The Last Warm Place Read online

  The Last Warm Place

  Barry Napier

  Published by Barry Napier, 2020.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE LAST WARM PLACE

  First edition. April 28, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Barry Napier.

  Written by Barry Napier.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  ALSO BY BARRY NAPIER

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  About the Author

  1

  The sky sat heavy above us like a rock on the edge of a cliff. The ground seemed to wait for it, as if it had expected the sky to fall long ago and was ready for the end. The few houses that remained along the landscape sat expectantly, leaning slightly like brittle bones waiting for the break. The homes leaned away from the direction the blasts had come, their backyards forever painted a moonlike gray, the back stoops either blown apart or reduced to cinders and ash.

  We were short on food and some of the highways were still on fire. I could smell them strongest in the morning, burning asphalt and smoke.

  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. It reminds me of Ma, when she had been enduring 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. She’d love the natural breeze through the screen, but hated the flies. She’d called it a no-win situation.

  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. It seems they are the only colors 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 make noise. No matter what type of wail leaps from its tiny little mouth, it reminds me of the fires and the screaming that came before.

  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 happened. Kendra swears it couldn’t have been more than a year, just before I met her. But it feels longer to me. 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 death and smoke. The smells of engine exhaust and the mowed lawns of summer afternoons had been stripped away and replaced by the stench of bodies and the burning of the world. It all mingled together in a timeline of scents that made it impossible to know how much time had passed.

  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 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. But we’re both pretty sure we’ve scavenged all the food there is to find.

  I sometimes wish Kendra had 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, 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, packing down that lane.

  These were nice thoughts, but as I watched the two emaciated figures drawing closer, those images felt as fantastical as my boyhood dreams of one day walking on Mars, or curing the cancer that had slowly and painfully wiped out a good deal of 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 carried what I thought looked like an AK-47. I’d never been much on guns, but after everything that had happened, I started to learn pretty quickly. The weapons they were carrying 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 nuclear radiation. It was usually worse on 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 our visitors 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 currently loaded into the Remington 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 this one sounded like the “feed me” cry.

  “How old is the kid?” one of the strangers asked, nodding towards the house. There were introductions, no fake pleasantries. This did not bode very well.

  “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.

  “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 t
he 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. “Got a problem with that?”

  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 with 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 black orbit of the barrel was right there by the side of my head and for one sickening moment, I almost wished her trembling hands would slip and that she’d pull the trigger. Just to end it. Just to be away from all of this.

  But her hands held steady and I was able to back away. The man with the AK followed and stepped into the house. He came across the doorframe with a look of scarred confidence on his face.

  I don’t think he had time to actually see Kendra before the Remington filled the house with thunder. It was followed by 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. I thought it had actually broken my frail arms. The living room smelled like gun smoke and fresh blood. Kendra looked blankly at the Remington. 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 start weeping.

  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.

  Her voice, like her eyes, 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.

  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. 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. When I went to the door to check out the commotion, the man opened fire with a small revolver. One of the stray shots had punctured a hole to the right of the doorframe.

  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 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. By the look of the little girl’s face—the upturned nose and dark brown eyes—it was clearly 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 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. It seemed as safe a place as any to live out the aftermath of the end of the world.

  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 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 was thirty years old then, 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 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 was 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. All she would tell me was that she’d been sexually abused before the end of the world. Throw in the fact that she never talked about her father, and I think I managed to put it all together.

  When we came to the house in Walton, the first thing we did was remove all of the pictures. The house had been abandoned quickly, and we had gotten a good snapshot 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 before there had been a need for my little pyre 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 they had built their lives in.

  The last year of my life 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. It would have been a quick and simple release.

  Sometimes when I stir awake in the middle of the night, 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. When the trigger was pulled, there had only been that 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.