Dark Days of the After (Book 2): Dark Days of the Surge Read online

  Dark Days of the Surge

  Ryan Schow

  River City Publishing

  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 SURGE

  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 eBook 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

  Visit the Author’s Website: www.RyanSchow.com

  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

  Chapter 25

  Your Voice Matters…

  The Last Light of Day: Inside Look

  Dark Days of the Apostasy: A Look Ahead

  The Last War Series: An Inside Look

  Also by Ryan Schow

  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 APOSTASY (FEB, 2020)

  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

  Night was hell. Waking up was much worse. Even before he opened his eyes, there was a pain in his heart he did not imagine possible. With a hitch in his throat, Logan turned and looked at Kim.

  She’s just asleep, he thought.

  “Liar,” he heard his mouth say. He held back a sob, felt the well of anger churning low, working its way up from his gut into his heart.

  He got out of bed, looked at her again.

  “She’s gone, idiot,” he told himself. Glancing around in Skylar’s old room, he hated what he saw. Not only was she gone (dead most likely), Kim was now gone, too.

  One room, two deaths...

  He reached down, touched her skin. She was cold to the touch. A sob shook him and he couldn’t look at her. Standing there, shaking, caught in that dark chasm between sadness and rage, he was frozen still.

  That’s when he realized how cold he was. He’d been freezing all night. Shivering. That was what happened when you didn’t have heat. The building seemed to not only grab ahold of the cold, it had trapped it inside the walls as well.

  His grief finally gave way to anger and he found himself feeling erratic. Stomping out into the living room, he went to his room for more clothes. When he got there he saw his bed, the blankets pulled back, a huge brown blood stain where Kim had bled out.

  Averting his gaze, his mouth making animal noises that seemed to start from the back of his throat and work forward, he looked around, found the nearest lamp and launched it across the room. It shattered against the wall unceremoniously. The guttural noises he was making became the sounds of steep and howling rage, a deeply tunneling pain.

  He picked up the end table, ran with it toward the window and hurled it through the glass. It sailed down five floors to its death in the alley below.

  There were bodies down there. The stack of men he threw out last night. Visions of beating one of them to death overtook him, stilled him.

  Who had he become? What had this oppression made him? It all went back to the weak politicians, the government sellouts, the quiet Chicom intrusion, the dead President. Had the country not had turncoats in office, would this situation be different? Would the nation be different? Would he be different?

  Back when he was just a boy, when his head was geared toward video games and writing code, he knew the nation had issues. At nearly two-hundred and fifty years old, the country weathered her fair share of bumps and bruises, but she had managed to stand strong. He was naïve back then, incautiously optimistic. He had figured his freedom would continue to be free and, living out the American dream, he’d one day go on to work for SocioSphere as a programmer. Eventually, Logan got that job. But after the founder, Atticus van Duyn, disappeared, everything went to hell in a hurry.

  He shook this train of thought loose, unwilling to revisit the past. Taking in his surroundings, some of the fog in his head lifting, he saw an apartment destroyed. In the back room, Kim was dead. Skylar, his dream girl, was gone. Even worse, he’d become a killer, part of the Resistance, a man without a job, a way back to Oregon, or the means to survive.

  They say if you ever got caught in the city after an EMP, you can pretty much kiss your chances of survival goodbye.

  He wasn’t going to make it. They’d detonated the EMP early, catching everyone unaware, even those “in the know.”

  He heard voices down in the street below, the sounds of a scuffle taking place. He leaned out the broken window, saw a threesome of Chicoms harassing a group of people below.

  He grabbed his coat, his stolen pistol and his Karambit knife, then he took a deep breath and fought for some sort of reason to stay. He could think of no such reason. He already knew what he was going to do, what he had to do.

  Taking one last look around, he set his jaw and surrendered to his fate. He had to end this. Logan’s eyes wandered back into Skylar’s bedroom, his gaze landing on all he could see of Kim: her legs. The dark, lonely feeling grabbed him again. This had broken him. He was broken. Narrowing his eyes, his grip on the pistol he was holding tightened. A chilly breeze coasted in through the broken window, flowing over him, driving ice into his veins, burying the bitter cold deep in his bones.

  Turning, he ripped open the door, stalked down the hallway, then tromped down the stairs, passing people, answering no questions, making no issue about brandishing a weapon when citizens were not allowed to own guns.

  At the ground floor, he shoved his way out of the stairwell, passed up a swiftly departing crowd of people, then burst outside and onto the sidewalk where the Chicoms had lined up nearly a dozen dissidents and were shooting their way through them.

  Walking with his gun outstretched for aim and readiness, he got as close as he could knowing he couldn’t hit things with precision from so far away. When the first Chicom saw him, Logan began firing.

  Seven rounds later, he was staring at three downed Chicoms. The wailing of innocents started, but it was all white noise in his head.

  Standing over the injured men, not even thinking, just reacting the way a person pushed to their limits in the wake of such horrific bloodshed would react, he put three more rounds into the squirming bodies. They were all head shots. Now people were running from him.

  He was the hero, wasn’t he?

  I’m the hero.

  Soon he’d be the martyr.

  He collected the pistols from the downed Chicoms, ejecting their mags then tossing the empty guns. His eyes went to where the Chicoms had bee
n shooting. He found a mother, a young boy and three men lying dead on the street. Two more were shot and would be dead in minutes. Logan looked at the young boy, how his eyes were turned up, how his jaw was slack and his face was pale. He had three rounds in his chest.

  The streets were officially packed, save for the circle of space around him. Up the street, he heard more gunshots, more screaming. Most everyone was moving away from the barking noises.

  He headed toward them.

  He pushed through the crowds, ignoring the eyes upon him and the condemnation he was sure to see and feel. But then he saw the truth of what he was missing. People were looking at him both in fear and in awe. This fueled him. Kept the surge of adrenaline pumping.

  Half a block later, he saw Chicoms pushing people around just outside their Jeep. The door was open and it was still running. There were too many innocents for Logan to open fire, especially with his poor aim. Instead, he stuffed his pistol in his coat pocket, pulled out his curved Karambit knife and prepared himself.

  Moving through the crowds, eyes on the Chicoms, he closed the distance. When he was right there, he heard the yelling, the demands being shouted, the screeching of orders in a language he didn’t understand and had come to hate. Everything flashed red before him as he pulled up on that hatred and did what he needed to do. He cut and sliced his way through the two men, blood geysering out everywhere.

  It should have been satisfying, but in truth, he felt nothing.

  The pervading feeling that he wasn’t really killing these men overcame him. It was almost as if half his body had split, and that the half he occupied was detached from the other half doing the killing. Instinctively he knew what was happening. He saw the gruesome affects both with his own eyes, and with the eyes of separation. He was moving fast, the crowds parting, the foreign soldiers trying to raise their weapons to fire on him before he trenched open their wrists, rendering their hands and fingers useless. He saw it all, but he could not feel it. It was like he was already gone from this world, already dead. Was he? Am I?

  His Krav instructor, Yoav, told him that if he ever felt like he’d reached the end of his life, his only obligation was to drag as many enemies to hell with him that he could take. And he was going to hell. For this, for the slaughter his body was committing, there was no way God would allow him entrance to the Kingdom.

  In that moment, he knew this and he set this truth aside. If he could take out evil to save good, how could God spite him? How could He look unfavorably on Logan when what he did was meant to save lives, not take them?

  All this introspection and still his body worked the dead Chicoms over. He slammed back into his body, saw through one set of eyes again, felt the blood dripping off him, his hands shaking with adrenaline, his heart keeping a relentless pace.

  Looking around, the eyes of strangers upon him, he felt their judgment once more, even though he didn’t see it. Was this really his own judgment masquerading as theirs? Or was this God looking down on him in condemnation?

  He felt his entire body break into gooseflesh. There was a message in him, almost like it was dropped into his brain the way an email drops into an inbox. Should he communicate this message to the masses, or keep it for himself.

  The silence around him was overwhelming, deafening almost. All he heard was the ragged breath leaving his mouth and nose. The message, however, needed to get out of him, as if his tongue were holding it hostage, and only after speaking it could he be truly free.

  “This is the new now!” he announced. “This is our chance to rout them out and take our country back!”

  To this poignant, yet simple speech, no one said a thing. Standing there, garnering no cheer or praise, he felt awkward to say the least. He told himself it didn’t matter. His mind was overwhelmed with the memory of Kim—how she moved when she fought, how she looked in the shower, in bed satiated, left dead in a pond of her own blood. He wasn’t doing this for these people, or even for himself. Right then, he was exacting revenge for all of those he liked and loved who were now gone.

  Move! he told himself.

  Kim had his mind, Skylar had his concern, and Harper had somehow grabbed ahold of his heart.

  Move!

  In his mind, these were all the people he liked, loved, adored most, and they were all gone, dead, impossible to get to.

  His motorcycle was crushed, his body aching, and nothing in town was working.

  Move.

  Where was he going to go? Was he just going to go on a killing spree until he was pumped full of Chicom lead and lying dead in the street, his life worth nothing, his legacy no more significant that a dead rat’s legacy? Or could he walk to Oregon?

  Hell no.

  Perhaps Kim was right. Preparing for war was never about escape. Knowing and understanding the fight was about digging your heels in and waging an impossible war with a formidable, if not unassailable, Chicom army.

  The mindset was to kill them all.

  The reality, however, was far more complicated.

  Kim was smart, and Skylar determined. In the back of his mind, he knew they understood the risks. There was one hundred percent chance they’d die, and probably early on. There was no way to win this war. But to him—and he’d only recently decided this—winning was dying on your feet, not on your knees before a scourge of tyrants.

  If he was going to die, he’d die dragging as many of them down to hell with him as he could.

  Rather than rally together a pack of scared but dedicated Americans and call them troops, he stood on his tippy-toes and searched the streets in both directions. Half his brain was telling him to walk to Oregon, but the other half was telling him that only this moment mattered and to make it count.

  When he started down the street, the crowd parted for him like the Red Seas, not out of reverence, but because he was an armed man on a mission. An unsung hero walking into a gunfight with a death wish and a savior’s mentality. Not that they would see it that way.

  To the masses, he imagined he was just some maniac who lost his marbles and threw the mother of all bitch fits. The truth was Logan Cahill was no hero. He was just a guy with some fighting skills and some weapons who had officially snapped. And if he was being honest with himself, he was really only a guy who would probably get a lot of people killed by the end of the day.

  Nevertheless, he moved through the crowds of cold, hungry, hysterical people, his head on a swivel, his eyes searching for more Chicoms to take his aggressions out on.

  It only took him a few minutes to find what he was looking for.

  Two Chicom soldiers were demanding that a group of people either go back to their homes, or get against the wall and be shot. One of the men they were pushing around pushed back. He was shot in the head for his defiance.

  By then Logan had slipped quickly and stealthily through the crowds. When there was no more cover, he walked up on the soldiers fast and pumped two rounds into them.

  Both soldiers dropped dead.

  He reached down, stripped them of their weapons. A teenaged boy was looking at him, his face dirty, his expression neutral, as if all the horrors he’d seen suddenly rendered him immune to such grievous displays of violence. He had a backpack on, but it looked empty.

  “What’s in there?” Logan asked.

  The boy looked at him, but did not respond. Logan snapped his fingers in the boy’s face and barked the question again.

  His eyes cleared and he suddenly seemed alert.

  “Extra socks, my re-education manual?” he said, although he phrased it like a question, which seemed strange.

  “Take out your stuff, give me the backpack,” Logan demanded, talking with his gun.