The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (15 page)

“Wait, back up,” Kimberly said. “Testing?
They have a way to
test
for the virus?”

“Yeah, just takes a drop of blood on a slide
and a few minutes for the lab techs to work whatever magic it is
they do to test for it,” Chris explained.

“Son of a bitch,” Kimberly muttered. “Do you
know how
badly
we could use something like that here? We’ve
had so many instances—at least, when we were in the Westin, where
we had to isolate people because we weren’t sure if they were lying
about being infected.” She motioned toward Ethan without thinking,
“Hell, after
he
—” She cut herself off and looked away,
shaking her head.

“What about him?” Chris asked, and his eyes
took on a cast of suspicion. “Are you infected?”

“That’s none of your—” Kimberly said.

“Get moving, Meiner,” Ethan ordered. “We
don’t have all night.”

“Not until you tell me what she’s talking
about,” Chris snapped back.

Ethan’s eyes narrowed, and he lifted his
Glock, pointing it right at Chris’s face. “I
said
, get
moving.”

Chris hesitated, and Ethan jabbed the gun in
his direction, snapping, “
Now.
” With a shake of his head,
Chris consulted his map and his compass and turned his back to
Ethan, heading off through the trees again. Once he was moving,
Ethan started to follow, lowering the pistol and tugging Kimberly
along with him.

“Don’t discuss that again,” he told her.
“Especially not around people like him. Not unless you want to end
up dead, because he doesn’t seem like the type to be willing to
talk things through.”

Kimberly clutched Ethan’s hand tighter. The
soldier walked ahead of them and she hoped, once again, that Ethan
was right and the man wasn’t leading them to their deaths.

A search of
the vehicles in their immediate vicinity for useful, portable
supplies hadn’t taken long, and now they waited, lurking in the
shadows of the concrete barricade, for the morning sun to rise and
light their way. Remy crouched on the roof of a car, her eyes
constantly scanning and examining their surroundings for any
infected. They wouldn’t hurt
her,
she knew, though the
thought still gave her the creeps, but that didn’t mean the others
weren’t in danger. And while she didn’t truly give a shit about
most of them, she refused to allow anything to happen to Cade and
Dominic.

As the man’s name crossed her mind, a little
flutter of
something
stirred in her chest. Remy sucked a
slight breath in and pressed her fingers against her left
collarbone.
What was
that
?
she wondered as the
flutter quelled itself, only to return when she glanced to her
right at Dominic, who stood nearby, looking over a map and
consulting with Cade and Keith. Was this what she thought it was?
That dreaded “L” word? No, it couldn’t be, especially not over
him
. After all they’d been through, the opposite sides
they’d fought on, even if for a short period of time, she couldn’t
possibly
be in love with Dominic Jackson. It didn’t feel
like what she’d felt for Ethan, not in the slightest.

No, what stirred in her chest whenever she
thought about or looked at Dominic made her feel more
alive
than that.

Maybe because what you felt for Ethan
wasn’t really love,
a wicked voice taunted in the back of her
head.

Remy scowled and shifted on the car’s roof,
sitting down on her backside and tucking her legs underneath
her.

Don’t be ridiculous,
she mentally
snapped at the mean little voice in her head. How could what she’d
had with Ethan been anything
but
love? How many times had
they made love in that safe house in Maplesville? How often had
they just laid there, fully dressed, enjoying the other’s company
and talking, sharing their deepest wishes and darkest fears? How
often had she confessed her worst deeds to him, telling him stories
about her life before the outbreak, her misdeeds and run-ins with
the New Orleans Police Department? If she hadn’t cared for him,
she’d have never gone to his room for the first time on the night
after her twenty-first birthday.

Caring for a person isn’t the same as
being in love with them,
that wicked voice in her head said,
laughing.

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Remy muttered out
loud. She dug her fingers into the knee of her jeans.

“Everything okay?” a voice to her left asked.
Remy tore her gaze away from the middle distance she’d been staring
into and onto the figure alongside the car she sat on. It was
Sadie, and she was looking up at her with a confused look on her
face. “I thought you said something.”

“I was talking to myself,” Remy said.
“Nothing to worry about.”

“I don’t know about that,” Sadie commented.
“We’re in
Atlanta
. I think there’s plenty of stuff to be
worried about.”

“I’m not worried,” Remy said. “I’ve been in
Atlanta before. Twice. And I came out alive both times.”

“Not unscathed though,” Dominic said from her
other side. She twisted to see him approaching the vehicle she was
perched on. Her heart skipped another beat.
Fucking traitor
heart
. “Atlanta has a way of damaging people,” he continued,
“and I freely admit I’m one of them. So was Alicia. And so, I
suspect, are you, Brandt, Cade, and Keith. It makes you do things
you never dreamed you were capable of or willing to do.”

“Yeah, right,” Remy muttered.

“Yeah, I’m right,” Dominic shot back. “You
think Alicia set out with the intention to be a domineering,
dictator-like bitch? No, she didn’t. She set out with the best of
intentions, wanting to get as many people as she could together
because she saw a situation where there was safety in numbers and
she had the appropriate skills to help protect those people. I went
with her and agreed to help her because I thought the same.”

“But you got out,” Remy said.

“You think I didn’t do bad shit when I was in
it?” Dominic shook his head. “If you even knew…” He looked away
from her. “So. We have a plan.” He shook out the map he held and
spread it out on the hood of the car. As if that were the signal,
everyone gathered around the vehicle, and Remy’s introspective
moment was broken up by the presence of
people
. “We’re on
Ralph David Abernathy Freeway, otherwise known as I-20,” he
announced, pointing the freeway out to the others. “I know we said
we would avoid the interstates, but we didn’t have a lot of choice
getting here. I didn’t know this side of Atlanta well enough to get
us here without getting on I-20, which we did about an hour ago.”
He motioned off into the distance. “Technically, we’re in East
Atlanta. Glenwood Avenue is that way, though I don’t think that
means anything to any of you who’ve never been here or aren’t
familiar with the city. It barely means anything to
me
.”

“Why are you telling us this?” Remy asked
impatiently.

“In case you need to know it, that’s why,”
Dominic said. “We might get separated, and you’ll need to know
which way we’re traveling so you’ll be able to catch up with us.”
He cleared his throat and consulted the map again. “Cade, Keith,
and I debated the merits of getting off the freeway and taking side
streets or following Abernathy into the city. We chose the former
option, if only because of the risk of infected hiding between the
cars in the freeway congestion. We’ll take Glenwood through Grant
Park to Cherokee. Then take Cherokee north to Memorial Drive,
follow it to Hill, and go left onto Decatur. Decatur will take you
into Marietta, and then stay on Marietta until you run into
Centennial Olympic Park Drive. Go right on Centennial and follow it
around to the corner of Centennial and Luckie. The Tabernacle
should be on the corner of those two streets. Large brick building,
stained glass windows, you can’t miss it.”

“How long will it take for us to get there?”
Sadie asked.

“It’s a little over four miles. Maybe an hour
and a half, barring any trouble on the way.”

“Sounds too easy,” Remy commented. “What’s
the catch?”

“We’ll be traveling in the vicinity of
several tourist attractions, which means we’ll be potentially
walking through a hell of a lot of infected,” Keith spoke up. “To
say it won’t be an easy trip is probably an understatement.”

“Nothing worth fighting for is ever easy,”
Cade remarked.

“Well put,” Keith said.

Dominic continued like neither of them had
spoken. “What do you say we get our shit together and get moving?”
He folded the map and tucked it into his back pocket. While the
others started gathering their bags and preparing for the four-mile
walk ahead of them, Dominic leaned against the car Remy was perched
on. “Hey, you mind walking with me once we get going?” he
asked.

That obnoxious little flutter in her chest
stirred up again, and Remy almost told him no, just to be contrary.
She could walk with Cade and maybe, in the process, avoid whatever
Dominic might be inspired to talk to her about during the journey.
But that nagging voice piped up again, pushing her in a whole
different direction.
What will it hurt?
the voice asked.
It’s just Dominic. Maybe he’ll say or do something that will get
rid of that nasty feeling in your chest, and then you can slap the
shit out of him for it.

Yeah, that sounded like a perfectly workable
plan to her.

She slid down the windshield and hopped off
the hood to the ground, dusting her pants off and giving him a
casual, nonchalant shrug. “Sure, but if we run into anything nasty,
I get to take the lead.”

“Fair enough,” Dominic agreed.

Much to Remy’s surprise, once they’d gotten
off the freeway and onto Glenwood Avenue, Dominic barely spoke a
word. None of them did. They walked in silence, save for the
occasional murmured question or comment about their
surroundings.

Glenwood Avenue hadn’t escaped the ravages of
the contagion, not by far. The road was jam packed with vehicles of
all types, motorcycles, sedans, and transfer trucks. Considering
the road’s vicinity to the freeway, Remy figured they’d either
tried to get on the freeway in their mad dash for safety, or they’d
gotten off the freeway trying to get around the roadblocks. Some of
the cars’ doors stood open, like their previous occupants hadn’t
bothered to close them when they’d fled their vehicles, and
frequently, Remy and her companions had to stop and ease doors
closed to clear the narrow paths between the rows of vehicles.

Dominic stayed behind her on their journey
down their chosen row of vehicles, and the one time she’d glanced
at him, wondering why he hadn’t spoken to her like she’d expected,
she saw that he had his weapons drawn, a pistol in one hand and a
machete in the other, his dark eyes scanning their
surroundings.

The group was approaching Cherokee Avenue
when Sadie broke the silence. She cleared her throat and called
out, “Hey, guys? Jude thinks he saw something.”

“Something like what?” Remy asked. “I see a
lot of somethings.”

“Something important, obviously, or I
wouldn’t bring it up,” Sadie shot back. “He’s not sure what it was,
just that it was slinking through the trees over there.” She
pointed to a grove of overgrown trees and bushes off to the
right.

“Slinking?” Dominic repeated. “What does he
mean by slinking?”

There was something in Dominic’s voice that
alarmed Remy, though she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.
Jude was signing frantically to his sister, his hands flying and
his eyes wide. He kept glancing back in the direction he claimed to
have seen something moving.

Sadie said, “Stalking. That’s the word he’s
trying to use. Something is stalking us.”

“Infected?” Cade questioned.

Sadie shook her head. “Not a person,” she
said. “Something the size of a large dog. Maybe bigger.”

Dominic looked more worried at that, if that
were possible. “Four legs or two?”

Sadie conferred with Jude and reported,
“Four.”

“What could it be?” Remy asked, her
imagination running wild. Her brain shuffled through every
four-legged animal it could think of in rapid succession. Before it
would settle on any one option, Keith spoke up, his voice
shaking.

“I know what it is,” he said, pointing in the
direction they’d been walking. Fifty yards ahead of them, in one of
the rare clearings in the mess of vehicles, stood a massive male
lion, its huge mane framing its face. It stared down the road at
them, so still that, for the barest of seconds, Remy thought she
was looking at a statue. Then it shifted its weight, its muscles
rippling under its tawny fur.

“Oh
fuck,
” Remy breathed, her brain
scrambling to dredge up everything it had learned about lions from
watching
Animal Planet
. The first thing that surfaced was
how male lions never did the hunting, the females did. The males
relaxed and waited for the females to bring home the bacon. She
drew her Sig Sauer from its holster, gripping it in her right hand
and her bolo knife in her left, wondering how much damage either
weapon could do against what they were facing.

“Keep eyes all around us,” she said. “If the
male is here, females might not be too far away.”

No sooner had the words left her mouth than
one of the feared female lions sprang from a nearby row of cars and
launched itself right at Jude.

The lioness
had barely launched into the air when Sadie started moving. She
grabbed Jude by his shirt and shoved him to the pavement, letting
herself fall with him to land on her stomach beside him. The
lioness was unable to correct her trajectory in mid-flight, and she
slammed into the car alongside them. Her back claws snagged Sadie’s
backpack, tearing it open and spilling ammunition, food, and arrows
across the pavement.