Free The McClane Apocalypse Book 4 by Kate Morris Page B

this area. The unfortunate part is that the ancient
rusted door is stuck. She shoves a good four times before it lets
out a loud squeal in protest of its rusty hinges being abused. It
finally opens about twelve inches, enough for her to squeeze
through. It doesn’t matter if they’ve heard her. She’s home free
now. This is where she excels.
    She knows for
certain they are after her now. That door
gave her away. Men’s voices are behind her. She hears their
footsteps slapping at the pavement and slush. Hers barely make a sound. She
dashes to an apartment building and blasts through the front door.
The shotgun is too cumbersome for her to continue carrying, so she
stashes it in a room on the first floor. At least she knows that
they can’t use it on her since she stole it from them. Running
straight, she comes to an exit and uses the door there. Then she’s
gone again. She can hear the men still pursuing her, but Paige is
positive that she can outrun them. This is her specialty, and she
needs to lose them before going back to the video rental store to
retrieve her friends. There would be no sense in leading them there
to continue this foot chase with Maddie and Talia. They’d never
make it. Those men likely have other guns that they are carrying
and could use against them.
    A quick glance over her shoulder
proves her right. Only two of them are still chasing
her.
    “We’ll get you, bitch!” one of them
yells.
    Right before he trips over
debris on the road and comes to a skidding crash in the snow where he
lands against the side of a parked car. Paige has to suppress a
smile and keep going. She darts down an alley and straight into a
building there. Jumping over a metal box, she makes her way to the
front, road-facing entrance. The door isn’t even there anymore.
She’s running back toward the way they’d come, whether her pursuer
realizes it or not. She’ll double back again to lead him away from
her group waiting for her. A few more stealthy sneaks into
buildings where she finally loses him in another big warehouse, and
Paige is on her way to collect her friends. The whole chase has
taken less than a half an hour. She’s barely even winded. Those men
should learn the importance of conditioning, or not to steal from
people who do, people who are even hungrier than them.
    She collects her friends
and out the back door they go. They hike through the woods, careful
not to be followed again. They were done in the city anyway. They
need to keep going since they have around twenty miles still to
hike. They make it probably close to five miles before they need to
stop for a break and to feed a bit of food to Maddie, even though
they’ve all been snacking on the video store candy of chocolate
covered raisins, Sweet Tarts and gummy worms. They take turns carrying Maddie
most of the time since she can only walk about a mile or less
before her tiny legs give out. It doesn’t take long before they
come to a small farm which is rather obviously abandoned. A
sizable, fenced-in pasture holds a small pony. Strange that it hadn’t died
in the past years, but it must’ve had enough to eat to keep it
alive. The pasture looks like a good ten acres, enclosed by
high-tensile wire fencing. Grass has grown up through the cracks on
the front porch of the white house. A black shudder hangs crookedly
from a second-floor window and from a wide picture window on the first
floor. They let themselves in through the unlocked front door and
perform a fast search of the home for inhabitants while Talia stays
outside with Maddie.
    Gavin finds some sticks and
firewood in a shed while Paige roots out some old newspaper. She
and Talia locate a hand crank water pump near one of the
outbuildings. When they pump it about ten times, water comes
trickling out. They find three empty buckets in the barn and fill
them. It doesn’t matter if the water is stale or contaminated. It’s
likely that the pony has been surviving on the same water that’s in