The McClane Apocalypse Book Five by Kate Morris Page A

Army
truck extends his hand to Simon in greeting. A young, attractive
blonde comes forward and hugs Cory. He returns the greeting but stands back immediately
after. A few of the children run over and hug his thick leg.
Apparently these people really like his best friend. Simon sure
does, and he’s glad to have him home.
    Cory introduces them to everyone in the
vicinity, which is mostly McClane family representatives and a
couple of the men from town. The family had informed the town of Cory’s impending arrival of
friends. For the past two days, he’d been getting increasingly
anxious about whether or not they’d make it. He was planning on
going out tomorrow to look for them. Now he doesn’t have
to.
    “We have two empty homes a couple streets
over ready for you guys,” Cory informs the blonde.
    She smiles widely at him before saying,
“Sounds great, Cory. Lead the way!”
    They will have roughly four adults in
each home with a small number of children, too. They don’t seem to
care. As a matter of fact, they seem in awe of the small, efficient
town and the minor amount of improvements that they’ve been able to
make. Simon, on the other hand, is highly frustrated at the slow
pace of progress they’ve made. There are simply just not enough
hours in the day to get it all done. He has so many ideas for even more projects and improvements
they could be doing. But before
long , winter will be upon them again, which will make
getting projects done more difficult.
    They get the group settled in,
introduced to their new neighbors and leave them to do their
unpacking. They didn’t have much, Simon noticed. It hadn’t taken
long to haul their meager possessions into the furnished homes. The
one house belonged to the local butcher, a single man who’d been
killed right at the beginning of the apocalypse. The other home belonged to a retired school
teacher in her eighties who’d passed away less than a year ago. The
people in town left the former owners’ belongings and furnishings
in the homes. Simon’s glad that someone will be occupying the
lonely, desolate homes. They have quite a few others in this
town.
    The remaining residents of Pleasant View,
especially the new sheriff, hadn’t been very open to the idea of
having new people coming into their tiny town. Once they’d heard
about the ammo and guns they were bringing, it had gone more
smoothly, the medicine easier to swallow.
    “I almost didn’t recognize you, Cory,” the
blonde, Jackie, comments as the five of them including her young
son walk to the clinic.
    Cory chuffs through his nose, “Well, had to
clean up. The family doesn’t like it when I go full-on
caveman.”
    She giggles, a light, high-pitched sound. This woman
seems awfully fond of Cory. Simon takes a second to look at her
more closely. She’s very pretty ,
not very old, but likely older than Cory. She also walks closely
next to Cory instead of walking ahead of them with Paige and
Sam.
    Simon says, “Yeah, we thought maybe a
Cro-Magnon man was comin’ out of the woods.”
    Jackie giggles again. She’s a short, thin
woman, her hair a pale blonde with matching eyebrows. Her brown
eyes are warm with longing as she regards Cory.
    “I like this look on you,” she says. “You
look rather handsome.”
    Up ahead of them, Paige snorts rather rudely. She has talked to
him repeatedly about how much she doesn’t like Cory and would like
it if he moved back to the big house and out of “their” cabin.
Simon has had to explain many times that the cabin belongs to him
and Cory. He hates to hurt her feelings, but Cory was at the farm
before her. It’s not really a seniority thing, but Cory and the
rest of them built the cabin by hand. It would be like evicting him
out of his own house. Simon can’t ask that of him. She will just
have to get used to Cory living with them.
    “Yeah, he just about killed Paige when he
first got here!” Sam tosses over her shoulder.
    Simon frowns unhappily.
    “Well,