Dark Days of the After Special Edition | Prequel & Book 1

by Schow, Ryan

  He slipped the paper into his pocket then shut everything down for lunch. A knock on his door startled him. He opened the door slowly, the bright lights hitting his eyes like hellfire. One of the girls was holding a Styrofoam container of take out.

  “We’re not your delivery service,” she said with a frown.

  “I’ll take you off the payroll then,” he said sarcastically as he took it from her.

  Still frowning, she asked, “What really happened to Han?”

  “Flying brick took off half his head.”

  Her eyes started to well and then his eyes started to well and that’s when a sob jumped in her throat and she turned and walked away.

  Get it together, he told himself as his own emotions began to bleed to the surface.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Han wasn’t the first person he cared about who had died. Half of Logan’s family was dead. He lost friends, cousins, co-workers, women he liked, women he would have dated even if they wouldn’t have dated him at the time.

  He told himself to stop thinking about Han, about those he lost. There was his food for starters. Who ordered it for him? Probably Skylar. She had a habit of sending him takeout when she needed to get him a message. He grabbed the food and headed for the break room. It was too packed. As in not one single table was free. He wasn’t excited about eating in the dark, but if he had to, he’d rather eat in his old office where there were no traces of Han around to depress him.

  Thinking he couldn’t afford to be off his game, he shook his head and instead forced his attention back on the Resistance. He was new, but he didn’t exactly know what that meant, or who—other than Harper—was in charge. What did they really want from him? It was all too much. Maybe he would start his own Resistance. He killed those five soldiers earlier today. And he killed nine in the two days before that. It was an impressive body count for a newbie, if that was his thing. But it wasn’t. Or was it? Maybe it should be. Why? Because he did that. Not the Resistance. While they were playing war in underground and abandoned buildings, he was out on the front lines using what he learned to put their enemies into the ground.

  When it came to Harper Whitaker, the unofficial leader of the Resistance, or so it seemed (even that was unclear), he’d been the one to take care of her. No one else. Him. And Skylar Madigan, his roommate, the woman he wanted to be in love with? She was doing her part, but she was also not his. She would never be his. Skylar was a daughter to the Resistance, a fighter before a lover, too hardcore to let herself become only a woman in love with a man looking forward to a future. He understood that and he was grateful for her, but she would be dead soon. They’d all be dead soon. Such were the ways of life in the Resistance.

  This was what he had chosen. No, this was what he was choosing.

  When he got to the bottom of his food, he saw the note wrapped in plastic. He was right that the emergency take-out was from Skylar.

  Using his cell phone flashlight feature, he read the note. It said, “Peel back the nine, waste no time.”

  “What the hell?” he mumbled.

  At the end of the day, when he was leaving, Ming Yeung stopped him and said, “Why did you return to your old office?”

  He thought the cameras had been shut down; apparently they were active.

  “Han and I were friends,” he told the woman.

  “That’s not your office anymore, so it is off limits. You want your pay docked?”

  “No, Ms. Yeung.”

  She frowned, looking at him with unblinking eyes and a penetrating stare. “Friends get you killed. Best to have no friends.”

  “Do you have friends?” he asked. She scoffed at the comment, waved a hand at him. “Are you at least married?”

  He knew she wasn’t.

  “Marriage is for masochists,” she said, getting slightly uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation.

  “So you have no one.”

  “I don’t need anyone,” she said. “The day is done, time to leave.”

  “Who makes you a better person?” he asked, not caring how this conversation was changing her, or if it would set her off.

  “The state,” she said, plainly.

  “Me, too,” he said, the lie cutting deep into his heart.

  “Who else do you have?”

  “I had Han.”

  She nodded, like she understood. He wondered what kind of horrors she’d seen where she had come from. If half the rumors about mainland China were true, the woman’s head must have been an absolute wreck.

  “Well now you have the state,” she said, as if this should be comforting.

  He nodded, said good-night, then left, thinking about where he began with this company and where he was now. Working for SocioSphere started out as his dream job. Silicon Valley billionaire, Atticus van Duyn, started this company, but when he, his wife Margaret and their daughter Savannah disappeared, the company grew, even if morally it lost its way under a slew of corrupt comers and goers.

  China spent decades creeping into the United States, eventually rising up, seemingly from the morning fog to take over the west coast. America spent decades in decline. Morally, socially, politically and spiritually. One could look back and see where everything went wrong, but he wasn’t one to revel in the past.

  He walked downstairs to the lobby, had his belongings searched and had to turn out his pockets (kept his Karambit blade tucked away), then he went outside where there were emergency vehicles and a heightened security force.

  He fell into the procession of going home traffic, then after an exhausting walk home, he walked into his grungy, state appointed apartment. Inside, the two bedroom, one bath abode was dark and empty. He didn’t look at the cameras he knew were in the smoke alarms, the TV, the laptop computer, and he didn’t act like anything was out of the ordinary.

  Instead, he kicked off his shoes, put his phone on a loop timer—something Han taught him to do—then sat down in the recliner and closed his eyes for just a moment. He fell asleep, but then he jerked awake.

  Shooting out of the chair, ripped out of his sleep, he saw the time, ran to his room, changed his clothes and put on a hat.

  Where the hell was Skylar?

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was concerning that Skylar wasn’t home. He grabbed a dummy phone, hurried out of the apartment, then walked downstairs with his head held low against the cameras and other residents. When he was outside, he walked the preplanned route, mindful of the cameras, alert for the Chicoms.

  Security was everywhere. They were looking for more people like the Molotov Cocktail guy that morning. It was dangerous to be out.

  Then again, it was always dangerous.

  People were now being lined up against walls like criminals, searched without due process, pushed around like they were errant dogs rather than humans who once had rights.

  Logan was about to turn away when he was spotted by one Chicom solider.

  Dammit!

  Without choice, he kept going into the gauntlet. When he got there, he was shoved into the side of a wall and patted down.

  Fortunately he wasn’t carrying anything but his phone.

  “Is it active?” the Chicom patrolman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you going?” the man shouted at him in Chinese. This was one of the few Chinese phrases he’d learned.

  The man’s breath was a foul addition to the already smelly air. Standing back, just enough to breathe, he said, “Home,” in poor Chinese.

  Without provocation, he was spun around by another soldier and punched in the stomach. The blast was high, near his solar plexus, where you couldn’t flex. The shot hurt, but he was used to worse. He knew the drill. Play possum lest it get worse. Sinking to his knees, he groaned like everyone else. The business end of a gun was promptly laid upon the crown of his head. He took a breath, mentally resigned himself to the fact that death could come any minute and for no reason at all.

  “Where are you goin
g?” the man screamed again.

  “Home,” he repeated.

  The man grabbed Logan by the ear, hauled him to his feet. The pain was far more real than the pain from the gut shot. The sharp burning that started in his ear and radiated inward proved to be no joke. This man was a torture artist. He winced, but tried to rein in his anger. Good God…he’d rather be punched in the stomach than have his ear yanked that hard!

  The burning, the stinging…it wouldn’t go away.

  Then again, that’s why he kept his head shaved. If he let his hair grow out, whenever they got physical—and the Chicoms did it all the time—they would go for your hair and really give it a twist and yank. Back then, before he started shaving his head, they yanked on his hair all the time and he thought, Anything would be better than this! Now they grabbed his ears and he thought, Anything other than yanking his ear was preferable, but he couldn’t cut off his ear.

  Not yet, at least…

  “Where are you going?” the Chicom soldier screamed one last time.

  “Home,” Logan snapped.

  The man’s eyes and nostrils flared and he stood back. Logan saw the slap coming from a mile away and forced himself not to react. He didn’t flinch, tense up or even blink. It was coming and he was going to take it.

  The impact rocked his head and he stumbled sideways into the woman next to him.

  The man then screamed “Go!” Another Chinese word he knew. When he turned to leave, the man kicked him hard in the butt and he went. Behind him he heard the soldier going after another person, presumably putting them through the same abuse.

  Before, when he was just a computer programmer and he felt this was just part of the new life he was living, he told himself to take it, to not make a scene, to let no emotion enter his eyes. Now he wanted to kill these people. He wanted to grab them by the throat then pluck their eyes out one by one until they fell to their knees screaming. After that, his thoughts were too violent to repeat. This was how he felt. That’s how everyone felt.

  Keeping his head low, he made his way to an abandoned church. This was where Krav classes were being held tonight. Last time it was someplace else, in two days it would be someplace else as well. They had to stay on the move. Learning to fight was the same thing as resisting and that was the same thing as treason. Part of living under the rule of the Communist regime was not resisting.

  He knocked three times regular, then scraped his hand across the wooden door and then he gave it a low kick with his toe.

  The door opened up, a familiar face appeared and he nodded for him to come in. Logan slipped in fast.

  “Where’s Skylar?” the man asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You live with her, yes?”

  “She lives with me,” Logan said.

  Dismissing the comment with a frown, which told Logan these people placed a much greater value on Skylar than on him, he said, “Is that abnormal for her not to show up?”

  “Yes, very,” Logan said. “Honestly, I’m worried.”

  “Focus on your training and hopefully she’s just running late,” he said, looking concerned as well. “She knows where to find us.”

  When they trained that night, the focus was on defensive measures for knife attacks. The first defense they trained was the overhead knife attack.

  Instead of backing out of the path of the knife, this defense involved rushing toward the enemy. Doing as he was taught, he slid in fast, grabbed his training partner’s wrist with the left hand. With the right hand, he cupped the back of the man’s neck, yanked him down, simulated two brutal knee strikes into his torso and a third into his head, then kicked the inside of one shin and then the other.

  At that point, the opponent was rattled.

  At least, he should be.

  That’s when Logan manipulated the man’s knife hand, twisting it the opposite way to both off-balance his opponent and loosen his grip on the blade. When that happened, it was easy to grab the knife. After that, part two was a choose-your-own-adventure stab-fest.

  The second part is about not hesitating. It’s about seeing the neck, the collar bone, seeing the armpits, the femoral artery…any number of targets, and then choosing what to stab or slice open first.

  If you get into a knife fight and you don’t know how to kill quickly, precisely and thoroughly, what the hell was the point?

  That’s what they were taught. That was their training.

  Then again, the point was much deeper than just self-defense. If this was the enemy, then it wouldn’t just be one guy with one knife. That’s why they began running three-on-one drills with knives. That night, he was one guy in the middle of a triangle of attackers.

  It started with the defense of the overhead strike, then it moved to the sideways slashing motion, and finally it was the lunging stab or the underhand stab.

  A lone idiot, Logan could handle that. But fighting more than one of them? This was the kind of training that might one day save his life. This was why Skylar wanted him there. She said, “You might be the only thing standing between my death and the enemy, and I can’t afford for you to be weak.”

  “The second you stick your opponent,” their instructor, Yoav, was saying, “you need to move quick, but not so quick that you get sloppy and get cut. Speed and precision is what we’re going for here. There will be nothing more disheartening than you being the reason you die.”

  When it came to the fatal wounds, Logan preferred to punch down on the fleshy space above the collar bone (bringing the head toward the blade). You can’t just stab and wait, though. That used to be the kind of Hollyweird laziness you’d see in the movies. Conversely, that’s the kind of idiocy that will get you killed in real life. And that’s why what’s next is you yanking the knife out while at the same time pushing the head aside to get at the neck. One swipe is all it takes to draw blood. But to get to the Carotid artery, you need to go deep. You have to plan on an inch at the very least. You also have to believe that if you don’t get it right the first time, you’re not going to get a second chance at it. The instant you get that cut, the opponent’s hand will go to cup the wound, and that’s when you punch the blade into the exposed armpit and head to the next threat.

  In Krav class, they used hard plastic dummy knives so they could move, get cut, but not bleed. They had to see their mistakes so as not to make them in real combat.

  They did drills for twenty minutes.

  When they switched out his training partners, however, he frowned, finding this odd. The person you start with had always been the person you finished with. Those were the unspoken rules. According to Skylar, this cut down on wasted time and maximized the training.

  His new partner was a woman who had never said word one to him. Her name was Kim. He didn’t know the last name of the brunette, all he knew was that she was in her early thirties, she was alright looking and she was ferocious. He trained with her as if she were anyone else.

  When Kim said, “Where’s Skylar?” he said, “I don’t know. Let me focus, please.”

  When Skylar was first introducing him to everyone, she told him she and Kim started training together at the same time.

  Logan knew where Kim’s loyalties lie.

  Not with him.

  When Kim ratcheted up the intensity of their training, Logan followed suit. When she went to the next level, and then to the level after that, he found he couldn’t keep up.

  Apparently that was the point.

  She put a beating on him, then she put him down, and then she leaned over him and said, “Where’s Skylar?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, irritated and embarrassed. She pounded the floor beside him and then growled, “Do you know who she is?”

  “Like in the carnal sense?” he asked sarcastically.

  She punched him in the face this time, rattling his brain. “Do you know who she is to the cause?” she asked, clarifying.

  “I don’t know what the cause is,” he lied. “I mean, I do
—resist—but specifically, I only know that she tells me to train and I train. Beyond that, what you’re all doing, I don’t know.”

  “If you can’t find her by the time we do the next class,” she said, standing up and not helping him up, “don’t bother showing up.”

  He sat up, shook off the beating, wiped away the sweat and said, “If this is the Resistance, and you’re Resistance fighters, then what am I? I train with you and I see you looking at me different, but I don’t know what you want from me or why I’m even here.”

  “I don’t know,” Yoav said, cold. “What are you to us?”

  His instructor came and stood over him, along with three other proficient fighters. Logan looked up, his eye still watering where Kim had hit him.

  He said nothing.

  “Well?”

  “I thought I was Skylar’s boyfriend,” he said to an uproar of laughter. When it died down, he said, “But then I learned otherwise.”

  He stood and pushed Kim back out of his space. She let him, but made sure he saw the look in her eye.

  To her, he said, “How many kills have you got this week, Kim?” She didn’t speak. He turned and looked at them all. No one said anything. “I have fourteen in the last three days.”

  Now they looked at each other and that was the answer.

  Kim said, “Bullshit.”

  “How do you think I got these cuts and bruises on my face and knuckles? It wasn’t from jerking off in the closet. And it wasn’t from training with you guys.”

  Now they were looking him over. Trying to decide things about him

  With people like that, seasoned fighters, they could read your face like a map. They could tell the difference between a punched face and a kicked face, what was hit and how hard he was hit to leave a bruise, a cut, a scrape.

  The way they were looking at him just then, it was them figuring out exactly how the fight went down without him having to even say a word.

  “You level me with your scorn, beat me with your fists then threaten me, but all of you stand here sweating from training while fourteen of the enemy are dead by my hand.”