Chapter 55
Cade Alton was seeing red, and it had nothing to do with Alicia Day’s hair color. She caught her balance against the edge of the table and eyed the woman, watching how she held her firearm, how it was pointed right at Brandt’s face, how tight her grip was on the weapon, how her finger rested loosely against the trigger. Cade gritted her teeth and backed up quickly, careful to keep her boots from making a sound on the carpeted floor. Her hands found the metal folding chair at the end of the table, and she eased it closed, hefted it into both hands, and took two brisk steps forward. Gripping the chair tightly, she swung it with all her strength and slammed it into the woman’s back.
Alicia staggered forward with the force of the blow. At the same time, Brandt brought his arm up and slammed his fist against Alicia’s hands, knocking her weapon to the floor. It tumbled across the carpet and disappeared into the darkness under a table.
Alicia caught herself on the tables to either side of her before she fell. She righted herself with a grace that Cade had only ever seen in Remy. Before Cade could react, Alicia twisted and lashed out with a foot. Her booted foot struck Brandt across the face as he reached for his sidearm, and knocked him flat on his back. Once he was temporarily out of commission, Alicia faced Cade with a grimace.
“Well, if it isn’t the bitch who caused me so many fucking problems,” Alicia snarled.
“If it isn’t the bitch who just took a cheap fucking shot like a coward by kicking me in the back of the knee,” Cade retorted. She slid easily into a defensive position, struggling to not be the first to launch an attack against the woman.
“Too bad I didn’t take a fucking cheap shot in your damned skull,” Alicia said. She raced forward and swung her fist in an arc, aiming for the side of Cade’s head. Cade put her own arm up and blocked the strike. A pang of pain shot through her forearm as Alicia’s knuckles struck her skin. She would have a bruise there in the morning.
Cade didn’t take the time to worry about her arm, though. Instead, she stepped forward, meeting Alicia head-on. She twisted her arm around and grasped the woman’s wrist, hauled her forward, and slammed her own fist into the woman’s nose. Cartilage gave under her fingers, and a spurt of blood accompanied the punch. Alicia staggered backward as blood poured down her upper lip and chin. The grimace twisting her face was made worse by the blood.
Alicia didn’t bother saying anything. She didn’t even cry out in pain at the strike. She only retaliated.
In a move that Cade found frightening, if only because of its speed, Alicia leaped onto a chair and then onto a table. She took three quick steps and kicked out. Her boot struck Cade’s chest, sending her stumbling back and falling to the floor as the pain of the boot’s impact radiated through her sternum. The air rushed from her lungs, and her head bumped the carpet hard enough that, for a moment, she saw stars.
Thankfully, the knock on her head wasn’t quite enough to distract her from Alicia’s next attack. Even as she struggled to get air flowing back into her lungs, Alicia launched herself off the table at Cade. Cade rolled flat on her back and kicked out with both feet. Her boots connected with Alicia’s midsection, and she pushed up, flipping the woman over her head and slamming her heavily to the floor.
Alicia uttered a low groan as Cade rolled to the side and climbed to her hands and knees before regaining her feet. She steadied herself with a hand against a table and pulled her Glock from its holster. Alicia still lay on the floor, conscious but her chest heaving, as if Cade had returned the favor of knocking the air from her lungs. She took a slow step toward Alicia as the other woman let out another groan.
Cade bumped the woman’s leg with the toe of her boot. “Don’t fucking move,” she ordered breathlessly. “But I suppose that goes without saying.”
Alicia’s eyes slid open, and she glared at Cade hatefully. Then she struck out again, her foot hooking behind Cade’s knee and pulling. Cade’s leg was jerked out from under her, and she toppled backward. The back of her head struck the edge of a table, and she yelped as she tumbled to the floor, stunned. Her Glock skittered out of her hand.
Alicia came into her line of view moments later, stepping over her and picking the dropped weapon up from the floor. She studied it for a moment before aiming it down at Cade’s face. Cade blinked at her stupidly. Her brain felt hazy, and the back of her head hurt like hell. She couldn’t get her thoughts together, couldn’t force her limbs to cooperate with her brain, couldn’t tell herself to move. She groaned and squeezed her eyes closed as Alicia pulled the slide of the Glock back—unnecessary, really, because Cade had already chambered a round. It was obviously meant to intimidate. And, frankly, it was working.
Cade forced her eyes open and looked up the barrel of her own gun.
“Stop right the fuck there!” a voice yelled. “Drop the fucking gun, or I swear to God I’ll drop you.”
Alicia froze, her eyes narrowing, as she looked up at the owner of the voice. Even Cade managed to tilt her head back, and just like that, a grin split her lips. Brandt stood near the spot where Alicia had knocked him out just a few moments before. A slow trickle of blood oozed down the side of his head and shone in his dark hair. His hands gripped his M-4 Carbine tightly but confidently. And his eyes held a hardness that Cade had never before seen in them, a hardness speaking of a catalog of awful things he wanted to do to Alicia for daring to threaten Cade’s life. Alicia seemed to sense the danger she was in; she moved the Glock from Cade and aimed it instead at Brandt as the Marine spoke.
“I’m going to give you one fucking chance,” Brandt said, his voice low and cold. He didn’t loosen his grip in the slightest on his weapon.
“One fucking chance to what?” Alicia bit out.
“One fucking chance to save your damned life,” Brandt snarled. Alicia tensed almost imperceptibly, but from her position on the floor, Cade couldn’t help but notice. As Brandt barked out his next statement, Cade slowly eased her hand underneath herself, slipping it down to the small of her back. “I want to know why the fuck you decided to do this.”
“Because somebody fucking had to!” Alicia replied. She tensed further, adjusting her grip on the weapon she’d pilfered from Cade. Cade held her breath as her fingers brushed the pommel of her survival knife. Almost there, she thought. Knife in a potential gunfight. Fucking brilliant. “You’ve got the cure! You’re supposed to save everybody!”
“Why didn’t you ask me like a sane person?” Brandt said, his voice rising in frustration. “Why didn’t you just fucking ask? You think I would have said no if you’d sat down and explained shit? Instead, you just come the fuck after me and kidnap Cade and endanger her life and mine and everybody else’s, and you fucking killed my friend, all because you decided to have a fucking psychotic break!”
“I’m not fucking psychotic!” Alicia yelled back viciously, glaring hatefully at Brandt. “Don’t you fucking dare call me that again!”
“Because of you, a good man is dead, Alicia! All because he dared to want to help a friend!” Brandt snarled. “So do not fucking tell me what I can and can’t call you! You’re fucking garbage if I want you to be!”
Alicia’s grip tightened on the Glock. Cade wasn’t sure if Brandt could see that from where he stood. She hoped he could. She inched her fingers farther down, wrapping them slowly around the hilt of the knife, and then just lay there, listening, as Brandt took several deep breaths and tried again.
“Alicia, you could still be of some use to people,” he said, his voice shaking slightly with his anger. “You could help people. You’ve got Michaluk in you too, and they were able to use you to develop the medications that helped the people here. There’s got to be some good still left in you.”
“I’m not going to be a guinea pig for those assholes!” Alicia shouted. “I’m not going through that shit again!”
She lifted the gun higher, as if adjusting her aim to point it more fully at Brandt’s head. Cade tensed as she saw the woman’s finger flex on the
trigger.
It was now or never.
Cade rolled quickly away from Alicia, simultaneously ripping the knife free from its sheath on her belt. She swung it around as she moved, and buried the blade to its hilt in Alicia’s thigh.
Alicia cried out in pain and staggered backward. Her finger jerked reflexively on the trigger, and a bullet discharged with a bang into the wall just above Brandt’s head. He ducked instinctively, even as Cade scrambled to her feet and darted toward him.
Alicia didn’t wait to see what they would do next. As Cade faced her, the woman broke right, flung a door open, and dove inside at a fast limp. She slammed it shut behind her. Cade swore and staggered to the door, trying the knob and finding it locked.
“Fuck!” Cade exploded. She kicked the door in frustration and rattled the knob uselessly. “She’s going to get away!”
“Not from the fourth fucking floor she won’t,” Brandt pointed out. He pulled Cade away from the door and took her face in both his hands, looking her over carefully. She stared back at him and tried to appear confident and unperturbed, but the pain in her newly acquired bruises was beginning to set in. “Are you okay?” he asked seriously, touching a sore spot on her cheek.
“About as good as can be expected,” Cade admitted. “Now can we bust that bitch’s ass already?”
Brandt gave her a mock salute and knelt to look at the door’s lock. Then he rose, placed the barrel of his M-4 near the lock, and fired into it twice. The lock shattered under the onslaught of bullets, and Brandt put his foot to the door to kick it open. It swung open only a couple of inches before stopping short with a heavy whump. It took Cade a moment to realize that Alicia had thrown the security lock on the door. Brandt growled under his breath and put his weapon to the doorframe where the base of the lock was screwed into it. He nudged Cade farther back, much to her annoyance, closed his eyes, and turned his head away before squeezing the trigger two more times. The doorframe around the lock exploded with the impact, and with another hard kick, the door flew open and banged against the wall beyond.
A single gunshot snapped out. The bullet embedded itself into the wall behind Brandt, just barely missing his head. Wordlessly, reacting to the danger without even realizing it, Brandt lifted his rifle and squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession.
There was a thud inside the room. And then silence.
“Please tell me you just ended this,” Cade murmured in the silence that followed. She eased toward the door, afraid she’d get shot if she stepped into the doorway. Standing in the doorway like he was didn’t seem to faze Brandt. She took that as a good sign, moving to stand beside him.
“I don’t know,” Brandt admitted. “Let’s find out, yeah? Then maybe we can get upstairs and give Ethan and Remy a hand. By now, they probably need it.”
Chapter 56
Remy and Ethan walked straight into trouble almost as soon as they reached the fifteenth-floor landing. As they ascended the landing’s final steps, Ethan reaching for the door handle to pull it open to assess the hallway’s status, a figure darted from the darkness of the steps above him with surprising speed and tackled him. Ethan slammed into the stairwell railing with bruising force and tilted backward. As he flailed an arm, grasping for the railing to prevent himself from toppling over it, Remy let out a yelp of alarm that echoed through the entire stairwell, alerting every infected being within earshot of their presence. She lunged forward, heedless of her own safety, and reached past the large infected woman clinging to Ethan. She grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled him back, away from the railing and his potential death.
As Remy hauled on him in a desperate bid to save his life, the infected woman grabbed Remy’s arm and, before Ethan could do anything to prevent it, clamped her broken teeth onto Remy’s forearm. Remy howled in pain and jerked back, even as Ethan grabbed the infected woman from behind and dragged her back, away from Remy. He hooked his arm around the woman’s neck and twisted her around, wasting no time slamming her face to the floor. He braced his boot between the woman’s shoulder blades and put a bullet into the base of her skull.
Ethan shone his flashlight up the stairwell. Not seeing any more immediate threats, he turned to Remy instead, his heart hammering wildly in his chest. The young woman leaned heavily against the railing, her hand clasped tightly to her right forearm, a pained expression on her face.
“Are you bit?” Ethan asked bluntly. He strode toward her to see her better in the light from his flashlight. When she didn’t offer an immediate response, he asked more firmly, “Remy! Are you bit?” Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed her hand and jerked her arm toward him, examining the sleeve of her brown leather jacket, hoping, praying the dead woman’s teeth hadn’t broken through the fabric. His heart lurched when he saw the two fresh holes punched in the sleeve, one of them neat, the other torn around the edges. Blood beaded at the edges of the fabric. Ethan swore under his breath and shoved the jacket sleeve up to her elbow. Two puncture wounds, one shallow, the other deep, decorated her otherwise perfect skin. Ethan let go of her arm and swung his pack around, digging into a pocket inside it with trembling hands.
“That was stupid, Remy,” he admonished as he freed a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the bag. “Absolutely fucking stupid.”
“You needed help!” Remy protested. Her voice cracked, but Ethan didn’t deign to comment. He simply broke the seal on the alcohol bottle, glaring at her the whole time.
“You should have let me fall!” he snapped. “That would have been infinitely preferable to this!” He lifted the bottle over her bare arm and started to tilt it. “This is going to hurt.” He upended the bottle’s contents over her arm, and she let out a whimper of pain as the searing liquid splashed its way into the wounds. Ethan dropped the emptied bottle onto the landing and dug back into the bag.
“Am I infected?” Remy asked weakly, in a voice laced with pain.
“Maybe,” Ethan admitted as he gazed into his bag. Derek had given him four auto-injectors of medication before they’d set out on their respective missions; it was supposed to be enough to get him through the process of taking care of business here and then meeting up in South Carolina. But none of them had anticipated this scenario. Ethan had assumed that if the infected got their hands on any of them, the victim would end up dead. He fingered the four auto-injectors hesitantly, knowing what he’d have to do.
If he wanted Remy to survive, if he wanted to give her an opportunity to live, he would have to give up his own chance.
Suddenly, it all opened up before him, everything he’d forgotten coming back in a rush of memory and feeling: his life before the Michaluk virus had taken it all away; his wife’s sacrifice to save others in the flames of the hospital; the helplessness and despair he felt when she’d died; the closeness he’d developed with Nikola, with Brandt, with Theo, and yes, even with Gray. And with Remy. Especially with Remy.
He remembered Nikola’s death as if experiencing it all over again. And Theo’s decision to end his own before the virus took his identity away from him. Avi, cut down too soon. He couldn’t imagine allowing Remy to walk into a death like that. He couldn’t reconcile the concept of her and death in the same sentence. He hadn’t been able to when she’d been mistaken for dead. And he wouldn’t be able to now.
This was why he’d survived. It was all so clear to him now.
Was it worth giving up his own survival in order to attempt to ensure hers?
“Of course it is,” Ethan said out loud.
Remy gave him a confused look. “What?”
Ethan yanked three of the auto-injectors from his bag and ripped the caps off of all of them. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t wait for Remy’s permission to administer the drugs. He simply grabbed her arm, pulled it to him again, and slammed one of the auto-injectors into the flesh right above her wounds, dispensing the medication into her body. He dropped to a knee to stick a second one into her right thigh, and then he straightened, wielding the third.
“This one’s really going to hurt,” he warned her. He took her chin in his hand and tilted her head to the side. He jabbed the third auto-injector into the side of her neck.
“Ow!” Remy protested once he’d withdrawn the third auto-injector. “What the hell did you put in me?”
Ethan looked at the three spent cartridges for a moment before he released them, letting them tumble over the railing. Far below, they clattered to the floor.
“Drugs. To keep you alive,” he said shortly, trying to not dwell on what he’d just done. After wrapping one of the t-shirt strips from his bag around her arm, tying it securely, he beckoned to her and started up the stairs to the sixteenth floor. “Come on. We’ve got to move fast. We need to get this done and get you to Derek as soon as possible.”
Remy started up the stairs behind him. “But what if I’m not infected?” she asked. “Won’t the drugs fuck me up if I’m not?”
“You probably are,” Ethan warned her. As terrible as it sounded, he hoped she was. Then he wouldn’t feel as if he’d just wasted his own life for nothing. “But if you weren’t, the drugs wouldn’t hurt you. I know that much, but please don’t ask me to explain it. I’m a cop, not a pharmacist. Besides, all this talking is slowing us down.”
Remy made a face at him, but he ignored it and kept climbing, aiming for the next floor. “Slowing us down? What the hell, Ethan?” she muttered. “I got fucking bit, and you expect me to be all cool and casual about it?”
“You’re cool and casual about everything else, aren’t you? Besides, last month, you were perfectly fine with the idea of dying at the hands of the infected,” he pointed out.
“Doesn’t mean I want to become one,” Remy muttered.
Ethan stopped outside the seventeenth-floor door and put his hand on it, leaning close to the door and listening carefully. Even as he listened, trying to gather the status of the situation inside the hall beyond the door, Ethan’s eyes kept flicking to Remy, watching her, trying to gauge how she felt. Her eyes still shone with worried tears, obviously terrified of what would become of her, her future, her fate. Ethan didn’t need to be a master of reading body language to know and understand that; he’d been there himself just over a month before and every day after that.
The Becoming: Revelations Page 31
