by Kate Morris
The McClane Apocalypse
Book Nine
Kate Morris
2018
Ranger Publishing
Copyright © 2018 by Ranger Publishing
Note to Readers: This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is not intended to provide helpful or informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss or risk personal or otherwise.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file
ISBN 13: 978-1720484837
ISBN 10: 978-17204843X
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the fans of The McClane Apocalypse for supporting the series and following this family. Also, thank you for giving my Detective Lorena Evans thriller series a chance and supporting it, too!
Kate
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Epilogue
Chapter One
Cory
“Move your asses!” Kelly yells through an open mic at the men on his team who are reporting to him.
Cory observes helplessly from the building where he was told to hold his position until instructed otherwise. It is frustrating watching his brother taking fire a few hundred yards away and in danger while he is stuck picking off stragglers and those who try to flee or come at them from the rear. The attacking force is busy seeing all the action while he and Simon, along with Dave’s sniper and two more of his men, are acting as a blocking force and sniping losers who run. He’s not sure how long he can remain passive while this continues. That ticking in his head is as loud as if he were standing in the clock tower of Big Ben listening to it chime out its cadence marking the hour. It is hard to suppress that need within himself to destroy.
“Push forward,” John orders his own team at the other end of their planned ambush. Cory isn’t working with him, either.
It is not going as well as the other times they’ve done this. The loud bark of a long-range shot from the other side of the road- Dave’s sniper, Lucky- rings out in the night air. Another man in the road falls to his death, but they are fighting a larger group tonight.
“Do not retreat!” John is commanding with authority, audible in Cory’s earpiece. “Keep moving.”
His friend’s voice is not frantic, and John probably doesn’t feel panic, but Cory is getting antsy. He needs to be a lot more involved in this. Not much rattles John, though. He is as calm and relaxed as if he were still back at the farm baling hay on one of the old tractors.
“Incoming,” Simon says beside him.
Cory is working with the Professor to keep the enemy at bay. Last week they’d taken on a smaller group northwest of Dave’s town, Hendersonville, and got themselves flanked. It all worked out in the end, but they hadn’t been too keen on the idea of their enemy calling for backup and flanking them. It had pissed Cory off actually.
He spies through his night-vision binoculars and sees what Simon has spotted. There are men coming out of a building closer to the end of the perimeter where he and Simon are hiding out. This battle is different than what they’ve done before. The highwaymen stopped taking their bait of the broken-down car routine. As a matter of fact, the creeps have mostly been hitting the remnants of towns or small, newly-formed villages. The McClanes believe that their tactics have worked too well, and they’ve pushed them off the highways and main roads. People traveling on those roads are safer now, but the ones living in towns are more at risk. It seems with these assholes that they just can’t win.
Tonight, they are in a railroad yard where so many huge, diesel engines and freight cars have sat abandoned for years, rusting away with time and left behind without a conductor or engineer to bring them back to life. The building in which he and Simon are concealed is perfect, though, not because it is old but because it is solid brick. No streetlamps illuminate the night for them, and a misty fog has set in, making it difficult to see.
A round pings off one of the big engines parked twenty yards in front of them.
“I’m counting at least a dozen,” Simon announces quietly. “Hundred and fifty yards out.”
Cory nods, “Yeah, I’d say the same.”
“Close to the hornet’s nest,” his friend says.
“Right,” Cory agrees. Although Dave’s team reported back that they did not find occupants in the former mansion homes of the used car dealer and the senator, they still believe that they are based in this area. It would be easy to send reinforcements from a central command base, as Simon is suggesting.
“We’ve got about a dozen hostiles down here,” Cory relays to his brother and waits for Kelly to answer.
“Affirmative,” he says a moment later, gunfire in the background. “I’ll head your way.”
“Permission to engage,” Cory requests.
“Wait for me if you can,” Kelly says. “Give me five, over.”
“Yes, sir,” Cory answers and looks at Simon.
“Are we waiting?”
Cory smirks, “What do you think?”
Simon sighs hard and nods, “Alright, I’m with you.”
“I know. You’re my best bud,” he teases his friend, who is still sore with him and barely speaks to Cory unless he has to.
“I’ll try not to friendly-fire on you,” Simon jeers.
Cory chuffs and rises from his squatted position to head out, “Nah, you love me. You’d never shoot me in the back.”
“Maybe in the ass, give you an Easy Company.”
Cory smiles, knowing his friend is referring to so many of the shootings in the butt that the 101st Airborne, Easy Company, from WWII took while fighting across the whole of Europe. John and Kelly were the first ones to tell them of the story. Then Dave the Mechanic lent the book The Band of Brothers to Cory, who, in turn, lent it to Simon when he was finished. It was a fantastic read. Then he found a few more books written about that group of brave young men at the library thanks to Mrs. B. There is so much to learn about war
from studying past battles, skirmishes, and wars.
“You’ll patch me right up,” Cory teases his friend. “I have faith in you, brother.”
“Beings I detest you, that conclusion is not a very prudent one,” Simon corrects as he, too, rises to go make war on some assholes.
“Nerd,” he jokes.
“Idiot,” Simon returns without missing a beat.
“Cover me?”
“Maybe,” Simon threatens and flees to the metal staircase that will take him up to the second floor where he’ll have a better line of fire at men and will provide cover for Cory, who can take his battle to the ground.
He smiles as his friend retreats into darkness, consumed by it and swallowed whole. Cory just hopes Simon finds it in his heart to forgive him someday. His friendship is too important to Cory to throw away because of what happened with Paige. Although he hadn’t meant harm to come of their hidden relationship, Cory knows what he did was wrong and that he somehow has to make amends for what he’s done.
Cory’s smile fades as he rushes through the building and exits on the other side. He will flank the men coming toward them. It should cause them to panic, probably scatter, and will be much easier to deal with in the end. They’d gotten lucky and were tipped off to this hideout these men were using. North of them just outside of Nashville, a group of people in a very small village told one of Dave’s scouts about this place and that they were pretty sure some of the highwaymen were using it to hide out when they traveled through town. It was a good lead. They surveilled the rail yard and found evidence of the men a few days ago. They’ve been camped out in the woods nearby ever since waiting for them to return. Tonight that had happened. John had called in for Dave and his group to meet them, and they’d brought a few men from Hendersonville, as well. With the intel they’d gathered, they knew they were up against seventy-five or so men. Thankfully, this was only a meeting place and a shelter when they worked the area, and no women were involved or present tonight from what they’ve seen.
He jogs carefully in the dark to the other side of a permanently parked locomotive, remembering all the times as a young boy that he enjoyed playing with toy trains. Tonight is not a game but a fight for his life. Cory hops over the iron rails in front of the lead car and lands in the gravel on the other side of the tracks. Then he sprints as silently as possible toward the men heading their way. Gravel crunches under his boots, but Cory keeps moving at a fast click. At the second to the last train car, he climbs up into it through an open, sliding door and creeps quietly to the other side. He works the lever and cracks the door slightly open, letting it slide on its rusty hinges. It makes more noise than he wants.
Voices nearby let him know how close they are, and he keeps himself concealed behind the wall of the boxcar. The men’s conversation grows louder, and Cory holds his breath as they pass right by the train car without detecting him. They are obviously thinking they are going to flank John and Kelly by the tone of their conversation and the hushed scheming of a piss poor plan.
He whispers into his mic, “Fire at will, Professor. I’m in position.”
Simon’s response is almost immediate as a round cracks clear and loud through the night, followed by men yelling in chaos.
He pushes the door slightly farther open and sights in on the first one he sees. The man is running carelessly toward Cory, so he opens fire, disabling the target. Then the panic he predicted takes hold, and the crowd disperses as they realize they’ve been spotted, flanked, and are now being picked off from multiple angles.
Cory spots another running parallel with the train toward the warehouse where Simon is located. Cory aims and squeezes, hitting the man in the back of his thigh. He falls and rolls to his right where Cory cannot see him anymore. It doesn’t matter. He can’t worry about him. The wound is severe. He may even bleed out from it. All that matters is that he is down.
Shots are being fired toward the general direction of the train, but nothing comes even close to him. They aren’t sure where he is hiding just yet, so he takes full advantage and fires again at a third man, who is thin and very tall. It’s not a good characteristic to have in the middle of a firefight, standing out in a crowd like that. Cory wings him in the right shoulder, causing him to spin in a one-eighty and fall backward against another man. Then Cory shoots him, too, and finishes off the tall one with another quick squeeze. He no longer holds onto his friend but drops away dead from his wounds. The shot on the second one isn’t clean, but it causes him to go down with the tall man. Then an all-out barrage of gunfire comes directly toward the train car, so he hits the deck, belly crawls to the opposite door that is still open, and slides out, landing on his side on the ground.
Cory jumps to his feet and squats behind the heavy steel wheels and waits for the gunfire to slow down. In a rail yard like this, bullets hitting just about anything other than a human body will ricochet and ping against metal of one sort or another. Like clockwork, they all run out of ammo at about the same time, and there is a pause in the fight. He makes his escape and sprints to the end of the train, passing by four more closed boxcars. Then he scoots around the engine and waits at the corner patiently. He takes a quick peek and sees men scattering, running toward the train car where he was hiding. One goes down from a headshot and lands with a sickening slapping sound on the concrete. Others panic and dive for cover behind a yellow pick-up truck with red safety lights on the roof. It must’ve been a vehicle belonging to the rail yard that workers used to drive from one area of the massive operation to another.
Two of the men point to the building where Simon is hiding and killing them. They know his friend is up there.
“We’re here,” Kelly says into Cory’s earpiece.
“I need to deal with some dudes who are about to make a move on the Professor,” Cory states.
“I don’t need your help,” Simon argues.
“Cory, take ‘em out,” John commands. “Simon, hold your position.”
A second later, he spots through his night-vision goggles his brother and John as they jog confidently toward the group, laying down a designed firing pattern as they push forward. He makes his move and sprints toward the two who have separated from the group and are in pursuit of Simon.
They’ve disappeared in the commotion, and Cory has a moment of dread that he’s too late, that they’ve moved too quickly and will find his friend in the top of the building. Simon means so much to him, like a brother, and he picks up the pace and locates the rear exit of the building again, the one he’d taken to leave Simon. Gunfire in the distance signifies that the rest of their team is still working on the other men. The shots from his brother and John ring out clearly behind him, but he pushes forward.
He hears a noise off to his left but a moment too late as a man jumps out from behind a train car and swings something. He is hit in the left shoulder, which he partially deflects. He is still knocked back against the boxcar, though. Then the man is on him. He shoves Cory and punches, connecting with his right to Cory’s jaw. It does nothing but piss him off as he is knocked nearly all the way down. He is able to catch himself with one hand and do a rolling maneuver to get away. Before he can stand erect again, the man executes a football tackle, taking him all the way to the ground, which also knocks Cory’s rifle from his hands. The man is big, bigger than him. And he is a skilled fighter. For every move Cory attempts, the man is able to counter.
His assailant lunges away from him and goes for Cory’s rifle. It’s enough time for Cory to pull his knife from his boot. As the man’s hand lands on his AR-10, Cory shoves to his knees and launches onto the man’s back. The attacker instinctively lurches upward trying to dislodge Cory. Unfortunately for him, Cory is able to stab the man in the neck. It doesn’t stop him. He shoves harder and manages to throw Cory off. Then he makes a terrible, wet, gagging sound and scurries away from him on his hands and knees. Blood is spurting from his wound as Cory grabs his rifle. He doesn’t even bother to shoot him. Witho
ut a trained medic, and maybe even with one, the wound will prove fatal within minutes. Cory merely gets to his feet again and sprints into the building. There were two men going after Simon. He just hopes that one of them is now bleeding out from a neck wound and that two of them are not still in pursuit but one.
He steps inside the building and, to his immediate left, slips behind a row of tall, metal shelving units. There he pauses and listens. A metallic jangling at the other end of the long building creates a rattling sound as if someone were trying a locked door and not gaining entry. Then whispering comes. There is still more than one of them. The man he just stabbed in the neck must not have been with these others. A loud crack from the floor above echoes in the night, and he knows Simon has shot another person outside. It elicits a less than whispering tone from one of the men at the other end of the building where Cory is slowly creeping.
“Fuck! We gotta find that sniper. Assholes.”
His partner calls to him, “Over here! There’s a stairway.”
They have found the dark stairway that Cory took earlier to leave Simon. Instead of caution, he dashes the rest of the way, heedless of noise. In seconds, they will make it to the top of the stairs, enter the massive second-floor warehouse and find Simon. If his friend fires once they are on that floor, he’ll be exposed even more quickly.
Cory spots a man as he is just disappearing through the door and fires a round toward him. A cry of pain lets him know he has connected. The door slamming loudly against the inside wall is also a good thing because it will let Simon know that someone is now below him in the stairwell. The loud shot Cory just fired off will also help with that.
“I’m heading your way, Professor,” Cory says into his throat mic.
“I’m a tad busy for a social call,” Simon quips, an unusual move for him in the middle of a battle.
“You got one coming up the stairwell. I’ll try to get him before he reaches you,” he relays.
“You’re getting fat, so you probably won’t.”
Cory chuckles as he breaches the door, which is being held open by the man writhing in pain and agony lying in the way. Cory puts him out of his misery with one more trigger pull. It’s a good thing the rail yard is no longer in business. The workers would have one hell of a clean-up job come Monday morning.
