The Becoming (Book 5): Redemption

by Jessica Meigs

  He was stuck here. There was no clear escape from this cell. He would have to bide his time and wait for an opening. He would only be here for forty-eight hours, and he had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t be enough time for him to find and take advantage of any openings that presented themselves.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He leaned forward, dropping his head into his hands and rolling it from side to side. He was at a loss of what to do, and the feeling was detestable. He hated feeling hopeless and helpless, because it made him angry and prone to lashing out at the nearest person. Seeing as how there were no other people nearby, all he could do was stuff that frustration down inside him, where it would undoubtedly simmer and stew until eruption.

  The banging of the infected on either side of him was muffled but rhythmic, like a heartbeat. He closed his eyes, trying to tune the noise out before it drove him crazy, and sent up a silent prayer to whatever deity would deign to listen to him that he’d find a way out of this and would be given the opportunity to track down Kimberly and make their escape.

  Chapter 42

  Roughly two hours ticked by, and Kimberly was getting antsy. She was pacing back and forth across her tiny cell, counting minutes to calculate hours, trying to keep track of the time that was passing. She was ready for something, anything to happen already. The lack of action was driving her insane.

  Occasionally, she went to the door and peered out the narrow window, watching for long moments for the least bit of activity in the hallway. Once, she’d seen a thin woman with a short blonde bob power walking down the hall, her heels click-clacking with every step. Kimberly thought about smacking her hand against the door to get the woman’s attention, but something had held her back. Her hand, raised and halfway to the door, dropped uselessly to her side.

  That woman was the wrong target. She couldn’t get Kimberly out of there. She looked too low on the totem pole to have any say in the matter.

  That was, by Kimberly’s count, thirty-eight minutes ago, and she hadn’t seen another soul in the hallway since. After those thirty-eight minutes, she’d started peering out the window with each pass, searching for anyone—the guards, the scientist who’d visited her before, Chris, Ethan, anybody. She wanted to get out of the tiny room so badly it burned.

  Kimberly rubbed at her face, tilting her head back and pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. She saw bright, blotchy red stars in the darkness behind her eyelids, and she reveled in them. She stood for a moment longer, her eyes still closed, then blinked them open and stared at the tiled ceiling.

  At the tiled ceiling.

  “Jesus,” Kimberly whispered. “Damn it, Geller, why didn’t you notice that earlier?”

  It was so horribly action-movie cliché, and Kimberly hated that she was even considering it, but she had to do something, and sitting around hoping for another solution wasn’t going to cut it. She stared at the ceiling, trying to calculate the distance between the top of her head and the ceiling tiles, and guessed it to be between five and six feet. Too high for her to reach from the floor or by standing on the bed.

  Kimberly turned her attention to the sink. She thought maybe it would give her enough of a boost to reach the ceiling tiles.

  She glanced at the door, wondering if she should wait until the scientist who’d stopped in before made another appearance before she tried climbing around in the ceiling. It was hard to judge whether now or later would be the better course of action; she’d lost all accounting of time during her unconsciousness, when that stupid soldier had smacked her on the head with the butt of his rifle. For all she knew, it was the middle of the night, and no one would come by for hours, hours that she could spend getting as far of a lead on anyone who would follow them as she could.

  Worst case scenario, someone was about to find her standing on the sink.

  Kimberly went to the toilet and stared at it for a second. It was a metal contraption, much like the sink, with no lid, so she was going to have to balance on the metal seat and pray she didn’t slip. With one last glance at the door, she braced her hands against the wall and climbed on top of the commode, balancing on it with one foot on either side of the seat. Once she was sure that her stance was steady, she shifted to put all her weight on one side of the commode and quickly hauled herself up onto the sink.

  Standing on the sink ended up being a lot harder than it looked, and her balance was precarious. She stretched an arm up and nudged at the ceiling tile above her head. It shifted easily, and she smiled.

  “Jackpot,” she murmured, shoving it out of the way. She pushed it into the ceiling’s crawl space and felt around in the gap she’d left behind, searching for hand holds to haul herself up with. She hooked her fingers around the framework that held the tiles, sent up a prayer that they would hold her weight, and pulled.

  Within moments, Kimberly was in the narrow space between the dropped ceiling and the building’s actual ceiling. It was dusty up there, and long strands of dark cobwebs hung down from the narrow rafters above her head, like a series of veils spread randomly throughout the crawl space. The idea of the cobwebs being loaded with spiders was enough to make her want to crawl back into her cell. But no, she had to do this. Finding Ethan was imperative.

  Kimberly twisted around to pick up the displaced tile, sliding it into place silently. When it thunked into place, the little light that had been illuminating her surroundings vanished, plunging her into a murky darkness that set her teeth on edge. She crouched there, her feet planted carefully on two of the junctions where the framework crossed over itself, and waited impatiently for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Once the subtle shapes of cobwebs and the ceiling’s framework shifted into focus, she took a deep breath, nearly choking on an errant cobweb in the process, and picked a random direction to start crawling in.

  The journey was a lot more awkward than she’d expected it to be. The framework was relatively sturdy, but every time she set her knee against one of the places where the bars overlapped, she swore the ceiling sagged slightly. Whenever her imagination kicked into gear and she pictured herself plunging through the ceiling onto some unsuspecting soldier or lab technician below, she prayed that her worst fears wouldn’t be realized.

  Kimberly hadn’t been shuffling her way through the roofing for long when her eyes picked out a bright light shining up from the darkness. She made her way toward it so she could decide whether she needed to shift course.

  It was some sort of vent, maybe an air conditioning outflow grating that had been put there but hadn’t been connected to anything. Kimberly eased her way to it, lurking near the edge, bracing her hands in order to lean at the right angle where she could see below without being seen. She found herself looking down on what appeared to be some sort of laboratory; it didn’t appear to have been used in quite some time. The equipment on the counters was dusty, and there wasn’t anyone in sight. She wondered why the light had been left on, but she figured maybe all the lights in the facility were on all the time. Regardless, she stayed where she was, examining what little she could see of the room below, and debated whether to exit the ceiling there or at a point further away from her cell. She looked back in the general direction she’d come, staring into the darkness, then looked beyond the light in front of her and searched for another light source. She spotted one quite some distance off, maybe twenty or thirty yards, and decided it was best to go to that location and see what was there.

  When she got there, she discovered that she was looking down at another lab, this one more obviously well used than the other. The steel countertops below were polished to a mirror shine, and the instruments that were laid out on it were equally clean. It was more brightly lit than the last lab she’d peered down into, too, which made her suspect that she might have been looking down at one of the primary labs in the facility.

  There was movement below. Kimberly recoiled reflexively, pulling back away from the grate and hoping she hadn’t been spotted. When she was assu
red she hadn’t been, she eased forward again, bracing her hands against the framework and squinting at the lab below. A man had entered the lab, swathed in the familiar biohazard suit, a clipboard in his hand. He walked across the room before disappearing from view.

  Kimberly scooted backward, easing toward the direction the man had gone, hoping to hear anything he said. The voices she heard were muffled, though, and it took a long moment for her ears to focus enough to make out words. When she gathered what was being said, her heart leaped into her chest and hope flooded through her.

  “Who are you?” the scientist asked, and it took Kimberly a second to recognize the voice as Jacob Howser’s, the same scientist that had visited her in her cell a couple of hours before. His voice was severely muffled, both by the distance and by the hood he was wearing. His confusion was obvious. “What are you doing here? Nobody told me I had a new volunteer.”

  “I’m not a volunteer,” a man replied, his voice noticeably angry. Kimberly recognized whose voice it was, and her eyes widened. Ethan.

  “Then how the hell did you end up in one of my cells?” Jacob asked.

  “Your asshole soldier boys stuck me in here,” Ethan snapped. “It’s not like I asked to be put in here. Where the hell am I?”

  “You’re at the Eden Facility, in the main labs,” Jacob explained. “I’m Dr. Jacob Howser. I’m an epidemiologist who’s been hired to help find a cure for the Michaluk Virus, and I’m also in charge of the laboratory.”

  “Fine, then let me out of here and take me to my friends,” Ethan demanded.

  “Why are you not already in the quarantine cells with your friends?” Jacob asked.

  “I guess I pissed off the wrong person.”

  “You must have really done a fantastic job of it to end up in the cell between these two guys,” Jacob said. “What did you do?”

  “I managed to get myself infected and then vaccinated, and it actually worked,” Ethan said. “Apparently, your Major Bradford seems to think that that’s unacceptable.”

  “Major Bradford thinks everything is unacceptable,” Jacob said. Kimberly heard him move around below, and he added, “This file says you were bitten seven months ago?”

  “That’s right,” Ethan replied.

  “How have you survived this long like this?” Jacob asked. “Because these results Bradford sent over show you as testing positive for the Michaluk Virus.”

  Kimberly didn’t hear Ethan’s response; she was busy making her way back to the grating she’d initially looked through, hoping to catch a glimpse of the scientist below, maybe even wiggle around enough to get a look at Ethan. She doubted she’d be able to see him, but she had to try. She had to see for herself exactly what condition he was in.

  “I’ll be right back, okay?” she heard the scientist saying as she crawled to the grating. “I want to see what sort of information I can find out about why you were brought in here.”

  Jacob Howser came into view almost at the same time Kimberly reached the grating again, and she saw him exiting through the decontamination chambers that led out of the lab into the office beyond. There was another grating just beyond that looked like it might have been over the offices, so while Jacob was decontaminating, Kimberly scrambled over to it, careful to stay as quiet as possible so she didn’t draw his attention upward.

  The grate opened up where she thought it would: right over one of the desks inside the office area. Both of the desks were bare, though each had a telephone situated at the upper right corner of the desk, and there was a desktop calendar across one of them. Nothing identified anything in specific about who typically occupied the desks.

  Dr. Howser walked into the office, his hair damp, dressed in black sweatpants and a white t-shirt. He went to the desk without the calendar on it and unlocked a drawer, opening it and taking out a cell phone. He turned it on and thumbed through the menus, selecting a name in the screen and putting the phone to his ear. After a moment, he hung up, then dialed another number. When the person he called answered, he cleared his throat and asked, “Why are you on your burner?” He paused, nodding slowly to himself, then asked, “Did you two get out?” Another pause and then he added, “Good, because I have a problem. I think I have another one.” Another pause. “Major Bradford had him hauled to the labs. He’s another one that’s asymptomatic but has a positive Michaluk profile.”

  Another pause, then he said, “A name? Ah…” He flipped a few pages in the folder he’d set on his desk and answered, “Ethan Bennett.”

  Kimberly could practically hear a feminine shriek on the other end of the man’s cell phone.

  “You know this one too?” Jacob asked with a heavy note of incredulity in his voice. “How many of your friends are they going to be hauling in here?”

  Kimberly frowned, wondering what the hell Jacob was talking about—friends? Who was this person on the phone that he was talking to? And this other friend he referenced, who was he talking about?

  “Look, I can’t get him out of here too,” Jacob said. He’d dropped his voice, and Kimberly strained to hear him as he added, “As soon as they realize the other one is missing, and you’re not here, they’re going to play connect the dots, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where those dots are going to lead. You need to get back here. I need help with this. Stash him somewhere safe and get back to work before someone realizes you’re both gone.”

  After listening to whatever the person on the other end of the line had to say, Jacob hung up his cell phone, turned it off, and returned it to the drawer in his desk. He looked around the room, as if he were suspicious that someone was listening to him, then left the office, heading for the doors that led into the hallway.

  Kimberly stayed still, counting off three minutes in her head before she dared to make a move. She examined the area below the tiles, deciding that the man’s desk would probably be the best landing point she would have. She had to get out of the ceiling and get to Ethan.

  Kimberly grasped the tile alongside the grate, wedging her fingernails into the narrow space between the tile and the frame so she could pry it up. She levered it up and stared down into the dizzying distance to the desk and the floor below.

  It was now or never.

  She shoved the tile aside, double checked that she wasn’t going to get busted by anyone the minute she dropped down from the ceiling, and then slid her legs through the gap. With another deep breath, she dropped out of the hole, hung by her fingertips for, and then let go.

  The drop was longer than she thought it’d be, and she landed on the desk with a louder thud than she’d meant to. Her right ankle turned when she landed, and she instinctively went with it, falling sideways right off the desk and onto the hard tile floor. Her breath rushed out of her lungs, and she barely managed to keep her head from smacking the tile when she landed. Struggling to get breath back in her lungs, she scrambled underneath the desk in case someone had heard the commotion and was about to come into the office to investigate.

  Nobody showed up. Kimberly’s lungs steadied, her breath returning to them until she felt more settled. Then she crawled to the edge of the desk and peered around the corner of it, searching to make sure no one was coming.

  Once she was assured that her fall from the ceiling hadn’t been heard, Kimberly turned her attention to getting into the laboratory area and, hopefully, tracking down Ethan on the other side of those doors.

  Chapter 43

  The trip to Lindsey’s apartment near the center of Eden was made in silence, not a word spoken between her and her passenger as she steered her sedan through the twilit city streets. Brandt stared out the window alongside him with a look suggestive of ones she’d seen on prisoners who’d just been released from jail. Relief at getting out was there, along with envy at the apparent ease of the life they all led. But what worried her the most was his pure, hard anger.

  The anger was filling up the car, oozing out of Brandt’s pores to stain everything around him. His fist
s alternately clenched and unclenched, and he glared with hatred at everything moving by. It made Lindsey afraid that he was going to come across the center console at her. However, he didn’t seem like the type to hurt a woman, no matter how angry she made him. If he were, her sister would never have married him.

  Thoughts of her sister were enough to sink her spirits again. Cade was still out there, somewhere on the wrong side of the Wall. She was pregnant, possibly alone, surrounded by creatures that wanted to kill her. She might even be dead by now. That thought made her chest hurt. Cade was all she had left; her parents were gone, her brother was gone, and her daughter—

  A sob surged from her chest and up her throat, escaping her mouth before she could stop it. She tried to choke it down, but it exploded out, shattering through the essence of Brandt’s stew of anger to smack against the windshield and reverberate throughout the car. She hunched over the steering wheel, grinding her palms against its leather-covered surface, as the gut-wrenching pain of grief tore through her.

  “Lindsey?” Brandt’s voice queried through the haze of her grief. A horn blared somewhere beyond her car, and she instinctively jerked the wheel, getting the car out of the lane she’d drifted into. “Lindsey, pull over,” Brandt said, and something in his tone of voice was enough to cut through to her logic and reason. She steered the car to the side of the road. The wheels on the passenger side ground against the curb, and she fumbled at the gearshift, trying to shove it into park. Brandt did it for her, and then his arms wrapped around her in a crushing hug, practically squeezing the life out of her. She accepted his too-tight embrace without complaint, burying her face against his shoulder and sobbing out everything that had been trapped inside her since he’d confirmed her daughter’s death.

  When she came back to herself, Lindsey was surprised to discover that only five minutes had passed since she’d broken down. It had felt like an eternity that she’d sat there, crying into Brandt’s arms, the gearshift digging painfully into her side. Brandt’s hand was rubbing soothing circles against her back, and when she pulled away from him to mop her face with her sleeve, she could read the worry in his eyes.