The Day After Never - Insurrection (Book 5) Read online

  The Day After Never

  Insurrection

  Russell Blake

  Copyright © 2017 by Russell Blake. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact:

  [email protected]

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  Contents

  Books by Russell Blake

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Excerpt from A Girl Apart

  Books by Russell Blake

  Co-authored with Clive Cussler

  THE EYE OF HEAVEN

  THE SOLOMON CURSE

  Thrillers

  FATAL EXCHANGE

  FATAL DECEPTION

  THE GERONIMO BREACH

  ZERO SUM

  THE DELPHI CHRONICLE TRILOGY

  THE VOYNICH CYPHER

  SILVER JUSTICE

  UPON A PALE HORSE

  DEADLY CALM

  RAMSEY’S GOLD

  EMERALD BUDDHA

  THE GODDESS LEGACY

  A GIRL APART

  The Assassin Series

  KING OF SWORDS

  NIGHT OF THE ASSASSIN

  RETURN OF THE ASSASSIN

  REVENGE OF THE ASSASSIN

  BLOOD OF THE ASSASSIN

  REQUIEM FOR THE ASSASSIN

  RAGE OF THE ASSASSIN

  The Day After Never Series

  THE DAY AFTER NEVER – BLOOD HONOR

  THE DAY AFTER NEVER – PURGATORY ROAD

  THE DAY AFTER NEVER – COVENANT

  THE DAY AFTER NEVER – RETRIBUTION

  THE DAY AFTER NEVER – INSURRECTION

  The JET Series

  JET

  JET II – BETRAYAL

  JET III – VENGEANCE

  JET IV – RECKONING

  JET V – LEGACY

  JET VI – JUSTICE

  JET VII – SANCTUARY

  JET VIII – SURVIVAL

  JET IX – ESCAPE

  JET X – INCARCERATION

  JET XI – FORSAKEN

  JET – OPS FILES (prequel)

  JET – OPS FILES; TERROR ALERT

  The BLACK Series

  BLACK

  BLACK IS BACK

  BLACK IS THE NEW BLACK

  BLACK TO REALITY

  BLACK IN THE BOX

  Non Fiction

  AN ANGEL WITH FUR

  HOW TO SELL A GAZILLION EBOOKS

  (while drunk, high or incarcerated)

  About the Author

  Featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and The Chicago Tribune, Russell Blake is The NY Times and USA Today bestselling author of over forty novels, including Fatal Exchange, Fatal Deception, The Geronimo Breach, Zero Sum, King of Swords, Night of the Assassin, Revenge of the Assassin, Return of the Assassin, Blood of the Assassin, Requiem for the Assassin, Rage of the Assassin The Delphi Chronicle trilogy, The Voynich Cypher, Silver Justice, JET, JET – Ops Files, JET – Ops Files: Terror Alert, JET II – Betrayal, JET III – Vengeance, JET IV – Reckoning, JET V – Legacy, JET VI – Justice, JET VII – Sanctuary, JET VIII – Survival, JET IX – Escape, JET X – Incarceration, JET XI – Forsaken, Upon a Pale Horse, BLACK, BLACK is Back, BLACK is the New Black, BLACK to Reality, BLACK in the Box, Deadly Calm, Ramsey’s Gold, Emerald Buddha, The Day After Never – Blood Honor, The Day After Never – Purgatory Road, The Day After Never – Covenant, The Day After Never – Retribution, The Day After Never – Insurrection, The Goddess Legacy, and A Girl Apart.

  Non-fiction includes the international bestseller An Angel With Fur (animal biography) and How To Sell A Gazillion eBooks In No Time (even if drunk, high or incarcerated), a parody of all things writing-related.

  Blake is co-author of The Eye of Heaven and The Solomon Curse, with legendary author Clive Cussler. Blake’s novel King of Swords has been translated into German, The Voynich Cypher into Bulgarian, and his JET novels into Spanish, German, and Czech.

  Blake writes under the moniker R.E. Blake in the NA/YA/Contemporary Romance genres. Novels include Less Than Nothing, More Than Anything, and Best Of Everything.

  Having resided in Mexico for a dozen years, Blake enjoys his dogs, fishing, boating, tequila and writing, while battling world domination by clowns. His thoughts, such as they are, can be found at his blog:

  RussellBlake.com

  To get your free copy,

  just join my readers’ group here:

  http://bit.ly/rb-kos

  Chapter 1

  Ezekiel “Zeke” Winthrop had grown to hate the spring rain that inevitably followed the winter storms in the Pacific Northwest. Before the collapse, it had just been a gray sameness that he’d become inured to, an inconvenience if he had to drive somewhere, nothing more. But now that much of his time was spent outdoors as one of the leaders of the Astoria, Oregon, security detail, the rain was a punishment, the icy sting of it on his face like needles, the water a conspirator that outsmarted his best efforts no matter how he secured his slicker and which managed to leave him soaked by the end of a patrol.

  His pony, Starbuck, didn’t seem to mind, and Zeke leaned forward and patted his mane reassuringly with a gloved hand, a well-used AR-15 clutched in his other. The twenty men accompanying him were watchful in the drizzle, weapons at the ready. They’d ventured beyond the secure area maintained by the enclave in Astoria and were skirting the road to Clatskanie, roughly thirty miles east of their little port town.

  A report had come in that morning over the shortwave radio from a trading post along the road that a band of heavily armed marauders had been spotted headed Astoria’s way. Zeke’s team had mounted up, their directive always the same: to send a clear and unambiguous message that raiding wouldn’t be tolerated in their territory and would incur a massive and immediate display of overwhelming force.

  “Probably from Portland,” the gunman on Zeke’s right muttered, his voice a low growl. “Seems like it’s getting worse there by the day, don’t it, Zeke?”

  “Doesn’t much matter where they’re from, does it, Burt? It’s where they’re going that counts,” Zeke said. “Be nice if the sky stopped pissing on us for a while, though.”

  “Maybe we should move to Arizo
na. Or Southern California. I hear there’s some big sales going on down in Beverly Hills, and you won’t see water for two days’ ride.”

  Zeke grunted. “Thank the Lord for small favors that we didn’t live there, huh?”

  “Little rain never hurt anybody,” Burt agreed, the wet sucking of the mud as his horse worked its way along the trail as regular as a heartbeat.

  Los Angeles was infamous after the collapse that had ended the world as they’d known it; the city’s masses had become a panicked swarm when the grid went down and the virus spread like wildfire. The various criminal factions previously kept in check by the police were emboldened by the lack of law enforcement, and even good neighbors turned on one another once the food ran out. Everybody had a gun or three, convinced that would save them when things got ugly, but even in the grimmest projections nobody could have predicted millions dying slowly of thirst and hunger, desperate to survive for another few days. The worst of the initial crime spree had petered out after the first few weeks as the virus had turned the L.A. basin into a charnel house, and then it had been a grim war of attrition, the freeways gridlocked, even church-going pacifists growing trigger-happy when anyone neared their home.

  Within six months, the majority of the damage had been done, and almost ninety percent of the population south of San Francisco had died of disease, starvation, or violence. The army never did arrive to rescue them, instead focusing its limited resources on locking down its own facilities and securing assets deemed vital to national interests. But the virus played no favorites, and soon even the most dedicated members of the armed forces had succumbed to the forces of entropy, either dying at their posts or starving with the rest of the population as the distribution systems failed.

  Stories had reached Astoria early on as drifters made their way north, braving adversity in search of somewhere, anywhere, with food and water. The accounts were always the same: whole families left to rot in their homes, now worthless, their six-figure electric cars as useless as their big-screen TVs and their credit cards. Those whom roving gangs hadn’t murdered languished with whatever they’d been able to scrounge until thirst drove them mad, the pumps that carried water from the aqueduct many miles away silent. Pestilence, starvation, and sudden violence were the new norm, and many had committed suicide after taking their children’s lives, the prospect of agonizing death too much for even the bravest. For weeks whole communities were uninhabitable due to the stench of decomposition.

  Eventually drifters stopped coming from the south, and the grim accounts were limited to chatter on the shortwave radio. Zeke had weathered the collapse better than most, his background in the military essential to surviving in the new world. His family hadn’t been as fortunate: the virus had taken them along with most in the coastal hamlet, leaving him the last man standing in his little neighborhood. He’d kept to himself for the first year, but had run into other surviving members of the town when fishing or heading to one of the streams for water, and ultimately agreed to join forces with the rest and work for the common good, applying his specialized skills to keeping the tiny fraction of the townspeople who’d made it past the challenges of the first year safe.

  Zeke checked his watch and wiped the rain from his face, his gaze returning to the trail. Marauders were uncommon these days; Astoria’s reputation as able to protect itself discouraged all but the most desperate. Occasional groups out of Portland still made attempts to loot outlying areas, but most who’d survived had learned to be deadly since the collapse, and there was no longer such a thing as easy prey for raiders or scavengers, even in the boonies.

  The report they’d received had triggered alarms with the town council, therefore, and now Zeke and his crew were chartered with hunting down the marauders and executing them, no questions asked. Astoria’s approach was both brutal and effective, and as a result it was one of a number of communities that had escaped the ravages of the criminal warlords who ran the larger cities – Seattle and Portland both controlled by a particularly vicious bunch of ex-bikers who’d established order with an iron fist. Astoria was too distant and too dangerously self-reliant to be worth attacking, so the town had forged a cautious truce with its larger neighbors, relying on its strategic location at the mouth of the Columbia River for ocean fishing and the coastal trade initiated by a few intrepid souls with sailboats liberated from marinas up and down the waterway.

  Zeke squinted at a clearing ahead and signaled to his men. They halted their horses and dismounted in silence. These patrols were a regular occurrence for them, their training born of discipline and real-world experience that had forged them into effective fighters. Most were ex-military, hardened vets who’d seen combat before the collapse. Those who had been virgins before the virus had since seen more firefights than the average Special Forces soldier in an entire career.

  Burt exchanged a wary glance with Zeke, who motioned ahead with two fingers. Burt leaned into him, his voice a barely audible whisper.

  “What is it?”

  “Red fabric. Up ahead. Probably a tent. Showtime, buddy. Take point,” Zeke instructed. Burt nodded and brushed past him, the snick of his safety flipping off the only sound besides the squishing of his boots in the mud.

  The gunmen made their way along the trail, two staying back to mind the horses while the rest marched toward their target. Marauders would be easy to distinguish from ordinary travelers by their weapons and their numbers. The stragglers who found their way to Astoria from Portland traveled in twos and threes, and rarely had anything resembling impressive firepower – usually an old shotgun or rifle with a handful of cartridges, or a couple of gangbanger pistols with half-empty magazines. Marauders usually traveled in groups of ten or more and knew their way around weapons, having depended on them for years to steal and kill rather than do honest work to survive.

  When asked by one of the townspeople what his group did, Zeke often compared his job to that of an exterminator – pest control. He experienced exactly zero remorse at the taking of life from those who lived by murdering innocents. That was how the marauders did business – they hunted in packs, targeted the weak, and slaughtered for amusement. Even the thugs that ran Portland and Seattle wanted no part of them, and the highways between the two cities were considered a death sentence by travelers.

  At a signal from Burt, the men fanned out; the group was now ten yards across as the brush thinned and the trail widened. Up ahead Zeke could make out multiple tents but no animals, which struck him as odd. Marauders always had well-tended horses, and plenty of them. Maybe they’d run across a hapless group of refugees from Portland, who’d staked out a camp in the inclement weather? Zeke had a hard time believing the trading post would mistake them for a threat, though, and frowned to himself as he scanned the trail ahead, his finger on the trigger guard of his assault rifle and a coil of tension lurching in his gut.

  Zeke stopped in his tracks at something in the periphery of his vision – something he’d seen before in his military days and which he instantly recognized.

  “Burt, stop!” he called out, abandoning any pretense of stealth, but it was too late. Burt’s boot tripped the monofilament strung between two trees at shin height across the trail, and the dreary afternoon exploded in a blinding flash of orange flame. Burt vaporized into a hundred pieces before Zeke’s eyes as Zeke was hurtled backward, his legs numb, flying through the air in defiance of gravity as though weightless, the skin of his face melted off, but the synapses of his pain receptors unable to telegraph the blinding agony that should have instantly followed. The trees overhead pinwheeled as he tried to blink away blood, and some part of his reptilian brain vaguely realized that he no longer had hands with which to stop his fall.

  Zeke slammed headfirst into the wet earth, already dead by the time his body bounced once and shuddered. The shrapnel and the blast from the IED had already shredded his patrol, leaving only the moans of the wounded at the rear of the group and cries of alarm from the men guarding the ho
rses.

  Chapter 2

  Richmond, Washington

  The cooling towers of the Columbia Generating Station hulked in the near distance as Richie and Loomis Vargas pulled open the gap they’d cut in the perimeter chain-link fence just beneath a rusting radiation warning sign affixed to the cross post and crawled through. Loomis, the older of the brothers, hoisted his stained army surplus rucksack and adjusted the shoulder strap. His younger sibling straightened and pushed the fencing back into position, so in the unlikely event anyone came by that remote section it wouldn’t be noticed.

  They looked over the field covered in gray-white ash from the eruption of Mount St. Helens two days earlier, and Loomis elbowed Richie and offered a crooked grin.

  “Looks like it snowed, huh, dude?”

  “Christmas in March,” Richie agreed, and they set off toward the industrial gray buildings across the expanse.

  The pair shuffled toward the main structure. The way was familiar after three prior foraging trips, when they’d found a treasure trove of small items they could easily carry – flashlights with dead batteries, coveralls, cleaning supplies, and solvents useful in making methamphetamine in their backwoods lab. The latter was the object of their current trip, their supply exhausted but the demand for the heady drug stronger than ever.

  The brothers were scavengers, outcasts from the enclave in Richmond, which largely consisted of holier-than-thou survivalists who ran what remained of the town like a prison. Of course, repression always created blowback, and Loomis and Richie had discovered a thriving desire for anything that could numb the pain of daily existence or provide relief from a grinding reality with no bright spot in sight. Their little business had thrived, and they now wanted for nothing. Those in need of their product were willing to supply whatever they wanted – food, drink, ammo, sex.

  The latter had been especially appealing to the pair of twenty-something men, who delighted in the charms of the daughters of the smug elite elders who dictated terms to their flock. All in all, they’d made the best of a bad situation and were as happy and prosperous as they could have imagined, given the circumstances.