The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege (29 page)

When Remy reached the truck, she glanced
back at Dominic before taking a knee to look underneath. Brandt
stared back at her from the darkness under the truck, blood stained
and in obvious pain. He reached toward her, and she stretched her
arm out, clasping his hand in her free one.

“How is he?” Dominic asked, and the infected
around them seemed to tense, several of them making snarling sounds
and pushing forward. Remy was jostled until she was shoved against
the truck.

“Shut up!” Remy hissed, glaring at him as
she pushed herself off the truck. “Not another word. You’re
stirring them up.” Then she leaned back down to look at Brandt.
“Are you okay?”

“I’m hurt,” Brandt whispered.

“How bad?”

He shrugged and winced. “I don’t know.” He
tightened his fingers on hers and breathed, “I don’t know how
you’re doing it, but please, get me the hell out of here.”

Remy looked up at the crowd, trying to guess
at the number. At least a hundred, if she had to guess, but she’d
never been very good at guessing. Clearly, she had some sort of
camouflage against them, perhaps caused by whatever she and Dominic
had injected into her earlier; otherwise, she’d never have been
able to walk through them unscathed. And it seemed that her
camouflage extended to Dominic to some degree. She was curious how
far that camouflage would expand past just one person, but she
didn’t know if it was time to be experimenting with it. Regardless,
she had to get Brandt out of there. Leaving him behind was out of
the question.

“Dominic, help me,” she said, pulling at his
hand. He took a knee and peered under the truck, his eyes widening.
He reached underneath and wrapped his hand around Brandt’s
wrist.

“Come on, man, let’s get you out of here,”
he said. And with one tremendous pull, he yanked Brandt halfway
out. Brandt grunted in pain, his entire body tensing, but other
than that, he didn’t make a sound.

He didn’t have to, though.

The moment he was dragged out into the open,
the infected went wild, throwing themselves forward, hands
outstretched, scrabbling at both him and Dominic. Remy let out a
cry of alarm and dove between her friends and the horde, pushing
the infected back, trying to force them away from the two men.

“Back! Get back!” she yelled without
thinking, and to her shock, they obeyed, backing away from the
three of them. It was only a step or two, but it was enough to give
them breathing room and to give Dominic the opportunity to get
Brandt onto his feet.

Dominic slung Brandt’s arm over his
shoulder, smearing blood on his hand and shirt, and said to Remy,
“We’ve got to go!”

“Where?”

“Rec center,” Brandt choked out. “It’s
closest.”

“Head that way,” Remy said, tugging Brandt’s
other arm around her shoulders and starting forward. With her free
hand, she pushed infected out of their way, shoving them aside to
force a path wide enough to accommodate the three of them. “I doubt
this is going to last,” she said to Brandt as she waded through the
crowd. “Any chance you can move a little faster?” Brandt grunted,
but he did pick up his pace just enough to be noticeable, limping
along beside her, his fingers digging into her shoulder as he clung
to her.

The infected behind them began to crowd
closer the further they moved from the truck until they were
pressed against them, their hands grabbing at Remy’s hair and
tugging at her shirt again, as if they were fans trying to get a
touch of their idol. She shuddered, itching to pick up her pace,
but if she did, she’d outpace Brandt and leave him behind. So she
soldiered on and forced herself to keep moving.

The rec center’s front door was just ahead,
so close that she felt like she could reach out and touch it. Three
more limping steps and then they were there, pushing the door open,
staggering inside, and slamming it shut behind them. Brandt slumped
to the floor with a groan, and Remy rushed forward to help Dominic
as he worked on barricading the doors, throwing the locks at the
tops and bottoms and helping to slide a large, thick board through
the handles.

Now that they were out of sight of the
infected, the creatures seemed to forget their adoration for Remy.
They surged against the doors, slamming against them and making
them bow inward half an inch. Remy stumbled backward, nearly
tripping over Brandt, and dragged Dominic with her.

“Go check all the doors, make sure they’re
secured,” Remy said to Dominic. She pushed away from him and went
to Brandt, kneeling on the floor to check his injuries. As Dominic
scrambled to check the rec center’s other doors, she turned Brandt
onto his back and dumped her backpack onto the floor. After
unzipping it, she started to dig through the supplies for her first
aid kit. “What happened out there?” she asked as she found the kit
and tore it open, pawing through the contents.

“I was in the Humvee, and they got in,”
Brandt said, trying to sit up. Remy planted a hand against his
chest and pushed him back down.

“Lay still,” she ordered, making her voice
as stern as she could. She found her trauma shears and grabbed the
hem of his t-shirt. She cut it free from his torso.

“I didn’t have a clear path to the main
house or the medical house, and my only real option was here,” he
continued. “I made a run for it, but I didn’t make it.”

“Obviously,” Remy muttered, pushing the
shredded remains of his t-shirt aside and moving on to his pant
legs. “I hope you have another set of clothes somewhere nearby,”
she commented, as she used the shears to cut a slit in the bottom
of his pant legs, sawing through the cuffs. She grabbed the two
sides of the slit and pulled, ripping each of his pant legs up to
his knees, revealing bloodied, wounded calves. “Son of a bitch,”
she said. “What did you do, let them use you for a chew toy?”
Without waiting for his answer, she grabbed a bottle of sterile
water from her supplies and ripped the cap off. “Hold still,” she
ordered, and then she upended the bottle over the wounds on his
arms and legs.

To Brandt’s credit, he merely grunted, his
back arching off the floor slightly before he collapsed back
against the tile. “Holy shit,” he breathed. Remy finished washing
away the blood on one of the wounds and then sucked in air through
her teeth.

“Jesus, that looks painful,” she said,
examining the bite marks that were decorating his skin. “You’ll be
lucky if this doesn’t get infected.”

“I’ll be lucky if
I
don’t get
infected,” Brandt said. “We haven’t established my immunity
yet.”

“Well, no time like the present to work on
that.” Remy pulled out gauze and tape and started to bandage his
wounds. She crawled up to get to his arms. When she took one by the
wrist to examine the first wound she planned to bandage, Brandt
twisted his hand around to grasp hers tightly.

“How did you do that?” he asked. “How did
you make them ignore you like that?”

Remy paused in the act of opening a package
of sterile gauze squares and looked down at her hands. She spread
her fingers wide, studying them like they were different.

“Honestly? I don’t know,” she admitted
quietly.

The woods around Ethan were uncomfortably quiet as
he eased his way under the shadow of the trees, his pistol out in a
two-handed grip. Kimberly was just ahead of him, her machete in her
hand, and even from several feet back, Ethan could tell that her
shoulders were tight and stiff with tension. He could hardly blame
her for that; he felt like he was going to crawl right out of his
own skin at any moment.

It was quiet.
Too
quiet. There seemed
to be no other living creatures besides the two of them in the
woods, when there should have been squirrels, birds, deer,
insects
. But there was just them, crunching through the
underbrush and the dead leaves. He glanced around, wondering where
the animals had gone. He wondered if they’d cleared out around
Woodside when the infected had shown up. His heart stuttered in his
chest as he thought about the hordes of infected gathering outside
the community’s walls and the friends he’d left inside of those
very same walls.

Ethan shook the thought loose from his head.
Now wasn’t the time to even think about those he was leaving
behind. There was only
ahead
, only the woman he was supposed
to be helping, only the job he had committed to guarding her for.
And she was getting too far ahead of him for his comfort.

“Kim,” he hissed, trying to keep his voice
down and somehow get her attention. She half-turned to look back at
him, eyebrows raised, and then seemed to realize just how far ahead
of him she’d gone, because she slowed down to let him catch up.

“Sorry,” she murmured, her voice coated with
embarrassment. “My nerves are getting the better of me out
here.”

Ethan nodded in understanding, releasing his
grip on his pistol with one hand to unclip his compass from one of
his belt loops. “It’s okay,” he assured her. “I totally understand.
If you’re not used to being out in the open like this, it can be
nerve-wracking. Hell, it can be even if you
are
used to
it.”

She nodded in agreement, moving closer to
him and asking, “What are you doing?” She wasn’t looking at him,
her blue eyes rapidly scanning their surroundings instead. Good
thing, too. Visibility was poor—most of the light from the
almost-full moon overhead was blocked by the overhanging branches
above—but that was no excuse to let her attention lapse.

“I’m trying to get my bearings, or at least
some semblance of them,” Ethan explained. “I’m thinking we should
head east for now, put as much distance as we can between us and
the infected and Woodside. Then we can start for the first CDC
installation that Derek directed us to.”

Kimberly nodded slowly. “I’m going to follow
your lead for now,” she said. “I haven’t been out in this mess
much, and my brain is too frazzled to even try to cope enough to
plan right now.”

Ethan clipped the compass back onto his belt
loop and gestured to her. “Come on, then. The sooner we get moving,
the sooner we can get further away from this party and the sooner
we can get these samples into the right hands.”

Kimberly was silent as they started walking
again, trying to keep their steps on the crunchy ground as quiet as
possible. Ethan had his Glock back in his two-handed grip, walking
just slightly ahead of Kimberly this time, on the alert for any
movement. As he carefully slid through the dark spaces around
trees, he had a sudden moment where he felt like he was back in the
normal world, in the one before the outbreak, when he’d been just a
police officer doing his daily duties to his community, trying his
best to serve the people he’d been committed to serving. There had
been a time, early in his career, where he’d participated in a drug
bust—an activity he’d always hated doing, but only because of the
uncertainty over what he might walk into. It had been a dark, dark
night, similar to the one he was currently walking through, and his
nerves had been on edge. He’d only just started to relax, started
to guess that the occupants of the house he and his fellow officers
were approaching weren’t going to put up a fight, when the gunfire
had erupted from the building, peppering the ground and trees
around them and sending Ethan’s heart leaping into his throat.

That feeling of terror and nervousness at
the idea of someone getting the drop on him had resurfaced, slowly
but surely, in the minutes since he and Kimberly had stepped out
through the gap in the wall. He forced himself to take in measured
breaths to stay calm and focused. And it was because of that effort
that he was relaxed enough to notice the first infected person
stagger out from behind a large oak tree. He held his hand up,
motioning for Kimberly to stop where she was.

She caught sight of the infected man
stepping out into the little bit of moonlight around them, and she
gasped.

“Shh,” Ethan breathed out, catching one of
her hands.

They stood silently, watching as the man
stumbled through the trees. His clothes were tattered, dirtied, and
Ethan could see just how thin he was through his threadbare
clothing; his collarbones jutted, and his shoulder blades reminded
Ethan of bird’s wings. It was hard to tell how old the man had been
when he’d been alive; his hair had long since fallen out, and his
skin was desiccated, tight against his bones like he’d been
starving for months. In that moment, Ethan felt nothing but pity
for the undead thing yards away from him, not because of what it
was but because of what it could have been. The man was just a
victim of the virus that had spread like wildfire through their
world. He couldn’t help that he’d gotten sick, any more than Ethan
could.

And that, he realized immediately, was the
crux of his thought process. That man was what he could have
become, what he
had
become for several months, and compared
to that man, he was lucky to have the friends that he had, friends
willing to stick their necks out for him and take his presumably
hopeless body back to Dr. Rivers and pray for a miracle. They’d
gotten their miracle, even if he wasn’t feeling quite as whole as
before he’d turned.

It was that pity that drove Ethan’s next
actions. He slowly slid his Glock back into its holster. He pulled
the machete from its sheath on his belt. He glanced at Kimberly,
motioned for her to stay put, and then approached the infected man
at a slow walk, not bothering to keep his steps silent. The
infected man stumbled around at the sound of his approach and
swiveled to look in Ethan’s direction. But his cloudy gaze slid
past Ethan to Kimberly. Ethan shifted with the man’s gaze,
inserting himself between the two, trying his best to keep the
man’s focus on him, only him.