The McClane Apocalypse: Book One (7 page)

She is cut off as Reagan reaches for her hand and squeezes it.

“Don’t, Sue. Don’t do that!” her little sister reprimands sternly, her emerald eyes warning. “There’s no time for that. Not anymore.”

“It’s just that the last time we spoke he was finally being honest with me. He said it’s not good out there. He’d just been sugar coating the facts before, not wanting to upset me. He said the President’s announcements are full of lies and misleading information. They are just trying to keep people from being afraid. Derek says it’s not getting any better. He and John think it’s actually getting worse. The militia groups are moving into the more suburban areas. He said they could even come as far as the rural farms, like here,” she explains, even though she knows she’s told her family this before. Maybe saying it aloud will make something sound different this time, more encouraging.

“That’s why your grandfather has been fortifying this old dinosaur for years, girls. He never told you girls anything about it because he didn’t want you to think he was getting senile. But he and Derek made quite a few plans in the last couple of years,” Grams chirps in. The girls already know this, but always indulge Grams anyways.

Reagan rolls her eyes at Sue and Sue smiles at her, which isn’t returned. Her smiles don’t come as easy anymore. She has only seen her sister smile once in the last three months since she’s been home and it had been at something Sue’s son Justin had said to her

“I’m just so worried about them. Johnny, too, he’s like my brother,” Sue tells Reagan.

“I know, Sue. But he’s a trained soldier. He’ll make it. I made it and hell, I don’t know shit for survival skills,” Reagan states as she steals another tomato chunk.

“Young lady!” Grams explodes and thunks Reagan to the backside of her skull, sending her tomato flying out of her mouth and across the wide counter top. “Language! You will not speak thusly in this house, Miss Reagan McClane. In this house, we serve the Lord. Now, Susan, you stop your worrying. You hear?”

Her commands are met with reticent, “Yes, ma’am’s.” Both women glare as Hannah chuckles quietly in the corner while chopping potatoes. She’s moved on quickly from bread and is now chopping potatoes. How does she do it, Sue wonders to herself? The girl could’ve been a mess-haul cook in the military. She is fast, organized and efficient. And though, not a particularly tall, domineering type person, if you stood around too long in her kitchen she’d give you some chore, which is how Sue has come to be dicing tomatoes. Derek had only been around her a few times, being always deployed elsewhere in the world, but he’d commented on Hannah’s military precision in the kitchen.

“Geesh, Grams! I’m still recovering, you know,” Reagan whines petulantly about her head slap.

“My eye, you’re still recovering. I saw you out riding this morning. And what did Grandpa say about riding?” Their grandmother is wiping her wet hands on a dishtowel that always seems permanently attached to the front her housedress with a clothesline clip. She flips her long gray braid behind her shoulder.

“Hm, let me think. I know this one,” Reagan sarcastically answers, earning her a warning glare. Grams’s raised eyebrow look is maybe worse than the thunk. Even Derek had cowered from her when he’d made the grave mistake of cursing at the dinner table once.

“I was just doing a perimeter check. We can’t be too careful. Some creeps could sneak onto the property somewhere during the night and take a cow or two and we wouldn’t even know,” she answers. She shoves back an errant curl and wipes her hand across the back of her mouth, smearing it with dirt. She doesn’t seem to notice... or maybe care.

“Sweetie, nobody even knows we’re back here. We sit over a mile back from the nearest road, and the entrance is so concealed now that I don’t even know if I could find our house,” Hannah adds in. She wipes at her forehead delicately. With no air conditioning in the mansion, the June heat is sometimes a bit stifling. Luckily old oak trees stand close to the house and provide a ton of shade from the sun.

“Duh, Hannie. Like you could find it anyways,” Reagan insults. “This isn’t a joke. Look, we can never let our guards down. Never!” Reagan hisses with deadly calm and slides off of her stool.

Sue watches with great sadness as her once youthful, fun sister marches like a drill sergeant from the room. Reagan has taken to spending hours upon hours alone which frightens Sue. She’d much prefer her sister spend time with the rest of the family than be by herself. But with a house this size, it is easy to disappear.

The McClane farm has been in the McClane family for three generations. It had started out as a farm, but had morphed over the years to fit the needs of the current McClane owners, whichever descendent they should be. It could never be sold to a non-McClane. Their great, great grandfather McClane had built a simple six bedroom Georgian style farmhouse, complete with the front pillars. He’d had a rather large family but was a strict man with a no-nonsense approach to the home. He added nothing extravagant, no fancy schmancy decorating for his wife. The home still boasts most of the original hardwood floors. His only son who had any interest had taken on the farm and being a lawyer with a practice in Nashville, he’d had the money to add on and make upgrades as he saw fit. He had also acquired another sixty acres to add to the existing two hundred. He’d only had one child and that was Susan’s Grandpa. He’d bought out a neighbor’s farm, which wasn’t much more than a shack on ninety acres. Over the years, Grandpa had again updated the home and added four more bedrooms in the renovated basement, each with a set of bunk beds and thick, warm carpeting to combat against cold Tennessee winters. They had planned on having a large family, but Grams had only ever been able to have one child, the girls’ father. The updated security system had proven recently useless because of the failure of satellite uplinking. But the cameras are still operable, making it possible to scan many areas of the farm from the comfort of Grandpa’s study.

Reagan’s room is in the attic, something she’d always loved. Hannah and their grandparents stay on the first floor in the add-on at the back of the house that Grandpa had built with his own two hands right after the girls had moved in. He said it was because Grams and he didn’t want to go up and down stairs anymore, but Sue knew it was for Hannah. Hannah has her own suite back there and all the privacy she needs, but she’d always felt safest near them. Sue and her children take up most of the space, with the exception of two extra bedrooms, on the second floor. The kids share a room. They are only five and seven, after all, and the things they saw on the news at the beginning of the end hadn’t made a breakaway from each other a possibility anytime in their near future. There are two separate bathrooms which makes things more convenient, except for when Reagan came down to use one. The kids were nagging a lot recently to sleep in the basement in one of the bunk rooms, but Sue can’t be so far from them. Not exactly the brave example she should be setting for her children.

But for all its size and grandeur, Grams had made the farm into a cozy home, and Sue never really thought of it as a mansion. She’d learned back in high school that her home was stately simply from the reactions of her friends and by the stunned looks on their faces when they saw it for the first time. There are family pictures lining many of the walls and stairwells and soft, plush area rugs lay upon the hardwood flooring. Most of the walls had been painted pale, monochromatic tones which make the rooms with tall ceilings more comfortable. The kitchen had been a labor of love redesigned by Hannah and Grams, who had co-conspired on the project. It is massive compared to the kitchen in Sue’s house. A house she will likely never see again.

She’d taken most of their family pictures and video files on her portable computer pad when she’d left over three months ago. At the time, she hadn’t wanted to leave Kentucky to live with her grandparents. It had made her feel childish and not adequate to handle her own problems. But Derek had insisted that she stay with them until the baby was born because he wasn’t sure if he was to be deployed to Syria again. Sue sometimes wondered if her husband was “touched” as Grams puts it. He sure was this time, and she is glad for it. She could’ve ended up like Reagan, barely making it to the farm alive or perhaps not at all.

The farm is as secluded as Hannah had described it, though. The nearest neighbors are over six miles away, dairy farmers. The mile and a half long lane isn’t paved or fancy but simple gravel and sometimes muddy during a wet spell. The hidden lane is surrounded on either side by deep woods filled with wildlife. Grandpa and Sue and even the kids had recently covered in the opening of the driveway with tree branches and foliage to better conceal it. Unless someone is flying over in a helicopter, the farm is far from being visible. It isn’t exactly a heavily-traveled road anyway- just a county road filled with potholes and sparse gravel. Basically, if someone didn’t know the McClane farm was here, then they weren’t going to anytime soon.

Feeling discouraged, Sue makes a lame excuse of needing rest and heads outside to find her kids. If anyone can uplift her flagging spirits, her kids sure could. And it doesn’t take long to find them. All she has to do is just follow their laughter and shouts. They are chasing chickens down by the barn. Sue waddles off the back porch and goes to them.

“You’d better not let Aunt Hannah hear you out here doing that!” she warns, but the smile in her voice is evident and she only receives toothy grins from her rugrats. Justin is looking more and more everyday like his father, favoring Derek’s dark looks. And Arianna will forever resemble herself, poor kid. Justin takes his role as older brother very seriously, and Sue thinks it’s because their father gets deployed so often. It’s such an unfair pressure for her young son to feel like he needs to be the caretaker of herself and especially Arianna. But, then again, the struggle for survival may be something that her children will eventually worry more about.

“Mama, watch me!” Arianna yells with glee and does a cartwheel right in the barnyard, her long pigtails dragging the ground while she’s upside down. The little waif has successfully managed to cover herself with dirt and so early in the day. Sue claps and cheers her on and then perches on a swing attached to their wooden swing-set that Grandpa had built after Justin’s birth.

Her daughter may look like her, but she favors her Aunt Reagan in behavior. Heaven help her! Reagan already had her riding. Sue’s heart raced every time she saw Reagan swing her tiny girl up in front of her on a damn, dangerous horse. Arianna is only five but smaller than most kids her age. She’d been a preemie just like Reagan, too. Maybe it is a preemie personality trait to be such a fighter. They had to start out fighting, and they were gonna push their way through life head first. It is probably what had motivated Reagan to plow through school like she had a vendetta against it. But Sue knows her sister is the most accomplished rider on the farm, with the exception of Grandpa. It doesn’t stop her mommy side from panicking. And if she is being completely honest with herself, it isn’t a bad idea to learn how to ride. It isn’t like anyone can just jump in a car anymore to head to the local grocery store. Horses could become a valued commodity. She’d never been much of a horse person, but she’d been older when they had come to live on the farm after mom.

She is glad Reagan is a fighter because if she’d been meek and docile, then she may not have made it home to them. There isn’t much that she knows about the night of her sister’s escape from the university, but she knows enough and had seen the condition of her sister upon her arrival, to know that she’d been through Hell and back. Yes, her little sister is a fighter, and she is thankful that Arianna is going to be like her.

“Mama, when is Daddy gonna get here?” Justin asks for the millionth time since the start of the apocalypse. His big brown eyes plead with childlike innocence. A stray lock of mahogany hair falls over one eye, and Sue gingerly pushes it back.

“Soon, my love, very soon. I promise,” Sue replies. But as soon as the word “promise” had left her lips she’d regretted it. It isn’t right to get her young son’s hopes up when she isn’t sure if his father will ever come home alive.

It is so hard for Sue to be optimistic, to be the one who doesn’t worry. Since their mother had passed away, it had been Sue who had felt the need to hold the girls together. At the age of sixteen, it had been a difficult time for them all, and Sue had been closest with their mother. Their brother Mark had entered the military the year before their mother passed, so he was no longer the person in charge of the younger kids. Sue had speculated many times over the years that Mark had left on purpose to get away from the eldest brother duties. Their father had very rarely made an appearance, so their mother had relied so heavily on Mark to help with the girls and household chores and fixing leaky faucets and mowing the lawn and taking out the trash. And when they’d lost their brother a few years ago to an air-raid in Syria, again she’d been the one who had felt the burden of playing matriarchal leader to the girls.

Oh, they had Grams, but she was their Grams. She made them hot cocoa and cookies and let them cry on her soft shoulders. But she wasn’t pushy, didn’t feel compelled to make them do their homework- Hannah- or how to get ready for school in matching, coordinated clothes- Reagan. Grandpa was much stricter, especially with schooling, but he was always at his office. And Grams was a little out of touch with raising young girls. Sue had been the person the girls had gone to when they were having problems with other kids or which dress to wear to church or how to apply makeup. Most of these subjects were simply reserved for Hannah as Reagan had been a misfit in any school she went to and would’ve rather died than wear a little lip gloss. The girl had been pretty clueless when it came to girlfriends, social rules, boys, makeup and basically anything else that most girls learned. But she could tell you what disease some nerd scientist at John’s Hopkins or Harvard Med was studying. Poor thing.