The McClane Apocalypse Book Five (46 page)

The car
trolls
past them, pausing again. Simon slides the
sniper rifle up closer to his shoulder in case he needs it. Then
the other car disappears from sight and progresses back up the ramp
toward other floors or the exit. He’s not sure where it’s going,
but he also doesn’t care. He needs to get them out of this
basement. He needs to get Samantha to safety. Simon exhales his
held breath and sits up fully again, adjusting his seat lever and
then Sam’s.

“Do you think they saw us?” Sam asks with
fear in her soft voice.

“I don’t know, but we’re not stickin’ around
to find out,” Simon tells her and starts the vehicle.

“Who were they?” she asks as she starts
packing away their gear.

“No idea. Could be looking for someone. Could
be dangerous or just someone looking for gas,” he estimates.

“Where are we going?”

“Let’s pull around to the back of the
hospital and we’ll go in through there. I’ll find another place
over there to stash the car,” he explains. “I don’t want us to
leave the car here in case they come back and find our stuff. They
could also take it if they know how to hotwire this thing.”

He puts the SUV in reverse just as the sound
of squealing tires reaches his ears. Soon, the same headlights come
careening back down the ramp toward them. This time they aren’t
trolling. They’ve spotted them or noticed their lights.

“It’s them again!” Sam nearly yells.

“Put on your seatbelt,” Simon orders as he
slams the SUV into drive.

He maneuvers the vehicle out of the way just
in the nick of time before the other car would’ve crashed into them
and prevented their escape. This time as the car passes them, Simon
gets a better look at the driver and his passenger. It appears to
be just two people, a man and a woman. They look desperate. He’s
not waiting around to find out. The woman in the passenger seat had
a shotgun.

He speeds out of the hospital parking deck,
nearly ramps the exit onto the street. The big SUV slams into the
pavement. Simon takes a hard left heading north.

“We’ve gotta lose them,” Simon tells her.

“There they are!” Sam exclaims, looking over
her seat and out the wide back window.

Simon maneuvers the cumbersome vehicle
around an abandoned truck that is flipped onto its side in the
middle of the road. He has to use the sidewalk to get around it.
He’s driving at a fast speed for all the debris that’s in the way.
Sam squeals as he bounces the SUV back
onto
the road. They both get tossed around along
with the items in the trunk. He’s glad she has on her seatbelt. He
hooks a right and revs the engine to pick up the pace. A trashcan
in the road gets plowed through, sending old newspapers and trash
into the air. Some of it lands on the car behind them.

“What do they want?” Sam cries.

Simon doesn’t answer her. There’s
no
good
answer to offer if these
people are in such hot pursuit of them. He just keeps going,
swerving around a motorcycle on its side and then a semi-truck
taking up most of the four lanes of the road.

“Sam, open your window and send a few
rounds
downrange
. We need to
scare them off,” he tells her.

Before he even has the words out,
Simon
spies
in the rearview
mirror as the driver, a large man, sticks a pistol out his window
and fires a shot at them first.

“Get down!” he yells and pushes her
head toward her knees. Damn. The
shot
doesn’t hit their vehicle. At least he doesn’t think it did,
but he can’t be too sure. “Sam, I need you to drive. I’m gonna need
to take them out.”

Simon hates this. He hates having her in
danger, and he hates hurting people. Why couldn’t they have just
left them alone?

“Oh goodness,” his little companion
frets.

“Just climb over here onto my lap and switch
places, honey,” he orders calmly, although he feels nothing that
even comes close to calm.

“Oh goodness,” she repeats but unhooks her
seatbelt.

“You’re fine,” he reassures her as he whips a
hard right and picks up speed again. He doesn’t want that man
shooting at them again. If he gains enough speed, he’s pretty sure
the distance between them will deter the other man or his partner
from taking another wasteful shot.

Sam pushes up the center arm-rest and
slides over closer to him. He hands her his sniper rifle, which she
promptly
lays
on the vacant
passenger seat. Then she climbs onto his lap carefully. It’s a good
thing she’s small. Simon takes one hand off the wheel and covers
her head with it. He knows it’s a stupid
thing
, but he feels like he could stop a bullet
from hitting her there if the other people shoot at them
again.

“Take the wheel,” he orders softly and she
does. “Steady.”

He scoots out from under her, peeking in the
mirror as he does so. They’ve lost some speed during the switch and
now the other people are closing in on them again.

“Make a left up ahead,” he tells her.

“I’m not that good of a driver, you
know,” she complains
at
him.

Simon almost grins. John had taught her
and then Huntley to drive on the farm because she’d never had the
opportunity to learn before the apocalypse. His own mother had paid
for him to take a driving course
at
an expensive school in Arizona. His father had thought
it
necessary
for Simon to
understand the concept of defensive driving being a senator’s kid.
His father had a few death threats against him over the years.
Paige had gone through the same thing. But Sam’s not exactly ready
for a high-speed chase while being shot at.

“You’re doing fine. Just try to keep it
steady and don’t jerk the wheel. I need a clean couple of shots,”
Simon tells her.

He climbs over the seat with his rifle and
then over the second row, as well. When he gets to the back row of
seats where he and Sam usually sit, he pries open the half window
above the tailgate. He hopes it doesn’t break from being left open
while they are zigzagging around town. Something like that would
not be replaceable.

Sam cries out and yells, “Oh, Simon, hold
on!”

They hit something in the road, and the right
side of the SUV skids against something just briefly. The sound of
metal scraping against metal assaults his ears.

“Oops! Sorry,” she calls back.

He has no idea what she’s run into, but Simon
also doesn’t dwell on it. He takes a deep breath as another shot is
fired from the other car. He thinks it hits the driver’s side
mirror because Sam screams.

“You ok?” he shouts.

“Yes, it didn’t hit me. It just hit the
mirror.”

“Keep it steady, Sam. I’m taking aim,” Simon
calls out to her calmly.

He pokes the silencer-equipped barrel
of his rifle through the open window and sights in on the driver of
the black car. He has shot moving targets before, but the man has
figured it out that he’s after him and is swerving recklessly all
over the road. This isn’t just leading a moving target. This
target
is like shooting at an
intoxicated person behind the wheel. Simon takes aim and squeezes,
blasting through their windshield. He’s missed both of them. The
woman yells out her window at him. He’s pretty sure it’s not much
more than swearing. It’s certainly not a friendly
greeting.

Sam
swerves
something in the road which throws him onto his side. He
rights himself as another shot is fired from the other vehicle.
This time it sounds like it has hit their bumper. The sound is
different this time, too. The woman has fired the shotgun and is
hanging half out of the passenger side window.

Simon pulls the rifle erect again and
steadies his shot. He takes a faster aim this time and fires. He
hits the driver dead center to the chest. Another quick succession
shot and he’s hit him in the right shoulder. Their vehicle skids,
spins hard to the right and crashes into a building with a brick
façade. It hits very hard because of their high rate of speed and
not having time to apply the brakes.

Sam slows down to a crawl. He knows
for
certain
that he’s killed the
driver, but he isn’t sure if the woman survived the crash. Smoke is
billowing out of the mangled hood and front end of the disabled
car.

“Stop,” Simon tells her.

They sit there in the middle of the road for
a moment waiting for movement from the other car.

He whispers in repetition, “Don’t get
out.”

Finally the woman stumbles from the car. And
she isn’t happy to have lost her partner or husband or whatever he
was to her.

“Damn it,” Simon swears.

She comes out cursing and shooting at
them with the shotgun. Simon hates to do it, but he takes her out.
These moments weigh on his
conscience
at night when the day is over, the work is done, and he’s
alone with his own thoughts. When he’s not thinking about Samantha,
he’s thinking about murdering people and whether or not he’ll ever
find God’s forgiveness for what he’s done. He also wonders what his
mother would think of the person he’s become. She was a genteel,
sweet woman. She was so much like Sam. They would’ve gotten along
great. She only ever thought of others and was of a kind
disposition. He’s not so sure she would be proud of his latest
accomplishments, of the lives he’s taken, of the people he’s killed
in cold blood. These are the moments of his life for which he is
ashamed.

He lowers the gun and signals with his hand
for Sam to keep driving. After a few moments, he shuts the rear
window and joins her in the front again.

“Pull over,” he tells her. “Up there in that
cemetery, Sam.”

They are in a relatively remote area. A
cemetery is always a desolate place, even after the world falls
apart. However, they look differently than they used to. The grass
is as high and unkempt as it is on the great plains of the West. A
few of the tombstones have even fallen over. She pulls in, going
quite a distance around the lot until she finds a place to park
behind a long row of mausoleums, where some douchebag has thrown
buckets of red and yellow paint on the sides. They even left the
empty paint cans. She cuts the engine and sits back
with
a deep sigh.

“I’ll be right back,” Simon tells her and
hastily exits the truck.

He
darts
quickly
behind one of the tombs and vomits. He knows
it isn’t from the bumpy, fast ride through the city but from the
fact that he had to shoot a woman. Again. Damn it.

Sam comes up behind him as he stands
straight again and wordlessly hands him a piece of cloth. Then she
hands him her bottle of water to rinse out his mouth. He
swigs
a few times and spits, thankful
for the clean, minty taste. She rubs his back
soothingly.

“I’m sorry you had to do that, Simon,” she
tells him with sincere sympathy.

“I was hoping she’d stop, that she’d just
stay in that car,” he admits with regret edging through his voice.
“Why couldn’t she have stayed in the car, Sam?”

“I know,” she says and rubs his back some
more.

The rain clouds that have been threatening to
unleash a downpour final open up to replenish the earth.

“She looked like someone’s grandmother,”
Simon confesses and turns to face her.

“She didn’t look like my grandmother.
My grandma wore cardigans with flamingoes on them and had white
hair and smelled like cookies. That woman looked
crazy,
like she was on drugs or
something.”

“I think she was,” Simon agrees. “Maybe they
were cooking homemade drugs or alcohol. Her eyes were insane.”

Sam’s bright blue eyes stare up into his with
concern, “I know. I saw her, too. I don’t know why they did that.
They were definitely going to kill us. Maybe for our vehicle or for
our guns.”

Simon interrupts her, “Or for you, Sam. And
that’s not going to happen. That’s never going to happen again. I
promise you that. I’ll kill every person in this godforsaken city
if I have to.”

“I know,” she answers
simply
.

The rain coming down picks up in intensity
and volume. Simon rests his hand against her soft, pale cheek. He
tries to focus on her wet skin and trusting eyes and not the dirt
and grime and gunpowder residue on his fingers. The temperature is
dropping fast.

“Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe,” he
promises.

“I know,” she repeats. She closes in on his
personal space and hugs Simon. “I’ll keep you safe, too.”

Simon
chuffs
softly and nods. She leads him back to the
Suburban, this time getting in on the passenger side and leaving
the driver’s position for him. He starts the SUV and cranks up the
heat for her. The last thing he needs is Sam getting
sick.

“You did pretty well, Miss Samantha
Patterson, for not
really
knowing
how to drive. Well, not in a high-speed chase around a
post-
apoc
city,” he praises as he
locks the doors after they are seated. He checks the rearview
mirror quite a few times.

“Thanks,” she says. “I used to watch action
movies with my dad, so I think it must’ve rubbed off. I’m probably
gonna be the next Steve McQueen.”