The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5)

by Jessica Meigs

  “Couple of blocks, I think,” Remy said. “If I’m remembering right, anyway.”

  “Do you remember how to get into the building?”

  Remy smiled, her earlier anger and frustration clearly forgotten. “Of course I do,” she said.

  Chapter 23

  Sadie hadn’t once felt scared on the group’s journey to or through Atlanta, not until someone had grabbed her from behind. She wasn’t the screaming type, but a shriek had bubbled up and escaped before she could stop it, echoing off the cars and concrete around her. Fingers closed onto the pant leg of her blue jeans, and she started kicking, striking back at the person clinging to her, bashing the sturdy heel of her combat boot into her assailant’s face.

  Then Dominic was there, sliding across the hood of the car on one hip like an action movie star, a machete in his hand and an angry, determined look on his face. Sadie flattened herself against the car’s hood, trying to make sure she was out of his way.

  The meaty thunk of the blade biting into flesh met her ears, and she shuddered. The fingers slackened their grip. She turned, snagging her own machete, ready to face whatever was coming their way.

  Five more infected had shoved their ways through the cars and were gaining on them, prompting Sadie to take an impulsive step back. This only pressed her against the car she’d fallen on.

  Dominic grabbed her arm and tugged her closer to him. “You still got that bow you’ve been toting around?”

  “Of course,” Sadie replied.

  “Get over the car, use it as a shield, and cover me,” he instructed.

  Sadie mimicked his slide across the hood, dumped her ratty, ripped-up backpack onto it, and took her compound bow off her shoulder. In seconds, she had an arrow nocked into place and aimed in Dominic’s direction. She didn’t release the arrow right away, though; she waited for the infected to get closer so she could be assured that her shot wouldn’t miss.

  Dominic was doing the same thing, his machete in a two-handed grip as he stood, shoulders squared, ready to swing as soon as they got to within blade’s length. Sadie didn’t understand why they couldn’t just make a run for it. Her best guess was that they were standing as a delaying tactic for the others to get further away, but the cars around them could do just as good a job at that as she and Dominic could. Unless he was doing this as a sign of machismo, and if that were the case, she was sorely tempted to put the arrow she was ready to fire right into his ass.

  “Come on, Dominic,” she urged. “Let’s get the hell out of here. These cars can slow them down as well as we can.”

  “I don’t want them slowed down,” Dominic replied gruffly. “I want them dead.” He stepped forward and swung his machete downward into a hard and fast stroke. The blow was hard enough to cleave halfway through one of the infected men’s necks, shattering bone and spraying old brown blood onto the pavement. Dominic barely waited for the body to fall to the ground before he moved on to the next attacker, and Sadie knew it was time to get her brain into gear. She lifted her bow, aimed at the infected woman—teenager, her brain corrected—to Dominic’s left, and released the arrow.

  In the split second before it embedded in her right eye, Sadie could have sworn that the woman looked right at her with a sense of relief in her eyes.

  She shook the sensation off and grabbed another arrow. She couldn’t let anything distract her, not now. Archery demanded a lot of focus if the archer expected to hit the target, and that amount of focus increased the smaller the target got. If she expected to actually kill the infected, she had to aim for the eyes; there wasn’t much elsewhere that she could shoot them that would take them down permanently.

  Before she could fire her second arrow, there was a crack of gunfire, a distinctive and familiar sound from Sadie’s childhood, and the infected man that she’d aimed at dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Sadie looked around wildly, searching for the source of the shot, as a second bullet took down another infected, leaving them with only one more to deal with. With two brisk swings of his machete, Dominic took care of the last one and slid across the hood to join her.

  “Who the hell did that?” Sadie asked, snatching up her ripped backpack and returning the arrow she held to it. “Where did those shots come from?”

  “I don’t know, and right now, I don’t care,” Dominic replied. “Call it a guardian angel, and let’s get out of here before we run into a bigger problem. We’ve got to catch up to everybody else.”

  Sadie’s nerves were vibrating under her skin, and despite Dominic’s urges to disregard what had happened, she scanned the overpass around them for the source of the shot. Of course, out on an overpass with only cars and trucks around, there wasn’t a living soul in sight besides the two of them.

  Guardian angel, indeed, she thought, the ridiculous mental image of an angel in white, flowing robes with massive, fluffy white wings and a sniper rifle in its hands coming to mind. She almost laughed at the thought and refocused her mind on where it needed to be: the area around her, where potential danger lurked. Drawing in a deep breath, she shouldered her backpack and the compound bow and gestured for Dominic to lead the way. As they headed down Decatur at a brisk, ground-eating pace, she said to him, “Thank you.”

  “For what?” Dominic asked.

  “For coming back to help me,” Sadie said. “Nobody else looked like they were going to do it, not even Jude.” She was aware of how bitter she sounded, and she was beyond caring.

  “What’s going on with you and Jude?” Dominic asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Sadie asked.

  “I’m talking about you and your brother,” Dominic said. “You two have barely spoken to each other beyond the immediate business of survival since we left for Atlanta. You were so close back at the house. What changed that?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Sadie grumbled, adjusting her backpack on her shoulder.

  “Anything that might threaten the cohesion of this group is my business,” Dominic said. He sounded like he was reciting something he’d heard from someone else.

  “Who did you steal that line from?” Sadie asked. “Winston Churchill?”

  “If you don’t want to talk about it with me, that’s fine. I will say, though, whatever is going on between the two of you, get it straightened out, because the last thing I want to see happen is your conflict getting in the way of your survival.”

  “Whatever,” Sadie grumbled. His warnings didn’t make her want to talk about it. Her feelings still ached over Jude’s angry tirade at her back at the house, when he’d basically told her that he didn’t need her. Things hadn’t felt right since. She’d just been looking out for him like she always had. She didn’t understand why everything had to be different now that they were with this new group of survivors.

  It almost made her want to go off somewhere away from other people. Things had been so much simpler before they’d run into Remy and Dominic.

  Sadie shook her head. Now was not the time to get lost in her thoughts. If her father saw her now, he would be less than happy with her, and he’d have smacked her against the back of her head to get her to focus.

  “I’ll talk it over with him later,” Sadie assured him, “assuming we ever see the others again.”

  “We will,” Dominic replied. “If I have to move Heaven and Earth to make it happen, I will. You can count on that.”

  “Thanks,” Sadie managed. Her throat was tight, like the word was too big to fit past her vocal cords. She cleared her throat, sticking close to Dominic. “Do you think all of this is a fool’s errand?”

  “All of what?”

  “This whole thing. Trying to go after Brandt. Do you think it’s an idiot’s quest?”

  Dominic’s eyebrow rose, and he stared beyond them at a cluster of wrecked cars. There were three infected people trapped among the wreckage—two men and a woman—but they didn’t pose a direct threat to either of them.

  “I haven’t known these people a
s long or as well as they have known each other,” he started. He paused to help her squeeze through the narrow gap between a car and one of the building’s walls. “One thing I can tell you is that I have never met a group of people more suicidally devoted and protective of each other in my life. These people have risked their lives for each other so many times that it has become second nature to them. In all honesty, I’ve never had anything like that. Cade’s not a fool. If she thinks she can get in and out alive and get Brandt back in the process, I have no doubt she will.”

  “You seem to be really confident in her abilities,” Sadie commented, stepping around an abandoned briefcase on the sidewalk.

  “And you’re not?” Dominic asked.

  Sadie shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind on how I feel about any of this.”

  “What are you even doing here then?” Dominic asked. “If you have doubts, maybe you and your brother should have stayed behind with Isaac and Dr. Rivers.”

  “I’m here because I have to make amends,” Sadie replied. “It’s partially my fault that the infected got to Woodside, that Brandt got taken, and the community fell. If Jude and I had never shown up, Woodside would have been fine and we wouldn’t have to be out here.”

  Dominic pointed left at the intersection of Spring and Luckie streets, and they turned in that direction. “You could look at it that way,” he acknowledged. “At the same time, who’s to say they wouldn’t have found us anyway? Me and Remy were outside the community, probably where we shouldn’t have been. Who says they wouldn’t have followed us back to Woodside, regardless of whether or not we’d found you guys?”

  “Stop making so much damned sense,” Sadie grumbled, not wanting to admit that he was right.

  “I’m just pointing out the obvious, that’s all,” he said. “Come on. I can see the Tabernacle up ahead. Let’s catch up with everybody else and get inside before more infected stumble across us.”

  Chapter 24

  Ethan, Kimberly, and Chris had walked through the rest of the night before they’d finished traversing the woods and had come out on an embankment that rose to the edge of a highway. It was approaching dawn when the three of them crouched into the shadows of the trees and underbrush lining the road. Ethan couldn’t deny the stir of nervousness in his gut as he studied the road above them, searching for any movement, either good or bad, so he could get a sense of whether or not Chris had led them into a trap.

  “What do you think?” Kimberly asked from her spot beside him. “Think it’s safe to go up?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” Ethan admitted. “I guess it depends on whether or not this guy,” he nodded his head toward Chris, who knelt on his other side, eating a chunk of beef jerky, “lied to us about whether or not he was taking us into a trap for his buddies to pick off.”

  “I didn’t lie,” Chris grumbled. He pulled the bag of beef jerky out of his backpack and offered it to Ethan. Ethan accepted two pieces and gave one to Kimberly and the soldier continued. “If I show up with you guys and I don’t have my mask on, I’m committing suicide.”

  Ethan stared at him for a long moment, during which Chris shifted uncomfortably under his scrutiny. When he didn’t see anything deceptive about the man’s mannerisms, Ethan refocused on the road ahead. “I think he’s okay.” He nodded toward the road. “One of us should go up there and check things out.”

  “I’ll go,” Kimberly volunteered.

  Ethan grasped the back of her shirt before she could crawl off. “Wait a minute. I haven’t agreed to that.”

  “You haven’t let me pull my weight here,” she replied. “You’ve been doing everything and keeping me in the background. I understand it’s because you want to protect me, but you can’t expect me to stand back while you do all the work. Let me do this one thing, okay?”

  “Fine,” Ethan said grudgingly. “If you get into trouble, I’m going to be right there behind you.”

  “It’s an empty highway. What sort of trouble could I possibly get into?”

  “You trying to tempt fate?” Ethan asked. “Go before I change my mind, would you?”

  “Aye, aye, captain,” Kimberly said. She gave him her backpacks and started to work her way up the embankment, crawling through the thick, dew-dampened grass toward the highway above. Ethan’s eyes locked onto her slender form as she made her way toward the highway, and he found himself leaning forward, like he could will himself to be climbing the embankment right beside her.

  His desire to be at Kimberly’s side must have shown on his face, because Chris cleared his throat to get his attention and asked, “So, how long have you two had something going on?”

  “What?” Ethan blinked and glanced at him, then returned his eyes to Kimberly. She’d reached the top of the embankment and was crouched on the balls of her feet, her fingers resting against the grass for balance.

  “You two,” Chris said, waving his hand back and forth between Ethan and Kimberly. “How long have you been together?”

  “What makes you think we’re together?” Ethan asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Chris shrugged. “Maybe the way you’re overprotective of her,” he said. “I figured you’re either together or she’s your sister, but with the way you look at her, I think the sister option is out.”

  Ethan didn’t answer the question. He scooped up the bags Kimberly had given him and started to edge out into the tall grass to move closer to her. “Stay here,” he ordered before easing to a halfway point between Chris and Kimberly. “Hey!” he whisper-shouted to her, raising his voice as much as he dared. Kimberly turned to look at him. “What do you see?”

  “A whole lot of nothin’,” she replied. “Looks like the military has already been through here. The road’s roughed up, and everything is shoved to the sides. It shouldn’t be hard for us to get where we’re going if we can find a car that works.”

  “We’ll look for something diesel,” Ethan said. “Gas is probably well beyond bad at this point. Then again, considering the little I actually know about diesel fuel, it’s probably gone bad too.”

  “It won’t hurt to check, will it?” Kimberly suggested with a tired smile. She still held the piece of beef jerky in her hand, and she ripped off a chunk with her teeth and started chewing. “Either way, we’ve got to do something. These samples aren’t going to hold forever, and this is already taking longer than I’d expected and hoped for.”

  “Understood,” Ethan stated. He glanced back to make sure Chris was still in the tree line. “I’m sorry if it seems like I’m trying to take control of everything.” She opened her mouth to argue, and he shook his head. “Really, I mean it. I can be a bit of a control freak and more than a little impatient, and you are a saint for willingly putting up with my crap.”

  “It’s not like you’re that hard to deal with, Ethan,” Kimberly protested. “I know you do things the way you do because you care, which is more than I can say for most people.”

  “Yeah, well, this is supposed to be more of a democracy than what I’ve been allowing. I want you to have a say in what we’re doing.”

  “And him?” Kimberly indicated the soldier huddled in the trees. “Does he get any say?”

  Ethan didn’t look back at Chris. “Why should he?” he asked. “We’re at war, Kim. For all intents and purposes, he’s essentially our prisoner of war. Why should we not treat him as such?”

  “Ethan,” Kimberly sighed, pressing her lips into a tight line, “when you made him take his gas mask off, you made him one of us. He won’t do anything to sabotage us, because he is one of us. It’s basic survival, status quo bullshit. We both know that. We played that game with Alicia Day, remember?”

  Ethan remembered all right. He remembered that redheaded bitch in combat boots all too well. She’d played him, fucked with him—and his head and his emotions—really good before having him locked away in a bare hotel suite in the Westin in downtown Atlanta. It was a hard thing for him to admit that he’d begun to lik
e her, to care for her, as bizarre and borderline crazy as she had been. But he had, right until she’d turned on him and tried to kill all of his friends.

  His heart had hardened after that, and he wasn’t sure it had thawed completely after Derek cured him.

  As he thought that, he looked at Kimberly, and his doubts of whether that was true surfaced again. He shunted them aside for now; he had more important things to worry about than how he might feel about the woman in front of him.

  Chris still knelt on one knee, right where Ethan had left him, his expression openly worried and curious. He was probably wondering what they were discussing, and considering how many times Ethan and Kimberly had looked back at him, he probably knew it was about him.

  “Fine,” he muttered, raking his hand through his too-long blond hair. “You win. We’ll give him a vote.”

  “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Kimberly asked, and a large grin spread across her face. “Things always go so much better when we’re all getting along.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Ethan agreed reluctantly. “What are you thinking we should do? Once we find an operable vehicle and get to this Eden place that Chris mentioned, what then?”

  “I guess it depends on what we find when we get there,” she said. She looked past him. “I bet I know just the person who can help us with that.”

  “We’re wasting time standing here, so why don’t we grill him while we walk?” Ethan suggested. “Not a moment to lose and all that shit.”

  Kimberly took her backpacks from Ethan, shouldering them and adjusting them until they were comfortable. She blew a short, shrill whistle for Chris’s attention and beckoned to him. “Come on, get up here, soldier,” she called. “We’ve got a bunch of questions to ask you and a lot of distance to cover, so we’re pulling double duty.”

  Over the following hour, Kimberly and Ethan learned depressingly little about Eden from Chris. It was through no fault of Chris’s; apparently, he’d only had the opportunity to go to Eden once, when his unit had been temporarily transferred there for additional training six months before. He had barely been allowed off the training grounds, or out of the barracks and the cafeteria, so he hadn’t had the chance to take a look at the facilities there. Despite that, he was able to give them a few details about the Wall in general that would hopefully help them in their quest.