by Justin Bell
AFTERSHOCK
Darkness Rising Series
Book 4
By
Justin Bell
Mike Kraus
© 2018 Muonic Press Inc
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www.JustinBellAuthor.com
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Author’s Notes
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Special Thanks
Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great. Thank you to Christine, Claudia, Glenda, James, John, Jonna, Karen W, Karen O, Kelly, Laurel, Lynnette, Marlys, Robin, Sarah, Scarlett & Teresa!
Dark Cloud: Book 5 of the Darkness Rising Series
is now available!
Prologue
When looking at the grand order of the universe, ninety days doesn't feel like a very long time. Less than a blink of an eye, some might say.
Then came the incident. A series of devastating nuclear attacks that decimated the West Coast of the United States and obliterated a complex infrastructure that had taken centuries to build. Within forty-eight hours, the nation was crippled. Shattered and reeling, the United States of America floundered, trying to catch its breath. But a nation so reliant on connectivity, transport and communication could not recover swiftly from such devastation.
With the western region of the country in flames and enveloped by a deadly radioactive cloud, residents poured east, desperate for refuge. Under the guidance of Karl Green and his enormous security contracting company, Ironclad, massive subversive security forces stood their ground, holding the east against what was coldly viewed as "western aggressors," as they were called within the company, and thrusting an already devastated nation toward the deadly precipice of civil war.
While the finger of blame was quickly pointed toward North Korea, an immediate response was impossible to carry out for multiple reasons. A lack of solid evidence that North Korea was responsible—and firm denials of responsibility by a country normally happy to admit to its role in chaos—left the United States alone as its allies refused to commit to a combined response. Additionally, as China quickly realized what kind of response the United States could muster even on its own, they swiftly changed tack and went from a semi-neutral party to a firm and forthright ally of North Korea, promising that they would defend the small country against any aggression without proof of its role in the attacks. America dared not prod the sleeping dragon. Deep in the process of recovery, an attempt to retaliate would have been viewed as an act of war by North Korea's allies and the ensuing onslaught would have finished what the attacks had begun.
Meanwhile, as the military minds struggled to develop a response, the country attempted to focus on rebuilding itself. Canada, Mexico and European allies rushed to lend aid, sending scattered airdrops and shipments overseas, flooding America with supplies and support in hope that it would help get the country back on its feet and to right the balance of power in the world.
For the first ninety days, the devastation was too intense, the recovery too ominous, and while the government tried to collect itself as much as it could, it would take time to return to a place where the power of the United States could be appropriately utilized.
After ninety days, that time was drawing near.
The world had become a frightening place. A violent, aggressive wasteland of conflict, a conflict where the only option for individuals is to survive.
To come together. Form bonds. Build a family. Because even in the ashes of the end of the world, there is nothing more important than family.
Chapter 1
There was a prevailing thought that the apocalypse—that Armageddon—would occur as a single point of impact. One event, one circumstance. One moment the world was there, then it wasn't, like one swift cataclysm that obliterates all. In this case, the apocalypse wasn’t immediate. Not the slamming of a door so much as the slow, maddening creak; old hinges making sure you’re aware of just how much strain it takes for one simple motion.
For some, the events of the incident all along the west coast was instantaneous apocalypse. Millions of lives snuffed out in several calculated attacks all up and down the western seaboard.
Seattle. Portland. San Francisco and San Diego. Las Vegas. Provo. Galveston.
Those were the ones Rhonda knew of. The ones she had heard about first hand or that Brandon Liu had told her about before he’d died.
Before he’d died.
As of three months ago, Rhonda could count on one hand the number of people she considered close friends who had died prematurely, whether by sickness or accident. There had even been one suicide. But since the incident, since those detonations of suitcase nuclear devices, the deaths had come fast and furious, a prevailing, painful sequence of events, one strung right after another and perhaps none worse than what she’d experienced eight weeks prior.
Perhaps it was the brutal nature of the attack that had carved it so indelibly in her mind. The fact that she’d been right there. She’d seen it with her own eyes. After all, she hadn’t known Brandon Liu well, and knew Ricky Orosco even less, but seeing the way they hadn’t hesitated to put themselves in harm’s way, they’d shown no cause for concern for their own safety. They had pushed forward, guns in hand, prepared to do what nobody else would. And they paid the price. She tried to tell herself they hadn’t died for her. They’d been investigating links between domestic militia organizations and some key federal agencies, links that might show some homegrown terrorist network at least conspired with North Korea to obliterate American infrastructure. It was a concept that seemed alien to her, not something that could be true, like the hair-brained plot of a made-for-TV movie, one of those films starring the actors you sort of recognized, but you never could quite identify.
Was that what the world at large had become? A TV mini-series? Apocalypse on a small-screen budget, the Frasers stuck in a shopping mall because there wasn’t enough money to travel to some more appealing location? Then, once the cast got too big, well, too bad, some characters had to die; they couldn’t afford to pay all of those actors.
Rhonda snickered, trying to muffle her almost hysterical laugh. For eight weeks she’d been hovering on the edge of hysteria, prone to fits of strange laughter, or an onslaught of unexpected tears. It wasn’t just about Liu and Orosco, or Harrison for that matter, the man who had piloted the helicopter that now sat in their front parking lot, out of fuel and useless to everyone. It was also about Lydia, her eldest daughter who may or may not be in Chicago, less than sixty miles away, but who might as well have been in a different nation. They’d had no leads, no clues, and not even the slightest idea where to look for her. And trying to find one young woma
n in a city that once held three million?
Those odds weren’t good.
Not that they were in any shape to go looking.
Mentally, it shattered them. Nearly the entire family had been right in that room when the explosion happened, and the only one of them who didn’t appear to be affected was Brad. Rhonda figured it was because he’d seen and felt his parents shot to death right in front of him, so the unexpected and violent deaths of Liu and Orosco, not to mention the grisly injury of Clancy Greer, didn’t seem so shocking. She’d hoped that was it. The alternative was too scary to consider. The fact that a not even twelve-year-old boy might already be so desensitized to real world violence, that seeing an explosion rip bodies apart in front of him had no lasting effect? Rhonda didn’t want to even consider that possibility.
Then there was Clancy.
Poor Clancy.
It had all happened so fast Rhonda never had found out what he’d been doing or how he got caught in the blast the way he did, but a jagged piece of the metal door from the Employees Only area of the store had hacked through his arm just below the elbow. Tore it off, picked it up and tossed it like the arm of an action figure until it came to rest against one of the toppled shelves. She remembered Brad looking at it, his face pale but his attitude nonchalant, as if he was staring at a dime store mannequin. She remembered Rebecca Fields scrambling to save his life, saying how he was fortunate it was a clean cut, the arteries had sucked back into the arm cavity and sealed themselves.
She still wasn’t sure how they’d managed it. Agent Fields was to thank for most of it, her rudimentary field training kicking in and prompting her to use a modified tourniquet to stem what blood there was, a surprisingly little amount considering the severity of the wound. Huddled over him for a good two weeks, she cleaned the injury religiously, thanks to some first aid supplies they’d scavenged from nearby stores. Cleaning it, disinfecting it, wrapping it, changing the bandages, she’d done almost nothing else for two weeks besides care for Clancy Greer. Winnie had needed rudimentary medical attention, but her injury ended up looking much worse than it was. The bullet had passed clean through, and thanks to liberal amounts of antibiotics and a suture kit they had in the helicopter, she’d been up and going again after only two weeks.
Fields had buried herself in the medical care of both Greer and Winnie early, and then just Greer later on. Rhonda thought it was her way of coping with the deaths of her three fellow agents, and her way of weathering the fact that she remained stranded in central Illinois, far away from her home in Texas. The helicopter that had brought them had used up nearly all of its fuel reserves to do so, and even if they could get it fueled up, it’s not like anyone knew how to fly it with Harrison dead. It was about as useful as the dead vending machine in the shopping mall lobby, though at least they’d been able to break the glass on that one and get some food out.
All of these things shot through Rhonda’s mind as she stepped out of the mattress store near the rear corner of the Lakeview Mall, her bare feet slapping on the tile floor. They’d made a home in the place, of sorts. Many of the stores still had some supplies, either on their retail shelves, or in employee break rooms, and they’d been rationing food in order to make it last. Now, though, it was almost gone.
She angled right from the mattress store and walked along the wide aisle of the mall, stores flanking on either side of her. A faint early morning sun shone down through the skylight in the ceiling, an orange bulb stuffed in purple cotton, casting its strange mottled glow upon them. Power had gone out for good even before they’d set up shop, but the skylights allowed a decent amount of light to shine through, at least enabling them to maintain some semblance of a normal sleep schedule.
Walking around the fountain she glanced along the left side of the central pathway, eyeing the makeup store, the jewelry store and the candle store. She found it difficult to rationalize how stores like that had ever felt important. They seemed so useless these days. So inconsequential. Frivolous. It baffled her that in her adult life she might have traveled to a mall just like this to visit one of those stores. She knew she had, usually with Winnie, but that was in a whole different life.
“Sleep okay?”
Rhonda looked over and saw Angel leaning against the wall to her right. He had a package of pre-made donuts in his hand, the cellophane wrapping peeled away, his stubby fingers plucking the artificially orange rings of dough from the package.
“Yeah it was all right,” she replied. “We’re down to those?” she asked, gesturing toward the donuts. Angel glanced down at them and made a face, nodding.
“Want one?” he asked, holding a small ring out toward her.
She extended a palm and shook her head. “I’m good. There’s gotta be something else, somewhere.”
Angel shrugged. “Break rooms cleared out. Vending machines all empty. We’re making regular runs to the grocery store across the way, but so are a lot of other folks.”
Rhonda nodded. Even though they hadn’t seen many other people in the past eight weeks, she knew they were out there somewhere. Living in neighboring towns, coming out only at night, taking what they needed to live for a day or two and retreating again. She suspected that having the black S.W.A.T. helicopter on their front stoop helped prevent invaders into the mall, but she could also see that changing once the grocery stores in the area ran dry. It would just be a matter of time, and not very much time at that.
“Have you seen Phil?” she asked.
Angel nodded. “Yeah it was his shift on watch. Been out front for a few hours.”
Rhonda nodded. Phil had been a trooper. With Greer’s injury, the watch rotation had suffered a big hit, and Phil had stepped up to the plate. He’d taken the lion’s share of the late night/early morning watch shifts, and part of Rhonda knew he’d done it to make up for his perceived uselessness.
Phil had never been the outdoorsy type. Greer had given him several crash courses in pistol technique, but the fact was that Winnie, Max, and Brad had caught on faster than Phil—a fact that bothered Phil to no end. Perhaps the saying was true about not being able to teach an old dog new tricks.
Up ahead, Rhonda’s eyes landed on a small shop which once upon a time had sold massage beds. Not a shop that carried mattresses like the one in which she used to sleep every night, but a smaller specialty shop with several demo units, each one adjusted to a different height. In one of the beds angled at forty-five degrees, she could see Clancy Greer propped up half sitting/half laying, his eyes open and staring off into nothingness, his left arm was facing the aisle, or would have been if it existed. Instead it was just a bandaged stump.
“Clancy, how goes it?” Rhonda asked, making her way into the small shop.
Greer looked over and flashed a smile that tried to be genuine, but was far from it. “Doin’ fine, Rhonda. Just fine.”
She knew he was lying. Fields had been loading him up on pain medication almost non-stop since the explosion and had just started to dial it back some, and as a result, Greer had been going through bouts of severe discomfort, both from the pain and the withdrawal from the meds. They’d had no choice; they’d nearly burned through whatever medications they’d salvaged from area pharmacies and had needed to put a halt to it. Greer understood, too, but that didn’t mean he liked it much. There was something more to his malady, something beyond just half his left arm missing. Something deeper and more systemic.
“What’s on the schedule for today?” Rhonda asked. “You taking any of the watch shifts yet?”
Greer looked at her as if his severed arm was growing out of her forehead. “You crazy,” he said, shaking his head.
“Why? You’re a righty, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I’m a righty.”
“Shove a pistol in your mitt, I bet you’re still a better shot than Phil.”
Greer narrowed his eyes at her. “Be nice, lady.”
“I only speak the truth.”
Greer laughed. “Eh, you�
�re right anyways.”
“So, what? Tonight? Tomorrow? We get you out in that front parking lot?”
He shrugged. “You’ll have to ask the doc.”
Rhonda looked around. “Where is she, anyway?”
“Doc Becky?” Greer asked, referring to Rebecca Fields by his own personal nickname for her, which drove her absolutely insane. Still, it was better than “Ginger” which is what all her squad mates down in Texas called her.
“Yeah, Doc Becky.”
“Where you think she is?”
It was a stupid question. Fields was almost always tending to Greer, and when she wasn’t tending to Greer, she was in the helicopter. Agent Orosco had brought several bankers boxes of paperwork and documents with him from Texas, pieces of what he claimed was an avalanche of irrefutable evidence there were inside contacts working with North Korea to facilitate the nuclear detonations.
So far any evidence that Fields had found was easily disputed, but that didn’t keep her from digging.
“Anything I can get you?” Rhonda asked. “Angel had some nasty looking mini donuts he was stuffing in his craw.”
Greer scowled. “Dang, woman. You guys working round the clock to keep me alive only to kill me with pasteurized breakfast pastries?”
Rhonda chuckled, but her laugh died quickly. “Seriously, Clancy. What do you need?”
“Man I need some coffee. Or bacon. Or anything besides canned goods.”
“We’re even running low on canned goods,” Rhonda whispered. “We will have to hit a supply run soon. Like a real supply run.”
Greer nodded. “Inevitable. Mall’s great and all, but we can’t stay here forever.”
Rhonda nodded, looking at the building that surrounded them. It had protected them for the past eight weeks. Helped them to stay alive and to heal, but Greer was right, as a home it was temporary… and there was Lydia. She couldn’t forget Lydia. They’d been in no shape to travel, no condition to venture deeper into the city which Liu said had been called the “wild, wild west” by one of the border guards so long ago. They couldn’t risk it.
