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

by Schow, Ryan

  Three software engineers, one of the IT managers and a hardware designer were all killed for not expelling enough hatred. They’d kept too much inside. That was wrong. If they had any hatred left, it was only a little and only because Chairman Mao said it needed to be stored for the next day.

  But what if there wasn’t a next day?

  “Enough!” the fake Chairman on television snapped.

  Logan and Kim fell silent, their chests rising and falling from the strain of doing their part to reassure the state that in even the most mundane of tasks, they were loyal to the Chicoms.

  Logan dared not show emotion for the cell phones were connected to the smart TV’s and they were connected to the Nest system both on the wall and in the kitchen.

  Any significant deviance from the norm would be recorded and flagged for variance.

  After it was over, Logan shut off the television.

  “I’m going to bed,” he said, taking his phone with him into the bedroom. He looped the digital recording in the dark, then set the harmless phone on the dresser where it would be playing a recording and not invading their privacy.

  “If you’re not going to take me for another ride,” she said, “then at least let me cuddle.”

  “If I had known you were like this outside class, I would not have been so hateful toward you.”

  “When you get back into town, if you come back and there is no EMP, then I will go harder on you than before.”

  He laughed and pulled back the blankets. Watching her as she undressed, he was actually looking forward to her crawling in bed beside him. To think he’d spent all that time dreaming of Skylar only to now be sharing a bed, his body and his affections with Kim…

  Who would have thought?

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Harper didn’t remember falling asleep, she didn’t remember dreaming, and when she opened her eyes, just the right amount of sunlight was cutting through the window. She woke rested, relaxed and ready for the day.

  It wasn’t like that back in the city. She never smiled, for every day was you praying something would give or change. It was you hating your life, the people around you, everything that eviscerated the world you once loved.

  Making matters worse, each day somehow managed to bring about more pain than the last.

  It wasn’t like that now. Not up there. Not in the woods on the outskirts of Five Falls, Oregon. For that, every day felt like a gift. Something to treasure.

  She moseyed into the kitchen where Connor left some literature for her on the table with a note that said: New girl—start reading.

  Laughing, she picked up the first of half a dozen old books about making ammo and thought, I guess it’s better than writing software the enemy would later use to enslave you.

  She’d been reading a thin manual with old ink that felt dry on the page. A yellowing around the edges, and the slightly crisp feel of it, gave the indication that this book had been passed down through the generations.

  This book was short, easy and pretty clear. She got the fifty-foot overhead view of what making your own ammunition was all about. It seemed pretty simple. Basically, you took the old casing, removed the primer and set a fresh primer. After flaring the end of the casing, you add the gunpowder and the projectile, and then you run it through the press and bingo, you’re done.

  Easy peasy, fast and sleazy.

  It was the measuring of the gunpowder and the making of the bullet itself that required both precision and artistry. At least, that was her assumption. That’s where Connor came in. Ammo was his specialty.

  “Morning,” Connor said. Cooper trotted into the kitchen after him, sniffed her, then sat down closer to Connor than her.

  “Good morning,” Harper said.

  “I see you got the literature I set out for you,” he said.

  “I figured it was for the other new girl,” she joked. “Thought I’d start reading it anyway.”

  “Sorry, I forgot your name for a second. I kept thinking Harley, but that’s because I miss my Hog.”

  “It’s Harper,” she said.

  “I know that,” he replied, sitting down and waving off the comment. “Now if I could only get Cooper to remember.”

  “Is it Harley?” he said to Cooper. The dog just sat there. “Or Harper?”

  Now Cooper raised an eyebrow and looked at her. This caused her to smile, and to feel like maybe she wasn’t such a stranger there anymore.

  “Good dog!” Connor said, scratching the pup’s neck.

  “So which one of you is Connor and which if you is Cooper?” she asked. “I keep getting the old dog confused with the new dog.”

  “I named him for that very reason alone,” Connor grinned. “See, Orbey took to yelling at me a decade or so ago. Maybe even more. It’s not my favorite thing, I’ll tell you. Now, when she wants to yell at me or him, she has to stop and think of which one of us is named which.”

  “Clever,” she conceded.

  “She started yelling at the dog, calling him Connor. I used to say, ‘That’s Cooper!’ and laugh and that would piss her off. Then she’d yell at me, mistakenly calling me Cooper because she’d been yelling at the dog all day, and I’d say, ‘Darling, I’m Connor,’ and this would piss her off even more. She got frustrated, I got amused, and soon the yelling stopped.”

  “So you got your way,” Harper laughed.

  “It only took a few weeks. But then she found she’d gotten her way, too,” he said. “Soon as she stopped yelling, I started behaving more. It was kind of a give/give situation I forced through sheer brilliance.”

  “How long have you been married?” she asked, picking up one of the other books he’d left her.

  “Gonna have our fortieth here in a few years,” he said, proud. “Don’t tell her how happy I am about it, but know that even though I grouse like a fussy old fart, it’s because these bones are getting creaky. It’s not her. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “Awe…that’s sweet.”

  His eyes flashed with worry. “Don’t tell her I said that either. Knowing her, she’ll use it as leverage for later.”

  Harper started laughing again, something she hadn’t done in years. “You guys are funny,” she said.

  “It’s a balancing act we got down a couple of years ago. This is the most at peace I’ve ever been and I don’t want anything getting in the way of my Zen life. Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s all about to go sideways. I just want to enjoy it while I can.”

  “Speaking of your Zen life, I read enough of this little book to understand some about you making fresh rounds.”

  Of course, when she told Connor she understood the process, he smiled at her, then looked at Cooper and said, “You hear that, boy? The new girl understands the process.”

  “I mean from a general overview,” she tried to say. Looking at the dog, she said, “You know what I mean, don’t you Connor?”

  The dog whined, then looked up at Connor as if to say, “I know her name, why doesn’t she know mine?”

  “It’s okay, Cooper, I know who you are,” she said, whispering and putting a hand to her mouth to conceal the message from Connor.

  Chuckling, maybe even starting to like her, Connor said, “Yes, but do you know how to make the primers, the casings, the projectiles?”

  “You just buy the separate parts and hand load the ammo, right?” she said, still preoccupied with the dog.

  He looked at Cooper and frowned. Harper sat up and fixed him with a grin. She was talking his language, wasn’t she? Her grin faded. When he looked back at her, Connor wasn’t smiling. What did she miss? The blonde-haired, self-proclaimed computer nerd was not smiling anymore. She knew what this was. By saying she read a pamphlet and understood what he did, she’d minimized his life’s work. She would never be as passionate as him in this regard.

  On that point, she wouldn’t argue with him either.

  Still scratching behind the German Shepherd’s ears, then getti
ng a quick kiss from the pup, Connor said, “See how easy all that sounds? You just do this and that and when you need more bullets you go to the store for bullet parts.”

  “If I was an expert already,” she said defensively, “I could be petting the dog and making fun of you. Wouldn’t that be amazing? It would be so much fun.” She said this with a fair amount of exaggeration, but not a hint of humor.

  “Did you read up on swaging?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Well you’re going to need to have at least a basic understanding of the process if you want to work with me.”

  “I thought I was planting the garden and helping you keep the property safe,” she said. “Beyond that, I have my own responsibilities.”

  “You do, as long as we have power, but this ain’t no Club Med, sweetheart. We don’t just sit around and sleep and water the garden. There’s a lot to do to prepare.”

  “I get it,” she said, feeling like a fish out of water. “This is all new. I mean, I’m a computer nerd. A software engineer who somehow managed to become a central information hub for the west coast Resistance.”

  “That sounds easy,” he said.

  “I’m only in communication with everyone trying to save the country, so yeah, it’s totally easy.”

  Sitting up, he said, “I was wondering what it was you did.”

  She stared at him and he stared back. He was the first to break. He smiled at her, softened his eyes, tilted his head like he was listening.

  After almost forty years of marriage, she could see he’d learned a thing or two about winding a woman up then diffusing her without much bloodshed.

  “At noon each day,” she offered, “I pick up intel from the various pockets of the Resistance around the west coast. I gather it all together, then separate the gossip from the actionable intel and disburse a clean report accordingly.”

  “So you’re kind of important,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “To me, you’re still the new girl.”

  “I get it,” she said.

  “Well, new girl, we’re rolling stones around here. We gather no moss. That’s why every day it’s boots on the ground, not asses in the seat.”

  “Well this ass needs to be in a seat for about an hour a day. Around that, I’m all yours, I’m not afraid of hard work, and I’ll level up to where you need me.”

  “Can you fight?” Connor asked.

  “Like a savage,” she said in a no-nonsense tone.

  “Hand to hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you want to live this life, you go from consumer to producer. That’s not just about the food you grow. I’m talking about ammo. Every round you pop off when you get into a gun fight, the casing goes somewhere, you need more gunpowder, more lead, another primer, a copper jacket if that’s your thing. You have to make these decisions in the fight and on the fly.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “I’m not yanking your girl-chain. You think about the primer you popped, the casing that’s gone—if you’re forced to leave it—the gunpowder you’ll need to reload a fresh round, the bullet you’re going to have to create. There will be a time when we run out of rounds and if we haven’t been smart, this will be one of a hundred possible reasons that we’ll die, or worse.”

  She started to understand what he was talking about, where he was coming from. He and his family were out here on their own, living off the land, defending their property with weapons and intimidation, as evidenced by the dead body a couple hundred yards away. The fact that they were planning for a dark future made everyone start thinking differently. Now, with her latest intel, it seemed like it would be here sooner rather than later.

  “A swaging wad cutter is a machine you use to press your bullets,” he said, pulling her from her short reverie. “You need to understand how the machine is built, why it works the way it does. You need to know how to thread and unthread the press, how to seat the punches, the proper amount of lubrication between the parts.”

  “What about the lead?” she asked.

  “I have a thousand pounds of cores,” he said. “Best to have what I can in case situations somehow get a bit sticky, which they will.”

  “Doing this, making bullets, that’s your specialty, though,” she said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m all about learning new things and pulling my weight…”

  “If I die, who continues the process?” he asked. He was reaching back down to Cooper again, who was now nuzzling up against his leg.

  “You’re still young,” she said.

  “My kind of young in a modern world isn’t young if you’re living in the dark ages, surviving off the land, defending your property, and under Communist rule.”

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Sixty-three.”

  “Orbey?”

  “She says it’s not polite to talk age with women, but I’ll tell you this, with me she’s robbing the cradle,” he answered with a conspiratorial wink.

  “So what’s this swage wadmaking thingamajobber?”

  “Swaging wad cutter. It makes the bullet. Some people melt lead alloys in molds, but for us old school guys, we basically compress and shape the cores into a slug using pure, mechanical force. I don’t mess around with heat and all that jazz because, if the power goes out, then you can’t make anymore lead.”

  “I’m less worried about the power going out than I am about having to drop down and polish the Chicom boot.”

  “We don’t do that here,” he said, sitting up. “Just so you know, we’re proud Americans. We aren’t bootlickers, we don’t acquiesce to those Commie pricks, and we won’t give up anything without shoving the full force of our will straight up their rusty tailpipes.”

  “That’s you and Orbey,” Harper said. “And that’s me. But what about Stephani? She seems a little…eccentric.”

  “She loves her bees enough to punch a hole right through you if you mess with them.”

  “I gather,” she laughed.

  “She’s just misunderstood,” he explained.

  “Yeah?”

  “She took up with a guy in town last year,” he said, leaning in. “Got that just-right taste for a new life. A love life, if you know what I mean.”

  “You mean she lost her virginity?” Harper asked, quietly.

  “Shhh,” he said. “I wasn’t saying that if anyone asks, but right now I’m not saying I didn’t say that.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Go on.”

  “Anyway, she and her new beau were in town when a military brigade rumbled by. Those sickle and hammer cocksuckers—pardon my French—they paraded through town in their jeeps and their transport trucks like we were lucky to have them there. And Stephani’s new man, being strapping and in love, with all that false bravado coursing through him, he decides to exercise his defiance.”

  “Uh, oh…”

  “He double barrels them as they passed through”—and this is where Connor whipped out the double middle-fingers for effect—“telling them to suck a giant…well, you know what…and he did that for Stephani, like a complete fool in love.”

  “What happened?” she asked, rapt.

  “They shot him in the head then laughed about it. One minute my daughter was standing there with her new man, her life finally coming together, and then she was standing over his corpse. Even worse, his blood was all over her.”

  “My God,” she said.

  “Yeah, you’re spot on. Anywho, she don’t sleep well now, gets a little hostile over stupid stuff, and spends a lot of time with those bees. I swear, them little flying creatures—when push comes to shove, if its about either the bees or us, for either cause, she’ll go down fighting, I assure you that.”

  “That’s good to know.” Nodding her head, envious of their bond, Harper said, “You’re a tight family. That makes you a very lucky family.”

  “We stick together.”

  “Me being the new girl, an outsider,” sh
e said, “it must be strange having me here.”

  “I won’t lie,” he said. “It is.”

  “What about you?” she asked Cooper. “Are you okay with me?”

  The dog lifted its head, gave her the once over, then whined in the back of his throat and laid back down.

  “He hasn’t decided yet,” Orbey said from behind them. “He’s still developing his instincts about others, though.”

  They both turned around and the older-than-sixty-three year old woman had the most beautiful smile on her face. Her hair was fashioned into a ponytail, her eyes were bright, and her clothes were pressed and nice.

  “Seeing you smiling is probably the best part of my day,” Harper said, “yet it’s also very strange and hard to get used to.”

  “Why is that?” she asked, her smile infectious.

  “Because no one really smiles in the city anymore. If you’re smiling, the Chicoms think it’s because you have something over on them. For us, down there, it’s like wiggling a slab of meat in front of a rabid dog.”

  “That sounds terrible,” she said.

  “I watched a man and woman laughing once, not knowing the Chicoms were out on foot patrol. They interrogated the couple and then they shot them. We all watched it happen.”

  “Right there?” Connor asked. “Right in the street?”

  “Interrogations from them are about three or four questions, followed by barked orders to turn around, or get on their knees. No sooner are they in position do the gunshots crack into the air and justice is served.”

  The smile fell from Orbey’s face. Harper instantly felt bad. She didn’t mean to take away the fresh start to her day, but those were the realities of the life she lived. The life much of the urban west coast was living.

  “Hundreds of people die a month in the streets by firing squad,” she continued. “A few of them are justified. People like you and me, people who refuse to drop down and suck the Communist D—pardon me, Orbey—lose their minds. It happens all the time. They go aggro and try to take out as many of those Commie pricks as they can.”