The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (37 page)

“Jackpot,” Ethan murmured. He scanned the
rest of the immediate area and spotted a lab coat draped across a
stool. He snagged it, shrugged it on, and dropped the magazines in
the left pocket, the pistol in the right. Now that he felt
sufficiently armed to get out of the immediate vicinity, he rose to
his feet and shined the light around the ruins of the lab,
searching for Kimberly with his heart in his throat.

Cade cowered
in a corner of the room, fear vibrating through her bones,
shivering through her entire frame as first one, then another,
explosion rocked the building in which she and her friends had
taken shelter. Her breath came short in her throat, in
hyperventilating gasps, and her eyes were moist with tears. The
building shifted under the shockwaves from the explosions, and a
thin trickle of dust and plaster rained from the ceiling.

Cade couldn’t get the sight of Remy out of
her head. Remy, beautiful Remy, her face, her hands, her clothes,
all splattered and soaked with blood. The thought of how that blood
had gotten there to begin with haunted her.

The building creaked again, more ominously
than before, and the distinctive sounds of massive numbers of
infected outside reached her ears. The stamp of their feet, their
low moans, groans, and snarls echoed in the room, adding to the
instability of the building. A surge of bile rose in her throat,
but she masterfully forced it back down. Now was definitely
not
the time to get sick.

Keith broke away from the corner to her
right, where he had been shielding Jude and Sadie from the
possibility of falling debris. He slunk along the wall until he
reached her, grasping her hand in his and leaning close to murmur
in her ear.

“What the hell is going on out there?” Keith
asked, and Cade realized with a sinking feeling that he hadn’t seen
anything that had happened and that she would have to explain it to
him.

“Remy,” Cade said, and to her disgust, she
discovered that her voice was shaking as much as her body was. “I
think she’s finally lost it. I think—”

“Are you telling me that
Remy
did all
of this?” Keith asked.

“I don’t know how, but yes, she did,” Cade
said.

“Where did she get the explosives?”

“What does it matter where she got the
explosives?” Cade asked loudly. “She had them, and she used them,
and now we’re up shit creek.”

“In a building that’s acting like it wants to
drop on our heads,” Keith said with another cautious glance at the
ceiling. “We should get out of here.”

“Where the hell are we going to go?” Cade
demanded. She jabbed her finger at the windows, covered by thin
particleboard scavenged from desks to shield the view of the
building’s interior. “The street is full of infected, and even if
we go
up
, there’s not many other places to go from there,
because the buildings around here aren’t in fantastic shape to
begin with.”

“Up is better than being eaten,” Keith
replied. “Come on, what do you say we take what’s probably the only
option available at the moment? We can get a good look at
everything around us and see what other choices are available.”

Cade glanced between the windows and the
cracked ceiling above. “Fine,” she sighed.

“I can find us a route up,” Sadie said from
her spot across the room. “Shouldn’t be too hard to find one that
we can all navigate.”

“Go,” Cade ordered. Sadie scampered off,
going down a short hall and disappearing out a window that Cade
would have sworn was too small for Sadie to fit through. Once Sadie
was gone, Cade turned back to Keith. “We’re still looking for
Brandt.”

“Believe me, I had no doubts about that,”
Keith said. “We still have two problems. Where is he and how the
hell are we going to get out of here?”

“For the where, I’m hopeful he’s in this Eden
place,” Cade said. “As for the how? I don’t know.”

“I do,” Sadie said, sliding agilely through
the window with a smile on her face. “I just found us a way out of
here.”

Kimberly knew
an explosion when she heard one. Lord knew she had heard enough
grenades going off while she’d lived under Alicia Day’s roof. When
the explosion ripped through the Eden Facility while Kimberly was
searching through a drawer looking for a tool to bust Ethan out of
his cell, her heart leaped into her throat. Cheap particleboard
tiles plummeted from the ceiling, and Kimberly threw herself
against the cabinets on the far side of the lab, huddling there
with her arms over her head, trying to avoid getting struck by
debris.

The floor bucked upward, throwing her
backward, and her already abused and aching head banged against the
cabinets behind her. There was a sharp pain on her scalp, but she
ignored it and curled up tighter into a fetal position, hoping that
nothing heavier fell on her.

A microscope toppled from the counter and
crashed to the floor right beside her, and then the room went pitch
black.

“Ethan,” Kimberly whispered, not daring to
speak louder. Even if she could have been heard over the rumble of
the ceiling caving in, there was the question of the scientist in
the lab with both of them. She was terrified he would hear her and
then both she and Ethan would get shot. She was there to save
Ethan, not to get them both killed.

By the time the dust settled and objects
stopped falling from the ceiling, Kimberly was half buried
underneath broken ceiling tiles, covered in dust, dirt, and
cobwebs. She grimaced and pushed her hair out of her face, raking
cobwebs out of the strands and shaking them onto the floor. She
didn’t get up right away. She stayed where she was, waiting to see
what was going to happen next, hoping that Dr. Jacob Howser had
been knocked unconscious by some random chunk of debris.

A flashlight flicked on halfway across the
room, and Kimberly heard Ethan and Jacob exchanging words. Jacob
got up and left the lab, taking the flashlight with him and
plunging the room into darkness once more.

A long moment later, another flashlight
blinked on, and Kimberly caught a glimpse of Ethan through the
darkness, his blond hair catching the light enough to make the
strands glow. He slung a lab coat on and called her name. She
opened her mouth to reply, but her teeth were coated with dust, and
she choked. She hacked dirty saliva onto the floor and tried
again.

“Eth! Here!”

The flashlight swung around and pointed in
her general direction. She shoved a few pieces of tile off herself
and sat up. Ethan rushed to her, his tennis shoes crunching over
the ceiling tiles and kicking away debris that littered the floor.
He skidded to a halt beside her, dropping to his knees and taking
her face in his hands. His flashlight thunked to the floor between
them.

“Oh God, tell me you’re okay,” he said, his
eyes wide and intense in the light from the flashlight. “Are you
hurt?” In the same breath, he said, “Oh fuck, you’re bleeding.”

“I am?” Kimberly asked. She touched her head.
With his words, the ache in her skull came to her attention with a
vengeance. When she pressed her fingers against the back of her
head where she’d struck it on the cabinets, her fingertips came
back stained with blood. “Crap.”

“We need to find something to bandage it,”
Ethan said. He stepped away from her to rummage through drawers,
practically tearing them out of the counters in his search for
first aid supplies. He found a white plastic box with a bold red
cross on it, brought it over, and popped it open, kneeling beside
her to tend to the wound on her head. Once he had it bandaged
enough to get the bleeding to stop, he smiled cautiously. “How’s
that feel?”

“Like I’ve been smacked in the head and
bandaged up,” Kimberly said with a tiny smile. She held a hand up
to him. “Help me stand up?”

Ethan grasped her hand and tugged, kicking
away a few shattered tiles, pulling her to her feet. She nearly
slipped when she stood, but he looped an arm around her waist to
steady her.

“What’s the game plan?” Kimberly asked. “I’m
sure step one involves getting the hell out of here. What about
after that?”

“I’m not sure,” Ethan said. “I’m tempted to
wait for that doctor guy to come back. He knows Brandt.”

“I overheard him making a phone call before I
found you,” Kimberly told him. “He was talking to someone, and he
told them your name and sounded surprised that it was someone who
already knew you. He asked how many of that person’s friends were
going to be dragged in here.” She licked her lips as Ethan stewed
over what she had told him. “I think there’s someone here who knows
you, and I think they know Brandt. I also think that Brandt was
here and they somehow got him
out
of here.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Ethan said, his
confusion obvious. “Brandt was in Woodside when we left. How would
he have ended up here?”

“We’ve been gone from Woodside for a week,
Eth,” Kimberly reminded him. “There’s no telling what’s happened in
the meantime.”

“There was that bomb…”

“I know, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t
get out,” she said. “They were planning an evac, remember? Maybe
some of them got out. And maybe somehow, Brandt ended up here.”

“Where he happened to run into someone that
knows him, that knows
both
of us, who then got him out of
here?” Ethan asked. “Hell, that sounds ridiculous even to my
ears.”

Kimberly shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.
“I’m shooting in the dark here as much as you are. I have—”

Something crashed somewhere in the lab.
Kimberly clamped her mouth shut and whirled in the direction the
sound had come from; it sounded like it had come from somewhere in
the neighborhood of the cells that Ethan had been in earlier.

“Oh God, what was that?” she asked.

“There were infected in cells to either side
of me,” Ethan said. “Maybe they got out in the explosion.” He
fumbled at the pocket of the dirty white lab coat he was wearing
and pulled free a pistol. “Stay here.”

“To hell with that,” Kimberly said. “I’m
coming with you.”

“Kim—”

“Don’t argue,” she said. She picked up one of
the metal stools littering the room, holding it in a two-handed
grasp by its legs. “I’m armed and ready,” she said confidently,
“but I’ll let you take the lead, if it makes you feel better.”

“How gracious of you.”

He started in the direction of the sound,
sweeping the beam of his flashlight across the room, searching for
the source of the noise. Kimberly stuck close to him, holding the
stool in a position where she was ready to swing it at anything
that moved threateningly toward either of them. It wasn’t
necessary, because Ethan looked like he could handle almost
anything.

The source of the sound was apparent soon
enough; one of the infected from a cell beside Ethan’s had gotten
loose and was stumbling its way out of the debris on the far side
of the lab, trying to follow the sounds of their voices. Ethan put
his hand out, indicating for her to stop where she was. The
infected man caught sight of them and started to move more quickly
toward them, extending his arms in a classic zombie movie style.
Ethan advanced, slow and steady, the pistol in his right hand
extended toward the infected man, the flashlight held in his left
hand near his shoulder, tucked in close so he didn’t lose it.

There was a crack somewhere to their left,
and both she and Ethan whipped their heads in that direction, eyes
wide. Jacob Howser stumbled back into the lab, accompanied by
entirely too much noise. Kimberly tensed, raising her stool higher,
like she was going to smack the doctor with it. He froze when he
spotted first her, and then the infected man across the room, and
he gasped in alarm.

“Quiet!” Ethan barked at him. He advanced
toward the infected man and fired the pistol. A neat bullet hole
appeared in the infected man’s forehead, and his body toppled to
the ground with a crunch of ceiling tiles and a crack of skull
against the utilitarian tiled floor. The body had barely finished
falling before Ethan was turning, shifting the aim of the pistol
from the infected man to the scientist. “Don’t move,” he ordered,
and Jacob put his hands up defensively, dropping his flashlight on
the floor.

“Ethan,” Kimberly said warningly. He didn’t
pay any attention to her.

“How did you get out of your cell?” Jacob
asked, directing the question to Kimberly.

“Ceiling,” she replied simply, pointing at
the ceiling in question. Jacob raised an eyebrow.

“Look, you can put the gun away, okay?” Jacob
said, this time aiming his words at Ethan. “I’m on your side
here.”

“Yeah? Prove it,” Ethan said. “Because right
now, the only person on my side that I actually believe is on my
side is her.” He bobbed his head toward Kimberly. “Give me a reason
why I shouldn’t just shoot you and haul ass out of here.”

“Because Lindsey Alton asked me to get you
out of here myself,” Jacob said.

Ethan’s eyebrows shot up, and the grip on his
pistol wavered. “How do you know Lindsey Alton?” he asked, and his
pistol steadied once more.

“She’s my lab partner here at the facility,”
Jacob said. “I’ve been working with her for a while now, ever since
the outbreak began and the government decided to establish this
place for research.”

“Lab partner?” Ethan repeated.

“Yeah, microbiologist, remember?” Jacob said.
“She knows you’re here. She’s trying to get back here so she can
get you and, I’m assuming, Ms. Geller out of here. She’s already
stashed Brandt somewhere, so I’m assuming you’re next.”

“So Brandt
is
here?” Ethan asked. “How
did that happen?”

“It’s a long story, and I’m sure he’ll be
more than happy to tell you all about it,” Jacob said. “In the
meantime, we need to get you two somewhere where she can get you
out of here. There’s been an explosion, and the facility has been
compromised.”