The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (42 page)

Brandt shook himself out of his reverie and
back to the task at hand, moving forward to help Ethan, who paced
down the street toward the second group of infected moving toward
them. He cast a quick glance back to assess everything behind them
and saw that some of the bystanders had caught on to what was
happening and had begun to flee in the opposite direction. Lindsey
had eased the car forward, trying to steer around the bodies to
stay close to Brandt and Ethan, the high beams of her headlights
illuminating the scene before them.

He and Ethan had taken care of the few
stragglers behind that first small group of infected when Lindsey
and Kimberly jogged up to them, carrying backpacks full of weaponry
and wearing anxious looks on their faces. “Why are you two out of
the car?” he asked, keeping his voice short of demanding.

“The police are coming,” Lindsey said. “I can
hear the sirens.” Brandt’s ears picked up the faint strains of the
sirens in question, far off in the distance, getting gradually
louder as they approached. “I think a bystander called the
cops.”

“We’re leaving the car and heading out on
foot from here,” Kimberly told him. “Lindsey says we’re not much
further from the wall, so the going will probably get a lot tougher
from here.”

“I didn’t think we’d have to ditch the car so
soon,” Brandt said. “I thought we’d be able to get closer.”

“Me too,” Lindsey said, “but I suppose we
thought wrong.” She patted at her sides, checking to make sure she
had everything she needed, and handed Brandt one of the backpacks
she had on her shoulder. He put it on, noting that Kimberly had
given Ethan his.

“As usual, we have shit for luck,” Brandt
said. “Come on, then. Let’s get out of here before those cops show
up.”

Her heart
pounding, Cade raced parallel to the wall, her three companions
spread out behind her, on the alert for any infected as they ran.
They’d been going like this for almost thirty minutes now, hurrying
through the dusky dawn. The destroyed, leveled cityscape had long
given way to a wooded stretch that ran alongside the remains of a
road that had been partially dug up by some sort of excavator, part
of the two hundred-yard stretch of cleared land extending out from
the wall. The same stretch of cleared ground that she’d have to
figure out a way to get across without getting shot.

There was movement in the trees ahead. It
wasn’t the first time she’d spotted something rustling in the
bushes, but it was the first one she’d seen directly in their path.
She raised her machete into position, and as she jogged past the
infected man, she swung out hard, partially severing the man’s head
from his shoulders. Behind her, Sadie completed the man’s
destruction with a blow of her own, slicing the man’s head from his
shoulders. He crumpled to the dirt. Cade and Sadie never broke
stride, and neither did Keith and Jude. They continued on,
repeating the process for three more infected.

One for each of us,
Cade thought
caustically.

She stopped after another twenty minutes’
jogging, panting as she slowed and nearly stumbling to her knees.
She caught herself against a tree, her chest heaving, and leaned
over, struggling to catch her breath. The other three were drawing
to a stop around her, looking just as winded as she felt. Jude sank
to his knees beside his sister, bracing his hands against his
thighs. He looked like he was about to vomit, but he held it
back.

“Everybody okay?” Cade asked once she
recovered enough to speak. “No twisted knees, sprained ankles?”
Everyone shook their heads, and she pushed away from the tree and
started toward the tree line, intending to see how far away they’d
gotten from the main mob of infected. Sadie followed her, her boots
crunching on the dead leaves, a determined expression on her face.
Cade asked, “What do you see?”

Sadie fished in her bag and pulled out a pair
of compact binoculars with red lenses. She lifted them to her eyes
to examine the wall ahead of them. “I see…no guards,” she reported.
“I guess we were right that they’d be drawn to the action and away
from their immediate posts. I also see…” she trailed off, studying
the wall, “the wall’s blocks are uneven.”

“Uneven how?”

“Like the wall was put up quickly and they
didn’t have time to line up the blocks properly,” Sadie said. “The
blocks are stacked unevenly, so we’ll have some handholds and
footholds to climb with. Which would solve any problems with trying
to figure out how to get a rope to the top and secured for us to
climb.” She lowered the binoculars and looked at Cade with the
utmost seriousness. “What happens when we get to the top?”

Cade gestured in the direction they’d come
from. “We go back that way,” she said. She caught a glimpse of
dread and exhaustion in Sadie’s eyes and added, “Don’t worry. I’m
not going to insist we run all the way back.”

“Thank God,” Sadie said. “I like to think I’m
in pretty good shape but—”

“No think about it,” Cade assured her. “You
are in better shape than I am.”

Sadie smiled fleetingly. “Thanks. Even I
don’t think I can manage another run like that. I can tell you that
Jude
definitely
can’t. I’m amazed he didn’t throw up.”

“He
did
look a bit queasy, didn’t he?”
Cade said with a smile. She considered everything that they were
about to do, and she added, “Maybe he and Keith should stay
behind.”

“Not an option,” Sadie said. “He stays with
me. I can’t risk him getting separated from me and me getting
killed. He won’t have a way to communicate with anyone then, not
without writing. And that takes time.”

“Understandable,” Cade acknowledged. “We’re
walking into a pretty dangerous situation, and I wanted to make
sure you’re fully aware that there’s a chance he could get
killed.”

“There’s a chance we could all get killed,”
Sadie said. “I try not to lose too much sleep over it.”

Cade was surprised at Sadie’s blasé attitude
toward death; maybe the girl was bullshitting a front that made her
appear braver and tougher than she was. She adjusted her rifle on
her back and focused on the wall again before saying, “I think I’m
ready to do a little free climbing. How about you?”

“I was born ready,” Sadie said with more
confidence than Cade felt. She went back into the trees, and Cade
looked at the wall again. She was trying to judge how tall the wall
was, how high she would have to climb to make it to the top.
Thinking about free-climbing made her think about the last time
she’d done anything climbing-related. It had been a little over a
month into the post-outbreak world, when they’d gone into Biloxi,
Mississippi, to rescue Remy from an RV surrounded by the infected.
She and Brandt had gotten separated from the others in the process
and had ended up holed up in an office building…and
that
had
ended with them rappelling from a fifth-story window to get away
from the infected.

That had been terrifying, rappelling without
a semblance of proper equipment, but she’d managed it, and if she
could handle
that
, then she could handle this.

By the time the others joined her, Cade had
psyched herself up for the impending climb, and she barely waited
to confirm that the others were ready before she started across the
two hundred yards that separated them from the wall. The others
followed her, keeping up with her brisk pace, not uttering a word
of question or contention.

When they reached the base of the wall, Cade
said, “Now is the time to back out if you don’t think you can make
the climb. If you fall, we won’t be able to come back for you.”

“Understood,” Keith said, and Jude nodded in
agreement. Sadie looked completely unperturbed by the idea.

Cade blew out a breath, stretched her arm up
as high as she could reach, and grasped the first viable handhold
that she could curl her fingers around. As if that was their cue,
the other three spread out along the wall and mimicked her motion,
and they all began to climb, slowly but steadily.

The climb was harder and longer than Cade had
expected, and the muscles in her arms and shoulders had begun to
burn long before she’d reached the halfway point. She soldiered on,
though, not letting something as inconsequential as pain stop her
from reaching the top of the wall. Her fingers and knuckles were
scraped red and raw halfway up, and by the time she’d reached
three-quarters of the way up, they were bleeding, staining the
stone with traces of dark red fluid to mark her passage. She didn’t
care; nothing would prevent her from meeting her self-appointed
goal.

She was
going
to find her husband,
come hell or high water. Or both.

Reaching the top of the wall and finding the
energy to climb over the iron railing there was the second-hardest
thing that Cade had ever had to do. Standing up from the metal
walkway she rolled onto was the hardest. Her limbs trembling from
exertion, she knew if she stopped for a rest, she’d never get
moving again.

The other three had made it to the top
safely. Sadie was leaning against the railing that lined the edge
of the wall, massaging her shoulders, her chest heaving. Jude lay
on his back on the metal walkway, his knees drawn up and his feet
flat on the walkway, and Keith leaned over him, trying to catch his
own breath.

“Everybody okay?” Cade asked, hating the way
her voice shook from the mere effort of talking.

“I feel like I’m going to puke,” Keith
announced, “but it’s nothing I can’t power past.”

Jude waggled a hand from side to side, making
a gesture that meant “so-so,” and grasped Keith’s extended hand so
he could help him up.

Sadie merely shrugged and said, “I’ll
live.”

“Okay, then,” Cade said. She straightened and
took her rifle from her shoulder. “Let’s go.”

“Can we have five minutes to catch our
breath?” Keith asked.

“We don’t have five minutes,” Cade said.
“Brandt probably doesn’t either. We’ve got to find him before
someone gets it into their heads that killing him is a good
idea.”

Keith sighed. “Look, I understand.
Completely. But we aren’t any use to him if we exhaust ourselves.
We’ve got to stay healthy if we expect to help him.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Cade asked,
giving him the dirtiest look she could muster. “I know how this
shit normally works. But it’s
Brandt
. It’s my husband. He’s
one of
us
. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. Most of
us wouldn’t be. He’d follow me into a fire to help me, and I’ll be
damned if I’m going to drag ass on doing the same for him.”

Keith stared at her, and she stared right
back, her chin jutted out, challenging him to contradict her.
Fortunately, he wasn’t so inclined. Maybe he’d seen the
determination in her eyes and had realized there was no way she was
going to budge. He sighed, cutting his gaze away somewhere to his
right, and muttered, “Whatever.” Cade turned her back to the rest
of them to examine their surroundings more carefully.

The space to her left opened onto the
southern side of the wall, and it dropped off into a steep plunge
that made Cade marvel at the fact she’d managed to climb it without
falling. To her right was another drop off; this one revealed
several buildings below and a metal staircase about a tenth of a
mile ahead of her that led to the ground. She debated whether or
not they should leave the wall via the metal staircase, and she
rejected that idea. There would be more obstructions on the ground,
and at least the top of the wall afforded her not only a straight
shot to her destination but a panoramic view of her surroundings.
Adjusting her grip on her rifle, she called out, “Come on, let’s
get moving.”

She started walking down the metal walkway,
her boots clanking against the steel as she strode to the west. Her
rifle was comfortable and familiar in her hands, its heavy weight
soothing. So long as she had her rifle, nothing would happen to
her. She wouldn’t
let
anything happen to her.

Cade and her friends had been walking for
thirty minutes, completely unmolested, when she saw, below them,
the first straggling edges of the infected mob that was besieging
the wall. They were flooding toward the blown-out section of wall,
and Cade picked up her pace, anxious to get there herself.

When she drew closer to the chaos surrounding
the location of the former-gate-turned-smoking-hole, Cade’s heart
skipped a beat. It looked so much worse up close than it had from
far away. The infected were a seething mass of ugliness, stepping
on and climbing over each other in their efforts to get to the
fresh prey on the other side of the wall. The wall itself was a
twisted ruin, the walkway she and her friends were traveling on
sheared away and dropping down into nothing. The sound of gunfire
was continuous and rapid, overlapping until it all sounded like one
solid, unceasing wall of noise. Several soldiers were lined up on
either side of the gap, firing into the crowd, and more soldiers
were perched on the maze of walkways to Cade’s right, doing the
same. She was tempted to join her fire in with theirs, but she
refrained; she couldn’t risk running out of the few bullets she
had.

“Hey!” a voice shouted from somewhere to her
right. Cade twisted in the direction of the shouter. She stopped
herself from lifting her rifle, keeping the barrel pointed down at
the ground. The man who’d yelled was young, too young for the rank
he held, and he wore a dusty, dirty uniform that gave the
impression that he was currently in charge. “Who are you?” the man
demanded. “You’re in a military facility! You shouldn’t be
here!”

“I think that’s our cue to get the hell out
of here,” Keith said. He grasped her elbow and tugged her back the
way they’d come.