The McClane Apocalypse Book Five (4 page)

“I’ll get Sam,” Paige tells her and
flees the room. That is only bound to get worse. They’ve vexed
Hannie and when she gets
mad,
she
can really lay on the guilt. She’s a funny little person. Sometimes
Paige thinks she runs the whole family.

She takes the stairs two stairs at a time and
starts down the long hall toward Sam’s room. The bathroom door
opens, and she expects Sam to come out. It turns out to be Derek
with his head down.

Paige tries to pass him, but his hand lashes
out and clamps down onto her upper arm. What the hell? When she
glances up, it isn’t Derek at all but her arch nemesis. Her heart
skips a beat, or twenty. She hadn’t recognized the dirty Viking
because he’s shaved his beard and mustache clean off. His face is
chiseled and angular and smooth and clean.

He’s wearing a towel around his waist and
nothing else. The skin on his torso is still damp. Beads of water
trickle over the grooved planes of his pectorals and down over the
waves of his stomach muscles. She feels even more out of sorts now.
The hallway, although easily six to eight feet wide, feels too
small and claustrophobic. He looks even bigger when he’s nearly
naked. She backs up a step, still in his grasp.

“Hey there,” he says as if she’s startled
him, as well.

She jerks free and glares at him.

“I actually wanted to get you alone…” he
starts.

She interrupts him, “Why? So you can finish
the job you started in the woods?” She tries to keep her voice low
so that the rest of the family doesn’t hear her.

“No, if I’d wanted to finish the job, I
would have. Trust
me
that
wouldn’t have been
very
difficult
,” he brags.

“You say that, but I got away
from
you,” she returns with a haughty
attitude.

He chuffs through his nose and grins as
if she
is being
humorous. His
dark hair is still uncut and skims his shoulders.

“Yeah, ok,” he replies with
an enormous
amount of sarcasm. “Look, I
just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I thought you were trespassing
on our property. I saw the gun and knew it was my
brother’s
. I saw the shirt, which I
notice you’ve changed, and knew that it was mine.”

His eyes skim the front of her,
lingering on her chest.
Of course
she’d changed out of his dumb shirt. She wears one of her
long-sleeved tees borrowed from Reagan. So, naturally, it is
plain
and black. At least it isn’t his.
Paige folds her arms self-consciously over her front. His keen
brown eyes meet hers again and there’s that lust again before they
travel south once more. She’s not some sort of naïve young girl.
She knows that look.

“Hey, eyes up here, asshole. You stay away
from me,” she interjects and points to her own blue eyes and then
at him. “I don’t care who you’re related to on this farm. Stay away
from me. I don’t like you, and I sure as hell don’t trust you.”

Cory just grins down at her again. This
pisses her off more. She’s always been tall for a woman and
relished this fact. At five-nine and a half, she’s the tallest
woman on this farm. This guy makes her feel very dwarfed by his
height and width.

“Don’t like me, huh?” he asks dryly. “You’re
kinda’ spunky, aren’t you?”

“Go to hell,” she hisses and spins on the
ball of her foot to the stairs. Screw Sam. She doesn’t want to have
to pass that asshole again to get down the stairs. Someone else can
go back up and fetch Sam for dinner.

She nearly runs Kelly down on the first floor
near the staircase.

“I think your brother needs clothes,” she
says in a rush. “And can you get Sam for dinner while you’re up
there?”

He looks confused and surprised but answers
amiably, “Oh, sure, Paige. No problem.”

God, how can Kelly be so
nice
and kind and sweet and be related
to that jerk on the top floor?

She keeps right on going until she reaches
the music room. This farm is big enough that she can avoid that
creep. She’s starting to wonder if maybe she and Simon shouldn’t
leave, after all.

Ten minutes later, they are finally all
assembled in the dining room. Cory sits across from her. Small
miracles. At least he is clean enough to come into the house
finally. His filthy dog is sitting on the back porch waiting for
him. The dog obviously isn’t too smart if it aligned itself with
the likes of him.

Doc leads off with a long prayer of how
thankful they are to have Cory home. Paige doesn’t even close her
eyes but stares across the table at him. She notices that he is the
only other person who doesn’t bow his head and pray. He
doesn’t
notice
her watching him,
but he also doesn’t join in with the family’s prayer.

“Pass the mashed potatoes, Sam,” Simon
requests beside her when the prayer is finished and the noise
starts.

Sam sits right beside her brother. She
always has. The table is crowded, so the children eat in the
kitchen and in the music room. Hannah and Sue had discussed it
during the final food preparations before everyone had come in that
they need to come up with a new dining room plan. Most days in good
weather seasons Sue and her family eat in the big house. Snowy or
stormy days they’ll stay out in their log cabin and Sue will
prepare food from her pantry storage of canned goods. Today they’ve
made roasted pork,
gravy
and
mashed potatoes. The children picked sweet corn from the garden to
go with it along with the homemade rolls Sue and Hannah made. Paige
weighed herself the other day and wasn’t at all surprised to find
that she’s gained three pounds in the last few months. She was more
surprised that it wasn’t a bigger gain.

Helping herself to an ear of corn and some of
the pork, she passes dishes along to Derek, who sits next to
her.

“Eat more than that, son,” Doc says to
Cory.

“I
’m fine,
sir,” he replies. “Haven’t had anything this good for a
while. Or hot and filling.”

“What have you been eating?” Reagan asks.

“Mostly meat and vegetables,” he answers
honestly. “Wild game, turkey, deer.”

“Where’d you get vegetables, Cory?” Kelly
asks next.

He sighs before answering, “Well, you see,
that’s the thing I wanted to talk to everyone about. In the next
day or so,” he pauses and shakes his head. “…or hell, maybe a week
as slow as they are, I have a small group of people coming this
way. Not to the farm. I’d never do that. But they’re coming to town
in Pleasant View.”

“Oh yeah?” Derek asks.

“Where are they from? How’d you meet them?”
John asks.

“Ohio. Went up north for a while. Met
them at an old, closed down ammo depot up there. They’re good
people. I felt
bad
when I told
them I was leaving. I felt… I don’t know. I guess I felt obligated
to help them. Mostly it’ll be women and kids, a few older people.
That’s all they had in their group. Probably why I felt like I
couldn’t just ditch them.”

“I think that’s a very noble thing to do,
Cory,” Sue comments.

“Yes, I agree, Sue,” Doc adds. “It’s the
right thing to do. Grams would be proud of you, son.”

Cory looks like he’d prefer to die on
the spot under such praise. Paige hates this Saint Cory shit. He
wasn’t so saintly in the woods. At least he has on
clothing
again. He wears black cargo
pants and a white t-shirt that has seen better days.

“Where all have you been? You said Ohio,”
Reagan asks.

Cory pauses in between mammoth bites and
says, “Yeah, Ohio for a while. Pennsylvania. Kentucky. Just kind of
moved around. Went through your old college town, Reagan.”

“Yeah? What was it like? It was going to hell
pretty damn fast when I was hightailing it outta’ there,” she
says.

“Reagan,” Hannah scolds for the swearing.

“Pretty messed up. In the city
center
area,
it was fried. On the
outskirts of the
cities,
it was
better.
Jet
was shot
there.”

Reagan says, “I thought I saw a stitch scar
on his shoulder.”

“Yeah, you can check it out. I’m not a doc
like you, so it’s probably not the best,” Cory admits.

“What’s it like everywhere else? Any better
than here?” Kelly interrupts. “Paige told us how rough some of the
places were out there. I’m just wondering if you went to different
areas if it was any better.”

He sighs and takes a moment before answering,
“Not really. Some places are worse. Some about the same, but I
don’t think I’d say that anyone is doing better. There was a group
in Columbus, Ohio, that had natural gas running in their town. That
was good. They had shut-off valves tied in everywhere so that they
could cut it and restart it. It was a pretty good system if it
lasts.”

“That’s great,” Derek remarks.

He looks to his wife and she nods in
agreement.

“Brought back a bag of medical
supplies,
bunch
of bottles of
antibiotics for you from a couple zoos up there in Ohio,” he tells
Reagan.

John remarks, “Zoos. Smart. We never
thought about zoos
for
a source
of medicines. We’ll have to look into going on some runs to zoos
soon.”

“Yeah, that is a good idea,” Reagan
replies. “We’re really
low
on
some meds. Thanks, Cory.”

He nods in her direction, catches Paige’s
gaze and winks. What the hell? She’d like to throw her ear of corn
at him. Creep.

“Damn, we really shoulda’ thought of that,”
Reagan says. “We should hit up all zoos and vet clinics and forage
for antibiotics and meds.”

John smiles at her.

“You said that a group had natural gas going.
So people are working together like here in Pleasant View?” Doc
asks with hope in his voice.

“Some are. Well, you know how that
goes,” Cory tells them. He takes a bite of potatoes before
continuing with his explanation. “There are bands of good people
working together, but then there are bands that are scum who want
to rob and kill. And those are the ones that
need dealt
with.”

Paige notices that his eyes radiate
such a cold intensity that she flinches. Reagan had told her a few
months ago that Cory was going on a killing spree when they’d left
him in that cabin in the woods after his sister had died. She
hadn’t really believed Reagan. Either that or she hadn’t really
wanted to
believe
her. She’s
leaning toward
believing
her now
after looking into his vacant eyes.

“We’re just glad you’re home safe and sound,”
Hannah says, trying to lighten the mood.

“What did the big cities look like if you
went through any? When we did coming home, you remember, they were
congested and a mess,” Kelly asks, going back to their conversation
about the state of the country.

“Worse,” Cory replies and stuffs a piece of
bread into his mouth.

He’s avoiding this question, it seems to
Paige. He’s not telling them a lot of details about his adventures.
Perhaps that’s for the best. He also doesn’t know about the radio
transmission that Sam had heard in Doc’s office a few weeks ago.
She wonders if the family will tell him. He seems like sort of a
loose cannon.

John presses him, though, “Were they trying
to work together in the big cities?”

Cory shakes his head and says, “Not in
Cleveland, Louisville, or Pittsburgh. There aren’t a lot of people
left there, either. There’s definitely no congestion anymore. The
ones that are still living in the big cities are the ones you have
to watch out for. They’ve formed groups that are a lot like the
ones I heard about from Simon that attacked the farm.”

“At least people are starting to pull
together in the smaller towns,” Sue says.

“There were the usual rumors about
different cities having power and being back on the grid, but I
never saw any of that. Mostly people were using oil lamps,
gennies
, or solar. One
woman
I stayed the night with had a wind
turbine on top of her house,” he explains.

“That’s all we can do until full power
gets restored
someday,
if it ever
does,” Sam says.

“Don’t get your hopes up too high, Sam,” Cory
tells her. “There were also a lot of rumors about people migrating
to the South or to the West to warmer climates. Who knows? They’re
probably just dead.”

Nobody picks up that circle of conversation
again. They would all like to hold onto a little hope, even if that
is all it ends up being.

“We need to wrap up soon, everyone,” Doc
says, cutting in on the gloom. “Need to head into town for that
meeting.”

“Yeah, Simon told me what’s going on,” Cory
says. “I’ll go with you.”

“Why don’t you just hang out here with the
women and keep an eye on the farm while we’re gone. Get some rest,
too,” Kelly suggests.

“Yeah, man, me and Derek, Kelly and Doc are
going in,” John says. “Just stay with Simon and rest up.”

Cory
nods,
but Paige can tell that he’d like to go with them. She wasn’t
planning on going tonight. She’d offered to stay behind.