The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (18 page)

Good for Keith,
Cade thought. The last
thing they needed was for more people to be separated from the core
group. She wasn’t in her best shape, and she had a feeling that, if
she were attacked, she’d need as many of them as she could get to
help her out of the situation.

As it was, she’d be lucky to make it to the
Tabernacle at this rate.

“Not much further!” Remy reassured her, right
before Cade stumbled over the shredded remains of a tire that she
hadn’t seen and nearly faceplanted onto the pavement. Remy grabbed
her arm and steadied her. Cade didn’t have time, or the breath, to
thank her, so she just kept running.

The overpass on Decatur was left far behind
them as they made it to Marietta, and the sight of the street sign
was enough to give Cade her second wind, to motivate her into
running faster. All her hope rested in finding Spring Street, on
getting to Luckie and to the Tabernacle. She would be damned if she
let even exhaustion ruin that hope for her.

Though there were no signs of infected ahead
of them, she wasn’t going to take the chance of letting her guard
down, not now that she’d gotten this far.

“Cade!” Remy called. Cade barely glanced at
her as she powered down the street as best she could. “Spring
Street! Just ahead!”

Cade found one last burst of energy somewhere
deep within herself, and she surged forward, cutting right onto
Spring Street. She slowed, twisting around to look behind them to
see if the infected were still following them. When she didn’t see
anything behind them, she slowed further, stumbling to a slow jog
and then winding down to a walk. Her lungs burned and her muscles
ached. She breathed in as deeply as she could, ignoring the pain in
her legs. She held her sniper rifle in both shaking hands,
clutching it tightly and close to her body. She saw a few infected
ahead of them, halfway down the block, but they were trapped in the
center of several cars that had crashed into each other, creating a
corral of steel that they couldn’t get out of.

“Everybody okay?” she asked once she’d gotten
enough air into her lungs to speak. Remy, who’d stopped beside her,
nodded, though she was looking beyond them at the trapped
infected.

“We’re okay,” Keith reported breathlessly,
“but Jude wants to go back to find his sister.” He still had a grip
on Jude’s wrist, and Jude struggled against him, trying to wrench
himself free, looking like he wanted to bolt back the way they’d
come.

“Jude, I know it sucks, but Sadie will be
fine,” Cade said, examining their surroundings. “Dominic is helping
her. I need you to focus and help me. We’ve got to get to the
Tabernacle, and I need your attention on the here and now.” Jude
stopped struggling with Keith and glared at her, and she imagined
that, if he could speak, she would be getting an earful right now.
No matter; she had more important things to attend to. “We can’t be
very far away from the Tabernacle,” she added. “Let’s get moving.
Stay alert, and don’t stop for anything.”

Despite their mad, exhausting dash, they all
moved briskly, weapons at the ready in case anything assaulted them
on the rest of their journey. Cade returned her rifle to her
shoulder and took out the machete Dominic had insisted they all
carry. She wasn’t a fan of bladed weapons when it came to fighting
the infected; still, she gripped it tightly in her right hand,
walking toward the three infected that were corralled among the
cars. She was tempted to climb over the cars and kill them, but
ultimately she had neither the time nor the energy to deal with
them, especially not when there was a clear path around them to the
right.

They cut around the wreckage, squeezing
through a small gap between the crushed front end of a truck and
the brick wall of a building, and Keith let out a pained swear.
Cade twisted around, expecting the worst. She only saw him slipping
the rest of the way out of the gap, a hand clamped against the side
of his knee.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“I cut my leg,” Keith said, pulling his hand
away to look at his pant leg. It was stained with a splotch of
blood, and the fabric was torn. “No big deal,” he reported. “Keep
going. I’ll keep up.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course.”

Cade turned back to the path ahead. Two cars
along the way, there was a figure crouched behind the vehicle,
hands gripping the hood as it peered over the edge to stare at
them. Its eyes were rheumy and cloudy, and Cade had no idea how it
could even
see
them. Regardless, it was in their path, and
she would have to take care of it before they could proceed. She
bounced her machete in her hand, speeding up to take on the
infected woman that was rising from her spot behind the car.

She was only a few feet away from her,
lifting the machete to take her swing, when Remy grabbed her
shoulder and shouted, “No, don’t!”

“What the hell are you doing, Remy?” Cade
exploded, checking her swing at the last second.

“I’ve got this,” Remy said. The infected
woman launched herself across the hood toward Cade. Cade
backpedaled, raising the machete into the swing, but Remy put her
hand up to stop her and moved closer to the infected woman, staring
at her with thinly veiled curiosity. She walked toward the infected
woman, who stared up at her like she was enthralled with Remy. When
she reached to within arms’ length of the infected woman, she
stopped and pointed at a space past her and to the left. “Go away,”
she ordered, her voice firm. “Get out of here.”

Much to Cade’s surprise, the infected woman
listened to Remy, stumbling away in the direction she’d been
ordered to go, periodically looking back toward them, which earned
her another barked, “Go!” from Remy.

“What the hell was that?” Cade demanded when
the infected woman disappeared from view behind a wrecked transfer
truck. Remy shrugged and started walking again. Cade hurried
forward and grabbed her shoulder, pulling her around to face her.
“What. Was. That?” she asked emphatically.

“I don’t know, okay?” Remy snapped back, her
cheeks flushing with anger. “It’s been going on since I…since I
dosed myself with the stuff in Derek’s vial. It’s like I can tell
them what to do, and they listen to me. Whenever I’m around them,
they don’t try to attack me. They just let me pass.”

“And you planned to mention this
when
?” Cade asked, keeping her voice down with a valiant
struggle.

“Never,” Remy mumbled, not looking at her.
“It’s not like I
like
being a freak. The last thing I want
to do is go around advertising it.”

Cade shook her head. “You’re not a freak,
Remy,” she said. Before she could take the conversation any
further, Remy pointed into the distance.

“Luckie Street,” she said.

They’d made it. Cade felt a rush of relief
surge through her, and her questioning of Remy was forgotten when
she saw the green and white sign hanging from the pole that arched
above the street. “Thank God. How far from here?”

“Couple of blocks, I think,” Remy said. “If
I’m remembering right, anyway.”

“Do you remember how to get into the
building?”

Remy smiled, her earlier anger and
frustration clearly forgotten. “Of course I do,” she said.

Sadie hadn’t once
felt scared on the group’s journey to or through Atlanta, not until
someone had grabbed her from behind. She wasn’t the screaming type,
but a shriek had bubbled up and escaped before she could stop it,
echoing off the cars and concrete around her. Fingers closed onto
the pant leg of her blue jeans, and she started kicking, striking
back at the person clinging to her, bashing the sturdy heel of her
combat boot into her assailant’s face.

Then Dominic was there, sliding across the
hood of the car on one hip like an action movie star, a machete in
his hand and an angry, determined look on his face. Sadie flattened
herself against the car’s hood, trying to make sure she was out of
his way.

The meaty thunk of the blade biting into
flesh met her ears, and she shuddered. The fingers slackened their
grip. She turned, snagging her own machete, ready to face whatever
was coming their way.

Five more infected had shoved their ways
through the cars and were gaining on them, prompting Sadie to take
an impulsive step back. This only pressed her against the car she’d
fallen on.

Dominic grabbed her arm and tugged her closer
to him. “You still got that bow you’ve been toting around?”

“Of course,” Sadie replied.

“Get over the car, use it as a shield, and
cover me,” he instructed.

Sadie mimicked his slide across the hood,
dumped her ratty, ripped-up backpack onto it, and took her compound
bow off her shoulder. In seconds, she had an arrow nocked into
place and aimed in Dominic’s direction. She didn’t release the
arrow right away, though; she waited for the infected to get closer
so she could be assured that her shot wouldn’t miss.

Dominic was doing the same thing, his machete
in a two-handed grip as he stood, shoulders squared, ready to swing
as soon as they got to within blade’s length. Sadie didn’t
understand why they couldn’t just make a run for it. Her best guess
was that they were standing as a delaying tactic for the others to
get further away, but the cars around them could do just as good a
job at that as she and Dominic could. Unless he was doing this as a
sign of machismo, and if that were the case, she was sorely tempted
to put the arrow she was ready to fire right into his ass.

“Come on, Dominic,” she urged. “Let’s get the
hell out of here. These cars can slow them down as well as we
can.”

“I don’t want them
slowed down
,”
Dominic replied gruffly. “I want them
dead
.” He stepped
forward and swung his machete downward into a hard and fast stroke.
The blow was hard enough to cleave halfway through one of the
infected men’s necks, shattering bone and spraying old brown blood
onto the pavement. Dominic barely waited for the body to fall to
the ground before he moved on to the next attacker, and Sadie knew
it was time to get her brain into gear. She lifted her bow, aimed
at the infected woman—
teenager
, her brain corrected—to
Dominic’s left, and released the arrow.

In the split second before it embedded in her
right eye, Sadie could have sworn that the woman looked right at
her with a sense of relief in her eyes.

She shook the sensation off and grabbed
another arrow. She couldn’t let anything distract her, not now.
Archery demanded a lot of focus if the archer expected to hit the
target, and that amount of focus increased the smaller the target
got. If she expected to actually kill the infected, she had to aim
for the eyes; there wasn’t much elsewhere that she could shoot them
that would take them down permanently.

Before she could fire her second arrow, there
was a crack of gunfire, a distinctive and familiar sound from
Sadie’s childhood, and the infected man that she’d aimed at dropped
to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Sadie looked around wildly,
searching for the source of the shot, as a second bullet took down
another infected, leaving them with only one more to deal with.
With two brisk swings of his machete, Dominic took care of the last
one and slid across the hood to join her.

“Who the hell did that?” Sadie asked,
snatching up her ripped backpack and returning the arrow she held
to it. “Where did those shots come from?”

“I don’t know, and right now, I don’t care,”
Dominic replied. “Call it a guardian angel, and let’s get out of
here before we run into a bigger problem. We’ve got to catch up to
everybody else.”

Sadie’s nerves were vibrating under her skin,
and despite Dominic’s urges to disregard what had happened, she
scanned the overpass around them for the source of the shot. Of
course, out on an overpass with only cars and trucks around, there
wasn’t a living soul in sight besides the two of them.

Guardian angel, indeed,
she thought,
the ridiculous mental image of an angel in white, flowing robes
with massive, fluffy white wings and a sniper rifle in its hands
coming to mind. She almost laughed at the thought and refocused her
mind on where it needed to be: the area around her, where potential
danger lurked. Drawing in a deep breath, she shouldered her
backpack and the compound bow and gestured for Dominic to lead the
way. As they headed down Decatur at a brisk, ground-eating pace,
she said to him, “Thank you.”

“For what?” Dominic asked.

“For coming back to help me,” Sadie said.
“Nobody else looked like they were going to do it, not even Jude.”
She was aware of how bitter she sounded, and she was beyond
caring.

“What’s going on with you and Jude?” Dominic
asked.

“What are you talking about?” Sadie
asked.

“I’m talking about you and your brother,”
Dominic said. “You two have barely spoken to each other beyond the
immediate business of survival since we left for Atlanta. You were
so close back at the house. What changed that?”

“That’s none of your business,” Sadie
grumbled, adjusting her backpack on her shoulder.

“Anything that might threaten the cohesion of
this group is my business,” Dominic said. He sounded like he was
reciting something he’d heard from someone else.

“Who did you steal that line from?” Sadie
asked. “Winston Churchill?”

“If you don’t want to talk about it with me,
that’s fine. I will say, though, whatever is going on between the
two of you, get it straightened out, because the last thing I want
to see happen is your conflict getting in the way of your
survival.”

“Whatever,” Sadie grumbled. His warnings
didn’t make her want to talk about it. Her feelings still ached
over Jude’s angry tirade at her back at the house, when he’d
basically told her that he didn’t
need
her. Things hadn’t
felt right since. She’d just been looking out for him like she
always had. She didn’t understand why everything had to be
different now that they were with this new group of survivors.