The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 (33 page)

“
Sit rep
on Charlie Tango party,”
Derek returns with more calm than Paige feels.

“Charlie Tango clear. I
repeat, Charlie Tango party all clear. Civilians
wounded,
some
casualties. Send the Hulk to JF1. Rendezvous and reinforcements
ASAP in case of repeat assault,” he says more calmly this
time.

“Roger that, Charlie. Right away. Over
and out,” Derek says and ends the transmission.

Reagan has stepped away,
and Sam and Paige have risen from their low squatting positions.
They all go into the main waiting room of the practice where panic
and chaos has
ensued
and twenty or so people have taken safe refuge.
Women are crying. Children are screaming and crying and clinging to
their mothers. Simon runs through the front door and heads straight
for them. He’s scanning his
surroundings
as if looking for someone.
Her brother seems unusually subdued for what just went down. His
eyes connect with
hers,
and he nods curtly. He’s carrying some sort of
military rifle in front of him pointed toward the floor. He touches
her shoulder briefly but squeezes past her
in
the crowd, scanning.

“Sam!” he calls out.

“I’m here, Simon,” Sam returns and
rushes forward from behind other people.

Her brother hugs the
younger woman fiercely to him. This strikes Paige as unusual.
He’d
told
her how close they are and how they’d been through so much
together. He hadn’t expanded
on
anything beyond that, however. Paige
can only speculate
on
what they’ve been through to make him so
desperately protective of Samantha. Of course, Sam is small and
delicate in nature. She hardly seems capable of taking care of
herself. Paige joins them near the wall where her brother regards
her over Sam’s head which is still stuck to his chest like it’s
been glued there.

“That’s never happened before,” he
tells her.

“Who were they?” Paige
asks.

Other members of the McClane family
join them. Reagan and Doc are flying into motion trying to treat
the innocent victims who’d only come today for medical care, not to
be shot at.

“We’re not sure yet,” Simon
answers.

“Kelly’s on his way
with
back-up
from the Johnson farm,” Sam says when she pulls
away.

Paige notices that she doesn’t
relinquish Simon’s shirt tail.

“We gotta help these
people,” Simon tells them. “Paige, take my rifle. The safety’s on.
Keep it with you for
now
so I can help John carry people
inside.”

He shoves the heavy rifle
into her hands whether she wanted it or not. Guns have always
scared her, but she has been glad that she had one a time or
two
…
or
three or four during the last few years. One time her group hadn’t
been lucky enough to have one. That had by far been their worst
experience together.

“Um, yeah, ok,” Paige answers and
slings the rifle behind her shoulder like she’s seen him do at the
farm. She hopes she doesn’t accidentally shoot herself with
it.

Chet Reynolds rushes into the room
carrying a child. She can’t be more than ten years old. Her long,
single blonde braid is dampened with blood.

“Reagan!” Chet yells. “She’s been hit.
Right shoulder.”

“Come with me,” Reagan says in a rush.
“Sam!”

Samantha races after Reagan
and Chet as they disappear to the back of the clinic. Her brother
has already gone back out the front door and is carrying a woman
who has also
evidently
been shot.
It’s so
surreal seeing him like this.
Her once
youthful, silly kid brother is carrying a woman in his strong,
capable arms.

“Paige,” he calls over to her. “Come
with me.” Paige follows him on legs that quake from the waiting
room where they end up in Exam Room 2.

“Protective gear,” he orders her
firmly. “Set the rifle in the corner.”

He quickly dons a surgical
style gown, rubber gloves, and a face mask. He pulls a
hair
cover out of
a drawer and puts the funny looking cap on.

“Mimic everything I’m doing, sis,” he
states. “We don’t want to risk our own infection or our
patient’s.”

Paige would like to explain
to him that she’s not a nurse, that she has absolutely no
experience with this sort of crap, that she feels like she’s going
to puke her breakfast all over the nice clean floor at the sight of
this woman’s blood. She doesn’t. She
simply
follows his dictate and tries her
best to be helpful
while
their patient gasps and cries
from
pain. The McClanes, of
whom she now fully realizes that her brother is a part of, do not
seem to allow for weakness, hesitation or indecision.

Her brother takes a hypodermic from
the drawer, removes the plastic cap, squirts a tiny amount of
liquid into the air and plunges the needle into the fatty tissue of
the woman’s lower calf area where she’s been shot. She looks to be
in her late fifties and is moaning loudly.

“Morphine, pain blocker,” he explains
patiently. “It will help to relax her and also block pain to the
whole area.”

How the hell is he
so
cool
and
collected? Their practice was just attacked, he ran outside to
return fire, perhaps killed some men, and here he is so steady and
sure.

“Now, Paige, I’m going to need you to
hold her still and mop up the area for me as I go. The bullet’s
lodged in there. It needs to come out. Then we’ll get her stitched
up. All right?”

Paige nods shakily but would like to
tell him “hell no!”

She uses the gauze blotting
pads and clean linens to keep the area as dry as she can while her
brother digs through flesh and muscle and tendons or ligaments or
whatever the hell she’s trying so hard not to look at until he
finally finds the small lead bullet. He places it in the porcelain
sink behind them. Paige
pats
gently at the woman’s wound while swallowing hard.
The poor lady is weeping softly. Paige would like to run from the
damn room. Maybe run all the way back to the farm.

“Got it. It was only a .22 round, so
that’s good. No hollow-point. Not a high caliber large cartridge,”
he notes.

The patient moans loudly
from the
pain
. And no wonder. Her wound seems
deep
and painful. Paige assumes he’s
learned so much about guns and bullet sizes from the Rangers on the
farm. They certainly didn’t grow up shooting guns and hunting in
Arizona.

“Load that syringe,” her brother
says.

It takes a moment to realize he’s
talking to her. “What? I don’t know how to do that!” she whispers
hysterically.

Simon smiles gently behind his mask.
“Ok, sis,” he says.

Then he proceeds
to calmly show her
how to load a shot vial. This time it’s called lidocaine
something or other. She barely has time to read part of the
label.

“Now, Mrs. Parker, I’m
going to administer some stitches, ok? We’ll wait just a minute to
give the shot a chance to kick in. If you start feeling this, let
me
know,
and I’ll hit the wound again with another shot of
lidocaine.”

The woman
mumbles
something
incoherently, leading Paige to believe that she is nearly out.
Apparently that shot of numbing solution had been
powerful
. Either
that or she is in shock. There are cries of pain and agony and
likely grief coming from different areas of the clinic through the
walls of the small building.

Simon says to her, “Make sure she
doesn’t roll off the table, Paige.”

He turns his back to them,
threads a needle, returns to the table and begins carefully yet
swiftly sewing this woman’s small wound together. Paige watches in
amazement as her once bookish brother
sews
an open, gory wound so neatly and
precisely until he has the hole closed.

“See that bottle over there?” he asks
her.

“Um, yes. Got it,” Paige says as she
brings the bottle of disinfecting solution to him. He also treats a
few abrasions on his patient’s knee and left arm where she’d taken
a hard fall on the concrete from the shooting.

“Take a few cotton balls and moisten
them so I can clean the area and get this covered,” he orders
softly, his voice muffled through his cotton face mask.

They work side by
side until the woman’s wound is covered with fresh white
bandaging.
Then Simon helps her down from
the table to escort her out of the room. A nervous young man is
waiting on the other side of the door,
obviously
a relative or friend of
the
patient
.

“If there’s blood on the table, try to
get it cleaned before I come back with another patient,” he tells
her.

She can hear her brother
giving the woman instructions on her wound care as he helps her
down the hall. After he departs with the limping
woman
, Paige
assesses the room. What the shit? There’s
freagin
’ blood everywhere. She
quickly grabs a stack of rags from a box and starts mopping it up.
She’s about halfway through it, when a wave of nausea hits her so
hard that she has to run to the rear exit where she expels her
stomach contents on the gravel behind the building. When she’s
done, she hunches there in the same bent over position taking deep
breaths. A hand on her back startles her, but it’s only
Sam.

Her kind blue eyes smile into hers.
“You all right?”

Paige nods, “Yes, thanks. I’ll be
right back in to help. I’m just not used to seeing that much
blood.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Sam conciliates. “It
takes a while to get used to working here. We’ve never had anything
like this happen, but we’ve seen a lot of bad things over the
years. A lot of shooting victims, too. That seems to be one thing
people haven’t run out of.”

“Bullets?”

“Ways to hurt each other,” Sam
elucidates with sadness.

“Right. I’ll come back inside in just
a moment,” Paige says. Sam just rubs her back another
second.

“Take your time. We’re safe
now. Kelly’s here with three of the Johnson clan. He brought your
friend Talia, too,” Sam says kindly. “Oh and Paige? Don’t come back
in and work with Reagan. She’s a bit abrasive sometimes. She’ll not
tolerate you puking. She’d just say something crude like ‘nut up or
shut up.’ She can be harsh, but we still love her. Trust me, work
with Grandpa or Simon,” Sam says
with
a smile and turns to
leave.

When she feels calm enough, Paige
pushes her braid over her shoulder, goes back inside on shaking
legs, and helps her brother with a little girl who has minor
abrasions and scrapes from the broken glass. Talia is working with
Doc. And they’ve allowed Sam to continue to work with
Reagan.

The anxiety
everyone feels is just slightly subdued by the time they are done
with the girl.
Reagan is called to work
with Doc, and Talia is sent outside. Moments later Simon sends
Paige to join the others in the main lounge. She tries to be
helpful where she can, offering assistance, a blanket to an elderly
woman who is mostly in shock, a lollipop to a small, frightened
child from the stash that Sam gave her to hand out to the children,
and cleaning up glass debris from the windows.

Reagan emerges from the
room where she has been working with Simon and Doc. She and John
are conferring. Kelly stands at the entrance to the clinic,
effectively
blocking the wide doorway. Paige joins Reagan and her
husband.

“He didn’t make it,” Reagan
relays.

“Yeah, I wasn’t sure about that one.
His wound was pretty bad. That makes the death toll three, counting
the woman who was killed out front,” John says. “Kelly and I will
go get him out of Doc’s exam room before he tries to do it by
himself.”

Her husband sprints away with
Kelly.

“What happened?” Sam whispers as she
joins them.

Reagan explains it quietly, “One of
the shooting victims died. He bled out before we could get the
artery sewn.”

“Where’s Simon?” Paige asks
next.

“He’s still with another patient,” Sam
explains.

“It’s gonna be a long day,”
Reagan says and
swipes
a hand through her ponytail. “We still need to
treat the people who came here for help. Cleaning up is going to
take hours today. You two, make sure you take precautions. We don’t
want any germs or blood borne pathogens coming back to the
farm.”