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

by Schow, Ryan

  The drone changed direction, locating long lines of military transports and several approaching helicopters.

  A cold pit of dread set into him and he finally put his sandwich down.

  The United States had been betrayed from within, everyone knew that by now. The new President sold them out, but really the compromise started long before that, back so far as the mid-nineties when the US ballistic missile codes were sold to the Chinese for a pittance.

  Now America was that giant cow freshly dead on the side of the road being picked at by buzzards.

  Logan didn’t even have the heart to check the Canadian Border. Who knew what army would pour through there?

  He killed the illegal feed, reset the cameras and got back to work. That’s when the ping came in. He had a message on the emergency contact voicemail. It had to be from Skylar, although Harper knew the emergency number, too.

  As much as curiosity was now nipping at his brain, then nudging it, then absolutely torturing it, there was no way he’d risk listening to it at work. Not with the cameras above him and all around him.

  Not with Ms. Yeung watching.

  Time passed at a slower pace than normal. He couldn’t clear his mind and just focus on his job. Drumming his fingers on the desk and tapping his foot under it was burning off nervous energy, but that didn’t mean his mind wasn’t in overdrive with speculation. It sure as hell was!

  For heaven’s sake, what had constituted use of the emergency number?

  Dozens of possible problems churned through his mind, some taking shape, others being written off as preposterous, outlandish, or downright impossible.

  With a half an hour left to go in the day, he thought about going to the bathroom to listen to the message there, but he couldn’t risk listening to it on his regular phone in such a highly monitored building.

  He needed to access it from the burner phone.

  No matter how bad he needed to scratch that itch, there could be no possible trace of linkage between him and that number.

  When he finally clocked out and left the job, he was scanned but not patted down by the Chicom guards. He didn’t care about their invasive procedures, or that condescending look on their faces that said everyone was a criminal just waiting to be caught.

  While he walked home, he did so with a little less fear of being blown up or shot and a lot more fear about what was happening to Skylar, or Harper. Although, truth be told, he was worried more about Skylar since she was the one missing. At least Harper was off the grid with people who knew how to protect their land and weren’t afraid to kill to do so.

  When he got to his apartment tower, he saw two men outside the front entrance who looked somewhat suspicious. He wrote them off as him being paranoid—a constant, soul-breaking condition of living in a Communist state.

  While waiting in the lobby for the crowded elevator box to arrive and take them to their respective floors, he saw two more guys resembling the pair out front. He caught one of them looking at him, but the perpetrator’s eyes immediately darted away upon contact.

  Okay…not good.

  Now he was definitely paranoid! If they were there, were they watching him or looking for Skylar? As he moved into the elevator, stuffed in there shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone else, he tried to see if the men were still there. He couldn’t quite see past the people packed in front of him. He stood on his tippy-toes, but by then the doors were closing.

  Within minutes he was at his floor and unlocking his front door. He prayed to God that Skylar was there waiting for him. He so wanted the emergency number to have been used for good news. Alas, that was not the case.

  When he got inside, he loosened his tie, set his cell phone on the table and looped it and the internet of things the Chicoms used to spy on everyone in their homes. Still brimming with curiosity, but taken aback by the men who might have been waiting for him, he made himself a stiff drink to take the edge off. He then fished his burner phone out of the false bottom in one of the kitchen drawers.

  He listened to the message with an increased heart rate. When he heard her voice, the sheer terror in it, the absolute brokenness of it, his skin broke into goosebumps.

  Horrified, he played the message again, try to make sense of it. She’d basically sent him the same message through his take-out food.

  “Peel back the nine’s, dammit!” she said. The thudding sound he heard had to be her being hit, or knocked out.

  He erased the message, hid the burner phone, then dumped the drink down his throat and paced the kitchen for a minute, running his hands over his freshly shaved head.

  What the hell were the nines?

  He walked back to his bedroom and was changing when two men grabbed him from behind. The pain of electrical shock that hit his spine, along with the crackling noise of a tazer shook him, scrambling his brain. The surge of current roared through him until he passed out. When he woke up, he was on his knees in Skylar’s bathroom and they were filling the tub.

  As he stood there, his brain full of fuzz and angry bees, he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. When he returned to consciousness, everything became clear.

  “He’s awake,” the guard said.

  A hand snaked up under his chin, jerked it up. He was looking up into the eyes of one of the men who had been standing outside the building when he first arrived.

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  The fist that punched him rattled his teeth and eyeballs. His head was jerked up again, the Chinese face staring directly into his.

  “Let’s try this again, Mr. Cahill,” he said, impatient. “Where is she?”

  “She’s been missing for two days now.”

  The faucet on the bathtub was still running when someone grabbed the seat of his pants, hauled his ass off the ground enough to dump him face-first into the scalding-hot water. He tried to pull his head out, but a hand held him under. When he couldn’t breathe anymore and his lungs felt like they were about to explode, he was dragged up.

  Coughing, gasping for air, he felt the rage take over. This was a different kind of anger, though. This was helplessness mixed with hostility.

  This was prisoner rage.

  “Where is she?” the man asked again.

  “I told you, she’s been missing for two days!” he screamed, his voice hoarse, scalding hot water dripping into his eyes.

  “How long have you been working with her?” the other asked. He couldn’t see the man, but Logan felt like maybe he was the one to worry about.

  “I don’t work with her. She’s just a roommate,” he said.

  “She doesn’t pay rent.”

  “I pay the rent,” he said. “She buys me food and pays for utilities.”

  “How long have you two been sleeping together?”

  Because the Chicoms recorded everything everyone did and said every day of the year on devices in their homes, their work and on their cell phones, he knew they didn’t have squat on him. The two times he and Skylar had sex were not monitored.

  “I told you, we’re just roommates.”

  “Everyone has needs, Mr. Cahill,” the one before him said. “Even a nobody like you.”

  “Do you expect us to believe you pay her rent and ask for nothing in return?” the one he couldn’t see asked.

  “She pays for food, utilities.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit,” he said. “Have you seen her?”

  “We have,” the man said.

  “Then you know she’s out of my league,” he replied. Then, and this was a painful admission, he said, “But that doesn’t mean I’m not trying.”

  The two of them shared a short laugh, but then the one Logan couldn’t see said, “Refresh his memory.”

  And he went back in the water.

  The very second before he was about to gulp in a ton of water and drown, he was pulled out, slapped three times in the back of the head and kicked.

  “What ab
out now?” the man at his back asked.

  “I already told you!”

  He went in the drink again. Fortunately he’d taken a breath before going under. Unfortunately, one of them thought he’d up the ante by kicking him right in the balls from behind. He still had his head under water. The pain was so ferocious, he sucked in a gallon of water and really started to drown.

  And still, even as he fought for air, they held his head underwater…

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  When he came around, Logan was lying sideways on the bathroom floor choking and coughing out water. When he was done, one of the guys grabbed the collar of his shirt and hauled him through the apartment into the living room.

  “Toss the place,” the ball sack annihilator said.

  As he lay there, helpless, shocked, beaten and nearly drowned, the two guys tore his apartment apart. After a minute, when he felt his strength returning, he waited until they were both preoccupied to get himself into a better position to charge them.

  They wouldn’t count on this.

  Pain or not, he’d taken worse beatings in Krav class and still kept fighting. When the time was right, when they were close enough in proximity to both him and each other, he sprung to his feet and charged them. It was slow and a bit sloppy, but what he lacked in style, he made up for with rage.

  He hit the first man with a vicious punch to the side of the head; the other was already drawing his weapon. Logan caught him in time to check the gun. It fired into his stomach, but fortunately he got enough of a hand on it to have diverted the round. The searing heat in his side became a hot trail rather than a fatal tunnel.

  The grunt of the man behind him told Logan he’d been struck by his partner’s bullet. He shot his hand up, catching the Chicom intruder under the chin. This was all he had and it was no lethal blow. He needed distance though, and in this, he succeeded.

  Despite being chin-checked, the thug was on him in a second, driving Logan to the ground. When he hit, the weight of the man crashed down on him, knocking the wind out of him.

  For most people, this is a terrifying thing, not being able to breathe.

  Logan understood what was next. When you get the wind knocked out of you, the last thing you want to do is try to breathe. That’s how you panic. Logan wasn’t panicking, he was fighting for his life and he planned on winning. The forearm driving down into his throat, however, wasn’t helping.

  He craned his head to the side—getting the pressure off his Adam’s apple—then he checked the inside of the man’s arm. His body collapsed on top of Logan’s, his head dropping to the side of Logan’s head. Wasting no time, he circled his arm around the back of the Chicom’s neck as he launched blow after brutal blow into Logan’s ribs.

  Twisting his face around, with his mouth, Logan opened wide and grabbed ahold of the man’s ear. With all the ferocity he could muster, he sunk his teeth into the flesh and clamped down hard. The son of a bitch squirmed and bucked against him, but Logan refused to let go, even as he shook and tore the man’s ear from his head.

  As soon as Logan got done Mike Tysoning him, he rolled over on him and drove a thumb into his eye. The screaming was high pitched and extremely satisfying. Three ferocious strikes to the Adam’s apple left the intruder grabbing at his throat and gasping for breath.

  “That’s for kicking me in the nuts,” he said, breathless and in pain.

  The man beside him was trying to get his gun out, but his chest was a big red bloom. Logan crawled off the soon-to-be-dead-man, looked him in the eye. He was about to speak, but then it occurred to him these men may be armed with recording devices. He began rifling through the half-eyeless, half-earless man’s pockets. He came up empty. He grabbed the wrist, saw no watch. He checked the remaining ear for an earpiece, found nothing.

  Dirtbag number one wasn’t wired for sound.

  On to clown number two…

  After a thorough search of the man, he found neither of them were wired up. That’s when he chose to speak freely.

  “You poked the wrong bear, shitbird.” He found the bullet hole in the other guy’s chest, stuck his thumb in there and watched him squirm. “Yeah, this is fatal. It’ll take a minute, but it’s fatal.”

  Blood lined the inside of the dying man’s lips and his eyes held more fear than he’d ever seen in a Chicom.

  “Do you know how many of you I’ve killed this week? I’ll give you a hint, I’m double digits.”

  “They’ll…find…you,” he said.

  “Who will?”

  The man tried to snicker, but the pain shook through him and he stopped, a small whine escaping him.

  “When you die, and that should be any minute, I want you to know something.”

  “What?” he said, his eyes locked on Logan.

  “A Gweilo did this to you. I did this to you. And by the time I join you in hell, I will have killed tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of you.”

  “So you say,” he eked out before coughing up thin, red spittle.

  Looking around at how badly those two trashed the place, he felt a burst of energy, the old, familiar anger. He grabbed the man by the shirt, lifted him up. He was grumbling and wincing, his face bloodless and contorted with pain.

  “Do you know how hard it is for the body to die?” Logan asked, now realizing the other man was dead, asphyxiated. “It’s a rather resilient system we humans have here.”

  Logan managed to stand him up. As his legs began to wobble beneath him, Logan said, “If you stand, I’ll leave you alone. If you fall, I’ll stick my entire thumb in that hole in your chest. Let’s see how you do.”

  The man stood, but only barely. The two of them were in the middle of the living room. On one side there was the couch. On the other side was the dead man, stretched out on the floor. Taking the standing man by the collar, he pulled him forward, ran two steps with him, then launched him face-first into the wall.

  He crashed into the old drywall, leaving a large divot before his back bowed in and his legs gave way. He sunk face-first down the wall, his arms limp at his side. Flicking a look at the dead man beside him, Logan was now only concerned with the one still alive.

  “Ten bucks says you’re still breathing,” he said. Getting on a knee, Logan grabbed a fistful of hair and pulled back his head. “Oh yeah, look at you. Nostrils flaring and everything.”

  Logan dropped his head, the man’s face slapping back into the wall. Then, with a ferocious elbow and the last of his strength, he drove a blow into the back of the intruder’s head. This caved in the wall. The man’s body sagged against the wall with permanence. Logan waited for him to take that next breath. There was no next breath.

  Dragging the body off the wall, pushing him aside, Logan let out a sigh of relief. That’s when he saw the wallpaper. Beside the blood splat, a corner of it had come loose. There, written small and in an ink pen, were several different 9s.

  Peel back the nines…

  Using the phone, he filmed the house as it was, then used the video footage to create a looped roll. He did this to reflect his trashed place and his trashed face. Satisfied, he started in the corner where Skylar had written the number 9s and began to pull back. The paper came off easily, and underneath he saw all kinds of coding and instructions for a hack. Who provided Skylar with these? This was some next-level hacking. Was this something Tristan understood?

  Did Tristan create this?

  He began to study the coding, and that’s when he realized there was a server in there. L2#178R4. Level two, server number one seventy-eight, rack four. There was also a site listed with DW in front of it.

  Dark Web.

  The dark web was where hackers often kept coding for their Trojan horses, their malware, their ransomware and any other number of attacks, from DDOS attacks to brute force attacks, to the kinds of attacks you could use to catch a server on fire and physically delete everything.

  The rest of the message said: UR CD is wtng.

  Your code is waitin
g.

  Did she want him to destroy something, or access something? And how the hell was he going to justify getting into a server room? Physical access came with protocols. He didn’t have either physical clearance or access. That’s when it hit him. He had to somehow break into the server room at work, figure out what he was supposed to see, and get out unnoticed. Then somehow he had to get back to his desk without being interrogated and/or killed. So yeah…what she was asking him to do was definitely going to be a problem. Then again, if he was going to pull his weight in the Resistance, he needed to be the solution, not the guy crying about the problem.

  He glanced around at the mess these Chicom rodents made of his house. Shaking his head, discouraged, he hobbled to the bathroom then looked himself over in the mirror. They’d made just as much a mess of him than they did of his home.

  He checked the time, then panicked.

  He had to go.

  He finger combed his hair, wiped the blood off his face and swished a bit of rust-flavored water through his mouth. When he spit it out, it was tinged red. He ran his tongue along his teeth, made sure they were all tight in the gums.

  They were.

  Mostly.

  Putting on his clothes, grabbing his things, he headed out into the city. Unlike so many of the pedestrians moving like ants in a procession down the sidewalks, he was not wearing his work clothes. At that point, with what he’d just endured, with what he’d just found, he didn’t care. It didn’t matter that you weren’t supposed to mingle. He’d mingle if he wanted to. Why? Because he had a home and a job. Things he cared about. Nowadays, you couldn’t be homeless unless you wanted to get killed or sent to the cages.

  Groaning inside at the reality they’d come to accept, the Chicoms were always promising you a cage right before they gave you a bullet instead.

  He walked down the renamed city streets with his hat pulled low over his eyes. There were once so many great street names in the city. Market Street, Mission, Broadway, Fulton, Hays, Lombard, Haight & Ashbury. They were all gone now. Renamed. Some of these Chinese street names, he thought about them and they made no sense. Like he couldn’t register with them. That’s why he refused to learn their names, let alone speak them out loud.