“No, that’s okay.”
Neither of us moved for several moments. Kendra finally summoned up her nerves and clicked on the folder labeled NEST EXP. There were five files in the folder. One of them had been created three days ago. This was the footage my little headpiece had filmed for the time I was in the nest.
I pointed to it and said, “Let’s see it.” But I wasn’t sure I really wanted to.
Kendra opened the file and the same video player opened up. The screen was still split down the middle by a single white bar, as it had been when Vance had showed it to me in the back of the dump truck. On the left side, a small indicator text read: NO SIGNAL. On the right, there was an image of a dark concrete wall. I stared at it for a while, trying to make sense of it. As I studied it, the picture began to move.
The concrete wall became a street that was shrouded in pitch black and a few jostling motions indicated that the camera was moving. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing and when I did, my heart felt like it was melting.
“My God,” I said.
“What is it?” she asked. “What are we seeing?”
“The ‘no signal’ one is me. I lost that little head device after coming out of the nest. The other screen is Mike. He’s still alive inside the nest.”
29
We watched Mike’s movement for a good fifteen minutes. I kept looking into the darkness on the screen, looking for more of those shapes that had eluded me while I had been inside. I stared at that on-screen darkness until I could nearly differentiate each pixel. I came to the conclusion that he was still in the nest because outside our hotel room window, the gray daylight I had come to know was hundreds of shades lighter than the darkness Mike was sending back to us via Vance’s program.
On occasion, Mike would speak to himself. Most of it was rambling, but on one occasion, he clearly said, “Ain’t no thing, sweetie. Just another day at the beach. Pass me another beer, would you?”
“This is too sad,” Kendra said after a while. “He’s gone crazy. I feel like shit watching this.”
“Me too,” I said.
Kendra stopped the video and closed the laptop.
“What do you think it means?” she asked. “Why is Mike still alive? Why did he not die? Didn’t Vance and his goons say that Mike had survived a nest before this one?”
“Yeah. Mike said it, too. I wonder if maybe Vance and his boys had it wrong. Maybe going into the nest doesn’t necessarily mean that you die.”
I again thought about how those tentacles had seemed not to care that I existed until I had a gun in my hand and had intended to fire. Yet, on the heels of that, it was impossible for me to believe that the nests were inherently harmless. How could they be if it felt like dying to step inside of them?
“When you were in there, did you feel like your life was in danger?” Kendra asked.
“Absolutely. Stepping into the thing felt like death. Whether or not you die inside, it’s not something you want to go venturing into.”
“Do you…do you think dying in there would be painful?”
It was an odd question and took me by surprise. “I don’t know,” I answered finally, but in my mind I saw Watts smeared on the road and Greenbriar trapped between the road and the side of the fire truck as it had been dragged into the nest.
“And I don’t care,” I added. “For right now, all I’m thinking about are the Blue Ridge Mountains and that gate we saw in the picture.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”
I have no idea why, but I didn’t really believe her.
30
We rested for nearly an entire day. I think I would have slept through the whole day if the baby hadn’t woken us up off and on. Kendra seemed concerned that her milk supply might be drying up again even though she had slowly been taking in our Gatorade. While we could feed the baby on solids, he would not get nearly as much sustenance; it wasn’t something that we wanted to think about unless the time actually came to worry about it.
Not able to resist the temptation, we decided to check the other rooms in the hotel for supplies. We gathered up all of the keys from behind the check-in counter and went from room to room, hoping to hit the jackpot.
The whole process was eerie. Opening each new room was like opening the door into an empty life. I thought of all of the people that had slept in these rooms, all of the lives that had passed through here, and now there was nothing. Just stillness, silence, and the perfectly square shapes of everything, right down to the generic bars of soap on the sinks.
We gathered up a good amount of towels for making more diapers and two blankets, but there wasn’t much of anything else. Even the rooms that seemed to have been occupied had either been thoroughly packed up just before the shit had hit the fan, or they had already been ransacked at some earlier date.
On the second floor, we opened one door and saw two people lying in bed. I jumped back right away, raising the rifle. I nearly pulled the trigger in my fright. But we realized at once that the bodies were dead. It was an elderly man and an elderly woman—husband and wife if the rings on their hands were any indication. The man slept in a pair of sweatpants and a tank top; the woman was in a cotton nightgown. They were laying face to face, their noses almost touching. The man’s arm was at his wife’s waist.
On the bedside table, two bottles of pills had been opened. Only a few pills remained. A glass sat beside the bottles, holding just a bit of water.
Kendra started crying and left the room quickly. The scene almost brought me to tears, too. I suddenly felt miserable for having walked in on their final resting place. I said a quick prayer for them as I backed out of the room, shutting the door softly behind me.
31
We waited until the following morning to set out again. Even the baby seemed well rested when we left the hotel. He was speaking to us in his gibberish and although it made me nervous that we might be attracting attention if anyone was nearby, I found it hard to shush him. We put one of the pacifiers in his mouth on a few occasions, but he promptly spit it out.
We checked the streets of Rudduck for a car. We found one easily—a red Saturn that had been parked on the street just two blocks away from the hotel. Its gas gauge was sitting just below a quarter of a tank. I drove to a gas station to check the pumps, hoping for a miracle. I was not too disappointed when the pumps were non-responsive.
Hell…we’d gotten a bed and a car. I guess gasoline on top of all of that was just too much to hope for.
We decided that we would head back just a bit, into the outskirts of Greensboro to see if it had been as miraculously untouched as Rudduck. I got back on the interstate and took the first Greensboro exit. Within two miles, we could tell that we were going to be out of luck in this regard, too. Cars were scattered in the roads as we reached the outskirts of the city. We saw the shapes of countless bodies on the sides of the road and buildings burned to the ground.
“Let’s just forget it,” Kendra said. “Let’s just go. No more stops unless we have to.”
I did as she asked, turning back around and looking for the exit back out onto the interstate. Hearing her state such a command made me think about how close we actually were to pulling this off. Fretting over it at the Dunn’s kitchen table seemed like ages ago.
We drove for forty minutes. I kept the Saturn pegged at seventy. I had to slow down on two occasions to get around car accidents. One of them had been particularly bad, having involved at least nine cars. As we passed, I could see the shapes of the drivers and passengers. It was like looking at an exhibit at some ghastly wax museum.
I was looking back into the rearview at the crumpled and tangled shape of the large accident when Kendra screamed.
“Oh shit, Eric!”
I turned my head around and saw it instantly. I hit the brakes as my heart leaped up into my throat.
In front of us, the sky and ground had darkened considerably. We had not seen it one hundred yards back but there it was n
ow, right in front of us.
A nest.
“Was it there the whole time?” I asked.
“I guess so. The darkness of it must just be gradual…”
“Or this is part of how they work,” I suggested. “They appear out of nowhere to lure people in.”
It was far too easy to recall the tentacles coming out of the one outside of Athens, so I wasted no time in shifting the car into reverse. When we were a good distance away from it (almost all the way back to the nine-car collision), I stopped the car.
“What are you doing?” Kendra asked.
“One second.”
I opened the door and stepped out. I stared straight ahead at the nest, trying to peer in through its pitch black shifting boundaries, but saw nothing. Not a damned thing. But there was that noise again, like distant thunder coming from it. It could have been my imagination, but I thought I could feel it reverberating in the road and through my feet.
The scariest thing of all was that I felt myself wanting to go into it. I wanted to step inside and see what was in there. I thought of the video we had seen, with Mike still alive and moving around. If death wasn’t a certainty when walking into a nest, why not explore it? After everything we had been through, maybe Vance had been on to something.
I then remembered the brief time I had spent inside the one outside of Athens. My legs buckled a bit and I leaned against the car. Still, I stared into it. It covered the width of all four lanes of the road and much of the land beyond the north-bound lanes. I looked in that direction and could see no end to it. Glancing out towards the east, I could see the darkness of it dwindling away, its borders soft and hazy like drifting smoke.
I started to calculate a way around it, a way to backtrack and get off at an earlier exit. We’d have to find a new route to our destination and that meant we’d likely run out of gas before getting to the Safe Zone.
Then I heard Kendra’s door open and those thoughts dropped like stones on a glass floor.
Kendra stepped out of the car with the baby cradled to her chest. Even the baby was looking to the nest with a sick sort of fascination. He reached a hand out and flexed his little fingers, as if trying to clutch that black cloud-like texture that sat before us like a storm cloud that had sunk to the earth.
“What are you doing?” I asked her over the top of the car.
“Nothing. I just wanted to see.”
I could still feel the pull of the nest luring me in, inviting me inside with some deranged sort of gravity. Not too long ago—about three years before the creatures appeared—I had given up drinking for various reasons. On occasion, I’d pass a bar or glance at a drink menu in a restaurant and badly want a drink. That sensation was incredibly similar to what I felt as I looked into the nest.
I tore my eyes away, knowing that if I stared too long, I’d walk right up to it and walk inside. That is, if something didn’t come out and grab me first.
“Get back in the car, Kendra,” I said.
The world was quiet except for the distant rumbling within the nest. Was it just my imagination, or was that noise getting closer? I watched the amorphous sheets of black waver and swirl slowly. It was almost like a gigantic cancerous finger inviting us in.
“Kendra…”
“What….what is that?” she asked.
“What is what?” I snapped.
“That feeling. I’m terrified looking at it, absolutely scared shitless. But…I want to go in there.”
“Yeah. I feel it too. So get back in the car.”
She did, but slowly. Her eyes never left the nest, nor did the baby’s. When Kendra closed the door, she did it softy, resentfully.
I followed her example and got in the car. I turned around, found a median, and looked for an exit that would take us around the nest.
32
After checking the map, we found a round-about way that would put us back on track towards the central part of Virginia. The route took us forty miles out of our way and I could only hope it was enough room to avoid the nest. We actually passed into Virginia twenty miles after taking our exit and when we did, I felt both relieved and anxious.
Yes, we were close to safety. Yes, we were so very close to our destination. But things would be different when we got there and I knew deep in my heart that whatever weird little dreams I had for Kendra and I becoming something would be less of a reality when we arrived at the Safe Zone. I don’t know why this might be, but it was something I felt with certainty.
We got on a two-lane that would connect us to a highway that would give us a nearly straight shot to the Blue Ridge Parkway. I kept my eyes peeled the whole time for any signs of darkness, making sure we had made it safely around the nest. I even looked into the rearview when we were back on the highway, but saw no traces of it.
I then wondered if the space inside the nests was different somehow. It was an odd thought, and not something I would usually ponder. But it almost made sense, given how peculiar and unnatural the nests were. When you stayed inside a nest, was the space it covered the only space inside or did its interior eventually give way to some dark cold place that we, as humans, couldn’t fathom? Maybe the nests were even literal doorways into whatever world the creatures had come from.
I don’t know why, but I speculated that thinking about such things might be dangerous. I tried to flush the thoughts from my mind. It was easier to do when I realized that the gas needle was covering the top portion of the E.
The gas warning light came on five minutes after we got on the highway again. As we started passing signs for Danville, I estimated that we had maybe twenty or thirty miles left in the car.
I didn’t dwell on this, though; instead, I started to take in the decimated land. It seemed to get worse with every mile we put behind us. In many areas, the road was nearly impassable. The pavement was gouged and cars—stranded and simply destroyed—acted as barricades. On two occasions within a single mile stretch, I had to squeeze in so tight between the wreckage that the sides of the little Saturn screeched against the wrecked cars we were passing, knocking off the driver’s side rearview mirror.
I nearly asked Kendra if she thought we were passing through one of the areas that got nuked. For the most part, the places that got that treatment were the locations where the monsters had popped up. I couldn’t remember one being in Virginia anywhere, but there was no way of telling what happened to the world after we lost all broadcast communications.
I didn’t ask Kendra, though. She was staring out of the windows with sad fascination. The baby looked out too, banging on the passenger window on occasion. I wondered what he must think of this dreary world into which he had been born. I also thought (and not for the first time) how Kendra would handle the heavy conversations with her son later on. What would she say when he asked about his father? How would she answer him when he asked how the world had come to be in this state?
It made me sad to think about those things. So instead, I drove on, swerving around destroyed areas of the road, fallen signs, and wrecked cars.
33
The road ran out before our gas did. The little Saturn was surely running on nothing but fumes when I was forced to bring the car to a stop. In front of us, the entire road looked as if it had been plowed up by an enormous piece of machinery. Chunks of tar jutted up from the ground in jigsaw fragments, barely hiding the crater-like hole in front of us.
I stepped out of the car and tried to think of what might have caused this. My first thought was a bomb, but I didn’t see any charred ground anywhere near the site. Maybe one of the monsters had come through here. Or maybe something I couldn’t even begin to fathom had occurred.
The damaged section of road went beyond just the highway. To the right, an entire hillside had been leveled. Trees were pushed down, bent and cracked at their bases. They all leaned away from the road, as if daring passersby to proceed.
There was no way to get around it. I was about to turn around and tell Kendra the news b
ut she was already on my wavelength. She was positioning the baby’s sling around her chest and sitting the baby inside of it.
Maybe it was because we were so close to the Safe Zone or maybe we were just sick and tired of moving and wanted this whole ordeal over with, but we unloaded the Saturn quickly and were walking around the massive hole in the road within three minutes. My feet seemed to welcome the motion. It was like my feet and my brain were working closer together than ever. Get this over with, they both thought. Let’s get there and have this all done.
We had to venture off of the road to the left, stepping into what I assume had once been an open field. The ground was in the same damaged shape as the road, and in some instances, we had to climb over fallen trees and piles of debris. On more than one occasion, I saw human remains in the litter of twisted car parts, tree fragments, and chunks of the highway. I tried to steer Kendra away from the worst of it as she followed me, but it was impossible to avoid it entirely.
Once around the destroyed section of road, we got back on the highway. Everything ahead of us was featureless. Even the green highway signs that had fallen from their steel supports—one telling us that the exit for Danville was half a mile away—seemed gray. Whatever had happened here had sucked the life and color out of everything.
We walked, sometimes stopping for the baby to eat, sometimes talking about our lives before all of this. I talked about Ma and shared a story about how she had won numerous awards within upstate New York for her killer strawberry jam. Kendra, in turn, told me about the time her brother had fallen out of a pine tree at the age of eleven, trying to save a neighbor’s cat. Her brother had broken his leg and fractured his wrist in the fall. The neighbor had given him one hundred dollars for his troubles.
It was the first time I had ever heard her mention that she even had a brother. It made me realize that there was so much about this amazing woman that I didn’t know.
I had realized even in the Dunn’s house that with each passing day, we spoke about our former lives less and less. It was almost as if we were trying to forget they ever happened. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because those reminders were too sad to think about. They were pictures on a TV that we could barely remember watching. And the lives on that screen had been good. It was best to forget those images, as they did nothing but remind us of everything we had lost.
Nests: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 12
