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

“Who was roaming your land last?” he said, taking out a notebook.

  “Couple of boys,” Orbey said. “But they were a ways away.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They started lobbing rounds at the house,” Orbey said, grabbing four plates. “You sure you don’t want some eggs, Sheriff? I made plenty.”

  “Lobbing rounds?” he said, ignoring her hospitality, which Harper would have thought to be an impossible endeavor.

  “I can put some cheese on them if you want. Sprinkle in a little bacon, some chives. I really don’t mind.”

  “This ain’t a friendly visit,” he finally said, frustrated with her hospitality.

  “Don’t make it unfriendly,” Harper replied, looking right into his eyes as if she was one of the Madigan clan as well.

  “I have a dead kid on my hands,” he relented. “So maybe you could cut me some slack.”

  “Where’d you find him?” Harper asked.

  “Haven’t yet.”

  “So then you have a missing kid,” she said. “Not a dead kid.”

  “Yeah,” he grumbled.

  He tried to straighten his hair, make himself more presentable. Harper was sitting right next to him. She leaned in and whispered, “Don’t bother.”

  “This missing kid…” Stephani prompted.

  “He was last seen on your property, so naturally I’m here to ask a couple of questions.”

  “We haven’t seen anyone missing out here,” Connor said.

  The Sheriff rolled his eyes, looked down at Cooper, who barely raised an eyebrow for the man.

  “Why don’t you just come clean,” he said, putting away his pencil and notebook.

  “About what?” Orbey asked.

  “The dead kid, Mrs. Madigan,” he said, more anxious than ever. “I have a dead kid on my hands.”

  “Then go attend to him and let us eat our breakfast!” Connor finally snapped. “Now we’ve been polite, but you aren’t exactly catching us at the right time. There’s lots to do and our breakfast is hot. So grab a plate and you can be a friend, or take them dirty ass socks, stuff ‘em in your boots and get to stepping.”

  “I have a warrant,” he said.

  “Let’s see it,” Stephani asked, taking a steaming hot plate from Orbey and handing it to Harper. She set it down, her heart thundering in her chest at the thought of the Sheriff poking around.

  “I haven’t got it here,” he said sheepishly.

  “One last time, Sheriff,” Orbey said.

  “No eggs, dammit.”

  “Watch your manners,” Connor said, rising up over him. “You’re in my house as my guest, and if you so much as say one more crass word, or show my wife anything less than perfect respect, I’ll haul yer ass outta here on my own, law or not.”

  Standing up, backing away from his chair, he said, “Forgive me, Mrs. Madigan.”

  And then, without another word, he left.

  “I used to have so much respect for the law,” Harper said. “Now no one seems to remember their manners.”

  Orbey watched him walk down the hill from the kitchen window. When he was gone, she said, “If he does get a warrant, if he brings the dogs out here, you know they’ll find the body, right?”

  “Yeah,” Connor said.

  “I’ll dig it back up and burn it,” Stephani said. “One of the hens is having some serious issues. I can put her out of her misery, then mangle her a bit and bury her. We can say the coyotes got her.”

  “It’ll certainly fool the dogs,” Connor said.

  “Consider it done,” she said. Then to Harper: “You need to go up to the barn, see what they’re doing.”

  “I wake every morning to the sound of hammers and saws,” Harper said. “I know what they’re doing.”

  “Everything’s nearly framed out,” Stephani replied. “Insulation and plywood is going up today followed by drywall and texturing tomorrow. I’d think you’d be excited.”

  “I can paint if it helps,” Harper said, looking for something to do. “After egg collection, it’ll keep me busy.”

  “They’ve got a sprayer,” Connor said.

  “Back hoe guy is coming tomorrow, right?” Stephani said, chewing eggs and talking with her mouth open.

  “He is,” Orbey replied.

  “For the underground shelter or the root cellar?” Harper asked.

  “Root cellar,” Stephani said. “We’re starting the underground shelter next week. Just need to make sure all these guys are out.”

  “Why?” Harper asked.

  “Because they’re simpletons,” Connor said. “They’ll see three women, an old guy and a harmless pup in possession of an underground shelter. It’s different if it’s just us four and a barn. When the crap hits the fan, if they survive and it gets bad enough, they’ll come up here and we’ll have a war on our hands.”

  “We’ll win,” Stephani said, forking in more eggs.

  “Maybe, but every war has its casualties,” Orbey said. “I like you guys in one piece.”

  “I’ll bring you the kerosene,” Connor told Stephani. “Harper, you help dig this morning. You can do eggs tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  If she was right, they were referring to digging up the dead body.

  Orbey and Stephani looked up, smiling and making sounds like they were impressed with Harper’s manners. Nodding his head, smiling and proud, Connor said, “Now that’s what I’m talking about ladies. Orbey, Steph? You two taking notes? It’s ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir.’”

  Laughter permeated the kitchen, filling the house with some much needed happiness, and though there was hard word and potential troubles ahead, that suddenly felt far removed enough for some levity.

  “I just have to be back here at noon,” Harper said, feeling lighter than before. “Beyond that, like I told Connor, I’ll do whatever else you need.”

  Orbey said, “New girl now has a name, Connor.”

  “It’s Harley, right?” he said with a wink.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When they finished breakfast, put on their shoes, their gloves and grabbed a pair of shovels, Harper said to Stephani, “How many people have you killed here?”

  “Counting the guy Orbey shot the other day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just one,” she said.

  “Do you think this will become a thing?”

  She wasn’t terribly worried about killing people. After the first few kills, you start to tell yourself stories about them, how the dead deserved it, how it was either you or them. For awhile, that suffices, but then the dead start to inhabit your dreams. Pretty soon, you can’t keep all the bad things down, so you just learn to live with them, with the ghosts of them.

  “As things get worse, the idiots will get worse along with them. They’re always sniffing around here anyway. You know, hunting at the back of the property, or camping. Their campfires are a dead giveaway that they’re here , or the sounds of them shooting. That’s why we need to stay on them. But if they keep ignoring our warning shots, we’re going to have to walk those shots right up to them until they realize we mean business.”

  “This guy’s buddy,” Harper said as they approached the dead man’s grave, “he knows what happened. He knows we shot him.”

  “I’ll take the fall if it comes down to it,” she said, driving the spade into the fresh dirt. “I just need to know my bees will be okay.”

  “It won’t come to that.”

  “I won’t let my mom do time for this fart knocker,” Stephanie told her.

  They started digging and didn’t let up. Some hours later, Orbey came out on the porch and rang the dinner bell.

  Harper turned to Stephani and said, “Is that the lunch bell or the noon bell?”

  “Close,” she said. “It’s eleven forty-five. Lunch is at noon.”

  They dropped the shovels and headed up to the house. Harper fired up the computer, connected to the satellite internet, then began checking her various acc
ounts. She used the same encryption key as before, but having now relocated, she’d have to jump back on the dark web and grab another.

  As she ate, she did just that.

  After grabbing a stored encryption key and firing it out to the others in a return email, she began to peruse the data she was receiving. The more reports she saw, the slower she read. She wasn’t sure when the tremors in her hands first started, but she became aware of them about the time Stephani asked if everything was alright.

  She looked up and said, “I…I don’t know.”

  The bottom layers of the skin in her face felt hot, a rush of blood and fear starting that fire below. Warning bells chimed and she couldn’t stop them.

  Looking away, she said, “Give me a few minutes to digest everything here, and I’ll catch you up on the details.”

  “Is your food okay?” Orbey asked her.

  Harper was sitting at the built-in desk a few feet away from the kitchen table, a laptop in front of her, her half-eaten lunch beside her.

  “It is, Orbey,” she said, taking a quick bite, even though her stomach was still tying itself in knots. “I’m so sorry, it’s just…there’s a huge data dump from multiple sources and…oh God…yeah, it’s…it’s just a lot to process.”

  “What’s wrong?” Connor asked. “You don’t look well.”

  If Harper hadn’t seen the satellite photos, she could have pretended the situation didn’t exist. But it did exist. And it was worse than she thought.

  “Just reading about troop movements along the southern border,” she said, sugar coating her activities. “The pictures I’m getting…they’re not pretty. The South American Army penetrated the southern border wall and they’re now flooding in.”

  “Where to?” Stephani asked. She was eating a sandwich, her appetite unaffected, her curiosity at a level six out of ten.

  “They split up just outside Tucson. It looks like the smallest regiment is heading for Phoenix. Another is moving east toward Albuquerque, or maybe they’re going all the way through to Texas, I can’t tell just yet.”

  “And the other contingent?” Orbey asked. She looked like Harper felt… restless, fretful, sick. “Where are they heading?”

  “The way it’s looking?” she said. “California I think.”

  “Is that bad?” Stephani asked, chomping down on her sandwich, nearly halfway done and ready to get back to digging it seemed.

  For being reasonably thin, the woman sure could put away some food. Then again, whenever she saw Stephani, she was always doing something, and it was usually hard work.

  “The Chicoms are bombing highway 8 down by Yuma, Arizona,” she announced. “They’re also bombing highway 10 coming in through Blythe at the California/Arizona border. And it looks like they laid waste to highway 40 at Needles.”

  “So they’re taking out the highways, forcing them to go around, or—” Orbey started to ask.

  “They aren’t just dropping smoke bombs, they’re obliterating the highway and every reasonable entry point into the state. Plus, Chicom military forces are arriving in the Port of Long Beach. Troop transports have been heading to these entry points into the state en masse.”

  “What’s that doing to the cities?” Connor asked.

  “If the South American Army wages war on the Chicoms in the occupied states, which is what we’re thinking will happen, we’ll have a hot war in our own backyard. Before that happens, if we can put together enough of a militia, the Resistance might be able to thin the Chicom’s respective herds.”

  “How would you do that?” Orbey asked.

  “We’ll use the chaos of the invasion to activate our insurgents. From a distance, we might be able to take out the Generals of both armies.”

  “That’s an optimistic plan,” Connor said, not terribly enthused.

  “It’s unrealistic thinking we can win the war and take our country back,” she said. “But every dead occupier is one step closer to restoring our sovereignty and our freedom.”

  “You’re going to need your strength,” Orbey said.

  Harper, lost in the midst of all of this data, and the horror that came with knowing what was next, almost didn’t hear her. “I’m sorry, Orbey,” she said. “What was that?”

  “I said you should try to eat. You’re going to need your strength.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She ate slowly while she crafted out a response to be delivered over encrypted email to the different Resistance factions. The infiltration teams were in place, but it was now time to shift from subversion to staging for a preemptive assault.

  The Resistance knew that when the time was right, when the dogs began fighting for scraps—i.e., what was left of the former United States—they would activate the interior assault teams. These were teams run by people like Yoav, Kim, Paul and the others. On a single night, they would go weapons hot, taking out the Chicom hierarchy and establishing a new command. So far, they weren’t in place yet.

  They were close, though.

  After finishing her directives, she powered down the laptop and slid it into a lead-lined pouch. She did the same for her cell phone. Looking at her half eaten food, she couldn’t finish it. They were about to go from clandestine to full assault. How would she handle that? Was she even equipped to do so anymore?

  “We may have been weakened,” she muttered to herself, “but don’t count us out of the game.”

  Looking out the window, it was easy to pretend the filthy streets of San Francisco and the occupying forces never existed. California was a nightmare compared to the dream of Five Falls, Oregon. All around her there were pretty trees and clean, fresh air. Long gone were the TVs that made you yell at them, the Chicoms and their monstrous ways, the day-in and day-out monotony of working both for and against the enemy at the same time. If not for her position in the Resistance, she might have convinced herself of this. But the pending war demanded her attention. Because if they got that wrong, then before long, Five Falls would be a war zone, too.

  Before she went back out to help Stephani finish digging up the body, she pulled the laptop out and emailed Tristan at the emergency address he’d last provided. She sent him her new encryption key. She then sent him a message.

  HARPER: I need a Megan’s Law rundown around my place, plus anyone with a violent past or present. I think I’ve got a pedo and two violent felons nearby. Oh, and I need to know about any retired military or former police in the area.

  Five Falls wasn’t a large town, but it did have its fair share of residents. At least three thousand people, maybe even a thousand more, if everyone came out of the woodwork. In addition to good people who could rise to the occasion, there were bound to be problems as well. Guys like Ned at the Five Falls Feed & Seed. Or worse. If she could weed out the trouble ahead of time, she could pick off the violent offenders first, then monitor those who presented a subsequent threat later. She wasn’t a hundred percent on how she felt about this approach, but it was definitely something she’d been thinking about. The reality of it, however, felt far worse than the strategy. In order to clean out the town, she’d have to play judge, jury and executioner. And if she did that, would she really be that much different from the Chicoms?

  They weren’t at that point yet, so she stowed the laptop once more, and hurried back down the property where Stephani was digging.

  “My freaking back,” she said, clearly happy to see her. “It’s like my dad’s standing on it.”

  “Let me jump in there for a bit,” Harper said.

  “At least the soil’s still soft from when we buried him,” she said, taking Harper’s hand and crawling out of the grave.

  An hour later, after they switched again, the blade of the shovel hit meat. “Got him,” Stephani announced.

  She started moving all the dirt off the body. Harper dropped into the pit with a bucket and a hand scoop ready to help. For the next hour, they created space around the body, then tucked some small kindling underneath it hoping for
hotter, longer burn. They need to ash this clown, meaning they needed to leave no bone behind. No bones, no teeth, no nothing.

  They each knew what the Sheriff had in mind. Bring out a dog, sniff out the corpse, use any trace evidence as cause for their arrest.

  When the body was ready, they climbed out of the pit, dusted themselves off, then grabbed the accelerant. There was five gallons of it.

  “Don’t use it all at once,” Stephani said to Harper. “Just get it wet.”

  Harper doused the body. Stephani lit a match and tossed it down in the hole. They both stood back as a fiery explosion whooshed up in front of them, the dry heat palpable.

  “Whoa!” Stephani said.

  Harper laughed, but only out of nervousness. She’d never burned a body before. If they got it wrong, their tasks would double, as would their risk of capture and incarceration. But if they got it right, then perhaps they could wash their hands of the Sheriff.

  “We should have brought marshmallows,” Stephani said, deadpan.

  Harper looked at her, blinking fast. “You want to cook food in the heat of a corpse?”

  “I’m sure it would be fine.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it would, too. Hey Harper, how do you like your marshmallows? Oh, hey, Stephani, with a little burnt meat on them. Uh, no thanks.”

  “If we roasted hot dogs,” she asked, “would you ever know the difference?”

  “Wait, are you serious?” Harper asked.

  The flames were still tall, the body engulfed in fire. This was a hot burn so far, one that had promise.

  “Are you hungry?” she said, as if this was an answer. “Because I’m always hungry.”

  “I am, but I ignore it.”

  “You’ve lost weight,” Stephani said, looking her over.

  “Your eyes are playing tricks on you,” Harper replied.

  “No, serious. You’re going to start shedding fat real quick, beginning with this dig.”

  “I was kind of hoping to keep it,” she said, truthfully. “You know, insulation against the cold.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  Looking at her funny, she said, “I’m going to be sleeping in a barn.”

  “You don’t have to do that just yet,” Stephani offered.