by James Ryke
© 2021 by James Ryke
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.
The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.
Third printing
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-951780-10-4 (trade paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-951780-12-8 (eBook)
Printed in the United States of America
Dedicated to my best friend, and my wife,
who happens to be the same person.
Note to the Reader:
SEVEN DAYS was first published in 2014. It was my first novel published, and it was received very well. It did, however, have some problems. In 2018, I decided to pull the novel from publication and fix those issues that plagued the novel before. It was a difficult decision, but I believe it was the right one. So, I hope you enjoy this new version of the novel, which seems more timely than ever.
I also am publishing this novel under the pen name of JAMES RYKE. This is not in an effort to conceal my identity, but to compartmentalize my book series. I write a wide array of fiction novels, to include young adult and middle grade. I was finding out that readers were jumping from my middle-grade books into my apocalyptic books and then getting quite a shock. To make it simpler, I began writing under pen names so readers know what kind of book they will be picking up and reading based on the author’s name.
Whether this book turns into a stand-alone, or a series, depends entirely on the readership. I am always working on multiple book series and a lot of times, the book series that gets the most attention by the readers, gets most of my attention as the writer. So, if you enjoy this novel and want to see more like it, please take the time to leave a review or let me know. Receiving feedback from you helps tremendously as I try to balance my time among all my book series.
I also enjoy hearing from my readers. If you have any comments, thoughts, critiques, questions, and/or just want to say hello, please email me at [email protected]. It may take some time for a response, but I try to answer each email personally. Or, you can visit my Facebook page at James Ryke—Author, to learn about additional details of upcoming releases or pending projects.
“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
ONE
The sound of metal scraping across the pavement felt like continuous punches to the head. The metal trashcan was not heavy, but Rick’s hangover was. The distance to the main street usually did not bother Rick, but it was days like these when he seriously contemplated moving. He hated drinking until he was drunk. He thought it a sign of weakness, and he only did it when he was overcome with memories. Nowadays, however, that seemed to happen more and more often, despite the self-loathing that accompanied the pounding headache in the morning.
Morning. Rick laughed to himself. Morning was not quite an accurate description of the current hour of the day. If Rick had to guess, he would have said it was noon. But even this was not a great guess, and in truth, the sun had long since passed its zenith and was already beginning its trek into the horizon.
Rick was a large individual that at one time in his life had been marked by powerful and toned muscles, evidence of long hours in a gym, but now, his workouts were less about developing a six-pack and more about drinking one. He had kept himself active by teaching Jiu-Jitsu, but even this outlet had started going to the wayside. He had blue eyes, a square jaw, and thick, brown hair that was slightly bleached. He typically sported a goatee, but it was often blurred out by the un-kept beard that his apathy allowed to grow in. As each day passed, Rick’s world began to shrink more and more until there were days—even weeks—where he did not communicate face-to-face with a single person. He gave up on church a few years back, he stopped attending community events and social parties at least a year ago, and now he even declined to spend time with his immediate family. His closest friends and family did their best to revive Rick from his social coma, but their persistence only seemed to put more distance between them and him.
The metal scraping stopped as Rick pulled the trashcan the last few feet to the end of the driveway. He had wanted to get a trashcan with tires, a real heavy-duty one from Costco—his house was after all a good fifty yards from the street—but his wife had insisted that they were not good for the environment. Rick eventually won the argument, and his wife conceded, but he never did get around to buying it. That was six years ago. Since then, things had changed little in his subdivision—besides his new Asian neighbors. In total, there were only six houses in the area, each one having a large section of land. Rick’s portion was the biggest, stretching out for a good fifty acres.
“You suck at life, Mr. Dick.”
Rick rolled his neck around until he could see the source of the shrill sound—it was his new neighbor, Mrs. Chung, or Chang. Or was it Yang. Rick turned to face the short, round-faced female. She had a large nose and heavy wrinkles around her eyes and lips—evidence of a life spent smiling and laughing. Rick did not have wrinkles.
“Good morning, Mrs. Yang.”
“My name not Yang. How you not know that by now? I Zhao. I been Zhao for long time. And it not morning. When you come over for special dinner? You eat my food, I bet you don’t forget name. We invite you long time.”
Rick thought of smiling to ease the tension, but he lacked the desire to call his cheek muscles into action. “That’s not my thing.”
“What? You no eat food? It’s the year of the horse. You should be active and friendly this year. Horse year, good year; you be happy.”
Rick folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. “Why do you say I suck at life?”
“It Thursday…”
“Yes, I’m aware of the day.”
“Garbage truck come already this week. It come Monday.”
Rick swallowed hard, straining his pounding head for an answer. “Maybe I’m bringing the can out early.”
“My husband already did that for you; that is why the can so light.”
Rick nodded, half tempted to squeeze out a “thank you” but, instead, settled for a nod. He turned on his heels and headed back towards his house—his head now hurting twice as much as it did before. He squinted his eyes, focusing on the front door of his home. For some reason, his house looked much farther than it really was. He stumbled forward, slightly tripping on a small rock. He shook his head. I need to get ready. I need to get dinner on the table; they’ll be here soon. Rick blinked his eyes in rapid succession, trying to force the fog out of his vision. I can’t do this to myself. Maybe I should cancel dinner tonight. This can’t be healthy. Maybe they won’t show up tonight. But this last thought was a blatant lie. They always came—always at the same time and always in the same way. Sometimes he prepared dinner; sometimes he did not, but either way, they came. More and more, he found himself making elaborate meals—meals that would put to shame some of the fancy local restaurants. He had rationalized this irrational trend by blaming it on the recent increase in cooking shows being aired on television. As a general rule, he hated cooking shows—he hated how the directors attempted to dramatize something that was just not that dramatic—but just as much as cooking shows, he hated channel surfing. These two dislikes went head-to-head on a daily basis but, usually, the cooking shows won out. In truth, Ric
k preferred the constant drone of the TV to the empty silence. He thought of the noise as life support for his home. Without the TV, everything became as still and distant as death.
Rick opened his front door and stepped inside. He breathed deep, taking in the scent of his home. It smelled faintly of concrete and freshly cut wood, much like a lumberyard or a home improvement store—and rightly so. Rick had spent the better part of four years turning his home into a venerable fortress. Several unused bags of concrete and stacks of wood were scattered about the house, most of them close to the front entrance. He had wanted to beef up the security of the home without sacrificing its beauty. Jaylynn would have wanted it that way. She was at the other end of the spectrum. Whenever Rick became too focused on survival, too focused on preparing for the future, she would rein him in by offering a different perspective.
“If society is going to crumble one day,” she used to say, “and every comfortable thing that we have is going to be taken away, then I would rather live life to the fullest now, so that when I don’t have a pleasant possession in the world, I’ll at least have pleasant memories.”
Rick always had a response on the tip of his tongue, but he never used it. How could he adequately convey his experiences into words? Has she ever seen a person so bloated with hunger that their clothes cut into the skin? Has she ever seen a near corpse in the advanced stage of rhabdomyolysis, when urine comes out as black as coffee? Or what about a man that’s so consumed with shock he can’t help but shove his fingers into his own bullet wound? And these were only a few of Rick’s memories from his law enforcement career.
One experience in particular still left a cold pit in his heart. Despite himself, he found his mind drifting slowly to the unpleasant memory. He had been twenty miles west of Nogales, Arizona, patrolling the international border between Mexico and the United States. He was a Border Patrol Agent and had been for six years. The area he was assigned to on that particular shift was rugged and unforgiving, full of multiple mountain ridges that dominated the scorching landscape. One could get a perfect idea of how difficult the terrain was by merely studying the local plant life. As Rick used to say, “There wasn’t a damn thing that grew there that didn’t have thorns, spikes, poison sacs, or barbed needles. And the scum that operated the illegal drug trade were twice as rough as the terrain.”
Rick had a partner assigned to work with him that night but, right before they were about to head out, an undocumented alien fell off the border fence, sending his tibia exploding out of his skin. Rick’s partner was reassigned to watch over the individual at the hospital.
The shift began like any other: Rick checked out his assigned M4 that was equipped with an EOTech scope, a set of night vision goggles or NVGs, and a Recon 5—a thermal imaging unit that could zoom in on targets several miles away. He had planned to spend the night high up on Mule Ridge—a dramatic peak that was so named for the human “mules” that carted drugs over the top of it.
He was after dope. For Rick, there was no more thrill left in chasing illegal aliens. When he was first an Agent, nothing gave him more joy than to track somebody down over miles of terrain using their own foot sign. It didn’t matter if they were carrying drugs on their back or if they were just coming here to live. And if they ran, it was that much the better. The situation would turn into an impromptu football game where Rick was the Defensive End and the illegal alien had the ball. But, there were only so many tackles you could make before the whole game lost its appeal.
Chasing dope, however, was something different entirely. Many of the drug guides had formal, military training and were armed with fully automatic AK-47s. There was a time when traffickers only used the weapons against “rip crews”—a mix of resentful guides and traffickers, forced out of the trade because of rising cost, who would use their knowledge to steal the drugs and keep their pockets fat with cash. Rip crews were known to layup in the mountains and wait for a group of human drug mules to parade by. Sometimes the rip crews killed the mules; sometimes, they let them go, knowing the cartels would slaughter them all like cattle anyway when they showed up in Mexico empty-handed. But things had escalated since then. Now the drug mules and guides would fire on just about anyone or anything. There had not been many Border Patrol Agent casualties, but this was just pure luck. It was only a matter of time before there were scores of dead on both sides. With the Mexican government deteriorating and massive spending cuts within the Department of Homeland Security, the cartels simply were not afraid of the United States anymore.
If you asked any higher up in the Border Patrol what the official stance was on chasing and apprehending drug mules, they would respond by saying, “the Border Patrol makes every effort to apprehend the individuals that bring illicit drugs into the United States and bring them to justice.” This, however, was far from the truth. The unofficial way to chase down dope was to scare the traffickers into dropping their fifty to sixty-pound burlap sacks of drugs. Once the perpetrators had cleared from the scene, then, and only then, would the Agents move in and secure the dope. Sometimes Agents would pretend to chase the mules, acting as if they were out of breath as they spoke on their radio, but that was just to save face—it was all a farce. Everyone knew that you chase the dope—not the mule. Most of the “salty” Agents—the ones who had lots of stories to tell, but little energy to get out of their truck and make new ones—said they did not chase the mules because they did not want the extra paperwork. But the stark reality of it was that no Agent wanted to get shot over a few hundred pounds of dope.
But Rick was different back then. He would chase the mules just as much as he would the dope. It was not that he was fearless, or had nothing to live for, he had a beautiful wife after all, but it was something else that drove him. It just seemed wrong to let them go. It was an injustice. And nothing stirred more emotions in Rick’s heart than injustice.
Rick could not remember what was distracting him that day, but he ended up getting turned around and hiking up the wrong hill. He was about halfway up when he heard voices. A rush of adrenaline hit his bloodstream. Immediately, his vision sharpened. He crouched down and peered through a thorny plant that was a poor excuse for a bush. The plant smelled moist, as if it had recently been watered. He could see three people approaching him from the opposite direction; each one was armed. It was hunting season, but it only took a second to realize that these men were not hunters. After a few minutes, they changed direction and headed straight for Rick. The large man silently pushed the forward assist on his rifle to make sure that his chamber was completely closed. In a few minutes, they would walk right on top of him—and it would be a shooting match for sure. This final thought pushed another wave of adrenaline through his body. He tried to key his radio and let the station know where he was, but he was on the east side of the mountain, well out of range of the West Mountain Repeater.
When the three men were only seconds away, they suddenly disappeared. Rick blinked his eyes in quick succession. Am I seeing things? He partially stood up, tentatively raising his head so he could get a better look. They were gone. He took a few steps forward, being careful not to kick any rocks. This is stupid. I’m outnumbered and outgunned. They know this area, and I don’t. I don’t have radio comms, and they probably do. He would have turned back then and there—he now regretted that he did not—but then he heard someone scream. The yell was sharp but muffled, as if the person who produced it had a gag over their mouth.
Rick inched forward. By the time he reached the edge of a significant cut in the mountains, the screams had become more erratic. The closer Rick came to the edge, the more he realized why he had not been able to see where the men went. The cut in the mountain was slender from the top, but as it progressed down, it became a vast chasm. From all angles around the hill, the cut looked like a small ditch at best; only if one was close enough would they realize how deep the chasm went.
Rick could see that there were three additional men below, making
a total of six individuals. One of them had an AK 47, another a large knife. A third individual was stripped naked and tied to a pole that was sunk into the ground. He was black with bruises and red with blood. The man whimpered and kicked against his bonds.
Rick knew instantly what he was seeing. It was cartel members—most likely from the Sinaloa Cartel. Probably lost one drug load too many—and now he was paying for it. Rick had seen hundreds of photos of this kind of cartel torture on private blogs or in Intel briefings. Since the Mexican media was controlled by the cartels, the only truthful news came from freelance bloggers, and they censored nothing when it came to cartel violence. Many of the bloggers, however, paid for their honesty with their lives. Still, they were not deterred, and thousands of photos and videos continued to surface, each one a gruesome testimony of what a cartel was willing to do to anyone who got in their way.
Rick trained his M4 on the bodies below. I can hit two of them before they react—I’m sure of it. But then what? Run to an area with better radio comms? But comms could be down for any distance from here—hell, it’s possible the whole repeater isn’t working. That’s a man getting cut up down there; he’ll die if I don’t do anything. I have the high ground, and it will take them a while to climb out. Maybe, I can arrest them as they come up? But, if any of them tries anything, it’s going to turn into a lead storm real quick, and I have fewer barrels and far fewer bullets. Dammit, I can’t let that man die—even if he is a scumbag. No one deserves to die like that.
With new resolve, Rick shouldered his M4 and trained his EOTech optic on one of the assailants below. He tightened his grip and eased the trigger back, holding his breath as he did. Sight alignment; trigger control. Snap. It was not the sound of his gun. Snap. It was something off to his left. He barely turned his head. Not forty feet from his position, just down a small slope, were two men, dressed in border patrol uniforms. He had been so focused on the other men below that he had not noticed the arrival of these newcomers. Was it just two, or were there more of them? Rick couldn’t tell from his vantage point. Initially, relief flooded over Rick when he saw the Agents. He was about to flag them down when a sickening feeling sunk into his gut. Those Agents aren’t reacting to the man’s screams. They have to be able to hear him—hell, this whole side of the mountain has to be able to hear him. Rick studied the Agents closer. He knew them, knew them well. One of them was a Watch Commander named Jake Michler; the other was Chad Reagan, one of Rick’s classmates from the Border Patrol Academy. Their inaction indicated one thing: they were on the take. If Rick did anything, he was dead. Even if I take a few of them out, they would catch up and finish me before I could make it back to the station. And then he pieced it all together: the man they were torturing was an informant—a damn good one too. It was the Agents who had turned him in. It was the Agents who brought him out here....