The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (28 page)

“Thoughts?” Ethan asked.

“I think I’ll reserve them for later,”
Kimberly said. The caravan came to a halt. Soldiers surrounded the
Humvee, and doors flew open. Kimberly was hauled out of one side of
the vehicle, and Ethan was dragged out of the other. Her bags were
whisked away, and two female soldiers wearing the same MOPP4 suits
that the other soldiers were had grasped her upper arms with gloved
hands. Everyone else had scattered at the caravan’s appearance, and
within moments, the area around the caravan was devoid of anyone
but Ethan, Chris, Kimberly, and the suited military men and
women.

“Come with us,” one of the women said, her
voice weirdly hollow through the mask.

“Where are we going?” Kimberly asked.
They’re not going to kill me,
she told herself. If they
were, they’d have already done it
.

“We’re taking you to the women’s
decontamination room.”

Dominic glanced
repeatedly at Remy in the passenger seat of the military cargo
truck. She sat in the seat, slumped awkwardly with her head resting
against the passenger window, her eyes closed and her body slack.
She hadn’t moved since Dominic had caught her when she’d fallen and
stuffed her into the seat an hour ago, and it was starting to worry
him. Her last words to him before she’d lost consciousness—“
Dom,
what the fuck is wrong with me?
”—were haunting him, because he
couldn’t give her an answer. He didn’t have any idea what to tell
her.

What made him worry more was that they were
drawing ever closer to their destination, and she still hadn’t
woken up. He had a feeling he was going to really,
really
want her to be awake by the time they arrived in Eden. He had a
suspicion that what they were going to run into there would likely
be the same military guys that had taken Brandt from them. He
needed Remy to be awake during that. He might need to have her
finger on the trigger.

For the third time since he’d stuffed her
into the truck, Dominic pulled her into a sitting position, trying
to make her more comfortable. When he let go of her bicep, he
trailed his fingers down the soft skin of her arm, his fingertips
coasting over her wrist to her hand. He pulled his hand away and
returned it to the steering wheel.

Another twenty minutes passed before Remy
grunted and her dark eyes fluttered open. Her hand flopped out and
slapped against the glass beside her head. She pushed against the
glass into a sitting position and shoved a stray lock of hair out
of her eyes. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes
and yawned, then scrubbed at her face and looked out the
windshield. “Where the hell are we, and how long have I been
unconscious?”

“I’m not sure of the
where
in regards
to the nearest town. I think we’re maybe an hour away from Eden,”
Dominic reported. “As for how long you’ve been unconscious, almost
an hour and a half.”

“Figures,” Remy muttered. She rubbed her eyes
again and studied the road. “Has it been clear like this the whole
way?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Dominic answered. “There
have been a few rough patches where I had to steer around
obstacles, like a tree and a car that wasn’t fully off the road,
but other than that, it’s been surprisingly smooth sailing.”

“That doesn’t reassure me, you know,” Remy
said. She started yawning midway through her statement and kept
talking through the yawn. “It makes me wonder when the other shoe
is going to drop.”

“You think there’s going to be another
shoe?”

“At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if it
ended up being an entire shoe store,” Remy said. She pulled her
hair loose from its ponytail, raking her fingers through the
strands to gather them into a fresh tail. “God, what I would do for
a hot shower.”

Dominic’s brain immediately conjured up the
mental image of Remy in a shower, naked and wet, and he cursed as
the truck swerved. He straightened it out without
over-compensating, grinding his hands against the wheel and
fighting to regain control of his brain. He smiled at Remy and
said, as casually as he could, “A shower would be Heaven right
about now. Maybe we’ll get lucky and there will be one wherever we
end up.”

“Where do you think we’re going to end up, a
luxury resort?”

“Hey, you never know,” Dominic said with as
much good cheer as he could muster. “For all we know, they’re
stationed in a resort, and Brandt is living it up in one of their
rooms getting a back massage from a pretty lady in a string
bikini.”

“Your mind works weird,” Remy said. “You
think Brandt would let
any
woman except Cade touch him?”

“Probably not, but the thought of how she’d
react is pretty damn amusing,” Dominic chuckled.

“Maybe for you. I wouldn’t want to be the one
to have to clean up the blood,” Remy said.

“Brandt’s?”

“No, the woman’s who dared to touch him. Cade
would massacre her.”

Dominic suppressed his grin and changed the
subject before Cade overheard what they were talking about. “So how
do you feel?”

“Like shit,” Remy said. A stray lock of hair
had fallen from her ponytail again, and she scraped it back,
stuffing it behind an ear with frustration. “Like I’ve been through
ten rounds in a boxing ring.”

“You’ve been through ten rounds in a boxing
ring before?” Dominic asked.

“No, but this is what I imagine it feels
like.” Remy rested her head in her palms, massaging her temples
with the heels of her hands. “I think I might have broken my brain.
I have a headache from Hell, and it doesn’t appear to want to go
away anytime soon.”

Dominic frowned and reached across the space
between their seats, pressing his hand against the side of her neck
and her cheek. Her skin was overly hot, and moving his hand to her
forehead confirmed his concerns. “You feel feverish,” he told her.
“Not dangerously so but noticeably.”

“Well, fuck,” Remy said. She dropped her head
against the headrest, groaning. “Just what we need, one of us
getting sick.”

“Are you sure this isn’t a side effect?”
Dominic asked. “Maybe that vaccine sample thing we shot you up with
is having a bad effect.”

To his surprise, Remy’s face didn’t even
register alarm. She looked tired and resigned. “The thought doesn’t
surprise me anymore,” she said. “When it comes to me, Murphy’s Law
is in effect: if it can go wrong for me, it will.”

“Oh, come on,” Dominic protested. “Not
everything
goes bad for you, does it?”

“You would be surprised,” Remy said. She
stared out the window, still massaging her right temple with one
hand. “Can I tell you something I’ve never told anyone else since
all this shit started?”

“Of course, Remy,” Dominic answered,
undeniably curious.

“When all this first started, when the virus
first got to New Orleans… I was in the custody of the New Orleans
Police Department.”

Dominic raised his eyebrows. He couldn’t say
he was surprised; he’d always guessed that she’d been involved in
less than savory occupations before the apocalypse. “May I ask what
you did to end up in the hands of the illustrious NOPD?”

“I stole a carton of cigarettes,” Remy said,
and her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “Not to smoke, but to
sell.” She shrugged and muttered, “I didn’t have any money.”

They both fell silent, the only sound between
them the crunch of the crumbled pavement under the cargo truck’s
massive tires. When the silence had stretched for too long, Dominic
cleared his throat and asked, “What was the money supposed to be
for?”

Remy looked confused at his question, as if
her mind had wandered and she’d lost track of what they’d been
discussing. “What?”

“The money you were going to sell the
cigarettes to get,” Dominic said. “What was it for?”

“I was trying to save up to get the hell out
of Dodge,” Remy said. “Things at home weren’t great, and I was
wearing out my welcome.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Dominic said.
“Where did you plan to go?”

“Honestly, I hadn’t thought that far ahead,”
Remy said. “My destination mostly consisted of, ‘anywhere but New
Orleans.’” She squinted through the windshield, then leaned forward
to get a better look out and asked, “What the hell is that?”

“What the hell is what?” Dominic asked. He
slowed the truck down so he could get a look at whatever had caught
Remy’s attention, worried that it was something that was about to
roll into their path and hoping he wouldn’t hit it. He caught a
glimpse of a dark shadow looming in the distance, but it was too
far away for him to make out what it had been. “What was that?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it was, it was big,”
Remy said. “Very,
very
big. Maybe we should head in that
direction and check things out.”

“How about we stay on this road instead?”
Dominic suggested. “Our priority is getting to Eden, not checking
out anything that looks remotely weird between here and there.”

“Spoilsport,” Remy muttered, smiling.

“We can’t run off to kill everything you want
to kill,” he said. “I know you’re totally badass and everything,
but there’s a limit.”

Remy rolled her eyes. When she turned her
gaze back to the window beside her, her smile widened.

The next hour passed without a word spoken
between them, though Dominic could make out the murmur of voices in
the truck’s cargo bed. He figured the others were plotting out what
they were going to do when they reached Eden, something he hadn’t
taken the time to think out for himself. His overall plan involved
backing up Remy in whatever she needed to do, regardless of what
that happened to be. He hoped that they wouldn’t be strolling into
a life-or-death situation. He had high hopes that it would be an
easy talk, that they wouldn’t have a problem sitting down with
whoever was in charge and talking to them about their attack, maybe
helping the survivors instead of enacting their scorched earth
policy. He didn’t think their negotiations would be successful, but
he had that hope.

As for what he’d do if they shot first and
asked questions later? He hadn’t considered it.

When they passed a sign that said “Eden City
Limits,” Dominic couldn’t quell the excitement that stirred in his
gut. A long journey was coming to an end, like they were only a few
steps away from all of this being over with. He didn’t expect any
of this to ever be truly “over with,” though, even after they got
Brandt back. The world wasn’t going to magically change or get
better because they freed Brandt from the clutches of a possibly
rogue military branch. At this point, it was about increasing their
chances of survival. Dominic knew that they needed Brandt, if not
for his knowledge of survival skills then for the morale for the
rest of their group, however small it might have become. And then
there was that matter of his immune status. They needed him because
he couldn’t get infected. He was, in essence, their walking,
talking insurance policy.

Dominic slid deep into thought, his mind half
on the road, pondering the multitude of situations they might run
into in their attempt to recover their friend. Remy gasped and
exclaimed, “Holy
shit,
what is that?”

Dominic slammed on brakes reflexively,
thinking he was about to hit something. The back end of the cargo
truck fishtailed on the gravel, and his heart leaped in alarm. He
tightened his grip on the steering wheel and did his best to
maintain control of the vehicle before looking around wildly.

“What?” he demanded. “What is it?”

Remy didn’t have to answer, because the
question was barely out of his mouth when he saw it. Or rather,
when he
didn’t
see it.

There should have been more to Eden than the
little bit they’d traveled through. Though it hadn’t appeared to be
a
big
city, it had most certainly looked larger than this on
the map he’d consulted before they’d left Atlanta. Maybe half a
mile down the road, all the buildings and cars and sidewalks and
trees dropped away into nothingness before a long stretch of dirt
and torn-up roads. Looming over it all, as far as the eye could see
in either direction, was a massive concrete wall, casting the
cleared area in front of them into deep shadow.

“Oh, God no,” Dominic murmured, gazing at the
wall before them. He knew what this meant; he knew why that wall
was there.

He was going to be sick.

“Dominic?” Remy’s voice sounded like it was
coming from the end of a long tunnel. “What the hell is that?”

“Get out of the truck,” Dominic said. He cut
the engine and threw the door open.

“Why?”

“I have to meet with everyone,” he said, and
he dropped to the pavement. His boots crunching on the road, he
walked to the back of the truck without hesitation, climbing onto
the tailgate to look into the back. “Everybody out,” he announced.
“We have a problem.”

“What sort of problem?” Cade asked. She
looked irritable, roughed up and banged around, and unhappy at
hearing the word “problem” coming out of his mouth.

“A life-altering problem.” He let go of the
canvas flap and dropped to the pavement to wait for his companions
to join him. Once they did, Cade stopped right in front of him, her
arms folded over her chest.

“What’s going on?” she demanded.

Dominic pointed down the street toward the
wall. “That,” he said. “That changes the entire game.”

“What the hell?” Keith muttered.

“That wall can only mean one thing,” Dominic
continued. “The virus didn’t go global. We’ve been quarantined.” To
punctuate his statement, the far-off buzz of helicopter rotors
filled the air, and in the distance, several of the aircraft
disappeared over the wall. “I’m not positive, but I think they have
enacted a scorched earth policy,” he said once the helicopters had
vanished from view. “They’re assuming we’re all infected, and
they’re taking us out accordingly. That’s why they attacked
Woodside like they did, rather than attempting to help us or
evacuate us.”