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

It wasn’t necessarily that she disliked
caring for Ethan. Far from it. She enjoyed sitting with him after
taking his vitals and talking about everything they could think of.
She found herself liking him more and more as the days passed.

And that was the problem. She didn’t want to
like him. Judging by what he’d told her—and that hadn’t been
much—he’d gotten her younger sister Avi killed. She should hate his
guts. Instead, she spent half of her rare moments of downtime
fantasizing about him and his intensely green eyes.

Sometimes, Kimberly wanted to slap herself.
This was one of those times.

When she reached the top of the stairs, she
threw a quick glance at Remy’s room. The door was closed and,
presumably, locked, though Kimberly could hear voices on the other
side: Remy’s somewhat twangy, girlish voice and the rumble of an
indistinct male voice that could belong to Brandt, Dominic, or
Derek. The voices were raised just enough that, while Kimberly
couldn’t make out what was being said, she could easily make out
the tones: Remy’s angry, the man’s placating. She debated knocking
on the door but shook her head. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t
her business. She was supposed to be doing the first of her
twice-daily assessments of Ethan Bennett, not nosing into something
that didn’t involve her.

Kimberly focused her attention on the task
at hand: Ethan. After tapping on the door with a knuckle to alert
him that she was coming inside, she eased the door open and slipped
through, shutting it quietly behind her. Ethan was sitting up in
bed, studying the contents of a battered hardcover book—a glance of
the title revealed it was
War and Peace
. Who the hell read
War and Peace
for
fun?
He grimaced at the page and
leaned close to read it, forehead wrinkled in a squint because he
was without his reading glasses. As always, Kimberly was taken
aback by his appearance. He looked up at her and gave her a smile,
and she couldn’t help but compare how he looked now to how he’d
looked when she had first met him all those months ago in the
Westin.

He was thin now, shockingly thin. He sat
shirtless in bed, the blankets bunched at his waist, some of his
ribs visible under his skin. His collarbones jutted out in sharp
angles, and his blond hair hung limply across his forehead. He
looked clean—she and Derek took pains to make sure he was well
taken care of—but horribly unhealthy. They’d struggled to put
weight on him, and though he ate every bite put in front of him
like a starving man, it never seemed to be enough; he never put on
any weight.

He gave her another smile, his eyes bright
and attentive, and eased back against his pillows. Folding a corner
of the book’s page down to mark his place—something that made
Kimberly cringe—he set the book on the bedside table and motioned
to her. “I was wondering when you were going to show up. You’re
late.”

Kimberly raised an eyebrow, glanced at the
watch on her wrist, and sighed. “Only by ten minutes,” she said.
She moved further into the room, dropping her medical bag onto the
chair beside Ethan’s bed and easing down onto the edge of the
mattress. “Ten minutes barely even counts as late.”

“When I was a cop, ten minutes could have
conceivably cost me my job,” Ethan said.

Kimberly rolled her eyes and unzipped her
bag. “Yeah, well, when I was a vet, my patients didn’t bitch so
much,” she retorted, grinning.

“Well, fortunately,
I’m
not a
dog.”

“You say that like it’s a brownie point in
your favor. A dog would behave better,” she joked. She pulled the
thermometer from her bag and waved it in his face. “Open up, would
you?” she said. When he obeyed, she stuck the thermometer
underneath his tongue and added, “Hold that there.” Then she dug
Ethan’s chart from the bag and uncapped her pen with her teeth.

“I don’t see why you have to check all this
so much,” Ethan said around the thermometer. “I’ve never actually
seen any of it change, and I know you haven’t.”

“Stop talking or I’ll take your temperature
the uncomfortable way,” she threatened. She checked her watch again
and then flipped through the chart until she reached the end of the
list of vitals that had been taken over the past five months. She
scribbled down the date and time on a fresh line and then set the
folder against her knee. “We don’t know how this whole thing works,
so we have to monitor you to make sure you aren’t going to
relapse.”

Ethan looked like he was dying to ask her
something, but he held the question in until she removed the
thermometer from his mouth and jotted down the temperature—98.6
degrees, yet again. “Is there a chance of that happening?” he
asked.

Kimberly wrapped her blood pressure cuff
around Ethan’s bicep and plugged her stethoscope into her ears,
buying herself some time before answering. She wrote the numbers
onto his chart before shoving her tools back into her bag. “Eth,
look at this,” she said, setting his chart on his lap. “I honestly
don’t know if there’s a chance you’ll relapse. Just look at your
vitals over the past five months and that should show you why.”

His eyes skimmed down the page, and he
flipped back a few pages before looking up at her in confusion.

“I don’t get it,” he admitted.

“Your vitals are baseline perfect,” Kimberly
said. “They’re textbook. Temperature, 98.6 degrees; blood pressure,
120 over 80; heart rate, 80; respirations, 14; O2 sats at 99. Your
resting vitals
never change.
They’ve been like this since
the day we cured you. And honestly? We don’t understand it. There
should at least be some variant there, a point or three here or
there in either direction.”

“Is that why you can’t tell me whether you
think I’ll relapse or not?”

“Exactly. Because we don’t totally
understand Michaluk and the way it behaves,” she said. “There’s
every chance this thing could mutate further and turn you into one
of the…well, the walking dead. Or it could turn you into something
even worse, something we’ve never seen before.
Or
it could
simply do nothing. It’s too hard to tell right now, so we’re just
being cautious.”

“So am I infectious?” Ethan prompted. “Is
whatever is in me contagious like
them
or is it more like
Brandt?”

Kimberly smiled for the first time during
their conversation. “Well, at this point, as far as we can tell,
you’re like Brandt,” she answered. “Infected, but not contagious.”
She dug into the medical bag for the small black case that she kept
her blood sample supplies in. She began to prep to take a sample of
Ethan’s blood, as she did every day. He groaned when he saw the
thin glass vial in her hand.

“Aw hell, do you
have
to do that
today?” he asked. “I’m beginning to wonder if you guys are turning
into vampires.”

“Hey, these are Derek’s rules, not mine,”
Kimberly protested. She grabbed his right wrist and tugged it until
he extended his arm with a heavy sigh. There was a saline lock near
the crook of his elbow, and she began the same procedures she
always used when drawing a sample of blood from his arm, almost
mindlessly moving through the steps. “Bitch at him if you don’t
like it.”

Ethan waited until she was done taking the
blood and packing the vial into its padded case before he asked,
“How is Remy doing?”

Kimberly hesitated, folding the cover of the
chart closed and smoothing a hand over it before tucking it into
her bag. She wasn’t sure how much to tell him. She wasn’t sure how
much she
should
tell him. The last thing he needed was
stress pushing his blood pressure up or altering his heart rate.
Her curiosity was tweaked at the idea, though. Stress could be a
good way to test whether Ethan’s vitals would change under
pressure. She and Derek had been debating the idea of stress tests,
taking Ethan out jogging as soon as he seemed strong enough to
handle the exercise and checking his vitals afterward to see how
his body responded to the exertion. But she didn’t want to move
forward with the idea until she’d cleared it with Derek. The last
thing she needed was to mess up whatever the doctor’s plans
were—the entirety of which she hadn’t been made privy to. “She’s
been doing okay,” she finally replied, trying to hedge around
giving him any details.

Ethan rolled his eyes and let out a heavy
sigh. “Come on, Kimmy, you’re dodging the question,” he said.

“Don’t call me Kimmy.”

“Then answer my damned question,” he
said.

“She’s not doing good at all,” Kimberly
said, shaking her head. She focused on zipping her medical bag
closed, keeping her eyes away from his. “We’re a little worried
about her mental health. And there’s the question of whether or not
the medications are going to hold out.”

“Is she already starting to be resistant to
them?” Ethan asked, with alarm in his voice.

“No, more like we’re starting to run out,”
Kimberly admitted. “We’ve been sending out a list with the supply
team to look for medicine. They’ve been breaking into every
pharmacy, doctor’s office, clinic, and vet office that they can
safely get into, and they’re coming back empty-handed.”

“The drugs are all gone?”

“Looks like people have beat us to most of
those places,” she admitted. She met his eyes again and said, “It’s
not looking good for her, Eth.”

“When are you guys going to give her
whatever you gave me?” he asked. “When are you going to cure
her?”

“I don’t know,” Kimberly admitted, averting
her gaze as a surge of nervous energy welled up in her stomach.
“Derek has his plans, and he doesn’t tell me all of them. Mostly,
he has me focusing on you. He’s handling Remy and her care
personally.”

Ethan stared at her for a moment, as if he
were trying to gauge whether or not she was telling him everything.
Judging by his expression, he wasn’t satisfied with her answer. He
grasped his blankets and flipped them off of himself, revealing
that he was wearing only boxers. He levered himself around to swing
his legs over the side of the bed. “If she is
that
bad off,
then why the
fuck
hasn’t he done what he needs to do to help
her?” he demanded. The moment he stood from the bed, his weakened
legs wobbled, and he nearly tumbled to the floor. Kimberly lunged
forward and caught him, her arms looping around his thin waist. The
shock of his body pressed against hers gave her a little shiver,
and she tried to shake it off.

“Take it easy, Ethan,” she said sternly. She
backed him up a step and made him sit on the bed. “You’re going to
kill yourself if you push this too quickly.”

“I’m not fucking fragile, Kim,” he said
bitterly. Despite that, he had just allowed her to assist him back
to the bed. His expression was a cross between grateful and
angry—grateful to be sitting again, but angry that he couldn’t
charge downstairs and utilize authority, the kind of authority he’d
once exercised in his own group of survivors. The authority that
would allow him to bend Derek to his will and maybe give him a
well-deserved smack to the head. “I’m just pissed off.”

“So pissed that you’re ready to charge after
Derek in nothing but your underwear,” Kimberly pointed out. She sat
on the bed beside him, grasping his hand and squeezing it gently,
trying to will him to serenity. “Being angry like this isn’t good
for you. I know you can’t help it, but you need to fight through it
as best as you can, okay?”

“I’m sorry. I’m just so
wired,
” he
said. “I’m ready to get out of this room. I spent ages trapped in
the Westin, and then when I got out, I ended up trapped here. I
understand the reasoning, but I’m just sick of looking at this
room.”

Kimberly studied him thoughtfully as he
stared blankly across the room. Then she sighed and slapped both
hands against her thighs. He startled at the sharp snap and looked
at her, wide eyed.

“Fine, fine,” she said. “At the very least,
let me help you put some clothes on before you rustle up the
cavalry and try to kick some ass. Though I don’t think you could
manage to knock a fly over right now in your condition.”

“My condition?” Ethan repeated with a raised
eyebrow.

Kimberly smiled, stood, and went to the
closet. She retrieved a duffel bag she’d stashed there the week
before while he’d been asleep. “Luckily, I come prepared,” she
said, carrying the bag to him and setting it on the mattress. She
unzipped it and let him look inside as she explained. “Cade was so
kind as to help me dig up some clothes in as close to your sizes as
we could approximate. Some new boots too. We figured you were going
to need them, since you lost pretty much everything you owned in
Atlanta.”

A melancholy expression flickered across
Ethan’s face, but he smothered it and pulled free a pair of jeans,
shaking them out before looking them over. They were a good pair of
jeans, reasonably intact with only a few worn spots near the knees
and pockets. He nodded in satisfaction and gave her a grateful
smile that warmed her insides. “Thanks.”

“You work on getting those on while I find
you a razor and some scissors,” Kimberly offered, heading for the
dresser where they kept some basic hygiene supplies. “You look like
a mountain man or something.”

Ethan rubbed a hand over his thick beard.
“More like a lumberjack, I think,” he commented with a chuckle. He
scooped up a shirt from the bag and slowly tugged it over his head,
working his arms into the sleeves and pulling it down over his
torso. Then he went to work on the jeans, sliding them over his
legs. When he was forced to stand and tug them over his hips,
Kimberly rushed over to give him a supportive arm. He gave her
another grateful smile as he leaned against her and pulled the
pants up the rest of the way.

“I feel like an old man,” he admitted as he
sank to the bed again, looking like he’d been slapped on the back
of the head by a two-by-four labeled “exhaustion.”