The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (30 page)

“Fine,” Lindsey said. “As for the plan, as
soon as you’re finished dressing, we’re torching these clothes, the
body bag, and the mattress from the stretcher. Then Jacob is
pushing it back to the lab while I go out to my car, ostensibly to
retrieve something I’ve forgotten. You’ll follow me at a discreet
distance. Once I’m at the car, I’ll pop the trunk and get into the
driver’s seat. You get into the trunk and close it, and leave
everything else to me.”

“So I get to hitch a ride in the trunk of a
car,” Brandt said. “Please tell me you drive something fairly large
and not some little Volkswagen Beetle or something.”

“It’s a Toyota sedan,” Lindsey said. “Yeesh,
you think I’m going to cram you into a Beetle’s trunk? Look at you.
That’d be like trying to shove ten pounds of wet cat in a
five-pound sack.”

“You trying to say something about my
weight?” Brandt joked as he stuffed his feet into the boots she’d
brought.

“No, not at all!” Lindsey replied. “You’re
just…very muscular.”

“I’m kidding.” He leaned down and laced his
boots up, then straightened. “Let’s get this show on the road,
yeah? I need to try to find my wife.”

Lindsey gave him a mocking salute and stepped
around him to haul open a steel door set into the wall behind him.
She and Jacob gathered the clothes and body bag and the thin
mattress on the stretcher and shoved it all into the glowing
confines of the incinerator. She pushed the door shut with a loud
clang.

“We’re moving,” she said, grabbing one end of
the stretcher. Jacob grabbed the other, and they started for the
door. “Remember what I said to you,” she said, looking at Brandt
pointedly. They opened the door and stepped outside. Brandt slid up
behind Lindsey, easing through the door behind her without making
it obvious there was a third person present. Lindsey and Jacob were
making a show of laughing and cutting up, like they’d have been
expected to do under normal circumstances. Brandt kept to the
shadows as best he could, considering how relatively brightly lit
the area was. Lindsey was saying something to Jacob in a voice too
low for Brandt to hear, and she lightly smacked herself on the side
of her head and said loudly, “Shoot! I’ve got to run to my car real
quick. I left my wallet in there earlier, and I’m going to need it
if I expect to eat tonight.”

“I could spot you, you know,” Jacob said, and
the way he said it made Brandt think this was a conversation
similar to one they’d had before.

“Come on, you know how I feel about that,”
Lindsey protested. “Let me go to my car. You okay to get this back
to the lab on your own?” She patted the stretcher rail
casually.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Jacob said. “I’ll see you
inside.” He winked at her, then took a firmer grip on the stretcher
and rolled it toward the doors that Brandt guessed they’d come out
to begin with. Lindsey smiled and split off from Jacob and the
stretcher, walking briskly and purposefully toward a parking lot
near the back of the building. Brandt followed, slinking through
the darkness not far from her. She led the way to a black, low-key
newer model Toyota. At the vehicle, she took out a set of keys from
her lab coat pocket and punched two buttons on it. The first made
the trunk latch release; the second unlocked the car doors. She
circled the vehicle to the driver’s door and opened it, then made a
show of sliding inside and starting to dig into the console between
the front seats. Brandt darted forward, grabbed the trunk lid, and
slid inside, pulling the lid down over him until it thunked
shut.

As the darkness closed over him, Brandt was
extremely grateful that he wasn’t claustrophobic. Even so, things
that he couldn’t see were crushing down on him, and the feeling of
being trapped was unnerving. He spotted the glow-in-the-dark
emergency trunk release handle and focused his eyes on it, keeping
them locked there and his fingers only inches away from it in case
he needed to make a quick escape.

The car’s engine started, and with a jolt, it
backed out of its parking space and, he assumed, moved toward the
exit gates. The car rolled smoothly, and he found he was holding
his breath as the tires crunched over gravel littering the
pavement. A few moments later, the car eased to a halt, and he
heard voices, one Lindsey’s and the other a man’s, though he
couldn’t make out what they were saying. The vehicle started moving
again, and the sound of hard rock music began blasting from the
vehicle’s interior. Lindsey started to sing along, off key but
enthusiastically, and the vehicle picked up speed. Brandt counted
as the vehicle moved, ticking off minutes on his fingers each time
he reached sixty. After eight minutes, the vehicle slowed down and
took a slight right, then drove for another minute before making a
sudden hard right that made him bang his head against the side of
the trunk.

The road they’d turned on was rough and
curvy, judging by the jouncing of the car’s back wheels over ruts
and the jarring turns. After a moment more, the tires crunched over
gravel, and the car came to a stop. Brandt worried that Lindsey had
brought him out somewhere where no one would hear him scream—not
that he was the screaming type—and he fumbled around in the trunk
until he found a tire iron, grasping it in his right hand. The
sound of shoes on gravel met his ears, then the trunk lock popped
open with a whump and the lid swung open to reveal Lindsey staring
down at him.

She looked him over incredulously and asked,
“What the hell are you doing with my tire iron?”

“Seemed like a good idea to have a weapon,”
Brandt said. He set the tire iron down and sat up, keeping his head
ducked low to avoid striking it on the inside of the trunk lid.
Lindsey offered him a hand, and he accepted it, swinging both feet
out of the trunk and scooting out until he found solid ground once
more. “Where are we?”

“We’re still in Eden,” Lindsey answered. “At
an abandoned house about three miles away from the facilities. Some
people weren’t comfortable with living so close to the wall, so
they abandoned their houses and moved on elsewhere. This is one of
them.”

“What now?” Brandt asked, barely glancing at
the overgrown house fifty yards away.

“We—or rather, I—have to play this cool,”
Lindsey said. “With any luck, no one has noticed that something is
wrong. I need to get back to my lab before someone
does
realize there is an issue. Jacob can only cover for me for so
long.”

“You can’t possibly think you’ll be able to
go back there,” Brandt protested. “It won’t take long for Bradford
to put two and two together. You have a sister named Cade, I have a
wife named Cade, and we both went missing at the same time? It
doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we left together.”

“What are you saying I should do?” Lindsey
asked. “Abandon my job tonight and take off with you?”

Brandt snorted. “You make it sound
so…illicit.” She growled at him, and he sighed. “Look, you’re the
one who was all, ‘Let’s break you out of here.’ So you’ve broken me
out, and you did it for the express purpose of finding Cade. So
let’s go find Cade. I would
really
prefer reconnecting with
my wife sooner rather than later, especially considering the fact
she’s pregnant and will need me.”

Lindsey stared at him, then looked at the
watch on her wrist and dug her cell phone out of her pocket. Brandt
thought she was about to make a call, but she dropped it onto the
ground and stomped on it until the screen was shattered and its
innards were battered and broken. Then she shucked off her lab
coat, rolled it up, and tossed it into the still-open trunk. “We
have to go to my house for supplies before we leave,” she said.
“Because I’m pretty damn sure they confiscated your weapons when
they took you into custody, and all I have is one pistol and the
ammunition for it.”

A slow smile spread across Brandt’s face.
“And after that?”

“After that, we’re going to kick ass, take
names, and find out where my sister is.”

Once they’d
discovered the existence of the wall, Cade and her companions had
decided—rather forcefully, on Remy’s part—to retreat, observe, and
assess what the next step needed to be. They’d taken shelter in one
of the buildings not far from the metaphorical line in the sand
where all the buildings had been razed, setting up camp as
comfortably as they could and waiting for dark to fully settle on
everything. Cade had a Sterno stove in her backpack, and she took
it out and lit it, opening open cans of food to warm them for
everyone to eat. Sadie, Jude, and Keith sat against a cracked
sheetrock wall on the other side of the room, a single flashlight
balanced on its end with the beam aiming toward the ceiling.
Sitting in the middle, Jude looked to be teaching Keith sign
language; the older man was focused on Jude’s hands and notepad in
turn, mimicking the signs Jude was making with his hands. Sadie sat
cross-legged, sharpening their machetes with a kit that Cade
figured she’d had in her own backpack, her compound bow beside her
with its arrows lined up alongside it. She looked like she was in
her own world, but she occasionally tore her eyes away from her
work to interject her own instruction into Jude’s ASL lesson.

Dominic was to Cade’s right, sitting against
that wall, his knees pulled to his chest. He grasped one of his
pistols in his right hand, resting it against his right knee, and
he stared into the middle distance in front of him, deep in
thought. Cade would have given her left arm to know what was on his
mind; she hoped it was a plan for how they were going to approach
the wall. She didn’t have the greatest confidence in the emissary
idea the others had come up with in the back of the truck on the
trip from Atlanta. There was nothing that would stop the men in the
guard towers along the wall from shooting every one of them the
minute they walked into sight.

Cade attacked a can of beans with a can
opener, looking around for the last missing member of their party.
Remy was nowhere to be seen, a fact that was concerning in and of
itself. She stuffed the can opener into the side pocket of her
backpack and set the can carefully on the Sterno stove, then asked
Dominic, “Where is Remy?”

“Last I saw her, she said she was going to
sit on the roof and think,” Dominic said. “Should I go check on
her?”

“Do I even need to dignify that question with
a real response?” Cade pulled a spoon out of her backpack and stuck
it in the warming can, stirring gently to distribute the heat.

Dominic pushed to his feet, sliding his
pistol into its holster. “I’ll be right back,” he said and slipped
out the door. Seconds later, Cade heard the metallic thunks of his
boots on the fire escape ladder outside the building, heading
toward the roof where Remy was supposed to be.

“Anybody hungry?” she asked the others.
“These beans are ready if anybody wants them.”

“I’ll take some of them,” Sadie said, making
a few final passes over her machete’s blade with the whetstone. She
set the stone on Jude’s knee, examined the blade, then carefully
sheathed it and got up to join Cade. She settled down onto the
floor opposite Cade, the Sterno stove between the two of them, her
legs tucked underneath her. Cade pulled out several plastic plates
and divided the beans between them before taking out her can opener
again and starting to open another can to heat.

“Have you come up with a workable plan yet?”
Sadie asked. “Or are we still thinking about doing the whole
emissary thing?”

Cade rubbed at the bridge of her nose with
her thumb and middle finger, pinching it between them. “I don’t
know,” she said. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“I think it’s probably the only option we
have,” Sadie said.

“Yeah, I know what you think,” Cade grumbled.
She poked another spoon in the can on the Sterno stove, jabbing
more forcefully than necessary. “Do
you
know the risks
associated with one of us walking out there trying to play
emissary?”

“Yeah, they could listen to us,” Sadie said.
“We could get a chance to meet with them.”

“
Or
whoever we send out there could
end up dead,” Cade retorted. “Honestly, I’m not sure I’m willing to
risk it.”

“What if Dominic is?” Sadie asked.

“Then that’s his business, but I won’t
condone it,” Cade said. “I want to get Brandt back, yes. However, I
don’t want to ask anyone else to risk themselves because of my
desire to rescue my husband.”

“I don’t know Brandt well, but he’s one of
us
,” Sadie countered. “You can’t expect the rest of us to
sit back and let you run it by yourself.”

Cade didn’t know how to respond to that.
Thankfully, Dominic’s return spared her from having to do so. He
slipped back inside the building with a look of dark concern on his
face, his shoulders set in a manner that suggested he was deeply
worried. “What is it?” Cade asked, instantly on the alert.

“It’s Remy,” Dominic said. “She’s not on the
roof.”

Cade sat up straight, alarmed. “You’re
kidding me, right?”

“Not at all,” Dominic said, and Cade got up
from the floor. “I looked around for her, but I didn’t dare call
out for fear of drawing too much attention to our position too
soon.”

“Any sign of which way she went?” Cade asked.
She put the Sterno stove out, leaving it on the floor to cool, and
gathered her weapons.

“No clue,” Dominic replied. “I looked, but I
didn’t see any signs giving me any ideas.”

“Son of a bitch,” Cade snarled. “I’m going to
kick her ass the minute we find her.” She looked to Sadie, Jude,
and Keith. “You three stay here in case she shows back up before we
locate her. We’ll be back shortly. If we
don’t
come back in,
say, an hour, assume the worst and move on.” She walked out the
door, Dominic right on her heels. “Where could she have gone?” she
asked.