Zommunist Invasion | Book 3 | Scattered Picott, Camille (best ereader for pc .TXT) 📖

Amanda shoved with everything she had. The boulder inched across the streambed. She didn’t let up. Her muscles screamed in protest. Her thighs burned and her stomach shook. Rocks dug painfully into her tailbone. She pushed with everything she had, bunching her hands into fists from the effort.

The earth gave way under her pressure. The boulder slid forward, blocking the tree-tangled entrance.

They were hidden, completely concealed from the Soviets.

21

Ants

Amanda slumped to the ground, panting for breath. She stared at the rock, exhilaration pounding in her temples. She, Amanda Nielson, had just moved a boulder.

That was stuff wrestlers did. Not biology nerds.

A few tears leaked out of her eyes. Relief mingled with awe. She hadn’t felt this good about herself since acing her honors chemistry final last year.

No, that wasn’t accurate. Getting an A in honors chemistry had been radical, but it was nothing compared to the feat of raw strength she had just exhibited. How much did that boulder weigh? Two hundred pounds? More?

No wonder all the varsity sports guys were into themselves. Amanda wasn’t sure she’d ever felt so into herself as she did at that moment.

Someone squeezed her hand. She looked up to see Lena beaming at her. The other girl gave her a wide smile and a big thumbs up. Dal added his own thumbs up, giving Amanda an approving nod.

She thought she might burst with pride. As they huddled together in the cracked dirt with nothing but a tangle of branches and a boulder separating them from the Soviets, it occurred to Amanda that if she’d been born a boy, her life would have been different.

Her body would have been viewed as an asset. She could have been popular like Leo and Anton and Bruce. She could have played varsity football.

This realization rocked her to the core. She would not have been more shocked to see a unicorn trot out of the trees.

Her body was a deep, secret shame she carried close to her heart. Not a day passed where she did not yearn to look like the skinny girls in the MTV videos. People like Mrs. Fink just made it all that much worse.

If she’d been born with a penis instead of a vagina, she would have been viewed as a worthy specimen. Amanda digested this as she lay in their hiding spot, pondering her genitalia. One little thing—well, one big thing, really—had changed her fate. A stupid chromosome had swept in and played a dirty joke.

The world was really fucked up. So what if she had a vagina? She was an amazon. Dal had said so. If she survived and made it back to the cabin, she was going to start acting like one.

No, scratch that. She could move trees. She could move boulders.

Amanda was going to start acting like an amazon right now. An amazon could survive the Russians who hunted them. Amazons didn’t shrivel up like raisins in the sun. They lived to fight another day. That’s what she would do: survive.

There were loose leaves and sticks in their tiny hollow. Lena gathered them up, covering their bodies as best she could. Luckily, they all wore plain jeans and boring button-down work shirts. They practically blended into the creek bed already, but extra camouflage couldn’t hurt.

Lena didn’t stop there. She scooped up a handful of mud and smeared it all over her face, gesturing for Amanda and Dal to do the same. Soon, all three of them had mud covering the exposed parts of their skin.

Somewhere nearby came rustling. Amanda’s heart leaped into her throat. She sat very still, barely daring to breathe.

She, Lena, and Dal sat shoulder to shoulder, machine guns across a soft bed of leaves that covered their jeans. The fresh mud made her skin itch. God, she was going to get an acne breakout from this, she just knew it. Although acne seemed a small price to pay to avoid having your head shot off by enemy invaders.

Something stung her hand. Looking down, she spotted an ant crawling across her skin.

Not just one ant. Several of them. Wrinkling her nose, she squished them.

Another sting flared on her back, then several more across her hip. Horrified, she scanned the ground and realized the ground crawled with ants. Thousands of the little black things tracked across the ground.

And they were sitting right in a pile of them.

Dal and Lena realized the situation just as Amanda did. She saw them pinching the ones they could reach.

They were covered in mud, hiding in a ditch, surrounded by ants and enemy Soviets.

Wow, there really was a way for things to get worse. Who would have thought?

Amazon, she reminded herself. You’re an amazon. Amazons didn’t get weak-kneed over ants. They were just bugs, for crying out loud. Yes, getting bitten sucked big time, but on the scale of insect encounters, this was pretty mild. It would have been much worse to sit in a cluster of ticks. Or, even worse, a black widow nest.

This wasn’t so bad. Just ants. No big deal.

A swarm of bites broke out across her lower back. Amanda didn’t react. She was too busy listening to the sound of approaching soldiers.

There were two of them. They spoke softly to one another. Lena had her head cocked, listening intently. Amanda would have given just about anything to understand Russian.

The soldiers crunched through the bed, moving slowly through the terrain.

Amanda saw the tip of a machine gun before she saw the soldier attached to it. The first man came into view. His form was obscured by the tangled branches in front of them, but the red star, sickle, and hammer on the breast of his uniform practically glared at her through the tree limbs.

The ants had made their way under her shirt and bit their way up her back. She swallowed, not daring to move. It seemed a small thing to endure in light of the current situation.

The two men surveyed the land on either side of the fallen tree.