The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5)

by Jessica Meigs

  “There’s a chance we could all get killed,” Sadie said. “I try not to lose too much sleep over it.”

  Cade was surprised at Sadie’s blasé attitude toward death; maybe the girl was bullshitting a front that made her appear braver and tougher than she was. She adjusted her rifle on her back and focused on the wall again before saying, “I think I’m ready to do a little free climbing. How about you?”

  “I was born ready,” Sadie said with more confidence than Cade felt. She went back into the trees, and Cade looked at the wall again. She was trying to judge how tall the wall was, how high she would have to climb to make it to the top. Thinking about free-climbing made her think about the last time she’d done anything climbing-related. It had been a little over a month into the post-outbreak world, when they’d gone into Biloxi, Mississippi, to rescue Remy from an RV surrounded by the infected. She and Brandt had gotten separated from the others in the process and had ended up holed up in an office building…and that had ended with them rappelling from a fifth-story window to get away from the infected.

  That had been terrifying, rappelling without a semblance of proper equipment, but she’d managed it, and if she could handle that, then she could handle this.

  By the time the others joined her, Cade had psyched herself up for the impending climb, and she barely waited to confirm that the others were ready before she started across the two hundred yards that separated them from the wall. The others followed her, keeping up with her brisk pace, not uttering a word of question or contention.

  When they reached the base of the wall, Cade said, “Now is the time to back out if you don’t think you can make the climb. If you fall, we won’t be able to come back for you.”

  “Understood,” Keith said, and Jude nodded in agreement. Sadie looked completely unperturbed by the idea.

  Cade blew out a breath, stretched her arm up as high as she could reach, and grasped the first viable handhold that she could curl her fingers around. As if that was their cue, the other three spread out along the wall and mimicked her motion, and they all began to climb, slowly but steadily.

  The climb was harder and longer than Cade had expected, and the muscles in her arms and shoulders had begun to burn long before she’d reached the halfway point. She soldiered on, though, not letting something as inconsequential as pain stop her from reaching the top of the wall. Her fingers and knuckles were scraped red and raw halfway up, and by the time she’d reached three-quarters of the way up, they were bleeding, staining the stone with traces of dark red fluid to mark her passage. She didn’t care; nothing would prevent her from meeting her self-appointed goal.

  She was going to find her husband, come hell or high water. Or both.

  Reaching the top of the wall and finding the energy to climb over the iron railing there was the second-hardest thing that Cade had ever had to do. Standing up from the metal walkway she rolled onto was the hardest. Her limbs trembling from exertion, she knew if she stopped for a rest, she’d never get moving again.

  The other three had made it to the top safely. Sadie was leaning against the railing that lined the edge of the wall, massaging her shoulders, her chest heaving. Jude lay on his back on the metal walkway, his knees drawn up and his feet flat on the walkway, and Keith leaned over him, trying to catch his own breath.

  “Everybody okay?” Cade asked, hating the way her voice shook from the mere effort of talking.

  “I feel like I’m going to puke,” Keith announced, “but it’s nothing I can’t power past.”

  Jude waggled a hand from side to side, making a gesture that meant “so-so,” and grasped Keith’s extended hand so he could help him up.

  Sadie merely shrugged and said, “I’ll live.”

  “Okay, then,” Cade said. She straightened and took her rifle from her shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  “Can we have five minutes to catch our breath?” Keith asked.

  “We don’t have five minutes,” Cade said. “Brandt probably doesn’t either. We’ve got to find him before someone gets it into their heads that killing him is a good idea.”

  Keith sighed. “Look, I understand. Completely. But we aren’t any use to him if we exhaust ourselves. We’ve got to stay healthy if we expect to help him.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Cade asked, giving him the dirtiest look she could muster. “I know how this shit normally works. But it’s Brandt. It’s my husband. He’s one of us. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. Most of us wouldn’t be. He’d follow me into a fire to help me, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to drag ass on doing the same for him.”

  Keith stared at her, and she stared right back, her chin jutted out, challenging him to contradict her. Fortunately, he wasn’t so inclined. Maybe he’d seen the determination in her eyes and had realized there was no way she was going to budge. He sighed, cutting his gaze away somewhere to his right, and muttered, “Whatever.” Cade turned her back to the rest of them to examine their surroundings more carefully.

  The space to her left opened onto the southern side of the wall, and it dropped off into a steep plunge that made Cade marvel at the fact she’d managed to climb it without falling. To her right was another drop off; this one revealed several buildings below and a metal staircase about a tenth of a mile ahead of her that led to the ground. She debated whether or not they should leave the wall via the metal staircase, and she rejected that idea. There would be more obstructions on the ground, and at least the top of the wall afforded her not only a straight shot to her destination but a panoramic view of her surroundings. Adjusting her grip on her rifle, she called out, “Come on, let’s get moving.”

  She started walking down the metal walkway, her boots clanking against the steel as she strode to the west. Her rifle was comfortable and familiar in her hands, its heavy weight soothing. So long as she had her rifle, nothing would happen to her. She wouldn’t let anything happen to her.

  Cade and her friends had been walking for thirty minutes, completely unmolested, when she saw, below them, the first straggling edges of the infected mob that was besieging the wall. They were flooding toward the blown-out section of wall, and Cade picked up her pace, anxious to get there herself.

  When she drew closer to the chaos surrounding the location of the former-gate-turned-smoking-hole, Cade’s heart skipped a beat. It looked so much worse up close than it had from far away. The infected were a seething mass of ugliness, stepping on and climbing over each other in their efforts to get to the fresh prey on the other side of the wall. The wall itself was a twisted ruin, the walkway she and her friends were traveling on sheared away and dropping down into nothing. The sound of gunfire was continuous and rapid, overlapping until it all sounded like one solid, unceasing wall of noise. Several soldiers were lined up on either side of the gap, firing into the crowd, and more soldiers were perched on the maze of walkways to Cade’s right, doing the same. She was tempted to join her fire in with theirs, but she refrained; she couldn’t risk running out of the few bullets she had.

  “Hey!” a voice shouted from somewhere to her right. Cade twisted in the direction of the shouter. She stopped herself from lifting her rifle, keeping the barrel pointed down at the ground. The man who’d yelled was young, too young for the rank he held, and he wore a dusty, dirty uniform that gave the impression that he was currently in charge. “Who are you?” the man demanded. “You’re in a military facility! You shouldn’t be here!”

  “I think that’s our cue to get the hell out of here,” Keith said. He grasped her elbow and tugged her back the way they’d come.

  Cade wrenched her elbow out of his grip. “You three, go,” she ordered. “I’m not stopping.”

  She slung her rifle onto her shoulder, grasped the iron railing alongside her, and vaulted over it to drop to another walkway ten feet below. She landed with a clang that reverberated off the surrounding wall, and she heard the man that had confronted them shouting about a breach above ground level.

 
Another clang brought her around to her right, and she rapidly retrieved her rifle and aimed it at the perceived threat. She was greeted by the sight of Sadie, who crouched a few feet away from her, where she’d landed when she’d completed her own jump.

  “I’ve got the other two headed back the way we came,” Sadie said, straightening, unfazed by the rifle pointed at her. “They’re going to find another way in.”

  “Good,” Cade said. She wouldn’t admit, even to herself, that she was relieved she’d have backup on this…even if it came in the form of an eighteen-year-old girl with zero training beyond what her Special Forces father had given her. “Come on,” she urged, “before someone gets the wise idea to start shooting at us.” As if on cue, a bullet pocked into the concrete behind her, mere inches from her head. She swore and shoved Sadie ahead of her, scanning the complex for cover as they fled down the walkway. It was a tangle of walkways, metal staircases, and scaffolds, with nothing solid enough to take cover behind. They would have to keep moving quickly and inventively and hope their luck stayed with them.

  Chapter 55

  Back towards the Eden Facility was the last place Ethan had any desire to go, but that was where he was headed, moving at a brisk jog, hoping that he, Lindsey, Brandt, and Kimberly would be able to help stem the tide of infected before they got too far into the city of Eden and its uninfected populace. He had no idea if they would be fired on the moment they were spotted by any of the military personnel that were entrenched at the facility. The thought of Kimberly bleeding out on the ground made him almost physically ill. He shoved the thought aside; he didn’t have time to dwell on the terrible consequences that might come to pass due to their actions.

  At some point during their dash down the street, Brandt had fallen back, taking up the rear, and Kimberly had joined Ethan at the front of the pack. Her blonde hair was a rumpled, dirty mess, and the scrubs she was still wearing were filthy, but she was the most alive thing he’d seen in months. He itched to take her hand, to pull her into his arms and drag her off someplace nice and quiet to hide from all the terrible shit they were going to be facing. That, however, wasn’t an option. Maybe after all this was over, they could get away for a while and get to know each other better than they already did, without the looming specter of the infected hanging over them.

  “Ethan, your left!” Lindsey called out, and he looked in the indicated direction to see two infected coming their way. He intercepted, putting them down with quick jabs of his knife to the bases of their skulls, then rejoined the other three, who’d slowed to a stop nearby.

  “Can I just say it’s disturbing how easy you make that look?” Kimberly remarked when he caught up with them.

  “It’s a talent,” Ethan said. “What’s the hold up?”

  “Lindsey said there’s an entrance not far from here where we can get into the facility without having to go directly to the gates,” Brandt reported. “She thinks we should go in through there.”

  “Is it safe?” Ethan asked.

  “Is anything safe anymore?” Lindsey countered, and Ethan agreed with her statement. “It’s the best we can do, which is about all I can say. It’s either that or walk right into the mess at the gate, and I think that we should come at it from the side so we can have the chance to assess what we’re stumbling into.”

  “She has a point,” Brandt said.

  “I’m not arguing it,” Ethan replied. He looked at Lindsey. “You okay to lead?”

  “It’s not like I have a choice,” Lindsey said. Without further discussion, she moved to the front of the group. Ethan and Kimberly fell back to keep an eye on her as she started forward again, leading them toward the entrance.

  “You doing okay?” he asked Kimberly once the four of them were on the move again.

  “As well as can be expected, considering we’re about to walk into something that will probably end up killing us,” she said. Despite her words, she sounded upbeat. “Other than all that unpleasant mess, I think I’m okay.”

  “Any regrets?”

  Kimberly didn’t answer right away. She seemed to be thinking the question over as she darted forward and took down an infected woman that was staggering toward Lindsey from her right. “Us,” she said simply when she rejoined him, wiping down her knife with a scrap of fabric.

  “Us?” Ethan repeated, surprised at her answer.

  “Yeah, us,” Kimberly repeated. Ethan spotted another infected and killed it with disturbing effortlessness. Once he was back alongside her, she continued. “I regret that we didn’t figure out any of this,” she waved her hand back and forth in the space between them, “sooner. So much lost time, you know?”

  “Maybe if we both make it out of this, we can work on making up for some of that lost time,” Ethan suggested, irrationally afraid that he was about to get a rejection.

  Kimberly’s grin lit up her entire face, and her eyes met his. “I think I’d really like that.”

  Ethan reached across the gap between them with his empty right hand and grasped her left hand tightly, squeezing it gently before letting go and forcing himself to refocus on the task at hand. He wasn’t going to get the opportunity to spend more time with her in a situation that wasn’t immediately life threatening if he didn’t make sure they actually survived it first.

  They soon reached the security gates that admitted people to the employees’ parking lot. The booth at the entrance was empty, and Ethan assumed that the guards that had once been in there had abandoned their posts, headed further into the facility to help deal with whatever problems had arisen after the explosion. The gates were closed and chained shut, but climbing over them posed no real difficulty. Ethan scaled the chain links to the top and draped the stolen lab coat over the barbed wire at the top, then slung himself over the top and dropped to the pavement. He landed in a crouch to absorb the impact and lifted his pistol, holding it so he could deal with any oncoming, uninfected threats to his friends while they climbed over the fencing to join him.

  “This is the same lot Jacob brought me and Kimberly through when he was getting us out of here, isn’t it?” Ethan asked, recognizing a few of the cars parked around the lot.

  “It is,” Lindsey said. She was breathless from her climb over the fence when she dropped down beside him, but she seemed exhilarated at the same time. “It’s also the same lot I brought Brandt through when I got him out of here.”

  “What about inside?” Brandt asked as he joined them, helping Kimberly down from the fence. “What did the explosion do to the interior?”

  “There’s debris everywhere,” Ethan said. “Lot of ceiling tiles fell, and some of the walls are cracked. For the most part, though, the facility’s intact. Granted, we weren’t that close to the epicenter of the explosion, so it could be worse closer to where it happened.”

  “I can guarantee that,” Brandt said with confidence, and his tone reminded Ethan of the fact that the former Marine was a demolitions expert when he was in the military. Or, as he often liked to put it, he was a specialist “in blowing shit up.” “If I knew what happened with the explosion, if it was sabotage or if it was just shitty luck, maybe what sort of demolitions material was used if it was sabotage, then I could have a better idea of what to expect.”

  “What about the infected?” Lindsey asked. “What do you think we can expect there?”

  “A metric shit-ton of them,” Brandt said. “And all of them want to eat us.”

  “Except maybe Ethan,” Kimberly said with a slight smile in his direction.

  “How do you do that, anyway?” Lindsey asked, looking at him. He felt like squirming under her scrutiny as she looked him up and down, resisting the urge to stuff his hands into his pockets, which he didn’t even have. “It’s like they barely notice you’re there. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  “It has to do with the vaccine,” Ethan said. He looked across the parking lot, searching for the door that would lead into the facility. “Look, we can discuss my ap
parent superpower later, yeah? I don’t think this parking lot is the best time or place for it.”

  “Definitely to be continued,” Lindsey said. The look in her eyes was predatory, like the scientist in her was anxious to get her hands on him and turn him into a lab experiment. He knew she wouldn’t actually do it. If there was anyone who was science-inclined that would be the last person to experiment on him, it would be her.

  The four of them started across the parking lot, Lindsey taking the lead again so she could let them into the building. The lot was oddly abandoned, none of the Eden Facility’s employees anywhere in sight. Ethan thought that was weird. After an explosion like that, shouldn’t people have been flocking out of the building, like middle-schoolers during a fire drill? “Where is everyone?” he asked. “Shouldn’t there be evacuees out here?”

  “Not necessarily,” Lindsey said. “The facility has a lot of shelter-in-place policies. People close to the actual detonation would be evacuated. Everyone else would be ordered to shelter in place. We’re far enough away from the gates that the people who normally park in this lot would have stayed where they were.”

  “What are the chances they’ve realized we’re missing?” he asked, motioning to Kimberly to include her in the question.

  “Slim to none, depending on how hung up they are with what’s going on at the gates,” Lindsey said. “Why?”

  “Maybe I should ask what the chances are that we’d be able to get a friend out of the holding cells you guys have here,” Ethan said.

  Lindsey’s eyes narrowed. “What friend?”

  “His name is Chris,” Kimberly said. “We met him on the road. He was brought here with us, and we haven’t seen him since.”

  “Chris…Chris…” Lindsey mused. “I think I checked out a Chris before they put him in quarantine. If he’s still there, we might be able to try to get to him, but only if they put him where they usually put the quarantined folks.”