The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (7 page)

“Damn it, Jude,” she muttered. She set the
rifle onto the shingles beside her and returned her gaze to the
ground. “What the hell are you doing?” Another figure climbed out
of the back of the ambulance. It took her a second to recognize
Keith, and she grimaced. “Oh. I see.” She made a mental note to
talk to Jude about leaving the house without mentioning it to her,
and then she discarded the thought as quickly as it had occurred to
her. Most of them were going to be leaving the house soon, and it
was pointless to fuss about him stepping foot outside if she’d be
doing the same shortly.

Sadie went back to the duffel bag and started
pawing through it again, turning her attention to the weaponry
inside. She was especially intrigued by the compound bow, and she
slid it out of the bag. Something small and black tumbled out with
it, and she scooped it up to examine it. It was a black leather
shooting glove with two fingers and a thumb, and further in the
bag, she found a matching bracer, which brought a smile to her
face. She hadn’t put her hands on anything archery-related in
almost a year, and holding the bow felt good. It was larger than
what she’d used in the past, but she was sure that, after a year of
not using the smaller bow, she could compensate easily enough.

Sadie sat down on the shingles and slipped
the bracer around her forearm, adjusting the tightness of the laces
until it was as tight as she preferred, then slipped the glove on
and wiggled her fingers, testing the snugness of the leather. She
grinned and murmured, “Perfect.” She felt better about going to
Atlanta already.

Sadie stood and lifted the bow, taking the
proper posture and stance, and grasped the bowstring. She pulled it
back, slowly and smoothly, testing the weight of the string. It
wasn’t too hard to pull, though it was heavier than the last bow
she’d used. However, she was stronger now, and she knew she could
handle this new bow fine.

“What are you, an Amazon?” someone called
out. Sadie glanced toward the ground to see Keith and Jude looking
up at her, Jude with a big grin on his face. He held his notepad
where Keith could see it, and Keith said, “Jude wants to know if
you’re
trying
to add to your badass image or if it just
comes naturally.”

“Oh, shut up,” Sadie replied. “And keep your
damn voice down. You’re going to attract unwanted attention.”

“What are you doing up there anyway?” Keith
asked.

“Keeping watch,” Sadie said. “
Someone
has got to do it, and no one else seems interested.”

“What am I, chopped liver?” Keith asked, and
Sadie grinned at the mock indignity in his voice.

“Get up here and help me then,” Sadie
replied. Jude raised an eyebrow and pointed at himself, mouthing,
“Me too?” and Sadie shook her head. “No, you go get some sleep. I
want to talk to him alone.” Jude looked confused, but he
disappeared underneath the edge of the roof. Sadie heard him
climbing the porch steps and the door opening and closing.

“So how do I get up there?” Keith asked.

“Second floor, third door on the right. Go
out the window that faces the front of the house, and it’ll put you
out onto the roof.”

Keith saluted her and disappeared from view.
Sadie settled back into a sitting position, setting the bow on the
shingles beside her so she could start looking through the bag
again. She unsheathed a machete to check the sharpness of the blade
and was still examining it when she heard the scrape and muffled
curse from Keith as he climbed out the window. She set the machete
back in the bag and fished out a knife, pulling it free from its
sheath and studying the blade.

Keith sat down on the roof beside her. “What
do you need to talk to me about?”

Sadie was silent, trying to get her thoughts
in order. She hoped she wasn’t about to overstep her bounds. Jude
was a grown man, after all, and he’d bristle if he knew she was
questioning his choices, just like she would if someone were doing
the same to her. Still, she had a compulsion to protect her brother
from anything that could hurt him, and that included himself.

When she did speak, she kept her voice low
and steady. “What are your intentions?”

“My intentions?” Keith repeated. “What do you
mean?”

“I mean, what are your intentions with my
brother?” Sadie persisted. “What’s going on with you two?”

Keith shrugged. “Nothing’s going on,” he
said. “At least, nothing serious. We’re just becoming friends. He’s
teaching me sign language so he doesn’t have to use paper so much
when we talk. Just, you know, friend stuff.”

“Friend stuff,” Sadie repeated. The concept
was foreign to her. She’d never had friends growing up. She
couldn’t imagine the sorts of things that would qualify as “friend
stuff.”

“Yeah, friend stuff,” Keith confirmed. “I’d
like to be friends with him. And really, I wouldn’t mind being
friends with you too.”

Something on the street below moved, a shadow
darting through a slightly lighter shadow cast by trees overhanging
the road two houses down. Sadie sat up straighter, trying to get a
better look at what it was through the darkening evening, mentally
debating the merits of the different weapons available to her. “I
don’t need any friends,” she muttered.

“Everybody needs friends.”

“Not me,” Sadie replied. She eased her hand
off her leg to rest it on the compound bow beside her. She didn’t
want to move quickly, mostly out of a desire to keep the man on the
roof with her from making any noise in alarm.

“Oh, come on, what makes you so different?”
he asked.

“I’ve never had friends, and I’ve never
needed friends,” Sadie said. “Never got along with any of the
people I grew up with, and I didn’t want to, either. I had nothing
in common with any of them. They were a bunch of pretentious, stuck
up, rich bitches that liked to make fun of people who weren’t
pretentious, stuck up, or rich like themselves. I didn’t want
anything to do with people like that. My mama and daddy raised me
better.”

She inched her free hand into the duffel bag
and slid out one of the arrows.

“What about everybody else in your class?”
Keith asked.

“We went to a private school. Most of them
were the rich bitch types. The ones that weren’t were the ones that
liked to make fun of and bully Jude.”

“Oh,” Keith said. “Those types.”

“Exactly.” She picked out the dark shape
below with her eyes and slid to her feet, simultaneously nocking
the arrow on the bow.

“What are you doing?”

Sadie adjusted her grip on the bow. “Don’t
make any sudden movements. There’s something down there.”

Thankfully, Keith obeyed, scooting onto his
knees to look for himself. After several heartbeats of silence,
during which both of them studied the slinking figure in the
shadows, he spoke.

“Do you think it’s a scout?” he asked. Sadie
looked at him questioningly. “Brandt told me once that some of the
infected, the ones that aren’t dead, can be really smart and
organized at times. He said that sometimes a few will go out to
look for uninfected people like us, and when they find us, they go
back and get the others. If that’s a scout, we need to kill
it.”

“That’s exactly what I intend to do,” Sadie
said. She raised the bow, drawing the string back, her gloved
fingers gripping the arrow as she sighted her target. The shape was
in the shadow of another tree, visible enough that she was sure she
could take it out without any difficulty. She took aim, her muscles
and her mind falling into the familiar form and motions that she
hadn’t used in a while. She adjusted her aim for wind and distance.
Once she was certain the arrow would go where she wanted it to, she
released it.

The arrow sprang from the bowstring and arced
down toward the ground. Its aim was true; it struck the figure in
the face, and it tumbled to the ground. Sadie set the compound bow
onto the roof and grabbed a pair of binoculars from the duffel bag,
looking through them to see how accurate her aim had been.

What she saw made her grin widely. “How ‘bout
dem apples?” she said, passing the binoculars to Keith. He peered
through them and let out a low whistle.

“Jesus, where did you learn to shoot like
that?” he asked. “You put that arrow right through his eye.”

Sadie shrugged. “Seven years of competitive
archery,” she said. “It’s something my dad and I used to do
together. He was my coach and trained me himself.”

“Jude didn’t do it?”

“No, Jude was more into indoor activities,”
she said. “He was closer to Mom than I was because of it, but I was
closer to Dad.” She squinted at the dead body on the road again,
then scooped up the bow and shrugged her duffel bag onto her
shoulder. “We should get inside before something else sees us,” she
said. “And we need to warn the others. Where there’s one, there are
probably more, and I think we should move out of the way before
they get here.”

“I think that’s a
fantastic
idea,”
Keith agreed. He pushed to his feet and scrambled up the roof to
the window. Sadie followed him, clutching her bow tightly as she
ducked and slid through the window.

Jude stood across from the window with his
arms folded over his chest, looking thoroughly annoyed with her.
Keith, thankfully, detected Jude’s mood, and he started for the
door.

“I think I’ll head on down to my room and
leave you two alone,” he said.

Sadie waited until Keith had left the room,
and she counted to ten before she snapped, “What?”

“
Why did you need to talk to him
alone?
” Jude asked, his hands jabbing the signs out with
anger.

“I had to ask him some quest—”

“
It was about me, wasn’t it?”
Jude
signed. “
You were asking him questions about me.”

“I just wanted to know what his intentions
are,” Sadie said. “I wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to hurt
you.”

“
I am perfectly capable of taking care of
myself,”
Jude replied, scowling. “
I don’t need you to take
care of me. You’re not my mother. I already had one of those, and
she’s dead.”

Jude’s words were like a punch to the gut,
and Sadie stepped backward. “That was so uncalled for,” she said,
fighting the quaver in her voice.

“
Yeah, well, it’s the truth,”
Jude
said. He didn’t look at her as he signed the words, looking ashamed
of what he’d said. “
I don’t need you to take care of me. Dad
taught me things too, you know
.”

“I promised, Jude. I
promised
.”

“
Did it
ever occur to you that I
made the same promise?
” Jude signed, and without waiting for
her response, he turned away and strode out of the room, shutting
the door behind him.

Sadie backed up another step and sat down on
the windowsill. She dumped the bow and her duffel bag onto the
floor at her feet and buried her face in her hands, drawing in a
slow, ragged breath, trying her best to not cry.

Remy sat on the end
of the bed in the room she and Dominic had commandeered, her bolo
knife unsheathed and laid across her knees, her fingertips lightly
dancing over the flat of the blade. The room had once been a guest
room, if Remy’s interpretation of the lack of personal objects was
correct. That was how she preferred it; too much personality in a
room made her think about all the dead people, both the ones she
did and didn’t know, that shouldn’t have died in the ways they had.
It was too damned depressing.

The day had been long and felt longer, filled
with planning and coordinating their next moves, right on top of
all the action and adventure of their escape from Woodside. The
first full night they were spending in this house promised to feel
even longer than the day, if the fact that she was wide awake was
any indication. She hadn’t slept since she and Dominic had dosed
her with the fluid in the vial she’d stolen from Derek, and she
hadn’t
felt
like sleeping either. The same problem had
arisen with food; none of it appealed to her, and just the thought
or sight of food made her feel queasy.

She was going to have to talk to Derek about
this eventually, though the thought of doing so made her queasier
than the idea of eating food. She didn’t want to imagine how angry
Derek would be when she confessed to him that she’d stolen one of
his cure samples and dosed herself with it. He was probably going
to kill her, and she couldn’t blame him in the slightest.

There was a rapid knock on the door,
startling Remy out of her reverie, and she twisted around to look
at it as it opened. Dominic slipped in and shut the door, then
turned to her with a worried expression on his face. “What’s up?”
she asked, ready to get to her feet. “Is it the infected?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. He knelt
beside the bed, grasping one of her hands in his. “Do not be mad at
me,” he started.

Remy resisted the urge to yank her hand out
of his. “Any talk that starts off with, ‘Do not be mad at me,’ is
guaranteed to make me mad at you,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“I told Derek,” Dominic said. Remy’s heart
lurched in her chest and her pulse sped up. “He’s on his way here
to talk to you.”

“Oh God,” Remy murmured. “He’s going to kill
me, isn’t he? He’s totally on the warpath, right?”

“Not yet,” he said. “Just be honest with him,
and he won’t be.”

Remy swallowed hard and nodded. Dominic
squeezed her hand and pressed his lips against the inside of her
wrist. When he lifted his head again, there was another knock on
the door, and he murmured, “Be calm, and be confident. You did the
right thing.”

“It doesn’t feel like it,” Remy said. The
door swung open, slowly and ominously, and Derek was revealed in
the doorframe, watching them silently.