Storm Orphans: The Beginning Read Online Free PDF Page A

of his aluminum cane down on the thing’s skull with a sharp crack, but Renee was already crumpling to the cement. Her face went white due to shock and the loss of blood. Even as the monster’s head began to bleed from Curt’s strike, it continued to feed on Renee, gnawing on her flesh.
    Jenny screamed again and began to flail at the Afflicted with her own walking stick, beating the monster on its arms and shoulders, but it seemed oblivious to the pain. It grunted savagely as it tore a hunk of the thrashing woman’s throat out with its teeth, sending afresh gout of blood spraying all over the sidewalk.
    Her life slipping away, Curt landed another vicious blow, this one breaking the monster’s nose and causing it to howl in pain, but it was too late. Renee died in front of her husband and daughter as the thing sat astride her chest and continued to devour her. Curt cried out in despair as he reached down to haul the Afflicted off of his wife’s corpse. He was ready to strangle it with his bare hands if necessary, when he realized just how desperate the situation had become. The noise had brought more of the monsters, five of them now closing in rapidly from different directions.
    As his wife’s killer began to grapple with him, Curt looked at his daughter and yelled at her to run. Jenny stood motionless, the shock of her mother’s death too much to comprehend. The nearest of the newly arrived Afflicted was nearly upon them when he yelled again.
    “Run, damnit!” he screamed. “Go!”
    The curse word is what broke Jenny’s paralysis. Her father had never cursed at her. She broke into a run, dodging between the cars and making a diagonal approach for the nearest intersect ion. She looked back once to check if her father was following, but all she could see were the monsters attacking him. They’d surrounded him and were trying to haul him to the ground as they had her mother. She almost turned back when she heard her father scream in agony, but then she saw that one of the things had broken off its attack and was now chasing after her.
    Jenny cried hysterically and ran as hard as she could. She was faster that the Afflicted, a flabby middle-aged female with stocky legs that caused it to shamble more than run, but she was tired and trembling with fear. She stumbled twice, skinning both knees on the pavement, and losing her cane the second time she fell, but each time she got up and kept going. She stumbled down a side street, the stores and wrecked cars giving way to weedy lots and a crumbling parking deck.
    As Jenny looked for some place to hide, she spotted a drainage ditch that led up to and under the road just ahead. The ground on either side of the pavement was swampy and a culvert was set beneath the road, allowing water to flow under the pavement rather than flood over it. The circular tunnel wasn’t more than 18 inches in diameter, but it was more than wide enough for a skinny 12-year-old girl to squeeze into.
    She went feet first, inching her way backward inside the steel waterway so that she could still see daylight in front of her as well as if her attacker tried to follow. There was a good two inches of water in the tunnel and it quickly soaked both Jenny and the stuffed animal she still clung to, but she barely noticed. She was terrified. Once she was safely tucked a good five feet away from the opening, she stopped and waited. Her heart was pounding inside her narrow chest and tears still flowed down her face as she mourned the death of her parents.
    A minute later, the Afflicted’s horrible bloated and bruised face appeared at the end of the culvert. It hissed menacingly as it looked inside the dark tunnel for its prey. It spotted Jenny and tried to follow after her, but it was too fat to jam its way inside. The monster howled in rage and kept trying to force its shoulders into the pipe, but all it managed to do was rip its blouse and bloody the pale flesh beneath.
    Jenny wasn’t sure how long the