THEM (Book 0): Invasion Read Online Free PDF Page B

revolver, cheap but reliable. .38 was a common round, so I took it along with the box of shells the driver had left on the seat. I said another prayer for the old timer, and silently thanked him for the gun and shells. He had a picture of some kids and what I assumed were their parents on his dash; I took it and placed it in his hand, and shut the door.
    As I climbed down off the cab, I saw some people approaching from Leakey. Not just some. A whole mob. They were far enough away to give me plenty of time to get in my truck and head back the way I came before they could even get close enough to be a threat. I decided to give up on seeing what things looked like in town. If the looting had already started in the little city of Leakey, Texas, population 425, I needed to get my parents out of Round Rock as soon as possible. I left the mob in my rearview and headed back to the cabin as fast as all the broken down cars and debris on the road would allow.

FOUR
    UNREAL
    ONCE BACK AT THE CABIN I plugged the girl’s cell phone into the charger and tried the landline again. No dice. I left the cell phone on, though, just in case someone tried to reach the girl. I figured I could tell them what had happened and at least give them closure, even though it might make me a suspect in her murder. Considering the circumstances, I thought it was unlikely that the courts would be back in operation anytime soon, but eventually things would return to some level of normalcy, so I decided to turn off the phone after all. No sense getting involved until I spoke with Randy about it.
    I felt pretty hungry. The day’s events had ended up being a lot more stressful than I had expected. Not that being in a nuclear apocalypse was supposed to be a day at the beach, but I hadn’t expected things to be this chaotic and violent so soon. I put some soup on the stove and munched out on some deer sausage and crackers while I waited for the soup to heat, then I tried calling my parents again using the landline. I got nothing but a busy signal, so I decided to keep trying on the odd chance I might get through. Once the cell phone I’d found was charged enough, I’d also start trying to call them on that. Couldn’t hurt to try.
    Once my soup was ready, I hunkered down in front of the short wave and started scanning the freqs for some news of what was going on out there in the big wide world. Nobody seemed to know exactly what had happened, but we did know who fired the first shot. Apparently the North Koreans decided to drop the bomb on Seoul, and that started a whole chain of events that had ended with the U.S., Russia, and China tossing nuclear weapons at each other. It would have been only a matter of time before something like this happened. I mean, once you let the crazies build nukes, the logical conclusion is that eventually they’re going to use them. Heck, even a ten-year-old could see that.
    Thankfully, something major happened that caused the powers that be to stop just short of total global annihilation. Apparently some greater threat had appeared out of the blue, but due to conflicting reports I couldn’t get a clear picture of just what that was exactly. Some said it was a global pandemic, others said aliens, while still others were yammering about an impending zombie apocalypse. Go figure. I was more likely to believe the alien invasion scenario than I was the zombie thing. Come on, zombies? I love Romero films as much as the next guy, but that was just a little too far out there for me to believe.
    Still, there were some pretty hairy reports about massive riots and waves of civil unrest hitting large cities all across the globe. There was also some talk about cannibalism, which wasn’t surprising if you took into account just how close to starvation much of the global population was at any given moment. Throw in a little hysteria and confusion, and it was easy to see that most of this stuff was hearsay being blown out of proportion. Even