by Schow, Ryan
There were five men shooting ten people at a time, and two more guards grabbing fresh bodies and hauling them up.
Women, children, the elderly…it didn’t matter.
He had two guns with Lord knew how many rounds left. But this was it. He wasn’t going to live, so he thought it best to take out as many of those bastards as he could.
He fired five rounds, all five rounds hitting their marks. Meaning they struck a body. He fired on the two grabbers, who were now un-holstering their weapons. Nothing happened. He squeezed the trigger again but the mag was empty.
Switching to the other weapon cost him time. People were now pushing and shoving each other out of the way. They were bumping into him, moving past him, around him, some trying to go through him.
He fired the first round, caught one guard high on the chest, but the other guard had him dead to rights.
The guard fired and a spray of red and bits of bone blasted Ryker right in his face. Startled, staggering back, he was shoulder checked by someone who accidentally knocked into him, then driven to the ground with a second, harder hit. Lying in the dirt, he got kicked and trampled.
In the midst of all that, somehow he managed to get a hand to his face to see where he’d been shot. There were no fatal wounds, and the pain wasn’t sufficient enough to convince him he was dying. At best, he found a few nicks here and there, but no bullet holes.
That’s when he realized what happened.
Quickly crawling through the crowds of rushing people, getting hammered in the ribs, the arms, the legs and the head with shins, feet and knees, he found the man who’d been shot. This was the dead guy who took the round intended for him.
Ryker saw the entry hole, then he turned his head over and sure enough, the back of his skull was blown out.
The cuts on Ryker’s face were from the man’s skull fragments.
He set the empty gun in the dead man’s hand, then managed to get to his feet and scramble away with the departing crowd. He knew the guard who fired the weapon would check on the body, and hopefully they would identify him as the shooter and be done with it.
When the guards finally wrangled everyone together in the corner of the yard, including Skylar—who he saw, who hadn’t yet seen him—he breathed a sigh of relief.
All over the grounds, there were dead people, and there were mortally wounded too, most of them crying out for help.
He’d been hoping Skylar wasn’t one of them.
With her safe, he looked around at the bloodshed, the senseless death and he told himself this was on him. He did this. The feeling rolled through him hard, twisting his guts, causing him to convulse. Like so many others, he fell to a knee and vomited, the tears a fact not of the upheaval, but of the horrible thing he’d just done.
The shooting started from inside one of the blocks, maybe North Cell Block, maybe the Block behind it where Skylar heard the guards were stationed. Most of the guards in the yard remained in the mix of people, working through them with the confidence of tyrants.
The more the short bursts of gunfire echoed into the yard, the more people grew quiet. They were listening, the air suddenly crackling with energy.
This was not a good thing.
That was what put the guards and everyone else on high alert. The guards from the observation towers began to leave their posts. What the hell was happening? The first thing she did was think about her back, her legs, her raw fingertips. She saw the guard who pissed on her, and started moving toward him.
Keeping tabs on the Chicoms with eagle eye vantage points, as well as those in the yard, she started to let the beast in her unfold.
Scared, beaten and locked away, she’d kept her emotions guarded. Now that they were unraveling, it was like the clutch was being let out on her anger. She had her eye firmly on Mr. Golden Showers.
The guard who pissed on her.
There was only one last man now on the tower, the chaos from inside the building was continuing, and she was but a few feet from the guard. His head was looking this way and that, concern in his eyes, his mind attuned to any eruption of violence, a rising mob, or an active shooter.
He wasn’t looking at Skylar.
He didn’t even see her coming until it was too late.
When the active shooter moved into the crowd and started firing on other guards, Mr. Golden Showers headed in his direction.
Then he stopped.
One of the guards in the crowd was met by another guard, and then a shot was fired and the first guard collapsed.
Golden Showers signaled to the man on the high tower, got his attention, then pointed like a crazy person at the shooter.
By then, the man in the tower was radioing someone on his two-way.
That’s when Golden Showers turned to return to the edge of the crowd. He bumped right into her. She drove a flattened fist up into his throat, the hollow crunch being a slow delivery death sentence.
“Works every time,” she said, staring at him.
Wide eyed, he tried to bring his gun hand up, but she stepped in, grabbed his wrist to control him, then grabbed him by the grapes so hard, his legs went weak. She crushed his balls in her hand like she’d never crushed anything in her life.
Choking, having his testes wrecked, barely standing on his own two legs, she stood with him, her eyes boring into his. He tried to push her face away, but she withstood the effort, never taking her eyes off him until his legs finally buckled and she let him drop to the ground.
By then the crowd was moving away, a firing squad opened up on the masses and she was forced to take cover.
As she stood there, huddled together with hundreds of scared prisoners, she realized that her work was done there. Maybe tomorrow someone would take Golden Shower’s place. Maybe he’d be better, or perhaps he’d be worse to her. But right then, how she’d exacted her revenge, she could live with that even if she was one of the survivors to take a bullet.
About that time, people started to duck down because the gunfire was getting closer, as evidenced by the dropping bodies.
Then it stopped, but only because one of the guards turned on the others, firing into the backs of those in the firing squad. This rogue Chicom soldier killed another, but then he was shot in the head.
What in God’s good name was going on?
When she saw Ryker making his way in the crowd with blood all over him, she was happy to see him on one hand, but concerned he’d been shot on the other hand.
When it was clear she wasn’t in further danger, she moved toward him. He suddenly took a knee and vomited, and that’s when she started to wonder if there was something wrong with him, if he was dying.
“Ryker,” she said, touching his shoulder. “It’s me, Skylar. Are you okay?”
He looked up and nodded his head, then said, “Yeah, I mean, no. I’m not injured.”
Thank God.
Chapter Forty-Two
The Chicom guards were going through the dying and the dead. Those who were dead, they laid on their backs and crossed their arms. Those who were still alive were shot in the head, laid on their backs and had their arms crossed.
The refugees were ordered to carry the corpses out behind the old Maintenance and Vocational building where the body stack that had been going before the massacre was enormous.
The sight of this ever expanding collection of the dead was heart breaking.
The body stack burned 24/7, the beast being fed constantly. Now it would gorge itself on those who might never have survived this war, this prison camp, the next thirty days.
He tried to tell himself that a lot more were going to die before this thing was over, but it wasn’t encouraging. Ryker’s mood was so black, he couldn’t even see straight.
When he was heading back to the yard, he heard a voice.
“Hey!” a woman called out. “Ryker!”
He turned and saw Skylar, who walked over to him, checking the guards, making sure she wasn’t going to be shot for talking to
him.
“What the hell happened?” she said.
“My brother is dead.”
“What?”
“I had us a ride out of here, but my brother didn’t know. That’s what I was meeting him for earlier this morning, to tell him.”
“How did he die?”
“He thought the guard was there to kill him, and he welcomed it, but not before he shanked the guy. The guard was trying to tell him he had a way out.”
“Oh, my God.”
“So how did all this start?” she asked again, her voice low, conspiratorial.
“I saw an opportunity.”
“You did this?” she hissed low and surprised.
“Shhh,” he said.
Shaking her head, she looked around at all the dead. There must be two or three hundred of them.
“These deaths are on me,” he said. “I’m going to have to answer for this.”
“No, you won’t.”
“I shouldn’t have overreacted,” he said.
“How many?”
“Did I get?” he asked, glancing at her.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A couple of dozen, maybe more? I lost count. Things were moving so fast, and I was on edge.”
“I bet.”
“My heart is still out of control,” he confessed.
“So, you had a way out?” she asked.
Drawing a deep breath though his nostrils, he knew what was coming next.
“I did,” he said.
“Were you just going to let me rot here?”
Her face was beaten pretty bad, but last night out in the cold seemed to take a lot of the swelling away. It had gone down even more, but the faint bluish marks all over her face would soon turn yellow and green and she’d look just as bad, but in a different way.
Still, behind those hurt eyes, and behind all the damage done to her face, he could see she was a reasonably attractive woman. Well, not ugly. But she could fight. From what he saw outside the paddy wagon when she knocked out the guard, the woman could fight every bit as viciously as he could.
“So now what?” he said, not answering the question.
“We wait,” she said.
“For?”
“The EMP. We wait and we be ready. Because when it hits, unless they bring in generators for backup power, this is all going down. We can break out of here then.”
“There’s also one other thing,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The EMP will solve the problem of the Cyberlink in your head.”
“If it doesn’t, will you cut it out?”
With that he showed her the shank that he’d slipped into his pocket. It was the shank his brother made.
She smiled, then said, “Maybe we could clean it first.”
“If you insist.”
“I do.”
“Can I tell you something?” he asked as the two of them lifted a dead body, her taking the ankles, him sliding his forearms under the corpse’s armpits.
“Go,” she said, grunting as they penguin-walked the body across the yard.
“What do we do now?” he asked. When she didn’t say anything, he said, “I mean, I was only here to save Boyd, but he didn’t want to be saved. He only wanted to die on his own terms.”
“And you?” she asked, the strain in her face growing.
“I didn’t really think much further than that. But I have to tell you, when I started killing those guys, it felt horrible—me taking lives like that—but a part of me felt something big and beastly unfolding inside.”
“You liked it,” she said, making sure there weren’t any guards or people close enough to hear them.
“It felt…justified.”
“I move mission to mission,” she said, the admission important. “I infiltrated the Ministry of Propaganda, seduced the Minister, got into his cell phone and cloned it. From there we got intel on the upcoming battle plans.”
“You have their battle plans?”
“You can see most of them unfolding, but we didn’t know if they’d set off an EMP. There is a feeding frenzy happening east of here that’s honestly the most crushing thing an American can see. And it’s about to get worse.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“The EU Army is about to clash with the African Union’s Army for east coast dominance. And the South American Army is either breaking through the southern wall, or they’ve already done that. We’ve got reason to believe they’ll either make a hard run at Texas or they’ll veer west and wage war against the Chicoms here in California.”
“We’re like a carcass to these armies,” he said, disgusted.
“We’re not dead, yet.”
“No, but how do you defeat something like that?” he asked. “We’re two people.”
“No, we’re not.”
“How many of you are there?”
“People or factions?” she asked. “Because there’s actually a hell of a lot of both.”
“So we wait on the EMP,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
“And then we head up north, to a place called Five Falls, Oregon.”
“What’s there?”
“The staging ground for the west coast militia, hopefully.”
Nodding his head, he said, “Do you have anyone waiting for you?”
Now he could see her smile.
“You just starting to figure out I’m not half bad looking under all this abuse?” she teased.
He wasn’t in the mood for teasing, not while they were lobbing another body into the huge pit of flames. Still, he entertained her.
“Something like that,” he said.
“You’re not so bad yourself,” she said. “Or maybe you’re just average, but after what you did, maybe you’re a little larger than life, too.”
He laughed and said, “I’m sure that’s it.”
Chapter Forty-Three
That night, after walking the barn and seeing the progress made, Logan and Harper sat down to a nice meal with Orbey, Connor, Stephani and Cooper. He felt bad being there without Kim. But the company was good and everything was easy, comfortable.
After dinner, Harper told him he’d be sleeping in the room with her, even though he offered to sleep in the barn with the work crew.
By then he was feeling guilty for being with all these women. First he was with Skylar, then Kim, and now he could sense Harper might want to be with him, too.
None of this seemed real. He wasn’t that good looking or interesting.
Was it because he was getting stronger, more capable? The old stories where the handsome stud gets all the pretty ladies…Logan always figured that was just fantasy writers used to sell books to women in need of some romance.
Was that even realistic?
Actually, for a minute there, he was starting to feel like maybe it was. Except he wasn’t handsome and none of them were really that pretty.
Looks didn’t mean squat to him though. What he longed for was the connection. That’s what the Chicoms did that was so damaging—they cut everyone off from talking, from connecting.
Essentially, through a long, orchestrated effort, they turned Americans on each other.
Now, as he lay on the floor next to Harper’s bed, he wished he was back home in his own lumpy bed, with Kim there to cuddle up to him.
“The floor has to be rock hard,” Harper said.
He wasn’t aware she was still awake.
“It is.”
“Why don’t you come up here and sleep with me,” she offered. “You may be shy, or even modest, but trust me, come morning, you’ll wish you accepted my invitation.”
Halfway through the night, he dragged himself up off the floor, his back, hips and legs royally pissed off at him, and crawled into bed with Harper.
She stirred, then moved over. When he got in bed and pulled the blankets over him, she scooted close, snuggling up near him.
“Are you cold?” she asked, groggy.
“A little,” he confessed.
His blanket on the ground was thin, and too short. More like a decorative throw than an actual blanket. So yeah, he was cold.
“I sleep hot,” she said.
He was in his briefs; she was in her panties and bra. When his skin touched hers, he was surprised at how right she was.
“Good God,” he said, “you’re burning up.”
“And you’re freezing.”
She scooted even closer and he said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you feel good.”
“I was thinking the same of you.”
He laid there for a few minutes, enjoying the warmth and comfort of her body snuggled against his. He’d slept with her once before, taking a nap out in the barn before it was renovated. It wasn’t a sex thing, or even a romance thing. At least not to him. She’d said she liked to cuddle, and that wasn’t lost on him. Now she was doing it again, only with less clothes on.
Far less clothes.
He only slept in bed once with Skylar and she slept at the edge of the bed, her back to him. Kim was different. She was just a bunch of limbs draped all over him, but not in a bad way. But Harper…he even liked the way she smelled.
He stored that in his mind for later. And then he closed his eyes, nestled into her a little more, and finally fell asleep.
Logan and Harper went up to the garden to seed new grow boxes for the upcoming season. Orbey, Connor and Stephani stayed behind to work on their own garden. About an hour into the day, they heard the dinner bell at the house ring and knew something was wrong.
The two of them hurried down the hill where they saw the Sheriff standing on the porch with Craig.
“Oh, great,” Logan said as they stalked through the woods, over pine needles, twigs and tufts of a twig/pine needle mixture.
“You did kick Craig’s ass,” Harper said.
