Storm Orphans: The Beginning

Storm Orphans

The Beginning

By Matt Handle

Copyright © 2014 Matt Handle

All rights reserved

Part I

Progenitor’s Son:

Tyler’s Story

Despite his bitterness over being fired at Biomech, Roger Gibbons had a new job just two short weeks
later. A biochemist with his résumé and talents was in high demand, even with the blemish the military goons that had taken over his former firm had added to his record. The new gig was in Orlando, Florida at the Neuroscience Institute. He could have found another position in Atlanta, but the Institute promised a chance for him to do further research on the same type of toxins he’d been experimenting with for the past several years and he thought a fresh start in a completely new environment might be best for everyone, especially Tyler, his 12 year-old son.

By all accounts, Tyler was a
healthy, good looking, intelligent kid, but he wasn’t without his troubles. He’d been suspended from school twice already in the past year for fighting and his mother, Sherry, frequently complained to Roger in private that she thought their son was drifting away from them. He was distant, moody, and often inexplicably angry.

Roger thought Sherry was a bit overly-sensitive, but he had to agree that Tyler was having a tough time lately.
Roger had decided that losing his job might just be a blessing in disguise. The Sunshine State not only promised him a new opportunity, it offered Tyler a new school, a clean slate, and hopefully some new friends in the bargain. So they put the house on the market, packed up their belongings, and followed the moving van onto Interstate 75 South a mere five days after he accepted the position.

For the first
four years in Florida, things were indeed much better. Tyler was soon back to making straight A’s. He grew tall and strong, played junior varsity soccer, and had more than a few girls calling and texting him at all hours of the day and night. Meanwhile, his mother had relaxed into their new home, taken a part-time job as a substitute teacher at the neighboring elementary school, and Roger was impressing his superiors while he made progress deciphering the weaknesses in a variation of the neurotoxin he’d developed in Atlanta.

But
then the troubles began. More and more people around the country were suffering from cognitive impairment, losing their ability to speak anything but gibberish. Some even turned violent. What at first seemed to be isolated cases quickly turned into an epidemic. By 2013, Roger was convinced the increasingly regular reports of these episodes were tied somehow to the work he’d done for Biomech. He spent more and more time in his lab, feverishly looking for both proof and a cure.

As the violence turned to riots
the following year, Roger tried to convince the Institute to go public with his suspicions, but as an entity reliant on public and private donations, his superiors were reluctant to cause waves. Regardless of how dire the situation was becoming, they insisted he remain silent. Eventually, he went to the press with his suspicions anyway, advocating for a thorough investigation of Biomech and their possible ties to a secret government program.

The Institute fired him the next morning
and the papers wrote him off as just another nutty conspiracy theorist. He tried looking for another position, but the word on him was out. Roger Gibbons wasn’t a team player. Roger Gibbons was a poor investment. Then the public health became so dire, it became apparent that there was no point in Roger looking for work at all. The country was falling apart and his career was over.

So he packed
up his family one last time, deciding on a small town about an hour north named Wildwood. Given how dangerous urban centers were becoming as more and more people fell victim to what was now being called the Babylonian Plague, Roger thought the tiny burg was just the sort of place he and his loved ones might ride out the storm in safety. It was anonymous; it was nearly empty; and he found a house in the middle of five acres of undeveloped land whose owner was more than happy to rent it to him on the cheap given the state of the economy at that point.

Roger and Tyler spent their mornings in their new
rural abode mending the fence that ran around the property and Sherry home-schooled the teen in the afternoons while Roger tinkered in the homemade lab he’d pieced together in the garage. About their only excursion outside the fence line was a weekly trip to the nearest remaining grocery store. Sherry usually skipped this exercise but Tyler enjoyed joining his dad since it gave him a chance to see a bit of the outside world. It was on one of these trips that father and son watched in horror as a lank-haired woman in a black Nickelback t-shirt and hot pink yoga pants suddenly grabbed what appeared to be her daughter by the throat and proceeded to chew her way through the girl’s face. After the store owner charged out from behind the checkout counter and put a pair of holes between the woman’s shoulder blades with a .45caliber handgun, the Canadian rock band loving mother and her unfortunate offspring both lay dead in the middle of the dairy aisle. Roger and son quickly paid for their purchases and left for the safer confines of their place out in the country. From that day forward, Roger made the trips on his own.

The three of them
spent a quiet New Year’s Eve ringing in the year in the humble rental house and Roger allowed himself to believe all might be well despite the horrible things they’d witnessed and heard about on TV. Martial law was declared and there was some hope that the soldiers would be able to quell the violence before it got any worse. By then, television broadcasts were beginning to get sketchy. The news personnel changed faces with an alarming regularity as reporters fell sick and someone else stepped in to take their place. Channels lost signal for hours and sometimes days at a time with little to no explanation. Even Ryan Seacrest had disappeared, his Rockin’ Eve replacement some ex-football player that Roger had never heard of. But his little family was still together and relatively unscathed so they toasted the New Year with the best champagne to be found in Wildwood, Florida and promised one another that 2015 would bring something better.

But it wasn’t meant to be.
Five days before Valentine’s Day, Sherry fell ill. Tyler heard her first. He was sitting in the living room playing a handheld video game while his mother was in the kitchen cleaning the dinner dishes when she suddenly dropped a plate to the floor and began shouting gibberish. The plate broke in two, the noise it made as it shattered enough to get Tyler to his feet, but it was his mother’s howling cry of nonsense that brought him running. It was inhuman, that sound. She was screeching at the top of her lungs, the random syllables that were pouring out of her sounding like the shriek of a banshee.

As Tyler entered the kitchen, he found his mother holding her hands to her temples, her face beet red and her eyes rolled up in their sockets as she continued to scream. Slobber hung from her lips in long strings that stretched down to the blouse that clung to her sweat-drenched body. Roger came bounding into the room seconds later, almost running into Tyler before he stopped short and saw his wife’s condition.

“Oh, God, no!” Roger moaned.

“Dad, what is it?” Tyler asked hysterically. “What’s wrong with mom?”

Tears streamed down the teen’s terrified face. Tyler was no dummy. He knew what it was without his father saying a word. His mother was infected with the plague.

“Help me lay her down on the floor,” Roger instructed. “We need to calm her down before she hurts herself.”

Roger moved toward Sherry, holding out his hands in a placating gesture as he did so. He wasn’t sure she could even see him, but he’d witnessed enough victims to know they could lash out violently even at those they loved. A quick vision of the grocery store incident flashed through his head. He and Tyler needed to be careful.

“It’s okay, honey,” he said softly as he took another step closer. “Tyler and I are here. You’re going to be alright.”

Tyler didn’t budge. His feet were frozen in place as he looked on in horror as his mother began shaking, foam appearing around the corners of her mouth.

Roger stood directly in front of his wife and put his hands on her shoulders. He gripped them firmly and looked her in the face as he spoke.

“Sherry, honey, try to take a deep breath,” he told her. “You need to calm down.”

She didn’t acknowledge him in any manner. Only the whites of her eyes were visible and she continued to shake so hard that the cords in her neck stood out as she screamed her nonsense.

“Sherry!” Roger said louder and more forcefully. “Honey, can you hear me?” he asked desperately.

Her voice
raised an octave, the pitch so high that it hurt Roger and Tyler’s ears. There was absolutely nothing human in that final cry. Then she slumped to the floor in a heap, her head thudding on the tile. Her eyes closed and she went completely still.

Roger immediately knelt beside her and cradled her head in both of his trembling hands.

“Honey?” he asked, tears welling from his eyes now too. “Honey, look at me.”

But she never looked at him or anything else again. Sherry died in their rented kitchen in front of her husband and son less than two minutes
after they arrived in the room. Both Roger and Tyler were devastated.

They buried her the next day in the cemetery a half mile down the road. There wasn’t a funeral director or caretaker to be found so Roger and Tyler did the job themselves. It took them most of the morning to dig a hole deep enough, but once it was done, Roger said a short prayer and Tyler laid some wildflowers on her grave. They barely said a word to each other on the way home or for the rest of the day.

When Tyler woke up the following morning, his first thought was that the smell of fresh coffee was missing. And then he remembered why. His father was the one that drank most of it, but it was his mother that had always brewed it. It was a morning ritual that was as gone as the sight of her smiling face when Tyler would shuffle sleepily to the kitchen table every morning and ask what was for breakfast.

He and his father were alone now, in a world that was crumbling all around them. Tyler was 16 and old enough that he was usually embarrassed to shed tears, but he lay on his bed and cried until he couldn’t anymore. When he finally rubbed his hand across his eyes and got out of bed, he saw his father standing silently in the doorway to his room.

“I miss mom,” Tyler said quietly in explanation.

“I do too,” his father replied. “Go wash your face. I’ll make us something to eat.”

So began Roger and Tyler’s short life as a two-person household. Over the next year and a half, as society continued to crumble and their neighbors went from few to none, Roger taught Tyler everything he could about his science and his work. They spent their days in his garage laboratory and their evenings talking by candlelight in their living room over whatever dinner they could scrounge together.

Twice, Afflicted managed to scale the fence and attempt to break down their door. But Roger had had enough foresight to buy a shotgun and ammunition when they’d first moved to town. Neither of them had any experience shooting the weapon, but at point blank range, the monsters didn’t put up much of a
fight. They burned both corpses in a fire pit they’d dug on the farthest corner of the property from the house.

Many of their evening conversations hinged on what Roger knew of the plague and speculation on what might have spread the infection. He found that his son had a natural curiosity for science a
nd even in their dire situation, Roger took a certain pride in Tyler’s seeming desire to follow in his footsteps.

“Our former government faced a growing crisis,” Roger explained to his son one night as they dined on beef stew and half-stale potato chips washed down with bottled beer that would have tasted much better if it hadn’t been served at room temperature. “If you study history, you’ll find that there’s a threshold of income
inequality that once met, always results in violent upheaval. At some point the overwhelming numbers of poor rise up against the oppressive forces that they blame for their poverty.”

Tyler stayed quiet as his father lectured, the only other noises in the room coming from their crunching on the chips and the clank of their spoons on the bottoms of their bowls of stew.

“While I’m sure I didn’t get the entire story at Biomech, what I do know is that we were asked to create an innocuous method of urban pacification. Television and the government’s regulation of that industry in order to control its content and beam it into every household had served that purpose for decades, but the arrival of the Internet changed all of that. People all over the world could now freely exchange ideas and information. Government lost control over the message. The new idea was that if we could calm the growing anger chemically, we could keep the status quo without resorting to military intervention.”

“So they wanted to drug us,” Tyler replied with more than
a hint of accusation in his voice. “And you were helping them?”

“It’s complicated, Tyler,” Roger answered.
“You have to weigh the alternatives. Violence was bubbling just under the surface in every state of the Union. A government’s primary purpose is to protect its citizens. If street riots began and people started attacking each other, the government would have been obligated to intervene with police and military force. That would have meant a large number of deaths. And every police action would have stirred up more anger, creating a downward spiral into anarchy.”