Storm Orphans

by Matt Handle

  “I get them sometimes when I’m really upset,” Jenny explained. “I’m sorry.”

  And then she burst into tears. Angel wrapped the girl into her arms and held her, rocking her back and forth until the crying subsided.

  “You’re okay now,” Angel murmured in her ear. “Everything’s alright.”

  She looked up at Sawyer and Lynch and motioned for them to go away.

  “Give us a few minutes,” she told them. “By the time you grab some supplies, she’ll be as good as new.”

  Sawyer looked at Father Lynch and then shrugged. “You heard her,” he said and then the two men got busy gathering what they could.

  When they left 15 minutes later, Jenny seemed to be back to her normal self. She was still timid, but clear-eyed and no longer clinging to Angel. Sawyer and Father Lynch had found plenty of bottled water, a few cans of peaches and pears, several cans of chicken noodle soup, and enough beef jerky to last them for days. As they set off for the entrance ramp to the highway, Sawyer looked up at the already scorching South Florida sun and smiled. Day Three of his journey across the ravaged landscape was underway. He didn’t know how many more dangers he’d face along the road, but he was no longer alone and it felt good to be alive.

  Chapter 4

  Lynch seemed a little better for the rest, but he was still weak. He was limping within 30 minutes after they started trudging along the pavement. The heat was unrelenting. As the sun baked the asphalt of the highway and reflected off the broken glass and wrecked steel of the abandoned vehicles, it left the four survivors feeling as if they were walking a path through Hell itself.

  Sawyer took the priest’s bag, doubling his own load in order to make it easier on the old man, but it still wasn’t long before Lynch gasped out that he needed to rest. The priest wiped his brow along the sleeve of his robe, sat down cross-legged where he could lean against an abandoned but otherwise intact Chevy Malibu and then took a long swig from the bottle of water that Sawyer handed him.

  “My body is failing me,” Lynch croaked. “So many years spent exercising the spirit, but not enough spent strengthening the flesh.”

  “We’ve been through this before, Father,” Sawyer said quietly. “We’re going to make it to the base one way or the other. You need to rest, so be it. We rest.”

  Sawyer plopped down beside the old man and a minute later, Angel and Jenny joined them, forming a half circle in the shade of the former rental car.

  Angel peeled off her combat boots and socks and then began to rub her feet. When she realized the other three were watching her, she stopped and shrugged.

  “I’m used to heels,” she explained. “These things are killing me.”

  Sawyer snorted in amusement and then turned to give Lynch a closer look.

  “You ready to trade in that robe for something more appropriate?” he asked.

  The old man gave Sawyer a steely gaze. “There’s nothing more appropriate for me than the robes of a priest,” he stated. “I learned that before you were even born.”

  “Come on, Father,” Sawyer argued. “You’re not going to sit here and tell me that Catholic priests wear their robes 24/7. I know better. It’s at least 90 degrees out here and you’re dehydrated and weak.”

  “I don’t claim to speak for other priests,” Lynch replied as he brushed dust off one of his loose sleeves. “I only answer for myself.”

  Sawyer shook his head in frustration and then turned to look at Jenny. She was sitting quietly next to Angel, stroking one of Luna’s long, floppy ears. “How you holding up, sweetheart?” he asked her.

  She looked up from the bunny and tried to smile. “I’m okay,” she responded. “It’s hot though.”

  Angel put an arm around her and gave her a soft kiss on the head. “We’ll be there soon,” she said. “We’ve just got to keep going.”

  Sawyer looked off into the distance, squinting into the sunlight. “Before all this happened, I was a soldier,” he started, glancing at Jenny for a second to make sure she was listening. “I was overseas in a desert even hotter than this highway. It wasn’t humid like it is here. It was bone dry. Like living inside an oven. The sweat would dry on my skin before it even had a chance to dampen my clothes.”

  Sawyer pulled his dog tags out from under the neckline of his t-shirt and fingered them as he spoke.

  “On one of our missions, me and five buddies drew fire while we were walking through a village,” he continued. “Ragheads were holed up in the hills and taking pot shots at us. An old man and his granddaughter were outside this scrap metal lean-to they called a home. He was trying to fix some sort of farming tool and she was washing clothes in a dusty clay bowl full of dirty well water.” Sawyer glanced back down at Jenny. “She was probably about your age, maybe even younger. Dark hair and eyes, skinny as a rake.”

  Sawyer looked back out at the horizon, his eyes unfocused as his mind went back into his past. “We took cover behind an old beater even worse off than the heaps left here to get in our way, but before we could scare the shooters off, one of their bullets hit the old man. It got him right in the chest. We were trying to flush them from their position and the little girl was just wailing like a banshee. She was bent over the old man screaming for him to breathe, trying to apply pressure to his wound as blood soaked through his shirt, his eyes rolled back in his head.”

  Sawyer smacked a mosquito that was sucking on one exposed bicep and then flicked the mashed corpse away before continuing his story. “Time seems to slow down in moments like that, almost frozen as your instincts and muscles take over, fighting to keep you alive. The whole thing probably only took about two minutes, but it felt like an hour. There were three of them shooting at us. We nailed two before the third one took off running. As soon as he was gone, we went to help the old man.”

  Sawyer looked at Lynch and saw that the priest was listening intently, his old gray eyes glued to Sawyer’s sharper brown ones.

  “I knew right away that he wasn’t going to make it,” Sawyer went on. “The bullet had missed his heart by a good three inches, but he was old and weak. I could barely get a pulse when I checked his neck and his breathing was ragged and shallow. The girl kept crying, tears streaming down her dirty cheeks and snot running from her nose as she begged us in Dari to help him. I didn’t understand more than a couple words of it, but stuff like that doesn’t need translation. He was dying and he was all she had.”

  A hawk flew by overhead, calling out hungrily before moving on in its hunt for food. All four of them squinted up into the sun to watch it for a moment before Sawyer continued.

  “He died right there in front of her,” he said. “Never uttered a word. We had to drag her away from the body. There was no telling when al-Qaeda reinforcements might come back looking to even the score for the two Hajis we’d waxed. We took her to a school set up not far from our base of operations. She never said another word to me after that day, but over the next couple months I saw her a few times with her new classmates. I even saw her smile once.”

  Sawyer looked directly at Jenny as he finished his tale. “She lost her family, but I think she found a new one,” he said. “The four of us can do the same thing. We’ve just got to stick together.”

  With that, Sawyer got up and stretched before climbing onto the hood of the Malibu and surveying the road ahead.

  “What do you see?” Angel asked him as she pulled her boots back on.

  “More of the same,” Sawyer replied. He looked down at Lynch before asking, “You ready?”

  The priest offered him a weary smile and pushed himself back to his feet.

  “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me,” Lynch said. “The faster you get us there, the happier I’ll be.”

  Sawyer glanced at Angel and Jenny before giving Lynch a bemused grin. “Then I guess we’d better get moving,” he said. “Follow me.”

  The quartet made good progress for the next hour. Lynch seemed to have found a second wind and the wreck
age was light enough that they could weave around the abandoned vehicles without being forced to climb over them or to venture into the surrounding vegetation and swampland.

  Soon after, Sawyer took note of the clouds rolling in, bringing a welcome respite from the heat, but also threatening rain. It wasn’t more than 10 minutes later before it started sprinkling, quickly soaking their clothes and veiling much of the path ahead.

  “What do you think, Padre?” Sawyer asked Lynch. “You want to hunker down in one of these cars and wait out the storm or do you want to keep going?”

  “How much further is the journey?” the priest asked in response.

  Sawyer shrugged, swiping the rain out of his eyes in the process. “Another mile, maybe less. We’re close.”

  Lynch turned to look at Angel and Jenny. “It’s up to you two,” he said. “I can make it if you can, but you’ll get no complaints from me if you want to ride it out with a roof over our heads.”

  Angel looked down at the girl and raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “Let’s keep going,” Jenny said as bravely as she could. “We can dry off when we get there.”

  “You heard her,” Sawyer said as he adjusted the rifle strap on his shoulder. “We’re gonna make it this afternoon, rain or shine!”

  They marched on, the rain getting heavier as they went. Before long, it was a downpour. Sheets of rain pelted them as they bent their heads down and kept moving forward. The rain left the highway in a shroud of gray, the dead vehicles in their path nothing but looming shadows until they were right on top of them.

  Lynch began to cough, but he kept pace with Sawyer, his feet splashing in the same puddles just seconds behind the younger man. All four of them were cold and miserable, but each was set on reaching their goal before they quit. They were so caught up in the task that they didn’t hear the low groans and growling at first. The noises got louder as the foursome approached, until finally they stood in front of a four-lane bridge that spanned a waterway. On the other side of the bridge were at least 50 Afflicted, bunched together to form a wall of stinking flesh and staring, inhuman eyes. The monsters were soaked; the monsters were hungry; and they were waiting for Sawyer and his friends to cross. They looked like they’d come from all walks of life. A few wore the torn remains of business suits, several wore ragged uniforms of various types, and the rest were clad in shredded and bloodied t-shirts and shorts. The one thing they all had in common was the plague’s blind rage that had replaced their humanity.

  “Holy shit,” Sawyer growled as he swung his rifle around to face the onslaught. “This is gonna get messy in a hurry.”

  Lynch kissed his rosary and said a brief prayer as Angel and Jenny clicked the safeties off their weapons and aimed them at the crowd on the other side of the bridge. Once Sawyer heard the priest do the same, he spared a brief glance back at his comrades. None of the three looked steady. Jenny looked downright petrified, but there was no time for a pep talk.

  “Don’t stop firing until every one of them is down, you got it?” he demanded.

  Angel and Father Lynch nodded affirmative and Jenny looked up at Sawyer with her wide, innocent eyes and swallowed hard before she spoke.

  “What if I miss?” she asked quietly.

  “Just keep shooting, sweetheart,” Sawyer replied. “With that many, you’re bound to hit something.” Sawyer looked down at Jenny’s toy bunny where it lay momentarily forgotten in a puddle of rainwater at the girl’s feet. “Luna’s counting on you,” he told her. “Once we get through this, we’ll dry her off at the base and she’ll be as good as new.”

  Jenny looked down at Luna in surprise, not having realized until now that she’d dropped the bunny in her effort to draw her weapon. “Luna...” she gasped. And then the Afflicted began their charge across the span.

  Without a second’s hesitation, Sawyer kneeled down and unzipped his bag, retrieving a grenade. In one swift movement, he pulled the pin, stood up and heaved the explosive across the bridge at the oncoming monsters, immediately settling his rifle back in his hands and opening fire.

  At the sound of his first volley, his three companions pulled their triggers as well, the combination of their bullets taking down several of their attackers before they’d made it more than five steps forward. Seconds after that, the grenade exploded, tearing another dozen of them to pieces, globs of ragged flesh splatting on the wet ground as what remained of the corpses collapsed to the pavement.

  “Aim for the head and chest!” Sawyer yelled as he took out another four of the monsters with a rapid-fire burst.

  With almost half of the Afflicted already dead, the wall of attackers wasn’t quite as thick as it had been seconds earlier, but they were nearly a quarter of the way across the bridge and Sawyer knew they’d be on top of him and his friends in another 30 seconds if they didn’t act fast. Stepping forward and hoping Jenny didn’t accidently plant one in his back, Sawyer swept his gun both left and right, emptying the 30-round magazine in mere seconds, foregoing his usual accuracy for pure speed. As he yanked out the spent magazine and reached into his pant pocket for another, he saw two more of the creatures drop as his companions continued to fire.

  Sawyer slammed the new magazine home and counted seven remaining enemies, closing fast. The nearest wasn’t more than ten yards away. As he aimed at the leading attacker, Lynch stepped up beside him and shot down a monster on the far right, the last of the suit-wearing cannibals. Sawyer put two bullets in his own target, turning the monster’s Zeppelin t-shirt into a dark red Rorschach before it fell face first onto the pavement.

  Looking for all the world like a warrior-monk in his soaked black robes, dripping hair and beard, Lynch swiveled to his left and shot down another, this time putting a hole in the forehead of a female attacker wearing purple nursing scrubs.

  The remaining four monsters were now upon them, three bunched together as they rushed Sawyer and Lynch, the other darting off to the side, straight for Jenny who stood just a few steps away from Angel.

  Sawyer tried to get a bead on the monster that was going for Jenny, but there wasn’t time. The three creatures bounding toward him howled as they got within an arm’s length of their prey. At point blank range, Sawyer and Lynch simply planted their feet and pulled their triggers. The three monsters, all looking like former beach-goers in their surf shorts and one-time colorful t-shirts, were shredded in the barrage, their bullet-ridden bodies flopping to the ground at Sawyer and Lynch’s feet.

  At the same time, Angel unleashed a fierce scream and fired the entire remainder of her clip at the maintenance worker-turned flesh-eater that had gone for Jenny. Jenny had tried to shoot it herself, but she’d frozen, her gun of no more use in her self-defense than Luna as it lay soaking in its puddle a few feet away. Angel had no such hesitation. She put two holes in the creature’s chest, killing it just before it could grab Jenny, and then continued to blast it as it lay twitching on the ground, only stopping after her gun clicked empty four times.

  Sawyer stepped over and gently lowered Angel’s gun, looking into her eyes as he spoke.

  “She’s safe,” he said firmly. “You killed it.”

  Jenny bent down to pick up Luna and clutched the toy tightly to her chest. “I’m okay,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I couldn’t shoot.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Sawyer said. “When we get to the base, we’re going to practice. You’ll pull that trigger so many times it’ll become second nature. All of you will, right Father?”

  Lynch nodded affirmatively. “So you keep promising,” he said.

  Sawyer looked at each of his companions and offered them a tired smile as he flicked the raindrops away from his eyes. “Let’s get there already before another pack of those things tries to change our plans again,” he told them.

  “From your mouth to God’s ears,” Lynch replied. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a warm shower and some dry robes.”

  Angel murmured agreement as Lynch let
loose with another bout of coughing and Jenny just stared ahead in silence. They were all veterans of combat after today. Without a word, each of them knew, whether they were ready for it or not, there was only more bloodshed ahead.

  Chapter 5

  Jenny hugged Angel as the party made their way through the carnage to the other side of the bridge. The sights and sounds of their battle were etched in her young mind forever, but Jenny still did her best to shut out the rain-drenched scene that surrounded her. The torn and bloody remains that had once been human were now just more slain victims of the terrible plague that had taken her parents and left her in the care of Angel and her friends.

  The heavy rain let up soon after they’d put the bridge behind them, but it continued to drizzle, the water not just soaking their hair and clothes, but seeming to settle into their weary bones. Lynch’s cough got progressively worse. By the time they came over the hill that looked down upon the wreckage of the Boeing 757, the old priest looked like he was on the verge of death.

  The plane was in three pieces, the main fuselage strewn across the highway, one wing broken loose and lying upside down on the far side of the wreck, while the tail section lay half submerged in the blackened and swampy forest just off the edge of the road. The wreck looked like it’d been there for years, the metal rusted where it wasn’t scorched from the fire of its crash. Sawyer whistled when they first saw it.

  “Now that’s something you don’t see every day, even around here,” he observed.

  “I can’t even imagine…” Angel began.

  Lynch bent over double as he hacked up a wad of bloody phlegm onto the slick pavement at his feet. Then he looked at the plane with eyes that were bloodshot and watery as he mumbled, “The righteousness of the perfect shall direct his way: but the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness.”

  Sawyer turned to look at the old man. “What?” he asked in confusion.