Origins (The Becoming Book 6)

by Jessica Meigs

  She was too scared that if she did, she would see Marc on the ground, splayed out and bloodied, people hunched over him.

  Remy pushed all the thoughts of Marc aside, burying them where they wouldn’t pop up and disturb her at the worst possible moment. For now, she had to focus on getting home, where she could barricade herself inside, huddle up with her family, and wait for all of this to blow over from the safety of her own bedroom.

  First, she had to find a way out of New Orleans proper.

  It took three hours for Remy to make it out of the metro New Orleans area. Compared to the usual forty-five minutes or less that it typically took , it felt like an eternity. She figured most of that had to do with being forced to avoid the interstates and the major throughways, sticking to roads that looked mostly empty and uncongested. Of the cars she did see, none of their occupants made a move to stop her, not even with the belief they were flagging down a police officer. Everyone seemed too totally focused on whatever their personal goal happened to be to pay attention to a random police car in their midst.

  When Remy came close to home, approaching the last stretch slowly and cautiously, she smiled slightly at the sight of the mailbox at the end of the road. Even if it did say Dodson, it still represented home. She pushed her hair back from her face and steered the cruiser up the driveway, her stomach churning with anticipation.

  The house looked the same as it always had, as broken down and well lived-in as usual. However, there was something slightly off about it at the same time, though Remy couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was that made her think so. She pulled the police cruiser to a stop at the head of the driveway, cringing when the brakes squealed, and shifted the car into park. She sat there, listening to the engine idle, waiting. For what, she didn’t know.

  Remy turned her head to the left, studying the tree line that curved from the edge of the road around to the back of the house. There was no movement that she could see. To the right was an open field, formerly a pasture before the farm that it had been a part of had gotten sold at foreclosure and the land divvied up for individual houses. How that particular pasture had remained intact and unused, she had no idea. Doing a double take, Remy felt her heart skip a beat.

  There was a crowd of people making their way across the field towards her house.

  Remy had no idea if these were sick people or not. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. They were heading towards her family, and she had to get in there and warn them.

  She cut the engine off and scrambled out of the driver’s seat, leaving the keys behind as she ran up the rest of the driveway and across the half-dead front lawn. She barely paid attention to the squeak and wobble of the porch steps. The front door was locked, and she didn’t have her keys, so she started to beat on the door, hoping they hadn’t packed up and gotten the hell out of Dodge and left her behind.

  She’d just started to wonder if anyone was home when she heard the sound of the locks disengaging, and when it swung open, she found herself staring down the barrel of a shotgun. She reflexively took a step backward before she realized it was only her stepfather Jason. He apparently recognized her at the same moment, because he lowered the rifle with an exasperated sigh and stepped aside.

  “I don’t want to know where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, or what you’ve been doing with them,” Jason said with a scowl. “Get your ass in here.”

  Remy obediently stepped into the house. though at any other time she might have argued with him, she figured that considering everything that was going on, it probably wasn’t the time for her ridiculous, petty bullshit.

  “Have you heard about what’s going on?” Remy asked as he shut and locked the door behind her.

  “Of course I have,” Jason replied. “Why the hell do you think I answered the door with a shotgun?”

  “Then you should know that there are a bunch of people who are probably sick coming across the field,” Remy told him.

  Jason’s eyes widened comically. “How many?” he asked.

  Remy rolled her eyes. “Hell, I don’t know,” she said with her own dose of exasperation. “I didn’t exactly stop to count. Suffice to say that ‘enough’ should be a good answer.”

  Jason swore under his breath.

  “What?” Remy asked. “What is it?”

  “It’s your mother,” Jason told her. “She’s sick.”

  “Sick?” Remy repeated. “How sick?”

  “Pretty damn sick,” Jason said. “If we have to go anywhere, I’m not sure we’ll be able to move her.”

  “How the fuck did that happen?” Remy screeched. “She was fine last night!”

  “Keep your voice down!” Jason barked. “She’s resting, and you will not wake her up.” He paused, then said, “She got sick overnight. When it hit her, it hit her hard and fast.” He shook his head. “She must have caught it on the plane.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “It…I’m not sure, but it looks like that stuff they’re showing on TV.”

  Remy’s insides turned to ice as his words registered in her mind. “No,” she breathed. “Where is she?”

  “Asleep on the couch,” Jason told her. “Don’t wake her up, okay? She needs to rest.”

  Remy nodded absently and moved toward the living room, pausing in the doorway for a long moment to stare into the dim room. There was a lump on the couch, covered with a blanket, a tangled mop of highlighted, dark brown hair in the vicinity of the lump’s head.

  Curled up in the nearby recliner, a thin paperback in hand, was Maddie. She was rhythmically flicking her fingers over the edges of the book’s pages, though she wasn’t actually reading the book. She was too busy staring at the lump that was her mother. Remy stepped into the room, and Maddie looked up from her book and smiled brightly.

  “You’re home,” Maddie said, sitting up straighter. “Daddy got really mad about you sneaking out last night.”

  Remy moved closer to the couch. “How’s Mom?”

  “Sick,” Maddie said. “She hasn’t been off the couch all morning. Daddy keeps watching the news. He looks really worried.”

  As he should be, Remy thought, though she didn’t dare say it out loud. There was no sense in scaring the crap out of her little sister unnecessarily. She moved closer to the sofa, kneeling beside it to brush her mother’s hair out of her face. “Mom?” Her mother didn’t reply.

  A bang from somewhere in the direction of the kitchen drew Remy’s attention away from her mother. She stiffened, straightening as she looked toward the kitchen, and when the bang came again, she jumped up. “Stay here,” she told Maddie. She pushed to her feet and started out of the living room, hoping that the noise had just been caused by her stepfather doing something in the kitchen.

  No such luck. When she stepped into the kitchen, she realized that there were several people on the dilapidated back deck behind the house. She bit back a swear and took a step backward, away from the door. She froze by the doorway leading between the kitchen and the foyer, watching the shadowy figures through the window on the back door as they moved from one end of the deck to the other, presumably searching for a way in. She fumbled at her waist, searching for the revolver Marc had given her. “Jason!” she hissed into the house.

  Jason appeared from the upstairs level, his face creased with concern. “What is it?” he asked, his voice entirely too loud for Remy’s comfort.

  “Keep it down!” Remy hissed. She jerked her head toward the back door. “We’ve got company.” Jason’s eyes widened at the sight of the shadowy figures outside the door. “They moved a lot faster than I expected them to.”

  Jason crossed the kitchen to look out the window over the sink. “There are more coming too,” he said, still too loudly. Remy rubbed one of her temples with a hand.

  “We need to get out of here,” she said.

  “We can’t. Your mom is too sick to move,” Jason replied.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Remy said. “I’ve seen firsth
and what these people do, and it’s not something I want to experience personally.”

  “Is that where you were last night?” Jason asked. “Experiencing things personally?” His voice was neutral and calm, casual, like he didn’t really care about the answer. Maybe he didn’t; maybe he was just making small talk out of sheer nervousness.

  “I was actually with a cop,” Remy said with equal amounts of neutrality.

  There was a loud bang against the back door. Both of them jumped, and Jason lifted his shotgun and pointed it at the door out of obvious reflex.

  “You get arrested again?” he asked after a long moment.

  “You act like it’s a regular occurrence,” Remy grumbled.

  “It is,” Jason said.

  Any further words were interrupted by the sound of breaking glass and the sight of an arm thrusting through the space where the glass had been. At the same time, Maddie’s piercing scream rent the air, and the blood froze in Remy’s veins.

  “Oh God, Maddie!” she gasped.

  The scream seemed to have stirred up the people outside, because there was a renewed frenzy to get through the door to them, and the door was shaking on its hinges.

  “Go!” Jason snapped, raising his voice just loud enough to be heard over the commotion. “Go to Maddie. I’ve got this.”

  Remy spun on her heel and bolted toward the living room, yanking the revolver out of its holster and raising it defensively. A short, dark figure ran out of the living room and nearly plowed headlong into her, and Remy raised the revolver at an angle so it wasn’t pointed at her sister. “What’s wrong?” she said urgently, grabbing Maddie and shoving her behind her.

  “Mama,” Maddie said, crying so hard that it was difficult to understand what she was saying. “She tried to hurt me!”

  “Hurt you how?”

  Maddie didn’t get the opportunity to explain. She didn’t have to. Their mother stumbled into view in the living room, her hair a tangled mess, her face slack with something that made Remy think of delirium, though that wasn’t quite the word to describe it. She looked confused, out of it, but at the same time, she was with it enough to focus on Maddie with a single-minded intensity, baring her clenched teeth and staggering forward, her arms outstretched like a zombie in an old black-and-white horror movie. Remy grabbed Maddie’s hand with her free one and nudged her backward, not taking her eyes off of her mother. Instinctively, Remy knew that something wasn’t right with her mother; some animal part of her brain was flinching away from the woman, screaming at her to either destroy the danger in front of her or run and hide.

  A crash from the kitchen behind her heralded further danger, and the blast of her stepfather’s shotgun punctuated the noise. Then Jason’s voice boomed out, rising over the escalating sounds in the kitchen. “Remy!” he shouted. “Take your sister and run! Get upstairs and hide!”

  Remy snorted. Upstairs was the last place you were supposed to go in the unlikely event that you found yourself in a real-life horror movie. But this was no movie. She grabbed Maddie’s arm and propelled her toward the stairs. “Go!” she shouted. “Move!”

  Maddie charged up the stairs, her bare feet making soft, thudding sounds on the steps that Remy could barely hear over the ruckus downstairs. Remy backed away from her mother, intending to make sure no one came near Maddie, not even her mother. As soon as she was sure that Maddie was fully upstairs, Remy broke away, turning to follow her.

  When she started up the stairs, a hand closed around her right ankle, and she crashed down hard to the steps. All the air in her body rushed out of her lungs in a whoosh. The hand that had grabbed her was clawing up the back of her jeans, and she kicked out, thrashing. She spun around, trying to roll onto her back, still kicking at the hand on her leg at the same time, and saw that it was her mother. She didn’t look like her mother anymore; she looked evil, a being filled with hatred and hunger, her fingers hooked into claws and she tried to drag herself up Remy’s body. Remy’s mind skittered back to the sight she’d witnessed on the street, the two men leaning over the body of the woman, and she tensed, kicking out again. Her foot connected with her mother’s hip, throwing her off balance but not stopping her progress. Desperate, she fumbled for her revolver, but to her dismay, she couldn’t find it. She tilted her head back and realized that it had fallen from her hand when she’d been tripped up on the stairs, and it lay a few steps above her, just out of her reach, balanced precariously on the edge of the step.

  The shotgun blasts in the kitchen went ominously silent.

  As her mother clawed at her more desperately, Remy got her legs under her and thrust upward, practically throwing her mother off of her, sending her crashing into the wall. She against the bannister hard enough that it jarred the revolver off the edge of the step and sent it toppling to the floor alongside the staircase. Remy hurriedly stood, gripping the bannister for balance, and looked around frantically, searching for another weapon that she could use. There was nothing, so she scrambled over the bannister, hoping that the fall wasn’t too high, and jumped, landing heavily on the floor two feet away from the weapon. She rolled, scooping the revolver up in mid-move, and swung around to aim it at her mother.

  It took three shots to put her down. Two of them impacted with her chest, splattering blood on the wall behind her like punctuation marks. The third one struck her in the head, and she dropped to the stairs, unmoving, her arm outstretched above her head like she was reaching for something. Remy didn’t have time to mourn, though; the sound of more sick people had flooded in the kitchen, and with no more sounds of defense coming from Jason, she had to assume he was out of action. Stuffing the revolver into the holster so she wouldn’t lose it this time, she bolted up the stairs, leaping over her mother’s body with one jump and racing up toward the second floor.

  Remy stopped on the landing between the first and second floors. Her eyes landed on an item that looked like a cross between a very long knife and a machete, mounted on display hooks inside a shadowbox screwed to the wall. The hilt was wooden, worn shiny by hands that had used it in the past, and despite the fact it had hung on the wall for as long as she could remember, the blade still looked sharp. It had belonged to her paternal grandmother, who’d brought it over from the Philippines when she’d immigrated to America before Remy’s dad’s birth. It was called a bolo knife, Remy remembered, and it would be the perfect weapon to protect her and her sister. She snatched it off the wall, along with the thin sheath that hung below it, and slid the blade inside the sheath before she charged up the stairs the rest of the way.

  Maddie was screaming and crying so loudly that their distant neighbors could probably hear it. Remy ran towards her bedroom near the end of the hall, where Maddie was probably hiding in her closet again, like she did whenever she had bad nightmares. Still holding her revolver tightly in one hand, her newly acquired bolo knife in the other, she hurried down the hall, entering her bedroom and going straight to the closet.

  Maddie sat huddled on the floor of the closet, her arms folded above her head, like she was doing tornado drills in the hallway at school. Her sobs were even louder now that the door was open. Remy nudged her with her foot.

  “Hey, shut up,” she told her. Maddie didn’t make an effort to obey. The floodgates had opened, and there was no one left to shut them. Holstering her revolver and propping the bolo knife against the wall, she dropped to a knee in front of Maddie, grasped the girl by the shoulders and shook her, trying to get her attention. “Maddie, you have got to shut up!” Remy hissed. “If you don’t shut up, they’ll find us!”

  That only made Maddie cry even harder.

  There was a thud on the stairs, and out of reflex, Remy crawled into the closet with Maddie, though she knew instinctively that that was a terrible idea. Crawling in the closet was a sure way to get trapped. However, she felt like she had no choice; in the hallway, she could hear the distinct thump of someone making their way to the second floor of the house. She fumbled for her revolver ag
ain, holding it in a tight grip, and tried to remember how many shots she’d already fired. She was sure it had been five. She fiddled with the revolver, trying to figure out how to pop open the chamber, and when she did so, she shook out everything that was inside the weapon. Five empty cartridges and one bullet fell into her palm. She tossed the empties on the floor, then jammed the one bullet she had into the pistol and snapped the barrel back in place, spinning it so it ready to fire with the next trigger pull.

  Somewhere in the hallway she could hear the sound of multiple sets of feet. She tensed, crawling back deeper into the closet, dragging Maddie with her. Maddie squealed, and Remy clamped a hand hard over her mouth, trying to muffle the noise. The girl had officially entered hysteria, her fear overriding all good sense she might have had, and Remy had no idea how to get her to be quiet.

  “Shut up, Maddie! Shut up!” Remy hissed in her ear, hooking an arm around the girl’s head to better anchor the hand she’d clapped over her mouth. “Calm down or I’m going to kick your ass! You’re going to get us killed!”

  Remy’s threats didn’t make any difference. Maddie was too far gone. Remy couldn’t help but think of the sight of those men tearing into that woman again, and she tried to drag Maddie further back into the closet, looking around desperately for a way to shut the girl up. There was nothing, of course. She thought longingly of the ammunition she’d left in the police cruiser in her panic to get to her family, but it wasn’t going to do her any good now.

  She and Maddie were going to die in her closet at the hands of a bunch of crazy sick people.

  “Maddie, Maddie, Maddie, you’ve got to be quiet,” Remy said into her ear, lowering her voice as she struggled to calm the girl down, though she knew it was far too late for that. There were footsteps out in the room. Remy could make out at least three sets of feet against the carpet in her bedroom. She almost whimpered as her own fear started to overcome her, the horrible images she’d seen on the streets on her way home pounding in her brain. She would do anything to save her sister from that gruesome fate.