The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (30 page)

“Poor Gavin,” Sam
sympathizes. She’d never
seen
her family’s bodies, either. The
McClane family had buried them for her.

“He took it really hard. I
guess he was really close
with
his dad. He was depressed for
weeks. Talia and I had to do the foraging. I even shot a
deer,
and the two
of us girls skinned and gutted it. We found canned food in some of
the flooded homes, too. And then from there, we heard about a group
that was headed to the Northeast. So we figured it was probably a
good idea to join up with a
group
. They had three buses, and two
Army trucks that were leading the way. At that point, I think the
military fell apart, and the men left their posts.”

“That’s probably
about
right;
summertime is when the men showed up here,” Reagan
says.

Paige tries to offer a smile, but it
comes off as morose.

“The
men
leading us were Marines.
They said they didn’t have family. They just wanted to help people.
There were four of them, very kind men. They were trying to reunite
people with their families up north. None of us three felt it was a
good idea to set out on our
own,
and since that group was
going,
and the
opportunity was there, we took it. Our caravan was attacked in
northern Virginia, though. We spread out, and everyone got
separated. It was a mess. The military men went into an all-out
battle with these really violent people. They were organized, not
just a few looters. We didn’t stick around. We learned to keep
moving. We hit the ground running. Literally. We walked for a few
days until we found an abandoned car. Talia’s family’s home was
inland in Jersey, so we felt like maybe we’d have better luck
finding hers. We made it to her sister’s house, but she was gone.
Nobody was there. She didn’t leave any information on where she
went with her son. Talia’s brother-in-law was in Thailand when it
all hit, so we know he never made it home. But her sister was just
gone. We talked to a neighbor, and they told us they saw her pack
everything into her SUV and leave. Maybe she was coming south to
find Talia, but we’ll never know. Her mother was in a nursing home,
so we went there next. She was only in her early fifties, but
she’d
had
a
stroke the year before. I guess it was
really bad
, and she was put into a
care facility. Her parents were divorced, and her dad was in
England when it all happened. She never made contact with him,
either. We had Talia wait outside the nursing home for us. Gavin
and I went in. Everyone was dead. The staff was long gone. Most of
the patients looked like they starved to death or died from not
having whatever medicines they needed. The staff must’ve left the
nursing home months before we got there. We found her, but she was
long gone. She must’ve died right after it all started.”

Paige’s eyes take on a
haunted appearance as she remembers whatever that
nursing
home had
looked like. Sam regards Reagan, who frowns with understanding. Sam
can’t even imagine the horrors that Paige has seen in the last
three years. Paige shivers and rubs her arms.

“Where’d you go from there? I mean
that was a long time ago,” Reagan asks.

“By then it was almost winter, so we
knew we couldn’t keep traveling with Maddie in the winter. She was
still just a baby then remember,” Paige says.

“What did you do?” Sam asks. Simon’s
sister has a lifetime of stories to tell from her cross-country
venture.

“We ended up in an
abandoned farmhouse that year. We only made it to the border of
Pennsylvania and West Virginia. We didn’t know it was going to be
such a rough winter. There was firewood in the barn and even some
canned goods like you guys
have
in your cellar. Well, not
quite
that
much,”
she says
with
a grin.

“Really? What the hell happened to the
people who lived there?” Reagan asks bluntly.

“Um, I’m not really sure,”
Paige answers honestly. “There were dead animals in their
barns;
chickens
were still running around the barnyard. That was actually good
because we were able to have eggs. Never collected eggs from a
chicken coop before. That was interesting. When we first got there,
there were eggs all over that place; in the barn, in the hay mound
in the top of the barn, even in the stalls. We ate them, but we
didn’t even know if they were still good. We were that hungry. We
also never built fires in a fireplace for heat, either. We all
three learned a lot that year. Gavin and I went looting for us,
too. We both got
very good
at being quiet and sneaky. We’d bring back bags of
food, canned goods mostly. There weren’t any more rescue camps or
centers to go to at that point, so we were on our own.”

“Yeah, I was a city slicker for all
intents and purposes before the apocalypse, too, Paige,” Sam says.
“I have learned a lot of new skills since then.”

“Yes, I suppose we all have,” she
agrees. “The owners of the farm maybe went out for supplies and
were killed. I don’t know.”

“Or maybe they left looking for their
family somewhere else in the country,” Reagan says. “Our neighbors,
the Johnsons, did that. But then they came back.”

Paige shrugs and says,
“Perhaps. Who knows really? But most times I’d go with Gavin and
let Talia stay with Maddie. We found enough food and supplies to
make it through that first winter by raiding homes in the area that
were deserted. One night some men came there. Luckily our fire had
burned out. We could tell
immediately
that they were up to no
good. They came
in
the first floor of the house, kicked in the door.
We were upstairs sleeping, but we heard their loud truck pull down
the long drive. Saw the three of them get out of the cab. They knew
we were there. There were signs of life on the first floor like
empty jars, baby bottles in the sink, a smoking freaking fireplace.
We yelled down the stairs at them to leave. They kept trying to
talk to us like they weren’t a
threat,
like we could just all live
there together. It got heated very quickly. Then one of them got
mad and shot his pistol up the stairwell at us. Little did they
know, though, that we’d found two old guns in a gun cabinet in the
master bedroom. It looked like there were a lot of other guns there
at one time. About a
month
before those men showed up, we’d figured out how
to load them. Gavin and I took some time to familiarize ourselves
with them. Even shot a few rounds each to practice out behind the
barn. The worst part about that night was dragging their dead
bodies back out of the house. They were big men,
heavy
.”

Sam’s eyes widen at the realization of
what she is hearing. She can just imagine the fear they must’ve
felt, the fear and desperation they lived day in and day out. She
doesn’t comment, but naturally Reagan does.

“So you guys killed three men? Have
you killed any other people?”

“A few,” Paige answer
honestly. She shakes her head with forlorn memories. “We
stayed
there
the rest of that first winter until we felt like we could get
moving again. Then we walked until we could find a vehicle to use.
Gas was harder to find than a car. We crossed farther into
Pennsylvania and finally ran into a caravan of people. It was safer
to be with them. They were
good
people. Travel was really slow. You
gotta understand. Sometimes we were lucky to make it twenty miles a
day. We were always stopping for a lot of different reasons; gas
scavenging, cars or vans breaking down, food and supplies
runs.”

“I can’t imagine,” Reagan says,
furrowing her brow.

Paige sighs heavily. “We
stopped at a big camp in Ohio. And then we hit sickness. I don’t
know what the hell it was. People were puking, fevering, had
horrible rashes. The group’s plan was to continue all the way
through and go to Colorado. We were going to head south and leave
them because we knew we needed to get here. They’d
heard
there was
power out West. None of us made it further than the border of Ohio
and Pennsylvania. It was bad. There was a small hospital there that
was trying to run an emergency medical facility to help people. I
think most of the people there weren’t even doctors or nurses. They
were just people from that small city who were trying to help each
other. We shouldn’t have stopped. But some of the people in our
group were tired of being on the move and wanted to rest and hole
up for a few weeks to gather supplies. Some of them felt like we
should try to help the sick ones there.
Well,
that didn’t work out so well.
There were twenty-seven of us when we got there. I convinced Talia
and Gavin to leave within the first week. We lost seven people in
our group. Whatever the sickness was, it was killing people that
fast. They were having seizures and
…
”

Her voice drifts off, and she doesn’t
restart her tale of horror. Her story reminds Sam of the sickness
that had struck down her traveling companion-captors. She still
can’t reconcile in her mind that the wretched people she hated
within that group hadn’t contracted the illness, but that Huntley’s
young twin brother had and had also succumbed to it.

“We saw the pneumonic
plague hit here,” Reagan recounts. “But that doesn’t sound like
what you saw up north. That
sounds
like some sort of fast moving
virus. Sometimes prolonged high fevers can cause seizures.
Something pretty damn deadly to kill people so quickly,
too.”

“No kidding,” Sam agrees.

“There was a veterinarian working
there that said he thought it could be typhoid fever, whatever that
is. I mean I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really know what it
is.”

“Hm, maybe,” Reagan says
thoughtfully. “It’s usually spread
through
contaminated food or water. It
will spread through third world villages quickly because they are
all drinking and eating from the same source of contamination. It’s
not all that deadly, unless, of course, you don’t have the right
antibiotics to treat it.”

“Yeah, they didn’t have
anything to treat it. They were just trying to keep the sick people
hydrated
…
”

“Well, there you go,” Reagan states.
“If they continued to drink the contaminated water, then of course
they weren’t going to get any better.”

“We left in the middle of
the night. Gavin went into the hospital and stole some medical
supplies for us, especially for Maddie in case she got sick. It
wasn’t much. A few aspirin tablets and a tiny bottle of
little
kid
Tylenol. We stopped down below Columbus, Ohio next.”

“That’s where I went to college,”
Reagan offers and then furrows her brow.

“Yeah, Simon told me that
you did. Sorry, but there’s not much left of that town. We stopped
at another settlement below Columbus and stayed there for a few
weeks. At that
point,
it was getting harder to find food and clean
water. This settlement was homes,
tents
and campers all in a small town.
They were
nice
people. They welcomed us in. Most other established
communities did not.”

“That’s terrible,” Sam
says.

Paige vehemently shakes her
head. “No, it’s understandable.
It
was so dangerous.
I don’t blame any of them
at all.”

“Where did you go after that?” Sam
asks.

Paige toys with the leather
strings on her wrist before answering, “We tagged along with
another caravan going down route 77 south. We ended up staying with
them for the winter in
Kentucky,
which was a hell of a lot
easier than the winter up farther north.”

“No shit,” Reagan swears,
getting a smile of all white, straight teeth from Paige. “I hated
those
freagin
’ Ohio winters. They were a whole shitload harder than
here.”

Sam recalls how she used to ride
during the winter with her best friend and teammate from her riding
academy. She never minded the weather back then. Snow and cold
weather were the least of her worries in her former life. She never
worried about much of anything other than winning at a riding
event. Her life had been sheltered and protected from the harshness
outside of it. She was always just happy to be out riding or
spending time with her family.

“There wasn’t a lot
for
food at that
point. It took everyone working together in that whole group to
scavenge and produce food. Gavin and I decided we needed to leave.
Talia wanted to stay. She liked the security, but we took a vote
and left. Gavin’s
great
with his bow, too. We found a lot of books at
a
bookstore
about what plants you can eat in the wild. We would’ve starved
after that without those books.”