The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (46 page)

“No, Sadie!” he shouted. “Go to your brother.
Try to help him.” He looked to Cade. “Make sure she doesn’t go
after Remy. She can’t handle her.”

“Where are you going?” Cade asked.

Ethan turned to Remy. She’d finished killing
a handful of soldiers on the platform with Keith and Jude, and now
she was making her way to the ground, where all of the infected
were. “I’m going after Remy,” he announced. “Brandt, take care of
them,” he said. “No matter what happens.” Brandt nodded, and he
turned away, searching for a way to the ground.

It took Ethan a second to realize he was
being followed. When he turned to see who it was, he was horrified
to discover Kimberly behind him.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“You’re supposed to be with the others!”

“You’re kidding yourself if you think I’m
letting you do this without backup,” Kimberly replied.

“You don’t need to be here,” Ethan protested.
“You can’t go onto the ground with me. They’ll eat you alive.
Literally.”

“I’m not going onto the ground,” Kimberly
said, and she held up a rifle—
Cade’s rifle
, he realized—so
he could see it. “I’m staying up here. If you fail, at least I can
try to shoot her from up here.” She smiled slightly. “Just call me
Plan B.”

“Son of a bitch,” Ethan grumbled. He didn’t
have time to argue with her over it; he was losing sight of Remy by
the second. “Come on, then. But be careful. I’ll never forgive
myself if you get killed.”

Kimberly’s smile widened and she stepped
forward and kissed him, quickly and sweetly. When she pulled away,
Ethan missed her already. “I won’t get killed,” she said. “Promise.
Now get down there and save the world.”

Ethan almost laughed at that. Save the world?
Who did she think he was, Superman? He shook the thought aside.
There was serious business in front of him, and he was certain that
either he or Remy would end up dead before the end of it. Now was
the last time he needed to crack jokes in his head. He hurried down
the steps that led to the ground level, jumping the last few steps
to land on the dirt. He stood there for a second, getting
acclimated, trying to get oriented on where Remy was in relation to
his current position. He glanced up at Kimberly, high above him on
one of the metal walkways, and she pointed, showing him which
direction he needed to go. He nodded in acknowledgment and started
in that direction.

There were infected everywhere, both the
living kind and the already deceased, walking dead ones. The stench
from them was indescribable, a miasma of old and fresh blood, shit,
piss, and rot that made him gag. He breathed shallowly through his
mouth, which made him feel like he could taste the odor, and he
soldiered on, his pistol in his right hand, a knife in his left. He
shoved his way through the crowds, jostling infected people aside,
occasionally pausing to kill one that presented the opportunity
without increased effort on his part, trying to reach Remy before
she got away. He had to stop her, and if that didn’t work, he had
to kill her.

He didn’t want to have to kill her. Though
after what he’d witnessed on that platform, seeing her stab Jude
and, presumably, Keith, who’d been half collapsed onto the platform
behind her, he figured he might end up having to take that course.
When they’d gone in search of her, Cade had filled him and Brandt
in on what had happened on their journey to Eden, on how Remy could
control the infected. He believed the claim. He’d noticed that,
while the infected apparently recognized him as one of their own,
they also were willing to follow his orders, even though it was
something he hadn’t experimented with much. While he didn’t know if
it was possible to manipulate this many infected, he couldn’t rule
it out, not when he took his own experiences into
consideration.

If she’d actually blown a hole in the wall
and made all these infected show up en masse to do whatever she was
thinking she wanted them to do, then that was something he couldn’t
forgive.

Ethan shoved past another batch of infected,
jostling one that had been a small woman before death, made smaller
by wasting away from starvation, and caught a glimpse of Remy. He
picked up his pace, fighting his way through the claustrophobic
press of bodies surrounding him. He approached Remy, realizing he’d
lost focus of another threat to his safety besides the infected and
Remy herself: the soldiers. Bullets were still flying down from
above, pocking into dirt and bodies, dropping walking corpses to
the ground, and there was a real chance he could get shot.

“Price to be paid,” he said aloud, not wholly
sure he understood what he meant. Several of the infected around
him turned toward him at the sound of his voice, and he snarled,
“Oh, fuck off.”

A bullet embedded into the head of an
infected man ahead of him, sending a spray of old blood and bits of
brain matter out from his head and onto Ethan. He gagged as the
rotten stench around him increased tenfold, spitting to clear the
nasty taste of the smell from his mouth. It didn’t work, so he
continued on, lifting his pistol in a two-handed grip, the knife in
his left fist, blade sticking out so all he’d have to do was let go
of his pistol with that hand and stab out.

As soon as he thought he was within shouting
distance, raising his voice enough to be heard over the sound of
gunfire, groans, moans, and snarls, Ethan yelled, “Remy!”

She was cutting across the open
courtyard-like area, passing in front of a helicopter, when she
stopped and tensed. She stayed like that for a long minute, not
flinching when a bullet pinged off the helicopter above her head.
She turned around, and Ethan was horrified by her appearance.

Remy was covered in blood. Her jeans were
stained with spatters of blood from the knees up, as was her white
tank top. He couldn’t tell how much of it was on her leather
jacket, but it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to assume it was
likewise smeared with blood. Her bolo knife was in her right hand,
held by her hip. Her long dark hair was disheveled and matted with
who knew what.

Ethan shoved past several more infected as he
continued forward. “Remy, what the hell are you doing?”

Remy’s expression had betrayed her shock and
surprise at his presence, but with his words, it became hard with
anger. She stormed toward him, stopping short of arm’s reach, and
said, “What the hell am I doing? I’m giving them what they
deserve!”

“What they deserve?” Ethan repeated. “What do
you mean?” He was still pointing the pistol at her, and he lowered
it, though he kept the weapon out and ready to fire.

“All of this!” Remy said, waving her hand
around. “They put this fucking thing up, and they trapped us all in
that hellhole and left us to die!” A slow smirk spread across her
face, casting her expression in an evil light. “All I’m doing is
breaking our chains, knocking down their prison walls, and giving
them a taste of exactly what they forced on us!”

“There are innocent people on this side of
the wall,” Ethan pointed out. “People like us.”

“There
is
no one like us!” Remy
snapped. She held her hands out to the sides, the tip of her bolo
knife’s blade nicking one of the nearby infected. Ethan caught a
glimpse of the gunshot wounds that riddled her body.
Jesus, how
is she still standing?
“Look at where we are!” Remy insisted.
“We are standing in the middle of a horde, and not a single damn
one of them is trying to kill us.” She shook her head. “We can do
this, you and me. We can make them do whatever we want them to do.
We can punish the people responsible for all of this!”

“Who are
we
to decide who needs
punishment?” Ethan countered. “That is not our place to decide.
We’re not God, Remy.”

Remy widened her already outspread arms.
“Yes, we are! We can do anything we want! We can
control the
dead.
And we’re immortal! Look at me! I’ve been shot twelve
times, and I’m still standing. If that doesn’t make us gods, then I
don’t know what does.”

“That’s blasphemy, Remy.”

“I don’t care
what
it is, it’s the
truth.” She looked up at the walkways above them, where several
soldiers still fired into the horde. “You should let me go take
care of them before they shoot one of us in the head. I’m not
willing to test whether that will kill me, even if the others
didn’t.”

“No, Remy,” Ethan said. “You’re not going to
kill anyone else.”

“You going to stop me?” Remy asked, her tone
high and querulous.

“If you insist on continuing this, I’ll have
to,” Ethan said. “I can’t let you hurt innocent people. You know
I’m not going to stand by and let you do that.”

“That’s too bad,” Remy said. “I didn’t want
to have to kill you.” She took three brisk steps towards him and
lifted her bolo knife like she was about to try to cut his head
off. He took a step back, and when she moved toward him again, he
lifted his pistol and fired a single shot.

Remy stumbled, her eyes widening, a neat
bullet hole in her forehead above her right eye. She collapsed,
dropping to the dirt at his feet, her body twitching.

Ethan stared until her body ceased to
function, the gun still raised and pointed at her. He noticed he
was shaking when he saw the barrel of the gun tremoring. “Oh God,”
he said.

He was crying. He realized this objectively,
like he was standing outside of himself and watching the
proceedings from afar. One of the infected jostled him from behind,
and he lowered the gun, realizing he had more problems at hand,
ones that meant he would have to mourn later. He stepped up to
Remy’s body and gently closed her eyes before picking up her fallen
bolo knife, which lay by her hand. Then, still shaking, he looked
at the infected around him.

He had a lot of work to do. And not one bit
of it was going to be any fun.

Kimberly couldn’t
believe what she was watching. After Remy had fallen dead at
Ethan’s feet, he’d picked up her bolo knife. Everything that
followed had been nothing short of a miracle.

He
herded
the infected. There was no
other word for it. He yelled at them, he cajoled, he ordered,
pushed, and shoved, and batch by batch, he rounded up the vast
majority of them and steer them in the direction he wanted them to
go—right back toward the hole in the wall, the hole Remy had put
there. Most of the infected obeyed his commands, shuffling along in
the proper direction. There were some that didn’t obey, that didn’t
comprehend what he was trying to get them to do, and those were the
ones that he plunged his knife into.

Kimberly wanted desperately to go down there
and help him. She knew she couldn’t. She didn’t have whatever
ability Ethan had to walk invisibly among the infected. She itched
to fire Cade’s rifle into the mess of them, but she only had the
ammunition that was in the rifle; Cade hadn’t given her any spare
magazines. All she could do was stand where she was and watch Ethan
methodically clear as many infected as he could from the helipad
and the surrounding area.

Brandt joined her after a while, leaning
against the railing beside her. Soldiers had begun to descend from
the walkways and emerge from the facilities to help, and the work
went more rapidly after that.

“Remy’s dead,” Kimberly told Brandt, breaking
the silence between them.

“I figured that much,” Brandt commented. “It
was only a matter of time before she snapped, and I always knew
that when it happened, there wouldn’t be any pulling her back from
it. I’m not sure Sadie is going to be okay.”

“Did Jude…?”

“Yeah,” Brandt said, and his voice cracked.
“He didn’t make it. Neither did Keith.”

“Shit.”

They stared at the mess below for a long
moment. The soldiers had taken advantage of what Ethan was doing,
and they’d gone out to help, putting down infected while a squad
worked to get portable walls deployed and maneuvered into place.
Kimberly pressed her lips together, hoping that some idiot wouldn’t
get the wise idea to take a potshot at Ethan. An action like that
would put her in a position to start shooting, which was something
she didn’t want to do.

Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. The
soldiers weren’t projecting any outward signs of ill will toward
Ethan, and he stayed with them until the temporary, portable walls
were erected to block the hole. When he stepped away from them, he
moved back to Remy’s body and knelt there for a long moment. He
slid his arms underneath her and lifted her limp form from the
ground. He shifted her so she settled comfortably against him and
started toward the metal stairs he’d descended, climbing them
slowly. Brandt and Kimberly met him at the top of the stairs, and
he smiled crookedly, though there were tears in his eyes.

“Are you hurt?” Kimberly asked when he
reached the top of the stairs. She reached out to help him with his
burden, but he shrugged off her attempt at assistance.

“Not physically,” he answered, his voice
hoarse. He stepped past her, carrying Remy toward the facility
building.

“Where are you going?” Brandt asked,
following behind Ethan, with Kimberly bringing up the rear.

“I’m going to go find that Bradford bastard,”
Ethan said. “We have some samples and research he stole from us
that we need to get back.” He cut a glance to Kimberly. “I believe
we promised we’d put it into the right hands. Nothing I’ve seen yet
tells me that these are the right hands.”

Kimberly nodded in understanding and let him
lead the way to the facility’s entrance. Cade was waiting there,
and Kimberly handed her rifle back.

“Where’s Sadie?” she asked.

“Still with her brother,” Cade explained.
“Lindsey is staying with her until we’re done here.” She looked at
Ethan, staring with obvious sorrow at Remy’s body in his arms.
“Where are you going?”