The McClane Apocalypse: Book One (17 page)

“Yeah, I guess so,” his sister answers quietly and looks at her toes.

“Well, then we have to get her milked or she’ll get sick. So we’re actually helping her, and she wants us to help her. See, Clover here is a Jersey. That’s what Mary told me. She gives us the milk that will make butter, and Daisy over there is a Holstein and she will give us milk for drinking. Pretty cool stuff, don’t ya’ think?”

“Kelly?” she asks distractedly and twists her small hands nervously.

“Yeah, Em?”

“Are we going to stay here?” Em asks him.

“Well, Em, what do you want to do?” Kelly stops in the middle of the morning feeding and stoops to be eye level with her. This twelve year old girl has too much wisdom in her brown doe-like eyes. She’ll know if he lies.

“I like it here. I don’t want to leave. Do you think they want us to leave? I really, really like it here. It’s... safe, you know?” she says with childlike innocence. It bothers Kelly more than he cares to admit that his tiny sister is worried about shit like safety and where her next meal might come from. Kids shouldn’t worry about that kind of stuff- ever.

“I know, kid. We’ll see, ok?” Kelly returns. It’s not something he likes to think about. If the McClanes would ask him and John or just him and the kids to leave, then he’d be obligated to. He wouldn’t dare to challenge the family. They’d done nothing but show kindness to him and the kids since they’d arrived.

The laughter of the McClane children coming from somewhere out in the barnyard draws Em’s attention away from him.

“Go on, Em, scat,” he tells her, and she runs to join her compadres in a day of tree climbing, chicken chasing and childish games of adolescence.

Kelly finishes with the morning feedings and heads back to the house with buckets of rich, creamy milk and full fat cream. He enters through the back of the house, the kitchen door everyone uses, and is greeted with the smells of a farm fresh breakfast being made and the sounds of the two women who are coordinating it. He takes the milk pails to the pantry room where Mary and Sue will take care of them after the breakfast meal is finished.

“Go and wash up, Kelly,” Grams orders as she’s taking sausages off of a wide griddle pan. “And tell those kids to get in here and scrub their grubby digits, too.”

She could put his Colonel to shame. But she is kind and gentle, if not a tad abrasive sometimes. She is the life source of the family. They literally move around her, ebbing and flowing and circling as if she is the sun itself.

“Yes, ma’am,” Kelly answers quickly.

When the entire family has been assembled in the large dining area, including Reagan and Derek, the doc says grace, and the chaos that has become their meals begins. Dishes clang, the children talk animatedly, the adults converse and everyone partakes in fabulous, hearty food. Four days has passed since Derek’s blood transfusion and he’s already on his feet. His activity is still being monitored and restricted by the doc. Reagan is also doing fine and complaining twenty-four seven about not being able to do her patrols and take care of the horses. She’s not one who likes sitting still for long and is anxious to be back outdoors and keeping busy.

The seating at the long table has become habitual. The grandparents sit at either end of it and the right side of the table is taken up by Sue, Derek, Justin, Arianna and Em who likes sitting with the other little girl. Arianna has become Em’s constant shadow. But Kelly thinks it’s actually helping Em to come out of her shell. The left side of the table always seems to be Hannah, Kelly, Cory, John and then Reagan who sits nearest her grandfather. The second morning following Derek’s recovery, Mary had suggested that they all sit together for their morning meal. Kelly had found out that the morning meal didn’t take place until after morning chores. Subsequently, everyone worked expediently at their morning chores and came in with huge appetites. Reagan had thrown a snit about having to sit by John, who had just smirked. Boy, did she ever have it in for him.

Lunch time is not formal at all and some of the family doesn’t even eat a lunch. Mary and Hannah usually leave food out on the island in the kitchen for anyone who wants it when they have time to grab it. The lunch faire usually consists of fresh fruit, homemade cheeses, leftover bread, jam, cut up vegetables from the garden, whatever meat might be leftover from the previous night’s dinner and sometimes a sweet like cookies or leftover cake. Kelly had eaten a raw green bean for the first time just yesterday. He hadn’t even known they could be eaten uncooked.

Kelly pauses in lapping up pancakes with syrup harvested from the trees on this farm to listen in on the conversation going on around him. Everyone is discussing the current events from which the McClane family has been so secluded.

“We were first sent out to the East Coast, sir,” John is telling the doc. “After the tsunamis the survivors needed all the help they could get. It was bad. There weren’t a whole lot of survivors left.”

“What is left exactly? The television stopped working almost immediately, and the radio reports weren’t much better. We’ve been quite in the dark here. Does anyone really know what’s left?” Herb asks.

Derek jumps in, “Not a whole lot. New York State is gone all the way in to the mountain ranges. We never got any farther north than that. We were told from what they could tell by air and what was still available from satellite patrols that the other New England states above New York were basically cut off from help. They weren’t showing too many signs of life up there, either, though. Whoever’s left north of New York is on their own. We couldn’t make drops or anything. There’s a massive fault line that’s running all the way in past Toronto, Canada, and back out through the Massachusetts coast line. All of New Jersey, Delaware, parts of the Carolinas- they’re all under water. Some places were hit as far as a couple hundred miles inland from the coast line. As far in as D.C. felt the aftershocks, and the damage they caused was almost as bad as the tsunamis themselves. We were told that Georgia faired a little better and Florida, too. But they got hit with the earthquakes. And now they’re just trying to regroup and stay above water from the flooding.”

“The earthquakes were so far off the Richter Scale that they couldn’t even measure them,” Kelly says.

“Yeah, entire cities were destroyed. Sink holes took others, fault lines formed,” John adds.

“Most people that survived have moved more inland away from the ocean,” Kelly quickly says.

“And what about the West Coast? Is it any better?” Sue asks. Kelly notices that she rubs her stomach nervously. Her eyes are pinched at the corners, and her brow furrows with worry. They probably shouldn’t be talking about this in front of her.

“I’m sorry to say, Sue, but no. It’s not better, maybe even worse. The entire western coast of California is gone, into the sea just like all the kooks predicted for so many years. Guess they weren’t kooks after all,” John answers her.

“And Texas and Arizona, how are they? The last radio transmission we were able to bring in said that another wave of earthquakes and a tsunami hit there,” Herb inquires.

“As far as we could tell, Arizona isn’t too bad. The eastern coastline of Texas was destroyed, but inland it was better,” Kelly explains patiently.

“Yeah, but many parts of South America were hit. Mexico we heard is as bad as California, not many survivors,” Derek adds. “Another round of crap went the other way, and we heard Japan got hit again.”

“The survivors that we could get to in the states were all taken to military bases and temporary housing units. They sent me and John in with the first wave, and it was pretty bad. We’ve done more tours than I care to count, but it was the worst I think we’ve ever dealt with. Maybe also ‘cuz it was our own people, too, you know?” Kelly explains quietly.

“And what about up north?” Sue asks.

“The North and the Northwest and the Midwest like here are still making it. Canada isn’t fairing too badly, except over above New York like Toronto. We lost all communication with that entire city and satellite images weren’t showing anything too positive to report,” John tells everyone and looks at his fingers which are in a steeple on the table instead of looking at Sue. Kelly takes over for him.

“By the military’s estimates there’s only about a third or less of survivors in our population now, which is still better than overseas. But it’s the violence that’s spread that has made everything so unstable. Plus, there’s sickness spreading from the exposure people are suffering. Many people don’t have homes anymore. The CDC sent out a lot of doctors on mission trips to the temporary camps set up for the survivors. People are dying of influenza, infections, fever... other stuff I don’t know about,” Kelly answers. Herb nods solemnly.

“When the European problems started, there were many American Medical Association conferences where the sicknesses and diseases were discussed. We tried to work with the European medical community, but it collapsed so quickly over there that we couldn’t offer much help. That’s when I knew that if anything happened here, we would need to be as prepared as possible,” Herb explains.

“Well, Herb,” Derek says, “those who aren’t dying of the diseases in the temp housings are killing each other for food and rations and well... just because they can.” His friend shakes his head with disgust.

“Yeah and most of the police around the country were sent to the hospitals and prisons to help protect the people there.” John offers but looks at his hands cupped together on the table in front of him.

“The prisons?” Doc asks.

“Most of them were overrun by the prisoners, the guards killed. A few are still standing, but they’ll run out of supplies soon. We even heard of a prison in Virginia that the guards locked up and left abandoned. The prisoners won’t last more than a few weeks on the supplies they had. But the guards probably didn’t feel safe leaving their own families to go to work every day. Other prisons fell and the prisoners are out, loose, on the run,” Kelly explains.

“And what about the hospitals?” Hannah asks. John just shakes his head and looks down again.

“Not good. Most of them were raided by drug addicts within weeks because the guards and cops were overrun,” Derek says. Everyone is quiet for a moment.

“Shocker. Junkies attacking people. How come you guys are here and not still out there?” Reagan demands impatiently. Why had the drug addict comment upset her more than the other bad news, Kelly wonders. Perhaps she was irritated by this because she is a doctor.

“Well, you see, it didn’t take long for everything to just go to crap,” Kelly tells her. He looks at Hannah beside him and notices that she’s stopped eating. She is a thin person to begin with; she needs to eat. He doesn’t like being the bearer of the bad news that would kill her delicate appetite.

“And?” Reagan prodded rudely.

This time John takes the lead, “And it just got bad. People were breaking into everything: gun stores were the first to get hit of course, retail stores, taking anything they wanted, robbing each other and their neighbors, killing. Anybody that still had a job to go to just stopped going. There aren’t any companies still in operation. Banks closed up quick, so it wasn’t like anybody was gonna get a paycheck anymore. The government shut down all nuclear power plants and put them in kind of a limbo, stand-by status because they were afraid the tsunamis would cause them to leak or explode. That’s probably why the electricity didn’t last long. That and the electric companies’ employees probably ditched work, too. It’s just not safe out there anymore. This is the only place we saw that seems even remotely safe.”

Doc pacifies them all, “I’m sure there are others out there who were prepared, son. There are people who live off the grid. We’re not the only family in the whole country who was ready, or as ready as anyone could be for something like this.” He resumes eating his breakfast, takes a sip of coffee, too. Everyone follows suit, and the girls are obviously comforted by his act of normalcy. If Mary is the sun of this family solar system, then Herb is definitely the moon. He has a calming effect on his family. He’s their rock and even Kelly feels calmer.

Derek speaks again, “People are trying to put up a fight against the anarchy, but most of them are losing. We were starting to see small bands of criminals forming. There were also groups of good people clustering together, like here. Then the local governments were overthrown as the local law enforcement officers started abandoning their jobs. You can hardly blame them. They were literally outgunned and outmanned.” The children are oblivious of the negative conversation. Justin, Arianna and Em are using their forks to draw designs in their gravy and making up funny names for them.

“That’s when we got orders for helping out in the bigger cities that still stood. It was pointless. You can’t tell who’s a bad guy anymore. It’s not like they wear turbans or look like Muslims anymore,” John points out.

“Didn’t feel right trying to disarm ordinary citizens. We knew they were gonna need whatever weapons they had to fight off the real bad guys,” Kelly agrees. Beside him, Hannah is pushing her eggs around on her plate. He takes a second to whisper to her, “You need to eat those, ya’ know. I’ll tell your chicken friends if you don’t. Plus, I mean if you’re ever gonna beat me at arm wrestling...”

She smiles to herself and takes a bite of her bread followed by a nibble of sausage. It’s good enough for Kelly. She lays her palm flat on the table, sliding it past her plate. He knows she’s going to reach for her water glass because he’s seen her do this numerous times. He picks it up, pressing it into her palm instead. He’s learning that in order to hand her things, he must first make physical contact with her so she knows he is helping her. It seemed strange at first to go around touching a woman who wasn’t your girlfriend or your relative, but he is getting used to it. And she seems to appreciate not having a big deal made out of it. When he looks up again, Mary is smiling warmly at him, and he returns it with a nod.

“I can understand that. I wouldn’t be able to disarm citizens, either. They could’ve been like my Reagan,” the doc says reminiscing something in his mind as his eyes cloud over. But his comment sets Reagan off and she throws down her fork, storming from the room in a flurry of livid green eyes and a tornado of blonde curls.