The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (26 page)

“Shit,” Jacob drawled. He pulled his wallet
out and sorted through the cards inside for his debit card, then
passed it to the cashier at the delivery window. Once he’d paid and
gotten their drinks—a hot mocha latte for him and a caramel
frappuccino for her—he pulled away from the window. “Do you think
you could take me to him, let me examine him?”

“He won’t trust you,” Lindsey warned. She
took a sip of her drink and set the cup in one of the cup holders
between them. “He barely trusted me until he found out who I was.
You, he won’t tell you anything, and he won’t believe anything you
say.”

“Then I’m going to have to
make
him
believe,” Jacob said.

“Why?” Lindsey asked. “What do you need to
see him for, anyway?”

“You can’t possibly think I’m going to let
you deal with all this on your own,” Jacob said. He put his cup in
its cup holder and took her hand in his, squeezing it lightly. “I’m
here to help in any way I can.”

“Why?” Lindsey asked. “What’s in it for
you?”

Jacob steered into a random parking lot and
pulled into a space, shoving the car into park and turning in his
seat to look at her. “Do you really not know, or are you playing at
ignorance?” he asked. Thankfully, he didn’t sound like he meant it
insultingly, or Lindsey would have crawled across the car and
smacked the shit out of him. “You honestly don’t know that I like
you?”

“No, I didn’t,” Lindsey said, her eyes
widening with surprise. “But, Jacob, I don’t know if the two of us
is a wise idea. I don’t… I don’t date coworkers.”

A fleeting look of disappointment came into
his eyes, and he nodded. “Understandable,” Jacob said. “That
doesn’t mean I won’t help you, though.”

“How?”

“I’ll help you get him out of there,” Jacob
said. “I’ll help you figure it out, and I’ll do whatever needs to
be done to make sure you make it out of the facility in one
piece.”

Lindsey smiled warmly. “You’re a good man,
Jacob. You know that?”

He smiled sheepishly. “I do my best. So what
do you say we get back to the facility and start looking for holes
to slip your lieutenant through?”

Twenty minutes later, Lindsey and Jacob were
walking back into the lab, coffee cups in hand, when a soldier
rushed inside and stopped at Lindsey’s desk. “He’s asking for you,”
he told her as she stared up at him in bafflement.

“Who is?” Lindsey asked. She set her grande
frappuccino cup on the coaster near the corner of her desk calendar
and looked at him in confusion.

“The prisoner,” the soldier explained. “He
said he’s ready to talk, and he’s specifically asking for
you
.”

Lindsey pushed away from the desk, and in her
haste to grab her medical kit, she knocked her drink over. Ignoring
the tan-colored liquid that spilled across her calendar, she
followed the soldier out of the room at a near run.

Brandt sat on the edge of his cot, his hands
pressed together and resting on his lap, rocking back and forth
slightly. When the door creaked open, he looked up at Lindsey
expectantly, and though his face remained somber, there was
excitement in his dark eyes.

“Lieutenant Evans?” she said, keeping her
tone measured and steady as she walked toward him. “You wanted to
speak to me?” Brandt nodded, and she glanced back at the soldiers
briefly then stepped closer to him. After a second’s hesitation,
she sat on the edge of the cot, far enough away to maintain a
professional demeanor but close enough that he could speak with a
reduced risk of being heard. “What is it?” she asked, her voice
low. She opened the zipper on her medical bag and made a show of
rooting through it.

“They fuck up around meal times,” Brandt
said. “They let their guards down when they bring me my meals.”

“How much do they let it down?”

“Enough that you could use it,” he replied.
“I’ll take care of the immediate obstacles if you can get here to
get me out.”

Lindsey started to wrap her blood pressure
cuff around his bicep, smoothing it out and taking out her
stethoscope. “I’ll check the meal schedule,” she murmured, making a
show of unkinking the stethoscope’s cable. “Don’t make any moves
until the meal after next.” She plugged the stethoscope’s earbuds
into her ears and pressed the cuff to the crook of his elbow,
starting to inflate the cuff.

Once she’d taken his blood pressure and
pulled the cuff away from his arm, he said, loudly enough for the
guards to hear, “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t feel like talking
right now.”

It was a fight for Lindsey to suppress the
grin that teased her lips while she stuffed her blood pressure cuff
into her bag and stood. “I understand,” she said. “I’ll come back
later and see if you’re ready to chat then.”

When Lindsey left the cell, her hopes were
soaring with excitement and elation as she made her way back to the
labs. She was getting Brandt out two meals from now, and after
that, he would be able to take her to her sister.

Remy’s head had
started to hurt again, badly enough that it felt like her skull was
about to split open. The bumping and rumbling of the truck wasn’t
helping, and not for the first time since they’d gotten out of
Atlanta, she wished she could crawl into the cab, throw Cade out of
it, and curl up in the passenger seat where the trip was bound to
be quieter and more comfortable. But the last person she wanted to
piss off was Cade; that woman could wipe her across the floor
without breaking a sweat. Rather than grumble about the pain in her
head or the ache forming in her lower back from sitting on the hard
cargo bed for so long, Remy kept her mouth shut, sucked it up, and
dealt with it as best she could.

She’d almost dozed off, her head lightly
thumping against the side of the truck bed with the rhythm of the
tires on the road, when the truck screeched to a halt, jerking her
to attention. She sat up straight, looking around the darkening
cargo space myopically. “What the hell is going on?”

“No idea,” Sadie replied, and Remy made out
the shape of her pushing her way through a crack in the canvas
covering the cargo area. As her lithe body slid halfway out into
the open air, Remy levered herself to a standing position, hanging
onto one of the canvas supports arching above her head. Keith and
Jude had also come to attention when the truck had rocked to a stop
and were scrambling for weapons and other supplies in case they
needed them. Remy didn’t look at them, watching Sadie, waiting for
her word.

“What’s going on out there?” Keith asked.

Sadie slipped back inside, and when Remy got
a glimpse of her face, her heart sank to her stomach. Sadie’s face
was pale, and her dark eyes were as wide as saucers. “We ran into a
horde,” she reported, a quaver of fear in her voice.

“How big of a horde are we talking about?”
Remy asked.

“Big enough that we probably can’t drive
through it,” Sadie replied. “We’d trash the truck.”

On cue, the truck’s gears ground together,
and the truck lurched backwards, nearly throwing Remy onto the
floor. She tightened her grip on the support and wavered on her
feet. They traveled backwards for dozens of feet, weaving from side
to side as Dominic fought to drive a straight line in reverse. She
braced her feet at shoulder-width apart for balance, but it didn’t
help her stay upright when a crunch of metal met her ears and the
truck lurched to a stop. Remy tumbled to the floor, falling at
Keith’s feet, and he leaned down to help her stand back up.

“What the
hell
is he doing up there?”
Remy asked. “Whatever it is, it isn’t driving.”

“Presumably, he’s trying to get us
out
of here,” Keith replied.

Remy ignored him, because another sound had
caught her attention. It was the thud of one of the cab’s doors
flying open and striking something alongside the truck. Footsteps
started thudding on metal on one side of the truck, and there were
boots on the pavement on the other side. The canvas flaps on the
back of the truck flipped open, and Dominic stuck his head
inside.

“We’ve got to go,” he said. “There are too
many infected ahead, the road is totally blocked, and there’s no
way we can get through them.”

Remy put her backpack on and went to the back
of the truck, allowing him to lift her over the tailgate and down
to the pavement. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

“Backtrack until we find a route out of here
or a vehicle that still works,” Cade said, stopping beside her.

“Why don’t we
turn around
?” Sadie
asked. She swatted away Dominic’s offer of assistance and swung
herself out of the truck, dropping to the pavement smoothly. Keith
and Jude followed.

“The road isn’t wide enough to do a
three-point right here, and we don’t have time for anything else,”
Dominic said. He grabbed Remy by her upper arm and started to haul
her down the road. “No more questions. Just run.”

As they cleared the truck and the road beyond
came into view, Remy chanced a glance back to see what the highway
ahead of their vehicle looked like. She wasn’t one to be afraid of
the infected—far from it, she had developed a love-hate
relationship with them, but what she saw made her stomach sink. To
define it as a “horde” was an understatement. There were easily
five hundred infected, likely more, stumbling down the highway in
their general direction, a moving, roiling mass of bodies, so many
of them clustered together that they looked like one large,
single-bodied mass, an amoeba that threatened to swallow up
everything in its path.

“Oh hell,” Remy said, understanding why Sadie
had looked so pale. While the infected didn’t pose a threat to her,
they would definitely kill her friends the first chance they had.
There were at least two members of this group that she refused to
entertain the idea of anything happening to. So she squared her
shoulders and turned her focus back to the road, though she allowed
the others to get ahead of her so she could run at the back of the
group. Cade took the lead, and as Remy ran, Dominic started to
drift back toward her.

“What are you doing way back here?” he asked,
breathless with the exertion of his run. He had a pistol out of its
holster and gripped in his right hand.

“I could ask the same thing of you,” she
pointed out, doing her best to keep pace with him. “As for me, I’m
running interference for you guys. Those things don’t want to
attack me, and I’m taking advantage of that fact.”

“That’s smart thinking,” Dominic said,
“though I can’t necessarily agree with anything that puts you in
higher danger than the rest of us.”

“You should take a blessing when you see it,
Dom, and not get all pessimistic and protective over someone who
doesn’t need it.”

“Touché,” he acknowledged, and there was no
more talking, only running, hurrying, scurrying down the cleared
highway back the way they’d come.

The group hadn’t made much time when Remy
realized that they weren’t going to outrun the massive gang of
infected surging down the highway. They hadn’t had enough time,
enough warning to stop and reverse and get moving without delays.
Dominic backing into the other cars lining the road
had
been
a delay. She looked back at their pursuers one more time and swore,
grabbed Dominic by his arm, and yelled to the others. “Stop!” she
shouted. “Right where you are!”

“Are you
shitting me
?” Cade
yelled.

“Trust me!”

Cade growled in frustration and anger, but
much to Remy’s relief, the rest of them were willing to give her a
moment to do whatever she was going to do. She shoved her friends
together into a single group. “Stick close to me,” she ordered. “We
can’t outrun them.”

“Remy, you’re going to get us killed, aren’t
you?” Cade asked from over her right shoulder. “You’re going to
fuck around on one of your little suicide binges and you’re going
to get us all killed.”

“Shut up, Cade,” Remy snapped, “and stick
close to me unless you want to get eaten.”

At that, the others pressed closer to her,
smashing against her back like she was their human shield. In a
way, she was. Because she was the only thing that stood between her
friends and the oncoming horde.

She only hoped this worked as well as she
wanted it to.

“What do you guys say we get our truck back?”
Remy asked, digging deep for the cocky attitude she kept buried
inside her and bringing it to the fore.

“Is that the precursor to a Kurt Russell
joke?” Cade asked.

“Not at all,” Remy replied. “It’s total
coincidence that that line sounds like it’s from
Big Trouble in
Little China
.”

“Can we
please
focus on our immediate
problems and not on who’s quoting what cheesy eighties movie?”
Keith asked. He sounded like he was dangerously close to losing his
temper, enough so that Remy sobered up and adjusted her focus onto
the crowd ahead of them.

The leading edge of the infected had reached
the front of the truck they had abandoned in their haste to get
away from the mash of impending doom. Remy wasn’t fazed by the
sight. Even before she’d been infected, cured, and apparently
rendered invisible to the infected, she wouldn’t have hesitated to
walk into a mess like that, bolo knife swinging and her anger on
her sleeve.

This time, though, there was no anger. There
was only a serene calmness, a steady assurance that she would be
fine, even if she walked straight ahead into the middle of the
pack.

She was right.

She broke through the leading edge of the
infected mob, and they parted, sweeping past her and her friends
like she was Moses and they were the Red Sea. She heard her
companions’ startled intakes of breath, and she imagined they were
horrified at being right in the midst of their enemies. Dominic was
the only one who didn’t make a sound. He’d been in this position
before. His hand was warm in hers, his fingers clutching hers
tightly. She offered what little assurance she could, because the
sensation of being surrounded by the horde was unnerving, no matter
how many times she did it.