The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (4 page)

“Easy now, Em,” Simon instructs. “Cory, lay her
back and I’ll hit her with morph before we move her to the horses.
I don’t want her to be in pain.”

Cory makes brief eye contact, his dark eyes
sick with worry, but he nods anyway. When they gently lay her back
again, Simon fishes the morphine vial out of his bag and pops off
the cap, squirts a tad out the end of the hypodermic.

“Em?” Cory says in a rushed panic.
“Em?”

His voice is so strained and urgent that Simon
looks up. Cory shakes his sister as Simon catches a glimpse of her.
Her eyes are open and unblinking.

Simon jumps into action. He performs CPR as
Cory looks on helplessly.

“Cory!” Simon shouts and snaps his friend out
of his frozen state. It’s enough to get Cory to start blowing puffs
of air into his sister’s mouth.

Simon works for longer than he can
calculate. Seconds turn to minutes. He pumps her chest, and Cory
blows again into her mouth. Again and again they repeat the
process. Simon takes out the emergency stash of adrenaline and
plunges the needle into her chest. There is no hesitation in his
movement. He’s been working in the field as a medic for almost four
years and at the clinic in town for as long. There is no choice in
the matter. She’s dying. He’s seen Reagan do this once on a patient
who’d been crushed by debris in a crumbling building. They’d
brought
their
family member to the only clinic that was around, Doc McClane’s old
practice. It hadn’t worked then. It isn’t working now. He resumes
his chest compressions. Cory
resumes
breathing the essence of life
into Em’s small body.

There’s just no bringing her back.
Her blood loss has taken her life, stopped her heart. The second
gunshot must have hit her femoral artery to have
bled
her out so
quickly, leading to cardiac arrest. Without a proper surgical room,
equipment and a blood transfusion, this type of wound in the field
is hopeless.

“I’m sorry, Cory,” he says as he
stumbles back from her many minutes later. Simon hits the wall
behind him and stops. “Jesus, Cor.
I’m so sorry.”

The look on Cory’s face is one of
pure horror. He emits a broken sob of sadness and heartbreak mixed
into one frightening, God awful sound as he pulls her limp, frail
figure to his chest. Simon flinches from Cory, afraid his friend
may hurt him. He doesn’t,
though
. Cory is shaking from head to
toe.

Finally, he
simply
stands, lays her gently
down, turns away a moment, then turns back to her. He takes a deep
breath and kneels beside her again. He bows his head as if in
prayer and remains there for a few long moments with his eyes
closed and his hand on hers. Then he turns her small hand over,
unclasps the gold bracelet she and the other women at the farm all
wear and removes it. He stows it away in the cargo pocket on his
coat. Cory slowly wraps her in the blanket on which she’s lying but
not before he closes her lifeless eyes. Then he takes a length of
rope from the cabinet and ties her blanket around her.

“Give me your ammo,” Cory demands hoarsely,
stoically.

Simon notices that his hands no longer shake.
He is back to being himself, cool and hard.

“What?” Simon asks
with
a certain
amount of confusion. He blinks hard at his friend, whose look is so
wild and feral.

“Give me your extra ammo,” he demands again
with an extended hand.

His tone is so firm that Simon does
as he says and
hands over
his three extra magazines for his rifle and the
one extra mag for his pistol. Cory sets them on the bed. He then
lifts his dead sister carefully, cradling her as if she is still
alive. He exits the cabin which forces Simon to follow him. Does he
wish to bury her?
With impatient anger, Cory snatches the reins of the pack horse,
causing the animal to back up a step and toss its head. He
carefully lays Em across the saddle on her stomach. He ties her
body down so that she won’t fall off the other side. Next, he
catches Simon’s horse and hands him both sets of reins.

“Take my sister home,” Cory
mandates.

“Ok, Cory,” Simon agrees as he takes
the reins. “Get your horse. We’ll just leave the gear here
and
…
”

“No,” Cory interrupts him. “I’m not
coming.”

“What do you mean, Cory? You have
to
…
”

“Take my sister home,” Cory interrupts again
and just continues. “Take her home to the farm. I want her buried
at the farm. Bury her next to Grams on the hill.”

“Cory
…
” Simon tries to say more, but his
voice cracks.

“Take her and go, Simon,” Cory responds with
flint. “Take her home. Please take her home for me.”

This time he does make eye contact, but Simon
wishes that he wouldn’t have. The look in Cory’s eyes is haunting.
Simon knows with certainty that he’ll never forget this look in his
best friend’s eyes. There is something so intensely horrifying
there that Simon does not argue again. He’s too afraid
to.

Simon takes the reins, mounts his
gelding and leaves for the oil well road where the family will be
waiting for them
to deliver Em
safely
. They will not be expecting her dead
body to be greeting them there. When he is less than a mile away,
Simon hears a scream of rage and anguish like he’s never heard in
all his nineteen years on this earth. It sends a chill down his
spine that he is sure will never fully fade.

Chapter Two

Paige

The sun has set, which means that the
temperature will be falling fast. She wraps a blanket around Maddie
and tucks it tightly down into the space between the wall and the
bed so she doesn’t kick it off in the middle of the night. Paige
pushes the little girl’s hair back from her forehead and presses a
kiss there.

“She out?” Talia questions from the open
doorway.

“Like a log,” Paige returns as she retrieves
the oil lamp she’d only just
placed
on the
dresser.

“Good,” Talia whispers. “We need to have a
meeting.”

Paige nods and adjusts the small kerosene
heater. They will all four sleep in this room later for safety
reasons. She steps around the queen size mattress they’d
dragged
into this room yesterday and follows
her friend from the once nicely appointed kid’s room in this broken
down mansion. There weren’t any dead bodies in this one, which is
why they’d
chosen
it to crash in for a few
days. They walk carefully down the stairs, avoid tripping and
falling or twisting an ankle on the debris scattered everywhere.
Paige doesn’t know where the occupants of this home have gone, but
apparently they left in a hurry because some of their belongings
have been dropped and discarded or forgotten.

“Gavin back yet?” she asks of her
friend.

“No, not yet, but he should be
soon.”

Talia sets her
own
lamp
down on the granite counter-top in the expensive kitchen as Paige
places hers on the round, bird’s eye maple table with the intricate
wrought iron base. Their simple meal awaits them there, as well.
Tonight it’s canned tuna, some cooked squirrel meat from
yesterday,
some greens picked from the field
behind the house and a can of black beans all to be split equally
among them. For a special dessert tonight, Paige has been saving a
can of apple pie filling that she found a week ago in a desolate
corner of a
burned-out
grocery
store. It had likely
been
accidentally kicked
and had skidded across the floor to that
forgotten corner.

She’d fed Maddie about an hour
ago, and Paige had made her promise not to tell their secret about
the apple pie filling dessert while Talia was busy going through
the upstairs closet searching for some clean clothing to
pilfer.
Maddie had eaten two helpings of the pie filling,
and Paige made sure to give her a big portion of the greens and
beans, too. She’s only four years old. She needs the nutrients and
proteins more than they do.

Talia takes plates from the custom made maple
cupboards and silverware from the drawers, placing them on the
table that Paige had wiped clean of three years’ worth of dust
earlier today. The upstairs bedding they’d taken out to the back
yard and had shaken out dust and dirt. Luckily this home still has
bedding. It’s rare. They’ve already made plans to take some of it
with them when they leave. Last fall while camping in the forest in
their two tents, some of their supplies had been stolen while they
were fetching
water
and Gavin was hunting for
squirrels or rabbits. They’d immediately packed up what was left
and took off. They’ve had shoddy, threadbare blankets and one
sleeping bag since then. This home has apparently not been raided
for much because it’s still stock full of supplies, minus food, of
course.

“Found some clothing upstairs. Think there’s
some stuff that you can use, too, Paige,” Talia offers.

“Awesome,” she declares happily. “These
clothes could damn near stand up without me.”

Talia laughs and agrees. “Yeah, mine, too! We
are some nasty, skanky
chics
, huh?”

“Ya’ got that right,” Paige jokes. It’s rare
that they joke, laugh or smile about anything. Their days are
simply about staying
alive,
and there’s
usually no room for anything else. “Haven’t washed my hair in over
a week. Maybe I’ll do that tonight.
Gonna
suck
as usual.”

“Yeah, that’s going to be one cold wash,
girl,” Talia concurs with a smile.

They have no hot water. They almost never do.
Sometimes they’ll heat water on an open campfire so that Maddie
doesn’t have to wash with cold water, especially not now with
winter still hanging around. Paige pines for the warm weather of
Georgia where she’d
been
attending college
when the first tsunamis hit. Her home state’s weather was even
warmer, milder and super hot in the summer. She misses Arizona. But
as much as she misses her home, she
misses
her
family so much that the pain from it is hard
to even
think clearly
sometimes.

“No kidding,” Paige says. “But I’m starting to
smell like a grizzly bear.”

There is a soft tapping on the door that
connects the home to the attached garage. It’s Gavin.
This
is his signal that it’s him and not some creep
predator.

Talia crosses quickly to the door, unlocks it
and ushers their companion inside. He has a dusting of snowflakes
clinging to the nylon material of his winter coat.

“Snowing again, huh?” Paige asks. She hates
this snow shit.

When she was seventeen, she’d gone with her
brother and mother with a small group of their family friends to
Aspen to ski. Their father
was detained
in
D.C. for a special vote that he needed to be present
for
. She’d hated the snow then, too. Also, she’d fallen
and broken her wrist on the first hill. Yeah, snow sucks. Talia’s
from New Orleans, though, so she’s not at all used to it. Gavin’s a
former South Carolina native, so he
basically
feels the same as Paige about the cold, miserable Tennessee
weather.

“Yes, and
I’m froze
,” he
complains and
stomps
a few times to clear the
snow from his boots and clothing.

“Find anything?” Talia asks as he sets his
sack on the counter.

“Sure did,” he declares with a big smile.
“Went a little farther than me and Paige did yesterday and hit six
homes in the next neighborhood over.”

“Gavin, that’s
kind of
far,” Paige points out. “You shouldn’t be going that far without
one of us.”

“Yeah, Gav. We’ve only got a few rounds of
ammo left. That’s dangerous,” Talia also gangs up on
him.

He just smiles again and tosses his knitted
hat onto the counter, followed by his holey gloves. His sandy
blonde hair is damp from the snow where it hangs below the line of
his hat. Talia needs to cut it for him again. It’s getting too
long.

“Relax, girls,” he chastises. “It’s all good.
I got a box of macaroni and cheese.”

“Oooh,” Paige says with awe. They haven’t had
anything like that for months. Mostly it ends up being wild meat
and edible picked greens.

“Yeah, there’s more,” he adds with genuine
enthusiasm.

He starts removing the items from his bag and
stacks them on the counter.
There is a bar of soap, a
tapered candle, two lighters, a stuffed doll for Maddie, a can of
creamed corn, a half full bottle of shampoo, three pairs of socks,
a small bag of oatmeal, a new pair of used gloves for Maddie and
two cans of salmon.