“I’m with Remy,” Gray announced, earning himself an exasperated look from his brother.
“Figures,” Ethan muttered in disgust. Gray made a face and crossed his arms in a manner that struck Ethan as stubborn, especially as he refused to look anywhere remotely in his direction.
“She’s right,” Gray added. “People need to know.”
Ethan shook his head, grimacing and running a hand through his hair, tugging at the strands in frustration. He couldn’t believe how easily everything had slipped through his fingers. He caught Cade’s eyes, and she raised an eyebrow at him questioningly, prompting him for a decision. He turned away from her and shook his head again, putting his back to the rest of them as he tried to decide what to do. He didn’t want this. He wasn’t willing to put any of them at risk, not even Gray, as much as they seemed to dislike each other. The potential results of making a bad call on this weren’t worth it.
“I’m going regardless of your decision, Ethan,” Remy spoke up through the kitchen door. He tensed as she opened the door, leaning against the doorframe with a serious look in her eyes. “Whether you’re with me or not, whether any of you are with me or not, I’m going to go and help her.”
Ethan huffed and studied them in turn, a sinking feeling settling into his stomach. Could he really say yes? Was that even an option? He felt like saying yes would be giving his blessing for his family to go on a suicide mission.
“I need to sleep on it,” he finally said. It was all he could think to say to buy more time for him to get his head together. “We all need rest. This is something that should be discussed in the morning, when we’ve all had some sleep. It’s not something that should be jumped into without serious thought. Cade, you’ve got watch until three. I’ll take over then.”
The others retreated up the stairs to their beds without another word as Cade began gathering the things she’d need during her watch. Ethan’s eyes followed the group as they made their way upstairs. Serious doubt coursed through him for the first time in as long as he could remember.
Chapter Three
Brandt couldn’t sleep. Lack of sleep wasn’t anything new. At least three nights a week, he lay in bed and stared blankly at the ceiling, trying to will his mind into unconsciousness. The sleeplessness happened more often on nights he returned to the safe house from one of his supply excursions. With the adrenaline rush caused by Remy’s disappearance and miraculous return, he was sure his trouble falling asleep would be much worse than usual.
That wasn’t half the problem, though. Part of Brandt’s mind didn’t care much about Remy, as heartless as that sounded. Remy was a sweet girl, and he got along with her fine. But he wasn’t particularly close to her; she’d caused enough trouble for him the year before, when he and Cade launched their nearly disastrous rescue attempt of her out of the RV she’d holed up in. It was great that she had returned in one piece. But Brandt was forced to acknowledge that, after the events of last year, he didn’t care whether she did or not.
What was on his mind at the moment, the particular topic that was keeping him awake, was Atlanta, Georgia.
Atlanta was too dangerous a city to waltz into on a whim. And what that Avi woman proposed was waltzing in on a whim, in his opinion. Anything that wasn’t life or death was unnecessary, and there was absolutely nothing that could possibly take him back into Atlanta, no amount of people that were in need of help that would bring him back to the city where he’d lost everything. He didn’t think any of the others truly comprehended just how bad Atlanta was, how badly it had deteriorated. Oh, they knew it was bad, knew what little had been talked about on the news, but they didn’t understand just how bad. Brandt knew all too well. The idea of going into Atlanta made him feel physically sick. Even as he lay there, he could almost feel the bile rising in his throat.
Brandt wasn’t stupid enough to deny that the very idea scared the hell out of him.
He heaved an impatient sigh and sat up. The bedroom spun, and his head swam like it did whenever he lay down for longer than an hour or so. He pressed a hand against his temple to steady himself and fought off the usual spike of nausea. He didn’t understand where the sick sensation came from or what caused it; it had lingered on and off for the past year, and it was incredibly tiring to wake up with it every morning. Not like he could do much about it at this point, though. It wasn’t like he could just go down the street to the hospital or to a doctor’s office or urgent care and get checked out.
Once the dizziness passed, he pushed the blankets off, shivering in the cold room. He ignored Theo’s soft snores from the other bed, got up, and pulled on a black t-shirt. He didn’t bother changing his jeans; he’d only worn the ones he had on for two days now, so they could easily last one more day. He sat on the edge of the bed and stuffed his feet into his trusty combat boots, lacing them snugly.
Brandt hesitated at the door and looked around the room thoughtfully, feeling like he’d forgotten something. Theo made a soft sound and shifted onto his side, but he didn’t wake up. He sighed and scooped up his holstered gun from the bedside table, looping it onto his belt as he stepped into the chilly hallway. Trying to sleep was pointless. He’d spend the rest of the night lying awake, torturing himself with his thoughts.
Brandt made his way down the empty hall to the stairs, pausing beside a closed door and listening. He could just make out the creak of floorboards and the low hum of a voice as Ethan paced restlessly and talked to himself. There was the faintest of light seeping from the crack at the bottom of the door. At least Brandt wasn’t the only person in the house whose brain was on overdrive and preventing sleep.
He paused at the top of the staircase and leaned over the railing, looking into the dark living room below. He couldn’t see Cade from where he stood, but he could make out the sound of her working. A small smile crossed his lips, and he moved down the stairs, trying to be quiet. Once he was at the bottom, he peered around the corner of the doorway.
Cade had settled into a chair near the boarded-up front windows, her dark hair pulled back from her face into a neat twist at the back of her head. A small wooden camp table was set up in front of her, a towel with a whetstone on top laid out on it, a bowl of water and a steel rod resting beside the stone. Another camp table was to her right; two neat rows of handguns rested on it. As Brandt watched, she swept the blade of the knife along the stone in a smooth, graceful motion. She focused on the task before her, giving him plenty of time to observe her. His eyes followed the movement of her hand as she flipped the knife over to sharpen the other side of the blade. She looked absolutely perfect, absolutely gorgeous, and somehow absolutely deadly all at the same time. Maybe it was the ease with which she worked with every item in their weapons cache that made her seem so formidable.
“You’re more than welcome to quit lurking in the doorway,” Cade said suddenly, a smile crossing her face. She lifted the knife to examine the blade in the dim light.
Brandt laughed and stepped into the living room, grabbing a chair to sit across from Cade. “How did you know it was me?” he asked, dropping into the chair and getting comfortable.
“Because you always come down the stairs sounding like an elephant hyped up on LSD,” she teased. She held the knife over the bowl, using her fingers to trickle water along the blade. “You couldn’t do stealth to save your life.”
“Hey, I can do stealth when it matters!” Brandt protested. His own grin spread across his face. He wouldn’t tell Cade that it was only around her that he turned into a bumbling idiot who couldn’t walk in a straight line. He did have some level of pride, after all. He watched her with the knife for a long moment before speaking again. “What have you been doing?”
“Cleaning. Sharpening,” she replied, shrugging. She picked up the steel rod and ran the blade over it slowly. “Checking over all our weapons, making sure there aren’t any problems with them. You know, the usual.”
Cade had taken up this very activity almost every evening and
often throughout the days when she wasn’t out searching for supplies, he’d discovered. She lined up every single gun and knife and melee weapon and bullet and examined them, one by one, cleaning and reloading everything as necessary. It was a smart practice; nothing would be worse than to discover a malfunctioning weapon during a fight. But Cade was borderline obsessive about it, and he wondered if there was something to that, maybe something that had happened in her past to cause her to be so hyper-focused on the weaponry.
“You need any help?” Brandt offered. He didn’t like to sit while someone worked right in front of him; he needed to keep his hands busy. It was the perfect opportunity both to do that and to spend time with Cade, perhaps probe into her brain and find out how she felt about this whole Atlanta situation.
Cade shrugged again and wordlessly offered him one of the sidearms. He weighed it in his hand and examined it closely. It was a Glock 17, a standard service weapon used by police officers before the outbreak. Ethan’s gun. It was the same one he’d used for the past year, and as far as Brandt knew, it never let Ethan down. With a weapon as reliable as that, he could understand the former officer’s reluctance to let it out of his sight unless it was in Cade’s hands.
He sighed and pulled the slide back, locking it into place. He released the magazine and set it on the table between them, then he began to disassemble the weapon. As he worked, he snuck peeks at Cade from underneath his lashes, trying to decide how best to broach the subject he wanted to talk about.
Brandt had always thought Cade was particularly attractive, even when compared to Remy, who the other men seemed to gravitate toward like moths to a light bulb. He didn’t understand their attraction to her. Remy was too young, her good looks too girlish; her features weren’t quite matured, still having that soft roundness of youth. Cade was twelve years older than Remy and much more womanly in her beauty. Every one of those twelve years lent her maturity and hardness that made her that much more gorgeous. She had a foreign, exotic air that he found irresistible. And right then, sitting in the quiet living room, their work lit by a single flashlight and two stubby candles, he was reminded yet again of how much he liked her.
Cade’s voice cut into Brandt’s thoughts, and he flicked his eyes up to her face. “Are you going to?” she was asking.
He raised an eyebrow. “Am I going to…what?”
“Are you going to go back?” Cade clarified. She slid the sharpened knife back into its sheath and set it on the table.
Brandt rested the sidearm on his thigh and stared at it blankly. That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? Cade was the only person in the group who he felt he could be one hundred percent honest with. He tried to disregard the large swaths of his past that he’d kept hidden not just from her, but from everyone in the group, since it contradicted the whole “honesty” schtick they’d vowed to stick to and made him feel like a hypocrite and a disgusting ass.
“I don’t want to, no,” he answered.
“But will you?” Cade persisted. She leaned forward and rested her elbows against the edge of the table, her blue eyes wide with concern as she ducked her head, trying to look him in the face.
He kept his gaze on the Glock and refused to meet her eyes. There was no telling what she might see.
Only Cade and Ethan knew why going into Atlanta was such a big deal to him. Going back into Atlanta, he mentally amended. That he was from Atlanta was something he didn’t tell many people. Among the group, Cade and Ethan were the only ones who knew, mainly because they’d found him hidden in a house in Gadsden, Alabama, just after the virus had begun its secondary outbreak. It had been prudent to tell them something close to the truth at the time, to get them to trust him, because he’d needed their help. Sometimes, he suspected that the other four knew, though none of them had come out and said so. Despite the knowledge his two closest companions had of his prior involvement in Atlanta, neither knew the details of his time in the city, his direct involvement in its fall, or how he’d come to be in Gadsden and why. He preferred to keep it that way.
When he escaped Atlanta, Brandt had vowed to never go back there, no matter what circumstances might later arise. It was partially a fear of facing large numbers of infected and not knowing how he would come out of the other side of a fight like that; but primarily, it was a fear of facing his past and of having to become conscious of the fact he had literally lost everything there. The mere name of the city was enough to dredge up those memories that gave him nightmares.
And now some woman had appeared out of nowhere and begged that he and the others take her into the very place he’d sworn to never set foot in again.
He couldn’t do it. But something in his gut, some overused instinct honed to a sharp point over the past year, told him that he’d likely have to.
“I don’t want to do it,” he finally said. He still wouldn’t look at Cade, resting his hand loosely on top of the half-disassembled Glock. “I don’t want to ever go inside that city again. But…but if you decide to go, then I’m going,” he blurted out. He shifted his eyes up to Cade’s for a fleeting moment before staring across the room, falling silent.
He caught a glimpse of the small smile that Cade gave him as he turned away. “You’d follow me in?” she asked, her voice revealing her surprise at Brandt’s declaration.
“Of course!” he said, looking back at her and nodding, their eyes meeting again. “Yeah, I’d follow you in. I’ve got your back as long as you’ve got mine. We’ve been through bad shit together before, and it’s worked out fine for us. Why stop now?” Brandt picked up the pistol and started to clean and reassemble it slowly, focusing on the task at hand as he admitted softly, “You’re probably the only person here I really trust, you know? Don’t get me wrong. I like the others just fine, and I’d trust them with supplies or gear or whatever. I just wouldn’t trust them with my life. Not in Atlanta.”
“And you would trust me with it?” Cade asked cautiously. She picked up another sidearm and tried to affect a manner of nonchalance. He saw right through the act, and a small smile quirked at the corner of his lip. He stomped it down quickly.
“Yeah, of course. I mean, shit, you’re one of the only people here who knows what you’re doing. I mean, really knows what you’re doing,” he emphasized. “The others are good, but with the exception of maybe Ethan, they’ve survived by sheer luck or total insanity. I know that’s not the case with you. If you’re with me, I don’t have to worry about those bastards sneaking up on me and taking me out. And I know if I get Michaluk, you won’t hesitate to put me down, just like you promised.”
Cade nodded, a soft smile gracing her lips as she kept her eyes on the weapon in her hands. “I would,” she agreed quietly before busying herself with the gun once more.
* * *
“I can’t believe you’re willing to go along with that woman’s idiotic idea,” Ethan bit out. He paced across the creaky floorboards in his dim bedroom. The cold wood bit into the soles of his bare feet, and the chilly air made his bare chest and arms prickle with goose bumps. He missed the days of central heat, when the flick of a switch would create a temperature-controlled, comfortable indoor environment. But that didn’t exist anymore; their only heat sources were from fireplaces, and there wasn’t one in the master bedroom. He disregarded the chill for the moment, though, so intent was he on his ranting. “I mean, really, it’s a fucking moronic idea, and the woman is a fucking… I don’t even know a good word to describe what she wants to do. I don’t think there is one that fully covers how hopelessly stupid her idea is.”
Remy perched on the top of the bed’s rumpled covers, her bare legs tucked underneath her. The soft yellow light from the dim camping lantern in the room cast her in an almost romantic glow. She wore Ethan’s shirt, earlier discarded, and it hung loosely over her small frame. The partially unbuttoned garment slid off her shoulder to reveal the curve of her neck, but her long hair obscured Ethan’s view of her skin. Thank the Lord for that, because i
f he’d been able to see it, it would have derailed his train of thought, and he’d never have gotten it back on track.
Remy didn’t look up at Ethan while he vented. Instead, she kept her eyes on the long bolo knife in her hand, polishing it with a soft, clean cloth, rubbing down the blade in slow, sure strokes. Ethan was still baffled that she brought the thing with her when she snuck into his room three hours earlier. He couldn’t imagine what she might possibly need it for, not with the two sidearms he always kept by the bed. It wasn’t like they expected an invasion.
Unless she planned on killing him in his sleep or something. The thought was unsettling, to say the least.
Regardless of her plans, Remy didn’t seem interested in anything he had to say. That only made him crankier.
“Are you even listening to me?” he demanded.
“Mmhm,” she hummed. She shook the cloth out, using the edge of it to clean the line where blade met hilt. “Asinine, idiotic, stupid woman, bad idea, even worse to consider it, blah, blah, blah,” she said mildly.
Ethan stopped pacing and glared at her, the urge to throttle her rising. He crossed his arms to stop himself. It was infuriating how nonchalantly she treated the whole situation. “You really don’t see the problem here, do you?”
“What, that Avi’s idea is suicide?” Remy asked. She looked up from the knife, staring at him steadily. The hard look in her eyes surprised him, and his urge to throttle started to recede. She’d probably kick his ass if he tried to lay a hand on her—not that he actually would, not like that; he’d never hit a woman once in his life. “I’m aware of it,” she said. “I’ve heard all the stories about Atlanta and how bad it is. I know the dangers.” She smoothed the cloth over the blade again, more slowly, almost reflexively. “I’m going anyway. Regardless of what you think. I’m walking into this with my eyes wide open.”
Ground Zero Page 6