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

by Schow, Ryan

  Chapter Fourteen

  Logan was familiar with the two guards. Both men were Chicom assets, both of them as wooden as a hitching post. Neither smiled and neither said “Hello,” ever. Both men looked him over, specifically his face and the blood on his shirt.

  “What happened?” one of them asked in broken English. It was the first time Logan had heard him speak.

  “Dissident just now,” Logan answered, his breath stabilizing from the fight. The adrenaline was still surging, but soon it would dump and he’d be left feeling like he was in a coma.

  Holding his stomach down, he said, “Someone attacked a troop transport.”

  The guard nodded, as if chaos was the norm, then he ran the wand over him, passing over the hidden Karambit blade without going off. The composite metal was sold as undetectable to Chicom scanners; now more than ever, Logan prayed that was true.

  When the scanners passed over his side without beeping, he found he could breathe again. Wearing the blade was one thing, but having a bloody blade after a near riot with dead Chicom soldiers was something else entirely.

  In truth, it would be his bitter end.

  “Go,” one of them finally said, looking at him like he was a pestilence they were forced to deal with.

  The Chicoms were not regular Chinese citizens. Logan very much liked the Chinese people. But mostly he felt bad for them. They had lived a very dangerous, very oppressed life back in mainland China. Many of them fled to America after all hell broke out in Hong Kong back in 2019. Now that influence spread to America’s west coast, like a disease.

  The disease nowadays was these men in the transport trucks. They were in positions of security and were told to treat the Americans with all the same tenderness and compassion as they treated those in mainland China.

  The men had been steadily moving into the cities for years now. This left the largest cities on the west coast and most of California occupied. In Logan’s estimation, they were the true pestilence. They were the ones with guns they weren’t afraid to use and the authority to kill indiscriminately.

  Upstairs, he saw his boss, Ming Yeung. Her appearance never failed to move him. To say she was hard on the eyes was generous. Looks didn’t define a person though. How they viewed themselves and how they looked at and treated others was so much more than just looks. For this woman, though, she had none of these good qualities. This only served to make her uglier. And that sour look on her face!

  Is she looking at me, he wondered. She was. Oh, God. Was it him? Had he put her in a bad mood?

  She snapped her fingers at him, waved him into her glass office. Even as he was fake-smiling an acknowledgement, Logan was groaning inside. This was what subservience matched with obsessive hatred looked like. Deep down, however, he berated himself for his weakness. When he failed to move, she got up out of her chair, marched out into the bull pen of cubicles and screeched at him.

  “Why are you late?”

  More employees would be flooding into the floor’s front entrance behind him. Ms. Yeung wasn’t paying attention though, for her eyes were cataloguing every last detail on his face and bloody clothes.

  Great.

  He was now so close he could smell a foul odor on her, something cooked and fishy that she’d eaten for breakfast. He hated that smell. It upset his stomach, caused him to shrink back.

  “Why are you late?” she asked again, invading his personal space.

  He looked down on her, held her eyes. Focusing there helped him stay off the more bothersome details of her face—the off-center nostrils, a mouth full of crooked teeth, a slew of open pores, each its own dirty divot.

  If she was unattractive from ten feet away, she was ugly from five feet and flat out dreadful when you were mere inches away. The truth was, if she wasn’t such an asshole, Logan wouldn’t have cared at all about her looks. But couple tough looks with a domineering attitude and the bulk of his contempt for the Chicoms got dumped on her.

  Being this close, however, he froze, perfectly compliant.

  This woman made his life hell, but he reminded himself that she was also the reason he was able to stay off the Chicom radar. Their oppressors had a thing for zero tolerance. One mistake and you ate a bullet. There was no Fifth Amendment, no rule of law, no due process whereby you were considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. With just one hint of impropriety in this dark new world, torture was not only mandated, it was a privilege of the sadists, their brutality an art form they took way too serious. Unless the rumors were wrong, which he feared they were not.

  From what he heard, if you got hauled in for interrogation, it was worse than being shot in the street. While your captors were questioning you, they were also maybe cutting out a kidney, or removing your child’s brain in front of you as part of their organ harvesting program. Rape, mutilation, slow motion murder…nothing was off limits with these people. There were no lines they could not cross that hadn’t been crossed thousands of times before.

  So when it came to outwitting these monsters, specifically a low-rent gatekeeper like Ming freaking Yeung, Logan reminded himself to be as polite as a church boy on Sunday.

  “Han’s dead,” Ms. Yeung said. She was speaking of Logan’s friend who died recently in an attack not unlike the one he survived today. Han was not only another casualty of Chicom resistance, he was a level up from Logan.

  “It was tragic,” he said. He’d been there. He’d survived it enough to get pissed off that his friend was gone, now labeled collateral damage, a statistic.

  “Well today will be a good day for you then,” she said with a lopsided smile. “You get Han’s job. Don’t make me regret it.”

  Her strong Cantonese accent left her with the tendency to muddle her words. Even worse, her voice was like an old spring with a sharp edge. Her English had improved though. When she first arrived from the capital of the province of Guangdong in Southern China, no one understood her well. This was why she yelled. It spurred action. She knew the language barrier would be a problem, and fortunately she had the good sense to work on her speaking skills.

  “Thank you, Ms. Yeung,” he said, shocked that he was getting his dead friend’s job. “I’ll be sure to do my part to ensure the safety of the organization.”

  “Like you did with Harper Whitaker?” she asked.

  Oh, boy…

  This was what he hated about her. She was always trying to trap people in a lie. Even now he wondered, Is it working? Is she laying the trap now?

  It felt like it.

  He was rendered speechless, the blood draining from his face. In Harper Whitaker—a rather plain looking woman—he’d found a resistor, a part of the Resistance. To Ms. Yeung, he’d lost her the same day he discovered her. Ensnaring Harper Whitaker, a woman he was starting to believe was the head of the Resistance, would have been a whale if he could have turned her over to Ms. Yeung. She was an American though, a patriot. Even more, she was a woman who wanted the same thing Logan wanted. To return America to her former glory, her former sovereign self. He was not Resistance before her. But in getting her out of the city alive, stashing her away in the small town of Five Falls, Oregon, he’d made up his mind to join the fight.

  “We saw what you did,” Ms. Yeung said, vague, but suspicious.

  “I…uh…”

  And this is where it all ends, he thought.

  I’m dead.

  “Oh, you didn’t know?” she asked, that awkward smile back on her severely angular face.

  He shook his head in response. Words could be used against you, but gestures were a bit more obscure.

  “You found proof that Harper Whitaker was part of the Resistance. You found us a traitor. You did good.”

  I did good?

  With the praise—which seemed sincere—Logan stood a little taller, then he cleared his throat and said, “I wasn’t sure, which is why I didn’t come to you. I didn’t want to accuse an innocent woman of treason. Plus, I understand the value of your
time and your position, Ms. Yeung. I didn’t want to come to you unless I was sure.”

  “While you were out, we accessed her offline activity and found compelling evidence that she is in the Resistance,” she said, patting his head. “You’re a good boy.”

  Psychologically disturbed by being treated like a dog, he said, “What happened to Harper? Did you find her?”

  She flipped a hand and said, “She’s gone. We’re looking for her.”

  “Do you know where she might have gone?” he asked, knowing exactly where she was. The treasonous act of helping her escape nearly got him killed, but in the process, he found himself and his commitment to freedom from this oppression.

  “Other people will find her,” Ms. Yeung said, waving a hand like it was nothing to fret over. “But if there’s one resistor, there’s more. We need to find them, Logan. Root them out. You need to find them.” She said this while stabbing his chest with a finger, her face stern, completely devoid of warmth.

  “Do you want to show me to my closet, get me my credentials?” he asked.

  Security Engineers like himself didn’t work at cubicles, they worked in dark closets the size of port-o-potties watching all the actual programmers working in live time. A Security Engineer was just another name for a snitch. The way it worked in the huge tech firm was on one monitor, they had the coder’s screen mirrored, but on the other they had the coder’s face as seen through the cameras mounted inside the monitor. Everyone was being recorded, even though they were told otherwise. He had been a monitor tasked with a subject—in this case, Harper Whitaker—but now that he’d outed Harper, and now that his friend Han was dead, it was his job to watch those monitoring the software engineers. He was top tier.

  Well, just below Ms. Yeung.

  To his statement about showing him his new office, the Cantonese nightmare said, “You know where his office is, you go yourself.”

  “What about my credentials?”

  “They are already in place and your assignment is on your desk.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Yeung.”

  Before leaving, she studied him a moment, then licked her finger and swiped it across his face. The pad came back with blood on it. She studied it, sniffed it, then put the finger in his face.

  “Whose blood is this?” she asked.

  “Someone threw a Molotov Cocktail at a troop transport. It’s a bloodbath out there. I was close to some people who got shot.”

  She shook her head and said, “Stupid Gweilos.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The road outside, where the blast that killed Han originated from, was still littered with the rubble of the incident. Crews had cleared the roadways of most of the debris, if you consider shoveling a bunch of street trash up against a seamstress shop, a barber shop and a small grocery store a proper clearing.

  This was just disrespect. What they did with the dead bodies, well now, that was the message. It was a message meant for the Americans and the Resistance alike.

  The Chicoms piled the corpses around the corner where they would degrade and draw flies. It was one thing to see a stack of dead strangers. It was another thing entirely when you had friends or family in that heap.

  Logan was going after work to see if he could find Han. He wasn’t sure what he’d do with his friend, but he didn’t want him sitting in a rotting meat stack like something forgotten, something that never mattered in the first place.

  According to unspoken and unsanctioned customs, the Chicoms liked to wait at least a week before body burns or body disposal. They wanted to make sure everyone saw what dissidents got for standing up for themselves. Seeing the lifeless faces, those slack jaws, the bloody limbs draped over each other, it was a horrifying sight to behold, certainly a lasting memory they associated with open rebellion.

  Shoving the thought out of his mind, he went to Han’s “office” and sat down behind his desk. He hated that he was promoted this way. He hated that he could still see his dead friend in his mind, and that now he was sitting at his desk. His attention was drawn to a picture on the desk, a photograph of Han when he was a few years younger and new to America. Logan was surprised Ms. Yeung or the security staff hadn’t confiscated it.

  The thing about the security closets was, the darkness was a double edged sword. On one hand you could hide from the world as it was, or hide things, but on the other hand, it really dulled your senses, made your job boring.

  He turned on his cell phone’s flashlight feature, studied the picture. Han had been a typical looking man for both his Chinese race and his gender. That was to say, there was nothing outwardly special or unique about his appearance. Now, to look at this picture of him, one had to wonder what dreams he might have been chasing. To others, they might assume he was in America chasing the American Dream. He wasn’t. Han once told Logan he didn’t make the harrowing journey across the Pacific Ocean by choice. He’d fled here from Hong Kong. There the Chicoms were slaughtering hundreds of thousands of resistors. It became too dangerous. His parents grabbed him and together they fled the Chinese occupied city, running for their lives.

  That’s why having that picture on his desk made no sense for either Han or the internal Chicom security force.

  Without any more dillydallying, he got to work on his assignments. Every so often, however, he would turn his attention to the picture. There was something about the photo now glowing in the dual monitors’ bright light that bothered him.

  He finally laid it face-down.

  When it was eleven-thirty, the time Ming Yeung ate one of many of her famously disgusting lunches, he studied Han’s picture once more.

  He only hoped the overhead cameras watching him weren’t being monitored. That was a role Ms. Yeung took on, or so Han had said. He said, “She watches me all day long, and others, but not during lunch. During lunch, I know for sure she shuts her monitor down.”

  Logan listened for the cameras to either zoom in or adjust focus as he looked at the picture. He heard no such sounds. He didn’t bother looking behind him either, for he knew just where they were—in the upper corners of the room, where the wall met the ceiling.

  Same as his old office.

  Using inside sources to keep tabs on the Cantonese Nightmare, Logan was informed that Ms. Yeung ordered take-out every day. Everyone knew the food was disgusting, but what he appreciated about the woman was that she was predictable, both in her schedule and her palate.

  Han told him that this was when he could loop his own server activity (including the camera built into his monitor) and do whatever he wanted. They were taking a big chance that Ms. Yeung wasn’t watching through the cameras, but then again, Logan walked a pretty straight line when it came to that sort of thing, so it was seldom that he took advantage of the opportunity.

  As he looked at the picture frame on the desk, he thought of other things. Namely the men he killed, the soldiers who shot so many people, how he could make a difference out there, rather than in here. He was new to this world of mutineers and revolutionists, though. Not yet a hardened warrior like some of the people he’d recently met. Harper Whitaker was part of the Resistance. The woman he lived with, Skylar Madigan, was in the Resistance. Now he was in the Resistance. But what did that mean? He couldn’t just go out and indiscriminately start executing Chicoms, could he?

  It wasn’t a bad idea, but then he’d be just like the Molotov Cocktail guy—rotting in some gutter, the sacrifice forgotten, not even a martyr to the cause.

  This, however, is where his American brain interfered. He wasn’t a mass murderer. You can’t just kill everyone. On a deeper level, no matter the wars of men, all life had value, even if it had strayed from the just and moral path. Then again, that thought didn’t mean squat when you saw people getting slaughtered. And he had. He’d seen plenty of it lately.

  To beat the enemy, he let himself think, you have to become the enemy. That’s what was rolling around in his mind, that thought. That and, how do you go from a regular guy, a
software engineer-turned-snitch for the enemy, into the one to bring the entire power structure down?

  He couldn’t even fathom such a thing. He wasn’t a leader, or even an organizer. He could fight now, but only enough to get by. Had he not snuck up on those men in the midst of chaos—them weak from attack, him with a proverbial sucker punch—they would have killed him. He would have been dead.

  But he wasn’t.

  I’m not.

  Examining the frame on Han’s picture, he saw the cardboard backing had been opened recently. It was the loose fitting between the tiny metal arms screwed into the frame. He slid these floating tabs out, removed the cardboard and caught the slip of paper as it fell out.

  His breath caught.

  He listened for the zooming of the camera overhead, but didn’t hear anything. Drawing a deep breath, he told himself his privacy was still intact. He hadn’t been found out yet. That’s when he unfolded the slip of paper and located the secure email address to one of the most infamous hackers of all time, a hacker simply known as Tristan.

  Tristan was the Cheshire Cat of the underground Resistance and a man famous for his eccentricities. The most famous, of course, was his refusal to eat whole bananas. He viewed any fruit shaped like a penis to misrepresent his sexuality, therefore, he would never eat dick-shaped fruit unless it was cut first. So when Logan saw the email address as nowholebananas@ccat.com, it made perfect sense.

  Han, he’d recently learned, was tied to the Resistance as well.

  Regardless of the hacker’s many peculiarities, dick-shaped fruit notwithstanding, Tristan was a genius, a former car salesman, former gamer and a player with extreme mommy issues from what Logan had heard. Everything was third and fourth hand, though. It could be that all of it was true. Or none of it. Either way, he now had a direct point of contact.

  He wasn’t sure if he’d need to email the hacker, but having an address made him feel that much better about life in general.