The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (13 page)

“How did…how is…how does…?” Brandt sputtered.
He was unable to formulate a complete sentence in his anger and
confusion.

“How does it look so normal?” Bradford
suggested. “Because it
is
normal, at least insofar as it
partially serves as a military base. This is FOB Eden, where we’ve
been doing research on the viral contaminant in the southeastern
United States since shortly after its outbreak.”

As Bradford spoke, things started to slot
into place in Brandt’s mind. The wall he stood on, the references
to quarantine, how everyone kept referring to the “southeastern
United States.” All of it started to add up to a story he didn’t
want to hear, one that made his stomach churn with nausea.

“The virus never went worldwide, did it?” he
managed to ask without vomiting. “It was contained, wasn’t it?”

Bradford sighed. “For the most part,” he
said. “There were isolated incidents around the U.S. and parts of
Europe, but we managed to stop the virus’s spread and keep it from
spreading any further. We learned a
lot
of lessons very
quickly from the southeast’s fall.”

“What about the survivors in the southeast?”
Brandt asked. “Have you been launching search-and-rescue
operations? Is that why some of the roads have been cleared?”

“No, unfortunately not,” Bradford said. “Some
of the major roadways have been cleared to allow for troop
movements, but there aren’t any rescue operations. Those were
suspended when the extent of the infection’s spread became evident.
Instead, we focused on quarantine measures.”

“Quarantine measures?” Brandt repeated.

“
Extreme
quarantine measures,”
Bradford clarified. “As someone who’s been involved in that sort of
thing at the CDC, you should understand what sort of extremes the
quarantine measures took.”

Brandt didn’t have to take the time to think
back on what had happened to him when he’d been a test subject for
what had become the Michaluk virus. He remembered the chaos that
had occurred when the virus had slipped out, when the federal
government had ordered the complete shutdown of the testing,
including the eradication of all the test subjects. It was only
thanks to the CDC doctor Derek Rivers that Brandt was still
standing. A lot of good men and women had met their deaths that
day, and they hadn’t deserved to be cornered and shot like they
were rabid dogs.

Brandt stared at the man, the full meaning of
Bradford’s words setting in, and his queasy stomach finally gave up
the ghost. As the magnitude of the major’s words wormed its way
into his brain, he leaned over and puked on the walkway right at
Bradford’s feet, bracing his hands against his knees, his stomach
heaving and bile exploding from his throat. The major took a step
back with a sound of disgust, a sound that pushed Brandt’s nausea
away and replaced it with cold, seething anger. He straightened and
launched himself at the man, wrapping his hands around Bradford’s
throat and squeezing.

“You son of a bitch!” Brandt snarled. “You
left us all for dead!”

Bradford’s fingers scrabbled at Brandt’s
hands. Brandt clung even tighter to his throat, trying to choke the
life out of him as the faces of his deceased friends flashed
through his mind.

“Good people are
dead
because of you
bastards!” he yelled, and then Privates Hutcherson and Bayer were
there. They pried his hands loose and grabbed him under his arms,
hauling him away from Bradford. “You left us all to rot while you
people kept on living normal lives like
our
lives didn’t
matter!”

There was movement in the corner of his eye,
and the doctor woman came toward him, a syringe in her hand and a
sorrowful look in her eyes. He thrashed against the men holding
him, filled with a wild desire to grab this beautiful, sympathetic
woman and run for the world he was familiar with, to search for his
wife and try to re-establish the life they’d lived for the past two
years.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured, and the needle
slid into his bicep. With a press of the plunger, she injected the
fluid inside the syringe into his arm. Within moments, while he
continued to struggle to get loose from the soldiers holding him,
his vision blurred and his brain started to fog over.

The last thing he saw was Major Bradford
shaking his head in pity as he ordered Brandt to be taken back to
his holding cell. The doctor gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze
and murmured in his ear, “I’ll be in your cell to talk on my next
shift.”

Then everything went dark and consciousness
fled.

Cade and her
friends’ arrival in Atlanta was met with zero fanfare, not that
she’d expected any. They’d made the long trip surprisingly
unmolested and trouble-free, though they’d had to change vehicles a
few times until they found one that would not only run off diesel
but had some in the fuel tank. They rumbled into the city in a tank
of a fully loaded, extended cab Dodge pickup, everyone stuffed
uncomfortably into the front and back seats of the vehicle.

The sight in front of Cade was everything she
remembered from the last time she’d been to Atlanta. Cars were
still jam-packed along the road, shoved wherever their owners had
left them when they’d abandoned them and tried to flee the city,
creating a virtual wall of vehicles that blocked the roads. Up
ahead, further obstructing their path, was a massive concrete
barricade that had served as a roadblock, a wall that stretched
across the road. Cade didn’t remember seeing it when Alicia and her
people had brought her into Atlanta months before. She figured
maybe they’d taken her in through a different route that had been
cleared. She pulled the truck as close to the side of the road as
she could get it out of sheer habit and shifted into park, then
stared out the windshield at the jumbled mess in front of the
vehicle.

They’d made it. The first leg of their
journey was done, and now they were entering the hard part.

Cade rested her head against the seat,
letting out a slow, exhausted sigh. Just thinking about everything
ahead of them was enough to make her tired. She didn’t have a
choice, however; she had to do this, if it meant saving her husband
from the clutches of people who, in her opinion, obviously meant to
do him harm.

There was a light tap on her right arm, one
that she barely felt through the soft leather of her dark brown
jacket. She forced her eyes open and looked at Sadie in the
passenger seat, who was staring at her with wide eyes and a look of
concern on her face.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Cade waved her off, though she tried to do it
with as little irritation as possible. There was no sense in being
cranky with her friends; they weren’t the reason they’d all had to
come out here, and being ugly with them would alienate the only
help she had. “I’m fine,” she assured Sadie. “I’m just thinking,
that’s all.”

“Coming up with a plan?”

“Trying to,” Cade said. “As much of a plan as
it’s possible to make in a place like Atlanta, anyway.”

There was a creak of leather, and then Remy
leaned into view. She was sitting in Dominic’s lap, and Cade
wondered how uncomfortable he was feeling from having her on his
lap for the past two hours.

“How’s it look?” Remy asked. “Cesspool? Hell
on Earth? Belching fire and brimstone?”

“Still,” Cade replied. “Quiet. Maybe a little
too quiet.”

“The story of Atlanta,” Dominic muttered. “We
should get out of the truck and get moving. We didn’t come in the
same way we brought you in last time, so we’re not going to be able
to bring the truck in through here. We can either drive further
south and try to get to Alicia’s entrance, assuming it hasn’t been
blocked up again by now, or we can go on foot. Might take a little
longer, but we can take a more direct route if we do it on foot.
Votes?”

“I vote we shut up and get the hell out of
this truck,” Cade said. She cut the engine off, shoved the driver’s
door open, and stepped out onto the pavement. The road under her
boots crunched as she put her weight on the ground, and she glanced
down to see the pavement had deteriorated in the past two years,
grass and weeds growing up in the cracks, pushing them wider to
make room for more. As surely as time passed, nature was beginning
to take back everything that man had built, filling in the cracks
with budding life. She stepped around a patch of dandelion and went
to the back of the truck, taking her rifle out of the toolbox where
she’d stored it and retrieving her ammunition-heavy backpack. Her
companions disembarked from the vehicle, and once they were all out
and gathering their packs, Cade started in the direction of the
concrete wall blocking the road, leaving the others scrambling to
follow.

Dominic hurried up alongside her, still
shrugging on his backpack, his face shadowed from the rising sun at
their backs. “You shouldn’t go off by yourself, especially not in
Atlanta,” he said, his tone mild.

Cade scowled. “I can take care of myself,
Dominic,” she snapped. Distracted by his commentary, she tripped
over an abandoned, half-opened suitcase in the middle of her path,
and he caught her arm to steady her. She wrenched it away as soon
as she’d gained her footing, and he continued as if it hadn’t
happened.

“It’s not a question of whether or not you
can,” he said. “We’ve already established, repeatedly, that your
abilities are well beyond the average person’s, and we’ve
established that many times over, so I’m not going over it
again.”

“Good, there’s no need to,” Cade said. She
kept walking, her eyes focused on the obstacles ahead. Dominic
waited until they’d climbed over a vehicle blocking their path,
sliding over the hood carefully, before he spoke again.

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“Yes,” Cade said. “I’m going to the
Tabernacle.”

“Do you even know where that
is
?”

Cade gritted her teeth, anger flashing
through her at his question. “Somewhere in downtown Atlanta.” As
she said it, she knew it was a stupid answer, and she could
practically feel the well-deserved incredulous look he was giving
her boring into her skin.

“You’re kidding me, right?” Dominic said.
“That’s all you’ve got? ‘Somewhere in downtown Atlanta’? You can’t
possibly think you’ll be able to get away with wandering around
downtown looking for the place without being attacked.”

“Well, do
you
know where it is,
then?”

“Of course I know where it is.”

She whirled on him, clipping his elbow with
the butt of her rifle as she turned. “Then
stop
making a big
deal over the fact that I don’t know where it is and
get us
there!
” She shouted the last three words, and they echoed
against the pavement and cars and transfer trucks around them. The
others froze at her words, staring at her with wide-eyed
wariness.

There was an odd snarling sound toward her
left. Cade spotted one of the infected, somewhat fresh, maybe a
month old, trapped in an empty space between several cars, as if
he’d somehow stumbled his way into a manmade cage of mangled steel.
Poor bastard looked half starved, like he’d been there for a while,
maybe since he’d been turned.

Shooting one last glare at Dominic, she
marched toward the infected man, shouldering her rifle. She
unsheathed the machete fastened to her backpack and climbed onto
the hood of one of the cars, squaring her stance so she wouldn’t
lose her balance. She bounced the machete in her palm a couple of
times, testing its balance. She wasn’t used to using bladed
weapons; she was more the “shoot from a distance and blow shit up”
kind of woman, probably the reason she and Brandt had felt that
magnetic pull between them from the moment they’d first met. Crazy
attracted crazy, and they both had more than a small touch of it.
They were so much alike that it was hard to conceive of a life
without
them together in it. She twirled the blade in her
hand. The infected man scrabbled at her boots, and she stood back
just enough that his teeth couldn’t reach her. Lifting the blade
high, she swung it down and embedded it in the man’s skull.

The bone had begun to decay since the man’s
infection, and his skull partially collapsed under the blow. She
yanked her blade free, and he collapsed forward, his upper body
draping over the hood at her feet before sliding down to the
pavement with a thump.

Satisfied that the man was deceased, Cade
wiped the blade clean with a rag and sheathed it, hopped down from
the car, and marched toward the others. “We’re wasting time,” she
said. “We need to move faster. I want to be at the Tabernacle and
out of the city before sunset. I have a feeling we’ll have a lot of
ground to cover after that.”

“You ain’t kidding,” Sadie commented,
brushing past Cade. She strode toward the concrete barricade,
picking up speed with every step. Then she leapfrogged onto the
trunk of a car, bounced off the hood, and went airborne, landing
with seeming effortlessness onto the narrow top of the concrete
barricade. She shrugged her bow from where she’d hooked it over her
shoulder and slid an arrow from her backpack, nocking it onto the
bow and grasping the bowstring. She crouched, staring at whatever
was on the other side of the barricade.

Cade watched her with envy, wishing she could
move like that.

“She must have taken gymnastics as a kid,”
she remarked, and she saw Jude nodding out of the corner of her
eye. That sort of athleticism could come in handy for them all.

Sadie let out a low whistle and dropped over
the barricade and out of sight. Cade hurried forward, climbing onto
a vehicle that was close enough to the barricade to allow her to
reach the top. “Give me a boost,” she ordered, not caring who
listened to her. Dominic joined her on the hood of the car,
kneeling and cupping his hands so she could step up into them. Then
she was up onto the barricade, twisting to sit down on the edge and
swinging her legs over. There was a black convertible crashed
against the barricade, its top missing, so she dropped down into
the cushioned passenger seat, then climbed over the closed,
crumpled door to the pavement.