Jessica Meigs - The Becoming

by Brothers in Arms

  There was a loud pop. Jonathan jerked to the side and collapsed, lying halfway on the bottom door. Theo stumbled backward, his mind reeling, as his eyes registered the sight of the bullet hole in the side of Jonathan’s head.

  Chapter 7

  Gray paced impatiently back and forth alongside the pool table on which April’s body lay, the fingers of his left hand curled so tightly around his cell phone that his knuckles hurt. He ignored the pain, ignored the throbbing in his skull and the deep ache in his chest as he struggled to catch his breath. It felt like adrenaline had snatched the air from his lungs in the time since he’d called Theo, and he fought to not dial his brother’s number again. He had said he was coming. Bothering him by redialing his number over and over wouldn’t get him there any faster. It was already too late for Gray’s immediate need, anyway.

  April had died five minutes before, shortly after Gray had placed his initial call to Theo. She’d bled out, her blood pouring from her wound and spilling across the green felt of the pool table, soaking through the towels Jack had kept pressed against the wound. No one had managed to get through on the emergency line in the interim. There hadn’t been much they could do for her. She’d died, and they hadn’t been able to stop it.

  Gray ran both hands back through his hair, ignoring the sticky blood still staining them. He paced to the end of the table and then turned sharply on his heel to go back the other way. He managed to avoid looking at April’s body, lying on the table, cool and pale. He didn’t want to think about what had happened to her. He didn’t want to think about how her hair looked, tangled and disheveled, spread under and around her head like a dark halo. He couldn’t wrap his mind around any of it, so he simply shut it out. His chest still felt tight. He knew he needed to sit down, needed to take it easy and force himself to calm down before he worked himself into an asthma attack. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. His nerves wouldn’t let him.

  “Gray, please, sit,” Jack begged from somewhere behind him. “There’s enough going on without you driving me crazy walking all over the place.”

  Gray ignored him, though he abandoned his pacing to move toward the front doors. The shooting had begun outside not long after Gray, Jack, and the bouncer—Brendon was his name, Gray had learned—had brought April inside after they’d managed to disable their two attackers. It seemed like an absolute nightmare had broken out beyond the doors, and in light of the violence outside, Brendon had thought it prudent to barricade the doors, to keep the shooters and any other people who might have wished to do them harm out of the bar. None of them had any idea what was going on out there. Gray had more than once considered calling Theo back to ask him, but considering Theo hadn’t mentioned anything when he did call him, Gray suspected that Theo didn’t know either. It seemed like the entire world had collapsed around them in just a short hour. Gray had no idea how to even begin to cope with it.

  “Gray, please,” Jack said again. He sounded exhausted. Gray paused and turned on his heel to look at the older man. “Just sit, okay? You’re driving me nuts. Besides, we need to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “Do?” Gray repeated. “We’re going to call the fucking cops, Jack. That’s all we can do.”

  “We need to get out of here,” Jack replied. “It sounds bad out there. Really bad. I don’t think we should stick around in here that much long—”

  “We call the police,” Gray said again, more emphatically than before, raising his voice as he glared at Jack. “We can’t just leave. There’s a dead body in here! April’s dead! The cops need to—”

  “We can’t call the police, Gray,” Jack interrupted. “We can’t get through!”

  “But we can’t just leave her here!” Gray protested. He sank into a chair, slowly, leaning over to rest his elbows against his thighs. He didn’t look at Jack, directing his next words to the floorboards beneath him. “I can’t leave her here. I can’t just…I don’t know.”

  “The police aren’t going to come,” Brendon spoke up. “There’s a lot going on out there right now. I don’t think they’d have a few minutes to come out and investigate the attack on you guys when they have people running around with guns out there. It’d be total backburner stuff, especially since she’s already dead.”

  “And what the hell is going on out there?” Gray demanded. He stood, taking a few brisk steps toward one of the windows to peer out into the darkness beyond. The parking lot was poorly lit, but he could just make out several people running down the street and could hear the pop of a gun firing. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Never even heard of anything like this. Do you think it’s a riot or something? Maybe some sort of uprising against the government or something like that?”

  “If it was an uprising against the government, it’d make more sense if it was up in Jackson,” Jack mused. He moved to join Gray, and they stood staring into the darkness for several long moments of silence.

  “Zombies,” Gray murmured as the thought occurred to him.

  Jack gave him a startled look. “What?”

  “It’s zombies,” Gray said. “It’s got to be. I mean, hell, that guy bit April. He bit her. Think about it, Jack. That’s what zombies do, right? They bite people. They, like, eat them and shit.”

  “Gray…is the lack of oxygen from your asthma starting to affect your brain?” Jack asked. “There’s no such thing as zombies.”

  “But how do you know that?” Gray persisted. “Those two guys who attacked me and April, they’ve got all the hallmarks of a fucking Romero film. They were trying to bite me, they did bite April, and they stank to high heaven, like a damned corpse or something. Maybe there’s been some sort of lab accident somewhere or something, and a bunch of dead people are going around trying to, I don’t know, eat the living or whatever it is that zombies do.”

  Jack stared at him for a moment, the look in his eyes clearly incredulous. “Gray, I do believe you’ve finally cracked.”

  “I have not!”

  Jack shook his head and leaned against the wall beside the window, crossing his arms over his chest. “Okay then, genius. Where are all the zombie hordes like you see in the movies? There’s supposed to be massive crowds of them out there, right?”

  Gray shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe?”

  Jack sighed. “You know what I think? I think it’s just a bunch of people rioting, and you’ve been watching way too many horror movies.”

  Gray huffed out a breath and crossed his own arms, squinting as he noticed movement in the shadows near the edge of the parking lot. “So you still think we should leave?” he asked, trying to ignore the veiled insult to his intelligence that Jack had dropped on him. “You still think we should ditch out of here? Where would we go?”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure your brother would appreciate it if I got you home,” Jack started. “I know how he is. I have no doubt he’s in a panic right now trying to get over here to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Gray acknowledged. He wasn’t going to admit that, deep inside, he was in a fair amount of panic himself, stressing over whether Theo was okay. Being out in the town with things the way they were, even inside an ambulance, had to be incredibly dangerous. Theo was all he had; he didn’t want to risk losing him. “My car is right outside,” Gray started to say. “Maybe we could—” A loud thud at the front doors cut him off, and he and Jack were both brought around by the sound. “What was that?”

  “Sounded like someone at the door,” Jack murmured.

  “Or something,” Gray added grimly. He ignored the look Jack gave him in favor of stepping away from the window, edging toward the door. Another thud echoed through the room, and Brendon and Smitty both circled around the counter to join the two of them as they backed toward the center of the room.

  “Think we should check?” Jack asked quietly.

  “No,” Gray replied. “No, I don’t think so. I think it’d be better if we just pretended like nobody was in here. I mean, t
here’s a reason we barricaded the doors, right?”

  “I think I agree with him,” Brendon spoke up. “We should just stay inside, keep our mouths shut, and let them just go away.”

  The thudding at the door became more insistent, sounding more like fists—several fists—beating on it in a discordant rhythm that sent chills up Gray’s spine. He gripped his cell phone tighter, gliding his thumb over the keypad, searching for the “send call” button. Smitty walked briskly to the door, moving beside it to peer out the window nearby, trying to make out what was outside.

  “Anybody got a flashlight?” Smitty asked, his hushed voice sounding even louder than it should have in the otherwise empty bar. When nobody stepped forward to offer him one, he motioned to Brendon. “Get me the one behind the bar. It’s over near the shotgun.”

  “You’ve got a shotgun, and you didn’t mention it?” Jack asked. “You know we could probably use that, right?”

  “Nobody uses my shotgun but me,” Smitty said sternly. He glanced at Brendon. “Bring the shotgun too while you’re at it. Kid’s got a point. We might need it.”

  Brendon started for the bar as Smitty squinted into the darkness again. A hand slammed against the glass, and the man staggered back from the window, stumbling over a stool and almost falling. Jack rushed forward to catch him, helping him stay on his feet. The beating outside the doors became more insistent, more frantic, and it was accompanied by the sound of shouting. No, not shouting, Gray realized. It was growling. It was animalistic snarling and groaning and moaning. The sounds sent chills up his spine, and the thought of zombies suddenly no longer seemed quite so absurd. He bit back the nausea welling in his throat, even as the front doors were shoved inward. The tables and chairs blocking the door scraped against the floorboards as they gave a few inches under the onslaught from the other side of the door. Gray took a few steps back, closer to the table where April’s body lay. He turned on his heel, intending to search out something to use as a weapon, and that was when his eyes landed on the pool table.

  April’s body was gone.

  “April?” Gray called out, scanning the darkness in the corners of the bar. He looked back over his shoulder to Jack, who was giving him a quizzical look. “April’s gone!”

  “Gone? What the fuck do you mean, April’s gone?” Jack demanded, taking a couple of steps toward him.

  “Gone! Not here! Away!” Gray snapped. “Should I get you a fucking dictionary? Or would you prefer a thesaurus?”

  “She can’t be gone! She’s dead!”

  “Well then, her body is gone! Who moved it?”

  “Nobody moved it,” Jack said. His tone was wary, and he edged toward Gray, trying to get a look around him at the newly empty table. He was distracted by the sound of the chairs and tables scraping on the floor again, though, and he hurried to join Brendon and Smitty in their efforts to push the furniture back against the doors securely.

  Gray took a deep breath and turned back around. He knelt to peer under the table, as if April’s body had somehow rolled off the table or magically sunk through it to the floor below. He shook his head and straightened, rising from the floor to find himself face to face with April Linder. He gasped, even as she lunged at him, her hands out, grasping for him as she let out a snarl similar to the ones made by the people outside. Gray staggered backward with a shout of alarm, trying to dodge her grasping hands, even as the door behind him gave way and the animalistic people from outside flooded in.

  Chapter 8

  The sound of the gunshot seemed to hang in the air around Theo as he sat heavily against the edge of the jump seat. He stared at Jonathan’s motionless body lying just beyond on the edge of the doorway, horror washing over his mind as he gripped the leather seat with both hands. His breath was coming out hard and fast, and he felt a twinge of dizziness tickle at his brain. He shuddered and closed his eyes for the barest of moments, trying to slow his breathing before he hyperventilated. He had a sudden appreciation for Gray and what he went through when he had asthma attacks.

  Now wasn’t the time to get panicky, Theo reminded himself. He had work to do. He had to get out of the ambulance. He had to get moving. He had to find his brother.

  Theo wasn’t exactly sure where to start, though. He had no idea if the shot that had clearly killed Jonathan had been a stray one that had just chanced to hit the man or if it had been an intentional kill shot. If it had been an accident, then Theo was reasonably sure it wouldn’t happen again and he’d be okay stepping out of the truck from the back. Granted, “reasonably sure” didn’t translate to “absolutely sure,” and if the shot had been intentional…

  Theo sighed and shook his head, edging toward the door. The least he could do was pull the top door shut to minimize the risk to himself. The less exposure, the better. But he wasn’t going to lie, not even to himself: Even being within spitting distance of the door made him nervous. Figuring it was better to do it quickly, he rushed forward, grabbed the metal bar on the door, and yanked it hard, slamming the door closed before he quickly backpedaled from it.

  Theo’s heart hammered against his ribs as he stared at the door, waiting to see if anyone would come after him, if any bullets were going to tear into the open space on the lower half of the doorframe and rip into his body. When nothing was forthcoming, much to his relief, he turned to gather the trauma bags. The best place to exit was the side door that was now above his head. Though he wouldn’t be any less exposed climbing out on top of the ambulance, he figured that people were less inclined to look up when searching for dangers—or people to shoot—so it could at least offer him some semblance of cover from that perspective. Besides, if he remembered correctly, the exterior cabinets next to the door had extrication equipment in them, including a crowbar and a fire axe. If he was going to go out after Gray, he wasn’t going to do it completely unarmed.

  Theo hadn’t decided what the plan was for when he got to Smitty’s. It wasn’t an immediate concern. His main priority was getting to Gray, first and foremost, and then seeing if he could help Gray’s friend before she died. From what Gray had described, though, considering the amount of time that had passed while Theo tried to get out of the ambulance, there was a chance that April was no longer alive.

  Theo sighed and slung the heavier of the trauma bags over his shoulder. It took only moments for him to climb onto the edge of the jump seat and unlatch the door. With a firm shoulder against it, he swung the door open and out against the side of the truck.

  A cool gust of air blew in and ruffled his blond hair as he dropped back down from the seat to grab the other bag. It didn’t take him long to slide them out onto the top of the ambulance. A few minutes later, after collecting his flashlight from underneath the stretcher, avoiding the body sprawled on top of it, Theo managed to join them with some difficulty, pain shooting through his shoulders as he hauled himself over the edge of the door and fell onto his side. He lay there panting for several long heartbeats before he slid across the side of the truck to one of the exterior cabinets. The chill of the metal leeched through his uniform, and he started to shiver as he fumbled at the door’s handle.

  Theo couldn’t get enough leverage from his position to haul the door open; he vaguely remembered seeing a notation on the maintenance log that the doors had been sticking. He was forced to slide onto his knees and pull on it again. It popped open with a loud squeak. Theo tensed, instinctively ducking low, freezing as he flattened himself back against the metal siding. He lay there, breathing heavily and listening for anyone approaching, anyone trying to get after him. Once he was assured of his relative safety, he knelt once more and swung the second door open. He freed the flashlight from his right knee pocket again and turned it on, shining it into the cabinet. He discovered he was holding his breath only when he let it out on seeing the tools he was hoping for inside.

  “Oh thank Jesus,” Theo breathed in the barest of whispers. He reached in and picked up the axe and crowbar. The sledgehammer was going to be
too heavy for him to carry for any extended distance. The axe, too, would likely be too heavy in the long run, especially considering he would be bringing two trauma bags and an intubation kit along for the ride. But he would bring both tools anyway, at least as far and as long as he could physically carry them.

  Wielding his newly acquired weapons, Theo slid to the edge of the truck, peering off the side to make sure no one was below, waiting to pounce the moment he dropped to the ground. Satisfied that everything was clear, he lowered his bags and weapons off the side, switched off his flashlight and returned it to his pocket, and then slid off the truck. He landed in a defensive crouch and scanned the darkness as best he could. Gunshots still snapped through the night nearby, and his nerves still trembled under his skin, but the act of actually doing something, of getting out of the ambulance, of facing the mission to save his brother, was invigorating. He huffed out a heavy breath and scanned the road in front of him. Not seeing any immediate dangers within ten yards of him, he collected his bags, shouldering them and balancing them against his back. He slipped the crowbar beneath his belt and hefted the fire axe in both hands. Then he waded into the darker shadows alongside the road and began to walk rapidly in the direction of town, his fingers clenched painfully around the axe’s handle, praying he would make it to Gray before something horrible happened to him.

  Chapter 9

  Gray threw his arms up instinctively as April’s fingers grabbed at the front of his shirt, simultaneously trying to block her advance and protect his face as he stumbled backward. His retreat was impeded by the blood stained pool table behind him, and as she reached for him again, he dodged low, ducked under her arms, and cut around the corner of the table. He straightened in time to hear a shotgun blast from the direction of the door, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off of April. His instincts told him that if he did, he’d likely end up injured. Or dead.