The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (14 page)

Sadie hadn’t waited for any of them to join
her before she’d begun exploring. She was climbing up the side of
one of the military vehicles parked nearby, peering into the
driver’s door and pulling it open to look inside. A thunk behind
her told Cade that someone else had joined them on that side of the
barricade, and she glanced over her shoulder to see Remy coming
towards her.

“I guess the guys figured the order of the
day was ladies first,” she quipped. She stopped beside Cade and
stared in Sadie’s direction. “What’s she doing?”

“Exploring, I guess,” Cade said. She held her
rifle in a two-handed ready grip diagonally across her body. There
was silence between them while someone scuffed his way up and over
the barricade, and then Remy spoke up.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. “And I
don’t mean emotionally. Physically. How are you feeling?”

“What makes you think there’s something wrong
with me physically?” Cade replied, trying her best to keep her
temper in check. Out of all of them still with her, she refused to
lose her temper with Remy, especially if it was unwarranted. Remy
had been there since nearly the beginning. She was the only other
person from their original group outside of Ethan and Brandt that
was still alive, and Ethan and Brandt weren’t there. She
understood
, probably better than any of them, why Cade had
to do this. So instead of snapping at Remy like she’d been doing to
everyone else the past two days, Cade took Remy’s hand in her own
and gave it a gentle, grateful squeeze.

“Have I told you thank you lately?” Cade
asked, staring at Sadie’s silhouette through the truck’s
windshield.

“For what?” Remy replied.

“For being there. For sticking it out with us
through thick and thin.” Cade let go of her hand and sighed. “I
know you wanted to leave, back when Ethan was cured and you thought
Derek was going to give the cure to you right away too. And really,
after everything that had happened, I didn’t blame you for wanting
to get the hell out of there. Woodside was a bunch of people living
on borrowed time, and I know you’re not one of those people who is
willing to sit around and do nothing. You’re a survivor, a fighter.
I’m sorry we tried to make you be anything but that.”

“You had your reasons,” Remy said. “And maybe
those reasons were right.”

“What do you mean?” Cade asked.

“I haven’t felt right in the head since I got
infected,” Remy said, her voice low. “Something’s…off. I can’t put
my finger on what it is.”

“After you and Dominic injected you with the
cure?”

“Well, it sure as hell hasn’t gotten any
better,” Remy said, sounding like she was trying to be flippant and
failing miserably. Cade saw right through the nonchalant attitude
the younger woman was posturing with and right to the scared girl
underneath. She caught Remy’s hand again for another reassuring
squeeze and let go as Keith came up behind them.

“All are present and accounted for,” he
announced. “Where to next?”

Cade stepped away from Remy after one more
squeeze and motioned to the road ahead of them. “We start walking.
As soon as we’re oriented to where we are, Dominic will take the
lead and get us through to the Tabernacle.”

The sun was high
overhead and they’d been walking for most of the night, slogging
through underbrush as the soldier they’d virtually kidnapped led
them deeper into the woods. He clutched a compass in his right hand
and a laminated map in the other, a look of intense concentration
on his face. He didn’t look pleased to be dragging them through the
woods, but Ethan looked like he couldn’t care less. After nearly
ten hours of walking nonstop, Kimberly was at that point
herself.

Though the soldier hadn’t told them much
about himself, he had given them a few basics. Very few. His name
was Chris Meiner, and he was nineteen years old. He’d enlisted in
the military at the beginning of the second semester of his senior
year of high school, mere weeks before Michaluk had broken out of
containment and started its spread. He wouldn’t tell them anything
past that, keeping everything close to his chest, like he were
afraid to give them too much information about himself. Not that
Kimberly could blame him for that. If someone had grabbed her and
forced her to do his bidding at gunpoint, she wouldn’t be too eager
to tell him much about herself either.

Chris led the way, and Ethan walked alongside
him to make sure he didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.
This left Kimberly to trudge along behind them, tripping over
underbrush and trying to keep her lungs inflating and deflating
properly. Before their little apocalypse, she’d always bemoaned her
lack of being “in shape,” and she’d constantly try out new
exercises, the latest fads that said, “
This
is how you stay
slim and keep your weight down.” They would inevitably only last a
week or two before she’d go back to her old ways of vegging out on
the couch and watching bad sitcoms on her off days. These past
couple of years, she’d been in the best shape she’d ever been in in
her life, out of necessity, but that didn’t say much for her
ability or lack thereof to hike over unfamiliar terrain through the
woods with anything resembling grace.

She’d just muttered her fifth swear in a
two-minute span, prompted by her shoulder-length blonde hair
snagging on a low-hanging branch again, when Ethan said to Chris,
“Keep walking. I’ve got my eyes on you.” He dropped back to walk
with her, taking one of her backpacks off her shoulder wordlessly
and adding it to his own.

“You doing okay?” he asked.

Kimberly couldn’t stop the dirty look she
gave him as she stumbled over another fallen branch. “Ask me that
again
after
we’ve had dinner and some sleep.”

“That bad, huh?” he asked.

“You could say that. Why exactly are we going
cross-country through the woods instead of heading back to a road
anyway?”

“Because
he
,” Ethan beckoned to Chris,
“claims there’s a highway about two miles further ahead. He’s
trying to get us to it so we can look for a vehicle.”

“Thank God,” she said. “My legs are killing
me.” Ethan plucked a leaf out of her hair, and she dropped her
voice so Chris couldn’t hear her. “How do we know he’s not walking
us right into a trap for his buddies to pick off?”

“Because he won’t,” Ethan said. “He wants to
live as badly as we do, and he’s not going to walk into his own
execution just so his friends can bag themselves two more
people.”

“You sound awfully certain about that,”
Kimberly commented. Chris paused to examine his map by light of a
small flashlight.

“That’s because I am,” Ethan said. “I was a
cop, remember? I learned how to read people. This kid is just
that—a kid. He’s not a seasoned military guy like Brandt. Sure,
he’s got training, but he’s probably not battle-hardened like
Brandt or even Dominic. He won’t put himself at an unnecessary risk
because he doesn’t want to die.”

“That brings me to my other question,”
Kimberly said. “Why were they shooting at us? You’d think they’d
have been glad to see survivors, but the first thing they tried to
do was kill us. Why?”

“Because you’re infected,” Chris spoke up. He
glanced back at them before returning his focus to the path
ahead.

“Where did you get a damn fool idea like
that?” Kimberly asked, a flush of anger heating her cheeks. Ethan
watched the exchange impassively, though his eyes were alight with
interest. “Do we
look
like we’re infected to you?”

“Major Bradford said that everyone in the
former southeastern sector of the United States is infected,” Chris
replied in a know-it-all tone that made Kimberly want to smack
him.

“You ever seen one of the infected that could
talk?” Kimberly asked. “I’ve spent the past two years fighting and
killing the things, and I’ve yet to find one that uttered a single
word to me, even when I was cutting its head off.” She was grateful
that Ethan was wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt. She didn’t think the
scars that covered his arms from his attack in Atlanta would lend
her argument any support.

“The ones that talk are carriers,” Chris shot
back.

Kimberly looked at him incredulously. “You
can’t
possibly
be serious.”

“I don’t think Kim is asking the right
questions,” Ethan said before she could continue questioning
Chris’s intelligence, not out loud, at least. “I have a few of my
own, not least of which is why you talk like this is all confined
to the southeastern U.S.” He paused, and a note of uncertainty had
crept into his voice when he asked, “It did go worldwide,
right?”

Chris’s face dawned with realization, and his
expression became overwhelmingly pitying. It made Kimberly want to
punch him. She held her fist in check as he said, almost
delicately, “No, not exactly.”

“What the hell does that mean, ‘not
exactly’?” Kimberly demanded. She realized she was clenching her
fists only when Ethan’s long fingers wrapped around her right wrist
and gently squeezed. She forced her fingers to relax and loosen,
enough so that Ethan was able to slip his fingers between hers.
They stood that way, clinging to each other like they were the
other’s lifelines while they waited for Chris to answer the
question. When he did, Kimberly got lightheaded and her blood
pressure skyrocketed.

Chris looked like he felt a little sick at
being the one to tell them his news. He chose his words with the
utmost care, hesitating again before saying, “When the virus broke
out…well, things weren’t good. They tried to quarantine the CDC,
then the Emory University campus, then downtown Atlanta, and then
the entire state of Georgia. When it looked like the Georgia
quarantine was going to fail, the military and the Army Corps of
Engineers drew up maps and plans and mobilized, and every single
person who could get to the location who could do heavy lifting
came out and built the Wall.”

“The Wall?” Kimberly repeated, tasting the
words on her tongue, measuring the distinctiveness of the
capitalized “W” that had been evident in Chris’s voice.

“Yeah, the Wall,” Chris said. “It’s this
massive thing, runs for hundreds and hundreds of miles, from the
coast all the way across to the Mississippi River and then south to
the Gulf of Mexico. They built a temporary wall around all of it,
just some mobile units that were used in Operation Iraqi Freedom
and other places, and then they built up the Wall right behind it.
No one goes in, not unless they’re in MOPP4 suits, and unless you
have clearance to do so and your suit hasn’t been compromised, no
one goes out of here.”

“So, what, they’ve abandoned us?” Ethan
asked. His voice was low enough that the wind rustling through the
trees almost drowned it out. “They decided to hell with us and let
us rot?”

“Not exactly,” Chris said.

Kimberly made an exasperated noise. “There he
goes again with the ‘not exactly.’” Ethan squeezed her hand in
his.

Chris looked away from her, staring down at
the forest floor with a chagrined look on his face. “Look, we’ve
got a presidential campaign going on right now,” he said, his upper
lip curling like he realized how terrible that sounded. “The
Republican and Democratic candidates are tearing each other up over
what to do about the southeast, and the dumbass who’s in the White
House right now thought it’d be a good idea to try to make himself
look tough and in charge so he can get re-elected easier.”

“So he decided to send you guys in to check
things out?” Kimberly asked.

“No, he decided to send us in to
wipe
things out,” Chris said. “He sent in crews to do clean up on the
highways and interstates to make way for any ground troops that are
going to come through. They’ve got drones doing gridded flyovers of
the area to pinpoint settlements of survivors, and they’re sending
in helicopters and more drones and fighter jets with ordnance to
bomb whatever they find. They told us that everyone on this side of
the Wall that has been exposed is subject to extermination, and
everyone we come across is to be shot on sight.”

“Oh dear God, you’re kidding me,” Kimberly
murmured.

“Look, I don’t like doing it, okay?” Chris
said. “I think it’s a terrible order, and I’m not the only one.
There are a lot of us who think we should be airlifting survivors
out of here and taking them to the other side of the Wall. Without
new fuel for the virus’s fire, it’d die out after a while, and then
we could look into making the place habitable again. We’ve already
taken back Louisiana doing it that way. We walled it off on its own
with the portable walls, and we kept shifting them inward until
we’d killed everything infected we could find. That was early on,
and the monetary costs were high, even though we didn’t lose many
soldiers doing it, so the politicians sitting pretty in Washington
keeping their hands clean don’t think it’s worth the money to try
to save whoever happens to be left on this side of the Wall. You’re
all
expendable
.” He spat the last word out, as if it tasted
foul.

“What about the rest of the U.S.?” Kimberly
asked. “The outbreak spread fast here. How could you keep it
contained here?”

“We didn’t, not at first,” Chris said. “There
were some isolated outbreaks around major airports. We were
prepared for them that time, and we managed to quarantine and clean
it up. The entire air industry is shut down, per the FAA. There
hasn’t been a plane in the sky since the outbreak started, save for
military flights. No air travel is allowed for civilians, and
travel by car is strictly limited. People are constantly being
tested for signs of the virus, and they’re required to report in to
the special clinics at least once a week for testing. They’re
working toward creating a way to test every day, but they haven’t
figured that out yet. They’re doing this all in the name of
preventing another outbreak.” Chris’s upper lip curled again. “To
say personal liberties and freedoms have been limited in the past
two years is probably the understatement of the decade.”