Zommunist Invasion by Picott, Camille (ebook reader ink TXT) 📗

“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