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

  “She’s…?” Connor started to say, the reality of it dawning on him.

  Harper nodded her head. Yes, Skylar was sleeping with the Minister of Propaganda to get intel on the Chicom infiltration of America.

  “What exactly is happening?” Orbey asked.

  “It’s not good,” Harper said, cryptic.

  “We can handle it,” Connor said. Outside there was whining. It was Cooper at the back door wanting in. “Hang on a second. The big baby wants in.”

  He went and opened the door and Cooper trotted in, smelling everyone, then sitting on the floor at their feet.

  “The big cities have been taken over all along the west coast,” Harper said. “Mexico is moving on the southern states, with the exception of California. There the Chicoms held them off. It helps that the border wall is still standing, but it’s taken its fair share of abuse.”

  “What states are they coming through?” Orbey asked.

  “Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Texas is the stronghold for now. Arizona and New Mexico are weak links. Before all this began, most of the states had already been infiltrated from the inside. China was the most dangerous. Its spies had already infiltrated the colleges and turned them into re-education camps in disguise. After that they penetrated businesses, government organizations, NGO’s and even the US Military.”

  “How is that even possible?” Orbey asked.

  “To a large degree, they used the media, hate speech and racial division. When you control the media, the Hollywood studios, the youth through colleges and professional sports through proxies like Nike, you pretty much own the country’s official narrative. Now imagine you’re backed by European wealth, and sold out by your own government…is it really that hard to imagine?”

  “I thought that was just some conspiracy,” Orbey said.

  “Yeah, I never heard of any of that,” Connor said, kneeling down to pet Cooper.

  “Just because you never heard of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. All these people turning us against each other, then telling us everything would be alright, they were the foxes in the hen houses.”

  “Yes, but still,” Orbey said. “Nobody believes anything anyone says anymore.”

  “If you knew half the things that have been done, you’d lose your mind. But we don’t. We didn’t. Before all this started, our minds were weak, we became puppets, stopped thinking for ourselves. That’s why these things are so hard to hear. Yet, if you set foot in the cities and see the control measures there, you’d wonder how you never saw it coming in the first place.”

  “You were talking about Mexico…” Orbey prompted.

  “Oh, yes,” Harper replied. “They already had networks set up to take back these states. La Raza, which means the community¸ was by and large a way for many of the immigrants fleeing the violence of South America and the cartels to resettle into America. But like anything, there were small parts of any movement that were not as pure as others. Factions of La Raza began to turn against America years ago. They waved their flags while burning the American flag, stoked racial violence, basically protested the US immigration laws many of them were violating.”

  “I saw this break out in L.A. quite a few years back,” Orbey said.

  “The legal migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador hated this more than most Americans. We couldn’t understand why people we took under our protective arm would despise us this much, but to many of the legal migrants, they knew what this was. It was an uprising in America by the very same oppressive and violent forces that metastasized and overtook Mexico.”

  “But these are rag tag groups,” Connor said. “How could they rise up the way they have?”

  “Strength in numbers. Plus, you take even the tamest of animals and dangle something in front of them and they can’t help but take a swipe at it. These people aren’t animals as much as they’re opportunists, and this is an opportunity.”

  “So they paved the way for South America to surge up through the border?” Orbey asked. “Is that it?”

  “They’ve got bulldozers ramming the wall on both sides,” Harper said. “There are massive riots and half a war waging between Texas natives and those saying it was never Texas’s land to begin with.”

  “So we’re dealing with the Chicoms here on the west coast, the Southern Armies are coming up through the border and what…?” Connor asked, forgetting about the dog as the bad news appeared to almost age him by the minute.

  “Are you sure you want to hear the rest?” Harper asked.

  “How do you know all this?” Orbey asked.

  “That’s why I was inside SocioSphere, to gather intel from the largest server bank in the nation. Maybe even the world.”

  “It’s worse than this?” Orbey asked.

  “I’m afraid it is,” Harper said. “We can eat lunch though. Let’s not talk about these things and spoil an otherwise lovely day.”

  “I want to know,” Orbey said, more direct. Harper looked at Connor but Orbey said, “He’s fine. He plays like he’s the domesticated husband but he’s got a mean streak in him a mile wide. You just haven’t seen it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “The European Union officially lost control of the last of the European states. Now they’re using their army to overtake America’s east coast. The African Union’s army, however, now has control of Miami and Jacksonville, and they’re reportedly headed north, on a collision course with the EU army.”

  “I didn’t even know there was an African Union,” Connor said. “Let alone an army large enough to seize those cities.”

  “Slave traders in Africa joined forces with drug lords two years ago and now you have a continent that traffics in sex and violence. When you have that kind of culture, you need an army to quell the uprising.”

  Shaking her head, her hand to her mouth, Orbey fought not to appear disturbed, but it was clear she was having a problem with the information. No one wanted human suffering. No one wanted to see any nation fall, let alone lose their life, their sovereignty or their future to the worst of humanity.

  “What is the aim of the African Union?” Connor asked.

  “It started with white women,” Harper said. “At least, that’s the intel I received. They first touched ground in Miami. They swarmed the coast in boats, snatching up every pretty girl they could see. White, brown, black, Asian…it didn’t matter. They’d grab them on the beaches and from the shopping malls, they’d take them from grocery stores and parking lots. After that they stuffed them on boats and sent them back to Africa. When the AU arrived and saw the picking was easy, they wanted more. As of my last transmission, they’re moving up the eastern seaboard as we speak.”

  This is when Orbey turned away. She couldn’t take anymore.

  “I’m sorry, Orbey,” she said. “This is a big pill to swallow, I know.”

  “What about our President?” she asked. “How can he not do anything at all about this? And why isn’t the military responding?”

  “People within the State Department were compromised as far as I can tell. They sold our missile codes to China, used malware to weaken our weaponry, and they leaked critical missions in both China and the Middle East. This was why America began losing the ground war in the first place. At least that’s the case under this President.”

  “But why would our own government do that?” Orbey asked. “They took an oath.”

  “They were guaranteed a better future it seems. A decade ago, China was promised the world reserve currency by the central banks, which meant it would be taken from us. If you know anything about that, losing the world reserve currency would damn near break the country. The former President tried to move us back to the gold standard and nationalize the central banks, but the call for debt repayment happened behind the barrel of a gun, and that’s how we lost our way. As for the new President, he went to China months ago. We were told he was back. He wasn’t. Some channels said he was still in China, operating from there remotely. No
one bought that. A lot of us knew he’d been compromised at the highest levels of the State Department. Word finally arrived a few days ago and it wasn’t good. The President has officially been gutted and is now hanging from a fixture erected in Tiananmen Square. He’s hanging like a freaking tree ornament.”

  “He’s dead?” Connor asked, aghast.

  “Slaughtered and strung up by the ankles as a message to the world that China is now the dominant world power.”

  “Why haven’t we seen this?” Orbey asked, her face as white as a sheet.

  “You mean like on the news?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because our media is run by the Chicoms,” Harper explained. “We only see what they want us to see.”

  “It’s been like that for fifteen years now,” Connor said. “If the Chicoms are trying to assert dominance, I’d think they’d show us something like this.”

  “They will in due time,” Harper said.

  “Well what are they waiting for?” Orbey asked. “America to fall?”

  “America has fallen,” Harper said.

  “Then what?”

  “When they take out our infrastructure, it will be so they can bring in theirs, under their full control, ruling us with an iron fist.”

  “And that’s when they’ll announce it?” Connor said, looking a little peaked.

  “No, they’ll announce it when they rename our country The People’s Republic of America.”

  This was the thing that drove Harper to dig in and fight to take back what was once theirs. This was the war she was fighting. It wasn’t just an occupied California she worried about. It was the death of a dream. America was the great experiment in freedom. They always knew that America could remain free so long as the checks and balances were working, that government remained separate but equal. After the attempted coup of the last President, after the complete denigration of integrity and the stoking of division through planned channels, the weakened system fell easily under the forty-sixth President. The same President she’d seen pictures of strung up in China before sending a secret message to Blue Lark.

  This was the last transmission she sent to Skylar, the one that got her caught by Logan.

  Now she was there. Out of the fight. Tucked away in the forest in a dinky town called Five Falls, Oregon with a dopey Sheriff, poachers for neighbors and a super creeper pedophile running Five Falls Feed & Seed.

  Sitting down, she tried to wrap her head around everything. She was the leader of this Resistance cell, the San Francisco cell, but she had to bug out under threat of death. And Skylar? She sent the letter for a reason. Was she compromised? If she was, the Chinese would make an example of her. Or maybe they wouldn’t. To admit she’d been caught infiltrating one of the highest positions in the land would mean there was a way for others to penetrate it as well. Plus, for the Minister of Propaganda to make such an admission would cost him his life.

  If Skylar was going to die, it would be quietly and no one would ever know about it. Was that what was happening now? Was she dead already? Left in a ditch? Rotting?

  Just then Stephani burst through the back door and said, “I swear to God, you’d think every one of those guys is a straight up pipe chugger.”

  She stopped when she saw the looks on everyone’s faces.

  “What’d I miss?” she asked.

  “Cooper just let out the worst fart,” Harper lied. “Almost made your mom cry. Nearly did it to me, too.”

  She knelt down, took the dog by the sides of the face and said, “Did you make a stinky?” He looked at her, then lowered his head back down to the floor. “I don’t smell anything.”

  “We opened a window,” Connor said.

  “Cooper, tell me the truth,” she said. The dog didn’t move. “What did you feed him?” Stephani asked, looking at Connor specifically.

  “Nothing, but we don’t know if he ate something outside,” Orbey said. “It was pretty bad. But let’s not dwell on that. How are the bees?”

  “Good,” she said, looking around, suspicious.

  “We made peanut butter and honey sandwiches,” Connor said.

  “Deal me in,” she said wiping sweat from her brow. “I need to freshen up. Maybe go and show the outhouse who’s boss.”

  “Take the dog,” Orbey said.

  “Cooper, come!” she said. The German Shepherd jumped to its feet, instant energy, and trotted behind her as she went to her room to change.

  There was some silence, but it was clear Orbey was still bothered by their conversation. She finally asked, “Are you sure all this is happening?”

  “Yes,” she replied, regretfully. “That’s why I need to get on your computer. You have internet service, yes?”

  “Yes,” Orbey said. “Hughes Net does our satellite service. You can access the internet if you want. Skylar set it up. It’s still operating on something Skylar called the clear net. Is that right?”

  “She said you’d know what to do about THOR,” Connor added.

  “TOR,” Harper said, grinning. “It’s how you gain access to the dark web. That’s where we communicate a lot. It’s untraceable.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The clear net is basically everything you can see and access through search browsers. But the dark web and the deep web are unindexed sites. In other words, they’re not trackable, therefore they’re not traceable.”

  “That’s where all the bad stuff happens,” Orbey said, although Harper thought she meant it to be a question.

  “There are hitmen for hire, drugs and guns for sale, people for sale, children, and even red rooms.”

  “What’s a red room?” Connor asked.

  “It’s where people pay to watch someone get murdered in real time. People bid on the means of death.”

  “I can’t hear this anymore,” Orbey said. “Just, please stop.”

  Nodding her head, Harper said, “This is why I do what I do, Orbey. Skylar knows you can and will defend your land. She also knows you’ll defend me, too, if it comes to that. I can protect myself, but I still have to work.”

  “If things are going to collapse here,” Connor said, “there’s a few people who are going to have to die right when everything kicks off or we’re going to be in trouble.”

  “That’s what Orbey said,” Harper replied.

  “And she’s right,” Connor said, grim. “I just don’t like what that means.”

  Orbey cleared her throat, sat up a bit straighter. Harper watched her trying to get back to her more hospitable self. Forcing a smile, she said, “We’ll pray over it when Stephani gets done cuttin’ plumbs.”

  “Cutting plumbs?” Harper said.

  “That’s how we say doing number two,” Connor said. “You’re either cuttin’ plumbs or you’re sending a fax to Cleveland. Dealer’s choice.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  She laid down for a nap, but sleeping during the day had been no different than sleeping at night. The nightmares unfolded without warning.

  In her dreams, the gunshot had her tossing and turning. And the dead body? It was just laying there, a red bloom on the hip, one perfect hole in the head. Then the explosion, the smoke, everyone on the ground in a slow motion scramble. She started killing. She began stabbing people, the Chicoms, and when she was done, she just stood over one of them, watching him die.

  She woke up, sweating, the sheets damp around her, her forehead not only mapped with perspiration but running with actual sweat.

  Sitting up, she saw the sun was still up, but it wouldn’t be for long.

  She rolled her neck, heard the popping and instantly felt better. The weight of the dream weighed on her heavily. These mishmash dreams she was having, these were snippets of actual events in her head, which had her feeling even more lousy than before. Slowly she got to her feet, then fixed her hair and left her room. Orbey was in the kitchen making supper.

  “Can I help with something?” Harper asked.

  “No, but thank you. Wh
y don’t you get some fresh air before it gets too cold,” she suggested. “Besides, the kitchen’s small, maybe even too small for the both of us.”

  “It’s okay with me,” she said.

  “Stephani and Connor are up at the barn if you want to go there, too. This is my happy time, sweetheart.”

  She wandered outside, smelled the fresh air, the trees and shrubs, the hearty earth smell beneath her feet, then the fresh cut cord of wood.

  She walked around the four foot by eight foot length of chopped wood, fingered a few bullet holes, felt the memories coming back. It was like this in her dreams. Just like this in real life when she first arrived.

  Down the slope of the hill, past a couple hundred yards of meadow grass, was the edge of the trees. She started down the gentle grade, careful not to slip or twist an ankle. A few minutes later, she was standing over the mound of dirt knowing a dead body was down there. The missing man the Sheriff would love to find. If he found out what happened, people would go to jail.

  She might even be one of them.

  Trekking back up the hill, she walked over the ridge and past a clearing that held Stephani’s bee hives (there were nine of them on four-by-four posts held up by cinder blocks). Beyond that, in a larger clearing, on top of a flat hill, was the barn and a dozen half-naked men at work.

  Half-naked sweaty men…

  When she got there, every eye found her, and a few lingered. Most, however, went back to work unhindered.

  “Come up here, Harper,” Connor said. It looked like he was talking with one of the guys, maybe the foreman. Cooper turned and bolted toward her, circled her, then came at her side, tongue out, as if she was someone he’d like to either present or protect.

  “Look at you,” she said, “winning over my affections.”

  “Harper is new here,” Connor told the man, “but the barn will be hers. I appreciate all of you here, but if any of your men so much as lay a hand on her, or talk crass, I’ll kill you.”

  He said this without a hint of humor. Maybe this was the version of Connor that Orbey warned her about. The Connor that would risk everything to protect his family.