The McClane Apocalypse: Book Two (53 page)

“I don’t mind, boss,” John interjects and takes a handful of her clothing items from her bag, though she’d rejected the offer. “I’m caught up on mine, so let me help you.”

“Jacob still asleep?” she inquires.

“Yeah, out like a log. Guess that ride kicked his butt, too. If it was any longer, I think we would’ve had to stop again somewhere for the night,” John adds. “It would’ve been too much for the little guy.”

The idea of spending even one more night alone in a cabin with John isn’t something Reagan wants to think about.

He starts tossing her dirty clothes, including her socks and a tank top into a laundry basket behind him as he chatters on as if he’s doing nothing out of the ordinary. Reagan stands rooted, gape-mouthed and staring at him. Shaking her head in defeat finally, she reluctantly hands him another bunch to toss behind him. There is no sense in wasting time arguing with him. John Harrison is a stubborn ass when he wants to be.

Reagan thinks a moment and then answers, “He’s just a baby. He’s not exactly a Ranger, yet.”

John chuckles heartily. “Yet! He’ll be a kick-butt Ranger someday, I bet.”

His good humor is sometimes hard to resist, and Reagan feels herself smile before looking down again. The idea of such a tiny baby being an ass kicking Army Ranger any time in the future is almost comical.

“In case you haven’t noticed, the military isn’t exactly around anymore. How do you propose he go to Ranger school?”

“He’ll be one anyways. We’ll train him. And we’ll train any young men on the farm,” John says so assuredly. “How’d you know about Ranger school?”

“Watched a documentary on it one time. I knew Derek was one, so I wanted to know what it was all about,” Reagan answers.

“That’s not exactly surprising. What’d you think?”

“Seemed like it would’ve sucked. Two months of crawling around in mud and running your ass off all day? No thanks,” she tells him honestly while folding a jacket and then trying to place it on a higher shelf. John takes it from her and easily sets it there since she’d been on her tip-toes.

“Suck would’ve been an improvement,” John adds with a chuffing laugh. “But some of the other additional training I did, like Psych Ops, Advanced Weaponry, and Demos 101 to infinity weren’t so hard. Kelly even speaks a little Arabic. Helps when we’re interrogating.”

“Funny, I never thought of Kelly as an intellectual type that would learn languages,” she admits.

John laughs again. “He’s smarter than you might think. We all know a little Arabic; he’s just more fluent. Plus, he’s good at killing people when he needs to,” he says with another grim chuckle.

“Not the worst skill to have right now with the current, shitty state of our country,” Reagan puts in with sarcasm and a good amount of realism. When she turns to look at him, John is scowling. She’s noticed that he doesn’t like negative talk or talk of killing people. Probably too many bad memories. She can understand this.

“Speaking of... what do you think of these visitors we’ve got?” he asks as he tosses her boots to the bottom of her closet and reaches into another bag.

She just sighs heavily and answers, “I think I’ll be glad when they get the hell off our farm.”

For some reason her comment makes him grin. Most of the time she thinks he’s nuts, so this is just bound to be chalked up to another one of those moments.

“Yeah, me too. It’s not feeling real cozy having strange people here.”

“No shit. Now you know how I felt when
you
showed up,” she returns snidely and dumps her dust-covered, zip up hoodie in the hamper. It had been her favorite at one time. It is stamped in embroidered letters on the left chest area: OSU Med Center. Now it is just a reminder of her past and the horrible shit she’s been through just to survive since that nightmarish dilemma.

John is reflective a moment and then finally, “I definitely get it how you felt back then about me and Kelly coming here. I think you might have changed your mind about me since then, though, right?” John nudges his elbow against her shoulder gently.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she replies with a bit of attitude. She is too damn fatigued to do a whole lot of verbal sparring with him tonight.

“Hope’s all I got, boss. Hope and good pair of abs,” he teases and she tosses a dirty sock at him. Unfortunately, he deflects it. His grin is silly coupled with his raised eyebrows.

“I’ll let you know. Whether or not I’ve changed my mind about you, I mean,” she retorts but isn’t quite sure why she even says it. She hasn’t changed her mind at all about John. Damn. That is also not the whole truth of it.

“Care to make your determination right now?” he asks and pats his flat stomach, which of course, draws her attention there.

“Stop it,” Reagan demands. “I’m too fucking tired to deal with you tonight.”

“Hey,” John says quickly. “Potty mouth, cut it out with the “F” word language. We’ve got a kid now. Don’t make me start the corporal punishment already to get you to quit cussing like a sailor.”

“Go ahead and try,” she glares back with one hand on her hip. John just grins wider. “Besides, he’s dead asleep, where I should be, too.”

“Where we
both
should be,” he adds with insinuation. Always with the insinuations. God, he is annoying even when he’s exhausted! He doesn’t miss a beat and just keeps on, “So tomorrow you won’t cuss around him? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, I didn’t say that. I’ll cuss when and where I want. I don’t take orders from you,” Reagan grumbles.

“You are such a hard head. We should’ve just sent you and your rifle out to deal with our new friends. They would’ve peeled out to get the heck outta’ here,” he says, making her crack just the tiniest of smiles.

Reagan shakes her head at him, and he refuses to break eye contact as he throws another pair of pants and two pairs of socks into the basket but hands her a belt to hang. “I wish I could have. I’d like to throw them the hell out of here. Grams wasn’t ever gonna let that happen, though. She’s always tried to save her brother. But, trust me, he’s a real loser,” she explains and makes a gagging face.

“Yeah, I could kind of tell that by looking at him. We’ve got a lot of experience sniffing out shifty characters,” he reveals to her more of his dark past.

“You know I had a brother, right?” Reagan asks to which John nods. “Well, before he enlisted, he was hanging out a lot with our Great Uncle Peter. This was years ago right when he graduated high school. I found a bottle of mixed pills in a prescription pill bottle and a joint in his dresser drawer. I didn’t know what they were ‘cuz I was still pretty young at the time. But I showed them to my mom anyways because it just seemed strange. I thought he was smoking cigarettes, and I knew how our mom felt about that. But she told my dad and he came home from a meeting in San Diego. He was so mad. He shipped our brother off the next week to boot camp. We didn’t see him much after that. My mom always blamed herself over it, too. She didn’t exactly want him to get sent away from all of us; she just wanted Dad’s help with Mark- that was our brother’s name. I’m glad Mom was already gone when Mark was killed. That would’ve devastated her.”

“Wow, that’s why you don’t like your great-uncle,” John assesses correctly. “You think he got your brother into drugs.”

“No, I
know
he did. My dad thought so, too. I overheard him and my mom talking about it. Mark was smart, did well in school, played sports, had nice friends. My father wasn’t getting any medals issued for being father of the year, but he was a very good judge of character. And let me tell you, he hated Peter,” Reagan explains.

“Yeah,” John sighs. “These people with him seem... rough.”

Reagan nods and continues, “Mark graduated high school and my great-uncle rolled into town for the summer, stayed at a campgrounds. Mark would go over there and hang out with him and his scummy friends. I think he did it because he wanted to be around a guy, have guy time. My dad was never around, so he tried to fill that gap with Peter. Grandpa lived too far away to hang with him. Next thing I know, he was hooked on drugs and shipped off to the military. Peter split town after that. We’d see him every once in a while after we moved here when our mom died, but it was usually when he needed money or a place to stay. Grandpa even paid for him to get an apartment in town, but he’d be over here every other day filching money off of Grams. When she was younger, her sister died in a car accident, so she was always trying to fix her brother because he’s the only one of her family she had left. I think he’s like fifteen or twenty years younger than her. You don’t know Grams’s brother, but I do. He’s a leech, an alcoholic, a drug abuser and a user of people for whatever he can get out of them. If you don’t have anything to offer him, then he has no use for you. Case in point, showing up today on our doorstep?”

“He sounds like a real piece of work. I think it’s sad to say, but probably every family has an Uncle Peter. We did, too. But my dad moved us so far away from every single member of my mom’s family that they never bothered with us. She missed her family a lot, though. Sometimes she’d fly home at Christmas to visit them, but that was it. My dad was the most controlling man alive,” he confesses, surprising Reagan.

“He seems like an asshole,” Reagan says nonchalantly.

“Yep, pretty much was. Look, I don’t like these people here, either. Hopefully you and Doc will get their sick people patched up, and they can move on soon.”

“I don’t know,” she replies. “They seem really sick, kind of like what Jacob’s mom had. I don’t know what the hell they’ve got. I just want them to get better, though, especially that kid. It’s not fair to make it through the tsunamis and flooding and shit just to die of a flu or whatever it is that’s killing them.”

“Yeah, that sucks. I don’t like kids to get hurt by this garbage that adults have caused in the first place. Seems like kids always get the crap end of the stick. Every place I’ve ever been to, the little kids suffer,” John laments and pauses before tossing a pair of her jeans into the basket.

“Do you think they’re a threat? I mean, I know Peter’s a dipshit, but I’ve never known him to be violent or murderous. Do you think any of the others are?” Reagan asks the question that’s been nagging at the back of her mind since they’d first heard the loud cannon-like boom from earlier in the day.

They’d cantered the last hundred yards, pushing the horses, though they were just as beat as their riders. John had seemed calm, but as they’d tied their horses to a hitching post near the barn, Reagan had observed small details in him that others might have missed. A vein pulsed at his forehead and his mouth had turned to a thin, tight line filled with tension. She knows enough about him now to read his tells, and he’d been worried about the family, their family.

He is more relaxed this evening, but no less vigilant. He shrugs and shakes his head, “I don’t know. They very well could be. But I do know that we need to be more careful until they’re gone. As Colonel Blacker said, ‘Put your trust in God, and keep your powder dry’.”

He never ceases to surprise her. Here he is quoting some person she’s never heard of- and she’s done more than her fair share of history studies- and the next minute he’ll be offering to change Jacob’s diaper, or swinging Ari or Justin around in the yard, or stabbing some scumbag bastard in the neck at the Home Depot just to keep her safe. Sometimes John is an anomaly to be around. She’s certainly never been around anyone like him her entire life. Her Grandpa is definitely nothing like him, nor were any of the men at her college, including her professors, not even the younger ones. Derek isn’t anything like John, either.

She shakes her head to reset her thoughts. “Maybe we should just throw out everyone but the two in the shed,” Reagan suggests.

“I don’t know, Reagan,” he says, and for some reason when he uses her name it makes Reagan feel strange inside, as if something new and unfounded is spreading its wings within her for the first time in her life. “There are other kids out there. They could come down with this, too, and if you and Doc can cure them, then it seems wrong to send them off just yet. I know you couldn’t do that, either.”

And here he is being a big softy. It’s better to think of him like this than to remember him killing those men with his knife.

“Yeah, I guess. I just don’t know if I trust them,” she explains as she tosses her hair ties that she’s found in the bottom of her pack into a small box on her closet shelf where she keeps them. “Some of those men seem... I don’t know.”

A shiver runs down her spine involuntarily as she remembers the particularly large black man and the other man with the tinted eyeglasses. She doesn’t want to think about what they could be. The look in the eyes of the one hiding behind the tinted glasses seemed like the same look she’d seen in the eyes of her would-be rapist at her college. Reagan hopes that she is just being paranoid and distrustful because of what happened to her.

“I know, boss,” John mutters as he pulls her white bra from the bag he holds. Reagan blushes and tugs it from his grasp lightning quick. He just tosses the empty bag to the floor of her closet, below where her clothing hangs and grins at her. But her mind isn’t up for playful jesting about her stupid bra. She’s still fixated on those eyes.

“Do... do you think they could be...” the words won’t leave her lips. She’s too frightened all of sudden to even utter them. Those bad memories come back on her of their own will sometimes.

John’s hand comes to rest on her forearm, and Reagan glances down at it and then up at him directly. “Hey, it’s ok. Just be careful. Be on alert at all times. Keep an eye on yourself and your sisters and Grams. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of the security of the farm. I don’t like them here, either, babe. We’ll keep patrols moving and watch out for everyone. It’s just going to be a little more work than usual for us guys. Just stay close to the house or the shed if it’s your shift. Or me,” he speaks softly, his tone almost hypnotic with such purpose.

“I don’t want to stay close to you,” she murmurs.

“It doesn’t matter if you want to. You need to. I don’t want you far from me for any amount of time until they’re gone from here,” he tells her with intensity in his deep voice. “I don’t like it when you’re far from me
ever
. So stay close, ok?”