One solider grabbed Anton by the hair, hauling him toward the open cell door. Anton scrambled to get his feet beneath him, if only to keep the Soviet from ripping his hair out by the roots.
He and Tate were dragged down the hall, which was lined with other cell doors. The KGB strolled along behind them, his head wreathed in a cloud cigarette smoke.
The boys were flung into a new cell. It was larger than their previous one. Based on the bunk beds, it looked like it had been built to hold four prisoners.
The cell wasn’t empty. There were two other Soviet soldiers in the cell. Both had grayish bruises all over their faces, just like the two with Anton and Tate.
Anton barely noticed. All his attention fixated on the prisoners in the cell with them. Tied to two chairs, looking as fucked up as Anton felt, were Mr. and Mrs. Craig.
Even though he’d been pretty sure they were prisoners, seeing them was still a shock. They’d been stripped of shoes and shirts, just like Anton and Tate. Beholding Mrs. Craig’s bare, saggy breasts wasn’t the worst of it. The two of them looked like they’d been subjected to the same grisly shit that Anton and Tate had endured.
The sight of them turned Anton’s insides to mush. In that moment, he would have gladly taken all their suffering on himself. He would have done anything to spare them the torture they’d endured. Tears pricked his eyes, but he blinked them back.
The four of them stared at each other. No one spoke. They didn’t have to. Their eyes said it all.
The KGB agent observed them. “You know each other. It is as I suspected. You are all Snipers.”
No one said anything. Anton didn’t have the strength to deny it. Besides, what good would that do? The Soviets were going to grind them to blood and entrails no matter what they said.
“Tell me what I want to know.” The agent flicked his fingers at Anton and Tate.
Two soldiers loomed up before them. Anton braced himself as the first blow fell.
He endured. It was all he could do. He locked onto the mental image of Nonna, Lena, Leo, and Dal, clinging to them with the sanity he had left.
Blows rained down. His head. His back. His crotch. His ribs. His face. His stomach.
Everywhere. There was no part of his body that was spared.
But even worse than the blows was the sound of Mrs. Craig’s crying. It was like a file to his bones. It was the first time since he’d been captured that he began to pray for spontaneous death.
The blows stopped. Anton struggled to catch his breath. His vision blurred. He lay on the floor, limp and panting.
Mom. He silently called to her, summoning the image of what she had looked like in the weeks before she had died. The cancer had eaten her up from the inside, reducing her to skin and bones.
But she had never given up to the disease. She told Anton and his siblings every day that she loved them. She spent her waking hours combing through newspapers and studying everything she could find on the Soviets, one of her favorite pastimes. Dad used to joke that she had missed her calling as an investigative reporter.
She had a smile for each of them every day. Even in the face of death, she had been strong.
Mom, help me.
He clung to his memory of her. Mom’s body had folded under the weight of the cancer, but her spirit had stayed strong.
He remembered the last thing she had said to him before she died. “You will do great things in this world, Antony. I feel it in my bones. I love you, my son.”
Do great things. Holding out under the battering of the Russians felt like the singular greatest feat of his life. He would do it. He would hold out for Mom.
The world swam back into view. He became aware of two soldiers standing beside the Craigs. One had a gun pressed to the side of Mrs. Craig’s head. The second one held a gun against Mr. Craig.
Against the backdrop of this horror, Anton noticed something. The eyes of the soldiers looked red. Was it a trick of the light? Or had he been kicked in the head one too many times?
One of them even looked like he might be getting sick; the front of his uniform was stained with sweat. Or maybe he had just over-exerted himself beating the shit out them.
“I grow weary of this game.” The KGB agent stood over Anton and Tate, puffing like a chimney on his cigarette. “You have until the count of ten to tell me what I want to know. Refuse to answer me and I’ll kill your friends.”
Tate’s eyes bugged. He gaze shot between Anton and his parents.
“We’re ready to die.” Mr. Craig’s voice was pinched with pain, but his words were firm. “We—”
One of the soldiers smacked him hard in the back of the head.
“One.” The embers ignited in the end of the agent’s cigarette. “Two.”
Anton stared wildly at the Craigs. This was an impossible choice. He was being forced to chose between his family and the Craigs. It wasn’t right.
“Three.”
Mr. Craig met his gaze and gave Anton the tiniest shake of the head. The message was clear. He wanted them to hold out. To stay silent.
Even if it meant his death.
Anton shot a quick look at Tate. His friend looked on the verge of being sick.
“Four.”
“Long live America,” Mrs. Craig burst out, tears steaming down her eyes. She cried out when she received a hard blow from her captor.
“Five.”
“Stop.” A sob tore free of Tate’s chest. “Stop.”
“No!” Mr. Craig yelled. He received another vicious blow to the head. His captor looked sicker by the second, but that didn’t stop him from smiling when Mr. Craig sagged under the blow.
“I’ll tell you,” Tate said. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. Just let them go. Please.”
The KGB agent came to stand over Tate, lighting yet another cigarette. How many of those things did this fucker go through in a day?
“Let them go back to the farm,” Tate pleaded. “Just let them go and I’ll tell you everything.”
He wasn’t bluffing. He meant every word. His friend was about to sell out the Cecchino family.
“No!” Anton tried to lunge across the floor. He didn’t have a plan. All he knew was that he needed to stop Tate from talking.
He didn’t make it far. A soldier interceded, kicking Anton up against the wall.
Tate flicked a single look at Anton. It was all Anton needed to see. Tate was being forced to chose between his family, or Anton’s.
He had chosen his family.
Part of Anton didn’t blame him.
The other part of him wanted to kill Tate, to stop him before he could sentence Lena, Dal, Leo, Nonna, and everyone else to death.
He couldn’t move. The Soviet had him pinned to the wall, his boot pressed against his stomach and making it hard for him to breath.
“Tate, don’t do it,” his mother pleaded. “Don’t—” Her chair was kicked over. She fell to the ground with a cry.
“Let them go back to the farm,” Tate said again.
“Fine.” The agent puffed away on his cigarette. “They are of use on their farm. My men like their milk. Tell me what I want to know and I will have them taken back to their farm.”
“Tate, no!” Anton screamed. “Don’t do it!”
Tate rattled off the address of the Cecchino farm.
Mr. Craig made a desperate lunge, trying to fling himself at his son. A bullet from the agent took him in the side of the head. He was dead before hit the ground.
Mrs. Craig let out a terrible wail of grief. The KGB agent turned neatly on his heel and shot her in the head. He spun back around to Tate, a cruel expression on his face. Tate was howling, incoherent grief tearing from his throat as two Soviets pinned him.
“I always know when a man is lying to me,” the agent said to Anton. “That young man isn’t lying.” With that, he shot Tate in the head.
Shock reverberated through Anton’s body. He couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything beyond stare at the dead bodie
s of his friends.
The agent leveled his gun at Anton. He barely noticed. He couldn’t peel his eyes from the Craigs. They were gone. Their entire family, gone. Just like that.
A strange sound rippled through the prison cell. At first, Anton didn’t even register it; he was still caged in the vibrato of his own shock, feeling the pressure of loss gathering in his core.
Someone moved. A soldier. He fell on top of Tate, dipping a hand into ruined cavity of his friend’s head. His eyes had gone completely red. While everyone else in the cell looked on, he took a long, slow slurp of brain.
It was almost exactly what had happened to Jim when he died. Except the fucker eating Tate’s brain wasn’t a mutant zombie. He was a Russian. A fully sentient Russian.
The KGB agent let out a long string of words, shouting at the soldier. The solider ignored him, slurping on the brains. His eyes grew redder by the second. He didn’t stop, not even under the command of the KGB agent.
What the fuck was happening?
11
Alarm
A second soldier closed in on Mrs. Craig’s body. It looked like he was going to drag her from the room.
But he didn’t. Nostrils flaring, he fell over her shattered skull and buried his face in the brain matter. A disgusting slurping sound rose from the gore, overlaid by a rumble of contentment that came from the man’s chest.
The shouting of the KGB agent grew in intensity. The other two soldiers in the room had fallen back, staring in horror at their comrades.
Anton struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. There was only one reason people ate brains: they were infected with the nezhit virus.
Something had happened to these soldiers. Somehow, they’d been infected. They might not look like mutants or regular zombies, but even in his current state, Anton knew he was seeing some twisted fallout of the nezhit virus.
Never ceasing his string of commands—or his puffing on his cigarette—the KGB agent shifted the barrel of his gun, aiming it at his lackeys. The threat was clear in his voice. The soldier feeding on Mrs. Craig ignored him. The one feeding on Tate looked up and bared his teeth.
Anton registered the man’s bunching muscles. So did the KGB agent. Right as his soldier sprang for him, he fired. Three bullets hit the man in the face. He fell lifeless to the ground right in front of Anton.
The agent didn’t waste any more breath on orders. He rotated on his heel and shot the other feeding soldier with the same cold efficiency, emptying several bullets into his head. The remaining two soldiers stood petrified against the wall.
The agent turned his wrath on them, shouting. Anton caught a single name in the string of what was otherwise gibberish: Dr. Kozlovovich.
Under the agent’s fury, the terrified soldiers grabbed the bodies of their murdered comrades and dragged them out of the cell. Anton heard the agent scream the name of Dr. Kozlovovich several times.
Soon, the cell had emptied of soldiers. It was just Anton, the agent, and the bodies of his three dead friends.
The dark eyes of the KGB agent landed on him. He leveled the barrel of his pistol at Anton’s face.
Anton’s heart seized in his chest. He forced himself to meet the cold stare of his torturer. He would not give this fucker the satisfaction of seeing him cower. If he had to die, he would do it with a straight spine.
Slowly, painfully, he dragged his body upright. He crouched on his knees before the agent, staring up at him with defiance. He reached into the recesses of his life before the invasion and pulled up his best expression of cocky derision, the one he’d often served to Leo at breakfast.
“I always knew you’d be the hardest one to break,” the agent said. “Too bad our time is up. I would have enjoyed breaking you—”
The rest of his words were drowned out as a wailing siren broke out. The lights in the hallway flared on an off in time with the siren.
The agent swore in fluent English, never taking his eyes off Anton. He raised his voice so it could be heard over the wail of the siren. “Unfortunately, I have circumstances to deal with. I have no more time for breaking American dogs. Rest in hell, little Sniper.”
Anton never took his eyes off the agent. In his mind, he clung to the memory of the water fight with his family.
The KGB agent pulled the trigger.
The gun clicked empty.
Time froze. The only things that existed were Anton, the KGB agent, and the empty gun that hung between them.
Anton knew an opening when he saw one. He tensed, about to spring. The agent pre-empted him with the vicious blow to the head. Anton staggered under the attack, dimly aware of the cell door slamming shut.
“I’ll be back for you, little Sniper.”
He barely heard the words over the wail of the siren. The prison cell lurched around him. Anton sagged against the wall, trying to get his bearings. The fucking siren made his head feel like it was going to implode. Or maybe it was just the aftershock of the pistol-whip.
The siren abruptly shut off. Anton’s ears rang. But it was more than that. Over the ringing in his ears were strange sounds. He struggled to make it out. It sounded like screaming. Lots of it. And gunfire.
He closed his eyes, listening. Yes, there was definitely shouting. And gunfire. Lots of it. It was coming from outside the jail. Something was going on.
His eyes fell on the body of Tate. His gaze panned wide, also taking in the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Craig.
He was stuck in a cell, surrounded by the bodies of three dead friends.
The chaos outside the jail faded to a distant buzz. All Anton could hear was the pounding of his heart and the rasping of his breath. Emotion bunched in his throat, demanding release.
He fell forward, forehead resting on Tate’s bare, bloody shoulder. A sob broke from his throat. His chest heaved as he cried.
The entire Craig family was gone, wiped from the earth by the Russian scum. His mind kept looping on the moment when Tate gave up the address to the Cecchino farm. There had been nothing but blind desperation in his friend’s eyes.
Anton cried harder. He didn’t blame Tate. Not for a second. If that had been Lena and Leo in the hands of the Russian, Anton would have sung like a bird.
Little good it had done. Mr. and Mrs. Craig were dead.
The memory of Mrs. Craig’s pumpkin bread flooded his mouth. Even though his mouth was full of blood, Anton could taste it clearly. His sobs increased.
As Anton knelt on the cold, unyielding concrete of the cell, he felt a part of himself shrivel up and die on the floor with the Craig family.
He sensed it was the most precious part of himself that died. It was the little kid that had snuck up on Lena and sprayed her in the back with the hose. It was the boy who had pounded on the bedroom door during the sleepover, demanding to be a part of everything the older boys were doing. It was the teenage varsity football player who chased after pretty girls and snuck out to drink beer with his friends in the orchard after games.
Gone. All gone. He was too weak to hold onto them. It was like those pieces of Anton had been stolen and now belonged to someone else. He wasn’t sure how much longer he would live, but he knew he would never be the same.
For the first time since being captured and tortured, Anton wanted to die.
It was a true and singular desire. He wanted to join the Craigs and become nothing more than a memory. It had to be better than feeling like a stranger in his own body.
Sobs continued to wrack his body. He cried for the Craigs, for his father, and his lost friends. He cried for his ravaged country. Hell, he even cried for his mom.
Sometime later, amidst the screams and gunshots that continued to escalate outside of the jail cell, Anton passed out on the floor beside the bloody, beaten bodies of his friends.
12
Doctor
The sound of keys rattling in the cell door disturbed his slumber.
The Anton Cecchino who awoke was different from the Anton Cecchino who had passed o
ut beside the bodies of his friends. As he bolted upright, he distantly realized he could no longer feel the grief that had gripped him earlier. It was gone, ground to dust and obliterated.
Even though his body screamed in protest, Anton rolled into a crouch, ready to spring at the first fucker who walked through the door.
He was ready to fight. To kill. To exact vengeance for all that had been done.
A face peered in at him through the bars in the door. It was a big man with rumpled hair that was more white than brown. He didn’t wear a Soviet uniform. A dirty white lab coat hung from thick shoulders.
He stared at Anton, his eyes wide. “You are Sniper?” The English was thickly accented.
Anton just stared at him, fists bunching. He didn’t know who this fucker was, but it was clear he was a Russian. Therefore, he had to die.
“I doctor,” the man said. “I need . . . sanctuary. I . . . make nezhit vaccine.”
The words stabbed into Anton’s brain, attempting to penetrate the haze that demanded blood and vengeance.
“I help you escape. You give me sanctuary. I help. I help American scientists.” The man threw a nervous glance over one shoulder, looking in the direction of distant machine gun fire. “We must hurry. We help each other?”
Help. Help a Russian scumbag? He’d sooner cut his own throat.
The man must have seen this in Anton’s eyes.
“I help American scientists,” he said. “Nezhit vaccine. I help. I make vaccine.”
The words finally made it through. Anton felt them enter his body.
“Nezhit vaccine?” His words were rough, dragged from his parched throat by willpower alone.
“Yes.” The man nodded his head vigorously. “Dr. Kozlovovich. My name. I make nezhit vaccine.”
Vaccine. Anton remembered the Russians had a vaccine. It’s the reason they could walk among zombies without fear of being bitten.
Zommunist Invasion | Book 3 | Scattered Page 6
