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

by Schow, Ryan

  That man let loose of his bladder.

  “Did my parents piss themselves when you cut their heads off?” she hissed. “I doubt it.”

  Turning to Clay, she said, “Who has a knife?”

  Clay handed her his. She traded the pistol for the blade. Looking at him, her eyeballs shaking, her cheeks burning with rage, she was burning inside with the need to make this man feel every last thing her parents felt.

  Clay nodded again, giving her his approval.

  With nothing left to stop her, she went over to the prisoner, grabbed his hair, and yanked his head up, further straightening his back. Looking down at him, his hands were zip-tied at the wrists. Judging by the bloody nose he had, one of the guys softened him up.

  “You can kill me,” the man said trying to look up and over his shoulder over at her, “but that will not bring them back.”

  She spun the knife over, smashed the butt of it on his right collar bone. She felt the bone break, immersing herself in the satisfaction his shrieking provided. She then broke the other collar bone with an equally brutal strike.

  While she was doing this, her head began to fill with the voices of reason. There were so many. She ignored them all, until some were shouting at her to think this through, and others were chanting for her to kill him.

  “Suffering is the candy of the truly insane,” one of the voices said above the others.

  Harper told her to kill without conscience.

  She said to just do it.

  She jerked his head back, drove the butt end of the handle down on his nose, crushing it. Blubbering now, his arms weak, he cowered beneath her presence. When she looked up, everyone around was first looking at him, and then at her. They all had that look in their eye, that question: would she do it?

  All of these faces, all of these expectations…this is not the way you behave! Was that her voice? Or was this another voice of reason trying to save her from herself?

  She turned in the direction of the two pikes. The masses were blocking the view. With the knife in hand, she waved for them to move away. When her parent’s heads were visible, when that crushing grief tore through her like electric death, she leaned forward and drove the knife down into the man’s right thigh, and then his left.

  “This is torture,” another voice inside her head said. “Torture is the devil’s work.”

  I am the devil.

  Looking back up, she saw the faces and eyes had not turned away. They wanted this as much as she did.

  I am the devil, the almighty hand of righteousness!

  She spun the man over on his belly. He tried to squirm, fighting her with more vigor than she thought possible for his injuries. She spun the knife around in her hand again, drove the blade into his neck, twisted it around, started to cut and saw her way through him.

  He fought her at first, but the fight was short and at some point he died. She didn’t care. She just kept cutting and cutting, the voice in her head saying, “An eye for an eye.”

  Lifting his head, she worked the blade lower and lower, the blood making a pond around her, the rich scent of it reminding her of another pig that she’d slaughtered.

  The world had suddenly become a very quiet place.

  All she heard was her grunting.

  When she reached the bone, she wiggled the blade in between the vertebrae, sawing, torquing, getting through to the other side.

  The head finally rolled off the body.

  She sat back, sweating, her hands and forearms bloody. So caught up in the vengeance was she that she didn’t realize she’d just become the same as them. Looking up at Clay, he just looked down at her, no expression.

  You’re a weapon, he’d said to her.

  I feel like a scared little girl, she’d said back.

  She was not scared anymore. Felicity was rage, vengeance. She would be the hand of reckoning until the day she was killed and stuffed into a grave or an oven, or just left to rot under the light of a thousand days.

  “Your suffering is the gun you’ll use to kill them all,” a different voice inside her head whispered.

  “I’m a weapon,” she said, dazed, disconnected from herself, looking up at Clay with no questions, no answers, not an ounce of remorse. He reached for her; she took his hand, unconcerned with the gore.

  “Let’s get you to the truck,” he said, pulling her up.

  “Where are their bodies?” she heard herself ask. The naïve young woman made a sudden return, the warrior inside her faltering.

  “You’re just a scared child,” another voice in her head said.

  “I’ll find them,” Clay said, taking her by the shoulders. She felt her body start to shiver, the tears building inside of her.

  “I can’t leave them,” she heard herself saying.

  “Still all about love,” another voice said. “Still so weak, still so very, very small.”

  No.

  The tears hit hard, her body suffering an involuntary trembling. Clay wrapped his arm across her shoulders, walked her through the front gates. She got control of herself long enough to make it to the Jeep.

  He sat her down on the curb and said, “I’ll find them.”

  She watched him walk away, realizing for the first time that he was the closest thing to family she’d have now. And she didn’t even know him.

  The wounded child inside her, the young woman who was preparing to embark on adulthood, was officially gone, burned out, nothing but a charred husk of who she used to be. Her innocence was in tatters.

  With the grisly discovery of her parents, with the thoughts of what they must have suffered—how they must have been so scared for themselves and for her—she knew there was no going back. Then there was the deaths, the murders, the decapitation. All things she just did.

  She got up and stumbled to the bushes, crashing to her knees, shaking all over. Her stomach lurched once, twice, three times, the last time resulting in the rush of vomit emptying out in the bushes. She fell to her side, curled into a ball, descended into fits of sobbing.

  Clay returned ten minutes later carrying a body wrapped in dark plastic. Her mother or her father. She glanced at the bag enough to know he’d brought the head with the body. Although the idea of the entire body being together comforted her immensely, the very fact that their heads had been taken from their bodies broke unbreakable things in her. Things one could never imagine being able to heal. She looked away as Clay set the body inside the back of the Jeep. He then came and sat next to her, taking her hand.

  She let him have it, but couldn’t bear to hold onto him.

  “I’ll take care of you,” he said, which only made her heart ache worse. But then she took his hand into hers, gave it a squeeze and pulled it to her face. She couldn’t form words at that point. She only sat up and hugged him.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he finally said, helping her up. “When I get back, we can go.”

  He was about to leave to get her other parent.

  Clay walked back to the airport, looking down at the blood on his hands. He wiped it on his pant legs, but it wasn’t coming off. He thought of all that blood, blood Felicity had spilled. There was a moment there, watching her, when he thought she would be like Logan said Boone had been when faced with an opportunity at retribution.

  He hoped she wouldn’t do it. That she wouldn’t throw away what remained of her innocence.

  But then she was doing it.

  As he watched her little hands working that blade, as he saw all that pent up rage in her eyes, on her face, he’d wept inside for what she was about to become. After this, he wondered, who would she become?

  The change happened before his very eyes. All that innocence, everything once soft and pure, it was gone in a flash, depleted with her every violation.

  She’d killed the three other men right away, which he knew she’d do. But she took her time with the one who beheaded her parents. He couldn’t cut a person’s head off.

  Yet she did just that. />
  He felt sick in his heart and in his stomach. They shouldn’t have come there. But they did. They needed to come. He had to be there for her the way Stephani was there for Boone. In the end, everyone needed someone.

  But now, whomever was left standing would have nightmares. They’d suffer the haunting voices of those who died, their tortured faces forever etched in each other’s psyches.

  Inside the airport, Quan and Longwei just finished wrapping up Felicity’s mother’s body.

  “Thank you, both,” he said.

  Quan said, “I can’t believe this happened. Any of this.” He shook Clay’s hand and said, “I appreciate you, my friend.”

  “As I you,” he said.

  “When it comes time to move on Yale, will you be with us?” he asked.

  Clay immediately said, “Without hesitation.”

  Turning to the fifty or sixty men and women who hadn’t left their opened cages to return home, he said, “Take what you can from here. Arm yourselves, and don’t ever let these people take you again. Don’t give them even an inch of ground! This is a war. It wasn’t started by us, but we’re damn well going to end it!”

  “How?” someone asked. “We want to fight, but how do we do that?”

  “One body at a time,” he said. “This town needs to rally together and find out who can do what. You need to survive, and to do so, you will need to pool your talents, your resources and your intelligence. There is an expert among you in everything you need to do to survive. But you need fighters, too. Gather together as a community and find these people.”

  “If anything,” someone said to the others, “this will make us stronger.”

  “You need people to watch over the ingresses and egresses of this town,” Clay said to the gathering crowd. “These cockroaches are our enemies. And if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you don’t let a single roach live. You see it, step on it. Got it?”

  They gave a collective nod.

  He knelt down, picked up Reina Espinoza’s body then said, “If any of us are ever this far north again, it’s because we need help, or we need an army. My suggestion to you is this: get your army ready. This isn’t about if you’re going to have to fight for your family, your community, or your countrymen, it’s a matter of when. This is our war now, all of ours, and it’s inevitable.”

  And with that, he left Quan, Longwei and their soldiers to clean the place, and to gather up whatever weapons, trucks and intel was left to be found.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Clay drove them home, Felicity sitting there so quiet the entire time, he wondered if she was asleep. And then she was. Inside his broken body, parts of him began to repair, to feel what he couldn’t feel before. Every so often, he found himself looking over at her. Then he turned and looked in the back of the Jeep, at the two bodies he knew were back there.

  This old commie Jeep held almost everything that ever mattered to her. The gravity of this realization hit him hard, so hard he felt himself feeling things for his own parents he had previously been unable to feel since he learned of his mother’s death.

  He glanced over at her again, heard little mewling noises coming from her mouth, watched her settle back down. Then a tear ran down her cheek and it killed him.

  Dusk showed him a purplish-orange sky, but it also kept the roads clear of people and whatever foot traffic there might have been in the daylight hours.

  When he got them home, he woke her, but she did not rouse. He climbed out of the Jeep, went around the other side, then gently opened the door, cradling her as she slowly spilled out.

  He closed the door with his foot, then walked inside, setting her down momentarily as he opened the front door. He then carried her to his bed, took off her shoes and socks and tucked her in. Sweeping her hair off her forehead in the perfect darkness, then leaned down and kissed her forehead.

  In the morning, he woke up, found her sitting up in bed, that thousand yard stare. He had a pretty good idea what she was doing. She was most likely wrestling with what happened, with the emptiness she felt inside, and the roaring pain, with the things she’d done in the heat of the moment.

  “How could I have done that?” she asked, confirming his suspicions.

  “You weren’t wrong to,” he said, gently. “You would have hated yourself if you hadn’t done anything.”

  “Would you have done that?” she asked.

  “Of course, I would have,” he lied. “How you handle these things defines you now. If you would have done nothing, you would have tarnished the value of your parents, and you would be scared, angry, victimized. Now that you’ve done what you’ve done, you are coming from a place of reflection, but strength. You did not dismiss justice, or try to table your rage.”

  “I don’t know who I am, Clay.”

  “That’s for you to figure out. But if not with this tough situation, you would have been forced to become this person you are now by another. Or you would one day be killed for your cowardice. This world is bound to change us, Felicity. That I know.”

  “You came from war, this isn’t changing you,” she said.

  “It is, actually.”

  “How?” she asked, turning to him.

  “My heart closed down overseas,” he admitted, the discovery fresh. “But now, here with you, it’s opening up again.”

  “Thank you for everything,” she said. “It means the world to me that you’d say that.”

  He nodded, solemn.

  “Will you help me bury them?” she asked, no signs of the warrior he saw yesterday. “Maybe be with me while I say a word or two?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need to clean up,” she said. “Do you have water for that?”

  “Of course.”

  He got up, collected a bucket of water, then said, “It’s pretty cold.”

  “This will do just fine,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It will help me wake up,” she said, taking the bucket and limping into the bathroom.

  After a few minutes, he knocked on the bathroom door and said, “Be sure to peel the duct tape off the drain when you’re ready, then dry it and put a new strip on. There’s a roll of tape on the toilet tank.”

  “Okay,” she said, her voice frail.

  Clay went out back and started digging in the soft soil. When she was done cleaning up, Felicity joined him, looking up at the beautiful trees bordering the property.

  “They’ll like it here,” she said. She then picked up a shovel and started digging with him. “Can we bury them next to each other?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  They dug for the better part of the morning, Felicity pacing him most of the way. He had to get her gloves though, because her hands were soft, and blisters were forming. She didn’t seem to care. In some ways, he wondered if she was punishing herself for living when her parents could not. Survivor’s guilt. Or maybe she believed there was something more she could’ve done to save them. But she couldn’t have saved them. She had to know that.

  When they dug the hole deep enough, Clay lowered the bodies into the pit. Crying silent tears, Felicity laid them down next to each other. He asked if she wanted to know which one was her mother and which one was her father. She shook her head. It was already difficult enough knowing they were headless inside the bags. Then, just when he was about to offer her a hand and pull her out, she laid down in the dirt next to them, draping an arm over their bodies.

  He saw her starting to cry again and knew this was what she needed. She had to get as much of this out of her system as she could. He sat back on the lawn against the damp soil and let himself feel for her.

  He was tired of feeling nothing, but feeling so much for someone he cared for was not fun. It was downright painful.

  A few minutes later, he heard a four wheeler pull up out front. Boone. He listened as the front door opened, and then he heard his brother call out to him. Clay didn’t want to yell back while Felicity was having this l
ast moment with her parents.

  Boone came out back and Clay immediately shushed him. His brother looked panicked. He also looked clean. As in clean shaven, a fresh haircut, some life to his face.

  “When did you get back?” Boone asked.

  “Late last night.”

  “Why are you shushing me?”

  “This is a funeral, brother,” Clay said reverently, solemn.

  “Oh,” he said, looking over in the hole. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

  “What’s going on?” he whispered.

  “Logan, Skylar, Noah and Ryker got back to Five Falls yesterday,” Boone said, half his thoughts on this bit of news, and half his thoughts on Felicity.

  “And?” Clay asked.

  “The SAA is headed this way,” he said. Then, whispering, his eyes somewhat shiny, he said, “Both of them?”

  Clay nodded. Boone turned away, took it all in. Just when it appeared he might pull out of the Miranda funk, Boone met Felicity and saw her falling into that same deep well of despair. Clay saw the shadows of pain cross through his brother’s eyes, this young woman’s tragedy a stark reminder of his own.

  “What did I just say?” Boone asked, momentarily distracted.

  “That the SAA is headed this way,” Clay answered.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “How many of them?”

  “All of them, I think,” Boone said.

  “Let me finish with Felicity here,” Clay said deeply alarmed, but trying to set his immediate concerns aside to be with her. “I’ll join you after that.”

  “Sooner rather than later,” he warned, still looking at the hole in the earth. “I have a really bad feeling about this.”

  “This whole world is a bad feeling.”

  His brother left and a few minutes later, he heard Felicity call for him. He sat up, found her outstretched hand and bent down to help her out of the hole. When she was out, she wiped her hands on the front of her pants, then said, “I’d like to say a few words.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s a poem I memorized for when we buried Shawn. It’s by Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  He nodded.