The Becoming: Revelations (48 page)

Almost.

Then they all stepped forward, and the darkness of the mall pressed close around them. Brandt’s back and shoulder muscles stiffened instinctively. He was all for racing through the mall as quickly as they could. Cade and Remy seemed to share his sentiments, because they moved at a pace so quick that, loaded down as he was with Ethan and Shae, Brandt could barely keep up with them.

The mall was darker than Brandt liked. Not that there was anything he could do about it. The darkness unsettled him, and he couldn’t hear past Shae’s sniffles or the low grunts Ethan let out as he struggled against Brandt’s grip on him. His best senses had been temporarily robbed from him in the darkness, and he felt nervousness stirring in his gut. This wasn’t his idea of a good time.

They were in the stairwell on the second floor, racing as rapidly and silently as they could for the street level, when Brandt caught a flutter of movement in the corner of his eye. He stiffened and grabbed Sasha by the wrist, swinging her around him to the side closest to the railing and twisting to protect Shae as a man lurched out of the shadows and tackled him. Overbalanced with the impact, Brandt went down, falling on top of Ethan with a grunt. He flailed, trying to push himself up enough to get to his gun, still holstered at his hip and now pinned beneath him.

The infected man that had tackled him threw himself on top of the pile. Brandt swore and slung Shae out of the way, sliding the toddler across the tiled landing in Remy’s direction. At the same time, he braced a hand against the man’s chest and pushed up, trying to get the man off him. “Cade! Give me a hand here!” he yelled.

Before Cade could start in his direction, Sasha ran toward him and swung the flashlight she held with all the strength she had in her seven-year-old arms. The metal flashlight struck the side of the man’s head, and though it didn’t do much to injure him, it threw him off balance enough that Brandt was able to get his foot underneath the man and push up, shoving him off and to the floor beside him. Then Brandt rolled, took a knee, and lifted his rifle from its tactical carry against his chest.

Three shots echoed through the stairwell, two from Brandt’s rifle and one from Cade’s. The infected man twitched once and then was still.

“You okay?” Cade asked in the ringing silence that followed. She dropped to a knee beside Brandt and looked into his face. Her blue eyes were hard with worry, and she reached out as if to take his face in her hands. He leaned back and caught her wrists to stop her.

“I’m fine. Check on Sasha,” he ordered. “We need to get the hell out of here. No time for this.” He didn’t wait for Cade’s reply. Instead, he scooped Ethan off the floor and returned him to his shoulder, then beckoned to Remy. “Give me Shae.”

“Are you sure? I can—” she started.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Brandt persisted. “I’m fine. I can handle her. She barely weighs anything.”

Remy nodded and passed the girl over, and Brandt settled her once again against his hip. He nodded to Remy, indicating that she should take the lead, and tugged Sasha closer to him. And then, as one, they started down the stairs again, shaken by the attack but pressing forward regardless.

It didn’t take long for the small group to make it to the ground level, where they were greeted by the blessed sight of only a few infected milling around on the street. By Brandt’s quick calculations, there were maybe ten infected outside—not a small number, but definitely not something they couldn’t handle.

“Doesn’t look too bad, does it?” Remy spoke up. She rested a hand against one of the doors and peered through the glass, squinting past the cracks and the dust and the dirt to study what lay beyond.

“Assuming it stays that way,” Cade muttered. “And with the way our luck goes … well, let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.”

“Me either,” Brandt agreed. Ethan bucked against his shoulder, causing Brandt to nearly drop him. “We might want to make this quick. I’m not sure how much longer I can handle holding Ethan like this.”

“Yeah, and I think the infected have spotted us,” Remy warned. “They’re moving this way, and the crowd is getting bigger.” There was a small, exhausted tremor under her voice as she spoke the words. Brandt looked at her with concern.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “How are you feeling?”

“Really tired,” she admitted. “And my arms and face hurt. But I’ll be okay. Just going to want a
very
long nap after this. Maybe sleep for a day or two.”

“What about infection-wise?” Cade spoke up. “How’s that feeling for you?”

“Mildly queasy, but nothing I can’t live with.”

Brandt still didn’t like how Remy sounded, but despite that, he nodded to her. He was more intent on getting all of them out in one piece. He’d worry about Remy’s health after they’d reached the relative safety of whatever vehicle Isaac and Dominic had tracked down.

He only hoped the two men hadn’t given up on them in the time between their departure and now.

Remy pressed her hand against the door again, and everyone present seemed to take a deep, steadying breath in unison. Then she finally pushed it open and stepped through the door to the sidewalk beyond.

Almost as soon as her boots met the brick and concrete, the infected turned fully toward them, certain of their next meal. They started in the group’s direction, first at a slow pace and then quickly speeding up. Several of them made that horrible snarling noise the infected made when prey was present, and Ethan tried to echo it in the back of his throat, despite his mouth being taped shut. Brandt gritted his teeth and moved out the door, Cade following him briskly.

“Which way, Brandt?” Remy yelled as she wielded her knife before her, ready to attack.

“Right! Go right!” Brandt ordered, coming up behind her and goading her forward with a short nudge to her back. Remy lifted her knife and, before Brandt or Cade could stop her, charged directly into the mass of bodies coming toward them, blade swinging furiously. Brandt swore under his breath and, not seeing any other options available to him, ran after her, the children and Ethan in tow. He knew Cade was right behind him and would follow without question, even if she didn’t agree with the action.

As he plowed forward, chasing after Remy, Brandt realized that this was the most nervous he’d felt in the entire time the Michaluk virus had wreaked havoc on the world. Sure, he’d been involved in mass attacks before. He was no stranger to risking life and limb in fights with the infected.

But this was something wholly different. This was something more dangerous, more risky: to charge into a horde quickly growing into the dozens without even the courtesy of body armor, bringing along a duct-taped infected man, a pregnant woman, and two totally defenseless children. It was sheer fucking madness.

But it was the only chance they had to get out of this alive, especially with the way the infected blocked the sidewalk—the clearest path available to them.

Remy tore through the infected ahead of him and the children, her blade flashing in the lightning that illuminated the sky above them. As she hacked at heads and shoulders and limbs, working to clear a path through them, she looked like an avenging angel with the expression of righteous anger on her pretty face. She fought with the fury of a woman who was highly pissed off. Brandt had no desire to get anywhere near her while she was so enraged.

The shrieks of the infected were almost deafening. The idea that they were crying out in what sounded like pain was disturbing; the thought that they could even
feel
pain—something Brandt had never even considered—bothered him. But Brandt forced himself forward, trying to not dwell on that very human aspect of what he considered so inhuman.

Brandt’s heart hammered wildly in his chest as he tried to follow Remy through the crowd. Cade’s rifle fired behind him in a staccato beat, and hands grasped at his jacket. Brandt pulled Shae closer to his chest as Cade shot one of the infected close to him. The bullet struck the man in the shoulder, spinning him away, but then another was there to take his place almost immediately.

“We’ve got to get the hell out of here!” Brandt yelled to Cade over the sounds of the infected and the loud crash of thunder that rent the air. Sasha gripped his coat tighter as she moved closer to him, holding her flashlight as if she were ready to hit anything that came close to her. “There’s no way we can hold out like this! We’ve got to get the kids out of here!”

“We’re trying, Brandt!” Cade yelled back. Brandt glanced at her and couldn’t miss the desperation in her eyes. “There’s only so much we can do! I don’t know about Remy, but I’m getting tired. I’ll be happy so long as this doesn’t get any worse!”

As if on cue, another rumble of thunder shook the air, and the sky split open. The downpour that had built all evening finally dropped onto them, soaking them to the skin within moments and eliciting a stream of swears from Cade.

“You just
had
to open your mouth, didn’t you?” Brandt shouted, even as he started to run faster. Cade scrambled to keep up, raising her rifle to shoot into the infected again.

Brandt had nearly lost sight of Remy in the time he and Cade had had their discussion, and it took him several heart-stopping moments before he spotted the young woman in the nearly empty street, where the cars had cleared. She was still chasing down any infected in sight rather than sticking with fighting off only the ones blocking their paths. Cade and Brandt raced to join her, but before they reached her location, three infected ganged up on Remy and took her down to the pavement.

“Remy!” Cade shrieked over the thunder and rain that covered the sound of Remy’s impact with the pavement. She started in the younger woman’s direction.

“Cade, no!” Brandt said. “You can’t! I need your help! I can’t manage the kids and keep the infected off me at the same time!”

Cade looked torn, and she glanced between Brandt and Remy before firing a bullet at a woman grasping for Brandt. “Fuck!” she shouted in frustration. She whipped in Remy’s general direction and fired at the remaining infected converging on her position until the magazine ran dry. Then she slung the rifle onto her shoulder and swung the shotgun off her back, racking a round and firing the weapon into the crowd. “Come on!” she said to Brandt, grabbing the sleeve of his jacket. “We’ve at least got to try!”

Though the idea of running straight at the infected certainly didn’t appeal to Brandt, he knew Cade was right. The remaining members of the group had been through entirely too much together for them to just run away and leave Remy to the infected. They had to try to save her.

Cade brought the shotgun up to aim it into the crowd closest to Remy, ready to fire again and take down as many as she could from a distance before she closed in to try to fight them off. Before she managed to fire off a shot, though, the squeal of tires on pavement caught their attention. Brandt tensed, his shoulders squaring and his back stiffening, and looked in the direction of the sound.

A pair of headlights bore down on them. The vehicle to which they were attached squealed to a stop mere feet away from them. A familiar voice shouted from it.

“The cavalry has arrived!”

It took Brandt scant seconds to recognize Isaac Wright’s voice, and relief flooded his entire body. He let out a triumphant shout and darted to the vehicle, hauling Shae and Sasha with him. “Thank Jesus you’re here,” he said. He set Shae down and flung the back passenger door open to shove the two kids inside as Cade covered him. “Remy’s in trouble. She needs a hand.”

“I’ve got it!” Dominic said confidently. Despite his injured shoulder, he climbed from the vehicle and accepted the sidearm Cade offered him, then ran in the direction she pointed. As he disappeared into the rain, Brandt called to Isaac.

“Open the back door. I’ve got to put him in,” he said, shifting Ethan on his shoulder to indicate the “him” to whom he referred.

Isaac frowned and pulled the door-release lever. “What the fuck is wrong with him?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” Cade answered. She moved to help Brandt, pushing the back door fully open and helping him shift the man off his shoulder and into the empty cargo area. As Cade covered the vehicle, Brandt clambered in after Ethan to shelter from the rain. Remy and Dominic appeared within moments, running to the SUV, Remy’s hand clenched on Dominic’s uninjured arm. Her clothes were torn, her hair was disheveled and pulled free from its hairband, and she was covered with blood—both her own and others’—and other things Brandt didn’t want to think about. But she was in one piece, which was far more than he’d hoped for. He let out a relieved breath as she and Dominic climbed into the vehicle, Remy in the back seat with the kids, and Dominic in the passenger seat in the front. Cade swung herself into the cargo area with Brandt, despite the cramped quarters, and pulled the door shut with a heavy whump.

“Come on, get moving!” Brandt called to Isaac. The other man pushed the gearshift into drive. “We’ve got to get out of here. Take whatever cleared roads you can to the east. We have to rendezvous with the others in Hollywood as fast as possible.”

As the SUV started down the street, rapidly accelerating, Cade looked at Brandt, her eyes meeting his in the dim light inside the vehicle. She looked exhausted, a little scared, but also somehow relieved. Brandt broke his gaze from hers and closed his eyes, letting out another slow breath before opening them again. She reached out and took his hand, and he clutched it tightly, determined not to let go. No matter what happened.