The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (54 page)

“Are your friends in that journal?”
Hannah asks.

“Yes,” Paige answers
softly, temporarily forgetting that awful, hard bread and the
laughs they’d
had
over it when they’d lain awake out in those woods
giggling for a rare change.

“How do you get the bread to rise? Do
you still have packages of yeast or something?” she
asks.

Hannah shakes her head,
unknowingly swipes flour across her cheek with the back of her
delicate hand and replies, “No, we’ve been out of yeast for quite
some time. It’s a recipe that is kept in a crock in the pantry. You
don’t add yeast every day. You just replace the dry ingredients cup
for cup, teaspoon for teaspoon. It was a pioneer’s recipe. Women on
the wagon train couldn’t make fresh rising bread every single day,
so they used this
recipe
. The yeast is the same yeast
that’s been in there for a long time. It just has to be kept
covered with a
cheese
cloth
.”

“Cool,” Paige says with wonderment.
“How’d you find that recipe?”

“My Grams had it passed
down to her from her Grams,” Hannah says
on
a sad sigh. “She was from New
Orleans originally, so a lot of the recipes we make are from the
Deep South. She grew up poor, so her mother and grandmother were
good at making food go a long way.”

“Sorry, Hannah,” Paige
apologizes for bringing up the woman that Hannah was close with
and
lost
.

Hannah just looks in Paige’s general
direction and smiles gently. “It’s all right. I miss her. I do. I’m
not gonna lie. I miss Em, too. I know they’re in a better place.
Any place has to better than this.”

Paige doesn’t know how to respond to
this. Simon says how optimistic Hannah is, but this is not optimism
that Paige hears in her. She frowns hard and tries to think of
another topic.

“Talia’s from New Orleans, too,” she
offers.

“Oh, really?” Hannah asks with
curiosity.

“Yes, her father played pro football
for the Saints. Her parents got divorced when she was like ten or
twelve or something. I’m not sure exactly. But she lived down there
with him. It was later when her mother had a stroke and was placed
in a home, but Talia stayed with her dad.”

“What happened to him? Is he
alive?”

Paige frowns. “I don’t
know. I don’t think so. He was in
London like
our father. He was there to
promote the NFL Europe something or other. London was nuked, so I’m
sure that neither of them made it.”

“That
’s a shame
,” Hannah admits.
“It’s not like they could catch a flight home even if they were
still alive.”

That certainly isn’t optimistic. Paige
frowns harder and swallows the lump in her throat. Thinking about
her father hurts too much. The loss of her parents is the hardest
thing she’s endured.

“Is that in your journal, too?” Hannah
inquires.

“Yes, I have everything and everyone I
know in here. I don’t want them to be forgotten.”

“What about your boyfriend, the one
from college?”

“Yes, he’s in there, too,” Paige
answers and can’t help but smile. Simon was certainly right about
Hannah. When she wants to know something, she doesn’t have much of
a restraint button.

“Were you in love with
him?”

Paige sighs long and
wearily. “I guess. I don’t know.
I
thought I was, but now I’m not so sure.”
She shakes her head with indecision.

“Why is that?”

“It’s just hard to explain.
Everything changed. There was never a time
to even sit
down and process all of
it. It all happened so fast. One minute my friends and I were
ordering a pizza and the next minute the world changed. I changed.
I’ve changed so much that I don’t even know if I’d recognize the
girl I used to be.”

“Yes, I suppose everyone has gone
through some of that,” Hannah agrees. “Of course not everyone’s had
it as bad as you and your group. Tell me about your life
before.”

Paige chuckles. She’s more
than tenacious. Hannah Alexander could’ve had her own television
talk show. “I used to hang out with my friends, go to parties on
and off campus, go to the movies with them. I used
to really like
to
go out dancing. That was a lot of fun. I liked shopping with my
girlfriends. I rode my bike everywhere, so I didn’t need my car. I
left it in Arizona at my parents’ house. I’d just bike to school
and everywhere I had to go. Not exactly the right mode for
apocalyptic travel. But, heck, who knew that I should’ve taken my
car to college because the world was going to fall
apart?”

Hannah laughs softly and replies, “No,
I suppose not. What were you studying?”

“Architecture. I always
liked
architecture
and drawing and designing buildings,” Paige
replies but really isn’t sure why she’s disclosing so much about
herself to this woman who, although nice, is still basically a
stranger. “When I was twelve, my dad took me to Europe when he had
to go there for work. He was a senator. I don’t know if you
knew
that,”
Paige says and gets a nod from Hannah. Of course Simon
probably already told them this. “I stayed with a nanny during the
day while he worked, but then when he got home we went sightseeing.
I think that’s when the fascination with architecture started. He
took me everywhere with him after that. It’s amazing over
there
….
well, I mean it was
amazing
. I don’t know what it looks like
now.”

“Your parents must’ve been so
proud,” Hannah praises.

She turns to the refrigerator and
takes out a glass pitcher of milk. Hannah pours a cup for her
daughter. Paige notices that she sticks her index finger a half
inch into the top of the glass against the rim so that she can
ascertain when it is full enough by the liquid touching the bottom
of her slim, graceful finger. She’s learned a lot about blind
people by observing Hannah. Every little thing she’s ever taken for
granted like pouring a simple glass of milk has become something
that she watches Hannah perform with concise and careful detail.
Paige is in awe of the things she can do.

Hannah’s praise is false, though.
Paige swallows hard and goes back to her work. She forces the tears
to halt their progress.

Mary hops down with her mother’s help
when Arianna and Jacob come into the room to fetch her. They’ve all
been relegated to playing in the direct back yard and no further.
They want her to play baseball. Paige has no idea what a toddler
could possibly bring to a baseball game, but it is kind that they
are including her.

“Yeah, I guess,” she
admits. “My mother and I didn’t get along that great before I went
to school. I could’ve gone to a closer school, but I wanted the
distance from them. I felt like they were holding me down,
restricting me and smothering me too much. I was a big idiot back
then. I was so immature and stupid, and now I just have this giant
dark cloud of regret that I carry. I just
wish
I could see her one last time.
Tell her I’m sorry, you know?”

“She knows, Paige,” Hannah proclaims
so wisely.

Is she twenty-four or sixty-four?
She’s heard other family members, Simon included, speak of how
insightful Hannah can be, but Paige hadn’t expected this. The other
woman reaches across the counter and takes her hand, giving it a
reassuring squeeze before going back to mixing flour. Technically
this is the first full one-on-one conversation they’ve had. Paige
can’t actually believe that she’s even divulging this much about
herself, either. She’s not this open and communicative with the
other members of the family. She just finally felt the other night
during the battle that she even belongs with them.

“Your mom’s probably the reason you
made it here to Simon,” Hannah adds as she turns her dough out onto
the floured counter-top where she proceeds to knead it. “They watch
over us. They have to. It’s the only explanation I have for my
husband coming home safely to me every time he leaves for something
dangerous like the other night. My grandmother is watching over my
Kelly.”

Paige is so awestruck, so moved by
what Hannah is saying that tears spring to her eyes. She’s glad
that Hannah can’t see her childish reaction. She sure as hell never
believed in something like what Hannah is describing. She’s never
even heard anyone talk so openly about their beliefs
before.

“Maybe,” Paige says and hates that her
voice cracks. “I just hope someone’s watching over the guys, I
guess. It sounds like they’ll need all the help they can get if
they find those men again.”

“I know,” Hannah concurs.
“But they’ll be
fine
. It was only a few of them this
time, not a whole battalion.”

The way she says this makes
Paige think that Hannah’s also
worried about
the
men,
as if she is also trying
to convince herself. Hannah’s delicate features furrow into a dark
scowl, and she has to look away from her.

Paige shakes her head, “I
still can’t believe my dorky, younger brother is out hunting
down
bad-guys
every day and shooting people. You just have to know what
Simon was like before all this. It’s shocking for me to see him
like this, so transformed. I mean, he’s physically and mentally
transformed.”

“Oh, I know,” Hannah
says
with
a
grin. “I knew him when he first came here, which was probably not a
whole lot different than what he was like in Arizona. He was very
shy, quiet even.”

“You’ve got that part right,” Paige
agrees with a smile. “It’s just weird. He looks like the poster boy
for a join the Army billboard.”

“Yeah, the guys were pretty hard on
him and Cory,” she says with a smile. “You haven’t seen Cory yet.
Just wait. He’ll come home someday.”

Paige notices the other woman’s smile
deepen when she speaks of this Cory kid. She seems to think he’ll
come home. He’s probably dead somewhere. It’s not safe out there to
try to survive on your own. Paige probably wouldn’t have made it
ten minutes out there alone.

“I have heard about some of the
training and the stuff the guys put them through. It’s crazy. He
was so tall and skinny the last time I saw him. Now he’s wide,
too,” Paige says and actually laughs aloud.

“Yes, he is. That’s good,
though. He needs to be strong and
tough
. He’ll always be able to take care
of Sam that way. And you too, now,” Hannah says.

“He’s very different than
he used to be in the way that he thinks, too,” Paige says with a
touch of sadness. “He’s always on edge. Well, he’s always on edge
unless he’s out in the woods picking berries or weeds. He’s so
tense and
serious
to the point of being
intense
.”

“He’s been through a lot,” Hannah
says. “He and Sam have both been through quite a lot. Sometimes the
things that happen to us change us for the better, and something
they just don’t. They both decided not to allow their lives to be
dictated by what happened.”

“What did happen?” Paige
asks. “He hasn’t told me. He just said that he joined up with our
aunt’s group to get a ride back this way and that Sam was taken and
that they did
awful
things. I know that John killed our cousin, but
that’s about it.”

Hannah stops dicing celery,
which she’s moved on
to
and pauses. “I don’t think I should say. Some
of
it,
I
don’t even know. But it feels wrong to reveal another person’s
story without their knowledge.”

“I don’t know what
happened, and I just want to help my kid brother… even if he is
twice the size of me practically,” she says
with
a chuckle.

Hannah smiles and goes back to the
celery chopping, which makes Paige nervous that she’ll slice off
her finger.

“Your cousin, Bobby, was a vicious,
evil person. I don’t know what was wrong with him,” Hannah
says.

“He was always a punk, in and out of
juvey, minor stuff mostly, but a real piece of sh…crap,” Paige
states.

“I think people like him
saw the fall of society as their one-way ticket to total
debauchery. I believe he raped Sam. Don’t tell her or your brother,
but that’s what we all figure. She’s never talked about it openly,
and neither has your brother. But she has a lot of
problems,
and that
group was
very
bad
, all of them. I don’t even want to
think that any of the others raped her, too.”

“Oh my God,” Paige declares on a rush
of air. “I had no idea. That’s so sick. My poor brother. I can’t
imagine him having to stand by and let that happen.”

“I don’t think he did,” Hannah says.
“Reagan told me when the visitors were squatted on our property
that Simon always looked beat up. You know, black eyes, bruises.
She said when they first got here, he would hold his side a lot
like he had broken ribs. He probably did. There were too many of
them to fight, so he probably got beat up very badly by them. I
don’t know for sure what went on with those people, but I know it
traumatized your brother and Samantha.”