“Hello? Is anyone there?”
There was a pop of static, then silence. She sighed and spoke into the mic again. “Hello? Anybody?”
Nothing.
Remy let out an exasperated groan and threw the mic down in frustration. She rested her head against the steering wheel and fought back a surge of frustrated tears.
That was when the CB radio crackled and came to life.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
“Oh,” Remy said intelligently. She sat up straight and looked at the radio. She stared at it for a long moment while her brain registered that no, she hadn’t imagined that. She scrambled for the microphone, searching for where it had fallen on the floorboard. Within seconds, she had the mic in her hand and was pressing the button, her voice shaking as she spoke into it. “Yes! Yes, I’m here! Thank God! You’re the first person I’ve managed to raise on here!”
The man’s voice was pleasant, but it had a vague military air to it, like he’d served before. “What’s your situation?”
“I’m trapped in an RV and I’m surrounded and need help,” she told him.
There was a pause, and then he said, “Stand by, please.”
Remy felt her heart try to pound its way out of her chest. Was he going to come back? Or would he leave her to her own devices? The wait was so long that, though she shouldn’t have done it, she keyed up the mic and asked, “Hello? Are you still there?”
A different voice came over the radio this time, younger sounding. “Yeah, we’re here. Who is this?”
“My name is Remy,” she said. “Who is this? You sound different than before.”
“You were talking to Brandt then. This is Gray,” he answered. “Brandt said you needed help?”
“Yeah, I think I’m trapped,” Remy reported. “I might need a bit of help getting out of here.”
“Where exactly is ‘here’?”
“I’m stuck in an RV in Biloxi,” Remy clarified, her voice quavering. “There are some of those…things outside. And I think I broke my ankle, but I’m not sure. It could just be a bad sprain. It’s swollen like hell, and I can’t really walk on it.”
“Hey, uh, Remy? Where exactly in Biloxi are you? We need the nearest intersection to your location.”
Remy set the mic down, levering herself out of the driver’s seat long enough to kneel on the passenger seat and squint down the road. She made out what the sign said, and she returned to the mic and reported her location to the people on the radio.
There was another pause, this one much longer than before, and Remy could have sworn she was about to get sick to her stomach. She clenched her teeth, this time refraining from keying up the mic again, and waited for either Gray or Brandt to come back over the CB radio again. Her patience was rewarded when, almost five minutes later, just when she was contemplating turning the RV off under the assumption that nothing further would be said, the first man, Brandt, came over the radio again. “Remy, you still around?”
“Yeah, I’m still here,” she answered.
“What’s your situation with food and water?”
Remy glanced back at the narrow couch she’d spent most of the past nine days on, staring at all the empty food wrappers she’d tossed on the floor and the two water bottles tucked into the corner of the couch. She’d been sipping from one of them, trying to make them last as long as possible. “I’ve got two bottles of water left, but I’ve been out of food for five days now, I think,” she said. “It might be four days. Somewhere around that, anyway.”
There was another long silence, then Brandt came over the radio again. “Remy, just sit tight, okay? We’re coming to get you.”
“Oh,” Remy said again, this time to herself. “Oh thank God.”
“Stay safe. We’re coming from the Meridian area, and we’ll be there as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” she said into the microphone. She set the mic down in its cradle and turned the truck off, then swung up to her feet and hobbled painfully back to the couch, where she collapsed onto it and started to sob in relief.
Help was coming. She wasn’t going to die here. Not today.
About the Author
Jessica Meigs is the author of The Becoming, a post-apocalyptic thriller series that follows a group of people trying to survive a massive viral outbreak in the southeastern United States. After gaining notoriety for having written the series on a variety of BlackBerry devices, she self-published two novellas that now make up the first book of the series. In April 2011, she accepted a three-book deal with Permuted Press to publish a trilogy of novels. The first of the trilogy, entitled The Becoming, was released in November 2011 and was named one of Barnes & Noble’s Best Zombie Fiction Releases of 2011 and Best Zombie Fiction Releases of the Decade by reviewer Paul Goat Allen.
Jessica lives in semi-obscurity in Demopolis, Alabama. When she’s not writing, she works full time as an EMT. She can be found on Twitter @JessicaMeigs, on Facebook at facebook.com/JessicaMeigs, and on Goodreads at goodreads.com/JessicaMeigs. You can also visit her website at www.jessicameigs.com.
Jessica is represented by Hannah Brown Gordon of Foundry Literary + Media. For any rights inquiries, please contact Hannah at [email protected].
Table of Contents
The Becoming Origins
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two: During
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Three: After
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
The Becoming: Brother in Arms
Chapter 5
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 11
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
The Becoming: Deliverance
About the Author
Origins (The Becoming Book 6) Page 30