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

by Schow, Ryan

  “How unusual.”

  “You guys are the sex freaks,” she said. “Some guy not liking dick-shaped fruit isn’t the same as having sex addictions. Besides, if there’s any truth to the rumors, if he does indeed send such abominations to his enemies, it’s his twisted idea of disrespect.”

  “I understand that,” he said.

  “So you will understand that he values his privacy, and he’s very good at what he does.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “He gets information that doesn’t want to be gotten from places you and I barely even know exist,” she answered, knowing she wasn’t betraying Logan, and knowing he wouldn’t find Tristan.

  “I’ve heard that. What exactly did he give you?” he asked, his eyes flicking to her nail again.

  “A server, that’s all.”

  “What was in this server?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “You hit me before I could leave. And now we’re here.”

  “Would it help if I tell you I plan to torture you?”

  “No.”

  Nodding his head, as if this were a forgone conclusion, he stood, stepped forward, then knelt down and grabbed her biggest toenail with the pliers.

  She sucked in a startled breath. She didn’t count on that.

  “Last chance.”

  “Pull it out you frog eating motherfu—”

  It wasn’t easy to get out, and the screaming hurt even her own ears, but when the nail tore loose of the bed—all kinds of tender skin ripping and bleeding—she started swearing. It was a litany of hostility that felt more like channeling demons. The unrelenting stream of obscenities rushed forth like a swollen river of hatred. She called him every name in the book and then some.

  Frothing, struggling against her restraints, against the pain and her captor, she spit and cursed, her eyes bulging and blood red with an animosity. Her hatred ran so deep her lithe body could not contain it. As she howled at Renshu and his pliers—pliers that held her big toenail in front of her face—she felt the memories of her grandmother returning, like a little face in the crowd. The hate stopped and that’s when the real pain set in. It wasn’t her toe that caught her unaware, it was the emotional turmoil she carried around for that loss.

  Her grandmother had been looking at larks that day. Larks and the pure blue sky. That’s all. But to the Chicoms, the binoculars meant spying, and that’s why they shot her.

  The sky was so bright that day.

  As bright as her pain.

  Get ahold of yourself, she thought. Glaring at the handsome sadist, she growled at him like the dog he thought she was. “Take them all you self-righteous bastard.”

  “I intend to.”

  He’d only removed four toenails when she passed out.

  When she woke up, it was to the memory of that day. The day her grandmother was shot. She’d been alive after the first bullet. Her head bucked on the second. In that moment, Blue Lark was born, but it was not fortified with the blood of her grandmother alone. When the men who entered their home dragged her mother down the hall, they raped and beat her.

  There were men standing over her now. Looking down, blood and toenails all over the floor, she started to laugh.

  Tears accompanied this dark, wayward amusement.

  “She’s awake,” someone said.

  After they got done raping her mother, they held her down and did the same. That was where her first scars came from. The men who did this didn’t expect her and her mother to recover.

  But they did.

  Skylar had been beaten so bad she could barely speak. All she could say was “Blue Lark.” That was the answer to every question, to every riddle, to every statement.

  Now, looking down at the tattoo of the blue lark on her thigh, she thought of her grandmother, and of her late mother. She killed herself last year.

  Skylar’s hair was damp with sweat and hanging in her face. This was her bitter end. She would see her grandmother soon. She would see her mother, too. And hopefully she’d see her little dead brother.

  Looking up, she laid eyes on the big man who first pulled her from the tub.

  “There you are,” she said.

  “Here I am.”

  She worked up some spit, powered it at his face. It landed on his shirt. Looking down, she saw he’d had enough. She tilted her chin up, knowing what was about to happen.

  He made a fist; she offered up her perfect nose.

  When he swung for it, she head-butted his fist with all her might. The shot rocked her, had her mouth flopping open with spit starting to drizzle out, but what she did to him was far more damaging. She started to laugh, even as the blood poured down her face. Looking at him through hazy eyes, the world tilting ever so slightly, she saw him cradling his injured hand. The face he was making one of surprise and agony.

  “Got you, asshole,” she said. Her head finally bobbed forward. She tried to bring it back up but unconsciousness was setting in. She raised her head up just enough to hold it steady, but then it fell backwards, and the darkness came once more.

  She woke to an incredible amount of pain in her armpits. There were hands under them, dragging her down a hallway, through a kitchen, out into a garage. White hot agony flared from her feet, specifically her mangled toes. They were dragging her face toward the ground, the fronts of her toes with the ripped off nails scraping over the multitude of surfaces.

  The back of a paddy wagon scared her. This was one of the mobile death squads. One of the guards opened the back door. She didn’t see any of her captors, but she recognized the Minister of Propaganda’s voice.

  “She lives long enough to regret the choices she made,” he said to someone.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Someone grabbed a fistful of the back of her hair and yanked her head up. It was the Minister. “I gave you my bed, my body, my trust,” he hissed in her ear. “For you to have violated all three things is a hundred deaths to me. You’ll pay for what you did.”

  He let go of her hair and her head dropped between her shoulders.

  “She needs re-education. Take her with the others.”

  With that, she was thrown into the back of the paddy wagon, her shin slamming on the sharp edge of the metal box where the door was supposed to close. When hands took her leg to lift it in and close the door, she thrust a kick back with all her might, catching solid meat.

  She flipped herself over and thrust another kick at the man’s chin. He turned his head in time, but the kick hit him in the jaw anyway, sending him staggering sideways. She scrambled to her feet in time to see the guard raise up a shotgun.

  The flash of fire should have been her death. Instead, it was a bean bag round that hit her in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of her. She doubled over and fell into someone’s legs. The second shot hit her in the forehead.

  Sadly, the first thing she thought after being hit in the gut and doubling over was, this is a beanbag round and it won’t kill me. In that moment, she was sad that with all that pain, there was no promise of death. Then the second round hit her, the flash of pain in her head not even registering.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Before the anonymous alert hit Logan’s email—a ping that both startled and excited him—he waited for Ming Yeung to begin lunch before hacking in and looping his office camera to illegally access a live news feed from the East Coast.

  As he ate his peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich, he watched video footage of the European Union’s Army clashing with protesters in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. It reminded him of the Hong Kong assault ten years ago. There was smoke, tanks, gunfire and dead bodies. He’d just found the feed last week and it was bad then, but not this bad.

  He changed feeds, searched the Miami circuit and found what he was looking for. The African Union’s Army had toppled Miami and was now destroying everything in sight as it marched north. The sky was filled with smoke from a hundred fires, the streets too chaotic to even make
sense of it all.

  Even as more boats came in from Africa, loaded with more soldiers, artillery and both trucks and tanks, the smaller coastal cities like Jupiter, Vero Beach, Palm Bay and Titusville fell to a fast moving horde.

  One of the soldiers in the AU was talking with a reporter saying the United States was fertile ground and up for grabs, but only after they defeated the EU Army.

  They didn’t even consider America a threat.

  When the awkward looking, obviously terrified reporter asked what the AU Army was there for, the dark skinned, wild-eyed brute said, “Beach houses and free women,” like it was Christmas morning and they were preparing to unwrap gifts.

  Just then, an explosion rocked the building behind them. The ground shook, as did the camera, and the reporter and the soldier she was interviewing ducked until they realized the falling debris wouldn’t reach them.

  A new ruckus sounded though, causing both of them to look to their right. Just then an onslaught of bodies ran past them, either to their posts or away from potential danger. What happened next had Logan sitting there in complete, slack-jawed silence.

  Of the crush of people sprinting through the area where the interview was being conducted, someone had a blade and swiped it hard across the side of the reporter’s neck, causing her to start geysering out a fountain of blood.

  The camera zoomed in on this with shaky hands, as if the cameraman was scared, and then the feed was abruptly cut.

  Logan suddenly lost his appetite, but he checked the clock and Ms. Yeung still had fifteen minutes of lunch left.

  He didn’t want to cut it too close, but he wanted to see what was going on in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. He found another hacked feed of a long stretch of border wall, as if seen by a drone.

  On the Mexico side, there were giant trucks and bulldozers smashing against the side of the wall. Even as they used their battering rams on one side, there was an apocalyptic looking fire engine, a ladder truck, that was extending its ladder to the top of the wall. Several people were climbing the ladder, lugging up huge ropes and heavy looking chains.

  On the American side of the wall there were mobs of people and a few big tow trucks. The drivers were clearly waiting to hook the ropes and chains to the wall to try to pull it over.

  In the mean time, there were giant sections of the wall being cut away with reciprocating saws. The second a section opened up, people rushed toward the entrance en masse, bottlenecking at the hole itself as they pushed and shoved their way into America.

  The scene changed to a section of the border wall in Arizona where giant dump trucks had smashed through a section and were now just slamming into the sides to create a wider gap.

  Down in Texas, the same thing was happening, but drone footage near El Paso showed massive armies gathered on the other side. In addition to the formal armies, pockets of tens of thousands of rag tag soldiers with guns, knives and spears stood ready to attack the second they had a chance.

  The drone changed direction, locating long lines of military transports and several approaching helicopters.

  A cold pit of dread set into him and he finally put his sandwich down.

  The United States had been betrayed from within, everyone knew that by now. The new President sold them out, but really the compromise started long before that, back so far as the mid-nineties when the US ballistic missile codes were sold to the Chinese for pittance.

  Now America was that giant cow freshly dead on the side of the road being picked at by buzzards.

  Logan didn’t even have the heart to check the Canadian Border. Who knew what army would pour through there?

  He killed the illegal feed, reset the cameras and got back to work. That’s when the ping came in. He had a message on the emergency contact voicemail. It had to be from Skylar, although Harper knew the emergency number, too.

  As much as curiosity was now nipping at his brain, then nudging it, then absolutely torturing it, there was no way he’d risk listening to it at work. Not with the cameras above him and all around him.

  Not with Ms. Yeung watching.

  Time passed at a slower pace than normal. He couldn’t clear his mind and just focus on his job. Drumming his fingers on the desk and tapping his foot under it was burning off nervous energy, but that didn’t mean his mind wasn’t in overdrive with speculation. It sure as hell was!

  For heaven’s sake, what had constituted use of the emergency number?

  Dozens of possible problems churned through his mind, some taking shape, others being written off as preposterous, outlandish, or downright impossible.

  With a half an hour left to go in the day, he thought about going to the bathroom to listen to the message there, but he couldn’t risk listening to it on his regular phone in such a highly monitored building.

  He needed to access it from the burner phone.

  No matter how bad he needed to scratch that itch, there could be no possible trace of linkage between him and that number.

  When he finally clocked out and left the job, he was scanned but not patted down by the Chicom guards. He didn’t care about their invasive procedures, or that condescending look on their faces that said everyone was a criminal just waiting to be caught.

  While he walked home, he did so with a little less fear of being blown up or shot and a lot more fear about what was happening to Skylar, or Harper. Although, truth be told, he was worried more about Skylar since she was the one missing. At least Harper was off the grid with people who knew how to protect their land and weren’t afraid to kill to do so.

  When he got to his apartment tower, he saw two men outside the front entrance who looked somewhat suspicious. He wrote them off as him being paranoid—a constant, soul-breaking condition of living in a Communist state.

  While waiting in the lobby for the crowded elevator box to arrive and take them to their respective floors, he saw two more guys resembling the pair out front. He caught one of them looking at him, but the perpetrator’s eyes immediately darted away upon contact.

  Okay…not good.

  Now he was definitely paranoid! If they were there, were they watching him or looking for Skylar? As he moved into the elevator, stuffed in there shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone else, he tried to see if the men were still there. He couldn’t quite see past the people packed in front of him. He stood on his tippy-toes, but by then the doors were closing.

  Within minutes he was at his floor and unlocking his front door. He prayed to God that Skylar was there waiting for him. He so wanted the emergency number to have been used for good news. Alas, that was not the case.

  When he got inside, he loosened his tie, set his cell phone on the table and looped it and the internet of things the Chicoms used to spy on everyone in their homes. Still brimming with curiosity, but taken aback by the men who might have been waiting for him, he made himself a stiff drink to take the edge off. He then fished his burner phone out of the false bottom in one of the kitchen drawers.

  He listened to the message with an increased heart rate. When he heard her voice, the sheer terror in it, the absolute brokenness of it, his skin broke into goosebumps.

  Horrified, he played the message again, try to make sense of it. She’d basically sent him the same message through his take-out food.

  “Peel back the nine’s, dammit!” she said. The thudding sound he heard had to be her being hit, or knocked out.

  He erased the message, hid the burner phone, then dumped the drink down his throat and paced the kitchen for a minute, running his hands over his freshly shaved head.

  What the hell were the nines?

  He walked back to his bedroom and was changing when two men grabbed him from behind. The pain of electrical shock that hit his spine, along with the crackling noise of a tazer shook him, scrambling his brain. The surge of current roared through him until he passed out. When he woke up, he was on his knees in Skylar’s bathroom and they were filling the tub.

  As he stood there, his brain
full of fuzz and angry bees, he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. When he returned to consciousness, everything became clear.

  “He’s awake,” the guard said.

  A hand snaked up under his chin, jerked it up. He was looking up into the eyes of one of the men who had been standing outside the building when he first arrived.

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  The fist that punched him rattled his teeth and eyeballs. His head was jerked up again, the Chinese face staring directly into his.

  “Let’s try this again, Mr. Cahill,” he said, impatient. “Where is she?”

  “She’s been missing for two days now.”

  The faucet on the bathtub was still running when someone grabbed the seat of his pants, hauled his ass off the ground enough to dump him face-first into the scalding-hot water. He tried to pull his head out, but a hand held him under. When he couldn’t breathe anymore and his lungs felt like they were about to explode, he was dragged up.

  Coughing, gasping for air, he felt the rage take over. This was a different kind of anger, though. This was helplessness mixed with hostility.

  This was prisoner rage.

  “Where is she?” the man asked again.

  “I told you, she’s been missing for two days!” he screamed, his voice hoarse, scalding hot water dripping into his eyes.

  “How long have you been working with her?” the other asked. He couldn’t see the man, but Logan felt like maybe he was the one to worry about.

  “I don’t work with her. She’s just a roommate,” he said.

  “She doesn’t pay rent.”

  “I pay the rent,” he said. “She buys me food and pays for utilities.”

  “How long have you two been sleeping together?”

  Because the Chicoms recorded everything everyone did and said every day of the year on devices in their homes, their work and on their cell phones, he knew they didn’t have squat on him. The two times he and Skylar had sex were not monitored.

  “I told you, we’re just roommates.”