The McClane Apocalypse Book Five (48 page)

“I think it’s empty,” Sam says. “Someone
would’ve come out when they saw our headlights. Or shot at us. That
seems to be a popular thing to do today.”

Simon offers a lopsided grin and nods.
“Right. Let’s hope the shooting is done for the day. I just want to
get you inside. Then we need to get you warmed up.”

“Hm, sounds like that could be promising,”
Sam remarks with a sly smile, making Simon blush. “Are you gonna do
it the same way you did in the back of the clinic?”

Referring to the kiss is off limits,
but she can’t seem to stop herself from bringing it up. She thinks
about it often- his arms around her, his mouth so greedily moving
on hers. These memories are all she’ll ever get
for
intimacy between them. She knows Simon will
never allow it to happen again.

“Not funny,” he tells her and takes his
handgun from his hip holster.

“It was kinda’ funny,” Sam mumbles as she
trails after Simon to climb the stairs of the rear entrance to the
massive structure.

They come to a long,
open-air
hallway of sorts with the massive pillars
resembling the original Greek Parthenon. Sam was struck by their
sheer size and beauty when she’d come with her mother. At night,
however, they seem imposing, the dark corridor frightening. The
pillars loom skyward to a thick roofline that must be fifty feet
overhead. Water is puddled around some of the bases of the large
structures. Vines climb around a few. Shadows bounce around as
their flashlight beams aim forward and down. Anyone could be hiding
behind one of the pillars or in a dark corner. This will be a
tricky area to secure. They sneak around to a service entrance, but
the steel door is locked.

“Hold my flashlight,” Sam tells Simon.

She takes her lock picking kit from her pack
and gets to work. She’s usually faster than he is with breaking and
entering. If only her parents could see her now. She doubts that
lock picking, shooting at people, or fast car chases would impress
them much with how she’s turned out. A few seconds later, she has
the lock disengaged, and they enter the tall building. Simon
relocks the door so that nobody can sneak in behind them.

As they move forward, passing a
maintenance room, Sam can hear the soft dripping of water
somewhere. She wonders if the roof has a leak. The water
pinging
echoes eerily in the massive
building.

“We’ll take those with us when we leave
tomorrow,” Simon tells her, pointing
at
the shelf full of cleaning products.

“’
Kay,” she whispers. He’s obviously
not as spooked by this structure and the strange sounds.

They leave the back room and head
toward the public areas of the museum. The building is rectangular
and very dark, which takes them a long time to search. There are
ornate castings along the ceiling, a two-story gold statue of the
Greek goddess Athena on the second floor, and sculptures molded
into the architecture. Their footsteps sound like those of a giant
clomping around on the marble flooring, making it difficult to be
sneaky. Sam feels
bad
that Paige
wasn’t able to meet up with them. She knows how much her new friend
loves architecture.

Finally after every area and hidden
nook and cranny
are
searched,
Simon calls it safe to sack out. They unload their provisions for
the night from the Suburban and set up in a small gallery room
where paintings from some famous American artists were kept. A few
even still hang on the walls. Sam knows he has chosen this
room
because it was one of the few with
a lockable door, even if they are glass.

They quietly work together to get their
temporary camp set up. Sam lights the two short beeswax candles
from her sack and places one on the floor and one on a nearby
bench. He lights the two from his bag and does the same. Everyone’s
bags are stocked with the same basic supplies and provisions in
case they get separated. They have enough to survive about three
days, which is also the same amount of time it would take to travel
on foot back to the farm if they had to.

Simon gets the small kerosene heater
ignited while she unpacks their sleeping bags and food. She’s
starving and knows Simon must be even more so since he
retched
his lunch in the cemetery after
he was forced to kill that woman. She can’t judge him for it. He’d
done it to keep her safe. She’s seen him do it before.

“Mm, Sue and Hannie packed us jars of roast
pork and potatoes and carrots,” she informs Simon as he shucks off
his wet coat.

“Sam, you’d better change. I’ll get that
heating,” Simon suggests. “You will get sick if you don’t change
out of your wet clothing.”

Sam nods and rises from her knelt position
near their crate of food stuff. She glances around the mostly empty
room. There really isn’t anywhere to change with any modicum of
privacy.

“Um, I’m going to go out in the hall to
change,” she tells him.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Simon
disagrees. “Just change over there in the corner. It’s dark over
there behind that half wall. I won’t see you.”

“No way,” she argues. “I’m going out to the
hall. I’ll be right back.”

Simon furrows his brow and gives her a
disparaging look.

“I’m ignoring you and all your brooding
stares tonight, Simon,” Sam says as she goes out the door with one
lit candle and her backpack.

She makes fast work of it, though.
She’d been confident of her plan of changing in another room
without him, but being out in the pitch dark hallway is about as
spooky as it gets. The ancient-inspired building creaks and groans,
echoes, pops and snaps, or at least those are the sounds she hears
as she strips out of her cold and very damp jacket and shirt. She
can barely see to find her rolled up clothing
at
the bottom of her pack. An icy shiver trails up
her spine as she imagines someone coming upon her from behind. Sam
pulls on clean undergarments, a dark blue, long-sleeved tee and
tops it with a green flannel shirt. Black sweatpants follow, which
are more comfortable for sleeping than jeans. She also tugs on a
gray hoodie that Sue lent her. Wind whistles somewhere through one
of the corridors, startling her. Sam stands still a moment, waiting
and listening. Then she expels her held breath and resumes. Warm,
dry socks are last. She’ll need to put her shoes back on before
they go to bed in case they need to get up quickly in the middle of
the night, but for now it feels good to wear no shoes at all. She
carries her dirty items under her arm with her shoes, slings her
bag over her shoulder, and re-enters the room with no windows. She
nearly runs Simon down, who’d
obviously
been waiting just on the other side of the door for
her.

“Sorry,” Simon blurts. “I just wanted to make
sure you were all right.”

“Yep, I
’m
fine
. Just like I told you I would be, Mr. Worrywart,”
Sam chides and squeezes past him. She’s not going to admit that it
was eerie in the dark hall. He already thinks of her as a
child.

She spreads out her damp clothing across one
of the viewing benches at the other end of the room. She’s not sure
if they’ll dry all the way, but it’s better than nothing.

“The food’s
heating
,” Simon tells her.

“Good, I’m starving,” Sam reveals. Her eyes
follow him as he moves about the room.

“Don’t get too excited,” Simon informs her.
“It’s going to take a while to heat up.”

“That’s fine,” Sam says as she pulls
out her small, portable
sketchpad
and sets it on the floor beside her. “I’ve got stuff I can
do.”

Simon doesn’t ask her, probably because
he knows. Sam takes a candle and strolls around the gallery room
looking at the artwork that has been left behind. It’s a shame that
Americans were worried about looting for liquor, cigarettes and
electronics, but much of the lovely artwork in this museum still
hangs on the walls untouched. Nobody tried to save it or preserve
it. She studies the painting,
Mt.
Tamalpais
by Albert Bierstadt. The soft hues nearly
glow by candlelight. Perhaps when he’d painted this, he’d done so
by candlelight or hoped that people would view it in such a fashion
because the painting invokes such a vision of golds and yellows
that she can literally feel the dawn breaking over the hillside
he’s painted.

Without turning to face him, Sam says, “You
should change clothing, too, Simon. If you get sick, I’m getting
payback on you for all the times you’ve made me drink some of your
nasty tea or for having to take gross medicine that you and Grandpa
have ground up.”

She moves on to a painting by Samuel F. B.
Morse and studies it a few moments, taking in the dark and light
contrasts.

“I’ve only ever had to treat you once, if you
remember correctly, young lady,” Simon reprimands.

She hates it when he talks down to her like
she’s a child.

“It was bad enough just the one time that it
seemed like more,” Sam reminds him.

Simon stops unpacking his gear and
grins at her. The light from the candles plays on his auburn hair,
making it
appear
shimmery and
gold streaked. A shadow of stubble has covered his chin and cheeks.
Sam moves on to a painting by another man named Emanuel Gottlieb
Leutze. He seems to have been a patriot painter who had a love for
America. His painting depicts a battle from the Revolutionary War.
Sam wonders what he’d think of their
great
country today. Seeing his proud
painting
on this lonely wall where no
one will ever see it again makes her feel gloomy. These paintings
will all be destroyed eventually from humidity and chemical
weathering.

“You got better, right?” he continues with a
cocky attitude.

“You’re always hovering over me like I’m some
wilting flower,” Sam comments with exasperation. She barely had the
sniffles last year, but he’d insisted- like the control-freak he
is- that she take his tea for three days and some weird, powdered
medicine that made her want to retch.

Simon chuckles and answers, “It’s my
job to keep everyone
on
the farm
healthy. I mean, along with Doc and Reagan, of course.”

“Yeah, but when Reagan got sick, you were
checking me like four times a day for fevers. Gimme a break! You
didn’t check anyone else that much!”

“I have to take care of you,” Simon says with
an uncomfortable edge to his voice. “And all the other kids,
too.”

Sam scowls at how his last sentence makes her
feel.

“I’m
not
one of the kids,” Sam retorts angrily. She can barely
concentrate on the lovely artwork because he’s making her so mad.
“Don’t be such an ass, Simon.”

She passes a painting of a shipwreck by Edwin
Church and then pauses to study another by Mary Peale. The artist
has captured the grief of her subject, invoking the spectator to
wonder at the woman’s source of heartache. Perhaps she had to deal
with a difficult man like Simon.

“Hey, that’s not appropriate language,” Simon
scolds her.

She’d like to yank this lovely Mary Peale
painting from the wall and club him over the head with it.

“You aren’t in charge of me, remember? I’ll
talk how I like,” Sam tells him haughtily.

Simon says quietly, “You need to stop
hanging out with Reagan so much. She’s
a
bad
influence.”

“Wrong. She’s
a
good
influence. Now I just need her to tell me how to
deal with my annoying best friend when he’s trying to order me
around like I’m one of the children on the farm.”

The next painting is by Edwin
Blashfield called
The New
Dress
. It is just lovely, the tones so vibrant and
realistic.

“You don’t need advice from her. You’re a big
enough pain in my butt most of the time,” he tells her.

“I’d like to give you a kick to
the
butt
,” Sam tells him without
looking over her shoulder. Sometimes he can vex her nerves like no
one else.

“You’d just hurt your foot,” Simon tells
her.

“It might be worth it,” she grumbles and
studies the painting again.

“This was about as good a place as we
could’ve possibly picked for our first night in the city,” he
comments, changing the topic. “You get to look at art all
night.”

“I’m glad you guys decided on it,” Sam
agrees, admiring another painting.

“I thought it would be a nice change of pace
for you,” Simon comments, drawing her attention.

“You suggested it?”

He doesn’t answer for a moment. “Yes, I did.
Are you glad?”

“Oh, yes,” Sam says. “That was really
thoughtful, Simon. We should take some of these with us when we
leave. Can we? They’re just going to be ruined soon. Artwork can’t
stand up to humidity. We could give them to Grandpa. See what he
wants to do with them.”

“Sure, Sam,” he says, appeasing her. “I’ll
see what we can fit in the SUV in the morning.”

“Thanks for doing this, for choosing this
place.”

“No problem. I’m glad you like it. What are
you looking at over there?”

“This is…” Sam says as she turns back
to Simon, only to find him stripping out of his clothing in a
semi-darkened corner of the room. Apparently he thought it was
darker. It’s not. She can see his long, lean torso and bare stomach
quite clearly. “…um,
really
lovely
.”