The Becoming: Ground Zero

by Jessica Meigs

  Ethan groaned and leaned forward, resting his elbows against his knees and covering his ears, closing his eyes tightly. “Oh God, can we please stop talking about Brandt and Cade and sex? That’s like talking about my little sister having sex, and the thought makes me gag.”

  Remy laughed and flopped onto the bed beside Ethan, squeezing into the small space between Ethan and the edge and patting his knee in her own brand of affection. “Oh, Ethan. Cade’s thirty-three. I’m pretty sure she’s had sex before, you know? Nothing new there.”

  “That doesn’t make me any more inclined to want to think about it.”

  Remy laughed again. “You’re, what, forty? Since when does sex embarrass you?”

  “It doesn’t,” Ethan protested.

  Nikola interrupted at that point. “It kind of embarrasses me, so can we please not talk about it?” she asked, her cheeks flushing red.

  “Dropping it sounds like a superb idea, Nikki,” Ethan agreed, draping an arm around her and giving her a gentle, affectionate squeeze. Ethan felt a certain amount of protectiveness toward Nikola. She was the youngest of the group, and Ethan thought she looked up to him. He couldn’t imagine taking her into Atlanta. He wondered what possessed him when he allowed her to decide to go. She shouldn’t have been there, but she was. She’d never been the type of girl to allow them to leave her behind.

  The thought of Nikola being in that city, the thought of her being infected with the Michaluk Virus, sickened Ethan. He was supposed to protect her, not let her go into the deadliest city in America with nothing but a baseball bat for protection. He made a mental note to have a discussion with Cade in the morning. If Nikola was going to travel with them, then the teenager should have a better weapon. It would be impossible for one of them to keep an eye on her all the time while trying to simultaneously watch their own backs.

  Ethan looked up as Remy stood and moved toward the dividing door. She glanced back at him mischievously, and he shook his head in warning. “Remy, no,” he ordered firmly. “Get away from that door and sit down.”

  “But—”

  “Leave them alone,” Ethan said more firmly. He pointed at the bed across from him and added, “Sit down. Now.”

  “Aw, come on,” Remy protested, flopping heavily on the bed and crossing her arms in a playful sulk.

  Ethan shook his head again. “They’d give us privacy if any of us asked for it,” he pointed out. “The least we can do is offer the same courtesy.” He picked up a package of licorice whips and threw it at her. “Now eat your damn candy and shut up,” he added with a grin.

  Chapter 25

  Cade blinked.

  Her reaction wasn’t what Brandt had expected. Then again, she’d been throwing unexpected reactions at him all evening. As soon as the words left his mouth, Cade simply sat there, her back to him, her shoulders stiff and straight as if she were frozen. She looked uncertain, and Brandt scrambled to smooth things over before they got really messed up.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Brandt said. He dropped Cade’s thick hair and set the comb, slowly and deliberately, on the bed beside her. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was wrong of me to bring it up, and—”

  “No. No, it’s okay,” Cade said. She shook her head, and her dark hair swung across her shoulders and back, drawing Brandt’s eyes to the heavy locks. “I just … you caught me by surprise is all.”

  Before Brandt could respond, there was a noise at the dividing door. He looked up and saw Ethan give them a smile as he pulled the door between the rooms closed. Brandt glanced at the ceiling and sent up a silent prayer of thanks for the small amount of privacy that Ethan had managed to give them.

  “Did I really?” Brandt asked uncertainly. He studied the back of Cade’s head. The woman really did have beautiful hair, dark and rich and thick and healthy looking. His fingers itched as he struggled to not reach out and touch it.

  Cade twisted around, sliding so she could face Brandt on the bed, curling up and tucking her legs underneath her. She gave him a small, tentative smile. “Yeah, you did,” she said. There was a tremor of nervousness in her voice, a tremor that piqued Brandt’s interest even more. “Truth be told, Brandt, I really like you. I mean, really like you.” She hesitated and then added softly, “If I say it’s not at least a little bit of love yet, then I’m fooling myself.”

  Brandt’s breath caught in his throat as her words registered in his ears, and he forced himself to breathe out slowly. He looked into Cade’s ice-blue eyes, steadying himself as his mind reeled from the surprise at her words. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” Brandt asked. “You’re not just saying that to spare my feelings, are you? Because, I mean, I’m thirty-eight years old. I think I can handle a little rejection by this point in my life.”

  Cade laughed quietly, and Brandt fought back a smile. She looked up at him, her eyes sparkling merrily, and then she said, “No, I’m not just saying it.” She raked her damp hair back from her face. The movement drew Brandt’s eyes to the curve of her jaw and neck, and he followed it to her shoulder before he tore his eyes up to hers again. “I really do mean it. I’ve felt this way for a while. I’m just … well, I’m terrified, Brandt.”

  “Terrified?” Brandt repeated questioningly. He leaned forward to look at her more closely, his eyes concerned. “What are you terrified of? I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Cade said, shaking her head quickly. “It’s more that I’m scared we’re going to fall for each other, that we’re going to get involved, and that I’ll be really happy for the first time in a long while. And then something will happen to one or both of us, and the other will end up alone again. I don’t want that hope and joy snatched from me, so I’ve tried to avoid it to begin with.”

  Brandt looked at Cade sadly. “God, Cade, that must be the loneliest existence ever,” he murmured. He found her hand with his own and gave it a gentle squeeze, hesitating before lacing his fingers between hers. “But it doesn’t have to be like that, you know.”

  Cade squeezed his hand back, but she didn’t let up on her grip. Instead, she clung to his hand and closed her eyes tightly. “Do you really think we’re not going to live through this?”

  “I’d like to think we will,” Brandt said. He felt a renewed hope at the idea of living through the horrors of Atlanta, of being given the chance to possibly start a life with Cade. “But like I said, the chances are small,” he was forced to acknowledge. “The city is a mess. There’s no order; it’s nothing but chaos. And the infected are likely more highly concentrated there than in any other place in the world.”

  “I just want to make sure there aren’t going to be any regrets before I do this,” Cade said. And with that, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to Brandt’s before he could formulate a reply.

  The kiss caught Brandt by surprise, and it took his brain a moment to catch up with the action. Once it did, he returned the kiss, cupping her face in his hands and tracing his thumbs along her cheekbones, pressing his mouth to her soft lips. He pulled back an inch from the kiss, resting his forehead against hers momentarily, and murmured, “A little warning next time?”

  Cade smirked and nipped his bottom lip affectionately before she rose up onto her knees and pushed him back flat on the bed. “A little warning?” she repeated. “Where’s the fun in that?”

  Chapter 26

  The group made fantastic time in their travel toward Atlanta. Their progress across the state was going as smoothly as they’d hoped, and Ethan even stopped the van at a reasonably safe-looking city park to let them eat their lunches in the sunshine. It was almost like a pre-war picnic, marred only by the presence of several weapons lying on the grass beside their owners. The afternoon was the very definition of pleasant, and it was a memory of happiness to which Ethan would cling for the rest of his life.

  Now, though, it was late, and dusk and sheets of pounding rain from a bad thunderstorm were doing a fine job of blurring the windshield and making it difficult
for Ethan to see the road ahead of him. He squinted more often than not as he struggled to see through the veritable waterfall pouring down the windshield. On top of the low visibility problems, he was dog tired. No, he was completely exhausted. With the exception of their lunch stop and, later, their brief dinner and leg-stretching rest, Ethan had driven the van for almost eight hours, a slow slog mile by mile, impeded by debris and vehicles and even fallen trees littering the roadway. He was beginning to feel each and every one of those miles. Ethan contemplated pulling the van over and letting Brandt drive, but a quick look in the rearview mirror revealed the other man sleeping on the bench seat behind him. Ethan didn’t begrudge the younger man the rest. Brandt had been awake almost nonstop since they left the safe house, and when they were in Walmart, Ethan had noticed how tired Brandt looked. If anyone needed the rest, it was Brandt.

  With his thoughts so occupied, Ethan didn’t see the blockade that spanned the entire stretch of road until it was too late. His eyes widened as his brain registered what he was seeing. With a gasp, he wrenched the wheel hard to the left, instinctively attempting to avoid the concrete barricade. The van swerved and shot off the side of the road, rolling down the sharp embankment and careening toward a muddy, waterlogged ditch.

  Ethan barely heard a startled shout behind him as he tried to correct and pull the van up the embankment, back onto the road. He’d already slammed on the gas and gunned the engine. The motor roared with the strain of working up the hill, tires spinning in mud and grass before gaining purchase and shooting up the incline. Ethan sucked in a breath as he saw a large truck parked on the opposite side of the barricade, right in the path of the van.

  The front passenger side of the van slammed into the truck with shocking force. Ethan was jerked violently in his seat. His head slammed into the window beside him. He was just conscious enough to feel the van tilt, the ground lurching into view of the driver’s-side window. Then the van began to roll back down the embankment.

  Overcome by the pain in his head, Ethan closed his eyes as his world slid into blackness.

  Chapter 27

  The van came to a stop on its roof. Its wheels still spun as the engine thrummed a few more moments before sputtering to a rough stop. Remy hung upside down in her seat, her seatbelt digging painfully into her chest, shoulder, and hips. She closed her eyes and mentally assessed herself for obvious pain and injuries. Finding none other than some soreness in her shoulder, she tried to collect herself enough to figure out what to do.

  The van was oddly still and quiet. Someone behind Remy gave a harsh cough. Everything in the van was dim, and she squinted as she fumbled at her seatbelt. A voice somewhere toward the front of the vehicle broke the silence.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Cade asked shakily. She crawled onto her knees from where she’d fallen on the ceiling of the van. There was a crunching, wet noise underneath her, and Remy saw that the sunroof was busted. A not-quite-small stream of water collected in the roof of the van.

  What an odd thing to notice in this situation.

  Remy braced a hand against the roof below her, sucked in a fortifying breath, and unbuckled her seatbelt. She fell out of her seat and landed heavily on her injured shoulder with a pained “ow.”

  “We crashed,” Gray said from beside Remy in answer to Cade’s question. He’d already unfastened his own seatbelt and crouched in a puddle, his gun drawn. “We need to get out of this van,” he said, looking through the shattered back window. “It’s a fucking death trap.” He knelt lower to look under the seat. “Theo?”

  “We’re fine. A fucking bag of cans fell on Avi,” Theo’s voice growled out from the very back of the van. Remy shook her head and crawled to the busted window to her right, slogging through the mud and water that ran ever more steadily into the van.

  To Remy’s surprise, Brandt was already outside the van. He offered her a hand to assist her slow wiggle through the broken window as she tried to avoid the sharp bits of safety glass still left in its frame. Remy scrambled out into the pouring rain, her fingers digging into the wet earth as she hauled herself from the wreckage. She waited until Cade made it out of the van before she stuck her hand back inside and waved it around vaguely. “Gray, my knife,” she called to him. After Gray passed it to her, Remy let out a slow breath at seeing that it was undamaged. The knife was the one thing she still owned that she wouldn’t ever leave behind.

  As Remy climbed to her feet, she saw Theo helping Avi out through the back window. Gray was in the process of climbing out of the window through which Remy and Cade had crawled. As they dragged themselves out of the wreckage, Brandt headed for the side of the road, climbing the steep embankment to examine the highway. After Remy cast one more glance at Gray, she started to scramble up the slope after Brandt, slipping and sliding on the rain-slickened grass, starting to shiver as the water soaked through her clothes.

  “What did we hit?” Remy asked Brandt breathlessly as she reached the top. She was covered in mud, grass stains, rain, and sweat, and she grimaced as she ran a hand over her sleeve, attempting to scrape mud off her clothes. She shielded her eyes from the rain as she, too, glanced in either direction down the highway.

  “Almost hit that roadblock,” Brandt said over the rumble of thunder. He pointed to a large concrete barricade that was now behind them, the type of barricade normally used along the sides of bridges on highways. It had been erected across the entire highway, blocking traffic from both directions. Several large military trucks were parked around it, a few Humvees backed against the barricade itself. Barbed wire lined the top of the barricade, and despite the year that had passed, it still looked sharp and potentially deadly. “We hit that truck there.” He pointed to the truck in question, illuminated in the flash of lightning that preceded the next burst of thunder. It was one of the Humvees; its front passenger door was bashed in from the impact of the van.

  “Why is that roadblock even here?” Remy asked in exasperation, raking her wet hair out of her eyes and off her face.

  “Because we’re in Georgia now,” Brandt said somberly.

  Before Remy could formulate a reply, an agonized cry rang out behind them. It was anguish, despair, and lament rolled into one mash of heartache. Remy turned, brandishing her knife instinctively, prepared to fight off any threat that came at them. She squinted into the darkness, but she couldn’t see anything immediately in their vicinity, not through the darkness and the rain. Her eyes shifted to the dead van below her and Brandt as her brain registered the sound. It had sounded almost like …

  “Ethan,” Remy breathed out.

  Remy gripped her knife in her right hand, wielding it as a precaution, and began to slip and slide her way back down the embankment. Brandt was right on her heels, following her down the hill as he too realized that something below them was amiss. “Ethan!” Remy shouted as she came closer.

  Cade sprinted to her, boots splashing through the puddles, and caught Remy by the shoulders. “Don’t go over there, Remy,” Cade warned breathlessly. She shook her head frantically, trying to keep Remy from moving closer.

  “Fuck that!” Remy snapped. She whacked her hand firmly into the other woman’s ribs, jostling her aside before she ran to the van. As she approached and saw the scene at the front of the van, she stopped short. Her boots skidded on the slick grass, nearly sending her in a short fall to the mud below, but she quickly caught her balance, her eyes wide as she stared at the tableau before her.

  Ethan knelt in the wet grass by the broken passenger window. The side of his head was wet with blood and rain, and his clothes were equally smeared with dirt and mud and grass. Even as Remy watched him, a trickle of blood worked its way down from his temple to his jaw, but he was heedless of the injury he’d suffered as he hunched protectively over something—no, someone. Remy swallowed compulsively and took a few steps closer. Her eyes lit on the battered red Converse sneakers that the figure in the grass wore.

  Nikola.

  Even as t
he realization struck Remy’s brain with the violence of a baseball bat, Theo knelt beside the teenager, sliding his hands over her cheeks and face, holding a wrist near her nose, feeling at her chest and stomach. Ethan spoke to Theo in a broken, pleading voice. “Theo, help her,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion. Even as he said this, Theo leaned down and blew two quick breaths into Nikola’s mouth.

  Theo pushed Ethan roughly away with his free hand before he began to press both hands down hard onto Nikola’s chest. It was then, as Ethan backpedaled away from Nikola, that Remy got a glimpse at the young girl’s face. The expression there told Remy everything she needed to know. The teenager’s eyes were wide, staring blankly at the sky, her mouth slightly opened. Nikola wasn’t moving, even as the rain fell onto her pale, exposed skin. Remy covered her mouth with her hand and let out a soft, choked sob.

  “No. No, not Nikki,” Remy murmured, her voice trembling violently.

  Ethan was beside himself as Theo stopped compressions and blew two more breaths into Nikola’s lungs, her chest rising and falling with each puff. Then Gray was on his knees beside Nikola, blocking Remy’s view, and he and Theo began to work frantically yet rhythmically, trying desperately to save the girl’s life. It was several long, anxious minutes before Theo pulled away and gently checked for a pulse, pressing two fingers to Nikola’s neck. As Gray continued the chest compressions, his wheezing breaths audible as far back as where Remy stood, Theo slid his fingers gently along either side of Nikola’s neck. As he did so, the girl’s head lolled oddly to the side. Something about the way her head rested on her neck seemed wrong to Remy, seemed somehow obscene, somehow not right.