The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege

by Jessica Meigs

  “Your room,” Ethan repeated. He took an almost unconscious step forward, as if an invisible string had tugged him toward her. “And where, exactly, do you plan to sleep?”

  “In my room,” she answered. “Unless, of course, you’d prefer otherwise…”

  Despite his instincts screaming that it was a bad idea, Ethan reached for her. His fingertips followed the curve of her cheek almost of their own volition. He marveled at the contrast of her soft skin against the rough calluses on his own fingers, and he nearly pulled his hand away, not wanting to mar her.

  As he’d caressed her face, Kimberly’s brown eyes closed. When he pulled his hand away, her eyes flew open, and she grabbed his wrist. He could read her intent in the way she traced her tongue over her bottom lip.

  She pressed her body against his, her lips to his. His knees weakened with desire. Her fingers slid into his hair, and he tangled his own hands into her short blonde bob, pulling her deeper into the kiss. His body moved by instinct, and he pinned her against the porch rail.

  His hands dropped from her to her hair to her shoulders; his fingers ran down her upper arms. She pulled away from the kiss, panting slightly. He leaned toward her again, but she pressed her fingers to his lips to block his advance.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” Kimberly murmured.

  “A little late for that, Kim,” Ethan replied. “You’re the one who invited me to share a room while on lockdown.” He gave her elbow a gentle squeeze but didn’t step back from her. “That has ‘bad idea’ written all over it.”

  “So you think I’m a bad idea?

  Ethan nuzzled his nose against hers, burning to kiss her again. “I think you’re a dangerous idea,” he whispered. He brushed his fingers against her cheek one last time, turned, and slipped into the house without another word.

  Chapter 14

  Remy was fuming as she stormed away from the gates and toward the medical house, heedless of anyone or anything that may have been in her path. She could hear someone following her, but she ignored it in favor of snarling at herself and everyone she knew in her head. Her fury was overwhelming, and it wasn’t long before the snarling switched to words.

  “How dare she?” Remy asked out loud. The person behind her continued walking in time with her steps. “How dare she blame me for this mess? Those things were going to find us anyway. This isn’t my fault!” When the person who was following her remained silent, she wrinkled her nose and demanded, “Well? Aren’t you going to say something?”

  “What’s there to say?” Dominic’s voice was hoarse but quiet. “You’ve made your feelings known. I just wish you’d stayed around to make that clearer to Cade instead of storming off in a huff.”

  “I did not storm off in a huff,” Remy snapped. She spun around to glare at Dominic. He only stood there with his eyebrow raised. He remained silent for so long that Remy couldn’t help but explode. “What?” she demanded.

  Dominic rubbed at one of his eyes and shook his head. “You need to calm down, Miss Angellette,” he said, much to Remy’s irritation. “You’re too emotional, and when you get that way, you can’t think clearly.”

  “I’m not too emotional!” But even as Remy spoke, she realized Dominic was right. She was getting too emotional, letting her feelings control her. She had repeatedly told herself to not get crazy with her emotions, but no matter what she did and no matter how hard she fought, she couldn’t seem to rein them in.

  Seeing Ethan hadn’t helped, either. The whole scene back at the wall made her want to pull her bolo knife from its sheath and go on the attack. It was instinctual, she knew, but partly in reaction to the man who had wormed his way into her mind: she recalled his grasping hands and the feel of his fingers curling into her shirt. She remembered him taking her down to the floor. She just didn’t trust his return to normalcy.

  “You’ve got to keep a level head, Remy.” Dominic looked her over appraisingly. “You still want me to train you, right?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Remy said without hesitation.

  “Then you’re going to have to trust me,” Dominic said. He approached her, and their eyes met. “And trusting me entails you actually trusting me, and not just with teaching you and having your back.”

  Remy blew out a breath and ran a hand through her dark hair, scraping the long strands back from her face before replying. “It was…him,” she said. Her voice trembled, and she wiped the back of her hand over her eyes, even though she wasn’t crying. “It’s just…I don’t know. Seeing him…rattled me.”

  “Understandably,” Dominic acknowledged. He grasped her arms in his hands, trying to make her look at him, but she wrenched free. “What?”

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, her words coming out more bitterly than she’d intended for them to.

  Dominic brushed off her rejection, seemingly unaffected. She imagined that not much bothered him; he’d probably had every scrap of real emotion trained right out of him when he’d been accepted into the DIA, if not before.

  She desperately wished she could be like him: cold and distant. The idea suited her.

  “Don’t let him have that power over you, Remy,” Dominic said.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Remy muttered. “You aren’t the one he tried to kill.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Dominic said. “But you can either come with me and do something proactive, or you can stay at the medical house and wallow in self-pity. Your choice, but I won’t extend the invitation again if you decide to go with the second option.”

  Remy could feel a nerve in her cheek twitching, and she gritted her teeth to keep herself calm. “I’ll go with the first choice. Of course.”

  “Of course,” Dominic repeated. He offered her a hand, and when she glanced at it but didn’t take it, he dropped it and started in the opposite direction of the medical house. “Come on. You can stay at my house for lockdown.”

  “I need my medicine,” Remy pointed out. “And I need to clean myself up. Why don’t you go ahead and I’ll meet you there?”

  Dominic nodded. “Yeah, okay. I can do that.”

  Remy bolted into the medical house, taking the stairs two at a time to her bedroom. She dropped her backpack and weapons on the bed and took a few minutes to clean herself up before gathering the spare weapons she’d hidden around her bedroom: the pistol in the slats under the bed, the magazines taped to the bottom of the dresser, the knives on the back of the bed’s headboard, and more. She gathered the last of her personal belongings before heading to the door. She had no intention of ever returning to the medical house. She didn’t care what Dr. Rivers said.

  After picking the lock on Derek’s room, she found the prefilled auto-injectors he gave her each day. The medicine inside the twelve injectors sloshed as she stuffed them into the increasingly heavy bag on her back. She hurried out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her so Dr. Rivers wouldn’t immediately realize she’d been there, and headed for the stairs.

  Remy made it halfway down when she heard footsteps and voices below. The words were indecipherable, but it was obvious who was downstairs: Dr. Rivers, Kimberly, and Ethan. She eased her way back upstairs and ducked into her bedroom. With a click, the door closed behind her, and she swore under her breath.

  Unable to go out the front door, Remy resorted to her second-favorite exit: the window by the bed. She threw it open and slipped onto the porch’s roof. A rose-covered trellis was attached to the side, and she half-crawled, half-slid to it, scrambling down silently. Once her boots hit the grass, she paused to make sure no one had seen her swift exit.

  Suddenly, the front door banged open. Remy pressed back into the shadows against the house, her fingers grasping the hilt of her bolo knife instinctively. But it was only Dr. Rivers and Kimberly, supporting Ethan between them.

  The three stood on the porch, bickering. She watched as Kimberly and the doctor helped Ethan onto the edge of a deck chair. “I’m not sure you really realize what you’re asking her to
do,” Ethan was saying. Remy peered between the rose vines and through the diamond-shaped gaps in the trellis to get a better look at Ethan. She’d seen him at the gate but had been too angry to really look at him.

  His hair was lanky and dirty, and he was in need of a bath; his arms were skinnier than she remembered and still covered in scars from the attack he’d endured months before—not that she’d expected the scars to magically disappear. But otherwise, he looked healthy for someone who’d suffered for months under the throes of Michaluk. His appearance didn’t ease her mind about being infected herself.

  She focused on what the three were saying.

  “Look, Ethan, I understand you have some reservations over the idea,” Derek said.

  “Some reservations?” Ethan repeated. “That’s like saying there’s only a few infected outside the gates. I wouldn’t wish what you’re proposing on my worst enemy.”

  “And why is that?” Kimberly asked. Her voice was gentle, and she laid a hand against his forearm.

  Remy wrinkled her nose and fought not to throw something at the woman.

  “Because you don’t understand it any more than I do,” Ethan said. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know why I—” He broke off and shook his head, resting his face in his hands, his elbows propped on his thighs.

  “Is this about the rabbit?” Derek asked.

  What about a rabbit? Remy wondered.

  The doctor took his ever-present white lab coat off and draped it over the porch railing. Remy still wondered why he wore it; she supposed it was a prestige thing.

  “Let’s not bring the rabbit up, please,” Ethan said, his voice muffled. “It’s fucking disturbing.”

  “Why do you find it disturbing?” Derek asked. He leaned against the porch railing beside his coat and folded his arms over his chest.

  “What, you don’t?”

  “I don’t understand it yet.”

  “Precisely,” Ethan bit out.

  “But we’re aiming to,” Kimberly spoke up. “We’re going to study this thing and figure out what it’s done to you so we can have a full understanding of the side effects.”

  “You don’t even understand it and yet you’re wanting to let Remy turn into one of them and shoot her up with it?” Ethan said. “That is so fucked up.”

  “Well, what do you expect me to do?” Derek asked, and for the first time, Remy heard a note of anger in his voice. “The medicine is running out. I have enough for a week and a half, maybe a little more, but it’s not enough to last until the end of the month for sure. She’s going to turn, one way or the other, Ethan. And I’d personally rather it be sooner than later so we can control it and deal with it accordingly.”

  Remy scowled. She’d heard all this before.

  When she focused again, Kimberly was kneeling beside Ethan’s chair and speaking to him in a low voice that Remy couldn’t hear. She frowned and leaned closer to the trellis.

  Then Ethan spoke up.

  “Look, I don’t want to discuss this right now,” he said. “It’s just…I’m tired. Maybe I got out of bed too soon.”

  “Yeah, we need to keep you from pushing yourself too hard,” Derek agreed. He took one of Ethan’s arms and helped him from the chair. Kimberly took the other. “Let’s get you back in and back to bed, okay?”

  “Not here,” Ethan said. “In the main house. I’m staying in Kim—”

  He broke off, and Remy gritted her teeth. She watched as Woodside’s two medical personnel led Ethan down the porch steps and across the side yard to the main house. She waited for the door to shut and then made her move.

  Derek had left his white coat draped over the porch railing. Remy kept her head low and slunk to the coat, slipping her hand into one pocket and then the next, searching for anything useful. When her fingers encountered a cool glass vial, she pulled it free and pocketed it before heading to Dominic’s.

  Chapter 15

  Kimberly could feel a headache coming on. She scrunched her eyes shut, trying to shut out the sound of the infected hammering on the wall. Sometimes they were quiet, like before when she’d been on the porch with Ethan and Derek, perhaps lulled into silence by the lack of anything human in view. But sometimes, maybe after catching sight of the guards on the platforms, they fairly hummed in unison. It rattled in her head, sending her brain scrambling for solace. Cade sat at the other end of the dining table that Kimberly was slouched at, her head in her hands. She appeared to be trying to do the same thing Kimberly was—drown them out somehow. Brandt paced back and forth across the kitchen, checking his watch and glancing toward the boarded-up window over the sink, as if he could see through the wood. Kimberly didn’t know where Ethan was, but she wished he was with them. The thought felt traitorous; for the millionth time, she had to remind herself that she wasn’t supposed to like him, not after Avi’s death. Despite her silent reminder, the heated kiss they’d shared on the porch that afternoon came back to her mind. It was a kiss that she would have given an arm to experience again. She scowled and shook her head, as if the motion could erase the memory.

  “Is there anything we can do about that fucking noise?” Kimberly snapped, her voice breaking the semi-silence of the room. “It’s driving me insane.”

  “Sure,” Brandt said, turning in front of the fridge to make another pass to the stove. “We can go out there and shoot them all. Of course, that would be a waste of bullets, and that’s beside the fact we don’t have enough to do the job.”

  “Your problem is all psychological anyway,” Cade said. Her voice sounded hollow, toneless, and she didn’t look up from the tabletop. “It’s like war drums. Armies beat on them to unnerve their enemies, because the repetitiveness drives them crazy.”

  “Well, it’s certainly driving me crazy,” Kimberly admitted. “Though I doubt they’re doing it as some sort of orchestrated strategy.”

  “I don’t know,” Brandt said.

  Kimberly frowned and wondered if he was being facetious.

  “They’ve shown some limited ability to strategize before,” Brandt continued. “Well, the ones that aren’t already dead, anyway.”

  Definitely not being facetious, Kimberly thought with a grimace.

  “We can’t discount anything when it comes to the infected,” Brandt added. “For all we know, they’ve evolved in the time we’ve been avoiding them.”

  Kimberly agreed with Brandt wholeheartedly—now was definitely not the time to lie down on the job or get lax about security, not with the infected literally at their doorstep. “Is there anything I can do?” Kimberly asked. “I hate just sitting here. It makes me feel useless.”

  Brandt didn’t look at her, and he resumed his pacing. She figured if he kept it up, he’d wear a hole in the floor. “You could go check on Derek, see if he needs any help,” he said. “I’m sure he could use help organizing and packing away the important things in case we need to get out of here fast.”

  Kimberly sighed and nodded, pushing herself up from the chair. It hadn’t been the answer she was looking for, but she had to acknowledge that Brandt had a point: out of everyone, she was probably the one most knowledgeable of Derek’s working habits and filing systems. She made her way out of the kitchen, surreptitiously scanning her path for signs of Ethan’s whereabouts, but she gave up when she reached the basement door. She could hear Derek slamming something beyond the door, so she opened it and peered inside.

  The brightness of artificial lighting, so rare in the post-infected age, made her eyes water, and she rubbed at them as she slipped inside. The main house’s basement was the only place in Woodside that had been allowed to use the lone generator the missing supply crew had scraped up shortly after their arrival, since it was generally accepted that Derek was doing important work. She used to come downstairs a lot, especially while Ethan had still been sick, trying to give Derek whatever assistance he needed while he searched for a solution to Ethan’s illness.

  Ever since Ethan had been cured, tho
ugh, she hadn’t been down much, mainly because every time she’d stopped by, Derek acted as if she was only in the way.

  She wasn’t going to lie: that hurt.

  Kimberly pulled the basement door shut behind her and started down the stairs to the makeshift lab below. With every step she took, she could make out a little more of the woodworking benches that had been commandeered from someone’s garage, littered with papers and light microscopes and other bits of equipment that had been liberated from a medical lab and a vet’s office. When she’d descended the stairs enough to catch sight of the entire room, a frown crossed her face. She spotted Derek slumped on a rickety metal stool at one of the two workbenches. His head was in his hands, his shoulders hunched, the perfect picture of despondency. Kimberly hurried down the last few steps and went to him, circling the workbench so she could try to see his face. She couldn’t, so instead, she reached across the workbench and grasped his shoulder, squeezing it gently.

  “Are you okay?” Kimberly asked, keeping her voice low. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I’ve lost one,” the doctor said. His words were barely audible, and Kimberly had to lean closer to hear him better. “I’ve lost one, and I have no idea where to look to find it.”

  “You’ve lost one what?” Kimberly asked. She frowned and snagged another stool, sinking down onto it and resting her elbows against the workbench’s surface. Being downstairs, she could barely hear the infected outside the gates; the absence of noise was enough to make her want to stay down here permanently.

  “A sample,” Derek answered. “I’ve lost one of the samples of Brandt’s blood, and I don’t know where I put it. I’ve torn this place apart, and I can’t find it.”

  Kimberly raised an eyebrow and reached for the black case near his elbow. It was snapped closed, and as her fingers brushed against its hard plastic surface, Derek snatched the case back, pulling it closer to him where she couldn’t get to it.