The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (60 page)

“…
I can’t do this, baby,”
he says. “You gotta come back to me, Hannah, to all of us. We need
you. Mary needs you and so do the other children.”

Hannah is crying softly. It breaks
Reagan’s heart. She knows what he’s talking to her sister about.
It’s the same thing she was just discussing with John
upstairs.

“I’m sorry, Kelly,” Hannah says
weakly.

“You don’t have to be sorry, baby. But
we need you to come back to us. You’re the one person everyone in
this family relies on for nurturing and love. It’s what you do.
It’s what we’ve come to lean on you for.”

“It’s just too hard, Kelly,” she says
brokenly and sniffs.

Kelly sighs long and loud and rests
his head in Hannah’s lap.

“Come back to us, Hannah,” he pleads
again.

Jacob calls her from the
kitchen, breaking her trance of spying on her sister and
brother-in-law. She snatches a rag from the linen closet and
hurries back to her son. After giving him a dose of fever reducer,
Reagan carries him to the front room where she’ll stay the night on
the sofa with him. First she takes up
position
in a rocking chair next to the
dying fire. After about an hour of heating and re-heating the rag
and holding it pressed to his soft ear and rocking him soothingly,
Jacob finally falls asleep again. His fever breaks a short time
later, but she’ll not risk him going back to bed where she can’t
monitor him. She
simply
tucks him in on the sofa and slides in behind him
where she can cradle him to her.

Worrying about her baby,
even though he’s almost five, has prevented her from finding sleep.
As she lies awake most of the night, she has time to reflect on
Kelly and Hannah’s conversation that she’d overheard. He, too,
knows that her sister has to snap out of this, to move on from her
grief that is literally causing her to waste away mentally and
physically. She’s going to be the next one to become ill. Reagan
could never bear it if she lost one of her sisters. Perhaps she
could just stay home more instead of going to town to the clinic or
when the men work on the wall. She could spend more time with
Hannah, help her out more, too. A frown mars her features. She’s
not even sure that would work. Her sister is in the
deep
bowels of
depression and has been there since Em’s death. Perhaps if Cory
came
home,
she’d feel better. Hannie’s crazy about him. Perhaps that
would do the
trick,
if he’d just bring his ass home.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Sam

Sam chuckles and moves
closer to Paige in the garden, who is about as clueless at
weeding
as she is
about milking cows and riding horses.

“No, Paige,” Sam corrects her. “You’re
pulling carrots. Silly, we need to put those back in. See?” she
asks and points to the feathery fronds of the carrot tops. “These
aren’t weeds.”

Paige frowns, unknowingly rubs dirt on
her forehead from the back of her soiled glove and says, “Shit.
Sorry. That one really did look like a weed. We used to boil down
stuff like this to eat.”

This isn’t the first time Paige has
pulled vegetables thinking they were weeds.

“I’m glad you’re
here,
glad you
are
n’t out there anymore,” Sam acknowledges
about her new friend. “Even if you do like pulling out our baby
vegetables.”

Paige laughs at herself and
nods.

“Me, too. I’m glad I’m here,” Paige
says and lays a hand over hers in the dirt.

Sam still feels like Paige holds back
from sharing her thoughts and feelings, but she’s coming along. Sam
understands that it must be difficult to trust people after what
she has been through.

“Well, the horses might get
mad if we kill all the carrots before they get a chance to grow,”
Sam says
with
a chuckle. “I try to sneak a few every once in a while to
them. Unless Hannah happens to be around. Then I don’t even attempt
it. She’d get mad for sure since she likes to put them in stews and
sauces.”

Paige finally smiles, but Sam can tell
that she still feels bad about pulling weeds that weren’t weeds.
She touches her arm and offers a lopsided grin.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sam appeases
her new friend.

They’ve all been busy
tending the garden while the men work in shifts on the wall in
town. They are making fast progress, but it’s still
a huge
undertaking
surrounding an entire small town with a wall system. Some days
Paige goes into town with them, but on others she’ll stay behind to
help on the farm.

She tells Paige, “Just wait
till canning season starts. It gets downright crazy around here.
The kitchen
gets
like
two hundred
degrees it seems like. Sue and Hannah do a lot of the canning
outside to help.”

“Really?” Paige asks as she picks
actual weeds this time.

“Oh yeah,” Sam says. “They
do almost all of the tomatoes in the
cauldron
and old
canner
over a fire in the back
yard. Everything gets canned. Plus we make applesauce as long as
the orchard doesn’t get infested with worms. And peaches, too,
those are great for canning. Sue always makes sure that some kind
of fruit gets canned to help ensure the kids stay healthy all
winter. If we didn’t can the vegetables and even the fruits, we’d
never make it.”

“Yeah, I guess not with so many people
living here,” Paige concurs as she swipes loose tendrils of red
waves behind her ear. “There were many times on the road that I
wished for an apple or a peach or even some broccoli, which I
hate.”

Sam chuckles and nods. “I don’t mind
broccoli, but I’m not too fond of the spinach. I wish we didn’t
plant it at all. But Sue makes a pretty good dish with it where she
stuffs it inside pieces of chicken with herbs and our goat cheese.
That’s not too bad. Any other way that it actually tastes like
spinach makes me wanna’ hurl.”

“Yeah, I think I remember having that
dish once since I came here,” Paige says. “It was good. Heck,
everything they make is good.”

“What kinds of things did
you like to eat before
…
you know,
before
?” Sam asks.

“Um, well, I was a vegan.
So I didn’t eat dairy or meat. My diet was a lot different. But my
mom used to make a
really
good
veggie lasagna for me,” Paige
answers.

Sam doesn’t miss the flicker of
sadness that passes over her features like a gloomy, gray cloud on
a sunny day. She sketched a picture of Paige the other day when
she’d found her asleep in the hammock in the side yard near Grams’s
rose garden. She hasn’t had the courage to show Paige yet. Maybe
she’ll just show it to Simon instead.

“That sounds good. You should tell the
girls. They’ll probably make it for you. They can make just about
anything,” Sam offers, trying to make her feel better.

“Yeah, maybe,” Paige
mumbles
.

Sam knows that
talking
about
her mother is difficult for Paige, so she doesn’t push. Some
day if Paige comes to her to talk, then she’ll be there for her.
Until she’s ready, though, just coercing her into it will feel
forced and disingenuous. She figures a change in subject matter
will help.

“We were thinking about
playing music tonight,” she says as she wipes a bead of sweat from
her forehead. The sun is high and hot. It must be nearly two in the
afternoon already. They’ve been in the garden for
nearly
three hours
already. They planted two more rows of vegetable seeds to stagger
the crop harvest. Her back is starting to feel
kinked
. “Do you play an
instrument? Or do you sing? I notice you never get
involved.”

Paige just furrows her brow and shakes
her head before answering, “No, do you want me to attract wild cats
for miles away?”

Sam laughs good-naturedly and says,
“No instruments, either?”

She gets another shake of
Paige’s head in answer. Simon’s sister is wearing a pair of his
faded, threadbare cut-off
blue-jean
shorts that hang off her very
slim hips, secured by one of his brown leather belts. Paige also
has on a borrowed t-shirt that she’s knotted
at her slim waist
to keep it
out of her way. Sam is fairly sure it’s one of Cory’s tees since it
has a picture of a 1940’s era pin-up girl perched on the front of
an old airplane, but it hardly matters since he’s not around to
make use of it. Everyone on the farm tries to share and offer up
clothing and supplies to Paige and Talia since they came to the
farm with one small bag of belongings, most of which weren’t really
even usable anymore. They’d given her group a tub of clothing for
Maddie to use, as
well
since the tiny tyke only had two outfits that
they’d
been
forced to rotate on her. Unfortunately, not one of the women
wear the same size shoes as Paige. She’s so much taller and leaner
than the women, too, which doesn’t make for ideal swaps. They just
do their best, and she never complains.

“I like the way you play the violin,
though,” Paige offers. “It’s really lovely, Sam. You have quite a
talent there.”

She gives a shrug and says, “I don’t
know. My mother thought it was important to learn a musical
instrument. She grew up playing the cello. My older brother played
the drums. That wasn’t popular in our house!”

“Ha, I bet!”

Her new friend’s laugh is very raucous
when she actually allows herself to laugh.

“No, my dad would come home from work,
and my brother and his friends would be in the garage banging away
at their instruments. He even thought he might like to be a rock
star, but my dad wouldn’t have gone for that. He wanted him to take
over when he retired.”

“What did your dad do for a
living? Simon said you guys had a really nice house
and
…
well,”
Paige stammers.

“Oh, yeah, I suppose we did. I didn’t
think of it like that. It was just the house I lived in, where I
grew up, where I used to have silly slumber parties with my
girlfriends from the riding academy where I took
lessons.”

Sam loses her train of
thought for a moment, thinking of her friends, so young like her,
so full of hopes and dreams, all ridiculously childish dreams given
the current circumstances of the world. They used to stay up late
after horse shows and talk and giggle and fantasize. Sam had been
hoping to gain a scholarship from riding in the show-jumping and
cross-country circuit and eventually making it onto the US Olympic
team for the
three day
eventing. Her mother had even taken her to meet
two of the coaches for the team, and they’d
been
impressed with her stats.
They’d
told
her mother
that with her tenacity
and passion that she should be a shoe-in someday. Her father had
bought her a national level show-jumping gelding from Germany and
had shipped him all the way to their home. He was a big,
muscular
handsome
bay
at sixteen and one hands. His name was in German,
so she just always called him Brutus since the guttural sounds of
his native language were too complicated for her to master. He
seemed to like it, too, because he used to
nicker
and
call
out to her when she went
anywhere near the barn and said his name. The show-jumping circuit
season was just about to start back up when the world fell apart.
She and her best friend were both involved in show-jumping and
dressage. They were excited to get back into the swing of things
which meant trailering the horses all over the country, meeting up
with long lost friends from the circuit, and competing for ribbons
and points toward that elusive scholarship offer. Sometimes her
mother would take her, sometimes her father and sometimes her
friend’s parents. It seems like a whole other life, her old life.
Thinking about it
seems
surreal, as if she is remembering a movie
she’d
watched
and can just barely make out the characters’ faces instead of
what it really was which is her own story. It doesn’t seem like her
life or that she was ever a part of it. The life that she has as a
McClane seems like the only one she knows. That other girl died a
long time ago, along with her hopes and dreams of being an
Olympian. When she glances up, Paige is staring at her before
quickly looking away.

“What? What did you ask? Oh, yes, my
father,” Sam says with embarrassment. “Um, he owned a real-estate
development company, townhouses, office buildings, commercial
real-estate mostly. I know he wanted my brother to go to college
and take over when he got closer to retirement.”