The Becoming (Book 5): Redemption

by Jessica Meigs

  There was movement in the corner of his eye, and the doctor woman came toward him, a syringe in her hand and a sorrowful look in her eyes. He thrashed against the men holding him, filled with a wild desire to grab this beautiful, sympathetic woman and run for the world he was familiar with, to search for his wife and try to re-establish the life they’d lived for the past two years.

  “I’m so sorry,” she murmured, and the needle slid into his bicep. With a press of the plunger, she injected the fluid inside the syringe into his arm. Within moments, while he continued to struggle to get loose from the soldiers holding him, his vision blurred and his brain started to fog over.

  The last thing he saw was Major Bradford shaking his head in pity as he ordered Brandt to be taken back to his holding cell. The doctor gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze and murmured in his ear, “I’ll be in your cell to talk on my next shift.”

  Then everything went dark and consciousness fled.

  Chapter 16

  Cade and her friends’ arrival in Atlanta was met with zero fanfare, not that she’d expected any. They’d made the long trip surprisingly unmolested and trouble-free, though they’d had to change vehicles a few times until they found one that would not only run off diesel but had some in the fuel tank. They rumbled into the city in a tank of a fully loaded, extended cab Dodge pickup, everyone stuffed uncomfortably into the front and back seats of the vehicle.

  The sight in front of Cade was everything she remembered from the last time she’d been to Atlanta. Cars were still jam-packed along the road, shoved wherever their owners had left them when they’d abandoned them and tried to flee the city, creating a virtual wall of vehicles that blocked the roads. Up ahead, further obstructing their path, was a massive concrete barricade that had served as a roadblock, a wall that stretched across the road. Cade didn’t remember seeing it when Alicia and her people had brought her into Atlanta months before. She figured maybe they’d taken her in through a different route that had been cleared. She pulled the truck as close to the side of the road as she could get it out of sheer habit and shifted into park, then stared out the windshield at the jumbled mess in front of the vehicle.

  They’d made it. The first leg of their journey was done, and now they were entering the hard part.

  Cade rested her head against the seat, letting out a slow, exhausted sigh. Just thinking about everything ahead of them was enough to make her tired. She didn’t have a choice, however; she had to do this, if it meant saving her husband from the clutches of people who, in her opinion, obviously meant to do him harm.

  There was a light tap on her right arm, one that she barely felt through the soft leather of her dark brown jacket. She forced her eyes open and looked at Sadie in the passenger seat, who was staring at her with wide eyes and a look of concern on her face.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Cade waved her off, though she tried to do it with as little irritation as possible. There was no sense in being cranky with her friends; they weren’t the reason they’d all had to come out here, and being ugly with them would alienate the only help she had. “I’m fine,” she assured Sadie. “I’m just thinking, that’s all.”

  “Coming up with a plan?”

  “Trying to,” Cade said. “As much of a plan as it’s possible to make in a place like Atlanta, anyway.”

  There was a creak of leather, and then Remy leaned into view. She was sitting in Dominic’s lap, and Cade wondered how uncomfortable he was feeling from having her on his lap for the past two hours.

  “How’s it look?” Remy asked. “Cesspool? Hell on Earth? Belching fire and brimstone?”

  “Still,” Cade replied. “Quiet. Maybe a little too quiet.”

  “The story of Atlanta,” Dominic muttered. “We should get out of the truck and get moving. We didn’t come in the same way we brought you in last time, so we’re not going to be able to bring the truck in through here. We can either drive further south and try to get to Alicia’s entrance, assuming it hasn’t been blocked up again by now, or we can go on foot. Might take a little longer, but we can take a more direct route if we do it on foot. Votes?”

  “I vote we shut up and get the hell out of this truck,” Cade said. She cut the engine off, shoved the driver’s door open, and stepped out onto the pavement. The road under her boots crunched as she put her weight on the ground, and she glanced down to see the pavement had deteriorated in the past two years, grass and weeds growing up in the cracks, pushing them wider to make room for more. As surely as time passed, nature was beginning to take back everything that man had built, filling in the cracks with budding life. She stepped around a patch of dandelion and went to the back of the truck, taking her rifle out of the toolbox where she’d stored it and retrieving her ammunition-heavy backpack. Her companions disembarked from the vehicle, and once they were all out and gathering their packs, Cade started in the direction of the concrete wall blocking the road, leaving the others scrambling to follow.

  Dominic hurried up alongside her, still shrugging on his backpack, his face shadowed from the rising sun at their backs. “You shouldn’t go off by yourself, especially not in Atlanta,” he said, his tone mild.

  Cade scowled. “I can take care of myself, Dominic,” she snapped. Distracted by his commentary, she tripped over an abandoned, half-opened suitcase in the middle of her path, and he caught her arm to steady her. She wrenched it away as soon as she’d gained her footing, and he continued as if it hadn’t happened.

  “It’s not a question of whether or not you can,” he said. “We’ve already established, repeatedly, that your abilities are well beyond the average person’s, and we’ve established that many times over, so I’m not going over it again.”

  “Good, there’s no need to,” Cade said. She kept walking, her eyes focused on the obstacles ahead. Dominic waited until they’d climbed over a vehicle blocking their path, sliding over the hood carefully, before he spoke again.

  “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Yes,” Cade said. “I’m going to the Tabernacle.”

  “Do you even know where that is?”

  Cade gritted her teeth, anger flashing through her at his question. “Somewhere in downtown Atlanta.” As she said it, she knew it was a stupid answer, and she could practically feel the well-deserved incredulous look he was giving her boring into her skin.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Dominic said. “That’s all you’ve got? ‘Somewhere in downtown Atlanta’? You can’t possibly think you’ll be able to get away with wandering around downtown looking for the place without being attacked.”

  “Well, do you know where it is, then?”

  “Of course I know where it is.”

  She whirled on him, clipping his elbow with the butt of her rifle as she turned. “Then stop making a big deal over the fact that I don’t know where it is and get us there!” She shouted the last three words, and they echoed against the pavement and cars and transfer trucks around them. The others froze at her words, staring at her with wide-eyed wariness.

  There was an odd snarling sound toward her left. Cade spotted one of the infected, somewhat fresh, maybe a month old, trapped in an empty space between several cars, as if he’d somehow stumbled his way into a manmade cage of mangled steel. Poor bastard looked half starved, like he’d been there for a while, maybe since he’d been turned.

  Shooting one last glare at Dominic, she marched toward the infected man, shouldering her rifle. She unsheathed the machete fastened to her backpack and climbed onto the hood of one of the cars, squaring her stance so she wouldn’t lose her balance. She bounced the machete in her palm a couple of times, testing its balance. She wasn’t used to using bladed weapons; she was more the “shoot from a distance and blow shit up” kind of woman, probably the reason she and Brandt had felt that magnetic pull between them from the moment they’d first met. Crazy attracted crazy, and they both had more than a small touch of it. They were so much alike that it was hard
to conceive of a life without them together in it. She twirled the blade in her hand. The infected man scrabbled at her boots, and she stood back just enough that his teeth couldn’t reach her. Lifting the blade high, she swung it down and embedded it in the man’s skull.

  The bone had begun to decay since the man’s infection, and his skull partially collapsed under the blow. She yanked her blade free, and he collapsed forward, his upper body draping over the hood at her feet before sliding down to the pavement with a thump.

  Satisfied that the man was deceased, Cade wiped the blade clean with a rag and sheathed it, hopped down from the car, and marched toward the others. “We’re wasting time,” she said. “We need to move faster. I want to be at the Tabernacle and out of the city before sunset. I have a feeling we’ll have a lot of ground to cover after that.”

  “You ain’t kidding,” Sadie commented, brushing past Cade. She strode toward the concrete barricade, picking up speed with every step. Then she leapfrogged onto the trunk of a car, bounced off the hood, and went airborne, landing with seeming effortlessness onto the narrow top of the concrete barricade. She shrugged her bow from where she’d hooked it over her shoulder and slid an arrow from her backpack, nocking it onto the bow and grasping the bowstring. She crouched, staring at whatever was on the other side of the barricade.

  Cade watched her with envy, wishing she could move like that.

  “She must have taken gymnastics as a kid,” she remarked, and she saw Jude nodding out of the corner of her eye. That sort of athleticism could come in handy for them all.

  Sadie let out a low whistle and dropped over the barricade and out of sight. Cade hurried forward, climbing onto a vehicle that was close enough to the barricade to allow her to reach the top. “Give me a boost,” she ordered, not caring who listened to her. Dominic joined her on the hood of the car, kneeling and cupping his hands so she could step up into them. Then she was up onto the barricade, twisting to sit down on the edge and swinging her legs over. There was a black convertible crashed against the barricade, its top missing, so she dropped down into the cushioned passenger seat, then climbed over the closed, crumpled door to the pavement.

  Sadie hadn’t waited for any of them to join her before she’d begun exploring. She was climbing up the side of one of the military vehicles parked nearby, peering into the driver’s door and pulling it open to look inside. A thunk behind her told Cade that someone else had joined them on that side of the barricade, and she glanced over her shoulder to see Remy coming towards her.

  “I guess the guys figured the order of the day was ladies first,” she quipped. She stopped beside Cade and stared in Sadie’s direction. “What’s she doing?”

  “Exploring, I guess,” Cade said. She held her rifle in a two-handed ready grip diagonally across her body. There was silence between them while someone scuffed his way up and over the barricade, and then Remy spoke up.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked. “And I don’t mean emotionally. Physically. How are you feeling?”

  “What makes you think there’s something wrong with me physically?” Cade replied, trying her best to keep her temper in check. Out of all of them still with her, she refused to lose her temper with Remy, especially if it was unwarranted. Remy had been there since nearly the beginning. She was the only other person from their original group outside of Ethan and Brandt that was still alive, and Ethan and Brandt weren’t there. She understood, probably better than any of them, why Cade had to do this. So instead of snapping at Remy like she’d been doing to everyone else the past two days, Cade took Remy’s hand in her own and gave it a gentle, grateful squeeze.

  “Have I told you thank you lately?” Cade asked, staring at Sadie’s silhouette through the truck’s windshield.

  “For what?” Remy replied.

  “For being there. For sticking it out with us through thick and thin.” Cade let go of her hand and sighed. “I know you wanted to leave, back when Ethan was cured and you thought Derek was going to give the cure to you right away too. And really, after everything that had happened, I didn’t blame you for wanting to get the hell out of there. Woodside was a bunch of people living on borrowed time, and I know you’re not one of those people who is willing to sit around and do nothing. You’re a survivor, a fighter. I’m sorry we tried to make you be anything but that.”

  “You had your reasons,” Remy said. “And maybe those reasons were right.”

  “What do you mean?” Cade asked.

  “I haven’t felt right in the head since I got infected,” Remy said, her voice low. “Something’s…off. I can’t put my finger on what it is.”

  “After you and Dominic injected you with the cure?”

  “Well, it sure as hell hasn’t gotten any better,” Remy said, sounding like she was trying to be flippant and failing miserably. Cade saw right through the nonchalant attitude the younger woman was posturing with and right to the scared girl underneath. She caught Remy’s hand again for another reassuring squeeze and let go as Keith came up behind them.

  “All are present and accounted for,” he announced. “Where to next?”

  Cade stepped away from Remy after one more squeeze and motioned to the road ahead of them. “We start walking. As soon as we’re oriented to where we are, Dominic will take the lead and get us through to the Tabernacle.”

  Chapter 17

  The sun was high overhead and they’d been walking for most of the night, slogging through underbrush as the soldier they’d virtually kidnapped led them deeper into the woods. He clutched a compass in his right hand and a laminated map in the other, a look of intense concentration on his face. He didn’t look pleased to be dragging them through the woods, but Ethan looked like he couldn’t care less. After nearly ten hours of walking nonstop, Kimberly was at that point herself.

  Though the soldier hadn’t told them much about himself, he had given them a few basics. Very few. His name was Chris Meiner, and he was nineteen years old. He’d enlisted in the military at the beginning of the second semester of his senior year of high school, mere weeks before Michaluk had broken out of containment and started its spread. He wouldn’t tell them anything past that, keeping everything close to his chest, like he were afraid to give them too much information about himself. Not that Kimberly could blame him for that. If someone had grabbed her and forced her to do his bidding at gunpoint, she wouldn’t be too eager to tell him much about herself either.

  Chris led the way, and Ethan walked alongside him to make sure he didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do. This left Kimberly to trudge along behind them, tripping over underbrush and trying to keep her lungs inflating and deflating properly. Before their little apocalypse, she’d always bemoaned her lack of being “in shape,” and she’d constantly try out new exercises, the latest fads that said, “This is how you stay slim and keep your weight down.” They would inevitably only last a week or two before she’d go back to her old ways of vegging out on the couch and watching bad sitcoms on her off days. These past couple of years, she’d been in the best shape she’d ever been in in her life, out of necessity, but that didn’t say much for her ability or lack thereof to hike over unfamiliar terrain through the woods with anything resembling grace.

  She’d just muttered her fifth swear in a two-minute span, prompted by her shoulder-length blonde hair snagging on a low-hanging branch again, when Ethan said to Chris, “Keep walking. I’ve got my eyes on you.” He dropped back to walk with her, taking one of her backpacks off her shoulder wordlessly and adding it to his own.

  “You doing okay?” he asked.

  Kimberly couldn’t stop the dirty look she gave him as she stumbled over another fallen branch. “Ask me that again after we’ve had dinner and some sleep.”

  “That bad, huh?” he asked.

  “You could say that. Why exactly are we going cross-country through the woods instead of heading back to a road anyway?”

  “Because he,” Ethan beckoned to Chris, “claims there�
��s a highway about two miles further ahead. He’s trying to get us to it so we can look for a vehicle.”

  “Thank God,” she said. “My legs are killing me.” Ethan plucked a leaf out of her hair, and she dropped her voice so Chris couldn’t hear her. “How do we know he’s not walking us right into a trap for his buddies to pick off?”

  “Because he won’t,” Ethan said. “He wants to live as badly as we do, and he’s not going to walk into his own execution just so his friends can bag themselves two more people.”

  “You sound awfully certain about that,” Kimberly commented. Chris paused to examine his map by light of a small flashlight.

  “That’s because I am,” Ethan said. “I was a cop, remember? I learned how to read people. This kid is just that—a kid. He’s not a seasoned military guy like Brandt. Sure, he’s got training, but he’s probably not battle-hardened like Brandt or even Dominic. He won’t put himself at an unnecessary risk because he doesn’t want to die.”

  “That brings me to my other question,” Kimberly said. “Why were they shooting at us? You’d think they’d have been glad to see survivors, but the first thing they tried to do was kill us. Why?”

  “Because you’re infected,” Chris spoke up. He glanced back at them before returning his focus to the path ahead.

  “Where did you get a damn fool idea like that?” Kimberly asked, a flush of anger heating her cheeks. Ethan watched the exchange impassively, though his eyes were alight with interest. “Do we look like we’re infected to you?”

  “Major Bradford said that everyone in the former southeastern sector of the United States is infected,” Chris replied in a know-it-all tone that made Kimberly want to smack him.

  “You ever seen one of the infected that could talk?” Kimberly asked. “I’ve spent the past two years fighting and killing the things, and I’ve yet to find one that uttered a single word to me, even when I was cutting its head off.” She was grateful that Ethan was wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt. She didn’t think the scars that covered his arms from his attack in Atlanta would lend her argument any support.