Origins (The Becoming Book 6)

by Jessica Meigs

  “We’re at the NOPD substation,” DuBois told her. “The county jail’s full, so I’m going to stick you in one of the holding cells here.”

  “Oh joy,” Remy said sarcastically, flopping back in her seat. “Oh bliss.”

  As if her evening couldn’t have gotten any worse.

  Chapter 5

  For Remy, the end of the world began while she was sitting in her holding cell at the New Orleans Police Department. She’d been examining her chipped black nail polish for the past hour and wondering when Officer DuBois would get around to actually doing whatever it was he was supposed to be doing to get her out of there when the screaming started in Holding Cell 2.

  “Get away from me!”

  “Get this stupid bitch off of me!”

  “What is wrong with this chick?”

  “Somebody get a cop in here!”

  “Great,” Remy muttered, dropping her hands into her lap. She slouched back against the concrete wall, resting her head against a block proclaiming

  that Kitty had once been there. “Drunken bitch started a fight. Now I get to sit here even longer.” She folded her arms over her chest and tried to not roll her eyes at the sound of the crash next door. She was the only person who had been chucked into Holding Cell 3, the first for the night, so thankfully she didn’t have any drunk, obnoxious cell mates of her own to put up with yet.

  For now, it was just her and her thoughts, and all of those thoughts were currently revolving around how badly her stepfather was going to kick the shit out of her for getting arrested. Again. It was going to be the usual mess: Jason yelling at her for stealing a carton of cigarettes; her mother sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter crying her eyes out and wondering where she went wrong raising Remy; and Remy’s eight-year-old half-sister Madeline hiding in her room as she’d likely been instructed to do by her parents. There would be comments about how Remy had obviously gotten her streak of disobedience from her father, because her mother’s side of the family couldn’t possibly be capable of anything even remotely like that, and then—as usual—Jason would bail her out and plead her case to the judge about how distraught she was trying to cope with her birth father’s death and her mother’s remarriage and how she was only acting out in a misguided attempt to assuage her grief and all that other hokey psychologist bullshit he liked to spout when she got busted for yet another screw up. It would go down in her criminal record, she would be assured once more that she could never get a decent job, and then she’d go about her life on the same downward spiral her father had when he’d packed up and left her mother to become a professional musician and had failed miserably.

  Like father, like daughter. It was something her mother liked to say whenever Remy got into trouble. Remy was only just beginning to wonder exactly how accurate that statement happened to be.

  Another crash echoed out in the holding cell beside hers. It sounded for all the world like someone had ripped the bench free from the wall and flung it across the room. Amidst the screams and the yelling, she could hear cops shouting, repeatedly ordering someone to stand down, to put their hands up and get down on the floor. Uneasily, Remy rose to her feet, rubbing her numb rear, which ached from the hard bench she’d been sitting on for the previous hour. She should have been used to the ache by now—God knew she was intimately familiar with the assorted holding cells of the NOPD over the last year alone. Her curiosity piqued at the noise, and still with a fair bit of trepidation, Remy edged up to the cell door and peered out into the limited view of the police station that the small window allowed. She pressed her palms flat against the cool steel door and eyed the scene beyond.

  Police officers were hurrying between the desks, disappearing from Remy’s view somewhere to her right, toward the sounds of the fighting. More than one had a Taser in his hand, and a few even had guns or cans of pepper spray. Another crash; her eyes picked out a single oasis of calm in the middle of all the chaos. Officer Dubois sat at a desk, carefully copying information from a driver’s license to a form with a ballpoint pen. At his elbow was an unopened carton of Marlboro Lights.

  Officer DuBois looked up from the card in his hand, and their eyes met. She waved a hand at him and then called out over the commotion next door, “Hey, Marc! When do I get my fucking phone call?”

  She stared at him across the noisy offices, waiting impatiently for his answer. Finally, he sighed, set her driver’s license down on top of the form, and rose from his desk. After ducking out of sight from the window, he reappeared with a key in hand and unlocked the door.

  “Arms out,” he said. “You know the drill. No trying to be funny.”

  “Oh, you’re such a sweet talker, Marc,” Remy crooned. She obediently extended her arms and let the officer fasten the handcuffs he held onto her wrists. “When are you going to ever use that sweet talk to ask me out to dinner?”

  “I don’t go on dates with repeat offenders, Remy,” Marc replied, leading her out of the cell with a gentle hand on her elbow. “I told you that last time I arrested you.”

  “So if this was only the first time I’d been arrested, you’d ask me on a date then?” Remy teased. She couldn’t help herself; something about Marc DuBois made teasing him irresistible.

  Marc gave her an exasperated look and stopped her at the pay phone mounted to the wall. “Why do you keep letting yourself get arrested anyway?” he asked, lifting the receiver. “This isn’t Raising Arizona, and you’re too smart of a woman to repeatedly screw up like you have.”

  Remy rankled at the comment, but she tried to not let it show. She smiled brightly at him. “Why, it’s the easiest way I know of to get to see you!”

  Marc punched a code into the phone’s keypad. “If you were about five years older and didn’t have an ever-growing rap sheet longer than my arm, I’d consider it. But only one of those things is even remotely fixable.”

  Remy grinned. “Give me five years and I’ll have both corrected.”

  “Very cute, Rem—”

  Gunfire rang out, first one shot, followed by several more. Marc dropped the telephone receiver and grabbed Remy, pushing her against the wall and standing protectively between her and the potential danger. The yelling reached a fevered pitch, a mad, echoing crescendo that made Remy stuff her nose into her wrists so she could get her hands up high enough to cover her ears. When the gunshots ended, the shouts continued, this time of police officers yelling for a medic. Marc moved toward them then, and Remy followed him closely, partly because she figured it wouldn’t be smart to stray too far from her arresting officer but mostly because she felt it was better to stick close to the nearest man with a gun, just in case. Of what? her mind persisted. She didn’t know the answer to that.

  Marc stopped in front of Holding Cell 2 and looked inside. His face paled, hardening at the scene in front of him. Remy swallowed hard as she studied his face, wondering what he saw in the cell. She eased forward a few inches, contemplating satisfying her morbid curiosity, but she had the decision made for her when a couple of medics, one carrying a backboard and the other a trauma bag, jostled her. She stumbled forward and got an eyeful of the scene inside the holding cell.

  Blood. There was blood everywhere. Smeared on the walls. Puddled on the floor. The attacker lay in a pool of her own blood, clearly deceased. Just beyond her, another woman sobbed and shook, covered in blood that oozed from wounds on her arms and shoulders. Remy’s mouth flooded with saliva, and bile rose in her throat. She swallowed convulsively and forced herself to take a step back from the door.

  Marc remembered her then, and he took her by the elbow. She looked at him with eyes that she knew reflected her horror. “Miss Angellette, we need to get you back in lock up,” he said, leading her away from the door. “This isn’t something you need to see.”

  “What happened in there?” Remy asked past her nausea.

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.” Marc led her back to the holding cell she’d been in earlier, which was now ful
l of the other arrestees from Holding Cell 2.

  After he unlocked her handcuffs and left her in the cell with the other women, she slouched into an empty space on the bench, dropping her head into her hands. The women were quiet, no one talking among themselves. They all sat in collective shock over the events that had transpired in their prior holding cell. She could feel a headache coming on, a pain throbbing at her temples, like a monkey was stuck inside her skull and throwing itself against the inside of her head in a desperate attempt to get out. She would have killed for a dose of aspirin. Or a cigarette, even though she didn’t smoke. Maybe even one of the cigarettes that were in the box sitting on Officer DuBois’s desk. She wondered how much it would take to sweet talk him into giving her one.

  She wondered how big of an idiot she had to be to actually think she could.

  Remy turned her attention onto the subdued women that now shared a cell with her. They all sat in various stages of shellshock. A Hispanic woman wearing too much makeup sat in the corner of the cell, mumbling a prayer under her breath. Remy wondered if it would be wise to ask the question that nagged at her. For all she knew, asking it might set off all sorts of chaos. No, it wouldn’t be a good idea to let the question fester in her brain; she had to get it out before she was consumed by endless speculation.

  “So…what happened in there?” she asked. She didn’t single out any one person to ask; she figured if anyone was going to answer, they’d speak up.

  And speak up they did. Remy’s question brought on a flood of women’s voices, all trying to talk at the same time, obviously eager to describe what they’d seen now that they’d realized that there was someone in their midst who hadn’t witnessed the events in Holding Cell 2.

  “Tanisha attacked—”

  “There was a crazy bitch—”

  “She said she got bit by a hobo—”

  “They’re not called hobos anymore, Deena.”

  The Hispanic woman in the corner started praying louder, as if she felt the need to compete with all the other voices in the room.

  “Shut up!” one of the women shouted, raising her voice to be heard over everyone else. Her voice was loaded with authority, and everyone present seemed to be willing to listen to her, because they obeyed her order to quiet themselves, looking to her expectantly. She was looking at Remy, her eyebrows raised in curiosity.

  “You weren’t in there, honey?” she asked, and Remy struggled to not bristle at being called “honey.”

  Remy shook her head. “No, I was already in this cell by myself. When Officer DuBois let me out to make my call, there were gunshots, and I heard a lot of screaming and saw a lot of blood.”

  “My name is Trish,” she offered. “I was sitting next to the lady that started attacking people. She was…she was crazy, I think.” She looked away from Remy for a moment, staring blankly at the floor. “She attacked Debra. It was like she just went…crazy,” she said again, like she lacked a different word for whatever they’d witnessed.

  “She bit Debra,” one of the other women corrected. “When that woman attacked her, Debra threw her arm up to block her, and the woman bit her. She tore out a chunk of her arm!”

  “Yeah, with her teeth!” another woman added enthusiastically. “It was disgusting. There was blood everywhere.”

  “Why did she attack Debra?” Remy asked.

  “We don’t know,” Trish said. “Debra was just minding her own business, not even looking at the woman. The lady looked sick, like maybe she’d gotten into some bad drugs or something. She kept slapping herself on the side of the head, banging her head against the wall, that sort of thing. I figured she was on a bad trip or something, but it all went crazy when she went after Debra.” Trish shook her head. “It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Remy nodded in understanding, her mind churning over the admittedly disjointed description the women had given her of the event. She was silently glad she hadn’t been in there to see that, considering the brief glimpse she’d had of the aftereffects of the attack.

  At the sound of a key in the lock of the holding cell’s door, Remy sat up straighter, looking at the door with wide eyes. It swung open and she saw Officer DuBois, who beckoned to her.

  “Miss Angellette, please come with me,” he requested. “I have some information I need from you for your processing paperwork.”

  Remy rose from the bench, dusting off her pants reflexively and glancing back at Trisha. The woman was no longer paying attention to her. She was back to staring into space while the rest of the women chattered with each other about what had happened. The Hispanic woman started praying again, almost as loudly as before.

  “What kind of information?” Remy asked as soon as she stepped out of the holding cell. She extended her arms toward him, wrists held close together, expecting him to put handcuffs on her like he was supposed to. He didn’t do it, though; he just shut the holding cell door, locked it again, and took her by the elbow.

  “Walk with me,” he said. “Don’t argue, and don’t question. Don’t draw attention to us.”

  Remy obeyed, though she was itching to ask him what was going on. Around them, the police station looked busier than it had before; things were chaotic, with officers calling to each other, the radio on the counter belching out static and ten-codes, and the occasional person who’d just been picked up adding their own yelling to the racket. Officer DuBois guided her through the mess, then right out the back door into the substation’s parking garage. It was when they’d emerged into the cool, dark parking garage that Remy dared to voice her question.

  “What the hell is going on?” she asked. “Why are you taking me out of the station?”

  “I’m getting you out while I have the chance,” he said. “There’s…a problem. I’ll explain in the car.”

  “Oh, we’re getting in the car?” Remy said. “Where the hell are you taking me?”

  “I’m hoping to take you home,” he said. “My house, to start with, and then we’re going to go to your house.” He took her to his police cruiser and unlocked the front passenger door, opening it for her, then circled around to the driver’s side and got in behind the wheel. Once he had the door shut and the engine started, he turned in his seat to look at her.

  “Have you heard anything about what’s been happening in and around Atlanta?”

  “Only some hints,” Remy said, thinking back to the few scattered tweets she’d seen—the ones that had disappeared like they’d never existed as soon as she’d hit refresh. “Nothing much, just little comments people made on social media.”

  “I have an uncle that lives in Smyrna,” Officer DuBois said. “He called me just before his phone lines went down. He told me that there appears to be some sort of sickness spreading out from Atlanta. What he described is…not good. I figured he was exaggerating, though—he’s pretty prone to do that. He’s one of those conspiracy guys that sees a federal agent behind every bush. It kind of stuck with me, though, and then when the Thompson thing happened—”

  “What thing with Thompson?” Remy asked, not having any idea who Thompson was.

  “There was a call of a woman at a shopping center attacking people. Thompson and a couple of other officers showed up, and the lady attacked Thompson and bit the shit out of him,” Officer DuBois said. “He’s started getting sick. So have all the other people who were attacked at the shopping center. And there are repots of even more sick people around town. When they’re sick, they’re violent, just like what my uncle described. The military’s gotten involved in Atlanta. It’s only a matter of time before they show up here. I’d prefer to get you home while I still can.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “Yeah, I think it is,” DuBois confirmed. He started the engine, then signaled for her to fasten her seatbelt.

  “So why me?” Remy asked once she’d obediently pulled the belt across her body and buckled it.

  Once it was buckled, DuBois pulled out of his park
ing spot and steered the car out of the parking garage to the street below.

  “There were plenty of other women in the holding cells back there,” Remy insisted. “Why just me?”

  “Because you were the only one in there whose paperwork hadn’t been processed and put into the computer,” Officer DuBois said. “For all intents and purposes, you weren’t even there. If the military were to come in and take over, they’d want a full accounting of who was in our cells. Since you weren’t in the system, I had an opportunity to sneak you out. I guess you can consider the shoplifting charges dropped.”

  “I just can’t believe you were willing to press them over a carton of cigarettes,” she said.

  “Stealing is stealing,” Officer DuBois said. “I don’t care what you stole or why.”

  “So you don’t care about the circumstances around it?” Remy asked. “What if it was, say, an older lady shoplifting food because she doesn’t have the money to feed her kid?”

  “That’s different,” DuBois said. “She’s stealing based on need. You, on the other hand, stole something you didn’t need.”

  “Who said I didn’t need it?” she asked, and when he glanced at her skeptically, she sighed. “I was going to sell them,” she admitted. “I need the money.”

  “For what, more tattoos?”

  “No. I was wanting to start saving up to go to school. So I can, you know, get a good job and stuff.” At DuBois’s raised eyebrow, she protested, “What? You think I don’t want a good job? I just can’t afford school. My mom makes next to nothing and my dad didn’t leave me very much.”

  “There’s financial aid,” DuBois pointed out. “You don’t have to shoplift. You can just apply for—”

  DuBois slammed his foot on the brake.

  Remy lurched forward, but her seatbelt caught her forward motion, biting into her chest and abdomen to stop her movement. Regardless, she threw a hand forward to brace it against the edge of the dash and yelped out, “What the hell, Marc!” She turned to look at him and realized the expression on his face was wide eyed and horrified. He was staring out the windshield, both his hands gripping the steering wheel, and his face had gone pale with shock. Remy followed his gaze, and what she saw made her heart lurch in her chest. “What the hell is that?”