“In where?” I asked, but I knew before the question was finished.
No one answered directly, but Mike seemed oddly excited. “As soon as they told me their idea, I knew I had to go back in. There’s so much more for me to see.”
“What’s he talking about?” I asked.
Vance ignored me and pulled a small yet very heavy-looking metallic box from the backpack. It wasn’t until he flipped it open, creating an L-shape with it, that I realized that it was some sort of heavy-duty laptop. It wasn’t any laptop you could buy wholesale. It was clearly some sort of military computer, built to take a beating.
The baby’s cries had subsided and he was now reaching out for Kendra. He was whining softly which I knew meant he’d want to eat soon. This was all too much. I felt a scream laced with every emotion imaginable wanting to come rushing out of me in a tidal wave.
Vance punched a few keys on the laptop and then grinned in a way that made his face look like a reaper’s mask. He turned the computer towards me so I could see it. The screen showed two pictures, split vertically. On one, I saw the computer that Vance was currently showing me. On the other, I saw Vance’s back, Watts’ left side as he held his gun on us, and then my own face looking back at me.
The screens were showing the feeds from the cameras on the headsets.
“The nests,” I said. “You’re sending me into a nest?”
“That’s right,” Vance said. “If it makes you feel any better, we would have done this even if you had decided to stay.”
Kendra began to cry again, but she managed a scream through it. “What gives you the right?” she asked. “Why not do it yourself?”
“Sweetheart, that’s cute,” Vance said. “But you’ve never experienced one of these things. Being within touching distance of one is hell in itself. I’m not about to voluntarily walk into one of those things. Mike wandered into one, and just look what happened to him.”
“Ain’t nothing happened,” Mike said. “It was amazing. It’s why I want to go back.”
I was beginning to understand why they called Mike crazy. Hell, even now, understanding exactly what Vance meant to do to me, I thought I felt a touch of craziness creeping up on me.
The dump truck came to a stop and then turned right. It picked up speed again, its engine like the clearing of a dragon’s throat. When Greenbriar hit a new gear, there was another lurch. I saw that Watts had to reach out to keep his balance. It was clumsy and he could have pulled the trigger on his gun by accident. This made my anger reach new heights and I felt it throbbing in my head.
“Why us?” Kendra asked.
“Don’t feel so special,” Watts said. “There have been four before you. They all fell for the stranded car with keys and gas trick just like you.”
“We have a child,” Kendra said.
I felt a flutter in my heart as she referred to us as we. I know it was stupid, but there it is.
“And your child will live,” Vance said. “I’m not a total monster. I wasn’t about to send you and your baby into one of those things. Eric will be going solo—well, with Mike, I mean. The way I see it, you and the baby being out here with us gives him extra motivation to make it out.”
“What’s the point?” I asked. “If it’s so bad in the nests, what good will it do for you to see it?”
Vance seemed surprised by the question. A blank slate seemed to pass across his eyes for a moment, but then he answered like a man in a dream. “No one ever knew for sure where those creatures came from. No one knows what they are, really. They caused our world to end. It’s their world now. And if we’re living here uninvited, we should know as much about our new living companions as we can.”
“You can’t do this,” I said. I knew it sounded cowardly. But I didn’t care.
“I can’t, you’re right. But we’re going to do it. You take that headset off now or at any point while you’re in the nest, I’ll gut-shoot Kendra and leave the baby to starve.”
I lost it then, but knew that if I directed my anger at Vance or Watts, they’d so something to Kendra. I screamed in fury, turned around, and struck the side of the bucket with my fist. It hurt, but it was a good hurt; my anger fed on it. Fine, I thought stubbornly. Send me in. I’ll make it back out and beat your brains in with that computer.
The truck rolled on for about fifteen more minutes. The baby started fussing a bit more, growing hungrier. He had learned to wait, though. I figured Kendra had at least another half an hour before he’d break into the full-on wails.
After those fifteen minutes of aggravated silence, (Watts eying Kendra perversely the entire time), the truck stopped and the engine died. Vance looked up to the sky. I followed his gaze and saw that the night seemed darker than it ever had before.
“We’re here,” he said. “Now climb out really slow and remember that Watts will have a gun to Kendra’s back the whole time. Don’t be a hero and don’t do anything stupid.”
I was biting my lip and clenching my fist, trying to make sure I didn’t lash out. I felt like there was venom in my veins and fire in my stomach as my feet hit the pavement. Vance came over the back of the truck next and before I had time to worry about Kendra and the baby, my eyes fell on the sight in front of the dump truck and I forgot about everything else in the world for about ten seconds.
21
The nest sat like a deflated thunderhead on the road ahead of us. The fact that it was illuminated by the dump truck’s headlights as well as the headlights of the truck that Riley had driven behind us the entire time, did nothing to make it seem any less dark. Seeing the nest against the backdrop of night showed just what it was made out of.
It was the darkest black imaginable. It was a shadow from Hell’s cellar. It was so dark that my skin felt it and tried to shrink away from it. The headlights seemed to stop completely; they did not fade, nor did they taper off. They stopped cold, falling dead against the darkness.
This one sat on a four-lane road. A gas station sat to the right side of the road; thin forest and a scraggly open field sat to the left.
Greenbriar had pulled us close to it. The one that Kendra and I had seen on the way to Athens had been at least a mile away. This one was as close as one thousand yards. Maybe less.
“My God,” Kendra said beside me. It was her voice that snapped me out of my daze. I then remembered where I was and why I was here.
“Eric,” she said, “you can’t go in there, you can’t.”
A sound came trickling out of the darkness towards us. It sounded like thunder from a distance with something organic behind it. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and my stomach roll.
Mike stepped up beside me. Despite being in the presence of the nest, he still looked determined.
“I’m coming baby,” he said.
His wife, I thought. He thought he saw his dead wife in the last nest he went in. And whatever happened to him, he made it out. Maybe he can help me get out alive.
It was a promising thought—one that already had me planning how I would kill Vance.
Riley and Peterson had joined us and the entire group was together now. Greenbriar seemed like a different man, like a demon almost. I remembered his fist meeting my face in the dark of our room less than half an hour ago and it infuriated me.
“My computer is up and running,” Vance said. “And time’s wasting. Get going.”
I looked to Kendra and then to the baby. He looked at me with his beautiful brown eyes and I almost threw the headset on the ground. I had always felt like a father to this child, but now the very real possibility of never seeing him again was gut-wrenching. I then looked to Kendra and hated myself when the tears came. I wanted to be strong for her in that moment so badly that I could feel it shaking the walls of my heart.
“No,” she said.
“I have to,” I said. “They’ll kill you and the baby.”
“Oh, he’s right about that,” Vance said. “And the killing will be slow.”
Kendra cut her eyes at him in a way that I had never seen. It actually made me feel slightly at ease to know that she had intense amounts of rage lurking under her sorrow.
In a move I had not been expecting, Kendra leaned towards me and kissed me on the mouth. I was so startled that I opened my mouth too late to accept her tongue. It was an awkward kiss, but it made my head spin for a moment. I looked at her with total heartache when she pulled back.
I then looked at the darkness ahead of me and saw that Mike was already walking towards it. I gave the baby a kiss on his head, squeezed his little hand, and went off after Mike.
I felt myself wanting to fall to the road and bawl. I wanted to collapse and die, but I kept thinking of Kendra and the baby. I’d name him William, I thought, as I caught up to Mike. If Kendra was my wife and we had named him, I would have named him William.
“Sorry, man,” Mike said as I fell in beside him. “Shitty deal for you.”
I only gasped in response as a wet sob escaped my throat.
He and I walked directly towards it and I was surprised to find that part of me wanted to go inside. It was almost as if there was something in that wall of darkness that was urging me on, telling me to come closer, to come see the secrets it held.
“How can you go back in so easily if it’s as bad as they say it is?” I asked him.
“I know she wasn’t really there,” he said. He looked back over his shoulder to make sure we were out of hearing range of Vance and his partners. “But I didn’t care. In there, she looked real. She felt real. Don’t get me wrong…there’s some bad stuff in there, too. Things I would never have even thought about in my own nightmares. But whatever is in there…it shows you things you want to see.”
“You got out before, right?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“Hell, man…I don’t even remember. I just came to on the side of a road about twenty miles away from where I walked into the damn thing.”
“Could you do it again?” I asked. “Can you get us out?”
Mike shrugged.
I looked back, hoping to see Kendra. But all I saw were the outlines of the people back there. I tried to tell myself that while Mike and I were in the nest, they wouldn’t do anything to Kendra; they’d be too preoccupied with wanting to see what happened to Mike and I. That gave me more motivation than ever to make it out.
It was then that I realized that within two steps, the light I was able to see from the headlights behind us was winking out quickly. And then, with another step, it was gone altogether.
I looked ahead and saw only darkness. I couldn’t even see the road at my feet. But oddly enough, I could still see Mike beside me.
“Is this it?” I asked. “Are we in it now?”
He smiled nervously. “Sort of. I think this is kind of like the front door.”
A sound blasted out from ahead of us. It sounded like a giant stretching its back after a long night’s sleep.
We took five more steps inside and I started to see shapes in front of us. Everything was in black, but in varying shades of it. The shapes I saw seemed to be amorphous, changing shape and position as we stepped closer. I also began to realize that I was growing cold, like slowly wading into a frigid pool.
In the midst of these shapes, I saw fragments of what the nest was covering up. I could see better now, as if passing through what Mike had referred to as “the front door” was literally like stepping through a gate and into some other place. But as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I was shocked to find buildings and trees. The inside of the nest was only the area of land that it covered. There was nothing different inside, no clues as to the whereabouts of the creatures that Vance believed to be inside of them.
Somewhere off to my left, I heard a skittering sound; it made me think of a lobster pawing at the glass of a tank, its claws bound together. Only this lobster would have had hundreds of appendages raking at the glass. And it would have been the size of a house.
As soon as I turned my head in that direction, I heard something else. It sounded like a large door opening, a door that was the size of a mountain and had not been opened for ages. It came from very far off, but that did nothing to ease my mind.
Terror began to seize me, but I kept walking. After all, this was being recorded by the device on my head. I didn’t think that Watts or any of Vance’s other men would really leave Kendra alone if I was a good boy and did as I was told, but I certainly didn’t want to take any chances.
I saw a road sign to my right, asking drivers not to litter. In the large field beyond it, shapes were moving in and out of the grass. It didn’t look like a field anymore, but some black ocean that harbored unspeakable creatures.
I looked ahead and tried to imagine how far we had come. A quarter of a mile, maybe? It was hard to tell. The darkness was thick and made it hard to judge distance. I thought of the noise I had heard moments ago—the large door-like noise—and hoped against hope that it had been some great distance off.
In the darkness ahead, the veils and clouds of black were still moving. It was almost like the darkness itself was breathing forms into life. I was in awe of the action but too terrified to care. I just walked on, making sure I kept Mike directly beside me.
I focused on one of the shapes ahead of me. It was growing larger by the second and there seemed to be a very faint sound accompanying it. It was approaching us in a way that made me wonder if it was going incredibly fast or if we were just walking slowly.
“Mike, what the hell is th—”
Whatever it was, it was aimed directly at me. I fell to the ground as it came. As I dropped, I learned a bit more about it. It was cylindrical in shape and it was long. The noise I had heard was the sound of it flying through the air.
“What was that?” Mike asked. “Damn, it’s still coming…it’s…”
I rolled over and looked up. The thing went on forever, moving with eerie speed. I peered into the darkness ahead and could see no end to the shape that had nearly beheaded me. At that moment, the cylindrical shape stopped moving—or growing, or flying, or whatever the hell it was doing. It seemed to go rigid and then it flexed. It then started retreating quickly, going in the opposite direction. It moved faster still and Mike and I watched it without moving. We were standing no more than five feet from it and as my eyes continued to adjust to this weird darkness, I saw the thing for what it was and my heart felt like it stopped beating.
It was an appendage of some kind. I instantly thought of an octopus and then of a squid. But if this was a tentacle, it was easily as thick as a redwood tree.
“Mike, do you see it?”
“Yeah, it’s—,”
The darkness was filled with the screeching of metal and a thump thump noise that I couldn’t quite place. It was coming from behind us, as if something large and metallic was chasing the enormous tentacle.
“Shit,” Mike said.
And then I saw it, too.
The dump truck was coming at us. Only, it wasn’t being driven; it was being pulled on its side by the tentacle. The truck had been overturned and as it came barreling forward, sparks flew into the darkness. Their light faded immediately, as if it had been sucked out of the sparks by the frigid dark. Mike and I had to jump back, Mike actually leaping to his stomach and diving like he was trying to steal third base. Even then, the truck barely missed him.
As it went gliding quickly by, I saw two things. First, the tentacle had wrapped around the truck three times, covering almost the entire thing. Second, I saw half of a body caught between the road and the area of the truck where the bucket met the cab.
Greenbriar’s face was hardly recognizable, as most of it had been peeled away by the pavement. His leg had been caught at an excruciating angle, his toes somehow touching his bloodied chin.
The dump truck went sailing by and as I watched it go, I saw two more of the appendages hurtling through the darkness towards us.
“This di
dn’t happen before,” Mike said. “None of this. But I think if we actually walk in, we’re cool. If we run, I think that’s when they get us.”
As if backing up Mike’s theory, the next tentacle came sailing through the dark. It was at least twenty feet away from us when it passed. This time, I took a moment to really study it. It was hard to tell in the dark, but I thought it glistened with some sort of residue. There were other little offshoot appendages along its body and its hide looked smooth.
I took a step further into the darkness and then realized what was happening.
Whatever was sending the orders to these appendages, it was apparently telling them to reach the outskirts of the nest and get the intruders. If that was the case, Kendra and the baby could be next.
“Oh my God,” I said.
Taking a chance and hoping that things were going to hell to the point where Vance was no longer glued to his computer, I turned around and ran back towards Kendra.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mike said. “If these things don’t kill you, Vance or Watts sure as hell will.”
“I can’t let these things get Kendra and the baby,” I screamed back at him.
“They already dead man. I bet you anything.”
I barely heard the end of this. It was like his voice was being eaten by the dark.
My feet pounded the pavement and every nerve in my body was drenched in either fear or panic. I attribute this to hearing the tentacle speeding through the air behind me. I turned my head, saw it coming, and hit the ground. I rolled to my left and when I did, I saw the underside of it. It was a sickly shade of fish belly white. Staring at it, I was almost hypnotized by the grandness of it, of just how damn big it was. There was a smell to it that was like burning ozone. It had a sick sort of sweetness to it that was similar to rain on hot pavement.
I then scrambled to my feet and started running again. When I saw the white glare of headlights through the murk of what Mike had called the front door, I ran harder.
And when I heard gunfire and Kendra’s screams, I ran harder still.
Nests: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 8