The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (27 page)

When the group reached the truck, Remy
signaled to the cargo area. “Everybody but Dominic in there,” she
ordered. “Dom, you drive. I’ll walk in front of the truck and clear
us a path.” She winked cheekily. “Just don’t run over me in the
process, yeah?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, doll,” Dominic said.
Remy took him to the passenger door. He climbed inside and closed
the door behind him. Once he was in the relative safety of the
truck’s interior, what little interest the infected had in their
group dissipated. Reassured at their reactions, Remy squared her
shoulders and moved ahead of the truck. The infected shuffled
aside, making a path for her, as they continued to move onward in
the direction Remy and her companions had come.

Remy glanced back once, when the rumbling
roar of the truck’s engine groaned to life, and then she started
walking, her pace steady and brisk. With a grinding of gears, the
truck followed her, nudging a wider path through the one the
infected had already given her.

As she walked, untouched by those she’d
always considered enemies, Remy was fascinated by the figures that
moved past her. In the previous two years, her hatred for the
things had blinded her, had prevented her from seeing them for what
they were. She spread her arms wide, her fingertips brushing their
dirtied clothes, their bloodied hands and broken limbs, like the
Pope blessing a crowd of worshippers. A few, the ones who appeared
freshly turned, who didn’t have as many wounds or bloodstains as
the others, reached toward her in return, their cold fingers
brushing against her bare forearms.

She started to understand why Alicia Day had
kept them in her hotel instead of killing them.

The infected were nature’s ultimate
biological weapon. If Remy could figure out a way to harness the
inherent power in their nature, then she and her friends could
establish a new place to live, a new community, a new home, one
that was protected by the infected as if they were guard dogs,
assuming she could figure out a way to keep them from attacking the
community’s residents, of course.

There’s nobody left to even create a
community from,
a nasty voice in the back of her mind said.
And it’s all the fucking military’s fault.

No,
another ugly voice said, speaking
up from somewhere else in her head.
It’s all
your
fault.

Remy nearly stopped in the middle of the road
as the thought occurred to her, but she continued walking after a
minimal pause in her stride, her dark eyes staring ahead. The back
edge of the horde came into view. She shouldered her duty once
more, feeling like she should have been staggering under the heavy
load. The infected around her slowed, their heads swiveling towards
her, looking at her as if they were seeking and awaiting her
orders. The fact that she was able to give them orders that they
would actually follow was still incredible to her. She looked back
at them, jabbed her thumb over her shoulder. “Keep moving.” She
didn’t even feel a tinge of surprise when those that had stopped
turned their heads back around and started walking again, obeying
her command without hesitation.

It took a few more minutes for Remy to break
free of the infected, the truck carrying her friends right behind
her. She walked a few more feet, feeling like she was sleepwalking,
her brain hazy from the effort she hadn’t realized she’d been
expending while walking through the crowd. She stopped, standing in
the middle of the street, and couldn’t muster the energy to turn
around and face the truck.

The truck ground to a halt, and the sound of
a door opening and boots striking the pavement met her ears. Then
Dominic was at her side, gently touching her elbow. She forced her
head to turn so she could look at him. The expression on his face
was concerned.

“Are you okay?” he asked. His voice sounded
like it was coming from far away, like they were standing at
opposite ends of a long hallway and were struggling to make
themselves heard to the other. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Remy squeezed her eyes shut and then opened
them again. She hadn’t noticed the wetness on her upper lip until
he’d mentioned it. Her brain felt like it was spiraling, like she
was on a potent drug. She hadn’t felt like this the other times
she’d walked through groups of infected. Maybe it was because there
had been so many more of them this time.

“Dom, what the fuck is wrong with me?” Remy
slurred. Then she fell backwards, and the last thing she remembered
before everything went dark was Dominic’s arms coming around her to
catch her before she hit the ground.

The sound
of helicopter rotors was partially blunted by the massive helmet
contraption that one of the soldiers had put on Kimberly’s head,
and the repetitive sound was getting on her last nerve. Her fingers
had curled into fists, her fingernails digging into her palms, and
she craved the ability to smash her hands over her ears in a futile
effort to clamp the sides of the helmet more firmly over them. But
she couldn’t, not with her hands cuffed behind her back as they
were, and that infuriated her. She was clenching her teeth so
tightly that it was painful. She forced her jaw to relax, shifting
it from side to side to work the soreness out, and looked at
Ethan.

Ethan and Chris were on either side of her,
trussed up similarly to her. Ethan looked concerned but,
surprisingly, not fully worried, and he was staring right at her.
She raised her eyebrows at him, and he gave her a tentative,
marginally reassuring smile.

“You okay?” she mouthed to him.

“Fine,” he replied. “Thinking.”

Kimberly wanted to ask him what he was
thinking about, but the three soldiers across from them were
watching them, and if Ethan was planning something, she didn’t want
to accidentally give the game away. She shifted on the hard seat
and looked at the backpacks between her feet. The soldiers had,
thankfully, decided to leave their bags with each of them, though
she had no idea why they would do that. If she, Ethan, and Chris
escaped, they’d have everything they would need to survive. It was
a stupid mistake, one that Alicia had known better than to make.
Whenever they’d had new arrivals at the Westin, Alicia’s standing
orders had been to strip them of everything remotely
useful—backpacks, weapons, belts, shoelaces—and put them into
quarantine. Kimberly vividly remembered doing that to an
unconscious Ethan when Alicia’s people had brought him in, removing
all of his clothes and bathing and bandaging his wounds. She’d
never told Ethan that she’d been the one to care for him then. She
was sure that he believed Alicia had done it, and knowing the
now-dead redheaded woman, she had probably never disabused him of
the idea.

The helicopter swayed in midair, and
Kimberly’s stomach lurched, bile rising into her throat. “
We’re
about to land,
” the pilot’s tinny voice said through the
contraption over her ears. “
Everyone brace for
touchdown.
”

There was a strap above Kimberly’s head. She
stared at it longingly. Resigned to falling out of her seat, she
braced herself with her feet against the helicopter’s metal floor.
Chris and Ethan did the same, Chris with practiced ease, Ethan
completely unconcerned. Kimberly wished she could say she felt the
same.

The helicopter touched down with a light thud
on the ground, and Kimberly once again fought off a surge of bile.
Her body felt too light, like the helicopter was still in the air,
and it took several long moments before her brain settled onto the
idea of being on the ground again. The helicopter’s rotors ground
to a halt, and the soldiers disembarked. Kimberly craned her neck,
trying to get a look out the door so she could figure out where
they were, but two of the soldiers returned, their bodies blocking
her view. They climbed into the compartment and began to unbuckle
Ethan’s shoulder straps and lap belt.

One of the soldiers pointed at her and Chris
each in turn. “Do not attempt to get up,” he ordered. The mask he
wore muffled his voice. “Someone will escort you off the aircraft
momentarily. If you attempt to leave the helicopter without an
escort, you will be shot. Understood?”

“Understood,” Kimberly replied.

A third soldier reached into the helicopter
and picked up Ethan’s bag, then the first two soldiers hauled him
to his feet and led him out of the helicopter.

“Where do you think we are?” Kimberly asked
Chris, her voice overly loud in the now-quiet helicopter
interior.

“Most likely, we’re in Eden,” Chris said. “If
we’re lucky.”

“And if we’re not lucky?” Kimberly
prompted.

Chris shrugged. “Then we’re not in Eden and
are about to get killed.”

Kimberly frowned at his pessimism. “If they
planned to kill us, they’d have shot us on the highway, not given
us a free helicopter ride and brought us here, wherever ‘here’
is.”

Three more soldiers boarded the craft. One of
them grabbed her bags while the other two unstrapped her and helped
her out of her seat. She kept her eyes on her bags as they led her
out of the helicopter. The soldier carrying it was doing so
carelessly, and Kimberly exclaimed, “Please, be careful with that
bag!”

“You heard the lady,” one of the soldiers
said snidely. “Be careful with that thing.”

Kimberly gritted her teeth and fought the
urge to wrench herself free from the soldiers who were holding her
by the arms. She squared her shoulders and continued on, letting
them take her to another Humvee, where Ethan sat in the back seat
under armed guard. A guard pressed a hand against the top of her
head to shield it from banging against the doorframe, and she slid
into the seat next to Ethan. The soldier with her bags dumped them
onto her lap, and one of them tumbled to the floor, landing on her
feet with a thud.

“You okay?” Ethan asked.

“About as well as can be expected,
considering the circumstances,” Kimberly said. The Humvee’s door
slammed shut, a soldier climbed into the driver’s seat, and the
engine revved to life. “Where’s Chris?”

“Other truck,” Ethan answered. Kimberly
leaned over enough to see past him, and she spotted Chris sitting
in the back of the Humvee alongside theirs. He nodded to them like
he was telling them that all was well, and she returned the
gesture.

“I’m more concerned with where we are than
where he is, though,” Ethan said.

Kimberly leaned forward to address the masked
soldier in the Humvee’s passenger seat. “Excuse me, where are we?”
The soldier didn’t answer, much to Kimberly’s frustration. She
refrained from kicking the back of his seat, though she desperately
wanted to. “Hell of a lot of help you are,” she muttered.

The soldier picked up a radio microphone from
the dash, mashing the button on the side and speaking into it in
code and jargon that Kimberly didn’t understand. The Humvee drove
into shadow, the light outside darkening, and Kimberly leaned in to
get a good look out the window.

“What the hell is that?” Kimberly said when
she caught a glimpse of what loomed over the convoy of vehicles.
She couldn’t make out much in the way of details, but what she saw
whetted her curiosity.

“If I’m not mistaken,” Ethan said, “I think
it might be that wall Chris mentioned.”

The convoy broke free of the decimated city
landscape they’d been driving through to emerge into open space.
Kimberly swung her head from side to side, taking in everything she
could as she tried to figure out where the heck the military convoy
had brought them. The land that stretched along either side of them
had been cleared by heavy equipment, the buildings and trees razed,
the grass dug up so it was only torn and scraped dirt. Concrete
foundations dotted the landscape, some of the concrete freshly
poured, like whoever had razed the buildings had taken the time to
fill in the basements so the infected—or anyone else—couldn’t use
them.

Marveling at the landscape and the serious
work it must have taken to get it to the condition it was currently
in, Ethan had leaned forward in his seat, and his exclamation of,
“Ho-
ly
shit,” drew Kimberly’s attention back to him. “Would
you look at that?”

Kimberly spotted what that had captured
Ethan’s attention, and she drew in an amazed breath of her own.

“Is that it?” she asked. “Is that the
wall?”

“Yeah, I think it is,” Ethan replied.

“Jesus, it’s huge,” Kimberly replied. “Way
taller than ours. Must be…forty feet tall.”

“I think it’s closer to fifty,” Ethan said.
“What’s that made out of, concrete?”

“Looks like it.” Kimberly trailed her eyes
along the massive gray structure, picking out the sight of a guard
tower far to the right. She could barely see the two figures inside
its glass-walled booth, and she assumed they were soldiers standing
guard.

What was directly in front of the Humvees,
though, was far more interesting. The line of vehicles was
approaching a massive gate made of stone, slightly shorter than the
wall in which it was set. Guard towers flanked the section of wall,
similar to the one she’d already spotted, except these two were
more heavily armored and fortified. Soldiers practically crawled
over the towers and walked along the top of the gate, bristling
with weapons. Kimberly noticed the distinctive sight of sniper
rifles in the hands of a few of the men.

The gate started sliding open on hidden
tracks with a loud grinding noise that set Kimberly’s teeth on
edge. She balled her hands into fists, wishing she could cover her
ears. Even the Humvee’s driver and passenger seemed irritated by
the sound. Then the Humvee moved forward, driving through the open
gate to reveal a massive facility swarming with military personnel
and what appeared to be their civilian staffers, all armed with
rifles or sidearms, all well-organized.