The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege (18 page)

Keith looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“Cannon fodder,” Brandt explained. “The
smarter ones
want
you to shoot a bunch of the dumber ones
and let them pile up. Then, once the pile gets high enough, the
others can climb them and come right over.”

Keith frowned and stared down at the mess
below before shaking his head. “Shit, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t
realize…”

“It’s okay,” Brandt said. “Most wouldn’t.”
He scratched his head and stared out at the infected, trying to
figure out a solution to the problem, but his mind came up empty.
They were in a catch-22 scenario: if they didn’t kill the infected
that were climbing each other to get into the community, then
they’d get in quickly; but if they
did
kill them, they’d
just pile up until the pile got high enough that they could get in.
He didn’t like either option, but ultimately he needed to go with
the one that allowed for the longest period of time between now and
them getting in. “We don’t have much of a choice. Shoot them for
now, but try to do what you can to minimize the speed they’re
building their body ladder with. I’ll be back up here soon to check
in with you, and hopefully I’ll have a better plan for you
then.”

“Gotcha,” Keith acknowledged. He turned his
attention back to the mess below, and Brandt turned to descend the
ladder. He’d stepped onto the top rung when he saw movement off to
the side of the community, behind the houses directly across from
the main house. He squinted as he tried to make out what it was in
the late evening shadows cast by the wall.

He drew in a sudden breath when he realized
what he was looking at.

“It’s a diversion,” he breathed, and then he
was moving, grabbing Keith’s arm, and jabbing his finger in the
direction he’d been looking. “This is a diversion!” he exclaimed.
“We’ve got a bigger problem! Blow that whistle again, and let’s get
some people out here!”

“Oh hell,” Keith uttered.

Brandt grabbed the ladder bolted to the
platform and descended rapidly, his boots skipping a few rungs in
his haste to get to the bottom. He’d barely gained his feet on the
grass before he was off and running, charging across the grass and
sidewalk and pavement and the yards across the street, pulling his
Beretta out of its holster. He shunted aside the fleeting thought
that he might not have enough ammunition. He didn’t even have a
melee weapon on him!
Brandt stumbled to a stop against the front of the house, skirting
around the corner of the building without hesitation, his pistol up
in a two-handed grip as he readied himself for battle.

The first infected man stepped from the
shadows at about the same time Brandt reached the halfway point to
the backyard. Brandt ducked into the shadows alongside the house.
He didn’t think the infected man had seen him, and he wasn’t eager
to draw attention to himself until he had backup.

Boots striking pavement somewhere behind him
heralded his arriving backup. Brandt lifted his pistol again and
stepped into the infected man’s view. They stared at each other for
several seconds, the man glaring at Brandt and Brandt staring at
him over the sight of his pistol, sizing each other up. Before
Brandt had time to wonder
why
the man wasn’t throwing
himself at him yet, the infected lurched forward, lifted his hands
in a classic Romero-style fast stagger, and Brandt squeezed the
trigger. The infected man fell backwards, a neat, round bullet hole
in his forehead, the back of his head a shattered mess.

The shot echoed against the house’s wall and
bounced off, amplifying in the late evening air. Even though he’d
been prepared for the sound and the inevitable attention it would
draw, Brandt still swore. “I really hope that backup is good
backup,” he said out loud as he started toward the back of the
house.

“I
always
bring good backup,” a voice
said from behind him, and Brandt glanced over his shoulder to see
Isaac hurrying after him. Isaac’s presence didn’t surprise Brandt;
the man had always been enthusiastic about jumping feet-first into
danger. But what
did
surprise him were the O’Dell twins, who
were bringing up the rear.

“What are they doing here?” Brandt hissed,
jabbing his finger at the two teenagers.

Isaac shrugged with one shoulder. “They’re
tough and they can fight, and options are limited. Why shouldn’t
they be out here?”

Brandt opened his mouth to argue—they were
just kids, and they had no business being out in the middle of an
ugly fight, regardless of their skills.

At least a dozen infected circled the corner
of the building, drawn toward them by the sound of Brandt’s bullet.
There was no time for further debate. The twins would either fight
or die, and it wouldn’t be Brandt’s responsibility either way.

He glimpsed Sadie before her raised his
pistol and advanced on the crowd. She had drawn the two machetes
she wore on her back, twirling the blades in her hands in a manner
that suggested long hours of practice. Jude was just behind her,
racking the slide of his shotgun. Isaac had his own pistol out, and
he raised it at the same time Brandt raised his, taking aim at the
group that had made it over the wall.

And then the infected were on them.

Brandt shot two more infected in the head—an
older woman in her late-sixties wearing the tattered remains of a
track suit and a twenty-something woman in what appeared to be a
leotard.

The gap between them and the infected
closed, and Brandt pulled his black-bladed knife from its sheath
for backup. He pressed the barrel of his pistol against an Asian
woman’s head and squeezed the trigger. She dropped back with a
convulsion, and Brandt whipped around, blade leading. He slashed at
a young black man who’d slid in around his defenses. The rotting
man’s teeth grazed Brandt’s forearm. Then he staggered backward
from the force of Brandt’s fist against the side of his head.

“Brandt, down!” Sadie shouted, and Brandt
didn’t hesitate to obey; every battlefield instinct he had forced
his compliance. He slid to the grass like a baseball player sliding
into home plate, bowling over two more infected in the process. A
blade flashed over his head.

Sadie leaped into view, swinging one of her
machetes and decapitating one of the infected with a single,
impressive blow; blood arced across the grass and several of the
other infected as the body and head tumbled to the ground. Brandt
didn’t take time to ogle the young woman’s fighting skills or
strength. Instead, he whipped his knife up with one hand and his
pistol with the other. He shot one in the head just before he drove
the knife’s blade into the temple of a second attacker. Warm blood
from the knifed victim’s head splattered on his face and chest. He
wiped at it haphazardly with his sleeve and scrambled to his feet,
gave Sadie a short nod of thanks, and scanned the rest of the
fight.

The number of infected had been reduced to
just three. Brandt had to hand it to the twins: they could fight,
far better than any eighteen-year-olds he’d ever seen. Even as he
thought that, Jude jacked the slide of his shotgun again and
blasted one of the stragglers at close range, blowing it off its
feet even as he blew its head into something unrecognizable.

But there was no time for back patting or
congratulations. Brandt glanced at the wall in the rough direction
he guessed the infected had come from, and even as Isaac and Sadie
finished off the last two infected, he could see two more heads
popping up over the top of the wall. Gunshots, presumably from the
front gates, were still echoing out, sporadically for the most
part. The community was still far from secure, and he cursed
mentally, wishing there were more hours in the day, more time to
complete all of the safety features they’d wanted to add to
Woodside, like, for example, the barbed wire at the top of the
wall.

“Isaac, we’ve got more coming over,” Brandt
pointed out. “We need to do something about that. Otherwise, us
being out here is pointless.”

Isaac glanced back and forth between Brandt
and the wall, then took aim at the head of an infected that was
slowly dragging itself over. “I’ll stay here for the moment—”

“No,” Brandt interrupted.

“—and keep an eye on the wall and shoot
anything that starts to come over it,” Isaac continued, speaking
louder to drown out Brandt’s objections.

“I don’t think so, Isaac,” Brandt said. “I
already have plans for you. I want you with Cade.”

“That’s fine,” Isaac said. “But someone has
to do something about this wall. We can’t just allow those things
to come over it.”

“So what do you propose we do then?” Brandt
asked as he knelt to wipe his knife on the grass. He sheathed it
before he stood and looked at Isaac, waiting on the man’s
proposal.

“We should get a sniper out here, or at
least someone with shooting skills that are good enough, and get
them up on that house.” Isaac pointed to the house they were
beside. “Up on the roof. They could stage there and take out
anything that tries to get over that wall while we try to get
everyone out.”

Brandt considered for a moment, and as he
thought, one of the infected climbing over the wall tumbled to the
ground with a meaty thud. He looked up at the top of the wall,
checking to make sure another one wasn’t about to come down on top
of him. Then he strode over to his newest victim and put a bullet
in his head. There was no real solution to the problem at hand; it
was clear that, even if he put a sniper on the roof to monitor that
area of the wall, they’d be in the same situation. He cast one last
glance at the top of the wall and then returned to Isaac, speaking
in a lower voice.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s going to have to
do,” he said. “Either way, we’re going to end up with a problem on
at least two sides of the community.” When Isaac gave him a
questioning look, Brandt gave him a brief rundown of what was going
on at the gates and the mess that Keith was dealing with on his
own. Isaac swore under his breath as Brandt continued, “We have to
do something, right? So let’s go with your plan. It’ll only be
temporary until we can get these folks out of here, since we don’t
have the ammo to do this for a long period of time. Any suggestions
on who we can approach that’s a good enough shot for this? We’re
low on options since Joseph’s team never came back.”

“Peter?” Isaac suggested.

Brandt thought it over. Peter Davies was the
very definition of a grizzled war veteran. He’d been in his
mid-thirties when he’d seen action in the First Gulf War, and he’d
gotten injured while he was overseas and honorably discharged soon
after. Now, he was in his fifties. There was grace to aging for
most people, but in Peter it had left nothing but scars, wrinkles,
and bitterness. Peter had an attitude problem, and he disliked
Brandt almost as much as Brandt disliked him. Brandt wasn’t sure
exactly where or when the animosity had started or
what
had
caused it to start. He’d always assumed it had to do with Peter not
liking to take orders from someone younger and—to his
perception—more inexperienced. But now was the time to set aside
their mutual animosity and work together.

“I’ll go tell Peter the plan and see if he
agrees to monitor the wall,” Brandt said. He looked to Sadie and
Jude, who stood nearby, eyeing the wall with a mixture of
discomfort and steely resolve. Both wore signs of the fight; their
dark hair was in disarray, and blood and grass stains marred their
clothes. “You two need to head back to the main house,” he said to
them. “We’re going to have a meeting. I need to know everything you
know about the land outside of Woodside.”

Dominic slumped against the wall beside his front
door. His heart hammered in his chest, slamming frantically against
his ribcage; he pressed a hand over his left pectoral, breathed
deeply, and tried to calm himself.

Jesus, that had been close.

He hadn’t expected Brandt to come out to his
house, and he had the suspicion that he’d been searching for Remy.
At times, he’d feared that Brandt was going to walk right into his
house until the whistle drew him away.

Dominic couldn’t let
anyone
—not
Brandt, not Derek, not anyone—see Remy and realize what they’d
done. They couldn’t know that they’d used whatever had been in that
vial, that they’d injected it into her veins without even knowing
what it was.

After calming himself down, Dominic went
upstairs with trepidation. Remy was locked away in the master
bedroom on the second floor—her idea, in case she went homicidal;
she’d insisted she needed to protect him from that possibility,
even though he was more than capable of taking care of himself and
handling her if she
did
turn deadly. Everything had been
silent upstairs since he’d locked her away. He wasn’t sure if the
silence was good or not, and he was reluctant to check.

Dominic stopped at the top of the stairs for
a moment, listening for sound. It reminded him too much of the
initial Michaluk outbreak, when he’d found himself trapped in his
apartment building with a few dozen infected. He’d had to fight his
way free of them; there had been multiple instances of this, of
wending his way through the building on only semi-familiar
staircases and fire escapes, his nerves on edge as he waited for
something to attack him. He shook himself free from his
contemplation and forced himself onward.

When he reached the bedroom door, Dominic
tapped on it with a knuckle, waited an appropriate ten seconds, and
then opened the door a crack. “Remy?” he called, keeping his voice
low and soothing. “Are you okay in there?”

There was a rustle of movement and a cough.
“Yeah, I’m still breathing.”