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

by Schow, Ryan

  Oh, thank God!

  “Out!” he roared. The men left. To her, he said, “I shared my bed with you, which is to say I shared my trust.”

  “We all make mistakes.”

  “So it’s true?”

  “Yes,” she said, defiant. “It’s true.”

  If she couldn’t topple the Chicom regime, she was going to weaken it as best as she could. After that, if they chose to torture and kill her, she’d at least get to see her grandmother again.

  “You are Blue Lark.”

  “I am.”

  “Why?” he asked, his expression one of pain, of betrayal. In that moment, she was not a Christian, a white woman, a Gweilo he was slumming with out of some taboo need to defy the state or lay with the enemy. She was a woman he…loved?

  Had he actually fallen in love with her? Was that what she was seeing?

  Oh, my God.

  “Your people killed my grandmother,” she finally confessed. There was no reason to hold out. It would only give him hope. It would only make matters worse. “They shot her in cold blood after accusing her of being a traitor to the state.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “They don’t need a reason, Minister. They only need a target. You don’t see this from here. This ivory tower of yours, it blurs out the details of what goes on below. We are far removed from the slums I come from.”

  “You’re not from the slums,” he said.

  “They did not start out that way. Once the city was beautiful, relatively clean, bustling with people who felt freedom but didn’t know it. When you took everything away from us, you turned humans into animals, and when an animal is cornered…”

  “It fights like its life depends on it,” he said, quietly.

  “Yes,” she said, the fire in her waning.

  He leaned forward, held her face, then kissed her. “I am sorry that you had to betray me the way you did. I…I loved you.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “She’s cold.”

  That’s all he said. She wondered if he was weeping. That would not only be uncomfortable, that would hurt her somewhere inside where she still had a heart, compassion, the desire to feel.

  “Did you feel anything for me?” he asked, lifting up, his eyes needing something, anything to maybe spare her what indignities, what cruelties, were sure to follow.

  “Yes,” she said, her shoulders burning where they were wrenched back, her wrists aching where they were smashed beneath her body weight, her back hurting where Renshu had planted a knee he’d used for leverage when choking her.

  “You did?” he asked, a small glimmer of light in his expression.

  “Yes,” she said. “I felt disdain. I felt a deep loathing every time you touched me, every time you kissed me, every time you pumped your way into me and called it love.”

  That light in his eyes went out. He stood up, frowning, his lips tight with disapproval.

  “You lie to the very people you enslave,” she continued, some of that fire coming back. “You tell us how wonderful the People’s Republic is, yet you shoot us in the streets, you rob us and rape us and you make us scream at televisions.”

  “This is the conditioning,” he said. “When you submit, it will be so much better.”

  Touching her chin, but then pulling back, he did not like the white hot glare he was receiving. “We will never submit to you,” she said. “Minister of Lies.”

  “I will try to spare your life,” he said without emotion. “For now.”

  “If they find out what you’ve been doing, that I’ve compromised you, your bony Asian ass will be right next to mine against a wall.”

  He turned to go, leaving her there, naked, enraged, abandoned.

  “They’re going to kill you like they’ll kill me!” she yelled, her voice hoarse. “You’re dead! Don’t you get it? YOU’RE DEAD LIKE ME!”

  And with that, the goon came back in, this time looking very much unsettled.

  Instead of taking her then, he sniffed up her entire body, past her privates, all the way up to soft skin beneath her earlobe.

  “You smell like a dog,” he snarled.

  “Your breath smells like semen,” she growled back, even though it didn’t. The Chinese were notorious for their treatment of homosexuals back home.

  And with that, he cupped his hand over her mouth and pinched her nostrils shut. She bucked and squirmed, but he was too big. He had all his weight on her.

  It will be easier when you submit.

  Her eyes began to hurt along the edges, the darkness crowding in. The heaving, sucking emptiness in her chest gave out and she felt all that darkness swarm her at last.

  She wanted to feel relief in that moment, but she was also wise enough to realize there was no grace in death.

  Skylar did not expect to wake up. She didn’t think they expected that either. But when she did, she was alone. Feeling off, her head light like it was stuffed with paper, she belly crawled across the bed to the nightstand where a phone stood.

  Lifting it off the cradle with her mouth, she heard the dial tone. She drew a deep breath, saw the antique buttons and let the tip of her nose do the dialing. She punched in the number in her head. It was an emergency number, an untraceable number she’d committed to memory in the event that she’d been compromised, or captured.

  It rang through.

  She was waiting for the beep, but she heard the door open instead. The beep sounded and frantically she said, “Peel back the nine’s, dammit!”

  The punch to the side of the head stopped the conversation.

  It stopped her completely.

  When she woke again, she was in a gown. It was a stiff material, like you see in scrubs, but in the form of a utilitarian dress. She wasn’t even sure if she had underwear on.

  “This was all we had,” Renshu said, smiling at her.

  “You again.”

  “Yes,” he said with kind eyes. “Me again.”

  “I need a name.”

  “Buck.”

  “Not just any name,” he said.

  “You want to know who I called,” she said. In his hand he had a pair of pliers. She was seated in the kind of arm chair you find in old diners, her right arm zip-tied to the chair. Skylar watched his eyes dip to her fingernails. They were chewed short for this reason alone. In that moment, she wondered if he could get an edge under her nail. Looking down, she knew he couldn’t. He’d have to slip a knife under there, pry up the fingernail, then get the pliers under it and pull. “I called Tristan.”

  “The hacker?”

  “Yes.”

  He started laughing, and then he said, “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “That’s as far as any of us get,” she said, still looking at her hand. It was out there not as an offering, but as a sacrifice. “A rerouted number and an email.”

  “We know all about Tristan.”

  “Then you know more than me,” she said.

  “There are rumors,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are they true?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure what you’ve heard,” she said, “but the man has serious issues with fruit or vegetables that are shaped like a penis.”

  “How unusual.”

  “You guys are the sex freaks,” she said. “Some guy not liking dick-shaped fruit isn’t the same as having sex addictions. Besides, if there’s any truth to the rumors, if he does indeed send such abominations to his enemies, it’s his twisted idea of disrespect.”

  “I understand that,” he said.

  “So you will understand that he values his privacy, and he’s very good at what he does.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “He gets information that doesn’t want to be gotten from places you and I barely even know exist,” she answered, knowing she wasn’t betraying Logan, and knowing he wouldn’t find Tristan.

  “I’ve heard that. What exactly did he give you?” he asked, his eyes flicki
ng to her nail again.

  “A server, that’s all.”

  “What was in this server?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “You hit me before I could leave. And now we’re here.”

  “Would it help if I tell you I plan to torture you?”

  “No.”

  Nodding his head, as if this were a forgone conclusion, he stood, stepped forward, then knelt down and grabbed her biggest toenail with the pliers.

  She sucked in a startled breath. She didn’t count on that.

  “Last chance.”

  “Pull it out you frog eating motherfu—”

  It wasn’t easy to get out, and the screaming hurt even her own ears, but when the nail tore loose of the bed—all kinds of tender skin ripping and bleeding—she started swearing. It was a litany of hostility that felt more like channeling demons. The unrelenting stream of obscenities rushed forth like a swollen river of hatred. She called him every name in the book and then some.

  Frothing, struggling against her restraints, against the pain and her captor, she spit and cursed, her eyes bulging and blood red with an animosity. Her hatred ran so deep her lithe body could not contain it. As she howled at Renshu and his pliers—pliers that held her big toenail in front of her face—she felt the memories of her grandmother returning, like a little face in the crowd. The hate stopped and that’s when the real pain set in. It wasn’t her toe that caught her unaware, it was the emotional turmoil she carried around for that loss.

  Her grandmother had been looking at larks that day. Larks and the pure blue sky. That’s all. But to the Chicoms, the binoculars meant spying, and that’s why they shot her.

  The sky was so bright that day.

  As bright as her pain.

  Get ahold of yourself, she thought. Glaring at the handsome sadist, she growled at him like the dog he thought she was. “Take them all you self-righteous bastard.”

  “I intend to.”

  He’d only removed four toenails when she passed out.

  When she woke up, it was to the memory of that day. The day her grandmother was shot. She’d been alive after the first bullet. Her head bucked on the second. In that moment, Blue Lark was born, but it was not fortified with the blood of her grandmother alone. When the men who entered their home dragged her mother down the hall, they raped and beat her.

  There were men standing over her now. Looking down, blood and toenails all over the floor, she started to laugh.

  Tears accompanied this dark, wayward amusement.

  “She’s awake,” someone said.

  After they got done raping her mother, they held her down and did the same. That was where her first scars came from. The men who did this didn’t expect her and her mother to recover.

  But they did.

  Skylar had been beaten so badly she could barely speak. All she could say was “Blue Lark.” That was the answer to every question, to every riddle, to every statement.

  Now, looking down at the tattoo of the blue lark on her thigh, she thought of her grandmother, and of her late mother. She killed herself last year.

  Skylar’s hair was damp with sweat and hanging in her face. This was her bitter end. She would see her grandmother soon. She would see her mother, too. And hopefully she’d see her little dead brother.

  Looking up, she laid eyes on the big man who first pulled her from the tub.

  “There you are,” she said.

  “Here I am.”

  She worked up some spit, powered it at his face. It landed on his shirt. Looking down, she saw he’d had enough. She tilted her chin up, knowing what was about to happen.

  He made a fist; she offered up her perfect nose.

  When he swung for it, she head-butted his fist with all her might. The shot rocked her, had her mouth flopping open with spit starting to drizzle out, but what she did to him was far more damaging. She started to laugh, even as the blood poured down her face. Looking at him through hazy eyes, the world tilting ever so slightly, she saw him cradling his injured hand. The face he was making was one of surprise and agony.

  “Got you, asshole,” she said. Her head finally bobbed forward. She tried to bring it back up but unconsciousness was setting in. She raised her head up just enough to hold it steady, but then it fell backwards, and the darkness came once more.

  She woke to an incredible amount of pain in her armpits. There were hands under them, dragging her down a hallway, through a kitchen, out into a garage. White hot agony flared from her feet, specifically her mangled toes. They were dragging her face toward the ground, the fronts of her toes with the ripped off nails scraping over the multitude of surfaces.

  The back of a paddy wagon scared her. This was one of the mobile death squads. One of the guards opened the back door. She didn’t see any of her captors, but she recognized the Minister of Propaganda’s voice.

  “She lives long enough to regret the choices she made,” he said to someone.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Someone grabbed a fistful of the back of her hair and yanked her head up. It was the Minister. “I gave you my bed, my body, my trust,” he hissed in her ear. “For you to have violated all three things is a hundred deaths to me. You’ll pay for what you did.”

  He let go of her hair and her head dropped between her shoulders.

  “She needs re-education. Take her with the others.”

  With that, she was thrown into the back of the paddy wagon, her shin slamming on the sharp edge of the metal box where the door was supposed to close. When hands took her leg to lift it in and close the door, she thrust a kick back with all her might, catching solid meat.

  She flipped herself over and thrust another kick at the man’s chin. He turned his head in time, but the kick hit him in the jaw anyway, sending him staggering sideways. She scrambled to her feet in time to see the guard raise up a shotgun.

  The flash of fire should have been her death. Instead, it was a bean bag round that hit her in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of her. She doubled over and fell into someone’s legs. The second shot hit her in the forehead.

  Sadly, the first thing she thought after being hit in the gut and doubling over was, this is a beanbag round and it won’t kill me. In that moment, she was sad that with all that pain, there was no promise of death. Then the second round hit her, the flash of pain in her head not even registering.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Before the anonymous alert hit Logan’s email—a ping that both startled and excited him—he waited for Ming Yeung to begin lunch before hacking in and looping his office camera to illegally access a live news feed from the East Coast.

  As he ate his peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich, he watched video footage of the European Union’s Army clashing with protesters in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. It reminded him of the Hong Kong assault ten years ago. There was smoke, tanks, gunfire and dead bodies. He’d just found the feed last week and it was bad then, but not this bad.

  He changed feeds, searched the Miami circuit and found what he was looking for. The African Union’s Army had toppled Miami and was now destroying everything in sight as it marched north. The sky was filled with smoke from a hundred fires, the streets too chaotic to even make sense of it all.

  Even as more boats came in from Africa, loaded with more soldiers, artillery and both trucks and tanks, the smaller coastal cities like Jupiter, Vero Beach, Palm Bay and Titusville fell to a fast moving horde.

  One of the soldiers in the AU was talking with a reporter saying the United States was fertile ground and up for grabs, but only after they defeated the EU Army.

  They didn’t even consider America a threat.

  When the awkward looking, obviously terrified reporter asked what the AU Army was there for, the dark skinned, wild-eyed brute said, “Beach houses and free women,” like it was Christmas morning and they were preparing to unwrap gifts.

  Just then, an explosion rocked the building behind them. The ground shook, as did the
camera, and the reporter and the soldier she was interviewing ducked until they realized the falling debris wouldn’t reach them.

  A new ruckus sounded though, causing both of them to look to their right. Just then an onslaught of bodies ran past them, either to their posts or away from potential danger. What happened next had Logan sitting there in complete, slack-jawed silence.

  Of the crush of people sprinting through the area where the interview was being conducted, someone had a blade and swiped it hard across the side of the reporter’s neck, causing her to start geysering out a fountain of blood.

  The camera zoomed in on this with shaky hands, as if the cameraman was scared, and then the feed was abruptly cut.

  Logan suddenly lost his appetite, but he checked the clock and Ms. Yeung still had fifteen minutes of lunch left.

  He didn’t want to cut it too close, but he wanted to see what was going on in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. He found another hacked feed of a long stretch of border wall, as if seen by a drone.

  On the Mexico side, there were giant trucks and bulldozers smashing against the side of the wall. Even as they used their battering rams on one side, there was an apocalyptic looking fire engine, a ladder truck, that was extending its ladder to the top of the wall. Several people were climbing the ladder, lugging up huge ropes and heavy looking chains.

  On the American side of the wall there were mobs of people and a few big tow trucks. The drivers were clearly waiting to hook the ropes and chains to the wall to try to pull it over.

  In the mean time, there were giant sections of the wall being cut away with reciprocating saws. The second a section opened up, people rushed toward the entrance en masse, bottlenecking at the hole itself as they pushed and shoved their way into America.

  The scene changed to a section of the border wall in Arizona where giant dump trucks had smashed through a section and were now just slamming into the sides to create a wider gap.

  Down in Texas, the same thing was happening, but drone footage near El Paso showed massive armies gathered on the other side. In addition to the formal armies, pockets of tens of thousands of rag tag soldiers with guns, knives and spears stood ready to attack the second they had a chance.