Chapter 1, Part 1

It was one of the hottest summers on record. Sticky, humid, lazy weather. Go-see-a-crappy-movie-just-to-sit-in-A/C-for-two-hours kind of weather. Eat a sit-down dinner in a mediocre restaurant to avoid returning to a hot, hot house and the little box fan that kicks up more noise than air. But with the heat, come the storms, fifteen tornadoes in June alone. And numerous thunderstorms, tornadoes in training, that only take down trees and power lines instead of entire buildings. There was even talk of something called a derecho. Wikipedia called it “a widespread and long-lived, violent convectively induced straight-line windstorm that is associated with a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms in the form of a squall line usually taking the form of a bow echo.” The residents of Arborville, Michigan called it a pain in their ass.

It’s not that these residents were hardy, sun-scorched, tough-it-out kind of folk. Not even. More people in Arborville owned smart phones than pick up trucks. And the main movie theater in town, the one built in 1927 and lovingly restored to its former glory by a group of concerned citizens, was more likely to show a foreign film sans subtitles than anything requiring 3D glasses.

No, it wasn’t that Arborvillians were so confident in their ability to deal with the storm, one way or another, when or if it arrived. It was that the sirens sounded so goddamn often that most people ignored simply them. Tuning them out, as if they were the sounds of a passing fire truck, on its way to some emergency on the other side of town.

But not Jeana Saito.

Jeana Saito lived on the top floor of a hundred year old house less than half a mile from downtown with her fiancé, Nicholas. His grandmother, Hattie Washington, was their landlady and downstairs neighbor. And on this night, when Jeana heard the siren she rounded up the Washingtons and they wove their way through Hattie’s cluttered old-lady kitchen to the painted yellow door that was the entrance to the basement. As soon as Nicholas opened the door, the smell hit them. He flipped the switch. The light illuminated the darkened space, and the sight hit them.

In every direction. As far as the eye could see, stray cats. Every single one, dead.