It was better to focus on what we had. And although that wasn’t much, it began to seem like more and more with every day we survived.
The first day of walking went by quickly. We were forced to walk through a good portion of the night before we found any sort of shelter. We found an eighteen wheeler that had crashed into a culvert. I’d had to remove the driver—long ago dead—so we could climb in. As I slept jammed into the rear of the cab that night, I dreamed that the driver had been headed to Athens, Georgia with a truckload of diapers. In my dream, his corpse drove the truck and every few minutes he’d get blasts of people speaking through his CB. One of them was Crazy Mike and he was saying “Ain’t no thing, sweetie. Just another day at the beach. Pass me another beer, would you?”
When I was stirred awake by a hand on my shoulder, I was sure it was the driver, asking what I was doing in his truck. But it was only Kendra. She looked worried about something. I could tell through the cracked windshield that it was morning.
“Sorry to wake you,” Kendra said.
“It’s okay. What’s up?”
“I just fed the baby. My milk is getting really low. I think I need to drink the rest of that first bottle of Gatorade.”
“Drink all you need. Even walking, I don’t see why it would take us more than four days to get there.”
She thanked me and gripped my hand. After that, I drifted to sleep again. Kendra let me sleep for a while and when I woke up, I was more refreshed than I had been in several weeks. We ate a quick breakfast from our meager supplies and then started walking again.
We started following signs for Lynchburg and Roanoke. I wasn’t sure where the Safe Zone was, but if it was somewhere near the Blue Ridge parkway, the map suggested that it was between those two cities somewhere.
On the second day of walking, we heard an engine running somewhere close by. We ran into the forests but never saw a vehicle go by. We waited for nearly twenty minutes until the sound disappeared and we continued on our way.
Less than an hour later, we heard gunshots in the distance. These were rapid fire rounds, something like Vance would have had. With no forest to either side of the road, we simply stood in the road, listening to the sounds of those far away pop-pop-popping noises. The gunfire went on for about five minutes and was followed by a small explosion, more gunfire, and then deafening silence. Although the noise had been a considerable distance away, it was a stark reminder that no matter how empty the road made the world appear to be, we were far from alone.
As the day wound on, the baby started to squirm and cry more than usual. Neither of us wanted to admit right away that it was because he was hungry; he just wasn’t getting the amount of food he needed. Kendra nursed him and started crying as he ate. Her milk supply was all but gone. She simply wasn’t getting enough water or nutrients to produce enough.
We were sitting on the edge of the road as she cried over this. A few yards ahead of us, a road sign told us that Lynchburg was sixty-eight miles away.
“Can he make it on solids alone?” I asked her.
“He can, but he won’t get the nutrients and vitamins he needs. I feel like he’s already getting sick. He’s so weak lately.”
“How are you?” I asked her. “Physically, how are you?”
“Okay.”
“Do you think you can pull two more days of walking for twelve hours? That should get us to the Safe Zone. And I think the baby could make it that long. Just two or three days. Is that doable?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But in the meantime, I’ll be praying for a car.”
We ate a light dinner of pinto beans, chicken broth and crackers, and walked on. Just before it got too dark to see, we came to a grouping of storage sheds on the left side of the road. The sign at the center’s entrance was partially demolished but I thought it read Carver’s Storage. Most of the sheds were either totally destroyed or had collapsed. But there were five units towards the rear of the lot that were untouched.
We approached these and found them locked. I covered the lock with one of our makeshift diapers to mute the noise, and attacked it with the butt of the rifle. Two whacks separated the lock from the shed’s sliding door. I took our flashlight and looked around as we opened the door.
The shed was mostly empty except for a few boxes in the back. As Kendra set to laying out a blanket for the baby, I rummaged through the boxes. There were come clothes and various household knick knacks such as candle holders, lamps, salt and pepper shakers, but nothing of use. In one of the boxes I found several books. The thought of reading one by the flashlight was enticing but I pushed it away.
I turned back to Kendra and the baby. He stretched out on the blanket Kendra had set on the floor for him. He fussed for a bit, but his cries quickly diminished and he fell soundly asleep. Kendra started unfolding one of the blankets we had taken from the hotel in Rudduck and spread it out as I looked to the baby.
“He’ll be okay, won’t he?” I asked.
“If we can get to the Safe Zone in the next few days, I think he will. He’s losing weight. Can’t you tell that when you carry him?”
I thought I had noticed it a few times in the last week or so but had not wanted to say anything.
“I think you need to drink that other Gatorade,” I told her. “Do it now. Don’t wait. Make sure you’re plenty hydrated for tomorrow so you might make enough milk.”
She smiled at me. “You’d let me do it, too. Wouldn’t you? And not even ask for a sip.”
I said nothing. In that moment, my mouth ached for just a mouthful of it.
“You’ve been…” she said and then looked to the ground. “You’ve been a miracle. I’d be dead in Manhattan if it weren’t for you. And…you take care of him like he’s your own. Why?”
It came out before I knew it was on my lips. “Because I love you.”
“I know you do,” she said. In the weak light of the flashlight, she looked like a phantom.
She stepped to me and cupped my face in her hands. She kissed me softly on the cheek. She then stepped slowly backwards, her eyes locked with mine.
Slowly, as if I was witnessing it in a dream, she lifted her shirt over her head and dropped it on the floor. With the same slow speed, her pants followed. She stood that way for a moment, letting me see. She was beautiful. I had seen her in various stages of undress before, but the whole scene was different now. When she stepped back towards me and placed her hands on my hips, every inch of her seemed to fill the flashlight’s glow.
“Will you?” she asked. Her fingers reached around to my waist and found the button of my jeans. She undid it slowly.
“Yes,” I said.
Before the s had time to fully form in my response, her mouth was on mine.
Everything after that was slow and gentle, not with the fury and aggression you’d expect from a man and woman that had spent every day together for the past year and had not yet allowed this to happen. It was over quick and after we lay side by side on the blanket in the glow of the flashlight, I went to her again. Somewhere during the second time, we cut the flashlight off and as we held each other tightly in the dark, our breath and sighs in perfect rhythm, I thought of the nests for some reason.
I thought of the ungodly darkness inside of them, and in that moment, it did not seem so terrifying.
34
When our feet hit the pavement the following morning, it felt like nothing had changed between us. It was not that we were ignoring what had happened the night before, but acted as if it had been natural—as if we had been expecting it to happen all along. And now that it had occurred, it was back to business as usual.
Still, I noticed the way she touched me in the morning as we readied for the walk. She held my hand for a while as we took a moment to play with the baby. We were pleased to find that he was in great spirits. He was clapping his little hands together and looking at us with actual joy in his eyes. He took the pacifier with no problem and remained quiet, yet very aware as the mo
rning unfolded.
I carried him first. He did seem lighter but he looked at his surroundings with rapt attention. Within two hours, the landscape seemed to regain some of its composure. As the highway became more passable, we debated the idea of heading off at the next few exits to find a car. But we then recalled the gunshots and the explosion we had heard yesterday. Staying on the highway and heading straight for our destination seemed to make the most sense.
After five or six hours, I spotted a truck on the side of the road. It appeared to be in great shape, no physical damage anywhere to be seen. As we neared it, I raised my rifle. The truck seemed strategically placed and I didn’t trust it. I thought about the first car we had picked up for this trip and how it had led us to Vance. That was prefect evidence for not trusting such a gift.
We approached the truck and found it totally empty. There were a few empty beer cans in the floorboard but other than that, there was nothing. The keys weren’t in it so there was no way of knowing if would run or if there was gas in it.
Earlier in our time together, before the Dunn’s house, I had spent the better part of an afternoon in West Virginia trying to hotwire a Jeep. After several attempts and a few slight shocks and burns to my fingertips, it had worked. That Jeep had helped us cover about sixty miles of our journey. I recalled that moment as I reached beneath the steering column and found the wires I’d need to try performing the trick a second time.
It only took half an hour this time. I felt like an idiot as I played with the wires, Kendra watching with an amused grin on her face the whole time. But when the engine slowly and laboriously turned over, we both looked at each other in utter shock. We actually allowed ourselves to laugh. The baby looked at us suspiciously, not happy that he wasn’t in on the joke.
Our good fortune was only temporary, though. The gas needle was precariously close to E and no more than five minutes after driving, the gas light came on. I drove ahead, coming to a few places where ruined cars and bad sections of road caused me to have to swerve creatively to avoid them.
I had checked the odometer when we had pulled away from the side of the road and eyed it again when the truck started to shudder. When it gulped down the last of the fumes in its tank, the odometer told us that we had saved ourselves thirty-eight miles of walking.
Finding the truck had been that extra jolt we needed. Even after it died and we had to resume walking, Kendra was all smiles. I tried to axe any internal thoughts I had that suggested what had happened the previous night also had something to do with her mood.
I estimated that we had another two hours of daylight. When we walked by a sign telling us that Lynchburg was only seventeen miles ahead, I suddenly wanted to walk through the night. Of course, Lynchburg was only the starting point. The Safe Zone could be anywhere between the forty miles or so that separated Lynchburg and Roanoke. Still, I felt that it would be almost perfectly positioned between the two; the map that we were going by placed the Blue Ridge Parkway almost exactly between the two cities.
We found our shelter for that night well before dusk. To the right side of the highway there was a mobile homes dealership. Surprisingly, almost all of the lot models were still standing. It was such an ideal location that I did a sweep of each and every home before we decided to stay. It seemed too perfect that no one else had thought to use these as a place to bunk down.
Of course, the fact that people seemed to be a rarity in this area also made me worry. What could we expect to see when we reached Lynchburg? How bad had things gotten in this part of the state?
We selected the mobile home furthest away from the highway. It was such a perfect place to sleep that I was okay with losing an hour and a half of daylight for walking time. The place even had a sample bed, sans sheets, in two of the bedrooms. False flowers greeted us from a dining room table that would never grace a family dinner.
My concerns about losing the walking time were further dashed after the baby was asleep and Kendra and I made full use of the bed in the other room. Now more familiar with each other’s bodies, we took our time with one another. We were more forceful, more playful.
And afterwards, we lay in the sheetless bed and held each other as if we had been doing it forever.
I drifted off with her head propped against my arm, her hand lingering on my inner thigh.
“I love you,” I said.
I don’t think she replied but I couldn’t be sure. The two hours we had spent exploring one another again had me so exhausted that I fell asleep quickly.
35
We closed in on the Lynchburg city limits shortly after two o’ clock in the afternoon the following day. The day had been a monotonous blur of walking. The baby seemed to be in good spirits most of the day; his noontime feeding had gone well and I was glad to see Kendra excited about being able to nurse properly after having downed most of the second Gatorade and the small remainder of water that had managed to make it since leaving the Dunn’s house.
Even before we reached the outskirts of the city, I could tell that we were in for one hell of a walk. Portions of the road were in major disrepair. There were hundreds of crashed vehicles, including a school bus that was sitting on its top, the remainder of its charred frame bent and twisted. An exit sign had been knocked down, forcing us to duck and awkwardly climb through its metal piping to carry on.
As the highway wound closer to town, it became evident that something of cataclysmic proportions had happened here. We began to see corpses, too charred to make any real sense of. Many of them had guns. We saw a few military vehicles, most overturned and with bodies in them. Buildings had been knocked over into piles of rubble.
“What do you think happened here?” I asked Kendra.
“I don’t know. Not a bomb I don’t think. Well, not a nuke anyway.”
I agreed with her. There seemed to be too many buildings standing for there to have been a nuke detonated here. I assumed some sort of military event had occurred. This oddly gave me some sort of comfort. It made me think that the Safe Zone might be nearby. Any sort of military presence—even if it was dead and long gone—felt like a good sign.
“Do you think we should go around it all?” Kendra asked. “Should we get off of the highway and find some back roads or do we walk through?”
The thought of the Safe Zone being so close was too enticing. My legs had started to ache and I reminded myself of the food situation for the baby. Even if the city was destroyed and we would have to walk through some grisly sights, it seemed like a better option than walking several miles out of the way just to avoid the wreckage.
“I say we make it through here unless it’s just impossible.”
She nodded and stared blankly ahead as we walked.
It wasn’t as bad as I had expected but it certainly wasn’t a picnic. We came to several areas that looked as if they had been sandbagged off. Orange metal and wooden blockades had been put up on some of the roads and side streets. We stuck to the main throughway, the highway that became the main road through town that would, within a few miles, become a highway again and head in the direction of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
“This is like some weird ghost town,” Kendra said.
She was right. I felt that we really were the only people in the world as we walked through the chaos and rubble. As we neared the center of town, there were more bodies. They were everywhere. For about a block, they appeared to be lying on top of one another, stacked up in a failed escape attempt or battle, or both.
I was wearing the sling, the baby at my chest. I held his head gently, keeping his eyes away from the worst of it. On one occasion the road and the signs were so useless as a result of the destruction that I had to use the map to figure out which way we needed to go.
As we came towards the exit we needed, the road was almost totally blocked. We had to squeeze carefully through a traffic jam of charred cars. I saw bullet holes in many of them. In the midst of these cars, there were more military vehicles. I saw a few tha
t had gun turrets on the back.
By the time we were out of Lynchburg, the baby started to squirm. Within ten minutes, he started to cry fiercely.
“He’s hungry again,” she said. “I’m nowhere near ready to feed him. I can tell I don’t have enough.”
“I’ll give him some crumbled crackers and water, then. How’s that?”
She nodded and I could tell that she was frustrated and saddened not to be able to properly provide for her son. As I took him from the sling, I gave her a loving kiss on the mouth.
“You’re doing fine,” I assured her. “You’re doing your best. And just think…tomorrow at this time, we should be at the Safe Zone.”
She did her best to make a happy face as the baby looked at her. I sat him on my lap and fed him crumbled crackers. He ate them willingly enough but lost interest pretty quickly. He started pawing for Kendra and I diverted his attention by standing up and walking in a circle with him.
“Not now, buddy. Mommy needs a minute. What do you say?”
After a while he calmed down. I changed his diaper, tried feeding him more, and we were able to carry on. Kendra finished off the last of the Gatorade and I sipped from the little bit of remaining stagnant water we had.
As we made our way down this final stretch of road—a scarred and desolate portion of Highway 460—it occurred to me that the Safe Zone was on this road. Somewhere. As if to back it up, I caught sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. I’m sure they would have looked majestic before the monsters and the bombs. But today, they looked like large grey lumps that held up a deflated sky.
Night fell and we had a hard time finding shelter. I used the flashlight sparingly, not wanting to kill the batteries or attract the attention of any other people that might have been lurking around. The conditions of the road had smoothed out but we were on a pretty dull stretch of road. About two hours after nightfall, we came to a Sheetz gas station. The pumps in the lot had been destroyed and the large red awning over the pump area had partially collapsed.
Nests: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 13