The McClane Apocalypse: Book One (4 page)

Dropping her like a sack of potatoes, Reagan lands on her butt half on the burgundy, floral rug and half on the scarred, dark-wood floor with hundreds of scratches and divots from many years of use. She huffs as the breath leaves her again. She tries to scan the room, but her attacker is on her too quickly. He kneels beside her, his finger pointing in her face.

“Now, you be a good girl, and we’ll have some fun. You go and be a bitch, and I’ll cut you up real nice, ya’ hear?” he questions but not wanting or needing a response. Reagan simply nods. He takes the knife from its sheath on his hip and stabs it purposefully into Dr. Krue’s mahogany desk top. It’s an intimidation tactic, and it is very effective.

The room is too dark to see clearly since there are no windows. Plus the overhead lighting is not turned on. The darkly stained, cherry paneling isn’t helping, and she realizes that she hasn’t seen any lights on anywhere for a while. The electricity must have gone completely out everywhere at the university, and perhaps back-up generators aren’t firing. This realization frightens her.

Her assailant yanks her to a standing position by her wrist, nearly dislocating her arm. He’s too strong to fight, Reagan realizes. Keep him talking.

“Where is my friend?” she asks quietly as she tries to keep her tone calm and soothing.

“She’s just fine. Don’t you go worrying ‘bout the Muslim, ya’ hear?” he says with a grin, his silvery eyes making contact with hers directly.

Reagan knows he’s lying. She knows Uma isn’t ok. She knows this man will rape and then kill her in this room. She knows if she ever wants to see her family again, then it’s gonna be him or her. But only one of them can ever leave this room alive again.

“D... don’t hurt me, ok?” she asks in her best childish voice. She wants him to think her weak. She’s small. She’s always been small. But she’s never been weak. Her grandpa would’ve never permitted that from her.

“No problem, baby. We’re just gonna have us some fun,” he lies smoothly as he reaches out to run a hand down her arm.

Her eyes dart to the door a few feet away, and it’s all the motivation she needs. But he grabs her as she lunges toward it, picking her up with one arm from behind. Then Cold Eyes swings her around and slams her face first upon Dr. Krue’s desk. Her head takes the brunt of the hit, and she’s momentarily stunned. He’s behind her in a position of power, and Reagan struggles to turn as he grinds his crotch against her backside. She tries to pull away, to get away from him, but he holds her fast as he works at his belt buckle. The hood from her sweatshirt falls back, and he aggressively yanks the ball-cap off, freeing her springy, messy curls.

“Nice, sugar. Why were ya’ hiding all this under there?” he inquires after her hair and strokes it, making her want to vomit again.

All she can hear is her own quiet whimpers and moans and his mindless grunting as he struggles with his belt some more in the silence of the richly appointed room. Nobody ever explained to her that an act of rape is more about sounds and smells and what you can see more than what you actually feel. The room is eerily silent, and their sounds are so loud, as if coming from a megaphone. He grabs a handful of her hair to better hold her head down, and Reagan can see Dr. Krue’s medical degrees hanging on the wall beside them. She’s looked at those degrees and awards many times but never with blind fear in her heart and never from this angle. A bead of sweat runs down her forehead and lands on the table. He has successfully manipulated his pants buckle and zipper and lets them fall to his knees. Reagan feels him push against her from behind through her own thin pants.

“Yeah, you like that, don’t you?” he asks as if that makes any sense because what he is perpetrating is nothing more than rape and not consensual in any way. Reagan doesn’t answer, however, because she knows her reply to the negative will earn her a slap or punch or something far worse.

She is struggling with him, trying to keep him from getting her pants unbuckled, too, but it’s not doing much good. Luckily for her, he is preoccupied with his single-minded determination to do what he intends that she is able to slide her grandpa’s pocket knife from her cargo pocket and conceal it in her palm.

“Hold still, you stupid little whore,” he grinds out through his gritted teeth. He is bent over her, his spittle hitting the side of her exposed cheek again. Disgusting beast. She opens the blade with only one hand. “You’re gonna love this, bitch.”

At this exact moment, Reagan rears up slightly, just long and high enough to plunge the knife into his thigh. She’s praying she hit his femoral artery and that he’ll bleed out quickly, but with the bad lighting and the awkward angle of doing so from a face down position she isn’t too confident. It doesn’t stop her assailant from howling in pain, though, so she must have gotten it in pretty deep. She pulls it back out and lurches backward, successfully throwing him off of her.

Whipping around to face him, Reagan sees that she has hit him square in his thigh muscle, and blood is gushing fairly quickly out of it. His face is a perfect blend of anguish and fury as he lunges for her, and his cold eyes have turned downright arctic. Reagan is knocked backward again onto the desktop as he has now resorted to strangling her. He is obviously an equal opportunity murderer and sees no problem with changing up his modus operandi.

She gags and gags and feels the air rushing from her lungs, her vision starting to blur. Her chest burns as the air is expelled, and Reagan can hear wheezing deep in her throat. Realizing there is no way she can get his hands off of her neck, she relinquishes that fight and stabs him again, this time in the shoulder. Seemingly undaunted, he punches her to the side of her head, knocking her into senselessness. Reagan isn’t sure if she blacks out or just momentarily loses her vision. But she sure isn’t functioning on too high of a level at this point. This is when she feels her own blade being used on her.

When her vision clears again, she can see his shoulder is bleeding, and he is wielding her knife which he apparently dislodged from his own shoulder muscle. What strikes her as odd is that she doesn’t feel anything, but she knows that he’s stabbing or slicing her because she watches the blade arc high again and again. Blood is spraying her in the face from it.

“I told you I’d carve you up, bitch ...use a knife on me, you bitch. You think this is my first time with a little whore like you?” he hoarsely expels his words at her. He slices across her cheek with her beloved grandpa’s three inch knife. She feels that one for sure as if someone has just lit a match using her face. It’s enough to spur her back into motion and to fight through her pain, blurred vision and dizziness.

For just a brief moment he releases her throat and Reagan is able to turn her head to the left. She spies her escape from this horrific event. It’s not the exit door or a campus security agent here to rescue her. It’s the long, sharp blade that he’d stabbed so hard into Dr. Krue’s desk. His breathing is labored as he struggles with the button of her jeans again. He’s almost unhooked it. Reagan swiftly frees the long, serrated dagger from its lodging in the wooden desk and stabs him straight in the jugular. A spray of his blood hits her in the face and hair and all over her hoodie. He is clearly startled, unnerved by her action. His lack of anticipating her has cost him his life, and he knows it. But Reagan isn’t done. She yanks it out and hits him in the center of his chest with it, as well, which doesn’t spray blood at all, telling her that his heart has stopped pumping it. His dagger is long, at least six inches, and she knows for certain that she’s killed him. His heart would have most likely stopped within a few seconds from the hit to the chest. She shoves him, and he falls sideways to the ground with a heavy thud.

Not wasting a precious second, lest his friend become alarmed and come running, Reagan rolls the dead man over and takes his pistol from the waistband of his briefs. When she stands, her vision blurs for a moment again. Quickly brushing aside any weakness that she can’t deal with at the moment, Reagan works the slide and sees that it’s a .45 caliber and that there is already a round in the chamber with the safety off. Her throat is raw and burning, making it difficult to even swallow. But her work here is hardly finished. Locked and loaded, she listens for sounds of movement, and when she hears none, Reagan inches toward the door.

As quietly as she can manage, she reaches up from a squatted position and works the doorknob. It barely makes the slightest whisper of a sound, but it could be one of the rusty, noisy hinges on the door to the horse barn at the farm for all the anxiety she feels over it. She takes note that her hands are shaking crazily, so she breathes deeply three times before peering quickly into the adjoining lab classroom.

The door is still closed, and the room appears to be empty. Perhaps the struggle for her life, which had seemed to go on for an hour, had only taken a few minutes. She gets to her feet in a more upright posture and speedily crosses the room to stand behind the door. She’s hoping to catch Giant Pupils in a surprise assault of her own. And before she can even take another breath, the door swings open and in lopes the greasy-haired accomplice. He’s unaware of her and is carrying looted vending machine goodies.

She shoots him twice from behind, causing him to fall hard, his bounty flying everywhere. His can of soda skids across the floor, spraying the room with its sugary, liquid contents. The report from the .45 is deafening in the classroom, making her ears ring. Reagan moves slowly to stand over him. He is moaning weakly so she puts him out of his misery. She’s too afraid not to. She’s too petrified to reason out that with two shots from a .45 into his back that he’s no threat anymore. But her adrenaline and absolute terror alone are pushing her now.

Reagan wastes no time and returns to Dr. Krue’s office. She knows she has been stabbed, and she can also feel blood running down her cheek and onto her neck. Dr. Krue has a small room attached to his office with medical supplies should one of his students accidentally cut themselves in class using dissection tools. Once she’s in his office, she takes in how much darker it is than in the classroom. Squinting into the dark recesses of his office, she rushes over to his supply room and trips over something, falling and hitting her head on the hardwood floor.

“Shit!” she curses to the empty room. What she wouldn’t do for a flashlight. Along with everything else she’s gonna have a huge bruise on her forehead. Not the most unbelievable part of this day as she is not known for her grace. That would be her sister Hannah’s department. The pistol is still secure in her tightly fisted grip, which she will not relinquish again until she gets home. She comes up onto her hands and knees and turns to see what had tripped her, only to gasp in horror.

“D... dd...doctor? Dr. Krue?” she whispers, her lower lip trembling. She crawls on all fours to where her mentor, her teacher, her friend lay in a puddle of his own blood. His eyeglasses are on the ground near him, and he is dead of an apparent blunt trauma wound to the back of his head where the blood has pooled. Her tears will not be held back. They fall and fall and she doesn’t care in this moment as she heaves through her ravaged throat. When she presses her hand to the side of his face, Reagan notices that she leaves smudges of her own blood there and it saddens her to tarnish his beloved face so. He deserves her tears. He deserves to be mourned. He was a great man, and he was willing to do whatever he had to get her home safely to her family. Her grandpa is going to be devastated. They had been so close, and Dr. Krue had been to the farm many times.

Reagan hastily wipes the tears off of her face, and with grim determination she decides that she won’t let his sacrifice for her go without merit. She drags herself to her feet again and feels her way into the anteroom, pushing open the wooden door. Her foot kicks something that skids around, something metal. To her relief, it’s a flashlight. Dr. Krue must’ve been in here with this flashlight looking for something or gathering medical supplies when he was come upon by the scum in the other rooms. She clicks it on and relief immediately floods her while the light immediately floods the area. And, more importantly, she no longer has to feel around in the dark or be afraid of it. There are no windows whatsoever in this small room, either, but she knows it fairly well as she’s been in it quite a few times retrieving items for Dr. Krue. There is a dividing, metal shelving unit running down the center of the room and floor to ceiling built-in shelves along the walls. Stumbling along, Reagan rushes to the shelves that she knows have on them the things she’ll need. She grabs a few packages of gauze, a needle and stitching thread, stitching glue, antiseptic, antibiotic cream and three packages of self-adhesive bandaging and shoves them in the wide, kangaroo pocket of her hoodie. She isn’t sure to what extent that she is injured, but she also salvages a handful of clotting powder in small packets.

Reagan moves farther into the room and around the corner to where the single serving pouches of antibiotics and pain relievers are kept under lock and key. There are also vials of shots available for medical care when a student would be more seriously injured. It had only happened twice to a student while she had been under the tutelage of Dr. Krue. She had been excited at the time to assist him in administering stitches and a pain shot injection into the wound site. She plans to use the butt of the pistol to smash the glass, but what she sees horrifies her. She has been blocking this mentally as if that alone would make it not be true.

She has found Uma, her only friend close to her own age at this college. Clearly, she has been sexually assaulted as her long, flowing skirt of many beautiful colors is torn and askew, her tights shredded. Reagan cannot bring herself to look further at this area of her friend’s body. Her lovely, black eyes are staring lifelessly at nothing in particular. There is coagulated blood trickling from her mouth and down the side of her face, disappearing into her dark hairline. There are purple bruises against the creamy, mocha skin of her neck, suggesting she was also strangled as Reagan had been. She was just a young girl. She didn’t deserve to die like this. She was good and kind and would never harm another human being. She had been studying to be a doctor so that she could help people, for God’s sake. Reagan staggers into a nearby corner, gags and vomits, which causes her stomach wounds to pull painfully.