The McClane Apocalypse: Book Two Read Free Page B

“I should’ve been there.” Regret is just something that everyone who is still alive is gonna have to swallow hard these days. It could eat a person alive, or it could be a useful tool from which to learn to never again let their guard down for any reason.
    “Nah, you didn’t know that was gonna happen, Kelly. None of us did. It was like they overran our neighborhood in one night, ya’ know? One minute I was hanging with my friends at the park where we’d meet and talk about how screwed up the world had gotten and how we all wished we could enlist that same day, and then two days later it was like the whole town had just gotten taken over,” he explains.
    Kelly is quiet, pretending to still milk his cow, which he’d finished a few minutes earlier, because he knows Cory needs to get this shit off his back, unload his burden onto him. It’s ok with Kelly. God had seen fit to give him these wide shoulders for a reason. It is like a heavy load the kid has been carrying around, weighing him down, and he’d not opened up to anyone about that night as far as Kelly knows.
    “After that first night when I hid with Em till they were gone, I called you and you told me to go and hide in the woods with her. I did and the next morning I went back and got us some supplies so we wouldn’t starve out there, and she was real scared. I mean real scared, kept crying and all. I went over to my best friend’s house to check on him. I didn’t go out in the open, though, Kelly. I did like you told me and snuck around, tried to use the woods as much as possible. And I took Em with me, too. Don’t worry. I didn’t leave her behind. We crossed back through Grant Park and came out to the neighborhood that Mike lived in. It looked worse than ours, man. I hid Em in a bunch of bushes and went to Mike’s house, thinking we could stay there till you came for us. But they were gone. They packed up their shit and split sometime in the middle of the night.”
    “A lot of people did that when it first hit. They just picked up and left. Guess they felt safer being away from the cities, which is probably smart,” Kelly tells him
    “It was weird. I just saw him the day before, and he was tellin’ me how he’d always had a crush on Allison Daniels at school and that he wished he would’ve asked her out before all this shit happened ‘cuz her and her family went to live in Indiana with her grandparents. Everybody had a crush on her. She was a typical cheerleader type. You know- blonde, pretty, dumb- the kind of girl you’d want to stick on your arm just for a day or two but that dumb-blonde crap would get old real quick? I remember when I got home that day, Dad got mad when he found out I’d sneaked out my window to go and meet up with my friends. We kind of had an argument. He said it was stupid and not safe to do that kind of crap anymore- that we had to be more careful. Little did I know. Guess Dad knew, though. I knew he’d been talking to you, getting updates on what it was like out there, but I think he was trying to protect me and Em. I just thought he was being a pain in my ass. Now I wish he could be a pain in my ass again,” Cory says quietly.
    “Yeah, he was good for that; protecting people from the bad, the negative,” Kelly tells his brother and finally stands, taking the bucket full of milk with him. He unhooks his cow, leads her back to the corral in the barn and frees her. She immediately joins up with the rest of the herd and her own baby. He stands next to Cory while he finishes with his own cow and lets him talk a while longer.
    “So after I couldn’t find Mike I tried a couple of my other friends’ houses, but they were the same or worse. Some of them were gone and a couple were...,” he says and doesn’t go any further. He doesn’t need to. Kelly knows it’s painful to remember this nightmare. He’s gotten pretty good at suppressing disturbing memories over the years. Men couldn’t be in the military