The Last Warm Place

by Barry Napier

  I continued to look back that way, ready to get out the map and make our journey even harder. It was like defeat, knowing that we’d have to backtrack.

  My thoughts of pity were shattered when Kendra screamed from behind me.

  I brought the gun up to my shoulders and wheeled around. What I saw made no sense but was also sickingly familiar.

  Something that looked like a headless boa constrictor had come out of the nest and wrapped itself around Kendra’s right leg. Even as it began coiling its way up, another shape shot out of those black roiling shadows without form and grabbed her around the waist. This one was identical to the tentacle-like things from the nest outside of Athens.

  I screamed and aimed the rifle at the still-surging root of the larger one. I shot it and there was a pleasing wet sound as the bullet punctured it. A chunk of meat went flying as I aimed and took another shot. It may have been my imagination, but the thing seemed to lose its grip slightly. But it didn’t matter. Two more shapes were sailing out towards us from the darkness of the nest.

  I aimed the gun to hit one of these while also reaching out for Kendra, hoping to pull her and the baby away. She was doing something odd with her arms, something I didn’t understand at first.

  Then she yelled a command at me, a scream that made my heart break.

  “Take him!”

  Her eyes were like steel. In that moment she didn’t give a damn about the nest or the ungodly things that had her in her grasp. She just wanted her son safe. She wanted me to take the baby and let the unimaginable things inside the nest have her.

  With a moan of despair, I reached out to take him.

  “Kendra,” I said, the word coming out of my mouth like sand.

  Just as my fingers touched the baby, one of the snake-like shapes blindsided me. I was slapped in the side of the head and instantly realized the enormity of the shapes. It was ridiculously heavy and very strong. I went sailing through the air and struck the ground hard. I heard the rifle clattering to the road as a black haze and brilliant stars filled my vision.

  A tentacle was groping for me blindly and I drew back, dodging it easily. Another came out of the nest but stopped short and circled back, apparently more concerned with the commotion Kendra was causing.

  “Kendra!” I screamed.

  I did not hear her respond. I only heard the baby. He wailed like I had never heard him wail before. It was terrible...but not worse than fumbling around, trying to bring my vision back into focus, and realizing that his screams were getting further and further away by the second.

  “No!” I yelled.

  My vision was still blurred and I was stumbling from the impact I had taken. I was barely aware of the force on my leg as one of the tentacles found it and wrapped tightly around my ankle. I yanked my leg away and fell backwards, barely saving my face from the pavement.

  I found the rifle on the ground. It looked like three different guns as I reached for it, my eyes still off kilter.

  When I looked up, there was one thing that my wobbly vision had no problem registering.

  Kendra and the baby were gone.

  I let out a cry of agonized rage and sorrow. I gripped the rifle tightly, still screaming. The sound seemed to throw off the wavering tentacle shapes that remained outside of the nest, ready to grab me. They seemed to pause and observe me like I was some sort of oddity.

  Leaving them to their hesitation, my mind shut down and reverted into a primal mode I had only ever sensed was there before.

  Still roaring in grief and anger, I ran straight into the dark boundaries of the nest.

  38

  When I had been forced into the nest outside of Athens, I had entered slowly. My body had gradually gotten used to the environment inside. But this time, running at a death sprint into the wall of roiling darkness, it was like jumping into an ice cold lake on a blistering hot day. My breath felt like it had been sucked out of me and for a split second, I thought every muscle in my body was going to lock up and send me falling to the ground.

  I knelt over, gasping for breath and looked all around me. I didn’t see any of the large tentacles, but there were smaller shapes on the ground. It was still too dark to see anything clearly enough, but I got the sense that these objects were small. I recalled the layout of the previous nest and remembered how this wall of absolute darkness had eventually faded into a series of blacks and grays—to a world that looked forever cast under a huge thunderhead.

  I gathered my breath and walked forward. I fully expected ice particles to come from my mouth and nose. With each step, that sense of frigidness melted away and was replaced by a tight sensation, like walking through mud that was chest deep.

  Within thirty seconds, I was able to see the briefest shapes of things. I looked to the ground and saw that my hunch was correct. There were indeed small moving shapes on the ground. These were creatures that looked like a hybrid between a worm and a snake. There was no head to discern, no eyes, no mouth. The shapes seemed mostly harmless as they curled and inched along. One had found my boot and slapped lazily at it. I kicked it away as my eyes took in the sheer number of the things.

  There were hundreds of thousands of them on the ground, covering the road. Some were very short, no more than six inches long. Others seemed impossibly long, winding further away into the deep dark greys and blacks of the nest until I couldn’t separate the shapes of their bodies from the darkness.

  Stepping forward, I felt some of them perishing under my foot. They made a slight crunch when stomped on but also left behind a sort of gelatinous residue on my shoe that I could feel with every step I took.

  Somewhere much further ahead, I heard that rumbling that was almost like thunder. I’d heard it in the previous nest, and Kendra and I had both heard it at the one just before leaving North Carolina. But now it sounded more organic. As I heard it a second time, I became somehow certain that this noise was not coming from the atmosphere of the nest; it was being made by something living.

  My mind reached back to the footage we had watched on Vance’s computer. Thinking that this place was potentially harboring one of these creatures terrified me.

  Trying to imagine such a thing, I felt something in my head that was almost like giving up. It was not a voice or even a thought. It was some physical part of my mind that seemed to just shut down. It was the mental equivalent of the buckling of knees prior to passing out.

  I then thought of Kendra and the baby somewhere ahead in this wretched darkness and it was enough to keep that mental trembling at bay.

  I didn’t understand why there were no tentacles or other horrid bodies coming for me. What had these forces sensed in Kendra and the baby that I didn’t possess?

  The cloud-like curtains of darkness that served as the outer boundary of the nest began to fade, evaporating to let me see more of my surroundings. I saw without much trouble that the interior of this nest was slightly different than the one I had been forced into outside of Athens.

  I saw the shapes of familiar things as I stepped further into what I assumed was the city of Bedford. I saw the husks of cars, only their shapes were indefinite somehow. It looked like a child with cosmic powers had smudged their outlines with its finger, creating blurred edges. What looked like black moss grew on everything, including the road.

  I looked down and saw that some of the worm-like creatures were sinking into this moss, wriggling down into it. As I watched this and walked slowly forward, another sound filled the world.

  It was a shrieking of pain and torment. I was at first relieved to realize that this wasn’t Kendra’s voice. That relief was short-lived after I realized that this shriek was likely not from a human mouth. It was too deep, too wet. If a human was making this noise, they were likely twenty feet tall with a slit throat.

  My gaze snapped up to the road ahead of me. I caught a glimpse of several shapes trotting across the road on legs that had that same smudged quality I had seen on the cars. I held the rifle firmly in my
grip but it felt comical in this place.

  I then noticed that the darkness ahead was so absolute that my eyes hurt in trying to understand it. Its position was peculiar, though. It seemed as if the horizon had shrunk and rather than a sun sinking over it, there was this darkness instead, pulling itself up and into the world. And, like the sun on the horizon, it never really seemed to move. It stayed there, constant and ever-watchful as I walked deeper into the nest.

  As more shapes became visible to me, I began to see several buildings. They were also covered by that black moss-like substance in many places. To my left, I saw a restaurant of some sort. The sign had been knocked down and partially rotted, but I thought it had been an Applebee’s. There were other indistinct buildings after it, squares that were now just ghost smudges of history and decay within the nest.

  Still walking in the center of the road, I saw the first bodies. They were strewn about in the road like leaves in autumn. They, too, were covered with the black moss. Some of the worms were crawling around the dried corpses.

  I stepped around the cluster of bodies when I realized, thankfully, that none of them was Kendra.

  I felt like I needed to call out for her but didn’t. It would do me no good to have rushed in here only to give my presence away to whatever hellish beasts called this place home. That’s pretty stupid, I thought. Whatever is in here already knows that you’re here.

  I walked on, willing the courage to scream out Kendra’s name. I could feel it in my throat but I also sensed that the moment my voice penetrated the damnable silence of this place, something would come barreling out of the darkness ahead, primed to suck me deeper into its black guts.

  To my right, I saw a large building looming in the dusk-like gloom. There was a huge open space in front of it that threw off my depth perception for a moment. Numerous cars broke up the space, making me think it was a car dealership. Within that open space, I saw the fleeting shape of one of the larger tentacles, slowly dragging itself over what I thought was a parking lot. I looked away, not wanting to watch the monstrous shape moving, but a sudden sound drew my eyes back in that direction.

  It was light but it was certainly there; in the bleakness of this place it rang out like church bells.

  It was a muffled cry—a feminine cry. It was followed by the somewhat muted sound of something breaking, something metal and heavy.

  I didn’t hesitate in the slightest. I went running in the direction of the sound, towards the large parking lot where I had just seen the tentacle shape. My eyes scanned the grey area, looking over the parking lot that was littered with several cars that had been overturned, burned out, and similarly destroyed. There were a few bodies among the debris as well, dried husks that could only truly be identified as human due to the scraps of clothing that still clung to their frames.

  All of this went by in a blur as I neared the huge building. I was vaguely aware that it was not a car dealership as I had thought, but a Wal-Mart. The shopping carts and trashcans that littered the front of the store, all overturned, all seemed alien in this dark place.

  “Kendra!”

  Finally shouting her name, I felt a tremendous weight lift from me. I paused, waiting to see if I’d hear anything else, any clue as to where she might be.

  The sound of that muffled cry came again but this time it was followed by the terrorized cries of a baby. I shuddered all over as I tried to locate the sound. It seemed to come from everywhere, their cries somehow bouncing from every dark corner of the nest.

  At first I thought it was coming from within the Wal-Mart, but that couldn’t be right. No, after letting the sound sink in for a few seconds, I was sure it had come from the direction of that blackness waiting at the horizon.

  I turned back towards the highway and took three running strides before I was knocked to the ground. Something attacked me from behind, letting out a shriek of glee. Its weight was light, but the surprise of it had caught me off guard.

  I hit my chin on the pavement and saw stars again for a moment. I felt something scratching at my back and rolled over to stop it. As I rolled, so did the thing at my back. When I hit my side, I saw it face to face and let out a scream.

  It was a man, only not really. His face was distended and grotesque. He seemed to be covered by the spongy black substance that covered everything. When he screamed back at me, his mouth opened to an impossible length, as if his jaw was made of rubber. The teeth inside his mouth were brown and rotting. There was no tongue to be seen.

  “All the stars...they fell,” this almost-man said. “Fell right out of the sky and we let them! Oh the things they will show us if we can find them!”

  I felt his arms trying to slip around my back in some sort of embrace. I pushed him away with another scream. His body under my hands felt like something made of paper. He started to cough violently as I rolled over onto my knees and then got to my feet.

  “Kendra!”

  I screamed her name so hard this time that I felt something in my throat give out. Somewhere in the distance, I heard that familiar thunderous sound. Was it something growling? Or was it perhaps the actual sound of the nest? Houses creaked as they settled...maybe this was the nest adjusting to our world. Maybe it was—

  “Eric...”

  I wheeled around at the mention of my name. It was a woman’s voice, but not Kendra’s. I saw the bloody figure standing there and screamed. It sounded like a raspy cough, as my throat had been shredded from screaming Kendra’s name.

  I stared at my Ma, now almost a year dead after a large government truck had run her over in New York. She looked exactly as I had seen her in that last moment: her head cocked hard to the left and the lower part of her face pulverized.

  This version of Ma was smiling at me with her lopsided mouth, her teeth floating in a pooling gel of red and black rot along her broken neck.

  “Stay here...” she said. “With me...please...”

  I backed away, shaking my head. I felt my body go limp and I nearly dropped the rifle. I felt lunacy pressing in on me, felt it crushing me like the wheel that had crushed my mother’s head.

  Kendra, I thought, thinking her name in a panicked attempt to pin my logic to something that made sense, to anything other than rotted men talking about falling stars and this grisly phantom image of my dead mother.

  Keep it together for Kendra and the baby.

  I shook my head and blinked my eyes as characters do in horror movies, but my mother did not disappear. Instead, she reached out to me. When her cold rotting fingers touched my face, I screamed again. I backed away so quickly that my feet tangled together and I hit the ground.

  As I started to get back to my feet, I saw the snake-like creatures and their smaller worm counterparts collecting around my hands and feet. They covered my hands and the feeling of them actually tickled. It made me think of capturing caterpillars in the spring as a child, those soft fuzzy bodies running along my forearms.

  By the time I realized that these small creatures actually had weight to them, it was too late. Hundreds of them were on me, crawling on my legs, arms, even spreading up onto my chest and inching towards my face.

  I didn’t have time to register the fear of what this could mean. As I craned my neck up to start fighting them away, a shape came out of the darkness ahead of me. It was so massive that it made me think of a whale breaking the ocean’s surface.

  I saw the large tentacle come slithering rapidly towards me and I had just enough time to pull off one meaningless shot with the rifle before it wrapped its cold flesh around me and pulled me forward.

  39

  Feeling the weight of the tentacle, I became aware of two things that I had no business knowing.

  First, this tentacle was indeed part of something much larger. I could feel that in the mere shape and motion of the thing. It was not acting of its own accord but was being guided by something else.

  Second, I got the impression that whatever awaited me—whatever intentions the source o
f this appendage had for me—was not instinctively harmful. It was only doing what it knew to do, what it was expected to do, what it had been designed to do.

  All of this foreign knowledge didn’t make me fight against it any less. Even if I had decided to give up right there and then and just let the damned thing have me, it was pulling me over rough parking lots and the highway. While the thickness of the appendage covered most of my back and legs, one of my arms was sticking out, rubbed raw on pavement and scratched by anything that had edges sharp enough to do harm.

  The tentacle did not squeeze me tightly, but held me in what felt almost like a reassuring embrace. It pulled me closer and closer to that impenetrable blackness on the darkened horizon. I kept craning my neck, hoping to look up and see what the body that this appendage was attached to might look like. But there was nothing. There was just the darkness of the nest’s horizon approaching like some deep dark throat.

  It then occurred to me that perhaps the body of this thing was inside that darkness. That dark center was the core of the nest and the real terrors of this place resided in there. It was more of that foreign knowledge, given to me by simply being in the thing’s grip.

  I peered ahead into that darkness and felt the weight of exhaustion start to claim me. The dark ahead was so perfect, so absolute. I could go there and sleep forever and not feel a thing. I could—

  The shrill crying of a baby destroyed these thoughts. I sat up and, for the first time, started to truly fight against the impossible size and weight of the tentacle that was coiled around me.

  “Kendra?” I said, wanting to scream it but unable to do so. I repeated her name a second time, louder, but not as loud as I would have liked.

  “Eric.”

  This time it was her voice...not some deranged version of my mother, but Kendra. I looked around for her but saw nothing other than ruined streets and a dark fog that seemed to hug the ground. I tried to slow myself with my one free hand. I grabbed frantically at the pavement but all that did was scrape my palm and pull back the fingernail on my ring finger.