The Becoming: Revelations

by Jessica Meigs

  “You two bring up the rear,” he said. “You’re going to the seventeenth floor, right?”

  “Right,” Ethan confirmed. “Where should we meet after this? The third floor? It’s the top level of the parking garage and opens out onto the street. Hardly anybody went down there when I was here, so there shouldn’t be many—if any—infected there.”

  “Works for me,” Brandt said. He strode into the lobby, following Cade. His eyes sought out and locked onto her silhouette as she moved farther ahead of him. Another pop rang out as she aimed her firearm and took down another infected. The last thing Brandt wanted was to mistake her for one of the infected and accidentally shoot her. As Brandt moved farther into the lobby, Ethan and Remy broke left, heading for a bank of elevators on that side of the lobby, and Brandt was left alone for the first time.

  The floor beneath Brandt’s boots was slick with blood and the bits of flesh the grenade ripped free from the infected horde, and each step he made crunched with shattered glass from the doors, windows, and chandeliers. His boot bumped something in the haze, and his eyes darted to the floor. A faint twinge of nausea bit at his gut as he saw a hand, shrunken and bloody and unattached, lying at the toe of his boot. He reflexively swept it aside before focusing his mind once again on the task at hand.

  Brandt realized he’d lost sight of Cade and bit back another curse, this one of exasperation. He couldn’t see any infected still standing, even as the fog began to clear, and he debated calling out to her. There was a chance he’d distract her in a moment when it would be critical that she not be distracted. He had to do something, though. He opened his mouth to call out, but before he got any words out, a gunshot and a thud nearby made him lift his rifle into a firing position. But then Brandt spotted Cade and hesitated.

  Cade had made it all the way across the lobby, taking a brisk pace to the door indicating the stairs near another bank of elevators. Brandt hurried to join her, nearly slipping in the blood splattered on the floor. Cade barely looked at him as he returned to her side, too intent on easing the stairwell door open quietly, on making as little noise as possible. Brandt recognized the look on her face; she was in the zone, the space to which he himself often retreated when on a mission, where emotions and stresses and worries were shoved aside in favor of accomplishing the intended goal.

  “What’s the story?” Brandt murmured. She pulled the door fully open and propped it there with a metal trash can. It tried to slide shut at first, but then the can caught, and the door gave up the fight and stayed open.

  “We’re heading down,” Cade said. “Remember what Ethan said. Her quarters are on the fourth floor. We should start there.”

  “What’s the guarantee she’s still on that floor?” Brandt asked pointedly. He didn’t wait on Cade’s response. “There is no guarantee. We need to be prepared to check higher up.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Cade grumbled. She faced him, looking oddly combative, and froze. She grabbed his jacket and hauled him aside. “Move!” she barked out. Brandt scrambled to obey, and the gunshot Cade fired next to his head made his ear ring. He staggered into the stairwell, nearly tripping over the bottom step of the stairs leading up, and turned to face the danger, raising his M-4 again.

  Cade followed him into the stairwell, her gun pointed at the infected that had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, moving almost silently—frighteningly so. Brandt had never seen infected move so stealthily, and certainly not in such a large group. Even as he lifted his gun, Brandt scanned the crowd, estimated it to be around fifteen strong. He didn’t bother to fire a single shot. There were too many. They couldn’t fight them off. He grabbed the back of Cade’s jacket before she squeezed the trigger and dragged her from the doorway as he backed down the steps.

  “Come on! There’s too many!” Brandt said. He stumbled blindly down a few steps, hauling Cade with him. She finally got the gist of what he was doing and started down the stairs with him at a breathless run.

  “What are we going to do?” Cade asked, panting as she descended the stairs behind him.

  Brandt reached the fourth-floor landing and paused, sweeping the next set of stairs leading down to make sure it was clear. He didn’t look at her as he went to the edge, grasped the railing, and looked to the floor above, trying to gauge whether the infected were making their way down the stairs. In the distance, somewhere in the hotel, he heard a single gunshot. He pushed the sound out of mind; he had more important things to worry about.

  “We’re going to find the bitch, fast,” Brandt said. “And then once we’re squared away with her, we’re going to get the hell out of here before those infected figure out how to get down the stairs.”

  “Or up,” Cade added. She, too, was at the railing. But instead of looking up, she’d chosen to look down into the darkness below. If he focused his ears, Brandt could hear the very distinct sounds of at least a few infected below them. “Fucking surrounded. We don’t have much chance of getting the hell out of here,” she said softly. “And Remy and Ethan are probably walking into a damned death trap up there.”

  “Then if we’re going to die, we have no reason to not make sure we find Alicia,” Brandt said. He grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze, then released it and went to the stairwell door. He wrenched it open, immediately swinging his rifle up to sweep the hallway as he drew his flashlight out and shone it down their path.

  The short hallway leading to the fourth-floor lobby was cluttered with tables and chairs lining the walls at every available space between conference room doors. Brandt eased inside, the flashlight in one hand, rifle against his shoulder; he eyed the dark spaces beneath the tables warily. Cade slipped in beside him, letting the door swing shut as she studied the hallway. She, too, took in the tables littered with papers, her eyes narrowing as she slipped past him and progressed down the hallway. She paused beside one table, looked at a large paper taped there, and sucked in a sharp breath.

  “Brandt,” she said with a flick of her fingers. Her tone was stricken, which only made Brandt less inclined to approach. But he went to her and shone his flashlight onto the table.

  Brandt was startled to see his own handwriting staring back at him. He blinked in surprise and leaned closer to make sure he was actually seeing correctly. He most definitely was; it was his handwriting, scribbled in the margins of a Georgia map, a very familiar-looking map that took him scant seconds to place.

  “So this is what happened to it,” Brandt murmured as he smoothed his hand over the paper. “I wondered where it disappeared to.” He looked at Cade and caught a glimpse of her quizzical expression. “It’s the map Ethan and I were working with. That’s why it’s written all over. We were making notes about where we should or shouldn’t go, marking roadblocks and traffic jams I knew about, whatever came to mind. It’s probably how Alicia found us in the end. Once she got her hands on this, it was like there was a neon sign over our heads that said, ‘Hey, we’re right here!’”

  “Do you think Ethan gave this information to them?” Cade asked. “Do you think he helped them voluntarily?”

  “I don’t doubt it in the slightest,” Brandt admitted. “But I think if Ethan had known what Alicia was like, he’d have done everything he could to stop her or at least delay her taking any action. He genuinely thought he was on the right side on this one. Road to Hell, good intentions, all that shit.”

  Cade traced her fingers along the paper, lightly touching a place bearing Brandt’s cramped scrawl. “Poor Ethan has always been a bad judge of character,” she said. “No idea how he ended up becoming a police officer.”

  Brandt started to reply, but before he got a word out, Cade let out a sharp cry and pitched forward. She put out her hands to catch herself and fell gracelessly against the table. Her palms slid across its top and ripped the map, and her Beretta skittered across the table and dropped between it and the wall. Even as she fell, Brandt turned, raising his rifle to point it at the new threat he hadn’t heard coming on the carpete
d floor. His rifle was kicked from his hand in mid-turn, and a boot slammed into his stomach, driving the air from his lungs and dropping him to his knees. A knife slipped between his chest and the strap of his rifle, and the strap was sliced through. The rifle tumbled to the carpet.

  Brandt pressed a hand to his stomach and struggled to breathe, even as he scrambled for his gun, which lay on the carpet, nearly in reach.

  A booted foot came down on top of the weapon, effectively blocking his attempt.

  Brandt slowly looked up at the figure standing above him. He stared down the barrel of a Beretta M9 handgun similar to his own, pointed directly at his face. It was held in an easy grip by a familiar redheaded woman.

  “It’s about fucking time you showed up,” Alicia Day snarled.

  Chapter 54

  Remy’s nerves felt like they were about to vibrate through her skin as she stood guard beside Ethan, her back to the gate behind her, her bolo knife grasped in her sweaty hand. She trembled as she squinted through the darkness of the lobby, hoping none of the infected would notice her or Ethan. The man in question knelt on the floor beside her, nearly lying down, as he worked at the lock on the security gate pulled over the hotel bar’s entrance. Remy personally thought the short detour was the epitome of stupidity; they didn’t have time for this, not with people possibly dying eleven floors above them! But Ethan had insisted, had pushed on it until she couldn’t say no, not without risking him going alone.

  “Almost got it,” Ethan whispered below her, mostly to himself. Remy didn’t bother responding to his statement, knowing it wasn’t necessarily intended for her. Instead, she straightened her back and squinted into the darkness again.

  It hadn’t been long since she and Ethan had split off from Brandt and Cade. The other two had disappeared to the right, on their mission to seek out Alicia Day. Remy and Ethan were intended to search for and rescue any survivors they could. But even with this mission in mind, Remy could still remember Brandt’s words to her, spoken earlier in the day, while Ethan napped, the promise he’d forced out of her. The one that tore her heart in two whenever she thought on it. If Ethan shows any sign of turning into one of the infected, any sign of the medication wearing off whatsoever, you pull the fucking trigger on him. Promise me, Remy.

  Remy wasn’t sure she could do it.

  She glanced at Ethan. He still worked at picking the lock with two slender screwdrivers, twisting and jabbing in an intricate manner that she wouldn’t claim to understand. She returned her eyes to the scenery around them. Still nothing moved. Another gunshot rang out on the other side of the lobby, but it wasn’t followed by any more. Remy hoped that meant the other two were okay and had only been threatened by one of the infected and not a mass of them.

  “How much longer?” Remy asked hoarsely. A flicker caught the corner of her eye, and she turned, instinctively brandishing her knife.

  “Just a minute more,” Ethan promised.

  Remy located the source of the movement when she turned her head to the left. She drew in a sharp, startled breath at the sight of infected. There were at least ten, and they were headed straight for the two of them.

  “Want to make that just a few seconds, Eth?” Remy snapped. She stepped forward to meet the infected, even as she warned, “We’ve got company.”

  Ethan glanced up from his work, and his eyes widened. “Shit, shit, shit,” he chanted emphatically. He worked more frantically at the lock, not worrying about the noise he made anymore.

  The infected were closing in fast. Remy knew Ethan wouldn’t get the gate opened before they got there. So she did the only thing she could do.

  With a short step forward, Remy raised her knife and lashed out, turning sharply to the right. The blade caught the nearest infected man across the face, splitting his nose and cheeks wide open, and he went down in a splatter of blood. Remy gritted her teeth and reversed her swing, bringing the knife back around to attack a second infected person. With a two-handed grip, she slashed at a woman, embedding the knife’s sharp blade into the side of the woman’s neck, ripping it free, and slamming the blade into the woman’s chest. The blow wouldn’t kill the woman; Remy wasn’t so stupid as to think that. But the goal wasn’t total death and dismemberment. Remy only wanted to slow them down long enough for Ethan to get the damned gate open.

  “Hurry the hell up!” she barked out to him. She slashed at another infected man and missed him by centimeters. “Get that gate open! Now!”

  “What the hell do you think I’m trying to do?” Ethan snapped back. There was a squeal of metal against metal behind her, and Ethan called out breathlessly over the fray. “Got it!” Remy barely listened as she lit into another enemy, slicing and hacking at his hands and arms. A hand, disconnected from its owner’s body, fell to the marble floor with a sickening wet sound as Remy’s blade struck home. She kicked it into the crowd and, despite Ethan’s shouted, triumphant statement, she kept fighting, slashing at the infected with everything in her. “Remy, come on!” Ethan yelled impatiently.

  Remy started to turn, but a hand closed around her right forearm, the one that grasped her bolo knife. She swore and yanked her gun from its holster, spinning and pressing the barrel against the forehead of the infected woman that grabbed her. She squeezed the trigger.

  The snap of the gunshot was surprisingly loud as the sound ricocheted and magnified against the marble flooring, even as blood and other matter Remy didn’t want to think about fanned out from the infected woman’s head in a spray. Remy swore again and wrenched herself backward toward the gate. Ethan was already on the other side, holding the gate open two feet off the floor; clearly, he’d simply rolled underneath it once he’d managed to get it open. Remy slung her bolo knife underneath the gate and grasped the bottom of the flimsy-looking barrier. With one last glance at the infected surging toward them, she swung herself under the gate, flattening her body to clear the two-foot space. Once she was in, Remy twisted, walking her hands over each other and using her full body weight to slam the gate closed, even as she gained her footing again. She scrambled to her feet, panting, and she and Ethan both stumbled back from the gate. It took her only seconds to recover her knife, and then they just stood there, wide-eyed, watching as the infected on the other side flung themselves at the gate.

  “Shit,” Ethan hissed.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Remy muttered. While Ethan had the gate covered, she turned on her heel to check out the rest of the small restaurant they’d entered. It was a bar more than a restaurant, full of small, round two- and four-seater tables and booths. A large menu board behind the bar listed an assortment of alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks and included a noticeably bigger advertisement for fresh oysters. Remy raised an eyebrow as Ethan spoke up.

  “Ah, an oyster bar,” he said. He winked at Remy and added jokingly, “Think they got any fresh ones?”

  Remy wrinkled her nose, shuddering with disgust, and glanced at the infected. They shook the gate with their hands, shoving it with their bodies. “If I had to choose between eating oysters of any kind and running into a horde of infected with steak sauce all over my body, I’d choose the infected,” she said. She snagged a serving cloth from a table and wiped the blood from the blade of her knife, following Ethan farther into the bar.

  “Wait, you’re from New Orleans and you don’t like oysters?” Ethan asked, raising an eyebrow and stepping behind the bar.

  “I had an awful experience involving a raw oyster and a bad bet when I was a child, okay?” Remy said in exasperation. “And just because my family is of Cajun descent doesn’t mean we shotgun raw seafood. Now what was so important that you felt the need to detour from our assigned mission to come in here?”

  Ethan picked up a glass bottle and held it up for her to see. “This,” he said, slinging his backpack around to set it on the counter. He unzipped it and started grabbing bottles, stuffing them in his bag as rapidly as he could, arranging t-shirts he’d already cut into strips around them to keep t
hem from getting broken.

  “Wait, you threw us on a detour and possibly stuck us in a trap so you could grab a bunch of whiskey?” Remy demanded incredulously.

  “I thought you were the one who’d been around Brandt too much,” Ethan said pointedly.

  “I have not,” she protested. “I think you’ve gotten me confused with Cade.”

  “Do I have to remind you about the stove in Maplesville?”

  Remy smirked. “That was just a rare moment of creative ingenuity,” she proclaimed. “These are for Molotovs, aren’t they?” A grin split her face. “Aw, Ethan. Brandt would be so proud of you.”

  Ethan snorted and stuffed a few more bottles in his bag before zipping it shut. “Who said I got the idea from him?” he asked. He shouldered the bag and settled it close to his body. “Don’t let me do something stupid that will get these bottles busted. I don’t want to end up smelling like an alcoholic hobo.”

  Remy bit back a laugh as he circled around the counter and headed for a door in the corner of the bar. A sign of a little stick person climbing cartoon stairs was stuck to the wall next to the door. “I don’t think they call them hobos anymore,” she pointed out as Ethan paused at the door and checked over his Glock.

  Ethan let out another undignified snort. “I don’t think they call them much of anything anymore.” He grasped the door handle and wrenched the door open, quickly stepping through and swinging his flashlight and gun around, searching the stairwell for any immediate dangers. When he didn’t see anything, he beckoned to Remy. “Come on, babe. Let’s get this shit taken care of.”

  Remy smirked at the nickname and slithered into the stairwell, her newly cleaned bolo knife grasped firmly in her hand, the sound of the infected on the other side of the security gate still echoing in her ears.