Nests
Barry Napier
1
The sky sat heavy above us like a rock positioned to fall off a cliff. The ground was the tangible ghost of the world we had once known. The houses that remained sat expectantly, leaning slightly like brittle bones waiting for the break. They leaned away from the direction the blasts had come, their backyards forever painted a moonlike gray.
We were short on food and some of the highways were still on fire.
We kept looking out of the front door, the screen rusted and peeling at the top. It reminds me of the screen door to my parents’ old house and Ma, when she was battling the worst of her cancer. She would complain about the flies coming in through the screen door when I’d prop it open in the hot summer months. Sad as it seems, I miss both the flies and Ma with equal measure.
From time to time, we look out into the mornings, staring at the colors of the sky—of the peach that wants badly to be orange—the only colors it seems the world can recall. It’s just me, Kendra, and the baby. Sometimes the baby will cry, letting us know it needs to be fed. Sometimes it cries to let us know it needs to be changed. Sometimes it just cries to be making noise. No matter what type of wail leaps from its tiny little mouth, it reminds me of the fires and the screaming. It reminds me of Ma getting trapped under the wheels of that big green government truck when the men came with their folders, their forms, and their guns.
I lost count of how long ago that had happened. Kendra swears it couldn’t have been more than a year, just before I met her, but to me, it seems longer. I can still smell the smoke from the burning roads. I can still smell burning rubber and a chemical scent that seems to have replaced every other smell the world once had to offer. The honeysuckle that clung to the spring breezes I knew as a child was now the scent of cinder and smoke. The smells of engine exhaust and mowed lawns had been stripped from the world and replaced by the stench of bodies and the burning of the world.
As I sit here, looking out of the window, I can smell it all. I’m dressed in a pair of shorts that are too big for me. My hips are clearly outlined through my skin, as are my ribs.
“Why do you keep looking out of the door?” Kendra asks me on occasion. She’s right. I do stand by the door a lot.
“Someone will come soon,” I usually say. “Someone good. We can’t be the only good ones left.”
She leaves me alone after that. She’ll go tend to the baby, or walk to one of the abandoned houses on the other side of the flattened fields behind us to rummage in the pantries and cellars.
I sometimes wish she had have been on one of her little excursions when I saw the shapes of two people walking down the driveway that day. The driveway connects the house and its obliterated yard to the dead highway. The driveway is just a ghost; it was a long smudge of earth that was likely traveled every single day not too long ago. A husband and wife, probably on the way to, and back home from work. A mother and father, taking their kids to baseball practice or church.
These were nice thoughts, but as I watched the two emaciated figures drawing closer, those images were as fantastical as my boyhood dreams of one day walking on Mars, or curing the cancer that seemed to run on my mother’s side of the family.
When I saw the people walking down the driveway, I instantly looked over to Kendra. She was reading an old paperback, its cover stripped, its pages pleasantly yellowed.
“Visitors,” I told her.
She let out a sound that was part sigh and part gasp. She set the book down and reached under the couch where we kept the rifle.
2
Both of the approaching figures were carrying guns; one carried a pistol and the other what I thought looked like an AK-47. The weapons looked heavier than the people that held them. As they got closer, I saw that they were both men. One appeared to have what Kendra simply called The Rot. You could see it in his face. His left cheek was yellowed, the area around his eyes swollen, his ear drooping as if there was an invisible weight attached to it. I suspected that within a day or two, it would fall off.
We’d always assumed this was a side effect of the nuclear radiation people got—usually people that had lived close to the nuke sites.
I opened the screen door and stood on the porch. I held my hands out to my sides, revealing my palms to let them see that I was unarmed. Kendra and I have only a single weapon—an ancient Remington rifle that we keep stashed beneath the couch—but we ran out of ammunition several weeks ago when we had to ward off a rogue group of scavengers. The single round loaded into it was all that was left.
I nodded to the men and they nodded back in return. Seeing my empty hands, they lowered their guns. Behind me, from inside the house, the baby started to cry. Kendra knew his cries better than I did, but it sounded like the “feed me” cry.
“How old is the kid?” one of the strangers asked, nodding towards the house. No introductions, no fake pleasantries.
“Why?” I asked.
One of the men was licking the area where his lips had once been. Now there were scabs and chapped skin. He blinked his eyes like he was sleepy, as if he were trying not to pass out on the spot. The other hefted his gun in a way that was meant to let me know that they had the guns, so they’d be asking the questions here.
“Ain’t seen a baby in weeks. It was sick. Its mama had left it on the road.”
“Where was that?” I asked.
They both ignored my question. One of them braved a step onto the porch. The other, the one with the pistol, stood firmly behind.
“Got any weapons?” the man creeping onto the porch asked.
“One.”
“What is it?”
I didn’t say anything. This was how most conversations had gone for the last fourteen months or so. If you came across a stranger, you automatically suspected that not only were they out to kill you, but that you likely had possessions that you’d be worth killing to get.
Behind me, the baby kept crying. The cries were escalating into tight little screams. I also heard the very slight sounds of Kendra getting up from the couch.
“We’re going to come in,” the man said. To stress his point, he trained the barrel of the AK-47 directly at me.
A lump formed in my throat and a fear that had become all too familiar washed through me. I raised my hands and took a step back. As I did, the man on the porch stepped forward .His partner stepped up onto the porch and joined him.
Taking my step backwards, my eyes still on them, I saw Kendra’s shape pressed against the wall just out of the corner of my eye. The barrel of the Remington was outstretched, hidden by the wall but no less than three inches from being exposed by the doorway. Without really being able to see her, I could tell that she was shaking.
The man with the AK stepped into the house. I don’t think he had time
to actually see Kendra before the Remington filled the house with thunder. Behind it was a disgusted cry from Kendra.
The man staggered hard to the right. His partner froze on the porch, screaming. Ignoring the blood and other unidentifiable matter that had suddenly appeared on the wall, I sprang for the partially headless man and grabbed his gun. It felt heavy in my hands, like metal had been welded into my bones.
His screaming partner was too slow to react. I had the AK trained on him before his dead partner had even hit the floor. I squeezed the trigger and popped of five shots. The man’s screams were cut off abruptly and he did a jerking dance backwards. The fifth shot forced him back just far enough to fall off of the porch.
He fell onto the dead lawn, made one lurching motion with his left arm, and then went still.
The recoil of AK-47 still thrummed in my hands. The l
iving room smelled like gun smoke and fresh blood. Kendra looked blankly at the Remington and slowly released. It was the third time in the past six months she had used it, but it was the first time she’d been forced to kill someone. The haze in her eyes told me right away that she was not handling it well.
She handed the rifle to me and I could tell that she was on the verge of some sort of emotional collapse. She looked to the floor and I thought she was going to cry or scream.
The baby was screaming bloody murder from the back room now, his little breaths hitching in what Ma had always referred to as a double-clutch cry.
“I’ll tend to him if you clean this up,” Kendra said. Even her voice seemed distant. Her face, usually quite pretty, was contorting into something between sorrow and disbelief.
“Okay.”
I propped the Remington and the AK against the wall as she headed for the back of the house. She was already unbuttoning her shirt to free her beast for the baby to eat.
I heard her cooing at him between his cries. As he calmed down and eventually quieted, Kendra’s muffled whimpers replaced them.
3
I used an old scrapped tee shirt and dirty wash water from the kitchen sink to clean the blood and bits of skull and brain from the wall and floor. Kendra had placed the shot directly over the man’s left eye, and most of that side of his head was missing when I slid him across the floor and out of the doorway.
We’d been through this only once before. A few months back, a man had randomly come running down the driveway, screaming that “they” were after him because he knew their secrets and where they had come from. When I went to the door to check out the commotion, the man opened fire with a small revolver.
We wasted three of the Remington’s shots before the lunatic finally fell. He’d made it to the edge of the porch before he finally keeled over. We had pulled him in, not wanting to attract any suspicion just in case anyone else happened to come by the house looking for food, weapons, or other supplies.
I carried out the motions on these two men now as Kendra fed the baby in the back room. I placed their weapons to the side and then patted them down. The man that had brandished the pistol had a wallet. The ID inside showed the same man that now lay dead at my feet. David Giuilano of Plano, Texas. The wallet contained six dollars in cash, a spare key to something that would never get unlocked again, and pictures of a little girl, maybe five years old or so. By the looks of her face—the upturned nose and dark brown eyes—it was David Giuilano’s daughter.
The rest of my search of the men uncovered a few additional rounds for the pistol, an old crackled pack of spearmint chewing gum, two sticks of beef jerky, and a cheap lighter. I then went through the messy task of undressing them. The man with the AK wore a pair of cargo pants that had held up well. They were a bit too big for me, but I could bind them up with twine. His work boots were a size too small for my feet, but Kendra could probably use them. His shirt had soaked up too much blood from the shot that had killed him, so that was no good.
From David Giuilano, I was able to salvage everything. It was odd to see that the man I had just shot to death, wore the same brand of boxer shorts I had preferred back when boxer shorts were an everyday normal thing.
With this done, I dragged the men back down the porch and into the yard. The man Kendra had shot left a nasty trail of gore on the porch boards, but I’d worry about that later. I took the bodies around back one by one, and set them on the old charred sheets of tin that I had pegged in the ground several months earlier when we had been forced to kill our first would-be intruder.
We had taken the house as our own almost seven months ago. It was nine months to the day after Ma had died. Even in the dirt tracks and sticks of the American south, things had been bad. In the end, we had settled on this flat stretch of Georgia that sat just off a secondary highway—a small town called Walton that was located in the middle of nowhere.
Kendra, being pregnant, hadn’t been able to walk after a while, so we settled on the first house we found on the day her back had started to spasm violently. Like the house, Kendra wasn’t mine either. When the bad things started happening, I had been dating a woman for almost two years. If the world hadn’t have gone to hell, I would have probably asked her to marry me. I’d been thirty years old and it had seemed like the time to settle down.
The two years that followed aged me much more. I found Kendra in an alleyway just outside of Manhattan. She’d been hiding in a dumpster under an old carpet remnant. She thought I was going to rob or rape her. She was pregnant when I found her—about three months in. She suspected that the child was the victim of rape. She’d been attacked twice since the world came to its abrupt halt, and she had no real way of knowing which rapist was the father.
We’d made the trek down the eastern US in a series of cars that were either broken down, or run out of gas along the way. We had no clear destination in mind, although Kendra had her heart and mind set on somehow making it out onto the ocean and living in the Florida Keys. We’d almost died a few times, including a particularly harrowing night when I would have had my head blown off if our assailant’s gun hadn’t jammed on him.
By the time we had managed to scrape our way through most of the east coast, Kendra had been seven months pregnant. I’d grown to love her, I guess. I knew she didn’t feel the same way about me. She was twenty-two and had lived a rough life. I’m still not sure she understood love. Not really.
When we came to the house, the first thing we did was remove all of the pictures. The house had been abandoned quickly, and we had gotten a good picture of the family as we removed the pictures and sifted through their belongings for anything of value.
The house belonged to the Dunn family. The father was Brian, and the wife was Ellie. They had three kids, two of whom were in college, the third, a high school girl. We burned the pictures out back on those scraps of tin. The mere presence of the pictures anywhere in the house was like having ghosts watching us as we slowly took over the house that they had built their lives in.
The last year felt like an eternity as far as I was concerned. There were a few times when I had thought about suicide. I keep putting it off, telling myself that I had to help Kendra with the baby. I delivered him in the Dunn’s living room and somehow managed to not let Kendra die in the process. Kendra wasn’t mine and the baby wasn’t mine, but they felt like mine.
At the very least, they were my responsibility. That’s what I told myself anyway. I sometimes think that if I hadn’t found Kendra in that dumpster, I’d have given up a long time ago. I would have let the hordes catch up to me, rob me, and kill me on the blazing highways.
When I stir awake, my heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat, I sometimes go back to that night when a gun had been aimed at my forehead from five inches away, and the maniac pulled the trigger only to get the dry click—
“Hey,” Kendra’s said.
I blinked, startled. I turned to her and nodded, acknowledging that I had heard her. She carried the baby on her hip. He was not crying anymore. He was actually smiling, staring into the featureless sky as if he saw something there that we were not privy to.
At my feet were the two men we had killed. They were waiting for their place on the tin scraps where we had burned two other bodies since we had started calling this stolen house our home. I had nearly forgotten about them. I forgot what I had set out to do. That happened from time to time, especially when I started thinking about the things that had brought us to this state—those news reports that showed things that humans were never supposed to see.
“Sorry,” I said, “I zoned out.”
“It’s okay,” she said. She held out her free hand and I saw the old bottle of hair spray.
I took it from her and went back to the bodies and the tin. A few remnants of a splintered chair sat off to the side. I placed them on the tin for kindling and then drug the bodies over the wood. I sprayed the partially headless man’s bloodied
shirt heavily with hair spray, and then threw the remainder of the splintered chair on the bodies. I shook the hairspray as I took a lighter from my pocket.
I flicked the lighter and the flame danced. I hunched down, sprayed the hairspray at the bodies and raised the flame to the aerosol stream. A jet of fire rained down on the bodies, the soaked shirt going up at once. I held the can and the lighter like that for about twenty seconds, before the shirt and the stream of fire had properly ignited the men.
Behind me, the baby cooed.
4
Dinner that night consisted of a can of green beans and a snack-sized cup of sliced peaches. Kendra was excited about the peaches. She had found them in the cellar of a farmhouse two miles to the south. There had been a whole box of them, unopened. Twenty-four cans of peaches just up for the taking. Good luck like that was hard to come by these days. She’d also found some pickled beets at the same house, but even on my hungriest of days, I couldn’t bring myself to eat them.
We ate our dinner at the Dunn’s small kitchen table. The baby sat at a high chair we had found packed away in the attic. The baby was experimenting with solid foods. He was currently smooshing a quartered bit of peach between his fingers and studying it intensely.
“What do we do now that we’re out of bullets for the rifle?” Kendra asked.
“I don’t know. We should be okay. The AK has fourteen rounds left. The pistol has one in the chamber and five in the magazine. I also found six more rounds for it in his pocket. David Giuilano.” I said his name, both glad and deflated that I knew the name of the man I had shot.
“What do you think they wanted?” Kendra asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. They seemed interested in the baby.”
Kendra frowned, looked at the baby, and then tried on a smile for his benefit. Kendra hadn’t given him a name yet. After he was born, Kendra asked me for ideas and I refused to give her any.
Nests: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 1
