The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege (32 page)

Dominic actually laughed at that. “Believe
me, I’m not going anywhere.”

Remy smiled and gave him a short nod, then
turned and went to the back door. She grabbed the knob with one
hand and the deadbolt with the other. She hesitated and glanced
back at Dominic. He’d followed her to the door and lurked just
behind her, his pistol in hand, ready to re-lock the deadbolt. Then
she sucked in a deep breath, unlocked the door, and flung it
open.

She stepped out into the cool night air
scented by the stench of undead bodies.

The door clicked shut behind her.

“Oh hell,” she whispered, and then she
forced herself to start walking, striding unhesitatingly around the
corner and into the mob of infected that were attacking the
community. In the time they’d been inside the rec center, more
infected had come into Woodside and were starting to curve around
the back of the rec center, making their ways toward more of the
survivors’ houses. She hoped they were prepared and fortified
against the bodies coming their way.

But she didn’t have time to think about
that. Brandt needed her to focus, to toughen up, to do what she
needed to do to get to the medical house. So she squared her
shoulders, took a deep breath, and began to walk more confidently
into the mob surrounding the medical house.

Remy was almost halfway across the
courtyard, reveling in her ability to walk through the infected
unmolested, when she chanced a glance back the way she’d come.
Dominic stood on the roof, watching her progress, a rifle in his
hands. She couldn’t help but smile. Even though she wasn’t with
him, Dominic was trying to look out for her. The backup was, at
least, reassuring.

It took her only moments to reach the
medical house. She shoved her way through the crowd until she
reached the porch. There were more on the porch, and the front door
hung crookedly on its hinges, broken by the beating hands and
rotten bodies that smashed against it. She wrinkled her nose and
pushed her way inside, drawing her bolo knife as a precaution. She
didn’t spend much time trying to figure out how to bar the door;
not many of the infected had come inside—or if they had, they’d
left after discovering no prey in the house—and they posed no
threat to her anyway. Despite that, she kept the noise level down;
there was no sense in stirring the infected up any more than
necessary.

Remy crept up the stairs in the dark, not
bothering with a flashlight since, to her surprise, she could see
well enough to navigate to Derek’s room. The door was closed and
locked, and she scowled at the door as if it would magically unlock
itself. She looked at the head of the stairs again, as if she
expected something to lurch to the top if she made enough noise.
She tucked her bolo knife back into its sheath and drew the KA-BAR
she’d been given in Atlanta months before. She wedged the tip of
the blade into the doorjamb, wiggled it around the gap, pushed,
shoved, and twisted. Something popped, and the door opened with a
squeak. She grinned and returned the knife to its sheath before
stepping into the room.

It seemed like weeks since she’d last been
here, stealing medication for herself. That nothing had changed was
unsettling. She thought that, with the mess going on outside the
house, something inside should be different, should reflect the
conditions outside. But then she shook the thought off and focused
on her objective.

The medicine cabinet was a large storage
unit made of plastic. It had been commandeered from one of the
houses when they’d first arrived. Derek had outfitted it with
homemade dividers and handwritten labels. The labels were stuck to
the outsides of the clear plastic drawers, which helped her find
what she was looking for more quickly. She scanned the labels,
tracing her finger over each one, until she found the fever
reducers. She pulled the entire plastic drawer out of the unit in
her haste. She shifted her backpack around, unzipped it, and shook
the medicine bottles into the bag. She almost left it at that, but
something made her stop and take a closer look at the rest of the
drawers. And, as she scanned the room, the tackle boxes stacked
beside the storage unit caught her eye. The medicine inside was too
valuable to just leave behind. If they had to establish a new
community somewhere, they would need this to get started.

She swore and started pulling drawers open,
grabbing medicine bottles and blister packs by the handful. She
dropped them into the backpack with the fever reducers. Then she
attacked the tackle boxes, popping the latches on each one in turn,
pulling out suture kits and forceps and tweezers and scalpels and
needles and IV catheters, all packaged individually in sterile
plastic packs. After she’d cleaned out everything that she could
reasonably carry, she headed for the door, intending to go back to
the yard and cross to the main house. She had to figure out how to
get inside the building next door without letting the infected in
with her.

Remy hitched her backpack higher on her
shoulders as she started back down the stairs, running through a
variety of ideas and possibilities for how to get into the main
house. But try as she might, she was having a lot of trouble coming
up with something that would get her inside safely. If only the
trees around the houses hadn’t been cut down to build the fencing!
She could have climbed through a second story window and across the
tree that used to be there without ever touching the ground.

Remy had just reached the bottom of the
stairs when a strange sound met her ears. She paused, gripping the
banister with her left hand, and strained her ears. It was an odd
chugging sound, almost a whump, repetitive like a train going down
tracks, and it was coming from somewhere above her. She frowned and
started to creep back up the stairs, trying to place the sound. She
went to the first bedroom she came to and looked out a window that
faced the front of the house. She flung it open and leaned out as
far as she safely could, hands braced against the windowsill, and
twisted around to look up at the sky. What she saw there took her
breath away.

It was a helicopter, hovering above the
street in front of the house like a great black bug. It was
monstrous, unlike any helicopter she’d ever seen—most of which had
been compact medical helicopters lifting and landing at the
hospital not far from where she’d lived in New Orleans. It
seemingly bristled with weaponry; two barrels stuck out from the
front of the helicopter, and there were more weapons in several
other places, but with her layman’s knowledge of guns, she was
unable to identify them. As she gawked at the war machine that
hovered above her, the sound of more helicopters filled the air,
their rotors stirring up the air and blowing several of the
infected right off their feet. Elation swelled up in her as she
realized that it must be the military—it
had
to be. She
couldn’t imagine anyone else having the capabilities to get so many
helicopters into the air; and now that she looked more closely, she
could see even more of them in the distance, enough that she
thought they were mounting a rescue mission.

The lead helicopter swooped low as she
watched, adjusting itself into an angle that kept the nose toward
the ground. The occupants opened fire on the infected below. Remy
let out a whoop of excitement and encouragement as the
large-caliber ammunition tore into the masses, shredding bodies and
sending blood and gore and limbs spraying into the air and
splattering onto the pavement. The first helicopter swept the
field, firing nonstop as it flew towards the rec center, and then
it stopped firing and pulled up. As it did, the second helicopter
swooped in behind it, performing the same firing exercise, chewing
up even more of the infected.

Even though she was anxious to watch the
show, Remy turned away from the window and started for the
stairs.

It was a decision that saved her life.

To say Brandt felt sick was an understatement. His
head pounded, the ache inside his skull pulsing like a heartbeat,
and he felt like he had bugs crawling underneath his skin. He
shuddered as a pang of nausea churned in his gut, and he tried to
swallow it down. Even in his haze of illness, the last thing he
wanted to do was throw up all over himself.

He rolled his head to the side, squinting in
the almost nonexistent light, searching for Remy. He didn’t see
her; by all appearances, there wasn’t a soul in the room with him.
Just another example of my miserable luck.
His lips felt
parched and cracked, and if his legs would have supported him, he’d
have walked naked and covered in hot sauce through a crowd of
infected for a bottle of water.

Brandt forced himself onto his side, then
rolled until he was lying on his stomach across the cold tile
floor, just off the edge of the passably soft palette someone had
laid him on. The easy part was over; now he had to tackle the hard
part: getting to his hands and knees and then, once that was
accomplished, somehow standing on his own two feet. His palms were
slick with sweat against the floor as he tried to lever himself up,
and he nearly slipped and fell on his face as his hands slid around
underneath.

“Whoa, Brandt, what are you doing?” a voice
asked from behind him. Brandt twisted around enough to see Dominic
hurrying toward him from the direction of a supply closet. He
scowled. Of all the people in Woodside to come to his assistance,
it
had
to be Dominic.

“I need water,” Brandt muttered almost
incoherently. His tongue felt thick in his mouth. He licked his
lips and managed to get to his hands and knees, his elbows shaking
as they struggled to support the weight of his upper body.

“You shouldn’t be up like this,” Dominic
said, and Brandt felt him loop an arm around his waist and pull him
to stand. “You’re sick as a dog. You should be resting.”

“Fuck you,” Brandt said, slurring the
words.

“No need for the attitude,” Dominic
retorted. “I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t need your damn help,” Brandt said.
Dominic let go of him, and he promptly fell on his face.

“Fine. I’ll leave you there then.”

Brandt glared at him and snapped, “Don’t be
an asshole.”

“Hey, I could say the same thing to you,”
Dominic said. He grabbed Brandt’s arm then and hauled him to his
feet. He steered him to a chair at one of the tables scattered
around the room, dumping him unceremoniously into it. Then he went
to his backpack and dug a bottle of water out. He placed it on the
table at Brandt’s elbow with a thump.

“Where’s Remy?” Brandt asked as he twisted
the cap off the bottle. He fumbled with it and nearly dropped it.
At the last second, he righted the bottle and set it back on the
table.

“She’s out there somewhere,” Dominic said,
nodding his head toward the front door. “She was going to go for
medicine for you and to try to check and make sure everything was
okay at the main house.”

Brandt nodded and took a small sip of water
from the bottle, forcing himself to swallow it down. “What’s wrong
with me?” he asked as he set the bottle back on the table. “What
happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“I can’t focus on much of anything at the
moment, no,” Brandt replied. He propped his elbow against the table
and put his forehead in his hand. He was burning up with what felt
like a high fever; no wonder he felt like hell.

“Brandt, you got bitten,” Dominic said.
“Repeatedly.”

Brandt frowned at his water bottle. “Oh,
yeah. That.”

“That’s all you’ve got to say?”

“What, there’s more to say about it?” Brandt
asked. He rolled his head from side to side against his hand and
took another sip of water to quell the nausea churning in his
stomach. “There’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Maybe
we’ll just prove Derek’s theory about my immunity right. Or
wrong.”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure this is the way I
personally would have wanted to do it.” Dominic said.

Brandt glanced at him blearily. He sat a few
tables away, his feet kicked up in a chair. Dominic stared back at
him, studying him closely in the dim light.

“Brandt, I—”

But Brandt didn’t get the opportunity to
hear what Dominic wanted to say. A noise familiar to both of them
broke the air, and they immediately looked up toward the
ceiling.

“Is that…?” Dominic trailed off, his eyes
widening in surprise. “Is that a helicopter?”

“More than one by the sounds of it,” Brandt
observed. He couldn’t help the slight smile that flitted across his
face. Helicopters were in the air, and Brandt could think of only
one entity with the capability to get multiple helicopters off the
ground a year and a half after the outbreak. “It’s the military,”
he said, resting his head back onto his hand again.

“The military?” Dominic repeated. “How…how
would they even
find
us?”

“What do you think I was doing in the Humvee
in the first place?” Brandt mumbled. “I was playing with the radio,
trying to see if I could get in touch with
someone
who could
help us. It was my plan B, and it seems to have worked. I told them
where we were, but it was a crap shoot if they were even going to
show up.”

“And it appears they have,” Dominic said. He
started across the dining room, heading back toward the storage
closet at a jog. “Stay here. I’m going up on the roof to check
things out.”

Brandt scowled again, wishing he could go up
on the roof himself, but he doubted he could even walk across the
room without assistance at this point. He groaned and started to
yell out, “Dominic, let me know what you see!” But large-caliber
weapons opening fire drowned out his words.