The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (10 page)

She sprints toward the back of the
machine shop again as voices rain down over her, heightening her
fear. She doesn’t stick around long enough to hear what they are
saying. She doesn’t think they spotted her, but she’s not waiting
around to see. Unfortunately, when she gets to the back door, it’s
locked. It takes her a few seconds to work the lock since it is
mostly dark in this area. The unfortunate part is that the ancient
rusted door is stuck. She shoves a good four times before it lets
out a loud squeal in protest of its rusty hinges being abused. It
finally opens about twelve inches, enough for her to squeeze
through. It doesn’t matter if they’ve heard her. She’s home free
now. This is where she excels.

She knows for
certain they are after her now.
That door
gave her away. Men’s voices are behind her. She hears their
footsteps slapping
at
the pavement and slush.
Hers
barely make a sound. She
dashes to an apartment building and blasts through the front door.
The shotgun is too cumbersome for her to continue carrying, so she
stashes it in a room on the first floor. At least she knows that
they can’t use it on her since she stole it from them. Running
straight, she comes to an exit and uses the door there. Then she’s
gone again. She can hear the men still pursuing her, but Paige is
positive that she can outrun them. This is her specialty, and she
needs to lose them before going back to the video rental store to
retrieve her friends. There would be no sense in leading them there
to continue this foot chase with Maddie and Talia. They’d never
make it. Those men likely have other guns that they are carrying
and could use against them.

A quick glance over her shoulder
proves her right. Only two of them are still chasing
her.

“We’ll get you, bitch!” one of them
yells.

Right before he trips over
debris
on
the road and comes to a skidding crash in the snow where he
lands against the side of a parked car. Paige has to suppress a
smile and keep going. She darts down an alley and straight into a
building there. Jumping over a metal box, she makes her way to the
front, road-facing entrance. The door isn’t even there anymore.
She’s running back toward the way they’d come, whether her pursuer
realizes it or not. She’ll double back again to lead him away from
her group waiting for her. A few more stealthy sneaks into
buildings where she finally loses him in another big warehouse, and
Paige is on her way to collect her friends. The whole chase has
taken less than a half an hour. She’s barely even winded. Those men
should learn the importance of conditioning, or not to steal from
people who do, people who are even hungrier than them.

She collects her friends
and out the back door they go. They hike through the woods, careful
not to be followed again. They were done in the city anyway. They
need to keep going since they have around twenty miles still to
hike. They make it probably close to five miles before they need to
stop for a break and to feed a bit of food to Maddie, even though
they’ve all been snacking on the video store candy of chocolate
covered raisins, Sweet
Tarts
and gummy worms. They take turns carrying Maddie
most of the time since she can only walk about a mile or less
before her tiny legs give out. It doesn’t take long before they
come to a small farm which is rather obviously abandoned. A
sizable, fenced-in pasture holds a
small
pony. Strange that it hadn’t died
in the past years, but it must’ve had enough to eat to keep it
alive. The pasture looks like a good ten acres, enclosed by
high-tensile wire fencing. Grass has grown up through the cracks on
the front porch of the white house. A black shudder hangs crookedly
from a
second-floor
window and from a wide picture window on the first
floor. They let themselves in through the unlocked front door and
perform a fast search of the home for inhabitants while Talia stays
outside with Maddie.

Gavin finds some sticks and
firewood in a shed while Paige roots out some old newspaper. She
and Talia locate a hand crank water pump near one of the
outbuildings. When they pump it about ten times, water comes
trickling out. They find three empty buckets in the barn and fill
them. It doesn’t matter if the water is stale or contaminated. It’s
likely that the pony has been surviving on
the same water that’s in the round, stone
basin
. It streams out at a steady,
continuous pace from the spigot feeding into the trough that
overflows onto the saturated, muddy ground around it. The pony laps
it up as if to prove a point. They’ll still boil the water for a
long time just to be safe.

Once they have
a low
burning fire
going in the fireplace, the flue open- which they’ve learned the
hard way over the years to check- and food cooking, Paige tells
them of her chase. Neither of her friends
is
too happy about the perilous
danger of which she’d subjected herself to. They are, however, all
just
happy
to be eating food, have a roof over their heads and heat for
the night. It is so much more preferable than going to sleep with
cold, damp feet and a growling stomach, which they’ve done so many
times.

The four of them will sleep
on the first floor near the fireplace to stay warm and close
together in case of danger. They spread out the meager few blankets
they found upstairs in the attic along with their newly acquired
sleeping bags. The blankets are musty but dry. At least the
flooring is carpeted which adds some padding. The doors and windows
have been secured and locked. Chair backs were placed under the two
main entrance doors at opposite ends of the first floor.
Noise makers
in
the form of strung together empty cans were hung on each
first-floor
window
handle or on their ledges to alert her group to intruders. This is
just another trick they’ve picked up over the years trying to stay
alive.

Their clothing and shoes
are set close to the fireplace to dry out and warm up for another
long day of walking. Maddie has an actual pillow under her head for
the first time in many nights instead of a rolled up article of
clothing. She and Talia found another pillow that they
are
willing to
cohabitate. Gavin removed a cushion from a chair and is going to
use it for a pillow.

Tonight their meal was the
rice she’d stolen, pan-fried rabbit and canned corn. It had all
tasted as good as any
five-star
restaurant because they were
absolutely famished. They’d found a jar of pickled beets and
another three of something called potted beef according to the
small white label on the front. On another shelf in the basement,
Talia had found two bags of dried apricots. Paige is not sure if
any of it is still good, but they’ll find out tomorrow.

In the amber light of
the
fire,
as they lay cozy and warm and snuggled together, Paige yawns
widely.

“Hey, guys,” Gavin says, “maybe we
could catch that pony tomorrow. We could put Maddie on it. Maybe
even put some of our bags on it to carry.”

“It might be wild, Gav,”
Paige says
with
a chuckle.

“Yeah, bro,” Talia agrees. “It’s not
like we know the front end of a horse from the back.”

They all share a soft laugh that isn’t
loud enough to awaken Maddie. It’s good for her to get sleep. She’s
just a toddler practically. She needs rest. She needs more food
most days, too, but they do the best they can with her.

“I know a little,” he says.

“Ok, farm boy,” Talia
mocks.

She and Paige enjoy another laugh at
his expense. He’s more of a beach boy than a farmer, having grown
up in the Carolinas in a posh beach community.

“It’s worth a try,” Paige
admits. “It would be a hell of a lot faster to travel if we didn’t
have to carry her. Maybe we’d even get
there
the day after tomorrow or
so.”

“Sounds good to me,” Talia
agrees.

They talk a short while
longer in the dark, the sounds of the fire
cracking
and popping and providing
more warmth than they’ve had in a while. A wind gust causes the old
house to groan and creak. The windows even rattle slightly. The sky
had looked angry enough to dump more snow onto the earth tonight.
Paige has a hard time falling asleep and lies awake long after her
companions. She feels a certain amount of apprehension at what
awaits her at the end of this long journey. It could end joyously
or on a tragedy, one of so many that they’ve shared.

Chapter Six

Cory

He awakens to the sound of
his horse blowing through his nose. Cory knows the
sound
well. This
isn’t a happy, greeting type of sound or the sound of joyful
whinnying. Jet is blowing through his nose hard. It’s a loud
warning of something out there. Cory climbs out of his sleeping bag
already dressed since he slept in his clothing. He’s under the
shelf of a large rock formation coming out of a hill which had
provided shelter from the snowstorm.

This isn’t the first time he’s had a
problem with someone being in his camp. Just yesterday the same
thing had happened. Only yesterday it had happened during the day
while he’d been gone on a mission in the city. He has no idea what
time it is, but it’s nowhere near dawn yet. Below him about eight
feet, his horse is tied securely to a tree. He’s dancing in place.
Cory can hear him doing it. This is also a sign of agitation in the
stallion. Someone or something’s out there.

He stays
low
, squats near
the opening of his homemade cave with the coated canvas tarp acting
as a door. Resting his back against the stone behind him, Cory
scans the area with his rifle which is equipped with a night scope.
Yesterday someone took a keen interest in his camp and had trashed
it. He’d come back to find his things ransacked. The only item
missing was the remains of a carcass too charred from earlier in
the day to be eaten by him. He’s not the best campfire
cook.

A soft yet menacing growl
comes from the forest to his east. Footsteps that are
heavy
enough to
break twigs reverberate through the hills. Owls stop their
nighttime communications. The forest falls silent. The hair on the
back of his neck stands up. He rubs the gold bracelet, which he’d
woven around the black leather cord around his neck, between his
thumb and forefinger. He’s not afraid. He’s just anxious. His camp
guest is back. Cory had ensured whatever it was would come back by
leaving a trail of cut up innards, raccoon innards to be exact,
from about twenty yards out all the way to the campfire below
him.

He opted to not have his
tiny campfire in his cave tonight but
to light one instead
below him near the
horse. He wants the area well-lit. The fire down below is still
burning but at a much less generous strength than he would like.
Too late now. He doesn’t have the time to go down and throw on more
logs. It’ll just have to do. The trap is set. Now he just needs to
be patient and wait.

This could be a coyote or a
wolf, but those sometimes tend to run in packs. They’ve had
numerous run-ins at the farm with both. The wildlife in America has
gone into super breeding mode for the last unadulterated three and
a half years. There was no such thing anymore as a hunting season
or limited seasons to hunt anything. Sometimes it seems more like
hunt or be hunted. So much of the human population, the
densely
populated
east coast is gone, just dead in that first wave of tsunamis. He’s
seen herds of deer in different cities right downtown, like in
Nashville one time when he’d gone with John. Another time in
Louisville when he was with Kelly, they’d
seen
their first pack of wolves.
That time he was actually scared. It was a few years ago, and he
and Kelly weren’t too sure they were going to be able to make it
back out of the city. They’d taken the Hummer that time or else
they may not have made it home. Those wolves had stalked them
relentlessly. John actually shot an elk that had wandered too close
to the farm about a year ago. There are no boundaries and fences or
occupied cities anymore that keep the wildlife at bay. The animals
go where they want and hunt what or whom they desire. Most of them
have no fear of people left.

Another growl draws his attention away
from memories, for which he is thankful. He doesn’t like thinking
of the family or memories of him and the men hunting together. He
buries them and concentrates instead on the sounds of movement and
branches being broken.

After a few more
minutes,
the
animal still does not appear. Maybe it wasn’t an animal that had
ransacked his camp. He is second guessing himself. There were no
signs of human tracks. There were, however, signs of animal tracks,
multiple sets of animal tracks. The new snow on the ground had made
it somewhat difficult to tell what all had been there earlier. But
he was able to discern raccoon, possible coyote and something much
larger. Perhaps it was a human who’d been good at covering their
tracks. Why wouldn’t they have taken some of his gear, though? He’d
left his sleeping bag and some of his other, heavier items behind
at the camp. When he’s hunting, he likes to travel
light.