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

stunt, but he didn’t care. He didn’t let up on the trigger. He didn’t stop screaming. God, it felt good to scream. So. Damn. Good.

Is this how She-Ra felt when she transformed into a warrior and beat back Hordak’s evil Horde?

This thought brought a bark of laughter. Fictional cartoon characters didn’t have feelings. Everyone knew that. Cassie and Amanda would laugh their asses off.

For the first time in his life, he didn’t feel like a wussy scaredy cat. He wanted to save those poor people down there. Cassie and Amanda would never believe this when he told them the story. It felt good to be doing something for the first time in his life.

Two of the mutants broke away from the road, disappearing into the trees that bordered the road.

The last two mutants hit the pack of down bikers. In the blink of an eye, three of the cyclists were dead on the ground, the mutants feeding on their brains. One of the riders fled into the trees. The others managed to get back onto their bikes and ride away, leaving their dead behind.

Nonna lowered her gun. Stephenson kept firing, kept screaming. Only when Nonna rested a hand on his shoulder did he stop.

He panted with emotion. Chest heaving, he reluctantly lowered the gun. He let loose two more long screams, just for good measure. He felt like a lion. A fucking badass lion. He’d just risked his own life to save strangers. He’d just exposed himself to danger of the worst kind.

And he was still alive. Still breathing.

At least for the moment.

Eyes wide behind his glasses, he turned to Nonna. Her mouth was set into a hard line.

“They will be hunting for us,” she said. “We have to get back to the cabin.”

37

Memory

It had to be a mistake. Valentina was convinced. She’d made a mistake. In her grief, she’d misunderstood what she’d seen.

It was nearing sunrise when she crept out of the house with her coat bottomed up to her chin. Papa was slumped on the kitchen table, head resting next to Luca’s hand. Grandmother had fallen asleep in the kitchen chair, spent from grief. Mother had retreated into the bedroom and locked herself in there.

Marcello had not yet returned.

The snow had stopped falling. The pre-dawn air frosted before her with each exhalation. Long icicles hung from the eaves of the family home. More glistened from the bare branches of the trees.

Valentina picked her way over the fresh, unmarred whiteness. Her boots made soft crunching sounds as she made her way back to the family shed. Just to the left of the herb bed were the fading footprints left by her and Marcello when they had carried Luca’s dead body to the house.

It was hard to believe that only a short while ago, she’d come out here to fetch Luca for supper.

She knew he snuck out to the shed to smoke cigarettes he stole from their father. She’d caught him at it more than once.

Apparently, smoking wasn’t the only thing he had done out behind the family shed.

Tears pressed against the back of her eyes. Valentina blinked and sniffled, shoving down the wail that built in her throat. Breaking down would serve no purpose right now.

The shed loomed before her. It was an ancient structure built by her grandfather Trione. It had withstood many winters. Her mother complained about it being an eyesore, but her grandmother wouldn’t hear of rebuilding it.

Carved into the front door was a faded, lopsided heart. Inside were the initials GT and JPT. Gretta Trione and Jean-Paul Trione. Her grandparents.

Grandma Trione loved to tell the story of how her husband had proposed to her. He’d carved the heart into the shed door right after he finished building it, then invited his future wife over to admire his handy work. When she saw the carving in the wood, he’d dropped to one knee and proposed to her.

The heart carving was barely visible through the snow, but Valentina easily picked out the familiar shape. She used to dream about a boy carving her initials into a heart with his. But this very place where her grandparent’s love blossomed had somehow transformed into the killing ground of her brother. How could deep love exist next to deep tragedy? It defied logic.

Steeling her nerves, Valentina stepped around the shed.

There was Luca’s blood. It had turned into a frozen puddle obscured by snow. If a person didn’t know what he was looking at, it would be easy to mistake it for a patch of frozen dirt.

Valentina knelt on the ground and swept the snow away with her fingertips. She didn’t want to let her brother’s murder disappear under the snow. It wasn’t right.

Her eyes traced the frozen edges of the blood puddle. They traveled to the indentions that had been fresh footprints when she’d first found Luca. Those, too, were obscured by recent snowfall. But there were still spots of Luca’s blood showing through. The bloody rake now lay facedown in the ground, the bloody tines hidden in the snow.

Someone had turned it over.

The rake had killed Luca. Before tonight, it had been a benign object. Her family used it to rake the fall leaves and to till the garden bed soil in the spring. It was a tool, nothing else.

But tonight, it had transformed into something else. She felt like she was seeing it for the first time. How could she ever have mistaken it for a simple household tool?

The first rays of dawn turned the sky a dark gray, making it easier for her to see. Valentina felt her insides freeze.

More than anything, she wanted to see three sets of footprints: Luca’s, Marcello’s, and the fascist’s. She had prayed she had been mistaken, that she had been in too much shock to properly register the truth.

But she hadn’t made a mistake. The truth was plain before her.

There were only two sets of footprints. They were exactly where she remembered them. One set bloody, one set plain.

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