The Becoming: Revelations (24 page)

“We’ve got your back,” Derek assured Ethan. He nodded to Kimberly over Ethan’s shoulder. She drew in a deep, audible breath and pushed the door open, ushering Derek and Ethan through before she slid into the short hallway beyond. She eased the door shut, keeping her hand on it so it didn’t make a sound as it swung closed, and then grabbed Ethan’s wrist.

“Come on, let’s go,” she whispered. “The walkway’s this way.”

With those words, Ethan was led down the short hallway toward the lobby area. Kimberly stopped at the end of it, pressing flat against the wall and motioning for Derek and Ethan to do the same. Then she peered around the corner to see if the coast was clear before putting a finger to her lips and gesturing for them to follow her.

Ethan walked out into the lobby, keeping close to the wall, and heard Derek do the same. Kimberly led the way to the glass double-doors across the lobby; they were secured with a thick, heavy chain and padlock. Kimberly glanced behind them, making sure no one approached, and then slung her bag off her shoulder. She dug through it for a moment before pulling out a pair of heavy bolt cutters, and then she holstered her sidearm and set to work on the padlock holding the chain together. Ethan waited impatiently, constantly glancing over his shoulder, expecting the hammer to drop and send a bullet into his skull.

It was two long, agonizing minutes of waiting as Kimberly tried again and again to force the bolt cutters to slice through the padlock before, with a loud snap that made all three of them wince, the cutters sheared through the lock. Kimberly pawed at it, ripping it free and sliding the chain noisily from the handles. She dropped it all in a heap beside the door and then waved to Derek and Ethan.

“Let’s go,” she said urgently, sliding her Walther PPS from its holster once more. “Quickly. I can’t guarantee somebody didn’t hear that.” She nodded to Ethan and added, “It’s okay to get your gun out now. Just in case we need it.”

Ethan pulled his Glock from his bag as instructed. As he eased past Kimberly to enter the dark elevated walkway leading to AmericasMart, the woman caught his arm and offered him a familiar-looking hunting knife. “Here,” she murmured. “This was with your things. I don’t think Alicia wanted you to have it back, but it’s yours, so I brought it with me.”

Ethan took the knife, rubbing his fingertips over its smooth hilt and studying it almost sadly. It was Cade’s knife, and he suddenly, vividly remembered when he’d taken it from her the month before, when he’d promised he’d give it back, even with the firm belief he’d never see her again. He distinctly remembered the look in her eyes as she’d backed away from him and started up the fire escape like he’d told her to. It was a look he’d nearly forgotten, lost to the fog the virus had thrown over his mind, but the sight of the knife in his hand brought it all back into sharp clarity.

Kimberly’s hand on his arm brought Ethan back to focus on the here and now, on the very dangerous reality in which he stood. Derek was almost halfway down the walkway, waiting on both of them to join him. Ethan looked behind them as he tucked the knife into a side pocket of his bag. After another glance at Kimberly, Ethan darted into the lobby, snatched up the chain and padlock, and pulled the glass doors shut as he backed into the walkway.

“What in the world are you doing?” Kimberly asked, raising an eyebrow. Ethan wound the chain around the doors’ handles, looping it under and over and around, as he answered.

“Trying to make it that much more difficult for these fuckers to follow us,” Ethan said, breathless from the exertion of fastening the door shut. As he wound the chain around a final time, movement on the other side of the door caught his eye. He and Kimberly looked up simultaneously. Several of Alicia’s crew from the fourth floor had come to investigate the noise they’d made and were even now sprinting to the door, guns in hand, led by Dominic.

“Fuck, Ethan. Let’s go, let’s go,” Kimberly urged. She backed a step away from the door, her voice trembling, and reflexively lifted her Walther PPS to point it at the glass.

“Don’t shoot,” Ethan ordered, fumbling for the padlock. “We don’t know if the glass is bulletpro—”

The snap of gunshots met his ears, interrupting the rest of his sentence. The glass on level with his head chipped as the bullets struck. Ethan stumbled backward, nearly tripping over his own feet. Kimberly caught his arm, and Ethan regained his footing. He scrambled forward and grabbed the padlock as one of the men on the other side of the door slammed into it. Ethan was half-kneeling at the door, and he looked up into the man’s angry eyes as he shoved the lock into place. The lock wouldn’t hold for long—Kimberly had done too good a job damaging it for that—but it would hopefully delay their getting through the door long enough for the three of them to get away. Ethan grabbed his Glock and found his feet, catching Kimberly’s elbow.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Ethan said breathlessly. He and Kimberly rejoined Derek, and together, the three of them started their mad dash down the walkway to the next set of glass doors. Behind them, the men tried to break through the doors, and a surge of adrenaline burst through Ethan. “Kim, the bolt cutters,” he urged. He reached out for the tool and nearly ran right into the glass doors at the end of the walkway. She passed them to him and took up position behind him and Derek, aiming her sidearm down the walkway in case their pursuers broke through.

Ethan jammed the padlock into the cutters, and he and Derek each grasped a handle, pressing them together as hard as they could. The lock snapped easily with both men applying pressure, and Ethan unwound the chain and kicked the doors open. He pushed both of his companions through and then hauled the doors shut once again, winding the chain around their handles, just like he’d done with the other door. He glanced down the walkway as he worked, trying to see if the other men had broken through the first set of doors yet. It was impossible to tell in the near-total darkness on the other side of the glass. Ethan managed to get the doors secured and then nodded to Kimberly.

“Lead the way,” he said. “You know where we’re going better than I do.”

Kimberly gave Ethan a mock salute and led the two men into the dark shopping mall, walking briskly and assuredly into the darkness. “We’ll take the escalators down,” she said. At the thought of escalators, Ethan wrinkled his nose; he vividly remembered one of his
last
encounters with escalators in a mall, and it had been fairly messy, to say the least. “There are quite a few leading down to the bottom floors. We’ll just work our way down them. We’ve got to move fast. This is no time to drag ass.”

Brandt slowed the Escalade to a stop and examined the highway before him, narrowing his eyes at the blockage that lay as far as he could see. Gray slept in the passenger seat, and Remy was engrossed in a book on her lap—where she’d gotten the book from, Brandt had no idea. He sighed and reached across the front seats, whacking Gray on the chest just hard enough to wake him up. Gray straightened, rubbing his eyes and squinting in the late-morning sun at the traffic jam and military-established road block in front of them.

“Where are we?” Gray asked, a faint tone of grogginess still in his voice.

“Coming up on the Atlanta city limits,” Brandt answered. He leaned forward in his seat and searched for a gap in the road block through which he could drive the Escalade. Despite conducting a careful search, he couldn’t see anything remotely promising, so he was forced to give up. He flopped back in his seat and turned the engine off. The quiet that followed was oddly heavy. “I hope you’re both ready to do some walking,” Brandt said to break the silence.

Remy breathed out heavily and punched something soft—probably the car’s leather seat—before tossing her book over her shoulder into the back of the vehicle. “I’m so fucking sick of walking,” she complained. “Just drive over it all.”

“You think I can do that and
not
trash the Escalade?” Brandt asked, even though he knew she hadn’t been serious.

Remy smirked and leaned over the seats to grab her backpack from the back. “I’m just not looking forward to walking through a traffic jam like that again. Not after …” She trailed off and glanced at Gray uncomfortably.

“You know, you don’t have to tiptoe around me and my feelings whenever something to do with Theo comes up,” Gray said. “I’m a big boy. I can handle it.”

Remy cleared her throat and nodded. “Yeah, well … after the
last
time we waded through a traffic jam like that and lost a member of our team. I’d rather not go through that again.”

“While I agree with you on that, we don’t exactly have much of a choice,” Brandt pointed out. “Not if we’re getting in there, tracking Cade down, and hauling her out. I, for one, have zero plans to turn this car around at this point, and I
will
go it alone if I have to.”

“Well we’re not going to let you go in alone,” Gray said. A note of determination was evident in his voice. “Isn’t that right, Remy?”

“I was
not
proposing that
anybody
go in alone,” Remy snapped. Brandt glanced at her in the rearview mirror and watched as she snatched up her bag, her bolo knife, and her Sig Sauer and slid sideways to the door. “Let’s get our shit and get moving.”

Brandt raised an eyebrow and grabbed his M-4 Carbine, then scrambled for his own door handle. He nearly fell out of the SUV in his haste to get out and moving. “Remy, don’t you
dare
get out of the fucking car by yourself in unsafe territory,” he admonished as he circled to the back of the vehicle. Gray disembarked from the SUV as he slung the rifle into a tactical carry, opened the vehicle’s back door, and retrieved the last two packs. “It’s a fantastic way to get your ass killed.”

“Yeah, like you care,” Remy muttered. She tried to keep her voice down, but Brandt caught her words regardless. He abandoned his bag and stormed toward her, grabbing her upper arms in a bruising grip and yanking her around to face him.

“Don’t you say that,” Brandt snarled. He leaned close to her face, almost looming over her. Her dark brown eyes widened in surprise. “Don’t you
ever
fucking say that! You think I’d have risked my life saving your ass in Biloxi if I didn’t fucking
care?
”

Remy stared at him for a long, silent moment, as if trying to assess how serious he was. When she finally spoke, her voice was hushed and strained. “Brandt, you’re hurting me.”

And with that, the spell was broken. Brandt pushed away from Remy with a nauseating mixture of anger and shame stirring in his stomach. He snatched up his bag and slung it over his shoulder before slamming the door shut. “Let’s go,” he said hoarsely. He didn’t look at them as he made sure he still had all his weapons on his person.

“Where are we going?” Gray asked. “Besides the obvious going-after-Cade part, that is.”

Brandt adjusted his pack securely against his body and began to walk. He didn’t look back to make sure Remy and Gray followed. He had no doubt that they would. “I want to check out the intersection of Central Park Place and Ralph McGill, like I said earlier. If it
was
Cade that got out there, maybe there’s some sign of her in the area.”

“And if there’s not?” Gray prompted, falling into step beside Brandt. Remy lagged a few steps behind, the expression on her face still hard and distant.

Brandt didn’t want to consider that possibility. “Then we go to the Westin and see what we can find out.”

“Those people want you dead or something,” Remy spoke up. Brandt glanced over his shoulder at her and raised an eyebrow. “How do you know they’ll let you walk out of there alive if you just go up and knock on the door?”

“I don’t know that,” Brandt admitted. He hiked his bag higher onto his shoulder and approached the concrete barricade that spanned the highway. He pulled himself up to look over it, checking for immediate dangers, and then hauled himself on top of it, muscles straining. He sat on it, one leg hooked over the other side. “But for Cade, I’m willing to take the chance.”

“You must really love her,” Remy commented. Brandt caught her hand and helped her onto the barricade. She straddled the top and added, “You know, to be so willing to throw your life away like that.”

“No, I just thought it’d be fun to knock her up and split,” Brandt snapped sarcastically, rolling his eyes. He offered Gray a hand and added, “Of
course
I love her. And we’ve had this discussion before. I don’t see the point in rehashing it again.”

Gray accepted Brandt’s offer of help, clasping his hand and letting the older, stronger man pull him onto the barricade. Remy made a face at Brandt and twisted sideways, dropping off to the pavement on the Atlanta side almost soundlessly. Gray climbed down to join her, but Brandt stayed on top of the barricade. He lifted a hand to shield his eyes against the brightness of the sun and squinted down the highway, trying to make out what lay far ahead of them.

“What’s on your mind?” Gray called. Brandt tore his eyes away from the horizon and looked down at the man. He slung his own legs over and slid off the barricade to join both of them on the ground level.

“Nothing. Let’s just get moving, okay?” Brandt brushed his pants off reflexively and grasped one of his pack’s straps tightly. “I’m not comfortable standing around here like this. I want to get into the city so we can find shelter before it gets too late. Night isn’t a good time to be out and about in a city like this.”