by Schow, Ryan
Dark Days of the After: Special Edition
Ryan Schow
Copyright
The eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy so that you may read it with a clear conscience and not one day end up in hell over a shitty technicality. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
DARK DAYS OF THE AFTER: SPECIAL EDITION
Copyright © 2020 Ryan Schow. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, cloned, stored in or introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form, or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the express written permission of the author or publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Author’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents—and their usage for storytelling purposes—are crafted for the singular purpose of fictional entertainment and no absolute truths shall be derived from the information contained within. Locales, businesses, events, government institutions and private institutions are used for atmospheric, entertainment and fictional purposes only. Furthermore, any resemblance or reference to an actual living person is used solely for atmospheric, entertainment and fictional purposes.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Cover Design by Milo at Deranged Doctor Design
http://www.RyanSchow.com
Contents
Also by Ryan Schow
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Dark Days of the Surge: A Look Ahead
Your Voice Matters
The Complete Last War Series
Also by Ryan Schow
DARK DAYS OF THE AFTER SERIES:
THE LAST LIGHT OF DAY (PREQUEL)
DARK DAYS OF THE AFTER
DARK DAYS OF THE SURGE
DARK DAYS OF THE ALBATROSS (INSIDE ORIGINS OF HONOR ANTHOLOGY)
DARK DAYS OF THE APOSTASY
DARK DAYS OF THE ENCLAVE
DARK DAYS OF THE PURGE (May, 2020)
THE COMPLETE AGE OF EMBERS SERIES:
THE AGE OF EMBERS
THE AGE OF HYSTERIA
THE AGE OF REPRISAL
THE AGE OF EXODUS
THE AGE OF DEFIANCE
THE COMPLETE LAST WAR SERIES:
THE LAST WAR
THE ZERO HOUR
THE OPHIDIAN HORDE
THE INFERNAL REGIONS
THE KILLING FIELDS
THE BARBAROUS ROAD
THE TERMINAL RUN
THE COMPLETE SWANN SERIES:
VANNIE (PREQUEL)
SWANN
MONARCH
CLONE
MASOCHIST
WEAPON
RAVEN
ABOMINATION
ENIGMA
CRUCIFIED
Chapter One
The first time Logan Cahill saw Harper Whitaker, he thought nothing of her, except that maybe they were the same age. Late twenties, early thirties. He wasn’t attracted to her, nor did it seem she caught and held anyone else’s eye. She was just a dutiful employee of the San Francisco tech giant, SocioSphere. At the time, if he had known who she was, or what she was really doing, he would have thought otherwise. Maybe he would have asked for another assignment. But he didn’t. So by and large, he dismissed her, just like everyone else he met. And when he was tasked with spying on her, he agreed to do so with barely a nod.
On the outside, Harper was about as ordinary as anyone else he’d ever seen. Like himself, there was nothing overtly special to account for. She wasn’t thick or thin, pretty or ugly, exceptionally dressed or drab. No one really cared about looks anymore, not with what was going on. It wasn’t like the old days where Hollyweird or New York drove the fashion world into a multibillion dollar industry.
People were too preoccupied with surviving to care.
So she wore her hair flat and blonde, like a lot of people, and it was touched here and there with a few natural lowlights. Her face—being neither round nor angular—was wholly unexceptional. It could be pretty, Logan thought, but she had a few extra pounds on her that was maybe hiding her best self. Same as him. Nevertheless, her skin was dry but washed, without distinct markings, save for a blemish here or there. Even her eyes were the plainest blue you’d ever seen—two dimensional, like construction paper. No shine, no life, certainly nothing you’d ever look at and get lost in.
Beyond these sparse, rather uninspiring, observations of the woman, until Logan began covertly monitoring her daily activities, he hadn’t given even the idea of her much consideration.
When he began watching her through the camera built into her computer screen, however, it was clear she took her job as a software programmer seriously. He could see this as plain as day. Then again, Logan knew how to read people. It was his expertise. He was especially good at non-verbal cues as indicators of emotion.
As a security engineer, not only did he have access to his target’s entire online search history, he had special access to their texts and cell phone conversations as well as their home, but only if their work activities turned out to be treasonous. Seeing recordings of their home life compiled from audio and video retrieved from the bedrooms and kitchen via the smart network, i.e., the internet of things, often proved to be invaluable in crafting a complete picture. There was also the matter of video retrieved from around the homes and apartment hallways themselves. In the new world, there was no hiding, no conspiring.
It was sold at first as a means of keeping the peace, finding lost children, locating runaway pets, but that was the ruse. The lie that made everyone say yes. Today, everyone saw it for what it was…the spider’s web of surveillance.
When you began investigating every aspect of a person’s work life—like Logan was doing with Harper Whitaker—you stopped thinking of them on a first name basis and began to distance yourself from them completely. He didn’t want to think of her as human, a
woman with a life, someone’s daughter. He preferred to see her as a puzzle that may or may not be complete. She was no longer a she but an it. As in a question. A potential problem. Something to either investigate or check off the list. She had been reduced to suspect, target, potential dissident.
The truth was, he didn’t like looking at her that much. That’s not to say she was irritating or boring. To that measure, she was extraordinarily boring. That’s what threw him. No one was that controlled, or that robotic.
But Harper was...
The reason she was flagged for review wasn’t because she said anything wrong, or that she was behaving suspiciously—the terrible Ms. Ming Yeung told him that she was too perfect. That was why she was now under observation.
“People like that are often hiding something,” the horrendous looking woman said in her broken English.
Ming Yeung was a Cantonese national, severe looking with the kind of voice that made one think of unwarranted torture. That was the first time he heard that voice and saw those ugly, pitiless eyes. He felt bad for thinking ill of the new boss, but even his best friend Han said she was no daisy in the roundabout sense of the word. Logan’s gaze dipped down to her hands when the woman first arrived at SocioSphere. Looking at those small, fidgety hands, he saw no ring. Big surprise. If she ever had a husband, Logan was sure he would have killed himself by now.
Anyway, Ms. Yeung was officially brought into SocioSphere to oversee security operations. By all rights, she didn’t do anything but head up the tech giant’s internal spy grid. He assumed this because no one lost their job when she arrived, and no one seemed concerned she was there to replace them. Not with those hideous polyester pantsuits, and that long, perpetually unwashed hair.
“So what you want me to do,” Logan confirmed as he sat across from her at her awfully large desk for the first time, “is find something on her.”
“Yes.”
“I’m a software engineer, Ms. Yeung,” he said, “not a snitch.”
“You’ll be security engineer,” she said, tired, her English not up to snuff just yet. “In charge of security.”
“I don’t think that’s how that title works.”
He was measuring his words at this point. SocioSphere was founded by the late Atticus Van Duyn, a bitter rival of Mark Zuckerberg, and one of the most widely respected billionaires in the world. Looking across the desk at this woman, he almost asked if she showed up to work at the wrong job.
He held his tongue, though.
He knew better.
In response to his assertion, the short, thin nightmare of a woman slipped off her shoe and began picking a toenail. She held his eye the whole time, unblinking. He swallowed hard, his stomach lurching. From behind her desk, where he could only see her from the waist up, he fought hard not to imagine what those feet looked like. That she had such little concern for her grooming habits in front of strangers was disturbing enough.
Well that and the duck tongue soup. He’d heard about the meal she ordered from his friend, Han. Han learned that the woman was from the heart of Guangzhou, the capital of the province of Guangdong in Southern China. A quick background check on Han’s part showed that she had an affinity for takeout dishes that included things like frog legs, chicken feet and the aforementioned duck tongue.
That in itself spoke volumes of the woman. Her unsympathetic demeanor and her complete lack of decorum regarding her toenails did the rest.
From what little he knew of the Guangzhou economy, the woman had to have received a pay raise coming here. After all, who would leave such a bustling city to come to the all but fallen city of San Francisco? No one in their right mind. He began to wonder if she pissed someone off to get here. Perhaps this was punishment for something else.
As his imagination began to unwind, she interrupted his thoughts to give him his assignment, his upgraded security clearance and the key to his new office.
“What if I don’t find something on Ms. Whitaker?” he asked, low and conspiratorial. Leaning in, he said, “Will you need me to find something?”
She stopped picking her toenail, slapped her bare foot on the floor and flicked a tiny nugget of dirt on the desk. Then, tenting her short rodent-like fingers together, she straightened her back and drew a breath. Was she smiling?
He wasn’t sure.
Perhaps her smile was just a crooked frown, for there was nary a hint of emotion in this woman, barely any tell to warn him of an impending storm, should she one day snap and demand he be shot.
“I see you understand the task you have been given,” she responded, satisfied by his question. “For being a white, you don’t seem too stupid. You look stupid, but you don’t seem stupid. There is a difference.”
He bit his lip and slightly lifted his chin. Hearing things like this grated his nerves, but seeing her looking so proud of herself for the observation made him want to pull her guts out. Chewing on his anger, trying to stifle the growing heat in his cheeks, he told himself he wasn’t that kind of guy. He was a go-along-to-get-along kind of guy. Watching one of your colleagues get shot in the office for treason had that sort of an affect on normal people.
“Thank you, Ms. Yeung,” he said.
She sat back in her chair again, hiked that foot back up and turned her attention back to her ill-timed, podiatric care session. “Leave me now,” she said. “You know your task.”
That was a few weeks ago. Ms. Yeung hadn’t spoken with him since then. This alone was concerning. Day and night, a sick anxiousness began to take shape inside him. Little tendrils of worry snaked through him, infecting his moods, heightening his fear. No matter the days or hours of focus, he hadn’t found a single thing on his subject.
Harper Whitaker, by all rights, was a model employee.
This meant the tide had turned. Because of his lack of evidence supporting Ms. Yeung’s suspicions, he was now being watched at work. His new “office” was a dark closet he could barely move in, a desk, and a computer. On the ceiling behind him, he routinely heard the small camera moving, the lens focusing. That was her. Ming Yeung. Connoisseur of fine reptilian cuisine.
She was watching him—he just knew it!
Day after day, he could feel her, those sharp suspicious eyes, those bits of toenail boogers crushed and smeared between the ridged pads of her fingers, a cold bowl of mostly eaten soup on the desk before her.
He closed his eyes, fought to clear his mind.
This was no easy task considering he was now under observation, the weight of her perceived scrutiny a crushing, debilitating indignity.
How could this Whitaker woman come to work day after day working for these tyrants and display not one hint of emotion, not a single indecency, not even one hint of treasonous impropriety?
It was exhausting. She was exhausting.
Despite the mounting stress, he kept his non-verbal cues in check. Emotional stability was imperative. After what happened to Byron Chance, Logan knew the risks of disappointing the new regime. He understood that self-preservation meant upping his game. Fortunately, his grasp on the understanding of emotions was his wheelhouse. Knowing all the tells of a rattled person allowed him to keep his own tells in check. Managing those under the watchful eye of Ms. Yeung felt paramount to his own survival.
Logan’s office was so small it got both hot and stuffy. There was barely any room for a desk and chair, or the small fan in the corner of the room. In fact, the door to his office was so close to his desk, it actually opened up against his chair. Wiping his brow, he couldn’t help thinking how badly the ventilation sucked in there. One day he’d suffocate to death and slump over dead in his chair and no one would care. And the last thing he would hear would be that damn camera zooming in on him.
Han said the same thing. They often complained about such things in the dead spots between work and lunch when they left SocioSphere for a bland café or a formerly chic bistro.
“I can’t breathe, smoke a cigarette or rub one out without feelin
g like any one of those three things will lead to me passing out,” Han told him one day. “But I did learn something!”
“Yeah?” Logan asked.
Three days ago they were walking to a sandwich shop two blocks away. Even though there were directional mics along all the streets, there were dead spots. In those zones, they spoke freely.
Han said, “Ms. Yeung always eats at eleven-thirty, and she always finishes at noon. We have eyes on her now, just to make sure. Four days in a row.”
He was a security engineer too.
“Don’t let her catch you watching her or you’ll get Last Chanced,” Logan warned his friend.
Waving his hand to show his distinct lack of concern, he said, “Tristan told me. I asked him to pop in and see what’s what.”
Logan swallowed hard over a huge lump in his throat. “Tristan…the hacker?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” Han said, cool because now he was name dropping.
“You know him?”
“Of course I do,” he said proudly, “otherwise he wouldn’t be talking to me.”
“And he said…”
“Eleven-thirty to noon. That’s when you can do your thing. Just loop the cameras, disable two way monitoring, and you have a half-an hour of uninterrupted time.”