Free Storm Orphans: The Beginning by Matt Handle Page A

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