The Becoming: Revelations (8 page)

“Ethan, you’re hurting me,” Alicia said. Her voice was surprisingly calm, despite the threat looming directly in front of her.

“You know where they are.”

“And you’re letting Michaluk control you again.”

Ethan stared at Alicia for a moment longer, slowly loosening his bruising grip on her arms until he let go of her completely. He simply stood before her, his eyes closed, breathing in deeply and attempting to gain control of the anger threatening to possess him. “I’m not sorry,” he said after the moment and his anger had passed.

“I know you’re not,” Alicia replied. “I don’t expect you to be.”

Ethan started to open his eyes and take a step back from her, but her cold hand pressed gently against his cheek. He paused, unconsciously leaning into the touch. “I still want to go with you. Your team. Whatever.”

“I know, but I have a much more important job I need you to do.” Her fingers traced his jaw before withdrawing. “The man I usually leave in charge when I go out—”

“Dominic,” Ethan said impulsively.

“Yes. Dominic. He’s taking this trip with me. We’ll be gone for approximately four days.” Alicia paused again. The silence prompted Ethan to give her a curious look. “I don’t want my people leaderless while I’m out. It’s too long for them to manage themselves.” She slid from between him and the wall, picking up her knife from the dresser and adding it to her belt as she added, “I want you to fill in for me while I’m gone.”

Ethan’s eyes widened, and his back straightened. “What?
Me?
You want
me
in charge?”

Alicia’s eyes were hard and serious. “Yes, you. I know of no one else here who’s remotely capable of it. You’ve got the experience—”

“Leading six people—half of whom I got killed—is hardly effective leadership,” Ethan protested. “And it’s nowhere near the same as leading over a hundred people!”

“Ethan, I wouldn’t ask you if I thought you couldn’t handle it,” Alicia said. “You’re a capable leader. People here respect you, enough of them that they’d accept your leadership without question or protest.”

Ethan pressed his lips together, looking at the door uncertainly. “Alicia, I don’t know …”

“Ethan, please,” Alicia persisted. “We need you to do this.
I
need you to do this. There isn’t much choice in the matter. I don’t think I trust anyone else enough to do it.”

Ethan and Alicia watched each other for a long moment. Finally, Ethan crossed his arms again and let out a heavy sigh.

“What do you need me to do?”

Despite Brandt’s insistence that he and Gray set out on a supply search the morning after he’d realized it was prudent to do so, it wasn’t until nearly a week after Cade’s fever broke that they could even get into a position where it was feasible. The past two days had been full of heavy tension between him and Cade; it was two days during which he spent a lot of time on watch and two nights during which he dozed on the couch downstairs—against every rule he’d issued about spending time on the first floor at night. As a result, when Remy made an announcement as the four of them settled down for breakfast on the morning of Brandt and Gray’s departure, Brandt was tired, cranky, and ready for a fight, not a good combination for what Remy had in mind to discuss.

“I saw lights while I was on watch last night,” Remy said as she flopped into her seat, joining the other three late into their breakfasts. As her words fell onto the otherwise silent room, Brandt’s eyes darted from his plate. His elbow jerked reflexively and knocked over the glass of water someone had so thoughtfully placed by his arm. Water sloshed from the glass in a wave, spreading across the table and running off the edge, right into Gray’s lap. Gray let out an irritated grunt of protest and moved out of the way, even as he reached for a towel. Brandt barely noticed as he focused on the young woman who’d sat at the table directly across from him.

“You saw
what?
” Brandt demanded. He dropped his fork onto his plate with a clatter.

Remy didn’t look at Brandt. Instead, she kept her eyes glued to the plate in front of her, focused solely on the powdered eggs. “Lights,” she repeated. She prodded at the food with her fork and nearly snarled at it before grabbing the pepper shaker from the center of the table and applying the spice liberally. “Out near the horizon. I don’t suppose we have any hot sauce, do we?”

Brandt ignored the question and gripped the edge of the dining table as a jolt of panic surged through him. His fingernails scratched into the wood, and he struggled desperately to maintain control of himself. “What kind of lights?” he demanded. “Headlights? Taillights? Plane lights? Helicopter lights? Aurora fucking borealis?”

“Brandt, chill,” Remy muttered. She shoved a forkful of the newly peppered egg into her mouth. “I think it was just some headlights, okay? They were close to the ground, out on the horizon a good bit away from us.” She shrugged and took another bite of egg, then swallowed it and added, “It must be other survivors. Maybe we should figure out a way to contact them.”

Brandt stared at her, his fingertips turning white with the force of his grip on the table. His mind raced as he tried to guess at who could have been near their safe house, who might have been looking for them,
if
someone was looking for them. He shook his head. “No,” he said as firmly as he could. “No, I don’t think so.”

“What?” Remy raised an eyebrow, setting her fork down deliberately on the table. Cade and Gray watched both of them as she continued. “Why not? I mean, we spent most of the past year going out of our way to help people, and—”

“And we’re not going to this year,” Brandt interrupted. “I’m more focused on ensuring
our
survival, not the survival of a bunch of strangers. Now drop it.”

Remy fell silent and stared at her plate without making a move to pick up her fork. She took a slow sip of water as Brandt ventured a glance at Cade. The Israeli woman sat completely motionless in her chair, her eyes the only things moving, flitting back and forth between Brandt and Remy. Brandt tried to dredge up something to say to her, maybe asking her opinion on this situation. But before he could speak, Gray piped up.

“
So,
how ‘bout that Crimson Tide, huh?” he said, attempting to break the tension in the room. Remy seemed to take that as her cue to protest again.

“I just don’t see why—”

A surge of anger welled up inside Brandt. He slammed both fists against the tabletop. Dishes rattled, and all three of his companions startled. “Damn it, Remy!” he snapped. “Because I fucking
said so,
that’s why!”

There was a pause as Cade, Gray, and Remy exchanged glances that Brandt couldn’t read. They seemed to be having a silent conversation among themselves, which only served to irritate him further. Then Gray said cautiously, “Brandt, don’t you think maybe you’re being a little, ah, paranoid?”

Brandt stiffened and squared his shoulders. “Paranoid?” he repeated. “
Paranoid?
So I’m fucking paranoid for wanting to keep the three of you alive longer than I managed for Nikola and Theo and Ethan? If
that’s
paranoid, then I’m fucking happy to be paranoid.”

“I just think we shouldn’t lose sight of our mission—” Remy started. Brandt interrupted.

“Our
mission
is to stay alive. Everything else after that’s just fucking fluff,” Brandt bit out. “There’s too much shit going on out there, and there are dangers from things
other
than the infected. Do I have to remind you that Avi wasn’t killed by the infected? That she got
shot
by an
uninfected
person specifically targeting us?” He shook his head again. “I can’t risk it, okay? There are too many people out there who’d love to get a piece of me, and—”

It was Cade’s turn to interrupt. “Why would anyone out there want a piece of you?” she asked quietly.

An uncomfortable silence descended over them. Brandt had let his anger get the better of him, and he’d tipped his hand far earlier than he’d intended to. He pressed his lips together and mentally scrambled to come up with an answer to Cade’s question.

He finally settled on, “Because I know a lot more about what happened in Atlanta than most people do, that’s all. Now that’s enough. We’re going to fucking
eat,
and then Gray and I are going to get our shit together, because we don’t have time for this kind of garbage.”

It had only been forty-eight hours since Alicia had left with her group of four men on their mission, and Ethan was already going stir-crazy. He’d had to deal with one problem after the other, everything from fights to food ration distribution to a sick child—and he was
still
struggling to learn people’s names so he could communicate with them properly. He’d spent most of his time on the fourth floor, which seemed to have been established as a base of operations for all of the hotel’s day-to-day activities. And there were a
lot
of day-to-day activities.

And that fourth floor was where he found himself, sitting with his head in his hands, listening to an older black woman tell him exactly what she thought of him—none of it flattering. He struggled to maintain his cool, inches away from going off on the woman and giving her a piece of
his
mind, as she continued listing every insult she could muster. He let the woman go on for a moment longer before he lifted his head, put his hands up, and interrupted her.

“Miss Washington,” he began.

“
Missus,
” the old woman corrected. “I wasn’t married for forty years to start getting called
miss
again just because the mister got eaten.”

Ethan blinked but quickly got his mind back on track. “
Mrs.
Washington,” he started again with emphasis. “The fact of the matter is we
can’t
increase your food rations. Believe me, I would if I could, but there just isn’t enough to go around increasing everyone’s. The sick and the young get priority, and everyone else comes after them. End of argument.”

Mrs. Washington deflated at Ethan’s words, her shoulders slumping. Ethan sighed and looked at the papers on the table in front of him, studying the figures listed on them and trying to see if there was anything he could do. Finally, he said, “Look, I’ll take a glance over it a bit later, okay? Maybe I can work something out. But I can’t make any guarantees.”

The woman was reasonably satisfied with the promise. She nodded shortly and stood, her face still grim but not as angry as she’d initially been. After she’d disappeared down the hallway to the stairwell to return to her own rooms on the twentieth floor, Ethan groaned and dropped his head onto the table, rolling it from side to side as he tried to relax, just for a moment.

“Long day?” a woman’s voice asked above him. Ethan raised his head to see a woman with short blond hair standing beside his table, her hands clutching a manila folder. It took him a few seconds to recognize her—it was the woman who’d helped him and Dominic and Alicia with their mop-up in the parking garage earlier in the week, during the attempted invasion by the infected.

“You don’t even know the half of it,” Ethan said tiredly. “Does Alicia put up with this kind of shit every day?”

The woman sat down in the chair beside him and shrugged. “For the most part. Some days are a lot better than others.” She paused and offered her hand to Ethan. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Kimberly Geller.”

Ethan shook the woman’s hand and gave her a curious look. “Geller?” he repeated. “As in …?”

“Avi Geller?” Kimberly nodded. “Yeah, she was my younger sister.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Ethan said sincerely. “She was a good woman.” Kimberly waved her hand at him dismissively, as if she didn’t want to hear his condolences, so he continued. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Kimberly. I’m Ethan Bennett. But I’m pretty sure you knew that already.”

Kimberly gave him a winning smile that he found very attractive. “Yes, I did know that already,” she confirmed. “Just about everyone here knows who you are. Those who don’t have basically been living under a rock.”

Ethan raised his eyebrows. “Really? Am I that well known?”

“You have
no
idea,” Kimberly said with a small laugh. She shook her short blond hair out of her eyes. “There are a lot of people here that you and your friends have saved over the past year. They got our radio broadcasts and made their way here after you pulled them out of whatever sticky situations they were in, and after that, word just started to spread. It’s surprising how fast news travels under these kinds of circumstances.”

Ethan perked up and turned in his seat to face Kimberly more fully. “Radio broadcasts?” he repeated, intrigued. “What do you mean by broadcasts?”

“Broadcasts,” Kimberly repeated, as if Ethan should have known what she meant. “You know, on the radio?” When Ethan continued to give her an odd look, Kimberly stood and motioned for Ethan to do the same. “You obviously don’t know anything of what’s going on. Come on. I’ll enlighten you.”

Ethan stood obediently, curiosity eating at his insides, and followed Kimberly as she wove among the tables and chairs and the bustle and movement of the several other people in the short hallway. As he passed another table, his eyes brushed over the map of Georgia, and he wondered yet again why it looked so familiar. His hesitation over the map distracted him long enough that he nearly lost sight of Kimberly, and he raced to catch up with her. She waited for him by the stairwell door, looking surprisingly not irritated by his lag.