Viral Dawn Read online

VIRAL DAWN

  By

  Skyler Rankin

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Viral Dawn

  Copyright © 2012 by Skyler Rankin (Ann Logsdon)

  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.

  Chapter 1

  From where I stood on the rooftop of the high school, Bronson looked dead.  I didn’t have to go outside the wall to confirm that.  I lifted my sunglasses to get a better look. He hadn’t made it far past the front gate before he was attacked.  From the looks of his tattered body, he had to have been swarmed upon by a group of them.  A broken down school bus sat in the street a few yards from the body. If only he had made it that far, he might have been able to barricade himself inside until we could get him back inside. It was a shame.

  “Do you see him Casey?” Harley yelled from the ground below.

  “Yeah,” I yelled back.  “He’s about fifty yards from the front gate.”  I picked up my rifle, climbed down the fire escape, and walked toward her.

  Harley stared at her feet.  “Why did he have to do it?” she said, her voice breaking with emotion.

  “Why do any of them do it?” I asked.  Bronson was the ninth person who lost it and tried to run from the high school, and he was the ninth person to die.  We had been hiding out in the school for a month, our supplies were running low, and people were becoming desperate.  “Come on,” I said, “We need to look for food.”

  Harley and I went back inside the school building to get our group together to help.  It was already almost noon, but most of the fifty or so evacuees were still asleep on the floor in the gymnasium.  They slept in rows on the floor on top of exercise mats or anything else they could find to give some small comfort on the hard floor.  They had to sleep when they could during the day, because the screaming kept us all awake at night.  That’s when the zombies came out to hunt.  We had managed to stay safe here, but the nightly terror of the zombies ramming at the gate was unnerving.

  I found Jordan and Matt sleeping in the corner and woke them.  “You guys up for a supply run?” I asked.

  Jordan groaned.  “Man, I just got to sleep.  Leave me alone.”  He rolled over and pulled the curtain panel he was using for a blanket over his head.

  Matt sat up and rubbed his face.  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “It’s almost noon,” I answered as I pulled Jordan’s curtain off his face.  “Come on!  We don’t have much time.  You know we have to go downtown today, and it is a pretty far walk.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jordan said, standing up.  “Just give me a minute.”

  We had been venturing out during the daylight to forage for food and other supplies ever since the food started running low in the cafeteria storage building.  As long as we made it back before sundown, we were safe.  That had not been a problem when we could still ransack the houses near the school, but now that we had to move farther out to find anything, it was becoming more of a challenge.

  While Harley, Jordan and Matt gathered up the empty duffle bags we had scavenged from the athletic department, I found the school nurse sleeping near the door in her traditional white uniform. Mrs. Hoffstedder was old school like that.  “Mrs. Hoffstedder,” I said, shaking her shoulder.

  She awoke startled.  “What’s wrong?” she gasped.

  “Nothing’s wrong.  We’re just going for supplies, and I need you to secure the gate behind us,” I answered.

  “You almost gave me a heart attack,” she said breathlessly.

  “Sorry about that.  I guess we’re all on edge, aren’t we?”  I helped her heave her ample frame up to a standing position as she wobbled, trying to balance herself.  “Oh my knee,” she growled in pain.

  “Still hurts, I see.”

  “Damned zombies,” she huffed.  “I’d be going with you if it weren’t for this knee.”

  The knee still looked inflamed.  She had nearly broken it in a fall during our last attempt to gather supplies.  We had spent too much time on the outside.  That evening, the sun was sinking on the horizon when we were a few yards from the gate.  One lone zombie appeared out of nowhere.  We had all scrambled toward the school, and Mrs. Hoffstedder tripped on the curb.  We dragged her inside and slammed the gate on the zombie’s head as it tried to get in.  Its head snapped off with a sickening crunch, and its body fell to the ground outside the gate, flailing wildly in the road and slinging black, slimy zombie blood everywhere.  Luckily, none of the blood got on us.

  Before we lost power, the authorities on the emergency broadcast system had warned that contact with the blood or saliva of the zombies could spread the condition.  They had called it a mutated virus.  It was engineered by a company called BioGenetics. I couldn’t recall the scientific name for the virus.  No one knew how to stop it.  Guess it really didn’t matter what they called it.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I reassured the nurse.  “We’ll bring back enough.” I wished I believed it.  The truth was it was becoming more and more difficult to carry back enough food for everyone.  But most of the others were too sick or injured or old to help.  The nurse limped after us as we left the building and made our way to the front gate, which we kept locked from the inside. Carver High was an inner-city school, and the high concrete walls surrounding it once protected it from gangs.  The fortress now served as our home.  Even if the zombies broke through the gate, all of the windows had bars on them.  It was good to know the bars were there when the zombies rammed the gate at night with their blood-chilling screams echoing in the deserted streets.

  “Be careful out there,” Mrs. Hoffstedder said as she pulled the gate closed behind us.

  I patted my rifle. It was an assault rifle we had been lucky to find in a military jeep that had been overturned by the zombies.  A severed hand had been all that was left of the soldier who probably owned it.  That was the biggest problem.  The zombies had an insatiable appetite and they attacked and ate anyone they could catch.

  “We’ll be back soon,” I told the nurse.  “Be ready for us.”  We began walking at a brisk pace past the rows of houses in the Carver neighborhood.  The street looked like a war zone.  In fact, it was in a way.  The military had come through to evacuate people.  They had fired on the zombies and even on civilians who they thought might be carriers.  Anyone who looked sick was a target.  Bodies were scattered through the streets, both zombie bodies and unfortunate civilians who got caught in the firefight.  The smell of decay hung in the air like a thick, musty blanket.  Burned out and broken down cars lined the roadways.

  We had walked for almost two hours, and my feet were beginning to hurt when we reached the downtown area. Boots weren’t the shoes of choice for food runs, but they were all I had.  As bad as the Carver neighborhood had been, it was nothing compared to what we saw before us.  More bodies and parts of bodies were strewn across the sidewalks and roads.

  It had been rush hour when the cloud of toxic gas carrying the deadly strain of virus wafted into the city.  It had happened so fast that anyone caught in the open air was infected. There had been an explosion at the nearby army depot where the military stockpiled chemical weapons.  There weren’t supposed to be any biological weapons stored at that facility, but apparently the site had been the location of a covert initiative.  The virus had been genetically engineered and was designed to kill.  But something went horribly wrong, and the virus mutated into a deadly agent that caused a horrible sickness followed by a kind of death state that lasted a period from a few hours to a few days.  The virus then incubated inside the body and caused it to become, well, reanimated is the
best word I can think of.  I mean the zombies weren’t really alive and fully functioning like a human would.  They were jerky and robotic like in their movements, but they were incredibly fast and strong.  They screamed and wailed as if they were in constant pain.

  And the way they looked.  It was disgusting.  The virus caused a hideous outbreak of bleeding blisters.  It rotted the flesh, even though the victim was reanimated.  In a way, the body would decompose as it walked among the living.

  As we approached the main street, the sun was high in the sky, casting a ribbon of light down the road between the tall skyscrapers - - something we hadn’t planned on.  The doorways to all the shops down the street were in shadows.  We all stopped and stared.

  “What do we do now?” Harley asked, dropping her duffle bags onto the asphalt.

  “We can’t go into any of the buildings,” Matt observed.  “What now, boss lady?” he said sarcastically, looking in my direction.  “This was all your idea.”

  Possibly because I was eighteen and year older than the others, I had become the de facto leader of our group over the past few weeks, and it was a role I didn’t particularly like.  It meant that everything that went wrong was my fault. But Matt had a point.  We couldn’t be sure that zombies wouldn’t be lurking in the shadows in the buildings, and we had to find food.  Otherwise, we wasted another precious day.

  “We go on,” I said simply.  “We don’t have a choice.” I reached into the pocket of my black jeans and pulled out a hair band. I pulled my unruly blonde hair into a pony tail. I didn’t want it getting in the way if we had an encounter with the undead.

  “Are you crazy Casey?” Jordan said in disbelief.

  “Look, if we go back empty-handed, we’ll run completely out of food in days,” I reasoned. “It’s best that we keep stocked up.”  I regarded them thoughtfully.  No one wanted to go. “Come on guys.  We’ve come this far.  We can pick a store, run in, and get out fast.  I’ll cover us with the rifle.”

  Reluctantly, Harley stepped forward.  “Casey’s right.  We don’t have a choice in this.”  I was proud of her.  Harley was beginning to take a stand, something she rarely did.

  “All right,” Matt said.  “I’ll do it, but we’ve got to come up with a better plan in the future.”

  “I agree,” Jordan added.  “I’m not interested in suicide missions.”

  We walked further down the ribbon of light in the middle of the street, surveying the buildings as we passed.  All of the storefronts were broken into.  They had been looted by the few survivors over the weeks.  But now it looked as if everyone was gone.  They were probably dead or had become zombies.  We passed what had been a clothing store and a shoe store, and finally reached a diner.  It too had been broken into, but it seemed to be the most promising place to start looking.

  “Let’s start here,” I said. I removed my sunglasses and hung them from the neck of my tank top.  “I’ll go in first.”  I gingerly stepped into the shadowed doorway. The diner was a long, narrow room lined with booths and a service counter on the left.  The kitchen was probably behind the closed door in the back.  Tables and chairs were overturned in the center aisle.  Broken glass was everywhere.  And of course, there were bodies, and dried blood, zombie and human, splattered on the walls and floor.

  “See anything?” Jordan asked.

  I shushed him with a finger to my lips.  I was listening for any sound that might indicate we were not alone.  I motioned for them to follow me.  When they were close beside me, I whispered, “We’ll have to go to the kitchen in the back.”

  We moved toward the door.  I looked through the small window in the door and peered into the room beyond.  It was darker inside, but I could make out a stove and a steam table.  I nodded to the others and slowly opened the door.  We moved in further.  Around us, work tables stood with rotting food and flies buzzing around.  Pots and pans were scattered across the floor, and we stepped over them carefully, trying to move as quietly as possible. What was left of a man who must have been the cook was lying on the floor, covered in blood.  From what I could tell, there was nothing useful in the kitchen.  Another door loomed near the back of the room beside a walk-in freezer.  We made our way toward it.  Like the previous door, this one had a small window, and I could see that inside it was considerably darker.

  “Must be storage,” Matt whispered.

  I nodded, “Let’s go in.”  I carefully opened the door, my heart pounding in my chest.  Inside, we stood listening.  After a moment, I moved forward.  I could see shelves.  Some still held large, institutional sized cans on them, but it was impossible to tell what the labels said.  “All right,” I said.  “Just fill your bags with whatever you can fit in.  We’ll sort it out later.”

  “Looks like we hit the jackpot,” Matt whispered.

  “Don’t count on it,” I warned.  “Let’s hope it’s not all tomato sauce.  What I wouldn’t give for a nice big can of chili.”

  I was grateful that we almost filled all our bags, but they were very heavy.  I bent down to zip my bags closed when I felt the skin on the back of my neck start to crawl.  “Shhh,” I whispered.  We all froze in the darkness.  “I thought I heard something,” I breathed.  “Guess it was just my nerves.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s just get out of here and get back,” Jordan said.

  We hoisted our bags onto our shoulders and walked lop-sided back toward the kitchen.  It was difficult to manage the bulky load of cans and carry my rifle at the same time.  “Jordan,” I nudged him.  “Take my bag.  I can’t carry it and the gun.  I won’t be able to shoot if I need to.”

  “Casey,” he whined, “I’ve got all I can carry.  You’ll have to manage.”

  “Don’t argue with me Jordan.  I just need you to carry it until we get into the light.”

  Suddenly the door slammed open against the wall, and a dark figure stood blocking the way out. Harley screamed.  Instinctively I dropped my bag and lifted my gun to my shoulder to take aim.

  “Hold it!” a male voice yelled.  “Don’t shoot.  I’m a human too.”

  I kept my finger on the trigger, ready to pull.  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I’m Kyle Carter.  I live here,” he said.  “I could ask you the same thing.  What are you doing in my, um...house?”

  “What’s it look like, dude?  We’re getting food,” Matt said.

  “I’d feel a lot better if you put that gun down,” Kyle said.

  “We don’t know if we can trust him,” Harley said in a small voice.

  “Back into the light,” I said.  “We’ll settle this outside.  Just walk out, and don’t make any sudden moves, Kyle Carter.”

  We inched our way back through the kitchen and into the dining area.  I kept the gun on Kyle.  We made it into the shaft of sunlight that had narrowed considerably since we went inside.  It took my eyes a second to adjust to the light as I carefully looked Kyle up and down. He was dressed in military fatigues.  I circled around him looking for signs of injury or infection.  I didn’t see any blood.  There were no blisters that I could see.  “What are you doing here?” I asked.  “You’re military. Why weren’t you evacuated?”

  “Evacuated?” he laughed without humor in his voice.  “Very few people were evacuated from here.  When the army came through, we got orders to consider everyone infected. We were told to shoot everyone.  What few the army didn’t kill, the zombies got.”

  “If that’s true, then why are you still here, and how did you survive?” Jordan asked, his voice suspicious.

  “I was in the diner when it all went down. I thought we were here on a humanitarian mission. I heard the commander on my earpiece telling us to treat all civilians as diseased and to shoot to kill.  Soldiers everywhere started opening fire on the civilians. Everyone in the diner ran outside into the street, panicking.  At first I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I couldn’t just kill the peopl
e I was sworn to protect.  I tried to push my way out, but I couldn’t get through the crowd.  So I turned around and went to the back.  That’s where I found the walk-in refrigerator.  I went inside and closed the door.  I hid there until the noise stopped.”

  “Dude, if that was true, you would have frozen to death,” Matt said.  Jordan shook his head in agreement.

  “It was cold in there for a while, but then the power went out.  I’ve been bolting myself into the freezer every night since then.”

  “Well, just go back to your freezer G.I. Joe and we’ll be moving on,” Jordan said, turning to leave.

  “You can’t take my food,” Kyle said.  “That’s all I have.”

  “I think we can take it,” Matt said defensively.  “We do have the gun after all.”

  “Wait,” I said.  “You can come with us.”

  “What Casey?  We don’t know this guy,” Harley said.

  “We know he’s not infected,” I answered.  “Besides, we need all the able bodied help we can get.  In case you haven’t noticed, we have a lot to carry.”  All three of them glared at me as if I had lost my mind.  I looked at Kyle, still keeping the gun aimed toward him.  “Do you want to go with us?  We have a safe place.  There are others there.”

  “What and leave all this behind?” Kyle smirked.  “Guess I have nothing to lose.” Matt reluctantly handed Kyle two bulging duffel bags.

  “Let’s go,” I said, looking at the sun that was now hanging low.  “We don’t have much time.”

  With the heavy load, we walked back toward the Carver neighborhood at a much slower pace.  I felt the need to stay ahead of the group to motivate them to keep moving. Kyle walked just ahead of me, and I kept the gun ready. We could probably trust him, but I wasn’t ready just yet to let my guard down.  The sky was clouding up, and it looked like it may storm.  As I expected, Matt was the first to jog up to my pace to complain.

  “I just don’t understand why we have to bring this guy along with us.  It’s another mouth to feed,” he grumbled.

  “It’s another back to share the work.  It’s not that hard to understand,” I said.  What I didn’t say was that Kyle was another human life, and right now any human life was valuable if we were to survive.  That argument would be lost on Matt.  Maybe I couldn’t make much difference in this situation, but giving Kyle a chance at survival was one difference I could make.  He wouldn’t have survived much longer downtown on his own.  There would be too many zombies there. And if the military ever found out that he disobeyed orders, who knew what could happen to him.

  “Can’t we slow down?” Harley asked, running to catch up with me and Matt.

  “No, Harley.  Look at the sky.  It’s getting darker,” I stopped to face her.  “We don’t know exactly how dark it needs to be for the zombies come out, and I don’t want us taking chances.”

  Kyle turned and came back to take Harley’s bags.  “I’ll carry these for a while,” he said, pulling the bags onto his shoulders. He was in good shape and seemed to have no difficulty with the extra weight.  I gave Matt an ‘I told you so’ look.

  We were almost through Carver when it started to rain.  The sky was growing darker.  A flash of lightning shot through the clouds.  “Move it, guys!” I shouted as I started to jog.  I could see the gate of the high school down the street ahead of us.  “We’re almost there.”

  Without warning a scream sliced the air.  My stomach turned.  It wasn’t human.  “Run!” I shouted.  “Drop the bags and run!”

  They didn’t need telling twice.  That is, except for Kyle, who ran full force, still carrying his and Harley’s bags.  Another scream sounded.  This time it was human.  I turned to see Harley falling to the ground, a zombie right behind her.  “Keep running!” I yelled to the others as I ran to help Harley to her feet.

  “Run Harley!” I yelled as I pushed her forward and took aim at the zombie.  Harley ran a few steps and faltered again.

  “I can’t run.  My ankle!” she cried.  “Get inside!”

  “I’m not leaving you!” I yelled.  I pulled the trigger and fired, but nothing happened.  “Damn it!” I cursed.

  “Casey, run!”  It was Kyle.  He had come back to help.  He was looking around on the ground for something to use as a weapon.

  “No you run!” I yelled at him.  I hated having to fight zombies because they were so nasty, but I didn’t need Kyle’s help.  The zombie barreled toward Harley, and I sped toward it.  I hurled the stock of the rifle at its head.  Its rotting flesh slid off its face and flew through the air, but it didn’t stop moving toward Harley.  I aimed for its head again but missed, landing the butt of the gun into its back.  It crumbled under the blow, and smelly black blood spewed onto my arms and chest.  It finally turned toward me and swiped at me with its tattered arms.  I lifted the gun above my head and brought it down hard on the zombie’s head.  It fell forward onto me, knocking me to the ground. I swung wildly at it, gouging its face with my studded bracelet.

  “Casey no!” Harley screamed.

  Suddenly, Kyle appeared over me with a large rock.  He smashed it into the back of the zombie’s head, and it fell still.

  I scrambled our from beneath the putrid body, and pushed it off of me.  It slid onto the ground with a gurgling noise.  For a moment I stared at my clothes.  My jeans and my tank top were wet with the monster’s blood. I flung my grisly bracelet dripping with slime into the street.

  “Casey!  Are you okay?”  Harley asked.

  I didn’t feel any cuts.  “I think I’m okay,” I said.  “I’ve got to get out of these clothes.”  I ripped my shirt off and threw it to the ground.  Forgetting modesty altogether, I pulled my jeans off to get the infected blood off.  Kyle gave me his shirt.  I slipped it on, and it was long enough to cover me at least.  “Thanks,” I told him.

  “It was an old shirt anyway,” he said.

  “Not for the shirt,” I said.  “For killing the zombie.  It almost had me.”

  “Almost?” he asked, his face concerned.  “From where I was, it looked a little more serious than that.”

  “We need to go,” I said, brushing him aside.  “We’ve got to help Harley.”

  Kyle and I each draped one of Harley’s arms around our shoulders and lifted her up so she could stand on her good leg.  We half-carried her to the gate where Matt, Jordan, and Nurse Hoffstedder waited to let us in.  They pulled open the gate, and we slipped inside.  Jordan locked it behind us.

  “What happened?” asked Mrs. Hoffstedder as she looked us over.  “Was that a zombie out there? Where are your clothes, Casey?”

  “Never mind that,” I said.  “We need to take care of Harley first.”

  The nurse looked as if she wanted to say something but didn’t.  Instead, she followed the others into the building.  I was glad.  I didn’t want to tell her about the blood getting all over me or she might put me in some kind of quarantine.  I looked back toward the gate and listened.  I could hear the wailing beginning, and yet the sun wasn’t quite down.

  “Aren’t you coming in?”  Kyle called from the doorway.

  I walked toward him.  “They’re coming out earlier tonight,” I said.

  “Yes, I know,” he said.