A PERMUTED PRESS book
Published at Smashwords
ISBN (Trade Paperback): 978-1-61868-2-406
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-2-413
The Becoming: Under Siege copyright © 2014
by Jessica Meigs
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Dean Samed, Conzpiracy Digital Arts
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Table of Contents
From the Journal of Remy Angellette
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
From the Journal of Remy Angellette
September 9, 2010 (I think)
Rules for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (As Taught to Me by Cade Alton Evans)
1. Keep your gun handy. Keep enough bullets even handier.
2. Don’t be afraid to try to nail a headshot—those assholes deserve everything we can give them.
3. Keep a melee weapon on you at all times in case you run out of bullets. Knives are awesome, machetes are way sweet, crowbars and hammers are stupid as shit. (Do I really have to elaborate on why?)
4. Keep your friends close. Keep your (living) enemies closer.
5. Never ever, ever fall in love. He’ll only die and come back as a zombie and try to kill you. You’ll never be able to think about him the same as you did before—and you’ll have the scars to
Yeah, I’m bitter. What of it?
Who wouldn’t be bitter after all the shit I’ve been through? I lost my family, I lost Gray, and I lost him. My face is fucked up, and I want to get out of here. Like I was supposed to months ago. But Dr. Rivers won’t give me the cure he gave Ethan until he’s absolutely sure it won’t kill me.
Who gives a flying pigmy fuck, as Cade would say. Give me the cure anyway. I can handle it. I’m not fragile. And if it does kill me? Then so much the better.
I hate it here. I hate that there’s absolutely no one who really understands what I’m dealing with, what I’m going through. I hate the anger, the hatred, the hunger, always lurking in the back of my head. I hate this empty, hollow feeling in my chest where all of my good emotions used to be. I hate this whole place.
I just hate. Indescribably.
I’m way off the reason why I’m supposed to be writing this. All the shit I wrote before makes me sound like a stupid, emo little teenager. I’m almost twenty-two! I shouldn’t be all up in this damped mopey bullshit. Cade asked me to write about what’s been going on from my point of view—she’s been collecting all these stories from the survivors here for a “chronicle of events.” She got the idea from some horror novel that told an oral history of a zombie war. It sort of makes sense, considering we’re living it.
At the same time, though, I think Cade just needs something to do since she’s knocked up and supposed to be taking it easy. Maybe she needs to find an activity that’s less intrusive of other people’s lives to stay occupied with. Because for the past several months, she’s been driving me fucking nuts.
What if I don’t want to tell my damned story? Nobody cares about my mom or my stepfather or Madeline or any of the other people I’ve lost. And nobody cares about me getting bitten by one of the infected or Ethan saving my life and then trying to kill me. Nobody cares. And if no one cares, then why should I spend so much damned time talking about my feelings? I could be out with one of the search parties looking for supplies and maybe, I don’t know, actually doing something about the infected. I don’t want any more people going through the hell I’ve been through. And I don’t want to sit on my ass in this stupid house in stupid Woodside, keeping everything I do low impact while I whine in this stupid notebook.
I want the fucking cure. And once I get it? I want to finally get the hell out of here. Because damn it, I’m sick of this place.
Chapter 1
Brandt Evans searched for his wife, Cade, for nearly an hour before he finally found her. She was in the backyard of the house two doors down from the one in which they’d been staying, her blue jeans soaked to the knees with dew from the tall grass and her hair falling messily out of its ponytail. She stood near one end of the yard, her back straight and her shoulders squared, her eyes fixed on a distant point. She grasped a compound bow as she sighted down the length of the arrow resting against the string. She’d secured her ever-present Galil sniper rifle to her back, the strap crossed over her chest. She looked like a pregnant goddess of revenge, like an Amazonian warrior who would take no shit from anybody, and Brandt loved it. He smiled and climbed onto the nearby picnic table, watching as she adjusted her aim. After several heartbeats, she released the arrow. It embedded with a thunk into the narrow sapling at the far end of the yard.
“Damn, that’s good,” Brandt commented with a smile. He slid off the table and dusted dead leaves off the seat of his jeans. Shaking his dark hair out of his eyes, he started toward her through the knee-high grass. “I didn’t know you knew how to use a bow. Hell, I didn’t even know you had one. Where’d you get it?”
“I found it in the house,” Cade answered. She retrieved another arrow from the bag at her feet. “Guy who lived there must have been a bow hunter. He had a ton of equipment stashed in his attic. The searchers must have overlooked it, so I cleaned it all out.”
Brandt tried to picture Cade, pregnant Cade, crawling around in a dusty, dirty attic in which the temperatures likely rivaled the Mojave Desert, as almost all attics in the southeast tended to. It was amazing she hadn’t passed out from the combination of heat inside and outside.
“And how long have you known how to do this?” he asked. “You never mentioned that you could before.” He grabbed one of the arrows from the bag and held it up into the sunlight, studying it as Cade answered.
“Since this morning. Sort of,” she admitted. She fit the arrow to the bow and flexed her fingers as if they pained her. Then she drew the bowstring back. Brandt couldn’t help but admire how the muscles in her biceps shifted as she pulled against the weight of the bowstring. “I figured it’d be worth taking the time to teach myself. We might end up in another situation that requires quiet, and it would make a great stealth weapon.”
Brandt raised his eyebrows and looked her over again from head to toe, watching her sight for her target as he reassessed his opinion of her. Y
et again. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d done so since meeting her a week after the outbreak in Atlanta. She continuously did things that revealed whole new facets of her personality. “You mean to tell me you just learned how to do this?” he asked. She released the arrow. It missed the sapling and embedded into the wooden privacy fence beyond, prompting a scowl of frustration to cross Cade’s face. “You’ve never actually used a compound bow before?”
“Well, I figure how hard could it be?” Cade replied. She gave him a nonchalant shrug and ran her fingers along the curve of the bow. “I mean, you just pull the bowstring back and aim and let go. That’s not all that hard.”
Brandt realized his jaw was hanging slack, and he snapped it shut. How hard can it be indeed? he mused as he shook his head incredulously. His grandfather had spent years working his way to the level of an expert archer, and along came Cade, picking up the basics like it was the easiest thing in the world. It was insane how easily things like that came to her.
As Brandt mulled over the woman and her skill-set, Cade began to wade through the thick grass, heading for the other side of the yard to collect the arrows she’d shot. He followed her, unwilling to let her wander off—again—out of his sight, even if they were in a fortified, gated community that had already been thoroughly cleared of the infected. He kept his eyes on the back of her thin tank-top, which stuck to her skin in a sheen of sweat, brought on by the heat of the southern sun of early September. As he walked, each step was almost a struggle through the tall, lush grass. He glanced at Cade a few times as she focused on the path ahead of them, her bright blue eyes squinting in the sunlight, and he decided it was time to broach the reason he’d searched her out in the first place. “Have you talked to Remy today?”
“Yep,” Cade said. She stopped before she reached the thin sapling and scooped up a couple of arrows that had fallen short of the target. She passed them to him and started to pull the three arrows that were embedded in the tree. As she gave them to him, he tucked them into the bag. “I’m sure she hates me right now, if you want me to be honest,” she admitted. “I asked her to go to the rec center and inventory the food before she did anything else today, so when the supply team comes back, we’ll know exactly where we stand. She didn’t seem too happy with being asked to do it though.”
“Oh, she definitely wasn’t,” Brandt assured her. He shoved the final arrow into the bag before slinging it onto his left shoulder carefully, mindful of the residual soreness that still lingered after being stabbed with his own knife almost six months before. “She was swearing at an invisible you while kicking chairs and generally showing her ass. I tried to tell her that if she’d get busy, she could get it over with and move on to whatever she actually wanted to do. She just gave me the finger and told me to get the hell away from her.” He shook his head. “What the hell’s gotten into her, anyway?”
“She’s pissed off at me because I wouldn’t let her go out with Joseph’s supply team this morning,” Cade explained. She started through the grass again, the blades swishing against her jeans as she headed in the direction of the house.
“Why not?”
“Because she can’t fucking control herself is why not,” Cade said. She paused halfway across the yard and turned to face him. He stopped and looked at her questioningly as she folded her arms underneath her breasts, her wrists and elbows resting against the swell of her belly. “Have you not noticed how she’s acting lately?”
“Oh, I have,” Brandt said. “I’ve just been choosing to not think about it too much, because frankly, her erratic behavior scares the shit out of me.”
Cade raised an eyebrow. “I think it’s about time we all did some serious thinking about it,” she said as they started to move again. “I don’t like how she’s acting like…well, like Alicia. Remy was already a bit unhinged before she got infected. You remember how she used to pick fights and chase down infected instead of trying to avoid them like the rest of us did. She was fucking reckless. I’m beginning to wonder now if she’s starting to totally crack.”
Brandt sat down on the steps leading to the deck and rubbed his hand over his mouth, brushing his fingers over the three days’ worth of stubble. Cade watched him closely, leaning against the railing beside him, her elbows propped on the rail. Her pregnant belly jutted out in his direction, and he resisted the urge to reach out and touch it. Instead, he focused on their conversation, blowing out a breath and trying to choose his words carefully. “I…honestly, I don’t know,” he said. “I understand her behavior from before, when we were in Alabama and Georgia. She’s got a vendetta against the things, and after what little she told us about what happened to her family, I can hardly blame her for that. I can’t say that, if not saddled with the responsibilities I’ve got now, that I wouldn’t go out and slaughter as many as I could before they took me down. But in the past few months, she’s definitely begun to act oddly. And it’s making me uncomfortable. You were right to keep her from going out with the supply team. I’m not sure she’s stable enough for trips out of Woodside right now. She’d probably take off after the first infected guy she saw and end up getting herself or someone else killed—and it’s the someone else that I’m more worried about, to be honest.”
“Me too,” Cade confessed. She sighed and took her rifle off her shoulder, then sat gingerly on the step beside him. She dropped her arms to rest against her thighs and stared emptily across the overgrown yard. “If she wants to get herself killed, that’s her prerogative, though I wouldn’t like it if she did and would prefer that she not. But I’m definitely not okay with it if she takes other people down with her. That’s why I told her no.”
Brandt took her hand and held it loosely, running his thumb along her knuckles. Her skin felt soft, almost fragile, and he couldn’t stop touching it. He studied her uniquely olive-pale complexion as he traced his fingers along hers. “Has she been to see Ethan yet?”
“Not since we got him here,” Cade answered. “And not since Dr. Rivers cured him, either. I’ve been trying to get her to at least go visit him ever since he woke up. He asked for her for a while, but she won’t go see him. I don’t understand it.”
Brandt bit back a low groan of frustration and shook his head. “What’s with her? I thought she was in love with him, you know? I mean, she spent that entire month he was separated from us mourning him because she thought he was dead. Hell, we all thought he was dead, but she took it harder than any of us. And now that he’s back and better, it’s like she doesn’t want jack shit to do with him.”
“I think…I think maybe she might be afraid,” Cade said thoughtfully. She twisted on the step to look at him, her expression serious. Without hesitation, he wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off the step, settling her onto his lap. Despite her general abhorrence of even semi-public displays of affection, she let him do it, which meant she was probably not feeling great. “I know that might be hard to believe,” she continued once she’d settled on his lap, “considering it’s Remy and she’s always seemed so fearless. But I think she’s actually afraid of Ethan.”
“He did attack her, didn’t he?” Brandt pointed out. He maneuvered Cade around on his lap, caught a lock of her dark hair in his fingers, and divided it into three pieces, starting to braid it absently. “Back at the Westin, he went straight after her, and I’m not sure it was only because she was closest to him. Hell, you saw what he did to her face. She’s probably still messed up over that alone.”
“Yeah, I have,” Cade acknowledged. “Everyone has. No matter how much she tries to hide it. It’s just there.” She paused, rubbing her hand idly along his forearm, drawing up chill bumps with her touch. She lightly kneaded the muscles as she added, “I think she’s afraid of what he’ll do.”
“Or what he’ll see,” Brandt theorized. He pressed his hand gently to the curve of her stomach and closed his eyes, hoping to feel something, some movement to indicate that the baby inside her was alive and well. When he didn’
t feel so much as a kick, he sighed in disappointment and stood, setting Cade carefully onto her feet before tugging at her hand. “Come on. It’s getting hot out here, and I’m not sure I like you being out in the heat like this. You might get heatstroke or something.”
A soft laugh escaped Cade’s throat, and she shook her head. The thin braid he’d put in her hair brushed against the curve of her cheek. His fingers tingled, itching to rearrange it. “Brandt, are you being overprotective again?”
“Probably,” he muttered. Despite his tone, a grin crossed his face.
“I feel fine,” Cade insisted. “But if it makes you happy, I’ll go with you to the damned house, though it’s not going to be that much cooler inside than it is out here.”
Brandt caught her hand and pulled her close to him, wrapping an arm around her waist. Unable to resist any longer, he pressed a soft, slow kiss to her mouth. He pulled back from the kiss once he’d gotten his fill—for the moment, anyway—and nuzzled his nose against hers. “Yes, it does make me happy,” he murmured, feeling her soft breath against his mouth as she sighed slowly. Then she laughed, gently pushing her hands against his chest, and he released her. They made their way across the backyard together, close but not touching. “You heard what Derek said,” he continued. “We’ve got to be careful. There aren’t exactly any hospitals to take you to if there are complications during your pregnancy or during the birth. I want you to stay healthy. And safe.”
Cade smiled at Brandt, and its appearance hit him in the chest like a punch. It felt like it had been forever since he’d seen her smile—really smile, not any of the faked, patient smiles she gave other people in Woodside—and he couldn’t help but give her one in return.
“So what do you say we head to the rec center and get dinner started?” she suggested. “We can stop by the house and drop the bag off while we’re at it. Joseph and his guys should be back soon, and I want to see what they haul in with them. Hopefully, they found more shells for me to work with.”
The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege Page 1