The Becoming: Revelations (17 page)

“I don’t care
what
she takes kindly to,” Cade snapped. Her eyes flitted to the water gushing from the bottle and over the rocks, and she fought to conceal her disappointment at the loss of the water. She really was still thirsty.

“Is there a problem over here?”

Alicia’s voice cut through the evening light to interrupt whatever reply Dominic could have formulated. He jerked back from his looming stance over Cade and turned to the woman approaching them.

“No problem,” Dominic said. “Just explaining to Miss Alton exactly why she should go out of her way to be cooperative with us.”

Alicia stared at them and then nodded shortly. “Get in. We’re moving.”

The man’s posture visibly stiffened. “At night?”

“
All
night,” Alicia confirmed. “We don’t have time to spare. We’ve got to get back to the Westin.”

Cade raised an eyebrow but refrained from speaking. The Westin? She thought it over, wondering if the Westin to which the woman referred was the massive one in downtown Atlanta. But if it was, that didn’t make any sense! Why would a group of people
choose
to live in Atlanta? Atlanta was, by all accounts Cade had ever heard, a veritable cesspool. It shouldn’t have been someplace people would want to live anymore.

As she pulled her legs into the van and as Dominic slammed the door closed, Cade began to wonder just how much she didn’t know about what was going on.

It’d been nearly eight hours since Derek Rivers had revealed the truth to Ethan. And despite the passage of time between the revelation and that moment, Ethan
still
felt the incessant urge to punch the nearest wall. Fortunately, he refrained—primarily because he felt no desire to nurse busted knuckles—and instead paced in the eighteenth-floor room in which he’d lived for the past month. He trekked across the thick carpet, stopping near the door before turning on his heel and making his way back to the window, trying his damnedest not only to put together what Derek had told him, but to combine it with Alicia’s words and motives
and
with the man he’d thought he’d known. It seemed like everybody around him was lying to him, hedging around the truth, bending it, twisting it, and avoiding issues and problems that needed to be addressed. And frankly, he was sick of it.

“Stupid son of a bitch,” Ethan muttered. He passed by the bed once more and glanced down at it, eyeing the pistol that lay there. “I
knew
I shouldn’t have trusted you. I should have just taken Cade and moved on.”

Ethan knew, though, that it was irrational to blame Brandt for this. Brandt’s initial secrecy couldn’t have been helped. If what Derek had explained to Ethan was accurate—and Ethan had no doubt that it was accurate, as the man had actually been there when it happened—then there had been a significant chance the military was seeking Brandt out, trying to track him down and do Heaven knew what to him. Considering he’d been involved in the testing of what would later become the Michaluk virus, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he was being hunted for extermination or experimentation. He’d likely hidden the fact from the others in order to protect them. Ethan couldn’t say he wouldn’t have done the same.

Despite this repeated mantra in Ethan’s head, the man was still incensed at the very
idea
of being lied to. Ethan esteemed few things as much as honesty—trust and friendship were the only qualities he valued so highly. And he had believed that he’d developed all three with Brandt over the past year, that they had both moved on past the initial caution they’d displayed toward each other on meeting.

Clearly, Ethan had been mistaken.

And Alicia …

Ethan paced to the bed and sat heavily on the end of it. He leaned forward and dropped his head in his hands, digging his fingers into his blond hair, tugging at the strands in his frustration. It was so tempting to pick up his Glock and hunt down some spare ammunition and supplies and get the hell out of there. The thought of helping Alicia any further was simply distasteful, and it made him sick to his stomach.

But he couldn’t leave—at least, not with Alicia actually gone. He couldn’t abandon these people to whatever fate came their way. He wasn’t self-centered or egotistical enough to believe that the only thing standing between these people and chaos was him. But if he left, if he shirked the duties that Alicia had given him on her departure, then someone a lot worse could potentially step in and make their lives a living hell, a dictatorship worse than anything they could imagine. Ethan just couldn’t take that chance.

A soft knock at the door interrupted Ethan’s train of thought, and he lifted his head from his hands to look at the closed door almost accusingly. He slowly rose to his feet and glanced at his gun one more time before venturing to the door. He paused before it as another knock sounded from the other side.

“Yeah? Who is it?” Ethan called. His voice was surprisingly gruff, almost harsh in tone. He cleared his throat as the person on the other side of the door spoke.

“It’s me. Kimberly,” a woman’s voice replied. “Let me in. I have to talk to you.”

Ethan raised his eyebrows, his hand dropping to the doorknob. He refrained from flinging the door open; instead, he eased it open to see the blond woman in question standing in the hallway. Her normally pretty features had a disturbed look to them, which only served to heighten his concern. His eyebrows knitted together in a frown.

“What’s wrong?” Ethan asked. Kimberly’s eyes flitted in either direction down the hallway. She made an odd motion with her head.

“Inside. Not out here in the hallway.”

Ethan moved aside to let the woman enter. Once the door was shut and locked again, he turned his full attention to Kimberly, the frown still on his face as he spoke. “What’s going on that’s got you coming all the way up to the eighteenth floor to my room?” Ethan studied Kimberly’s expression, trying to read something in it. Once again, he was reminded of his total lack of skill in doing so and how badly he wished Remy were there with him, even if only for her unique ability to give the illusion of reading minds.

Kimberly walked briskly across Ethan’s room to the windows, pushing the heavy curtains aside and looking out into the early dawn intently. She scanned the street below, squinting into the distance, as if she were searching for something. “We got word a little over an hour ago,” she said. She faced Ethan and let the curtain drop over the window behind her. “Alicia and her crew were spotted entering the city from the northeast two hours before dawn. They left with two vehicles. They only came back with one.”

“So what does that mean?” Ethan asked impatiently. “That they’ve lost a vehicle?” He finally moved away from the door and toward Kimberly with a deep frown. “That’s not a big deal.”

“Alicia doesn’t ditch vehicles just to ditch them,” Kimberly explained. “If she’s lost a vehicle, that means she’s likely lost the people who were in it.”

Ethan pressed his lips together and joined her at the window. “Do you think she’s got Brandt?”

Kim shook her head. “Ethan, I honestly have no way to know that right now,” she said. Her eyes met his; they were wide, with a touch of nervousness hidden in them. “With any hope, our contacts out on the city limits will have more information for us soon. We’ve requested they let us know whether any others are coming back with her.”

“And how long do you think it’ll be before we hear any updates?” Ethan asked, only the slightest note of impatience in his voice at the decided lack of information Kimberly had available for him.

“I’m not sure,” Kimberly admitted. “A couple of hours, maybe?”

Ethan sighed. “And then we’ll know if she’s got Brandt?”

“Maybe,” Kimberly hedged. Ethan gave her a dirty look, and she held both of her hands up defensively. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger, Ethan. I can’t tell the future. I don’t know what sorts of information Isaac will be able to get.”

“Why do you have a guy on the city limits anyway?” Ethan asked with both irritation and curiosity.

Kimberly shrugged. “We only stick him there when a certain someone leaves the city, so we have some forewarning of her return.”

“I see,” Ethan said thoughtfully. “And, what, this guy only has a carrier pigeon to use to get messages to you?”

Kimberly snorted. “Yeah, something like that,” she joked. “Its name is Emerson. They come in pairs.”

Brandt was in pain. That fact was clear to Gray merely through the older man’s mannerisms and the way he moved—somewhat gingerly, as if he were afraid to cause himself more pain. Gray narrowed his eyes and watched the man pace alongside the Escalade, his expression brooding and pensive, with a hint of anger.

Despite Brandt’s pain, the man was obviously, in a word, pissed.

They’d stopped on the highway outside another gas station an hour down the road from the last one. It was a beat-up affair that, despite the dozens of cars crammed in its small lot, was blessedly free of infected. Remy flitted from one car to the next—crowbar, gas can, and rubber hose in hand—siphoning gas from where she could in order to fill up the Escalade with as much fuel as it could hold. Gray still sat in the back seat and watched his companions. His eyes followed Brandt as the man moved to the front of the vehicle and back again, passing the opened back door with a grimace on his face that made him entirely unapproachable.

“What’s on your mind, Evans?” Gray asked.

Brandt stopped in mid-step and gave Gray an incredulous look. “You’re kidding, right?” he asked. “I mean, you
seriously
didn’t just ask me that fucking question.”

Gray rested his elbow against the back of the seat and watched Remy as she wedged a crowbar into the gas door of a sedan and wrenched it open, unscrewing the cap and threading the tube into the gas tank. “Let it out, Brandt,” he said. “It’s eating you up inside and turning you into a temperamental motherfucker. Well, at least more of one than you already are. We’re all friends here. You don’t need to take it out on us.”

Remy let out a cough and spit something—presumably gasoline—onto the ground at her feet, her face snarled up in an ugly expression as she jammed the other end of the tube into the gas can at her feet. Gray bit back a smirk and shook his head slightly, turning his eyes onto Brandt instead. Brandt remained silent as the gasoline drained into the gas can, and he didn’t respond until after Remy had finished and lifted the can to check its fill line.

“I’m not taking it out on you two,” Brandt grumbled.

Gray raised his eyebrows. “Want to bet?” he asked. “You’re acting like—”

“A total douche,” Remy said as she rejoined them, circling around the Escalade with the gas can to fill the tank.

“Not exactly the way
I
would have put it, but it’s rather accurate,” Gray acknowledged. “Gas in your mouth?” he asked, directing the question at Remy as she scrubbed her sleeve over her lips.

“Misjudged how far the gas was from my mouth in the tube,” Remy replied, pulling the gas cap off and shoving the can’s nozzle into the tank.

“Well, I don’t know about you two, but can you blame me for being pissed off that the woman I love has been taken hostage by a person I really, really hate?” Brandt bit out. He slumped against the side of the vehicle and crossed his arms. His eyes locked onto the empty lot around them, and his jaw visibly clenched. Gray pressed his lips together and leaned forward in his seat, resting his elbows against his thighs. His hands dangled loosely between his knees.

“We’re all upset over that bitch taking Cade,” Gray said. “Believe me, I’m almost as angry as you, but for different reasons.”

“And what reasons could those
possibly
be?” Brandt asked.

“You and Cade were essentially our leaders,” Gray explained. “I know we generally acted like you were the one in charge over the past month, and even before that, we acted like Ethan was the leader, but it was definitely you and Cade. And Cade was the one who kept you grounded and sane, which is obvious by the way you’re acting now that she isn’t here. You were a team, even when she was out of it for two straight weeks. You’re
still
a team. And we’re going to get the other half of that team back, come Hell or high water.”

“Basically, what Gray here is saying,” Remy spoke up, setting the empty can on the ground by the SUV and screwing the gas cap back on, “is don’t act so mad at
us,
okay? We didn’t have anything to do with Cade getting kidnapped. We’re just as angry as you are.”

“No, you’re nowhere near as angry as me,” Brandt grumbled. He sighed heavily and sagged against the vehicle again, dropping his head into his hands. “Fuck, guys. I’m just … hell, I’m scared for her. I don’t want anything to happen to her. And finding out she’s pregnant? That just makes it all a hell of a lot worse.”

Remy flipped the gas door shut and circled the vehicle, grasping Brandt’s uninjured shoulder and giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Hey, it’s okay to be scared, you know? Just because you’re some big, bad, kickass Marine doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to a little bit of fear on the random, rare occasion.”

Brandt cracked a smile that disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared. “Yeah, okay, Remy. I’ll take your word on that.”