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

by Schow, Ryan

  Plus, if he had to rush—which he would due to time constraints—he ran the risk of leaving a trail. One that wouldn’t be hard to trace back to him.

  “What are you waiting for?” Ms. Yeung asked, extra jumpy.

  “Be quiet for a second.”

  In his head, he tried to think of how many nuclear reactors were still online. The last of the California reactors were closed years ago. Others in nearby states were powering down as newer reactors were coming online in the northwest.

  Off the top of his head, he was pretty sure there were five of these older reactors left in neighboring states, only one of them near California. What did it really matter, though? If one of the reactors lost permanent power, if the rods melted, there was enough radioactive decay to turn California into meat soup. Whoever didn’t die right away would become cancerous mutants, forced to die slow, horrible, painful deaths.

  That meant Chinese casualties, too. With that thought alone, Logan was sure the Chicoms had some sort of plan. They’d be absolute fools not to!

  “Let’s go,” he finally said to Ms. Yeung, his face both numb and scorching hot at the same time.

  “What did you find?” she asked, keeping up, glancing at him several times only to see an uncharacteristically vulnerable look of distress.

  “Something bad,” he said, scrambling for an answer.

  “What?” she asked, grabbing the sleeve of his shirt and hauling him around. He turned to face her, but without an explanation. “Tell me!”

  “This kind of traffic…it’s not using our servers by accident. They’re using our network like their own server farm.”

  “Meaning what?” she said, panicked now, too.

  “Meaning their offsite operation is using SocioSphere’s interconnected servers as their main hub,” he lied. “They’re synchronizing our system to use against us.”

  “We need to shut it down,” she said, grabbing his arm and tightening her grip.

  “That can’t be done on site,” he said. “But if it continues, honestly, they’re going to bring everyone down using our system. Imagine nothing working. Nothing.”

  “What do you need?” she asked quickly.

  “I sent some data to my system. It’s encrypted, but our quantum computer can break the encryption relatively easily. The ISP address, however, will be fake, cycled through like the old VPNs. It will take me some time. But if I can come up with an address, we can gain access to the physical address and from there I can smoke their system.”

  “Get me the address,” she said, as serious as he’d ever seen her, “and I can send in teams to wipe them out.”

  “No,” he said, seeing his plan falling apart. “If there’s even a hint that you’ve got Chicom teams on the way, they’ll smoke the server themselves and reroute to a new location. I’m one of them. A tech geek. I can get in, gain their trust, then nuke everything in the house.”

  “How?”

  “Let me worry about that,” he said.

  This caused concern in her. She dealt with it though. “How long will it take to get the address?”

  “Not long, or maybe forever. It all depends on what I find when I’m in. And that all depends on how good these guys are versus how good I am.”

  “How good are you?” she asked.

  “I’m a master at internal penetration,” he said with a wink. She blanched, but before she could respond to yet another crude innuendo, or think too hard about what he’d just said, he followed up with the single most important thing he needed. “It’s the external movements I’m most concerned about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the address is outside the city, and I’m sure it is, then I’ll need to travel.”

  “We can get you documents,” she said.

  “I just need a sticker,” he told her, following her into her office.

  There was a sticker one of the Chicom patrolmen gave him when he was smuggling Harper out of the city that got them through the various checkpoints. He shouldn’t know about it, but he was hoping that the fear he put in her would somehow help her overlook some of the small details he was giving up.

  “No,” she said.

  “After what we just found out, Ms. Yeung, we cannot risk everything on half-measures.”

  “I’ll send someone with you,” she said. “An escort. You can travel in a diplomatic vehicle.”

  “Let me see what I can find,” he said. “If I can get an address, we need to move quickly. If not, we need to formulate a contingency plan to protect the company. That might mean bringing in your superiors.”

  “Let’s try to avoid that,” she said softly.

  Even Ming Yeung was afraid of Communist scrutiny. The principle of staying out of the light so as not to be seen carried through to them because that’s the world they grew up in. In America, it was a lesson they learned through a tremendous amount of fighting, losing and death.

  “I agree.”

  When they left, she said, “You can erase our entry, yes?”

  “If it’s necessary, I can.”

  “It’s necessary.”

  From his office, he anonymously accessed the security mainframe using a cloaking program. From there he went into the digital files, found the server room on the second floor and scanned the login registry. He found the moment he and Ms. Yeung made entry, erased two hours before it and shut off monitoring as of that moment. He also erased all traces of entry and exit for the morning. In its place, he patched the previous day’s entries for that exact timeline, crudely spliced them together, then exited the system.

  He stepped out of his office for a moment, walked to Ms. Yeung’s office and said, “Entry, exit and logins and logouts have been cleared.”

  “It’s scary that you can do that so quickly.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing that I’m a company man, isn’t it,” he said casually.

  “If you’re not, you’ll be a dead man.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” he asked, winking at the woman as he left. For a second—and maybe he mistook this—but for a second, he thought she might have blushed.

  Back in his office, he ran a system scan, a protocol that Ms. Yeung would not understand, but that he could explain as a custom search pattern for tracking TOR clients, should he be pressed on the issue at a later point. After about an hour of it, he shut it down, then went to her office with a restrained smile and said, “I got it. It’s an address in Oregon, just south of Roseburg in a town called Dillard.”

  “Oregon?” she asked, her jaw making an ugly drop.

  “It’s an unincorporated dump with a post office and about five hundred people. It’s a wonder the place is even on the map.”

  “How do they have the bandwidth to run something like this?”

  “It doesn’t take much, that’s the beauty of it,” he said, sitting in the chair in front of her desk. “As for Oregon, ten bucks and some of your soggy, duck feet soup says there will be a group of them there with motion detection for lookout, dogs for intimidating and guns for killing.”

  “What makes you say that?” she asked, her full attention on him.

  “You heard the part about a population of five hundred people, right?” he said. “I bet half of them have family trees that don’t fork. It’s just a guess, but the odds are fifty-fifty.”

  “How long?” she asked.

  “If I don’t run into problems, it’s eight hours there. I’ll stay the night somewhere, maybe in Medford—if I’m not shot for being a California Gweilo.”

  Ignoring the comment, she opened her desk drawer, got the keys to a safe, then opened it under her desk and pulled out what looked like a stamp booklet. “Here, put this on your windshield,” she said as she cut off a corner of the book with the single sticker.

  “I’ll be taking a motorcycle,” he added.

  “You’ll need an escort,” she said, handing him the official pass.

  “Not with this,” he said, taking it.

&nbs
p; Frowning, looking at him like he pulled one over on her, she said, “I guess it doesn’t matter. Just let me know when it’s done.”

  Standing up, he said, “You know, you’re prettier when you frown. You should try that more.”

  She tried to smile, just to spite him, and it would have been great had her genetic sequence not been all kinds of wrong.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but like the opposite of that.”

  “I don’t like you,” she said.

  “Yes, you do.”

  And with that, he stood up, smiled all the way to his desk, then finished out his day and went home.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  When he walked into his apartment and saw Kim, she was in white panties and a charcoal gray tank top eating a bowl of noodles and watching state run programming on TV.

  “You look exhausted,” she said. “Long day?”

  “Long week,” he replied.

  “Looks like someone came and got the bodies,” she said, looking at him extra long.

  “Happened late last night,” he said. “You were asleep and I didn’t want to wake you. No one came over while I was at work? I mean, to ask or complain about the noise yesterday?”

  “If you ran a slaughter house in here no one would complain,” she said, twirling her fork in the noodles. “So you got rid of them then?”

  “I did.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said, slurping a rope of noodles, “but you should have waited for me. What if you ran into trouble?”

  “I did,” he said.

  When he told her what happened, how he handled it, she said, “It used to be that a man was attractive if he had a good job, knew how to dress and liked to spend copious amounts of money on the ones he loved.”

  “Did you ever have anyone like that?” he asked.

  She laughed and it wasn’t a pretty laugh. It was rather gruff. Yet somehow it fit her personality. “I was a nerd. The only guys who liked me were good in math, dressed totally spastic and had big dicks they didn’t know what to do with.”

  “Sounds romantic,” he teased. “You must have been tickled pink.”

  “I want you to tickle me pink,” she said, setting the noodles aside. “Unless that was a one-off.”

  “It wasn’t a one-off,” he said. “But I’ve got some bad news and some worse news.”

  “Can I have the worse news first?” she asked.

  “There’s an EMP that’s about to detonate over the US. I’m not sure if it’s one or many nukes, but they want to knock the power out to take out the South American Army as it surges.”

  “That’ll kill our entire grid,” she said, aghast.

  “I know.”

  Shaking her head, picking up her bowl again, looking not at him this time, and not at the television either, she said, “You’re mistaken, aren’t you? I mean, we thought this would happen. We were actually sure, but...”

  “I’m not mistaken,” he said. “This is what Skylar needed to get to me. This was why she co-opted me I think. For a message like this.”

  “So when is this EMP supposed to hit?” she asked.

  “Seven days.”

  “What?” she said, sitting up so fast a noodle broke off and fell on her shirt.

  She didn’t seem to notice.

  “I think there are several things they’re coordinating,” he said.

  The second he got the all-access pass (sticker) from Ming Yeung, he’d sent a quick email to Tristan using the email address he’d found at Han’s desk. He knew by the password provided him that the contents of the server needed to be reported back to Tristan.

  The hacker had gotten back with him right away, wanting to know what Logan had found at the physical location. Logan told him about the countdown to the EMP.

  TRISTAN: That actually makes sense. The Arizona border wall has officially collapsed. Troops are converging into the country, splitting their forces three ways up the middle with the largest groups of soldiers and artillery heading to Southern California.

  LOGAN: What about the ships?

  TRISTAN: They’re halfway through the North Pacific Ocean carrying some very interesting parts.

  LOGAN: Such as?

  TRISTAN: A regiment of vehicles on two boats and replacement parts for nuclear generators on three others. Confirmation one hour ago. That’s why they’re going to hit the west coast with an EMP. They need to wipe out the SAA before it gets to CA, but not affect their incoming cargo. You have the time line. I think I have the location.

  LOGAN: Are you going to be safe?

  TRISTAN: Not sure my toilets will still flush. Pretty sure yours won’t either.

  LOGAN: Will you still be online?

  TRISTAN: We’ll see when it happens. 10-4 OAO.

  Over and out.

  As he sat there with Kim, looking at her, wanting only to be swept away in the essence of her, he knew what was coming. They were about to be tested in ways not even the Chicom regime could match. In fact, this being their operation, they were guaranteed to make a bad situation measurably worse. He didn’t even want to think about what would happen if the South American Army ransacked California.

  In a low, hollowed out voice, Kim said, “So basically the Chicoms are going to wipe out everything, then fight the foot soldiers with the troops and artillery now on boats headed our way?”

  “Yes, that sounds right.”

  “And then they’ll pick up what the South American Army attacked and claim it as their territory, effectively controlling half the nation.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She raised an eyebrow, blew out a breath, then looked at him and said, “Well I can’t say it’s a bad plan. It’ll suck for us, but at least we won’t be caught in the middle of their war.”

  “That we know of,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she replied.

  “All this talk of the end of civilization is giving me a softie,” he said. “I have to eat, then we can have sex, and after that, maybe we can eat some more and have some more sex.”

  “So what’s the bad news?” she asked.

  “I have to leave for Oregon in the morning,” he said. “I have to warn Harper and Skylar’s family.”

  “What about Skylar?” she asked.

  “She knew the risk.”

  “That’s cold,” Kim said. He shrugged his shoulders as he made himself a peanut butter and nothing else sandwich. “Hurry up and eat something, if this is the last sex I’m going to get, I want it ASAP.”

  “You should come with me,” he said.

  “And miss all this?” she asked, looking out the dirty window and fanning her hand like this was a game show and the world was her prize. “I don’t think so.”

  “You realize how much danger you’d be in, right?” he asked, the old bread breaking apart under the hard peanut butter.

  “This fight was always going to be a one way ticket, Logan. We’re in it until the end. And we’re not coming out unless we win.”

  “What if we don’t win?” he asked.

  “Then we’ll take as many of them down to hell with us as we can. Are you done eating already?”

  He looked up and she was already peeling her clothes off. When she was done—and there wasn’t much to take off anyway—she looked at him, made sure he saw her, then sauntered back into his room saying, “I’ll be warming myself up while you mess around with that sandwich.”

  Dropping the food, he walked back to the room after her, pulling off his clothes on the way there.

  After banging out a historic session with Kim, he laid there over the sheets, his body covered in sweat and the smell of sex, his mind, body and soul in need of rest.

  “What are you thinking?” she said, her hand flopping on his chest.

  “I was wondering if they were going to move me into a nicer apartment with this new promotion,” he mused. “That would have been nice.”

  “Is that normal when you’re promoted?” she asked.

  “It can be. But then I
was wondering if the housing authority took issue with you living here and Skylar gone. I mean, we haven’t been visited, so that’s good…”

  “If Yoav said he’s got it covered,” she told him, matter of fact, “he does.”

  “I trust him, but I’m also cautious.”

  Getting out of bed, putting on her clothes, she said, “Let’s go get our Unfettered Hate out of the way, then come back and do it again.”

  “Oh, you’re doing that now?” he asked.

  “Yoav got me my fake ID, so technically I live here now,” she said. “You will be up for another round with me, right?”

  “Mentally I’m up for the task, but I’m not sure my soldier is. I need rest, Kim. Serious sleep. In the morning, if we get up early enough, we can start the day out right.”

  “Put on your clothes,” she said, waving him out of bed. “We have to be ready.”

  She was suddenly super aware of standing before the television and participating in her Unfettered Hate.

  He got out of bed, put on his pants and a shirt.

  In the living room in front of the TV waiting for fake Mao to come on and tell them how glorious The People’s Republic of China was and how America now remained on a bent knee sucking the Communist banana, he said, “I’m glad you’re here, Kim.”

  With the phones pointed at them and the television on, the fake Chairman Mao Tse Tung—ruthless former leader and now dead dictator—appeared on the television saying the same thing he said every night for years.

  When prompted, Logan and Kim screamed at the screen, and at each other and at the windows. They screamed their hearts out because their screams were being recorded, checked for authenticity by AI voice analytics, and stored to be measured against the past screams.

  From what he understood of the rumors circulating among the staff at SocioSphere, if you failed to hit a certain level of energy during Unfettered Hate, they would take it that you were trying to hold on to your hatred and use it as fuel against them. Therefore, to not try was tantamount to conspiracy to commit treason against the state, and that carried with it a death sentence to be carried out on the spot.