The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege

by Jessica Meigs

  “I aim to please.” She nodded toward the trees where Keith had disappeared. “So, Keith?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

  “Jude…” Sadie trailed off, debating how much to tell him and what to tell him. She wasn’t sure Jude knew that she’d learned his big secret; it wasn’t like it had been hard for her to figure out—she wasn’t an idiot, and she was closer to him than anyone else on the planet. “I know,” she finally said.

  “You know what?” Jude asked.

  “I know…” She trailed off again and looked at the others before switching to sign language. “I know you’re attracted to guys, Jude.”

  Jude’s cheeks flushed pink, and he didn’t look at her for a long moment, just continued walking through the weedy underbrush. “How did you figure it out?” he asked, looking resigned to having the conversation.

  “I’m not an idiot. And nobody knows you better than me.”

  Sadie saw Jude mouth the words, “Damn it,” and then he shrugged and stared into the trees. “There’s not anything going on with Keith,” he responded. “He’s a nice guy. That’s all. I’m just making friends.”

  “If you say so,” Sadie murmured, and she refocused on the path ahead.

  The group emerged from the trees five minutes later after two stops for Cade to catch her breath and fight off pain from another contraction. Sadie couldn’t help but notice that the waves of pain seemed to be coming closer and closer together. She didn’t think it would be very long before Cade had her baby, and having a baby while on the run wasn’t Sadie’s idea of a good time.

  The ambulance was parked at the side of the road, just enough junk around it to make it look like it had been thoroughly abandoned, and Keith stood near the front of it with his rifle on his shoulder, his eyes moving over the landscape and the partially cleared road. Isaac slipped to the back of the vehicle and opened the rear doors, pulled out a flashlight, and scanned the interior of the truck before letting out a low whistle.

  “Wow, Dominic, you really went all out,” he commented. “There’s even a stretcher in here, and it’s clean like it’s brand new. Why did you do all this?”

  “Just in case we ever had to bail with Cade,” he replied, and then he easily scooped Cade into his arms and set her into the back of the truck. “Get comfortable. I’m pretty sure the ride won’t be.” Then he raised his voice and added, “Everybody get in, wherever you can fit. If Cade starts to have the baby, do whatever you can to help Doc, but don’t get in his way.”

  “Funny,” Sadie muttered. She pulled open the side door and hauled herself in, then reached to help Jude into the truck. It was only when everyone was inside, with Dominic behind the wheel and Keith riding shotgun, that Sadie let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. The engine ran with a loud, somewhat coughing rumble.

  It was cramped in the back, with not enough places for everyone to sit, but it was manageable. Cade lay on the stretcher that was locked into place and taking up most of the room. Isaac and Derek sat on the bench seat alongside her. There was another seat to her right, and Remy was perched in it, holding onto Cade’s hand and murmuring soft, coaching words into her ear. Jude sat on a bolted chair near the head of the stretcher, and since there was no other place to sit, Sadie merely stood near the hatch that allowed her to communicate with the two in the cab of the truck. She held onto one of the metal bars that were bolted to the ceiling to keep her balance.

  The truck spun gravel and lurched forward on the road.

  It was slow to accelerate, the engine groaning after so long of not being used. Sadie could hear Dominic chanting, “Come on, you stupid truck, come on.”

  “Got to go faster, Dominic,” Keith said, and when Sadie glanced into the cab, she saw Keith with a hand braced against the dashboard as he looked between the windshield and the side mirrors almost frantically.

  “Tell me something I don’t know!” Dominic snarled, and then something in the truck’s engine seemed to catch. It roared and began to pull the truck forward, easing up into the thirties, the forties, the fifties. Sadie silently cheered the large box truck on, rooting for it to go even faster, and it answered her summons, leaping forward. They were approaching seventy miles per hour now, and Sadie couldn’t tear her eyes away from the windshield, not even as she heard Cade let out another gasp of pain and the ripping of plastic somewhere behind her.

  “Put those rails down, now!” she heard Derek order behind her.

  Then there was something like a high-pitched whistle somewhere behind them, and before Sadie could turn around to look, the interior of the ambulance was flooded with light. There was a whomp, and seconds later, the back end of the ambulance lifted completely off the road. Screams filled the back of the truck. Sadie lost her grip on the metal bar and was flung forward, right off her feet. Her head struck the cabinets beside the side door, and then she knew no more.

  Chapter 43

  Ethan and Kimberly had been alternating between walking and running for several hours, and they had long since burned off most of the adrenaline they’d been running on since fleeing the community. Ethan’s legs were killing him. The muscles felt like burning tongues of pain, and his chest hurt like someone had used his lungs for punching bags. They had traveled nearly four miles, spending most of it on the actual road so they could see ahead of them.

  Suddenly, Ethan reached out and grabbed Kimberly’s arm, signaling for her to stop.

  “You okay?” Kimberly asked, gasping for air as she struggled to breathe. “You’re not hurting or feeling sick, are you?”

  “I’m hurting, yeah,” Ethan admitted. He didn’t hesitate when confessing that to her, because there was no sense in it. She’d catch on soon enough that he was in pain. “I’m not used to moving like this. I just need a break, time to catch my breath.”

  Kimberly nodded in understanding and took his hand, pulling him out of the road and into the cover of the trees alongside it. Once they both made sure the area was clear of infected, Ethan took the opportunity to sink into the soft grass underneath a tree. He leaned his back against its trunk and dropped his head back against the rough bark. He closed his eyes for a few moments, listening as Kimberly dropped, what sounded like, her backpack beside him. He listened as she unzipped it and dug around inside. Then a bottle of water was pressed into his hand.

  “Drink this,” Kimberly ordered. “Slowly. Too fast and you’ll puke all over yourself.”

  “You make it sound so appealing,” he commented, opening his eyes only long enough to twist the cap off and take a slow, careful sip of the water.

  “If you think that’s appealing, just wait until I really get going,” Kimberly joked with a small laugh. There was a rustle, and he reopened his eyes to see her dropping into the grass beside him, stretching her legs out and leaning over them to massage her calf muscles. “You let me know any time you need to stop, okay? I don’t mind taking breaks. Lord knows my legs don’t mind either.”

  “Same to you,” Ethan replied, watching her profile as she grimaced and worked her hands over the muscles. “If you need a break too, that is. I don’t mind stopping either.”

  She broke her grimace to give him a small smile. “Good.” Once she’d given up on massaging the ache out of her legs, she swung her bag back into her lap and dug into it. She pulled free their map and starting to unfold it. “Now we need to figure out exactly which way to go from here. Sadie marked a route on our map, but I’m not sure if it’s one you’d be willing to take, and I’d like to see what you think.”

  “I’m thinking that I know next to nothing about the area around Woodside, and it would probably be best if we went with what Sadie suggests,” Ethan replied. “I’d come up with a really great analogy about what asking for my opinion of the area is like, but my brain is too tired to dig up something suitable right now.”

  Kimberly started to laugh but cut the sound off abruptly, as if she were afraid to make too much noise. “Well at leas
t check out what she drew on the map and see what you think of it,” she suggested, and then there was the rustling of paper as she unfolded the map and spread it out on the grass.

  Ethan let out a slow sigh, careful to keep his annoyance out of the sound, and opened his eyes. He leaned forward to look at the paper in the darkness, fumbling for the small flashlight in his pocket and turning it to the map. A bold red line had been drawn along one of the highways, tracing it north and a little east until it stopped just short of a town marked North Charleston. Ethan traced the line to its terminus with his forefinger and shrugged. “I’m assuming it’s a good route to take,” he said. “I mean, would Sadie send us this way if it wasn’t at least partially safe?”

  “I don’t know,” Kimberly admitted. “I don’t know the girl well enough to say if she’d lead us astray intentionally or not.”

  “Well, I guess we’re just going to have to go with what she recommends for now,” Ethan said. “We can play it by ear as we go.” He paused, tilting his head as he listened carefully. He thought he had heard something somewhere above them, but he wasn’t sure. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Kimberly asked, raising an eyebrow. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Listen.” Ethan pushed himself to his feet, as if inching closer to the sky would help him hear better. He frowned as he tried to identify the faint sound he was hearing. It was far away, muffled by distance, and if it had been in the pre-outbreak days, he’d have never heard it. He rested his hand against his holstered pistol and strained his ears to the point that he nearly gave himself a headache. “I think…I think that might be a helicopter.”

  Judging by the look on Kimberly’s face, she’d finally noticed the noise too. “More than one, by the sounds of it,” she concluded. She started for the side of the road, and he followed her, hoping to get a glimpse of the machines, even though he knew they were probably too far away from their position to see.

  “Where do you think they came from?” Ethan asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe there’s a military base nearby that’s still operational,” Kimberly suggested. The tone of her voice was light, almost excited.

  He glanced at her and saw that her eyes were bright and wide as she stared up at the sky. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “It means we stand a pretty damn good chance of locating someone to take these samples to.” She patted her backpack to emphasize her point, and her grin widened. “And that means we stand a good chance of getting it into their hands or at least getting directions on where to take it and, maybe, having a vaccine developed. Or maybe even a cure.”

  “One can only hope,” Ethan muttered, and that was when the sound of gunfire met his ears, loud and continuous, as if a major battle were being fought nearby. He stiffened and looked back at the sky, as if it would tell him something about where the noise was coming from. Though he could at least ascertain that it wasn’t coming from anything in his or Kimberly’s immediate vicinity, he still grabbed her bicep and hauled her back into the trees, pushing her behind a trunk and slouching alongside her.

  “Who is shooting what?” Kimberly asked, twisting to look around the tree.

  “I don’t know, but it sounds like it might be large caliber weapons,” Ethan answered. He closed his eyes, hoping that that would help him focus more fully on the direction the sound was coming from. “And it sounds as if it might be coming from…that way.” He pointed.

  Kimberly gasped.

  “That’s back in the direction of Woodside,” she murmured.

  “Oh God,” Ethan whispered, pushing himself away from the tree as if he were going to race back toward the community. He took two steps in that direction before Kimberly grabbed his wrist.

  “Where are you going?” she demanded.

  “We have to go help them, Kim!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know what’s going on, but we can’t just bail! If that gunfire is coming from Woodside, then they might be in serious trouble!”

  “No, we’ve got to keep going,” Kimberly said, and Ethan whirled on her in anger.

  “You can’t seriously expect me to just abandon my friends—”

  “That’s exactly what I expect you to do, because that’s what you agreed to do,” Kimberly interrupted. “You agreed to help me on this task, no matter what, and we can’t afford to get delayed by going back. The samples will only keep for so long, and we don’t have a moment to waste. I’m sorry, Eth. I know you want to go back to help them. I do too. I can’t stand the idea of any of them getting killed. But we’ve got a chance to save the rest of humanity, and we can’t afford to let it go to waste because we turned back when we should have continued going forward.”

  Ethan stared at her for a second, grinding his teeth together, his anger almost too much to deny. Finally, he spun away from her and snarled out, “Fuck.” She was right, and he knew she was right, but that didn’t make him feel any better about turning his back on the rest of his friends. He sent up a silent prayer to anyone above who might be listening, asking them to protect his friends and see them safely out of whatever was going on back at the community. Then he ran his hands through his hair, pushing it back from his face.

  “Okay,” he said, and he was surprised to discover that his voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat and dropped his hands to his sides. “Okay. You’re right. I hate to admit it, but you’re right. We need to get these samples out of here. There’s entirely too much at stake right now to do otherwise.”

  Kimberly folded the map she still held and stuck it into the waistband of her jeans, then took his hand and gave it a comforting squeeze. It helped, but only a little. It didn’t do anything to get rid of the sick, heavy feeling in his gut. “They’re going to be fine, Eth,” Kimberly was saying. “They’re tough. They’re fighters. They can out-run and out-kill just about anything. Besides, they might even have the military over there helping them.”

  Ethan didn’t reply to that. He just closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and middle finger, shaking his head slowly. “If you say so, Kim,” he murmured.

  Chapter 44

  When Brandt regained consciousness, he was disoriented and partially blinded by the lights above him. The fluorescents, set into the tiled ceiling, sent stabs of pain through his head, and he squinted, trying to reduce the brightness. He started to assess what the hell had happened and where he was. The lights made it almost impossible; he couldn’t think with the ache in his head. He started to lift a hand to shade his eyes and was surprised when his arm jerked to a stop only a few inches above the mattress. A few more experimental tugs told him that his hands were restrained. A few tugs of his legs suggested the same. He craned his neck to the side, almost enough for it to be painful, and saw that he had padded straps wrapped around his wrists, and the ends of them were fastened to the metal rails on either side of his bed.

  “What the hell?” he whispered, keeping his voice so low that it was almost inaudible.

  A quick scan of his surroundings showed that he was in some sort of hospital room, and the bed he was lying on was one of those metal contraptions with rails, a too-thin mattress, and an almost paper-flat pillow. Several machines were hooked to him, including a heart monitor, which let out steady beeps in time with his heart. He frowned at the sight of it and rolled his head further to the side. He caught sight of the door and froze.

  There was a heavily armed soldier standing guard at the door, his M4 rifle held at the ready, staring at him almost unblinkingly. Brandt stared back, unsure if he should even speak to the man watching him. Knowing his luck, the man would swing that rifle around and put a bullet in his head the moment he opened his mouth.

  Thoughts of bullets brought the events he’d witnessed just before being taken from Woodside crashing back. He remembered the sight of the AH-60L DAP helicopters firing into the houses inside the community. His stomach tried to revolt as he thought about it, and he fought t
o swallow down the bile that was trying to push itself up into his throat. Once it had settled enough that he could speak without fear of vomiting, he turned his eyes back to the soldier and asked hoarsely, “Where is my wife?”

  The soldier stared at him for a second longer, then turned and slipped out the door, shutting it behind him. Brandt frowned and turned his attention back to his restraints, pulling and straining against them, trying to wiggle at least one of his hands out of the strap so he could unfasten himself. But it was no use. He still felt sick and weak from his fever and his bout of unconsciousness, and he couldn’t get enough leverage to pull anything free. But he couldn’t just give up, not without knowing what had happened to Cade and the others.

  His right hand had just begun to slip free of its restraint when the hospital room’s door swung back open. Three lab-coated doctors and two soldiers entered, all looking like they meant business, and Brandt rapidly assessed them with his eyes. The two soldiers were men, obviously the brawn of the group, who looked so much alike that they could have been mistaken for brothers, save for their different last names: one’s uniform was labeled “Hutcherson,” and the other’s said, “Bayer.” They would probably be his biggest threat if he found himself having to resort to an escape attempt.

  He turned his attention to the doctors in the room instead. Two of them were men. One was a gray-haired, pot-bellied white man who was clearly eating well despite the apocalypse. The second male doctor was a young, somewhat skinny black man who was listening to the other doctor’s chatter intently; Brandt strained his ears, trying to make out what was being said, but the voices were too low. Giving up on them, he turned his gaze to the lone woman in the room, and his heart caught in his throat.

  He could have sworn that he was looking at his wife. A woman who looked so strikingly like Cade that she could have been Cade stood just behind the two male doctors. She watched him with clinical detachment. Her eyes were the same icy blue, her hair the same dark brown, her skin tone the same olive-like complexion. He had to force his eyes away from her so he could re-assess the rest of the room for changes, but his gaze kept returning to her. He kept wondering how someone could be so much a doppelganger for Cade.