cab that night, I dreamed that the driver had been headed to Athens, Georgia with a truckload of diapers. In my dream, his corpse drove the truck and every few minutes he’d get blasts of people speaking through his CB. One of them was Crazy Mike and he was saying “Ain’t no thing, sweetie. Just another day at the beach. Pass me another beer, would you?”
When I was stirred awake by a hand on my shoulder, I was sure it was the driver, asking what I was doing in his truck. But it was only Kendra. She looked worried about something. I could tell through the cracked windshield that it was morning.
“Sorry to wake you,” Kendra said.
“It’s okay. What’s up?”
“You were mumbling in your sleep. You seemed really scared. Should I not have woken you?
“No, no, it’s fine.”
I couldn’t help but wonder if it was her way of letting me know the baby had woken her up and now she was anxious to get going. Now that we were so close, every wasted minute seemed to matter more.
By the time we were out of the truck and had eaten a small breakfast and drank down some water, I realized that I was more refreshed than I had been in several weeks.
We started walking again, following signs for Lynchburg and Roanoke. I wasn’t sure where the Safe Zone was, but if it was somewhere near the Blue Ridge parkway, the map suggested that it was between those two cities somewhere.
We walked all day, stopping only for a bathroom break, and an early dinner. The baby napped in the carrier and seemed to continue to struggle with his upset stomach. This also required a few quick stops, but I felt covered a lot of ground by the time we called it a day when we set up camp inside of a burned out McDonalds.
On the second day of walking, we heard an engine running somewhere close by. We ran into the forests but never saw a vehicle go by. We waited for nearly twenty minutes until the sound disappeared and we continued on our way.
Less than an hour later, we heard gunshots in the distance. These were rapid fire rounds, something like Vance would have possessed. With no forest to either side of the road, we simply stood on the pavement, listening to the sounds of those far away pop-pop-popping noises. The gunfire went on for about five minutes and was followed by a small explosion, more gunfire, and then deafening silence. Although the noise had been a considerable distance away, it was a stark reminder that no matter how empty the road made the world appear to be, we were far from alone.
As the day wound on, the baby started to squirm and cry more than usual. Whatever was wring with his stomach seemed to be getting worse and he had a very bad case if diaper rash. Because diaper rash scream was simply not something we had in our arsenal, Kendra did her best to relive his pain by using a bit of petroleum jelly. I felt a strange sting of regret as I looked at the little container; it was one of the items we’d found in the Dunns’ house when we first arrived. I hated to admit that I missed that place fiercely as I did my best to console the baby.
We were sitting on the edge of the road as he cried. Hearing him cry made Kendra cry. And it made me feel helpless. I honestly just hoped he would cry
himself to sleep and his wails weren’t loud enough to attract the attention of the people that had been shooting earlier.
I distracted him, letting him play with a nearly empty bottle of our water. That seemed to do the trick, and when he had settled down a bit, we started walking again. A few yards ahead of us, a road sign told us that Lynchburg was sixty-eight miles away.
“Dumb question,” I said. “Is the rash something that will clear up on its own?”
“No clue. I doubt it. I’m more worried about what’s making his stomach upset. I wonder if its something I’ve eaten...something in my milk.”
“How are you?” I asked her. “Physically, I mean. How are you?”
“Okay.”
“Do you think you can pull two more days of walking for twelve hours? That should get us to the Safe Zone. And I think the baby could make it that long. Just two or three days. Is that doable?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But in the meantime, I’ll be praying for a car.”
We ate a light dinner of pinto beans, chicken broth and crackers, and walked on. Just before it got too dark to see, we came to a grouping of storage sheds on the left side of the road. The sign at the center’s entrance was partially demolished but I thought it read Carver’s Storage. Most of the sheds were either totally destroyed or had collapsed. But there were five units towards the rear of the lot that were untouched.
We approached these and found them locked. I covered the lock with one of our makeshift diapers to mute the noise, and attacked it with the butt of the rifle. Two whacks separated the lock from the shed’s sliding door. I took our flashlight and looked around as we opened the door.
The shed was mostly empty except for a few boxes in the back. As Kendra set to laying out a blanket for the baby, I rummaged through the boxes. There were come clothes and various household knick knacks such as candle holders, lamps, salt and pepper shakers, but nothing of use. In one of the boxes I found several books. The thought of reading one by the flashlight was enticing but I pushed it away.