Free Shudder (Stitch Trilogy, Book 2) by Samantha Durante

incidents, but the symptoms were so… gruesome… that
it made the news, just for the shock value. It was clear from the
outset that this wasn’t just another strain of the flu or
something. People were bleeding from the eyes and nose, coughing up
chunks of flesh, their skin mottled with those big black bruises.
Just wasting away from the inside out in a matter of days. It was…
horrifying.”
    Alessa nodded – Isaac was sure she
remembered this from her own experience. He continued.
    “ And then when it started
popping up all over and they declared a state of emergency and
instructed everyone to stay home, that’s when it really set in that
this might be more than just a story on the news. They’d identified
it as some sort of mutated plague, right?”
    “ Yeah. But they still
couldn’t find any way to treat it, so they were encouraging people
to stay away from
the hospitals so it didn’t spread.”
    “ Right, I remember my mom
saying that. Anyway, we stayed in our apartment like instructed,
and it was so weird to all of a sudden be spending all day every
day with our parents like that. We fought, a lot . Joe and I had gotten used to
being left on our own – Joe was finishing his last year of high
school, and I missed meeting up with friends after school every
day, and neither of us could stand being cooped up in the apartment
24/7. But they wouldn’t let us leave.”
    “ My parents wouldn’t
either. I wanted to kill them at the time, but I guess they were
just trying to protect us. I didn’t realize then how serious the
virus was, how widespread it’d become. How deadly.”
    “ Yeah,” Isaac concurred.
“There was so much mystery surrounding the whole outbreak – it was
really unclear to me how it’d gotten started, what we could
even do to stay
safe.”
    “ They still don’t really
know,” Alessa added. “I heard speculation that our enemies in the
Eastern Allies had released it as a biological attack, but that
didn’t seem likely to me, given how quickly their countries became
infected as well.”
    “ My dad thought it must
have been some kind of mistake at a lab.”
    “ That could
be.”
    Isaac sighed. “So anyway, my parents
had wised up after that food shortage a few years earlier at the
start of the war, and they’d been stockpiling whatever they could
since then in case we ever hit a shortage again, with the wars
still going on. Of course, it wasn’t much – things were always
tight for us – but we were in better shape than a lot of our
neighbors.”
    Alessa nodded. “My mom had
had some kind of intuition and went out and just bought a ton of stuff right when
the first reports of the virus came out. ‘Just in case!’ she’d said
and we all thought she was nuts at the time, but in a few months,
boy were we glad she’d done it.”
    “ I couldn’t believe how
crazy people got. I saw someone get shot outside our window one day – he
was just pushing a grocery cart full of supplies, minding his own
business, and then boom – he was dead. They ran off with his stuff
and just left his body there to rot.” Isaac shook his head. “We
boarded up the windows after that. Luckily our building was run off
solar generators, so electricity and water weren’t an
issue.”
    “ Oh really? We lost power
after a few weeks, but it wasn’t so bad. It was summer at least, so
we didn’t have to worry about the cold.” At that, Alessa shivered
and burrowed deeper into the blanket. “So when did you guys decide
to head to the quarantine zone?”
    Isaac’s eyes darkened –
this was the most painful part of the story for him. “We ran out of
food after a few months. I kept trying to eat less, to leave more
for my family, to make it last, but I couldn’t do it. I was so hungry all of the time. My
parents did the best they could, but it wasn’t enough to sustain us
long-term. So finally one day my dad went out to scavenge, and he
came back with a cough.”
    Alessa squeezed his