By the time I realized that these small creatures actually had weight to them, it was too late. Hundreds of them were on me, crawling on my legs, arms, even spreading up onto my chest and inching towards my face.
I didn’t have time to register the fear of what this could mean. As I craned my neck up to start fighting them away, a shape came out of the darkness ahead of me like a whale breaking the ocean’s surface.
I saw the large tentacle come slithering rapidly towards me and I had just enough time to pull off one meaningless shot with the rifle before it wrapped its cold flesh around me and pulled me forward.
38
Feeling the weight of the tentacle, I became aware of two things that I had no business knowing.
First, this tentacle was indeed part of something much larger. I could feel that in the mere shape and motions of the thing. It was not acting of its own accord but was being guided by something else. Second, I got the impression that whatever awaited me—whatever intentions the source of this appendage had for me—was not instinctively harmful. It was only doing what it knew to do, what it was expected to do, what it had been designed to do.
All of this foreign knowledge didn’t make me fight against it any less. Even if I had decided to give up right there and then and just let the damned thing have me, it was pulling me over rough parking lots and the highway. While the thickness of the appendage covered most of my back and legs, one of my arms was sticking out, rubbed raw on pavement and scratched by anything that had edges sharp enough to do harm.
The tentacle did not squeeze me tightly, but held me in what felt almost like a reassuring embrace. It pulled me closer and closer to that impenetrable blackness on the darkened horizon. I kept craning my neck, hoping to look up and see what the body that this appendage was attached to might look like. But there was nothing. There was just the darkness of the nest’s horizon approaching like some deep dark throat.
It then occurred to me that perhaps the body of this thing was inside that darkness. That dark center was the core of the nest and the real terrors of this place resided in there. It was more of that foreign knowledge, given to me by simply being in the thing’s grip.
I peered ahead into that darkness and felt the weight of exhaustion start to claim me. The dark ahead was so perfect, so absolute. I could go there and sleep forever and not feel a thing. I could—
The shrill crying of a baby destroyed these thoughts. I sat up and, for the first time, started to truly fight against the impossible size and weight of the tentacle that was coiled around me.
“Kendra?” I said, wanting to scream it but unable to do so. I repeated her name a second time, louder, but not as loud as I would have liked.
“Eric.”
This time it was her voice…not some deranged version of my mother, but Kendra. I looked around for her but saw nothing other than ruined streets and a dark fog that seemed to hug the ground. I tried to slow myself with my one free hand. I grabbed frantically at the pavement but all that did was scrape my palm and pull back the fingernail on my ring finger.
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.
“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.
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 its flesh 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.
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. 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?”
39
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 str
ong 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 haul ass,” 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.
“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 sure as hell 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 or two 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.
“Kendra?” I screamed.
“I’m here! What the hell 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.
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 as we walked quickly away from the nest. Then, once we were a safe distance away from the nest, the three of us sat in the road and wept together.
40
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.
Just before nightfall, we found a house that sat just off of the highway. The front porch was partially collapsed, but 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. 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—a few of our home-made diapers, some dry cheerios and a few strings of beef jerky. That was it. The Gatorade was gone and we had no water.
“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. Her hands were in my hair and my hands found her hips.
I pulled her close and we slowly undressed one another as we made our way into the next bedroom. Our mouths separated only when our shirts had to go over our heads. We made love on a blanket that Kendra had already laid out.
After she climaxed, she collapsed on top of me and started weeping. I joined in and we lay there, holding one another and fell asleep crying. I have a memory of vaguely dreaming about the ghastly man in the nest, telling me about falling stars.
The baby woke up sometime later, screaming. We both went into the bedroom and 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?
It also made me wonder what I might currently be doing if I had given in to the lunacy and stayed there with Ma.
Kendra and I returned to our bedroom. We slept for an hour or so more before I awoke to her hands on me. I came fully awake as she straddled me, kissing my chest and neck softly. I entered her in a blur of kisses, heated breaths, and fingernails. We whispered each other’s names in gasps of pleasure, 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 grasped her hips and urged her on, but it was worth it.
Near the end, she leaned down low and, with her hair falling perfectly to both sides of our faces like a veil to keep our secrets in, she put her mouth to my ear.
“I love you,” she said.
I opened my mouth to respond but her lips were already there to stop it.
41
The baby got most of the remainder of the Cheerios the following morning. Kendra and I had the remainder of the beef jerky. 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 w
as 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 and there were gouges in the road. 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 had 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 the hell would we do if we made it this far only to be turned away at gunpoint?
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 demolished vehicles. Holding the ticket in my hand, this entire ordeal began to seem like a very disturbed dream.
Nests: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 15