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

  “I think I can. I mean, if what you say is happening actual comes to fruition, then probably.”

  “Probably won’t get the job done,” Harper said, dead serious.

  She thought about this for a long time, turning her attention to Cooper. She pet the dog for a few minutes, and then she said, “If push comes to shove, I’ll push.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking up. “So what’s next?”

  Harper frowned, for the truth was as ugly as it was necessary. “I put together a kill list,” she said. “And then maybe I go talk to Vlad the Impaler.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Skylar woke to a jarring sensation and someone else’s hands holding her tight. Her head was flopped over on the shoulder of what felt like a man next to her. She tried to sit up, somehow managed to do so, then looked at him with a woozy brain and bleary eyes. From what she could see, he had a decent build and average features. Groggy, slurring a bit, she said, “You the one holding me up?”

  “Couple of perverts in here,” he said.

  He didn’t look at her.

  The bumping and jarring was the paddy wagon they were riding in.

  “Where are we headed?” she asked.

  “Hell.”

  “Seriously,” she said, looking at him. He still wouldn’t look back at her. Finally she nudged him and said, “Hey, meat. Where are we going?”

  He slid his head sideways and cocked an eyebrow. “You look different with that extra lump on your face. I think it’s impairing your judgment.”

  She sagged against the back of the vehicle, cool eyes appraising him. She was grateful she wasn’t back in the Minister of Propaganda’s apartment, but she was terrified about where she was going. If she knew anything about the Chicoms, it was that they took torture seriously.

  He stopped looking at her, which bothered her. At least her senses were returning.

  “When a good looking woman is no longer a commodity,” she said, breathless, “then the world has truly lost its way.”

  Turning, he said, “You used to be good looking?”

  She frowned.

  The wagon shuddered to a stop. There was a fair amount of commotion, and plenty of chain rattling coming from the restraints. Most of them looked miserable. Of the half dozen occupants, she was the only woman and no one was looking at her.

  Then one of the men turned and smiled. He looked like an oily rat. He was fringe hair that was damp and messy, bad skin, beady eyes and chipped teeth that looked thrown into his mouth haphazardly. Even worse, he was on a skinny, Freddy Krueger frame.

  “Didn’t realize this was a pedophile pickup, too,” she said.

  He frowned and said, “I’m no pedo.”

  “You’re giving off a very rapey vibe right now, which is super uncomfortable, so maybe you should stop.”

  His eyes dipped to her bare legs, to the robe that was barely covering her privates, which she now realized were sheathed in some sort of material. In that moment, after thinking of how enraged the Minister was, she was grateful that he didn’t send her off without her underwear.

  “Told you,” the guy next to her said, referring to perverts.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, keeping her voice low. “I’m Skylar.”

  “Ryker,” he said. “Ryker Sinclair.”

  “Did you serve back in the day?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You look like you did, like maybe you were—I don’t know—someone who’s been in the shit a time or two.”

  “On that part, you’re right.”

  Of the guys in the paddy wagon, only four of the six she saw were cuffed to the bar behind them, and that was only by one arm. Unlike the guys, Skylar wasn’t cuffed. Bringing her hands forward, she rolled her wrists, flexed her fingers. Looking down, she saw her legs weren’t chained up either.

  Outside, there was gunfire, and the sound of something heavy being slammed into the side of the van. The big boom startled everyone.

  Her eyes flicked over at the pedo. His eyes were back on her, a needy smirk on his face.

  “What’s your problem?” she barked.

  He lifted his chin, looked down his nose at her, those beady eyes becoming maddening slits. The ends of those thin, dry lips lifted from a smirk into a slow, menacing smile.

  “He’s just messing with you,” Ryker grumbled.

  “Yeah?” she said, staring him down. “This isn’t intimidation, this is revulsion.”

  “People like you,” the pedo said, his hand at his side, twitching, “they do all the wrong things, then they end up with me. You’ll end up with me.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “We’re going to the same place,” he said. “And you will.”

  “You’d better pray to God that doesn’t happen. Because if it does, it won’t be good for you.”

  Sneering, he said, “We’re in the same place now—”

  More gunfire outside the paddy wagon, some screaming in Chinese, demands of someone to do something, people being rounded up, then a short firing squad and silence.

  “We’re not even cuffed,” the guy said, sliding down the bench until he was almost across from her.

  “Watch it, scumbag,” the guy next to pedo man said. His closest hand was cuffed to the rail behind him, putting his free hand on the other side of his body.

  “I’m not interested in you,” the creep told him, grinning, wet eyes locked on Skylar, “so you can keep your little homo fantasies to yourself.”

  “Baby killer,” he grumbled.

  “I enhanced life, gave life back, and sometimes, yes, I did what people wanted me to do, what they paid me to do, which is take a life.”

  “He sold aborted babies on the black market,” Ryker said. “Among other things…”

  “Why am I not in cuffs?” she asked. “Why isn’t he?”

  “America never rounded people up to this degree. After most everything illegal became unpunishable in this state, California stopped buying handcuffs from Smith & Wesson. They had the prisoners making them. The low level prisoners, like this bag of smashed assholes sitting across from us.”

  “You don’t know me,” the creeper snapped, sitting on his hands, licking his lips, glancing between Ryker and Skylar. His sneer turned to laughter, then quickly fell back to a frown.

  “So then with prison reform, high level offenders were let out. That’s where the state went wrong. We got overpopulated. And we decriminalized everything.”

  Rocking slightly, his eyes on Skylar’s privates, the oily menace said, “The fall was manufactured.”

  She squeezed her legs together, aware of every exposed inch of her body.

  “Finally he says something that makes sense,” the guy sitting next to pedo man said. He was a big white guy with a head so bald it practically shined in the low light, a full beard and a grizzly bear’s body to match. Looking over at him, in the hot, stuffy air, he said to the freak, “Scoot over. And stop touching me.”

  “The prisons used what cuffs they had on hand,” the guy next to her continued, “but one of the inmates learned how to sabotage the new cuffs in manufacturing. By the time the prisons figured it out, it was too late. The recall was huge, but before production could get back up, the Chicoms rose up and…well, you know the rest.”

  “How do you know all this?” she whispered as voices outside got closer to their mobile prison.

  “Because I’m the guy who sabotaged them,” Ryker said.

  The second the lock was thrown on the back end of the paddy wagon, Skylar’s insides were like a race car at the starting line. Her heart was officially rumbling like a V12, a thousand horsepower with nitrous oxide on tap. At least, that’s what her mind was telling her.

  Her body, on the other hand, sat in stark disagreement.

  Instead of just sitting there, eyes wide like some crazy woman, rearing to go, she slumped over, let her head loll to the side. Closing her eyes down to a pair of slits,
she prayed there would be a right moment, because there was no way in hell she was staying there with those clowns.

  The back door broke its seal and a shotgun barrel was the first thing she saw. It went right to her, but then it slid over to the creeper across from her.

  “They’re not expecting you to do…what you’re about to do,” Ryker said.

  She didn’t move a muscle. Looking as ragged as she felt, her face smashed up, a knot on her forehead, she had a small advantage. She was going to use it. Rather than lamenting her dire situation, she waited for her opportunity. The doors finally opened up wide, filling the inside of the paddy wagon with sunlight.

  “Back up!” the man screamed to the pedo.

  Outside, there were two guards and two men who looked like they’d taken a face full of pepper spray. From what she could see, there was also a fair amount of blood splatter over them. Were they next to those in the firing squad? Had the Chicoms sought them out specifically?

  This was all bad, she thought.

  The minute the first guy was jostled into the paddy wagon, the prisoner behind him began to squirm, jerking his arms and body in an attempt to get loose. The screaming started. First it was the prisoners screaming, and then it was the Chicoms.

  The guard struck his prisoner in the side of the thigh with the butt of his shotgun. Hobbled, crying out, the man fought to stay on his feet. The Chicom’s partner turned to see what the commotion was about and that’s when she moved.

  Skylar rushed past the beaten prisoner on the floor of the van. She dove for the guard, slightly off balance due to the human obstacle. It didn’t matter. She caught him high on the body, taking the smaller, surprised man to the ground.

  They hit, his head bouncing off the asphalt with a hollow thud. She landed hard, too. Her right knee, the side of her thigh and her elbow mashed into the pavement, road-rashing the hell out of her.

  The second guard moved fast, thrusting the butt end of his shotgun at her. She swung her head sideways, the recoil pad cutting open the cheek of the Chicom beneath her.

  He thrust the weapon again, but his attention between her and his squirmy prisoner now slapping the back of him weakened the shot. Skylar grabbed the shotgun by the stock and started jerking it like crazy. Flustered, still being whacked by the prisoner, the guard could not keep up with Skylar’s frenzied tantrum.

  She was getting the shotgun out of his grip when the guard beneath her moved, sending her falling forward. She clung to the weapon, half her body being dragged over the guard’s body. Fists from below started hammering her ribs in short, hard bursts. She clung to the weapon, drove a knee into the nuts of the maniac below her, then locked her legs on him and pulled her body back down.

  The maniac prisoner finally broke loose. Cursing wildly, unable to get his shotgun back, the guard standing over her retaliated with force. He started kicking her in the shoulders, the head, the arms. The guy under her was still squirming, too. She adjusted her body to his every attempt, digging her weight into him in places like his crotch, his gut and his throat, but she was losing that fight as she struggled to take the weapon.

  That’s when rocks and bottles started hitting the street all around them.

  People were mobbing the Chicoms.

  Renewed, she dug down deep inside herself and fought even harder. The rush of feet all around told her the guards were under attack. He finally let go of his shotgun, whipped out a pistol and started shooting everyone.

  Beneath her, the guard she’d tackled bucked her off him. She rolled with it, came up on one knee and spun the weapon around. He looked at her with ferocious animosity. Grimacing, she racked the shotgun. As he was scrambling to his feet, she squeezed the trigger.

  The bean bag round caught him in the chin and he went down hard. She racked the shotgun again, feeding in a fresh load, but it was too late. She was doused with pepper spray.

  The savage, stinging burn of oily chili resin and rubbing alcohol nearly blinded her. She pulled the trigger, aiming to where she thought the Chicom guard was. That’s all she had. He oofed, but then he hit her again with the pepper spray.

  Breathless, her shaky hands dropped the shotgun, the tips of her fingers exploring the burning flesh of her face. A scream in her throat dislodged, tearing free in a glass breaking howl the likes of which she never heard before.

  As she laid there wailing, holding her face, blinded by rage, by the vicious capsaicin mix, she realized that she was not as strong as she thought she was.

  She was not so tough.

  A pair of boots started stomping down on her body. The cursing, growling, raging hatred from her attacker was cruel and unrelenting, matching the brutality of his physical attack. She was too hurt to lash out, too weakened by blindness and fear to know who to fight, or how to even wage that war.

  Hands grabbed her arms, hauled her up. A fist drove in her stomach, bending her over, hobbling her.

  Her shrieking turned to crying, which was embarrassing, catastrophic to a person like her. She was no warrior. Another shot to the stomach softened her, sapped the strength from her legs. Wobbling, the guard hustled her back to the van.

  With her hands out like a sightless person feeling for obstacles, scared of what she was going to run into, her blurry vision was full of abstract shapes, colors that ran together and everything wet and burning.

  “If they did not want you alive,” her attacker’s enraged voice growled in her ear, startling her, “I would have gutted you like a fish.”

  With her face on fire, she knew she’d made a mistake. She shouldn’t have done that. The big black shape before her was the paddy wagon. She could barely discern the edges, let alone see clearly. Another gut punch doubled her over, causing her to cough mightily as fresh pain radiated up through her.

  Before she could retaliate, or even get her bearings, one hand grabbed a fistful of her hair while another gripped her crotch from behind. She was both lifted and tossed into the back of the vehicle like garbage. She landed on her side, crying out. Her dangling legs were shoved inside rather harshly. The door slammed on her heel, the pain bright and crippling.

  The Chicom guard cursed once more, then grabbed her foot and pushed it in. When the heavy doors slammed shut behind her, she felt all her weakness boiling to the surface. She started crying now, unable to stop.

  For a second, she thought she heard a low, syrupy giggling coming from the pedo. She couldn’t be sure. It was too dark and she didn’t have the energy to look up. Aside from some light coming through the mesh rectangle cut in the metal barrier between the back of the paddy wagon and the cab, they were in near darkness.

  The snickering continued.

  If the super creeper was laughing at her, if that was in fact him, she swore to herself she’d make it so he could never laugh again.

  When she heard movement in the vehicle, she tried to look up, but someone’s hand grabbed her and dragged her forward. She cried out, and then it was a frenzy of commotion, guys yelling at the pedo, him practically hyperventilating with nervous, anxious laughter.

  “I will kill you,” a rough voice said through it all.

  Ryker.

  She started to move, but the pedo punched her in the cheek, her head slamming back down on the floor of the van. He got on top of her, pinning her legs down.

  Swirling, her eyes burning, a new kind of dizzying sensation overtaking her, she felt the pedo walking his two fingers up her leg. The little tippy-toed fingers walked toward her privates, like she was a child and this was a game they only played in the darkness.

  Restraints were rattling then snapping tight. It sounded like dogs charging their targets but hitting the end of the chain. Ryker was cursing the pedo, saying some truly awful things, but her vision was still swimming, the moment as surreal as it was frightening.

  She jerked her leg, unbalancing him. She tried to get away, but he regained his balance, snickering again as he walked those little walking fingers north.

  She twitche
d, but he slapped her so hard the sting seemed to reverberate even her bones. Then, gently, he grazed the pads of his fingers along the inside of her thigh, closer to her center. Teeming with revulsion, she hit his arm, said, “Get your damn hands off me!”

  This time, instead of slapping her, he punched her in the face, so hard that only blackness and the cold rush of fear followed.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  When Stephani formally introduced her to Vladimir, Harper didn’t expect to feel so shy. She could infiltrate SocioSphere, manage much of the Resistance and even attack and kill the Chicoms, but she couldn’t string together a solitary thought looking at this man.

  He wasn’t the Resistance, the enemy or something in between. She told herself he was just a guy who built things for a living with a crew of other guys. So why did she feel like such a twelve year old girl right then?

  Maybe because he didn’t seem interested in her before, but now he was, according to Stephani.

  “So this is like some sort of survival shelter?” Vlad asked when Stephani left them alone. “Because if so, it’s the coolest shelter I’ve put together so far.”

  “It’s more like a place to stay,” she managed to say.

  “Skylar wanted the inside built to her exact specifications,” he said. “When I asked about comfort level, she said the setup should be more tactical than practical.”

  “She’s from the big city, so she gets worried,” Harper said, feeling a little more relaxed than she first felt. “Have you been in the big cities?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Eugene.”

  “Is it Chicom occupied?” she asked.

  “Not as bad as Portland and Seattle, or worse, San Francisco or Los Angeles. Those places turned into sewers real quick.”

  “That’s the truth,” she laughed.

  “Someone said they won’t let anyone leave,” he said. “Is that true?”

  “Yeah. That’s why she’s asking for this. Even if it feels like overkill to me,” she lied, “but whatever Skylar feels is best works for me. It’s her money, and its work for you and your guys.”