The McClane Apocalypse: Book One (2 page)
“The military men will also eventually abandon their posts. Men will not let their families become victims to lawlessness and violence. Our communication systems were already on shaky ground the last few weeks. Reagan, you said you tried yesterday to phone your family and all you got was a busy signal. I didn’t want to alarm you. I was hopeful. But I don’t think our cell services and satellites are working correctly, and they might not ever work again. I’ve been trying the land lines here in the school; they don’t work, either. Our government was trying its best to hold everything together here in America, but it is unavoidable now. I spoke with Herb, I mean your grandfather, a few weeks ago, and we discussed the probability of this happening and that I would make sure you made it home if something did arise. This country, like everywhere else, will fall. There will be no more United States just like there is no more Russia and China and Great Britain... everywhere. There will be famine and disease that spreads from the dead and the inability to take care of these tsunami victims. You must only think of yourselves now,” he explains as he hastily lights his smoking pipe.
Reagan’s head is swimming with information overload, and she feels like she is going to puke. This morning her toughest decision was which tights to wear with her wool skirt and black sweater. She was never good with high fashion concepts. Uma does her best to help her, but Reagan is pretty much pathetic. Hair in a ponytail, raggedy jeans and her beat up Converse are her preferred dress code.
“This is so frightening, Dr. Krue,” Uma joins in. Her black eyes are wide with fear.
“Everything will be ok, Uma,” Reagan tries to calm her young friend. She notices that Dr. Krue does not chime in with her. He obviously does not feel that everything will be ok at all.
“Come back for me at 7:00; that will give us some time to get ready. Pull around back to the faculty parking, and we will take my car. I’ll go home, get gas and a few things we’ll need. I’ll bring my medical bag, too. Lord knows I haven’t needed it in years, but you never know what we’ll encounter on the road. I’ll meet you right back there where we park. Go and pack your things. Don’t worry about taking everything with you, nothing cumbersome or big. Just grab a bag and pack what few things you might need in order to make the trip straight through to your family’s farm. Get whatever water or food you can find small enough to throw in your backpacks, a change of clothes, important items only. I’ll get out an old map and find us a route to take that will help to avoid the main freeways. They will be dangerous and congested. In my day, all we used were maps, not one of those handheld gizmo whatcha-callems. Your grandfather’s farm is only about a six hour drive from here, maybe a little longer if we don’t take the freeways. We should be able to get there by morning. Leaving at night might help with that, too, less traffic. Don’t bother with any of your school things. You’ve officially graduated,” he adds with a single chuckle. The familiarity of his voice is soothing.
She returns his smile as best as she can, knowing it comes off as a crooked, one-sided grin without much humor behind it. She is normally a silly-hearted person, easy to laugh, to find humor in irony.
“Four hours. That gives us about four hours,” Reagan confirms. “We’ll be back for you.” As she finishes this statement, a loud explosion can be heard from another part of the campus. They rush to the windows where nothing but a stream of gray smoke is visible in the distance, but the source cannot be seen as it is obscured from view by the ancient, brick buildings of the campus. Reagan glances at Dr. Krue, and he gives her his raised eyebrow “I told you so” look. She nods in agreement and grabs Uma by the arm to rush back to their dorm.
As they race through the halls shoulder to shoulder with other students, there is a noticeable change taking place before Reagan’s eyes. Students are partying, breaking into vending machines, streaking and all in all raising hell. Some students are distraught and trying desperately to reach family members on phones that no longer work. Many of these students are like her, transplants from other states. She says a quick prayer for their sakes that their families are not on the East Coast or what’s left of it, but she’s sure that many probably are.
Once they reach their dorm room, they hastily shove a change of clothing into their backpacks and start grabbing what they deem as a few essentials. There seems to be general chaos, loud music and noise coming from the narrow hallways but nothing that couldn’t be heard on any normal Friday night at such a large university. This is not the average Friday night at any university anywhere.
There is a small picture of herself and her two sisters sitting on her shelf near the window overlooking the dorm’s courtyard. She tucks it securely inside her dark blue E=MC squared hoodie in her bag. They look so goofy and young and innocent in the photo. The picture was taken of the three of them on the farm, all sitting or standing on the wooden fence enclosing the horse paddock. Reagan is sticking out her tongue- for which Grams had scolded her- Sue is smiling broadly and Hannah is simply grinning as if she was keeping a good secret. It is the same demure smile Hannah always gives.
Next, she grabs her toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant and clean socks and underwear from her drawers. She also throws in her emergency kit which contains five maxi pads, a bottle of aspirin, sunblock and other ridiculous items that she’ll probably have no use for.
“I can’t believe this is happening, Reagan,” Uma whispers, her voice cracking.
Reagan notices that her roommate’s small, dark hands are shaking. “Hey, don’t worry. We’re gonna be fine. It’ll be ok, Uma.” Uma begins crying. Reagan hopes that she will have some sort or any kind of soothing reassurance on Uma as she hugs her close. She doesn’t deserve to be so afraid, not with her not knowing about her own family’s well-being. After a short while, her friend pulls back.
“I’m going to try one more time before we head back to meet Dr. Krue to phone my parents or chat them or whatever I can. I have to know they are all safe, Reagan,” Uma explains shakily.
“Sure, that’s fine, Uma. We have some time. I’m gonna just close up everything here and sneak down to the student lounge to see if I can’t raid the vending machines for snack food or drinks for the ride,” Reagan tells her as she starts putting things that might be thought of as valuable under their beds or in the back of their dresser drawers. If things don’t turn out the way Dr. Krue is predicting, then she wants to come back to the university as soon as possible to resume her studies and research.
A half an hour later, she leaves their room to hunt for sustenance, but the first lounge she comes upon has already been vandalized. A few of the tables have been overturned, and someone has drawn some graffiti on the far wall, a few choice words about the Dean, who Reagan had always found to be a pleasant enough woman. She climbs to the fourth floor of their dorm and stops in another student lounge area where she manages to salvage one bag of pita chips, a small package of trail mix and a single bottle of water. The vending machine has been completely knocked onto its side, the glass broken out from a likely well-placed kick of a foot. She’d stupidly brought her student debit card which now seems silly.
After deciding against going up another floor to find what is sure to be a similar and fruitless bounty, she straps on her backpack and begins descending the stairs that will take her back to her room. She consults her watch and is surprised that almost three hours has already passed since leaving Dr. Krue. A small group of young men burst into the stairwell and bump into her as they ascend. They smell of alcohol and marijuana, and one of them makes a lewd pass at her. But Reagan doesn’t notice anything malevolent in their behavior. Maybe Dr. Krue is just over-reacting. Then she hears breaking glass and a woman’s scream from somewhere far overhead in the stairwell. Maybe his assessment is spot on. Reagan pauses only a heartbeat before sprinting back to her room.
And less than an hour later, Reagan’s life will never be the same again. Tests, research projects, Gross Anatomy or fancy coffee drinks will cease to be important. The fight for her life will become the only thing that matters.
Reagan
Once again in her dorm room, Reagan quickly closes the door behind her and locks it. She does a hasty scan of the room and immediately notices that Uma is gone. She must’ve headed back over to the Med Lab without her.
“Uma! What the hell?” she swears with frustration to the empty room.
Reagan decides that she’s not exactly dressed appropriately for what may be coming with road travel, fast walking and getting shoved around in hallways. She strips out of her version of dress-up clothing, dons a pair of black cargo pants and throws on her trusty Converse. When she’s finished, she looks out their dorm room window and takes a quick glance down into the courtyard hoping to spy Uma. But what she sees is not what she would have ever believed she’d see there.
A car is parked on the lawn in that same courtyard where Reagan had sat on the grass and studied so many times, and it is on fire. A few motorcyclists are driving circles around it and yelling, hooting and cheering. The men on the bikes are clearly not students of the university, unless they are taking adult continuing education classes majoring in tattoos and body piercings. Reagan watches in horror as another car speeds onto the grass, turfing it as it goes. Four men jump out, grab a young woman and physically drag her into their car as she screams for help. Nobody helps her. Nobody even notices because there is absolute calamity taking place. There are at least three different all out brawls going on, two men are throwing bottles that are on fire through windows, and deeper into the student parking area another car is set ablaze. The campus is no longer safe. It’s a war zone. And that war zone will soon infiltrate her dorm building. Unless, of course, it is successfully burned to the ground first.
As if pinched, Reagan flinches at a sudden memory. It is one of her and her grandfather as he was dropping Reagan off at college her first day. They had argued. She had called him old-fashioned. He had called her naïve. He had been absolutely right. And thank God he’d been insistent, as well.
Reagan had grown up in her grandfather’s medical practice, nosing around, shadowing him, asking millions of questions, likely driving him crazy. But there was always something to learn, something new with medicine. Grandpa had graduated med school at the age of eighteen. Her own father had also become a doctor, but he’d gone through at the normal pace. Her father is a doctor in the Marines, so he was never around, always deployed somewhere in the world. When her mother died twelve years ago, Colonel McClane had basically dumped his three daughters on his parents to be raised. Mark, Reagan’s older brother, was already deployed and serving in Thailand at the time when their mother passed, so he had been spared having to meet new friends in a new school and adapt to having no mother and their father leave them. Unfortunately, Mark had been killed a few years ago in the Middle East.
Having been bumped four years ahead of her age group in school didn’t exactly help Reagan with fitting in with other kids. Being small for her age only added to this. But Reagan’s one calm throughout the storm of her adolescence was her grandparents. They were steadfast and strict and believed in schedules and education. But they are also the most loving, respectful people in the world and as dear to her as her own parents. Reagan had spent all of her free time at her grandfather’s practice after school and on weekends, hanging on his every word. She became so enthralled with medicine that she plowed through school, took her SAT’s at fifteen, and earned a full scholarship to Ohio State University of Medicine just short of her sixteenth birthday. Leaving her grandparents, sisters and the farm which had become home to her had been the most difficult thing she’d ever done.
She reaches far into the back corner of her small closet, crammed full of used textbooks, stacks of notebooks full of research, and dirty laundry she had meant to wash but hadn’t seemed to ever find the time to do so. There she feels around for a small shoebox. It is the same box her grandfather had literally shoved into her arms as he hugged her one last time at her dorm room door before he left for the farm.
“Thank God for Grandpa,” Reagan whispers to herself as she pulls the box clear. Inside she finds the small canister of mace, a few clear packages of bandages, “a good, sharp pocket knife” as her grandpa had put it and some antibiotic cream in a tube along with a few other medical items. She shoves the small, folded knife and the mace into the cargo pockets of her pants and takes the rest of the items and stuffs them unceremoniously into her pack.
Reagan stands again and grabs a dark navy hoodie and ball-cap out of her closet and puts them on. It might not be a good idea to stand out right now, not that she ever does. Fitting all of her thick, curly blonde hair into the ball-cap proves easier said than done.
She takes her room key out of her pocket and scans the area one last time, wistfully remembering all the good times she and Uma have had here. She locks her dorm room, which is probably a silly thing to do at this point, but it gives her a small semblance of control.
Someone slams into her from behind, nearly knocking the breath out of her. Reagan turns to see who had rammed her, but it is impossibly crowded in the hallways now, nearly impassable. She pushes and shoves and fights her way through the masses and comes to a stairwell near the back of their building that will lead to her and Uma’s secret shortcut to the Med Center where Dr. Krue should be waiting for them.
As she blasts through the ground floor service-door to the narrow alleyway behind her dorm building, Reagan is assaulted by smoke, acrid and thick. For a moment she can’t see much but feels her way to safety as she coughs, staying low to the ground. There is thicker smoke coming from somewhere off to the left at the source of the fire, and Reagan is thankful that she needs to go straight and then right, hopefully away from any potential danger.