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

  From out of nowhere, the number nine burned bright in his mind again. This number was a reminder that he was not a coward anymore, that he had taken matters into his own hands, meted out justice, was Resistance.

  Looking at these fiends, he told himself he would not bow to these people, that he would not submit. He flexed his knuckles, made them into fists. His hands hurt where he’d beaten several men to death over the last few days. That didn’t matter. To a guy like Logan Cahill, that was fuel. A truth he tried to hide from the cameras, the police, the soldiers. His rage and how he was no longer keeping it on the back burner was the secret burrowed into his brain.

  Logan did not start out life as a violent person, even though he understood the need for violence, and retribution. He never thought it would come to this. That’s why he said yes to the Resistance. And with that affirmation came a new devotion, a commitment to reclaiming what was lost, what was taken, what had been trampled under foot.

  Stay your emotions, he told himself. With the Resistance came certain responsibilities, the foremost being that you die only when all other options had failed. Before the Resistance, he felt weak, servile, helpless. Now, just knowing he was taking a stand, his heart was filled with patriotism, with outrage, with the need to stop this occupation before it was too late.

  But it’s too late, he thought.

  It’s not.

  Staring at these armed creatures from under the brim of his hat, he felt a softening to violence, that hard edge of hate cutting through him.

  Right then the Asian man from the eaves, the dissident with the bottle of what he assumed was alcohol, pushed through the parade of bodies and raced after the troop transport. The rag hanging out of his bottle was now on fire.

  Logan’s eyes flew open to the sight, his legs slowing him down. The person behind him slammed into him, shoving him hard in the back and tripping on his feet. He was too scared to care. The man screaming at Logan about his failed etiquette didn’t see what was about to unfold. He didn’t see the danger that Logan saw coming, or the potential opportunity.

  The man with the Molotov Cocktail launched the burning bottle at the gaggle of soldiers in the truck. When the makeshift bomb hit, it exploded, the flames licking up the soldiers’ bodies. A smile formed on Logan’s face, one he quickly tempered.

  Four soldiers at the tailgate lowered their weapons and pumped the dissident’s body full of lead. He was still running when the bullets ripped into him. Torn apart by gunfire, he shook briefly before stumbling and crashing face-first into the asphalt. Even though he was clearly dead, his body was still in motion. The corpse came to a skidding stop on the side of his face. There he’d surely lay for the next few days, being run over, maybe being pushed aside into the gutter where he’d rot and draw flies and rodents alike. This was the new way of things. This was life under Communist rule.

  Chapter Two

  The Molotov Cocktail did its job. The explosion caught most of the soldiers unaware. Even as the fire consumed their clothes and devoured their flesh, the jammed-tight pack of them were falling all over each other trying to avoid the spreading inferno.

  Half the men were now burning, and the ones who escaped the conflagration were falling out of the transport. Even as the driverless truck bullied its way through traffic, the horn still blasting, the back was emptying out.

  One of the defaults Logan found fitting was that the driverless transport’s pre-programmed system was oblivious to the attack on its passengers. When the truck finally showed up to its location empty, the Chicoms were going to be so pissed.

  Brave men and women broke free of the heavy morning march to attack the surviving soldiers. At first the American patriots were successful, stomping several of them to death, but then the gunfire started. The Chicoms didn’t aim at the dissidents, rather they fired into the crowd of pedestrians.

  The long line of people caught in this unfolding nightmare began to shake and shudder, some of them collapsing, most of them ducking down. Dozens dropped dead, purses and briefcases spilling open, the contents of the deceased irrelevant.

  Logan grabbed the woman and her child and pulled them down, cradling the girl as bullets punched into brick walls and shattered the glass behind them. The woman couldn’t still her fear. She was frantic, moaning and making screaming sounds. Hysterical, she reached for her daughter, found her under Logan and held on. The gunfire was still coming in hot.

  Logan dragged the woman closer, if that was possible, drawing her into the protective cover he made of his body. The twelve year old girl was already crying. When the gunfire finally ceased, Logan glanced up, saw several men mobbing the soldiers. They weren’t winning, but they weren’t losing either.

  The fight could still be won…

  Glancing up at the security cameras, he saw the billowing smoke was enough to obstruct their view. In that moment, he knew how this would work. Essentially the Chicoms were no different from the Nazi’s in that, for every dead soldier, ten Americans would be butchered in the streets. He didn’t even want to count the fallen soldiers. He did anyway. There were maybe fifteen burning bodies and a handful of survivors in the streets.

  That begged the question: If the retaliation for this was going to be ferocious, why not make the best of it?

  It’s now or never, Logan.

  The Chicoms had their hands full with the onslaught of a few outraged citizens, people like him looking to exact a little payback under the cover of a smoky skirmish. All this and the transport truck was now a block and a half away, honking, shoving, being an absolute, unimpeded menace.

  Make a decision, he told himself, weighing the risk.

  MAKE A DECISION!

  Logan sloughed off his jacket, pulled his hat back down, then stood, took a deep breath and pulled out his Karambit blade—a short, curved blade made of a hard composite the Chicom metal detectors couldn’t read.

  The compact blade was curved like a dinosaur claw and was the main knife they trained with in his underground Krav Maga classes. Needless to say, he was pretty good with it. Not great by his own estimation, but hopefully good enough.

  Sprinting into the ensuing battle, the smoke pillowing into the air from a dozen roasting bodies, he sighted his targets. He hit the first solider, a middle-aged Chinese man in uniform who was beating a civilian man with the butt of his rifle.

  Logan struck the back of the soldier’s knee, collapsing him.

  Moving fast, knowing there were multiple threats, he hooked the Karambit blade into the soldier’s armpit and jerked the blade upward, tearing through muscle, tendons, veins and arteries. He then swiped the blade across the man’s exposed neck.

  One down.

  He checked the smoke. For a few minutes more, he liked the cover it was providing. Shoving off the dead man, he made time for another.

  The next target was an older soldier stabbing a woman in the stomach. By the time Logan arrived, she was a sopping wet mess, her blood everywhere. With the tip of the blade, he dug in and trenched open the soldier’s neck.

  Everything was moving fast now, too fast. He felt enemy eyes upon him.

  Wasting no time, he snatched the fallen soldier’s rifle from his hand, spun it around and shot the next two men before dry firing the rifle.

  Dropping the weapon, he went after the fifth man—a brute by the look of him. He was now rounding the truck. With the gore of dissidents streaked up this man’s arms and splattered on his face, he looked like one of hell’s soldiers.

  Tucking his chin to conceal his identity from the cameras, Logan charged him, driving into his big body low and hard, like a linebacker back in the days when football was allowed.

  The two of them crashed to the asphalt in front of a stopped car. Logan was on top, his mount an advantage if he could keep it.

  With the outside curve of the blade, Logan went for the throat. The man caught his wrist, held him off. That’s when he started pushing back. Logan shifted his weight over the top of the blade, widening
his stance.

  Face-to-face with this Chicom foot soldier, sweat dripped off Logan’s face onto the other man, their collective limbs shaking with the struggle.

  Adjusting more of his weight over the blade, using all his strength to get the knife to the Chicom’s neck, he used what advantage he could.

  When it was clear Logan was going to win, the soldier tried to tuck his chin to protect his neck from the blade.

  He was too late.

  The curve of the razor-sharp metal scraped the underside of his Adam’s apple and slipped into the thin skin. Blood boiled around the blade, the fight still on. Until it wasn’t.

  The knife finally slipped in deep, striking bone. Everything became so much easier from there on.

  Logan shifted his body, worked the blade sideways, the cut becoming lethal.

  The dying man gurgled, his eyes wide and bulging, getting that faraway look. Staring deep into those weak, hateful eyes, he looked for evidence of a soul. He wanted to look at this soul, made sure it knew that it could not oppress him anymore, that its minutes were numbered.

  In that brief moment of defiance, Logan felt the familiar tethers on him loosening. If he could kill five enemy soldiers just like that, he could kill a lot more, maybe even enough to take the country back. For him, that moment was freedom. Standing there under smoke and flame, he was not a victim, a murderer or a straight executioner.

  He was the Resistance.

  Suddenly aware of himself and his otherwise guarded emotions, he felt the nature of his face for the first time since this all began. He was crazed eyes, a sneer for a mouth, cheeks jumping from a clenched jaw.

  He let the emotions ride.

  As he watched the soldier bleed out, he realized in that moment that there could be more soldiers. That there could be more cameras. Awareness shot in. Stupid! Rolling off the dead man, his area of awareness now moved from a six foot bubble back to the surrounding block. Fortunately there were no more threats.

  The smoke was thinning out though. He needed to move lest he be seen and recorded by the Chicom surveillance grid.

  If they saw his expression, what would it say?

  Vengeance.

  The sidewalks were a flurry of pandemonium. Everyone was running, screaming, stepping over the dead, tripping on them, sobbing. Logan blended into the departing mob, running with them, disappearing into the masses, moving over and past the bloodied corpses like everyone else.

  One guy was slumped over against the wall, his baseball cap barely on his head, his jaw slack with a string of red saliva connecting his lower lip to his chest. Logan grabbed the man’s hat off his head, ducked down among the departing masses and put it on while somehow managing to keep up.

  Up ahead, fresh gunfire eliciting half a dozen shrieks. At that point, he was in front of his building. He ducked into the glass skyscraper, moved through the rounder, then dumped the stolen hat into a garbage can and walked into the foyer as calmly as he could.

  Chapter Three

  Logan was familiar with the two guards. Both men were Chicom assets, both of them as wooden as a hitching post. Neither smiled and neither said “Hello,” ever. Both men looked him over, specifically his face and the blood on his shirt.

  “What happened?” one of them asked in broken English. It was the first time Logan had heard him speak.

  “Dissident just now,” Logan answered, his breath stabilizing from the fight. The adrenaline was still surging, but soon it would dump and he’d be left feeling like he was in a coma.

  Holding his stomach down, he said, “Someone attacked a troop transport.”

  The guard nodded, as if chaos was the norm, then he ran the wand over him, passing over the hidden Karambit blade without going off. The composite metal was sold as undetectable to Chicom scanners; now more than ever, Logan prayed that was true.

  When the scanners passed over his side without beeping, he found he could breathe again. Wearing the blade was one thing, but having a bloody blade after a near riot with dead Chicom soldiers was something else entirely.

  In truth, it would be his bitter end.

  “Go,” one of them finally said, looking at him like he was a pestilence they were forced to deal with.

  The Chicoms were not regular Chinese citizens. Logan very much liked the Chinese people. But mostly he felt bad for them. They had lived a very dangerous, very oppressed life back in mainland China. Many of them fled to America after all hell broke out in Hong Kong back in 2019. Now that influence spread to America’s west coast, like a disease.

  The disease nowadays was these men in the transport trucks. They were in positions of security and were told to treat the Americans with all the same tenderness and compassion as they treated those in mainland China.

  The men had been steadily moving into the cities for years now. This left the largest cities on the west coast and most of California occupied. In Logan’s estimation, they were the true pestilence. They were the ones with guns they weren’t afraid to use and the authority to kill indiscriminately.

  Upstairs, he saw his boss, Ming Yeung. Her appearance never failed to move him. To say she was hard on the eyes was generous. Looks didn’t define a person though. How they viewed themselves and how they looked at and treated others was so much more than just looks. For this woman, though, she had none of these good qualities. This only served to make her uglier. And that sour look on her face!

  Is she looking at me, he wondered. She was. Oh, God. Was it him? Had he put her in a bad mood?

  She snapped her fingers at him, waved him into her glass office. Even as he was fake-smiling an acknowledgement, Logan was groaning inside. This was what subservience matched with obsessive hatred looked like. Deep down, however, he berated himself for his weakness. When he failed to move, she got up out of her chair, marched out into the bull pen of cubicles and screeched at him.

  “Why are you late?”

  More employees would be flooding into the floor’s front entrance behind him. Ms. Yeung wasn’t paying attention though, for her eyes were cataloguing every last detail on his face and bloody clothes.

  Great.

  He was now so close he could smell a foul odor on her, something cooked and fishy that she’d eaten for breakfast. He hated that smell. It upset his stomach, caused him to shrink back.

  “Why are you late?” she asked again, invading his personal space.

  He looked down on her, held her eyes. Focusing there helped him stay off the more bothersome details of her face—the off-center nostrils, a mouth full of crooked teeth, a slew of open pores, each its own dirty divot.

  If she was unattractive from ten feet away, she was ugly from five feet and flat out dreadful when you were mere inches away. The truth was, if she wasn’t such an asshole, Logan wouldn’t have cared at all about her looks. But couple tough looks with a domineering attitude and the bulk of his contempt for the Chicoms got dumped on her.

  Being this close, however, he froze, perfectly compliant.

  This woman made his life hell, but he reminded himself that she was also the reason he was able to stay off the Chicom radar. Their oppressors had a thing for zero tolerance. One mistake and you ate a bullet. There was no Fifth Amendment, no rule of law, no due process whereby you were considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. With just one hint of impropriety in this dark new world, torture was not only mandated, it was a privilege of the sadists, their brutality an art form they took way too serious. Unless the rumors were wrong, which he feared they were not.

  From what he heard, if you got hauled in for interrogation, it was worse than being shot in the street. While your captors were questioning you, they were also maybe cutting out a kidney, or removing your child’s brain in front of you as part of their organ harvesting program. Rape, mutilation, slow motion murder…nothing was off limits with these people. There were no lines they could not cross that hadn’t been crossed thousands of times before.

  So when it came to outwitt
ing these monsters, specifically a low-rent gatekeeper like Ming freaking Yeung, Logan reminded himself to be as polite as a church boy on Sunday.

  “Han’s dead,” Ms. Yeung said. She was speaking of Logan’s friend who died recently in an attack not unlike the one he survived today. Han was not only another casualty of Chicom resistance, he was a level up from Logan.

  “It was tragic,” he said. He’d been there. He’d survived it enough to get pissed off that his friend was gone, now labeled collateral damage, a statistic.

  “Well today will be a good day for you then,” she said with a lopsided smile. “You get Han’s job. Don’t make me regret it.”

  Her strong Cantonese accent left her with the tendency to muddle her words. Even worse, her voice was like an old spring with a sharp edge. Her English had improved though. When she first arrived from the capital of the province of Guangdong in Southern China, no one understood her well. This was why she yelled. It spurred action. She knew the language barrier would be a problem, and fortunately she had the good sense to work on her speaking skills.

  “Thank you, Ms. Yeung,” he said, shocked that he was getting his dead friend’s job. “I’ll be sure to do my part to ensure the safety of the organization.”

  “Like you did with Harper Whitaker?” she asked.

  Oh, boy…

  This was what he hated about her. She was always trying to trap people in a lie. Even now he wondered, Is it working? Is she laying the trap now?

  It felt like it.

  He was rendered speechless, the blood draining from his face. In Harper Whitaker—a rather plain looking woman—he’d found a resistor, a part of the Resistance. To Ms. Yeung, he’d lost her the same day he discovered her. Ensnaring Harper Whitaker, a woman he was starting to believe was the head of the Resistance, would have been a whale if he could have turned her over to Ms. Yeung. She was an American though, a patriot. Even more, she was a woman who wanted the same thing Logan wanted. To return America to her former glory, her former sovereign self. He was not Resistance before her. But in getting her out of the city alive, stashing her away in the small town of Five Falls, Oregon, he’d made up his mind to join the fight.