I looked to the sky, my head spinning slightly. For reasons I could not fathom, I thought about the ghoulish paper-thin man that had attacked me in the nest. “All the stars…they fell. Fell right out of the sky and we let them! Oh the things they will show us if we can find them.”
There were no stars to be seen in that ruined early evening sky, but I could imagine them further up there, twinkling as they always had, unaffected by the catastrophes our world had faced.
I smiled at this thought and looked back towards the road.
Further up ahead, a huge steel wall came into view just around a bend in the road. A metal gate stood in its center, labeled in huge black letters that read AA.
Seeing the gate was enough to make me feel a warm flood of triumph. But then seeing them swing slowly open to allow the green army truck out made me want to cry. Even before I knew the intent of the two men I could see through the windshield, I felt like we had won.
I had succeeded. I had gotten Kendra and the baby to safety. And even if these men had ill intent, I didn’t care. I had gotten us here. Now I could die and be happy.
The truck stopped a few feet ahead of us. Both men hopped out, dressed in military fatigues. They had guns, but they were holstered to their sides. When one of the men gave us a hesitant wave, I could have sworn he looked like Vance.
I felt the world spinning. I was going to pass out, I was sure of it.
But then Kendra reached out and grabbed my hand. She squeezed it softly and I remembered her telling me that she loved me last night. The baby squirmed in my other arm, slapping at my shoulder. I felt the weight of my family with me as we walked towards the truck and the smiling men that waited to greet us there.
42
“We had damn near given up on finding anyone else,” one of the men in fatigues said as they drove us through the gates.
The baby seemed fascinated with this new face and was smiling brightly at him. The army man smiled back but I could tell it made him feel awkward.
“Yeah,” his companion said. “We haven’t had anyone show up for almost two months.”
“How many people are living here?” I asked.
“Seventy-one members of the military,” the driver said. “Another one hundred and two make up their families. Then there are roughly two hundred civilians.”
Beyond the gates, they took us a bit further down the highway and turned off onto a simple two-lane road that almost immediately started taking winding turns into the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“Are any of the other Safe Zones still in operation?” Kendra asked.
“We lost a few…one in Florida, two in California. But there are eight others that are running smooth. All told, there are a little more than one hundred thousand people living somewhat comfortably in the Safe Zones.”
“That’s great,” Kendra said. The baby agreed with a coo.
The driver wound through two miles of curvy mountain roads before he came to what looked to be a tunnel that had been carved directly out of the side of the mountain. A newer road led us into the tunnel and into the mountain. Within a quarter of a mile, this tunnel opened up wider. We came to small guard shack with a mechanical barricade attached. The driver slid his ID card through a slot in the side and the barricade lifted. We drove through this and then the tunnel became an actual roadway.
“Has this always been here?” I asked.
“Since the early 80s. It was a project that was started because of the Cold War. This was a just-in-case sort of thing. All of the Safe Zones were.”
The driver brought the truck to a T-intersection and took a left. Almost immediately, we came to a small parking lot. Several government vehicles were parked sporadically around the place. It looked normal. It looked secure and safe. Overhead, thin white fluorescent lights lit the scene in a ghostly sort of glow.
I watched this all, still feeling dizzy. Maybe it was just too much to keep track of. On the other hand, the baby was enjoying it. He stared up to the lights with grinning fascination.
The driver parked the truck and helped us out. They led us to the far end of the parking lot where a thin elevator had been installed in the side of the mountain.
“We have plenty of room,” the driver’s companion said as we came to the elevator. He slid his ID card into a panel along the side of the elevator and I could hear something mechanical at work within the rock walls. “But before we can give you a room or food, we need to have a physician check you over. I’m sure you understand. There are a lot of radiation threats and other nastiness out there.”
“Of course,” I said.
The thought of the baby getting proper medical attention and a healthy diet filled me with joy. This joy was punctuated with a slight ding noise as the elevator arrived. The doors slid open, warm and inviting.
“After you,” the driver said.
Kendra stepped on and then I stepped on with the baby…only I didn’t have the baby. And neither did Kendra.
“What the—” I started.
I peered into the dark square of the elevator and saw the person standing there in the center of it, waiting for us. Kendra had not seen the figure. She stood directly beside it, oblivious.
The figure beckoned to me and then stepped forward.
Ma smiled at me, her head still shattered, her crooked smile as red and wide as ever.
“After you,” she said.
I screamed and stumbled back. And when I turned to look to the military men for help, they were gone. So were the parking lot and the glorious fluorescents that had dazzled the baby.
The baby, I thought. Where is the baby?
I looked back into the dark square of the elevator and saw that Kendra was gone, too. I was all alone in the dark with this hellish representation of Ma.
“It’s okay,” Ma said, reaching out for me.
And like a child with a scraped knee, I went to her, wanting to feel that reassuring motherly touch.
“Stay here with me,” she said.
But the baby, I thought. Where is the baby?
And then I heard him screaming, wailing out in fright. I looked around for him and as I did, I realized that the world seemed to have flipped on its side. I felt like I was flying, reaching out with one hand to stop myself and feeling nothing but the road and—
“No,” I croaked. “No…please God…”
It all sank in then and that’s when I let it all go. I wept at the sounds of the screaming baby, knowing that I would never see Kendra again because I was being pulled away from both of them towards some deeper, darker place where I felt I had always been meant to go.
43
My free hand was numb. My voice was shredded from screaming. All of this was knotted into a singular point of pain that pulled me away from a picture of driving deeper into the mountains with Kendra and the baby. Already, as I tried to recall the faces of the military men that had acted as our saviors, I came up blank.
It had all been that thin.
I can faintly recall Crazy Mike speaking about his time in the nest. It shows you what you want to see, he had said as I had been forced into that first nest with him.
It shows you what you want to see.
I looked ahead and saw that the tentacle was pulling me closer and closer to that odd dawn that lurked in the dark pit ahead of me. The cries of the baby grew fainter and fainter until I couldn’t hear them anymore.
Just before I was pulled into the dark and waiting center of the nest, I got a true scale of the thing that had me in its grip. Pulled closer to its body, it was clearer to me somehow. I saw its true shape, its true size, and I felt like a flea kneeling to worship a mountain.
And then I thought of Kendra. She had not come to my aid after all. She had been caught up elsewhere and had never found the twisted steel that I had believed she’d used to free me.
That, and everything after, had been an act of the nest. It had shown me what I wanted to see as it dragged me into its black heart.
&nb
sp; I wondered, dreamlike, if it had showed Kendra the things her heart most yearned to see. Had I been a part of them?
As I neared that unfathomable darkness, I kept seeing glimpses of the light from within it. It was spectral somehow—cosmic.
The monsters and their secrets came from there. I knew this as surely as I knew that Kendra and I had never made it to Gate AA of the Blue Ridge Safe Zone.
My final thought as I was dragged into the darkness and the light that flickered modestly within it was of the baby.
I would have named him William.
And I would have told him that the darkness claims us all at some point. The trick is to keep your eyes on the light that is trapped within, waiting for us to reach out with trembling fingers to touch it.
That, after all, is exactly what I did as I was pulled inside.
END.
www.severedpress.com
Read on for a free sample of
Dead Lake
Also by Barry Napier
Novels
The Bleeding Room
The Masks of Our Fathers
The Hollows
Everything Theory: Cold Compass
Everything Theory: Blood Routes
Streets of Blood (The Dead Man #18)
Short Story Collections
13 Broken Nightlights
Tricks of Shadow and Light
Debris (out of print)
Poetry
A Mouth for Picket Fences
Sleepmaps
About The Author
Barry had had more than 50 short stories and poems published in print and online publications.me. He has had novels, short story collections, poetry collections, and a chapbook published by small press venues. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in publications as wide ranging as a Norton anthology to a small press horror collection thematically based on The Wizard of Oz. He was also the 2012 winner of Amazon.com's Write A Dead Man Novel contest, which awarded him a contract to write a novel for 47 North, a division of Amazon.
Barry lives in Lynchburg, Virginia with his wife and three children. Visit him online at www.barrynapier.wordpress.com
and follow him Twitter under @bnapier.
CHAPTER 1
Hearld Money crushed out his cigarette on the heel of his boot and stared out over the rough water of Vivid Valley Lake. A cold wind had kicked up, filling the surface of the water with white caps. The sandy soil under his feet was soaked with thick, blackened blood that sucked at his boot soles like molasses. The steep banks along the shoreline were rutted, the soil plowed deep
and thrashed into festering piles of excrement surrounded by puddles of congealed blood. Bits of torn flesh hung from nearby limbs and clung to the mossy rocks. He took a long pull from his hip flask and shoved it back in his pocket.
A heavy mist had crept over the valley and shrouded the lake in thick, gray fog. Money took a step back from the remains and lit a fresh smoke. A small boat appeared in the mist. It was skimming over the water at a dangerous clip, throwing a strong wake and heading straight for the sandy knoll next to Money. He recognized the boat, knew the hull numbers by heart. It was Sgt. Charlie Nickles.
Nickles was out of the boat the minute it bottomed out on the knoll. The smell of weeping tree sap, evergreens and wind-blown pollen mixed with the odors of rotting fish and death. He approached Money, shouting into a cell phone and waving his free hand in the air. “I’m out here now. Won’t know much more till I have a look for myself. I’m well aware who made the call. He’s standing here in front of me right now. Don’t get your shorts in a wad, and don’t call me back. I’ll call you.”
Money leaned in close, hoping to learn who was on the other end of the phone. He caught random bits of the conversation through Nickles’ phone, words like ‘nutcase’, ‘whack job’, ‘public nuisance’ and ‘drunken pain-in-the-ass’, but nothing about the carcass he’d found.
The carcass lay draped over a nearby log. Bones and tufts of bloody hair jutted out of the remains at odd angles. The head, what there was of it, was crushed flat and stripped of its flesh. The stomach and organs had been removed and the legs were snapped like dried twigs. Money tugged at the handkerchief in his jacket and stuffed it over his nose and mouth, a feeble attempt to ward off the stench. He gagged, choking back bile and fighting the urge to lose his liquor-laced breakfast. The smell leached through the thin cotton and crawled up his nostrils.
Nickles clapped his phone shut. “What’ve you got this time, Money?”
Money pointed at the bloody mess on the log. “See for yourself.”
Nickles approached the carcass, waving the stench away from his face with a meaty hand. He was no cherry when it came to death—car crashes, homicides, suicides, maulings, hunting accidents— he’d had a lungful of them all. The stench surrounding him now was a nauseating mixture of cod liver oil and limburger cheese being scorched in a cast iron skillet. It seeped through his freshly-pressed uniform, saturated his flesh, penetrated his pores and gnawed at his soul. He examined the log, removed a ball point pen from his uniform shirt and picked at the
bloody mess.
“What is it?” asked Money.
Nickles flicked the bloody glob off the end of his pen and wiped it clean. “Near as I can tell, a deer, at least it was. Now, it’s just a stinkin’ pile of rancid meat and gut leavings.”
Money stuffed the handkerchief back over his nose and inhaled deeply. He nudged a bloody stone with the toe of his boot. “Looks like a bear got hold of it. That’d be my guess, anyway. That what you’re thinkin’?”
The ground along the shore was soft and pliable without distinctive impressions—no recognizable tracks from bear, coyotes, or wolves—just the bloody mess of thrashed soil and sand, cut in deep, wide gashes.
Nickles pointed to a pair of ruts cut deep in the sand and leading straight into the water. “Not unless bears have learned how to do the backstroke in fifty feet of water with a mouthful of venison.”
Money’s eyes followed the drag marks to the edge of the lake where they disappeared into the deep, dark water. Waves lapped at the shoreline, leaving bloody pink foam along the edge. “Shit.”
Nickles stared out over the lake, his hand resting on the butt of his holstered .45, his eyes straining to penetrate the dense fog. He had the thick and muscular build of an outdoorsman, his once black hair overtaken with strands of gray. He kept it cropped short, what the barbers called a flattop. The job had aged him some, slowed his pace a bit, maybe made him a little more cautious and a lot more cynical. He rubbed a callused palm across his cheek and let out a long puff of air. Three weeks ago he’d been sitting at his desk, listening to Travis Tritt, sipping bourbon from a coffee mug and dreaming about retirement. Then the calls started coming in. First it was Mrs. Weingarten’s missing collie, followed by a flock of mangled geese in Grant’s Cove. And now, this mess.
He knelt down next to the rutted sand and idly flicked a finger through the damp granules. Something jagged and yellow snagged his skin, slicing through the meat of his forefinger. He picked it up and eyed it in the dim afternoon light. A tooth. He turned it over in his hand. It filled his entire palm, extending an inch past his fingertips. He judged it to be over eight inches long, nearly three inches wide and sharp as a straight razor. He turned to Hearld Money, his hand extended, blood still seeping from the gash in his finger. “What the fuck’s happening to my lake?”
CHAPTER 2
Deep beneath the blue-green waters of Vivid Valley Lake something vile was lurking around the heavy clumps of weed and thick layers of silt. The thing was once one of God’s normal creatures—a gar. It fed on minnows, crayfish and shad and swam the crystal clear water of the Whitewater River. It flourished in the swiftly flowing rapids and basked in deep pools, warmed by the sun. Then, the river was dammed up, the lake was built, the waters deepened and men arrived in noisy machines and sleek boats filled with partiers.
The waters began to sour—run-off from pesticides
, industrial waste being dumped in the dead of night and something long-dead rising from the flooded valley floor. The soured water penetrated the gar. The gar was no longer a fish, the feast of the dead had seen to that. Its DNA had a new strand, a twisted strand. Soon, it was becoming something else. Its needle-like teeth grew longer and turned yellow and jagged. Part mutant genetics, part ancient curse, the gar was now a hideous freshwater carnivore, an undead monster that would hunt and stalk and feed.
The monster became aggressive, killing and eating day and night. It never rested. It began to crave bigger prey—warm blooded prey—human prey. As it swam the souring waters of Vivid Valley Lake satisfying its constant craving, it learned there was other prey on which to feast. Buried prey. Dead prey. Cursed prey. And so, the feast began. Soon, the thing would have it all.
CHAPTER 3
Nickles pinched his eyes shut and rubbed his temples. The horns of a vicious migraine were ramming around in his skull and goring the backs of his eyeballs. He fished a pill bottle from his pocket, popped the cap, shook out four long, blue pills and dry-swallowed them. He felt the chalky burn in the back of his throat.
Of all the pains in his ass, Hearld Money was one of the biggest. Money was a ‘weekly whiner’, calling the DNR hotline whenever someone farted crossways. Charlie, there’s a boatload of drunks and their naked girlfriends tied off at my private dock…Charlie, I got hunters pissing in my sweet corn again…Send Charlie over right away, I got some nosy bastard peepin’ in my windows. With all the corn liquor Hearld Money cooked up in his barn and swilled down his throat, Nickles wondered how the addle-minded old fuck could find his ass with both hands and a topographic map.
Nests: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 16
