The McClane Apocalypse: Book Two (35 page)

John grabs her arm to halt her and holds his hand up for the stop signal which she readily obeys. He cautiously pushes open the door at the top step and listens, swings right and left before allowing her to follow him. The tacky red carpeting and the movie advertisement posters tells her that they’re in a movie theater. She’d come to this one with Sue once to see a sci-fi flick that had little to no realism to it and had left her disappointed as most motion pictures usually did.

“Window,” he says softly. What the hell is that supposed to mean? She has no idea and gives him a wrinkled-nose, brow-furrowed look. “I need a window. Wanna’ keep an eye on that group. There were too many of them.”

This time Reagan nods in concurrence and follows closely behind him as he leads them to an office that must have belonged to the theater manager. The window John locates faces the same direction of that four-way intersection. He whips out his binoculars in a nanosecond before Reagan can even dig around in her pack to find hers. Where had he had his stashed?

“Do you see them?” Reagan asks impatiently.

“Watch our backs. Watch the door,” he tells her, even though he’d locked it.

“Do you see them, John?” she asks again as her eyes dance with trepidation from the door to the area outside and back again.

“Yeah, I see them. They’re moving south. Looks like eight, maybe ten of them,” he informs her as he continues to scan with one hand on his rifle and the other confidently holding the binoculars.

“Shit,” Reagan replies. “What do we do?”

“Nothing for now. Just sit tight. Make sure they leave. I’m not gonna go running out there with you,” John tells her as he continues to look through his small, compact binoculars.

“Are they armed?”

“A couple look like they are, but most of them just have baseball bats or crow-bars. Couple women are with them. They might not be a threat, but we’re sitting tight here until I’m sure they aren’t coming back,” he tells her and finally lowers the binoculars.

“Ok. That’s fine with me,” Reagan breaths on a sigh of relief.

“They might just be trying to stay alive and not actually looking to pillage and steal from someone,” he adds in a serious tone.

“Great. We should invite them to the farm for a bonfire,” she remarks sarcastically. John chuckles at her and raises the binoculars again. His posture is relaxed, but there is a firm set to his mouth.

“Wanna’ catch a movie?” he asks with one of his trademark smirks, not making eye contact with her but continuing to stare out the tall, dirty window. Guess the window washers took the day or the last six months off.

“Funny,” Reagan remarks as she crosses the room and sits on the executive’s desk. Papers are strewn about in a haphazard fashion, as well as the computer has been smashed, broken to pieces. Tough day at the office.

“You sure? It could be like our first date,” he suggests with a grin.

“I gave your brother about two pints of my blood. I think we’re a little past first date phase,” she quips and searches the desk she’s been sitting on. It’s better than just sitting around doing nothing. John just laughs at her again.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he says as he wanders around the room, also searching things out. “Come this way, Reagan.”

He motions for her to pass through a door with him that leads to another office. They pass through two more offices until they come to the building’s far wall with a corner office view and tall windows.

“This must’ve been some kind of home office for this theater franchise or something. These offices are awfully big if not,” John says as he locks both point-of-entrance doors.

“So no to the movie, huh?” he jests again.

Reagan ignores him and moves to the adjoining storage room, which isn’t much larger than Grams’s pantry back at the farm. She rummages filing cabinets, a locker, and a chest of drawers.

“Sweet!” she exclaims as she comes into the office again where John is back to playing viewfinder while spying on the criminally-minded with his high-tech binoculars.

“Watcha’ got, boss?” he asks without turning.

“Nothing,” she answers cunningly. And she’s not sharing, either.

“Don’t make me come over there,” he says and finally turns to her. Reluctantly, she holds up her loot. “Sweet,
literally
,” John jokes with her.

Reagan grimaces at his joke and, with the letter opener on the desk, splits open the box of movie theater candy in individually packaged single serve pouches. There are small tins of chocolate-covered peanuts, bags of Twizzlers, boxes of Reese’s Pieces and packs of Jolly Ranchers hard candies. It’s a rather heavenly find.

“Now all we need is some popcorn,” John quips as he comes to stand at her elbow near the desk where she’s dumped the stash.

“Yeah, popcorn. That would be good,” she admits, opens a box of the Reese’s and pops three into her mouth. For a moment, she closes her eyes and just savors the candy coating and the soft peanut butter hidden inside. John takes a box of the peanuts and does the same, minus the closed-eye expression.

“Of course, I would’ve brought you flowers and picked you up in my car, not expected you to ride twelve hours by horseback with me to get here,” he is still going on about the movie date night.

“No, you wouldn’t,” she counters smoothly.

“Sure I would have. And I would’ve opened your door for you and come in to meet your grandpa. Then I would’ve taken you for a nice dinner first. What kind of restaurant would you have wanted to go to?” he asks her softly.

She doesn’t like his tone or the way that it seems to have a bizarre effect on her and her breathing and her perception of John as a man.

“It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have gone out with you. So you couldn’t have taken me to dinner or anywhere else for that matter,” she argues.

He just grins. “Oh, you would’ve wanted to. I can tell. You’d have gone out with me,” he argues right back, pissing her off.

He steps closer, making Reagan long to push him away. But for some reason, she doesn’t.

“Get real. I wouldn’t have gone out with you. Quit being so cocky,” she orders, but John only picks up a curl and allows his fingers to brush against her neck. A shiver shoots down her back, but she tries not to acknowledge the reason for it.

“I would have pursued you until you relented. I can be just as stubborn as you, Reagan McClane, and I don’t give up easily, either,” he informs her, as if he needed to at all.

Suddenly, her interest in the candy is forgotten, and the package slips from her fingers to the carpeted floor where it makes a scattered mess of orange, brown and yellow.

“I’m not the kind of person you ever would’ve even asked out,” she tells him. John chuckles close to her ear, so close she can feel his hot breath.

“You have no idea, babe,” he says and finally pulls away. Reagan blinks a few times and swallows hard. “You dropped something.”

She’d like to yell at him, but doesn’t for fear of being heard. She knows damn well that she dropped her candy, and now she’s got an even better reason to be mad at him. He goes back to his window and leaves her to pick up her candy package, which luckily is still mostly full. Damn him anyways. Why the hell does he have to talk like that around her? He has absolutely no interest in her. He probably just hasn’t sewn his oats in a while.

“Finish your junk food, sugar freak. We need to move again and soon. I want to hit that Home Depot store still today, and we’re burning daylight waiting for you to get your sugar on,” he chides her.

Reagan throws a handful of candies at him and successfully hits him in the back of the head with quite a few. He just laughs without turning around to face her. John folds his binoculars in half- which she hadn’t known they did- and sticks them in his cargo pocket on his right thigh. That same thigh she’d seen yesterday. That train of thought isn’t going to help anything, so she shoves it away.

“I’m ready,” she tells him, shakes her head and just tucks the candy into her pocket and the extra boxes into her backpack.

He leads her again into the hallway, and they pass movie poster after movie poster behind glass frames. It is like the wall of fame of movie posters. This is a massive, mega-movie-plex that showed around twenty of the newest movies out on the market. The latest teen heartthrob is starring as a spy of some sorts. Laughable. Another advertises a romantic comedy with the same two stars who were acting in those types of movies three years ago. She knows because it had been the last time she’d gone to a movie and had had to sit through that drivel once already. Some of the titles even strike Reagan as funny because they are advertising some ridiculous, horror plotline or another. Giant, mutated salamanders, serial killers, zombie brides attacking people- what more could a movie goer want? Buxom blondes and lusty-looking brunettes are plastered scantily across the fronts of these posters with all of their assets pushed front and center. John points to one with a particularly crude title and matching redhead on the face of it and raises his eyebrows.

“Look good? Is this the kind you’d want to see?” he teases to which she frowns and cocks her head to the side in anger.

“I think that one’s a little more to your taste,” she blurts before she means to.

“Jealous?” he mocks with a jaunty slant of one eyebrow.

“Get real. Jealous of what?”

“Their huge... IQ’s,” he smirks, and Reagan can barely contain a grin. She does, though, and rolls her eyes instead. He is such a smartass.

“I’m not the one staring at their IQ’s,” she remarks snidely. No wonder he doesn’t stare at hers. She isn’t exactly the most well-endowed woman ever. Her mother and Grams had apparently passed that trait to Hannie.

“I’d rather stare at yours, but I know you’d ball kick me,” he says as they come to the end of the hall.

“No shit. Besides, it’d be a short stare. There’s not much to stare at,” she divulges. Damn. What the hell is wrong with her? Why does she always just say whatever first comes to her mind around John? Apparently he must’ve been a master interrogator for the Army when he’d needed to be.

“Oh, trust me, babe. I could stare all day,” he remarks and turns abruptly to look down at her.

John pauses a few seconds to openly stare and smile at her. He doesn’t, however, stare at her chest, thank God. But he does look her up and down and again. They stand there almost a full minute while Reagan feels highly uncomfortable and wishes she was anywhere else.

“Let’s keep moving before I take you into one of these offices to show you just how perfect I think
all
of your... IQ is.”

Reagan has to close her mouth, which she hadn’t known was open, in order to nod to him. He grins, chucks her under the chin and continues on. He descends the stairs, a different set this time, and she dutifully follows him. At a closed door, John pushes on the bar and releases the catch as it swings inward. His two fingers signal for her to come closer; then he points downward. It is an actual movie theater room with over five hundred seats that recline and hold a giant fountain drink in the cup holder. They have come through the emergency exit at the top of the stairs. They can view the entire, semi-darkened area from here, including the projection room to their left. But that isn’t what he is pointing to. On the floor in front of the stage are tents, many tents. A few people mill about, including a woman and several children who are tossing a ball back and forth while giggling. The woman is cooking something on a campfire stove, the smell wafting up to the rafters where John and Reagan stand unobserved two floors above. There are boxes and crates filled with supplies and large, clear plastic containers that hold what looks like water, probably for drinking.

John presses his hand back against her abdomen, indicating that she should sneak out the exit door and leave this area again. The door shuts again with the faintest click.

“What the hell?” she asks.

“Looks like people are claiming areas of the city to live in like this theater,” he says very quietly, not wanting to attract attention.

She wishes they were still back in that office with the door closed and not in the middle of the damn hallway.

“Weird. Guess they probably lost their homes or something,” she pensively adds.

“Yeah, raided or overrun like the Reynolds. This might’ve been the safest option for them,” he tells her. “But there are quite a few tents down there, and there may be men with that woman or many families living here. I don’t think we should linger. Let’s move toward an exit. We don’t know who all is with those people, and we don’t need to trespass and end up getting into a firefight.”

John leads again and takes her to a dark stairwell. They descend together while John holds the flashlight and his rifle at the ready as they move slowly toward the bottom floor. They are almost to the bottom step when suddenly John swings toward her.

“Back, back,” he whispers frantically, and Reagan sprints to the top of the stairs again.

“What is it?” she asks him, but John ignores her, gives her the “be silent” signal with his finger to his lips and shakes his head. He grabs her arm, and they head down a different hall from the one with the movie posters.

They come to a dead end where an exit sign no longer glows overhead on the door. John pushes it silently open, and they are greeted by blaring sunlight that is at first hard to focus around. He closes the door even quieter. This must’ve been another emergency exit because this isn’t a set of stairs that any company would want their customers or employees to use. It’s metal and narrow like a fire escape on an apartment building.

“There’s nothing to wedge under the door. Go, Reagan. Don’t stop until you get to the ground,” he warns.

She doesn’t need to be told twice and hauls ass down the stairs like the devil is nipping at their heels. And for all she knows, he is. There are a shitload more people moving around in this city than she’d thought. Of course, she and Grandpa had only been in the city for a few hours before getting out of it. When she gets to the bottom, Reagan jumps to the ground, skipping the last step and turning to ascertain John is still with her. He’s a good ten steps above her, moving more slowly and cautiously. He glances behind him from time to time and scans the area on the ground around her.