Jessica Meigs - The Becoming

by Brothers in Arms

  Theo was still in the kitchen when Gray entered, digging in what they’d always called the “junk drawer.” He barely looked up as he shoved things around in the drawer. “Did you find the plastic?”

  “Yeah, I got it,” Gray assured him. He dumped the supplies on the kitchen counter near Theo. It was then that his brother looked at him, a deep frown crossing his face.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, the concern in his voice noticeable. “You look…I don’t know. Rattled?”

  “I’m fine,” Gray said. “Nothing wrong.” He looked over the kitchen, decided to start on the windows in there, and began to climb up onto the counter to measure the window above the sink.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, Theo, I’m sure,” Gray muttered. “Jesus.” He rolled his eyes and grabbed one of the packages of plastic.

  After fitting the windows in the kitchen and living room with thick plastic coverings, Gray found himself standing outside the closed French doors to his mother’s office. He ran a hand through his hair, tucking it back behind his ears before taking a fortifying breath and stepping forward to open the door. The door creaked softly, and he peered around the edge to look into the office.

  The large desk and its computer sat undisturbed in the room lined with windows and bookshelves that were heaped with piles upon piles of books and notebooks. Everything was covered with a thin film of dust. His heart raced as he stepped into the room, and he tightened his grip on the roll of plastic in his hand. The room was essentially a shrine, an altar to their mother, homage to all the work and creativity she had expended throughout their childhood. Even from where he stood, he could see the seven books on the bookshelf closest to the desk, their spines facing out, each adorned with the name “Melissa Carter.” Gray smiled slightly at the sight as he took another slow step deeper into the room and closed his eyes, sucking in a deep breath. He immediately began choking on the dust floating in the air.

  Coughing harshly, Gray put a hand up against his nose, glanced around one more time, and then retreated from the room, pulling the doors shut behind him. He sagged against one, blowing out a breath, suppressing the coughing and trying to calm his lungs and ward off an asthma attack before it really hit. A couple of short breaths later, the coughing began to subside, and moments after that, he began to feel like he could breathe again. He shook his head, as if that could free him of the horrendous creeping sensation of suffocation, and moved away from the office doors. He couldn’t go in there, couldn’t deal with being in that room with what felt like his mother’s presence everywhere around him. He would just have to see if Theo could handle the windows in that room for him.

  Gray heard voices echoing against the ceiling. He abandoned his spot at the office door and followed the sound, moving from room to room in search of it. It didn’t take him very long to track it to the living room, and he stepped inside to find Theo sitting on the coffee table in the near-dark, his elbows resting against his knees and his hands over his mouth, his eyes wide. The lights from the television flickered over his face, and Gray could see his entire body shaking as he stared at the screen. Gray dropped the plastic and duct tape onto a small table by the door and walked toward him with a frown. “Are you okay?” he started to ask, but then he glanced at the television, and his breath caught in his throat as he saw what Theo was watching. “Oh, Jesus. Is that…?” He swallowed and somehow managed to finish. “That’s not a movie, is it?”

  “No,” Theo answered. His voice was muffled by his hands, but he didn’t move them away from his face so Gray could hear him better. “That’s not a movie. That’s Birmingham.”

  Gray sank down to sit on the table beside Theo, leaning forward as he stared intently at the television. “What’s going on?” he asked, taking in the sight of the smoking city, the glowing skyline hinting at raging fires, and the screaming that nearly drowned out the reporter yelling into her microphone. “What happened?”

  “The same thing that happened here,” Theo said. His voice sounded dull, wooden, but Gray didn’t look at him. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the screen. “Only worse. Only…bigger.”

  “My God,” Gray breathed out. He dug his fingers into his knees as he stared in shock at the scene on display before them.

  “Emergency management agencies are requesting that everyone stay indoors at this time,” the reporter was saying. “Lock all doors and windows, do what you can to barricade any entry points into your home, and just wait it out. Martial law has been declared for the entire state of Alabama, and a curfew of sundown will be strictly enforced. The state of martial law will likely be expanded soon to include Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida, in addition to the states of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia that are already under martial law. There’s a possibility that South Carolina will soon be added to that list.”

  “This is insane,” Theo commented. Gray glanced at him and saw that he’d finally taken his hands away from his mouth and was instead picking at the edge of the coffee table.

  “Now we’re going to kick you back to our station, where Edward will be speaking with David Keene from the Department of Homeland Security. Edward?”

  “Thanks, Chelsea,” Edward said. Gray sat up a little straighter as the camera panned back from the frazzled-looking Edward to show another man sitting beside him, this one much more composed and professional, almost relaxed, his tie straight and his shirt and coat smooth and unwrinkled. “I’m here with David Keene from the Department of Homeland Security, who is here today to outline the threat we are facing and the precautions viewers should take in order to protect themselves from it. Mr. Keene?”

  “Zombies,” Gray said promptly. “Doesn’t take an idiot to know that’s what it is.”

  “Shut up and get me some paper,” Theo said. “A notebook or something. I want to take notes.”

  “What’s to write down?” Gray asked. “It’s zombies.”

  “I said shut up and get me some fucking paper!”

  Gray stared at Theo, wide-eyed, as the government official on the television began to drone. Theo had never yelled at him with such genuine anger and seriousness in his voice. Shaking his head, Gray forced himself off the coffee table and grabbed the notebook and pen from the table by the phone, handing both to Theo before sitting on the couch behind him. Theo bowed his head and, without another word, began to scribble in the notebook furiously, taking down everything the man on the television said, words Gray only half-heard as he stared at his brother’s tense back and wondered what in the world had suddenly made him so angry.

  Chapter 14

  Gray and Theo had been hiding out in their parents’ house for nearly three weeks when they began to run out of drinking water and gasoline for the generators.

  Theo didn’t tell Gray about their worsening situation right away. Frankly, he didn’t see the point in worrying him over it. Everything was bad enough without him having to deal with Gray having a spastic fit over whether or not they were going to dehydrate to death.

  That was, of course, assuming Gray would actually talk to him. In the long days that had passed since they’d taken shelter at their old family home, Gray had barely spoken two words to him. Theo wasn’t sure why; he didn’t know what he’d done to make Gray so sullen and withdrawn. He hadn’t concerned himself with it too much before then; he’d been too busy getting supplies together and coming up with assorted plans for different scenarios that could have arisen while staying there. Theo had figured that Gray was in shock from everything they’d seen on the street, on the television, and on the Internet—back before it had all stopped working, anyway. They weren’t getting any television stations anymore, just snowy static. The radio stations had stopped broadcasting the week before—at least in the way of information, though there were a few clearly automated stations still playing top-forty hits. The Internet had gone down about two days after they reached the house, thankfully not before an overnight intensive effort at information gathering. Theo was sure the pr
inter would never be the same again.

  Since they’d lost all their connections to the outside world, they’d been flying blind, save for the occasional broadcast made by amateurs over an old ham radio system Theo had dug out of the attic. Gray spent a lot of his time in his room with the radio, the door locked so Theo couldn’t check in on him and see how he was doing.

  Theo rubbed a hand through his hair and sighed as he tore himself out of his thoughts and focused back on the task in front of him. In his room-by-room search of the house, he’d stumbled across a Smith & Wesson revolver in his parents’ old bedroom, along with half a box of ammunition, and now he was kneeling on the floor at the coffee table, trying to figure out how to disassemble the weapon and clean it, an Internet printout as his only guide. Considering he knew next to nothing about guns, it was proving more challenging than he’d expected it to be.

  Theo sighed and set the gun down on the table with a shake of his head. The entire diagram and list of instructions read like Greek to him, and as he squinted at it again, trying to figure out what in the hell he was looking at, a heavy sense of helplessness settled over him. The idea of being able to protect Gray from all the shit going on outside suddenly seemed absurd in the face of his inability to even clean a gun. He blew out a breath and dropped his head to rest against the edge of the table, rolling it slowly from side to side as he tried to fight off the helplessness. It wasn’t time to let himself fall apart. He had too much to do, too much on his shoulders, to let the stress take over and derail everything he was trying to keep together.

  Footsteps on the stairs drew his attention away from his own pity party, and he quickly sat up straight, wiping at his eyes in an effort to erase the tiredness and stress from them. Then he snatched the gun up and grabbed for the first page of the cleaning instructions, narrowing his eyes and trying to look like he’d been focused on it for the past several minutes and not silently bemoaning his lack of ability. There was almost a skip to Gray’s step as he took the last few steps before thumping down to the first floor. Theo heard him go to the kitchen, the rattle of plastic as he pulled a bottle of water from the dwindling package on the counter and the crack as he opened it, and then the footsteps started to move again before stopping somewhere behind him. He didn’t bother to turn around, keeping his eyes on the task at hand, though he didn’t have the foggiest idea what he was doing.

  “You look confused,” Gray said to his left. Theo cut his eyes over and saw him loitering in the living room doorway, rolling the bottle of water between his hands as he leaned against the doorframe. “No, strike that. You look totally lost.”

  “I think I am,” Theo admitted sheepishly. He set the gun down on the table carefully, as if he were handling glass, and then twisted to look at Gray. He took a few moments to look him over, getting his first good study of the other man in nearly three weeks. Gray looked tired and pale, a bit thin, the dark circles under his eyes hinting that he hadn’t been sleeping very well. Theo could sympathize. He ruffled his fingers over the edges of the instruction manual before clearing his throat and shifting uncomfortably. “Are you…okay?”

  Gray shrugged and took a swallow from his bottle. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked nonchalantly. Theo bit his tongue to keep from making a smartass comment in reply. Gray’s eyes scanned the coffee table, and then he moved forward and flopped heavily onto the couch. He picked up the Smith & Wesson and the tools Theo had dug out nearly an hour before. Not bothering to look at the instructions, he began to disassemble the revolver with practiced ease.

  “How’d you learn to do that?” Theo asked. He leaned his elbows against the table to watch attentively.

  “Dad showed me ages ago,” he answered. “Back when he bought it for Mom. ‘Cause he was gone all the time on business and didn’t want her here without a gun she could use.”

  “Wonder why he never showed me how to do all that,” Theo mused.

  “Because you never acted like you were interested in this kind of thing.” He did something with the gun that Theo couldn’t see, and it seemed to magically come apart in his hands. “Besides, you never were very good with the mechanical stuff like this. No offense.”

  “None taken.” Theo sat back on his heels as Gray carefully lined the gun’s parts up on the table. He waited a moment, letting his brother work in silence, before he spoke again. “Are you mad at me?”

  “Why would I be mad at you?” Gray’s question was casual, but Theo could hear an undercurrent of tension beneath the words. He pressed his lips tightly together.

  “Well, that’s my point,” he said. “You’ve been hiding in your room for almost three weeks now.”

  “Has it really been that long?”

  Theo rolled his eyes. “Look, Gray, tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it, okay?” he begged. “I can’t deal with this whole silent-treatment bullshit you’re doing. Especially not now that the world’s like it is. It ever occur to you that I can’t do it all on my own? That maybe, just maybe I could use a hand down here getting all our shit together while you’re busy holing up in your bedroom doing God knows what?”

  Gray sat up straight then, looking right at him, and delicately set the revolver’s cylinder down on the table between them. Then he stood and, without another word, headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time. After he was out of sight, somewhere above him, Theo heard a door slam open and the sound of Gray banging around upstairs. He sighed and shook his head, his shoulders slumping as he focused on the printouts in front of him. He felt like slapping himself. He’d approached the whole thing in the wrong way; he’d never been good with confrontation, and he knew that.

  Theo pushed himself off the floor and headed for the stairs, intending to go up and apologize to Gray for whatever he’d done to slight him. Before he made it halfway across the room, the sound of Gray walking down the upstairs hallway brought him to a stop. He looked up at the staircase as Gray descended it, two books in his arms. One Theo immediately recognized as the family Bible, the one with all the generations of the family tree filled in in an assortment of handwritings from various family members. The other he’d never seen before: a thick black notebook, almost like a journal. When he reached the living room, Gray set the Bible reverently on the coffee table beside the disassembled revolver and then dropped the black book on the table beside it with a loud smack.

  “Never once asked you to do it on your own, Theo,” Gray said as Theo stared down at the book. “I’m not just sitting in there being useless. I’m actually doing stuff with my time. Useful stuff.”

  Theo leaned down, picked up the book, and flipped the cover open. The first page was filled with Gray’s cramped, miniscule handwriting, from one edge of the page to the other, disregarding the red lines demarcating the margins. He turned several pages, finding the notes going almost halfway into the book, every page absolutely covered in Gray’s handwriting, back and front. He shook his head in bewilderment and looked up at him. “What the hell’s all of this?”

  “You know that radio you dug out?” Gray said, sitting back down on the couch. He resumed where he’d left off cleaning the revolver. “I’ve been listening. And taking notes. Lot of information’s being passed around on that thing.” He brushed a hand through his hair, tucking it behind his ears, and then nodded toward the Bible. “And those maps I printed out from the Internet before it went down? I’ve been taking notes on those too.”

  It was then that Theo focused on the papers sticking out of the thick Bible. He pulled some of them free and discovered that, just as Gray had said, handwriting covered the maps. Some of the streets were colored in with a red marker, and notations next to them labeled traffic jams, vehicular pile-ups, and cryptic notations that said “infected.”

  “What’s this mean?” Theo asked, holding up one of the papers and pointing to the label.

  “Infected?” Gray asked. When Theo nodded, he continued. “That’s what they’re calling them on the radio. ‘The infected.’ They’re peo
ple who have gotten sick from whatever it is going around.” He motioned toward the dead television on the other side of the room. “That bullshit they were spewing on the television about riots and shit was just that. Bullshit. Turns out I was a hell of a lot closer to guessing right than I thought.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a virus,” Gray explained. “Near about as anybody can tell, anyway.”

  “What’s the vector?” Theo asked promptly. When Gray raised a questioning eyebrow, he clarified, “How’s it transmitted?”

  “They said it can get passed on through blood or spit, mostly. Nobody knows much of anything past that. Just that they like to pass on the virus by biting.” He closed an eye and squinted down the barrel of the gun.

  “And if you get the virus?”

  “Then you get really sick,” Gray answered. “And you die. Or sort of die. I’m not totally clear on that. But then after that, you go…well, crazy. They say that people with the virus are eating people.”

  “Like zombies,” Theo conceded.

  “Yeah, exactly.” Gray looked up at him. “And once you get the virus, you’re gone. There’s no cure.”

  “Figures,” Theo muttered.

  “So what are our options?” Gray asked. He refocused on the weapon in his hands, and Theo set the black journal down beside the Bible with a low, thoughtful hum.