Storm Orphans: The Beginning (2 page)

“Like what happened anyway,” Tyler responded.

“Yes,” Roger agreed. “Like what happened anyway. If the project had gone according to plan, we would have developed a chemical that was capable of dampening the human brain’s tendency toward aggressive reaction. We were testing the side effects when I found what I thought was a fatal flaw in its design. Unfortunately, Biomech’s new board chose to fire me rather than scrap the chemical and start over. I can only guess that whatever work went on after my departure failed to correct the problem.”

“And they drugged us with it even though it either kills you or turns you into monster,” Tyler said bitterly.

“I believe they did,” his father agreed. “I’m sure that wasn’t their intended result, but I think that’s exactly what happened. I tried to get an investigation going, but no one would listen to me.”

“So how does it spread?” Tyler asked after he’d finished his meal and drained the last of his beer. “Mom didn’t get attacked or bitten, did she?”

Roger shook his head. “It’s not like a zombie movie, Tyler. It’s a chemical. You have to inhale or digest it. The original plan was to introduce it into the city water supplies and spread it across the more rural areas via cloud seeding.”

“So it might have been in the rain?” Tyler asked.

Roger nodded.

“Your mother and I were always careful to buy bottled water for drinking and cooking after we moved to Florida,” he said. “But even then, there’s still the risk of things like taking showers or wiping your eyes after you’ve touched something wet with rain or condensation. There was no way to be completely safe.”

“So even now…” Tyler began.

“Even now, we could catch it,” Roger finished for him. “All we can do is be careful and watch out for each other.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Dad,” Tyler said as tears welled in his eyes.

He got up and hugged his father fiercely.

“I love you, Tyler,” Roger replied. “And your mother loved you too. Never forget that.”

It was several months after that conversation that Roger suffered his first symptoms. He was sitting in the garage with the door open, enjoying the afternoon breeze while he wrote some notes in a logbook. Tyler had gone inside to use the bathroom so he was alone when he felt the creeping sensation come over him. His mind went blank
and his hands shook so badly that he dropped his pen. He felt his eyes roll up in their sockets as the pen rolled across the page and fell to the floor. He wasn’t sure what else happened, but he snapped out of it just a minute later. When he did, he quickly wiped sweat from his brow and plucked up the pen from the floor just before Tyler re-entered the room.

He knew his face must have betrayed him because as Tyler looked at him, he frowned in immediate concern.

“Everything okay?” his son asked.

Roger forced a smile and nodded. “Just hot out here,” he replied. “I think I’m going to go in and lay down for awhile.”

Roger closed his bedroom door after leaving Tyler in the garage. He lay down atop the rumpled sheets and closed his eyes with a growing sense of dread. If he was infected, his time was running out. He needed to find a cure and failing that, he needed a plan on how to keep Tyler safe. A vision of the woman from the grocery store arose in his mind again and he hurriedly shoved it aside. No matter what else happened, he couldn’t harm his own son.

The next time
Roger lost control, Tyler was sitting directly across from him on the sofa. It was about a week after the first episode and they were eating another modest dinner by candlelight. Mid-bite, Roger closed his eyes, dropped his fork and barked out a 30 second litany of harsh consonants and extended vowel sounds as he beat both fists onto the coffee table that sat between them. Tyler was petrified by the experience and curled up into a ball in the corner of the sofa by the time his father snapped out of it.

That night Roger had to admit his growing certainty that he’d been infected and warned Tyler that he needed to be extra vigilant. Over the boy’s objections, Roger taught him how to load, aim, and fire the family shotgun the following morning.

The next several days were uncomfortable for them both. Tyler wavered between being overly needy and aloof. One minute he didn’t want his dad to be more than an arm’s length away from him and the next he was holed up in his room trying to put as much distance between them as possible. He didn’t know what to think. He couldn’t imagine his life without his father’s presence and yet he was scared stiff that his dad would turn violent and try to harm him. Roger made him keep the shotgun near at hand at all times. Tyler glanced at the big gun where it stood propped up against his nightstand and shivered.
What kind of world was it when you couldn’t trust your own father not to kill and eat you?

Tyler was pondering this terrible question when he heard his father bellow wildly from the garage. He grabbed the gun and flung open the door before running
toward the sound. Unnerved by what he was afraid he’d find, he hesitated for just a moment as he reached the thick door that led from the hallway to the garage and then he opened it with the gun held at his side.

It took his horrified brain a few seconds to comprehend what he saw. The garage door was open and his father stood crouched outside on the driveway, his shoulders hunched over and in awkward position. The afternoon sun
light cast a crooked shadow of the man across the cracked black asphalt beneath his feet. Roger’s bulging eyes reflected a combination of utter rage and agony and he was dripping wet from head to toe. Tyler saw the overturned red gas can a few feet away and it dawned on him what his father was soaked with.

“NOOOOOO!” Tyler screamed as he dropped the gun and bolted into the garage.

Roger took one last look at his son and flicked the lighter in his right hand before touching it to his chest. He was immediately engulfed in flames, the heat shoving Tyler to the ground before he could reach the edge of the driveway.

Tyler watched in stunned horror as his father fell to the pavement and burned. The first seconds of shrieking were terrible, but the following silence was even worse. The only sound
was that of the fire as it crackled and popped as it finished consuming his father’s flesh.

Tyler lay on the floor of the garage and wept. Hours later as the sun dipped below the horizon outside, the boy was still in the same spot. The fire had burnt out and all that remained of Roger Gibbons was the charred skeleton and ashes that lay in place of where Tyler had last seen him.

He fell asleep with his face on the cool cement and woke up stiff –necked and completely alone the next morning. Tyler couldn’t stomach the thought of eating, but he made himself brush his teeth and wash his face before packing up his meager belongings in a gym bag.

He left the house via the garage, plucking up the shotgun along the way. Then
he stopped beside his father’s blackened remains for a moment to pay his respects. He didn’t know where he’d go, but he knew he could no longer stay here. His parents had both died in this house that wasn’t even really theirs. Whatever fate awaited him, he’d meet it elsewhere. There were monsters out there and they’d taken everything that he loved. He patted the extra shells he’d stuffed inside the pockets of his jeans and looked toward the road that lay past the fence. It was time he took a few of the monsters out in return.

Part I
I

Even the Broken Ones
:

Jenny
’s Story

Renee Cooper watched her daughter’s fitful sleep by candlelight with a look of concern etched across her pale, freckled face. Jenny had already had two seizures in the past week. The second occurred not an hour ago and was so violent that Renee had feared the skinny little girl in her faded t-shirt and baggy cotton shorts might go into cardiac arrest. It was a small miracle that their family of three was still alive and together given the way that civilization had crumbled all around them, but it seemed there was no miracle to cure poor Jenny from the epilepsy she’d suffered from since just after her birth twelve years prior.

Curt walked up quietly behind Renee and put an arm around her slender shoulders before giving them a squeeze.

“How’s our baby girl doing?” he asked softly.

Renee turned
toward her husband and gave him a one-armed hug, putting her head against his chest as she held the candle at arm’s length.

“She’s finally asleep,” she answered. “Poor thing must be exhausted.”

Curt led his wife away from the open doorway of their daughter’s bedroom and down the narrow apartment hallway to their own. He sat down on the edge of their bed and Renee followed after she placed the candle on top of the dresser. She grabbed a pillow to put in her lap so she’d have something else to hold onto.

“How much longer is this going to go on?” she asked with a tinge of panic in her voice. “What are we going to do if she doesn’t snap back out of it next time?”

Curt reached up and brushed a stray lock of Renee’s strawberry blonde hair off her forehead. “I don’t know,” he replied. “We need to get her more medicine. I don’t see any other way.”

Renee stood back up and moved to the bedroom window so she could part its heavy curtain just enough to peek outside into the Miami night. It was pitch black outside,
the sky overcast, every street light and store front as dead as all the people the plague hadn’t turned into walking monsters.

The world had ended. There were times when Renee was
convinced that she, her husband of 15 years, and their only child were the last remaining people on the entire planet. Curt assured her regularly that there must be others, but they hadn’t seen anyone that wasn’t a corpse or mindless and Hell bent on eating them in over six months now. The view outside the window didn’t do anything to refute that status. There wasn’t a single sign of movement or life.

Renee let the curtain drop closed again and looked at Curt in the faint
amber glow of the room. The light flickered on his face, softening it around the edges and hiding some of the gauntness that had set in as their supply of food dwindled ever smaller.

“We’ve already talked about this, Curt,” she said as she stood in front of him with her hands on her increasingly bony hips. “It’s too dangerous. We’ve both seen what those things will do to you if you get caught.”

Curt reached up to take her hand and gently pulled her back down beside him.

“I know, honey. I know and I wish there was another answer,” he said.

“It’s too far,” she stated.

“I can make it,” Curt insisted. “I have to make it. Without the Carbatrol, she’s only going to get worse.”

Renee lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. She was silent, the only sound in the room that of her and Curt’s breathing. It remained that way so long Curt thought she’d fallen asleep. He got up to blow out the candle, the flame dying with only the slightest of effort. As he climbed back into the bed beside her, his wife said four words in the darkness. She didn’t say them very loudly, but they kept him awake for another hour all the same.

“I’m going with you,” she told him.

Despite falling asleep late, Curt was awake shortly after dawn. A bright sliver of sunlight peeked through the curtains and illuminated a thin strip of the room. He tried to rise from the bed and use the toilet quietly, but Renee was sitting up and waiting on him when he exited the bathroom.

He walked to the window and
looked out at the blue sky and gray world. It was going to be another scorcher of a day. The Miami sun was already heating up the street two stories below to the point that he could see its ripple effect on the air just above the blacktop.

“Did you hear what I said last night?” Renee asked from behind him.

Curt nodded without turning around.

“It looks empty out there at the moment,” he said with as much hope in his voice as he could muster.

“We can’t leave without saying goodbye,” Renee replied. “Just in case.”

They both looked at the doorway to their bedroom in
surprise at the sound of Jenny sobbing. Their little girl stood looking at them, her favorite stuffed animal clutched to her chest, as tears welled in her eyes.

“I’ll be better, I promise!” Jenny wailed as the tears streamed down her face.

“Oh, honey!” Renee exclaimed, rushing over to her daughter and embracing her tightly. “We’re not leaving you! And you didn’t do anything wrong!”

Curt crossed the room and put a hand on Jenny’s shoulder.

“We just need to get you some medicine,” he explained. “It’ll make you feel better and help keep you safe.”

Jenny took a step back from her mother’s hug in order to look her father in the eye
s when she replied.

“You always said the pharmacy is too far away,” she responded. “That we need to stay within sight of our
building.”

Curt tried to offer her a smile. “That’s true,” he answered. “But this time we need to make an exception. You’re more important to us than anything else in the world,
sweetheart. Your seizures are getting worse and we can’t take you to a doctor. We have to try.”