The Last Warm Place Read online

  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 can’t bring myself to eat them.

  We ate our dinner at the Dunn’s small kitchen table. The baby sat at a highchair we 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.

  “Not my baby, not my duty,” I had said.

  Honestly, I only refused because the idea of naming a child that not only did not belong to me, but was also the product of rape, seemed like an enormous responsibility. Kendra had not given him a name, either. I asked her once why she refused to name him and she got very upset. She railed on and on about how she hadn’t wanted him, hadn’t asked for him, and she refused to give a name to something that had been forced upon her. It would be like naming a stray dog, she’d said.

  I hadn’t questioned it any further after that. So it was always just the baby or him. And despite the way she had spoken about him in that instance, it was evident that she loved him very much. I think she loved him so much that it physically pained her heart I was very fond of him, too. I was proud that I had delivered him in the shadows the Dunn’s living room in the early hours of the morning six months ago, with nothing to assist except a few dingy paper towels and bottled water.

  He would always stare at me, as if in awe, whenever I gave him more than a second of my attention. It was like he knew what I had done for him and his mother. I hated that he didn’t have a name. I sometimes referred to him as Wet One or Squirt. He seemed to like Squirt.

  “Why in God’s name would two men want a baby?” Kendra asked.

  I had an idea but said nothing. The thought was too grisly, too immoral even for what had happened to the world. But I had seen evidence of it once before while walking the roads with Kendra, seen what I thought were bones picked clean at the charred remnants of an old campsite.

  “If there had been three men and they stole our baby, they could have made a reboot of that terrible movie. You ever see that?”

  “No. I think that was before my time.”

  “It was before mine, too. But I enjoyed movies.”

  She chuckled here and stared at the baby. Every now and then we try to diffuse a lot of situations with humor and it never works. Through it, I have come to understand that Kendra and I had grown up quite differently. I went to the movies a lot and watched them on Netflix and iTunes with my girlfriend. Kendra, I think, had been too busy protecting and providing for herself to enjoy such niceties.

  “They were probably just looking for food or weapons,” she said. “Gas, maybe.”

  “Probably,” I agreed.

  I also knew that two men on the road alone would have probably been very interested in Kendra’s company. I kept this to myself, too. Besides, given the nature of how she suffered before I met her, she was likely thinking the same thing.

  When dinner was done, we went into the bedroom. The house had four bedrooms, two baths, and a large room that was part-kitchen-part-den. Although Kendra and I had not slept together in the physical sense, there had never been any question about sharing a bed. I had nightmares on occasion, and according to her, she was terrified that she’d wake up one morning and I’d be gone. She claimed that she wanted to sleep next to me to not only talk me down from my nightmares, but also to feel the bed move if I got up to leave in the middle of the night.

  The baby slept between us on the Dunn’s king sized bed. There was no electricity—that had been gone in most places around the country for nearly a year now—so we had never been able to clean the sheets. From time to time, I thought I smelled traces of Brian and Ellie Dunn. His was a musky male shampoo sort of smell and hers was a light fragrance from a fruity lotion.

  By candlelight, Kendra read her paperback. I sat on the floor with the baby. He was doing his best to crawl but had not quite gotten it yet. Parentings books weren’t really a thing anymore and since Kendra nor myself knew anything about raising a child, we had no idea when certain milestones were supposed to occur. Still, I thought six months might be a little early for crawling, but the kid thought otherwise. He was trying his absolute best but couldn’t quite get the hang of it.

  As he swatted at my toes with his little hands, I re-counted the ammo we gained from our new weapons. I also went back through the clothes and other belongings I had taken from David Giuilano and his partner. As I looked at the cash in David’s wallet, I tried to remember a time when these stupid rectangles of paper had meant anything.

  I looked at the picture of the girl I assumed was his daughter. I smelled the stagnant pack of gum, hoping to trigger some memory of a life of normalcy that existed before all of this.

  I laid out the cargo pants I had taken from David and brushed them off with my hand. I looked them over carefully. One of the belt loops was torn and there was a small hole in the back pocket. As I checked the front pockets, I noticed something that I overlooked in my hasty search immediately following the shooting.

  Something made a crinkling noise in the front left pocket. I reached inside and felt the corner of a folded piece of paper. I took it out and saw that it was a piece of white office paper that was folded in quarters. It was torn at the edges and slightly discolored. Inside of it, something else had been folded as well.

  I unfolded the paper slowly, relishing the discovery. When the paper was unfolded to half its full size, the other item fell out into my lap. The baby clumsily reached for it with his grasping fingers but I grabbed it first, trying to make a game out of it. He cackled at me and slapped at the floo
r in delight.

  It was a black and white photo, printed on flimsy photo paper; it was the cheap kind of photo paper you could run through a computer at home. The picture was hard to decipher, as it had been taken at night and in poor light. From what I could tell, the picture showed some sort of large gate and, to its left, a stone pillar. There was writing engraved on the pillar but the picture was too blurry to read it.

  I set the picture to the side and unfolded the paper all the way. I read it several times before revealing my find to Kendra. My heart dared to believe that the words typed on the paper were legitimate. But deep in my soul, I was almost certain it was some stupid hoax, fabricated by someone like me—someone that missed the old world just enough to insist that when the searching was done, we’d find it waiting for us around the next decimated corner.

  The piece of paper read:

  NORTH AMERICAN SAFE ZONE No. 77, EAST US: VA / BLUE RIDGE

  Confirmation of Residence #275A

  C. Miller – Fort Worth, TX

  DOB: 7/20/78

  S/ID #749G-713A-11

  A strange bar code rested in the bottom right corner of the page. I ran my hand over it and somewhere in the recesses of my head, I thought of standing in a line at the grocery store as the cashier rang up my cheese, milk, beer, and chips.

  “Kendra,” I said, showing her the paper.

  She set her book down and leaned across the bed. She was wearing a black tank top, part of the wardrobe we had found remaining at the Dunn’s house. It fit very loosely and I made myself look away. Honestly, it was getting harder and harder to do.

  She took it, and like me, read it several times before reacting.

  “I remember hearing about these Safe Zones on the news before everything went to hell,” she said. “Do you think this is the real deal? I thought it was supposed to be a bunch of conspiracy crap.”

  “It could be,” I said. “I never believed any of it. With the speed that everything went down, there’s no way the government would have had time to plan for anything, let alone safe habitats for the world’s elite to escape to.”

  “What if, though?”

  “What if what?” I asked. “Even if the Safe Zones are real, why would this guy have this ticket? His name was David Giuilano. This supposed confirmation of residence is for a C. Miller.”

  “Who knows? Maybe David Giuilano ran across this C. Miller and killed him.”

  I stayed quiet for a moment because I knew it was possible. The baby was playfully slapping at my calf now, wanting to be picked up. I lifted him up and cradled him to my chest as I sat on the bed.

  “Blue Ridge,” Kendra said. “Where would that be in Virginia?”

  “I’m guessing somewhere along the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

  I hated that I was giving in to her wishful thinking, but it was entertaining. Figuring out the puzzle—if indeed there was one—to this document gave me something to busy my mind with. Even if it was fake (and I was almost certain this was the case), it was the first bit of new information of any kind we had gotten in six months or so. It was a reminder that the rest of the world beyond our little scrap of stolen land was still out there.

  “Would you go with me?” Kendra asked. “If we found out tomorrow that this Safe Zone really exists and that it’s somewhere on the east coast, would you go with me? Would you help me get there?”

  The way she looked at me made me want to collapse. It made me want to grab her face and kiss her. The worst part of all was that she had no idea what she was doing. She had never intentionally lured me on and I don’t think she was even remotely aware of how I felt about her.

  “Yes,” I said. And I sincerely meant it.

  She smiled and then took the baby from me. She spoke softly to him and hummed a song that always soothed him. The baby softly batted her nose and giggled.

  I looked at the new weapons on the bedroom floor. I looked at the cargo pants. My eyes were locked on that sheet of paper as my eyes grew heavy.

  I drifted off with Kendra humming the baby to sleep against my back.

  5

  I don’t remember having any dreams that night, or waking up with any sort of revelatory emotions dazzling my half-dozed head. Still, when I opened my eyes to that familiar rusty, yellow-white that had served as daylight after the last of the blasts and bestial roars, I was ready to pack our few meager belongings and hit the road. Maybe my rested mind was more willing to believe that the sheet of paper I’d found in David Giuilano’s pants wasn’t part of a hoax. Maybe those safe zones existed.

  It wasn’t too much of a stretch to believe. Before it all came to and, hadn’t there been multiple conspiracy theories about how the government had underground bases and bunkers set aside for this sort of thing?

  I got dressed and went into the kitchen where I found Kendra and the baby eating oatmeal. The baby’s breakfast was a bit mushier than Kendra’s; there was a froth of it around his mouth as he babbled enthusiastically at my appearance in the doorway.

  Here’s the thing about me and Kendra—well, actually, I think it might be a thing that any survivors of an apocalyptic event might share with one another after spending enough horrifying days together. But sometimes I like to think it’s something that was only ours. It’s this weird sort of telepathy that keeps us on the same wavelength. If I find myself thinking about how much I miss a Five Guys cheeseburger, she’ll start talking about how her dad used to grill the best cheeseburgers under the sun. Or if she’s starts thinking about TV shows she once enjoyed, I’d start talking about a movie that I suddenly remembered.

  Whatever might be behind this oddity was at work as she looked up at me. I gave her a sleepy nod as I took my seat at the table. There was no “good morning,” and no “how did you sleep?” She gave me a cute sort of frown and looked from my eyes down to her lumpy oatmeal.

  “If we could find a car that still ran halfway, we could do it, you know,” she said. “That is, if all the gas hasn’t been stolen.”

  “I don’t think it would be possible for all of the gas to be stolen,” I said. “Besides that, I’m not sure a car is the safest way to travel. The engine noise would attract the attention of anyone within earshot.”

  She smiled at me. I could tell that she was simply pleased that I hadn’t shot her idea dead right away.

  “To be honest,” I said, “if it wasn’t for Squirt, I’d go. I’d do it right now. But it’s too risky. Not just for him, but for us. What do we do if we’re trying to lay low and he starts crying?”

  She nodded. No doubt, she’d thought of this, too. “Still, the chance to get him to a place where he won’t have to worry about starving to death before he turns two would be worth it. For me, anyway.”

  I didn’t say anything. I got up and made my own little bowl of oatmeal. The expiration date on the lid was a few months gone, but I didn’t care; we had already sifted through it for any bugs, worms, or mold. I saw burned cardboard in the sink from where Kendra had started a small fire to heat the water for their oatmeal. I used the same lighter I used to burn the bodies yesterday to make a small fire for my own breakfast.

  As I waited for my small pan of water to warm up, I looked around the kitchen. This house—the place the Dunn family had once called home—had become our own home over the last few months. I’m sure we hadn’t loved it as much as the Dunns, but I’m fairly confident we appreciated it just as much.

  It would be hard to leave it behind.

  But I was already beginning to understand that we couldn’t just ignore the paper we’d found last night. It went unspoken between us, but we both knew that to ignore the paper and what it might mean would be foolish.

  Even if it was somehow fake, the hope it provided was enough.

  Hope was something neither of us had felt in a very long time.

  The way I saw it, there were two possible outcomes: first, the Safe Zones were real and if we could reach then, it meant we would no longer have to live in fear and hunger on a dail
y basis; second, the Safe Zones were a hoax as we had been told, and we’d simply have to find somewhere else to live.

  Really, it all came down to that sense of hope.

  Hope is a weird thing. When you were without it, it seemed like some foolish dream that children once had under summertime skies as they fantasized about the future. But when it reared its head and poked at your heart like an old scar, it was impossible to ignore. In many ways, it became your reason for living.

  “I think we need to go,” Kendra said. “We had to kill two men yesterday. Two men we that showed up out of nowhere on our porch. There were others before them. It’s no way to live. Especially not if there really are Safe Zones out there.”

  “Well, it’s not like we’d have much to pack,” I said.

  This was my way of giving in. I wasn’t necessarily letting her know that I was agreeing with her, but I wasn’t arguing either.

  “So we’ll do it?” Kendra asked.

  I took a moment to revel in the fact that she was waiting for my confirmation. This wasn’t a situation where she would take Squirt and leave on her own if I refused to go. She’d be mad for a few days if I didn’t go along with this, but she’d still be with me. She’d stay with me and eventually respect my decision. She knew that everything I did now was for the protection and safety of both of them.

  But she already knew that I was not going to fight her on this. As I took a mouthful of bland oatmeal, I knew that our time in the Dunn house was nearly over.

  “Yes, let’s do it. But tomorrow. We need to spend today packing and coming up with some kind of a plan.”

  The smile on her face was bright. The baby responded to it in kind, giggling and making clutching gestures at her.

  We wolfed down our meager breakfasts and carried out our daily chores with excitement. While I was collecting the few scraps of clothes I had and placing them in old plastic grocery bags, Kendra approached me and gave me a hug. She was frail and thin but I could tell by just wrapping my arms around her that there was something at her center that was unbreakable.