The McClane Apocalypse Book Five (24 page)

Paige whips around, and she watches Cory
warily.

“Move it, beanpole,” he agitates.

Paige doesn’t answer but shoots him a scowl.
Reagan catches her pale eyes sliding down over the broad expanse of
Cory’s chest and bare stomach, though. The sun is getting low in
the sky, causing a slight chill in the autumn air, but he seems
oblivious. Of course, John is still shirtless, as well. Although
Reagan doesn’t quite mind her husband’s shirtless torso. By the
look in Paige’s eyes, Reagan’s not so sure that she also doesn’t
mind looking at Cory’s, either. And when Paige meets Reagan’s gaze,
she pretends that she needs to wash up for dinner and makes a hasty
exit from the kitchen. She’s pretty damn sure that Paige wasn’t
just looking at Cory’s necklace, either.

“Think I’m just gonna grab some food to go,”
Cory announces as he places the heavy platter on the island.

“What? Why?” Reagan asks. Her husband comes
in next carrying the heavy pots of potatoes.

“I need to run out for a bit. I’ll be back
tomorrow…”

Hannah immediately jumps his case, “Hey! I
don’t think so, Mr. Cory. You will sit down with the rest of us and
eat dinner with the family, your family!”

Kelly and Grandpa come in followed by noisy,
bustling children and finally Derek, who has been working non-stop
on construction and repair jobs around the farm.

“What’s going on?” Kelly inquires.

Hannah states angrily, “Your
brother just made the mistake of thinking he was going to tear off
a chicken leg and take off instead of eating dinner with the
family, and I was kind enough to correct his error in
judgement!”

Simon laughs heartily at his friend’s
distress or at Hannah’s reprimand. Reagan isn’t sure why everyone
always thinks she’s the one who’s bossy. It’s definitely Hannah.
She just smiles at her sister, who is waving a spatula around like
some sort of angry Italian mother in her kitchen. Reagan wouldn’t
be more surprised if her sister also started spouting off in
Italian and making hand gestures.

“Hm, looks like you were mistaken, bro,’”
Kelly concedes, not interfering with his wife’s dictate or coming
to his helpless brother’s aid.

“Yeah, as usual. Guess I got that
wrong,” Cory
sulks
.

However, he ruffles Hannah’s hair, hugs
around her slim shoulders and leaves the room. Her enchantingly
beautiful sister
smiles,
a rare
moment for her lately.

After everyone is seated at the dinner
table, the prayer is given and food starts getting passed around,
John breaks the news that they are running low on fuel. Then he
breaks the harder news that he wants Cory to head up Paige’s
training
and that he’d like them to make
a trip with Sam and Simon to Nashville in a week or so. Reagan is
surprised at the quick timeline, but she also understands the
urgency with winter soon around the corner. She watches Paige’s
face fall dramatically when she hears the dictate of Cory being in
charge of her training, but she doesn’t defy the mandate. However,
she is quiet for the remainder of the meal. And immediately
following it, Cory takes off like he’d wanted to do
before.

“What are we going to do if we can’t
find fuel?” Reagan asks later. She is sitting in her grandfather’s
office with her husband,
Kelly
and Grandpa.

“We’ll figure it out,” John assures her,
taking her hand in his.

Grandpa sits behind his desk smoking his pipe
while she and John share the leather sofa and Kelly sits in a plush
chair nearby.

“I want to know what our contingency
plan is going to be,” Reagan says firmly. “Could we have people
come to the med shed here on the farm for medical care?”
“Hell no,” Kelly replies. “Nobody’s ever coming to the farm on a
regular basis, not even people from town. The
fewer
people who know about this
place,
the better. Sometimes you guys are treating
people who’ve just heard from a friend of a friend about the
clinic. We can’t have strangers showing up whenever they need your
help.”

“We’re working on a plan,” John says.

“What are you expecting the kids to find in
Nashville?” Grandpa asks.

“I may be going with them. Maybe Kelly, too.
We might be able to find a tanker truck over there at the gas
distribution center,” John tells her.

“And if all else fails, we’re gonna
find a CNG converter compressor kit and change out the pick-up
truck. We’ve still got plenty of natural gas around the
county
we can tap into,” Kelly says, his
large hands resting casually on his knees.

“Can we do that? Just convert a gas car to
natural gas? I’ve never heard of it,” Reagan says nervously. She’s
tired, exhausted really from canning and working all day. Tomorrow
is a clinic day, and she’d like to sit it out. She’s been unusually
tired lately and worried that it is stemming from her illness in
the spring still lingering in her system.

Grandpa answers, “Yes, we can. It’s not as
difficult as it might seem. The gas company trucks used to run on
compressed natural gas.”

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Kelly says. “That
changes things. Where are these trucks? You didn’t tell me that
part.”

They’ve
obviously
been discussing this idea without
her.

“Well,” Grandpa starts in his usual,
frustratingly slow way, “there were quite a few fracking sites in
our county. There’s the one between here and Clarksville- you and
John shoulda’ went past it when you
traveled
there a few years back.”

“Yeah, we did,” Reagan remembers.

“Right, we stopped at the one place to eat
and give Jake a break,” John says with a nod. “I don’t remember any
trucks up there, though.”

“No, they wouldn’t be there,” Grandpa
says. “That’s a storage facility with
pipelines
. The frack site would’ve been a few miles
to the east, off of the main road but with road access.”

“Hm, all right,” Kelly says. “We can
run over there tomorrow,
Doc,
if
you give us directions.”

“Sure can,” Grandpa says as he puffs at his
pipe and then rests it in an ashtray. “I’ll get my old maps out and
see if I can’t remember where the other sites are. I had them
marked on a map somewhere around her.”

Reagan rolls her eyes with a smile.
Grandpa’s organization skills are lacking at best. And now that
Grams is gone, it’s even worse trying to find things that he’d once
deemed as important. He doesn’t like anyone fussing with his
things
, but his filing system sure isn’t
something for which
anyone
can
help him.

“There are quite a few distribution
facilities that might have company trucks, as well, over closer to
Nashville,” Grandpa adds thoughtfully. “There might just be company
trucks still sitting on the gas company lots. I think there were a
few satellite offices spread around the area, too.”

“This could be a
crucial
change if we can get our hands on those gas
company trucks,” John declares.

“I agree, John,” Grandpa says.

“Tomorrow, Doc and I need to trek into the
woods,” Kelly tells them as Derek comes into the room.

“For what?” her brother-in-law asks as he
takes a seat on the other sofa.

“Gotta find that main gas line and open it
up,” Kelly says.

Grandpa takes a sip of his coffee,
found by Simon and Cory on their last trip, and explains, “I think
that’s why we’re losing pressure here in the big house. We’re going
up there to take a look at the main line. Now it was about twenty
years ago that I let them frack on the back forty, so I figure the
line
needs to be opened
up.
We’ve been getting our gas off of
the well here, but the other lines will have hundreds of thousands
of cubic feet just sitting in them since people aren’t using it
anymore and the gas companies aren’t accessing it or using it,
either.”

“Interesting,” Derek says. “I’ll go, too. I
know I’m supposed to go to the clinic with Simon and Reagan, but I
think this is something that I can help with instead.”

“Don’t worry about it,” John says.
“I’ll go to the clinic. We’ll be
fine
. I’ll have Roy come over and help out on
security there, too.”

“The farm will have to be covered by Cory,
Sue and some of the other kids,” Grandpa says.

“Yeah, it’ll be fine then,” John says with a
smirk. “I’d feel worse for the people that tried to come onto it
raising Cain if Cory was here unsupervised.”

Derek and Grandpa
chuckle,
but Kelly barely manages a smile. He is
clearly worried about his young brother’s state of mind. But one
thing is for sure, Cory will keep the farm safe while they’re
gone.

“When we all meet back here
after the clinic day closes, some of us can take the truck and go
see if we can find those gas company trucks,” Kelly says, changing
the direction of their conversation back to planning.

“Fill ya’ in later,” John tells his
brother.

“If you find the trucks, we’re going to
need the compression system,” Grandpa reminds them. “We have to
compress that natural gas to run the trucks. We can rig the system
up in the equipment shed. That’s the closest building to the gas
line
from
the well.”

“Right, that makes sense,” Kelly says. “It’ll
be easier to hook into the line out there.”

They go on and on about the plans and talk
about the harvest as Reagan’s eyes get heavier and heavier. She’d
already put Jacob to bed before they started their meeting. He
hadn’t wanted a bath and she hadn’t been excited about giving him
one, so she’d helped him scrub away some of the dirt and let him
crash.

A nudge alerts Reagan that she’d fallen
asleep
while
the men were still
discussing whatever topic they’d moved on to. John’s eyes smile
into hers, and they retire to the third floor.

“You sure you want to go to the clinic
tomorrow?” he asks as he pulls her close where she can lie on his
chest.

“Yes, of course. I have to.”

“No, you don’t have to at all. Nobody’s going
to fire you if you take a sick day, boss,” he teases.

His fingers thread through her curls and
scratch at her scalp in a soothing manner.

“I
'm all
right,
” Reagan answers
with
a smile. “Just tired.”

“I know,” John tells her. “I’ve noticed that
you’ve been tired a lot lately. Maybe you need a break.”

“I don’t need a break,” she argues and gets a
chuff from him in return.

Canning today had been tiring. Her feet
and legs are fatigued from standing so long. Making the soap had
worn her out, too. Then she’d worked with Hannah and Sue on dinner.
Normally, this amount of work wouldn’t tire her
out like
it had. Most times she would’ve tried to
squeeze in a run or some yoga before bed, but today had been
exhausting.

John continues to rub her head and then tease
down her bare back. She’s pretty sure he keeps harping, but Reagan
drifts off again before John gets through his whole reply.

Chapter Eleven

Paige

She can barely make herself get out of bed
the next morning. Simon is long gone from the cabin, having left
early for the clinic because he supposedly had some research
project he was working on there. Cory is also gone, probably
milking a cow or something equally gross. She cannot believe that
John has ordered her training to be executed by him. She would’ve
been happy, eager even, to work with anyone else on the farm. And
so her reluctance to rise is from her resistance to being forced
into his company. He’d made sure to tell her that they’d start
bright and early after breakfast, too. Then he’d chuckled
obnoxiously and turned off the light beside his bed last
evening.

With great irritation, Paige drags herself
out of bed and dons a pair of jeans, her black boots and a yellow
floral sweater, not something she’d have ever been caught dead in
before the apocalypse. She throws on her brown canvas jacket and
heads out to the chicken coop, one of her morning assignments. When
she’s done, she runs into Sam, also on her way to the big house for
breakfast. She has obviously been with the horses because her hands
have that signature gray dirt coating the palms. She also wears a
big smile, which is her usual expression after a visit with those
dangerous animals.

“Excited to start training today?” she asks
with her dimples showing and her black ponytail swishing
around.

“Sure. Ecstatic,” Paige replies dryly.

“Oh, but it’ll be fun!” Sam says.

“Yeah, maybe with Simon or you or one of the
other guys,” Paige explains patiently.

“No way,” Sam says, wrinkling her nose.
“Cory’s the best. He’s so good at teaching anyone who wants to
learn. He’s very patient. He taught me and… Em.”

Her smile falls as she refers to her dead
friend, Cory’s young sister. Then, without missing a beat, she
loops her arm through Paige’s and keeps on going.

“He worked with Huntley and Justin
last
year,
especially
with
knives. It’s important for the kids
to know how to defend themselves in case they ever come to
harm.
Hopefully,
that never
happens. That’s why we don’t take any of them to the clinic. I’m
sure
there’re
other kids in town
that they could make friends with or play with, but Grandpa and
Derek decided when we first started going to
town
that the kids should stay here. I used to be
one of them, one of the kids. But now I get to go because I like
helping out at the clinic.”