Chapter 9 Escape from death. Integrity Test

When I woke up, I just lay there for a while and digested a heavy nightmare. Invasion, fire, death, corpses. Dream like this! He tore his eyelids open with difficulty and looked around. For some reason, I was lying not on my sofa, but in the corridor at the very door. Did he get so drunk yesterday that he didn't crawl to bed? My head was really buzzing, as if after a rampant booze, my whole body ached, my back hurt very much. I tried to get up and realized that I was lying inside a sleeping bag. And then came the realization! The nightmare turned out to be a reality.

I woke up at once and sat down, looking around.

The wall clock showed half past six. Already evening? That's what I gave snorer! We went to bed, however, already at five in the morning, and the previous night at the birthday party we also did not manage to get enough sleep. But still sleep twelve hours in a row... What did the girls think of me? By the way, where are they? None of them were in the corridor, although there were empty sleeping bags nearby. Yes, and even rows of spaced shoes under a hanger littered with camouflage suits showed that the girls had not gone anywhere. From behind the closed doors of my room, I could hear the sounds of a Disney cartoon and women's laughter. It immediately became clear where the wards are now. I got up and went to the bathroom. Women's underwear was hung everywhere on all the drying lines, on the pipes and on the radiator.

I tried to look at my aching back in the mirror. It was red, in places the skin had peeled off, large blisters of burns were bubbling between the shoulder blades. It's even scary to imagine what would have happened if I hadn't disappeared under the car yesterday. I went to the sink. The toothpaste tube was empty. Like a bottle of liquid soap. The shampoo is out too. I didn't find any toilet paper either.

I went to the kitchen and looked longingly at the completely empty refrigerator. And although the tantalizing aroma of scrambled eggs and fried sausages still hovered in the air, there was no food left at all, even the unfinished beer had gone somewhere. Although, why be surprised? The food brought yesterday immediately evaporated when twenty-five hungry mouths took over. I was expecting some kind of ritual or prayer from the church school girls before a late dinner, but the hungry girls just joyfully pounced on the bags of food they brought. Nobody even said a simple "thank you", although I risked my life, getting food. Yesterday I didn't reproach the guests at all, much less condemn them. But now he was annoyed. It is one thing to bring food for everyone (by the way, bought with my own money), but the contents of a personal refrigerator are completely different.

I went into Zhenya's room and turned on the small TV set there. There were news. They were transmitting messages from the National Defense Council of Russia formed that night. They played shots taken from different points and a video of an alien ship shot down over Moscow. It was destroyed over the intersection of the Moscow Ring Road and the Minsk Highway by a simultaneous massive attack from the ground and combat helicopters. In the video footage, a huge fire blazed on the ground, and dozens of triangular ships hung nearby and intensively fired at the crash site from all guns, destroying the wreckage of their equipment. It looked really cool. With cheerful voices, the announcers in every way glorified the heroes who achieved the first victory, and called on all the young men and women of the country to come to the nearest recruiting stations for organized dispatch to the military units of the country.

Clicking on other channels, I did not receive any additional information. Foreign TV channels did not work, all Russian TV channels broadcast the same thing everywhere. I turned on the computer standing on Zhenya's desk, which was common with my friend - we bought a bunch of money together. Climbed into the Internet and began to look for any reports of military operations. Indeed, I easily found a bunch of sites where people tried to collect a complete picture of the state of affairs from disparate messages. The data varied greatly in different sources, but the numbers were still shocking.

According to the most minimal estimates, earthlings lost about one hundred and eighty million people killed only on the first day of the war. Most analysts leaned toward an even larger estimate of losses - up to a quarter of a billion people killed and more than eighteen million wounded and maimed. The destruction of seven alien ships was confirmed: one over the Mediterranean Sea, one over Moscow and five at once over Seoul in South Korea. In the latter case, there was a nuclear strike by North Korea, which declared the appearance of flying ships over its territory an act of aggression on the part of the capitalist countries and launched a missile attack on the capital of its southern neighbor. Since the total number of alien ships circling the Earth, based on radar data, was estimated at about two hundred thousand units, the loss of seven of them looked simply insignificant...

I also leafed through the news, then looked at the information about the pistol he found, which turned out to be a typical PM, after which I turned off the monitor and thought. From important information, I noted that flying hunters appeared almost simultaneously all over the planet over crowded places: beaches, airfields, train stations, busy streets, religious buildings and stadiums. The aliens have always tried to kill the maximum number of people, practically ignoring the infrastructure. From now on, any gatherings of people became dangerous - it was there that, first of all, one should expect the appearance of a flying death. The observation turned out to be important and confirmed my own guesses.

But what should I do now? In a good way, go to the draft board and join the ranks of the defense. If I were alone without the burden of twenty-four schoolgirls, that's exactly what I would have done. Although ... maybe the military will find a safe place for the girls? Schoolgirls will sit in a reliable bomb shelter, provided with food and medical care. I liked the idea, this option was in every way better than dragging myself to distant Sergiev Posad. But at first it was still necessary to go to the military registration and enlistment office alone or with a couple of assistants and make sure the route was safe, talk to the military and warn about a group of civilians, and then bring the entire group of girls to the military registration and enlistment office.