Dark Days of the After (Book 1): Dark Days of the After Read online

  “You’re DEAD!” Yoav screamed. “Stabbed to death, beaten with batons, shot half a dozen times. GET UP!”

  Through all this instruction, the fight never stopped, and the punches continued to rain in. When his chest loosened and he could breathe again, he rolled out of it, scrambled to his feet (more like climbed awkwardly), and put up his guard.

  Someone kicked him from behind, sending him sprawling into the center of the makeshift ring. He looked back and saw Kim glaring at him.

  When he turned back to his opponent, he took a side kick to the head, which rocked him sideways into a brutal rib punch. He was now fighting two opponents at once. He didn’t want to be between them, so he worked to always keep one in front of the other.

  When he managed to stay on his feet, land a few decent blows and get his wind, a third person came in. Kim. For some perverse reason, she loved to beat on him. Where the others pulled their shots, this woman drove them in.

  “Rule number one in a street fight,” Yoav said. “It’s okay to hit woman and children. If they’re after you, it’s because they intend to kill you.”

  And with that, he played possum for two shots, barely managed to get off the hard edge of them, and then drove in an uppercut he felt was waiting for him.

  The shot put Kim on her ass. Even as two more men attacked, he kicked her in the face, knocking her out. He expected someone to call the fight, but one of the remaining two came in and now it was a triangle. Yoav grabbed Kim, dragged her out of the way.

  “Rule number two in a street fight,” Yoav said, “is that nothing is off limits.”

  The first guy to come in, Logan snapped a kick off his nuts, drove an elbow into his face, which he blocked against arms Logan knew he’d hurt. He quickly got around the arms, took several shots to the ribs and kidneys, then drove several knees into the man’s side while shins wailed on the outsides of his thighs.

  He told himself to keep going in spite of the pain.

  The last person came in and now there were four. The beating was like a mob scene; he was trying to push himself out the back door of it. But there was no way out. The pain kept getting brighter and sharper with each rallied blow.

  Still, all he could see was four opponents.

  Someone hooked his arm, but he got it back, lowered his head and got up under his dazed opponent. He took him to the ground, began beating on him.

  “You’re ALREADY DEAD!” Yoav screamed. “The second you went to the ground to take out one guy, these three KILLED you!”

  Logan kept wailing on the downed man until Yoav pulled him off and tossed him aside like garbage. Something in him had snapped and all he could see was red. He scrambled to his feet and went after the guy again, one of his many opponents standing in his way.

  He faked with a high left punch, which was easily checked, but drove a kick into the side of his shin with the ball of his foot, offsetting the man. The second he took a ginger step back, Logan shoved him sideways and he was back on the downed man, wailing on him again.

  Yoav started screaming, but he didn’t hear it.

  Hands grabbed at him, roughly; voices rose into the air, all warnings to stop. He couldn’t hear past that rush of white noise, all that cotton in his head. He was torn off the man again, mounted by Yoav this time and punched twice on the chin.

  The room went black.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Logan awakened to the muffled sound of voices. He did not open his eyes. He didn’t move. Instead, he listened, unable to understand what was being said at first. Mental clarity returned quickly though, and he began to understand.

  “….loose cannon,” one of the guys was saying. “He knocked out Kim, put Chuck on his ass and went after him like a dog—”

  “Do you think any of those Chicom bastards will be any less ruthless?” another man asked. This was his instructor speaking. Yoav.

  Logan laid there perfectly still, his chin smarting, his ribs on fire. He almost opened his eyes, but he was afraid of interrupting the conversation. Afraid he’d never hear their uncensored thoughts about him again.

  “No, but we don’t hurt each other here,” one of the guys said. Logan couldn’t tell who this was. He thought maybe it was Chuck.

  “I hurt him every time I train with him,” he heard Kim say, shaking off a knockout of her own. “And you know what he does? He fights harder. Doesn’t complain.”

  “I think he likes the pain,” Yoav admitted. “Look at his face.”

  For a moment, he knew everyone’s eyes were on him, looking at him, studying the abuse. He remained perfectly relaxed, even though his heart was beating a touch harder under the perceived scrutiny.

  “What did you do to him?” Kim asked, presumably to Yoav.

  “He hit the nighty-night button,” one of the other guys said. Logan recognized the voice as Paul’s voice. “I honestly didn’t think he had that button. I’ve been trying to knock him out since he got here.”

  “He’s got spunk,” Kim said. “I say we keep him.”

  A big, contemplative drawing of air into the instructor’s nostrils let Logan know his fate was being decided right then and there.

  Did he want to be in the Resistance? I do. But did he want to be the Resistance with them? For a moment, he wasn’t sure. Then he was.

  “Alright Logan,” Instructor Yoav said. “You can open your eyes now.”

  Logan drew a breath, calmly opened his eyes. Three of the five veteran fighters looked at him like they were shocked he was even awake, let alone alert enough to take them all in with clear eyes.

  Yoav walked over to him, helped him up and said, “Do you really think Skylar has been compromised?”

  “Yes,” he said, his brain feeling slightly overheated.

  Yoav asked, “Do you want in on this?”

  “The Resistance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course I do,” he said.

  “Good,” Yoav said, pleased. Then to Kim, he said, “You’re going home with him tonight.”

  “With me?” Logan asked, astounded.

  “She’s off the grid,” Paul said. “De-personed last year and moving in the shadows ever since. We’ve got her fresh papers though.”

  “De-personed?” Logan asked, not understanding.

  “I don’t exist,” Kim answered. “It’s for my own safety.”

  “What if Skylar comes home?” he asked.

  “Let’s cross that bridge when we get there,” Yoav replied. “Until then, it will be nice to have my bed back.”

  No one chose their quarters in the Chicom occupation. You were assigned housing, or you were sent to the refugee camps, or put in a cage, or simply shot for being an inconvenience. The fact that Kim could get papers and be reassigned housing unnerved him.

  “Where do you work?” Logan asked Yoav. “Because what you’re talking about isn’t possible unless—”

  “Don’t ask anyone questions,” Kim interrupted. “Not yet.”

  “Housing and Urban Affairs,” Instructor Yoav said, surprising Kim and the others. “I work inside Selection and Assignment.”

  Smiling through the pain, certain body parts hurting more than others—like his chin and his right floating rib—he said, “And you’re assigning Kim to me?”

  “Yes,” he said with a nod.

  “How can you do that?” Logan asked.

  “You know Tristan, I assume,” he said. Tristan the whole banana man. Before Logan could answer, Yoav said, “Yes, you do. I can see by the look in your face that you do.”

  “What’s that guy’s deal?” he asked.

  “He’s got a general disdain for the public, a serious loathing for the Chicoms and a wicked, if not wildly inappropriate sense of humor.”

  “Yes,” Logan said, “but do you know him personally?”

  “No one really knows him,” Yoav said. “But I know enough. And to know something about a man or woman, specifically their passion, is to understand their potential value.”

&nb
sp; “He hates the Chicoms,” Logan said.

  “His hatred for them started fifteen years ago. He’s how we all knew what was coming, what’s on tap for America.”

  “So what about me?” Logan said. “I don’t exert the same kind of hostility toward these people that you do. I mean, I didn’t before I met Skylar. Now I do. But I didn’t then.”

  “It was your smile,” Kim said.

  “C’mon,” he said with a frown. “I’m being serious.”

  “It’s true,” Yoav told him. “You first saw Skylar in a deli not far from here. You looked twice at her, then three times. You smiled, and then she smiled.”

  “People look at each other all the time,” Logan said, waving it off.

  “A girl can tell,” Kim said. “Besides, people don’t smile anymore. It’s dangerous. Yet you risked smiling at her, even holding her eye.”

  “That wasn’t when we got together,” he said. “That’s just the first time I saw her.”

  “She followed you,” Jeremy added, letting Logan know that everyone knew. “She found out where you lived. Tristan needed about ten minutes to tell us all we needed to know.”

  “So this was a set up?” he asked, somewhat sickened by the revelation.

  “She likes you,” Kim said. “Just not the way you want her to.”

  “I know that now.”

  “That’s only because this world won’t allow for romance,” Kim explained. “It’s cute that you want that, but we’re moved by a bigger cause. That’s what fuels us.”

  “I get that,” he relented.

  “You despise this tyranny as much as we do. On a carnal level, after watching our world cascading into ruin under these Communist sacks of shit, how can you not hate everything about this occupation? How can you not hate everything about them?”

  “I do hate it,” he said.

  “Skylar said you weren’t ready to admit this to yourself because there was nothing you could do about it.”

  “She was right.”

  “Because to admit that meant you were weak, victimized and hopeless,” Jeremy said.

  Logan was rendered speechless. They were recounting his exact thoughts as if they were their own.

  Perhaps they were.

  Kim added, “So it doesn’t matter if Skylar liked you or not. You’re with us now. And we’re out there killing Commies because we’re not weak, and we’re not scared. And that’s how you go from victim to vigilante. From vigilante to freedom fighter. From freedom fighter to liberated. After that, I promise, the first thing women like Skylar will want is a guy like you to love them, and protect them.”

  “So you’re going to start a physical revolution,” Logan said, breathless.

  “When the time is right,” Kim replied. “We’re networked here, in L.A. and in Portland. Pretty soon we’ll have Seattle, too. But if one of our factions fails, we all fail.”

  “How’s that?” Logan asked.

  Yoav said, “Because when you’re caught, when you’ve been outed as a traitor, the things they do to you…you can’t begin to understand the depravity of a true Communist regime, let alone this one.”

  “Do you remember when those idiot college kids were walking around wearing Commie headbands and carrying AK’s like they were tough or something?” Jeremy asked.

  “Back when the colleges convinced them that Communism was a good thing,” Logan said, remembering a brief time like that just before 2020.

  “They didn’t know the first thing about Communists, even though they blew up Twitter with talk of how wonderful Communism was,” Paul said.

  “Then they had their guts pulled out of them,” Yoav said, his gaze turning dark. “And they had their fingers and toes chopped off and fed to them, or their spouses, or their children. When that happened, they knew what real Communism was. But by then, it was too late.”

  “They would really go that far?” Logan asked.

  “When they feed you your own child,” Kim said, her voice soft, that lost look in her eyes, “when they make you eat them with a loaded gun to your head…”

  Yoav took her by the shoulder and said, “It’s okay, Kim.”

  She shoved his hand off her and said, “That’s when you realize the true depravity of it, of them.”

  “You asked about our body count,” Yoav said to Logan, changing the subject. “Corbin, what was yours in the first week of you snapping?”

  Corbin was perhaps the most ferocious of the bunch, a man of few words, a man whose face was both emotionless and scarred.

  “Twenty-six Antifa off-shoots, including two leaders, one of them a founder.”

  This stilled everyone.

  “What’s your count now?” Logan asked, curious.

  “I’m in the triple digits,” he said, his eyes flat and dead looking, like there was not an ounce of remorse or feeling in him.

  Logan couldn’t help wondering if one day he’d have that same look in his eye. Was this what he was slated for in life? A life of fighting? All he wanted was to get together with Skylar, maybe carve out a sliver of life for himself, and for her. That’s all he wanted. And that’s why he felt betrayed. Skyler used that to co-opt him.

  They all did.

  Now he wasn’t thinking about sex or any of that other dreamy stuff. He’d let the idea of being with Skylar go. He was even letting the idea of his once great job slip away in favor of vengeance. These vicious despots stole his state, his city, his life. Now all he wanted to do was kill as many of them as he could before ending up in his own body stack. Or a dumpster. Or worse, dead in the gutter of some street with a name he couldn’t even pronounce.

  With nothing left to say on the subject, Yoav went and gathered up the small slips of paper containing the address for the next training session. He handed Logan his first. A surprise. In addition to the address, there was a phone number. Yoav’s number.

  “Just in case,” he said with a proud grin.

  “Thank you,” Logan said, humbled.

  “You did good tonight, in spite of what the others said,” Yoav admitted. “There is no room for hesitation, cowardice or quit. I still want to find Skylar, but we need people like you, too.”

  “I won’t let you down,” he said.

  When Kim got her slip of paper, she looked at Logan and said, “Are you ready?”

  “I am,” he replied.

  And with that, he was about to take a new woman home to his apartment. She took his hand the moment they walked into the street, which he knew was a way to keep the face and emotion scanning cameras from picking up dissent. But the way she held his hand? That was different. Unexpected.

  It was as if she would’ve chosen to do so anyway.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When they got to Logan’s house, Kim glanced around at the mayhem and the dead bodies. He saw her reaction and immediately said, “I gave the maid the week off.”

  “Looks like you gave her the year off,” she said.

  He shut the door, quietly marveling at the mess the intruders created. He didn’t say much to her, even though he knew he should show her to her room, but there was still a small part of him that was holding out hope. For the last ten minutes, he’d been hoping to come in and find that Skylar had returned.

  “Unfettered Hate is in ten minutes,” he said, his body feeling every last ache and pain now.

  “I don’t do that,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “We should probably get rid of the stiffs,” she said, looking them over.

  He pulled up the blinds, opened the windows. She looked out of the fifth floor window down to the dank alley below. It was shrouded by darkness. Nothing moved.

  “Where’s the nearest body dump?” she asked. She was talking about the place the Chicoms piled the corpses before burning them.

  “There’s a stack two blocks from here. They just burned two nights ago, so this one is relatively fresh.”

  “Do you get much traffic back here?” she asked, taking out the
screen.

  “Not after dark,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll hear the Chicom patrols in the alley. But mostly not.”

  There was a broken down BMW snugged up against the building’s brick wall. It had been there for months. For awhile, two guys were living in there. Not anymore. One of them was killed inside, the other stuffed in the trunk with the lid left open as a warning to others.

  “That BMW you see down there,” he said, “if we drop the bodies in front of that, if we can keep them against the wall, they won’t be seen from the street.”

  She was already dragging the first body over.

  “You’re looped?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  They hoisted the body head-first into the window, then shoved him forward, each of them grabbing an ankle so they could dangle him out and aim him straight. Holding him like this was a lot harder than he thought it would be. The man was heavy, and Logan’s arms were as shaky as Kim’s. They counted to three then released their grip.

  The first corpse fell slower than they thought, but hit harder than expected. The thud sounded like snapping bones. Big ones, like the vertebrae. The body hit and fell over sideways, his back broken in half.

  “I like it when a plan comes together,” she said with a rare smile. “Let’s give him a friend.”

  Logan checked the clock. He couldn’t miss Unfettered Hate.

  Five minutes.

  They got the other body to the window, lined him up and let him go. It was on a perfect trajectory, but when it hit, the body’s arms shot forward, his face pancaked on the asphalt,

  “Whoa!” they both said at the same time.

  The former Chicom compacted rather than toppled over. He’d face-planted against the building, one extended leg resting against the bricks, the other flopped over at the knee.

  “Dammit,” she said.

  “Yeah, that won’t fly,” he replied. “Not for long.”

  “The Chicom patrols, if they’re out there, will take a smoke break during Unfettered Hate,” she said. “We need to get them to the stacks. Sooner rather than later.”

  One minute.

  “Go hide in the closet,” he said. “Quick. I’ll tell you when I’m looped back up.”