Dark Days of the After (Book 1): Dark Days of the After

by Schow, Ryan

  When you’re someone’s prisoner, there are no rules and nothing is off limits. This she knew. That’s why she stopped struggling. There was no room for modesty.

  The man bent over, his big hand reaching for her. What was he doing? A dozen grisly deaths shot through her mind as she started to squeal. The possibilities hit her hard, the rush of them unrelenting.

  What could happen to her now…it was so much worse than before.

  With a roughness you reserve for the worst of people, he hauled her out of the tub, her hip bone and ankle knocking painfully on the side of the tub.

  Where before there was fear, now there was a little fight. The blood pumped back into her body and she grimaced as he stood her on her feet. Looking down at her, he smiled again. She wasn’t a natural beauty, but she’d worked on her body through years of training, through years of fighting whatever and whomever she could.

  Now she needed to fight, but she could not move her legs, and she could not move her arms. The slight struggle had her swaying this way and that, and then she wobbled a little too far to the left and had to hop not to fall over.

  He walked around the back of her, taking his time to appraise her. She expected the lewd comments, the grabbing hands, the probing fingers. Instead, without warning, he kicked her in the butt, jarring her whole body. She was pitched forward, careening into the bed. She hit the sides with her thighs, then collapsed face first onto the mattress.

  Straining to get up, her hands bound and useless, all she could do was lift her neck enough to look around and recognize the room.

  It was the Minister of Propaganda’s bedroom.

  Lying on the bed with this man behind her, this man she couldn’t see, she felt so incredibly exposed. Seconds passed and she didn’t feel herself being violated. She prayed to God it would remain that way. Rather than feeling any kind of assurances by God, she was overwhelmed by the feeling that nothing would ever be the same.

  “I like this view of you,” the man said in broken Chinese.

  “Really?” she said with hate-induced heat to her voice. “Because the Minister told me you were a cocksucker.”

  “Not me,” he said, getting closer.

  By now they must know what she’d found, although they wouldn’t know how she found it. She heard the man retreating and breathed a sigh of relief. Back in the bathroom, she heard him taking a leak. She was thinking of ways to escape when she heard a door open and then close. Someone else was about to join them. A new man walked into the room. He was of slight stature and he bore a calm demeanor.

  “Hello, Skylar,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “A little exposed.”

  “That’s because you are naked.”

  “I appreciate you keeping me up on current events,” she said.

  He smiled softly, a kind smile. He was dressed well, and handsome. This scared her. Men like this had charm and charisma, but they were also sadists, and unrelenting. He had a briefcase with him. She glanced down and imagined these were tools of his trade. Was his trade torture?

  She didn’t know.

  “She has a couple of head wounds, that’s it,” the bigger man from earlier said after flushing the toilet and returning to the bedroom.

  “Has she been violated?” the handsome Chinese man asked.

  “Had I known this was an option,” he said in slippery tones, “perhaps I would have been more…forthright.”

  “He’s into other men, don’t let him fool you,” she told the new guy in a jovial, taunting tone. “Get it? Into other men?”

  The man smiled again. In his eyes, there was compassion. It would not be reserved for her, and she knew this, for behind this façade she saw something dark squirming. Would he unleash this for her? Was he going to be the one to violate her, break her, kill her?

  “I’d like to know who you work for,” the man said.

  “We all work together,” she said. “There is no leader of the Resistance. We are all Resistance.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. Setting down the briefcase, he stepped closer to her, sat on the bed with her. She had her head laying on the bed facing him. Delicately, he brushed a strand of hair from her face, tucked it over her ear.

  “When I first came to this country, I found all of you so…ugly. You all looked alike to me. You were all just Gweilos. White insects I begrudgingly had to deal with.”

  “We used to have this thing about racists, you know,” she said. “They spoke like you. It was sick.”

  “The easiest way to divide people is through cultural and ideological differences. That and the power of words. Language can bring sophistication to people, or it can tear them apart if weaponized. Your country is proof of that.”

  “Your pretty face is just a mask,” she said. “There are demons inside of you.”

  “Indeed there are,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Two years ago I would never have done that. Put my lips to a face like yours. But I respect you. So many in your country have taken a knee, two knees. So many of you have chosen to lick the boots of minions in an attempt to be spared, to be…overlooked. That kind of weakness is responsible for my low opinion of your kind. But then I found you. People like you. Resistance.”

  “Ask me what you want and I’ll tell you what I know. After that, do your best. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than this.”

  Sitting up, he said, “I like you already.” Then, looking at her bare back, he said, “I see that you are not afraid to take a beating.” She felt him trace his fingers down her scars, down the areas where cigarettes had been put out on her back.

  “Get her a towel please,” the man said. Then to her, he said, “Do you have any clothes?”

  “I do.”

  “Perhaps after all this, we can get you back into them. It must be dreadfully uncomfortable like this.”

  “It is.”

  He stood, walked around her, traced his finger down her side, across her butt check, into her center, then across the other butt cheek where he wiped his finger dry.

  She swallowed hard, fought back the tears.

  “I never could get an erection over your kind,” he said matter-of-fact, moving around the other side of the bed. “The Minister of Propaganda is a powerful position.”

  “It is,” she said, hiding the tremors in her voice and turning her head.

  He dragged his finger down the side of her face. It was the one he’d slipped inside her. The revulsion crawled through her unbidden.

  “That’s why having such a position compromised by a beaten Gweilo seemed preposterous to me. I asked myself, what self-respecting gentleman would carry on with a dog like that? I asked myself how weak a man must be to abandon his own standards and sink so far as to share the same bed as a Christian, one as plain as you.”

  “If you’re trying to make me feel better about myself, it’s working.”

  “Have you seen the Minister’s wife?”

  “I have not.”

  “She’s a wonderful woman. Strengthened only by the sacrifices she’s made, not only in coming to America, but in being an official’s wife. You cannot understand the forfeits a woman like that must agree to.”

  “I have an idea.”

  “You lay there, his seed still in you, not an ounce of respectability to be found.”

  “I didn’t beat the hell out of myself, strip naked and crawl into a tub. I didn’t bind my wrists or bend myself over this bed. And what about you? You are sophisticated and well spoken, yet you shove your finger in a dog’s twat and talk about respect. Whatever it is you want from me, let’s get on with it already. I’m tired of listening to your voice. It reminds me of everything I hate about your government.”

  “I want to know who you work for,” he said.

  “I told you already.”

  “Specifics are better, Ms. Madigan.”

  “What is your name?”

  “You may call me Renshu,” he said. “But only if you cooperate. If you do
not, you will only scream for mercy.”

  “Okay, Renshu,” she said. “You are asking me the wrong questions. The better question would be, what do I know? Because when it comes to structure, or hierarchy—if you prefer—I will tell you this. We are not like you. We are purposely different. That means, whatever I know, and it’s merely a server location, begins and ends with me.”

  “You ordered food to a place you would not be.”

  “I owe my roommate food because I cannot pay rent. It’s an unspoken agreement. Plus it’s a bit of a joke.”

  “I hardly find any of this funny,” he said.

  The beastly man returned with a towel that he laid over the back of her so that her privates were not exposed. Already she felt better.

  “What’s funny is how much he hates your people’s food. But I love it, so I’m trying to indoctrinate him. Surely you understand.”

  He took the towel off her back, rolled it up, then crawled over the top of her and slipped it roughly under her face then around her neck. Putting a knee in her back, he pulled tight, then crossed the ends over to flatten her Carotid arteries.

  The strain on her neck and head was violent, dizzying. Just when she felt herself passing out, he let go.

  “I would like specifics,” he said again, that voice so dreamy, so…unbecoming of his actions.

  “I have a few things I’d like to say about you people,” she started to say, but then he tightened the towel again, cranking it up with all his might.

  The closing of her throat, the smashing tight of her Carotid arteries, the bulging of her eyes, it all scared her. She was prepared to die, to even endure more torture, but now that it was happening, there was nothing joyous or heroic about it.

  He finally let go, her head dropping down into the bedsheets.

  “This is all fun and games, Ms. Madigan. But in that briefcase there are pliers. There are clippers. The kind that take off fingers, nipples, clitorises. Would you like to keep all your body parts?”

  Standing up, he ripped the towel out the side of her neck, burning the skin. He began to take off his belt.

  “My daddy used to whip me, too,” she said, imagining he was going to choke her to death with the belt.

  “I bet he did.”

  “He was always trying to get me to do things his way.”

  “Turn her over,” Renshu said to his goon.

  The big man grabbed her, flipped her over on her back and gave Renshu the room he needed. His eyes were roving, fixating, growing wide and shrinking.

  “You changing your mind about girls?” she asked in a low voice.

  The first whip came down on her ribs. The sting had her gripping. With her wrists bound behind her back, she was defenseless. The next whip was to her privates. Humiliation didn’t even weigh in at that point. The pain was unbearable.

  “That’s enough!” a man said, entering the room.

  It was the Minister himself.

  Oh, thank God!

  “Out!” he roared. The men left. To her, he said, “I shared my bed with you, which is to say I shared my trust.”

  “We all make mistakes.”

  “So it’s true?”

  “Yes,” she said, defiant. “It’s true.”

  If she couldn’t topple the Chicom regime, she was going to weaken it as best as she could. After that, if they chose to torture and kill her, she’d at least get to see her grandmother again.

  “You are Blue Lark.”

  “I am.”

  “Why?” he asked, his expression one of pain, of betrayal. In that moment, she was not a Christian, a white woman, a Gweilo he was slumming with out of some taboo need to defy the state or lay with the enemy. She was a woman he…loved?

  Had he actually fallen in love with her? Was that what she was seeing?

  Oh, my God.

  “Your people killed my grandmother,” she finally confessed. There was no reason to hold out. It would only give him hope. It would only make matters worse. “They shot her in cold blood after accusing her of being a traitor to the state.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “They don’t need a reason, Minister. They only need a target. You don’t see this from here. This ivory tower of yours, it blurs out the details of what goes on below. We are far removed from the slums I come from.”

  “You’re not from the slums,” he said.

  “They did not start out that way. Once the city was beautiful, relatively clean, bustling with people who felt freedom but didn’t know it. When you took everything away from us, you turned humans into animals, and when an animal is cornered…”

  “It fights like its life depends on it,” he said, quietly.

  “Yes,” she said, the fire in her waning.

  He leaned forward, held her face, then kissed her. “I am sorry that you had to betray me the way you did. I…I loved you.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “She’s cold.”

  That’s all he said. She wondered if he was weeping. That would not only be uncomfortable, that would hurt her somewhere inside where she still had a heart, compassion, the desire to feel.

  “Did you feel anything for me?” he asked, lifting up, his eyes needing something, anything to maybe spare her what indignities, what cruelties, were sure to follow.

  “Yes,” she said, her shoulders burning where they were wrenched back, her wrists aching where they were smashed beneath her body weight, her back hurting where Renshu had planted a knee he’d used for leverage when choking her.

  “You did?” he asked, a small glimmer of light in his expression.

  “Yes,” she said. “I felt disdain. I felt a deep loathing every time you touched me, every time you kissed me, every time you pumped your way into me and called it love.”

  That light in his eyes went out. He stood up, frowning, his lips tight with disapproval.

  “You lie to the very people you enslave,” she continued, some of that fire coming back. “You tell us how wonderful the People’s Republic is, yet you shoot us in the streets, you rob us and rape us and you make us scream at televisions.”

  “This is the conditioning,” he said. “When you submit, it will be so much better.”

  Touching her chin, but then pulling back, he did not like the white hot glare he was receiving. “We will never submit to you,” she said. “Minister of Lies.”

  “I will try to spare your life,” he said without emotion. “For now.”

  “If they find out what you’ve been doing, that I’ve compromised you, your bony Asian ass will be right next to mine against a wall.”

  He turned to go, leaving her there, naked, enraged, abandoned.

  “They’re going to kill you like they’ll kill me!” she yelled, her voice hoarse. “You’re dead! Don’t you get it? YOU’RE DEAD LIKE ME!”

  And with that, the goon came back in, this time looking very much unsettled.

  Instead of taking her then, he sniffed up her entire body, past her privates, all the way up to soft skin beneath her earlobe.

  “You smell like a dog,” he snarled.

  “Your breath smells like semen,” she growled back, even though it didn’t. The Chinese were notorious for their treatment of homosexuals back home.

  And with that, he cupped his hand over her mouth and pinched her nostrils shut. She bucked and squirmed, but he was too big. He had all his weight on her.

  It will be easier when you submit.

  Her eyes began to hurt along the edges, the darkness crowding in. The heaving, sucking emptiness in her chest gave out and she felt all that darkness swarm her at last.

  She wanted to feel relief in that moment, but she was also wise enough to realize there was no grace in death.

  Skylar did not expect to wake up. She didn’t think they expected that either. But when she did, she was alone. Feeling off, her head light like it was stuffed with paper, she belly crawled across the bed to the nightstand where a phone stood.

  Lifting it
off the cradle with her mouth, she heard the dial tone. She drew a deep breath, saw the antique buttons and let the tip of her nose do the dialing. She punched in the number in her head. It was an emergency number, an untraceable number she’d committed to memory in the event that she’d been compromised, or captured.

  It rang through.

  She was waiting for the beep, but she heard the door open instead. The beep sounded and frantically she said, “Peel back the nine’s, dammit!”

  The punch to the side of the head stopped the conversation.

  It stopped her completely.

  When she woke again, she was in a gown. It was a stiff material, like you see in scrubs, but in the form of a utilitarian dress. She wasn’t even sure if she had underwear on.

  “This was all we had,” Renshu said, smiling at her.

  “You again.”

  “Yes,” he said with kind eyes. “Me again.”

  “I need a name.”

  “Buck.”

  “Not just any name,” he said.

  “You want to know who I called,” she said. In his hand he had a pair of pliers. She was seated in the kind of arm chair you find in old diners, her right arm zip-tied to the chair. Skylar watched his eyes dip to her fingernails. They were chewed short for this reason alone. In that moment, she wondered if he could get an edge under her nail. Looking down, she knew he couldn’t. He’d have to slip a knife under there, pry up the fingernail, then get the pliers under it and pull. “I called Tristan.”

  “The hacker?”

  “Yes.”

  He started laughing, and then he said, “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “That’s as far as any of us get,” she said, still looking at her hand. It was out there not as an offering, but as a sacrifice. “A rerouted number and an email.”

  “We know all about Tristan.”

  “Then you know more than me,” she said.

  “There are rumors,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are they true?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure what you’ve heard,” she said, “but the man has serious issues with fruit or vegetables that are shaped like a penis.”