The Last Warm Place

by Barry Napier

  I turned back to Kendra and the baby. He stretched out on the blanket Kendra had set on the floor for him. She reapplied some more Vaseline to his diaper rash and he didn’t seem to mind. He fussed for a bit, but his cries quickly diminished and he fell soundly asleep. Kendra started unfolding one of the blankets we had taken from the hotel in Rudduck and spread it out as I looked to the baby.

  “He’ll be okay, won’t he?” I asked.

  “If we can get to the Safe Zone in the next few days, I think he will. He’s losing weight from all the pooping. Can’t you tell that when you carry him?”

  I thought I had noticed it a few times in the last week or so but had not wanted to say anything.

  “I think you need to drink as much as you can,” I told her. “Do it now. Don’t wait. Make sure you’re plenty hydrated for tomorrow so he doesn’t need to go without. If it is something you ate, shouldn’t it sort of work its way out of your system?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She wasn’t snapping at e, but she was a little irritated. “Through all we’ve been through, I didn’t really get to grab a copy of Raising Your Baby During the Apocalypse.”

  “I know. Just...drink as much as you think you need. Drink it all if you need to.”

  She smiled at me. “You’d let me do it, too. Wouldn’t you? And not even ask for a sip.”

  I said nothing. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to hold her. I couldn’t imagine how helpless a new mother must feel during times like these.

  “You’ve been...” she said and then looked to the ground. “You’ve been a miracle. I’d be dead in Manhattan if it weren’t for you. And...you take care of him like he’s your own. Why?”

  It came out before I knew it was on my lips. “Because I love you.”

  “I know you do,” she said. In the weak light of the flashlight, she looked like a phantom.

  She stepped to me and cupped my face in her hands. She kissed me softly on the cheek and then stepped slowly backwards, her eyes locked with mine.

  Slowly, as if I was witnessing it in a dream, she undressed herself. She stood that way for a moment, letting me see. She was beautiful. I had seen her in various stages of undress before, but the whole scene was different now. When she stepped back towards me, every inch of her seemed to fill the flashlight’s glow.

  “Will you?” she asked. Her fingers found my hands and out fingers laces together.

  “Yes.”

  Before the s had time to fully form in my response, her mouth was on mine.

  Everything after that was slow and gentle, not with the fury and aggression you’d expect from a man and woman that had spent every day together for the past year and had not yet allowed this to happen. It was over quickly and after we lay side by side on the blanket in the glow of the flashlight, we held each other tightly in the dark.

  As I felt her drift off to sleep, I thought of the nests for some reason.

  I thought of the ungodly darkness inside of them and in that moment, it did not seem so terrifying.

  35

  When our feet hit the pavement the following morning, it felt like nothing had changed between us. It was not that we were ignoring what had happened the night before, but acted as if it had been natural—as if we had been expecting it to happen all along. And now that it had occurred, it was back to business as usual.

  Still, I noticed the way she touched me in the morning as we readied for the walk. She held my hand for a while as we took a moment to play with the baby. We were pleased to find that he was in great spirits. He was clapping his little hands together and looking at us with actual joy in his eyes. He took the pacifier with no problem and remained quiet, yet very aware as the morning unfolded.

  His morning diaper showed that his stomach was still upset but, miraculously, seemed to be improving. The diaper rash, however, was as red and aggravated as ever. We carried him as gently as we could, not wanting the makeshift diapers to rub against it.

  I carried him first. He did seem lighter but he looked at his surroundings with rapt attention. Within two hours, the landscape seemed to regain some of its composure. As the highway became more passable, we debated the idea of heading off at the next few exits to find a car. But we then recalled the gunshots and the explosion we had heard yesterday. Staying on the highway and heading straight for our destination seemed to make the most sense.

  After five or six hours, I spotted a truck on the side of the road. It appeared to be in great shape, no physical damage anywhere to be seen. As we neared it, I raised my rifle. The truck seemed strategically placed and I didn’t trust it. I thought about the first car we had picked up for this trip and how it had led us to Vance. That was prefect evidence for not trusting such a gift.

  We approached the truck and found it totally empty. There were a few empty beer cans in the floorboard but other than that, there was nothing. The keys weren’t in it so there was no way of knowing if it would run or if there was even any gas in it.

  Earlier in our time together, before the Dunns’ house, I had spent the better part of an afternoon in West Virginia trying to hotwire a Jeep. I figured it might be the sort of thing to know if the world was on its last legs. After several attempts and a few slight shocks and burns to my fingertips, it had worked. That Jeep had helped Kendra and I cover about sixty miles of our journey.

  I recalled that moment as I reached beneath the steering column and found the wires I’d need to try performing the trick a second time.

  It only took twenty minutes this time. I felt like an idiot as I played with the wires, Kendra watching with an amused grin on her face the whole time. But when the engine slowly and laboriously turned over, we both looked at each other in utter shock. We actually allowed ourselves to laugh. The baby looked at us suspiciously, not happy that he wasn’t in on the joke.

  Our good fortune was only temporary, though. The gas needle was precariously close to E and no more than five minutes after driving, the gas light came on. I drove ahead, coming to a few places where ruined cars and bad sections of road caused me to have to swerve creatively to avoid them.

  I had checked the odometer when we had pulled away from the side of the road and eyed it again when the truck started to shudder. When it sucked down the last of the fumes in its tank, the odometer told us that we had saved ourselves thirty-eight miles of walking.

  Still, finding the truck had been that extra jolt we needed. Even after it died and we were forced to resume walking, Kendra was all smiles. I tried to kill any internal thoughts I had that suggested what had happened the previous night also had something to do with her mood.

  I estimated that we had another two hours of daylight. When we walked by a sign telling us that Lynchburg was only seventeen miles ahead, I suddenly wanted to walk through the night. Of course, Lynchburg was only the starting point. The Safe Zone could be anywhere between the forty-five miles or so that separated Lynchburg and Roanoke. Still, I felt that it would be almost perfectly positioned between the two; the map that we were going by placed the Blue Ridge Parkway almost exactly between the two cities.

  We found our shelter for that night well before dusk. To the right side of the highway there was a mobile homes dealership. Surprisingly, almost all of the lot models were still standing. It was such an ideal location that I did a sweep of each and every home before we decided to stay. It seemed too perfect that no one else had thought to use these as a place to bunk down.

  Of course, the fact that people seemed to be a rarity in this area also made me worry. What could we expect to see when we reached Lynchburg? How bad had things gotten in this part of the state?

  We selected the mobile home furthest away from the highway. It was such a perfect place to sleep that I was okay with losing an hour and a half of daylight for walking time. The place even had a sample bed, sans sheets, in two of the bedrooms. False flowers greeted us from a dining room table that would never grace a family dinner. The staged refrigerator in the kitchen mocked us.
Still, Kendra and I both took turns opening it and looking into its empty interior. I don’t know why; maybe just to remember what it had once been like.

  My concerns about losing the walking time were further dashed after the baby was asleep and Kendra and I made full use of the bed in the other room. Now more familiar with each other’s bodies, we took our time. The downside was that we lost a lot of sleep.

  Afterwards, we lay in the sheetless bed and held each other as if we had been doing it forever.

  I drifted off with her head propped against my arm, her hand lingering on my chest.

  “I love you,” I said.

  I don’t think she replied but I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it, as I fell asleep quickly.

  36

  We closed in on the Lynchburg city limits shortly after two o’ clock in the afternoon the following day. The day had been a monotonous blur of walking. The baby seemed to be in good spirits most of the day; his noontime feeding had gone well and I was glad to see Kendra excited about being able to nurse properly after having downed most of the second Gatorade and two bottles of our water.

  Even before we reached the outskirts of the city, I could tell that we were in for one hell of a walk. Portions of the road were in major disrepair. There were hundreds of crashed vehicles, including a school bus that was sitting on its top, the remainder of its charred frame bent and twisted. An exit sign had been knocked down, forcing us to duck and awkwardly climb through its metal piping to carry on.

  As the highway wound closer to town, it became evident that something of cataclysmic proportions had happened here. We began to see corpses, too charred to make any real sense of. Many of them had guns. We saw a few military vehicles, most overturned and with bodies in them. Buildings had been knocked over into piles of rubble.

  “What do you think happened here?” I asked Kendra.

  “I don’t know. Not a bomb I don’t think.”

  I agreed with her. There seemed to be too many buildings standing for there to have been a nuke detonated here. I assumed some sort of military event had occurred. This oddly gave me some sort of comfort. It made me think that the Safe Zone might be nearby. Any sort of military presence—even if it was dead and long gone—felt like a good sign.

  “Do you think we should go around it all?” Kendra asked. “Should we get off of the highway and find some back roads, or do we walk through?”

  The thought of the Safe Zone being so close was too enticing. My legs had started to ache and I reminded myself of the the baby’s stomach and rash. Even if the city was destroyed and we would have to walk through some grisly sights, it seemed like a better option than walking several miles out of the way just to avoid the wreckage.

  “I say we make it through here unless it’s just impossible.”

  She nodded and stared blankly ahead as we walked.

  It wasn’t as bad as I had expected, but it certainly wasn’t a picnic. We came to several areas that looked as if they had been sandbagged off. Orange metal and wooden blockades had been put up on some of the roads and side streets. We stuck to the highway that eventually became the main road through the city Within a few miles, this road with its useless traffic lights and road signs, become a highway again and head in the direction of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

  “This is like some weird ghost town,” Kendra said.

  She was right. I felt that we really were the only people in the world as we walked through the chaos and rubble. As we neared the center of town, there were more bodies. They were everywhere. For about a block, they appeared to be lying on top of one another, stacked up in a failed escape attempt or battle, or both.

  I was wearing the sling, the baby at my chest. I held his head gently, keeping his eyes away from the worst of it. On one occasion the road and the signs were so useless as a result of the destruction that I had to use the map to figure out which way we needed to go.

  As we came towards the exit we needed, the road was almost totally blocked. We had to squeeze carefully through a traffic jam of charred cars. I saw bullet holes in many of them. In the midst of these cars, there were more military vehicles. I saw a few that had gun turrets on the back.

  By the time we were out of Lynchburg, the baby started to squirm. Within ten minutes, he started to cry fiercely.

  “He’s hungry again,” she said. “I’m nowhere near ready to feed him. I can tell I don’t have enough. But this is a good sign. If he’s hungry so soon after he last ate, his tummy must be feeling better.”

  “I’ll give him some crumbled crackers and water, then. How’s that?”

  She nodded and I could tell that she was frustrated and saddened not to be able to properly provide for her son. As I took him from the sling, I gave her a loving kiss on the mouth.

  “You’re doing fine,” I assured her. “You’re doing your best. And just think...tomorrow at this time, we should be at the Safe Zone.”

  She did her best to make a happy face as the baby looked at her. I sat him on my lap and fed him crumbled crackers. He ate them willingly enough but lost interest pretty quickly. He started pawing for Kendra and I diverted his attention by standing up and walking in a circle with him.

  “Not now, buddy. Mommy needs a minute. What do you say?”

  After a while he calmed down. I changed his diaper, tried feeding him more, and we were able to carry on. Kendra finished off the last of the Gatorade and I sipped from one of our remaining six bottles of water.

  As we made our way down that final stretch of road—a scarred and desolate portion of Highway 460—it occurred to me that the Safe Zone was on this road. Somewhere. As if to back it up, I caught sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. I’m sure they would have looked majestic before the monsters and the bombs. But today, they looked like large grey lumps that held up a deflated sky.

  Night fell and we had a hard time finding shelter. I used the flashlight sparingly, not wanting to kill the batteries or attract the attention of any other people that might have been lurking around. The conditions of the road had smoothed out but we were on a pretty dull stretch of road. About two hours after nightfall, we came to a Sheetz gas station. The pumps in the lot had been destroyed and the large red awning over the pump area had partially collapsed.

  We went inside the store and were not surprised to find that it had been ransacked. Still, we found a relatively safe place behind the kitchen area. As we set the blankets down, I kept seeing an ad for a Sheetz hot dog in the floor. It made me ravenous and brought to mind memories of eating hotdogs and burgers on the lake as a kid.

  We lay down and went to sleep instantly. I was vaguely aware of Kendra taking my hand in hers as I fell asleep into yet another dream.

  In this one, I was sitting at a picnic table with Crazy Mike, slathering mustard and chili on hot dogs that Vance and Riley were cooking on the grill.

  Over our heads, a flat and coal-black cloud started to slowly descend over us.

  37

  We started a bit late the next day. I had slept well and hard. I knew this because when I woke up, my face was on my arm and a puddle of drool had collected under it. We ate a quick breakfast and started walking as rapidly as we could. The knowledge that our destination could be around the next curve in the road or over the next hill was more than enough motivation.

  The baby seemed to catch on to our enthusiasm. He was cooing more than usual and making cute baby noises at Kendra in their own little game of peek-a-boo. Also, the rash on his rear end was almost gone now.

  Sometime later, closer to lunch than to breakfast, we neared a small town called Bedford. And while we knew it was coming any minute thanks to the map, we never really saw it properly.

  Instead, we saw somehthign else.

  Just before passing by the first sign welcoming us to Bedford, we both noticed that the sky had made a drastic change from its usual dead gray and not-quite blue color to a dark slate.

  Once again, we had app
roached a nest and not even realized it.

  “How did we not see it?” I asked. “We were both looking dead ahead.”

  “Maybe it’s like we talked about before. Maybe that’s how they work,” Kendra offered. “Maybe it’s some sort of camouflage.”

  It sat roughly thirty yards ahead of us. I peered behind us and saw where the sky did gradually change color. It was just so vague and faint that we had not noticed it until we were nearly right on top of it. Staring ahead, I saw streaks of dried blood and gore on the road leading towards the nest; it looked like many people had been pulled inside at some point.

  We both peered into the wall of cloud-like darkness ahead of us. Almost instantly, I felt that yearning to go inside. And while I knew it would do no good, my hand instantly went to the rifle.

  I stared into that darkness and muttered a curse.

  “What now?” Kendra asked.

  I was frustrated beyond belief. Somewhere on the other side of this nest was a place where we would be safe. Delivering Kendra there would mean that she and the baby would forever be protected. It would mean that I had done my job and gotten us there. It was a stupid macho thing to think, but there it was plain and simple.

  “I guess we have to backtrack and find an alternate way around,” I said.

  We both knew what that meant. It meant making our supplies last longer than we had planned. It meant pushing off the promise of safety for a longer period of time.

  I felt myself wanting to cry. I handed the baby to Kendra as the tears came, stinging and hot. I turned away from them and looked back down the road behind us. For a split second, I thought I saw the Dunns’ house back there, sitting on the side of the road and inviting us back in—back into the one place we had been at least somewhat safe. I felt like a failure for ever having allowed us to leave there.