“Griggs, Spill, think you can keep a civil tongue?” Leo asked. When they nodded, he said, “Great. Let’s go inside and eat.” He took Cassie by the hand and led her inside.
30
Photos
The meal was a demoralizing one. All this time, they’d been waiting for American troops to arrive and save the day.
Instead, all they got were two soldiers from a military safe zone in Nevada. Rather than bringing news of impending hope and triumph, they brought news of a full-scale invasion that reached far beyond the scope of West County, as well as a raging war against the infected.
“We have new information on the mutants,” Jennifer said.“The Russian vaccine doesn’t work on them.” She told everyone how they’d seen mutants attack and kill Soviets.
“That’s a good piece of intel,” Anton said. “Maybe we can figure out how to use it to our advantage. Dal, make sure you don’t broadcast that.”
“We need to keep this to ourselves for now,” Leo agreed.
His free hand kept straying under the table to touch Cassie’s knee. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to comfort her, or himself.
“Which one of you is Deejay Sniper?” Spill asked.
“Me.” Dal raised his hand from the end of the table where he sat with Lena.
“We heard you all the way in Nevada,” Griggs said. “It’s the reason our commanding officer sent us here.”
“What’s the mission you need help with?” Leo asked.
“We should speak alone,” Spill said.
“What we have to say is classified,” Griggs added.
A ripple of discontent ran around the table. Jennifer looked like she was considering scratching out the eyeballs of both soldiers.
Leo shook his head. “Everyone you see here fights the Russians. We risk our lives every day for our country. No one on my team operates in the dark. You speak to all of us, or none of us.”
A silent exchange passed between Leo and the soldiers. Leo stared at them without blinking. Griggs looked like he wanted to push the issue, but it was clear there was no way to do that without getting into an argument. Which would just make him look stupid.
“Fine,” Spill said at last. “We’ll do it your way. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. What we have to say is disturbing.”
Cassie couldn’t keep her mouth shut any longer. “Define disturbing,” she said. “You might be surprised by what we’ve seen that qualifies as disturbing.”
Leo’s face didn’t change, but Cassie could have sworn he saw a spark in his eye when he looked at her.
They all dispersed from the kitchen table, moving into the sitting area.
Cassie took her customary seat on the hearth, setting up her chess pieces. Leo stood above her, leaning with one arm against the mantle. Everyone else took seats on the floor and sofas. Spill and Griggs stood in front of the pair of bookshelves filled with back issues of National Geographic and spy novels with faded spines. According to Leo, Grandpa Cecchino had been an avid reader.
“It was your broadcast that tipped us off to the Second Offensive,” Spill began. “Our subs were able to take out most of them.”
“Most of them?” Leo said sharply.
Spill’s lips tightened. “Most of them,” he confirmed. He reached into a fanny pack that Cassie hadn’t noticed before. He pulled out a handful of black and white photos and tossed them onto the coffee table.
Leo picked up a few of the photos, holding them so Cassie could see. She paused her chess game just long enough to look at them. They were pictures of two very large cargo ships. The emblem of the USSR was emblazoned on the outside—and they were docked inside a port.
“These are satellite photos from just two days ago,” Griggs said. “Those ships are docked in Southern California. They contain the troops of the Second Offensive.”
Cassie saw soldiers in some of the photos as Leo leafed through them, but she saw regular people, too. Women and children.
“There are more than just soldiers on these ships,” she said. Black pawn to g4. White knight to c7.
“You’re right,” Spill said. “The civilians you see are the families of the soldiers.”
Cassie felt like the breath had been squeezed from her lungs. “Those are colony ships,” she whispered. Black bishop to b6. White pawn to g7.
“Bingo. Gold star for you, sweetheart.” Griggs took a step back when Leo leveled a glare at him. Leo might not knock people in the back of the head like Nonna, but his impact didn’t fall far short when he was angered.
Griggs plowed on, looking uncomfortably away from Leo. “The Soviets are planning a full-scale occupation.”
All the pieces snapped together in Cassie’s mind. Colonization. It all made perfect sense. The virus. The systematic infection. It was all part of a greater plan to seize American soil. This went far beyond a military occupation. This was a full-scale takeover.
“That’s why they’ve been rounding up people and infecting them in large groups,” she said. White rook to a7. “They’re speeding up the annihilation. They’re sending colonists to West County, aren’t they?”
“This is farm country,” Griggs replied. “They need people to work the land. There are three busses of Soviet colonists on their way here. Even more are on their way to the Central Valley where there’s even more farmland.”
“It’s not just colonists,” Spill said. “There are more soldiers coming, too.”
“When?” Jennifer demanded.
“Lucky for us, Southern California is a fu—a fantastic mess.” Spill’s eyes darted toward Nonna before he pulled more pictures out of his fanny pack. “There are zombies everywhere. It’s taking them a long time to clear the roads.”
The next group of pictures he passed around showed bulldozers on the streets, rounding up dead bodies. The pictures after that showed giant funeral pyres where the bodies were burned. It made Cassie sick.
“When will the colonists be here?” Jennifer asked again.
“Two days from now,” Spill said. “Three at most.”
Black bishop to c5. “By the time the colony ships arrive, they expect most of the west coast to be empty,” Cassie said.
“The people need to know. I need to get on the radio.” Dal knotted his hands in Lena’s shoulders. Presumably he was massaging the tension out of her, although based on the wince from Lena, Cassie wasn’t sure it was working.
“This is why we need your help,” Spill said. “The only direct way into West County is over the Luma Bridge.”
Luma. It was a city perched on a peninsula on southern edge of West County. The Luma Bridge connected the peninsula to the entire Bay Area west of San Francisco.
“If someone were to blow up the Luma Bridge, there would be no direct access to West County,” Cassie said. “Getting rid of the bridge will hamstring their supply line. They’ll have to go miles and miles out of their way to transport resources out of here.”
“Bingo.” Griggs gave her a dry, humorless smile.
“Why can’t the subs blow it up?” Anton asked.
“Missiles aren’t finite,” Spill replied. “And the military doesn’t have a lot of them. The missiles on the subs are being saved to defend the coastline in case more Soviet ships come our way.”
“What about the Central Valley?” Cassie asked. “How are you going to protect that farmland from colonization? The land is wide open.”
Griggs raised a condescending eyebrow at her. “You’re a smart one. Let me guess, captain of the chess club?”
He said it sarcastically as he took in her chessboard, but his derision faded when he saw the expressions around him.
“The Central Valley isn’t our mission,” Spill said. “That’s been assigned to another group. Our mission is the Luma Bridge.”
“You need us to help you take it out,” Leo said.
“Our commanding officer thought you were trained professionals.” Spill grimaced. “But those are our orders. Coordinate an attack with th
e Snipers and take out the Luma Bridge.”
“Wait a sec.” Anton hustled over to the bookcase and pulled out Nonna’s copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook. “There’s a whole section in here on blowing up bridges.” He slapped the book down on the coffee table.
Griggs and Spill looked nonplussed.
“Where did you guys get that?” Griggs asked.
Without looking up from the book, Anton jerked his thumb in Nonna’s direction. “Ask my grandma. It’s hers.”
When the two soldiers turned surprised expressions in Nonna’s direction, she gave them a flat stare. “My village barely survived Hitler,” she said. “I never intended to be caught empty-handed if the Nazis came here. Turns out it pays to be prepared.”
“I’ll say.” Spill crouched down eagerly beside Anton. “Can I see?” He leaned in beside Anton, studying the pages.
“Here.” Anton stabbed his finger at a page in the Cookbook. “The Luma bridge is a truss bridge. This shows us exactly where to place the bombs to disable the bridge.”
“There are guards on the bridge,” Spill said. “We’re going to have to take them out before we can blow up the bridge.”
“We can handle the guards, no problem. Let me see the book.” Bruce elbowed his way forward. So did everyone else, all trying to see the book at once.
Cassie stayed where she was, turning her attention to her chessboard so she could think more clearly. She had just castled the black king on the queen’s side when Leo sat down next to her.
“Cassie?”
She didn’t look up. “Yeah?”
“What’s your take on the situation?”
Her fingers moved swiftly over the board as she played. Black pawn to f2. “They’re right. We have to blow up the Luma Bridge. It’s the logical move.” White pawn to c6.
“Blowing up the bridge isn’t the question,” Leo replied. “That’s a given. It’s the trip to Luma I’m worried about. How are we supposed to get there? Russians are everywhere. You saw how they blew that plane to smithereens. If they catch us on the road, we could all be turned over to the KGB.”
White queen to f7. Checkmate. Cassie wrinkled her nose as she studied the board. This was not her most elegant game. She sighed and began resetting the board for another round.
Uneasy glances went around the room. Cassie was pretty sure everyone would prefer taking a bullet over being captured by the KGB.
Leo’s question had already been on her mind before he asked it. She worked through the options in her head.
a) They could walk. This was only a good idea if they wanted to spend the next two weeks getting to Luma. She quickly crossed this off her mental list.
b) They could take a car. This was only a viable option if they thought luck was on their side. The last thing Cassie wanted to rely on was luck. People who relied on luck lost chess games. Winning a game happened with tactics and strategy. You always had to be thinking three to five moves ahead and have contingency plans. She crossed this off the mental list, too.
c) They could take the horses and bikes. This wasn’t a bad option. Both forms of transportation had served them well so far. Then again, they’d never gone more than ten or fifteen miles. Luma was a solid forty miles away. They could run into a lot of trouble over the course of forty miles.
d) There was one more option. She was almost embarrassed to say it out loud, but it was the best she’d come up with in the last few minutes.
“We take the river,” she said.
“The river?” Anton frowned at her. “How do you figure?”
“The Russian River is less than a mile from here.” How ironic that the local river had been named the Russian River. “It’s unlikely the river is being patrolled, but we can go at night just in case. The water empties into the Pacific Ocean ten or so miles north of Luma. We’ll ride the river south as far as we can, then find bikes or a car to get us the rest of the way to the bridge.”
“You want to swim all that way?” Lena frowned at her. “The river isn’t that deep, but that’s still a long way to swim.”
Cassie shook her head. “No, we don’t swim. We steal kayaks from the Adventure Depot. We paddle down the Russian River.”
The Adventure Depot was a small shop in Westville that sat on the Russian River. It rented canoes, kayaks, and inner tubes. Leo’s parents had taken the family paddling down the river a few times over the years.
Leo squeezed Cassie’s shoulder. “It’s a good plan,” he said. “We take a team to the river, then take the back roads to Luma and blow up the bridge.”
“It’s not just blowing up the bridge.” Cassie’s mouth went dry, her heart beating a little too fast in her chest. She swallowed against the discomfort of what had to be said next. “We have to blow up the busses.”
The impact of those words changed something inside her. She felt a piece of her heart shrivel up and die. Is this what war did to people?
She wasn’t the only one impacted by her statement. She saw it in the eyes of everyone around her.
They knew what she was saying. She wasn’t just saying they had to blow up busses full of armed soldiers. That was only part of it. The busses headed their way also had families on them. Women, children. Maybe even grandparents.
It was their only move. You couldn’t win a game of chess if you let your opponent quadruple the number of pieces on the board. Sure, they could hamstring the supply line. They could make it really difficult for the Soviets to get in and out of West County.
But in the end, that would only be an inconvenience. The busses would still come. The farmland of this area was still a prime target. The only way to protect it was to get rid of the invaders who wanted to take it from them. It would be checkmate for the Snipers and everyone else in West County if they did any less.
“The girl is right,” Griggs said. His face was grim, but she thought she saw a glimmer of respect in his eyes. “We have to take out the bridge when the busses are on them. Spill and I each have enough C-4 to rig the bridge.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Tate said. “No one said war is pretty.”
“It’s our duty to protect our home no matter the cost,” Leo said reluctantly. “Cassie is right. We have to rig the bridge and blow it when the busses arrive. We have to make sure there are no invaders left to come to West County. Any volunteers?”
Everyone except Stephenson and Nonna raised their hands.
“Dal, you and Lena have to stay here,” Leo said. “The broadcasts are too important. You guys need to keep those up no matter what. Amanda, you’ve been going on their missions. I want the three of you to stay together.”
Leo went around the room, pointing as he went. “Anton. Bruce. Tate. All of you are going to Luma.” He reluctantly shifted his gaze to Cassie and Jennifer.
He wanted her to stay behind. Cassie saw it in his eyes. He wanted to protect her.
Jennifer’s mouth opened angrily. Fire was in her eyes.
Cassie cut her off with a small shake of her head. To Leo, she said, “Did you know the queen used to be one of the weakest pieces on the chessboard?”
The question caught him off guard. “What?”
“The queen used the be one of the weakest players on the board,” Cassie repeated. “She used to be like the king. She could only move one square at a time. The game changed in the fifteenth century after queens like Eleanor of Aquitaine came into power. People realized queens had power in their own right.” She idly picked the black queen up off the board, turning it between her fingers. “She’s the most powerful piece in the game now. It can be hard to win a game without the queen.”
Her eyes met Leo’s. She saw the fear in them. He just wanted to protect her. That knowledge warmed her all the way down to her toes.
But this was war. She couldn’t afford to be sidelined just because a boy cared about her. They all had to do their part.
“No one can assess a situation like Cassie.” Jennifer moved to stand behind her. “She came up
with the major plays for the Hillsberg attack. She just came up with the best way to infiltrate Luma while everyone else was standing around.”
Cassie wasn’t a queen. She knew that. At best, she was a bishop, an advisor to the king. But bishops were valuable players in their own right.
“You really don’t want to be on Jennifer’s bad side in battle,” Anton said. “We all know she fights like a wildcat.”
Cassie smiled up at her sister. Jennifer was the queen. Everyone knew it. She was strong and fierce and fearless, like a real queen. She was every bit the warrior that Eleanor of Aquitaine had been.
Leo broke eye contact, running a hand through his hair. When he spoke, his eyes were full of misgiving. “You guys are both on the team. We need you.”
31
Change of Plans
The next morning after breakfast, Leo found himself standing hand in hand with Cassie. Ever since returning with the American soldiers yesterday, he hadn’t strayed far from her side. They’d even fallen asleep in the living room last night, cocooned together on the worn leather sofa under a small throw blanket. Nonna had scolded them, but Leo had just shrugged it off.
Now they stood with the rest of the Snipers on the backside of the cabin. Spill carved the name of the soldier they’d lost yesterday into their Not Forgotten wall. He’d been shot and killed by a KGB agent.
As had become customary, Nonna brought her small tray with shot glasses and a grappa bottle. It was a fresh bottle. Even though they only drank to remember their fallen, they were going through the supply of liquor quickly.
Lieutenant Charles Higgins. Spill carved his name out beneath Jim’s.
Griggs sidled up beside Leo. “I’m sorry about how I reacted to you guys yesterday,” he said. “I was an ass. I’m sorry for your losses.”
“Apology accepted,” Leo said. “We weren’t what you expected.”
“No.” Griggs’s eyes were fixed on the names carved into the back of the cabin. Cassie realized that to Griggs, the wall of Not Forgotten gave legitimacy to the Snipers. It was proof they weren’t just a pack of brainless kids playing with guns.
Zommunist Invasion Box Set | Books 1-3 Page 41
