Come Whatever Storms

Chapter 1-2

Inside the back of the station wagon, they found what they’d hoped for—food. Canned and nonperishable food.

The first person to be diagnosed with HVT6, as the virus was known in its early days, died of severe hemorrhaging in March. She came down with what felt like a slight cold at first, followed by a long week of aching muscles in her back and neck. Her primary care physician prescribed a round of traditional antibiotics. When they didn’t work, they tried a different, hardier strain. No dice. The muscle aches turned to weakness as the virus ate its way through her nervous system, destroying all sensation in her extremities. A lingering cough raked her throat and chewed her lungs into a blood, septic mess. One by one, her internal organs began to fail. When she was admitted to the hospital, four weeks after the first sniffle, death came in only a matter of hours. Her kidneys failed, her liver, her bowels. At a little after six in the morning on the twentieth of March, the index case for HVT6 crashed and bled out.

She was contagious the entire length of her illness.

Soon others fell sick with the virus—those who’d sat beside her in the waiting room at her physician’s office, the doctors themselves, the technicians who ran her lab results, the ambulance workers who had rushed her to the hospital that one last time. Each person thought it was just a little cold, or they were feeling rundown, under the weather, and they managed to transmit the disease to hundreds—no, thousands—before anyone realized an epidemic was underway. The few who didn’t catch it nursed those who did. Soon the hospitals were overwhelmed, and people were told to stay at home no matter how sick they were. Then the morgues grew crowded, and no one came to retrieve the corpses of those who died. Rioting began, and looting.

Many of the stores Court and his friends had found since the virus had killed its last victim and seemed to die out were hollow husks of their former glory. Windows smashed, storerooms ransacked, shelves stripped free, all the canned food already stolen. What fresh vegetables, bread, and meat hadn’t been eaten rotted with disuse. Some stores had been burned to the ground, but whether fire had been set intentionally or caused by a short in the electrical system when it failed, Court didn’t know.

The remaining survivors could hunt—animals hadn’t succumbed to the disease, as far as Court could tell—but most of the wildlife they’d seen in their travels so far had been afraid of them. That would change over time, Court was sure, as nature reestablished itself and began to reclaim the land. For now, they were reduced to searching any homes they found, which weren’t many; Ronnie wanted to stick to the interstates, using the roads as a map to move them along, and Court thought that was a brilliant idea.

Then again, this was Ronnie—if he’d said he thought they should hole up in the woods and wait for the world to end, Court would be sitting right by his side.

Still, the highways proved fruitful. Despite the official entreaties to stay home in the vain hope of containing the outbreak, many people had hopped into their vehicles and took off…who knew where they thought they were going to go. To the hills, maybe. To larger cities, ‘civilization,’ where there were government buildings and larger hospitals, where they could search for answers. Or to visit friends and family one last time.

Their vehicles clogged the interstates, highways, and byways with wrecks much like the one Court and Adam had come out looking for that morning. People whose bodies gave up the good fight as they drove in search of some semblance of safety had run off the road or plowed into other vehicles, killing others as they themselves died. Many had bundled children into the back seat, or pets, and the whole family perished together on some anonymous road. It was sad, really, and Court felt his heart twist inside his chest every time he saw another wreck.

But he knew each car would have its own private stash of supplies—grocery bags full of cans, cereal boxes, chips, sometimes even batteries and flashlights, as well. Emergency provisions for the road, left trapped behind glass once the drivers were dead.

Left for the living.

He preferred to use the baseball bat to break into the cars because it brought to mind what he should really be doing this time of the year, what he would be doing if the virus hadn’t struck—coaching Little League for the county Parks and Rec Department. Swinging the bat, even if only to shatter a windshield, still sent a familiar surge of anticipation shooting through his body, a feeling of pride mingled with nervousness, a hope of swinging true and hitting it out of the ballpark.

Once they were inside a vehicle, it was easier for him if he treated these exploratory expeditions as nothing more than a long, strange shopping trip. Reaching into the back of the vehicle, he’d pull out one bag after another and hand each off to Adam, who set them to one side of the road. With the bags out, Court propped one foot on the car’s rear tire and stood up on it to look inside, making sure he had everything they could possibly use. Sometimes he took other items—tire irons, rope, bungee cables, tarpaulin, anything they might need later on, for whatever reason.

When he was sure he had it all, he and Adam retreated to their stash of bags and began to root through them like two frantic housewives checking to make sure the kid at the checkout had bagged everything properly. Canned items went into the shopping cart, as did any unopened boxes and bags of pre-made food—cereal, granola bars, crackers, cookies, chips, snacks. They passed on most of the jars of frou-frou items like salsa, spices, and sauces. They passed on boxes of noodles, too, though Court took bags of rice when he found them. Noodles were hard to prepare over a campfire, and wasted what little clean water they had. Who wanted to drink starchy water after they’d cooked a pot of linguine in it? But rice absorbed the water it cooked, and could be boiled in chicken stock if they had it. Besides, it was one of Court’s favorite foods.

By now any fresh vegetables they found were spoiled, and anything that had to be refrigerated was of no use. Unopened drinks went in the shopping cart—Court preferred water bottles still in the packaging, which was why he looked on the floor of each vehicle to make sure he wasn’t missing a twenty-four pack of unopened Aquafina somewhere. Sometimes he found drink mixes, and when he did, he took those. Sometimes he found soda, but after months in a hot car, most of the carbonation dissipated the moment they opened the cans, and to Court, nothing tasted worse than hot, flat Coke.

They took five brown paper bags of groceries from the back of the station wagon. Away from the stench of death rising from within the vehicle, Court and Adam lowered their bandannas for some fresh air, then went through the bags one by one. Instant rice (Court grimaced—he favored the real thing, but he’d deal with boil-in-the-bag if he had to, it was better than nothing). Some cartons of apple juice, for the children in the middle, no doubt. A box of Cheerios, and a few bags of Goldfish crackers—again, for the kids. Adam reached into one bag and looked up at Court with an almost exaggerated expression of sorrow on his face. “Cesar dog food,” he said, extracting a handful of cans designed for a small dog. “Now we know what was in the carrier.”

“Could we eat that?” Court asked, curious.

Adam gave him a crazed look. “It’s dog food.”

“Yeah, but it’s meat.” Court shrugged. “I mean, I’m not saying I want to eat it, but if we had to, could we? You know, heat it up over the campfire maybe, stir it in with some rice…”

But Adam shook his head. “It might say beef on the package, but I guarantee you, it doesn’t taste like steak. Why do you think dogs always beg at the table? They know this stuff is s**t, too.”

As Court loaded up the cart with the items they would take back to camp, Adam opened each can of dog food, tearing off the lids completely and discarding them in one of the now-empty grocery bags. Then he set each can on the yellow line marking the edge of the road. “What’re you doing that for?” Court wanted to know.

Adam shrugged. “Just in case anything comes along looking for a snack.”

Like us, Court started to say, but he kept that thought to himself.