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

by Schow, Ryan

  “Everyone has needs, Mr. Cahill,” the one before him said. “Even a nobody like you.”

  “Do you expect us to believe you pay her rent and ask for nothing in return?” the one he couldn’t see asked.

  “She pays for food, utilities.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit,” he said. “Have you seen her?”

  “We have,” the man said.

  “Then you know she’s out of my league,” he replied. Then, and this was a painful admission, he said, “But that doesn’t mean I’m not trying.”

  The two of them shared a short laugh, but then the one Logan couldn’t see said, “Refresh his memory.”

  And he went back in the water.

  The very second before he was about to gulp in a ton of water and drown, he was pulled out, slapped three times in the back of the head and kicked.

  “What about now?” the man at his back asked.

  “I already told you!”

  He went in the drink again. Fortunately he’d taken a breath before going under. Unfortunately, one of them thought he’d up the ante by kicking him right in the balls from behind. He still had his head under water. The pain was so ferocious, he sucked in a gallon of water and really started to drown.

  And still, even as he fought for air, they held his head underwater…

  Chapter Fourteen

  When he came around, Logan was lying sideways on the bathroom floor choking and coughing out water. When he was done, one of the guys grabbed the collar of his shirt and hauled him through the apartment into the living room.

  “Toss the place,” the ball sack annihilator said.

  As he lay there, helpless, shocked, beaten and nearly drowned, the two guys tore his apartment apart. After a minute, when he felt his strength returning, he waited until they were both preoccupied to get himself into a better position to charge them.

  They wouldn’t count on this.

  Pain or not, he’d taken worse beatings in Krav class and still kept fighting. When the time was right, when they were close enough in proximity to both him and each other, he sprung to his feet and charged them. It was slow and a bit sloppy, but what he lacked in style, he made up for with rage.

  He hit the first man with a vicious punch to the side of the head; the other was already drawing his weapon. Logan caught him in time to check the gun. It fired into his stomach, but fortunately he got enough of a hand on it to have diverted the round. The searing heat in his side became a hot trail rather than a fatal tunnel.

  The grunt of the man behind him told Logan he’d been struck by his partner’s bullet. He shot his hand up, catching the Chicom intruder under the chin. This was all he had and it was no lethal blow. He needed distance though, and in this, he succeeded.

  Despite being chin-checked, the thug was on him in a second, driving Logan to the ground. When he hit, the weight of the man crashed down on him, knocking the wind out of him.

  For most people, this is a terrifying thing, not being able to breathe.

  Logan understood what was next. When you get the wind knocked out of you, the last thing you want to do is try to breathe. That’s how you panic. Logan wasn’t panicking, he was fighting for his life and he planned on winning. The forearm driving down into his throat, however, wasn’t helping.

  He craned his head to the side—getting the pressure off his Adam’s apple—then he checked the inside of the man’s arm. His body collapsed on top of Logan’s, his head dropping to the side of Logan’s head. Wasting no time, he circled his arm around the back of the Chicom’s neck as he launched blow after brutal blow into Logan’s ribs.

  Twisting his face around, with his mouth, Logan opened wide and grabbed ahold of the man’s ear. With all the ferocity he could muster, he sunk his teeth into the flesh and clamped down hard. The son of a bitch squirmed and bucked against him, but Logan refused to let go, even as he shook and tore the man’s ear from his head.

  As soon as Logan got done Mike Tysoning him, he rolled over on him and drove a thumb into his eye. The screaming was high pitched and extremely satisfying. Three ferocious strikes to the Adam’s apple left the intruder grabbing at his throat and gasping for breath.

  “That’s for kicking me in the nuts,” he said, breathless and in pain.

  The man beside him was trying to get his gun out, but his chest was a big red bloom. Logan crawled off the soon-to-be-dead-man, looked him in the eye. He was about to speak, but then it occurred to him these men may be armed with recording devices. He began rifling through the half-eyeless, half-earless man’s pockets. They came up empty. He grabbed the wrist, saw no watch. He checked the remaining ear for an earpiece, found nothing.

  Dirtbag number one wasn’t wired for sound.

  On to clown number two…

  After a thorough search of the man, he found neither of them were wired up. That’s when he chose to speak freely.

  “You poked the wrong bear, shitbird.” He found the bullet hole in the other guy’s chest, stuck his thumb in there and watched him squirm. “Yeah, this is fatal. It’ll take a minute, but it’s fatal.”

  Blood lined the inside of the dying man’s lips and his eyes held more fear than he’d ever seen in a Chicom.

  “Do you know how many of you I’ve killed this week? I’ll give you a hint, I’m double digits.”

  “They’ll…find…you,” he said.

  “Who will?”

  The man tried to snicker, but the pain shook through him and he stopped, a small whine escaping him.

  “When you die, and that should be any minute, I want you to know something.”

  “What?” he said, his eyes locked on Logan.

  “A Gweilo did this to you. I did this to you. And by the time I join you in hell, I will have killed tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of you.”

  “So you say,” he eked out before coughing up thin, red spittle.

  Looking around at how badly those two trashed the place, he felt a burst of energy, the old, familiar anger. He grabbed the man by the shirt, lifted him up. He was grumbling and wincing, his face bloodless and contorted with pain.

  “Do you know how hard it is for the body to die?” Logan asked, now realizing the other man was dead, asphyxiated. “It’s a rather resilient system we humans have here.”

  Logan managed to stand him up. As his legs began to wobble beneath him, Logan said, “If you stand, I’ll leave you alone. If you fall, I’ll stick my entire thumb in that hole in your chest. Let’s see how you do.”

  The man stood, but only barely. The two of them were in the middle of the living room. On one side there was the couch. On the other side was the dead man, stretched out on the floor. Taking the standing man by the collar, he pulled him forward, ran two steps with him, then launched him face-first into the wall.

  He crashed into the old drywall, leaving a large divot before his back bowed in and his legs gave way. He sunk face-first down the wall, his arms limp at his side. Flicking a look at the dead man beside him, Logan was now only concerned with the one still alive.

  “Ten bucks says you’re still breathing,” he said. Getting on a knee, Logan grabbed a fistful of hair and pulled back his head. “Oh yeah, look at you. Nostrils flaring and everything.”

  Logan dropped his head, the man’s face slapping back into the wall. Then, with a ferocious elbow and the last of his strength, he drove a blow into the back of the intruder’s head. This caved in the wall. The man’s body sagged against the wall with permanence. Logan waited for him to take that next breath. There was no next breath.

  Dragging the body off the wall, pushing him aside, Logan let out a sigh of relief. That’s when he saw the wallpaper. Beside the blood splat, a corner of it had come loose. There, written small and in an ink pen, were several different 9s.

  Peel back the nines…

  Using the phone, he filmed the house as it was, then used the video footage to create a looped roll. He did this to reflect his trashed place and his tras
hed face. Satisfied, he started in the corner where Skylar had written the number 9s and began to pull back. The paper came off easily, and underneath he saw all kinds of coding and instructions for a hack. Who provided Skylar with these? This was some next-level hacking. Was this something Tristan understood?

  Did Tristan create this?

  He began to study the coding, and that’s when he realized there was a server in there. L2#178R4. Level two, server number one seventy-eight, rack four. There was also a site listed with DW in front of it.

  Dark Web.

  The dark web was where hackers often kept coding for their Trojan horses, their malware, their ransomware and any other number of attacks, from DDOS attacks to brute force attacks, to the kinds of attacks you could use to catch a server on fire and physically delete everything.

  The rest of the message said: UR CD is wtng.

  Your code is waiting.

  Did she want him to destroy something, or access something? And how the hell was he going to justify getting into a server room? Physical access came with protocols. He didn’t have either physical clearance or access. That’s when it hit him. He had to somehow break into the server room at work, figure out what he was supposed to see, and get out unnoticed. Then somehow he had to get back to his desk without being interrogated and/or killed. So yeah…what she was asking him to do was definitely going to be a problem. Then again, if he was going to pull his weight in the Resistance, he needed to be the solution, not the guy crying about the problem.

  He glanced around at the mess these Chicom rodents made of his house. Shaking his head, discouraged, he hobbled to the bathroom then looked himself over in the mirror. They’d made just as much a mess of him than they did of his home.

  He checked the time, then panicked.

  He had to go.

  He finger combed his hair, wiped the blood off his face and swished a bit of rust-flavored water through his mouth. When he spit it out, it was tinged red. He ran his tongue along his teeth, made sure they were all tight in the gums.

  They were.

  Mostly.

  Putting on his clothes, grabbing his things, he headed out into the city. Unlike so many of the pedestrians moving like ants in a procession down the sidewalks, he was not wearing his work clothes. At that point, with what he’d just endured, with what he’d just found, he didn’t care. It didn’t matter that you weren’t supposed to mingle. He’d mingle if he wanted to. Why? Because he had a home and a job. Things he cared about. Nowadays, you couldn’t be homeless unless you wanted to get killed or sent to the cages.

  Groaning inside at the reality they’d come to accept, the Chicoms were always promising you a cage right before they gave you a bullet instead.

  He walked down the renamed city streets with his hat pulled low over his eyes. There were once so many great street names in the city. Market Street, Mission, Broadway, Fulton, Hays, Lombard, Haight & Ashbury. They were all gone now. Renamed. Some of these Chinese street names, he thought about them and they made no sense. Like he couldn’t register with them. That’s why he refused to learn their names, let alone speak them out loud.

  When you change the fundamentals of history, then try to sell everyone on the new being better than the old, most people give up. They won’t say the old name—even though they think it—and they won’t say the new name, because they don’t want to think it. That in between place, that state of limbo, that was where depression began to foster.

  So now it was just turn right by this building, and left by the Pharmacy that’s next to that Vietnamese deli, and then left again by the old church, the grey one that was once so nice.

  That night, he did just that. That’s how he made sure he didn’t miss class.

  The way Krav Maga classes work is you have to show up. Come hell or high water, you must not miss class. He was beaten, nearly blown up, tired as hell and his stand-in pseudo girlfriend was missing. There were two dead guys in his apartment, and a body count now crowding his short term memory, so much so that they kept showing up in his dreams.

  He stopped at the back door, paused for a second before knocking.

  Did he really need to go tonight?

  With so much pain radiating all over and through him, the last thing he wanted was to sweat it out for two hours in some underground whatever, fighting with people who didn’t like him and would—in all likelihood—tell him to leave because he didn’t locate Skylar.

  He’d shown up anyway. Reaching up, he gave the secret knock for that day, then waited. The back door opened up and a head popped out, looking first at him, then around.

  “Where’s Skylar?” he asked.

  “I got word from her today,” Logan answered.

  The door opened and he slipped inside, unnoticed by anyone in the alley or nearby buildings, so far as he could tell.

  “Where is she?” Yoav asked. “And what happened to you?”

  “I think she’s been compromised,” he said, handing the man his burner phone. “There’s only one number in there and only one message. This is our emergency phone. As for the state I’m in, my place was mobbed by Chicoms.”

  The man took the phone, listened to the message, showed a sliver of concern the minute he heard Skylar’s voice. He listened again, then handed the phone back.

  “What happened to the Chicoms in your place?” he asked.

  “Dead.”

  “It’s time you come clean with us,” Kim said.

  “I have been clean with you,” Logan snapped. “I never knew what you guys were, what you are. I’m still not entirely clear what any of you do beyond this, but it doesn’t concern me. I have bigger problems than this.”

  “Such as?” Yoav asked.

  “Look at my face, Instructor Yoav. It’s not like I’m out bar fighting or running a one man fight club.”

  “Yeah, it looks like maybe your training isn’t working,” Kim said, “or perhaps you’re too confident.”

  “On the contrary,” he said, “it’s working out great.”

  “Have you checked the mirror?” Yoav asked.

  “Class was two days ago,” he told Yoav. “I told you about my Chicom kill count. What’s yours, Kim? What’s any of yours?”

  “We work in a different capacity,” Kim told him. “It’s above your pay grade.”

  “Oh, I get paid for this?” he said, his sarcasm thick and dark.

  “No,” Yoav said.

  “Skylar worked in a different capacity, too,” he said. “She was sleeping with the Minister of Propaganda, getting me intel. That intel was beneath the 9s. Beneath all these little 9s she drew as tiny numbers on our wallpaper was a server number and a tray number and a password. I don’t know what it means, but I’ll tell you this. If she was compromised while being undercover, the two Chicom thugs who are now lying dead in my apartment arrived under different circumstances.”

  “You really killed them?” Yoav asked.

  “I wasn’t offering them tea then asking them to hang out while I went to take karate.”

  “This isn’t karate,” Kim said.

  “I know it isn’t!” he roared at her. Then, calming himself significantly, he said, “We’re wasting precious training hours here.”

  So he didn’t get kicked out of class after all. In fact, they paired him up with Kim again, who worked the hell out of him, making him sweat for every move, and then they free sparred. After loosening up, they worked the same drill they always did at this point in time during training rotation: the five-on-one drill.

  For weeks he’d been on the outside of the drill, not really trusted to be in the center. Now Instructor Yoav handed him the big padded gloves and head gear and said, “Don’t go down.”

  With butterflies in his stomach, he slid on his head gear, then popped his rubber mouthpiece in and pulled on his gloves.

  “No wild shots,” Yoav warned.

  He nodded.

  Five of the most tenured fighters surrounded him, including Kim. The thing about
Krav Maga while under Chicom rule was that partner safety was important, but pain was important, too. It was something to not only get used to but to invite in. If you try to protect all your delicate sensibilities, you’re going to end up hurting with every shot.

  This was as much true in practice as it was in training.

  That meant these five people knew more pain than he’d ever know, so if he put it on them, if he didn’t worry about hurting them, he would be fine. Likewise, the people in the middle took a beating. It was always this way. That’s why he had headgear, a mouthpiece, the gloves.

  Guys like him tended to get tired, swing wide, hard and eventually really loose. That’s how you break wrists, pinkies, ring fingers.

  Yoav started the four minute clock.

  The good news was, Logan was already tenderized. Punched face, punched ribs, burning trail from a hot bullet making his side sting. And he wasn’t pretty. The pretty guys never want to get hit in the face. Their looks defined them. It was their stock and trade.

  Logan had a decent face, but he was no Saturday night sensation with the ladies, so he didn’t care. As long as he had all his teeth, could see through both eyes and breathe through both nostrils, he was good.

  Contrary to his own gear, none of the five wore head gear or feet and hand gear. The first shot was a kidney shot. He was on the receiving end, not the giving end.

  Yeah, it hurt.

  It would get worse, though.

  The circle was wide, with one person coming in. The fight wasn’t slow, but it wasn’t so fast it overwhelmed him. By the time he’d defended against one person, he’d been pulped a little more. So not only was he exhausted, he was hurting and getting weak in his resolve.

  That’s when the next person came in.

  He didn’t know who of the five would come when they did, but when he suddenly felt his foot being swept, when he felt himself going airborne for a moment, he knew the fight never paused. He landed hard on his back, the impact knocking the wind from him. He told himself not to breathe, but the body wanted that big gulp of air. It wasn’t there. Panicking, he merely turtled up as the kicks came in.