The McClane Apocalypse: Book One Read Free Page A

will cease to be important. The fight for her life will become the only thing that matters.

 
    Chapter Two
    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