Dark Days of the After (Book 4): Dark Days of the Enclave

by Schow, Ryan

  Back to the carcass.

  She grabbed the hollowed out beast by the hind legs, dragged him back to where she’d thrown the guts, then left him far enough away so that whatever animal smelled its future meal would leave her well enough alone.

  When she returned to her campsite, she went for the hand crank flashlight and the emergency medical kit. She cranked the flashlight, got a decent shine, put the beam on the kit. Wiggling out of her bloody pants, she stripped down to her G-string underwear, feeling naked and vulnerable.

  She glanced at her leg, sucked in a sharp breath, then turned away. It wasn’t an insignificant cut. Now she really started to cry. Hers were not the timid tears of a girl gutting an animal, but the big crocodile tears of a young woman being forced into adulthood. She took a deep breath, told herself everything would be okay, but then she looked down at the wound and understood why it hurt so damn bad.

  The skin had separated several layers deep, the gashed-open sight of it making her queasy.

  She opened an alcohol prep pad with bloody fingers. She wiped the area as best as she could before the pad filled with blood. She used a second pad.

  With the surrounding area clean, she looked around for a suture kit. There wasn’t one. Not all is lost, she told herself. Someone in Five Falls would have one, if she could just get herself situated for the fifty mile ride tomorrow.

  With the medical tape, she pulled the skin tight enough to bring the flesh together, but not so tight that she cut off circulation.

  Gently cleaning the rest of the exposed area with an antiseptic wipe, she placed a sterile gauze pad on it then wrapped her leg with a conforming bandage, which was an elastic knit bandage she could wrap the entire thigh with.

  After that, she took the emergency ice pack, squeezed it, then laid it on her leg while she watched the tenderloin cook. The icy sensation and the deadening of her thigh felt good.

  Every so often, she sat up, stuck the meat with her knife, turned it over. It smelled amazing. While it cooked, her tears dried and she felt stupid for ever having cried in the first place.

  Then again, she was just a big, bloody kid sitting in the dirt in her panties. Part of her wanted to scream. The other part of her felt proud of herself. She wouldn’t earn any style points, for sure, but she was out on her own for the first time, scared but capable, and victorious over the beast, a beast she would eat and gain strength from.

  When the meat was cooked, she used a sturdy pair of sticks to take the grill off the fire and set it on a raised stack of rocks she’d set up earlier. There she let the meat cool, and then she cut away pieces, enjoying what she could of her kill.

  Felicity felt bad throwing the rest of the animal away, for her father taught her that whatever they hunted and killed, the goal was to use as much of it as they could out of respect for its life. In her defense, though, that furry asshole charged her first. And self-defense wasn’t the same thing as hunting.

  Chewing on the cooked flesh, she figured that eating some of it was better than dragging all of it off and leaving it dead in the forest.

  When her stomach was full, but not so full she was going to spend all night feeling sick, she finally tried to get her pants on. The blood had stiffened the fabric though, and she didn’t want to get all that nastiness inside her sleeping bag.

  Tossing the pants aside, she scooched inside her sleeping bag, taking the gun and her blade with her.

  Looking up at the stars through the impossibly tall trees, she was wondering if her father saw her now, would he scold her for her state of affairs (the cut leg), or would he praise her for surviving the boar attack (the delicious meal)?

  She didn’t drift off right away, because every time she started to slide into sleep, she’d jolt awake with half-dreams of being attacked by animals. Finally her mind gave up and she surrendered to sleep.

  It wasn’t a good sleep, though.

  Her leg hurt like crazy, the ground was hard, and she was sleeping out in the open. She woke up a few hours later, used a stick to rouse what was left of the embers, then went back to sleep, somehow managing to make it through the bitter cold morning and past dawn.

  She hated every single second she was awake because she was in pain, her stomach hurt and every muscle in her leg was just freaking outraged at what she’d put them through yesterday. But she knew if she got some water in her, took a solid dump, then got back on the bike, she’d be golden. That’s what spurred her into motion: the need to move.

  Knowing the day was going to suck all kinds of ass was one thing, but trying to get back into her bloody pants was another thing entirely. The dried evidence of the slaughter had tightened the fabric, making it difficult to squeeze into. Hopping around like an injured fool, sucking in her stomach and yanking so hard her fingers felt raw, she managed to get them on, and that’s when the uncomfortable, full feeling hit her lower stomach.

  “Son of a bitch!” she barked.

  She grabbed the toilet paper roll from the trailer then wandered away from camp. Back in the brush, she found a place to squat. After she talked to God and prayed for a good day, she thanked Him for letting her live, and promised she’d be amazing to the world if He’d just let her empty out right and get her pants on again.

  By some miracle, she managed both, and then she got on with the day.

  When her tent was packed up (because she wasn’t going to just leave it there), along with the yoga mat, her sleeping bag, the grate, the medical kit and her canvas, she got her trailer hitched back up and limped down the hill to the interstate.

  Her leg protested all the way.

  She knew it was going to hurt, but she hoped it would loosen up sooner than later. When she got on the bike and started pedaling, however, she winced with every rotation, the pain in her leg worse than she imagined it could be.

  Chapter Ten

  Filiberto Espinoza was a proud man until his pride was stolen from him and he had to accept that he and his family were living in a Chicom occupied state. Several times, before the communists tightened their grip on the city, the state, the entire West Coast, he’d talked with his wife, Reina, about leaving. She always wanted to know where they would go, and when he’d suggest a different place—maybe somewhere deeper into the country where they could escape the Chicom influence—she always found a reason to say no. One day, she flat out refused to leave. She was a proud woman, too. Contrary to Filiberto’s often times heated assertions, Reina failed to accept the notion that this was permanent.

  Felicity hadn’t been present for many of these conversations, but when she finally arrived home, accompanied by a scar-faced stranger—a war hero as Felicity put it—something about Felicity had changed. She admitted that she and Clay had done some awful things to survive, and though she made light of them at first, she later admitted the memories of what she’d taken from others began to haunt her.

  Then Felicity’s boyfriend, Shawn, was killed.

  The boy’s execution crushed the last of Reina’s defenses, but by then it was too late. The Chicoms were everywhere, the fear nearly crippling. His wife fell into a constant state of duress, and Filiberto decided it was time to raise his daughter to be a merciless hunter rather than well-mannered young woman.

  “Only the truly ruthless will survive the world ahead,” he told Felicity early on.

  The way his daughter internalized this new mindset impressed him, but it also let him know how smart and how driven she’d become. She had only known Shawn for a short while, but Filiberto saw how the boy’s death ate at Felicity. He could see it in her eyes sometimes. How she missed him, how the hatred for the Chicoms festered in her heart like a plague. Felicity knew and accepted that which Reina could not: this was their new life, their future, and most likely their future demise.

  He and Felicity had a fruitful morning, hunting rabbit together, but then it all went wrong when he saw Reina being dragged out of the house by the Chicoms. It wasn’t just his home, either. The foreign devils were hitting
all the homes, moving through the community like termites chewing through wood.

  Those who survived were taken away in vans; those who didn’t were shot dead in the street, left there like bags of garbage.

  After he hugged his daughter tight, Filiberto frantically raced after Reina, unable to catch her, but unwilling to stop trying. He tracked the van holding her hostage. He ran as fast as he could, but because of the uneven surfaces, he spent more time running than sprinting. Too soon, his legs and back began to disagree with his mind’s desire to push them harder, and that’s when it hit him: he was no longer a middle-aged man.

  The energy he used to have as a kid deserted him, left him huffing and puffing and wanting to stop running out of sheer failure.

  This was Reina though, he thought to himself.

  He had to keep moving.

  Van after van was stuffed tight with the stolen citizens of Roseburg, their thrashing bodies dragged from their homes, their loved ones shot, their pets slaughtered.

  He saw this with a sort of disjointed horror, the sick reality of it gathering inside him. At first he channeled all of that fear and hostility into raw power. But then the realization hit him like a punch to the face: those were his friends and neighbors!

  Filiberto had several rounds in his rifle. He could stop and shoot any one of the Chicom scourge, but he forced himself not to. He didn’t take up arms against them until he lost sight of the van and couldn’t run another step.

  Bent over, spitting, trying not to puke, he cursed himself for his age, for not being able to run faster, or farther, but then he heard a ruckus across the street. Walking out from behind a house, he spotted a family of four being shoved around in the street. The three Chicoms told them to get on their knees. They were going to execute them!

  Filiberto lined up his first shot, took out the first Chicom. On the second shot—which he sighted quickly—he took out the second. The third man was moving at that point. Filiberto caught him in the spine.

  Drawing from his reserves, Filiberto trotted over to the men, gathered up two of the guns for himself, then gave the man and his family the third weapon. Without tending to the screaming, paralyzed Chicom soldier he’d shot in the back, he got in the van, drove over him, then headed as fast as he could after the van that had taken his wife. He’d lost her. He didn’t want to admit it, but it was true. Yet he was certain he knew where to find her.

  Unfortunately, there were more than a few of these nondescript vans rounding people up. Were they all being transferred to the same place? They had to be. That’s when the realization dawned on him. Slowing the van, pulling to the curb, he parked, got out, opened the back doors.

  Inside of his own van, he saw two families, the lot of them both beaten and scared.

  “Go,” he said. They all got up and moved toward him. “Hide quickly, arm yourselves with the weapons in the front seat, then get out of town while you can!”

  But if he had to get out of town, where would he go?

  He couldn’t think like that.

  Several people thanked him as they crawled their way to freedom, but who was he to be thanked? He lost his wife, sent his daughter away on what would surely be a harrowing journey to Five Falls, and then killed three people and stole a van. He was no one. If anything, he was a man about to lose everything, possibly even his good standing with God.

  When he got to the edge of the I5, he saw the vans making their way across the interstate and into the regional airport. All along the runway were gigantic chain link fences. They were secured to the asphalt all along the runway apron and the runway itself. He imagined they were anchored down with industrial strength concrete screws, or something of the sort. Three strands of barbed wire were strung across the tops of the fences, all of it angled to keep people in.

  This was a rudimentary detention center.

  A detestable sight, for sure.

  He ditched the van behind the Lil Pantry Market & Deli next to the Valero gas station, then scurried across the interstate heading toward Mulholland Drive, which ran parallel to the interstate.

  Behind that was a thicket of trees, and past that was the back end of the airport. He got as far as the chain link fence around the trees when he was yelled at to stop. He had his rifle, but it was long and he couldn’t get into firing position with it like he could a pistol. He’d be shot before he could even line up a shot. His heart, as well as his forward momentum, came to a grating stop.

  He lowered his gun, then raised his hands, a fearful compliance washing over him. The approaching Chicom soldiers had him dead to rights. Submission in itself was now the difference between life and death. If they let him live, he would at least get inside where he hoped to find Reina.

  They should have shot him right then and there, but he had acquiesced, lowering his eyes in a subservient gesture, all the retaliation having left his body in a state of weakness. He appeared calm on the outside, but inside, he was praying this wasn’t the end.

  It wasn’t.

  Instead of killing him, they perp walked him to a van, shoved him in back and drove him to the front gates. There they dragged him out of the back and hustled him into the detention facility by gun point. Twice they jabbed him with his own rifle, and twice he took it, hoping just to stay alive.

  From inside the camp, if he could find her, he and Reina would strategize their way out.

  He prayed she was still alive.

  When they quickly processed him, it was just inside an entrance behind the Oregon Department of Transportation. The chain link perimeter ran from the DoT to the Aviation Suites—which was once a hotel, or a motel, that now looked to be the quarters of the Chicom guard—then down Aviation Drive where it created a border between the street and nine large hangars that looked to have been converted into human pens. From there the barrier ran along the tree line he was trying to come through earlier and all up the outside of the apron bordering the taxiway. Instead of airplanes parked on the apron, there were thousands of people just sitting, standing, or walking around. What else were they going to do? And why were the Chicoms holding them now? Was this what they did with other survivors? Or were they planning something more nefarious?

  He couldn’t know for sure. The one thing he was certain of was that he was inside, and he had to find Reina.

  Filiberto made his way through the crowds of people. The heat of the blacktop radiated upward, the stink of the prisoners penetrating his olfactory senses with a punch. One crisis at a time, he thought. He reminded himself that he was alive, and inside. As for getting out, that was an entirely different matter, not something he’d need to consider at that moment.

  For the first time that day, he prayed quietly in his head, begging God to bring him back to his wife so that he might protect her, ease her fears, let her know she was not alone.

  If anything happened to her…

  Chapter Eleven

  Logan woke Harper up with the kind of morning sex that had been building in him since he first opened his eyes half an hour earlier. This was the just in case I don’t make it home kind of sex that left her grinding out an orgasm moments later. She was chewing on her hand to stay quiet. Looking down at Logan, her eyes holding his, her need for him was more apparent than ever.

  She told Logan he was her first true love. That she felt a connection with him that was so deep, the very idea of him leaving her, with Skylar no less, felt like a blade twisting in her heart.

  “I’m yours and only yours,” he said, his shields down, his soul the bright flame inside his heart.

  “If I asked you not to go,” she said, laying her head on his chest, her fingertip tracing a line of scar tissue, “would you stay with me? Let the others go?”

  When she asked this, she would not look into his eyes, for he imagined she was fearful that he would say no.

  “Why do you torture us both with such ridiculous questions?”

  He’d lost weight, gained muscle, brought his body back to its natural state. M
oving constantly, gardening, building things, eating small balanced meals while getting fresh air and clean water—all these activities did wonders for his body, mind and spirit. He saw her taking notice, her hands roving over his pecs again in slow, needful currents.

  “I love the way you look,” she said, ignoring the question.

  “We’ve both changed,” he said. He took her face, tilted it so they were eye to eye. “I’m in love with you, Harper.”

  “Really?” she asked. He hadn’t said that before. He’d been feeling it for awhile now, and felt like it would be selfish to keep it to himself any longer.

  “Truly,” he answered.

  Sliding down the side of him, she cuddled him, draping a hand over his chest. Pulling back the blankets, he looked at her nude body, marveled at how much she’d changed as well. He found himself missing the previous version of her, but he was also extremely attracted to this leaner, more muscular version as well.

  Like Logan, Harper’s body found its natural reset.

  “For the first time in a long time, I have to admit, I kind of like the way I look,” she said as he let the blanket fall back over them both.

  “Are you worried about Skylar?” he asked.

  She and Ryker were in the next room over, the insulation good, but the barn not any kind of sound chamber. If they could sometimes hear Ryker and Skylar going at it, they could surely hear him and Harper when they weren’t able to have the quietest of sex either.

  “I’m not worried much about her,” Harper responded. “I mean, maybe a little bit.”

  “Skylar’s in love with Ryker,” Logan said. “And I’m in love with you.”

  “But you were once in love with her.”

  “She was bigger than life to me back then, but there was never any real bond formed between us. Not like the bond you and I have formed.”

  “You two had sex,” she said.

  “And that will never change, but sex isn’t love. It’s just insert tab A into slot B, whereas you and I have each other’s hearts, right?”