The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (21 page)

The dead woman stumbled closer to her, her
hands grasping at Remy’s shirt like she was begging with her. She
looked into the dead eyes and imagined she saw horror and pleading
inside them. Seemingly of its own accord, Remy’s hand raised the
bolo knife and struck again, slicing the rest of the way through
the neck, severing the spinal cord. The now truly dead woman
collapsed to the pavement bonelessly, lying in a heap at Remy’s
feet, her head rolling to rest several feet away.

“Oh God,” Remy breathed. Her hand went slack,
and the knife tumbled from her grip to the pavement with a soft
clang. She staggered backwards, bumping into the dumpster and
sagging against it. She slid to the ground, balancing on the balls
of her feet, grasping her head with her hands. “Oh my God, what did
I do that for?” she asked out loud, her voice sounding stuffy to
her ears, like she was fighting to not cry. She sat up straight,
banging her head against the dumpster. “Why am I even upset about
this? It’s just a fucking infected woman.” She had an impulse to
stick her foot out and kick the body. Another impulse to not harm
the infected warred against it. She pressed the heels of her hands
to her eyes hard enough that she saw stars, and she blew out a slow
breath.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” She shook
her head, attempting to shuck the foreign thoughts from her mind.
This was so unlike her, to feel anything resembling
pity
for
the infected.

She tried to distract herself from those
thoughts and focused on her surroundings. She was supposed to be
watching out for Dominic and Sadie’s return, and instead, she was
out here having a meltdown. She scooped her bolo knife up from the
pavement, took a rag out of her back pocket, carefully cleaned the
blade, and returned it to its sheath. Taking a second to make sure
she still had all of her belongings, she chose one of the large
military trucks parked in the small parking lot alongside the
building and went to it, hopping up onto the step by the passenger
door and grasping for hand and footholds to climb up on top of it.
It was exhausting work at first, but as she scrambled onto the edge
of the opened passenger window’s frame, she felt herself getting
into the groove of climbing until she stood on the roof of the cab,
the cool mid-morning breeze ruffling her hair. She squinted into
the brightening sunlight, her dark eyes scanning the street for any
sign of her two remaining companions.

When there was no immediate sign of them,
Remy looked around the parking lot, taking a mental inventory of
what was there. There were at least three dozen military-style
vehicles, though she couldn’t have told anyone who asked what kind
they were. The only vehicles she recognized were the Humvees, and
there were eight of those, lined up in a neat row near the far edge
of the parking lot. There had been nine of them before, she
remembered. Brandt had taken one of them the year before, when he’d
evacuated her, Cade, and Gray out of Atlanta. It hadn’t been a
comfortable ride, and it wasn’t one she was eager to repeat.

She looked at the cargo-like truck she was
standing on top of and wondered what was in the canvas-covered
storage area. Probably a whole lot of nothing, considering the
Tabernacle’s proximity to the Westin. That had been one of the
number one complaints that Isaac and his crew had had regarding the
group of survivors that had lived in the Westin: they’d taken
everything—food, water, medicine, weapons, ammunition—and hoarded
it for themselves inside the towering hotel, leaving nothing for
the rest of the small enclaves of survivors inside the city’s
limits.

She lowered herself to her knees and crawled
toward the rear of the truck, staying on the metal cab since she
didn’t know how sturdy the canvas covering was. She reached behind
her, withdrew a hunting knife from the sheath on the back of her
belt, and stretched her arm out as far as she could reach. She
stabbed the blade into the canvas and dragged the knife toward her,
ripping a slice through the material and creating a gap she could
look through. She returned the knife to its sheath and grabbed her
flashlight, shining it into the darkness below.

To her surprise, Remy spotted several
unlabeled, dark green crates inside the truck, stacked against the
end closest to her. She had no way of knowing what was inside the
crates or why Alicia Day’s people had decided to leave them behind,
but the sight of them ate her up with curiosity. With one more
glance down the road to assess whether or not Sadie and Dominic
were returning, she grasped either side of the cut in the canvas
and pulled, tearing it open wider so she could climb inside. She
took a deep breath, grabbed one of the canvas canopy’s supports in
her left hand and the edge of the cab in her right, and lowered her
slim body through the tear into the gaping maw of the truck’s cargo
area.

The inside of the truck’s bed was faintly
pungent, and a shine of the flashlight around the interior revealed
why: there was the dead body of a soldier lying face down on the
floor of the truck a few feet away from the crates, so close that
Remy almost stepped on it. She cringed, sidestepping away from the
dead man for fear of disrespecting his corpse, and turned her
attention to the crates, wondering if the body was why Alicia’s
people had left this behind.

But no, a body wouldn’t be enough to deter
Alicia’s crew. They had been used to seeing bodies. Hell, they’d
been used to
making
dead bodies out of formerly live ones.
She moved the flashlight’s beam around, searching for booby traps
and other potential dangers. When she didn’t see anything, she
checked the body for anything useful, found a grenade, and stuffed
it in her backpack. She grasped the heavy black metal clasps on the
case and unfastened them, then lifted the lid.

“Holy shit!” Remy gasped as she saw what was
inside. If she wasn’t mistaken, she was looking at an entire case
full of C4 and all the detonators she’d need to make the plastic
explosives into bombs.

She almost abandoned the back of the truck
and went to get Cade. Almost.

Brandt wasn’t the only person who liked a
good explosion. Remy was rather fond of the spectacular sight, and
she was no stranger to creating ones for herself. She had, after
all, singlehandedly blown up an entire kitchen and killed the
infected inside of it the year before. She hadn’t admitted it then,
not even to herself, but the sight of the fireball going up, the
rush of air being sucked inward toward the fire and blowing out,
the debris flying into the air and littering the ground below…it
had given her more than just a little thrill. She could only
imagine what this haul would do.

She swung her backpack around and unzipped
it, shining her light inside to see how much room she had in it.
Not nearly enough to take as much as she wanted, so she started
pulling things she considered unnecessary out of her bag: mostly
clothes and food, since she didn’t think she needed either one. She
hadn’t felt the need to eat at all since she’d injected herself
with the fluid from Derek’s vial. Once she’d cleared enough space
in her backpack, she started grabbing the bricks of C4 and the
detonators, packing them into her backpack. When she was done with
that case, she shouldered the pack, making sure it wasn’t too
heavy, and shoved the case out of the way to see what was inside
the one below it.

That one was empty, though it wasn’t a big
deal. She had found plenty of fun stuff. She wasn’t about to look a
gift horse in the mouth.

She stepped over the body on the truck bed
and strode to the tailgate, hopped down from the truck, and started
toward Luckie Street, looking back at the Tabernacle only once as
she made her way past the row of cars alongside the edge of the
road to stand in the center of the street.

She was tempted, so very tempted, to bail. To
just take what she had on her and walk away and keep walking until
she got back to Louisiana. She was too far away from home. She
wanted to be on the familiar soil of her home, to stand in the
middle of Bourbon Street and smell the spilled alcohol and hear the
shouts of drunken revelers during Mardi Gras, to drink chicory
coffee and eat beignets at the Cafe du Monde, to breathe in deep
the earthy scent of the bayous that littered the entire state. None
of that existed anymore, she reminded herself. Well, except for the
bayous. Those would always exist, populated with snakes and
alligators and the odd bayou hermit that was probably, even now,
surviving as he’d always had out in the wilderness. She wanted to
crawl right into the bayou and build her own home there where no
one and nothing could find her.

She knew she couldn’t do that. Not because
she wanted to help Cade—the woman had done more than enough to piss
her off to tempt her into walking—but because she wanted to help
Brandt. It was impossible for her to forget what the man had done
for her earlier that year, when she and Gray had followed him into
Atlanta to rescue Cade from Alicia’s clutches. Though he hadn’t
been able to save Gray, he’d fought to protect her from Alicia and
her cronies, and she could never repay him for keeping her alive
when she’d been up to her eyeballs in more trouble than she’d
banked on.

She owed him. There was no other way around
it. She had to help Cade. Helping Cade meant helping Brandt, and
she
owed
him.

Remy’s problem with temptation was decided
for her. As she stood in the middle of Luckie Street, staring off
into the middle distance, someone shouted her name. It was a
familiar male voice, and her heart leaped. She looked around
frantically, searching for the source of the voice, and saw Dominic
coming towards her from the direction of Marietta, Sadie behind
him. She broke into a run, racing across the torn-up asphalt to him
and flinging her arms around him in a tight, exuberant hug.

“Oh my God, you made it!” she exclaimed. “I
was so worried that you…” She trailed off and shook her head. “No
matter. You’re back!” She took a step backwards to look him over
and frowned. He was dirtied and stained with blood, and his dark
skin was damp with sweat. Sadie didn’t look much better. Remy
regretted leaving her water bottles and extra food in the truck
where she’d found the explosives. “Are you okay?”

“As well as can be expected,” Dominic said.
“How do we get inside?”

“Follow me,” Remy replied. She turned on her
heel to lead the two of them to the dumpster. Sadie cut in front of
them, boosting herself up onto the dumpster, and Dominic followed,
turning to offer Remy a hand. Though she didn’t need it, she
accepted it anyway, letting him pull her onto the dumpster, and the
three of them slipped through the gate. After securing the
entrance, they went inside the building, and the door swung closed
behind them.

“
Because I’m
going to do my damnedest to break you out of here.
”

After Lindsey had made her dramatic
declaration and left his cell, Brandt had remained lying on his
back, staring at the blank ceiling, fighting off a rising sense of
hope. He had an ally, one coming from completely unexpected
quarters, and a song about small worlds kept ringing through his
head in an incessant loop as he contemplated the possibilities.
Small world indeed.
Who would have ever predicted that he’d
run into his sister-in-law, of all people, in a place like
this?

His brain sobered once again. He’d been going
through a mental loop over and over since he’d been shut away in
that cell, rising hope as the idea of getting out of there was
dangled tantalizingly in his grasp and crushing despair when the
reminder that Cade might not be alive anymore reasserted itself.
The never-ending slosh from one emotion to the other was giving him
a monster of a migraine.

He pushed himself to a sitting position and
scrubbed at his face with both hands, scowling when he felt the
stubble sprouting on his cheeks. He hadn’t shaved in several days
even before he’d been captured, and he could feel the beginnings of
a beard. He smelled pretty badly by now, too, and he wondered how
hard he’d have to beg to get a shower here. He was sure if they had
electricity, like the fluorescent lights above his head suggested,
then they had to have running water, even beyond the high-pressure
hose they’d taken to him when he’d first arrived. He wondered if
he’d be allowed to use a shower if he asked.

While Brandt stewed over this and debated
whether or not to ask, the sound of his cell door unlocking drew
his attention. He sat up straighter and scooted down the bed,
further away from the door. Private Bayer stepped inside, holding a
plastic tray loaded with food. Beyond the door, Brandt could see
Private Hutcherson standing guard in the hallway. Other than these
two, there didn’t appear to be anyone else guarding him. Bayer set
the tray down on the foot of the bed and left the room without
saying a word.

Brandt waited until the door swung shut with
a clang before he moved toward the tray. There was a turkey and
cheese sandwich on it, alongside an apple and a paper carton of
milk. It was the kind of lunch that would have been served at an
elementary school cafeteria, and he scowled again, realizing that
there were only enough calories on the tray to keep him at a
subsistence level. Despite that, he grabbed the sandwich and took a
bite, savoring the first taste of fresh bread and sliced turkey and
cheese—fucking
cheese
—that he’d had in quite some time. He
didn’t care that the turkey was salty, like it’d come from a
grocery store Oscar Meyer package, or that the cheese was obviously
“processed cheese product,” as the packages always said. It was
different from the fare he’d been eating over the past two years,
and that made it delicious.