The Becoming: Revelations (19 page)

The infected, dozens of them, more than Cade had ever seen in one place thus far, had flooded the street behind her. There were men, women, even children, all thin and bony, all looking as if they hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks. And they were intent upon
her,
the prospect of food brightening the looks in their eyes, their bodies moving with an agility she couldn’t match as they wove among cars in pursuit of her.

The van was moving, tires squealing as it sped backward down the street. Cade didn’t blame them for leaving her. She was sure she’d have left her too, if she’d been in the same circumstances.

Cade refocused her energy more fully on the path ahead of her. Her boots beat against the pavement with her heartbeat as she twisted and turned, weaving between crookedly parked cars, dodging side mirrors by centimeters, stumbling over debris in her path between the vehicles. Her fingers fumbled with the keys in her hands, searching for the key to unlock the handcuffs binding her wrists together. She had to get her hands free if she expected to survive. She couldn’t possibly last long without doing so.

Distracted by the keys, Cade nearly ran headlong into the front end of a Ford Taurus. She cried out as her knees collided with its fender, putting her hands out instinctively to soften the blow. Her sidearm clattered onto the hood. The keys struck the hood alongside it and slid to the ground at her feet. Cade cursed and slapped her fist against the car’s hood before grabbing the gun and dropping into a crouch between the cars, scrabbling for the keys. She found them, and as the first of the infected came almost within arm’s reach, Cade sprang up and fired a single bullet at him. She didn’t wait to see if it struck its intended target. Instead, she turned and started to run again.

The cars breezed past her in a haze as she sprinted for everything she was worth. She could hear the infected adjust their jostling paces to match hers. Her lungs hurt, and the muscles in her thighs and calves burned with the effort she expended trying to get away. At this rate, there was no way she’d outrun them. She’d simply collapse on the street, and then they’d do with her what they wanted. The thought alone was simply unacceptable.

Cade had run over a quarter of a mile, and her lungs had begun to burn along with her legs when her fingers finally found the small key for which she searched. She jammed her weapon into the waistband of her jeans before fumbling the key into a bracelet by feel alone. She gave a savage twist, and one of the bracelets fell away from her wrist.

Her hands sufficiently freed, Cade found it in her to run faster. She pocketed the keys, snapped the loose bracelet around the same wrist as the other, and then drew her sidearm again. The pursuit of the infected hadn’t let up a fraction, she discovered as she glanced back again. If anything, it had grown in intensity with the horrible sounds the infected made, heard more clearly than ever over her gasping breaths.

Cade tore her eyes from them. The road in front of her was nearly blocked by vehicles jammed haphazardly in the street, lacking the uniform lines that had composed much of the traffic jam thus far. Cade didn’t have much choice as to where to go; she chose the most obvious path available.

With a final burst of energy, Cade charged at the nearest vehicle—a sports car with a low front end—and leaped onto the hood. The heels of her boots left dents and scrapes in the car’s paint as she ran up the hood and onto the roof, plunging across and down onto the narrow trunk. She made a desperate leap for the next car in the cluster and landed on it effortlessly. In moments, she was on the second vehicle’s roof, her chest heaving as she looked back at her pursuers. They had, thankfully, been delayed by the same mass of vehicles over which she’d gone. But Cade knew that wouldn’t last. She shook her head and, still struggling to breathe, slid off the car’s roof and started for the next vehicle, intending to climb over it and begin a search for shelter while she tried to figure out what to do.

Alicia’s return to consciousness was slow and painful. She clawed her way toward it with the determination of a boxer in the twelfth round of fighting, opening her eyes and shifting them around the darkened room. She was back in the Westin; that much was obvious based on the familiar sight of the furniture. But she was most decidedly
not
back in her own space on the fourth floor. If she wasn’t mistaken, she was in a bed in one of the smaller conference rooms on the sixth floor that had been converted into a miniature hospital ward.

Alicia rolled her eyes in exasperation and pushed the heavy covers off, sitting up gingerly so she didn’t disturb her head too much. Dominic lay in the bed beside hers, his shoulder bandaged better than she’d done it. He watched her from his position on his back.

“You’re okay,” Alicia said. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, and her brain gave her the disturbing sensation that it was sloshing around in her skull.

“So are you,” Dominic replied. He slowly sat up in his own bed with a low groan. “How are you feeling?”

“Pretty shitty,” Alicia admitted. She stretched, resisting the urge to flop back on the bed once more. “What about you?”

“Doc dug the bullet out of my shoulder and stitched it up for me,” Dominic answered. “Fortunately, I’ll live.”

Alicia slid to the side of the bed. Her booted feet found the carpeted floor, and she levered herself to her feet. Once steadied, she looked Dominic over one more time before she asked, “And Cade?”

Dominic shook his head. “She escaped,” he said. “After she knocked the two of us out, she got out. Stole your keys in the process.”

Alicia gritted her teeth. A flash of anger surged through her at Dominic’s news. “Where is Cortez?” she bit out. Her eyes darted to the door. “I want him in here now.”

Dominic held his good arm out almost helplessly. “What am I supposed to do about it? Pull him out of my ass? Why don’t you exercise some authority and get him down here?”

Alicia rolled her eyes and huffed out an exasperated breath. She went to the conference room’s door and flung it open. A man sat on the carpeted hallway floor directly across from the door. His eyes eased up to meet hers. It was, unsurprisingly, Cortez.

“Get in here,” Alicia snarled. She slammed her palm flat against the door to open it wider. After Cortez ducked under her arm, she shut and locked the door. “
What
the
fuck
was that clusterfuck you two called a mission?”

Dominic sat up straighter, and the look in his eyes was hard enough to cut glass as he inched to the side of the bed. “If it was a clusterfuck, it was one you helped create,” he said. “We aren’t solely responsible for this mess. You fucking helped, what with your whole go-in-guns-blazing attitude. This isn’t the DIA anymore, Alicia. You can’t just pop off at every single person you come across just to get your way.”

“You are
not
going to pin all this shit on me!” Alicia yelled. “I’m not the one who let our hostage get away! Which brings me to my next question.” Alicia turned on Cortez, her eyes hot with anger. “Why the
hell
did you let her get away? Even if we were incapacitated, you should have been able to handle her! She’s only one woman!”

“I’d have handled her if she hadn’t been holding me at gunpoint at the time,” Cortez said in a carefully measured voice. His words barely broke the space between him and Alicia. “And she was leaning right over you. I didn’t want to risk her shooting you during her escape attempt.”

“And where the
hell
did Alton get a fucking gun?” Alicia asked. Her voice was significantly louder than Cortez’s. She didn’t care.

“From you,” Cortez said. “The woman seems to be incredibly resourceful.”

Alicia paced to the bedside table and slammed her fist against its top for want of anything better to hit. “And when she got out of the fucking car, you drove the other way instead of going after her
why?
”

“She shot at me.”

That was all Cortez needed to say. Alicia held on to her composure with difficulty. The sound of a single gunshot was enough to bring every infected person, living and dead, within earshot of the noise straight to the source of it. And in a city the size of Atlanta, with a dense population pre-Michaluk, to say there were quite a few infected to respond to a sound like that was most assuredly an understatement.

Alicia drew in a slow breath and faced Cortez again, watching his face closely for any sign of deception. She couldn’t see any. So she nodded and said, more calmly than before, “At least you got us out of there. That’s all I could ask for under those circumstances.” She paused and looked between the two men, then added to Cortez, “Did you see which way she went?”

“Straight ahead, right into the traffic jam on Central Park Place,” Cortez said confidently. “I know I saw her go into that. I don’t know if she made it all the way through or not. I was already getting us out of there by then.”

Alicia pressed her lips together, her frown deepening as she crossed her arms. A number of options flitted through her head. Not a single one seemed remotely acceptable. She hissed a breath through her teeth and raised her eyes from their contemplative study of the cream-colored carpet. Dominic and Cortez stared at her, waiting on the ideas she’d hand out that started them on whatever new path she desired to set. It was times like this when Alicia almost hated being in charge of this mess.

Almost.

“Okay,” Alicia started. She hissed out another breath and ran her hands slowly through her hair. Her fingers bumped a painful knot on the side of her head, and she grimaced. “I need four people, including you, Cortez,” she continued. “We’ve got to go out and find her.”

“Find her?” Cortez repeated, his eyes widening. “You’re joking, right? We can’t go out there just to find one woman! In a city this size, it’s impossible!”

Alicia’s face flushed as anger washed through her again. “We’re about to
do
the fucking impossible,” she snapped. “We have no choice.”

“We should leave the bitch out there to rot!”

Alicia took a step toward Cortez. “
That
is
not
an option! I don’t think you comprehend what sort of situation we now find ourselves in.” She narrowed her eyes and fought the urge to push the man into the wall and inflict a little bodily injury on him. “If the note was left like it was supposed to be, back in Hollywood—and I have
no
doubt it was—then Evans is well on his way here. If he gets here and she
isn’t
with us? He’s going to fucking kill every single one of us. And
that
is
definitely
not an option!” She turned to Dominic and said, “We’re going after her. You’re staying here, since you’re in no condition to go out in the field. You’re to get Ethan Bennett under lock and key and make sure he doesn’t go anywhere or do anything I won’t like.”

“Literal lock and key, or just keep an eye on him?” Dominic asked.

“Literal.”

Dominic sucked in a breath. “He’s not going to take that very well, you know,” he pointed out.

“I don’t really care what he does or doesn’t take very well,” Alicia said. She backed away from Cortez, one careful step at a time. “He can fucking well shove it up his ass if he doesn’t like it. I’m more focused on getting Evans here so we can get well again.”

“Your desperation is starting to show, Alicia,” Dominic warned. He didn’t look at her. Instead, he focused on the duffel bag through which he dug, pawing at the clothes inside and pulling free a gray t-shirt. He tugged it over his head, looking as if he wanted to add something else, but then snapping his mouth shut.

“I don’t
care!
” Alicia snarled. “We have
got
to find her! We have to take the chance that Evans won’t show up. And if that happens, it makes Cade Alton
incredibly
valuable, especially if it’s true that she’s carrying his child! Whatever is so special about Evans that he doesn’t show symptoms of Michaluk might have been passed on to the child, and we can’t risk losing the baby to a chance encounter with the infected.” Alicia turned on her heel and stormed toward the door, shoving Cortez out of the way in the process. She rested her hand against the door, then drew in a deep breath and said, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to do, especially if we expect to be able to find this woman.”

A deep, rolling boom of thunder startled Cade from her fitful slumber. Her eyes darted open, and she blinked rapidly to clear the haze from her vision as she pushed upright from the cold concrete wall against which she’d slumped. She raked back the stray locks that had fallen in her face and squinted into the darkness around her, trying to remember where she was.

A flash of lightning illuminated her surroundings. She huddled at the end of a short hallway in a dingy parking garage, next to a bank of badly painted elevator doors. Her side ached, and her palms were skinned from falling on the street on her way into the garage. But she was alive. None of the infected had gotten their hands on her.

Cade picked up her gun and dragged herself to her feet. She edged to the end of the hallway, her boot heels clicking on the ground; worry stirred up in her gut at the possibility that the sound could draw unwanted attention to her. She drew in a breath and forced herself forward, trying to quash the feeling. It wasn’t time to freak out over her situation. That would have to come later.