The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (19 page)

It almost made her want to go off somewhere
away from other people. Things had been so much simpler before
they’d run into Remy and Dominic.

Sadie shook her head. Now was
not
the
time to get lost in her thoughts. If her father saw her now, he
would be less than happy with her, and he’d have smacked her
against the back of her head to get her to focus.

“I’ll talk it over with him later,” Sadie
assured him, “assuming we ever see the others again.”

“We will,” Dominic replied. “If I have to
move Heaven and Earth to make it happen, I will. You can count on
that.”

“Thanks,” Sadie managed. Her throat was
tight, like the word was too big to fit past her vocal cords. She
cleared her throat, sticking close to Dominic. “Do you think all of
this is a fool’s errand?”

“All of what?”

“This whole thing. Trying to go after Brandt.
Do you think it’s an idiot’s quest?”

Dominic’s eyebrow rose, and he stared beyond
them at a cluster of wrecked cars. There were three infected people
trapped among the wreckage—two men and a woman—but they didn’t pose
a direct threat to either of them.

“I haven’t known these people as long or as
well as they have known each other,” he started. He paused to help
her squeeze through the narrow gap between a car and one of the
building’s walls. “One thing I
can
tell you is that I have
never met a group of people more suicidally devoted and protective
of each other in my life. These people have risked their lives for
each other so many times that it has become second nature to them.
In all honesty, I’ve never had anything like that. Cade’s not a
fool. If she thinks she can get in and out alive and get Brandt
back in the process, I have no doubt she will.”

“You seem to be really confident in her
abilities,” Sadie commented, stepping around an abandoned briefcase
on the sidewalk.

“And you’re not?” Dominic asked.

Sadie shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t made
up my mind on how I feel about any of this.”

“What are you even doing here then?” Dominic
asked. “If you have doubts, maybe you and your brother should have
stayed behind with Isaac and Dr. Rivers.”

“I’m here because I have to make amends,”
Sadie replied. “It’s partially my fault that the infected got to
Woodside, that Brandt got taken, and the community fell. If Jude
and I had never shown up, Woodside would have been fine and we
wouldn’t have to be out here.”

Dominic pointed left at the intersection of
Spring and Luckie streets, and they turned in that direction. “You
could
look at it that way,” he acknowledged. “At the same
time, who’s to say they wouldn’t have found us anyway? Me and Remy
were outside the community, probably where we shouldn’t have been.
Who says they wouldn’t have followed
us
back to Woodside,
regardless of whether or not we’d found you guys?”

“Stop making so much damned sense,” Sadie
grumbled, not wanting to admit that he was right.

“I’m just pointing out the obvious, that’s
all,” he said. “Come on. I can see the Tabernacle up ahead. Let’s
catch up with everybody else and get inside before more infected
stumble across us.”

Ethan,
Kimberly, and Chris had walked through the rest of the night before
they’d finished traversing the woods and had come out on an
embankment that rose to the edge of a highway. It was approaching
dawn when the three of them crouched into the shadows of the trees
and underbrush lining the road. Ethan couldn’t deny the stir of
nervousness in his gut as he studied the road above them, searching
for any movement, either good or bad, so he could get a sense of
whether or not Chris had led them into a trap.

“What do you think?” Kimberly asked from her
spot beside him. “Think it’s safe to go up?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Ethan admitted. “I
guess it depends on whether or not this guy,” he nodded his head
toward Chris, who knelt on his other side, eating a chunk of beef
jerky, “lied to us about whether or not he was taking us into a
trap for his buddies to pick off.”

“I didn’t lie,” Chris grumbled. He pulled the
bag of beef jerky out of his backpack and offered it to Ethan.
Ethan accepted two pieces and gave one to Kimberly and the soldier
continued. “If I show up with you guys and I don’t have my mask on,
I’m committing suicide.”

Ethan stared at him for a long moment, during
which Chris shifted uncomfortably under his scrutiny. When he
didn’t see anything deceptive about the man’s mannerisms, Ethan
refocused on the road ahead. “I think he’s okay.” He nodded toward
the road. “One of us should go up there and check things out.”

“I’ll go,” Kimberly volunteered.

Ethan grasped the back of her shirt before
she could crawl off. “Wait a minute. I haven’t agreed to that.”

“You haven’t let me pull my weight here,” she
replied. “You’ve been doing everything and keeping me in the
background. I understand it’s because you want to protect me, but
you can’t expect me to stand back while you do all the work. Let me
do this one thing, okay?”

“Fine,” Ethan said grudgingly. “If you get
into trouble, I’m going to be right there behind you.”

“It’s an empty highway. What sort of trouble
could I
possibly
get into?”

“You trying to tempt fate?” Ethan asked. “Go
before I change my mind, would you?”

“Aye, aye, captain,” Kimberly said. She gave
him her backpacks and started to work her way up the embankment,
crawling through the thick, dew-dampened grass toward the highway
above. Ethan’s eyes locked onto her slender form as she made her
way toward the highway, and he found himself leaning forward, like
he could will himself to be climbing the embankment right beside
her.

His desire to be at Kimberly’s side must have
shown on his face, because Chris cleared his throat to get his
attention and asked, “So, how long have you two had something going
on?”

“What?” Ethan blinked and glanced at him,
then returned his eyes to Kimberly. She’d reached the top of the
embankment and was crouched on the balls of her feet, her fingers
resting against the grass for balance.

“You two,” Chris said, waving his hand back
and forth between Ethan and Kimberly. “How long have you been
together?”

“What makes you think we’re together?” Ethan
asked, raising an eyebrow.

Chris shrugged. “Maybe the way you’re
overprotective of her,” he said. “I figured you’re either together
or she’s your sister, but with the way you look at her, I think the
sister option is out.”

Ethan didn’t answer the question. He scooped
up the bags Kimberly had given him and started to edge out into the
tall grass to move closer to her. “Stay here,” he ordered before
easing to a halfway point between Chris and Kimberly. “Hey!” he
whisper-shouted to her, raising his voice as much as he dared.
Kimberly turned to look at him. “What do you see?”

“A whole lot of nothin’,” she replied. “Looks
like the military has already been through here. The road’s roughed
up, and everything is shoved to the sides. It shouldn’t be hard for
us to get where we’re going if we can find a car that works.”

“We’ll look for something diesel,” Ethan
said. “Gas is probably well beyond bad at this point. Then again,
considering the little I actually know about diesel fuel,
it’s
probably gone bad too.”

“It won’t hurt to check, will it?” Kimberly
suggested with a tired smile. She still held the piece of beef
jerky in her hand, and she ripped off a chunk with her teeth and
started chewing. “Either way, we’ve got to do something. These
samples aren’t going to hold forever, and this is already taking
longer than I’d expected and hoped for.”

“Understood,” Ethan stated. He glanced back
to make sure Chris was still in the tree line. “I’m sorry if it
seems like I’m trying to take control of everything.” She opened
her mouth to argue, and he shook his head. “Really, I mean it. I
can be a bit of a control freak and more than a little impatient,
and you are a
saint
for willingly putting up with my
crap.”

“It’s not like you’re
that
hard to
deal with, Ethan,” Kimberly protested. “I know you do things the
way you do because you
care
, which is more than I can say
for most people.”

“Yeah, well, this is supposed to be more of a
democracy than what I’ve been allowing. I want you to have a say in
what we’re doing.”

“And him?” Kimberly indicated the soldier
huddled in the trees. “Does he get any say?”

Ethan didn’t look back at Chris. “Why should
he?” he asked. “We’re at war, Kim. For all intents and purposes,
he’s essentially our prisoner of war. Why should we not treat him
as such?”

“Ethan,” Kimberly sighed, pressing her lips
into a tight line, “when you made him take his gas mask off, you
made him one of us. He won’t do anything to sabotage us, because he
is
one of us. It’s basic survival, status quo bullshit. We
both know that. We played that game with Alicia Day, remember?”

Ethan remembered all right. He remembered
that redheaded bitch in combat boots all too well. She’d played
him, fucked with him—and his head and his emotions—really good
before having him locked away in a bare hotel suite in the Westin
in downtown Atlanta. It was a hard thing for him to admit that he’d
begun to
like
her, to care for her, as bizarre and
borderline crazy as she had been. But he had, right until she’d
turned on him and tried to kill all of his friends.

His heart had hardened after that, and he
wasn’t sure it had thawed completely after Derek cured him.

As he thought that, he looked at Kimberly,
and his doubts of whether that was true surfaced again. He shunted
them aside for now; he had more important things to worry about
than how he might feel about the woman in front of him.

Chris still knelt on one knee, right where
Ethan had left him, his expression openly worried and curious. He
was probably wondering what they were discussing, and considering
how many times Ethan and Kimberly had looked back at him, he
probably knew it was about him.

“Fine,” he muttered, raking his hand through
his too-long blond hair. “You win. We’ll give him a vote.”

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Kimberly
asked, and a large grin spread across her face. “Things always go
so much better when we’re all getting along.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Ethan agreed reluctantly.
“What are you thinking we should do? Once we find an operable
vehicle and get to this Eden place that Chris mentioned, what
then?”

“I guess it depends on what we find when we
get there,” she said. She looked past him. “I bet I know just the
person who can help us with that.”

“We’re wasting time standing here, so why
don’t we grill him while we walk?” Ethan suggested. “Not a moment
to lose and all that shit.”

Kimberly took her backpacks from Ethan,
shouldering them and adjusting them until they were comfortable.
She blew a short, shrill whistle for Chris’s attention and beckoned
to him. “Come on, get up here, soldier,” she called. “We’ve got a
bunch of questions to ask you and a lot of distance to cover, so
we’re pulling double duty.”

Over the following hour, Kimberly and Ethan
learned depressingly little about Eden from Chris. It was through
no fault of Chris’s; apparently, he’d only had the opportunity to
go to Eden once, when his unit had been temporarily transferred
there for additional training six months before. He had barely been
allowed off the training grounds, or out of the barracks and the
cafeteria, so he hadn’t had the chance to take a look at the
facilities there. Despite that, he was able to give them a few
details about the Wall in general that would hopefully help them in
their quest.

“It’s about fifty feet tall,” Chris told
them. “It varies in height in spots because of the quality of the
building materials and the stability of the ground and everything,
but for the most part, it averages around fifty feet tall all the
way across. Two hundred yards in front of the Wall on this side,
every tree, bush, building, whatever has been completely cleared
out. Even the grass has been dug up and razed, and they’ve sprayed
pesticides to keep all plant life dead.”

“Why would they do that?” Kimberly asked.

“Can’t have trees and tall grass hiding the
infected,” Ethan answered for Chris. He looked at the soldier and
prompted, “What else?”

“Not much else, man,” Chris replied. “Except
for the fact that if you step into the two hundred yard no fly
zone, you’ll get your head shot off by a sniper on the Wall.”

“Well, fuck,” Ethan muttered. “You couldn’t
have mentioned that sooner? And don’t tell me it wasn’t
relevant.”

“Wasn’t going to say it wasn’t relevant,”
Chris argued. “Just that it didn’t initially cross my mind because
I’ve never been on this side of the Wall before, so it’s never come
up.”

“Never come up,” Ethan muttered, scrubbing
his hand through his hair. “Fine, I’ll pretend like I believe that.
What are the chances we’ll be able to get someone to listen to us
without shooting us on sight?”

“I…honestly have no idea,” Chris confessed.
“Once again, it’s something that’s never come up. We were always
told that
everyone
behind the Wall was infected with the
virus
and
contagious. The thought of someone walking up to
the Wall and wanting to have a chat with someone there was
inconceivable, so there were never any protocols written for that
kind of thing.”

“I’m so sick of words like ‘protocols,’”
Kimberly said. “I got enough of that shit from Alicia, and now I
get to hear more of it? Great.”

“It’s the military,” Ethan replied. “What
else do you expect?” He turned his focus back to Chris, who stared
down the road with a blank look on his face. “What else do you
think is important that we know that’s never come up before?”