Jessica Meigs - The Becoming (14 page)

Theo visibly hesitated. Gray shook his head in warning, even though Theo couldn’t see the action. He didn’t trust this guy; he’d never seen him before, he didn’t know what he
really
wanted, and he didn’t like the look of the woman with the rifle. For all he knew, she was going to shoot both of them the minute they approached the house, and steal everything they had. But before Theo could answer the man’s offer, the woman yelled out from the house.

“Brandt, there’s infected coming this way!”

“Fuck!” the man exclaimed. He lifted the crowbar and turned away from Gray and Theo, putting his back to them and looking around the street wildly. Gray couldn’t help but do so himself, searching for the infected—the same ones that had probably followed them. “Where? Where are they?” the man yelled back to the woman.

The woman jerked her chin to her right and swung her rifle up, aiming it down the street in the direction Gray and Theo had come. Gray tensed and dug his fingers into Theo’s jacket even harder. Another flood of adrenaline hit Gray and stole more of his precious air.

“Shit, if she’s actually about to fire that thing, it’s fucking serious,” the man said. He grabbed Theo’s arm and jerked him forward. Theo yelped and stumbled, and Gray went with him, dragged inexorably along by his grasp on Theo’s jacket. “Come on, we’ve got to go!” Then the man began to run, hauling both of them along until they started to move on their own, across the street and straight toward the house. And toward a future they couldn’t possibly know or plan for.

Find Out What Happens to Theo and Gray in

The Becoming

The First Book in The Becoming Series

Available Now from Permuted Press

Turn the page for a sneak preview of

The Becoming

Available Now from Permuted Press

Excerpt From
The Becoming

Brandt’s Journal

March 8, 2009

I’m following Cade’s lead and keeping a journal. I can guarantee that this won’t last. I’ve never been good at these kinds of things, and I’ve never been the type of person to spill out everything I’m feeling, on paper or otherwise. This will probably end up being one of those bald-facts affairs that just tells things the way they are. And the way things are isn’t exactly the way I want them to be.

We are, figuratively, in the shit.

We made it to Tupelo, Mississippi, as safely as I expected us to make it. We’ve been in this little house for about a month and a half now, unmolested for the most part. There’s been a few incidents involving an infected or two getting uncomfortably close to where we’re hiding, but they were taken care of quickly and quietly. It’s scary how efficient we’ve gotten at this.

Cade spends most of her days either keeping watch on the roof or sitting in the living room with me and Ethan while we try to find reports on the radio. Ethan spends most of his time being the dickish guy he was when I first met him. I suspect that’s his normal personality, despite Cade’s assurances to the contrary. But I’m getting off topic. Ethan’s attitude isn’t the reason why I’m writing in this thing. I said I’d write down what happened, and that’s what I’m going to do.

So here is where we stand now:

By the fourteenth day after Atlanta’s fall (one week after I met Cade and Ethan) the entirety of the southeast was ravaged by the Michaluk Virus. There were some holdouts, mostly in small towns and cities that weren’t close to the larger metropolitan areas, but even those have since fallen. Now it’s just isolated pockets of survivors scattered across the southeastern states, struggling to live.

By the sixteenth day, the last television news station went off the air, presumably permanently. We’re not sure what happened, but my theories tend to involve the infected, so it doesn’t do to ask me about it. Cade thinks the news reporter gave up and decided to find his own place to hide out. Two days after he stopped reporting, the power in our safe house went out for good.

By the twenty-fifth day, we lost the last of the radio stations that we could pick up from our location. The final DJ went off the air with screams of terror and pain. I don’t think I will
ever
forget the sound.

On top of all this, none of us have seen another breathing, uninfected soul since we stopped at a gun shop in Alabama. This fact on its own is disturbing enough; the additional fact that we’ve been forced to move further away from Tupelo’s main center twice in order to get away from the ever-growing hordes of infected is downright frighte

Cade gasped. The sound broke through Brandt’s train of thought, and he dropped his pen. It rolled halfway down the sloped roof before it slowed to a stop. Brandt narrowed his dark eyes and turned his head to look at Cade accusingly, wondering what in the world she was freaking out about. But Brandt was more irritated at the fact that he would now have to get up to retrieve his pen before a gust of wind took it the rest of the way off the roof.

It was early in the morning of their third day at their third hide-out, or
safe house
as Brandt had mentally coined it. Cade had been out on the roof since sunrise, and Brandt had joined her soon after—partially to keep her company, but mostly to get away from Ethan. The older man had become surly and withdrawn throughout their time in Mississippi. Well,
more
surly and withdrawn, Brandt amended silently. Ethan had struck him as a grouchy bastard when they’d met the month before, and nothing the man had done had dislodged Brandt’s initial impression. Besides, it was much more pleasant on the roof with Cade, despite the way the air still clung tenaciously to its early spring chill. As Brandt breathed out, the air fogged before his face in the same way that it had in a dark alley over a month ago…

Brandt shook free from the dark thoughts threatening to surface and looked at the woman beside him instead. Cade was much more pleasant to think about. “What? What is it?” Brandt asked her, feeling impatient despite his determination to keep his cool.

“I thought I saw some people down there,” Cade said. She pointed down the street with a slim hand, her head nodding in the same direction. Brandt sat up straighter, suddenly attentive, and moved to one knee. He followed her finger to try to see what Cade thought she’d seen. Brandt couldn’t deny the way his heart pounded in his chest at the thought of other uninfected people there; he longed for company outside of Cade’s and Ethan’s. He liked both of them just fine, especially Cade. Who couldn’t appreciate the subtle beauty and courage and innate toughness the woman had demonstrated over the past month? Even if Cade
was
a total smartass, but Brandt had convinced himself that that was just part of her charm. Regardless of his growing affection for Cade, though, Brandt preferred an ever-changing environment, and the last month had offered nothing like that.

No matter how much Brandt squinted into the distance, he couldn’t see a thing.

“I think if you actually saw anything, it was probably just one of the infected,” Brandt said. He let out a sigh, his shoulders sagging. He dumped his notebook onto the roof beside him before he slid down the slope to grab his pen, careful to keep his body firmly on the roof. The last thing he wanted was to fall the two stories to the hard ground below. Brandt hissed through his teeth as one of his knuckles scraped roughly against the shingles. He stopped halfway down the roof to study his injured knuckle as Cade continued.

“I don’t know, Brandt.” Cade’s voice was heavy with doubt. Brandt looked up from his knuckle; she frowned as she kept her eyes on the street below. “I could have sworn that whoever I saw was running.”

Brandt couldn’t help the smirk that spread across his face, no matter how hard he fought it. He scooped up his pen and crawled back up to his spot beside her. “Yeah, I hear the infected can run too, you know,” he pointed out. He laughed and picked up his ragged spiral notebook, resting it on one of his knees and smoothing a hand over its battered cover. “Relax, okay?” he said. “Nothing is going to happen around here. And if something
does
happen, it’s not like the infected can get up onto the roof.”

Cade let out a sigh and shook her hair back from her face. She whipped out her ever-present hair elastic—Brandt still wondered where she kept those things—and started to pull her dark locks back into a tight ponytail. Brandt gave her a sidelong glance. The style into which she twisted her hair made her face appear hard, her jaw strong and more angled than before. Brandt realized, as his eyes traced her features, that Cade’s own eyes were locked onto a distant point on the street. He jammed his pen into the spirals of his notebook before he twisted to look at her full-on.

“There’s nothing down there, Cade,” Brandt said firmly. He snapped his fingers in front of her face, trying to bring her attention away from the street and onto him. “Nothing at all,” he repeated. “If there was, I’m pretty sure we would know it by now.”

A slow know-it-all smirk spread across Cade’s face as Brandt finished speaking. She gently elbowed him and stood up on the roof. “Oh, there’s nothing down there?” she asked. “Then what’s that?” Cade pointed down the street again. Brandt followed her gesture reluctantly, wholly convinced he wouldn’t see anything of significance down there.

Brandt was proven wrong as he saw two figures running down the street. One hunched under the weight of a large bag on his back, supporting the other man with one arm even as he stumbled along beside him. They were too far away for Brandt to make out any finer details. He stood up beside Cade and grabbed her rifle from the roof, aiming it in the direction of the two figures below.

Cade grabbed at Brandt’s arm as he aimed the rifle. She yanked it hard and nearly dragged the weapon out of his grip. “Brandt!” she protested, her voice horrified.

“I’m not going to fucking shoot them,” Brandt snapped as he wrested the rifle away from Cade. He rolled his eyes and studied the two figures through the scope mounted on the rifle, squinting through the tube. He watched their movements, the way they walked and gestured and helped each other along.

It was two men, as far as Brandt’s scope-assisted eyesight could discern. The brunette one appeared to be younger and was dressed in jeans and a mid-length dark coat; the older one was blond and had on some sort of dark uniform with patches on the sleeves. A dark blue canvas bag was slung over his shoulders, resting across his back. The way it bulged coupled with the way the man was bent over indicated that it was quite heavy. Brandt was honestly surprised that the man could run under the weighty load. Brandt squinted and tried to make out further details of the man’s clothes, such as the yellow words printed on one of his patches or maybe the specifics of the insignia, but the two men were too far away, and the letters were too indistinct from this distance.

“They don’t have Michaluk,” Brandt concluded. “We should get them inside. There might be infected nearby.”

“Are you sure?” Cade demanded. She took the rifle from his hands and gave him an offended look, as if she were disgusted that he had dared to lay hands on her precious weapon. Brandt had a mental image of her stroking the rifle lovingly, like someone would a dog, complete with the sweet crooning of “
Who’s
a good boy?” He bit back a snigger as she continued. “What if you’re wrong and
they
are infected?”

“Well, that’s what the rifle is for, isn’t it?” Brandt suggested. He started to climb the steep slope of the roof. He slipped in through the window, narrowly avoiding whacking his head on the frame, and then leaned out to help Cade inside. “All I know is that neither of them appears to be infected,” Brandt continued. He grasped her hand and assisted her inside. “And I cannot in good conscience leave them out there to fend for themselves when we have the ability to help them.”

Cade hesitated and looked back at the street through the window. The two men were starting to come into view, and Brandt could begin to see more details without the aid of the rifle scope. “Damn, Alton, you must have the eyes of a hawk,” he commented as he realized that she’d spotted them from a great distance without the help of binoculars or a scope. He was, in a word, impressed. “Come on, let’s get downstairs and get them in the house.”

Without another word, Brandt headed through the dark bedroom he and Cade had entered and stepped into the equally dim hallway. He debated taking out the flashlight he kept in his jacket pocket, but he’d become familiar enough with the house that he thought he could make it to the front door well enough without it. As he descended the stairs, his boots thudding heavily on each step on the way down, Brandt heard Ethan in the living room near the front of the house. Ethan was doing exactly what Brandt had left him doing earlier in the morning: pacing restlessly back and forth in front of the unlit fireplace. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he grumbled to himself, though the words were drowned out by the sound of creaking floorboards and Brandt’s hurried footsteps.

Ethan jerked his head up as Brandt darted into the room and snatched the steel crowbar from the coffee table. “What are you doing?” Ethan demanded. The only answer was the sound of Cade running down the stairs. Ethan’s expression was a perfect picture of bewilderment as he shifted his eyes from Brandt to Cade, directing his next question to her instead. “What’s going on?”

“There are people outside,” Cade explained. She reached the bottom of the stairs and circled around to the living room. Brandt strode to the front door and started to pry away the boards with which they had reinforced it. The boards came away with a loud creak of nails tearing from wood as Cade continued, raising her voice over the noise. “We’re trying to get them inside.”