The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5)

by Jessica Meigs

  “What do you think Brandt would do?”

  Cade shrugged and stood, moving around the bed to lay Olivia near the center of the mattress where she wouldn’t have to worry about the infant managing to wiggle herself off the bed. “I think, considering there’s a baby involved, Brandt wouldn’t come after me,” she admitted. “He would see Olivia as the priority over me, because she can’t defend herself. But I can’t do it,” Cade said. “I feel like…like I owe him. He risked everything to come after me in Atlanta. I wouldn’t be standing here if it wasn’t for him.”

  “No, you’d just be standing somewhere else,” Dominic commented. “Look, Cade, I don’t presume to speak for all of us, but me? I’m going with you because I have a hell of a lot to make up for, both to you and to the people who died in Woodside. That and I have a lot of respect for you and for Brandt. The least I can do is go with you and help you find him. I think Rem is going out of a sense of loyalty and friendship, and that’s not something you should spit on.”

  “What about the others who are going?” Cade asked. She was thinking about Sadie and Jude, who were so young and so willing to risk their lives to help her, and Keith, who was always so levelheaded and mellow. They didn’t seem like the types to want to help someone they didn’t know well.

  “I’m sure they have their reasons, and I’m not going to presume to know what those reasons are,” he said. “However, we’re here, and we’re willing to help. I know you don’t like asking for help, but we’re at a point that you don’t have to ask. We’d offer anyway.”

  Cade tried to swallow the lump in her throat. “Thanks, Dominic. I think I really needed to hear that.”

  Dominic smiled reassuringly and straightened. “Keith and Jude have gotten together all the weapons that we’re taking with us, and they’ve sorted out some that they’re going to leave here for Derek and Isaac. The vast majority of the medical supplies are staying here too, since Olivia will be here. Remy and I decided to leave most of the food here for those staying behind, since we figure they’ll need it more than us.”

  “We can always hunt down some more while we’re on the road,” Cade said.

  “Now we’re at the point where I need to know if there’s anything you have to handle before we leave,” Dominic said.

  “Nothing I can’t do myself,” Cade said. She hesitated, then stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him in a tight hug. “Thank you,” she whispered, hoping her voice had as much gratitude in it as she felt. She wasn’t much of a hugging person, and she hoped he realized what it had taken for her to be willing to hug him like this. He returned the hug gently, surprised, afraid to hurt her if he squeezed too hard.

  “You’re welcome,” he said warmly.

  Chapter 11

  “For the record, I think this is a terrible idea,” Lindsey Alton said. She stood in front of Major Bradford’s desk with her arms folded over her chest. She adjusted her grip on the folder tucked underneath her arm and did her best to not glare at the officer. “I don’t know if he’s mentally stable or not, and you’re basically asking me if it’s okay to deliver him the biggest shock of his life.”

  “He can handle it,” Bradford said with a dismissive wave.

  “We don’t know that,” Lindsey protested. “Not for certain. The last thing we need to create in this facility is a security risk.”

  “What do you think he’s going to do, Dr. Alton?” Bradford asked. “Grab a gun and start shooting up the place?”

  “He could,” Lindsey acknowledged. “He could lay all the blame for his prior living situation squarely on this facility’s shoulders and—”

  “And we’re following orders from a much higher ranking person than I am,” Bradford interrupted.

  “Somehow, I don’t think Evans would consider that to be an acceptable excuse.”

  “We need to show this to him so maybe he’ll cooperate with us. Is it your opinion that we should hold off on showing him this because he might get pissed off?” Bradford asked. She nodded. “Is that a personal opinion or a medical one?”

  “Both,” Lindsey answered.

  Bradford looked away from her, turning his attention to the paperwork in front of him. Near the corner of the desk, Lindsey spotted an acquisitions form for glassware for the labs that she’d filled out and submitted for approval nearly two weeks before. It was, of course, unsigned. The man clearly didn’t give a shit about the work she and her lab partner did every day.

  “I’ll keep your professional and personal opinions in mind when I make my final decision,” he said. His tone, however, suggested that he’d already made that decision, and it was the opposite of what Lindsey was encouraging.

  She squeezed her hands into fists, digging her fingernails into her palms and clenching her teeth, anger flaring up in her.

  “Major Bradford, this is not a good idea,” she tried again. “We still haven’t managed to get a complete history of what he’s been through. He has injuries that make it clear he’s been attacked by the infected at some point in the very recent past, and that’s only on a physical level. We don’t know what sort of scars he has mentally. We don’t know what sort of triggers this is going to activate—”

  “I said I would keep your opinions in mind,” Bradford retorted, turning his eyes from his paperwork and back onto her. “You’re dismissed, Dr. Alton. I’m sure you have plenty of work to do.”

  It took everything in Lindsey not to growl out her frustration. She turned away from the major’s desk and stormed out the door, not slamming it shut like she wanted to but shutting it hard enough that she hoped her displeasure came across loud and clear. She strode down the carpeted hallway until it transitioned to white tiles, heading toward the labs that she spent most of her time working in. A figure clad in the bulky, Level 4-style biochemical suit that had become a regular part of their working lives was visible through the glass wall at one of the workstations lining the hazmat room, hunched over a microscope, looking through the eyepieces with a clinical eye. She bypassed her office space and stepped into the outer room to don her own biochem protection suit. The figure looked up from the microscope, saw her, and held up a hand to motion for her to wait. She set the suit down and moved to her desk, sitting down to page through the thin folder on Michael Evans while she waited for her coworker to go through decontamination.

  Her emotions on her sleeve, she jerked the cover of the paper folder open and nearly ripped it in two. Her hands shaking, she set the folder on her knees and clenched her hands again, trying to still them. She had to get a handle on herself. She let things get to her much too easily. But she couldn’t help it, not this time. The very presence of the man who’d been sitting in the cell right down the hall for the past week was a promise of a possibility of finding her sister and her daughter, both of whom had been lost to her and presumed dead when the viral outbreak had begun. That one utterance of his, when he’d looked wildly at her and said her sister’s name, clearly confused, mistaking her for her sister, had been a shot of hope to her heart. She couldn’t let that chance slide through her fingers, not if she expected to be reunited with her lost family.

  The decon room’s door banged open, and Jacob Howser walked into the office, his hair still damp from the decontamination shower. He finished buttoning his dress shirt one-handed, pressing the buttons on the keypad beside the door to shut the decon room’s shower door behind him.

  “What are you doing in here?” he asked. “I thought your shift was over.”

  “I hung around because I wanted to talk to Major Bradford,” Lindsey said.

  “Yeah? How did talking to that monumental jackass go?” Jacob asked. He went to the mini-fridge under one of the desks and opened it, taking out two Diet Cokes. He handed one to Lindsey and returned to her desk, resting his hip against the edge of it. She cracked the can open and took a swallow of the liquid before she spoke. It was cold and soothing on her parched throat.

  “It went about as well as you would expect a
meeting with Major Jackass would go,” Lindsey replied. “He’s already gotten what he wants into his head, and he won’t entertain any ideas or objections, no matter how logical they happen to be. He still thinks that showing Lieutenant Evans the Wall will shock him into spilling everything he knows.”

  “And you think it won’t,” Jacob commented.

  Lindsey shook her head. “I think it will break him, but I don’t think it will be in the way Major Bradford hopes.”

  “What do you think is going to happen when we tell him?” Jacob asked, clearly curious.

  “Whatever it is, it won’t be anything good,” Lindsey said. She took another swallow of Diet Coke and set the cold can down on her desk, well away from any important paperwork. “Which is why I would really like to hold off on the big reveal until Evans is evaluated psychologically.”

  “And let me guess, you want to be the one to evaluate him,” Jacob said with a knowing look in his eyes.

  “Well, I am the only person in the facility with any training in psychological evaluation,” Lindsey said, feeling an odd mixture of pride and defensiveness over her university minor in psychology. “Even if we only get a basic evaluation of where he is mentally, it still should be enough to determine if it’s safe to show him the Wall.” She gave him her best doe-eyed look, hoping to play on his sensibilities and his attraction to her, a poorly kept secret around the labs. He saw the look and groaned.

  “You want me to pull rank and see if I can get you in to talk to him, don’t you?”

  “Would you? Please?” Lindsey begged. Jacob had been in the facility longer than she had, nearly since day one, and had far more pull with the higher ups than she did. If anyone could get her permission to have a chat with Evans, maybe even a private chat, away from cameras and guards watching and listening and recording his every word, it would be Jacob Howser.

  Jacob sighed and scrubbed a hand through his damp brown hair. “You owe me dinner if I succeed,” he said. It was a standard request from him whenever he did her a favor, and she had no problem granting it. It was a routine they’d been through many times before. She gave him a dazzling smile and sat up straighter, the promise of possibly meeting with Evans enough to bring her to a higher level of attention.

  “If you actually get me permission, I’ll even let you pick the restaurant,” Lindsey said. “Seriously, you have no idea how much this means to me.”

  The smile on Jacob’s face that had appeared when she’d agreed to go to dinner with him faded, and he leaned closer to her, looking her over with an expression as critical as the one he’d used when examining the slide under his microscope. “There something you want to tell me about?” he asked.

  Lindsey glanced toward the ceiling without moving her head, a quick flicker of the eyes, indicating the camera that was mounted in the corner of the room, watching their every move. “You should come over to my apartment after work,” she said, pitching her voice loud enough to carry to the cameras. Though she wasn’t sure if they recorded sound, she acted as if they did. “We can order in some takeout, watch some bad movies, and eat too much popcorn.”

  Jacob’s smile returned, lighting up his face. “Sounds like a plan,” he said, giving her a playful wink, but his eyes were serious. “This doesn’t count as the dinner you promised me, so don’t try to weasel out of it.”

  “I wouldn’t even dream of it,” Lindsey said. She glanced at her watch—it was five a.m.—and scooped up her Diet Coke can, took a deep swig of it, and dropped the rest into the trashcan. “I need to get moving.” She stood and opened a desk drawer to retrieve her purse. “Traffic is already going to be hell enough without me waiting for the morning rush to start. You got my research report from last night, right?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Jacob said. “It’s on my desk. I’ll go through it and check in on our test subjects, let you know how they’re currently holding together.”

  “Literally,” Lindsey muttered.

  “Be careful going home,” Jacob said, “and text me when you get there so I know you made it.”

  That wasn’t an unusual request. Considering the world they now lived in, where a virus could skip over into the general population and spread like wildfire in the time it took to complete a short drive home, tearing through the living and turning them into aggressive, homicidal cannibals, it was typical for friends and family to ask those traveling to let them know the moment they arrived at their destinations. Lindsey patted the pocket of her black slacks, where her cell phone was tucked.

  “Will do. I’ve got it all charged up, and my spare prepaid cell is still in my glove box. I’ll see you this evening, okay?” She didn’t wait for Jacob’s response. She shouldered her purse and stepped out into the hallway, letting the door fall shut behind her. Her heels clacked on the tiled floors, echoing rhythmically down the hall so anyone ahead would know she was coming. Unconsciously, she took the turn that would lead her past Michael Evans’s cell, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man who had seemingly twisted the entire facility into knots just by his presence.

  Lindsey only partially got what she’d hoped for. Ahead of her, she saw Major Bradford standing outside of Evans’s cell as the two privates who had been tasked with guarding the captive lieutenant led the shackled man out of his cell. Another lieutenant that Lindsey didn’t know stood alongside them, ready to do whatever was called of him. Immediately realizing what was happening, she quickened her pace, striding forward to catch up with the men before they took Evans topside.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded when she caught up with the soldiers.

  Bradford barely glanced at her, signaling to the soldiers to begin walking. “I’m taking him up to see the Wall,” he said. “Not that I’m obliged to explain myself to you.”

  “I asked you to wait until I’d evaluated him psychologically before you did that!” Lindsey protested. She sped up to keep pace with the group of men, mentally cursing herself for wearing heels that day and leaving her tennis shoes in her car.

  “I said I would take your opinions under advisement, not that I agreed with them,” Bradford replied. Lindsey almost growled under her breath, and her face heated up with a bright red flush like it did in that awful way every time she got angry. She could see Lieutenant Evans watching her with thinly veiled curiosity, his eyes locked on her face. If she wasn’t mistaken, she could make out a hint of recognition in his eyes, even though before this, they’d never met in their lives. Maybe it was the familiarity he obviously had with her sister that prompted that expression.

  “We don’t know what this is going to do to—”

  “Then come along and find out,” Bradford snapped. “But if you do, you’re going to keep your damned mouth shut.” Lindsey opened her mouth to protest—she was nothing if not a contrarian—and Bradford stopped her. “Not a word or I’ll have you shipped to a different facility so fast you won’t know what happened.”

  Lindsey almost mimed drawing an invisible zipper over her lips, like she’d used to do as a child when she and Cade had shared secrets with each other under cover of darkness, when they’d clamber into each other’s beds and pull the blankets over their heads and whisper to each other for hours, but she caught herself. “May I go get my med kit in case we need it?” she asked, thinking it would be smart to have some Haldol on hand in case Evans reacted badly and needed to be chemically sedated.

  Bradford looked at her, his eyes slightly narrowed. He reminded her of a hawk searching for prey, a thought that made her shudder. Finally, he gave her a shallow nod. “Go get the bag. We’ll wait here. Two minutes.”

  Lindsey turned back the way she’d come, hurrying down the hall and to the labs as quickly as her high-heeled shoes would allow. She ignored Jacob’s curious look, tossed her purse onto her desk, and unlocked a drawer to pull out a small red bag. She unzipped it and scanned the contents, seeing several syringes, needles, and the sought-after vials of Haldol. She zipped the bag closed again and spun on her heel, hurryin
g back toward where the group of men was waiting for her, Bradford practically glaring at his watch, counting the seconds until she returned.

  “Got it,” she said breathlessly, holding up the red bag triumphantly. Bradford gave her an impatient look, turned away from her, and beckoned to the gaggle of men to follow him. He moved to the front of the group and led the way down the long maze of hallways, heading for the exit door that would lead to a set of stairs that ascended to the very top of the Wall.

  Lindsey glanced at the prisoner as he shuffled along with the rest of them. Evans looked wary, his dark brown eyes darting from left to right, taking in every detail around them, clearly making mental notes of everything he could. The way he walked suggested that he expected something to crawl out of a corner and attack him at any moment. Considering what he had been living with for the past two years, his behavior was no surprise. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying to plot a way to escape at the first available opportunity. He’d never make it out of the facility alive, at least not on his own. He seemed like the type to die trying, regardless.

  The group rounded the corner of the final hallway. The exit door was ahead, its sign glowing a bright, steady red. Beside it was a red and white sign that read, “STAIRS,” with a cartoon of a white figure climbing an outline of a set of steps. Bradford walked straight to it and swiped his badge through the electronic sensor below the sign to unlock the door. He ushered everyone through, holding the door for Lindsey last. He caught her by the arm before she could begin to ascend the stairs on the other side of the door. “On your guard, Dr. Alton. You should be ready with that sedative sooner rather than later.”

  Lindsey took note of the deep seriousness in his eyes, and she wondered if he was starting to second-guess his decision to use the shock-and-awe technique to get Lieutenant Evans talking. She pressed her lips together and nodded. Then she brushed past him to ascend the stairs, gripping her little red medical kit in her left hand, a flutter of nervousness stirring in her stomach.