by Schow, Ryan
Fortunately he wasn’t carrying anything but his phone.
“Is it active?” the Chicom patrolman asked.
“Yes.”
“Where are you going?” the man shouted at him in Chinese. This was one of the few Chinese phrases he’d learned.
The man’s breath was a foul addition to the already smelly air. Standing back, just enough to breathe, he said, “Home,” in poor Chinese.
Without provocation, he was spun around by another soldier and punched in the stomach. The blast was high, near his solar plexus, where you couldn’t flex. The shot hurt, but he was used to worse. He knew the drill. Play possum lest it get worse. Sinking to his knees, he groaned like everyone else. The business end of a gun was promptly laid upon the crown of his head. He took a breath, mentally resigned himself to the fact that death could come any minute and for no reason at all.
“Where are you going?” the man screamed again.
“Home,” he repeated.
The man grabbed Logan by the ear, hauled him to his feet. The pain was far more real than the pain from the gut shot. The sharp burning that started in his ear and radiated inward proved to be no joke. This man was a torture artist. He winced, but tried to rein in his anger. Good God…he’d rather be punched in the stomach than have his ear yanked that hard!
The burning, the stinging…it wouldn’t go away.
Then again, that’s why he kept his head shaved. If he let his hair grow out, whenever they got physical—and the Chicoms did it all the time—they would go for your hair and really give it a twist and yank. Back then, before he started shaving his head, they yanked on his hair all the time and he thought, Anything would be better than this! Now they grabbed his ears and he thought, Anything other than yanking his ear was preferable, but he couldn’t cut off his ear.
Not yet, at least…
“Where are you going?” the Chicom soldier screamed one last time.
“Home,” Logan snapped.
The man’s eyes and nostrils flared and he stood back. Logan saw the slap coming from a mile away and forced himself not to react. He didn’t flinch, tense up or even blink. It was coming and he was going to take it.
The impact rocked his head and he stumbled sideways into the woman next to him.
The man then screamed “Go!” Another Chinese word he knew. When he turned to leave, the man kicked him hard in the butt and he went. Behind him he heard the soldier going after another person, presumably putting them through the same abuse.
Before, when he was just a computer programmer and he felt this was just part of the new life he was living, he told himself to take it, to not make a scene, to let no emotion enter his eyes. Now he wanted to kill these people. He wanted to grab them by the throat then pluck their eyes out one by one until they fell to their knees screaming. After that, his thoughts were too violent to repeat. This was how he felt. That’s how everyone felt.
Keeping his head low, he made his way to an abandoned church. This was where Krav classes were being held tonight. Last time it was someplace else, in two days it would be someplace else as well. They had to stay on the move. Learning to fight was the same thing as resisting and that was the same thing as treason. Part of living under the rule of the Communist regime was not resisting.
He knocked three times regular, then scraped his hand across the wooden door and then he gave it a low kick with his toe.
The door opened up, a familiar face appeared and he nodded for him to come in. Logan slipped in fast.
“Where’s Skylar?” the man asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You live with her, yes?”
“She lives with me,” Logan said.
Dismissing the comment with a frown, which told Logan these people placed a much greater value on Skylar than on him, he said, “Is that abnormal for her not to show up?”
“Yes, very,” Logan said. “Honestly, I’m worried.”
“Focus on your training and hopefully she’s just running late,” he said, looking concerned as well. “She knows where to find us.”
When they trained that night, the focus was on defensive measures for knife attacks. The first defense they trained was the overhead knife attack.
Instead of backing out of the path of the knife, this defense involved rushing toward the enemy. Doing as he was taught, he slid in fast, grabbed his training partner’s wrist with the left hand. With the right hand, he cupped the back of the man’s neck, yanked him down, simulated two brutal knee strikes into his torso and a third into his head, then kicked the inside of one shin and then the other.
At that point, the opponent was rattled.
At least, he should be.
That’s when Logan manipulated the man’s knife hand, twisting it the opposite way to both off-balance his opponent and loosen his grip on the blade. When that happened, it was easy to grab the knife. After that, part two was a choose-your-own-adventure stab-fest.
The second part is about not hesitating. It’s about seeing the neck, the collar bone, seeing the armpits, the femoral artery…any number of targets, and then choosing what to stab or slice open first.
If you get into a knife fight and you don’t know how to kill quickly, precisely and thoroughly, what the hell was the point?
That’s what they were taught. That was their training.
Then again, the point was much deeper than just self-defense. If this was the enemy, then it wouldn’t just be one guy with one knife. That’s why they began running three-on-one drills with knives. That night, he was one guy in the middle of a triangle of attackers.
It started with the defense of the overhead strike, then it moved to the sideways slashing motion, and finally it was the lunging stab or the underhand stab.
A lone idiot, Logan could handle that. But fighting more than one of them? This was the kind of training that might one day save his life. This was why Skylar wanted him there. She said, “You might be the only thing standing between my death and the enemy, and I can’t afford for you to be weak.”
“The second you stick your opponent,” their instructor, Yoav, was saying, “you need to move quick, but not so quick that you get sloppy and get cut. Speed and precision is what we’re going for here. There will be nothing more disheartening than you being the reason you die.”
When it came to the fatal wounds, Logan preferred to punch down on the fleshy space above the collar bone (bringing the head toward the blade). You can’t just stab and wait, though. That used to be the kind of Hollyweird laziness you’d see in the movies. Conversely, that’s the kind of idiocy that will get you killed in real life. And that’s why what’s next is you yanking the knife out while at the same time pushing the head aside to get at the neck. One swipe is all it takes to draw blood. But to get to the Carotid artery, you need to go deep. You have to plan on an inch at the very least. You also have to believe that if you don’t get it right the first time, you’re not going to get a second chance at it. The instant you get that cut, the opponent’s hand will go to cup the wound, and that’s when you punch the blade into the exposed armpit and head to the next threat.
In Krav class, they used hard plastic dummy knives so they could move, get cut, but not bleed. They had to see their mistakes so as not to make them in real combat.
They did drills for twenty minutes.
When they switched out his training partners, however, he frowned, finding this odd. The person you start with had always been the person you finished with. Those were the unspoken rules. According to Skylar, this cut down on wasted time and maximized the training.
His new partner was a woman who had never said word one to him. Her name was Kim. He didn’t know the last name of the brunette, all he knew was that she was in her early thirties, she was alright looking and she was ferocious. He trained with her as if she were anyone else.
When Kim said, “Where’s Skylar?” he said, “I don’t know. Let me focus, please.”
When Skylar was first intro
ducing him to everyone, she told him she and Kim started training together at the same time.
Logan knew where Kim’s loyalties lie.
Not with him.
When Kim ratcheted up the intensity of their training, Logan followed suit. When she went to the next level, and then to the level after that, he found he couldn’t keep up.
Apparently that was the point.
She put a beating on him, then she put him down, and then she leaned over him and said, “Where’s Skylar?”
“I don’t know,” he said, irritated and embarrassed. She pounded the floor beside him and then growled, “Do you know who she is?”
“Like in the carnal sense?” he asked sarcastically.
She punched him in the face this time, rattling his brain. “Do you know who she is to the cause?” she asked, clarifying.
“I don’t know what the cause is,” he lied. “I mean, I do—resist—but specifically, I only know that she tells me to train and I train. Beyond that, what you’re all doing, I don’t know.”
“If you can’t find her by the time we do the next class,” she said, standing up and not helping him up, “don’t bother showing up.”
He sat up, shook off the beating, wiped away the sweat and said, “If this is the Resistance, and you’re Resistance fighters, then what am I? I train with you and I see you looking at me different, but I don’t know what you want from me or why I’m even here.”
“I don’t know,” Yoav said, cold. “What are you to us?”
His instructor came and stood over him, along with three other proficient fighters. Logan looked up, his eye still watering where Kim had hit him.
He said nothing.
“Well?”
“I thought I was Skylar’s boyfriend,” he said to an uproar of laughter. When it died down, he said, “But then I learned otherwise.”
He stood and pushed Kim back out of his space. She let him, but made sure he saw the look in her eye.
To her, he said, “How many kills have you got this week, Kim?” She didn’t speak. He turned and looked at them all. No one said anything. “I have fourteen in the last three days.”
Now they looked at each other and that was the answer.
Kim said, “Bullshit.”
“How do you think I got these cuts and bruises on my face and knuckles? It wasn’t from jerking off in the closet. And it wasn’t from training with you guys.”
Now they were looking him over. Trying to decide things about him
With people like that, seasoned fighters, they could read your face like a map. They could tell the difference between a punched face and a kicked face, what was hit and how hard he was hit to leave a bruise, a cut, a scrape.
The way they were looking at him just then, it was them figuring out exactly how the fight went down without him having to even say a word.
“You level me with your scorn, beat me with your fists then threaten me, but all of you stand here sweating from training while fourteen of the enemy are dead by my hand.”
“Is Skylar dead, too?” someone asked.
“No.”
“Then where is she?” Yoav asked again. “If you know something…”
“I’m as in the dark as you are.”
“Who did you kill?” Kim asked.
“If you train for defense, then all you’ll do is defend,” he said, avoiding the question. “If you train for offense, then maybe we have a chance against these Chicoms. Skylar wanted me to train like each exchange was me fighting for my life.”
“Describe the kills,” Yoav said.
He did.
“What were you doing in Oregon?” one of the men asked.
Kim looked at him and said, “This is the douchebag who burned Harper.”
The edgy brunette had a strong, but lean body which complimented her face, which was hard, her eyes and attitude very “move forward and kill.” That was the problem with training so rigorously for so long, you never learned to shut off the attitude.
When it came to Harper Whitaker, he understood their concern. He used to work with Harper at SocioSphere. He’d burned her. If he had known who she was, he would have treaded lightly, but no one kept him in the loop, and so really he wasn’t to blame.
Somehow, though, Harper was the key to everything, the woman Skylar all but dumped Logan for. But that was last week and this was now. Harper was gone, Skylar was gone and now it was just him and a bunch of lethal, angry Skylar Madigan fans.
He decided one thing, though, and that’s that he wasn’t about to take this anymore.
“You say I burned Harper like it was my fault. It wasn’t. That’s on you.”
“Oh, and how’s that?” Yoav asked.
“That’s what you get for keeping me in the dark,” Logan said clearly, concisely and to the point. “Skylar, too.”
“Where is she?” Yoav asked again. This was very much starting to sound like a Chicom interrogation. When he started to say the same thing he’d been saying, Yoav cut him off. “I know you know. I can see it in your eyes.”
“What you see is anger,” Logan said.
The truth was, Skylar was banging the Minister of Propaganda, but Logan wasn’t sure who knew or if he should say anything. Her coital acrobatics weren’t recreational by nature—at least, that’s what she told him—and they certainly weren’t for pleasure.
She was a spy, undercover and in search of intel. If there was one thing he’d learned, it was that a media that lies routinely and without compunction is no different than a soldier on the battlefield—each of them are every bit as dangerous as a man with a gun in your face.
If she was right, if she could take out the mouthpiece for Propaganda, the fog of lies would die down enough for people to once again rely on common sense and not be such sheep.
It was the lies that bound people, the lies that turned their own brains against them. Who even knew what was real or true anymore?
If he was right in his predictions, Skylar wanted backdoor access into state run TV. He suspected she could use someone like Tristan to shut down the feed, maybe even find physical vulnerabilities and torch the entire studio.
“Bring her with you next time, or don’t show up,” Yoav said, reiterating the earlier words.
“I need a contact if I can’t find her by the next class,” he said. The way the classes were run, if you worked hard enough to prove your value, you got the address to the next class. Classes were every other day, so you really had to work. If not, once you were out of the loop, you never saw them again.
“No,” Kim said. “No contact.”
“You’d drop me because you don’t trust me, but she’s so valuable to you that you hate me for losing her? Like she’s a puppy, or some toy?”
“Find her!” Kim snapped, stepping toward him with an intensity he hadn’t seen before.
“Give me the next location,” he said, looking at Yoav.
He did, and Logan left.
Chapter Seven
He went to bed alone and he woke up alone. Now he was starting to worry. She’d been caught. He knew that now. That’s when he started thinking about the message she sent him via take-out. His cell phone alarm went off. When he shut it off, he saw he had a voice mail. He listened to the message. It was the same cryptic message he got in his food. She was almost too quiet, as if she’d been captured, or was in hiding. Yeah, she was definitely in trouble. No one escaped the Chicom surveillance system, not even someone like Skylar. The problem was, regarding her message, he didn’t know what she was talking about.
When he got to work, he opened his dashboard and saw his pay status had been upgraded with his security. He opened his task list and saw the people Han had been watching.
When Logan was told he was being retired as their Lead Software Engineer and moved into the position of Security Engineer, he kept his face neutral. Inside, he was upset. He liked his job. And it didn’t help that the new fancy title meant “snitch.” He was told, however, that the
reach of SocioSphere was global, and the possibilities for a network of resistance fighters was a risk too great for the company to bear.
It was his job to monitor potential dissidents. Back then, he hadn’t known he was being monitored as well, and by his friend no less. Who watches the watchers? He never thought to ask such a question. Well, he knew now.
He did.
Logan watched several men and women working in closet-offices like his looking to flush out people like Harper Whitaker.
Sitting back, watching the watchers, he let his mind drift back to Skylar. He let the remembered smells of her fill his mind. He closed his eyes for a moment and thought of her skin, the smooth flesh, the ridges of scars along her back.
She was his dream girl, a perfect beauty. That didn’t mean she was perfect looking, or even that nice. He was attracted to her strength. Her resilience. She was not a kind woman, not warm by any stretch, but she was a fighter and he liked that.
He felt himself smile at the memories of her, then lose that smile to the knowledge that she was gone, missing, or perhaps even dead.
He forced that thought out of his mind, clung to better memories of her.
Her face and body were more tomboyish than anything. She could care less about makeup, fancy clothes, being seen at her best. The thing that made Skylar so sexy was not even the fight, but her energy behind even that.
She was a force of will.
There was also a soft, wounded side to her he’d recently discovered. They made love the day before yesterday—a monumental rarity—but that didn’t mean they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Their lifestyle was…alternative. As in not monogamous. It was complicated and apparently he didn’t understand.
He was getting it, though.
Resistance before all.
With the Chicoms occupying California, Oregon and Washington, with the new President on bended knee kissing the boots of these heartless inhuman monsters, the county was quickly falling into oblivion.
It wasn’t just the Chicoms, though. With the new President being grossly unexperienced and weak on everything but what used to be his social media platform, all of America was under assault. It wasn’t just the Chinese Communists. Other forces were converging. In fact, if he told himself the truth, if he let that thought creep into his mind, he knew that America was dead and these invading forces were the buzzards picking at the nation’s corpse. It was only a matter of time before a DNR. Do not resuscitate. To kill the American dream, you had to conquer the country and its people. They were almost there. After that, you needed to occupy the lands, slaughter the strongest males, mate with the woman and kill all the children. He had a feeling that was next.