The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (29 page)

Sam notices that she doesn’t offer to
help but instead sits on a nearby folding chair.

“Yeah, I think so.
You aren’t
feeling
ill? Are you sure you want to go? If you’re tired, then
we
…
”
she
asks
of
her friend and adopted older sister. They have become very close
over the last few years.

“Nah, it’s cool. That bug’s
just taking
its
time exiting my worthless body. Nothing to worry about,” she
admits.

“We treated those people,
the ones from section four, when you were still down,” Sam says.
They’ve named the different areas of the town by numbered sections.
Small towns within the
town
almost. There are five of these separate
areas.

“
Yeah,
I know. I wish I could’ve
helped. Grandpa said a few more of them died. It seemed like
bronchitis,
and a
few had strep when it all started. I didn’t have what some of them
had,” Reagan answers. “I think it altered itself, became a nasty
flu bug.”

“Right, but you’ve seemed
kind of tired the last few days, too. It’s hard telling what we’re
running into out there when we work at the clinic. Perhaps
you
should
stay
here. We don’t want you to come into contact with another stupid
sickness, Reagan.”

Reagan waves her hand, dismissing that
idea.

“You are a hard-head, you
know,” Sam teases and lays her hand gently
on
the top of Reagan’s head, which
is a messy braid of frizzy curls. She gets a pat-pat to her hand in
return.

Before she’d gotten to know Reagan so
well, she’d have never felt comfortable joking around like that
with her. She used to be a lot fiercer, frightening actually. Sam
also wouldn’t have attempted touching her, either. Reagan has come
a long way in the last few years. Grams used to say how time heals
all wounds, but sometimes Sam has a difficult time understanding
that theory.

“Yeah, so I’ve been told,” she jokes
right back. “I’ll be ok, though. Don’t worry. We need to get these
sicknesses under control. We don’t want a full-blown pandemic on
our hands.”

Sam nods and adds, “No
kidding.”

Paige interjects, “When we went to one
of the FEMA camps about three years ago or so, there was an
outbreak of measles.”

“Measles? Really?” Reagan
inquires.

Her
nerd
brain isn’t going to let this
one pass her by.
Sam grins and
returns to the shelf where she collects more supplies.

Paige nods and continues,
“Simon and I were vaccinated for it when we were
kids,
but Maddie
never was, of course. So they recommended that anyone who never got
the vaccine should vacate the camp. It seemed
really bad
. We got out of
there, but not before I saw
behind
the camp that they had put a lot
of dead bodies in a pit there.”

Paige takes a deep inhale and stares
at her worn black boots for a moment. Sam can just imagine what
that pit had looked like.

“I thought measles wasn’t something
that could kill you,” Sam contemplates with worry. If measles hit a
camp a few years ago, it could spread again.

“Normally, it isn’t,”
Reagan says. “But that’s back when we had plenty of antibiotics and
vaccines to go around.
Those
kinds
of medical supplies at a big disaster
center wouldn’t have lasted long.”

“Exactly. They didn’t go
far at all,” Paige agrees and changes direction in the
conversation
. “We
stayed one time in another camp in South Carolina and some kind of
weird virus went around. Maddie got it. We were scared shitless. I
wasn’t sure if she was gonna make it.
She got so sick.
They gave her stuff for
the fevers, but there wasn’t anything to give her for the flu,
which is what they thought it was.
I wasn’t so sure.
It didn’t seem like a
flu to me.”

The sadness in her light eyes is
deeply ingrained there. Sam doesn’t think that time has healed any
of Paige’s wounds yet.

“Not to sound like a smartass, but how
come you didn’t head this way sooner? How the hell did you end up
going to New Jersey first?” Reagan asks with her usual flair for
tact.

Paige just laughs once. “We didn’t. We
went to South Carolina first. But that’s a long story.”

“We’ve got a few minutes,”
Sam coaxes. They’ve all been curious about why her group hadn’t
come to the farm sooner. She’s quite sure that Paige has discussed
it with Simon privately, but nobody has felt comfortable enough
around her
to just butt
into her business.

“Well, I didn’t exactly
start out with Gavin and Talia and a baby,” she says and then blows
out a deep sigh. “I was a student at Georgia Tech. I’m not sure if
you knew that,” she says and pauses as Reagan nods. “I had a
boyfriend in college. I lived off campus with him and my two
friends and one of their boyfriends. We all shared a
three-bedroom
loft
in the city. When we heard
about the first tsunami hitting the east coast, we didn’t know what
to do. The radio stations were repeating the same emergency
broadcast over and over on a repetitive loop.”

“We heard that, too,” Sam tells
her.

“They just kept saying things like
stay inside, stock up on water, don’t travel, don’t be out after
dark. We knew about the nukes overseas, of course, but never
thought it would get bad here in the states. My mom was pissed that
I wouldn’t come home. Hell, by then it was too late anyway. I
wouldn’t have made it to the state border.”

Sam frowns as she realizes that
Paige’s tale will be full of hardship and despair.

“We saw from our apartment
on the eighth floor what was going on. There were fires, people
were shooting, cars kept crashing, stores were being looted. That
was all the first month. It wasn’t like we could hop a flight out.
Remember? Flights were grounded after the nukes. The two guys with
us would take turns going out and trying to steal food and
suppli
es for
us. Then we ran out of food and water. That was it. We were
done. It’s not like we had weapons to go out and defend ourselves.
Our friends took baseball bats with them to hunt for food. But
there was nowhere left to go, and the violence was beyond what two
college boys could handle with a baseball bat. We heard from a
neighbor about a National Guard outpost that you could go to for
help. The last email communication I had with my brother told me
that our mother was dead and that he was coming with Aunt Amber to
your town. I told him I’d meet him, but he told me when I first got
here that he never got a return email from me.”

“Yeah, communications went down pretty
fast,” Reagan says.

Paige frowns and says, “I
thought:
simple
, right?
I’d just head here no
problem and probably beat him here since I was closer.
Like I’d just roll in here in a few days. What a
dumbass,” she almost whispers and takes the package of bandaging
Sam holds out to her.

“Yeah, we heard about those camps. The
guys- our Rangers- were working in some of those out West somewhere
before they came here. They worked security there when they weren’t
sent out on missions to control the populous,” Reagan
says.

“We didn’t exactly make it to the
outpost,” Paige says, shakes her head and looks away.

Sam can read the fear in her eyes as
Paige recalls the events of that day. She has a feeling that Paige
has never told anyone most of this.

“It was only about twenty
miles from where we were. It wasn’t like we had a long way to
travel to the outpost. We were
carjacked,
and my boyfriend who was
driving was shot and killed. My two girlfriends were literally
pulled out of the car windows and taken. The only thing that saved
me is that I got out the other door in the back seat and ran. My
girlfriend’s boyfriend wasn’t killed, either. We both escaped.
Within a few
seconds,
a herd of people
were
fighting over our car. It was just
he and I left, left with no car and none of our stuff, no food, no
water, and no friends. I literally only had the clothes on my
back.”

“Oh, Paige,” Sam says and
touches her arm.
“I’m so
sorry.”

When Sam looks at Reagan, her eyes
seem guarded and darker suddenly.

“It gets worse,” Paige
returns and frowns. “Gary was his name, my friend’s boyfriend. We
ran and ran forever, weaving through the city streets. It turned
dark. We managed to find another route that was safer. We found a
car, too. We were able to get to a grocery store because we were
hungry and tired. There weren’t any police around. We saw a few cop
cars with their lights on, but when we got to them, they were
empty. Maybe the police were chasing people down. Maybe they were
dead somewhere. I don’t know. We didn’t have any luck at the
grocery store, either. There were people in there looting. Three
men came at us with guns, so I dropped the things I had, which
wasn’t much, a few cans of soup and a candy bar. The men were
yelling at us from the other end of the grocery store aisle. Then
other people started shooting at the guys coming at us. It was
chaos. I ran out the back door. Gary took off the other way and
ditched me. He took off in the car,
too
before I could catch up
to
him.”

“Holy shit,” Reagan exclaims. “What a
dick.”

Sam can’t imagine being left to her
own defenses and abandoned. When her family was murdered, at least
she found comfort from Simon.

Paige scoffs. “No kidding, right? I
never really liked him all that much, but my girlfriend was head
over heels for him. I always thought he treated her
badly.”

“How did you get away from those men?”
Reagan asks and coughs a few times.

“
I ran track in high
school. When I went to college, I used their track to stay in
shape. It wasn’t hard to outrun them, but I was afraid they were
going to shoot me in the back.”

“You were lucky, I guess,” Sam
comments. “Either that or your guardian angel was watching over
you.”

Paige nods and gives a grim
smile before continuing, “Anyway it was dark, so I just hid out
until it got really late. I figured a lot of the people roaming
around would head back to their homes or cars or wherever. Then I
tried to sneak around the city looking for a car. I didn’t find
one. I didn’t find any help, either. I went to a police
station,
but there
was nobody there. I mean
nobody
and the doors were all locked. So
I just kept walking all night until the sun came up. An Army truck
spotted me on the road and picked me up. I don’t know what would’ve
happened to me if they hadn’t. I didn’t have a gun or even a knife.
Who knows? I could’ve been killed or taken like my
friends.”

“You
were
lucky,” Reagan states with a
scowl.

Paige sighs heavily and says, “I know
I’ve been lucky many times. They took me to the disaster center
that my friends and I were trying to get to. Gary wasn’t there. I
don’t know whatever became of him. I never saw him again. But it’s
there that I met Talia and Gavin. And then we got custody of baby
Maddie. We’ve been together ever since.”

“But why didn’t you come straight
here?” Sam asks.

“We literally had no way of
getting here… or anywhere really. Finding a vehicle that still had
gas had become nearly impossible. Plus we were kind of hoping
things would improve. After a few months of floating around to
different FEMA camps, we kind of figured that it wasn’t going to
get any better. They kept pumping us full of false promises and
even
falser
hope. But there was no denying what was happening. When each
camp became too dangerous, we’d leave. Then it just didn’t feel
safe at all to go to them. So we found an older minivan in a
neighborhood and headed for Gavin’s family’s home. It was the
closest to go to first. We had to learn how to siphon gas from the
empty cars on the freeway. We never even found his parents. They
could be dead, but we’ll probably never know. His town was
pretty much
under
water. They lived right on the coast, on the beach actually. We
found two kayaks, and Gav and I rowed as far as we could toward his
family’s home. That was the most horrific thing I’ve ever done or
seen. There were dead bodies floating in the water here and there.
Some of the homes were leveled like toothpicks. Again nobody was
around. No one. Not even emergency management organizations. All
you could see of some of the
homes
that were still standing were the
top floor windows, barely. His home was gone, ruined, hardly
anything left. We never found their bodies.”