The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (61 page)

Paige nods and says, “I’m
sorry, Sam. About your family, I mean. That must’ve
been
…
”

It’s Sam’s turn to frown and look
away. She turns back with a smile and announces, “Let’s take a
break, shall we? My back is getting sore. I think we got quite a
lot done today.”

“Sounds great,” Paige agrees
unsurely.

They carry their buckets
full of weeds and dump them in the compost pile near the hog barn.
Paige tries to make small talk with her, but it’s hard to
concentrate
fully
on her words. Sam chooses to ignore the fact that
her hands shake. Forgetting the past, which is what she mostly
attempts to do, is so much easier than remembering it. The place in
her heart where her family used to reside sometimes feels so empty
as if it will swallow her whole. Remembering any part of that old
life is difficult and painful. Remembering what happened to her
directly after she’d lost her
whole
family is entirely
unbearable.

“I think I’m going to take a walk,”
she tells Paige.

“Oh, um, is that ok? I mean the guys
are gone, and they say we’re not supposed to leave the farm when
they are,” Paige says protectively.

Sam smiles gently and says,
“I’ll be
fine
. I’m not going more than a few feet beyond the barns. Don’t
worry.”

Simon’s lovely sister with the pale
blue eyes and striking red hair nods nervously and looks around as
if she is trying to find someone to halt her.

“It’s fine. I do it all the time.
Besides, they aren’t all gone, just some of them,” Sam reassures
her before turning to go.

She heads past the hog
barn, climbs over the horse fence and strides into the forest.
Jogging about a hundred feet into the dense woods, Sam finally
rests against a massive oak. The roots of the ancient tree spread
far and wide, its
huge
top providing a reprieve from the June heat. There
she gasps for breath. This time is harder for some reason than
others. It’s just too painful to breathe around. The feeling of
loss has come over her hard and fast this time.
Normally
she’s prepared for
it. A long, rainy day brings it on sometimes, reminding her of the
day and the mood of the weather when her family had been taken from
her.
She hadn’t expected Paige’s
simple question about her father’s profession to bring forth this
much anxiety and so many bad memories.

It’s not Paige’s fault. Sam just needs
to pull her crap together before she goes back to the house.
Everyone has their own problems. Nobody needs to be brought down by
her negativity. They are all still reeling from the loss of Em and
then Gavin and some of the townspeople during the Target creeps’
raid. Talia is still distressed over the loss of her friend,
especially. And poor Hannah just seems to keep getting knocked down
emotionally because she doesn’t process loss well at all. When
these relapses come on, Sam tries her best to hide it from
everyone.

Her chest feels
constricted, the walls of her lungs closing in on her and making it
difficult to draw a full breath. Sometimes this is followed by
flashing lights in her peripheral vision,
nausea
and a lovely, intense
migraine. She reaches her hand out to lean against the rough bark.
She aches for her mother’s soft and gentle touch, to be held by her
again and told that everything will be ok. She aches for the
comforting, encouraging words of Grams. She’d
been
so helpful and thoughtful
with Sam when she’d first come to be unofficially adopted by the
McClanes. It’s just one more perforation in her broken heart, the
loss of Grams.

Sam slumps to the ground at the base
of the tree, mindful of the poison ivy that is growing only a few
feet away. She leans her head back against the trunk, closes her
eyes and reminisces a moment about her mother.

She had dark hair like her,
nearly black. Her mother was youthful and fun. They’d play duets
together, she on her violin,
her
mother
on her lovely cello. She told Sam
that when she was a young woman she’d been offered a scholarship to
Juilliard but had turned it down in favor of staying
in Tennessee
to
marry Sam’s father. Her mother’s parents, Sam’s grandparents who’d
been killed in a car accident while on vacation in California when
she was still quite young, had been furious.
At the time of the story telling, Sam hadn’t been able
to comprehend giving up something so huge.
She
could never
have given up a riding scholarship for any boy.
But, then again, she’d only
been
thirteen or fourteen when her
mother had told her. She had no idea what love was back then, nor
did she care to find out. Her life had been all about riding or
music, right up until it all fell apart. There wasn’t much room for
anything else. Boys weren’t even a thought.

When her mother had gotten
pregnant with the twins, they’d all rejoiced. But Sam knows that it
wasn’t a planned pregnancy. Her mother was forty-one years old.
Nonetheless, she’d gone through with the pregnancy and given birth
to Sam’s younger brother and sister. They’d
been
perfect, too. Well,
perfect
unless one
counted middle of the night feedings and bizarre sleep patterns
that woke everyone up for the first full year. But Sam had been
crazy about them, had shown them off to all her friends and bragged
them up
constantly
. They were stinking adorable
rugrats. She helped her mom as much as she could,
too
because she
knew how much they wore her out. They were only two years old when
they were murdered by Simon and Paige’s Aunt Amber’s group of
insane criminals. Her older brother had been seventeen, two years
older than she was at the time.

They hadn’t been
particularly close since he mostly thought of her as a pest, but
she still loved him just the same. They had their fair share of
sibling rivalry, arguments over pointless things, relentless
teasing from him, and the typical “stay out of my room” moments. He
favored their father with sandy brown hair and matching eyes. He
was very good-looking, always charming some girl in school. She
used to jeer him relentlessly about jumping from one girl to the
next and that he was going to run out of date prospects in their
school. He usually just
noogied
the top of her head for her. And
he absolutely hated the horses. He went to most of her shows just
to be supportive, but he didn’t ride, not ever. Sam knows that her
parents had probably forced him to go since he likely would’ve
preferred to hang out with his friends. But he’d gone, nonetheless.
He’d
been
thrown from a mare when he was young and had never mounted up
again. In his defense, he had broken his collar bone. He rooted her
on, though, and also picked up girls while hanging around the barns
by bragging about his band.

Sam doesn’t even realize that she’s
crying until she has to sniff.

One time her mom and dad
were preparing dinner and had asked her to fetch her brother from
the garage where he was pounding away on his drums. Her baby
siblings were also in the kitchen. Her tiny,
two-year-old
sister was in a
baby saucer entertaining herself with the gadgets and gizmos and
light-up mechanisms attached to the chair. Her
baby
brother was busy banging
on the cupboard doors and tearing items out of drawers and throwing
them on the floor at their father’s feet. After she’d called her
big brother, she’d returned to the kitchen to find her parents
laughing. She’d
caught
them in the middle of talking about her brother
and his noisy, nerve-rattling drums. Her father had said that
perhaps they shouldn’t encourage any more musical
instruments,
especially for
the
new babies. Sam distinctly remembers
her father leaning his hip against the granite counter munching on
red pepper strips her mother was slicing at the island. She was
making beef stir fry that night, a family favorite. Her father was
wearing dirty
blue-jeans
and a cotton button down shirt because he’d just
come from a construction site. Dirt and dust still clung to his
forearms, the front of his shirt, and even in his hair. Some days
he came home spic and span clean in a dark suit which meant he
worked at the office on a deal or had met with clients, but other
days when he visited the job site, he came home filthy. He was very
hands-on according to her mother, although Sam really hadn’t been
able to comprehend that saying at the time. If her father was alive
today, he’d have plenty to be hands-on about on the McClane farm
and on the building of the town wall. That day her mother’s shiny,
dark hair was pulled back into its usual bun at the base of her
slim
neck,
and she wore her ever present workout clothing of yoga pants
and a
zip-up
jacket. She enjoyed walking five miles every day with one of
the other moms in their development. Their neighborhood was more
like small, five to seven acre mini-farms, nothing like the McClane
farm.

Sometimes her mother would
go to town and take various exercise classes at a local gym, which
has since been totally ransacked and then burned to the ground
after the apocalypse for some reason. She was always such a health
nut. Once she’d even
dragged
Sam to something called a spinning class. It
hadn’t made sense to her. Riding a bicycle but not going anywhere
seemed pointless.

It’s still hard for Sam to
believe that her mom got so sick after the apocalypse. Her mother’s
cough and fever had been worsening with each passing day. Sam had
volunteered to stay home and take care of the chores which
were
mostly
fixing food and feeding the
horses. The twins were asleep in their cribs, and she was to keep
an eye on them
while
her brother,
father
and mother went to find medicine.
That morning she’d wanted to clean her parents’ room, to rid their
bed of fever-soaked sheets that she planned to hand-wash in their
tub while they were gone. She was in the middle of that when the
group arrived. She heard the big, noisy RV’s pull into their
circular drive. She’d checked to make sure the twins were still
asleep and had locked their door from the inside. Then she’d hidden
in her closet. Simon had found her. He told her to stay
hidden.

Their neighborhood had not been
impacted yet with the violence that seemed to have spread
nationwide on the television reports. She’d locked the front doors.
But sometimes when she thinks back on it, she is pretty sure that
she hadn’t locked the back door after coming in from feeding the
horses that day. She hadn’t had a gun like she’s worn on a constant
basis since coming to the McClane farm. Her mother had hated guns,
hadn’t wanted one in their house. It may not have helped anyway.
Sam knows that she would’ve been severely outnumbered by Amber’s
group.

Her parents and brother were only
going about three miles from their home. Her dad and brother went
out almost every morning to find water and haul it back to the
house. That morning had seemed like any other when they left to
forage, only that time they were looking for meds. Her mother was
worried that the twins would get her sickness, so she wanted to
have more of a stock-up of antibiotics or even some children’s
fever reducer or decongestant. It should’ve been safe. It had
quickly turned so horribly wrong.

“Hey!” Simon yells angrily.

Sam jumps out of her skin and presses
her back to the tree. Simon stalks purposefully toward her,
smashing through thickets and summer overgrowth like a raging
bull.

“What the hell are you doing, Sam?” he
barks. “You know you aren’t supposed to be out here by
yourself.”

He snatches her to her feet by pulling
her arm. It doesn’t hurt, but it does anger her just slightly.
Apparently Paige has ratted her out because she was worried about
her. Sometimes she’d just like a few hours alone, but it’s hard to
get any on a farm literally full of adults and children.

“Stop! I don’t need your
help, Simon,” she says with irritation
tinging
her voice. She doesn’t like
to raise her voice at anyone, especially Simon. Sam looks up at
him.

“Oh crap,” he mumbles. “Are you
crying, Sam?”

“No,” she lies
badly
and pulls
free of his grasp. “Let me be, Simon.”

“Wait,” he says.

Simon lunges for her when
she turns to leave but misses. Sam stumbles over an unseen
log,
her tears
blurring her vision. She
swipes
the back of her hand over her
damp cheeks while keeping her head low and marching on.

“Sam, wait,” he repeats. “Wait a damn
minute. What’s wrong?”

She doesn’t answer but waves her hand
over her shoulder at him, dismissing him. Sam picks up the pace
when she clears the woods. He tries to help her over the fence, but
she shrugs off his hand.