“What’s going on out there?” Keith asked.
Sadie slipped back inside, and when Remy got a glimpse of her face, her heart sank to her stomach. Sadie’s face was pale, and her dark eyes were as wide as saucers. “We ran into a horde,” she reported, a quaver of fear in her voice.
“How big of a horde are we talking about?” Remy asked.
“Big enough that we probably can’t drive through it,” Sadie replied. “We’d trash the truck.”
On cue, the truck’s gears ground together, and the truck lurched backwards, nearly throwing Remy onto the floor. She tightened her grip on the support and wavered on her feet. They traveled backwards for dozens of feet, weaving from side to side as Dominic fought to drive a straight line in reverse. She braced her feet at shoulder-width apart for balance, but it didn’t help her stay upright when a crunch of metal met her ears and the truck lurched to a stop. Remy tumbled to the floor, falling at Keith’s feet, and he leaned down to help her stand back up.
“What the hell is he doing up there?” Remy asked. “Whatever it is, it isn’t driving.”
“Presumably, he’s trying to get us out of here,” Keith replied.
Remy ignored him, because another sound had caught her attention. It was the thud of one of the cab’s doors flying open and striking something alongside the truck. Footsteps started thudding on metal on one side of the truck, and there were boots on the pavement on the other side. The canvas flaps on the back of the truck flipped open, and Dominic stuck his head inside.
“We’ve got to go,” he said. “There are too many infected ahead, the road is totally blocked, and there’s no way we can get through them.”
Remy put her backpack on and went to the back of the truck, allowing him to lift her over the tailgate and down to the pavement. “What are we going to do?” she asked.
“Backtrack until we find a route out of here or a vehicle that still works,” Cade said, stopping beside her.
“Why don’t we turn around?” Sadie asked. She swatted away Dominic’s offer of assistance and swung herself out of the truck, dropping to the pavement smoothly. Keith and Jude followed.
“The road isn’t wide enough to do a three-point right here, and we don’t have time for anything else,” Dominic said. He grabbed Remy by her upper arm and started to haul her down the road. “No more questions. Just run.”
As they cleared the truck and the road beyond came into view, Remy chanced a glance back to see what the highway ahead of their vehicle looked like. She wasn’t one to be afraid of the infected—far from it, she had developed a love-hate relationship with them, but what she saw made her stomach sink. To define it as a “horde” was an understatement. There were easily five hundred infected, likely more, stumbling down the highway in their general direction, a moving, roiling mass of bodies, so many of them clustered together that they looked like one large, single-bodied mass, an amoeba that threatened to swallow up everything in its path.
“Oh hell,” Remy said, understanding why Sadie had looked so pale. While the infected didn’t pose a threat to her, they would definitely kill her friends the first chance they had. There were at least two members of this group that she refused to entertain the idea of anything happening to. So she squared her shoulders and turned her focus back to the road, though she allowed the others to get ahead of her so she could run at the back of the group. Cade took the lead, and as Remy ran, Dominic started to drift back toward her.
“What are you doing way back here?” he asked, breathless with the exertion of his run. He had a pistol out of its holster and gripped in his right hand.
“I could ask the same thing of you,” she pointed out, doing her best to keep pace with him. “As for me, I’m running interference for you guys. Those things don’t want to attack me, and I’m taking advantage of that fact.”
“That’s smart thinking,” Dominic said, “though I can’t necessarily agree with anything that puts you in higher danger than the rest of us.”
“You should take a blessing when you see it, Dom, and not get all pessimistic and protective over someone who doesn’t need it.”
“Touché,” he acknowledged, and there was no more talking, only running, hurrying, scurrying down the cleared highway back the way they’d come.
The group hadn’t made much time when Remy realized that they weren’t going to outrun the massive gang of infected surging down the highway. They hadn’t had enough time, enough warning to stop and reverse and get moving without delays. Dominic backing into the other cars lining the road had been a delay. She looked back at their pursuers one more time and swore, grabbed Dominic by his arm, and yelled to the others. “Stop!” she shouted. “Right where you are!”
“Are you shitting me?” Cade yelled.
“Trust me!”
Cade growled in frustration and anger, but much to Remy’s relief, the rest of them were willing to give her a moment to do whatever she was going to do. She shoved her friends together into a single group. “Stick close to me,” she ordered. “We can’t outrun them.”
“Remy, you’re going to get us killed, aren’t you?” Cade asked from over her right shoulder. “You’re going to fuck around on one of your little suicide binges and you’re going to get us all killed.”
“Shut up, Cade,” Remy snapped, “and stick close to me unless you want to get eaten.”
At that, the others pressed closer to her, smashing against her back like she was their human shield. In a way, she was. Because she was the only thing that stood between her friends and the oncoming horde.
She only hoped this worked as well as she wanted it to.
“What do you guys say we get our truck back?” Remy asked, digging deep for the cocky attitude she kept buried inside her and bringing it to the fore.
“Is that the precursor to a Kurt Russell joke?” Cade asked.
“Not at all,” Remy replied. “It’s total coincidence that that line sounds like it’s from Big Trouble in Little China.”
“Can we please focus on our immediate problems and not on who’s quoting what cheesy eighties movie?” Keith asked. He sounded like he was dangerously close to losing his temper, enough so that Remy sobered up and adjusted her focus onto the crowd ahead of them.
The leading edge of the infected had reached the front of the truck they had abandoned in their haste to get away from the mash of impending doom. Remy wasn’t fazed by the sight. Even before she’d been infected, cured, and apparently rendered invisible to the infected, she wouldn’t have hesitated to walk into a mess like that, bolo knife swinging and her anger on her sleeve.
This time, though, there was no anger. There was only a serene calmness, a steady assurance that she would be fine, even if she walked straight ahead into the middle of the pack.
She was right.
She broke through the leading edge of the infected mob, and they parted, sweeping past her and her friends like she was Moses and they were the Red Sea. She heard her companions’ startled intakes of breath, and she imagined they were horrified at being right in the midst of their enemies. Dominic was the only one who didn’t make a sound. He’d been in this position before. His hand was warm in hers, his fingers clutching hers tightly. She offered what little assurance she could, because the sensation of being surrounded by the horde was unnerving, no matter how many times she did it.
When the group reached the truck, Remy signaled to the cargo area. “Everybody but Dominic in there,” she ordered. “Dom, you drive. I’ll walk in front of the truck and clear us a path.” She winked cheekily. “Just don’t run over me in the process, yeah?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, doll,” Dominic said. Remy took him to the passenger door. He climbed inside and closed the door behind him. Once he was in the relative safety of the truck’s interior, what little interest the infected had in their group dissipated. Reassured at their reactions, Remy squared her shoulders and moved ahead of the truck. The infected shuffled aside, making a path for her, as
they continued to move onward in the direction Remy and her companions had come.
Remy glanced back once, when the rumbling roar of the truck’s engine groaned to life, and then she started walking, her pace steady and brisk. With a grinding of gears, the truck followed her, nudging a wider path through the one the infected had already given her.
As she walked, untouched by those she’d always considered enemies, Remy was fascinated by the figures that moved past her. In the previous two years, her hatred for the things had blinded her, had prevented her from seeing them for what they were. She spread her arms wide, her fingertips brushing their dirtied clothes, their bloodied hands and broken limbs, like the Pope blessing a crowd of worshippers. A few, the ones who appeared freshly turned, who didn’t have as many wounds or bloodstains as the others, reached toward her in return, their cold fingers brushing against her bare forearms.
She started to understand why Alicia Day had kept them in her hotel instead of killing them.
The infected were nature’s ultimate biological weapon. If Remy could figure out a way to harness the inherent power in their nature, then she and her friends could establish a new place to live, a new community, a new home, one that was protected by the infected as if they were guard dogs, assuming she could figure out a way to keep them from attacking the community’s residents, of course.
There’s nobody left to even create a community from, a nasty voice in the back of her mind said. And it’s all the fucking military’s fault.
No, another ugly voice said, speaking up from somewhere else in her head. It’s all your fault.
Remy nearly stopped in the middle of the road as the thought occurred to her, but she continued walking after a minimal pause in her stride, her dark eyes staring ahead. The back edge of the horde came into view. She shouldered her duty once more, feeling like she should have been staggering under the heavy load. The infected around her slowed, their heads swiveling towards her, looking at her as if they were seeking and awaiting her orders. The fact that she was able to give them orders that they would actually follow was still incredible to her. She looked back at them, jabbed her thumb over her shoulder. “Keep moving.” She didn’t even feel a tinge of surprise when those that had stopped turned their heads back around and started walking again, obeying her command without hesitation.
It took a few more minutes for Remy to break free of the infected, the truck carrying her friends right behind her. She walked a few more feet, feeling like she was sleepwalking, her brain hazy from the effort she hadn’t realized she’d been expending while walking through the crowd. She stopped, standing in the middle of the street, and couldn’t muster the energy to turn around and face the truck.
The truck ground to a halt, and the sound of a door opening and boots striking the pavement met her ears. Then Dominic was at her side, gently touching her elbow. She forced her head to turn so she could look at him. The expression on his face was concerned.
“Are you okay?” he asked. His voice sounded like it was coming from far away, like they were standing at opposite ends of a long hallway and were struggling to make themselves heard to the other. “Your nose is bleeding.”
Remy squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again. She hadn’t noticed the wetness on her upper lip until he’d mentioned it. Her brain felt like it was spiraling, like she was on a potent drug. She hadn’t felt like this the other times she’d walked through groups of infected. Maybe it was because there had been so many more of them this time.
“Dom, what the fuck is wrong with me?” Remy slurred. Then she fell backwards, and the last thing she remembered before everything went dark was Dominic’s arms coming around her to catch her before she hit the ground.
Chapter 34
The sound of helicopter rotors was partially blunted by the massive helmet contraption that one of the soldiers had put on Kimberly’s head, and the repetitive sound was getting on her last nerve. Her fingers had curled into fists, her fingernails digging into her palms, and she craved the ability to smash her hands over her ears in a futile effort to clamp the sides of the helmet more firmly over them. But she couldn’t, not with her hands cuffed behind her back as they were, and that infuriated her. She was clenching her teeth so tightly that it was painful. She forced her jaw to relax, shifting it from side to side to work the soreness out, and looked at Ethan.
Ethan and Chris were on either side of her, trussed up similarly to her. Ethan looked concerned but, surprisingly, not fully worried, and he was staring right at her. She raised her eyebrows at him, and he gave her a tentative, marginally reassuring smile.
“You okay?” she mouthed to him.
“Fine,” he replied. “Thinking.”
Kimberly wanted to ask him what he was thinking about, but the three soldiers across from them were watching them, and if Ethan was planning something, she didn’t want to accidentally give the game away. She shifted on the hard seat and looked at the backpacks between her feet. The soldiers had, thankfully, decided to leave their bags with each of them, though she had no idea why they would do that. If she, Ethan, and Chris escaped, they’d have everything they would need to survive. It was a stupid mistake, one that Alicia had known better than to make. Whenever they’d had new arrivals at the Westin, Alicia’s standing orders had been to strip them of everything remotely useful—backpacks, weapons, belts, shoelaces—and put them into quarantine. Kimberly vividly remembered doing that to an unconscious Ethan when Alicia’s people had brought him in, removing all of his clothes and bathing and bandaging his wounds. She’d never told Ethan that she’d been the one to care for him then. She was sure that he believed Alicia had done it, and knowing the now-dead redheaded woman, she had probably never disabused him of the idea.
The helicopter swayed in midair, and Kimberly’s stomach lurched, bile rising into her throat. “We’re about to land,” the pilot’s tinny voice said through the contraption over her ears. “Everyone brace for touchdown.”
There was a strap above Kimberly’s head. She stared at it longingly. Resigned to falling out of her seat, she braced herself with her feet against the helicopter’s metal floor. Chris and Ethan did the same, Chris with practiced ease, Ethan completely unconcerned. Kimberly wished she could say she felt the same.
The helicopter touched down with a light thud on the ground, and Kimberly once again fought off a surge of bile. Her body felt too light, like the helicopter was still in the air, and it took several long moments before her brain settled onto the idea of being on the ground again. The helicopter’s rotors ground to a halt, and the soldiers disembarked. Kimberly craned her neck, trying to get a look out the door so she could figure out where they were, but two of the soldiers returned, their bodies blocking her view. They climbed into the compartment and began to unbuckle Ethan’s shoulder straps and lap belt.
One of the soldiers pointed at her and Chris each in turn. “Do not attempt to get up,” he ordered. The mask he wore muffled his voice. “Someone will escort you off the aircraft momentarily. If you attempt to leave the helicopter without an escort, you will be shot. Understood?”
“Understood,” Kimberly replied.
A third soldier reached into the helicopter and picked up Ethan’s bag, then the first two soldiers hauled him to his feet and led him out of the helicopter.
“Where do you think we are?” Kimberly asked Chris, her voice overly loud in the now-quiet helicopter interior.
“Most likely, we’re in Eden,” Chris said. “If we’re lucky.”
“And if we’re not lucky?” Kimberly prompted.
Chris shrugged. “Then we’re not in Eden and are about to get killed.”
Kimberly frowned at his pessimism. “If they planned to kill us, they’d have shot us on the highway, not given us a free helicopter ride and brought us here, wherever ‘here’ is.”
Three more soldiers boarded the craft. One of them grabbed her bags while the other two unstrapped her and helped her out of her seat. She kept he
r eyes on her bags as they led her out of the helicopter. The soldier carrying it was doing so carelessly, and Kimberly exclaimed, “Please, be careful with that bag!”
“You heard the lady,” one of the soldiers said snidely. “Be careful with that thing.”
Kimberly gritted her teeth and fought the urge to wrench herself free from the soldiers who were holding her by the arms. She squared her shoulders and continued on, letting them take her to another Humvee, where Ethan sat in the back seat under armed guard. A guard pressed a hand against the top of her head to shield it from banging against the doorframe, and she slid into the seat next to Ethan. The soldier with her bags dumped them onto her lap, and one of them tumbled to the floor, landing on her feet with a thud.
“You okay?” Ethan asked.
“About as well as can be expected, considering the circumstances,” Kimberly said. The Humvee’s door slammed shut, a soldier climbed into the driver’s seat, and the engine revved to life. “Where’s Chris?”
“Other truck,” Ethan answered. Kimberly leaned over enough to see past him, and she spotted Chris sitting in the back of the Humvee alongside theirs. He nodded to them like he was telling them that all was well, and she returned the gesture.
“I’m more concerned with where we are than where he is, though,” Ethan said.
Kimberly leaned forward to address the masked soldier in the Humvee’s passenger seat. “Excuse me, where are we?” The soldier didn’t answer, much to Kimberly’s frustration. She refrained from kicking the back of his seat, though she desperately wanted to. “Hell of a lot of help you are,” she muttered.
The soldier picked up a radio microphone from the dash, mashing the button on the side and speaking into it in code and jargon that Kimberly didn’t understand. The Humvee drove into shadow, the light outside darkening, and Kimberly leaned in to get a good look out the window.
The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) Page 20
