The McClane Apocalypse: Book Two (21 page)

Cory says nothing but nods and trots off. Kelly does the same, and within fifteen minutes they have enough to do what Kelly wants. He paints over the graffiti on the club-house which had so pissed him off. This neighborhood belongs to the people who live here, not the bunch of ragtag bottom-dwellers who had tried to take it over. People everywhere will need to learn how to take back their neighborhoods, and if Kelly can do anything to help them or set an example, then that’s what he intends to do.

And a half an hour later, as they are pulling away from the neighborhood of horrors, Kelly looks in the rearview mirror and grins. He and Cory bump fists. Nailed into the cut block wall of the guard shack for all to see is a sign covering the former one which had so proudly boasted a message of this neighborhood being gated, private, members-only and something about the eighteenth hole. Now it sports a freshly spray-painted white sign with bright red letters that reads:

THIS NEIGHBORHOOD HEAVILY ARMED

AND VERY DANGEROUS

MOVE ON!!

Chapter Twelve

John

He tugs her sleeve as they move through more of the deserted hallways and abandoned areas of the hospital where Reagan explained that her grandfather used to do rounds. So far they’ve found two more secret rooms and are moving toward the stairwell to go up another floor. She thinks there may be more doctors’ suites up higher. The sign on the “service only” stairwell door indicates the same. The stairwell is just as spooky as it had been earlier, but they’ve already used too many hours of this day and have no choice but to push on.

The very distinct sound of a door closing somewhere overhead, and the hollow echo of steel upon steel as it shuts, filters down to them. Reagan’s breath hitches, and John holds up a hand for her to halt and stay still. Within another moment, the sound of footsteps can be heard, as well. He wastes not a single, precious second and practically yanks her through the next door as soundlessly as possible. A discarded mop lies nearby, and John makes good use of it by sticking it in the door jamb so that the door can’t shut all the way. The noise would mimic the one they’ve just heard and alert whoever is now on those stairs above them that they are not alone.

“Come on,” he whispers to her urgently and together they sprint down a hall and come to a wing that looks to have housed some sort of research center. Everywhere he looks, the rooms are bright white and contain lab tables and chairs, beakers, microscopes and other lab equipment. Most of the rooms are encased in glass, so they aren’t going to find anywhere to hide here.

When they get to the end of the hall, John hooks a left, and they continue on. He doesn’t bother looking over his shoulder for her because she’s right on his heels. If he stops too suddenly, Reagan will literally run him down. They pass a suite of offices that seem to have belonged to doctors. His mind races as he tries to keep her moving along with him. Maybe the researchers had offices in this end of the hospital. Maybe he’ll find more concealed paneled rooms where they can secure more drugs which could prove useful. Maybe he can secret away with her and wait until the threat passes. If it is a threat.

John enters one of those rooms, shuts the door quietly behind him and turns to Reagan. Her eyes are wide with fear. Her finger rests near the safety on her rifle. John stays her hand and shakes his head.

“Look for a hidden room. Be quick, Reagan,” he urges on a muted whisper.

It’s all the encouragement she needs, and she frantically begins feeling along the wall. It is simply drywall in this room, though, and not the decorative wood paneling of the other doctors’ offices. They may not find a hidden room. He stands guard at the door, listening for danger.

“Shit, shit, shit!” she panics under her breath “I can’t find anything.”

“It’s ok. They might not have one in here,” he tells her when she comes closer again. “We’ll just hang here for a few minutes. Take a rest.”

“Why? Why not go out and if they’re someone bad just kill them?”

“Because they might
not
be and we don’t have time to keep getting delayed,” he explains as he risks a fast glimpse out the cracked door. “We’re doing a little E and E.”

“What the heck’s that mean?”

“Evade and escape. I don’t want to be bothered with every set of people we run into in this city. If they mean us harm, then I’ll take care of it. If not, then let’s just keep moving. Ok?”

“Yeah, sounds good to me. I don’t want to run into anyone, either,” she mumbles which makes John look behind him at her.

She’s biting her lower lip. Her eyes don’t meet his but continue to jump around nervously. She’s scared.

“Hey, it’s ok. I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” he reassures her to which she frowns and briefly makes eye contact. “You’re my responsibility while we’re in this city, Reagan. Trust me, I don’t take my responsibilities lightly.”

“I’m starting to get that,” she says teasingly. John shuts the door the rest of the way and sets the lock. “But I’m
not
your responsibility. I can take care of myself.”

“Mm hm, sure you can. Look, I just need you to watch my back when I’m working on something. You don’t have to take care of yourself. That’s my job,” he informs her with definitive sureness.

“It’s not your job,” she says on an angry hiss this time. John turns, puts his back to the wall and faces her straight on.

“Yes, it is,” he says with a grin. Reagan gives him one of her exasperated, roll of the eyes looks and stands almost shoulder to shoulder with him against the same wall. She doesn’t normally allow such close proximity, but John figures that she’s probably not totally hating the closeness now because of fear and fear alone.

“Whatever you say,” she says with a bit of derision. “Where are we going after this?”

“Probably over toward the part of the city where stores are located. We need some other supplies that we should be able to find over there,” he tells her while still listening intently to the hallway for any noise. The only noise he hears is an audible murmur of thunder, indicating that the storm is headed this way. He has been hoping it would pass over.

“I think it’s clear. Let’s keep moving,” he directs as he places his hand on the doorknob.

“Did you kill those people that were tracking that family?” she asks as she lays a hand on his forearm, preventing him from opening the door further.

This lie isn’t going to taste any better than the one he’d told her in the woods yesterday about the deer, but he does it anyways.

“Nah, just shot at them and they took off. Come on.”

“Oh,” she says with incredulity. “Ok.”

Her resignation is good enough for him. He’s not sure if she believes him or not since he’s never been a very convincing liar. For some reason he just can’t stand the thought of her fearing him any more than she already does. If he has to lie to protect her from his darker side, then it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make so that she doesn’t hate him.

“Let’s move,” he says in a hushed voice and gets a nod from her.

They leave the room they are in, a nicely appointed office, and traverse down a long, darkened hallway. At the end of this hall, they turn right and come to another group of offices that belongs to doctors and some that are designated for administrative staff. A hollow thud a floor above them reverberates down through the walls, causing Reagan to inch closer to him. John swings his rifle left, right and then behind them to ascertain that they are still alone.

“In here,” he says as they come to an office much larger and grander in scale than the others they’ve been in today. The impending storm is not doing anything to allow sunshine into the room. Ominous, melancholy clouds momentarily block out the light.

The nameplate sitting on top of the ornately-carved cherry desk placed directly to his left reads, “Dr. Bernson, Chief of Cardiology.” It only takes a few moments to find the hidden wall panel located behind the doctor’s desk which he pushes inward, releasing it from its catch.

“Get inside here and start,” he refers to the secret room. “I’ll lock the outer door.”

Before he even gets the dead bolt set, Reagan’s screech and sudden intake of frightened breath alerts him. He races over to the room and immediately sees what her flashlight beam is trained on. There is a corpse hanging from a noose fashioned out of what looks to be hospital towels. Reagan turns away and flings herself at his chest. John wraps an arm around her, but before he can offer much comfort she pushes past him and back into the office again.

“Fuck!” she hisses with anger and disgust.

She dashes to a window, has it unlocked, pushed up in about four seconds flat and her head poked out of it. John crosses the room and rubs her back soothingly as she inhales deep gulps of fresh air.

“Easy, boss,” he says, trying to calm her. John can feel the quaking of her muscles under his hand.

“Shit, I wasn’t expecting that,” she admits.

It’s literally the first time he’s ever heard her cop to weakness of any sort. It makes his sense of needing to protect her skyrocket by about a thousand percent.

“It’s ok,” he tells her as she straightens again. He lets his hand fall away so that she doesn’t feel the need to shirk it, which John is sure she was about to do. “Just wait here, ok? I’ll go in and check it out. I’ll bring everything out for you to look at.”

Reagan nods and blinks rapidly before John heads back into the suicide room. Apparently she’s seen dead people, obviously because she is a doctor, but this guy is semi-decomposed, rotting and the smell is pretty bad. It’s nothing to John, though. He’s seen dead bodies in all their horrifying states of decomposition. The worst ones were always the ones that had been burned. Those images stick with you for longer than you’d like. This corpse looks to have been in his late fifties, and his manner of dress suggests that he was someone of importance in this hospital. The spectacles lying on the tile floor near his dangling feet must’ve belonged to him.

After ten minutes of looting, John has many more vials of medicines that are everything from antibiotics and steroids to pain meds and aspirin loaded into his backpack. He ducks into the room and grabs a full shelf of fever reducers before going back out to her.

“There are more supplies in there. Do you think we need anything else?” he asks.

“No, not really. Some of this is heart medicine. Some are for controlling the beat, like what you would prescribe for a-fib patients, some are to lower cholesterol- that’s the least of our fucking problems now- some of these are more for post-surgery patients,” she explains on a snort. Her genius and her smart mouth know no bounds.

“Do you not want to take them?”

“Yes, I think we should still take them. You never know. We might have a use for them some day. Let’s hope not, though. The pain meds are more important. And the antibiotics, of course. You never know what shit’s floating around out there now,” she chides with her usual derision.

“Ready?” he asks and she nods again. He takes her by the arm toward the office door after he closes the secret room again.

“You ok, boss? We can rest a little while longer,” he offers, but of course she just shakes her head. John sighs once and nods at her. “Alright, I want to get to the roof so we can scan the area.”

“Ok. We’ll need to find another stairwell then,” she agrees.

John nods this time and eases the door open as quietly as he can manage. The hall is as empty as it had been earlier, and he nods over his shoulder to her. They skirt furtively around two more dead bodies, people who look to have just been visitors of patients within this hospital. The sign for the stairs is up ahead of them by maybe twenty yards. A shuffling-scuttling noise behind them from a connecting hallway spurs them into a quick sprint. Every few feet he glances over his shoulder, but no evil residents of the hospital follow them. No re-animated zombie corpses lurk behind nurses’ stations, either.

John opens the door to the stairs and pops his head through, listening a moment for movement or noise. Other than the dead man lying upside down in a sprawling manner on the stairs going down, there isn’t anyone present. A low reverberation of thunder in the distance accompanies them as they ascend the last few floors to the rooftop where John leaves a discarded piece of lumber in the doorway to make sure they can get back through it. He’s fairly sure this door will lock once it’s closed. He doesn’t exactly want to get locked on a rooftop with her.

The sunshine is still bright, but in the distance can be seen dark gray clouds foretelling a storm on the horizon. It’s exactly what they don’t need right now.

“Come, Reagan,” he says to her as they cross the hot rooftop toward the edge where a four foot high wall of cement protects people from going over. “Take a knee for a minute. Let me do a perimeter check.”

She gives him her obligatory nod and goes a few feet away to sit on a ventilation duct that pokes up from the roof’s floor. With binoculars, John scans the area below, the view of the parking lots attached to the hospital, and a lower wing where he can see a long hallway full of windows. They’ve spent too many hours here already, and John would like to either move on or head back to camp before that storm hits or before dark, whichever comes first. There is movement at the farthest eastern end of the main parking lot. A small group of people scurry clandestinely among the cars. John counts two men, a woman and a possible teenage boy. The two men and the woman all carry a weapon of some kind, shotguns and a pistol. The boy doesn’t, but he does have a baseball bat. He’s not sure if they’re a threat, but they are moving toward the front entrance of the hospital. He will avoid the front of the hospital. Most people will stick to using the front entrance of most buildings, but he’ll try to come at buildings through the rear or even side, alleyway entrances. The view of where they’ve left the horses is on the opposite side of the building, so John takes Reagan to that end of the roof.

“I want to see if anyone’s messed with the horses or if there’s movement of any kind back there. We need to move on soon. Do we have enough from this hospital or do we need to keep searching?” he asks her before encouraging her to sit again.