The Day After Never - Legion (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller - Book 8)

by Russell Blake

  “We need to get off this street. They’ll have an outpost farther along on one of the rooftops.”

  “Lead on.”

  Yi walked ahead and Tango dutifully followed as he rounded a corner onto a smaller artery. They proceeded two blocks before the little man made another left, looking over his shoulder occasionally at Lucas, who was riding behind him. All of the buildings had the same dilapidated appearance, but Lucas could occasionally make out a faded sign with Chinese characters, signaling that they were still in what had once been the outlying area of the International District, now little more than abandoned ruins.

  After another turn, a large sporting arena came into view. Lucas was about to ask Yi if he was sure of their direction when shots broke the silence, and divots of concrete sailed through the air to Lucas’s right. Yi threw himself behind a car, and Lucas dismounted in a single fluid move and sprinted for the cover of a doorway. Tango galloped away as more gunfire echoed off the asphalt. There were at least two shooters, and they had Lucas pinned down.

  Whether it was good fortune or just bad shooting, after half a minute of random volleys, the area quieted. Lucas retreated farther into the doorway, and a slab of plywood an owner had nailed into place buckled when he leaned against it. He put all of his weight on it, and it gave with a crack, and then he was in the building as the assailants wasted ammo on phantoms.

  He ran to a stairway and took the steps two at a time. By the time silence had settled over the street again, he’d found an ideal vantage point deep in the recesses of what had once been an office. The window glass had long ago been broken out, offering him a good view of the street from the shadows and a protected area from which to engage his attackers.

  Lucas didn’t have to wait long. Two Asian men with assault rifles appeared in the entryway of a tenement on the far side of the street, and one of them beelined for where Yi was cowering behind a rusting Chevy. Lucas could hear the gunman shouting at Yi in Chinese and Yi shouting back, pointing along the avenue and motioning with his hands.

  Lucas waited until the other shooter was stationary to put a round through his clavicle, and then shifted his aim and stitched three bullets through the second assassin’s back before he had a chance to react. Both men dropped to the pavement, one clutching his shoulder, the other already dead. Yi stepped from behind the car, scooped up the second man’s rifle, and fired point-blank into the first assailant’s head. He repeated the maneuver with the other gunman and set the rifle down before calling out to Lucas.

  “You can come out. Only the two of them. But more will be on their way.”

  Lucas was back on the street in twenty seconds and whistled for Tango again. The stallion was longer in returning this time, and Lucas strode over to where Yi was waiting, his expression unreadable. “I thought you said that you knew this area.”

  Yi bobbed his head insistently. “I do. They’ve obviously put more men on the street. We’re going to have to keep going south instead of west until we’re out of their territory. They’ll have concentrated their firepower between here and your camp. So we’d do best to avoid the entire mess.”

  “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

  “This way.”

  Yi took off at a run, moving surprisingly quickly for his age and malnourished frame, and Lucas urged Tango to follow him. They traversed a series of small streets, some nearly impassible from rubble and junked vehicles, until the composition of the neighborhood abruptly changed and they were in a more upscale business area, where the buildings were taller and mostly steel and glass.

  “Their territory ended two blocks back,” Yi explained. “The rest of the way should be safe.”

  “Why are the locals helping the surviving Chinese?”

  “They cut a deal to be able to continue to run things when the invasion force took over.”

  “But we defeated them.”

  “True. But they’ll send more from China. It’s just a matter of time.”

  To hear Yi confirm what Lucas, Sam, and Art had been discussing sent a chill up Lucas’s spine, but his face could have been carved from stone. “They might not find it as hospitable or easy to conquer as the last time now that we know they’re coming.”

  “Maybe,” Yi said, but he sounded unconvinced.

  An hour passed with no ambushes, and then they were in friendly territory again as they neared a roadblock a quarter mile from Art’s headquarters. The sentries waved Lucas through, and the headquarters rose up in front of them. Hundreds of men were milling about, stockpiling weapons and ammunition. Lucas slid from the saddle and handed one of the stable boys Tango’s reins, and then walked Yi to the mess tent that was set up in an adjacent park and introduced him to the cooks. He left the little man loading up a plastic bowl with unimaginable quantities of fish stew and rice, and made his way to Art’s building to share with him what he’d learned and to formulate a plan to deal with the rogue Chinese gang.

  Chapter 8

  Stockton, California

  Shelling from a hundred Blood Dog mortars began before dawn, taking the Stockton gang by surprise and raining death down onto the outlying defensive positions at the main entry points. Thousands of Blood Dogs had ridden through the night in order to maximize the shock and awe of their offensive, and the first salvos had proven devastatingly effective, catching most of the Stockton warlord’s men unawares.

  The weapons cache that the Illuminati envoy had made available to the Blood Dogs had made them unstoppable, and between mortars and grenade launchers and anti-tank rockets and large-caliber guns, the Stockton gang was hopelessly outgunned, even if its members were as hard as they came and fought with the desperation of cornered rats. Amos’s commanders shelled them relentlessly, and when the visible outposts had been flattened, they directed their squads forward into more aggressive positions within the city limits, where they continued lobbing freight cars’ worth of high explosives at the section of town the gang used as its base.

  After a half hour of mortar assault, the Blood Dogs switched to more strategic use of the dozens of .50-caliber machine guns they’d liberated from the armory, cutting buildings, vehicles, and gunmen to pieces with solid streams of fully jacketed rounds. The Stockton gang fought without flinching, but by the time the sun was warming the morning sky, hundreds of its members lay dead or dying, with the Blood Dogs pushing their advantage and slaughtering anyone they came into contact with.

  Amos’s troops were being directed by his top lieutenant, a former serial murderer and rapist named Scott who’d earned a dishonorable discharge from the Marines before embarking on a meth-fueled rampage across four states that had ended in a shoot-out in Sacramento and life behind bars. Scott had demonstrated remarkable abilities in leading his fellow gang members, and had eventually risen to his current position as Amos’s second-in-command. He’d led the charge through the Stockton gang’s fortifications, toting a machine gun Rambo style, his powerful muscles gleaming with sweat as he gunned down anything in his path.

  Scott and fifty of his best men had driven a wedge between two flanks of adversaries and were now powering toward the Stockton gang’s headquarters. Gunfire and explosions were roaring around them when their progress was stopped by a pair of machine-gun nests on the rooftops at least five hundred yards down the wide boulevard.

  Scott surveyed the impossible crossfire and turned to Rand, his lieutenant. “What’s the range on that grenade launcher?” he barked.

  “We can’t hit them from here. Too far.”

  “Well, we can’t walk directly into their fire, so we need to do something.”

  As if they’d heard Scott, the enemy gunners peppered the building inside of which the men were hiding, gouging chunks of concrete and brick from the façade. A few of Scott’s troops returned fire, but with little hope their small-caliber .223 rounds would do much damage against sandbags.

  “We’re stopped dead unless we can get them,” Scott muttered, and swept the interior before turning to
the other man. “Rand, take three of the grenade launchers and work your way along the back side of the buildings until you’ve closed the gap, and then get up to the roof. Those things will be pretty accurate to about four hundred yards, so you should be able to take the nests out if you can make it any closer.”

  “Pretty heavy shooting on the back side as well.”

  “Nothing like out in front. Just do it.”

  Rand still hesitated, his expression dour. “Nobody lives forever, right?”

  Scott glared at him. “I’ll kill you myself if you aren’t moving in ten seconds.”

  “Roger that, boss man.”

  Rand trotted to where the gunners with the six-round grenade launchers were hunkered down, and explained what they’d been ordered to do. Two of the men stood, and a third handed Rand his MGL-140 and a canvas bag with twenty spare grenades. They’d discovered dozens of the lethal devices in the armory and had carted every one to Stockton, along with as many grenades as each gunner could carry. Between those weapons, the mortars, and the heavy .50-caliber Browning machine guns, Stockton was fighting a losing battle, but the Blood Dogs hadn’t expected their arch enemies to go easily, and they were living up to expectation. Stockton also had some of the Brownings, although far fewer, and had positioned most of them at the town’s perimeter entrances. The ones on the roof were as clear an indication as any the Blood Dogs needed that they were closing in on the Stockton gang’s nucleus, which would be heavily defended.

  Rand hefted the MGL-140 and moved to the rear of the building. He kicked open the rusting steel door and regarded the alley beyond, and then signaled to his men to follow him as he began making his way along the narrow strip, pausing at abandoned vehicles for cover as the sound of shooting echoed through the area. At the alley mouth, Rand halted and scanned the street before whispering instructions and darting across to another alley that ran perpendicular to the boulevard.

  An assault rifle barked from a window in an office building down the block, but none of the rounds hit Rand, and he was safe in the far alley by the time the shooter’s magazine ran dry. A typical rookie mistake was to fire on full auto at a moving target in the hopes that more bullets meant a greater chance of a hit, and the shooter had succumbed to the temptation. Rand’s men didn’t give the gunman a chance to reload, and were already bolting across the pavement by the time the first seconds of silence had passed.

  They resisted the urge to waste grenades or ammo on the lone shooter and continued down the alley at a jog, their heavy boots clumping through puddles of murky water as they ran. They reached the next street, and Rand repeated his survey of the area, but this time no gunfire accompanied his zigzagging race to the next block.

  When he was sure they’d closed the distance sufficiently for the grenades to be accurate, he began trying doors until one swung open. Rand stepped into the gloom and found himself in what had once been a restaurant kitchen, and he picked his way past steel pots and pans that littered the floor. He pushed through a pair of double doors while his men waited in the kitchen, and then returned with his report.

  “There’s a stairway by the bar that leads to the second floor. Probably an attic for roof access,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “No signs of shooters?” one of the men asked.

  Rand’s expression darkened. “Is this stupid-question day? Get your asses on the roof, and stay low or you’ll give our position away. We don’t know what the sniper situation is, but they’d be crazy not to have them scattered around.”

  The men followed Rand up the stairs and up a steel ladder to the roof. He pushed the trapdoor open and waited for shooting and, when none came, peered over the edge at a flat tarred surface with a two-foot rim, providing just enough cover so any gunmen on the other roofs wouldn’t see them when they dog-crawled to the lip. He was up and on his stomach in moments, making his way to the far side, which by his reckoning would be the one facing the machine-gun nests.

  Rand raised a pair of binoculars, looked over the rim, and easily spotted the targets. The shooters didn’t seem to be monitoring the roofs, being too busy strafing the streets below to bother. Rand nudged the closest man and handed him the spyglasses.

  “Can you get a range? I’m thinking under four hundred yards, but I suck at reckoning,” Rand said.

  The man took the glasses and eyed the machine-gun nests. “You don’t suck that bad. I’d make it at about three seventy-five, give or take.”

  Rand took the glasses back and slowly scanned the surrounding roofs. When he didn’t see any other nests, he returned his attention to the pair that were guarding the approach to the Stockton gang’s headquarters.

  “All right. Mark your ranges, and on my count, you take the one on the right, and you the one on the left. Drop a couple each on them and then adjust based on where they hit.”

  The gunners did as ordered, and when they’d set their sights on the maximum accurate range, Rand set down the glasses to raise his M16 and provide cover if needed.

  “All right. Three…two…one…fire!”

  The two men squeezed off two rounds, and the projectiles arced toward their targets before falling no more than twenty yards short. The explosions startled the machine gunners, but by the time they’d reacted and swung their guns at their attackers, Rand and his men had fired the rest of their grenades, and the roof around the gunners exploded in fireballs when the projectiles found home.

  After ten seconds, the smoke cleared and they could see that the sandbags had been obliterated and the shooters’ bodies were strewn across the rooftops, the machine guns ruined. Rand glanced over his shoulder at the trapdoor. “Let’s get out of here and tell Scott we’re in business.”

  They returned to where Scott and his men were hunkered down, and broke the good news. Scott offered an ugly grin that a pucker of scar tissue made even more menacing.

  “Good. Let’s hit them while they’re trying to regroup. The loss of the machine guns is going to freak them out. Those things would have stopped us cold before we got the grenade launchers. That was probably their secret weapon on headquarters defense.” He held Rand’s gaze for a moment. “Send a runner back to the main group and get another couple of hundred men here now. It’s time to do this for real.”

  Rand was gone no more than twenty minutes, and when he returned, he did so with a swarm of Blood Dogs, all equipped with new gear from the armory. Scott explained to the squad leaders how he planned to approach the Stockton headquarters, and when everyone understood his strategy, they split off to make their final push.

  The blocks leading to the headquarters were heavily defended, and Scott’s men used up most of their grenades and mortars pummeling the gunmen who opposed them. The fighting raged through the morning, but by the time the sun was high overhead, the headquarters was ablaze and the Stockton leadership had been slaughtered like dogs on the steps.

  When it was obvious that the battle was lost, the surviving fighters surrendered with the promise that they wouldn’t be killed if they joined their rivals from Sacramento and swore loyalty to the Dogs. Most chose life over summary execution, and by the day’s end the town was securely under Blood Dog rule, thousands of their adversaries having died defending their stronghold in vain. The locals labored under their new masters’ watch to drag the corpses to a central square, where they were stacked like cordwood in a massive funeral pyre and set ablaze in order to avoid the disease that would accompany leaving the city an open cemetery.

  Amos watched the burning pile of humanity with Scott and his other lieutenants by his side, and nodded in approval as the sky filled with the nauseating stench of searing flesh.

  “Smells like pork, doesn’t it?” he commented to nobody in particular, and then flashed a grin. “Looks like our new friend was right. Let the men have their way with the town tonight, but tomorrow we head back home and repay our benefactor with a trip to Oregon. Leave a skeleton crew here to watch over the prisoners until we’re sure which are dependa
ble, and plan on being on the road by first light.”

  The men took off to relay Amos’s orders to the gang. They’d lost fifteen percent of their fighters, but considering the victory, it had been a worthwhile cost. Amos was now the sole ruler in the northern central valley, still with nearly five thousand capable fighters under his command.

  He watched his lieutenants leave, and the twisted grin tugged at his lips again as he inhaled the rank putrescence of burning flesh. With the Illuminati’s help he was unstoppable, and soon he would count the entire Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest as his territory – a prize that would have been unimaginable a week ago now within his grasp.

  Chapter 9

  Seattle, Washington

  The hall Art had selected for the meeting with his officers to discuss the future was filled with armed men, and the testosterone and manic energy of the group was palpable. Art and Lucas were seated on a polished wooden stage where natural light was filtering through a skylight, with Sam and his Salem contingent grouped in front and the Newport fighters beside them. The hall was packed to the rafters, and Art had notified the new Seattle city council that he wanted to have a special meeting following his logistical one.

  Art was fielding questions from the men, inviting them to speak up and be heard. The overwhelming message was that the Salem and Newport groups were anxious to return home now that they’d been victorious against the Chinese.

  Art gestured for quiet and fixed one of the Newport contingent with a hard stare. “I’m afraid it’s not as simple as we all just go home. Aside from the fact that we have an opportunity to reclaim our country from the miscreants who stole it from us, we have a very real issue with the nuclear plant that’s gone Chernobyl.”