The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege (24 page)

Remy folded her arms over her chest,
suddenly aware of how little she was wearing. “Right now? I feel
cold. And underdressed. Where are my clothes?”

“You took them off while you were feverish,”
Dominic said. He stepped forward and gently pressed the back of his
hand against Remy’s forehead and cheek. “I think the fever’s
broken. It didn’t last very long. Seems like it tore right through
your system and burned out whatever it was after.” He retrieved
another bottle of water from the nightstand and gave it to her.

“So what have I missed?”

“There was another one of those committee
meetings,” Dominic said as he rummaged through a dresser. “From
what I gathered while I was prowling around, they’re planning to
evacuate.” He pulled free a pair of jeans from the top drawer and
held them up by the waistband. He studied them before tossing them
to her. “These should be about your size,” he said.

Remy caught the pants. “Should I ask why you
have a pair of jeans in my size in your dresser drawer?”

“They got mixed up with some other clothes
that got sent my way,” Dominic said, waving a hand
dismissively.

“So you kept them instead of sending them
back to get bounced to someone else?”

Dominic waved his hand again and turned his
attention back to the drawer. “Anyway, I’ve been downstairs getting
some supplies together for us. As soon as the coast is clear and
everyone else has gotten out, I want us to bug out, maybe head for
Philly like we’d planned. Assuming you’re better, anyway.” He
looked up from the drawer and asked, “
Are
you better?”

“Are you a doctor?” Remy quipped. “I don’t
know if I’m better or not. Maybe we should ask Derek that question,
since he’s the bloody doctor around here.”

“I’m not asking you to tell me what you
think he’d say,” Dominic said, his tone snappish. “I want you to
tell me how you
feel
. Do you feel any different?” He threw a
too-big t-shirt at her. She snatched it out of midair, shook it
out, and pulled it over her head.

Remy hadn’t given much thought to how she
felt, but as she focused inward, she realized that she was much
better now than before being injected from the vial. She probed
deeper, searching her body for any of the aches, the pains, the
hunger that she’d felt unyieldingly for months. The hunger was
there, nagging but faint, where it wouldn’t plague her anymore.

Though she couldn’t say why, she decided to
downplay her health for Dominic. “I’m fine. I feel okay. Did you
tell Derek about what I did?”

“I haven’t,” Dominic said. “I didn’t want to
leave you here alone, so I prayed for the best and hoped I wouldn’t
need him.”

Before Dominic could take the conversation
further, gunfire erupted outside again. They instinctively whirled
to face the boarded-over windows. Out of habit, Remy felt at her
waist, searching for her bolo knife and pistol, and then blew out a
frustrated breath when she discovered they weren’t there.

“Where’s my gun and knife?” she asked,
looking around the room, searching for the weapons.

“They’re downstairs,” Dominic said. “I took
them down there when you got sick after we shot you up with that
stuff in that vial. I didn’t want to walk in and have you go crazy
and hack me to death with that blasted knife of yours.”

Remy smirked. “Yeah, good point,” she
agreed. “I can’t promise I wouldn’t have done something stupid. I
think I was pretty out of it.” She sat on the edge of the bed long
enough to pull her shoes on, lacing them tightly, then headed for
the door.

“Where are you going?” Dominic asked, hot on
her heels.

“To get my weapons,” Remy said, as if it
should have been obvious.

“And then?”

“And then I’m going to go out and kill
something,” Remy said. “I haven’t killed anything in forever, and I
feel the need to. Besides, if things are bad outside, like I’m
suspecting they are, then I’m going to need to get in shape sooner
rather than later.”

Another pop of gunfire rang out as she
descended the stairs, moving with a surprising amount of energy,
feeling it flood her limbs the longer she moved. The adrenaline
made her want to keep moving, just for the sheer pleasure of it. It
was powerful, exciting, and intoxicating all at once. She’d never
felt anything quite like it.

She wanted more.

But there were more important things at
hand, like the activity stirring up outside, activity she wanted a
hand in, too. She found her bolo knife, still sheathed, laying on
the dining table, her holstered pistol laying beside it, the belt
she kept them on rolled up in a coil between them, and the sheathed
tactical knife horizontally above it all. She grabbed the buckle
and uncoiled the belt with a snap. She took the weapons out of
their sheaths and holsters and threaded the holsters onto the belt
in smooth, practiced motions.

Dominic stood in the doorway, watching as
she methodically belted on her holsters and slung the lot around
her waist, fastening everything over her hips. She checked her
pistol to make sure it was loaded and slipped her knives back into
their sheaths.

“You said you’d listen to me,” Dominic said.
“Do you still agree to do that?”

Remy gave him a slight, crooked smile. “Do
you really have that much to teach me?”

“More than I can fit into the short time we
have left here,” Dominic confessed. He started strapping on his own
weapons then, sliding guns into holsters and buckling the belts
across his chest, belts that secured machetes to his back. It
occurred to Remy then that she’d never seen him wear the machetes
unless he was about to do something dangerous. The thought excited
her like nothing else had in months. And she knew that if she
wanted to have a hand in whatever Dominic had planned, she’d have
to do exactly what he said.

“I’ll follow your lead and do exactly what
you say,” Remy vowed.

Dominic seemed satisfied by the concession.
He slipped the final pistol into the holster strapped around his
thigh and buckled the strap over it. “Do you need anything to eat
before we go out?”

Remy shook her head. She felt invigorated,
excited, almost jumpy with adrenaline, but nowhere near hungry.

“Well, let’s go then,” Dominic said. He
moved to the front door and started to unbolt it. He paused,
looking back at her. “We’re going to the main house, just for a few
minutes,” he said. “I want Derek to look you over and make sure
you’re not about to spontaneously turn on me and chew a hole in my
neck.”

Remy wrinkled her nose. “Do we have to?”

“Just for my peace of mind, Remy,
please.”

Remy heaved a heavy sigh and waved a hand at
the door. “Fine, fine. Onward, good sir.”

Dominic gave her a smile that lit up his
entire face, and then he pulled the door open. Cool air rushed
inside.

Remy smiled in anticipation as she emerged
into the darkness outside.

Sadie O’Dell was exactly where she shouldn’t have
been: outside, in the community proper, slowly roaming through the
bushes, shrubs, and cars that sat hulking in the darkness. The air
was crisp and cool with early fall, a welcome respite from the
increasing stuffiness of the main house.

Sadie hated enclosed spaces. They made her
feel trapped, which brought out a wildness in her that she was
hard-fought to suppress. Jude had felt it too; she’d seen it in the
brown eyes that were so like hers, a borderline panic. So the first
opportunity she’d seen, she slipped out of the house, tugging her
brother along with her.

“I’m not sure I like it here,” Sadie said,
her voice low as she paused beside a Humvee. It was painted a dull
Army green, maybe a military leftover abandoned in the chaos of the
fall and commandeered by those who ran this place. She pressed a
hand against the vehicle’s cool metal and added, “There are too
many people here.”

Jude nodded, making several gestures with
his hands that she interpreted easily. “
We’re no safer here than
we were in the woods.
”

“I agree,” she answered. Jude signed to her
again, and she sighed. “We can’t,” she replied. “It’s too late to
go back now. Too dangerous, what with all the damned zombies out
there.” She tapped her fingers against the holstered pistol on her
belt, humming thoughtfully. “I’m a little surprised, though. I
figured they’d take all our weapons away from us the minute we
walked through the gates.”

“
Seems like they’ve got more important
things to worry about at the moment,
” Jude signed.

“Yeah, maybe so.” Sadie heard a scuff
nearby, and she snatched the pistol on her hip from its holster,
whirling to aim it at the source. She dropped low so she couldn’t
be easily seen. Jude followed her lead. The shush of a blade
slipping from its sheath was the only sound that marked Jude’s
movements. His hand touched her wrist to get her attention. He
motioned in the direction of the front gates. There were two
figures hurrying along through the darkness, heavily armed. The
figures scurried alongside the rec center with the urgency of
people on a mission. After a moment’s study, Sadie recognized Remy
and Dominic. She lowered her pistol, silently castigating herself
for her jumpiness and the fact that she’d put entirely too much
pressure against the trigger. She stuffed the weapon into the
holster.

“Son of a bitch, I hate it here,” she
muttered, half to herself. “Too many fucking people.”

Jude touched her wrist again, and when she
glanced at him, he motioned toward the front gates. “What, you want
to go check things out?” she asked. He nodded, and a slow smile
spread across her face. “Well, come on, then. Let’s go.” She
straightened from her crouch, and they started toward the front
gates.

There was only one person in sight. He stood
on one of the two tall platforms that flanked the gates. As they
approached, the sound of the infected grew louder; their bodies and
hands slammed against the fence in a staccato drumbeat that seemed
to pound in rhythm with Sadie’s footsteps. The gates themselves let
out ominous creaks under the pressure, and Sadie’s breath came
shorter and faster the closer she drew to them. She stopped short,
halfway between the fence and the small courtyard full of cars,
shaking her head as the full weight of what was mere yards away
settled on her. Jude paused and gave her a questioning look.

“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Sadie
explained. “Shouldn’t we be avoiding the gates and not walking
toward
them?”

Jude shrugged and then darted forward,
running straight toward the gates; Sadie barely suppressed a cry of
alarm at the suddenness of his movement. She raced after him,
despite her trepidation. There was no way she was going to leave
her brother—her twin, the other half of her soul. When she caught
up with him, he was prowling at the gates, studying the walls
around them, examining the gates themselves, and smoothing his hand
over a massive crack that had formed right through the middle of
the wood shoring up the gates. Sadie could smell the fresh, sappy
pine scent of the broken wood, and she could hear the creaks and
groans of the metal fittings that held the original gates in place.
The sound sent chills up her spine and suggested it could give away
at any moment under the immense pressure.

Jude touched her arm to get her attention
again and made several gestures. She nodded and took his hand,
taking several hasty steps back from the gates and pulling him
along with her. Her heart pounded in her chest, and she felt a
little sick from the surge of adrenaline that had washed through
her. Jude looked just as shaken, his eyes wide and worried. Then he
tugged away from her and moved back toward the gate again. She
reached out to stop him, but he waved her off and went to the foot
of the aluminum ladder, grasping it and climbing a few rungs. She
grabbed his ankle.

“Where are you going?” she hissed.

He pointed to the platform.

“Why?”

He hooked an arm around a ladder rung and
signed awkwardly, “
I’m going up to talk to Keith.
”

“Who’s Keith?”

Jude jabbed his finger up toward the
platform and then started to climb again, leaving Sadie at the
bottom to wonder just how he knew that the guy on the platform was
named Keith—and when he’d found the chance to meet him. She paced,
anxiously cutting her eyes toward the gates, her fight-or-flight
instincts screaming at her to run but her brain refusing to ditch
her brother. What was he doing up there? And what was so important
that he had to harass the guard?

Jude slid down the ladder a few moments
later, his cheeks flushed. “
We should get back to the main
house,
” he signed to her almost as soon as his boots hit the
grass. “
Keith says he won’t be able to stay here much longer.
Things are starting to get bad.
”

“Just starting?” Sadie said, only half
sarcastically. “How do you know that guy, anyway? I don’t know
him.”

“
What, I can’t meet people without you
around?
” Jude signed. He seemed irritated, his face a scowl of
annoyance that surprised Sadie. He turned on his heel and started
toward the main house without looking back, and she followed him,
wondering what that was all about.

Sadie was just reaching to knock on the door
when it flung open. A flashlight blinded her as the bearer shone it
in her face. She put her arm up to shield her eyes. Then she saw
Brandt glowering in the doorway.

“Where the
hell
have you been?”
Brandt demanded, lowering the flashlight. “We’ve been looking
everywhere for you two!”

“For what?” Sadie asked.

“What do you mean, for what?” Brandt said.
“Get the hell in here.” He practically shoved them into the house
and slammed the door behind them, bolting it shut and turning to
face Sadie. “What the hell do you think you were doing, leaving
this house unaccompanied and without permission?” he asked.