The After Days Trilogy (Book 1): After Days

by Scott Medbury

  “You know what Sonny? You’re right, and in honor of the fact that we were once Tigers together, I will let all of you go. All except him.” He pointed his finger at me like it was a loaded weapon.

  “No, I already told you its non-nego-”

  “Sonny,” I said loudly, interrupting him. “It’s all right. It’s the only way to appease him. He’s not going to stop until I’m dead…or he is. The only thing we need to work out is if he’s going to shoot me like a coward or fight me like a man.”

  I saw my words have the desired effect, Chen raised his chin defiantly. “You want to fight me laowai?” he asked incredulously.

  “My name is Isaac,” I said, as I walked forward holding his cocky gaze with my own defiant stare. “And yes I do, I want to fight you. Hand to hand, no weapons.”

  Chen laughed hard, almost as though he had heard a hilarious joke. My gaze didn’t waver. Finally he stopped laughing and looked at me unsmiling as he used the muzzle of the gun to scratch his chin. “Geez. I don’t know I-Zack, you speak of cowards but I seem to remember you shot my brother with a machine gun.”

  “He was armed and in the middle of raping a girl...like a coward, and would have shot me too, if he’d had the chance.”

  Chen’s eyes flashed angrily. “All right I-Zack, just the satisfaction I get beating you to a bloody pulp before I kill you should make it worthwhile.” He looked at his heavyset partner. “Zhou, if anyone makes a move while this is on, cut the girls throat and take out as many of them as you can.”

  “Isaac, you don’t have to do this,” said Sonny, stepping between us and holding his hands up like a traffic cop. “Chen, I’ll fight you.” Chen looked down at Sonny’s blood soaked T-shirt then back into his eyes.

  “As much as I’d like to kick your ass for the trouble you’ve given me Sonny, it wouldn’t be a fair fight. But, if you really want a piece of me you’ll have to wait your turn.”

  I walked up to Sonny and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right Sonny, I know what I’m doing.” He lowered his head. He turned towards me and whispered, “Any means.”

  I nodded and Sonny went back over to the truck where the others watched on apprehensively. I looked at Indigo and was strangely pleased by the concern etched on her face.

  When I looked back to Chen, he handed his gun to Zhou and pulled his T-shirt over his head. He was impressively muscled, not an overblown bodybuilder type, but the kind of ropey hard muscle that comes from years of martial arts training and fighting. His abdomen looked like it was carved from stone, its only blemish a small scar that looked like it was the result of a knife wound.

  A tiny seed of doubt sprouted in my mind and I quickly stomped it underfoot. My short time working with Sonny had revived my Kung-Fu skills and his insistence on his any means principle made sense in this new, savage world. Basically he had drilled into me the need to use any means fair or foul to disable an opponent. To disregard all sense of fair play. To kill or be killed. I knew this would be my first…or last test.

  The garage was getting colder and our breath plumed as we faced off. Chen eyed me cockily, and I reflected that his cockiness might work in my favor. That and also the fact that I might have the element of surprise on my side – he had no idea of my skill level and in fact probably assumed I had none at all.

  I stood on the balls of my feet with my knees slightly bent and held up my fists. Chen snorted and stalked straight at me. I waited till the last possible second then tilted backwards, eluding his flying fist and stepped back lightly out of his reach.

  His eyes widened slightly at my skillful evasion, but his face still told me he was overconfident. Stupidly he tried the same move again, this time I ducked his fist and rabbit punched him in the side before quickly moving away again. He winced and rubbed his side, I hadn’t inflicted any real damage but now he was taking me seriously.

  Chen sneered at me and raised his fists as he came at me again, more carefully this time. I waited as he slowly closed the gap between us. I wasn’t quick enough to evade his next punch but it only glanced off my chin. Too late though, I realised it was a feint and the second punch, the real one, collected me in the stomach. Breath whooshed from my mouth and nostrils and I doubled over as he deftly moved out of my reach. I heard shocked gasps from my group.

  His retreat was probably unnecessary as right then I was in no condition to counter. He took the opportunity to gloat, raising his hands and nodding his head like a victorious prize fighter. The audience was unappreciative. I regained my breath quickly while he strutted, but remained doubled over in an attempt to stoke his over confidence. It worked.

  Without warning he stopped his prancing and took two steps before launching a vicious roundhouse kick at my head. I rolled under the kick, but not quite fast enough to evade it completely. His heel grazed my cheek, right on the crusted over wound, but didn’t halt my momentum. My roll continued and I punched him hard in the groin as I rolled under him. He fell to the floor swearing and holding his jewels.

  Dazed from the blow to my cheek, I climbed to my hands and knees as warm blood flowed down my face. I watched him warily as he also struggled to rise. Score one-all, I told myself. I made it to my feet as he struggled to his knees. I waited.

  “Attack him Isaac!” yelled Sonny.

  Even though it felt wrong, I knew Sonny was right, I had to take advantage of him while he was down. Hadn’t he done the same to me? I thought of him holding the gun against Indigo’s forehead and channeled the rage. I rushed forward and aimed a kick at his head.

  Perhaps not quite as incapacitated as I thought, he grabbed my foot mid-air and twisted it viciously. I groaned in pain but allowed myself to fall the way he twisted, avoiding any injury.

  Unfortunately I fell hard and the side of my head smacked against the cold concrete of the garage. I know it sounds cliché but I saw stars. I struggled again to rise and to my horror, saw that Chen had now made it to his feet. Worse, his eyes screamed murder.

  I was in pain, the agony of my cheek cutting through the concussed fog in my brain. He waited again, seeming to enjoy my drunken struggle to get to my feet. He knew he had me. As soon as I made it upright he danced around me, just out of my reach. He bounced on the balls of his feet, and pushed his head forward as though daring me to hit him. I jabbed at him.

  The blow felt too sluggish, I knew the second I launched it. The spry, smirking gangbanger, seemingly recovered from the blow to his balls, ducked under it easily and rabbit punched my ribs. It sent fresh ripples of pain through me and I teetered a little. Once again he had skipped out of my reach without pressing his advantage. I didn’t fall; I knew if I did, it was over.

  He came for me again, and I knew this was it. The steely look in his eyes made it clear he was going to finish it. I just managed to dodge the first punch, and when the follow up to my ribs came, I sidestepped it and trapped his arm under my own. He tried to disengage but I had him pinned. Chen rained blows on the top of my head with his free hand. Luckily I have a hard head. Sonny’s words echoed in my mind. Any means.

  While he was trapped against me, distracted, trying to bash my brains in, I grabbed his jewels through his jeans and twisted them savagely. Yeah, I know it’s not noble, but this was a fight for my life. He was not going to stop until I was dead. He had already shown that he wouldn’t show me any mercy, if I was to prevail, I couldn’t show him any.

  Chen screamed and while he was preoccupied with the agony of his abused nether regions, I encircled his neck with my arm, getting him in a classic headlock. I then fell backwards, letting my weight pull him down. We hit the floor hard, with me taking the brunt of the impact. Winded yet again, I held on. Held on for dear life, as they say. My dear life.

  He ended up on top of me, his back against me. I quickly used my other hand to lock my arm in place and squeezed harder. He began to elbow me, frantically trying to dislodge me. He got me a few good blows and I gasped in pain, but I held on. Pulling my headlock tighter and tig
hter, squeezing the life out of him.

  It’s not like in the movies. It took forever for him to stop struggling and even when he did I wasn’t game to let go. It wasn’t until Sonny came over and patted my head and told me that I could let go now, that I slowly relaxed my hold.

  Luke was there too and helped me out from under Chen’s body. I couldn’t look at him. While I had won, I didn’t feel victorious, in fact I felt like shit. I took two steps to the wall and unloaded the contents of my stomach. We heard a clatter and then the doors to the garage were reefed open. We turned in time to see Zhou running into the night, Samara falling to her knees in relief, her hands near the discarded knife.

  Sonny patted my shoulder. “You did what you had to do Isaac. You don’t need to feel any remorse, as you said, it was him or you.”

  I didn’t say anything; I walked back to the truck, past the others. I shook Indigo off when she reached out to me, ignoring the hurt in her eyes as I continued to the cab. I climbed in and held my head in my hands. I ached all over but nothing hurt like what I was feeling. Killing a man with my bare hands was a million times worse than the feelings I had experienced when I had to shoot one. More real somehow, more raw.

  I barely heard the others getting into the back of the truck. I was wrapped up in my own little ball of misery. Finally Sonny climbed into the driver’s seat. He handed me my pistol and parka. I put on the parka mechanically and slipped the revolver into my pocket as Indigo, true to her word, climbed in and settled next to me. She didn’t say anything, just handed me a rag for my cheek and then put her hands in her lap.

  Looking in the one remaining mirror on the passenger side of the cab, she said to Sonny, “You should be able to go straight back.”

  “Okay, I'll rely on your directions,” he said, putting the truck into reverse and gently pressing down on the gas pedal. He made it first try and turned the truck around in the gas station's lot, stopping at the exit before glancing at me.

  “The freeway is to the right?” I knew he was trying to distract me and I was grateful.

  “Yep. Left would take us back to the bridge, and we don’t want to go there,” I said. “Beyond that I'm going to be fairly useless, Luke and his atlas are what I relied upon for navigation.”

  “It's a good thing that Luke left this up here then,” Indigo said, holding up the battered road atlas that Luke had taken from the Walmart, on that day that seemed so long before. God, has it really only been two weeks since we left Fort Carter? I asked myself, it seemed like a year. Sonny turned right and we hit the road.

  I hadn't realized how close to the freeway we had been, the on-ramp was literally just around the bend past the gas station. To my surprise, Sonny went under the freeway and didn't get on. We kept barreling up highway 140 as fast as he dared push the truck through the icy night.

  The truck cab was cold given the lack of side windows. I had been prepared for this, of course, having driven like that during the day, but at night it was accentuated by the plunging temperatures. I zipped up the bottom part of my parka hood to cover my lower face, and found myself wishing that I had some ski goggles to help keep the wind off my eyes.

  “This road will lead back to the freeway, and allow us to avoid a big semi-circular loop up by Fitchburg and Leominster,” Sonny explained. “We'll get on the 2 just past Leominster, and take it to 202, which will take us up to Concord, New Hampshire. From there we can take I-93 north to where we are headed.”

  “Looks like you don’t need a navigator after all. I was thinking we should dump the truck sometime before we get too close to Drake Mountain,” I said. “Don't want to make it too easy for the Chinese to find us when they find the truck.”

  “Good thinking,” he replied. “There's a town I remember being about ten miles before Lincoln, where we turn off to head for the Ski lodge, Compton or Campton, something like that. We can find a place to hide the truck there.”

  “Campton,” Indigo said, shining a light on the atlas in her hand and looking at the interstate 93 corridor through New Hampshire. “How long do you think it will take us to get there?”

  “If my memory is right, and we don't run into any more trouble, I think we should get to Campton inside of four hours.”

  “I'm not sure how realistic of an expectation not running into trouble is,” I said. “Concord is a decent sized town, and we should plan on there being a Chinese military presence in the area.”

  “You're probably right,” Sonny laughed. “We probably shouldn't count on getting to Campton until well after daybreak.” He was grinning as he spoke so I couldn't tell how serious he was being. “Damn its cold riding up here,” he said after a few minutes of silence. “I should have told you I was still too weak to drive.”

  “It's colder now than it was this morning,” I acknowledged. “But at least you have gloves, I drove without them today and my fingers still feel freezer burned.”

  “They aren't turning black or anything are they?” Indigo asked with real concern in her voice. “My Uncle Joe got frostbite in his foot a few years back and they had to cut off three of his toes.”

  “No, nothing like that,” I said, resting a hand on her arm. Their small talk had managed to put what had just happened with Chen to the back of my mind and I thanked fate, or karma or whatever the hell had helped me to find these people.

  “This weather should give us an advantage though, right?” Indigo asked. “Being cold and all, China is a warm place, right? So these Chinese soldiers won’t be used to the cold.”

  “Not really,” Sonny told her. “China is a big country, and it has all of the same climate bands that the United States does. While soldiers from South China might not be acclimatized to the cold, those coming from Manchuria will find that the weather is very similar to home at this time of year.”

  “Oh,” Indigo said, looking a bit crestfallen.

  I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and pulled her in closer to me for warmth. “Sonny, I was sure glad to see your girlfriend today.”

  “Huian hasn't been my girlfriend for a long time now,” Sonny replied. “I was not all that happy to see her because it meant that she was putting herself at risk for us.”

  “If she hadn't showed up when she did we would have been screwed,” I said.

  “We still might be screwed. When that decimated patrol is located, the search for us will heat up big time. It was foolish of her to come to our rescue, if what she says about her and her group...”

  “The Shadow Cloaked Seven,” I said, making my voice as ominous as possible.

  “Yes, them,” he said, seemingly missing the joke. “If what she says about them and what they are trying to do is true, then as much as I hate to say it, they are much more important than we are in the scheme of things.”

  We rode on in silence as the headlights, miraculously still working after all the punishment the truck had received, illuminated the tiny snowflakes that began to drift down from the night sky.

  21

  I have to admit that I don't remember much of the drive until we hit the freeway just outside of Leominster. I remember talking to both Sonny and Indigo, but the specifics of our conversations are not as clear as many of my other memories from this time period.

  Perhaps it’s because I was probably in a state of shock. Probably? I was in a state of shock. I vaguely remember Indigo pulling a first aid kit out of the glove box of the truck and cleaning the wound on my cheek, but even the sting of the alcohol she used did not seem to cut through the fog in my brain.

  One thing that did rattle around my brain was the knowledge that I had just killed another person with my bare hands and, although I know there had been no alternative, it was still something that weighed heavily on me.

  If things went to plan we would soon reach our destination, but it was hard to care when I couldn’t get the sounds of Chen coking to death out of my head. My hands shook for a long time afterwards. It was definitely not like the movies, where the hero would by no
w be cuddled up with the girl of his dreams. Well the girl of my dreams was beside me, and we were kind of cuddled up, but more through the need to keep warm than anything else.

  After a while the shock began wear off and I even got a couple of hour’s fitful sleep. When I awoke again, Indigo was drowsing and I found my thoughts drifting hopefully towards the future. The prospect of getting to the safe haven and settling down into some sort of normalcy was exciting for me, and I began to fantasize about how it might go down.

  Looking back I can honestly say that it was just that, a fantasy – the events that took place earlier that evening should have told me that. There could be no going back to any sort of normal, no matter how safe the place we were headed might actually be. Normal was gone, hell on earth was normal now. I guess I had one advantage over the others. My normal had already changed before the Chinese released the infection, and by the time all the adults started dying I had already become accustomed to adapting to new situations.

  Despite the fact that the heater was blazing, the lack of windows made certain that the cab of the truck was like a refrigerator. As much as I wanted to keep Indigo snuggled against me, by the time we got to the freeway, I was leaning forward in the passenger seat, my hands cupped around the heating vent on my side. The snow was falling heavier the further north we traveled, and I began fearing that it would make us easy to track from the air.

  It's funny how the same fears that plagued me when we were walking through the woods after losing Sarah would return to unsettle me as we drove north nearly two weeks later. I thought of Sarah, sweet innocent Sarah. She had made sure that we all had fun on her last night on earth.

  From her my mind drifted to the others that we had lost, Arthur and Karen, and those we had left behind, John, Samara and Mark. The last three were still alive when we had left them, and I hoped they were still okay, but regret at leaving them still ate at me. Before the confrontation with Chen I had thought that I had come to grips with that choice. A fresh wave of anger at the Chinese washed over me. They had taken everything from us. Our families, our people… even our country. I felt Indigo stir beside me.