Invasion: New York (Invasion America) by Vaughn Heppner Read Free Book Online Page B

enjoy it so much when he killed them?
    He remembered up in Alaska in his childhood. They’d had a cat named Tinkerbell. As a kid, he had called it Stinkerbell, and that had made his sister yell. Anyway, the cat caught a young jackrabbit once. The cat had played with its prey, clawing it, throwing it around and waiting for it to try to run away. As the baby jackrabbit made its feeble attempt to flee, the waiting cat pounced, caught the little thing and bit it in the neck. Jake remembered watching, fascinated. He’d thought the cat cruel, although his dad had told him later that that was the way of predators.
    Am I a predator now? Has the Militia turned me into a killer?
    Jake swallowed uneasily.
    Maybe he should stop blaming the Militia. Maybe he had always been a killer, and this war had simply brought it out of him. He had killed fellow human beings.
    Jake stopped, and he banged the back of his boot heel against the alleyway. He didn’t want to think deep thoughts. The war had caught him. That’s all. He’d been through the worst of it. He’d survived Denver and had seen truly awful things. He would never be able to tell others who hadn’t been through it what it had been like. He felt closer to his grandfather, who had been a weirdo at the end of his life. His grandfather had been a warrior. War, and especially killing, changed a man. There was simply no way around that.
    “Hey!” Jake shouted.
    He’d almost reached the neon sign. A soldier opened the door, and Jake heard music and saw flashing lights. He also caught the flash of a naked tit. Oh, okay, this was a strip club.
    Jake grinned from ear to ear. He didn’t realize there had been one of these in Topeka. Several seconds later, he paid the entrance fee, stomped his feet upon entering, and stared in fascination at the woman on stage. She wore a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and little else, and her tits jiggled as she danced around the pole. Oh man, but she was hot.
    “Beer,” he told a burly man.
    The bald man with a square build didn’t say anything. He just pointed at the obvious bar.
    Jake staggered there, slapped money on the bar and waited, turning and watching the woman gyrate to the pulse-pounding rock and roll. She ground her hips against the pole, moved away and high-stepped. She stared at the men looking up at her, and she spied Jake at the bar. She took off her cowboy hat—she had dark hair that spilled down to the middle of her back. She twirled the hat around and threw it at Jake.
    The hat sailed through the air. Men turned around, watching it. Jake reached up drunkenly, and he caught the hat. Maybe she’d been a powder-puff quarterback in high school. It had been a good throw; right at him. Jake laughed, and he put the hat on his head.
    “Here you go, cowboy,” a pretty woman said on the other side of the bar. She clunked a full glass on the wood. “Have a good time.”
    Jake agreed with her, picked up the beer and staggered to the stage.
    Men sat beside it, looking up with lust-glazed eyes at the dancer. They held bills in their fists. The stripper danced for them one by one, and each man put dollars on the stage. She was good at picking them up.
    Jake watched spellbound, drinking beers and judging three different strippers. He went to the restroom several times. The last time he bumped against walls, and he vomited in a sink.
    “Hey, stupid,” a tall man said. “Use the toilet for that.”
    Hardly able to see at this point, Jake gave him the finger. The man scowled, gave him the finger back. It was the longest finger Jake had ever seen, with a black-painted fingernail bitten down close. Jake rushed the guy. He hit Mr. Black Fingernail several times. They were uncoordinated swings, but they were enough. He left the tall guy on the restroom floor, with his eyes closed.
    As Jake tried to stagger back to the stage, a waitress intercepted him.
    “Your nose is bleeding,” she said.
    “Huh?” Jake asked.
    “It looks like someone hit