The McClane Apocalypse: Book Two (46 page)

John dismounts carefully so as not to bump Jacob’s face against the saddle horn and leads his horse to a pipeline where he ties her. Reagan does the same with both of hers and stretches and arches her back. She unhooks the food bag and cooler from her saddle, and John takes his rifle and the rolled blanket from behind his own and spreads it on the gravel base around an oil tank. This makes for a great cover should any marauders come through. Although John doubts that there are any ATV enthusiasts out and about anymore, there could still be thugs who will start roaming out of the bigger cities for hunting game... or people.

Reagan drops onto her knees on the small blanket and unpacks food from the bag while John unharnesses Jacob from his chest. He places the little guy on his bottom beside him where John is squatting using his rifle for support. There is barely enough room for all three of them and the food on the same blanket, so John half squats in gravel, whether Reagan knows it or not. First, she mixes another disgusting protein shake with some water and puts it in Jacob’s new sippy-cup which he greedily sucks from, almost falling over backward. John catches him at the last second and sets him back upright. Reagan hands him a sandwich and a vitamin-infused water.

“Thanks. It’ll be good to get back home. This trail food is starting to suck,” he says as he tears into his peanut butter and jam sandwich.

It is a foregone conclusion that his small traveling companion who has no regard for food will be sharing hers with the baby, which she does. Jacob tosses aside his cup and crawls on all fours toward Reagan where he kneels and balances himself on her leg and babbles in between tiny bites that she tears for him.

“Yeah, no shit. I’m actually missing Grams making me eat breakfast when all I wanna’ do is get my morning run in,” she laments.

“Language!” he jokes and gets a scowl in return from her.

“Get real, he can’t even talk yet. How’s he know what we’re saying?” she asks. John notices that she’s feeding most of the sandwich to the baby and hardly eating anything.

“It doesn’t matter. He’s learning. You can eat your other granola bar since he probably can’t,” he reminds her and gets a glare this time.

“Thanks, Dad. Maybe not everyone needs to eat as much as you. Did you ever think of that? Why is everyone always trying to make me eat more? I weigh a hundred and sixteen on a good day, and you weigh like two hundred, so...”

“Hey! That wasn’t very nice. I don’t weigh two hundred pounds, geesh.”

“Well, whatever you weigh then. It’s not the same as me, regardless, so I don’t need to consume as many calories as you do. Plus, genius, you do more physical labor at the farm, so you need to have more calories per day than me to equal out to the amount of work. It’s simple science, duh. If I ate as many calories as you, I’d weigh the same as you and look like a heifer. The height to weight ratio is a little different between the two of us,” she says as a matter of fact.

“Yeah, that would suck being so short,” he reflects honestly, staring off into the distance. A pebble hits him in the side of the head, but he ignores her as he keeps a keen eye on the horizon and the wooded area around them.

“Ouch!” she almost shouts.

“What? Karma kicking your butt?” John asks as he turns back to her.

“No, damn it! He about took my finger off. He’s got some sharp ass teeth in there. Be careful when you feed him. It’s like feeding a damn piranha,” she swears, and her tone scares Jacob who starts to pucker, his lower lip trembling.

“Ssh, don’t fuss. It’s ok,” she coos softly. Even her voice is soothing, though also sexy to John. Reagan rubs the top of the baby’s head with affection, if not a bit roughly. It’s a rare thing to see, and Jacob is instantly soothed by her gentle touch. Lucky kid. Then she laments, “Damn, that hurt!”

“There you go with the cussing again,” he points out, knowing it will peeve her.

“You’re not the one who almost lost a finger,” she says in a huff, holding up her hand to show him.

John takes her hand in his and examines her extremely small index finger which is a good inch or so shorter than his own. There’s a tell-tale, red indention after the first knuckle from Jacob’s tooth. He suppresses a laugh.

“I can imagine with your little fingers. Grizzly bear would have to gnaw at these to get one off,” he says as he holds up a hand toward her which makes her frown.

“Hey, you’ve got blood on your palm. Did you cut yourself?” she asks and he turns his hand over to inspect it.

“Hm, yeah, must’ve I guess. It’s dried up, though. Think it’s ok,” he calculates which makes her frown harder and pull his hand closer for further examination. He’s hardly going to argue if she wants to touch him, though. It’s rare that she does, and he has come to look forward to these stolen moments with her.

“I don’t know. This looks kind of deep. It should at least be irrigated and bandaged, John,” she says in her serious doctor tone. Why does it pang in his gut when she uses his name? Likely because she rarely does and isn’t calling him something scathing for a change. “Watch him and I’ll get my bag.”

John just sighs because he knows that she’s just going to do it anyway whether he wants her to or not. Jacob immediately starts getting whiny either at the loss of Reagan or at the loss of her food, which he’s nearly consumed. John shares the rest of his sandwich with the baby, and he instantly quits his fussing. Reagan is still digging out her doctor kit and re-tying Harry who has managed to wiggle just loose enough to chomp grass near where they are secured.

John picks up the baby and lets him bounce on his chubby legs on his lap. He’s done this many times with Justin and Ari on the rare times that he could go home to visit with Derek and Sue. Funny, he’d never seen or met Reagan before coming to the farm. If he had, he’d not have rushed off to fight in another stupid war so readily. He would have aggressively pursued her until she relented to go out with him. And if that would’ve failed, he may have had to just kidnap her in the middle of the night.

He’d met Hannah once about four years earlier when she had been visiting with Sue, but it was just very briefly when he had rolled through Fort Campbell base in Kentucky on twenty-four hour furlough. The next morning, he’d joined back up with Kelly and their unit and had been shipped off to the Sudan to hunt down and kill a terrorist leader, which they had. Jacob’s giggle of glee brings him back to the present.

“He’s probably gonna puke on you,” she says as she kneels beside him and opens her bag.

“Nah, he promised he wouldn’t. Look, he likes this. Watch his crazy legs. They crack me up,” John says and laughs heartily when Jacob’s spindly legs give out and then jump and spring back into bouncy action up and down on John’s thighs.

“How am I supposed to clean your hand if you’re playing with him?” she waits impatiently with her cotton ball and fluid, tilting her head to one side. If she had been standing, John believes her toe would also be tapping.

“Ok, all right. Sorry, dude. The boss needs me to stop. You’ll learn, best not to argue with her. You never win,” John says jokingly as he sets the baby on the blanket again. He crawls over to the food pack and starts getting into everything. Hopefully it’s just all harmless packages in there. Knowing Reagan, though, there’s probably a dagger hidden in the bottom.

“Hold still,” she complains when he flinches at the stinging liquid she’s using to clean the wound with. No wonder he hadn’t told her about it.

“You know we gotta talk,” John tells her as he watches Jacob try to put just about every object from the bag into his mouth.

“‘Bout what?” she asks with little interest as she finishes irrigating the cut on his palm. She reaches behind her and rummages for bandaging all the while still holding his hand in hers.

It’s times like these when John is around Reagan that he can glimpse into the life that would’ve been hers. She would’ve gone on to be some brilliant doctor scientist who discovered cures to diseases and probably would’ve eventually married another super brain doctor. He’s glad she didn’t have that life, and he realizes it’s just for his own selfish reasons because he would’ve never met or gotten to know her at all. Reagan has changed his outlook on so many things, women mostly and relationships more importantly. He’d never have thought in a million years that someone like her even existed, but here she is in all her tiny glory and she’s changed his life in so many ways, though she is completely unaware of this fact.

“About the monkey,” he explains, referring to Jacob. “‘Bout us,” he adds, and she knows that this time it isn’t about Jacob. She doesn’t even question to what he is implying.

“What about him?” she asks, ignoring the second reference as she turns back and blows on his hand to get the cleaning solution to dry before she can apply antibiotic cream. John knows with absolute certainty that she has no idea how sensual it feels or, for that matter, looks.

“We kind of told his mom that we’d raise him together, remember? Don’t you think we should talk about that?” he asks, wondering what she’ll say in response. With her, he just never knows. She does momentarily stop blowing against his palm, but she refuses to meet his gaze.

“So?”

“I tend to honor my promises, and I intend to do the same for this one. If I make a promise, then I keep it. If I take an oath, then I stick to it. She asked us to raise Jacob as our son, and I think we need to talk about it, boss,” he tells her.

“I don’t,” she argues without much of an argument. She sets a small cotton pad against his hand and then wraps his entire palm with white gauze and tape. The bleeding was very light. “It won’t need stitched when we get back. I’ll just tape it.”

“One more scar, right?” he says, repeating what she’d said when Derek had a seizure and tore her intravenous line out so many months ago. Sometimes it feels like years that they’ve all been struggling in this together.

She looks up at him briefly as she finishes with the tape. His palm still rests in her hand, and she doesn’t drop it immediately when she is done. “Right, just add it to the list.”

There is something familiar and sorrowful in her haunted emerald eyes that John can’t put his finger on, but he thinks it might be the same look he’s seen in the eyes of men who’ve not come back from battles quite... right. There is a damage lurking there that has a hold on her so tight that she must feel suffocated by it most times. The urge he feels to comfort her is so overpowering that he touches her arm which makes her snap out of it and flinch back from him.

“You know you can talk to me, right?” he asks softly and twines a finger around a curl that’s come loose of her ponytail. She also wears a black baseball cap with advertising for an organic seed company that her grandfather probably used to order from.

“I am talking to you,” she says with no regard to what he might be inferring even though John thinks she must know what he means. She crawls on all fours away from him to retrieve her pack. She’s so guileless and unaware of her own sexuality, and it drives him nuts.

“I mean about you, about what happened... to you,” he says and her hand freezes as she puts the food items back into her bag.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she lies and rinses Jacob’s cup with bottled water and puts the lid back on it to stow in the bag, as well.

“Maybe it would help if I told you something about me first,” he suggests, and she stops altogether and sits back on her heels.

John’s figured it out a while back that this is why she doesn’t sit still. If she’s in constant motion it keeps her mind occupied, and she doesn’t have to think about or remember any of the bad crap that fate had dealt her. Reagan doesn’t look at him but turns her head slightly toward him and shakes it as if it is all she can manage.

“I’m going to tell you anyway, and you can listen or not,” he says and she glances lightning quick up at him and then back at her bag which she fiddles with and puts more items inside. “When I was in that Turkish prison- I’m not sure if you knew that or not.” She nods twice but doesn’t look at him and keeps her back half to him. “It was no walk in the park. They were a bunch of mean, sick freaks that tortured us and beat the tar out of us and they would do violent acts against the two female soldiers to get us to talk like break their fingers or torture them. I was there for forty-nine days till we got rescued out.”

John inches closer to Reagan until he is right beside her; but she still won’t turn toward him. At least she stops packing and moving.

“They starved us, too. Gave us just enough to keep us alive, beat us with whips, electrocuted us, did sleep deprivation, water-boarding, all kinds of fun tricks.”

Her sharp intake of breath tells him that she’s listening even though Jacob is tugging at her medical bag that she’s holding. John’s never talked with anyone about this before, but he’s willing to do it if it helps her to know that she’s not alone in this cruel, hard world.

“There were thirteen of us that were captured alive from that caravan and only seven us that survived our incarceration. I was doing some stupid surveillance mission that should’ve lasted two days when an IED blew up a couple of the Hum-V’s. I wasn’t even supposed to be on that mission, but like a sucker I volunteered. Derek sent Kelly and our Special Ops team in to get us. My brother got in a lot of trouble for what he did because he went over his senior officer’s head and called in the rescue mission. It took them six weeks to gather enough intelligence to find us. Sometimes I wonder if my ticket wouldn’t have gotten punched, too, if they hadn’t found us when they did. Spent two weeks in an Army hospital in Germany recuperating. Kelly stayed by my bedside the whole time. And we’ve never done a mission without each other since. That’s how he came home to the farm with us. I wouldn’t let him go get the kids by himself, not after what he did for me. That’s why I had to get Derek home to Sue, because he put his career on the line for me.” They both sit quietly for a moment as Jacob chews on the strap to the food bag.

“Did they kill them?” she finally asks.

“Kill who?” John returns confusedly.