Dark Days of the After (Book 2): Dark Days of the Surge Page 2

  He wasn’t pointing the weapon at the kid, but it was a weapon nevertheless, and as conditioned as people had become to fear guns—even when they were not used as a threat—he was quick to comply.

  Logan took the backpack from the kid, loosened the straps so it would fit him, then started dumping guns and ammo inside.

  “You can’t take all of them,” some guy said in the crowd that had gathered around him. This brave soul was talking about the guns.

  “You have the stones to do what I’m doing?” Logan challenged.

  A bigger man appeared, his face rugged, like it had been used to clean the streets for a half a block and healed that way. Logan didn’t like his face. He liked the look in his eyes a whole lot less. Crossing his arms, he was showing Logan he wasn’t the only alpha on the block.

  “I think so,” the first said.

  “If you say you think so,” Logan growled, “then you don’t. Because guys who are ready for this know they’re ready.”

  “I can do what you’re doing,” someone else said, stepping forward. This guy was lanky, his arms bone thin, his eyes full of horrors.

  “Really?” he said, sarcastic. “I didn’t know pupils could get that big.”

  “Give me those guns,” he demanded. The guy didn’t look right. His expression was wrong, his energy all bad. Logan scanned his face for further signs of drug use, and the rest of his person for proof of gang affiliations.

  “Step back,” Logan said, now aware of the gun in his hand and ready to use it, if only as a threat. “Get your own weapons.”

  “I want yours,” he said, unblinking. “Which were really just theirs, thief.”

  “No,” Logan said, stepping back as this guy stepped forward.

  The man smiled. He saw Logan’s mistake—you never give up ground. You angle off, but you don’t go directly backwards.

  Don’t think about it, Logan told himself, the internal statement harsh, skewering. Just do what you have to do.

  He took a big step forward, jammed the barrel of his gun in this guy’s face, his finger on the trigger because he meant business. The thug frowned, swatted for the weapon.

  Logan knew this was coming.

  He jerked the gun back, forcing the tweaker to overextend himself, at which time—and with his free hand—Logan swiped upwards with the Karambit blade. The blade hooked into the back of the man’s armpit, the razor sharp point doing all kinds of damage.

  Howling, the man tried to get away, but that just made things worse.

  Logan finally ripped the blade out, causing the fool to startle, to cry out, then to shrink back into the crowds, blood drizzling everywhere.

  “Wrong enemy, bro,” Logan yelled after him. The man finally fell down to a collective gasp from the crowd. “Anyone else want to try and take my stuff?”

  “He only wanted to help,” some woman said.

  “That kind of naiveté will get you killed,” he grumbled, pushing through the crowd.

  Up ahead in the dreary, wet silence, people were everywhere, looking for food, for supplies, for help. Logan only wanted to find the Chicoms. He glanced up at the street cameras. They were dead for sure. Everything was dead.

  Why would the Chicoms do that? Why would they detonate the EMP early?

  The only thing he could think of was that the South American Army was inbound by air, or by sea. Or maybe they gained more ground than the Chicoms assumed. That would be the only reason to enact this plan so quickly.

  Continuing to nudge his way through the crowds, he paused for a moment at the distant sounds of a honking horn. The sound wasn’t the brutal, metallic screech of the driverless troop transports. Rather it was the squeaker-toy horn you heard from really old Jeeps.

  He hopped up twice and spotted the source of the noise. A Chicom Jeep was bullying its way through the crowds. He got a better look, moving around people, and what he saw was a woman jumping out of the way of the Jeep and grabbing her child to keep them both from being run over.

  The Jeep then scraped by one of thousands of stalled out cars in the streets, bouncing onto the sidewalk. Logan’s fingers opened and closed around the gun’s handle. Moving toward the Jeep, tracking its trajectory, these idiots were driving over whatever and whoever was in its way, women and children be damned.

  He kept moving, picking up speed.

  By then, everyone was jumping off the sidewalks into the already congested streets, preferring to knock into other pedestrians rather than get hit by the lunatics in the Jeep.

  Logan hit another crowd, pushing and shoving people out of the way, and yelling at them to move. Where at first he felt a bit hesitant in his rush to meet the Jeep, now the intensity in him was soaring, driving him to really bully his way through the people.

  He could not let this continue!

  Weapon free, his eyes fixed on the target, he finally broke through a moderately-sized mob of pedestrians and zig-zagged his way across four tight lanes of abandoned cars.

  Seconds before he hit the sidewalk the Jeep was driving down, something slammed into him from behind and sent him sprawling face-first into the path of the oncoming vehicle.

  Rattled to all hell but alert, he knew enough to know that he was in trouble. The panic nearly crippled him.

  In those precious seconds, everything happened too fast—people were struck in the sidewalk by the Jeep, its engine winding up rather than down, the chaos of people diving out of the way all around him.

  For that very last second, Logan wondered if his life flashed before his eyes. Parts of it did. He knew a great many things right then, but what Logan Cahill was certain of most was that he would not get out of the Jeep’s way in time.

  Part of him always knew it would come to this. He just didn’t expect it to be so soon. He was barely even into double digits on his kill count.

  Chapter Two

  Skylar Madigan went from someone to no one. The way she was being treated in San Quentin, you’d think the Chicoms didn’t even consider her human. Any of them. The very nature of her imprisonment was eating away at her resilience. She went from trying to save the nation from Chicom oppressors to picking up granules of dirt, cleaning out garbage cans and eating rats’ asses in watered down slop the Chicom cooks called “cuisine.”

  She knew it was taking a toll on her physically. When she looked down, she saw her ribs protruding, as well as her hip bones. Her legs had shrunken, her knees felt knobby and her shins ached relentlessly, like growing pains, but maybe the opposite. Maybe she was having shrinking pains. Looking at her knuckles, which she cracked regularly to alleviate the pressure, they were either growing or her fingers were shrinking, too.

  She couldn’t tell.

  The distance between who she was and who she’d become in this Chicom prison could be measured by days, but it didn’t take very long for an already hungry body to appear emaciated.

  Just yesterday, Ryker said, “You look like you’ve been in here a month.”

  It felt like longer.

  If asked, she’d slay entire fields of Chicoms for a four-course meal, but in truth, she’d settle for a glass of clean, cool water.

  On her hands and knees in the yard, she picked up tiny rocks, anything you could roll around on your finger, or get stuck in your heel. She swiped some sweat off her face, smearing the filth already built up on her skin. She didn’t care. If it kept the sweat from getting in her eyes and stinging, that was just as well.

  Looking around, other people like her were everywhere, but few of them forced to do the kind of crap work she was doing. It wasn’t particularly difficult work on paper, but in practicality, her knees and back ached, her fingers were rubbed raw, and her skin was burnt where she was exposed to the bright sun all day. More often than not, she wished the Minister of Propaganda had killed her.

  The very thought of him repulsed her.

  Not long ago she was a spy, surrendering her happiness, her dignity, and her virtue to the Communist government. And for what? For intel? Hopefully what she discovered and had sent to Logan made some sort of difference. Hopefully it would give Harper and the team some leverage over the Chicoms. If it didn’t, then all this was for nothing. Just a one-way trip to the main yard in the prison formerly known as San Quentin.

  Looking around, she spotted Ryker at work. He was scrubbing the walls of what used to be the gymnasium with a dry cloth. There were no weights left inside, not a treadmill in sight, not even a mirror to flex your biceps or your quads in. Now the gym was where the beatings took place. She overheard one woman saying they were mopping up buckets of blood in there. Skylar hoped the woman was exaggerating.

  She was afraid she wasn’t.

  Out in the sun, Skylar was being worked to death, beaten, and all but starved, but she was alive and she still had her wits. For how much longer, however, she could not say. The monotony of the day was suddenly shook with a slight tremor in the air, a changing of the white noise. The normal chatter of the detainees fell, then rose, and then rose yet again.

  She looked around, saw the masses agitated into movement. A few were pointing outside the gates. People started moving, walking at first, then jogging. One guy couldn’t stop staring into the sky, as if whatever had happened would happen again.

  Standing up, her body stiff and uncooperative, she rubbed her lower back and tried to get her balance. She was slightly dizzy from dehydration. The air immediately began crackling with gunfire. The guards on the balcony were shooting at them.

  All around her, bodies were dropping. Screams lifted into the air, scattered at first and sharp, but then rampant and unending, so loud the bang, bang, bang of gunfire barely registered above the din of chaos. If she didn’t get out of the yard, she was done for. But there was no place to hide, nowhere to duck
under, beneath or behind! Was she about to be shot?

  This thought gave her pause…

  Would dying necessarily be a bad thing? Skylar relaxed for a moment and thought dying might actually be a relief.

  But then she heard someone say the power was out. The power? Oh, God…the EMP. The EMP! Something in her sparked to life. She might have taken a breath and nearly smiled. Right then she knew everything had changed and she had to run for her life.

  Dragged from her suicidal reverie, she dropped her bucket of pebbles and forced her way in with those fleeing the yard for cover. Her body was tired, emaciated, overheated and burnt, but it didn’t matter. Freedom was near. So close she could grab it!

  The crowd moved in a stampeding crush through the yard, pushing and shoving their way toward the entrance, gunfire erupting so frequently she no longer flinched with each outburst. Where they could, others were scaling the fences. She only glanced at them, prayed they wouldn’t get shot. The guards turned their weapons on these people immediately, firing without hesitation, the bodies dropping back down, flopping in the dirt like fish out of water, save for those who were already dead.

  Two people managed to get over the fence, dropping down on the other side. One of them, a woman, landed wrong on her ankle, the foot folding under her leg. She couldn’t get up fast enough. A single shot ended her plight.

  Jammed tight and moving with the crowd, seeming more like cattle than a human exodus, Skylar glanced over her shoulder in time to hear another shot fired. Not ten feet away, a woman’s head rocked sideways, a red mist puffing out the exit side.

  Renewed fright got the crowds moving, the push forward even more ferocious than before.

  Outside the fence, the guy who got away was running as fast as he could, zig-zagging back and forth. The last guard shooting spent four more rounds trying to get him, but he gave up and took aim back in the crowd. Fortunately they were focused away from her long enough for her to make it to safety.

  At the edge of the yard, she searched for Ryker. She finally saw him. He was pressed up against one of the walls, out of the crush of people and seemingly looking for her as well. She waved frantically, called out his name. He saw her and started moving toward her, pushing against the bodies.

  When they found each other, he had a strange look on his face. “You okay?” she asked as he squashed his way in beside her.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I was just thinking of my brother, and you.”

  “Someone said the power’s out, so I’m thinking the grid is down,” she said. “I’m praying it was the EMP.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “We need to peel off from the horde.”

  “They’ve got shooters taking everyone down,” she said.

  “I saw that.” Looking her over, most likely assessing her physical strength, he said, “Are you up for a fight?”

  “Hell yes I am,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m starved and feel completely drained,” she said, “but I’ve still got some juice. Maybe enough to get me to my next meal. So long as there’s not a tail or a little pink bullseye on it.”

  He looked at her funny, then said, “Did you just crack a joke?”

  “Not on purpose,” she said.

  Smirking, but still focused, he asked, “Can you take out some of these guys? Because you need to move fast and you need to be lethal.”

  “I said I’m good,” she replied, slightly irritated. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking of flanking them.”

  “You look as run down as me,” she said. “Maybe worse.”

  “The adrenaline will kick in.”

  He grabbed her and pulled her out of the moving crowds. When they were clear of most of it, he said, “I’m going to move in on the other side of the wing. I might run into trouble heading over there, so be patient, and wait for me. If we have to fight our way to the top, don’t be surprised. And if you get a chance to end one of them, don’t hesitate. Just do it.”

  “That’s easier said than done,” she said.

  “They’re distracted right now,” Ryker told her, “so we have that advantage, but only for now. They’re also not that good. They’re presiding over this place using fear, but when I went toe-to-toe with them, they felt more like paper tigers. Scary on the outside—”

  “Spineless on the inside.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Are we going to do this then?” she asked, her blood pumping furiously.

  “The rubber is about to meet the road,” he warned her, his face stern, his expression charged.

  “As it should,” she replied.

  “Watch for my signal, then crawl right up their asses when they come after me. Things will move fast. Don’t miss.”

  “I’m good,” she said. “What about you? How are you doing?”

  He showed her a gun, which had her wondering what he did to get it. There was blood on the slide, so she imagined it wasn’t pretty.

  “I’m pissed off and armed, so yeah, I’m good, too.”

  Pulling something from his pocket, he stood close enough to slip her the shiv his brother had made. She quickly took it, tucking the weapon away so it would not be seen.

  “Use the pointy end,” he said, to which she said, “Joke like that again and I’ll use the pointy end on you.”

  He was already dragging her back in the masses, heading toward the block that would take them to the high ground and the shooters there.

  In the West Block yard, crowds of dissidents were rioting with Chicom guards, who had the upper hand. Everyone was heading for the same place—the front gate. The force of many was swiftly overwhelming the might of few. Ryker signaled her, then nodded.

  She nodded back.

  He then slipped away, scooting along the face of one of the building while she went to the entrance on the other side.

  She snuck into a hallway, which was a new addition to the prison (according to Ryker), a former inmate. Her ears were alert for any sounds. Fortunately everyone was more concerned with what was happening outside than in there, so the foot traffic was minimal.

  She ran through the hallway fifteen feet, heading for the door leading to the stairwell. One of the guards started yelling at her just as she grabbed the handle. She glanced up at him, terrified, his hand going for his weapon. For a second she saw something unusual. The guard’s eyes were wild with fear, or perhaps disbelief.

  She moved to go, but he fired off a round that smacked the wall behind her. With the shiv concealed in her hand, she went to her knees and put her hands behind her back.

  In San Quentin, compliance was paramount for survival.

  She complied.

  The guard was screaming at her in his language, which she ignored because she didn’t understand it. When he got near, she snuck a glance up at him in time to see him relax his gun hand and turn up the physical violence. This was typical behavior. The second he grabbed for her hair, she dropped her hand and thrust the shiv deep into his thigh.

  It all moved at hyper speed from there.

  Still on her knees, she whirled around and stabbed him four more times, trying to hit something vital, or at least take him off his feet and then find something vital.

  He fell down, crying out like a stuck pig, hysterically clawing at the floor for the weapon he’d dropped. She crawled all over him, took the shots he gave her as he bucked and squirmed, but it didn’t matter. The pain he inflicted didn’t matter. Not because it didn’t hurt. It did. It was because everything was pain. And when everything is something, then to some it can become nothing.

  “Death by a thousand cuts,” she growled as she grabbed his gun, then pushed up off him and dragged his limp body into the stairwell.

  Looking down, catching her breath, she couldn’t believe she’d spent so much energy on one guy. She should have dragged the shiv across his neck and called it a kill.

  “Stupid,” she said, cursing herself.

  Skylar moved up the stairs, trying to catch her breath. She had the guard’s pistol in one hand and her bloody shiv in the other. Since the gun was not suppressed, a single shot would make her a target. She needed to think strategically. Tactically.

  At the top of the stairs, she eased open the door, saw four snipers spread across the second floor walkway. The walkway appeared to be a recent addition as it looked nothing like the building’s original architecture.