The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege

by Jessica Meigs

  “Look, you two take care of each other and be careful,” he said. He dug a half dried-out pen and a scrap of paper from his backpack and scribbled an address on it before pressing the paper into Ethan’s hand. “This is the last address that I know of to a USAMRIID facility,” he explained. “If the CDC doesn’t pan out, try them. Considering they were probably involved in the virus’s creation, they’ll be equipped to deal with the samples.”

  Ethan stuffed it into his pocket. “Will do,” he agreed. “Take care of Cade for me, okay? Promise me you won’t let anything happen to her or the baby.”

  “I swear on my life,” Dominic promised. Ethan stared at him for a moment and then nodded like he was satisfied.

  “We’ll be back,” Ethan said, clapping Dominic’s shoulder before turning to join Kimberly.

  Dominic swung the door shut again, scooped up the padlock, and slipped it through the hasp, leaving it unlocked like he’d done on the supply room’s door in the rec center earlier.

  Remy stood beside him, looking like she was ready to come unglued. Her eyes flickered between the wall where Ethan and Kimberly had just exited, his face, and the area beyond where the front gates were. She looked like she was itching for a fight. Dominic was going to give her one. He hefted his rifle and motioned to her.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go slaughter our way to the main house.”

  Chapter 28

  Brandt waited until ten minutes after Ethan and Kimberly had left before he moved into action. He wanted there to be less people on their tails so as to not draw the attention of the infected. Then he’d gathered Keith and the few men he had left and gave them instructions about dividing the survivors into groups. He told them to gather at the back of the community until he arrived to show them how to get out.

  Brandt ran his options through his head again, inventorying where everyone was at. He didn’t know where Remy or Dominic were, but it was number one on his list to at least find Dominic; he had to ask him exactly how he was getting in and out of the community. He needed to know, and he needed to know now. Sadie and Jude were upstairs resting, and Cade was upstairs with them.

  When the infected managed to break past the walls and gates, there would no longer be any safe places in Woodside, but at least upstairs would be some semblance of safer than downstairs. Brandt had spent his first week in Woodside rigging up every house’s staircases to blow and collapse, just like he’d done to the group’s safe house in Maplesville. It was a last resort measure, but the infected wouldn’t get them immediately.

  Starvation might, though, a nasty voice in the back of his mind muttered darkly. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the thoughts, and refocused on the task at hand.

  Derek was, last he knew of, downstairs packing up his basement lab. Brandt intended to send him upstairs to shelter with Cade once he finished packing; the doctor was important to Cade, since he was the one who was supposed to help her birth Brandt’s child. He had zero desire to leave that to chance.

  The last person on his list was Isaac Wright. He hadn’t seen the man since the meeting they’d had earlier. Isaac was likely upstairs. He hadn’t decided what he was going to do with him yet; it probably involved figuratively shackling him to Cade and giving him orders to ensure she survived anything that came her way.

  Sure, Cade could survive anything that came her way on her own, but he would feel better if he knew Isaac was there to back her up in the event that he wasn’t.

  Decisions made, Brandt stepped out onto the front porch and turned his attention to the gates, studying them as well as he could in the low light. What he saw made his heart sink.

  “That gate is not going to last much longer,” he murmured, taking a few steps toward it so he could get a better look. It was leaning inward, bowing precariously under the weight of the infected on the other side, and he started recalculating their survival chances as he reassessed how long they had until the infected got in.

  Not long enough, clearly.

  As he stared at the gates, willing them to stand upright under the onslaught of infected, they wobbled, wavering under the pressure. Brandt’s heart jumped up from his knees to his throat. “Son of a bitch,” he choked out as everything he stood to lose flooded his mind: Cade, their unborn child, safety, security, his life, the lives of everyone! He stuffed his heart back down where it belonged and bucked up his courage and determination. It was time for plan B, his fallback should the community find itself in the situation it was in now. With one last glance toward the gates and another at the main house, he started jogging toward the courtyard near the center of Woodside, aiming for the military Humvee parked there.

  Several months before, when they’d run into trouble in Atlanta and Ethan had stayed behind to die so they could live and Cade had lain bleeding in his arms from a gunshot wound, Brandt had taken the few of them that were still alive through the dangerous streets of downtown Atlanta to the Tabernacle on Luckie Street. During the outbreak in Atlanta, the military had commandeered the former church-turned-concert-venue to use as a staging post and command center, and he’d thought he could use the radio to get in touch with someone in charge that could fly them out. He hadn’t succeeded—his pleas for help to Major Bradford were refused, with the excuse that it was “too risky”—so he’d stolen a Humvee and had gotten them out of Atlanta himself. That raced through his mind as he opened the driver’s door and climbed in, settling into the seat before hitting the aux switch to power on the Humvee’s battery, watching as the dash lights came to life.

  The radio was mounted into the transmission hump, a contraption that looked deceptively easy to use to the untrained eye. Thank God I’m not an amateur, he thought as he switched it on and picked up the mic. He weighed it in his hand for a moment, debating the futility of trying to summon help, since it hadn’t worked last time he’d tried.

  But no, he couldn’t not try, not with what was outside the community, not with what was about to be inside the community. Not with his pregnant wife’s life in imminent danger. And so, resolved, he started clicking through each channel, testing them, calling out for someone, anyone to answer him.

  Brandt was nearly through all of the channels and starting to feel despair when he got a hit.

  Just after his tentative call-out of, “Hello? Is anybody there?” a man’s voice broke through the static, clipped and authoritative.

  “This is a secured channel. Identify yourself.”

  “Oh thank Heaven, we’ve got a chance,” Brandt said, and then he clicked the button and spoke into the microphone. “This is Lieutenant Michael Evans, United States Marine Corps,” he started. “I’m putting out a mayday call and am requesting assistance.”

  The pause that followed was long. And Brandt worried that whoever was on the other end had decided not to bother with him. His heart thumped harder in his chest, and he looked through the windshield, squinting in the moonlight at the front gates, trying to see how bad things were getting. Bad enough: the gates leaned even further over than before. Then the voice came back on, and he blew out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

  “What is your SITREP, Lieutenant Evans?”

  Brandt’s brain snapped into business mode, and he started to explain. “I’m currently holed up in a gated community with approximately fifty survivors, men, women, and children, some elderly. We’re under siege from the infected. There are at least a thousand of them outside our walls, and they’re dangerously close to getting in. I’m requesting assistance, either brute force or evacuation to a safer location.”

  There was another pause, longer than the one before. Brandt tried to imagine what was happening on the other end of the radio. He pictured a man dressed in BDU’s, sitting at a radio, and surrounded by a beehive of military activity. He imagined a nameless base somewhere, a couple of officers hovering behind him as they debated on whether or not it was worth it to assist them.

  “Please, please, please,” Brandt whispered, watching
the gate more intently as it swayed. A loud crack shattered the air, and Brandt tensed as a slab of wood near the middle split, broke, and fell free. Infected arms thrust through the newly created gap as the wood gave way.

  But then the voice came back on the radio, and his attention returned to the microphone in his hands.

  “Lieutenant Evans, I’ve been asked to find out your location,” the man said. “Please tell us where you are, and be as detailed as possible.”

  “Oh thank God,” Brandt said, and then he pressed the button and began to explain where they were, even as he toggled the beacon built into the radio, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to have double the location information. “We’re in a gated subdivision called Woodside, about two miles to the southwest of downtown Hollywood, South Carolina,” he said. “There are fifty-two of us at last count, but a group went missing this morning, so it’s less now.” He decided to drop his ace in the hole, sure that it would prompt the military into a rescue. “You should also know we have a CDC doctor here with us, and…and there might be a cure for the virus too.”

  The silence on the other end of the radio was oppressive, and his eyes gravitated toward the gates again as he waited for their answer. A horrible squealing noise, like metal grinding against metal, had begun to emanate from the gate, and it sagged even further, far enough that he could see some of the infected climbing the steep slope, their dirtied, bloodied hands hooking over the top as they dragged themselves up, up, up, climbing over and on top of each other in their eagerness to get inside. He realized his breath was coming in short, painful gasps, and he forced himself to breathe slower before he hyperventilated like an idiot.

  “Lieutenant Evans, I’ve been told to inform you that help will be on the way soon,” the man’s voice said over the radio. “Just sit tight. Extraction is en route to your location.”

  “Copy,” Brandt said, but the word felt hollow. He had the sinking certainty that the military wouldn’t make it in time. Because, even as the man on the radio finished speaking, the gates let out a loud squeal of protest under the growing weight of the infected. Then the gate crashed fully to the ground in a tangle of metal and wood and bodies.

  As they flooded inside, Brandt realized that he was entirely too far away from the main house—and Cade. There was no way he could outrun the horde pouring into Woodside.

  There was no way to get to her before they tore him apart.

  Chapter 29

  Jude was still awake when a loud crash sounded outside the house, drawing him into a sitting position in a single, quick movement. He looked, wide-eyed, toward the window on the other side of the room, staring at it as if he expected the source to reveal itself without investigation. Then he rolled sideways until he nearly fell off the bed, bending his legs and planting his feet on the floor. He straightened and went to the window, pushing it open and leaning out into the cooler night air. He had to see what the noise was all about.

  What he saw nearly made his heart stop.

  “Shit,” Jude mouthed, pushing away from the window so quickly he nearly hit his head on the underside of the frame. He dashed across the bedroom, literally running across his bed, and staggering to a stop beside his sister’s twin bed. Sadie was asleep, lying on her side with her left hand tucked underneath her pillow, her right hand resting against the hilt of the sheathed machete that was beside her. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her roughly awake.

  Sadie opened her eyes with a start and a flail, swinging her fists wildly at the intruder. Jude, used to the way his sister reacted when awakened unexpectedly, ducked her swing, shook her again, and immediately began to sign.

  “The gates are down. The infected are in the community.” His hands moved with the same urgency that sent his heart racing in his chest.

  Sadie blinked tiredly and rubbed at her face before giving him a confused, cloudy look. “What?”

  “The gates are down,” Jude signed again, his movements jerky and impatient. “What do we do?”

  “Are you serious?” Sadie asked, her eyes widening much like his when he’d heard the sound of the gates crashing to the ground.

  “No, I just thought it would be a great joke to play on you,” Jude signed, rolling his eyes. “Of course I’m serious. They’re coming in now, and you’re wasting time. We need to go warn everyone else.” He didn’t wait for Sadie’s response; he turned on his heel and ran from the room.

  Judging by the noise and chaos going on in the hallway and adjacent bedrooms—the doors to which had been thrown wide open—everyone else already knew that the gates had collapsed.

  He heard Cade speaking urgently in one of the rooms near the end of the hall. He heard Isaac’s voice too. Incredibly, they were arguing about something, but he wasn’t going to stop and investigate. No, his sights were on something else entirely.

  Jude hurried downstairs to the first floor. He wanted to check the front door and make sure it was secure. He was halfway across the entryway when a voice said from the shadows to his right, “Fancy finding you down here.”

  Jude’s nerves nearly jumped out of his skin, and he had the pistol from his thigh holster out and aimed at the shadows before he’d even realized he’d done it.

  “Hold your fire, kid. It’s just me.”

  Jude felt his shoulders relax as Keith stepped into the meager light, his own pistol in hand but not aimed. “I’d ask what you’re doing down here, but it’s obvious,” Keith said, moving closer to him and giving him a small, friendly smile. “I’ve already checked the doors down here, but you’re welcome to double-check. It couldn’t hurt.”

  Jude nodded and moved to the front door, checking to make sure all the locks were secured. He was surprised at the number of deadbolts that were on the door, and he figured that Brandt or one of his friends had added the extras as a precaution when they’d moved in. Assured of the front door’s relative safety, he checked the back door, noticing that Keith followed him as he walked through the house. He paused in the kitchen, digging into his ever-present backpack to pull free his notepad and pen, and then he wrote, “Any particular reason you’re following me?”

  “Not really,” Keith admitted. “Company, I guess. Everybody else is upstairs. I figured I’d stay down here and keep an eye on things, but it can be lonely work when nobody else volunteers for the job.”

  “Everybody upstairs is making too much noise,” Jude added. “We need to get them to shut the hell up. They need to be quiet so they don’t draw any attention to the fact we’re in here.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Keith said. “We should go tell them that. I don’t know about you, but it’d be great if we could, say, survive the night.” He started for the stairs, and Jude followed, already writing his note to whoever would listen to him. But when he reached the second floor, he realized he didn’t need it. Sadie was already in the bedroom telling Cade and Isaac that the noise needed to be cranked down to only the necessary. Both of them looked less than pleased to be getting a lecture from a teenager.

  “The girl’s right,” Keith spoke up as he entered the room and heard what they were talking about. “And so is her brother. He was just telling me the same thing. We all need to shut the fuck up, and we need to do it right now.”

  “That’s my husband out there,” Cade hissed, jabbing her finger at the window, her face a mask of fury. “He needs backup, and I’m not going to sit by and not do something to help him!”

  “Well getting yourself and the rest of us killed because you can’t shut up isn’t going to help him at all,” Jude signed, forgetting in his irritation that Sadie was the only person in the room who could understand him. “We need to come up with a plan before we do anything else.” When everyone but Sadie stared at him like he’d been speaking Greek, he blew out an exasperated breath and stormed out of the room.

  Let Sadie handle all that shit, he thought. He didn’t have time to stand there and write everything out, and he was too impatient to wait for Sadie to interpret for him to a b
unch of adults who probably wouldn’t listen to a word he had to say—or sign—anyway.

  It took him a moment to realize that Keith had followed him out of the room, and by then he was already halfway down the stairs. He glanced at the older man and then dug his notepad back out of his pocket and wrote down, a bit messily, “We should take an inventory of where everyone is at.”

  Keith nodded. “I agree. You and I, your sister, Isaac, Cade, and Derek are in the house,” he said. Jude flipped to a new page and started making a list.

  “Brandt?” Jude mouthed, and Keith read his lips well enough to answer.

  “Last I saw him, he was going outside to try to track down Dominic and find out his exit point in the community. He hadn’t made it back before the gates fell.”

  “Who else?” Jude wrote in the margins of his page.

  “Remy and Dominic, but God only knows where they’re at,” Keith said, making a face. “I wouldn’t trust Dominic further than I could throw him anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  Keith read his question and then snorted softly. “Long story, kid. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.”

  “I’m not a kid,” Jude wrote, wrinkling his nose. “I’m eighteen.”

  “Oh really?” Keith looked him up and down, as if reassessing something in his head, and then smiled. “Good to know. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Jude raised an eyebrow and almost wrote, “For what?” but decided against it. He started to lift his hands to sign but then stopped, embarrassed, and flipped to a fresh page to write, “We should try to figure out where Brandt is and try to get him over here. Something tells me we’re going to need every capable set of hands we can get.”

  Chapter 30

  Brandt’s first instinct was to run. As he sat in the driver’s seat of the Humvee, watching the oncoming crush of infected flood through the newly created gap in the wall, trampling each other in their eagerness to get to the uninfected humans inside, he felt the urge to fling the door open, fall out of the Humvee, and just run in any direction that would take him further away. But that was suicide, he knew. He had to be smart about this, even if it was an impossible situation.