by Barry Napier
I looked up again and saw that the darkness ahead of me was changing. There was a flicker of light inside of it, faint but there. It was eerily similar to watching heat lightning on a brutally hot summer afternoon. You saw the lightning come, hidden in the storm clouds overhead, but never heard the thunder or actually saw the bolts break free from the clouds.
This light flickered and started to look faintly yellow in color. It nearly mocked what dawn had once looked like before the bombs had dropped.
It was, in an eerie and primitive way, beautiful. And God help me, I wanted to go there. For a paralyzing moment, I stopped fighting and let the tentacle pull me closer to its source.
And...was it getting warmer inside the nest? I felt comfortable all of a sudden, almost sluggish with conent.
“Eric!”
This time she was screaming. I heard the baby behind her scream, still crying in an exhausted and horrified way.
I let out a wail of anguish and did my best to locate the arm that was wrapped up in the tentacle’s grip. It was hard to move that arm but I could move it enough to get a sense of its position. The fingers of that arm still held the rifle and I could feel its barrel pressed right against my leg.
I did my best to position my fingers around the trigger, knowing it would do no good. I could easily remember the way bullets had done nothing to the tentacles that had come out of the nest outside of Athens. I tried to remember the names of the men shooting at it—Greenbriar, Watts, someone else, I don’t know—and understood that this was it.
I was done. This close to the Safe Zone and I would fail.
As I positioned my fingers, a remarkable thing happened. My flailing arm struck something hard and solid. My hand slapped for purchase and I found the solid dulled edge of something metallic. It was just enough to make the tentacle pause in its pulling although I knew that if it wanted, it could pull me off of my saving anchor with little problem.
If it wanted, it could rip me right in half.
I took this moment of hesitation to pull the trigger on the rifle. The barrel was directly against my leg and when the round punctured into the flesh of the tentacle, the heat of it seared my leg. I screamed and, to my surprise, felt the tentacle’s grip weaken considerably.
I acted on instinct and pushed myself away from it. I grew dizzy as I was slowly freed. I pulled off another shot and then another. Something clear and warm started trickling from the flesh of the appendage and its slickness actually aided in my escape.
I was nearly out, nearly free of the thing, and then it clamped hard around the lower part of my legs. This time its grip was deadly and I could feel the pressure in my bones. Within a few more seconds, my ankles would snap.
The appendage gave a hard jerk and I went flying forward again, pulled towards that almost-dawn that was still developing from the dark ahead.
I opened my mouth to scream again but was interrupted by a guttural cry and a series of sharp clanging sounds.
Looking up, I saw Kendra.
She was standing directly over me, her face all hatred and determination. She held some sort of weapon in her hand, a large piece of metal that had been bent out of shape and twisted during this poor town’s demise. It looked like a section of guard rail that ran along so many of the highways she and I had crossed together. She brought it up and down in fierce motions, its end ugly and sharp.
And suddenly, I was no longer being pulled forward.
Finally, she dropped the large piece of shrapnel and leaned down towards me.
“Come on,” she said.
I looked dumbly at her, not understanding. I reached to her hand anyway and then realized, as I stood up, that she had cut clean through the tentacle with the torn metal. I kicked off the remaining piece that clung stubbornly to my leg.
She took my hand and we both went running to the left. I didn’t question. I followed. It was all I knew how to do. My leg was filled with a sharp pain from where I had scorched myself with the rifle but I pushed past it. My mind was trembling, still feeling the lure of madness and the easy excuse of giving up.
I looked back towards that false dawn in the midst of the blackness that I had almost been taken into when a jarring thought nearly made me step in my tracks.
“Kendra,” I said. “Where’s the baby?”
40
She led me to a wrecked truck several yards away. The baby lay in the back, kicking his legs and screaming. He was purple in the face and his screams now sounded like nothing more than tiny wails of defeat and hopelessness.
Some of the small worm-like creatures had found him and were crawling towards him in the back of the truck. I brushed them away angrily as Kendra picked him up.
“I heard you screaming,” Kendra said. “I just sat him down here, hoping I could help you and get back here before anything happened to him...”
With that, Kendra seemed to collapse internally. Her face contorted into the most sorrowful expression I had ever seen. She turned away from me, let out a single tormented scream, and then did her best to carry on as usual.
“It’ll be okay,” I told her, even though I knew what she was going through in a way. The lure of lunacy was a strong one and after you have been handed the reality that your time is up only to narrowly escape it, everything begins to look different.
“Eric, I c—I can’t.”
“Yes you can. Here, trade with me,” I said, holding out the rifle.
She slowly and reluctantly handed the baby over to me. She still wore the sling, but it was torn now, hanging uselessly from her shoulders. When I had the baby secure in my arms, I gave him a kiss on the head which he seemed not to notice. He was still too busy screaming.
“We’re going to run,” I told Kendra. “I’ll do what I can to keep the baby safe if you’ll shoot everything that moves.”
She nodded, hefting the rifle against her. Still holding the baby close to me, I swung the pack from my back and dug around until I found the handful of ammunition we had. There were only four bullets, but that was enough as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t as if the shots were doing much to stop the monsters anyway.
I handed them to her and see loaded them in with uncanny speed and dtermination.
“Ready?” I asked.
She nodded, her face back to that fierce expression I’d seen as she hacked away at the appendage that had nearly pulled me into the core of the nest.
“Now,” I said.
I ran as hard as my legs would allow. My right one still sang out in agony with every few steps, but it actually served as a way to anchor me back to reality. Almost instantly, the nest’s peculiar thunder sounded out.
I didn’t run back the way we had come, as I thought it would be counterproductive. And I certainly didn’t want to run towards that inviting darkness at the heart of the nest. So we ran to the left. I don’t know what I was hoping to accomplish.
I just ran.
On multiple occasions, I heard Kendra cry out, followed by a blast from the rifle. We ran until my lungs felt withered and useless. The baby quieted a bit, apparently jostled into silence from the breakneck pace at which I was running.
Before I knew it, everything got black. At first, I was sure it was the first stages of blacking out. My body was winded and the world was dizzy, so it made sense. But then I felt the frigid air and the utter lack of anything. The bit of warmth I had felt earlier when that dim yellow light had presented itself was a distant memory now. I wondered if I’d really even seen it at all.
“Kendra?” I screamed.
“I’m here! What is this?”
“The outskirts,” I said, still running. “We’re almost—”
And then, before it was out of my mouth, I saw the road under our feet. Kendra stepped up beside me, looking backwards with the rifle held out, her arms shaking.
I looked ahead and saw the charcoal grays of the sky we had come to know so well over the last year or so. It was there, just beyond the black veil of the nest. Som
ewhere behind us, something huge made a roaring noise. It was not the thunder this time, but something that, oddly enough, reminded me of my stomach growling—only about one hundred times louder.
I dared a glanced back. I saw small shapes snaking around in there, their outlines smudged and chalky.
Butit looked as if we were nearly out. We had somehow managed to escape.
A grin touched my face, a smile that flirted with the lunacy that had crept into my mind and left its fingerprints.
“We’re out,” I said.
Then I felt my knees buckle. Kendra was able to catch me before I fell. She gently took the baby from me and helped me back to my feet as we made our quickly away from the nest. Then, once we were a safe distance away from the darkness, the three of us sat in the road and cried together.
41
My hunch about the space inside the nest seemed to be correct. While we had certainly not run any more than two miles, we came out of the nest nearly seven miles outside of Bedford. Our map told us that the Blue Ridge Parkway was less than twenty miles away. But the day was growing dark and since we had no real sense of time after coming out of the nest, we didn’t push ourselves.
As the sky grew darker, we stopped multiple times to make sure it was simply due to the progression of the day and not because we had happened upon another nest. There were also two times when I thought I’d heard something on the edges of the road, rustling through the fields and forest we passed. I fully expected to see Ma coming out at us, on her hands and knees begging me to stay with her.
But there was no one. Nothing. We were alone on the road again, but we could feel the weight of what we had narrowly escaped just behind us.
Just before nightfall, we found a house that sat directly off the highway. The front porch was partially collapsed, but it appeared as if the neglect and decay of the place had come long before the monsters or the bombs. An old FOR SALE sign lay in the yard of tall dead grass, the face of a cheerful realtor smiling up at us.
Inside, the place was musty and smelled heavily of mildew. It was not nearly as cushy as the hotel in Rudduck, but was several steps above the stock room of the garage we had called home a few nights ago, or the kitchen area of a Sheetz. There was no furniture in the place, only empty discolored squares in the carpet where furniture had once stood years ago.
The baby was asleep when we got there. When we laid him down on a blanket in one of the house’s three bedrooms, I stared hard at him. I recalled the purple tint to his face earlier in the day when he had been screaming in horror within the nest. I had never heard a baby scream in such a way. Looking at him sleeping soundly and recalling that moment, I knew then and there that no matter what happened when we got to the Safe Zone, I wanted to be a father to this child.
Kendra joined me and we both watched him from the doorway. We spoke in whispers although I don’t think anything could have stirred him from his sleep.
“We lost a lot of our stuff in the nest,” Kendra said.
“I know.”
I hadn’t even noticed the absence of one of our bags until we had walked three miles away from the place where we exited the nest. The bag that survived had been on my back. It contained a few of our home-made diapers, a bottle and a half of water, some dry cheerios and a few strings of beef jerky. That was it.
“What will we do if it’s not there?” Kendra asked.
The thought of the Safe Zone not being just up the road was too much for me to handle.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Right now, I can’t bear to even think about that.”
I was tired. Every muscle in my body felt the stress and horror of what had occurred in the nest. I could recall the image of Ma so well that she may as well have been there in the bedroom with us, watching the baby sleep.
Kendra hugged me tight. She felt frail and very breakable in my arms. She looked me in my eyes in a way I had sometimes seen the baby look at both of us. It was a look of trust and dependency. She took my face in her hands and kissed me softly on the mouth. The point of the kiss breaking came and went in a sensation that felt like melting. I wanted here then, but we were both too tired.
In the end, we simply lay next to one another, weeping. I’m not sure who fell asleep first, but I do know that before sleep claimed me, I started to wonder if my head striking the pavement earlier in the day was causing problems. I would see little flickers of white and yellow light, flickering like little stars in my field of vision. It brought to mind the ghastly man that had attacked me in the nest, telling me about falling stars.
The baby woke up sometime later, screaming. We both spent a very long time soothing him. Kendra fed him as best as she could and he fell asleep on her breast. I put my arm around her and it felt like we were a family.
As we sat there, I thought about my time in the nest. I had seen my mother even though I knew she was dead. And she had not been some phantom come to haunt me; she had been flesh and bone and blood. It made me think of Crazy Mike and how he had claimed to have spent time with his wife in the nest. The last we saw of him, in a video screen on Vance’s computer, he’d still been alive.
He’d clearly been out of his mind, but he had been alive and happy.
It made me wonder just what the nests really were. What had that dawn-like light been, lurking in its dark heart? When I tried to picture it, my head started to hurt and I would see those static-like pinpoints of white and yellow light. My head did not hurt, but I figured the two things were surely related.
Kendra and I managed to fall back asleep, there in the room with the baby. We slept for an hour or so more before I awoke to her body pressing into mine. There was nothing suggestive or sensual about the gesture; she just wanted to be close. She did kiss me on my jaw, though, and hugged me close. She said my name and I pulled her close and said hers. Speaking our names to one another seemed like some sort of confirmation that this was real, that we were here together even after what we had endured earlier in the day. The palm I had rubbed raw on the street within the nest screamed when I held her, but it was worth it.
I drifted back to sleep again with her clinging to me. Her hair fell in a tangle between our faces like a veil to keep our secrets in.
She put her mouth to my ear just as I was drifting off.
“I love you,” she said.
I opened my mouth to respond but her lips were already there to stop it.
42
The baby got most of the remainder of the dry cereal the following morning. Kendra and I had the remainder of the beef jerky and a few mouthfuls of water each. With those pitiful breakfasts in our stomachs, we started out on the road again for what we truly believed would be our last day of traveling.
Our hopes and thin assurances to one another started to shape within eleven miles of walking. It was there, walking up a slight hill in the four-lane road with the mountains rising around us, that we saw the first of the military barricades. They had been blown over and cast aside, but it was enough evidence that the Safe Zone was ahead to keep us going. Military jeeps and trucks lay scattered like a scene from a young boy’s bedroom floor.
As we waded into the wreckage, we started seeing dead bodies everywhere. Some were military men but the bulk appeared to be normal people. I wondered if these people had been looking for refuge when the monsters came and when the bombs started raining down. They had decayed slightly, yet not nearly as much as one might expect. It made me wonder, not for the first time, how much the environment had changed after the bombs. The flesh of the bodies we passed were much like the sky that their sightless eyes peered into: gray and featureless.
I looked ahead and saw that this carnage went on for a while. About two hundred feet ahead, numerous bodies were piled on top of one another on the sides of the road and there were gouges in the pavement. A jeep had been overturned on its side, missing its left rear wheel.
Kendra nudged me and pointed to a spot in the road a few feet ahead of us. There was a sign that ha
d been knocked down, bolted to steel posts. It read:
NORTH AMERICAN CONTENT SAFE ZONE, EAST US: BLUE RIDGE
GATE AA 1 MILE AHEAD
HAVE YOUR ID/TICKET READY
TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SITE
Even though it was apparent that the sign was old and held no further relevance, there was a moment where I panicked and thought about heading back. What would we do if we made it this far only to be turned away at gunpoint? What if we would be considered as trespassers as shot without question.
I reached into our bag and withdrew the paper we had taken from David Giuilano. I looked at the name on the paper, along with the information. It seemed like years ago since I had first looked at the ticket. The name on it still read C. Miller and all of his ID information was the same. This seemed very important to me as we stepped over corpses and around demolished vehicles. Holding the ticket in my hand, this entire ordeal began to seem like a very disturbed dream.
I looked to the sky, my head spinning slightly. For reasons I could not fathom, I thought about the ghoulish paper-thin man that had attacked me in the nest. “All the stars...they fell. Fell right out of the sky and we let them! Oh the things they will show us if we can find them.”
There were no stars to be seen in that ruined early evening sky, but I could imagine them further up there, twinkling as they always had, unaffected by the catastrophes our world had faced.
Although, as we started walking on, those little flecks of white and yellow popped in and out of my vision. One of them was particularly huge, like a comet blasting across my corneas.
Further up ahead, a huge steel wall came into view just around a bend in the road. A metal gate stood in its center, labeled in huge black letters that read AA.
Seeing the gate was enough to make me feel a warm flood of triumph. It was the same gate on the picture I held in my hands—the picture that had started us on this insane journey.