Stephenson tried not to throw up all over his shoes as he put them on. His nerves felt fried just thinking about guns. Did Nonna really think he had what it took to wield one? What did he look like? Rambo?
The other guys had the gun thing covered. Any one of them could pass for Rambo in a pinch. Heck, with their machine guns and badass moves, they were like an entire band of Rambos. Leo, Anton, Dal, Tate, Spill, Griggs, and Bruce. Heck, even Jennifer and Lena made better Rambos than he did.
As he bent down to grab his second sneaker, he glimpsed the neat pile of clothing tucked under the bottom bunk—the pile he had surreptitiously shoved all the way to the back and hidden behind his shoes.
There were the Jordache jeans with the zippers at the back of the ankles. The black mesh top and the pink spaghetti-strap tank top. The matching pink Converse shoes.
The worst part was that it was all a perfect fit.
It had only been a week ago when he saw Nonna go into the boys’ bunk room with the clothes. From his position at the kitchen table, where he’d been hard at work picking stems out of a colander of dried lentils, he’d had a clear view of her with the neat stack of clothing in her hands.
It was the pink spaghetti straps that caught his attention. Pink had that effect on him. It was impossible not to see pink things. Scrunchies. Socks. Shoes. There had been a lot of pink all over his high school.
He’d assumed Nonna had been on her way into the girls’ room with the clothes. Her stop in the boys’ room was just a detour. But she came back out of the room without the clothes and looked straight at him.
“Your bunk is a mess,” she’d said as she strode back onto the kitchen. “Go clean it.”
“What?” He paused, hand in mid-air over the lentils with a stem pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
Nonna had her head in the spice cabinet. “Your bunk is a mess.”
“What are you talking about? I made the bed this morning.”
Nonna sniffed. “Kids these days. They don’t know the meaning of the word clean. Go. Now.”
Stephenson tossed the stem onto a plate with other discarded stems. “Okay, Nonna.” He rolled his eyes behind her back.
He was good at making the bed. His mom, who spent a few summers in college cleaning hotel rooms, was an expert. She taught Stephenson everything he knew about making beds. He knew for a fact that his bunk looked better than all the others, but he went to the room anyway. A person didn’t have to spend more than five minutes in the Cecchino cabin to figure out that you did what Nonna said. Period.
When Stephenson confronted his perfectly made bed, he found himself face to face with the pink spaghetti-strap tank top. It sat in the middle of his bunk like an invitation.
It was an invitation both dreaded and yearned for.
It wasn’t just the tank. There was a perfect black mesh shirt that went over the top. An adorable pair of stone-washed jeans with zippered ankles sat next to the shirts.
And the shoes. Pink Converse. They were slightly worn and scuffed around the soles. It was the sort of thing any girl would die for.
Stephenson wasn’t sure if he wanted to caress them or set them on fire.
He did neither.
He shoved them under the bed as fast as he could and returned to the kitchen. He tried to disappear into the colander of lentils.
Nonna came into the cabin with a handful of fresh bay leaves. He avoided her eye, fearful of what she might say to him.
But all she said was, “Wash these when you’re done with the lentils.”
Feet clad in perfectly boring and atrociously masculine footwear, Stephenson trudged into the cabin’s sitting area.
He hated the way his missing toe felt inside his shoe. It was easier to forget it was gone when he was barefoot. But Nonna had told him to put on shoes. Besides, he was pretty sure he needed shoes to learn how to shoot a gun.
Nonna stood in the kitchen. On the table were two guns he hadn’t seen before. Not that Stephenson was any sort of weapons expert. He wasn’t like Leo and Dal and Anton. Those guys had practically been born with guns in their hands.
But there was a weapons rack by the door. It was actually just two old orchard pallets turned on their sides, but that’s where everyone stashed their weapons between missions.
There was a clear line of sight between the weapons rack and the kitchen table where Stephenson spent most of his days prepping food for the Snipers. In that time, he’d spent enough time looking the weapons to know which ones belonged to whom. He learned to recognize them by sight.
He also spent his fair share of time down in the storage room below the cabin. Along with their food stores, weapons acquired on missions were stored there. Stephenson had spent enough time in the storage room to know the difference between a machine gun, a rifle, and a handgun.
The two guns Nonna had on the table weren’t like anything he’d seen before. They were sort of like handguns, but the barrels were much longer.
“Where did those come from?” he asked.
Nonna smiled. “So you have been paying attention.”
Stephenson shrugged. “Kind of hard not to notice when there are guns in my face all day long. So what are these things?”
“These”—Nonna tapped the long barrel of the guns—“are silencers.”
He blinked. “Silencers?”
“Yep. We don’t have a car and I don’t know how to ride a bike. I’m too told to walk ten miles to an isolated place to shoot. So we use silencers.”
“What about the horse?” The stocky old mare Lena had brought from Rossi junior college was the last of their horses.
Nonna snorted. “I’m too old to ride a horse.”
That was fine by Stephenson. He didn’t like horses at all. Considering the fact that they were plant eaters, their teeth were way too big, in his opinion. He was terrified of being bitten.
“Where did you get silencers?” He felt stupid as soon as the question left his mouth. This little old woman was the person who had an Anarchist’s Cookbook, fuse wire, and a basement full of ingredients to make explosive devices. Why was he surprised she had silencers?
“I believe in being prepared. My son helped me get these from a dealer back east. Aren’t they nice?” Her wrinkled hand caressed the length of the barrel.
“Well, yeah, but what were you planning to do with them?”
“Young man.” Nonna pinned him with her dark eyes. “I survived Mussolini, Hitler, and Nazis. One can never be too prepared. This war is evidence of that.”
“Oh.” Stephenson felt like an idiot. She was right, of course.
“Pick one,” Nonna said.
He eyed the two weapons. They looked identical. Both were equally unappealing.
“You know, there’s an excessive amount of masculine energy in this house already,” Stephenson said. “There are plenty of people who know how to use weapons. Can’t—”
“You can’t leave your life in the hands of anyone else,” Nonna said. “Did you forget the conversation we just had outside on the porch?”
Well, yes. Stephenson had neatly locked that away. The idea of the Russians getting their hands on Tate and Anton and torturing the location of the cabin out of them made him want to curl up in a tiny ball and disappear.
Truth be told, if he had to pick between learning how to handle a gun and picking stems out of lentils, he’d rather pick stems out of lentils until his fingers bled.
He delicately picked up the gun that was closest to him. Nonna nodded at him in approval.
“Let’s go.” She shoved her gun into the deep pocket of her apron. On the way out the door, she scooped up a handful of cartridges and dropped them into her other apron pocket.
He was hanging out with one badass grandma. Stephenson admired her almost as much as he was intimidated by her.
29
Practice
“Valé, help me.”
Snow.
So much snow. It gathered on the tops of her ears.
It burned the tip of her nose. Tiny flakes melted on her cheeks, dripping across her skin like tears. Snow swirled around her boots, swiftly camouflaging the dark brown leather against the chilly white.
Fourteen-year-old Valentina was as frozen on the inside as she was on the outside.
More flakes swept down, melting in the pool of blood that marred the perfect snow in front of her. It was so fresh, it still steamed in the cold.
As far as puddles went, it wasn’t very large. Maybe fifteen centimeters across, at most.
It was lopsided. The right side was thin and tapered to a point. The left side was large and wide.
That’s where the blood first landed, Valentina thought.
Not too far from the pool was a footprint. A bloody footprint that was already partially concealed with white flakes. The back part of the print was a crisp imprint in the snow. The front part was smeared, bits of red dragged across it.
Valentina stood in the freezing cold, her eyes moving to a second bloody footprint, and then to the third. Then to a fourth, a fifth, and so on, until the prints disappeared around the back side of the shed.
Even though it was full dark and snow made the air white all around her, the blood stood out like a beacon. Her mind was frozen, but her eyes worked. Her gaze kept moving from the lopsided pool, across the footprints, and back again.
“Valé, help me.”
Nonna led Stephenson through the early morning, hiking west along one of the many hunting footpaths that dotted the Cecchino property. The fog already dissipated, promising a hot summer day.
Stephenson flailed along in her wake. Even though they were on a path, it sounded like he blundered into every bush and tree that bordered the trail. His awkwardness made her heart ache. She was determined to do her best to make sure he lived the through storm that was coming.
Because there was a storm coming. Nonna didn’t know what it looked like, or what shape it would take. But she knew as surely as she knew her own name that something bad was on its way.
It was like that the day her brother had died. It was the day he’d come home with his partisan patch sewn to his sweater, so full of pride that he’d joined the resistance army to protect their country from fascists. His smile had been big enough to crack the sun in half. His radiance had nearly blinded her.
As he stood in their family living room, so full of life and optimism, all she had felt was dread. It was a weight on her shoulders, so heavy it threatened to push her into the earth. It was a stomach that wanted to empty itself of the fear that had taken up residence there.
Nonna strode through the woods with Stephenson on her heels, feeling that same sense of foreboding settle on her. Even after forty years, she had not forgotten what tragedy felt like. Tragedy always sent heralds ahead of its arrival if you knew how to look for them.
It was the same on the day her son had died.
Even before Dal and Lena had returned home and delivered the news, she had known.
At the thought of her dead son, Nonna felt her throat constrict. She missed her boy more than she could ever say.
But he’d died a hero. He’d saved his children, both Lena and Dal. It was as it should have been. Nonna would have expected no less from her boy.
She tried not to overthink the heavy feeling of oncoming tragedy, or to overanalyze it. Knowing something was coming wasn’t the same as knowing what was coming. In some ways, the foreboding was the worst of it.
Whatever it was, she was going to make sure Stephenson had the skills to survive. She would help him as much as she could.
For Luca.
For Luca, she would lay down her own life to keep Stephenson alive.
30
Princess of Power
Stephenson trudged along behind Nonna. Every step he took convinced him that, when all this madness was over, he was moving to a place with lots of concrete. Lots and lots of concrete. If he never walked through another forest in his life, it would be too soon.
There were bugs and spiders and cobwebs out here. And other stuff. Raccoons and skunks and stuff. God. And squirrels. As far as Stephenson was concerned, squirrels were the spawn of demons.
For one thing, they were basically really big mice with fluffy tails. Everyone else thought they were cute, but Stephenson wasn’t fooled by their supposed cuteness.
Three of them lived in the two big mulberry trees in his backyard. The little bastards tormented the family dogs and quarreled with one another at all hours of the night. Once, he’d even seen a squirrel throw an acorn at their cat.
He was so busy watching the trees for demonic squirrels that he kept running into trees and bushes. He even blundered into a few cobwebs on the side of the trial. If he thought a gun would be a decent defense against a cobweb, he would have asked to learn how to shoot a long time ago.
It felt like Nonna dragged him through the woods for hours. In reality, it probably was no more than forty-five minutes.
She finally led him off the trail into a shallow valley of land. It was perhaps fifty yards across and surrounded by towering oak trees that most people would have called majestic.
Stephenson called them home to ticks. Thank God the branches didn’t extend over the whole clearing. If he stood near the center, he was pretty sure it would be near impossible for a tick to drop onto his head.
On the far side of the clearing was a half-rotted tree. It looked like it had fallen over a thousand years ago. It was probably home to termites and thousands of other creepy, crawly things.
Nonna marched over to the log and pulled out her knife. It was a big hunting blade like all the boys wore. Even Amanda and Cassie wore big knives like the boys.
Nonna pressed the tip of the knife into the rotting tree bark. The wood flaked off easily under the pressure of the blade. She drew three concentric circles in the bark, finishing it off with a bullseye in the middle.
Apparently, that old dead tree was going to be used for target practice. Stephenson tried not to imagine bugs discharging from the wood every time a bullet sank in.
He adjusted his glasses. Just to the right of where he stood was an old carving in the side of the tree. It was partially overgrown with moss, but he clearly made out the shape of a heart. It was lopsided; whoever had drawn it hadn’t been deft at carving.
In the heart was a set of initials.
GC + VC
“How did you know about this place?” He traced the letters with his eyes, noting how the bottoms were mostly filled with lichen.
“My husband used to bring me here for picnics.”
“That’s neat. What was his name?”
“Giuseppe Cecchino, God rest his soul.” Nonna glanced up at the trees. He imagined her looking up at her late husband through those branches. “Now.” She came to stand beside him, fishing her gun out of her apron. “Time to practice. Let’s start with the basics.” She looked at him, clearly waiting for him to hold his weapon.
Stephenson reluctantly pulled the gun out of his belt. Nonna walked him through the anatomy of the weapon, showing him the basics. He tried to pay attention, but he was too busy thinking about the likelihood of shooting off a second toe.
“Any questions?” Nonna asked.
He wanted to ask when they were going to go home, but didn’t. “No, Nonna.”
“Good. Now, I want you to practice shooting. Try to hit the target I made for you.”
This is the part he’d been dreading. He attempted to give himself a pep talk.
If little old Nonna could kill zombies, so could he. If little old Nonna could hold a rifle like a gunslinger straight out of a western movie, he could find the courage to pull the trigger.
The first shot missed the tree by at least three feet. The gun was surprisingly loud, considering it had a silencer.
“You flinched.” Nonna frowned at him. “Don’t flinch.”
“Why is it so loud?”
“It’s not loud. It has a silencer.”
“Yeah, but aren’t s
ilencers supposed to be, you know, silent?”
“Only in the movies.”
Well, at least they were out here in the middle of nowhere. There was very little chance of attracting mutant zombies way out here, even if the guns were louder than he expected.
Stephenson spent the next hour making an ass out himself. Even with Nonna’s instruction, he couldn’t hit the rotted trunk. He blew through three magazines. Nonna sat off to one side, reloading bullets into the used magazines.
“Are you sure we should keep doing this?” he asked.
“Did you have other plans today?”
“I just don’t want to, you know, waste bullets.”
“Nothing is being wasted if you learn how to shoot and protect yourself.” She gave him a sharp look from where she sat on a log, a box of bullets balanced on one knee as she loaded the magazine. “You aren’t dying on my watch, Jeff Stephenson. You’re going to learn to hit something with a gun or I’ll shoot you myself and spare you the agony of getting captured by a Russian.”
Her words chilled him. “You really think Russians are going to come here?”
She gave him a flat look. “Keep practicing. We’re not leaving here until you can hit that target consistently. I need to know you can take care of yourself.”
He wasn’t sure why she bothered with him. Everyone knew he was alive only through sheer dumb luck. If Leo and Dal hadn’t rescued them from Cassie’s house, he would have died there. The Cecchinos had taken him in. He did his part, sure, but he was here only by their grace and kind hearts.
It was clear from the look on Nonna’s face that she meant what she said: they were going to stay here until he learned how to shoot.
Stephenson closed his eyes, taking a moment to gather his resolve. He wasn’t cut out for this stuff. Nonna was in denial, thinking she could mould him into a real Sniper.
Still, he’d spent enough time with her in the past week to know she didn’t mince words. If she said they were going to stay out here until he learned how to shoot, he would be old and gray by the time she allowed him to go back to the cabin—unless he could suck it up and actually start hitting the target.
Zommunist Invasion Box Set | Books 1-3 Page 65