The McClane Apocalypse Book Five (2 page)

“Fuck you, asshole,” she swears again, her
cheeks reddening with anger and exertion. “They’ll tear your ass up
for this.”

“Oh, really?” he taunts with a smug
confidence that is
born
of months
of stalking and killing men with
an
ease
and finesse that he’s acquired while staying
alive.

She wiggles beneath him, which oddly
begins to stir
a lust
in his
groin. What the fuck? That wasn’t the reaction he was expecting
from his body. What’s going on here?

Cory leans farther back from her. It is
then that he notices her t-shirt. It’s a black concert tee. There
is dirt on it here and there as if she’s been working outside all
day laboring away. There are the faded
yellowy
letters for the rock band Metallica
scrolled across the front. There is a faint, telling bleach mark at
the left shoulder. He’s staring down at his own shirt.

“Where’d you get this shirt?” he demands, his
ire rising to new levels.

She doesn’t answer but shoves upward. His
lust is forgotten. Cory presses upward. He stretches to his side,
probably smashing her as he reaches for the pistol he’d knocked out
of her hand.

“What the hell?” he nearly whispers with
disbelief as he holds the pistol for her to see. “Where’d you get
this?”

“Get off!” she yelps.

“I’ll kill you, you stupid bitch. Where’d you
get this gun?” he shouts in her face, not caring that spittle hits
her cheek from him.

“From my friend, asshole,” she argues. “Now
get off.”

“You think I won’t kill you? You think I
won’t rape you? You’d better start answering some questions,” he
threatens.

The woman beneath him screeches,
lurches upward and manages to get slightly free. It’s all the
encouragement she needs. She grabs a handful of dirt and leaves and
smashes it into Cory’s face. Then she scoots out and crawls away.
He grabs her foot. She kicks his shoulder. A moment later they are
both to their feet. She tries to run
again,
but Cory grabs her from behind. She lets out
a
blood-curdling
scream, so he
covers her mouth with his hand. She bites him hard. Cory whips her
around to face him. It’s a huge mistake. She knees him in the
balls. He doubles over and howls in pain and anger. She’s a damn,
dirty fighter.

The last thing he sees of her is the red of
her hair flashing against the green of the forest as she sprints
away.

“You’d better run, you red-haired witch! I’ll
find you!” he shouts in anger.

He takes a knee until the need to vomit
passes. Using the butt of his rifle, he finally shoves up and goes
for his horse. She can’t outrun his horse. She can’t run forever.
If she’s heading toward the farm, which it looked like she was,
then he’ll catch her there. He’ll also kill every one of her group
that took over the farm. She’d been wearing his shirt. Cory knows
it because it had the bleach stain on the shoulder. When he’d left,
he’d not had that shirt with him because it was winter. She’s
gotten it from him and Simon’s cabin. He worries for his friend. If
anything has happened to Simon, he’ll kill the people who did it.
Killing is what he’s become rather proficient at during these last
eight months. He has no fear left inside of him. He barely has any
kindness, either. And he sure as shit doesn’t have any
goodness.

He makes it back to his pack and mounts up.
He tries the radio again and gets nothing. His family isn’t
answering and now he understands why they hadn’t earlier, either.
He takes a second to catch his breath, bring his rifle around in
front of him and whistle to his dog. He’s going to go clean house
on the fuckers that are at his farm. He’s going to find that
red-haired witch who had his brother’s gun.

Chapter Two

Paige

“Help!” she
screams repeatedly
at the top of her lungs as she
flies past the horse barn. She trips, goes down, scraping her
palms, but gets back up again. “Help! There’s someone in the
woods!”

The men come filing out of the
different buildings and barns, all on high alert. Her brother runs
toward her, too. Hannah,
Doc
and
Sue come onto the back porch. They all meet near the front of the
horse barn. John grabs his rifle which was leaning against the hay
wagon.

“Paige, what is it? What’s wrong?” her
brother asks as he grabs her by the shoulders.

She points toward the woods, trying to catch
her breath from the run and blurts so quickly that some of her
words jumble. The two dogs start barking, which adds to the overall
chaos of the scene. “There’s a man. A man in the woods. He attacked
me. He has a gun.”

“Slow down,” Derek orders. “Calm down. Tell
us what happened. Why were you in the woods alone?”

“I asked Simon if I could stay and pick
herbs, but I… I think I wandered too far,” she answers Derek.

“Who was in the woods with you? Are you
sure it wasn’t one of the
family
you saw?” John asks patiently, although Paige can see a vein
working in his forehead.

“Yes, I’m positive! He grabbed me.
Pinned me down. He was a big man. Huge. Like a dirty, hairy Viking.
He’s huge. Like Kelly
big
. He had
a gun. He was threatening me!”

“Where at in the woods?” John asks in a
deadly tone as he discharges the magazine from his rifle, checks it
and slams it back in with force. “How far from here?”

“Not far. Out where we were picking herbs,
maybe a little farther.”

“Did he hurt you?” Simon asks with deadly
intent.

“No, not really. He tackled me to the ground
and was asking me all sorts of weird questions. But he has a gun,
maybe one on his hip, too. Don’t go out there!” she cries
hysterically and grabs her brother’s arm before he can turn away to
leave.

“What kind of questions?” Kelly asks.

Grandpa,
Sue
and Hannah have joined them. He’s carrying his
old shotgun, but he seems calm. Paige doesn’t feel
calm
. That creep in the woods could have
friends.

“Maybe he’s one of those men that got away,”
she suggests.

“What kind of questions did he ask? Questions
about the family, about the farm? About us soldiers?” Derek repeats
Kelly’s line of questioning.

“Yeah, sort of. I don’t know. It all happened
so fast. He wanted to know where I got this shirt,” she tells them.
John and Derek give each other a puzzled look.

“What? Why would he want to know that?” Kelly
asks.

Hannah has come to stand directly beside him
and has slipped her hand into the crook of his arm. Paige can tell
that she is afraid. They should all be afraid. That guy in the
woods was a dangerous, huge Neanderthal. The look in his dark eyes
was crazed and malevolent.

“I don’t know!” Paige shouts with
impatience.

“Let’s go,” John says firmly.

She notices that Reagan flinches and touches
his arm. He nods down at his wife and turns to go. So does Kelly.
They aren’t three steps into their mission when the thundering of a
horse’s hooves comes from the area near the cattle barn. The rider
is still a good distance away, but John lifts his rifle to take
aim.

“That looks like him!” Paige cries
frantically. “He didn’t have a
horse,
though.”

Kelly and Derek mimic John with their own
rifles. Kelly’s has a scope, but Derek will use the front sights of
his. The rider approaches fast and hard as if he is one of the four
horsemen of the apocalypse coming at them. Paige firmly believes
that he might just be. Reagan also has her rifle.

“Hold on, guys,” Reagan calls out from the
porch where she has taken up position.

She’s looking through her scope.

“Wait a minute,” she yells and even holds up
her hand to the men. “Don’t shoot. I don’t know…”

“Hold your fire!” Kelly calls loudly and
steps forward to John. “Don’t shoot, John.”

“Who is it, Kelly? One of them?” Doc
asks.

“No, I think….” He pauses a moment before
saying, “I think it’s Cory? It is! It’s Cory.”

“Damn, I could’ve shot him,” Derek remarks as
if sick to his stomach and expels a deep breath.

Reagan hops down from the porch and confirms
it loudly.

“Cory?” some of the other family
members call out with excitement. Paige does not mirror their joy.
As the rider approaches closer, he swings down before the horse
even comes to a full stop. It
is
him, the Viking from the woods who had just threatened to
kill her.

He looks around as if confused for a
moment. His rifle is still out in front of him as if he’d expected
an all-out battle when he’d
leaped
from that wild looking beast. He stops moving forward and
just stands there in surprise. His long, wavy black hair hits right
at his shoulders and covers
half
of his face. His beard isn’t a whole lot shorter. He looks
like some sort of insane caveman. His crazed eyes scan the
crowd.

“Cory!” Kelly calls out to him.

His eyes dart to Kelly and he steps
hesitantly forward. Kelly rushes to him and grabs him in a bear
hug.

“Man, little brother, it’s been too long,”
Kelly remarks and finally releases the other man.

Sam rushes forward next and nearly
vaults into Cory’s arms. He returns her hug with one arm,
suspending her a good foot off the ground. He is as huge as Paige
had assessed. When he’d been lying on top of her, pinning her
painfully to the ground, he’d felt like he weighed three hundred
pounds. Now that she has a chance to see him while not running away
in a blurry flash, he’s not at all fat or heavy from
weight
. He’s just big. His shoulders are
wide, as wide as Kelly’s. His biceps are the size of hams. His
dirty shirt stretches tightly across his thickly muscled chest.
None of these quick assessments make her feel any better about
him.

Hannah finds her way to him and reaches out.
He steps forward and takes her slim hand.

“Cory, I’m so glad you’re home, honey,” she
says. Then with a fierce intensity in her voice, she orders, “Don’t
ever leave like that again.”

“Sorry, Hannie,” he mumbles.

One by one, different family members, even
the children, hug and kiss this man who is obviously Kelly’s
brother who’s been gone for nearly a year. For some reason, Paige
had thought he would be younger, scrawnier like a teenager by the
way that Simon talked about him. They step back to give him room to
breathe. His brown eyes scan the group again and land directly on
her.

“Red-haired
witch
!” he hisses and steps toward her with
aggressive intentions.

Kelly and John jump forward to hold him
back.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, little brother,”
Kelly says
with
a chuckle. “She’s
with us.”

“She had your gun,” Cory says. “I saw her in
the woods.”

Paige would like to scoff. Out of fear of
this maniac, she holds her tongue. He’d assaulted her in the woods.
That would’ve been a more accurate description than ‘saw her in the
woods.’

“She had my shirt and your gun,” he
explains.

“You shoved me to the ground, asshole!” Paige
shouts.

He looks at his brother and then John
and calmly replies
with
a shrug,
“Reaction. She had your gun, Kel.”

Kelly tells him, “Yeah, I lent it to
her.”

“I’m just glad you’re both ok. That could’ve
gone a lot worse,” Reagan interjects, breaking up a potential
argument.

“Who the hell is she?” he asks as he returns
Kelly’s pistol to its rightful owner.

Paige watches as he indicates with his
long finger toward her. Naturally she inches closer to Simon. Cory
looks her up and down, his eyes settling on her shirt for a long
time. At least she hopes he’s just looking at her shirt and not
contemplating what’s beneath it. There is a heat in his
unguarded
gaze, however
, that
warns her that he might not be looking
at
the shirt alone. She interlaces her fingers with
her
brother’s
.

“That’s Paige,” Kelly offers, getting a frown
from the psychotic Viking.

Simon steps forward with her, although
she literally digs her
heels
into
the soft ground and leans back. He doesn’t seem to notice or care
but continues dragging her toward her enemy.

“Cory,” Simon greets the other man.
“This is my sister, Paige. Remember I told you all about her? She
made it here,
man
. She was alive
all this time.”

Cory is now within two feet of her. She
doesn’t like it and won’t meet his gaze.
Instead,
she stares at the chicken coop off to
their immediate left. She doesn’t notice her social gaffe until
Simon nudges her. He nudges her kind of hard. When she glances up,
Cory has his hand extended toward her in greeting and has
obviously
been holding it there a long
time.

“Hi,” he says with a cocky smirk as if he
hadn’t just been lying on top of her in the woods and threatening
to kill or rape her to get her to give up information.

She gives him a sidelong glare and
shakes his hand quickly. When she tries to pull back, he
holds
on
a moment longer until
her eyes meet his. The smirk has turned sensual. Paige snatches her
hand back in irritation.