The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (29 page)

“So you’re saying they’ve abandoned us?” Remy
asked, her voice rising in both pitch and volume as the realization
dawned on her.

“Yeah, I’m saying they abandoned us,” Dominic
confirmed.

Watching Remy’s face as he told her this was
a horrible thing. Her expression had been one of confusion at
first, as she had tried to puzzle out why he’d stopped the truck
and why he’d reacted the way he had to what had lain ahead. As the
realization hit her, the confusion leeched out of her face like
water running down glass, and her skin paled to a grayish cast. She
swallowed, repeatedly and compulsively, her dark eyes wide. Then
her face flushed red in an instant, and she visibly shook with her
anger.

“Those sons of bitches
abandoned
us!”
she snarled, her tone sounding like she was ready to draw the bolo
knife sheathed at her hip and start gutting everything nearby that
moved. “How
dare
they?” Her hands curled into fists, and
Dominic took a reflexive step back. “Are we not worth saving
too?”

“Remy, they have protocols they’re required
to foll—” Dominic started to say, but she interrupted him with a
howl of rage.

“Does it look like I give a shit about their
stupid-ass protocols?” she screeched. “We’re citizens of this
fucking country too! What the hell makes us second class just
because we live in the wrong part of the country? It’s not our
fault all this has happened, so why are we being punished for
it?”

“I don’t know,” Dominic stated. He looked at
Cade. She wasn’t looking back at him; she was staring at Remy with
an expression of concern on her face.

Remy sobered, her face relaxing and her
stance calming. She didn’t say anything further; she fell silent
and waited for one of them to speak. There was another bout of
uneasy silence, and then Cade spoke.

“What do you propose we do?” she asked, and
it took Dominic a second to realize she was addressing him. Since
when had
he
become the leader of this group?

“Why don’t we do what I suggested in the back
of the truck?” Sadie asked, stepping up to insert herself more
fully into the conversation.

“What did you suggest in the back of the
truck?” Dominic asked.

“An emissary,” Sadie said. “I suggested that
we send one of us into whatever facility we found, white-flagging
it, and see if they would talk to us.” She looked past him at the
wall that loomed in the distance. “Though I wasn’t quite expecting
something like
this
when I suggested it.”

Dominic studied the length of wall that he
could see from where he stood. If he squinted, he thought he could
make out the sight of a few figures walking along the top of the
wall, which, combined with the sight of the helicopters that had
gone to the other side of the wall, suggested there was some sort
of base of operations there. Assuming the soldiers there weren’t
operating on shoot-on-sight orders, Sadie’s idea might actually
have been a good one. If someone was going to do it, however, it
was going to be him. There were too many variables at play, and
when he didn’t know what the other side was playing with, he didn’t
want to ask someone else to put themselves at risk of getting shot
because he’d asked them to play emissary.

“I’ll do it,” he said, hopefully in a tone
that brooked no argument from the others. “I’ll be the
emissary.”

Somehow,
Brandt had remained calm and collected in the intervening time
between when Lindsey had made her plans and when she’d carried them
out. He’d spent his time sitting on the bare cot in his cell or
pacing to keep his muscles warmed up, doing push-ups to limber up
his shoulders and arms. He’d accepted the first meal after her
visit—another sandwich and an orange—with as much calmness as he
could, eating every bite on the tray until only orange peels
remained.

The action didn’t happen until it was time
for the second meal to be delivered. Brandt had waited patiently
for the two privates to arrive with his tray of dinner, counting
off the seconds. When he heard the distinct thud of two sets of
boots coming down the tiled hallway beyond his door, he sat up
straighter on the edge of the cot, ready to leap into action the
second the door opened.

The key scraped in the lock. The lock
clicked, and the door swung open. Private Bayer stepped into the
room, a tray of food grasped in both hands. Beyond him, waiting
impatiently in the hallway, was Private Hutcherson. Neither of them
looked happy to be there, and both of them looked distracted. Bayer
had his head turned to look at Hutcherson instead of at Brandt, in
the middle of saying something. The setup couldn’t have been more
perfect if Brandt had staged it.

He lunged from his spot on the edge of his
cot and went at Bayer, his fist swinging up and slamming into the
man’s chest with a blow hard enough to send Bayer staggering
backwards. A swift uppercut sent the private sprawling,
unconscious, onto the floor.

Brandt caught the dinner tray that had
started to fall from Bayer’s hands, and when Hutcherson opened his
mouth to let out a yell of alarm, he threw the tray like a Frisbee,
rushing toward him. The edge of the tray caught Hutcherson in the
throat, and he fell back against the wall, sputtering and gasping
for air. The tray clattered to the floor as Brandt rushed out of
the room and grabbed Hutcherson by the sides of his face. He
thumped the man’s head back against the concrete wall hard enough
to render him unconscious.

Once Hutcherson slipped to the floor, Brandt
looked in either direction down the hall, ascertaining that no one
was visible, then grabbed Hutcherson under his arms and started to
drag him into his cell. He froze at the sound of hurried footsteps,
but his tensed shoulders relaxed when he recognized the
now-familiar form of Lindsey coming around the hallway corner
toward him.

She rushed towards him. “Holy shit, what did
you do?” she hissed. Despite her astonishment, she grabbed one of
Hutcherson’s wrists and helped him drag the man’s unconscious body
into the cell, out of sight of anyone that might come walking down
the hallway.

“I told you I’d take care of the guards,
didn’t I?” Brandt said. He hauled the man against the side of the
cot and pulled Bayer in the rest of the way. A search of their
belts revealed two pairs of handcuffs, so he made short work of
securing them to the metal cot bolted to the wall.

“You didn’t have to kill them, did you?”

“They’re not dead,” Brandt argued. “They’re
unconscious.” He ducked into the hall long enough to scoop up the
tray and the fallen food—another sandwich; why was he not
surprised?—and dumped it onto the floor inside the door so nothing
would look out of the ordinary. “Please tell me you have a plan to
get me out of here.”

“I have a plan to get you out of here,” she
confirmed, and a wave of relief washed over Brandt.

“Thank God,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”

“Not so fast,” she said, snagging his arm to
stop him from leaving the room. “Wait.”

“Wait?” Brandt repeated. “Wait for
what
?”

“For my help to arrive,” Lindsey said. The
faint sound of something squeaking on the floor permeated the room.
Seconds later, a man Brandt had never seen before rolled a
stretcher into the room, upon which was folded the slouched,
crumpled form of a body bag.

“Who is this?” Brandt demanded, looking the
man over warily.

“This is Jacob Howser,” Lindsey said. “He’s
my coworker in the lab. Trust me, he’s here to help.” She grabbed
the body bag off the stretcher, and she and Jacob expertly lowered
the stretcher to a manageable level. After spreading the body bag
onto the cot’s thin, hard mattress, she unzipped it and motioned
towards it. “Get in.”

“You have
got
to be kidding me,”
Brandt said.

“No, I’m not,” Lindsey said. “If you want to
get out of the facility undetected, you
will
get in this
body bag. You can either do that or rot here.”

“You wouldn’t leave me here,” Brandt
challenged.

“You’re right, I wouldn’t,” Lindsey replied.
“But I don’t feel up to getting shot for treason or whatever
charges they feel like throwing around today, so please get in the
body bag and help us get you out of here with minimal danger.” She
waggled the edge of the bag and added, “It’s a new bag. Never been
used.”

Brandt sighed exasperatedly and moved to the
stretcher. Lindsey unzipped the bag, and he climbed onto the
stretcher, sliding into the bag simultaneously. Lindsey gave him a
perky grin that reminded him of the same mischievous expressions
that Cade often gave him when she was up to no good. She pushed his
head down to the stretcher and zipped the body bag closed.

“Whatever you do, stay perfectly still,” she
said.

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Brandt
replied. “That makes me want to squirm.”

“You better not, because the military is
obligated to fill any dead bodies moving around here full of
holes,” Jacob warned. “Regardless of whether or not they’re in a
body bag.”

“Got it,” Brandt said. He drew in a deep
breath and closed his eyes, forcing himself to relax, his muscles
going limp.
Dead body, dead body,
he chanted mentally,
breathing shallowly so the body bag would move as little as
possible. The stretcher started moving, rolling out of the door and
into the hallway.

“You have your keys and wallet, right?”
Jacob’s voice filtered through the bag over the squeak of the
stretcher’s wheels.

“Of course,” Lindsey replied. “They’re in my
lab coat. Did
you
get your friend to disable the cameras in
and around the incinerator?”

It took everything in Brandt to not say
anything at the mention of an incinerator. He refrained, and he
focused on his jail breakers’ voices.

“Yeah, I got it taken care of,” Jacob
said.

“You didn’t tell him
why
, did you?”
Lindsey sounded alarmed at the idea. “The more people we bring into
this, the higher the chances someone will talk!”

“I didn’t tell him why,” Jacob replied. “I
implied that it involved me and you and slipped him two hundred
bucks under the table. I let him assume whatever he wanted, and he
promised he’d cut the cameras.”

“What if he doesn’t cut them?” Lindsey
asked.

“Then I guess we’re about to get busted.”

“You’re
so
reassuring,” Lindsey
muttered. Her words were followed by several beeps and the
distinctive swish of a card sliding through a card reader. There
was a clunk as a door was pushed open, and two hard thumps, then
the stretcher was steered out into the great outdoors. Brandt could
hear the whump of helicopter rotors in the distance, alongside the
distinct sound of Humvees’ engines roaring. The stretcher bumped
over rough, rocky pavement, presumably toward the incinerator, and
Brandt wondered what time of day it was. He guessed that it was
sometime late in the evening. Under all the noise, he could hear
the faint, rhythmic undertone of crickets chirping away.

“Get the door open, would you?” Lindsey
asked, followed by the distinctive sound of another door being
opened. There were a couple more thumps, the stretcher was rolled
into another building, and the door banged shut behind them.

The ambient temperature beyond the body bag
skyrocketed, and Brandt broke out in a sweat. Even though he had
agreed to lay as still as possible, he took in a sharp, deep breath
of air at the suddenness of the heat. The stretcher dropped without
warning, and despite his promise to the contrary, he instinctively
flailed out, trying to find something to grab onto.

“Thank God there are no soldiers around,”
Lindsey said. “That would have gotten us shot for sure.” The body
bag’s zipper ground open, and she peeled it back to smile down at
him. “We’re safe, for the moment, at least.”

Brandt sat up, shoving the bag’s flaps aside
and scrambling to get off the stretcher. “Jesus, woman, it’s
practically the temperature of Hell in here,” he said. Sweat was
beading up on his forehead. “Where the fuck are we?”

“Incinerator building,” Lindsey replied. She
stepped away from him and went to the corner of the room, where a
black trash bag waited. She tore it open. “It’s where we come to
destroy samples and biohazardous materials.”

“Test subjects, too,” Jacob said cheerfully.
“And according to our paperwork, you’re test subject number
eighty-two, recently deceased, officially incinerated as of…” He
checked his watch. “Seven fifty-eight p.m.”

Lindsey emptied the trash bag onto the
stretcher, revealing a bundle of clothing and a pair of boots. “I
got your sizes off the clothes you came in with,” she explained.
“Those were, incidentally, also incinerated in here.” She nudged
the pile. “Get dressed.”

Brandt stripped off the scrubs shirt he was
wearing and tossed it on the floor, then grabbed the black t-shirt
she’d supplied him. “What’s the plan once we’re out of here?” he
asked.

“At this point, you two are on your own,”
Jacob said. “I’ve done everything I can do up to here.”

“But—” Lindsey started to protest.

“But nothing,” Jacob replied. “If we’re both
gone from the lab, someone is bound to notice. One of us has to
stay behind, and I vote that it be me.”

“Why you?”

“Because if they interrogate me, it’ll be
easier for me to hold out on giving them any information.”

Lindsey’s eyebrow arched, and she looked like
she was ready to protest again. Brandt rolled his eyes and shucked
his pants off to change into the jeans that Lindsey had brought
him. “Lindsey, to be honest, I’d rather go with you than him,” he
told her. “By all accounts, you’re my sister in law, and I think
it’d be better if family stuck together.”