Dark Days of the After (Book 5): Dark Days of the Purge Read online

  Dark Days of the Purge

  Ryan Schow

  Copyright

  The eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy so that you may read it with a clear conscience and not one day end up in hell over a shitty technicality. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  DARK DAYS OF THE PURGE

  Copyright © 2020 Ryan Schow. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, cloned, stored in or introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form, or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the express written permission of the author or publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Author’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents—and their usage for storytelling purposes—are crafted for the singular purpose of fictional entertainment and no absolute truths shall be derived from the information contained within. Locales, businesses, events, government institutions and private institutions are used for atmospheric, entertainment and fictional purposes only. Furthermore, any resemblance or reference to an actual living person is used solely for atmospheric, entertainment and fictional purposes.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Cover Design by Milo at Deranged Doctor Design

  www.RyanSchow.com

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Also by Ryan Schow

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Your Voice Matters

  The Tears of Odessa: A Look Ahead

  Seven Books. One Great Price.

  Also by Ryan Schow

  THE COMPLETE DARK DAYS OF THE AFTER SERIES:

  THE LAST LIGHT OF DAY (PREQUEL)

  DARK DAYS OF THE AFTER

  DARK DAYS OF THE SURGE

  DARK DAYS OF THE ALBATROSS (INSIDE ORIGINS OF HONOR ANTHOLOGY)

  DARK DAYS OF THE APOSTASY

  DARK DAYS OF THE ENCLAVE

  DARK DAYS OF THE PURGE

  THE COMPLETE AGE OF EMBERS SERIES:

  THE AGE OF EMBERS

  THE AGE OF HYSTERIA

  THE AGE OF REPRISAL

  THE AGE OF EXODUS

  THE AGE OF DEFIANCE

  THE COMPLETE LAST WAR SERIES:

  THE LAST WAR

  THE ZERO HOUR

  THE OPHIDIAN HORDE

  THE INFERNAL REGIONS

  THE KILLING FIELDS

  THE BARBAROUS ROAD

  THE TERMINAL RUN

  THE COMPLETE SWANN SERIES:

  VANNIE (PREQUEL)

  SWANN

  MONARCH

  CLONE

  MASOCHIST

  WEAPON

  RAVEN

  ABOMINATION

  ENIGMA

  CRUCIFIED

  Chapter One

  A dozen Chicom guards lay dead all over the grounds of the Roseburg Airport. Most of them were perforated with bullet holes, their faces slack, their eyes turned up to the overcast sky. The detention facility’s tyrant, the sadist several prisoners identified as Na Huang, was among the deceased, but he was different than the other guards, for his body was without its head. Even though the asphalt was slick with the blood of these invaders, Na Huang had experienced the most violent ending of them all, one perfectly befitting of his character. His head was found nearby, the face twisted, the hair filthy, the skin sufficiently soiled from being kicked around the airport runway by hundreds of prisoners leaving the liberated facility.

  Glancing around the grisly scene, Longwei Zhou felt a dark satisfaction creep over him. He didn’t want to take delight over a massacre of this scale—because no one should have to lose their life like this—but seeing the war zone littered with dead men he considered his mortal enemies left him feeling elated nevertheless. The sensation passed as quickly as it had come. In its place, a darker, more upsetting emotion unfurled within him, a wicked, nagging feeling that left him with a pit in the bottom of his stomach.

  Standing inside the airport grounds, smoke from the burn stacks wafting through the air and freed people leaving en masse, he couldn’t help but stare at the two bloody pikes. Felicity’s parents heads had been staked there. He felt a rise in his stomach, like nausea, or a bit of stomach acid turning to bile. He turned away, unable to look at them. Instead, he took in the other sights. The human waste, the vomit, the corpses—most of them guards, but a few of them dead prisoners. There was no exuberance in war. No satisfaction to be taken from so much death. This was indeed a victory, but in the larger scope of things, this battle was but a grain of sand on the mile-long beach that was the Chicom/SAA/American conflict.

  “C’mon, let’s go check out the back of the building, see what we can find,” Quan Li said. He was talking to Longwei, but Longwei felt the disconnect between him and the scene around him. Quan snapped his fingers in his face, shaking him from the unexpected trance. “Hey, earth to Longwei.”

  “Sorry,” he said, fighting to shake the emotions loose.

  In the back of his mind, he couldn’t stop seeing that look on Felicity’s face. First it was the heart crushing revelation that her parents had been killed, but then it was the maniacal rage that consumed her, a rage that took her to places a young woman should never go in the pursuit of retaliation. Seeing the dark, twisted expression that consumed her when she beheaded Na Huang was a look that would forever haunt him. She was just twenty-two, still innocent before all this. But not anymore. A terrible sadness stretched out inside of him, one he didn’t understand, one he found to be profoundly upsetting.

  Quan was still looking at him, brow furrowed and perplexed. “What?”

  “I was just thinking of Felicity.”

  “Whatever it is you’re feeling, use it but don’t get used by it,” Quan said, eyes on the burning Department of Transportation building. The building Felicity blew up. Quan waved the team over, several of them coming at a soldier’s trot. To all of them, Quan said, “We need to see what we can scrounge up before the entire place burns down.”

  Longwei nodded absentmindedly, still floundering in his emotions. Once this was his team, but now Quan was calling the shots. Had he lost control of his people entirely? Part of him didn’t care. Whatever the case, the team headed into the back of the burning building, hoping to gather up some contraband before departing.

  Lienna was suddenly at Longwei’s side. Like him, she was squinting against
the smoke-filled air, and using the crook of her arm to cover her mouth and nose. Behind the building, where the fire had yet to reach, the air wasn’t as bad. Quan tried the locked metal door. It didn’t budge, so he pulled out his pistol and shot it. He tried again, but it still refused to open.

  “Here, try this,” Longwei said. He handed Quan a shotgun he’d just picked up.

  Quan racked a load, stood back, fired on the lock, then handed the shotgun back to Longwei and kicked in the door. Together they moved inside, guns ready, making sure there weren’t armed holdouts as they cleared the rooms thus far spared from the spreading fire. Inside, the air was slightly smoky, as well as hot and stuffy. They had but a few minutes. Longwei felt his lungs constricting, and he was overcome by a small bout of coughing, one that did little to clear the grit in his lungs.

  “There’s got to be a weapons room somewhere around here,” Quan said.

  Farther in back, Longwei heard Lienna call out.

  “Found it!” she said.

  Lienna was a thirty-year old woman Longwei recruited in the early days of the Resistance. She was fierce, loyal and smart. Plus she could fire a gun with a fair amount of proficiency and she wasn’t afraid of a fist fight. Longwei was first to find her. A rare smile crossed his face. They were in the weapons room that looked freshly stocked. Quan was next in. A smile touched his mouth as well. Longwei had never seen the man smile before. It made him uncomfortable. Without ceremony, he and Quan started pulling down handguns, rifles and shotguns. Others were quick to join, their delight apparent. Lienna and her male counterpart, Fai, gathered up stacks of ammo, handing them out to the others like candy in October.

  “We’ve got sat phones,” Gang said. Gang was an older man, a former vet, and a hell of a good shot. He was smiling as well. Gang’s younger, bigger brother, Chang, found them. He stared at the cache of weapons and ammo and said, “Sweet Jesus, what did we do to deserve this?”

  “Flushed a couple of turds down the cosmic toilet,” Fai joked with little enthusiasm. “Stop staring and give us a hand.”

  Quan turned and looked at Longwei. Longwei was only now realizing he hadn’t moved.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Quan asked.

  “I don’t know,” Longwei said, still shaken. “I mean, this was no big deal, but…”

  “What?”

  “What Felicity did—”

  “That again?” Quan asked, stopping what he was doing. Fai looked at him, but Chang was busy gathering up ammo with Lienna. Quan stepped forward, his head close to Longwei’s head, right in his personal space. Privately, he said, “You have to push that crap out of your mind, or at least compartmentalize it. You can fall apart when we win this war. But not a minute earlier.”

  “Can we?” Longwei asked, not as quiet as Quan had been. “Can we win the war? Because these are but a few men. There are hundreds more Chicoms out there, maybe thousands.”

  Now they all looked at him. He felt the weight of their curiosity, their concern, their judgement. Longwei had assembled this crew on the idea that they could win. That they would win. Yet there he stood after another victory, acting like the bottom fell out of his mood, his convictions, his very being. He wanted to talk about what he was feeling, but how would he describe it? Would they even understand? Whatever tortured emotions Felicity carried as a result of this war now infected him, like a cancer of the mind, her horrors clawing at his constitution.

  “Of course we can win,” Quan hissed. “In this life or the next.”

  “We either get rid of them while we’re alive, or we get rid of them by being dead,” Steve Daily said, the last to join them. This was Longwei’s white guy. The only American born patriot in the group. He’d just entered the building, not bothering to cover his face. “I found two more of those commie rats trying to scurry out the back door.”

  “And?” Lienna asked.

  “Two shots, two confirmed kills. Plus I picked up two more guns and three full mags.” Looking at Longwei, Steve said, “What’s your problem, sourpuss?”

  “I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “Nothing.”

  “Whatever it is, figure it out,” Steve said flippantly, “we’ve got a lot more killin’ to do before the day is done.”

  “By the day,” Longwei said, “I’m assuming you mean your life.”

  “Exactly,” Steve replied, eyes on the stockpile of weapons. “I want a shotgun and a Glock, if y’all have one.”

  When they were loaded up, when the fire threatened and the smoke became too thick to deal with, they hauled the rest of the loot out of the building and divvied it up. A few of the Roseburg locals saw them and headed over. Quan didn’t seem to mind. They had more weapons than they could manage, so Longwei and Quan handed out a few of the guns and some ammo boxes to a few of the Roseburg survivors, men who looked like they knew their way around the weapons.

  “What’s your name?” Longwei asked one of the locals, a guy who helped him sort out the ammo, matching the right caliber to the right weapons.

  “Zeke Jeffers,” the man said.

  Longwei shook his hand, graced him with a courteous smile. He was polite, but attentive, and he wasn’t greedy. But there was something in Zeke’s eyes that Longwei recognized. Fortitude, perhaps. Maybe even endurance. The thirty-something man had been worked over pretty good, had a little blood buildup in his right eye, and carried himself gingerly on his left leg. It looked like a new injury, not permanent, by the way he favored it.

  “Are you okay?” Longwei asked, nodding at his leg.

  “Yeah, just had one of those maggots kick the side of my knee a few days back. It’s on the mend, like everything else. How are you doing?”

  “Good, I guess,” Longwei said.

  “That girl who cut off Na Huang’s head,” Zeke asked, “she was with you?”

  “She was,” Longwei said.

  “I’m not sure if I should be scared of her, attracted to her, or in awe of her,” Zeke said, stuffing a few shotgun shells in his pockets while taking a box of ammo for the Chicom rifle he picked up.

  “I’m none of those things,” Longwei said. Zeke looked at him funny. “All I feel is sadness for her. She came here with the intention of freeing her parents, not seeing their heads mounted on stakes.”

  The blood seemed to rise in Zeke’s cheeks; he nodded, struggling to find the words. “Good point,” he finally said.

  “If we need you,” Longwei asked the man, sternly holding his eye, “are you around?”

  Zeke nodded, then said, “I’ll find something to write my address on, and if you ever need me, I’ll have a militia ready.”

  “Yeah?” Longwei asked, encouraged.

  “Yeah. Not pansies either. These’ll be guys who can handle their own. Guys who aren’t afraid to run into hell to keep this from happening again.”

  “You waited too long,” Longwei said.

  “Like frogs in a pot of water,” Zeke agreed. He ran his hand through a thinning head of whitish blonde hair. “It was all nice and warm until we realized the water was at full boil. By then, we were in cages.”

  “This is what the communist Chinese do,” Longwei said. “They oppress you inch by inch until you’re trapped and unable to get free. Then all that’s left are drastic measures and servitude.”

  “You guys definitely got the crap end of the stick,” Zeke said.

  “So if my team comes back, and I’m sure we will,” Longwei said, “you said we can count on you and some guys to be ready for war?”

  “I’ll make sure of it,” Zeke said, shaking Longwei’s hand once more. “I’ll get you my address and directions before I go. Better yet, why don’t you guys stop by for dinner. I’ve got half a cow ready for the grill and a root cellar stocked with potatoes and cheap beer.”

  “I wouldn’t want to impose,” Longwei said, the idea sounding too good to be true.

  “It’s no problem at all,” Zeke said. “I also have a few spare beds if you and some of your guys want to cras
h for the night. It’s the least I can do for what you guys did here.”

  Longwei wasn’t one to accept the generosity of others, let alone that of complete strangers, but there was something about Zeke that put him at ease. And the idea of a steak and a beer grabbed him and wouldn’t let go. He was prepared to graciously decline the offer, but then he thought of going home and seeing Felicity’s face and decided otherwise. He politely accepted on behalf of him and the three other guys heading home with him.

  “Are you sure you’re okay with that?” Longwei said.

  “Hell yeah, I am,” Zeke said, animated. “Otherwise I’m just going to be there alone, and I don’t really want to be alone.”

  Longwei turned and asked his guys about staying. All three of them nodded, their eyes widened by the idea of a celebration involving food and spirits.

  In one of the Jeeps, after seeing Quan and most of his team off, Longwei, his three guys and Zeke headed up the hill into a nearby neighborhood that was once nice, but had since fallen into disrepair.

  “This is really your place?” Barde asked Zeke as they pulled up to the very large home. Longwei’s best guy was wide-eyed and in awe.

  “Confiscated it early on,” Zeke said, walking them inside. It smelled a little musty, with an underlying odor of herbs and old carpet. “The owners either left or this was some kind of vacation home. Either way, it was pretty much cleaned out when I got here. It’s mine now. That’s how it works, you know. You just see something you want, or need, and you take it. Kind of like how you just killed those guys to get us all out.”