The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (9 page)

It snowed again, not a lot
luckily, but enough to be annoying. She squats and zips Maddie’s
coat, pulls her hat and mittens from her backpack and tugs those
onto her, too. She says nothing but stares up at Paige with her
pale, greenish-blue eyes filled with an
expectant
fear and an absolute
trust that they will keep her safe. Paige kisses her forehead and
tells her that everything will be
fine
.

“I have to pee-pee, Mommy,” Maddie
says.

“Ok, Maddie,” Paige tells
her. She gets a nod from Talia and Gavin, so she goes over to the
other corner of the building where she assists Maddie and then uses
a small scrap of torn material like they all carry
in bunches in their bags
to help her wipe. Paige
stows
it in a plastic bag to be
washed later. “Better?”

“I’m hungry. Where’s the sun?” she
asks.

“Not up yet, honey,” Paige answers.
“We’ll eat soon. We need to get out to our traps.”

They join up with the other two and
leave the area. Nobody pursues them, thank God. She and Gavin jog
through the woods after leaving Talia and Maddie in a safe
place.

“Gav, do you think those men were
looking for us?”

He shrugs, and Paige can tell that he
doesn’t want to admit it.

“Probably. I guess it’s likely,
Paige,” he says. “They could’ve been looking for anyone
really.”

“Yeah, I guess they could’ve,” she
agrees. She’s not entirely convinced, either. She also trusts no
one.

When they find the traps
that they’d set last night less than a quarter mile outside the
city limits in the forest, they are empty. Not only are they empty
but
simply
gone. The traps had contained dead rabbits or squirrels or
something else because there is blood on the ground. There are also
the innards and guts laying near each
trap,
the blood splattered against the
white snow. There are human footprints in the snow.

“Someone took our
kills
,” Paige says
angrily.

Gavin nods and points to a
place where one trap had connected to a tree. The remnants of four
inches of string
are
still there. Wild animals would’ve eaten the
smaller animals completely and not left a pile of innards. Only a
human would’ve done this. They’ve been robbed.

“Damn!” Paige hisses through her
teeth. They have to feed Maddie. They hadn’t had much for a dinner
last night, either. She needs food. All four of them need
sustenance.

“We have a can of chicken broth,”
Gavin adds, trying to be optimistic.

She regards him with speculation. This
is why she’s come to love him so much. He’s like this tiny little
light of hope in the midst of chaos. Paige reaches over and touches
his forearm gently.

“We need more than chicken broth, my
friend,” she says softly.

They walk back and reunite with Talia
and Maddie behind the cover of a short hill. Paige shakes her head
which lets her friend know what has happened without alerting
Maddie to the direness of their situation.

“I bet it was the guys in the building
this morning,” Talia observes after a moment of
contemplation.

“Why?” Gavin asks. “It could’ve been
anyone.”

“I think Talia’s right,” Paige
concurs. “I wonder if they found our traps and came looking for us
next, thinking we’d have more or have supplies or…”

Gavin’s eyes darken, and he gives a
quick, jerky nod of understanding.

“I want to go spy on them, see if they
have our stuff,” Paige says.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,”
Talia hastily interjects.

“It won’t take me long,” she argues.
“I can probably be back really fast.”

“Let me go instead,” Gavin
suggests.

Paige shakes her head before saying,
“No, Gav. Stay here with them. They could need you, and you know
that I’m faster than you. Plus, you have the gun, and you know I
suck with those.”

“Alright,” Gavin concedes. “But let’s
move and find a new place to hole up where you can meet
us.”

They decide on an abandoned
video store which had
evidently
been
looted
early on, strangely enough.
Many of the racks and shelves are empty, DVD’s and discs scattered
about on the floor or missing from their cases. Interesting. People
with no electricity were worried about stealing movies to watch? In
the rear storage room, they do find a few cartons of boxed candy
which they stash into their packs. Gavin even finds a box
containing twelve unopened packages of microwavable popcorn. This
is a rare find. Most places are completely wiped out, every last
morsel of food looted by people like them who don’t have much of a
choice in the matter.

Paige remembers the sketchy
television broadcasts when the first tsunami struck in America. For
some odd reason, perhaps with forethought or no thought at all,
people in large cities had jumped at the opportunity to loot.
Mostly what they were stealing
were
liquor and cigarettes, but it had
happened within hours of the first disaster. She would’ve never
dreamed people would do something so lascivious in
a bad
situation.
Of course, neither
had she thought anything so horrible could ever happen in her own
country.
When the second one hit, all hell
broke loose. The news feed wasn’t
good
at that point, mostly static. But
what she did see, she wished that she could unsee. It went far
beyond nationwide looting of liquor stores. She never dreamed
people were capable of such atrocities. She’d learned a year later
firsthand how intensely cruel they could really be.

“Stay here,” she tells them, although
she doesn’t need to.

“Take this,” Gavin says, extending the
small gun toward her.

Paige frowns, “You know I don’t do
well with these things. I can’t shoot for shit, Gav. Besides, I’ve
got my knife, and you guys might need this more than me. Just keep
it.”

“Ok, but don’t get too close to them.
Come back when you find out something. We’ll stay here and see if
there’s anything else we can find,” Gavin says.

“Got it,” she says and gives him a
quick hug. Then Paige hugs Talia and Maddie.

She takes most of
her
heavy
things out of her backpack, leaving space in it for anything
useful she might come across. Paige heads out, pulling her stocking
cap low, jogging through the desolate city where a pin could be
heard dropping. She and Gavin take turns doing runs like this. It’s
easier than all of them going, and Talia was sick last fall and
hasn’t had the lung strength she used to. Paige believes that her
damage is permanent, but she’d never tell her friend this. She lets
her hope. It doesn’t make a big difference in the matter of someone
going on runs. One of them would still need to stay with Maddie no
matter what, and Talia is simply better at keeping her quiet than
Paige.

She takes off at a slow pace, winding
back around to the office building where they’d set up camp last
night. An older woman, bundled in many layers of mismatched
clothing, pushes a metal shopping cart down a side street. Paige
shakes her head and keeps going.

Her feet are starting to get wet,
soaking through the distressed leather of her ankle boots as she
carefully trudges through three inches of melting snow. That’s the
least of her concerns. It would be nice to find a new pair of shoes
for each of them somewhere in this city. Items like that are even
rarer than microwave popcorn. She hadn’t expected this town to be
as big as it is, or was. She tugs her stocking cap down lower, her
collar up higher and ventures forth.

Climbing back over the
cement wall to the parking garage’s first floor where
important
executives would’ve parked, Paige sprints to the entrance
door. After a hasty search of the first floor and back up to where
they’d
slept
, she realizes that the pre-dawn intruders are gone. Out the
front door and down the street, staying close to the building
fronts, she jogs and hears men’s voices and an engine in the
distance, perhaps three blocks away.

She keeps to the buildings
but has to cross the street in a rather large intersection. Paige
runs low to the ground and takes cover
behind
a car that has been tipped
onto its side. Not seeing anyone yet, she
runs
to another building where she
climbs through the broken window. It’s a medical clinic, an urgent
care perhaps. Looking around briefly, she realizes that there won’t
be any medical supplies left. No point in doing a search of the
place. The back part of the building where supplies like that
would’ve been kept is burned out which exposes the brick wall of
the building behind it. She ducks behind the front window and pulls
out her binoculars. They aren’t that great, but they are better
than nothing.

She spots them near
a
warehouse,
a dilapidated
two-story
with many broken windows. It’s less than a mile
from where Paige and her friends had chosen to camp out last
night.
They were so close, and none
of her group even knew those men were out there.

They have a dark blue sedan
running, waiting out front for them. Two of them seem to be
arguing. One man shoves another, and the fight is broken up by two
more who join the scene. Paige is too far away to hear what they
are saying. Their group is probably close to a hundred or more
yards from her. So
far,
she’s counted four men but no others. There could
be more inside of the former manufacturing facility. She decides to
creep closer. To avoid being seen, she runs behind the buildings
and comes
in to
the rear of theirs.

The outside fire escape provides the
perfect place to view the area down below inside the plant. She
climbs the rusty metal stairs and peers inside a window. Only one
man remains. The other three have taken off in the vehicle
together. They have a ragtag camp of their own, but to Paige, it
seems permanent.

She climbs through a broken
window on the second story and
tiptoes
closer, careful not to bump into
anything that would alert him to her presence. There are huge
machines below
her,
though she has no idea what they would be used
for. This place seems as if it had closed down long before the
apocalypse happened. Everything has the patina of rust, old grease,
or just plain cobwebs and dust. She waits patiently, takes out her
binoculars again and spies silently.

She sees two rabbits on the
cement floor near their campfire which is burning at a
fairly
steady
capacity. These men are obviously not afraid of being seen, which
means they are always on the offensive and armed. No other men come
out of the shadows. It’s just her and the man below her in the
center of the warehouse floor.

She turns and walks quietly
to the end of the raised walkway, trying not to make noise on the
grated steel floor beneath her feet. Paige sneaks down the open
stairway and hides a moment behind
a large
machine with greenish-colored
paint that has faded and chipped with the passage of time. It looks
like a pizza oven like she’s seen at pizza shops, but she knows it
isn’t. She is about to pull her knife but spots a three feet long
piece of pipe with a threaded end. Perhaps this is what they used
to manufacture here. She doesn’t know, but she does pick it up,
feeling the weightiness of it in her hand. The pipe is heavy duty
steel.

Using the machines that are
mostly taller than her, she secrets down an aisle and comes in
behind the man, who has now resorted to bending over tending his
fire. He turns toward
her
and Paige ducks behind the big rusted piece of
equipment beside her. She counts to five,
peeks
and finds him with his back
to her again. There is a shotgun, or at least that’s what she
thinks it is, leaning against a
cot
that resembles the ones she’d
slept
on in many
FEMA camps in the beginning. There are four of them placed in a
circle around the fire. Apparently there are only four men as she’d
suspected. And three of them are gone, which is
fortuitous.

It’s now or never, and this
man has her rabbits which she needs to feed to Maddie. She takes a
deep breath and sprints toward him almost soundlessly. The clubbing
she gives him over the back of his skull isn’t soundless. It’s
almost
deafening,
the thud in the empty building sickening to her
ears. He falls forward almost landing in the fire. She doesn’t
pause to help him. She grabs her rabbits, stuffs them into her bag.
She turns to go but sees other items they could use. Paige takes a
small sack of rice, half empty. Then she grabs two cans of corn and
the shotgun. She doesn’t take their other food items, which she’s
sure are in the boxes and crates scattered about the room. It’s not
because she doesn’t want to. It’s because she hears the squealing
of tires as the unconscious man’s friends have returned.