Before she even truly registered what she was doing, she tugged her sister to her, pressed a kiss to her temple, and murmured, “Maddie, I love you. I’m sorry.” She put the revolver to the place she’d kissed and squeezed the trigger.
Maddie slumped to the side, tumbling away from her to the carpeted closet floor, her sobs finally silent.
Remy dropped the now-empty, useless revolver to the carpet and grabbed the sheathed bolo knife. Her hands were shaking, but her mind was settling into a resolute determination. She’d protected her sister, saved her from the brutality of a death at the hands of these sick, murderous people. As for her, she would go down fighting.
The closet’s doorknob rattled. She pushed herself to her feet, careful not to step on her sister, and pulled the bolo knife out of its sheath. She braced herself, then turned the knob and kicked the closet door open as hard as she could.
The impact of the door sent the figure pulling at the doorknob flailing backward, and like a bowling pin, it fell against its companions, sending all three of them tumbling to the ground. Remy dodged a hand that grasped at her ankle and started for the bedroom door, stopping short when she heard more of them out in the hallway. Backpedaling, knowing that they were probably heading this way considering the amount of noise she’d made, she raced across the room, stomping one of her attacker’s hands, and slammed into the window on the other side of the room. Though it was the last thing she wanted to do, she put the bolo knife away, needing both of her hands free, and unlatched the window. As the sick people in the bedroom staggered to their feet, she shoved the window open and leaned out to look at the ground below.
It was, thankfully, clear.
Seeing that sent a surge of need through Remy: the need to survive, the need to live, the need to get away.
With one last glance behind her to gauge how much time she had left to make her escape, Remy slung one leg over the windowsill and ducked low. This was a climb she’d made before, multiple times. She could do it again, piece of cake.
Hands grasped at the hem of her shirt as she scrambled over the windowsill, but she punched them away with one hand. Another hand grabbed at her, throwing her off balance, and she fell out of the window, falling to the ground below and landing in the grass with a hard thud. For the second time in the past hour, the air left her lungs, and she lay there spread-eagled in the grass, struggling to breathe and hoping that no one had heard her rough landing. She stared up at the window she’d just fallen from. The three sick people crowded around each other, as if they were attempting to launch themselves out the window at her.
Remy rolled over, grimacing at the pain that darted through her left side. She was reasonably sure that she’d cracked a rib in the fall and knew now wasn’t the time to be whining over it. She had to focus on getting out of there.
She stumbled to her feet, clutching at her side with one hand and clinging to the bolo knife with the other, and started back around to the front of the house where she’d left the police cruiser parked. It still sat at the head of the driveway, unmolested and, thankfully, not surrounded. She supposed they had no interest in a vehicle that didn’t have anyone in it. She raced forward, yanking open the driver’s side door and throwing herself in.
In seconds, she had the engine started and was swinging the car around, speeding down the driveway with a spray of dirt and rocks and a sob of desperation as she fled her childhood home forever.
Chapter 9
One Month Later
Remy’s eyes flew open, and she stared into the darkness, her hands gripping at the sleeping bag she lay on top of with fearful desperation. Her heart raced in her chest, and her pulse was as fluttery as her breathing. She drew in a shuddering breath and struggled to calm her nerves as the echoes of her nightmare rang in her ears. She shook her head, as if she could rattle the dream free, shake it out of her head. Then she blinked and tried to orient herself. It took her long, slow heartbeats to remember where she was: a newly abandoned house, somewhere near Biloxi, Mississippi, once the home of a family of four that had fled on short notice.
Remy reached blindly for the camping lantern she’d foolishly turned off before falling asleep and, after fumbling at the switch. The cold, luminous light flickered on, momentarily blinding her. Once she blinked the spots from her vision, she rolled from the bed and landed in a crouch beside it, the carpet absorbing the sound of her shoes. She took a step toward the barricaded door, listening carefully for any sounds of intruders. The night before, she had shoved a heavy dresser in front of the door to prevent it from being opened, right before she’d slung her sleeping bag across the master bed and collapsed onto it. The dresser had not been moved an inch, which meant she’d slept the night away safely. She blew out a breath of relief and straightened, rolling her shoulders back to loosen the muscles and scanning her eyes over the bedroom again. Then she angled her watch toward the camping lantern to check the time.
It was nearly dawn. As of today, Remy had survived an entire month alone among the horrors that had overtaken the world.
After taking a few minutes to clean up in the attached master bathroom—a liberal splashing of cold water across her face, a thorough hair brushing and tooth scrubbing—she dug out a couple of candy bars and a map she’d found in a looted convenience store the day before. She tore one of the candy bars open with her teeth and, as she ate, squinted at the map, trying to figure out what in the world she was looking at. It was a hopeless waste of time, really. Despite the extensive traveling she’d done with her father as a child, Remy had never learned how to read a map. As a result, everything she’d done over the previous month had been close to guesswork as she’d tried to match up whatever she was looking at to what was on the map of the day in front of her. It generally worked, most of the time.
That day, though, Remy wasn’t sure her mind was in the right place to make plans, especially plans that required her shoddy map-reading skills. The nightmare had left her rattled; she couldn’t get Maddie’s screams and the bang of the gunshot out of her ears. Though she knew it wasn’t real, she couldn’t expel the stench of blood and gunpowder out of her nose, tangy and metallic and haunting.
Remy shoved her map back into her backpack. She braced her hands against the dresser blocking the door and began to push. As it dragged across the carpeted floor, she began to enter a meditative state, motivated by the burn in her biceps, focusing and centering herself on the immediate and away from the past. Once the door was unblocked, she set about gathering her supplies to head out on foot.
Remy finished packing her supplies and pinned her long hair back from her face before she gathered her backpack, the hunting rifle she’d found several houses back. She hadn’t had need to use it or the rifle yet, but she knew going outside would only make those odds increase tenfold. As she slipped quietly down the stairs, Remy wished, not for the first time in the past month, that she had some real combat skills. She had had numerous chances growing up to take all sorts of self-defense classes, but her laziness, coupled with her general resistance toward authority and organized education, prevented her from taking her mother up on the repeated offers.
The downstairs level of the house was as clear as Remy had left it the evening before, much to her relief. She stepped into the family room, squinting at her gradually brightening surroundings to check for any impending dangers. Once satisfied that there were none, she made a beeline for the kitchen to ransack the cabinets and fridge for food. She hauled useful supplies from the kitchen: emergency candles, a few cheap plastic flashlights, a pack of spare batteries in a drawer, and a couple of dozen cans of food. Unfortunately, Remy couldn’t take all the food with her. Not only did she not have enough room in her bag for everything, but she could only carry so much without impeding her own mobility, especially since the only mode of transportation she had at that point was the Harley Davidson Touring motorcycle she’d found in a parking garage on the outskirts of New Orleans, its owner lying dead nearby. She gathered e
verything she could carry and slipped out the door that led into the garage. She stuffed most of the food and flashlights and other supplies into the saddlebags, though she made sure to keep some of the food in her backpack. She had no intention of being separated from that pack, and she figured it’d be wise to keep immediately necessary items in it just in case.
She wheeled the bike out into the street and climbed onto it, starting the motor without any difficulties. Whoever had owned this bike before her had taken very good care of it. She revved the engine a couple of times, despite the fact that making so much noise would attract unwanted attention to her, and then started east, heading into the heart of Biloxi.
Three hours later, Remy found herself at an impasse. The highway she traveled on was completely blocked, along with all the streets surrounding it, as if someone had set up a roadblock with the vehicles. The blockage came up on her suddenly, and she nearly laid the bike down on the road in an effort to stop quickly enough to avoid the leading edge of the mess. Bracing both feet against the pavement, she gripped the handlebars and panted like she’d run a marathon, staring at the crashed cars with wide eyes.
“Aw, hell,” she said out loud, cutting the engine off and lowering the kickstand. She scanned the blockage, searching for a way through, then frowned and shook her head. She didn’t have much in the way of options, and all those potential options involved abandoning her bike and going on foot. There were no gaps that would allow her to roll the bike through them, and a quick perusal of the surrounding streets didn’t reveal much better.
Remy slid off the motorcycle, adjusting her backpack on her shoulders and resisting the urge to kick the machine. Finding a clear route could take too much time and too many miles, and she didn’t have either to spare. She needed to get to the other side of Biloxi and find a new hiding place before it got dark, when the infected tended to get more active. Hoofing it was her only real option when it came to speed.
She opened the saddlebags on the motorcycle and rummaged around inside, looking for anything that might be of use. There wasn’t much that she could afford to take with her: a few granola bars and a small bag of almonds she’d forgotten were in there and a couple of cans of warm Coke, plus a Swiss Army knife. She put the food and drink into her backpack, stuffed the knife into her jeans pocket, and checked the security of her other weapons before starting forward to climb over the mess in front of her and maybe find a clear path on the other side.
She got her answer when she hiked over the first of the cars and stood on its crumpled hood, looking out at the scenery beyond it. Once she got a good look, her heart sank. Any thoughts she’d had about making her way through this mess were immediately dashed into the dirt.
As far as she could see were cars and trucks of all types, crashed together, driven up onto sidewalks, all telling small parts of a larger story of human panic and terror during Biloxi’s outbreak. Remy was thankful that she hadn’t had to endure this particular event; apparently, it had begun in New Orleans while she’d been in the holding cell at the police department. That didn’t make the sight before her any less depressing, though.
Remy sighed and sat down on the car’s hood, propping one of her feet against the hood of the car next to her and leaning over to tighten her shoelaces. She caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of her eye. She froze, her shoulder muscles involuntarily tightening, and eased back into a sitting position. She fumbled for her bolo knife, grasping the hilt, but she didn’t draw it, not yet. She didn’t know if the movement had come from a sick person or a healthy one—not that it made much difference; she’d already had more than one run-in with a non-sick person, and those encounters had ranged from merely uncomfortable to downright dangerous. It was why she’d chosen to stay away from people in general and go it alone.
Regardless of her reasons why she had chosen to avoid people, Remy didn’t want to pull a weapon on any of them if she didn’t have to. So she held fast, waiting, hoping that it wouldn’t be some innocent person who just happened to be nearby.
Movement to her left, in the opposite direction of the original movement she’d seen, cemented the fact that she hadn’t seen healthy people. She pushed up to a standing position on the roof of the car for a better perspective.
“Oh fucking hell,” Remy murmured as she saw what was coming in her general direction: entirely too many sick people, way more than she could handle. She picked up her rifle and slung it onto her shoulder by its strap, then jumped from the car to the ground. Her ankle turned as she landed, and a sharp pain ran up her leg, nearly sending her crashing to the ground. She gasped, startled by the sudden pain, and then forced it aside and started to run as fast as the tangled maze of vehicles would allow.
Remy’s actions seemed to open a set of unseen floodgates. As she skirted around the first few cars in the street before her, sick people burst from the streets, alleys, buildings, and cars all around her, tripping over debris, themselves, and each other in their haste to get to her. She let out a little whimper of fear that tried to overcome her, but then a surge of adrenaline beat back the terror, and she put on a bigger burst of speed. More and more sick people emerged from the side roads ahead of her, and she only hoped that she’d be able to run faster than them, get past them, and get to some kind of safety.
Roughly a quarter of a mile ahead, sitting like a beached whale in the middle of the street, was a white RV, one of those older models that had the cab built in to the RV itself, rather than being towed by a truck. Figuring that was as good a solution as any, at least until the crowd lost interest in her and drifted away, she ran towards it, hoping that not only was the door unlocked but that there were no sick people inside.
Luck was with her. The driver’s door was unlocked, and she flung the door open and scrambled inside. She fell onto the cushy driver’s seat, and her rifle dug into the small of her back and her shoulder blade as she tried to push herself up to grab the door and pull it closed. A group of sick people was trying to shove its way in through the door after her, and she kicked at them frantically, unable to get to any of her weapons with the steering wheel and the back of the driver’s seat in her way. She managed to both shove them out of the way and wrestle herself free at the same time, and she yanked the door shut, slamming it closed and hitting the lock at the same time. Then she slumped in the seat, panting, as the sick people outside threw themselves frantically at the driver’s door.
The sight of them whipped her into motion. She climbed out of the driver’s seat to the passenger’s and slammed her palm down on the lock, then ducked into the living area in the back of the RV. As soon as she was clear of the cab, she pulled her rifle off her shoulder and lifted it, aiming it down into the darker interior of the RV. Nothing moved, so she eased deeper into the cabin, checking to make sure the side door too was locked before finishing her search of the rest of its interior. Once she was assured that no one was lurking inside, she flopped on one of the bench couches to catch her breath before digging out her flashlight from her backpack to examine her ankle.
It was already swelling, and Remy had fits trying to get her tennis shoe off without unduly hurting herself, even after she took the laces out of her shoe. Once the shoe and sock were off her foot, she tugged her pant leg up and let out a low whistle. “Holy crap,” she murmured when she saw the bruises already forming on her ankle and the large, swollen lump that swelled from the outer side of it. She prodded at it gently with her fingers, afraid to push against the lump too hard, and then pulled her hand away. Maybe it was broken. She had no way to tell; she certainly wasn’t a medical professional.
Remy lowered her foot to the floor and hauled herself to her feet, careful not to put too much weight on her injured ankle. She hobbled to the cabinets in the miniature kitchenette, flipping cabinets open and finding a few bags of chips, some snack bars, and several bottles of water. She tossed it all over to the couch she’d been sitting on, then looked around, wondering what else she could find that could
be of use to her.
That was when she spotted what she’d missed when she had been in the cab: a CB radio.
“Oh joyful day,” Remy said aloud. She grasped the kitchen counter and used it as support to hobble her way over to the cab again. She tried to ignore the hands pounding on the doors and windows as she picked up the microphone and twisted a few dials on the device. It didn’t appear to be working; maybe it just needed power.
She saw the keys in the ignition and decided to see what would happen, turning them only enough to switch the battery on. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until the dash and the CB radio lit up like Christmas tree lights. She let it out in a whoosh and sent up a silent prayer of thanks before grabbing the mic and pressing the gray button on the side of it.
“Hello?” she called into the mic. “Hello, is anybody there?” She released the button, waited for a moment, and then tried again. “Hello, can anybody hear me?” When five minutes passed without an answer, she gave up, cutting the RV back off and retreating into the cabin again.
For nine days, she kept trying randomly throughout the day to raise someone on the radio. On day four, she ran out of food, which only made her plight that much more urgent. And through it all, her ankle kept throbbing, pulsing with pain with each of her heartbeats, and she’d have given a finger for a bottle of ibuprofen.
On the ninth night she was stuck in the RV, as she went through the motions of clicking the RV’s battery on and picking up the mic, contemplating her current situation, she realized that she’d given up hope. She was going to die in here, starve to death because she had a busted ankle, was surrounded by sick people, and had no way out. She was resigned to this as she keyed up the mic and spoke into it for the third time that day.
Origins (The Becoming Book 6) Page 29