The Last Warm Place

by Barry Napier

  My feet pounded the pavement and every nerve in my body was drenched in either fear or panic. I was vastly aware of the huge appendages occupying the space around me, searching in the dark. As I ran, I heard another 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 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.

  23

  When I made it out of the nest, the scene waiting for me on the road was surreal.

  The truck that Riley had driven behind the dump truck 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 six tentacles that were currently protruding from the nest. As I approached the scene, on of tentacle-like things slammed down on the truck. One of the tires flew off from the impact 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; only his chin was recognizable as any shape resembling human anatomy. One of the tentacles was wrapped securely around his waist, 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. When it struck the ground, I could feel the vibration of it in my feet.

  Vance was firing a rifle at it and although I could see every single shot hitting the thing, they did no good. I didn’t even see where the bullets were penetrating the thing’s flesh at all. The tentacle hesitated and seemed to taste the air, searching for where the shots had come from. It then 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. The night hid most of the blood and gore; from where I stood, it almost looked like some strange and comical magic trick. Vance screamed at this sight continued firing, his screams like those of a man possessed.

  I looked away from the chaos 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. It did almost nothing to make me feel more secure.

  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 much larger 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, slithering like a den of snakes with one mind. There were at least a dozen of these smaller ones, 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 nearly 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. With a bit more distance between me and the action, I was able to once again really appreciate just how huge those tentacles were.

  For the first time, a horrifying thought entered my mind: If those are tentacles, what are they attached to?

  As I neared the ditch along the side of the road, I saw them. Kendra 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. He started to calm down a bit, despite the noise of gunfire and screeching metal from the road.

  “What is it?” Kendra asked. Her voice was faint, cracking and weak. She wasn’t quite crying, but sounded almost hysterical.

  “I don’t know. But they’ve got to be attached to something and whatever that something is, it’s huge.”

  After seeing the look on her face, I wished I hadn’t said it. 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.

  24

  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. 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. Every now and then, one of us would look back in the direction of the nest. I knew it wasn’t following us, but its mere presence back there made me feel like we were being stalked.

  I was fully aware that we were headed back towards Athens, so we took the first offshoot road we came to. This was a relief in that it also put the nest mostly out of our field of vision, though its dark edges could still be seen slightly above the tops of the trees.

  About five minutes into the walk, the baby began 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 Dunns’ house.

  We walked in silence, the baby asleep in my arms. 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 or come back looking for us, 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. 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 cover of the 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. I wished we still had the map but that, too, was back at Vance’s complex.

  About twenty minutes later, the forests to both sides of the road started to give way, slowly taking away our cover. The trees petered out and gave way to small field with realty signs decorating the edges. A mile or so later, we came to a stoplight, an intersection, and the start of a small town on the other side. We crossed the intersection and came to a row of sporadic- 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. The first sat in the shadow of a small bank across the road. Kendra and I walked to the first house. We hadn’t spoken much since hearing the gunshots; we were too tired, too frazzled to even think about managing a normal conversation. We both needed sleep, but the thought of scavenging for supplies was enough motivation to keep us going.

  An old Chevy truck sat in the driveway. I checked it for keys but found none. Another car sat in front of the truck, but it looked to have been long-neglected. Still, the keys were inside and I tried to crank it, but it would not start. When I popped the hood and saw that the battery was missing, it led me to believe that this property had already been looked over by survivors. Still, we went inside, undaunted.

  Before looking for supplies, we found the bedroom. The bed was stripped of covers 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 settled down on the mattress, carefully laying the baby between us. He was asleep within seconds.

  “We took that road on the right a few miles back,” Kendra said. “So we’re headed away from Athens, right?”

  “That’s the hope. What do you think?”

  “I think we know that there are supplies there,” she answered. “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.”

  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. It had already been well picked over.

  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’d been forced to test it a few times before, and thought I had learned my limits. 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. It also made me wonder why they had veered off of the main highway. What ha
d happened on that road last night to make them go off course?

  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. Just before ti got too dark, we passed a series of signs indicating several approaching towns. Athens was one of them. It was twelve miles away, and we could get there by taking Highway 88.

  Not wanting to wander out onto a highway that may offer nothing more than an open stretch of road at night, we ended our day a little early when we came across an old auto garage. It was tucked between an empty lot and a featureless brick building. In terms of hidden away shelters, it was pretty much perfect.