“That sounds painful,” Remy murmured. Her voice still shook with her grief. Brandt pointedly chose to ignore it and eased the clean shirt he’d found over his head.
“Believe me, it was,” Brandt admitted. He shifted his t-shirt to rest more comfortably against his shoulders and glanced at Gray. “He looks bad,” he commented. “Do me a favor and get me the thermometer. It’s still in my bag.” As Remy retrieved the requested item from Brandt’s bag, Brandt edged closer to Gray and gently pressed his fingers to the man’s sweaty ashen forehead. Just as quickly, he pulled them back, wiping them against the thigh of his jeans. “Never mind, Remy. It won’t tell me anything I don’t already know.”
“Which is?” Remy prompted. She abandoned the bag and moved closer, though Brandt was glad to see that she still kept her distance. He didn’t want to have to throw her across the room again.
“He’s burning the fuck up,” Brandt answered. “Very high fever.” He took his flashlight out and gently lifted the man’s eyelids, shining the light into them and flicking it away. “Pupils are fixed too.”
“So does this mean …” Remy trailed off. Her eyes darted to Brandt’s face as he shifted his own eyes to meet hers.
“He’s definitely infected, Remy,” Brandt confirmed softly. “He’s got Michaluk.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty damn positive,” Brandt said. “I’ve seen it too many fucking times to not be sure.”
“But … but how?” Remy asked. “How could he have gotten Michaluk? He hasn’t even been in contact with any infected today!”
“But he’s been in contact with me,” Brandt said, his voice strained.
Remy’s head jerked up, and her eyes were wide, almost terrified. “What do you mean?”
“I think he’s been in contact with my blood,” Brandt said. “He’s been … I put him over my shoulder. The one I was stabbed in. I didn’t think … I didn’t know … I just needed my right arm free in case I needed my gun. I didn’t …” He trailed off and shook his head, at a loss for anything further to say.
“I don’t understand,” Remy said in a near whisper.
“I don’t either,” Brandt said. He sat heavily on the table again and buried his face in his hands. “What if I’m wrong? What if Alicia’s telling the truth and I wasn’t in the control group?” he asked out loud. “What if I’m fucking contagious?”
“I don’t know, Brandt,” Remy said. “I think we have a more immediate problem. Like what are we going to do about Gray?”
Brandt shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Well, we can’t just leave him like this!”
“I know.”
Remy bit her lip and looked away from Brandt with tears in her eyes. She studied the wall behind him, visibly trying to regain control of her emotions, clearly struggling with the task. Brandt pressed his own lips together and looked to Gray’s unconscious form sprawled out on the couch.
Gray’s eyes snapped open.
“Jesus!” Brandt gasped before he could stop himself. He grabbed Remy’s wrist and yanked her away from the couch as he fumbled at his holster for his sidearm. Remy let out a squeak of surprise and stumbled with the motion, whirling around to face the potential threat even as Brandt shoved her behind him. He ripped the Beretta from its holster and aimed it in Gray’s direction. He clutched it with both hands as the younger man slowly sat up, his eyes unblinking and his fingernails digging into the leather of the couch.
“Oh dear God,” Remy whispered behind him. Brandt didn’t look at her. He couldn’t. There was danger in front of them, danger wearing his friend’s body like a fucking suit. He had to stop Gray, had to shut him down before he hurt them or someone else. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not in front of Remy.
Gray’s every movement was slow and deliberate, surprisingly coordinated for someone only just now dead, for someone in whom the Michaluk virus had only just truly begun to establish itself. He turned sideways, his feet finding the floor, and eased up to them. He took a slow, shaky step toward Brandt and Remy, resembling a newborn deer as it learned to walk, a fresh wave of blood leaking from his gunshot wound. Brandt pushed Remy farther back with his body as he took a matching step backward. Remy’s fingers gripped his bicep painfully. He sucked in a breath and adjusted his aim, pointing his Beretta at Gray’s forehead.
“Oh fucking hell, Brandt. Do something,” Remy whispered. Brandt tried to tune her out. He couldn’t stand the sound of her voice, not with what was in front of him.
“Remy, get out of here,” Brandt ordered, his voice low. He watched his former friend try to navigate around the coffee table, nearly falling over it. He swallowed hard. “Go back onto the fire escape. I’ll be out there in a minute. We’ve got to be ready to get out of here fast, because the sound’s going to draw more of them to us.”
Remy started forward to grab her bag, but Brandt shook his head and pushed her toward the window through which they’d entered the apartment. “Now. I’ll get the bags,” he said. Remy looked at him. Gray was almost around the coffee table. Brandt hoped the woman wasn’t going to argue with him; they didn’t have time for that right now. Thankfully, Remy didn’t seem inclined to argue. She gave him a short nod and slipped past him, walking briskly to the exit and sliding out to the metal staircase beyond.
Brandt hoped like hell she wasn’t going to watch what he was about to do.
The Marine lifted the Beretta a little higher, adjusting his aim to compensate for the distance Gray had covered, his heart racing. Gray made an odd face, baring his teeth and putting his hands out as if he sensed that prey was near, as if he were ready to grab Brandt and tear him apart. Brandt took in a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet entered Gray’s forehead just above his left eye, leaving a neat circular hole. The man didn’t register any reaction with the impact of the bullet or when it blew out the back of his skull with a spray of blood and bone and brain matter. The bullet buried itself in the wall. Gray fell heavily to the floor.
Brandt stood like that, his weapon still raised, his body motionless, for several long heart-pounding moments. His breath felt rough in his throat. Once he was absolutely certain Gray’s body was no longer moving, Brandt lowered the gun and switched the safety back on, slowly sliding the weapon back into the holster. His fingers felt numb as he gathered their bags, settling them over his aching shoulders. He stepped toward the fire escape, but as he looked back at Gray’s body, he spotted the rosary the man had carried for the past year dangling from his front pocket. He snatched it and then retreated to the fire escape.
Remy waited for him there, her face shining with spilled tears as he ducked out the window. Brandt reflexively wrapped his arms around her, hugging her tightly, resting his chin against the top of her head as tears pricked at his own eyes.
It was just the two of them now. Despite Remy’s presence, Brandt had never felt so alone.
Chapter 40
Ethan hadn’t felt this happy in a very long time.
After Isaac had been reunited with his brother, he’d informed them that there was one more person he needed to get for the meeting before the discussion began. Never in his wildest dreams had Ethan expected Cade Alton to walk into the small apartment. He was sure Derek, Kimberly, and Isaac hadn’t expected him to dart out of his seat from the couch like he had.
And now he stood there, his best friend in his arms, holding her tightly with his face buried in her hair as she cried against his shoulder.
“Well, that’s one round of introductions we don’t need to make,” Kimberly said wryly. Ethan ignored her in favor of focusing on Cade, taking her face in his hands.
“How are you?” he asked softly. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay, Ethan. I promise,” she said. “My side got really infected for a while there, but Brandt and the others took good care of me, and now I’m as good as new.” She looked him over, her eyes lingering on the bandage that peek
ed over the collar of his jacket, and frowned. “I think right now, I’m more concerned about you.”
“I’m okay,” Ethan tried to say. “I’m … it’s a long story. Part of what we’re here to talk about, anyway.”
“Ethan, show her,” Derek spoke up from the other side of the room. “It’s probably the best way to get started on a discussion about all this mess.”
Ethan hesitated, the smile he’d worn almost constantly since Cade walked in falling away. He glanced at the doctor uncertainly before shifting his gaze to Cade. Her blue eyes were wide in confusion. He sighed heavily and stepped back from her, shifting his jacket off his shoulders. Kimberly stood and started forward as if to help him, and Ethan put a hand up to stop her. “No. I can do it,” he said, his voice strangled. She backed off, and he focused on unbuttoning the shirt he wore on top of his t-shirt, unfastening the cuffs to make it easier to slide the shirt off over his bandages. He made short work of the t-shirt and then stood there shirtless, his bandaged wounds on display for all to see.
“Oh God. What happened?” Cade asked. She took his arms in her cool hands and looked at the wrappings of gauze around them. Her eyes flickered over his shoulders and sides before she turned him around to look at his back. His cheeks flushed red, but with what emotion, he wasn’t sure.
“It was …” He trailed off as his voice choked, and he cleared his throat before continuing. “It was the infected. Last month. When I stayed back.”
“Oh my God,” Cade breathed. Ethan could see the shock and horror in her eyes. He hated that he was the one who put those feelings there.
“They … well, I don’t think you need to know the details, but it wasn’t pretty,” Ethan said. He skimmed his eyes over everyone in the room, one by one, hoping the ones he didn’t know wouldn’t draw their weapons on him, before finally saying to Cade, “I’m … I’m infected. With the Michaluk virus.”
Isaac looked up sharply. His brown eyes scanned Ethan’s body from head to toe. “How long?”
“A month, give or take,” Ethan answered. “The infection was passed on to me the same day we came into Atlanta.”
“But how are you still here?” Cade asked incredulously. He could hear in her voice the same shock and incomprehension that had plagued him in the days after the news had been broken to him. “How are you not like the infected outside?”
“Now that, I think I can answer,” Derek spoke up, drawing every eye in the room to him. All except for Cade’s. She kept her eyes locked onto Ethan, watching him closely. For what, Ethan wasn’t sure. Derek stood and paced across the room as he organized his thoughts. Ethan caught Cade’s wrist and tugged her to the couch, sitting down and making her settle beside him as the doctor continued.
“I first met Michael—that’s Brandt to you—in late November of 2008,” Derek began. “It wasn’t long after his parents died and left him and his younger sister Olivia in pretty dire straits financially. Olivia was in college, and Michael had gotten back to the States on bereavement only a few weeks before. He was desperate for money. The funerals had been expensive, his parents didn’t have life insurance, and he was neck deep in bills. On top of that, his sister wanted to drop out of college because she felt that funding her education was too much of a burden. Michael was determined that he’d see her done with school, so he accepted a $150,000 payment and signed on to the project in the first week of December.
“The test subjects were divided into three groups: A, B, and C. Michael was in group C. Alicia Day was in group B. Each group was tested with a different variant of the lab-altered pathogen we’d created. Group A was the control group, so they were given placebos. Out of all thirty test subjects—and yes, that includes group A—we only had two promising candidates: Michael and Alicia.”
“But what was the pathogen supposed to do?” Cade asked in mild exasperation.
“Do you remember what Remy suggested last month when we were on our way here?” Ethan asked. He glanced at the dark-haired woman beside him. Remy’s name nearly caught in his throat as he spoke it. Cade noticed, and her hand found his and squeezed it gently.
“You mean all that blathering about Kurt Russell when Brandt was giving us his mini science lesson?” Cade asked.
Ethan nodded. “Exactly.”
“Well shit,” Cade grumbled. “Why the hell would they want to do something like that anyway? What, the military men and women we already had weren’t good enough for them?”
“We were in the middle of a war on two fronts,” Kimberly explained. “Military recruitment levels were drastically down. A lot of people will join the military for the benefits, but they’re a lot less willing to do that when there’s a war going on.”
“The government was desperate to increase the strength, stamina, speed, and skill of the soldiers they already had, because they certainly weren’t getting enough enlistments to cover injuries and discharges of the ones already there,” Derek said. “I think they’d have done anything at that point. So when the potential benefits of this pathogen were discovered …”
“The government took over testing, took control of the pathogen, and ran with it,” Kimberly finished. “And they rammed it through to human trials as fast as they could.”
“We all see where that’s led us to,” Isaac muttered.
“And that’s where my involvement truly began,” Derek continued. “Despite the successes we saw in Alicia and Michael, the pathogen behaved differently in each of them. The pathogen made Alicia … aggressive. Very aggressive. Not quite the animalistic hatred you see in the Michaluk-infected out there,” Derek motioned vaguely toward the window, “but aggressive all the same. The baseline for it was there, most certainly. Alicia would get so … angry at the littlest things and turn absolutely violent. Not enough ice in her tea, the lights in her room were too bright, a nurse looked at her in a way that didn’t suit her, whatever. When it came to her, it was a constant battle, both on her part and on mine, to keep her aggression in check.
“Michael, though? Absolute model of perfection. He only experienced sickness for the first few days of testing as his body adapted to the pathogen’s intrusion. After that, he was perfectly fine, as if he’d never been sick. In order to keep the testing from being compromised, we told him he’d caught a virus at the onset of testing. We made out like we had postponed testing in order to treat what he had caught. In truth, though, the testing continued. By then, it was mostly monitoring, watching, and waiting to see what would happen.”
“And what did happen?” Cade asked nervously.
“Absolutely nothing,” Derek said. He sat on the arm of the couch beside Kimberly and clasped his hands loosely around his knee. Ethan thought he looked like a professor giving a lecture; the image suited Ethan’s perception of the man. “Like I said, Michael was the perfect model of what we wanted to achieve. Somehow, the version of the pathogen that had been introduced into his system … well, it certainly did something to him, because every single blood sample we took from him afterwards tested positive for the pathogen. But outwardly, he was asymptomatic.”
“So how did the virus get out, anyway?” Cade asked, her forehead wrinkling. Her grip on Ethan’s hand tightened, and he gave hers a comforting squeeze in return. He could imagine what she was thinking, how awful she probably felt as she learned about the things Brandt had never told her, the dangers he’d potentially posed to the rest of them for the past year.
“Excellent question,” Isaac agreed. “We all know the generally accepted and advertised story the government and media spread around. How accurate was it?”
“In every lie, there’s a fragment of truth,” Kimberly said.
“Calling it the Michaluk virus was a misnomer of … epic proportions,” Derek added. “If you wanted to be accurate in naming the virus after its originator, you’d have to call it the Day virus.”
“You’re shitting me!” Cade burst out in surprise. She half-rose out of her seat. Ethan tugged at her hand in an attempt to p
ull her back down. “You’re—that bitch—she started all of this? It’s her fault we’re living like this? Where’s my gun?”
“What do you need your gun for?” Ethan asked, pulling at her hand again.
“I’m going to hunt the bitch down and blow her motherfucking head off!”
“Whoa, whoa, Cade! Sit down!” Ethan ordered. He yanked more firmly at her hand and managed to successfully plant her ass onto the couch again. “We’re not going out about this half-cocked!”
“Who the hell said anything about half-cocked?” Cade snarled. “I’m always fully cocked, thank you very fucking much!”
Ethan blew out a heavy breath and shook his head. He was well aware of three sets of eyes on him and Cade, watching their exchange attentively as he tried to calm her down. He was tempted to tell them to get their entertainment elsewhere.
“Look, I was just as burningly pissed off about this a few days ago, when Derek and Kimberly laid it out for me, as you are right now,” Ethan admitted. “I wanted to wait for her to walk into the Westin and kill her sorry ass the minute she set foot inside it.”
“But you didn’t,” Cade pointed out, her tone accusing. “You could have stopped her then, and you didn’t!”
“I know,” Ethan said softly.
Cade slapped a hand against her denim-clad thigh and made a face at him. “It’s her fault Anna is dead! And Josie and Andrew! And every other fucking person we know!”
“Cade, believe me, I’m well aware of that.” Ethan didn’t need to be reminded of all he’d lost in such a short time. “But we need to bide our time. We need to be careful about this. And we need to find Brandt first. Because if we can’t find him, she’s our fallback option for a cure, and we can’t risk her death without having Brandt in our hands first.”
The Becoming: Revelations Page 21
