The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (8 page)

Simon nods on a frown and
looks
away,
looks into the far off distance at nothing. He’d not
cried
at the
burial ceremony of Em. If he has lost his composure over Em’s
death, then he’s done so in private.

John had removed her body
from the packhorse, according to Reagan, and had placed her in the
bed of the truck. He’d
chosen
to ride the extra horse beside
Simon back to the farm instead of in the
truck
with Reagan and Grandpa.
Reagan had told her that he didn’t want Simon to ride all the way
home alone. It had taken them hours riding through the dark to make
it back to the farm, and they hadn’t arrived until nearly
dawn.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she
asks as she takes a seat on a fallen tree stretching far into the
forest and also half across their path. The trunk of it is still
elevated a good three feet off the ground which makes her almost
eye level with Simon. The soggy bark will probably make her jeans
damp, but she wants Simon to take some time and talk with her. He
shakes his head and sighs on an unsteady breath. Sam reaches out to
him, but he won’t take her hand. “It’ll help, Simon.”

“Doc says that he wants me to draw out
the schematics of the solar panels so that we can distribute them
to our patients who come to the clinic,” he throws out, effectively
changing the topic.

Sam lets her gloved hand
drop back down to her thigh. Seeing Simon like this is hard
on
her. He means
so much to her. He means so much to the whole family, especially
Doc, who often praises what a great deal of help Simon is at the
clinic.

“Oh, that’s a good idea,”
she puts in, trying to be less morose. She knows better than to
pursue that other line of conversation. He’ll just shut down
further. “People still need to get their power up and
running
if they
haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Yeah, that’s what we were thinking,”
he says and swallows hard.

When his eyes meet hers,
there is so much pain and grief there that she frowns hard and
feels like she might start crying again. It seems like it’s all she
does nowadays. Simon looks quickly away. He does this so often
lately that she wishes she could understand him better. They’ve
always been close, but Simon has become very guarded around her for
quite some time now. She’s not sure what this is about. They’ve
been through so much together, so much that most people could never
understand. He’d
fought
so hard so many times to keep her safe. He’d
not
been
successful most of the time. But it hadn’t stopped him from
taking another beating from Bobby or Frank or some of the other
creeps with whom they’d
been
forced to travel, the group the McClane family had
called the visitors. He has a fierce sense of right and wrong, and
he’d known what was going on within that group and that the way
they were treating her and some of the other women and children was
so far beyond wrong it could only be described as pure evil. He’d
also
fought
for the twin brothers,
Huntley
and Garrett, even though Garrett
had succumbed to illness and passed away. Thinking of that sweet
boy just makes her feel even more depressed. Other than Em, Simon
is her best friend on this lonely, scarred and desolate earth. And
she’s desperate to have her best friend back.

“Simon, why…” she starts.

“Let’s head back, ok?” he interjects
suddenly.

“Um, sure, Simon,” she agrees and
allows him to help her down.

He doesn’t bring up anything of
importance on their walk back to the farm. He is behaving even more
distant now.

“I’m going out to the shed to work,”
he says as they come to the house.

Sam just nods reluctantly and goes
inside where she finds Hannah and Sue hard at work in the
kitchen.

“Hey, kid,” Sue greets. “What’s
up?”

“Nothing much. Went for a walk with
Simon,” she replies.

“What’s wrong?” Sue asks.

“Nothing really,” Sam says
but gets a look from Sue that
clearly
states that she understands that
it is not ‘nothing.’ “I just feel like Simon is being very distant
lately.”

“Honey, everyone’s been through a lot.
That’s probably all it is. You and Simon are very close. I’m sure
it’s nothing,” Sue tries at pacifying her.

“No, you don’t understand. He has been
like this for a while now. This isn’t just because of Em, although
I’m quite sure that isn’t helping. He has withdrawn even more since
then. He’s just been strange. I don’t know how to explain
it.”

Hannah finally says, “It’ll
all
work out
, honey. He obviously just has some things he needs to work
through. We all do.”

Sue places a comforting arm around
Hannah’s slim shoulders and gives them a gentle squeeze. Hannah
tips her head toward Sue’s and rests there a moment before
returning to her task of chopping potatoes. Her deep sigh does not
convince Sam that she even believes her own statement.

“Everything will be ok someday, Sam,”
Sue assures her. “Here, have a pinwheel. A little sweet never
hurts. Since we don’t have chocolate anymore, I guess you can have
something else that’s sweet.”

“Thanks,” Sam says and
accepts the treat. Whenever they have leftover scraps of dough,
they roll them in a mixture of honey,
cinnamon
and butter, and bake them in
the shape of little pinwheels. They are crispy yet tender on the
inside and oh so heavenly.

“In about an hour or so, Sam, why
don’t you start herding the kids in for dinner,” Hannah requests.
“I’m not sure where they all went to. I think some are playing
downstairs.”

“I saw Huntley and Justin out by the
equipment shed shooting bb guns,” Sam tells them, earning a chuckle
from both.

“Boys,” Sue says with a soft
smile.

“I’ll round them all up in a while,
though,” Sam agrees and leaves the kitchen.

She goes to her room at the
far end of the long
second-floor
hallway. There she takes
up
position
on a maple chair that she usually uses at her drawing desk.
Retrieving her violin from under her bed, Sam opens the black case
and draws out the bow, running her fingers
along
the
fine
hairs. Then she picks up the
instrument and proceeds to play one of her favorite Chopin pieces.
It was one of her mother’s favorites, as well, one she often
requested. The tone is in
minor
key, a serious piece, not one of
light notes used for a waltz. It is
a particularly melancholy tune
, but
somehow seems to fit her mood.

She plays for a long time, losing
track of everything but the music and the notes and the timbre of
the piece. When she’s finished, Sam glances up to find Reagan at
her door.

“Careful, Sam,” she warns. “Don’t go
down that road again, kiddo.”

Sam knows that Reagan means well.
Reagan looks out for her like Sam’s her kid sister. She is also one
of the few people on the farm who understands what she’s been
through. Reagan also knows that sometimes she slips into severe
depression from time to time. In those periods, she tends to play
dark music and sketch rather moody pictures.

Sam gives her a simple nod and says,
“I know.”

Reagan retreats again
without another word, but Sam knows she’s right. Even as she
recognizes this, it doesn’t stop her from moving on to a Handel
piece of the same dark undertones. It matches her mood and that of
her family and her best
friend,
Simon.

Chapter Five

Paige

They slept on the floor of
a
six-story
office building last night, and every tendon, ligament and
bone in Paige’s body is feeling the effects of doing so.
They’d
tucked
Maddie in on a sofa they’d dragged in from the receptionist’s
lounge, but the three adults had slept on the floor.

She’d startled awake,
immediately confused and disoriented. The small, portable heater
had shut off sometime in the middle of the night like it normally
does when it runs out of juice. Maddie continues
to snore softly
.
Gavin and Talia are out like logs. It’s nearly
dawn;
the light coming through
the blinds gray and bleak. Then a noise, a few floors down if she
was to guess, alerts her. That is what had awakened her. It wasn’t
the heater or Maddie’s snoring. No wonder she’d
startled
.

Paige listens intently without moving.
Talia stirs beside her, recognizing that Paige is awake and
alert.

“What is it?” her friend whispers
groggily and sits up.

“Think we have company,” Paige relays
as another noise sounds below but closer this time. “Let’s
move!”

She whispers her order
frantically, waking Gavin in the process. Talia is already packing
their gear as Paige snatches Maddie from the sofa. The
four-year-old
already knows this routine. They’ve done this a million times.
She knows to be quiet and move fast. Paige has her coat and tiny
shoes on in a mere seconds. Gavin is tugging on his boots and
simultaneously rolling their sleeping bags. This is a lot more
hectic than their departure from the beautiful mansion a few weeks
ago. Unfortunately, they had to move on from there. They’ll never
make forward progress if they stay in one place for
long.

Voices filter up from one
floor below, spurring them into a frantic exit. Paige
listens at
the
closed and locked door. She can hear numerous voices.

“Go, go, go!” she whispers as they
take another door to leave the office.

They run as furtively as
they can manage down the hall toward a back exit of the building.
She’d checked this
hall
with Gavin last night before they’d
bedded
down.
They’d
tried
to plan their exit strategy. Gavin carefully opens the door,
pressing the steel bar and pushing inward. He waits until they are
all through before closing it softly behind them.

“Go!” he says
urgently
as he
flicks on his flashlight.

They jog down the stairs,
careful not to slip and fall or tumble with Maddie, who Gavin
carries. The poor ruffian’s hair still stands on end, her darling
face puffy from sleep. They make it down two entire flights when
the distinctive sound of someone opening the door overhead echoes
through the stairwell. Gavin immediately cuts the light. She and
her friends press against the wall as hard as they can, trying not
to be seen in the
stairwell
. Nobody moves. She’s sure
nobody else even breathes because she sure as hell doesn’t. They
only have three bullets. Depending on how many people were coming
up those stairs on the other side of the building, they could be in
deep trouble. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Thought I heard something,” a man
says, his voice carrying.

His voice is deep and
gravelly. Paige doesn’t move an inch as he swings a flashlight
around spying for something
…
or them.

“You ain’t heard nothing, ya’ dumb
prick,” someone else says.

This man sounds younger, his
Southern accent as thick as Talia’s.

“I swear I did, so you shut your
mouth, boy,” the first one says angrily.

“You just hearin’ things, old man,”
the other one replies.

“Could be the ones we were lookin’
for,” gravel voice says.

Another man shouts from
further away from the two in the doorway, and the door closes again
with a much louder clang. They wait a moment and then start
descending again in an awkward
lope
since they carry so much of their
supplies that didn’t get
stowed
away properly. They break onto
the first floor, going through a door that takes them through the
back of the
six-story
building to the parking deck. This escape route
was planned last night just in case. More times than she cares to
recall, their ‘just in case’ plans became set into motion because
of
danger
.
She’s learned to sleep with one eye open over the years.

Paige leads the way, climbs over the
cement wall in the parking deck and takes Maddie from Gavin so he
can climb. They run to the next building and rest a
moment.

“Do you think they know we were up
there?” Talia asks quietly.

Paige shakes her head, “I don’t know.
Maybe. If they find our camp-out room, they’ll know because it was
still warm.”