Viral Series (Book 1): Viral Dawn [Extended Edition] Read online

  VIRAL DAWN

  By

  Skyler Rankin

  EXTENDED EDITION

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Woodland Media Creative Services

  Viral Dawn (Extended Edition)

  Copyright © 2019 by Skyler Rankin

  Copyright Notice

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination.

  Dedication

  Dedicated with love and appreciation to my family for all the support and patience they've shown me with my writing projects.

  Prologue

  “Things are never so bad that they can’t get worse.” - Terence Williams, Gunnery Sgt., USMC

  The massive rolling cloud barreled forward, engulfing buildings and cars as it came. What the hell was it? Fear gripped my stomach and squeezed.

  Derek! I have to get to Derek!

  I broke into a run toward the junior high, and a police car cut me off as I tried to cross the road. A cop jumped out of the car and rushed toward me. He grabbed me around the waist, and the force of my body against his forearm knocked me breathless as I doubled over in pain. His hand was a vice around my arm as he pulled me upright and turned me back toward the high school.

  “Wait! What are you doing?” I screamed. “I’ve got to go get my brother! Let me go!”

  He pulled me up the steps as I struggled against him. I had to make him understand. “Derek, my brother, is by himself at the junior high,” I gasped. He quickened pace toward the building, and my voice climbed in pitch as I realized he wasn’t listening to me. “Please! He’ll be scared and won’t know what to do. I have to get to him.” I felt myself being pulled up the steps, the concrete treads stabbing at my heels as he dragged me to the front doors.

  “Please!” I screamed at him. “Is my brother going to die out there?”

  He paused for the briefest moment. “I don’t know, kid, but you will if you don’t get inside. Now!”

  Chapter 1

  “Things are never so bad that they can’t get worse. Remember that,” my dad was fond of saying. I hated how he always seemed to be right about the most unnerving realities like ‘you get what you pay for’ or ‘if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.’ I mean, he’s dead now, and he’s still right, especially about the things getting worse part. Things could get worse, and they had.

  A hard jab between my shoulder blades had just awakened me from what was probably the best night’s sleep I’d had in months, which meant only that I had, in fact, slept an hour or so. Usually, I grappled with my covers and was up and down all night most nights, and no matter what position I landed in, comfort was short-lived. Depression, as it turns out, troubles more than one’s thoughts, or so the hospice counselor had explained. It left me exhausted most of the time and uninterested in most things. I navigated my days as if drifting through thick, heavy fog that slowed my body under its own dead weight. It trapped me in a kind of weird time warp where I never seemed to get anywhere on time, even places I wanted to be. It seemed like all I could do to make it through days that lagged, seemingly longer than they should be. Nights were both too long and too short. Last night I’d just fallen into bed, still wearing yesterday’s clothes, not bothering to change into my pajamas. I couldn’t remember making a conscious decision to do so.

  Another punch. This time it was harder. I think it hurt, or it should have. The ever-present bone-deep pain I’d felt over the last six months outmatched it. It was a side effect of watching my father waste away, suffused by a rare and aggressive form of lymphoma. Body aches were common with depression, the therapist du jour had said. It would get better with time. I should exercise more, he suggested.

  A sniff and heavy mouth breathing from behind me confirmed that my tormentor was still there, waiting for my reaction. Craving it. My foster brother, Derek, had just turned sixteen but “functioned intellectually at the level of a seven-year-old.” That’s what his first social worker told my parents two years ago when the demon spawn came to live with us. He delighted in tormenting me, but Mom lived in denial about Derek, Dad, and everything else.

  “Don’t think about the problem and just focus on the good part. Stop complaining and be thankful for what you have,” she would say as if by just being grateful, we might somehow keep bad things from happening in life or will them out of existence.

  At this point, I was pretty sure the universe dished out whatever it wanted to and that it didn’t care whether I appreciated it or not.

  I felt another jab and realized Derek was probably armed with his crossbow. Yeah. And no, I’m not making that up. For some inexplicable reason, Mom bought it for him last year for his birthday. He had become obsessed with survival and military paraphernalia while spending time with my dad. My mother took this as a sign the kid needed a weapon of his own. Obviously, she wouldn’t serve as a model for a family sitcom. Neither the Brady Bunch, the Waltons, nor the Gilmore Girls would last long in this house.

  At least Mom had the sense to secure the arrows in Dad’s shed—after Derek shot out the neighbor’s picture window. They let him keep the bow though because he cried when they took it. Not long after that, he started sneaking up on me, trying to catch me off guard so he could punch me in the back with the metal cocking stirrup at the end of the bow. He was determined to use it as a weapon one way or another.

  My massive biology textbook rested within reach on the nightstand in front of me. I considered for a moment that I could easily grab it and fling it at the little jerk and would have a good chance of hitting him because he wasn’t very fast. It would solve my problem for a minute or two.

  Another blow, but this time with a twist followed by more pokes and an exasperated sigh. Derek, if nothing else, was persistent. ‘Perseveration,’ the second clinical social worker called it. Because of the kid’s limited cognitive skills, she told us, he would engage in repetitive behavior until he learned that it wouldn’t get the results he wanted. She told me and my mother that if I ignored the hitting long enough, Derek would stop hitting me and leave me alone.

  “What if he never learned?” I’d asked. The social worker hadn’t answered. She just gave a weak smile as she changed the subject.

  Derek’s psychiatrist only increased his Adderall and mumbled something about displacement. That doctor seemed to think that my foster brother hit me because he had all this repressed anger toward his biological parents and that he hit me because he now felt safe to do so. Since he no longer lived in an abusive situation, Derek felt free to displace his anger onto someone he believed to be less dangerous.

  “See dear, it’s kind of a compliment,” my mom had added, reaching what might have been the most absurd level of excuse-making I’d ever heard from her. “He trusts you.”

  “He hits you,” the third social worker had explained, “because his communication skills are poor. He gets frustrated when he can’t make you understand his needs.”

  Always the parrot, my mom would echo the counselor’s words. If I just listened more carefully and tried to understand, Derek would stop this behavior entirely, she assured me.

  The fourth therapist said the boy’s reasons for hitting me weren’t important because we couldn’t know for sure what he’s thinking. He agreed with ignoring the behavior though. He said withdrawing any response that might reinforce it would cause it to eventual
ly fade away. ‘Extinction,’ he’d called it.

  ‘Ineffective,’ I found it.

  I kept telling Mom the ignoring didn’t work, and she perseverated in her response, saying it would take more time, conveniently landing the responsibility for managing Derek’s behavior back into my court. Displacement. Maybe they thought that because I was bigger than this kid that I should be able to control the situation. In truth, I could have pounded him if I wanted to, but who hits children who are younger than they are?

  As I laid still, ignoring Derek and waiting for him to give up and find something else to do, I heard him rummaging through my desk. Books hit the floor, and glass in a picture frame rattled as it hit the desk. It took every last bit of resolve I could manage just to keep from turning around and pounding him. I reminded myself the key to extinction was in giving no reaction.

  “Wake up, Casey,” he said, his voice slightly slurred from the cleft palate he’d had. He went through surgery, they’d said, but it left his speech permanently impaired.

  My foster brother came from a therapeutic care program that specialized in finding homes for kids with behavior and psychiatric problems. We weren’t given a lot of details like who his parents were or exactly where he lived. His caseworker only said he’d been removed from his rural home because of “extreme neglect and abuse.” The social worker didn’t say much about what happened to him, only that the parents seemed convinced they were helping him. They had this sick (my word, not hers) idea that by making him fend for himself they were teaching him how to survive on his own, and they’d done it at least since he was a toddler. The therapist was careful not to say anything remotely judgmental about Derek’s birth family, so she didn’t use the term, psycho farm. She didn’t have to. The kid’s behavior said it for her.

  Music blared as my tormentor flipped through the channels on my television. “It’s time to get up, Casey!” He began repeating the sentence in a sing-song voice.

  I kept ignoring him.

  Derek hadn’t been physically injured in his home, but his family would leave him out of the house for days, apparently. We had to watch him all the time when he was outside to keep him from eating weeds and bugs. The entourage of social workers and therapists who came in a boxed set with my new foster brother had differing opinions on why he did what he did. Eating bugs, or entomophagy, one LCSW said, wasn’t considered a disorder. It was a common practice in some cultures he informed us. My eyes begged me to let them roll on that one, but I instead opted for a convincingly appreciative nod.

  Another counselor said my foster brother probably developed some of his behaviors because of the neglect he experienced. She also felt that at least some of his developmental problems were related to years of malnutrition and inadequate schooling. That much seemed reasonable. I remembered the day he came to us. He was so frail and small compared to other boys his age. His skin had draped over his shoulders a wet t-shirt hanging to dry on the back of a knobby chair. He would cower from as little as a glance in his direction. It made me wonder what really went on back at that hellhole homestead where they’d found him.

  With so little information to go on regarding his background, I imagined he was rescued from some oddball cult or a doomsday prepper compound in an isolated part of the state. With all Derek’s issues, it just seemed like there had to be more to his story than we were told. Maybe his parents were crazed psychopaths. That seemed like a real possibility because of the way he looked like he was always on the alert and waiting for something bad to go down. ‘Hypervigilance,’ his social worker called it.

  “Like a soldier on patrol,” my dad had said.

  Back in Afghanistan, Dad was involved in an ambush attack when a truck he was riding in ran over a landmine. He lost his left hand and most of his hearing. He went through several surgeries and rehab and was discharged a year before the boy came to live with us. During that time, as he recovered, an agency for disabled veterans hired Dad, and he traveled around, working with other vets.

  Stability is what Derek needed, the social worker said, and that’s why they’d placed him with us here in Ft. Wayne. She believed he would benefit from a relationship with my father because of his disciplined military background. I wasn’t sure what that meant at the time, but the boy latched onto my dad and loved spending time with him. They worked in his shed with gunsmithing. They went on ‘wild-man’ weekends fishing and hunting. It was good for my dad, Mom had said. Derek could help him with things he could no longer do for himself. It would also help Dad by encouraging him to stay active, the social worker agreed. All that was great, I imagined. I just wasn’t sure where it left me. I wasn’t invited. The therapist was happy, and my mother liked having the stipend she got for taking a foster child in. The payment was higher for kids with behavior problems and, Mom said we needed the money because Dad’s disability pay wasn’t much.

  More pokes. This time, he kept at it. My shoulder. My side. My left buttock.

  Dad taught the boy how to use the bow and other weapons, and they spent just about every weekend together until last year when everything changed. That’s when we learned that while dad survived the blast that took his hand, his war wasn’t over.

  It started with the itching and red patches on his skin. He thought he’d gotten into some poison ivy while hunting. Derek had been right beside him but didn’t have any skin problems, so we weren’t sure what it could be. It kept spreading and getting worse, even after first aid. Within a few weeks, it covered his lower back and legs. It was annoying for him at first, but we even laughed about it being ringworm or some odd contact dermatitis. But things are never so bad that they can’t get worse.

  There’s no cure for T-cell lymphoma, and the aggressive syndrome my dad was diagnosed with took him down fast. In less than six months, he went from a strong man working to rebuild his life to the ghost of the warrior he used to be. It quickly invaded his blood and bone marrow, ravaging his body with unstoppable fury.

  After Dad became sick, the kid’s behavior got worse. He was so hyper that I thought I would lose my mind dealing with him. It seemed that losing the time outdoors with my dad made him worse. Fortunately, my mom had the sense to lock up the weapons and had begun selling some of them, but Derek moped around and cried until she agreed to let him keep the crossbow out, but thankfully without the arrows.

  It’s been less than a year since Dad’s diagnosis, and this afternoon, we’ll lay Gunnery Sergeant Terence Williams to rest.

  Another poke. As I laid here, ignoring the little demon’s incessant offensive, I wondered if he would ever get tired if this infuriating new game.

  “You’re dead again, Casey,” Derek informed me, speaking out louder than before.

  I continued ignoring him.

  “I said you’re dead again!”

  A sudden hard swat came down on my hip as the bane of my existence hit me with the broad side of the bow. A sickening pain shot through my hip and lower back.

  I snapped.

  “Damn it, Derek! You little jerk!” I yelled. Without thinking, I’d grabbed the textbook and hurled it at him. He ducked, and the book hit the wall, leaving a gash in the blue paint and exposing a glaring white patch of drywall. The kid went scurrying toward the doorway.

  “You’d better run because when I catch you, I’m going to strangle you,” I screamed at him. I lunged off the bed and barreled out of my room behind him. “Mom!” I yelled as I ran down the hall toward her bedroom. “Derek’s hitting me again!” I banged my fist on the door and flung it open, not caring whether she was awake, sleeping, or even decent. “I mean it this time. You’ve got to stop him from hitting me.” Her bed was empty. I glanced into the master bath. There was no sign of her.

  Another poke to my back. “Mom’s gone,” the demon’s voice mocked from behind me. “She can’t stop me. She’s not here.”

  What the heck? Where was she?

  The kitchen showed no sign of recent activity. Mom’s purse wasn’t resting in its
usual spot, and the Civic keys weren’t on the hook by the door. A roughly torn piece of canary legal pad paper beckoned from the dining table. Mom’s unruly script took over the page without regard for lines, punctuation, or basic grammar.

  ‘Got called in—working late,’ I read. ‘Janine coming 9:00 am/be ready—meet you @ Fallon’s!!!’

  Sometimes anger burns. It claws its way up from your stomach and through your throat where it broils, singeing your flesh like fire. What was she thinking? Working? Today?

  Suddenly, thudding, sock-clad feet padded into the kitchen and stopped somewhere behind me. God! I had to get Derek ready for my dad’s funeral by myself.

  He jabbed me again.

  I was supposed to be the older, responsible one. The role model. I played along with that expectation most of the time, but the spawn of Satan was pushing me to the raw edge of my last nerve. I pretended to ignore him and waited, bracing for another poke.

  Unable to resist, he came at me and jammed the stirrup into my lower back, and I swiveled and swatted at the bow, knocking it from his grasp. It slid across the linoleum as I charged at him, using my full weight to knock him to the floor. I pinned his arms above his head and wedged his body against the wall. “Derek, I swear to God if you don’t stop this, I’m going to make you regret it for the rest of your life.”

  He looked at me and giggled, a trickle of drool spilled down the side of his cheek. His green eyes looked at me expectantly from beneath his reddish blonde bangs. “No, you won’t,” he gurgled through the spittle. “You love me.”

  Yes, I was expected to be the mature one. The level-headed pseudo-adult in charge. I guessed that expectation had ratcheted up a notch or two now that dad was gone. Even when my parents were here, it wasn’t as if they fulfilled the role of the responsible guardians we both needed. My better judgment told me to back off, but I--.