Free The McClane Apocalypse: Book One by Kate Morris

get here?” Justin asks for the millionth time since the start of the apocalypse. His big brown eyes plead with childlike innocence. A stray lock of mahogany hair falls over one eye, and Sue gingerly pushes it back.
    “Soon, my love, very soon. I promise,” Sue replies. But as soon as the word “promise” had left her lips she’d regretted it. It isn’t right to get her young son’s hopes up when she isn’t sure if his father will ever come home alive.
    It is so hard for Sue to be optimistic, to be the one who doesn’t worry. Since their mother had passed away, it had been Sue who had felt the need to hold the girls together. At the age of sixteen, it had been a difficult time for them all, and Sue had been closest with their mother. Their brother Mark had entered the military the year before their mother passed, so he was no longer the person in charge of the younger kids. Sue had speculated many times over the years that Mark had left on purpose to get away from the eldest brother duties. Their father had very rarely made an appearance, so their mother had relied so heavily on Mark to help with the girls and household chores and fixing leaky faucets and mowing the lawn and taking out the trash. And when they’d lost their brother a few years ago to an air-raid in Syria, again she’d been the one who had felt the burden of playing matriarchal leader to the girls.
    Oh, they had Grams, but she was their Grams. She made them hot cocoa and cookies and let them cry on her soft shoulders. But she wasn’t pushy, didn’t feel compelled to make them do their homework- Hannah- or how to get ready for school in matching, coordinated clothes- Reagan. Grandpa was much stricter, especially with schooling, but he was always at his office. And Grams was a little out of touch with raising young girls. Sue had been the person the girls had gone to when they were having problems with other kids or which dress to wear to church or how to apply makeup. Most of these subjects were simply reserved for Hannah as Reagan had been a misfit in any school she went to and would’ve rather died than wear a little lip gloss. The girl had been pretty clueless when it came to girlfriends, social rules, boys, makeup and basically anything else that most girls learned. But she could tell you what disease some nerd scientist at John’s Hopkins or Harvard Med was studying. Poor thing.
    Sue hadn’t minded taking on the responsibility of the girls. It gave her a feeling of added closeness to her mother, though she was dead. She’d somehow felt that their mother was still with them if she could just make all the right decisions and do all the things she imagined her mother would do were she still alive. And then she’d met Derek, the love of her life.
    She’d gone to Louisiana for spring break with her two college girlfriends. They’d all considered themselves much more cosmopolitan than other spring breakers by not going to a beach town, drinking and clubbing for a week. They were going to see all of what New Orleans had to offer. They had gone on midnight ghost sighting tours, eaten French pastries and drunk strong espressos for breakfast and taken a river boat cruise around the area. It was on their third night there that she’d met Derek, who was on forty-eight hour leave. She and her girlfriends were dining al fresco and enjoying the warm Louisiana air. He was alone and sitting on a park bench across the quiet street, eating a po’boy sandwich and sipping out of a large Styrofoam cup. She’d been touched by his behavior as he kept throwing chunks of his sandwich to pigeons. He’d looked her way more than a few times, and she had blushed deeply every time. His actions had seemed a kind act, feeding the birds, until he had become quickly overrun by them. They’d literally started landing on him until he’d thrown his whole sandwich down and fled across the street. He was wearing his military fatigues and Sue’s girlfriends took full