On a blanket that Kendra had already laid out. After she climaxed, she collapsed on top of me and started weeping. I joined in and we lay there, holding one another and fell asleep crying. I have a memory of vaguely dreaming about the ghastly man in the nest, telling me about falling stars. The baby woke up sometime later buy youtube views, screaming. 

 
We both went into the bedroom and spent a very long time soothing him. Kendra fed him as best as she could and he fell asleep on her breast. I put my arm around her and it felt like we were a family. As we sat there, I thought about my time in the nest. I had seen my mother even though I knew she was dead. And she had not been some phantom come to haunt me buy youtube views; she had been flesh and bone and blood. 

 

 

It made me think of Crazy Mike and how he had claimed to have spent time with his wife in the nest. The last we saw of him, in a video screen on Vance’s computer, he’d still been alive. He’d clearly been out of his mind, but he had been alive and happy. It made me wonder just what the nests really were. What had that dawn-like light been, lurking in its dark heart buy youtube views? It also made me wonder what I might currently be doing if I had given in to the lunacy and stayed there with Ma. 

 

Kendra and I returned to our bedroom. We slept for an hour or so more before I awoke to her hands on me. I came fully awake as she straddled me, kissing my chest and neck softly. I entered her in a blur of kisses, heated breaths, and fingernails. We whispered each other’s names in gasps of pleasure, confirmation that this was real, that we were here together even after what we had endured earlier in the day. 

The palm I had rubbed raw on the street within the nest screamed when I grasped her hips and urged her on, but it was worth it. Near the end, she leaned down low and, with her hair falling perfectly to both sides of our faces like a veil to keep our secrets in, she put her mouth to my ear. I love you, she said. I opened my mouth to respond but her lips were already there to stop it.  The baby got most of the remainder of the Cheerios the following morning. 

 

Kendra and I had the remainder of the beef jerky. With those pitiful breakfasts in our stomachs, we started out on the road again for what we truly believed would be our last day of traveling. Our hopes and thin assurances to one another started to shape within eleven miles of walking buy youtube views. It was there, walking up a slight hill in the four-lane road with the mountains rising around us, that we saw the first of the military barricades. 

 

They had been blown over and cast aside, but it was enough evidence that the Safe Zone was ahead to keep us going. Military jeeps and trucks lay scattered like a scene from a young boy’s bedroom floor. As we waded into the wreckage buy youtube views, we started seeing dead bodies everywhere.