Dark Days of the After (Book 3): Dark Days of the Apostasy Page 5

  “I brought home the bacon, but all she wanted was BOX!” is what Don told him Otto had said last time, just before he passed out and fell face-first into a bar table.

  Now the Sheriff was dead and they were at war and Deputy Don was in the Captain’s chair. One look and it was plain to see that as heavy as the weight of so much responsibility was upon his narrow shoulders, the deputy was fixing to buckle.

  “Everyone please keep your voices down because obviously the mics don’t work,” Don announced, using hand signals to hush the crowd. “Can everyone hear me?”

  There was a murmur of yeses that had him shaking his head, like this was his first victory.

  “Okay, okay, good,” he said.

  “Well don’t start muttering now!” someone called out. Chuckles echoed throughout the gym, causing Don’s bobbing head to come to a firm stop.

  “We think this is an EMP strike. Electromagnetic Pulse,” he said, loud but shaky. “That means part of the electricity that’s supposed to work ain’t working at all. It means our grid probably can’t be fixed. But it also means our cars and appliances are dead. Like dead dead.”

  He said this and looked over at Boone, an eyebrow raised. Boone smiled, gave a quick nod, then a thumbs up.

  “So that means we aren’t getting gas, or power, and our cars won’t ever work again.”

  Boone stepped in and said, “What Deputy Sanders is trying to say is that we are on our own now. That means we need to be responsible for growing and gathering our own food, filtering and purifying the water we drink, altering the way we live so that we are a self-sustaining community.”

  “Where’s the Sheriff?” one woman called out.

  “He’s dead,” came a woman’s voice from across the gym. Harper stepped forward, along with Logan, who was leaning on her shoulder for support.

  The rustle of confusion permeated the gym.

  “Dead?” another woman asked.

  Harper walked up and joined Boone. He wondered if he looked as overjoyed that Harper had come to relieve him as Deputy Don was that he had stepped in to relieve him.

  “He was shot by the Chicoms on the Madigan property,” Harper said. “I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors by now.”

  Boone knew this was coming. He was going to ease into it, but the people here weren’t into foreplay. They just wanted the hard facts up front.

  “Sheriff Hall had a tough decision to make,” Boone announced.

  He hadn’t told anyone this, but what he knew had to be said, if anything to set the record straight about the Madigans.

  “The Chicom commander who arrived with the convoy yesterday asked the Sheriff if we would allow large convoys of vehicles through our town without incident. Sheriff Hall must have paused too long, forcing the commander to take a different tactic. He said the Sheriff needed to either give up the problem children of this town or he’d burn it to the ground.”

  Harper looked at him, aghast.

  “He took about fifty men to the Madigan’s place up the hill,” Boone said, ignoring the look.

  Even Deputy Don was as wide-eyed as Harper now, wondering how she and the Madigans had survived that. Don had been out fishing when all this happened. He didn’t even know what occurred until he returned to the steaming ashes of it.

  “What happened to them?” Chuck Burly asked. He was an older gentleman, fairly new to town, a retired accountant who relocated to Five Falls from Eugene last year.

  “We killed them,” Harper said, her face cold, expressionless. “Every last one of those dirty cockroaches.”

  “Who the hell are you?” a snotty looking teenager with crimped blonde hair and heavy eyeshadow asked.

  Boone didn’t know whose girl this was, but a few of her friends sitting beside her seemed to enjoy their little friend’s snark. Looking around, he could only name about half of them. And even then he knew them only by the cars they drove and the problems said cars had.

  “Her name is Harper Whitaker,” Logan said. “She’s the leader of the west coast Resistance. And I’m Logan Cahill. I’m with her, she’s with me, and for now, we’re with you.”

  Boone said, “If you want to know why you still have your lives, why this town is still standing, it’s because of these two people and the Madigan family.”

  “We can protect ourselves,” one young kid said. He looked college aged. Bill something or other.

  “While you were scratching your little baby nuts on your mother’s couch,” Logan barked, “we were dropping TNT on half those assholes and pumping the rest full of lead.”

  This caused quite a stir, one that had Deputy Don raising his hands and shouting for everyone to calm down.

  “If we’re going to survive this, it’s by sticking together and not running your mouth at strangers, especially those who saved your collective asses. You got that, Bill?”

  The boy nodded, red-faced, his lips pulled tight, his jaw flicking.

  “If any of you has what Bill’s got, ya’ll better stow that crap in a hurry,” Boone said, “because this is the new America. Think of it like the wild west where if you say or do dumb things, you get dragged home to your parents by your ear, or worse.”

  “I heard Ned was killed,” Gary Romlin said. He was Otto’s neighbor. An old guy with more hair in his ears and nose than on his head. His wife was sitting next to him, house dress on, swell socks pulled mid calf, varicose veins visible from outer space.

  “Ned was a child molester,” Stephani said, having just come in the side door.

  Boone sighed inside. Here we go…

  “He was a nice man,” Gary’s wife said. “We’ve been buying seeds from him since he got here.”

  “There’s a dead girl in a cage under his house if you want to know what’s what,” Stephani said. “Sheriff Hall confirmed it before he turned bitch and nearly got me and my family killed.”

  Someone in the back of the peanut gallery was complaining about all the coarse language, but then someone else turned and said, “If this is the first time you’re hearing curse words, you don’t get out enough!”

  “Or you’ve got a soft spine!” someone else chimed in.

  “Here’s the deal,” Logan interrupted, no longer leaning on Harper. “This town is about to be Grand Central Station to the Chicom oppressors. That means the next convoy to roll through here is going to see that mess we made of their last convoy. Then they’re going to want to know where the commander is. For the record, he’s up with us, and he has a giant hole in his skull. I say skull, not head, because we burned a huge pile of those communist rodents, just to keep the bears away. We don’t need to hear from Bill or any other male-feminist peanut gallery as much as we need men and women who can fight. We’ll also need a massive cleanup crew for that charred mess we made just up the street. And we need to cut off the main roads in and out of town. If we don’t secure Five Falls, we won’t have a chance to live.”

  Deputy Don was suddenly looking like he’d lost control. Boone didn’t have the heart to tell him he never had it in the first place.

  “This means all the water purification and gardening tips and hunting parties won’t mean squat,” Harper said. “We know firsthand this was an EMP that caused the grid to go down, the South American Army is invading from massive breaches in the wall down in Arizona, and all that hell is about to push north from LA and south from Portland.”

  “What can we do against all that?” a woman asked.

  She was fairly new to town, owned a 2018 Audi A5. Her husband was older, drove a BMW X5 M edition. Beyond their overly technical vehicles, Boone hadn’t once looked at their cars, nor did he have the time to get to know them. Not with the baby, a solid work load and Otto to look after. It wasn’t that long ago that his friend blew off a couple of his fingers messing around with dynamite while drunk as a skunk.

  “We do what we can,” Logan said. “But we prepare for war is the short answer.”

  “This is preposterous!” the A5 housewife said.
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br />   “This is the way of the world, Cassie,” Stephani said. “All your prim and proper ways of living aren’t going to do anything but get you dead. All of you! But I can tell you this, if you get desperate, or brave, or you wander on our property unannounced, we’re going to shoot you dead. Doesn’t matter if you’re friend or foe. This is your only warning.”

  The volume of outrage hit an all time high, which was something Boone feared might happen. This was a time for hard truths, but with so many people already suffering under communist rule, there wasn’t much buffer room to work with before people bottomed out.

  It was happening right before his eyes.

  Deputy Don was trying again to calm everyone down, but it wasn’t working this time. Harper looked at Boone and said, “Fire off a round.” She glanced down at his piece and said, “Go on, pop one off, wake these snowflakes up.”

  He pulled out his pistol and fired a round into the ceiling. Harper was right, that got everyone’s attention.

  “Can we please all just take a breath,” Deputy Don said.

  Cassie with the Audi and the BMW husband stood and said, “You can’t fire a weapon in a school gymnasium! Do you have any idea—”

  Another weapon fired another bullet, this one crashing through Cassie’s skull. The minute she fell down dead, another shot rang out and a round blew a hole in Deputy Don’s temple, the gore splashing across Boone’s, Harper’s and Logan’s faces.

  Boone ducked down, spun and fired on the Chicom infiltrators. There were about nine of them on one side, five on the other. They opened fire on the crowd. Boone hit three of them flush, missed two more, caught another in the chest. He emptied the mag, hit nothing more of consequence.

  His world turned upside down, panic hitting him hard. Don was on his side, thick crimson blood pooling on the polished hardwood floor beneath them. Gunfire was echoing off the walls, but it wasn’t as loud as the screaming. People were pushing, shoving and falling off the bleachers, everyone trying to get behind them for cover.

  Beside him, Logan and Harper were firing on the Chicoms. She moved well, but at a glance, Logan looked unsteady on his feet, most likely due to his recent injuries.

  A hand grabbed him by the back of the collar, pulling him away. He dug his feet in for purchase, but the strength of the person hauling him to safety didn’t let up.

  He looked up, planting his hands, trying to stand on his own. Harper was dragging him, Logan providing them cover fire. When he stopped, Harper looked down and screamed, “Get your ass up, sissy!”

  He did, but not before a bullet skipped off his face, startling him. Another nicked his thigh, and still another bullet dug into the floor in front of him, spraying splinters everywhere. Pushing through the pain, the wounds didn’t hurt like he thought they would. Then again, none of them were direct hits. He got up and got to cover behind the bleachers on the other side.

  With blood pouring down his face and his thigh smarting, he changed out mags, then fired on the Chicoms who were brazenly making their way into the gym. Boone tapped three of them, Harper took down two, and Logan took out five on the other side. But they were still out there, how many of them he couldn’t be sure.

  The sounds of screaming became the howling cries of agony, of people shot, of people mourning their loved ones. Twelve bodies were strewn out across the metal bleachers. One young girl was hit in the leg and trying to get out of the line of fire. Boone knew her. He also knew that the woman she was leaving behind was her mother.

  Another shot rang out from the side entrance of the gym. The girl’s head snapped back, then she dropped dead.

  Something hot and violent tore through Boone in that moment. It was an outrage long held at bay, the boiling hot hatred he sometimes felt for his father when he’d try toughening him and Clay up. This hatred stemmed from the prison these communist pricks were trying to build around this nation, and now this town. He started walking toward the entrance the gunshot came from.

  “Get back here!” Harper screamed.

  He wasn’t listening to her. He shot the two offending Chicoms. They both dropped dead. Then, behind him, at the opposite entrance, two more soldiers came in to join the one still firing, their rifles at the ready. They were both looking at Boone. They had him dead to rights.

  He stopped in the middle of the gym, paralyzed as the scene unfolded before him.

  From the bleachers, Harper shot at them, as did Logan. Logan hit one, Harper hit two and Stephani sprinted out from behind the bleachers to stab them all and grab their weapons.

  The heavy door slammed shut behind the now dead Chicoms, giving Stephani the cover to grab a rifle. When the door opened again, she wasn’t ready with the gun. She dropped it, turned and drove her knife into the man’s chest.

  He brought the weapon up and fired, but not before she could pivot out of the way.

  The beekeeper ripped the knife out of his sternum, but the second the man fell to his knees, the door was yanked open again, a gun firing a single round from deep within, catching Stephani high in the chest.

  She went down on her back and just laid there.

  Harper and Logan went after her; Boone snapped out of his trance, trekking across the basketball floor toward the opposite entrance. Behind the door, he heard them conspiring. There was maybe five of them. The second he heard the door open, he pumped each and every one of those murderous fiends full of lead.

  That’s when a barrage of gunfire from farther up the hall caught him off guard. Ducking inside the gym, he reached for his spare mag, remembered he’d just used it up, then froze. Was he out of ammo?

  Idiot!

  Across the gym, Harper and Logan made a run for Stephani. But the gymnasium door opened up again revealing a gaggle of Chicoms, all of them armed to the teeth. Logan and Harper stopped in their tracks, opened fire, then backpedaled fast, scurrying back to the bleachers and firing as they went.

  The men ducked for cover, but then shot back. By that time, the two of them made it to cover. Boone, however, was in the middle of it all. To move was useless. He let his gun hand hang at his side, his pistol as empty as his ever draining well of hope.

  The Chicoms stepped inside, fired a round high into the ceiling, causing everyone to stop what they were doing.

  From just outside the door, Boone heard a smatter of gunfire and felt his will failing him. His father would be so disappointed in him right now. He had three guns on him from across the gym. They were screaming in Chinese.

  Setting his weapon down, he raised his hands and thought of Miranda and Rowdy. It would be his last thoughts of them, because this was war and the Chicoms were not humanitarians.

  They were exterminators.

  Chapter Five

  Skylar heard the man rooting around in the rubble. She wasn’t sure if she’d regained consciousness because of him or if it was coincidence that she came around. She didn’t open her eyes, though. And that tickle in the back of her throat? She did what she could to suppress it.

  Flexing her fingers and toes only slightly gave her perspective on where she was. She was buried halfway in the dust and debris of a fallen building. She turned her head only slightly, felt the debris settle into the void she created. Bits of powdery residue dusted her eyelids, moving enough for her to know she was encased in the stuff.

  She was contemplating the next move when feet started back up the pile, heading her way. The Chicom. Strong hands grabbed hold of her face, roughly brushed the dirt off. She did her best not to move, to react, but she was suddenly terrified. He blew the dust off her skin. Fortunately she let her body go numb, slack, pliant to whatever he was about to do to her. The hand finally cleared away the dirt around her throat, then grabbed a finger hold of her jaw and dragged her out of the rubble. She felt the dusty, heavy refuse fall off her body as she was pulled from a tomb of debris. When she was clear, he hooked an arm under her armpit and dragged her out of the dirt. Hoisting her over his shoulders, he fireman carried her off.

 
Where the hell was he taking her?

  She suddenly felt him bend down, plant his hands on her and launch her off his shoulders. She landed awkwardly, almost like he’d thrown her on top of a pile of sandbags. When he walked off, she waited until she couldn’t hear him, then she opened her eyes, some of the grit getting in them.

  The second she landed on the pile of…whatever, she almost cried out. Landing was pain. Breathing was pain. Being alive in that moment and not knowing what was going to happen to her was pain.

  She quickly closed her eyes, not sure how she’d rub them clean if she was covered from head to toe in silt-like layers of this crap.

  Feeling around with her fingers—her ears wide open and listening for the man who hauled her out of the rubble—she tried to identify all the objects she was physically feeling, what she was laying on. That’s when she realized she was on a flat bed trailer with a stack of bodies beneath her.

  Dead bodies.

  She felt the surge of revulsion creeping up her throat. Swallowing hard, she thought of everything else she could, and that’s when she heard him coming back. A second later, the tromping of his footsteps stopped. He was at the back of the trailer. A second later, a body struck her hard, landing halfway on her, squishing her. She tried not to move, to cry, to show any signs of life, but with all the abuse she was taking, it was getting difficult. Soon it would be impossible.

  She had to do something!

  The man then walked around the trailer, got in or on his tow vehicle and started it up. It sounded like an ATV, the engine like that of a farm quad.

  When he took off, she felt the bodies shifting around her and under her. She traversed the body on top of her with her fingers, moving up the legs, feeling the small hands and arms. She moved enough to budge free and felt the face. It was a girl. Young.