Storm Orphans: The Beginning (3 page)

“I’m going with you,” Jenny stated fiercely, unknowingly echoing her mother.

Her father shook his head and replied. “It’s too dangerous, Jenny. You need to stay in here where it’s safe.”

“So you’re just going to leave me here all by myself?” Jenny asked,
the tears now coming even faster. “What happens if the monsters get you?” she demanded, her voice rising toward hysteria. “Please, daddy! Please don’t go!”

Jenny clung to both her parents as desperate sobs wracked her thin frame. Renee started to tear up herself as she looked to Curt for a solution. There was no way she could leave Jenny like this, but she was terrified of Curt going out on his own too.

Curt took a deep breath to calm his self as he hugged his family close. He knew there was no good answer. Leaving either one of them behind felt like he was abandoning them; taking either or both with him was leading them into horrible danger. The world had become a nightmare and no matter what he chose, he could lose everything.

“Jenny if something happened to you…” he began
, but his daughter interrupted him before he could finish.

“Then you’d be there to protect me,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “Which is why you can’t leave without me. I need you, daddy.” She looked up at Renee. “And you too, mommy. Please don’t leave me alone.”

And that settled it. As much as Curt wanted to do this on his own, he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving them petrified that he’d never return. The truth was, he might not. CVS was over a mile down the road and god only knew what they might run into along the way.

Half an hour later, the three of them stood in front of the barricaded door to their apartment and looked at each other for confidence.

“Remember,” Curt told them, “Move quickly but quietly. Watch where you put your feet and no talking. We go straight down the hall to the stairs, then directly down the stairs to the lobby. When I give the signal, we leave through the front door and go down the sidewalk to the right. It’s a long walk, but we can make it if we’re careful.”

Curt shoved the sofa that was blocking the door to one side and then turned to look at his wife and daughter one more time before he unlocked the deadbolt.

“Stick close and no matter what happens, don’t panic,” he said. “If anything comes after us, follow me. They’re deadly, but they’re stupid.” He smiled at Jenny in an attempt to boost her confidence. “And we’re faster.”

The three of them reached the lobby without a problem. The hallway was empty as was the dimly lit and stiflingly hot stairwell that led to the first floor. As they readied themselves to leave the building, Curt looked first at his wife and then Jenny. They were clearly scared, but they looked determined as well. He momentarily swelled with pride as it dawned on him how they brave they were. It was time to go.

He pushed open the heavy door and was immediately blinded by the sunlight. As his eyes adjusted, he scanned the street in all directions. As he’d seen from the window upstairs, wrecked and abandoned cars littered the two-lane road, but nothing was moving. The storefronts were dark, many of their display windows broken or covered in hastily nailed-up plywood. The formerly busy city street was a ghost town.

He moved at a pace just short of a jog, glancing backward every 10 or 15 steps to make sure Renee and Jenny were keeping up. Before the plague, at this hour of the morning, this street would have been packed with shoppers, joggers, and people walking their dogs. Cars would have been honking as they impatiently waited for the gawkers and the drivers that had the audacity to make a left-hand turn in front of them. Now there was nothing but silent rot
everywhere he looked. Cars baked in the same spots they’d sat in for years, blocking both lanes of traffic. The street lights that hung from their limp wires were colorless, their bulbs long burnt out. The sidewalk beneath his feet was cracked, weeds growing everywhere they could take root. When Curt had moved his family here in the fall of 2010, this was one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Now it was all but gone. The plague had taken everything except the two people he cared about the most.

They crossed the first side street they came to, weaving between the vehicles that blocked their path. A pigeon sitting atop a No Parking sign squawked at
them as they went by, startled by their interruption of its morning meditation. Curt glanced around nervously at the bird’s noise, worried that even something that mundane might awaken a hidden monster, but still, he saw no sign of the Afflicted.

They moved past the nearby stores that Curt was accustomed to visiting in his infrequent expeditions for supplies and the tension in him grew. They were too far now to race back inside their apartment building if they were attacked. His eyes darted this way and that, trying to gauge both the most likely hiding spots for predators while also looking for any potential places to hole up in case
he and his family had to bolt for cover.

When he took another look back at Renee and Jenny, he realized his daughter had brought along the same stuffed bunny she’d been holding when she had entered their room this morning. She clung to it like a talisman. Renee was right beside her
, their strides nearly identical. Mother and daughter were treading through the remains of the apocalypse and counting on him to keep them alive. Both of them were no more than eight feet behind him.

The first hint of danger didn’t arrive until they were nearly two thirds of the way to the pharmacy. As they walked past the old Pollo Tropical
restaurant, its red and green sign broken into pieces and tilting precariously to one side, an inhuman bellow echoed from some place in the distance. Curt had no way of knowing whether the angry-sounding roar had anything to do with their presence, but he broke into a cold sweat the second he heard it.

Jenny looked in the direction the animalistic noise came from and instinctively leaned closer to her mother. All three of them moved a little faster, adrenaline pumping through their veins as they fought off the urge to forget caution and sprint the remainder of the way.

The big, blocky white building that housed the pharmacy was in sight when they heard the rage-filled howl again. This time it was louder and much closer. Renee grabbed Jenny’s hand and almost dragged her down the final stretch.

The front of the store was a wreck. The sliding glass doors that marke
d the entrance had been broken and the metal frame hung awkwardly from the surrounding bricks. The glass glinted on the outside sidewalk, shattered into a million pieces that reflected the bright sunlight overhead. Curt reached the opening first and stepped inside carefully. He took a quick glance around the interior of the store and then motioned Renee and Jenny to follow.

The inside of the
store was even worse off than the exterior. Shelves were overturned. Dented and crushed merchandise was scattered all over the thinly carpeted floor. None of the overhead fluorescent lights were working and several had been pulled loose from the ceiling. A few clung by just one end of the bulb, hanging over the jumbled aisles like strange industrial icicles.

Curt led Renee and Jenny through the mess and to the back of the store where the prescription
counter was located. As he’d feared, the shelves of drugs that stood behind the counter had been ransacked. It looked like half of the stock was gone and what remained was lying in piles of cardboard boxes and plastic bottles that littered the pharmacy floor.  He bent down on one knee and began pawing through the remains.

“Look for a bo
ttle labeled Carbatrol,” he explained to Jenny, knowing his wife was already aware of what they sought. “Chances are, whoever was here before us was interested in painkillers or antibiotics. We might get lucky, but we can’t waste any time.”

Renee and Jenny immediately joined the search, each taking a different corner of the pharmacy.
After 10 minutes, they’d pawed through what seemed like hundreds of medicine bottles without any luck. Curt glanced up to look at his wife and he could see that she was beginning to get frantic. This was taking too long. However many Afflicted were out there, they could be getting closer. He knew if the things heard him and his family in here rummaging through this mess, they’d attack without hesitation. He needed to find some protection.

“Keep looking,” he said as he got to his feet and headed back out to the main section of the store. “I’ll be right back.”

Jenny looked worriedly at her father as he walked away and then to her mother. “Where is he going?” she asked in a whisper.

Renee just shook her head. “I don’t know,” she answered. “Do as he says.”

It felt like her husband had been gone for at least 10 minutes, but it probably less than five when Renee found what they’d been looking for. She pulled the white and red labeled box from a pile of dozens more that looked almost just like it and read the name printed on the front with a smile of relief. She held up the box to show her daughter and just as she did, Curt stepped back behind the counter. He had a can of soda in his hand and a trio of walking canes under the other arm.

“You found it?” he asked breathlessly.

Renee nodded and then pulled the bottle from its box, tossing the cardboard back into the pile it came from.

“What are those for?” she asked, nodding toward the red and blue colored aluminum canes.

“It’s all I came up with for protection,” he said. “But it’s better than nothing.”

Renee opened the bottle of pills and shook one out into her palm before offering it to
Jenny. “Take this before we go, honey,” she instructed.

Curt popped open the soda and handed it to his daughter to wash down the medicine. “I couldn’t find any water,” he explained sheepishly. “It’s warm, but at least it’s wet.”

Jenny dutifully swallowed the pill along with a few sips of soda before taking one of the canes from her father.

“What am I supposed to do with this, daddy?” she asked.

Curt handed a cane to Renee and then held his own up in the air as if it was a club. “Probably nothing, but if anything tries to hurt us, you hit them with it like this,” he stated before bringing down the cane with a quick slashing stroke. “Can you do that?”

Jenny nodded, wide-eyed and scared.

“It’s going to be okay,” Curt assured her. “We’re going to walk home just like we walked here. Chances are, we won’t see a thing we haven’t seen already. Think you can do that?”

Jenny nodded again and Renee tried to give her a confident smile.

The three of them made their way back to the store’s entrance and after Curt scouted the parking lot and the street just beyond it, they set out on their way home.

There was no getting used to the eerie feeling of walking through an abandoned city that had once been so full of life.
It was so quiet that when a crow cawed from its roost atop one of the dead wires that stretched across the street, Jenny nearly yelped in fright. The big black bird merely tilted its head slightly and looked at the humans below with idle curiosity. People were so rare these days, Curt momentarily wondered if they were the first the crow had ever seen.

It was as his brain was briefly toying with this question that the
ragged and torn member of the Afflicted suddenly launched itself from behind the oxidizing Subaru that was jammed between a wrecked mini-van and a late-model Ford in the lane nearest the curb. The monster looked like it had once been a skinny Hispanic kid, maybe 18 years old with tattoos on both arms, but now it was one of the murderous zombies that the plague had left in its wake. The former teen’s face was covered in open sores, its eyes milky and its black hair matted in blood and god-knows-what-else.

It grabbed Renee by the arm before she could even react and bit deeply into her neck. Blood immediately began to spurt from the wound, coating her attacker’s face and splattering Jenny where she stood just a foot or two away. The girl shrieked as she watched in horror.

Curt leapt to the rescue, bringing the end of his aluminum cane down on the thing’s skull with a sharp crack, but Renee was already crumpling to the cement. Her face went white due to shock and the loss of blood. Even as the monster’s head began to bleed from Curt’s strike, it continued to feed on Renee, gnawing on her flesh.

Jenny screamed again and began to flail at the Afflicted with her own walking stick, beating the monster on its arms and shoulders, but it seemed oblivious to the pain. It grunted savagely as it tore a hunk of the
thrashing woman’s throat out with its teeth, sending afresh gout of blood spraying all over the sidewalk.

Her life slipping
away, Curt landed another vicious blow, this one breaking the monster’s nose and causing it to howl in pain, but it was too late. Renee died in front of her husband and daughter as the thing sat astride her chest and continued to devour her. Curt cried out in despair as he reached down to haul the Afflicted off of his wife’s corpse. He was ready to strangle it with his bare hands if necessary, when he realized just how desperate the situation had become. The noise had brought more of the monsters, five of them now closing in rapidly from different directions.

As his wife’s killer began to grapple with him, Curt
looked at his daughter and yelled at her to run. Jenny stood motionless, the shock of her mother’s death too much to comprehend. The nearest of the newly arrived Afflicted was nearly upon them when he yelled again.