22
The scene on the road was surreal.
The truck that Riley had driven out to the nest had been overturned. Vance, Riley and Peterson were hunkered down behind it. All three of the men were shooting an assortment of weapons at the two other tentacles that came racing out of the nest. As I approached the scene, the appendage slammed down on the truck. One of the tires flew off and the truck was bent almost perfectly in half.
I heard Kendra screaming but didn’t see her anywhere. I did see Watts, though. He was lying on the road, motionless. His head looked like it had been pulverized. The second appendage was wrapped securely around his waist and was dragging him slowly back towards its dark home.
As I watched this, another tentacle came out of the nest. Its end landed on the ground a few feet shy of the wrecked truck. Vance was firing a rifle at it and although I could see every single shot hitting the thing, they did no good. Following the direction of the shots, the tentacle leaped off the ground and seemed to float towards the gunfire.
It grabbed Peterson by the face and popped his head directly from his body. Vance screamed at this and continued firing, his screams like those of a man possessed.
I looked away from this and tried to find Kendra. I could hear her screams without any problem but couldn’t locate her. As I followed the direction I thought her voice was coming from, I passed Watts’ corpse. I reached down and grabbed the assault rifle that was still grasped in his dead hands.
I took another running step towards the sound of Kendra’s screams and was tripped by something. I looked down and saw a large grey shape curling around my foot. It was the tip of another tentacle.
I screamed, raised the rifle, and nearly fired. I held off in the last moment, realizing that doing such a thing would have likely blown my foot off.
I felt it slithering around me, roughly the thickness of a baseball bat. I thanked God this was a smaller version of the first few large ones I had seen. Yet, as I stood up and tried to scramble away from it, I saw that others of this size had also come out of the nest. They were still attached to some unseen body further inside the nest, but they came as if of their own accord. There were at least a dozen of these smaller ones, slithering on the ground like snakes. Most of them were wrapping around the husk of the shattered truck and looking to gain purchase to Vance and Riley.
With a shriek, I pulled my foot away. I gave one solid hard jerk of my leg just as the small snake-like appendage started to coil itself around my ankle. I managed to escape but got a sense of the thing’s strength in the last moment. It tightened its grip just as I freed my toes. Its grip was so tight that it damn near took my shoe off.
“Eric?”
It was Kendra’s voice from somewhere behind me, light and hopeful. I turned and peered into the natural darkness (which now seemed almost like tropical sunlight in contrast to the darkness of the nest) but still didn’t see her.
“Kendra?”
And then I heard the baby wailing. That sound was easier to follow. I ran to the side of the highway, glancing over my shoulder to make sure none of the tentacles were following me. One seemed to be on the search for me, but was being distracted by the commotion that Vance and Riley were causing with their gunfire.
As I neared the ditch along the side of the road, I saw her. She had apparently thrown herself down into the ditch, cradling the baby close to her, when the first of the monstrosities had come out of the nest. Seeing her, I slid down to the ground and rolled over into the ditch beside her. The baby kept crying as I maneuvered my way onto my stomach, taking aim at the tentacles with the rifle I had taken from Watts.
As I kept my eyes on the chaos, Kendra shushed the baby, gently patting him on the back, and he started to calm down.
“What the hell is it?” Kendra asked. Her voice was faint, cracking and weak.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But they’ve got to be attached to something and whatever that something is, it’s big.”
After seeing the look on her face, I wished I hadn’t said that. I looked out and saw that several of the smaller appendages were pulling Riley’s truck away. Vance and Riley had given up on fighting the things and started to retreat, running back towards Athens. Vance would turn around every few feet to take another shot at the tentacles, although they seemed to be heading back into the nest slowly and reluctantly.
Vance was carrying his pack with him and as he ran, I could just barely make out the corner of that bulky little laptop. I felt the slightest flash of victory in knowing that I had not provided him with much footage tonight.
As Vance and Riley made their escape, they passed by our hiding spot in the ditch. I don’t think either of them saw us. I was holding my breath, praying that the baby wouldn’t make any noises. I kept my eyes glued on them until they were out of sight and didn’t relax until they were nowhere to be seen.
When they disappeared into the night and the border of the nest was back to its normal state, I rolled over against Kendra and placed my hand gently on the baby’s back.
“You okay?” I asked Kendra.
She nodded her head yes but she was crying. She was biting her bottom lip to keep the noise in and I could feel her shuddering next to me. Then, thinking of the absolute darkness and the hellish sounds I had experienced while in the nest, I did the same.
23
I’m not sure how long we stayed in that ditch. It was dawn when I finally stood up and looked around, but it was an odd sort of dawn. The horizon in front of us was totally blocked by the resolute darkness of the nest.
The baby was sleeping when Kendra and I stepped back onto the road. I didn’t understand why the things in the nest weren’t trying to attack us as they had last night. I had gone over a few theories in my mind in the hour and a half that we had stayed in the ditch. Maybe the creatures in the nest could sense hostility and did not sense it in us. It made sense to some degree. Last night, the only time one of the tentacles had purposefully attacked me was after I had picked up Watts’ gun.
But something about that didn’t feel right.
Kendra was staring at the nest in a way a child stares at the ocean the first time they see it. She saw something awe-inspiring about it, but she also knew that its very size was dangerous beyond human recognition.
“What was it like?” she asked.
“Dark,” I answered. “Cold.”
“Did you see anything other than those…those whatever…tentacle things?”
“Just shapes. Moving shapes with no real definition.” Drawing them up in my mind’s eye made me shiver. “Nothing I could really make sense of.”
She finally turned away from the nest and looked blankly to the road. I followed her gaze and took the weight of the sleeping baby from her.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“I think we resume as planned,” I said. “Head to Virginia.”
It was a simple answer and apparently not what she had been expecting. The entire episode we had just endured—from getting into that rigged car to my narrowly escaping a jaunt into the nest—seemed like one big pivotal moment. It felt like all of those things had detoured us and should have shifted our plans.
But I didn’t know what else to do. So we kept on course, our plans undeterred.
I started walking and she followed behind me. The baby was beginning to stir in my arms. I realized as I felt his warm weight against me that we now had no belongings. Everything had been left behind at Vance’s little bunker. We could chance going back, but I felt like that would be the first place he and Riley would have fled to.
We had nothing in the way if diapers for the baby, no food, and just this one assault rifle that I had taken from Watts. When I had checked it during our rest in the ditch, I found that it only had three rounds remaining.
We were starting from scratch again. For the second time in the last week or so, I felt incredibly stupid for leaving the Dunn’s house.
We walked in silence. Half an hour in, I looked over
to Kendra and remembered the hurried kiss she had given me before I had been forced into the nest. I wondered if she was thinking about it, too. It seemed like a stupid thing to be worried about given our current situation, but it kept my mind busy.
The baby stirred awake in the midst of these thoughts, letting us know that he was hungry. We stopped on the side of the road and Kendra fed him. I stood in the middle of the road, my back turned to her, keeping a look out. I didn’t see why Vance and Riley would lag behind when there were supplies waiting for them in their underground complex, but I wasn’t about to take any chances.
The baby nursed for about twenty minutes and was still fussy when Kendra handed him to me and put her shirt back on. We started to walk again as the morning beginning to cast its dismal coppery light onto the highway. The baby burped moments later and stopped crying. I tried to find some sort of humor in the sound—some comfort from the normalcy of it—but was unable to do so.
We had taken no more than five steps forward when we heard two sharp gunshots. We both instantly ran for the side of the road and into the thin forests beyond. But after a few seconds, we both realized that the shots had come from a considerable distance away.
Still, that was too close for comfort.
We stayed along the side of the road as was continued but the woods stopped providing cover. They petered out and gave way to a sporadic-looking grouping of businesses. There was a tractor supply store, a small diner, and a few brick buildings that had apparently been shut down prior to the end of it all.
At the end of this little string of buildings there were two small houses sitting side by side. Kendra and I walked to the first one. We both needed sleep and the thought of scavenging for supplies was enough motivation to keep us going.
An old Chevy truck sat in the driveway but would not start. When I checked under the hood, the battery was missing. This made me believe that this property had already been looked over by survivors but we went inside, undaunted.
Before looking for supplies, we found the bedroom. The bed was undressed and the mattress had a brownish stain at the foot of it. The closets were empty, having been picked over by people before us. A few clothes hangers were all that was left.
We carefully lay the baby between us. He was asleep within seconds.
“Are we heading back to Athens?” Kendra asked as she stretched out on the bed.
“I’d rather not. What do you think?”
“I think we know that there are supplies there. And electricity. It’s tempting.”
“I know.”
“Do you think that’s where Vance and Riley went? Back to their little hideout?”
“I think it’s likely,” I said.
That was the end of the conversation. She closed her eyes and fell asleep. I watched her sleep until my eyes closed and pushed me into a deep slumber.
This time, my nightmare took place in the ditch we had cowered in that morning. Only when I stepped out of it, it wasn’t Kendra that stepped back up onto the road with me. It was Ma. And behind her, Crazy Mike smiled at us as he came walking out of the nest, still wearing Vance’s headset. One of the thin snake-like creatures was winding lovingly around his leg when he pulled out a pistol and shot my mother in the head.
The baby stirred me awake, breaking the dream. I lay there for a while, staring at him and Kendra, but I was only able to find fragmented sleep after that. Three hours later, we were out of the bed and looking the house over for anything that might have been left behind. But there was nothing at all to be found.
With what I guessed to be about six hours of solid daylight remaining, we left the house and started back down the road. I reminded myself of the two gunshots we had heard earlier and kept my eyes peeled. The fact that our rifle had only three rounds made me feel incredibly vulnerable, but at least it was something.
We walked on for another hour. I started to get hungry, but having eaten the night before at Vance’s expense, I knew I could go at least two or three days before it would become an issue. I carried the baby most of the time, letting Kendra take the rifle. Although, to tell the truth, there wasn’t much of a weight difference. Because of the food conditions he had been forced to endure for his six months of life, the baby weighed hardly anything. Sometimes, when I held him in my arms, his fragile weight made me incredibly sad.
About twenty minutes later, we came to a body in the road. It was neatly clothed and looked to be relatively fresh. No decomposition had set in at all.
As we got closer to it, Kendra let out a gasp.
I looked down to the body and a smile of disbelief touched my mouth.
Vance had been shot once in the forehead and once directly under his left eye. His head was still intact, so I assume he’d been shot with a smaller firearm. I looked around the road for Riley but didn’t see him. This automatically made me wonder where the shooter was. If there was someone in the woods with a gun, we were free pickings.
Still, it had been at least seven hours since we had heard the gunshots earlier in the day. There had been two shots fired and there were two bullet holes placed in Vance’s head. Seven hours—I didn’t think anyone would hang around just waiting for random people to walk down the road only to shoot them.
“I think this means we can go back to Athens now,” I said.
“What about Riley? He’s still out there somewhere.”
“Yeah, but even if he goes back to their place, I don’t think he’s a threat.” It then occurred to me that there was a very good chance that Riley had killed Vance.
“How far away do you think it is?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It can’t be far. We were only in the dump truck for about half an hour or so, I think. We probably won’t reach it by nightfall, but early tomorrow.”
We walked on. The baby was fussier than normal. Kendra had speculated that he might be starting to teethe. I let him suck on the knuckle of my thumb and it seemed to satisfy him for a while; while we had been fortunate enough to have two pacifiers, they were back in Athens with the rest of our things. Thinking of the pacifiers, I was able to recall the day we had found them in a drugstore somewhere in—hell, where had it been? I couldn’t remember. But Kendra had been about eight months pregnant then, and finding the pacifiers had made her day. I can’t remember any other time, with the exception of holding her baby for the first time after I had carefully and awkwardly cleaned him, when she had seemed so happy.
Night began to settle on the horizon and we started looking around for any sort of shelter we could find. The road we were on was sporadically populated by random businesses, but we didn’t see any houses. Not wanting to wander too far away from the main road in the hopes of getting back to Athens early the next day, we ended up settling on an old auto garage.
We found the stock room where I broke down several cardboard boxes. I laid them on the ground and that’s how we slept. Kendra cried a bit before falling asleep. I held my own tears back. I felt like a failure as I lay the baby on the cardboard mattress, angry that I couldn’t provide more for them. The baby didn’t seem to mind. He stretched, cooed at me, smiled weakly, and then fell asleep on his blanket.
I watched them sleep, holding the rifle and looking out into the garage. I kept my eye on the retractable doors, one of which was partially open. The night beyond it seemed impossibly dark and a paranoid and slightly unbalanced part of me expected a tentacle to come inching into the garage from under it. I glanced from that rectangle of darkness to the lifts and ramps that countless cars had been inspected and maintained on, trying to imagine a time when such tasks had been normal. It caused an ache in my heart that had devastated me in those first few months but now only thrummed slightly, like the lurching in your stomach when you hit that first vertical drop on a roller coaster.
My eyes traveled back to the dark rectangle beneath the garage door and a very sick and tired part of me yearned for one of those things to come creeping through—to give me a reason to finally s
ubmit.
Of course, that did not happen. I fell asleep sometime later with the rifle still clutched in my hand.
24
The baby woke us up before dawn. He nursed and when he was done, Kendra and I were unable to go back to sleep. We scavenged the garage and were fortunate to find a package of unsalted peanuts and half a gallon of water in the break room. I took only a sip of the water, as I knew Kendra needed as much fluid as possible to keep her milk supply at a healthy level.
After eating our breakfast, we set back out onto the road. Dawn began to raise its head but the road was still dark. The shapes of buildings to each side of the road reminded me far too much of what I had seen in the nest, the hulking yet fragile outlines of things that once were but now were just the ghosts of architecture. Thinking of that experience again created a terror in me like I had not experienced since childhood, huddled under the covers due to the howling winds and thunder of a summer storm.
We passed a grocery store that looked in bad shape, but we went inside anyway. We looked for any supplies and found very little. There was a single can of Mountain Dew in the far corner of the deli. I picked it up and opened it. The popping noise was musical. I took a few swallows and let Kendra take the rest. It tasted fine and the carbonation, although having lost some of its pop, was pleasant on my tongue. And the sweetness was like something from another world. I had forgotten how sweet certain foods could be. It nearly shocked my tongue.
We continued on and I noticed that the businesses were now more closely spaced as we neared the city limits. We checked a few more businesses—a home decor store, a convenience store that had been completely raided, and even a travel agency where an empty water cooler had teased us—but found nothing. I checked about a dozen cars in all and found that they were either all out of gas or simply refused to crank.
We heard footsteps behind us as we were about to walk into a Walgreens. The front display window had been tagged with graffiti that stated: THIS IS THE BLACK LODGE.
I was reading this when I heard the first footfall.
Nests: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 9