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Zommunist Invasion Box Set | Books 1-3

Page 26

by Picott, Camille


  “Mom!” Amanda screamed.

  Mrs. Nielson shot across the bed. She barreled into Mr. Nielson and latched onto him. They both crashed to the floor. Mr. Nielson screamed as his wife bit down on his shoulder, her teeth tearing through his shirt and skin.

  Heart pounding, Cassie shoved Amanda aside. Option C. She still had a chance to make option C work.

  Unfortunately, that now meant locking Mr. Nielson in the bedroom, which hadn’t been part of the original plan.

  She jumped to her feet, lunged across the hallway and into the bedroom. She grabbed the door handle just as Mrs. Nielson turned bloodshot eyes in her direction.

  Cassie hauled back on the door. Mrs. Nielson leaped when she only had it halfway closed. By sheer dumb luck, Mrs. Nielson hit the back the door. The force of it slammed the door shut.

  “Mom! Dad!” Amanda rushed forward.

  Cassie blocked the way. “No! Stay back.”

  “But—!”

  “It’s not safe. Stephenson, grab the sideboard.”

  Stephenson had retreated to the end of the hallway, which led into the kitchen. There was a sideboard in there where Mrs. Nielson kept all her linens. It was skinny enough to drag down the hallway, but large enough to block the door.

  Stephenson gaped, eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses. His mouth worked, but no sound came out. He didn’t move.

  Cassie realized she was going to have to move it herself, but she couldn’t leave Amanda here. She was likely to do something stupid, like go in after her parents. Her mother was currently slamming her body against the door, growling and snarling.

  “Come on, Amanda.” She grabbed her friend’s arm with both hands and pulled.

  Amanda stumbled blindly after her, tears streaming down her face. Sobs broke free from her chest.

  It was an awful sound. Cassie blinked back her own tears. She adored the Nielsons. She’d taken countless road trips with them to various chess tournaments up and down the state all through high school. She was at their house so often she was practically their surrogate daughter.

  Cassie plowed into Stephenson and shoved him the rest of the way into the kitchen. He fell back against the sink, fumbling at the kitchen knives that sat in a wooden block on the counter.

  “Stephenson, help me move this!” Cassie positioned herself on the far side of the sideboard.

  Other than to grab a rather long knife, Stephenson didn’t move.

  “I can do it.” Amanda, still choking on sobs, got the other end of the sideboard.

  Fear and frustration made Cassie want to scream. Amanda had just lost both parents to a Russian virus, yet she was able to pull it together. Stephenson, on the other hand, stood at the kitchen sink like a useless fish.

  Cassie and Amanda dragged the sideboard down the hall and positioned it in front of the door.

  “Amanda?” It was Mr. Nielson.

  “Dad?” Amanda leaned against the wall, brushing stray wisps of brown hair out of her eyes.

  “Sweetheart, are you okay?” he called through the wood door. Growls from his wife punctuated his words.

  “Yeah. Are you?”

  A brief silence followed this question. Poor Amanda couldn’t stop crying.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I … I didn’t think your mother would actually bite me.”

  “What’s she doing now?” Cassie asked. She half expected Mrs. Nielson to eat her husband.

  “She’s not paying any attention to me now,” he said. “It’s like … she just needed to bite me.”

  In yesterday’s broadcast, Dal Granger had told them this was how the virus spread: through bites. All organisms had an internal directive to procreate. After what Cassie had just seen, she was pretty sure she’d just witnessed Mrs. Nielson following the virus’s need to replicate. And now that she’d done that, she was finished with her husband.

  Pretty soon, Mr. Nielson would succumb to the virus. He, too, would become a virus replicating machine. Just like the monsters outside ringing the cottage. Mr. Nielson had only a few hours.

  Mrs. Nielson continued to pound and scratch at the door. Stephenson at last came back into the hallway. He carried the knife in one hand and dragged a chair with the other.

  He was trying. That was better than nothing. Cassie took the chair from him and wedged it beneath the sideboard.

  “Can you grab another one?” she asked Stephenson.

  He nodded numbly and headed back toward the kitchen.

  “Dad, what are we supposed to do?” Amanda asked. “We need to get you out of there.”

  “No, sweetie. That’s not an option.”

  Silence again. Cassie took advantage of the moment to shove a second chair beneath the sideboard. It wasn’t bad, as far as barricades went. Although she’d feel better if there was another mile between them and the Nielsons.

  Amanda and her father continued to talk through the door while Mrs. Nielson tried to batter her way through it. Cassie retreated to the kitchen with Stephenson.

  “What are we going to do?” Stephenson asked in wail of despair.

  Cassie didn’t answer. The truth was, she hadn’t given them good odds of making it this long. She’d hadn’t plotted out their next moves yet.

  She went back into the living room and sat in front of the chessboard. Chess was her happy place. She could think better when she had her chessboard in front of her.

  “What are you doing?” Stephenson followed her into the living room. “Can you stop playing chess for five minutes?”

  Cassie resisted the urge to scream. Didn’t he understand that chess was the only thing keeping her from totally losing it right now?

  She resumed her game, playing against herself. Black pawn advances to d4. White bishop takes black pawn.

  Her hands moved rapidly as she played. She wasn’t thinking about the King’s Indian Defense anymore. She was thinking about the hard facts and listing them out in her head.

  a) The house was surrounded by zombies.

  b) There was one zombie in the house with another on its way.

  c) The Nielsons loved to buy things on sale. They had enough canned food and other shelf-stable things to feed Cassie, Stephenson, and Amanda for at least a month if they rationed.

  d) That shelf-stable food wouldn’t do them a damn bit of good if they didn’t figure out what to do about points A and B.

  e) If Stephenson didn’t stop pacing and asking her how she could play chess at a time like this, she might stab him through the eye with a bishop.

  f) Amanda was surprisingly lucid considering the circumstances.

  g) Cassie, Stephenson, and Amanda were members of the chess club. Thanks to their honor classes, they had a combined grade point average four-point-six. If they had any hope of surviving, the only thing they had on their side was smarts. Brawn was nowhere to be seen.

  Cassie continued to play. The thumping from the Nielson’s bedroom was seriously beginning to stress her out. It was also riling up the natives outside, who had returned to scratching and thumping on the outside of the house.

  “Checkmate,” Cassie said at last.

  “What?” Stephenson stopped his complaining long enough to frown at her.

  “Checkmate. Black wins.” Cassie set the chessboard aside and stood. “We need to find the entrance to the attic.”

  “Wait, what?” Stephenson trailed after her into the kitchen.

  “We need to find the entrance to the attic.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re going to let the zombies inside.”

  2

  Round-Up

  “No.” Leo had lost count of the number of times he’d said that word this morning.

  “You can’t shut me out of this,” Jennifer argued. “She’s my baby sister.”

  “And I’m going to get her and bring her back to you. I told you that.”

  “So I’m just supposed to sit around all day twiddling my thumbs until you get back?”

  “Help Nonna and the others mak
e bombs.”

  “There are more than enough people to make bombs.”

  “We don’t have enough horses.”

  “I can ride with you.”

  “I already told you. There might be more than one person to bring back from the Nielson’s. If you ride double with me, that’s one less place for someone else.”

  Jennifer’s mouth set in an angry line. Leo could see the argument gathering behind her eyes.

  He held up a hand to forestall her. “Jennifer, why are you making this so difficult? I’m going to get Cassie. Why can’t you just let me go get her?”

  Her shoulders drooped. When she looked at him, her expression was earnest. “She’s my sister, Leo. I need to know that she’s okay. I … I can’t just sit around waiting for you to bring me bad news. I need to see for myself.”

  Leo finally got it. She didn’t think Cassie was still alive. If her sister was dead or missing, Jennifer wanted to see for herself.

  In truth, the odds were stacked against Cassie. The odds were stacked against all of them.

  Leo never had a chance to say goodbye to his father. He’d done nothing more than wave goodbye when his dad rushed off to Rossi to find Lena and Dal. That was the last time Leo saw him. He knew what it was like not to see a body, not to have closure in that way.

  “Okay.” He gave her a curt nod. “You can ride with Anton.” If there were more than two people alive with Cassie, they’d figure something out on the fly. Hell, they’d probably have to improvise no matter how well they planned.

  Fifteen minutes later, Leo, Dal, Jennifer, and Anton were all mounted on horses. Nonna stood on the porch of the cabin to see them off. With her was the rest of the gang: Lena, his younger sister; Jim and Tate Craig, childhood friends and neighbors; and Bruce, Anton’s varsity football buddy.

  “Be careful out there,” Lena said. She spoke to them all, but here eyes were on Dal.

  “Kill any Russians you see.” Nonna’s face was set and serious.

  Leo led the way out, taking a familiar trail he and his siblings had used since childhood. He was on the stocky mare Dal and Lena had brought back from Rossi. He’d been planning to ride the big black stallion named Stealth, but it made more sense for Anton and Jennifer to double up on the strongest animal.

  “Just you and me, girl.” He patted the bay’s flank. She flicked her ears back at the sound of his voice. They needed to name her one of these days.

  “Tell me the route one more time,” Dal said from behind him. He was on the big bay named Thunder that he’d brought back from Rossi.

  “We cross through our land and onto the Gonzales’ farm.” The Gonzales family owned the land that bordered the Cecchinos’. “Then we take a few country roads and ride straight to the Nielsons’.” The journey would take them three times longer than if they used the highways, but there was too much chance of being spotted.

  The Russians had been out in force after the Snipers' attack on Bastopol High. The Soviets had driven by the Cecchino farm several times yesterday. A small group had even broken into the family house and poked around the barn before leaving.

  Leo worried they’d somehow traced the attack on the high school back to them. At least they hadn’t found the road to the cabin, which was hidden at the back of the orchard behind some bay trees that had fallen over in a storm. Nonna and the others had promised to keep a lookout while Leo was gone in case the Russians came back.

  Leo led his team off the trail and through an open meadow to a creek that ran year-round. From there, they followed the creek all the way to the perimeter of the Gonzales property.

  After cutting through the apple orchard and a small vineyard—Mr. Gonzales thought wine would be the next big commodity in the area—they arrived at a small gravel road. It was an offshoot off the main highway that serviced a small cluster of farms.

  Leo had grown up on those roads. He paused on the edge of the grapevines, listening. After discerning there were no vehicles or nezhit nearby, he led the group down the road.

  They hadn’t ridden more than a mile when the rumble of several car engines reached his ears.

  “Get off the road!” He kicked the bay in the flank and led her up a hillside thick with trees. It was covered with ferns, hazelnuts, and pines. The horses nickered as the loose soil slipped underneath her hooves.

  Dal’s big bay charged past them, the first to reach the top of the slope. Stealth, even burdened by two people, passed Leo’s old mare.

  His horse nickered in what Leo imagined was irritation. He patted her side and murmured words of encouragement until she reached the summit. As they reached higher ground, they had a perfect, unobstructed view of the road. The sound of approaching vehicles grew louder.

  It had to be Russians. No American was stupid enough to drive out in the open. Leo pulled out the binoculars he’d brought with them on the journey.

  Nine times out of ten, when he saw Soviets, they were in stolen vehicles. Today was no different. There were two trucks and a jeep. The jeep held two soldiers. Two more soldiers sat in the cab of the pick-up.

  The back of the truck was filled with people. Americans. They crouched in the back of the truck, huddled together in terror under the supervision of another two Soviets. They leaned casually against the back of the truck cab, machine guns aimed at the prisoners.

  “What the hell?” Leo handed off the binoculars to Dal. “What do you think they’re doing?”

  Dal took a look through the binoculars. “It looks like a round-up. I’ve seen them do this before.” His eye were grim as he lowered the binoculars. “I saw them do this in Rossi. That’s when—that’s how they got your dad and infected him.” Dal’s voice choked off.

  Leo felt rage simmer in his gut. “We need to follow them and see if that’s what’s going on.”

  “But what about my sister?” Jennifer said. “You promised to help me find Cassie.”

  He had. It would be easy to turn away from that promise and focus on this new mission. But if it were Anton or Lena out there, he’d be as desperate to find them as Jennifer was to find Cassie.

  “We’ll follow them for a few miles,” Leo said. “If we don’t learn anything useful by that time, we’ll turn around and head to the Nielsons’.”

  “You promise?” Jennifer asked. “You’re not going to change your mind in a few miles and insist on following the Russians all the way to who-knows-where?”

  “I swear,” Leo said. “Just a few miles. Then we head to the Nielsons'.”

  Jennifer nodded reluctantly. Leo led them along the ridge line, which roughly paralleled the road. The trees kept them concealed. They couldn’t keep up as the trucks rumbled past, but the horses moved quickly enough to remain within earshot of the vehicles.

  They followed the Russians all the way back to where the gravel road intersected the main highway. In the intersection sat more vehicles and more Russians.

  The truck with prisoners wasn’t the only one of its kind. There were two others there, both crammed full of scared people. There had to be almost fifty prisoners down there. Leo counted three teams of Soviets, eighteen in all.

  Leo raised his binoculars, watching a soldier approach the closest of the prisoner trucks and open the tailgate. The people inside were herded out by gunpoint. There were men, women, children, and grandparents. They were strung across the road in a long line.

  A half dozen Russians faced the line, each of them armed. As Dal had suspected, they weren’t armed with machine guns. The Soviets each held a dart gun. Tiny red darts sat in a tall cartridge at the back end of the weapons.

  “They have the nezhit virus,” Leo grated. “They’re going to shoot all those people with the virus and infect them.” He passed the binoculars down the line.

  “That’s exactly what they did in Rossi.” Dal raised the binoculars to his eyes and swore. “There has to be nearly fifty prisoners down there. Once they’re infected, they’ll be sent back to their homes to infect more people.”

&n
bsp; “And they’ll all be dead in less than ten days,” Anton said.

  Leo couldn’t stand by and let that happen. No fucking way. His blood hammered in his temples, fueled by his anger and sense of injustice. This was fucking America. This shit was not happening on his watch.

  “Dal, you’re on the first three Russians with the dart guns. Take them out. I’ll take out the second three. Anton and Jennifer, get in as close as you can. Use Nonna’s bombs to take out their vehicles so they can’t get away.”

  “Wha—what are you doing?” Jennifer gasped. “We—”

  Anton and Dal were already on the move, slipping silently through the forest. Leo silently thanked his father for all the years of hunting lessons. They wouldn’t have a chance in hell without his training.

  “We’re saving those people and then we’re going to get your sister,” he said to Jennifer. “Go with Anton and get ready to throw some bombs.”

  Jennifer looked ready to argue with him, then abruptly changed her mind and raced off after Anton. Good. He had more important things to do than argue with her. Like saving fifty innocent people who were about to be shot up with the nezhit virus.

  3

  Plan

  “What do you mean, we’re going to let the zombies inside?” Stephenson cried.

  There wasn’t time to explain. Cassie hurried into the kitchen. “Amanda, where’s the attic?”

  “Why?” Amanda looked from her seat at the kitchen table, where she’d been quietly dabbing her eyes.

  “Just tell me where the attic is.” Cassie’s nerves were frayed. She couldn’t deal with everyone asking her questions all the time.

  “It’s in my parent’s room,” Amanda said.

  Of course it was. Cassie closed her eyes, attempting to compose herself. She set up a chessboard in her head and began to play. White pawn to e4. Black pawn to e5. White bishop to c4.

  By the time she made her third move on the board, she’d regained a semblance of calm. She marched over to the fridge, grabbed the old metal broom, and headed into Amanda’s bedroom. She’d had countless sleepovers in this room.

 

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