The McClane Apocalypse: Book Two (7 page)

“I know, Kelly. You’ll take care of me,” she says it so matter-of-fact that it actually scares Kelly because of the amount of faith she has in him.

He dismounts, swinging a leg over his mare’s neck and slides to the ground while Hannah holds onto the back of the saddle’s rim. Kelly does not let go of the horse’s reins, though, lest it could take off for the barn with an unsuspecting Hannah on its back.

“Hold on, Hannah, while I get this gate, ok?” he instructs her. She seems very relaxed, at ease even, completely trusting. And she’s smiling ear to ear. She’s so frustrating.

“I’m ok, Kelly. Reagan used to do this, too. Sometimes she’d do it while she was still on the horse, but she said with me on with her that it threw off her balance. But I think it was because she was afraid I’d fall off,” she explains patiently.

Once he tugs the mare gently through the gate opening, he re-locks it with the chain and mounts again in front of her, careful not to kick her off.

They ride through the open meadow where mustard yellow Goldenrod blooms heartily in the late summer sunshine. A hawk’s scream can be heard in the distance, probably hunting prey for her needy family.

“Oh, it’s so divine to be out in the sun and riding... and spending time with you,” she lilts like she’s drunk on happiness and good cheer.

Spirits are not something of which any of the McClane family partakes, he’s noticed. They aren’t concerned about looting any of the local liquor stores or stressing out over where their next bottle of Merlot is coming from.

“Uh, yeah. This is a patrol, though, Hannah, not some social hour thing,” he doesn’t want to say date.

“I know, silly. I just love being outside in the fresh air, and I like spending time with you,” she explains gaily and presses her nose into his back.

He probably stinks like the milk cows, but she doesn’t pull back or gag, and Kelly feels self-conscious like perhaps he should’ve showered before taking her riding with him. He has to remind himself that this isn’t a date! Who cares how he smells?

“Mm hm,” he groans under his breath. Why the hell does she have to say shit like that? She’s too open with her feelings.

They ride for a short while in companionable silence, thank God for small miracles, until they come upon hoof prints marking deep into a particularly muddy area at the base of a ravine.

“I think this is where Reagan and John must’ve come through this morning. Looks like at least three sets of prints, fresh,” he remarks, thinking about the tracks, talking to himself mostly. “Reagan said they were pulling an extra horse to help with carrying items and bags back. That’s gonna be a hell of ride, thirty clicks.”

“What’s a click?” Hannah innocently inquires behind him and presses her cheek against his back muscle.

This stupid, tight t-shirt is way too thin, and he can feel her sun-warmed skin against his. He tells himself that she’s doing it because she probably feels more comfortable that way instead of trying to face straight on.

“It’s a kilometer. We always say click, just a military term,” he answers her as he guides his mare up a small slope. He’ll avoid the steep hills with her on back, even though he doubts her crazy ass sister ever did as much. He’s noticed that Reagan isn’t one for babying Hannah which pisses him off. She should be babied, protected, cherished... damn and there he goes again!

“Lean forward a little, Hannah. We’re going uphill,” he tells her calmly.

She clutches his middle more tightly, pressing herself to him. When they come to the top, the meadow opens up, and he stays near the forest line to keep them out of sight from potential dangers. When they come to the top, she doesn’t lean more away from him.

“You have your own language- you and John and Derek. It’s like the military created its own secret vocabulary for everything,” she says with wonderment.

He’s never really thought of it before; it is just second nature by now to refer to things in military terms because he’d been in for so long and had given up being a regular citizen so many years ago.

“Yeah, I guess,” he answers her nonchalantly. Then he adds, “Kind of like Braille. You have a secret language, too.”

A breeze kicks her long hair onto his arm and whips it up into his face in a tortuous, silken embrace of white blonde which she seems completely unaware of as she chatters on.

“Right,” she says with a laugh. “Except Braille is completely non-verbal.”

“Yeah, that seems hard to read, you know, little bumps on a page,” he admits to her as the horse nickers at a nearby cardinal.

“I could teach you some words some time if you’d like. It was difficult at first because I could already read with my eyes before the accident, of course. But I got used to it. And Reagan was a big help,” she tells him.

“Did you go to school around here?”

“No, my grandparents wanted me to go to some expensive school for blind kids, but I didn’t want to. We even drove up there and checked it out. Grandpa said it was a really good school, but I didn’t like it at all. So Reagan threw a hissy and told them that if they sent me there, she’d run away with me and we’d join the circus,” Hannah says on an enchanting, conspiratorial giggle.

“Shocker. Reagan being stubborn and threatening, I mean,” Kelly jokes, which gets another giggle from her.

“Right, so I just homeschooled instead, and Reagan worked with me on learning Braille better. Before my mom died, she tried to help me, and my dad’s suggestion was to just keep me at home. I think he wanted to hide me away in the attic or something. The Colonel was like that. He liked perfection in everything, and I think I embarrassed him.” Kelly hates the son-of-a-bitch even though he’s never met him.

“He sounds like a real asshole,” Kelly tells her honestly. She laughs again.

“Yeah, I guess you could call him that. But Grams and Grandpa helped me to learn my subjects just like any other kid. Grams more so than Grandpa, of course, because he worked so much or was always at the hospital in Clarksville doing rounds,” she explains as they come to a wide stream to cross.

The horse’s hooves splash water up onto their pants legs, but it’s so hot out that neither of them complains.

“Why couldn’t your mom teach you Braille? You said she started,” Kelly asks, wanting to know every minute detail of her life before he came into it.

“She got sick and went downhill really fast. I’ve always kind of wondered if me getting hurt and going blind was too stressful for her and the stress made her sick, but I’ve never told anyone that,” she reveals with a ton of remorse in her voice.

“Hannah, people get sick. It just happens,” he tries to ease her guilt, not liking the sound of her voice when she feels distressed.

“I know. It’s just that she was so healthy and vibrant before, and it seemed like too much of a coincidence that she got sick less than a year later and shortly after that passed away,” she tells him.

“Yeah, but she might’ve known she was sick and didn’t tell you guys. Parents are like that. They keep the bad shit from their kids so they don’t have to be stressed out about adult problems,” Kelly says.

“Yeah, I suppose I never thought of that before. She was like that, too. She didn’t like us to hear her and dad when they were fighting, and she’d cover up for him when he was being a jerk,” she discloses quietly.

“I know what that’s all about,” Kelly remembers.

“What do you mean?” Hannah asks.

“Nothing,” he says dismissively.

“I want to know. Tell me, Kelly,” she demands. Hannah can be more persuasive than he’d thought.

“Before my dad divorced my real mom, they’d fight something awful. She’d screw around on him, smoke dope, disappear for like a week at a time and then show back up. I don’t know why he put up with her garbage for as long as he did. He probably did it for me. But when I finally told him I wanted to just leave with him, that’s when he finally left her. And we never looked back. Some people never change. They don’t want to. If she couldn’t change for me, her own kid, then she wasn’t ever gonna change,” he tells her.

“She sounds very tormented. Maybe something happened to her when she was young that made her like that,” Hannah says hopefully. Kelly just grunts because he has no patience for vice or the victim syndrome.

“One time I heard her come home in the middle of the night, so I snuck out of my room to see her ‘cuz she’d been gone for almost two weeks, and we didn’t know where she was. I caught her going through my dad’s wallet stealing money, but I didn’t let her know I was there. I just kinda’ hid. And then I watched her leave and get in some dude’s car and go with him. That was right before I turned twelve, and me and dad left about a month later,” he explains, but isn’t sure why he’s even doing so. He’s never talked about any of this shit with anyone before but when he is around Hannah he seems to babble like she is his own personal shrink.

“That’s so terrible, Kelly. I feel so bad for you. A boy needs a mother just as much as a girl does,” Hannah sympathizes, which seems so genuine coming from her. She never minces words, and he likes that about her.

“It’s cool. I had my dad, and he was a pretty good dad. And then he met my stepmom and she was really nice. I was happy for him,” Kelly admits. Janet had been great for his dad. She was everything his worthless mother had never been, most importantly her loyalty being above all us.

“Everyone deserves to be happy, Kelly,” she informs him as if she’s directing this statement at him in particular.

“Yeah, well for some people it’s not that simple,” he says with an air of superiority over her because he is older, more worldly and has been around the block a few more times than her. Hell, he’s lapped the damn thing like it was a NASCAR racetrack.

“Sure it is, silly. If you love someone, then that’s all that matters. Everything else will work itself out,” she tells him with absolute certainty.

“It’s not always that easy, Hannah. You’re just naïve,” he insults her on purpose, hoping she’ll let the topic drop, which of course she doesn’t.

“I don’t agree,” she remarks. Naturally she doesn’t. “If you really love someone, then you make it work no matter what.” Is there no limit to her optimism?

“Hm,” he harrumphs impatiently at her.

“Hm,” she mimics him irritatingly, and they ride in silence for a while, which she doesn’t seem to mind.

A half mile further into their trip, his mare startles underneath him as a flock of pheasants fly out of the underbrush, scaring her. Hannah is knocked slightly sideways. Kelly reaches behind, clutching her with his arm bent backwards, and she manages to stay on. Temporarily, he’d forgotten that she has no stirrups or saddle holding her on this stupid beast and it upsets him. He hefts her onto her bottom more securely again.

“Are you ok?” he asks with worry.

“Oh yes, I’m fine. I’ve fallen off before, so don’t worry about me. I’m a good bouncer,” she says with a gay laugh.

“You shouldn’t even be riding this dumb animal. You could get seriously hurt,” he says with a disciplinary tone to his voice, hoping to scare her off of doing this again.

“Oh, yeah, I could. Goodness, maybe I might even fall and hit my head and go blind or something crazy like that,” she mocks and giggles.

Kelly shakes his head and frowns. Sometimes she can be a very frustrating woman. Sometimes she can be frustrating on other levels, as well.

“I’m serious, Hannah!” he says more loudly than he means to.

“Kelly, you worry too much. Sometimes even when you are careful, bad things still happen. Did you ever think that it doesn’t matter? That you can’t control everything... and everyone?” she lowers her voice with unhidden suggestion toward him.

“No, that isn’t the way it is in the real world, in my world. I
can
control the things that happen. If the enemy approaches, I kill him. If the enemy won’t talk, I torture him till he does. If the Hum-V breaks down, you walk. If the helo crashes, you pick your ass up and keep fighting,” he states simply.

“Wait, wait, wait. That’s a lot of information for me to take in. And it’s all kind of violent, too, if I might add. You mean you had to torture people? Like what kind of torture and what’s a hee-low? I don’t understand,” she asks perplexed.

“Here, let’s get off and walk a bit, let you stretch your legs,” he tells her, avoiding all of her questions, and lifts his leg over the mare’s neck again to dismount. When he turns back, Hannah has her arms stretched out so trustingly, reaching for him. Kelly easily snatches her off the back of the horse as she places her hands on his shoulders. Her body slides down languorously, skimming his entire front which is not at all what he had planned.

“Your butt’s gonna be sore,” he tells her lamely, which earns him a broad smile as she stares sightlessly up into his face. Why the hell would he bring up her butt? That was about as inappropriate as he could get. He’d needed to say something, anything to get his mind off of the feel of her lithe body sliding so sensually over the front of his, even though he knows Hannah had not done it on purpose. At least, he doesn’t think she had.

“My butt’s fine, but my legs are getting a little sore. It’s been awhile,” she reminds him, as she moves her hands from his shoulders to his forearms for balance.

“Yeah, I’d have to agree with that.”

“What?” she asks with confusion and a furrow of her brow.

“What? Oh, nothing. I didn’t... never mind,” he hesitates. He’d been thinking about her “fine” butt, as well, and had just agreed. His mouth is working faster than his brain can keep up and he’d been agreeing with her about her fine ass, although he knows that she didn’t mean it in quite the same context.

He grabs up her hand and the horse’s reins with the other and pulls them both forward, but not quickly. Kelly knows that Hannah can’t keep up with his military marching pace, his normal pace, so he slows down to accommodate her. They walk a short while and stop in the woods so that she can catch her breath. Hannah doesn’t seem particularly short-winded, but he’s concerned about her just the same. There are tiny purple violets and even smaller, dainty white flowers on the forest floor and, to Kelly, it’s the most perfect setting in the entire world for Hannah McClane to be surrounded by such serene beauty. She should be wearing a crown of these flowers.