The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege
Read The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege Online
Authors: Jessica Meigs
Tags: #zombies, #survivalist, #jessica meigs, #undead, #apocalyptic, #the becoming, #postapocalyptic, #outbreak
A PERMUTED PRESS book
Published at Smashwords
ISBN (Trade Paperback): 978-1-61868-2-406
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-2-413
The Becoming: Under Siege
copyright © 2014
by Jessica Meigs
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Dean Samed, Conzpiracy Digital Arts
This
book
is
a
work
of
fiction
.
People
,
places
,
events
,
and
situations
are
the
product
of
the
author’s
imagination
.
Any
resemblance
to
actual
persons
,
living
or
dead
,
or
historical
events
,
is
purely
coincidental
.
No
part
of
this
book
may
be
reproduced
,
stored
in
a
retrieval
system
,
or
transmitted
by
any
means
without
the
written
permission
of
the
author
and
publisher
.
Table of Contents
From the Journal of Remy Angellette
From the Journal of Remy
Angellette
September 9, 2010 (I think)
Rules for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
(As Taught to Me by Cade
Alton
Evans)
1. Keep your gun handy. Keep enough bullets
even handier.
2. Don’t be afraid to try to nail a
headshot—those assholes deserve everything we can give them.
3. Keep a melee weapon on you at all
times in case you run out of bullets. Knives are awesome, machetes
are way sweet, crowbars and hammers are stupid as shit. (Do I
really have to elaborate on
why
?)
4. Keep your friends close. Keep your
(living) enemies closer.
5. Never ever,
ever
fall in
love.
He’ll only die and come back as a
zombie and try to kill you. You’ll never be able to think about him
the same as you did before—and you’ll have the scars to
Yeah, I’m bitter. What of it?
Who
wouldn’t
be bitter after all
the shit I’ve been through? I lost my family, I lost Gray, and I
lost
him
. My face is fucked up, and I want to get out of
here. Like I was supposed to months ago. But Dr. Rivers won’t give
me the cure he gave Ethan until he’s absolutely sure it won’t kill
me.
Who gives a flying pigmy fuck, as Cade
would say. Give me the cure anyway. I can handle it. I’m not
fragile
. And if it
does
kill me? Then so much the
better.
I hate it here. I hate that there’s
absolutely no one who really understands what I’m dealing with,
what I’m going through. I hate the anger, the hatred, the
hunger
, always lurking in the back of my head. I hate this
empty, hollow feeling in my chest where all of my good emotions
used to be. I hate this whole place.
I just hate. Indescribably.
I’m way off the reason why I’m supposed to
be writing this. All the shit I wrote before makes me sound like a
stupid, emo little teenager. I’m almost twenty-two! I shouldn’t be
all up in this damped mopey bullshit. Cade asked me to write about
what’s been going on from my point of view—she’s been collecting
all these stories from the survivors here for a “chronicle of
events.” She got the idea from some horror novel that told an oral
history of a zombie war. It sort of makes sense, considering we’re
living it.
At the same time, though, I think Cade
just needs something to do since she’s knocked up and supposed to
be taking it easy. Maybe she needs to find an activity that’s less
intrusive of other people’s lives to stay occupied with. Because
for the past several months, she’s been driving me fucking
nuts
.
What if I don’t
want
to tell my
damned story? Nobody cares about my mom or my stepfather or
Madeline or any of the other people I’ve lost. And nobody cares
about me getting bitten by one of the infected or Ethan saving my
life and then trying to kill me.
Nobody cares.
And if no one
cares, then why should I spend so much damned time talking about
my
feelings
? I could be out with one of the search parties
looking for supplies and maybe, I don’t know, actually
doing
something
about the infected. I don’t want any more people going
through the hell I’ve been through. And I don’t want to sit on my
ass in this stupid house in stupid Woodside, keeping everything I
do low impact while I whine in this stupid notebook.
I want the fucking cure. And once I get
it? I want to finally get the hell out of here. Because
damn
it
, I’m sick of this place.
Brandt Evans searched for his wife, Cade, for nearly
an hour before he finally found her. She was in the backyard of the
house two doors down from the one in which they’d been staying, her
blue jeans soaked to the knees with dew from the tall grass and her
hair falling messily out of its ponytail. She stood near one end of
the yard, her back straight and her shoulders squared, her eyes
fixed on a distant point. She grasped a compound bow as she sighted
down the length of the arrow resting against the string. She’d
secured her ever-present Galil sniper rifle to her back, the strap
crossed over her chest. She looked like a pregnant goddess of
revenge, like an Amazonian warrior who would take no shit from
anybody, and Brandt loved it. He smiled and climbed onto the nearby
picnic table, watching as she adjusted her aim. After several
heartbeats, she released the arrow. It embedded with a thunk into
the narrow sapling at the far end of the yard.
“Damn, that’s good,” Brandt commented with a
smile. He slid off the table and dusted dead leaves off the seat of
his jeans. Shaking his dark hair out of his eyes, he started toward
her through the knee-high grass. “I didn’t know you knew how to use
a bow. Hell, I didn’t even know you
had
one. Where’d you get
it?”
“I found it in the house,” Cade answered.
She retrieved another arrow from the bag at her feet. “Guy who
lived there must have been a bow hunter. He had a
ton
of
equipment stashed in his attic. The searchers must have overlooked
it, so I cleaned it all out.”
Brandt tried to picture Cade,
pregnant
Cade, crawling around in a dusty, dirty attic in
which the temperatures likely rivaled the Mojave Desert, as almost
all attics in the southeast tended to. It was amazing she hadn’t
passed out from the combination of heat inside and outside.
“And how long have you known how to do
this?” he asked. “You never mentioned that you could before.” He
grabbed one of the arrows from the bag and held it up into the
sunlight, studying it as Cade answered.
“Since this morning. Sort of,” she admitted.
She fit the arrow to the bow and flexed her fingers as if they
pained her. Then she drew the bowstring back. Brandt couldn’t help
but admire how the muscles in her biceps shifted as she pulled
against the weight of the bowstring. “I figured it’d be worth
taking the time to teach myself. We might end up in another
situation that requires quiet, and it would make a great stealth
weapon.”