The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (5 page)

“Wow, Gavin, this is a lot,” Paige
exclaims.

“Told ya’ it was worth it,” he
says.

They’d
argued
earlier
today when he said he was going on a run by himself. He says it’s
because he can move faster without her or Talia with him, but Paige
knows it’s
really
only because he wants them
to be safe.

Paige smiles at him and then the three of them
embrace in a warm hug. They’ll make it another week with this much
food, along with the wild game they catch. They’ve become quite
talented with setting snares and hunting with the bow and arrow
that Gavin uses.

“You did good, Gav,” Talia praises. “Now let’s
eat!”

They all agree and take a seat at the
luxurious table with the pricey table settings. The floral pattern
on the dinnerware reminds Paige of her mother’s dishes. She chokes
down her tuna and squirrel meat and tries not to think of her
mother. She knows that her mom is dead. During their last, sketchy
conversation, her brother had broken the news of it to
her.

Now she travels with this ragtag group of
survivors and just focuses on staying alive another day. They’d
met
at a FEMA disaster center
that
wasn’t much more than a couple hundred tents, cots
and draped off areas in the former Atlanta Braves stadium. It was
there that she and Talia had become fast friends. They had
made
friends with another woman named Jenny,
but she’d passed away from
a bad
strain of flu
and left them with baby Maddie. The FEMA workers had wanted to take
Maddie from them and send her to another camp for orphans, but
Talia had jumped in and claimed her as her own. The fact that they
are both light-skinned African American had helped. The fact that
the FEMA workers hadn’t wanted to pry a crying baby from its
supposed mother had also helped. The fact that Gavin, a complete
stranger to them at the time, had come over and claimed to be the
father had sealed the deal. And they’ve been a band of misfit
survivors ever since.

When they
are finished
,
they do the best they can with cleaning the dishes and utensils,
using as little water as they can from the buckets they’d filled
from a nearby stream. Water conservation is one of their daily
struggles and something they are
constantly
working to improve
upon
. They’ve learned how
to collect water in cisterns, store water in sanitized jugs and
even how to find it when they are traveling in the
forest.

There are so many things that Paige is
thankful for every day, but there is a truckload of regret that she
also carries with her. She regrets arguing with her mother about
going to Georgia Tech instead of a college closer to home. She
regrets being rebellious with her father, who worked as a senator
for their state. She regrets not leaving college and going home
when the situation overseas had started escalating.
And most of all she regrets not being there for her brother and
that he was all alone in Arizona when their mother was killed, and
he was forced to leave the state with their aunt, who their mother
had disliked so intensely.

“I think we’re getting close,” Gavin states
when they are finished eating and sitting around the table
again.

Even though it’s only seven o’clock in the
evening, the
sun set
almost two hours ago,
which usually leaves them in near darkness. Sometimes if they find
extra oil for their lanterns, they’ll play a hand or two of cards.
But most nights they turn in immediately after dinner and get
moving again, weather permitting, at first light.

“Me, too, Gavin,” Paige returns.

Talia pulls out
the wrinkled,
tattered map of Tennessee
that they found almost a year ago
and opens it, spreading it out on the smooth surface of the
table.

“Look here,” she states as she points to a
section near the west. “We passed through Franklin last week. We’re
getting close.
This
looks like we’re almost to
Springfield.”

“Right,” Paige agrees. “Maybe another ten
miles or so to Springfield and then another twenty or less to
Pleasant View.”

“We could maybe be there in a few weeks,”
Gavin offers with
hope
.

“I think so, too,” Talia states.

Moving with a
four-year-old
child on foot isn’t exactly the fastest
mode of travel. They haven’t had a vehicle for almost a
year.

“Let’s stay here another night till this bad
weather passes through, and then we’ll move,” Paige
suggests.

“Right. Sounds good, Paige,” Gavin agrees.
“This weather’s horrible. I don’t want Maddie to get sick or catch
pneumonia or something.”

“Well, now that that
’s
settled
, wanna’ play a round of poker?” Talia asks with a
grin.

“Only if you don’t cheat this time, ya’
sneak,” Gavin jokes with her.

Paige offers her friends a soft smile that
belies her underlying state of edgy apprehension.
This
is a last ditch effort they are making to find
someone, anyone that they’d known before the fall. Paige’s brother
is
literally
the only person left on their
list of relatives who might still be alive. They’ve already
exhausted searches trying to find Talia’s parents, and Gavin’s
family
was simply gone
. His entire
neighborhood
was destroyed
when they’d
arrived
there
three years ago.
Some of it was flooded;
some
simply
destroyed by intense fires that had resulted from the earthquake
aftershocks of the tsunami, which had struck over eighty miles
south. The aftershocks had taken down electrical lines, causing
sparks that didn’t mix well with the broken natural gas lines.
Paige has seen enormous cracks in streets and freeways big enough
to swallow semi-trucks. Massive fires had swept through the coastal
states of the U.S. within days of the initial tsunami. Whole towns
had burned to charred rubble. Large metropolitan areas had followed
suit. Fire and rescue crews had not been able to slow the
fires
down. Paige remembered studying in high
school the great San Francisco earthquake that had caused similar,
devastating catastrophes, but she’d never imagined witnessing
anything like it for herself. And little did she know at the time,
that was only the beginning.

She rummages for the deck of worn out cards
from her backpack. Tonight she’ll enjoy a hand of dirty poker with
her
friends
,
and they’ll use pilfered jewelry and money they’ve found here and
there over the years.

“I’ll start the first bid with this diamond
tennis bracelet,” Talia states with a smile.

Her friend tosses it into the center of the
table after the first hand
is
dealt
.

“I’ll match that with this Rolex and raise you
by two ruby earrings,” Gavin says lightheartedly.

“I’ll see your earrings and match them with
this 10k stack,” Paige replies and tosses a bank-wrapped, wrinkled
stack of hundred dollar bills onto the pile.

Their poker games can become rather high
roller status, but it doesn’t
really
matter.
Money has no value anymore. If they were going to bet on something
that had actual value, they’d be using a can of peas or a tube of
toothpaste.

Chapter Three

Reagan

“Is the truck gassed up?” John asks of
Kelly.

Her husband is stressed out but trying not to
show it. They’d buried Em yesterday, and ever since, they’ve all
been running on nerves and adrenaline alone. Reagan knows John well
enough to recognize the signs and signals he puts off when he’s
under duress.

“Yeah, it’s ready. Let’s go,” Kelly returns
impatiently.

Reagan is also ready. She’s packed them enough
food for today and has her medical bag in hand.

“Be careful,” Grandpa says.

“Yes, sir,” John tells him and shakes his
hand.

Reagan hugs her grandfather and kisses his
whiskered cheek. Sue hugs her next, but Hannah has not come out of
the house. She’s still sitting in the music room on Grams’s
favorite sofa. It’s all right because it’s what she does most days
now.

Derek says, “Radio if you need more
help.”

Her beloved brother-in-law will stay on the
farm with Simon and Grandpa to protect it while they
are gone
. Reagan is going with the men should Cory be
injured or shot by the time they get to him.

“Will do,” John answers his
brother.

“Bring him home, Kelly,” Grandpa orders
gravely.

“Yes, sir,” Kelly returns but doesn’t meet his
eyes.

The sun has just risen, the children are still
in
bed
,
and
they
are headed
to hunting cabin number two to
retrieve Cory home. She rides in the middle of the bench seat
between Kelly and John. Reagan takes John’s hand into her
own
,
and he
gives it a gentle, reassuring squeeze. She’s thankful for his size
and strength. He leans over and kisses the top of her head. Reagan
tries not to let the tears loose again. The loss of Em has
shattered her family. Nobody even went to bed last night. They’ve
all been up since yesterday because sleep wasn’t going to come to
any of them, not after burying one of their own.

Kelly is speeding along the county road, not
something they’d normally do. However, the circumstances this time
merit
the use of public roads. Somehow they
have to get to Cory before he does something reckless that could
get him killed. When Simon had met them on the oil well road
without Cory but with Em’s dead body, Kelly had immediately wanted
to go after him. Grandpa had convinced him to do the honorable
thing and bury their sister first. Today, though, is a different
situation altogether. Today, nothing could stop Kelly from this
mission.

They drive for nearly forty minutes until
their
secret,
overgrown oil well road comes
into view. They’ve never encountered anyone else on these abandoned
service roads which makes them ideal for covert travel. Kelly slows
to a more reasonable pace since the
gravel
and
mostly dirt road is bouncy, rutted and full of potholes. They even
stop once so that the men can clear away a long fallen branch from
the road. They drive as far as they can on the snow-covered road
and come to a stop at the end of the trail where a forest begins.
They’ll go in on foot from here. It’s not far, less than a
mile.

Within twenty minutes, the cabin comes into
view. There isn’t a fire burning within, and no smoke comes out of
the chimney. Reagan
tromps
through the snow,
which had fallen last night and dropped a good four additional
inches on them. She finds the horse shelter empty.

“I don’t think he’s here,” she calls over to
John as he comes out of the cabin also shaking his head.

“We’ll have to wait it out here for him,” John
says as he adjusts the rifle sling on his shoulder.

“To hell with that. I’m going to look for
him,” Kelly says angrily. “I’m not sitting around here waiting for
him to come back.”

“Kelly, we have no idea where he might be,”
Reagan argues as she joins the men under the overhang of the
cabin’s roof line. It’s starting to flurry again, and she has no
wish to soak herself through with wet, cold snow.

She wishes she could offer her
big
friend some small semblance of comfort, but what
could she possibly say that would bring back his baby sister? In
the middle of the night, she’d found him on the back porch sobbing
brokenly. Kelly had
obviously
gone out there
to be alone and fall apart away from Hannah. Her friend
is shredded
to pieces from this but is
clearly
trying to hold it together, hold onto what is
left of his little family. She’d left him uninterrupted and sought
out the comfort of her grandfather’s arms in his study where he
sleeps most nights.

“Bravo One to Tango Three, come in Cor,” John
says into his radio.

Her husband is holding it together better than
anyone else, which is nothing more than what she’d expect from
John. He’s as strong as one of the thick, oak support beams in the
cattle barn in situations like this.

Static from the cabin alerts them, and they go
inside only to discover Cory’s radio sitting atop the small
table.

“Damn it,” Reagan swears under her
breath.

“I’m gonna light a fire,” John
offers.

“Thanks, babe,” Reagan says as she rubs her
gloved hands together. “I’m freezing.”

Her husband, as usual, has
a
low
burning, crackling fire going in the fireplace within a
few minutes.

“Why the hell didn’t he take his radio?” Kelly
growls and paces the floor restlessly.