The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (35 page)

The journey was a lot more awkward than she’d
expected it to be. The framework was relatively sturdy, but every
time she set her knee against one of the places where the bars
overlapped, she swore the ceiling sagged slightly. Whenever her
imagination kicked into gear and she pictured herself plunging
through the ceiling onto some unsuspecting soldier or lab
technician below, she prayed that her worst fears wouldn’t be
realized.

Kimberly hadn’t been shuffling her way
through the roofing for long when her eyes picked out a bright
light shining up from the darkness. She made her way toward it so
she could decide whether she needed to shift course.

It was some sort of vent, maybe an air
conditioning outflow grating that had been put there but hadn’t
been connected to anything. Kimberly eased her way to it, lurking
near the edge, bracing her hands in order to lean at the right
angle where she could see below without being seen. She found
herself looking down on what appeared to be some sort of
laboratory; it didn’t appear to have been used in quite some time.
The equipment on the counters was dusty, and there wasn’t anyone in
sight. She wondered why the light had been left on, but she figured
maybe all the lights in the facility were on all the time.
Regardless, she stayed where she was, examining what little she
could see of the room below, and debated whether to exit the
ceiling there or at a point further away from her cell. She looked
back in the general direction she’d come, staring into the
darkness, then looked beyond the light in front of her and searched
for another light source. She spotted one quite some distance off,
maybe twenty or thirty yards, and decided it was best to go to that
location and see what was there.

When she got there, she discovered that she
was looking down at another lab, this one more obviously well used
than the other. The steel countertops below were polished to a
mirror shine, and the instruments that were laid out on it were
equally clean. It was more brightly lit than the last lab she’d
peered down into, too, which made her suspect that she might have
been looking down at one of the primary labs in the facility.

There was movement below. Kimberly recoiled
reflexively, pulling back away from the grate and hoping she hadn’t
been spotted. When she was assured she hadn’t been, she eased
forward again, bracing her hands against the framework and
squinting at the lab below. A man had entered the lab, swathed in
the familiar biohazard suit, a clipboard in his hand. He walked
across the room before disappearing from view.

Kimberly scooted backward, easing toward the
direction the man had gone, hoping to hear anything he said. The
voices she heard were muffled, though, and it took a long moment
for her ears to focus enough to make out words. When she gathered
what was being said, her heart leaped into her chest and hope
flooded through her.

“Who are you?” the scientist asked, and it
took Kimberly a second to recognize the voice as Jacob Howser’s,
the same scientist that had visited her in her cell a couple of
hours before. His voice was severely muffled, both by the distance
and by the hood he was wearing. His confusion was obvious. “What
are you doing here? Nobody told me I had a new volunteer.”

“I’m not a
volunteer
,” a man replied,
his voice noticeably angry. Kimberly recognized whose voice it was,
and her eyes widened. Ethan.

“Then how the hell did you end up in one of
my cells?” Jacob asked.

“Your asshole soldier boys stuck me in here,”
Ethan snapped. “It’s not like I asked to be put in here. Where the
hell am I?”

“You’re at the Eden Facility, in the main
labs,” Jacob explained. “I’m Dr. Jacob Howser. I’m an
epidemiologist who’s been hired to help find a cure for the
Michaluk Virus, and I’m also in charge of the laboratory.”

“Fine, then let me out of here and take me to
my friends,” Ethan demanded.

“Why are you not already in the quarantine
cells with your friends?” Jacob asked.

“I guess I pissed off the wrong person.”

“You must have really done a fantastic job of
it to end up in the cell between these two guys,” Jacob said. “What
did you do?”

“I managed to get myself infected and then
vaccinated, and it actually worked,” Ethan said. “Apparently, your
Major Bradford seems to think that that’s unacceptable.”

“Major Bradford thinks everything is
unacceptable,” Jacob said. Kimberly heard him move around below,
and he added, “This file says you were bitten seven months
ago?”

“That’s right,” Ethan replied.

“How have you survived this long like this?”
Jacob asked. “Because these results Bradford sent over show you as
testing positive for the Michaluk Virus.”

Kimberly didn’t hear Ethan’s response; she
was busy making her way back to the grating she’d initially looked
through, hoping to catch a glimpse of the scientist below, maybe
even wiggle around enough to get a look at Ethan. She doubted she’d
be able to see him, but she had to try. She had to see for herself
exactly what condition he was in.

“I’ll be right back, okay?” she heard the
scientist saying as she crawled to the grating. “I want to see what
sort of information I can find out about why you were brought in
here.”

Jacob Howser came into view almost at the
same time Kimberly reached the grating again, and she saw him
exiting through the decontamination chambers that led out of the
lab into the office beyond. There was another grating just beyond
that looked like it might have been over the offices, so while
Jacob was decontaminating, Kimberly scrambled over to it, careful
to stay as quiet as possible so she didn’t draw his attention
upward.

The grate opened up where she thought it
would: right over one of the desks inside the office area. Both of
the desks were bare, though each had a telephone situated at the
upper right corner of the desk, and there was a desktop calendar
across one of them. Nothing identified anything in specific about
who typically occupied the desks.

Dr. Howser walked into the office, his hair
damp, dressed in black sweatpants and a white t-shirt. He went to
the desk without the calendar on it and unlocked a drawer, opening
it and taking out a cell phone. He turned it on and thumbed through
the menus, selecting a name in the screen and putting the phone to
his ear. After a moment, he hung up, then dialed another number.
When the person he called answered, he cleared his throat and
asked, “Why are you on your burner?” He paused, nodding slowly to
himself, then asked, “Did you two get out?” Another pause and then
he added, “Good, because I have a problem. I think I have another
one.” Another pause. “Major Bradford had him hauled to the labs.
He’s another one that’s asymptomatic but has a positive Michaluk
profile.”

Another pause, then he said, “A name? Ah…” He
flipped a few pages in the folder he’d set on his desk and
answered, “Ethan Bennett.”

Kimberly could practically hear a feminine
shriek on the other end of the man’s cell phone.

“You know this one too?” Jacob asked with a
heavy note of incredulity in his voice. “How many of your friends
are they going to be hauling in here?”

Kimberly frowned, wondering what the hell
Jacob was talking about—friends? Who was this person on the phone
that he was talking to? And this other friend he referenced, who
was he talking about?

“Look, I can’t get him out of here too,”
Jacob said. He’d dropped his voice, and Kimberly strained to hear
him as he added, “As soon as they realize the other one is missing,
and you’re not here, they’re going to play connect the dots, and it
doesn’t take a genius to figure out where those dots are going to
lead. You need to get back here. I need help with this. Stash him
somewhere safe and get back to work before someone realizes you’re
both gone.”

After listening to whatever the person on the
other end of the line had to say, Jacob hung up his cell phone,
turned it off, and returned it to the drawer in his desk. He looked
around the room, as if he were suspicious that someone was
listening to him, then left the office, heading for the doors that
led into the hallway.

Kimberly stayed still, counting off three
minutes in her head before she dared to make a move. She examined
the area below the tiles, deciding that the man’s desk would
probably be the best landing point she would have. She had to get
out of the ceiling and get to Ethan.

Kimberly grasped the tile alongside the
grate, wedging her fingernails into the narrow space between the
tile and the frame so she could pry it up. She levered it up and
stared down into the dizzying distance to the desk and the floor
below.

It was now or never.

She shoved the tile aside, double checked
that she wasn’t going to get busted by anyone the minute she
dropped down from the ceiling, and then slid her legs through the
gap. With another deep breath, she dropped out of the hole, hung by
her fingertips for, and then let go.

The drop was longer than she thought it’d be,
and she landed on the desk with a louder thud than she’d meant to.
Her right ankle turned when she landed, and she instinctively went
with it, falling sideways right off the desk and onto the hard tile
floor. Her breath rushed out of her lungs, and she barely managed
to keep her head from smacking the tile when she landed. Struggling
to get breath back in her lungs, she scrambled underneath the desk
in case someone had heard the commotion and was about to come into
the office to investigate.

Nobody showed up. Kimberly’s lungs steadied,
her breath returning to them until she felt more settled. Then she
crawled to the edge of the desk and peered around the corner of it,
searching to make sure no one was coming.

Once she was assured that her fall from the
ceiling hadn’t been heard, Kimberly turned her attention to getting
into the laboratory area and, hopefully, tracking down Ethan on the
other side of those doors.

The trip to
Lindsey’s apartment near the center of Eden was made in silence,
not a word spoken between her and her passenger as she steered her
sedan through the twilit city streets. Brandt stared out the window
alongside him with a look suggestive of ones she’d seen on
prisoners who’d just been released from jail. Relief at getting out
was there, along with envy at the apparent ease of the life they
all led. But what worried her the most was his pure, hard
anger.

The anger was filling up the car, oozing out
of Brandt’s pores to stain everything around him. His fists
alternately clenched and unclenched, and he glared with hatred at
everything moving by. It made Lindsey afraid that he was going to
come across the center console at her. However, he didn’t seem like
the type to hurt a woman, no matter how angry she made him. If he
were, her sister would never have married him.

Thoughts of her sister were enough to sink
her spirits again. Cade was still out there, somewhere on the wrong
side of the Wall. She was pregnant, possibly alone, surrounded by
creatures that wanted to kill her. She might even be dead by now.
That
thought made her chest hurt. Cade was all she had left;
her parents were gone, her brother was gone, and her daughter—

A sob surged from her chest and up her
throat, escaping her mouth before she could stop it. She tried to
choke it down, but it exploded out, shattering through the essence
of Brandt’s stew of anger to smack against the windshield and
reverberate throughout the car. She hunched over the steering
wheel, grinding her palms against its leather-covered surface, as
the gut-wrenching pain of grief tore through her.

“Lindsey?” Brandt’s voice queried through the
haze of her grief. A horn blared somewhere beyond her car, and she
instinctively jerked the wheel, getting the car out of the lane
she’d drifted into. “Lindsey, pull over,” Brandt said, and
something in his tone of voice was enough to cut through to her
logic and reason. She steered the car to the side of the road. The
wheels on the passenger side ground against the curb, and she
fumbled at the gearshift, trying to shove it into park. Brandt did
it for her, and then his arms wrapped around her in a crushing hug,
practically squeezing the life out of her. She accepted his
too-tight embrace without complaint, burying her face against his
shoulder and sobbing out everything that had been trapped inside
her since he’d confirmed her daughter’s death.

When she came back to herself, Lindsey was
surprised to discover that only five minutes had passed since she’d
broken down. It had felt like an eternity that she’d sat there,
crying into Brandt’s arms, the gearshift digging painfully into her
side. Brandt’s hand was rubbing soothing circles against her back,
and when she pulled away from him to mop her face with her sleeve,
she could read the worry in his eyes.

“I’m okay,” Lindsey tried to assure him. The
worry in his eyes turned to doubt.

“No, you’re not,” Brandt contradicted,
shaking his head. “You’re a hot mess. I’m not sure that you should
be behind the wheel. Let me drive.”

“You don’t know where you’re going,” Lindsey
protested. Her voice sounded rough, tired, and weak. She grimaced
and wiped at her face again.

“You can give me directions,” Brandt said.
“Come on, swap off. You’re in no condition to drive.”

Lindsey sighed, wanting to argue but at the
same time not feeling up to it. It would all end the same way
anyway, with him behind the wheel and her in the passenger seat.
“Fine,” she muttered. She unbuckled her seatbelt and got out of the
car, and they made quick work of the switch then got on the road
again.

Her brain still fuzzy with grief, Lindsey
collapsed into the passenger seat, sagging back against the leather
with the bonelessness reserved for the terminally exhausted. It
took everything in her to not slip into sleep. Brandt needed her to
give him directions. She couldn’t do that if she was
unconscious.