The Becoming: Redemption
Book Five in The Becoming Series
Jessica Meigs
A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK
ISBN: 978-1-61868-599-5
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-60008
THE BECOMING: REDEMPTION
The Becoming Book Five
© 2015 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.
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Found Written on the Back of a Credit Card Statement in a House in Charleston, South Carolina
Date Unknown
My name is Sadie O’Dell. I’m eighteen years old, and I’m almost directly responsible for the deaths of over fifty people.
My brother and I were running from zombies, just looking for a safe place to live. They had been following us for miles. They’d found us in the woods at our campsite, and when we ran, they followed. The crowd kept getting bigger and bigger, and we were stupid enough to keep going.
It was like we thought if we got to something resembling civilization, the zombies would magically stop following us.
I was such an idiot. And because I’m so damned overprotective of Jude, because I refused to read the writing on the wall, those same zombies caused all the people in Woodside to die.
I hate myself for that and I’ll spend the rest of my life—I will give my life if I have to—doing whatever I can to set it right. My life is all I have left to give, and it’s the least I can do after causing the ending of theirs.
God, I’m so fucking sorry.
Table of Contents
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
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chapter 1
When Sadie O’Dell regained consciousness, she was surprised and confused to discover that she was no longer in the back of an ambulance. With her eyes barely cracked open, she stared at the room around her. The bedroom had baby pink walls, frilly white curtains, and white-painted furniture. A little girl’s room. On the dresser, quite out of place in such a room, was a series of weapons—shotgun, machete, knives, several pistols, and a few stacks of spare ammunition magazines and shotgun shells—that she recognized as hers. Her Kevlar vest was draped across the back of a rocking chair, and her boots were on the floor in front of the chair. Her black backpack was in the chair’s cushioned seat.
Sadie’s head hurt. When she touched her forehead, she discovered a hastily applied bandage taped to her head. She pushed into a sitting position and promptly threw up off the side of the bed into a pink, flower-printed plastic trashcan that someone had placed just where it would be needed. Her stomach roiled, and she struggled to hold back another surge of sick. Embarrassed at the loss of control and still feeling queasy, Sadie swung her legs off the side of the bed and sat there, trying to get her bearings.
She closed her eyes and scrunched her nose, trying to remember everything that had happened that led to her ending up in this unfamiliar room. She remembered the flight from Woodside, the shooting, and the race to the ambulance. Most of all, she remembered the intense fear of what was to come down from the sky.
“MOAB,” Sadie whispered, recalling the term Dominic used when he’d explained it to them. The massive bomb must have been dropped. And like that, her heart sank. It was her fault. All those people, houses full of them. Women, children, the elderly… she hadn’t had the opportunity to meet any of them, though she’d seen them gathered inside the community’s gates when she and her brother had arrived, and she’d caught glimpses of them through the second-floor curtains of their safe houses. Now they were gone, every one of them.
Sadie shook loose from the grasp of despondency closing around her and tried to piece together the events surrounding the moment the bomb dropped. They’d been in the ambulance, and that was all she remembered for certain, though she had other suggestive images flashing through her mind, ones of a bright light, a hard wind, and being flung off her feet. Had they crashed? Was she the only one who’d survived? She couldn’t have been. Someone had bandaged her up and brought her to this little girl’s room. That meant someone else was still alive.
The thought of seeking out whoever was left got her moving. She pushed to her feet, mildly nauseous, and stumbled to the bedroom door, stopping at the dresser to scoop up one of her pistols and make sure it was loaded. She eased the door open a crack, peering into the darkened hallway beyond. There was a table against the wall across from the bedroom door, a mirror mounted above it. Sadie’s encounter with her reflection in the glass scared the hell out of her, and she had her pistol aimed at the figure before she realized she was looking at herself. She bit back a nervous laugh.
“Jumpy much?” she murmured, blowing out a breath. She took a step closer to the mirror, studying her reflection and scowling at how terrible she looked. Her skin was pale, and her eyes had dark circles under them, like she’d been sleeping too hard and hadn’t gotten any real rest. There was a bandage taped to her forehead, a spot of blood staining it, but other than that, she looked injury free. She backed away from the mirror and made her way down the dark hallway. There were voices somewhere near the end of it, most of them hushed. Cade’s voice rose above the others in clear anger.
“I don’t care!” she yelled, her words echoing in the otherwise quiet house. “I want to know where the hell they took my husband and why!”
Dominic’s voice came after Cade’s. “Why are you yelling at me, Cade? I have no way of knowing the answer to that. Hell, I didn’t even see which way the helicopters went when they fl
ew away. I was too busy hiding in the fucking kitchen and trying to not get shot!”
“Cade, please, lay back down.” Derek’s voice that time. “You just—”
“I’m fine! Stop treating me like I’m made of glass!”
There was a scuff of a shoe against the floorboards behind her, and Sadie whirled around, raising her pistol to aim it at the perceived threat. Keith Fenton stood in front of her, his hands up in a defensive gesture when he found himself on the business end of a Sig Sauer P226.
“Nice to see you up and about, Ms. O’Dell. Do you mind putting the firearm away?” Keith asked. He set a fingertip against the top of the gun and applied gentle, downward pressure. Sadie lowered the gun, resting it against her right thigh.
“Where is my brother?” she asked, skipping over any formalities. She didn’t have time to follow the polite courtesies of asking how everyone was or where they’d ended up. She looked past the older man, searching the darkness for the familiar figure of her twin brother, her heart skipping a beat when she didn’t see him.
“Jude is downstairs sleeping,” Keith answered. She shoved past him so she could search for Jude, but he caught her arm and made her look at him. His expression was serious, which made her feel queasier than she already did. “How do you feel?” he asked. “You’ve been out for a while.”
“I have a headache,” Sadie admitted, “but I’ve been through worse. What happened? Where are we?”
“We’re south of Charleston,” Keith answered. He slid his hand to her elbow and tugged it, leading her toward the top of the stairs. She shook her elbow free from his grasp. A baby’s thin wail came from a room somewhere behind them. “Dominic and Isaac found a useable house, and we locked it down to wait while Cade recovers.”
“Recovers?” Sadie asked. She felt stupid and sluggish and about ten steps behind everyone else.
“From having the baby,” Keith clarified. He gave her a worried look and made like he was going to touch her bandaged head or feel at her face for evidence of a fever. “You sure you’re okay? Exactly how hard did you hit your head?”
Sadie waved his question—and his hand—away, dodging his touch. “What happened with the ambulance? And the bomb?”
“Well, the military guys who showed up dropped the bomb, obviously, and it nearly knocked us right off the road,” Keith explained. “The backdraft picked up the tail end of the ambulance and dumped it back down, and Dominic managed to keep us on all six wheels through some seriously masterful driving. I think you hit your head on one of the cabinets during that and got knocked out. Cade had her baby while we were on the road, and Derek treated you once he wasn’t tied up with her and the child.”
“Was Jude hurt?” Sadie asked. “Is he okay?”
“Jude is fine,” Keith said. “He’s been worried about you. It was all I could do to get him to leave your bedside for a couple of hours and come downstairs to eat and get some sleep.” He smiled and added, “You have a very lovely brother.”
“Lovely?” Sadie repeated.
Keith’s cheeks flushed. “Loving,” he said, correcting himself with visible embarrassment. “He’s been glued to you ever since we got here.” Sadie narrowed her eyes and didn’t respond. She slipped past him and descended the stairs to look for her brother.
Sadie found Jude lying on his back on the black leather couch in the living room, eyes closed, face relaxed in sleep. He had one arm flung above his head, the other draped across his stomach. His dark hair was a mess, tangled and knotted from lack of brushing and probably from him running his hands through it like he did whenever he was worried. He’d removed most of his weapons, which were lying within easy reach on the coffee table in front of the couch, though he still wore his boots. Sadie reached out to wake him, but when she saw the dark circles under his eyes, she pulled her hand back. Their long-held roles had been reversed: Sadie, the one who usually went without sleep for days on end in her efforts to protect her brother, was well rested, while Jude lay on the couch looking like he’d been two seconds away from collapsing when he’d been put there.
“I’m glad you made him get some sleep,” Sadie said to Keith, who had followed her down the stairs and was lurking at the bottom, his hand resting on the bannister. “He looks like he was about to wear himself out.”
“I think he might have been.” Keith moved away from the stairs and to the coffee table, where he picked up a heavy black flashlight from the jumble of supplies there, and gestured to her. “Come on, let’s step into the kitchen so we don’t wake him up.”
Sadie followed him down a short hallway and through a swinging door into what looked to have been a well-appointed kitchen. The room had been ransacked; the once-shiny cherry wood cabinets all hung open, their shelves bare, the stainless steel refrigerator and freezer doors wide open. The counters were covered in a thin film of dust and grime, and the floors were tracked with dried mud, dirt, and blood. Sadie wrinkled her nose at the dirtiness of the kitchen, and Keith chuckled.
“I know, right?” he said. “This was how we found the place. It wasn’t in good shape compared to the houses in Woodside, but we haven’t had time to clean anything yet. Not sure it’s worth the effort, since I don’t think we’re going to be here much longer.”
There was a bar stool near the island at the center of the kitchen, and Sadie climbed onto it. She rested her elbows against the edge of the grimy counter to avoid staining her long-sleeved t-shirt any more than necessary and asked, “What makes you say that?”
“Brandt’s been taken captive, by all appearances by the United States military, and Cade is hell-bent on going out to find him,” Keith explained. He set the flashlight on the island counter, balancing it onto its end so the beam shone onto the ceiling and reflected back, casting a dim, whitish glow over the room. “I suppose we’re going to ignore the fact that we have no idea where he’s been taken to or where to start looking.”
Sadie shrugged. “People have been found with less information to go on, you know. And we’ve actually got a good lead on where to start. The military took him, so we can assume it was to military bases or installations. We can eliminate the ones we know were destroyed or compromised. That will help us narrow down the possibilities to the operational ones.”
“Yeah, but none of us has the knowledge of the current status of every single military base in the continental United States,” Keith pointed out. “It’s a fool’s errand. He’s long gone. Hell, he’s probably dead already.”
“Don’t let Cade hear you say that,” a voice behind Sadie said. She twisted around to see Isaac stepping through the kitchen door, looking tired yet upbeat. “She’ll kick your ass right out the back door.”
“Literally,” Keith said.
Isaac looked Sadie over, assessing her current state of health. She gave him a tight, crooked smile, even as she wished he wouldn’t. She hated the perception that, since she’d been hurt, she was something to hover over and worry about. There were more important things to be concerned with on their plates.
“I see you’re up and about,” he commented. “How’s your head?”
Sadie sighed. “It hurts,” she said with a nonchalant shrug. “I’ve had worse pains. I can live with it. A little aspirin and I’ll be good as new.”
“Good,” Isaac said. “Your brother has been worried.”
“So I’ve heard,” Sadie said.
“He’s been chasing Derek around with a notepad trying to ask him questions since we got here,” Isaac said. Sadie could picture that, and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. “He’s managed to kill a pen already. We had to scrounge up another one for him earlier today.”
“How is Cade?” Keith spoke up. He had a smile on his own face at Isaac’s comments about Jude. When he noticed her looking, he erased it and schooled his features into a neutral, somber expression. Sadie raised her eyebrows, but he didn’t look at her again.
Curiouser and curiouser, she thought.
“S
he’s fine, considering she pushed out a baby,” Isaac answered. “A little girl that she’s named Olivia,” he said before Sadie could ask the question that sprang to the tip of her tongue. “Now that she’s actually had Olivia, though, she’s all gung-ho to head out and find Brandt. Derek is trying to get her to wait a week or three before going out on a mission that’s going to involve so much physical effort.”
“Is she listening to him?” Sadie asked.
Isaac snorted. “What do you think? It’s Cade. She never listens to anybody unless they’re telling her what she wants to hear.”
“So what are you going to do?” Sadie asked. “Tie her down to a bed for three weeks until she’s healthy enough to go after him?”
“Wish I could, but she’d find a way to escape,” Isaac said. He folded his arms over his chest, leaning against the edge of the counter beside Sadie. “She’s going to go, and that means some of us will have to go with her.”
“Which of us are going to go?” Sadie asked.
“That’s something we’re going to have to discuss,” Isaac said. “Not right now, though. How about for now, we get you something to eat and drink, and then I can take you upstairs and let Derek check on your head wound? Maybe we can get that aspirin you need and have this whole problem nipped in the bud.”
Sadie nodded absently. She slid off the stool to follow Isaac to the stairs, already planning and plotting, because she had every intention of going with Cade, no matter what.
Chapter 2
To say that Cade was angry would have been an understatement of epic proportions. She’d slid beyond angry and straight into furious. Despite the pain and the soreness she felt, despite the exhaustion that nibbled at the edges of her consciousness, she was two seconds away from coming off the bed Derek and Isaac had put her in and tearing the world a new one.
The target of Cade’s wrath stood at the foot of the bed, his arms folded over his chest. She could imagine that, at any moment, Derek would start tapping his foot with impatience, but she didn’t care. She was too furious to give a shit.
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