“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 bodies 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
