The Becoming: Revelations (40 page)

“About as ready as I can possibly get,” Remy said. She drew her bolo knife from its sheath. Despite the firmness of her voice, though, Brandt could hear a quaver of nervousness in her words. Cade, for her part, held up her Beretta and gave him a short nod.

“We’ll be fine,” Brandt said confidently. “We’re going to track that bitch down and collect any survivors and make it out just fine.”

“I know,” Cade said.

Ethan grabbed the other door’s handle and gave Brandt a short nod. They simultaneously pulled the doors open, and the four of them stepped inside.

Just as Brandt suspected, there were infected in the sixth-floor lobby. What he had
not
expected, however, was so many. There were at least thirty infected spread out across the lobby, and their attention riveted on the four survivors as they moved through the doors. Ethan let out a startled gasp, and Brandt couldn’t help the curses that exploded from his mouth.

“Fuck!” Brandt snapped. He gripped the grenade in his right hand and grabbed Cade’s arm with his left. “Back out! Now!” As soon as the words left his mouth, he ripped the pin from the grenade. Cade and Remy were quick to obey, backing out into the walkway, Cade’s boots squeaking on the marble floor. Ethan and Brandt retreated with them, Brandt still clutching the grenade, squeezing the lever with a grip so tight his hand started to cramp. Once he felt they were clear enough, Brandt released the arming lever and rolled the weapon across the floor into the midst of the infected. As soon as it left his hand, Brandt grabbed Cade and spun around, kneeling and shielding her body from the detonation, even as his foot lashed out to kick the door shut behind him.

The explosion was short, quick, and violent. The pressure change in the air shattered the doors’ glass, which showered over the four of them. Thankfully, none of them was struck by any shrapnel from the grenade. Brandt barely waited for the debris to finish settling before he was on his feet once more, his Beretta out and aimed into the smoky dust clouding his vision.

“So much for any element of surprise we might have had,” Cade muttered.

“Aw, come on, Cade,” Remy protested. “I’m sure Alicia’s somewhere in here, pissing her pants in surprise right now. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Touché,” Cade conceded. She lifted her own Beretta, gave Brandt a short nod, and moved back into the lobby, confidently and quietly. “Let’s do this shit, yeah?” She disappeared into the cloudy haze settling over the lobby, and several quick bursts of gunfire rattled out as she fired on the infected still standing. Brandt nodded to Ethan and Remy shortly.

“You two bring up the rear,” he said. “You’re going to the seventeenth floor, right?”

“Right,” Ethan confirmed. “Where should we meet after this? The third floor? It’s the top level of the parking garage and opens out onto the street. Hardly anybody went down there when I was here, so there shouldn’t be many—if any—infected there.”

“Works for me,” Brandt said. He strode into the lobby, following Cade. His eyes sought out and locked onto her silhouette as she moved farther ahead of him. Another pop rang out as she aimed her firearm and took down another infected. The last thing Brandt wanted was to mistake her for one of the infected and accidentally shoot her. As Brandt moved farther into the lobby, Ethan and Remy broke left, heading for a bank of elevators on that side of the lobby, and Brandt was left alone for the first time.

The floor beneath Brandt’s boots was slick with blood and the bits of flesh the grenade ripped free from the infected horde, and each step he made crunched with shattered glass from the doors, windows, and chandeliers. His boot bumped something in the haze, and his eyes darted to the floor. A faint twinge of nausea bit at his gut as he saw a hand, shrunken and bloody and unattached, lying at the toe of his boot. He reflexively swept it aside before focusing his mind once again on the task at hand.

Brandt realized he’d lost sight of Cade and bit back another curse, this one of exasperation. He couldn’t see any infected still standing, even as the fog began to clear, and he debated calling out to her. There was a chance he’d distract her in a moment when it would be critical that she
not
be distracted. He had to do something, though. He opened his mouth to call out, but before he got any words out, a gunshot and a thud nearby made him lift his rifle into a firing position. But then Brandt spotted Cade and hesitated.

Cade had made it all the way across the lobby, taking a brisk pace to the door indicating the stairs near another bank of elevators. Brandt hurried to join her, nearly slipping in the blood splattered on the floor. Cade barely looked at him as he returned to her side, too intent on easing the stairwell door open quietly, on making as little noise as possible. Brandt recognized the look on her face; she was in the zone, the space to which he himself often retreated when on a mission, where emotions and stresses and worries were shoved aside in favor of accomplishing the intended goal.

“What’s the story?” Brandt murmured. She pulled the door fully open and propped it there with a metal trash can. It tried to slide shut at first, but then the can caught, and the door gave up the fight and stayed open.

“We’re heading down,” Cade said. “Remember what Ethan said. Her quarters are on the fourth floor. We should start there.”

“What’s the guarantee she’s still on that floor?” Brandt asked pointedly. He didn’t wait on Cade’s response. “There
is
no guarantee. We need to be prepared to check higher up.”

“I’m aware of that,” Cade grumbled. She faced him, looking oddly combative, and froze. She grabbed his jacket and hauled him aside. “Move!” she barked out. Brandt scrambled to obey, and the gunshot Cade fired next to his head made his ear ring. He staggered into the stairwell, nearly tripping over the bottom step of the stairs leading up, and turned to face the danger, raising his M-4 again.

Cade followed him into the stairwell, her gun pointed at the infected that had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, moving almost silently—frighteningly so. Brandt had never seen infected move so stealthily, and certainly not in such a large group. Even as he lifted his gun, Brandt scanned the crowd, estimated it to be around fifteen strong. He didn’t bother to fire a single shot. There were too many. They couldn’t fight them off. He grabbed the back of Cade’s jacket before she squeezed the trigger and dragged her from the doorway as he backed down the steps.

“Come on! There’s too many!” Brandt said. He stumbled blindly down a few steps, hauling Cade with him. She finally got the gist of what he was doing and started down the stairs with him at a breathless run.

“What are we going to do?” Cade asked, panting as she descended the stairs behind him.

Brandt reached the fourth-floor landing and paused, sweeping the next set of stairs leading down to make sure it was clear. He didn’t look at her as he went to the edge, grasped the railing, and looked to the floor above, trying to gauge whether the infected were making their way down the stairs. In the distance, somewhere in the hotel, he heard a single gunshot. He pushed the sound out of mind; he had more important things to worry about.

“We’re going to find the bitch, fast,” Brandt said. “And then once we’re squared away with her, we’re going to get the hell out of here before those infected figure out how to get down the stairs.”

“Or up,” Cade added. She, too, was at the railing. But instead of looking up, she’d chosen to look down into the darkness below. If he focused his ears, Brandt could hear the very distinct sounds of at least a few infected below them. “Fucking surrounded. We don’t have much chance of getting the hell out of here,” she said softly. “And Remy and Ethan are probably walking into a damned death trap up there.”

“Then if we’re going to die, we have no reason to not make sure we find Alicia,” Brandt said. He grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze, then released it and went to the stairwell door. He wrenched it open, immediately swinging his rifle up to sweep the hallway as he drew his flashlight out and shone it down their path.

The short hallway leading to the fourth-floor lobby was cluttered with tables and chairs lining the walls at every available space between conference room doors. Brandt eased inside, the flashlight in one hand, rifle against his shoulder; he eyed the dark spaces beneath the tables warily. Cade slipped in beside him, letting the door swing shut as she studied the hallway. She, too, took in the tables littered with papers, her eyes narrowing as she slipped past him and progressed down the hallway. She paused beside one table, looked at a large paper taped there, and sucked in a sharp breath.

“Brandt,” she said with a flick of her fingers. Her tone was stricken, which only made Brandt less inclined to approach. But he went to her and shone his flashlight onto the table.

Brandt was startled to see his own handwriting staring back at him. He blinked in surprise and leaned closer to make sure he was actually seeing correctly. He most definitely was; it was his handwriting, scribbled in the margins of a Georgia map, a very familiar-looking map that took him scant seconds to place.

“So this is what happened to it,” Brandt murmured as he smoothed his hand over the paper. “I wondered where it disappeared to.” He looked at Cade and caught a glimpse of her quizzical expression. “It’s the map Ethan and I were working with. That’s why it’s written all over. We were making notes about where we should or shouldn’t go, marking roadblocks and traffic jams I knew about, whatever came to mind. It’s probably how Alicia found us in the end. Once she got her hands on this, it was like there was a neon sign over our heads that said, ‘Hey, we’re right here!’”

“Do you think Ethan gave this information to them?” Cade asked. “Do you think he helped them voluntarily?”

“I don’t doubt it in the slightest,” Brandt admitted. “But I think if Ethan had known what Alicia was like, he’d have done everything he could to stop her or at least delay her taking any action. He genuinely thought he was on the right side on this one. Road to Hell, good intentions, all that shit.”

Cade traced her fingers along the paper, lightly touching a place bearing Brandt’s cramped scrawl. “Poor Ethan has always been a bad judge of character,” she said. “No idea how he ended up becoming a police officer.”

Brandt started to reply, but before he got a word out, Cade let out a sharp cry and pitched forward. She put out her hands to catch herself and fell gracelessly against the table. Her palms slid across its top and ripped the map, and her Beretta skittered across the table and dropped between it and the wall. Even as she fell, Brandt turned, raising his rifle to point it at the new threat he hadn’t heard coming on the carpeted floor. His rifle was kicked from his hand in mid-turn, and a boot slammed into his stomach, driving the air from his lungs and dropping him to his knees. A knife slipped between his chest and the strap of his rifle, and the strap was sliced through. The rifle tumbled to the carpet.

Brandt pressed a hand to his stomach and struggled to breathe, even as he scrambled for his gun, which lay on the carpet, nearly in reach.

A booted foot came down on top of the weapon, effectively blocking his attempt.

Brandt slowly looked up at the figure standing above him. He stared down the barrel of a Beretta M9 handgun similar to his own, pointed directly at his face. It was held in an easy grip by a familiar redheaded woman.

“It’s about fucking time you showed up,” Alicia Day snarled.

Remy’s nerves felt like they were about to vibrate through her skin as she stood guard beside Ethan, her back to the gate behind her, her bolo knife grasped in her sweaty hand. She trembled as she squinted through the darkness of the lobby, hoping none of the infected would notice her or Ethan. The man in question knelt on the floor beside her, nearly lying down, as he worked at the lock on the security gate pulled over the hotel bar’s entrance. Remy personally thought the short detour was the epitome of stupidity; they didn’t have time for this, not with people possibly dying eleven floors above them! But Ethan had insisted, had pushed on it until she couldn’t say no, not without risking him going alone.

“Almost got it,” Ethan whispered below her, mostly to himself. Remy didn’t bother responding to his statement, knowing it wasn’t necessarily intended for her. Instead, she straightened her back and squinted into the darkness again.

It hadn’t been long since she and Ethan had split off from Brandt and Cade. The other two had disappeared to the right, on their mission to seek out Alicia Day. Remy and Ethan were intended to search for and rescue any survivors they could. But even with this mission in mind, Remy could still remember Brandt’s words to her, spoken earlier in the day, while Ethan napped, the promise he’d forced out of her. The one that tore her heart in two whenever she thought on it.
If Ethan shows any sign of turning into one of the infected, any sign of the medication wearing off whatsoever, you pull the fucking trigger on him. Promise me, Remy.

Remy wasn’t sure she could do it.

She glanced at Ethan. He still worked at picking the lock with two slender screwdrivers, twisting and jabbing in an intricate manner that she wouldn’t claim to understand. She returned her eyes to the scenery around them. Still nothing moved. Another gunshot rang out on the other side of the lobby, but it wasn’t followed by any more. Remy hoped that meant the other two were okay and had only been threatened by one of the infected and not a mass of them.