In going over the map, we’d come up with other hard facts, too. Tomorrow, during our first day out, we’d have to find something to serve as a shelter—a tent, a tarp, or something. On occasion, it rained a dark sort of precipitation. It was cold to the touch and smelled like chemicals and rust. It was not something I wanted to get caught in.
We could both use new coats, too. The temperature was a fickle thing now. The nuclear assault that had been intended to save humanity from the “outside threat” (a term used by news affiliates that I still find laughable), had not brought about the nuclear winter I had read about in all the doomsday books of my childhood.
For about two months after the last bomb dropped, the sky had been a shale color. There were no clouds. Some days, night seemed to last nearly twenty hours at a time. During others, all twenty four hours of the day had been consumed by an odd chalk-like gray. Currently, thirteen months after that last nuke had been launched by the US military onto its own soil, Kendra and I would spot small tufts of daring clouds overhead. The sky is far from blue now, but there are days where it holds a tint that makes me think that its natural blue can’t be too far behind.
Without any sort of proper news or media to inform us, we can only speculate about how it all went down. Based on the nuclear attacks that occurred before most of the country lost any sort of connection with news media or other outlets, the bombing had not been on a full-out scale. That was why, when Kendra and I had been walking across portions of the country before arriving at the Dunn’s house and decided it would be our temporary home, there were still sections of the country that seemed to have been untouched by the attacks. Of course, the looting and resulting violence among the public was another issue altogether. Miles of beautiful green trees would roll by slowly, only to give way to the ruin that had been meant as our salvation.
All of this rolled through my head as I walked back through the house and looked out of the Dunn’s tattered screen door. I looked up the course of their driveway. It was a relatively overcast day (again, not due to clouds, but the lack of direct natural sunlight) and I could not see the thin black line that was the road. The trees—some dead and toppled over, some still standing like phantoms—blocked it from me.
I wondered if there were still sections of the American highways that were burning as they had months before.
It was morbid, but I was more willing than ever to get out of the Dunn’s house and start our way back across the handful of states that separated us from Virginia. I was curious how much the landscape had changed in the six months or so we had been holed up in this house.
I started to think about the idea of using a car to get back and forth. On the three different occasions we had been forced to kill people that had attempted to come into the Dunn’s house, none of them had been driving a vehicle. They had always been on foot.
Maybe using a car wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Even if we did attract attention, those that would hear us would likely be on foot. We could easily outrun them.
But what if they had guns? What if they shot out the tires and—
There were too many ifs for my liking. I figured we’d just play it by ear. But yes, the more I thought about using a car to cover the distance between us and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—a distance I estimated to be just shy of 450 miles—the more appealing it became.
I glanced to my wristwatch. It was 3:30. I had suspected for a while now that it was off, and I am pretty sure that I missed a daylight savings time in the course of all of the turmoil. But I had come to rely on the time that it gave me. I had a feeling the rest of the day was going to be very long.
Kendra entered the room behind me. She was carrying the baby on her hip, and in her other hand, the old baby sling we had stolen from an SUV not too long before finding the Dunn’s house. I looked at it and then to the few bags of our things sitting by the front door. I grinned when I realized that when we left tomorrow, I was going to end up looking like one of those old prospectors with several bags strapped to my back, and an assortment of items then tied to those bags.
Yes, a car might just be worth risking.
“I think he knows something is going on,” Kendra said, hefting the baby, “He’s excited.”
She was right. He was looking around the house with bright expectant eyes. A thin and shiny river of drool ran down his chin.
“I am, too,” she added. “It might sound corny, but this feels right. It’s like this is what we are supposed to do.”
I was starting to feel the same. The more I thought about finding the paper and photo in David Giuilano’s pants pocket, the more predestined it all seemed. I wasn’t quite ready to say it was what we were supposed to do, but I did think it would be foolish not to at least make the effort.
I looked back up to where I could sometimes see the dark line of the rural road the Dunn family had once lived on. Kendra approached me from behind and placed her head on my shoulder. The baby swatted at my hair and made a cooing noise.
It was the first time since the first bombs had fallen, that I felt that everything was going to be okay.
7
Although we turned in early that night, I didn’t get much sleep. I kept unwinding the memories of the last year and a half in my head. I did not try to make sense of it all—that would have been a waste of time—but I did try to pinpoint the one instant where humanity had no longer dared to hope for survival.
The first thing that happened was that a massive earthquake hit Madagascar, essentially destroying the entire island. The 9.5 quake also leveled a lot of land in southern Africa. The tsunami that came less than half a day afterwards as a result was probably the worst thing I have ever seen on the news up to that point. When it was all said and done, estimates indicated that with the quake and the tsunami combined, more than 300,000 people had lost their lives.
But the worst part of it came two days later when rescue crews saw the creatures for the first time. No one knew where the creatures had come from and even the faintest of ideas didn’t come until just before the airwaves became a thing of the past. All we knew for sure, was that they were enormous, larger than any creature ever known to mankind.
It was speculated that the creatures came from deep within the Earth and had been stirred awake by the quake. There was some argument among experts as to how old they might be if this was the case, but most thought they pre-dated the dinosaurs. The other theory was that the creatures were from some other dimension. It was funny to hear news reporters try to explain this theory. Usually, they had some representative from CERN mainly because there was public speculation that some experiment with the Large Hadron Collider had caused it all.
I had always personally gone with the “other dimension” theory because the creatures are just too damned unreal to have ever walked the face of this planet. Near the end of it all, when it was clear that these things were likely going to bring about the end of the world, the media started referring to them as beasts. I even heard one station call them Leviathans.
The first ones that were found in the Madagascar wreckage were roughly one hundred and twenty feet tall. They appeared to have no legs and moved with the speed and the gait of a snail. Most of their bodies consisted of white bellies that looked like the underside of a snake. The bodies were adorned with an assortment of appendages that were somewhere between a tentacle and a very long and malformed arm. The heads had rarely been seen but were slightly reptilian with features that were unlike any animal I have ever seen. When they roared, it sounded like a large diesel engine had exploded in a very small space.
By the time the world’s militaries tried taking action against the original eight creatures, they began to pop up elsewhere. In these cases, there were no quakes or natural disasters to warn of their arrival. They just showed up, seemingly out of nowhere (another reason I stake my claim in the “another dimension” theory).
There was a YouTube video that showed a severe thunderstorm in Czechoslovaki
a that became a massive electrical storm. When the storm died down, two of the creatures appeared. The video showed them literally materializing out of nowhere, as if the storm had parted some invisible curtain for their arrival. This footage quickly spread to news platforms all around the world, and as far as I could tell, that was when humans lost hope.
When the internet went down for good and television and radio became spotty at best, a global count of the creatures reached over eighty. They were destroying entire cities; one of the first in America to go was Miami. Then Boston, Dallas, and Chicago. They were popping up everywhere.
The general public seemed surprised that severe military action took so long to be enforced. After the creatures demolished Paris, Moscow, and then New York, the first nuclear assault was issued. Those that survived the carnage of the creatures and the nuclear bombs were able to catch updates on hijacked AM stations, ham radio broadcasts, and a surprisingly strong network of CB radio users spread across the country.
It’s those last broadcasts that still haunt me to this day. The military was actually using them sporadically, sending personal messages to their loved ones and apologizing for having to take such drastic measures. The last radio broadcast I heard had originated from Albany, New York. In it, a deputy sergeant of the US military informed everyone that it had been estimated that roughly eighty percent of the American population had been lost or unaccounted for due to the combination of the creature attacks, nuclear strikes, fallout from the nukes, and the resulting civilian chaos. The good news, however, was that there seemed to be no further reports of the creatures. We had wiped them all out. The deputy sergeant then ended the broadcast with an announcement that he could not carry on knowing what had happened to the world. The last sound from that broadcast was the sound of a gunshot, muffled by the mouth around the barrel.
I spent our last night in the Dunn’s former house thinking about the deputy sergeant and that figure of eighty percent. From what I had been able to tell since the last bomb had dropped thirteen months ago, that remaining twenty percent had no problems with killing other survivors in order to survive. I had also seen that many of them had no problems with rape or cannibalism.
Eventually, I drifted off to sleep. As I did, I did my best to get better acquainted with the side of me that was excited to get on the road, to get moving towards the hope of something better. But in the stale darkness of a starless night, that sergeant’s last broadcast kept ringing out in my head and that excited part of me seemed to have stepped out for the moment.
The last thing I heard before sleep snagged me down was the baby shifting slightly on the bed between Kendra and I.
8
Before we headed out the next morning, I did a quick perimeter check of the immediate surroundings. With our newly acquired AK-47, I walked up the long driveway and to the edge of the road. It was empty and the day was deathly quiet. I looked from one end to the other and saw nothing. The trees along the sides looked alien, like the twisted naked frames of bizarre architecture.
I looped back around to ensure that there were no lurking scavengers on the interconnected series of back roads that wound out behind the Dunn’s house. Those roads were just as dead and I saw no reason to be immediately alarmed. Walking down them in the desolate quiet of the Georgia woods, it was all too easy to imagine that I was the only person on the planet.
We ate a small breakfast (more oatmeal) and walked out of the Dunn’s house for the last time.
I carried the heavier bags on my back and the baby in the sling across my chest. He seemed happy enough, staring at me and then out to the driveway. It was a bit alarming to know that I had a baby strapped to my chest and an assault rifle slung over my back.
Kendra carried the lighter bags, with our valuable odds and ends stuffed into her fanny pack. We had taken three steps up the driveway when she reached out and took my hand. Her palms were clammy and I could feel her hands shaking.
“Thank you,” she said in a voice that was verging on tears.
“For what?”
“Everything. Finding me, caring for me, helping us survive. I trust you. I do. And I don’t know that I can say that about anyone else I have ever known. Not really.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I only nodded.
“I trust you,” she repeated again, “and I know that you’ll get us to Virginia safely. I know this is going to work. Don’t you?”
I kept my smile thin as I nodded at her again. I didn’t want to seem too hopeful when I said, “I actually do.”
And with that, we covered the rest of the driveway and were back on the road after six months of tentative safety.
9
The roads looked different once we got off of the back road that held the Dunn’s house. There was still an unnatural sort of heat in the pavement, something I assumed was the result of the nukes, but there was something else, too. When we had ventured across a good portion of the eastern US several months ago, the roads had seemed alive somehow. There had been the potential for recovery in an odd sort of way, their lines still mostly yellow and white, and their interconnectedness to everything absolute.
That trait was now gone. The roads, like the world they all connected, were dead. That same slate gray sky sat above us and now that we were out in the open, I could easily imagine it disintegrating into ash and falling on us like poisonous snow.
And what would be beyond that ruined sky? Perhaps the place the creatures had come from?
We made it an hour and a half before Kendra asked to stop for a moment. She took off her left shoe and rubbed at her foot. I readjusted the weight of the packs on my back and made a few goofy faces at the baby. He had been quiet for the entire trip. His eyes were wide most of the time as he took in the new surroundings. He craned his little neck upwards to take in the trees and the large expanse of unnatural sky above us.
I tried to imagine being a baby and thinking this was what the world was supposed to look like. It depressed the hell out of me.
“Sorry,” Kendra said as she put her shoe back on, “I’m a little out of shape.”
“Me too,” I said, “but if we can, I’d really like to keep walking until we can get off of these back roads.”
This, of course, contradicted what I had said the previous day. I couldn’t explain why this was important to me, but I think Kendra understood. There was something about being surrounded by nothing but dead trees that made me feel trapped and vulnerable. But more than that, we were still too close to the Dunn’s house. If we chickened out and decided that we didn’t want to go looking for the Safe Zone, the house was just a few miles behind us. It was too tempting.
We carried on, seeing nothing but black stripped trees and the asphalt beneath our feet. We walked for three hours straight and saw nothing along those back roads with the exception of an old stripped car. I checked it for anything of use and found nothing. There was a lone photograph of a family sitting along the steering console. A husband, wife, two young boys and a bulldog all glared at the camera.
I got out of the car quickly, feeling as if I was visiting ghosts that didn’t want me there.
When my watch read 2:11, the back road finally came to a marked two lane highway. At the intersection, there was a burned down convenience store on the left corner. A traffic light hung uselessly overhead, staring down with blank lenses.
“Left or right?” Kendra asked.
“Right.” I had memorized our route all the way into Virginia. I did not want to have to keep pulling the map out time and time again as we walked.
We went to the right, headed east. Kendra was slowing a bit and the baby rested against my chest. I had no sure way to tell, but we had likely walked thirteen miles. Knowing that there were at least four hundred more to go made me feel exhausted.
The two-lane was in the same shape as the back road. Dead, flat, and featureless. The only difference was the depressing scenery. There were houses that had not quite been flattened by the force o
f a nuclear bomb that had gone off sometime in the recent past. Several picket fences had been toppled and looked like dead teeth and pieces of forgotten classroom chalk sticking out of the ground.
A mile or so down the two-lane, a rotted body lay in the right hand lane. It lay face down, it’s left arm outstretched. Had there been any heat from the sun in these last few months, I assumed the state of the body would have been much worse. The stench was still pretty bad, though; we walked to the other lane, against the white strip on the side, to avoid it.
Shortly before my watch read 5:30, the baby woke up whimpering. Before he had time to get into his full-on “feed me” wails, we stopped, unlatched him from the sling, and fed him. Kendra and I ate lightly on stale crackers and dry cereal. The baby breastfed until he was content and then wanted to play. Kendra and I washed dinner down with meager portions of the water I carried in four twenty ounce bottles in one of my packs.
That was actually the one thing that terrified me about being on the road again. Water could be scarce and we had left behind what seemed like an endless supply at the Dunn’s house. It had a rusty taste and was slightly brown about half of the time, but beggars can’t be choosers.
We sat on the edge of the road, snacking and playing with the baby. One of Kendra’s requests was that we try to make this experience as normal for the baby as we could. He seemed excited to be out, to be experiencing new things. He obviously knew something was going on, but he showed no signs of fear or anxiousness…especially not when we were playing with him.
When we got back to our feet (and the baby back in his sling), I knew that we only had another two hours before it would be dark enough to hinder our walking. And here we were, still without any sort of covering except for the sheet and the blanket that were folded tightly in one of Kendra’s bags.
Nests: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 3