Storm Orphans

by Matt Handle

  “Notice the locked cabinet beneath the display cases?” Tyler asked Sawyer.

  Sawyer smiled and bent down to pluck the key from the rotting hand.

  “Good man,” Sawyer said and then ruffled the boy’s hair. “Let’s see what’s locked away in there.”

  The cabinet was a jackpot. They scored a shotgun and half a dozen boxes of ammunition for both it and their 9 millimeters. Sawyer loaded the shotgun and kept it for himself, handing a box of the 9mm bullets to Angel so she could reload her pistol too. He tucked the other boxes under his arm. Tyler and Jenny were carrying .33s but he had another couple of 9mm Berettas in the Humvee they could swap out once they were done shopping.

  Before they left the section, Tyler picked up a penlight that he stashed in his pocket along with a pair of flashlights and an armful of batteries to go with them. They hadn’t heard a peep since entering the store so they decided to try their luck with groceries before heading back outside. As they moved to the opposite side of the store, Angel scooped up a couple pairs of panties from a table piled high with them. Sawyer raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say a word.

  “What?” Angel asked. “I haven’t showered in days. Give me a break!”

  Tyler’s cheeks turned red, but they kept moving. The grocery aisles were even more depleted than the rest of the store. Several rows were completely bare, not a scrap of food to be found. As they passed the pet food aisle, a low growl brought all four of them to a halt.

  Sawyer took two more silent steps and peeked around the corner of the end cap. Crouching on the lowest shelf about midway down the aisle was a mangy-looking German Shepherd. One of its ears had been mangled and it had deep scars down that side of its scrawny body. An open bag of Science Diet lay beside the dog, its contents partially spilled onto the floor. The dog eyed Sawyer warily, uttering another low growl, its good ear pinned back against its head.

  Sawyer took one tentative step into the aisle and as he did, the dog rose off its haunches and bared its teeth, uttering a loud warning bark. When Sawyer didn’t immediately retreat, the dog took a step forward, barking twice more. That was enough for Sawyer. The dog clearly wasn’t interested in making nice. Sawyer backed himself around the end cap and looked at his friends, all three standing frozen and silent.

  “Nothing but dog food and a not-so-friendly customer,” Sawyer explained. “Let’s go.”

  Jenny gave Sawyer a worried look and asked, “Are we just going to leave him here?”

  “He’s fine,” Sawyer answered. “He’s got a roof over his head and plenty to eat. What more could a dog want?”

  Tyler looked up and down the aisle and wrinkled his nose. “Even a dog deserves better than this place.” he muttered.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Sawyer replied. “Come on.”

  Chapter 13

  Sawyer and his friends stopped dead in their tracks as they exited the broken doors of the store. Leaning on the front fender of the Humvee was one of the ugliest-looking men Angel thought she’d ever seen. The man wore a pair of crusty blue jeans that were at least two sizes too big for him, held up by a pair of red suspenders. His wife-beater t-shirt was stained green and brown and even standing ten feet away, the man’s rank odor was almost overpowering. Once they saw him, he offered a yellow-toothed grin, one eye focused on Angel’s exposed cleavage and thighs while the other eye wandered lazily off to the side. He had a rifle in his hands and it was aimed directly at Sawyer’s chest.

  “Looks like I caught myself a pack of looters,” the ma n drawled as a fly buzzed around his head and then landed on one of his gray-stubbled cheeks.

  Sawyer stood stock still and did his best to keep a calm look on his face. The last thing he wanted while the man had a gun pointed in their direction was to spook him into a reaction.

  “I’m pretty sure management is long dead,” Sawyer replied in his most reasonable tone. “We’re just passing through and thought we’d stop for some supplies.”

  “Ayuh,” the redneck nodded. “Guess you thought you could just take what you wanted for free. Is that right? Drop your guns before I shoot all four of ya for outlaws.”

  Sawyer gently placed his shotgun on the pavement at his feet and motioned for the others to do the same. Once they had, Sawyer took a step sideways, trying to put some distance between himself and the others in an attempt to draw the man’s aim.

  He said, “It’s an open market these days, pal. Maybe you hadn’t noticed.”

  “You take one more step and you’re gonna notice a new hole separatin’ your head from your trousers,” the redneck replied. “We don’t take kindly to looters around these parts.”

  “So there’s more of you?” Sawyer asked. “Other survivors?”

  “Don’t you nevermind how many of us there are,” the man warned. “You just need to worry about how you’re gonna pay for that stolen merchandise you got.” The redneck glanced at what Angel still grasped in one hand and then offered her a lecherous grin. “Includin’ them pretty panties,” he added.

  “What did you have in mind?” Sawyer asked, already suspecting he knew the answer. The redneck probably hadn’t been with a woman in years and judging from the bulge in the crotch of the man’s pants, he wasn’t planning on waiting much longer.

  The man licked his chapped lips and leered at Angel before redirecting his gaze to Jenny.

  “Seems to me, you got two pieces of cooz and you only need one,” he said before looking at Tyler.

  “The boy starin’ daggers at me ain’t old enough to know what to do with a woman.” The redneck swiveled his scrawny hips a bit in an effort to accommodate his growing erection and smiled at Jenny.

  “Why don’t you gimme the young one and we’ll call it even?”

  The words were barely out of the man’s mouth, his one good eye staring at Jenny’s pre-teen body with undisguised lust, when Sawyer whipped the pistol from the back waistband of his pants. He fired a bullet directly into the redneck’s heart before any of them even realized Sawyer had moved.

  The man looked at Sawyer with dumb understanding as his arms fell limp at his sides. The rifle clattered to the ground at his feet. With the sound of Sawyer’s gunshot still echoing across the parking lot, the redneck fell face-first, his corpse thudding to the pavement.

  Jenny burst out crying and Tyler quickly pulled her to his chest for a hug as Angel did the same, the two of them immediately offering comfort and shielding her from seeing any more of the dead body at their feet.

  Sawyer snatched up his shotgun and grabbed the dead man’s rifle too. “Let’s get your weapons and go,” he told them. “If there are any more of them, we don’t want to be around when they come to find out what all the noise was about.”

  Five minutes later and they were back on the road, heading for Atlanta. Traffic was snarled for fifty miles south of the city, wrecked cars and trucks piled up as far as the eye could see.

  They moved at a snail’s pace, weaving between the snarled rubber and steel when they could, driving on the weedy medians and in the debris-littered breakdown lanes when necessary. On two occasions, Sawyer put the Humvee’s built-in winch to use and dragged wreckage out of their way when there was no other means of getting through. The trip was slow going but by the time the sun dipped toward the horizon, the Atlanta city skyline was standing in front of them, the dark silhouettes of the towering buildings reaching toward the pink and violet sky as if in earnest supplication.

  Conversation had been minimal since the scene outside of Walmart and completely missing for the better part of an hour as they came up on the southern outskirts of the city. Angel turned to look at the backseat and saw that both Jenny and Tyler had dozed off.

  “I don’t understand how people can be such animals,” she said quietly. “She’s just a little girl.”

  “It doesn’t take a plague to turn us against each other,” Sawyer replied. “It happens every day. Always has. You should try to get some rest. I got a feeling sleep is going be h
ard to come by once we get inside the city.”

  Angel said “I can’t. You told me last night that you see Father Lynch when you close your eyes? So do I. I had nightmares about him. It’s like he’s judging me, blaming me. And now this.”

  Angel looked out at the darkening sky and continued. “It was bad enough when Lynch was alive. I know you liked him, but he didn’t like me.”

  Sawyer grimaced.

  “We all got our ghosts,” he said. “You’ve just got to find a way to shut them out.”

  “So who are yours?” Angel asked, looking at his chiseled profile as they drew closer to their exit. “You barely even blinked when you killed Lynch and that man back there. How do you do it?”

  “I spent four years fighting in Afghanistan,” Sawyer answered. “Then I spent the next two as an al-Qaida prisoner. I barely made it out alive.”

  Angel gasped. “What happened?”

  “The details don’t matter anymore,” Sawyer said. “My country sent me across the world to kill terrorists. And that’s what I did. One day they captured me and then spent the next 683 days torturing me, hoping to use me as a bargaining chip. When I got my chance, I killed them too. Slaughtered them like pigs. Then I got to come home.”

  Sawyer glanced to his side and saw that Angel was hanging on his every word, concern etched on her face.

  “I’ve seen more death than I want to remember,” he concluded. “At some point, you just lose count. In the end, all you’re left with are the scars and regret.”

  As the highway curved toward downtown, the buildings loomed over the Humvee, cloaking it in shadow. Ahead, all 14 lanes were blocked, the wreckage packed into the city’s asphalt corridor so tightly that there was no way they could continue further north.

  “I guess this is our exit,” Sawyer grumbled as he pulled over onto the nearest ramp. “We’ll have to try to find our way through the surface streets from here.”

  Neither of them noticed the slight movement atop the powerless traffic signal at the end of the ramp. Every camera they’d seen between Miami and Atlanta had been dead. This one wasn’t. It followed them as they ascended, monitoring their progress as they dodged around abandoned vehicles. Once they reached the intersection, they drove past it without a clue, drawing closer to the city’s skyscrapers. Angel looked up at the towering buildings and her eyes were wide and thoughtful.

  “Do you ever wonder how many uninfected are left?” she asked. She glanced at Sawyer and then continued. “I mean, all the people that used to live and work here…”

  Sawyer kept his eyes on the road. His voice was like gravel under the Humvee’s tires when he answered. “I only worry about what’s directly in front of me,” he said. “Anything more is likely to get us killed.”

  Minutes later, as they slowly cruised through one of downtown Atlanta’s narrow avenues, Sawyer suddenly slammed on the brakes. “Shit!” he exclaimed.

  Both kids bolted upright in the backseat, gawking through the windshield to see what was wrong. Blocking the way ahead of the Humvee, which had screeched to a diagonal stop in the middle of the street, were a dozen black Afflicted. Each wore the ragged remains of a t-shirt over a pair of filthy blue jeans. As a group, they looked like an undead street gang, emaciated and none of them older than 20 or so. Their eyes were crazed and several of them had blood crusted on their faces. As Sawyer and his companions stared through the windows at them, the gang approached, one of them howling something that sounded like a battle cry.

  Sawyer muttered “Nowhere to run,” and threw open his door so he could step out into the street. Angel, Tyler, and Jenny were right behind him. The foursome walked to the front of their vehicle and formed a line of guns, each pointed at the oncoming monsters.

  “Wait until they’re close,” Sawyer advised. “And don’t miss.”

  Six seconds later, he pulled his trigger, putting a bullet in the forehead of the lead gangbanger. His friends opened fire as Sawyer’s target hit the ground dead. The sound of the gunshots was deafening, all four of them shooting until each of the dozen attackers was cut to shreds and lying in pools of their own tainted blood. The fight was over in under a minute, but the echoes of the gunfire lasted another few seconds, bouncing through the eerily silent city.

  Once the echoes had faded away, Sawyer looked at each of his friends and grinned. “Much better,” he quipped.

  Jenny actually giggled, her body shaking like a leaf. In the face of what seemed like non-stop horror, it felt like the natural thing for her to do. As her nervous laughter subsided, Angel cocked her head to one side and squinted as she listened to something.

  She asked “Do you guys hear that?”

  She looked toward the sky and the others follow her gaze. In the distance, what first appeared to be a speck of black against the gray clouds overhead soon became the shape of an approaching aircraft.

  Jenny squealed in delight “It’s a plane!”

  Tyler asked “Do you think it’s some kind of rescue?”

  It only took Sawyer a matter of seconds to realize otherwise. “That’s no rescue,” he told them. “That’s a Predator drone. We used them in the desert.”

  As the drone got closer, Tyler asked “What’s it doing out here?”

  The drone flew so low to the ground that Sawyer could make out the tell-tale shape of the missiles attached under each extended wing of the automated plane. Just as he was about to warn his friends, the drone fired an air-to-ground missile pointed right at them.

  Sawyer saw the missile launch and then frantically looked around the street for someplace to hide. Almost directly across from them was the entrance to an underground MARTA train station. The cracked and faded letters were printed atop a cement roof under which was a set of wide stairs leading down to the tracks.

  Sawyer yelled “Run!” and then bolted for the entrance to the station. Meanwhile, his three friends stood in place, looking dumbstruck as they stared at the oncoming missile.

  As Sawyer reached the top of the staircase, he looked over his shoulder and saw that his friends weren’t following. “Move it!” he screamed with all the urgency and authority he could muster.

  The sound of his voice broke their trance and all three ran in his direction, each looking absolutely terrified. Tyler was next to reach the stairs, followed closely by Angel and Jenny. The four of them bounded down the staircase and disappeared underground just before the missile made impact.

  The rocket slammed into the street, obliterating the pavement, the Humvee, the bodies, and everything else on the block in a massive explosion. The fireball could be seen for miles and the smoke billowed through the surrounding streets like an army of phantoms bent on devouring anything left alive.

  High overhead, the drone banked north and disappeared back into the distance.

  Chapter 14

  Calvin Mechler stood in his office staring at a large viewscreen that displayed the same Atlanta explosion Sawyer and his friends had just run from. The camera was far enough away to escape the blast, but it provided a static-laced view of the missile strike and subsequent billowing smoke that left the screen full of nothing but clouds of gray.

  Over his shoulder, he said “Well done, General. It seems your training program is a success.”

  Mechler turned to face a second viewscreen on the opposite wall from the first. This one showed the stern face of General Keane. Beneath the white-haired buzz-cut, the general’s sharp blue eyes gazed at the doctor with calm determination.

  “The mission wasn’t without its faults, but we’re pleased with our progress,” Keane replied. “I’m down to an assistant, two rookies and a single mechanic. Pretty soon, we may not be able to put a bird in the sky.”

  Mechler waved away Keane’s concern and responded “Resource constraints are just part of doing business, General. Ground troop reinforcements are on the way. In the meantime, those drones and your pair of new pilots are our best defense. ”

  Mechler pointed a remote control toward t
he scene of the downtown Atlanta missile strike and changed the channel. A narrow-faced man wearing green doctor scrubs appeared on the screen. He was surrounded by metal beds full of strapped down zyborgs that were connected to tubes and wires.

  “Progress report, Doctor Steele,” Mechler barked.

  “Two dozen new zyborgs per your orders,” Steele replied proudly.

  “I trust you’ve resolved the issues discovered in the Miami prototype?” Mechler asked.

  Steele responded “Yes, doctor. They’ll be ready for advanced field testing before the day is over.”

  “Excellent,” Mechler said with a smile before turning back to General Keane’s screen. “You see, general? Your new army is on its way.”

  With that, Mechler turned both screens off and then strode out of the conference room, confident that all was going according to plan.

  ***

  While Mechler was busy formulating plans for his zyborg army, Erika Ling was riding the elevators and prowling the halls within the underground complex that housed Biomech. Knowing that at least some of the security cameras were still working, she tried to look inconspicuous. She carried a clipboard with her and attempted to look both busy and confident that she belonged in whatever hallway someone might see her in.

  She purposely avoided both Dr. Mechler’s office and staff rooms as well as the security office, but otherwise, she’d explored every floor of the complex and hadn’t found what she was looking for. Somewhere, Mechler must have an unknown section dedicated to developing the monsters that Benjamin had described to her and she meant to find it. She wasn’t sure yet what she’d do when she had her proof, but she knew she couldn’t go on pretending. If Mechler had killed her husband and was making plans to kill more of what few survivors the plague might have left behind, she had to find a way to stop him.

  After trying every floor accessible via the elevators, she decided to take the emergency stairs. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d used the dank cement stairwells that ran up and down the ends of the underground building, but she did know that there were four sets, one on each corner of the complex.