But something inside Cade told her to wait, to plot and plan, to not rush headlong into a second attempt without a clear idea of what she was doing. They fast approached the downtown area, the same general location where Brandt had taken them the month before. She wasn’t wholly familiar with it; at the time, she’d been nearly unconscious and more focused on the pain in her side than on her surroundings, trusting Brandt to keep her safe. Despite that, she recognized the tops of several buildings, ones of which she’d caught glimpses as her companions took turns carrying her from the street on which she’d been shot to the Tabernacle. They looked vaguely familiar enough that she was sure she could attempt to navigate the city with at least a little confidence—assuming she kept looking up, that was.
As the van approached a congested intersection, Cade felt the vehicle slow down. She glanced out the window and then down at her hands, still linked by the cuffs. They were the obvious flaw in her plan. She’d have to obtain the keys off Alicia’s person at some point during her escape. Cade was reasonably sure she could take Alicia down. Reasonably sure didn’t guarantee success, but she’d have to try.
As the van slowed down further, Cade leaned forward. It’s now or never, she thought. She raised her arms and, with a savage twist of her upper body, swung them to the right. She slammed the metal cuffs and her fists against the side of Alicia’s head. Alicia floundered sideways against the seat, stunned. Her hand touched the side of her head; her fingertips came back stained with blood.
Cade didn’t take time to worry about the woman. Dominic was quickly turning, raising the rifle in his hands to aim it at her. It was her rifle, and she’d be damned if she got shot by her own weapon. Cade fell back in her seat. She kicked out and jarred the weapon from his grip with a single strike of her boot heel against his knuckles. Dominic swore and grabbed for the rifle, retrieving it as Cortez slammed on the brakes. Everyone in the vehicle lurched forward violently. Cade let out an involuntary cry as she was thrown against the seat in front of her. She took the opportunity the new proximity to Alicia offered to reach over the seat and snatch the redhead’s sidearm from the holster at her hip. Cade raised the gun and gritted her teeth, holding the weapon tightly in both hands and pointing it almost wildly at the three people holding her captive.
“Put the fucking rifle down,” Cade barked to Dominic as she trained her newly acquired gun right at his head. “Or so help me God, I’ll put a bullet right between your fucking eyes.” Dominic didn’t lower the rifle, despite her warnings. She narrowed her eyes and flexed her finger against the trigger. “Don’t do it, Dominic. I said put it down.”
“Cade, you don’t want to do this,” Alicia spoke up. Her voice was soft, a faint tremor ringing through it. Cade wondered only fleetingly what the emotion under her words was. She didn’t have time to focus on that, though. There were more pressing needs in front of her.
“And what makes you think that?” Cade demanded. “Because right now? Nothing would please me more than to pull the fucking trigger.”
“If you kill him, I swear to anything and everything holy that I will have you shot,” Alicia threatened.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Cade said. The pang of memory of her last—and only—gunshot wound ripped through her mind. “You need me. You’re hoping Brandt comes after me.”
“Nobody said we needed you alive,” Alicia snarled. “Just here. We could lure him in just as easily with your rotting corpse.”
Cade had had enough of Alicia’s bluffing. She lunged forward again and batted the rifle aside to deliver a swift punch straight to Dominic’s nose. Then she lashed out at Alicia with the pistol, striking her in the head with the weapon. The woman collapsed in her seat, unconscious.
Cade didn’t spare Alicia another glance. Instead, she grabbed the barrel of the rifle Dominic attempted to point at her again and wrenched it to the side. She nearly dropped the sidearm in her hand as she twisted the rifle from the man’s grasp. Once it was successfully in her hands, she slammed the butt of the rifle firmly into his face. He fell back onto the floorboard, scrunched behind the driver’s seat, his nose and the new cut on his forehead bleeding profusely.
A shift of movement at the front of the van caught Cade’s attention. Unable to twist the rifle around and hold it appropriately in her cuffed hands, she dropped it onto the seat and raised the sidearm again. She squeezed off a single round in Cortez’s direction. He’d turned with his own gun to point it at her, but he dropped it when the bullet struck the windshield a mere inch from his head.
“Don’t fucking try it,” Cade snarled, even as he clapped a hand to the side of his head with a grimace of pain. Cade slid sideways along the seat and opened the door, keeping her weapon trained on Cortez. She leaned over the seat again and grabbed the keys clipped to Alicia’s belt loop, ripping them free and staggering out of the van. She turned on her heel to flee and nearly ran right into a group of infected drawn to her location by the sound of her gunshot.
Cade stumbled back with a yelp of alarm. She reflexively raised her weapon and squeezed the trigger, firing a bullet into the crowd before turning on her heel and running. She only had a single magazine with an unknown quantity of bullets, and she was far too outmanned to attempt to fight. Her better option was clearly to run.
Cade clutched Alicia’s keys in her left hand, ignoring the pain of the metal digging into her palm. She darted around the front of the van and headed straight for the traffic-jammed street ahead of her. She slid between two cars, nearly getting her breath knocked out by their side mirrors, and took the chance to glance over her shoulder.
The infected, dozens of them, more than Cade had ever seen in one place thus far, had flooded the street behind her. There were men, women, even children, all thin and bony, all looking as if they hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks. And they were intent upon her, the prospect of food brightening the looks in their eyes, their bodies moving with an agility she couldn’t match as they wove among cars in pursuit of her.
The van was moving, tires squealing as it sped backward down the street. Cade didn’t blame them for leaving her. She was sure she’d have left her too, if she’d been in the same circumstances.
Cade refocused her energy more fully on the path ahead of her. Her boots beat against the pavement with her heartbeat as she twisted and turned, weaving between crookedly parked cars, dodging side mirrors by centimeters, stumbling over debris in her path between the vehicles. Her fingers fumbled with the keys in her hands, searching for the key to unlock the handcuffs binding her wrists together. She had to get her hands free if she expected to survive. She couldn’t possibly last long without doing so.
Distracted by the keys, Cade nearly ran headlong into the front end of a Ford Taurus. She cried out as her knees collided with its fender, putting her hands out instinctively to soften the blow. Her sidearm clattered onto the hood. The keys struck the hood alongside it and slid to the ground at her feet. Cade cursed and slapped her fist against the car’s hood before grabbing the gun and dropping into a crouch between the cars, scrabbling for the keys. She found them, and as the first of the infected came almost within arm’s reach, Cade sprang up and fired a single bullet at him. She didn’t wait to see if it struck its intended target. Instead, she turned and started to run again.
The cars breezed past her in a haze as she sprinted for everything she was worth. She could hear the infected adjust their jostling paces to match hers. Her lungs hurt, and the muscles in her thighs and calves burned with the effort she expended trying to get away. At this rate, there was no way she’d outrun them. She’d simply collapse on the street, and then they’d do with her what they wanted. The thought alone was simply unacceptable.
Cade had run over a quarter of a mile, and her lungs had begun to burn along with her legs when her fingers finally found the small key for which she searched. She jammed her weapon into the waistband of her jeans before fumbling the key into a bracelet by feel alone. She gave a savage twist, and one of th
e bracelets fell away from her wrist.
Her hands sufficiently freed, Cade found it in her to run faster. She pocketed the keys, snapped the loose bracelet around the same wrist as the other, and then drew her sidearm again. The pursuit of the infected hadn’t let up a fraction, she discovered as she glanced back again. If anything, it had grown in intensity with the horrible sounds the infected made, heard more clearly than ever over her gasping breaths.
Cade tore her eyes from them. The road in front of her was nearly blocked by vehicles jammed haphazardly in the street, lacking the uniform lines that had composed much of the traffic jam thus far. Cade didn’t have much choice as to where to go; she chose the most obvious path available.
With a final burst of energy, Cade charged at the nearest vehicle—a sports car with a low front end—and leaped onto the hood. The heels of her boots left dents and scrapes in the car’s paint as she ran up the hood and onto the roof, plunging across and down onto the narrow trunk. She made a desperate leap for the next car in the cluster and landed on it effortlessly. In moments, she was on the second vehicle’s roof, her chest heaving as she looked back at her pursuers. They had, thankfully, been delayed by the same mass of vehicles over which she’d gone. But Cade knew that wouldn’t last. She shook her head and, still struggling to breathe, slid off the car’s roof and started for the next vehicle, intending to climb over it and begin a search for shelter while she tried to figure out what to do.
Chapter 27
Alicia’s return to consciousness was slow and painful. She clawed her way toward it with the determination of a boxer in the twelfth round of fighting, opening her eyes and shifting them around the darkened room. She was back in the Westin; that much was obvious based on the familiar sight of the furniture. But she was most decidedly not back in her own space on the fourth floor. If she wasn’t mistaken, she was in a bed in one of the smaller conference rooms on the sixth floor that had been converted into a miniature hospital ward.
Alicia rolled her eyes in exasperation and pushed the heavy covers off, sitting up gingerly so she didn’t disturb her head too much. Dominic lay in the bed beside hers, his shoulder bandaged better than she’d done it. He watched her from his position on his back.
“You’re okay,” Alicia said. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, and her brain gave her the disturbing sensation that it was sloshing around in her skull.
“So are you,” Dominic replied. He slowly sat up in his own bed with a low groan. “How are you feeling?”
“Pretty shitty,” Alicia admitted. She stretched, resisting the urge to flop back on the bed once more. “What about you?”
“Doc dug the bullet out of my shoulder and stitched it up for me,” Dominic answered. “Fortunately, I’ll live.”
Alicia slid to the side of the bed. Her booted feet found the carpeted floor, and she levered herself to her feet. Once steadied, she looked Dominic over one more time before she asked, “And Cade?”
Dominic shook his head. “She escaped,” he said. “After she knocked the two of us out, she got out. Stole your keys in the process.”
Alicia gritted her teeth. A flash of anger surged through her at Dominic’s news. “Where is Cortez?” she bit out. Her eyes darted to the door. “I want him in here now.”
Dominic held his good arm out almost helplessly. “What am I supposed to do about it? Pull him out of my ass? Why don’t you exercise some authority and get him down here?”
Alicia rolled her eyes and huffed out an exasperated breath. She went to the conference room’s door and flung it open. A man sat on the carpeted hallway floor directly across from the door. His eyes eased up to meet hers. It was, unsurprisingly, Cortez.
“Get in here,” Alicia snarled. She slammed her palm flat against the door to open it wider. After Cortez ducked under her arm, she shut and locked the door. “What the fuck was that clusterfuck you two called a mission?”
Dominic sat up straighter, and the look in his eyes was hard enough to cut glass as he inched to the side of the bed. “If it was a clusterfuck, it was one you helped create,” he said. “We aren’t solely responsible for this mess. You fucking helped, what with your whole go-in-guns-blazing attitude. This isn’t the DIA anymore, Alicia. You can’t just pop off at every single person you come across just to get your way.”
“You are not going to pin all this shit on me!” Alicia yelled. “I’m not the one who let our hostage get away! Which brings me to my next question.” Alicia turned on Cortez, her eyes hot with anger. “Why the hell did you let her get away? Even if we were incapacitated, you should have been able to handle her! She’s only one woman!”
“I’d have handled her if she hadn’t been holding me at gunpoint at the time,” Cortez said in a carefully measured voice. His words barely broke the space between him and Alicia. “And she was leaning right over you. I didn’t want to risk her shooting you during her escape attempt.”
“And where the hell did Alton get a fucking gun?” Alicia asked. Her voice was significantly louder than Cortez’s. She didn’t care.
“From you,” Cortez said. “The woman seems to be incredibly resourceful.”
Alicia paced to the bedside table and slammed her fist against its top for want of anything better to hit. “And when she got out of the fucking car, you drove the other way instead of going after her why?”
“She shot at me.”
That was all Cortez needed to say. Alicia held on to her composure with difficulty. The sound of a single gunshot was enough to bring every infected person, living and dead, within earshot of the noise straight to the source of it. And in a city the size of Atlanta, with a dense population pre-Michaluk, to say there were quite a few infected to respond to a sound like that was most assuredly an understatement.
Alicia drew in a slow breath and faced Cortez again, watching his face closely for any sign of deception. She couldn’t see any. So she nodded and said, more calmly than before, “At least you got us out of there. That’s all I could ask for under those circumstances.” She paused and looked between the two men, then added to Cortez, “Did you see which way she went?”
“Straight ahead, right into the traffic jam on Central Park Place,” Cortez said confidently. “I know I saw her go into that. I don’t know if she made it all the way through or not. I was already getting us out of there by then.”
Alicia pressed her lips together, her frown deepening as she crossed her arms. A number of options flitted through her head. Not a single one seemed remotely acceptable. She hissed a breath through her teeth and raised her eyes from their contemplative study of the cream-colored carpet. Dominic and Cortez stared at her, waiting on the ideas she’d hand out that started them on whatever new path she desired to set. It was times like this when Alicia almost hated being in charge of this mess.
Almost.
“Okay,” Alicia started. She hissed out another breath and ran her hands slowly through her hair. Her fingers bumped a painful knot on the side of her head, and she grimaced. “I need four people, including you, Cortez,” she continued. “We’ve got to go out and find her.”
“Find her?” Cortez repeated, his eyes widening. “You’re joking, right? We can’t go out there just to find one woman! In a city this size, it’s impossible!”
Alicia’s face flushed as anger washed through her again. “We’re about to do the fucking impossible,” she snapped. “We have no choice.”
“We should leave the bitch out there to rot!”
Alicia took a step toward Cortez. “That is not an option! I don’t think you comprehend what sort of situation we now find ourselves in.” She narrowed her eyes and fought the urge to push the man into the wall and inflict a little bodily injury on him. “If the note was left like it was supposed to be, back in Hollywood—and I have no doubt it was—then Evans is well on his way here. If he gets here and she isn’t with us? He’s going to fucking kill every single one of us. And that is definitely not an option!” She turned to Dominic and said,
“We’re going after her. You’re staying here, since you’re in no condition to go out in the field. You’re to get Ethan Bennett under lock and key and make sure he doesn’t go anywhere or do anything I won’t like.”
“Literal lock and key, or just keep an eye on him?” Dominic asked.
“Literal.”
Dominic sucked in a breath. “He’s not going to take that very well, you know,” he pointed out.
“I don’t really care what he does or doesn’t take very well,” Alicia said. She backed away from Cortez, one careful step at a time. “He can fucking well shove it up his ass if he doesn’t like it. I’m more focused on getting Evans here so we can get well again.”
“Your desperation is starting to show, Alicia,” Dominic warned. He didn’t look at her. Instead, he focused on the duffel bag through which he dug, pawing at the clothes inside and pulling free a gray t-shirt. He tugged it over his head, looking as if he wanted to add something else, but then snapping his mouth shut.
“I don’t care!” Alicia snarled. “We have got to find her! We have to take the chance that Evans won’t show up. And if that happens, it makes Cade Alton incredibly valuable, especially if it’s true that she’s carrying his child! Whatever is so special about Evans that he doesn’t show symptoms of Michaluk might have been passed on to the child, and we can’t risk losing the baby to a chance encounter with the infected.” Alicia turned on her heel and stormed toward the door, shoving Cortez out of the way in the process. She rested her hand against the door, then drew in a deep breath and said, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to do, especially if we expect to be able to find this woman.”
Chapter 28
A deep, rolling boom of thunder startled Cade from her fitful slumber. Her eyes darted open, and she blinked rapidly to clear the haze from her vision as she pushed upright from the cold concrete wall against which she’d slumped. She raked back the stray locks that had fallen in her face and squinted into the darkness around her, trying to remember where she was.
The Becoming: Revelations Page 14