The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (47 page)

“To find that asshole Bradford,” Ethan
replied.

“Well, lucky you, I remember exactly where I
left him,” Cade said.

Bradford was
still where Cade had left him, only now regaining consciousness
from the blow she’d delivered. He was sitting slumped against the
wall, his head lolling, trying to fight his way back to the waking
world. When he saw her approaching him, Kimberly, Brandt, and Ethan
behind her, his eyes widened, and he instantly became more
alert.

“Well, well, well,” Cade said as she stopped
in front of him. “Look who’s returned to the land of the living.”
She sank into a crouch in front of him, angling her rifle so if she
squeezed the trigger, the bullet would hit
some
part of his
body, and tilted her head to the side, examining him. “You look
like shit,” she said.

Bradford stared at her warily, looking like
he desperately wished for a weapon to use against her.

Ethan joined her. He’d set Remy’s body on the
floor nearby, and he had her bloodied bolo knife in his hand. He
pointed the blade in Bradford’s general direction. “I believe you
have something that belongs to me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,”
Bradford tried, clamping his mouth shut when Ethan tapped the edge
of the knife’s blade against the underside of his chin.

“Don’t lie to me, Bradford. I’m not in the
mood for it.” Ethan’s tone was deceptively mild, but it sent chills
down Cade’s spine. It was the kind of voice that she’d heard both
police officers and her IDF commanders use when giving orders, the
kind that said they had a finite amount of patience and an
unwillingness to use any of it. “Where is my stuff?”

“I’d talk if I were you,” Cade urged when
Bradford hesitated. “I don’t know where Ethan happens to be
mentally, but I can assure you that
I’m
not in a good place,
and my trigger finger is
itching
to be put to use.”

Bradford sighed. “In my office. The file
drawer on the right.”

“Is it locked?” Cade asked.

“Most likely.”

When he didn’t elaborate further, she growled
at him. “Key?”

“It’s on a clip on my belt,” Bradford said.
He shifted and reached behind him. Ethan tapped him on the
underside of his jaw with the tip of the bolo knife, and Bradford
froze.

“Nuh-uh,” Ethan said. “Cade, you get the key.
Bradford, I don’t suppose I have to tell you that if you attempt to
hurt or attack her in any way, I’ll give you a cricothyrotomy,
whether you need it or not, do I?”

Bradford shook his head, slowly, and Cade
slid a hand along his belt. She found the clip he’d referred to and
held it up for Ethan to see. “Got it. Now what are we going to do
about him?”

Ethan stared at Bradford, and Cade glanced up
at him, worrying about what was going on in his head. He was
rattled mentally; she could see that as plain as the nose on his
face. She had no doubt that Remy’s death was taking its toll on
him. It was taking a toll on
her
, and she was struggling to
not let it. She’d mourn later, when other events around her weren’t
so pressing, when she and Brandt could be alone somewhere and she
could cry it out like her brain was telling her she needed to
do.

“Let’s leave him,” Ethan said, much to Cade’s
surprise. “He’s not worth the extra stain on my soul that killing
him would put there.”

“You sure?” Cade asked, glancing at Remy’s
body, laid out on the floor behind them. She had to admit to
herself that she was itching to plug a bullet in this asshole, even
if it was just his kneecap.

“I’m sure,” Ethan said. He tapped Bradford on
the underside of his jaw again. “He’s not going to do anything to
us, is he?”

“I’m not,” Bradford answered.

“Then you can do something
for
us,”
Brandt said, stepping forward to loom over the major. He knelt down
and started frisking him while Cade watched Bradford to make sure
he wasn’t going to try anything stupid with her husband. He didn’t,
thankfully; he’d have paid a heavy price if he had. Brandt
scrounged up a service pistol and a knife from Bradford’s belt and
passed them to Kimberly. “You’re going to do whatever it takes to
inform the general public that we are not infected, that there are
survivors on the south side of the wall. Further, you’re going to
go to whoever made the decision to abandon all of us, and you’re
going to talk them into launching rescue missions for survivors to
bring them over the wall where it’s safer. Don’t tell me you can’t
do it, either. That answer isn’t acceptable.”

“Anything else?” Bradford asked dryly.

“Yeah, actually,” Brandt said, glancing at
Cade for a second as if he were seeking her approval. “You’re going
to supply us with a helicopter and a flight crew, and you’re going
to tell them to fly us anywhere we want to go.”

“Why would I do something like that?”
Bradford snapped.

“You don’t have a choice,” Cade said.
“Because, in case you haven’t noticed, you don’t hold the power
here. If you expect to get out of this alive, you’ll do as we
ask.”

Bradford looked irritated, like he wanted to
argue with them, but he rolled his eyes and said, “Fine. I’ll make
the arrangements.”

“Good.” Cade pushed herself to her feet, and
Brandt joined her. “Lead the way to your office before I can’t hold
back the urge to kick your ass any longer.”

Bradford stood, staggering until he got his
balance, which made Cade wonder how hard she’d hit him on the head
earlier. He stood there for a second, propped against the wall,
then pushed off it and started down the hall at a slow, unsteady
pace. Cade let Brandt walk ahead of her, just behind Bradford, and
when she glanced back at Ethan and Kimberly, she saw that Ethan was
kneeling to scoop Remy’s body off the floor again. She motioned to
Kimberly, signaling her to go on ahead, and approached Ethan with a
worried frown on her face.

“Eth, what are you doing?” she asked.

He slid his arms underneath Remy’s slender,
limp form and eased her off the cold floor. “Picking her up,” Ethan
said. “What’s it look like?”

“Why don’t you leave her here until we wrap
this up?” Cade suggested, trying to keep her voice gentle.

“No,” Ethan stated firmly, straightening and
lifting her off the floor. “I’m not leaving her behind. Not again.”
His eyes met Cade’s, a depth of sorrow in his gaze that she’d never
seen before, not even when he’d come back from Memphis with Nikola
and reported the news to her that his wife Anna was definitely
dead. “I shouldn’t have left,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come
here. I should have stayed at Woodside. Maybe I could have talked
to her. Maybe I could have, I don’t know, stopped her from going
down this path.”

“You think you could have stopped this from
happening?” Cade asked. “Eth, she was a ticking time bomb waiting
to go off. And believe me, when it comes to bombs, they’re made to
go off. You couldn’t have stopped it.”

“You can’t tell me that and expect me to
believe it,” Ethan said. He brushed past her, carrying Remy with
him down the hall in the direction the others had gone. Cade sighed
and followed him. There wasn’t going to be any reasoning with him;
he’d already convinced himself this was his fault, and he wasn’t
going to change his mind because Cade argued with him over it.

In Bradford’s office, the Major stood by and
waited while Brandt unlocked the desk drawer in question and pulled
out a familiar stack of battered notebooks. Brandt stacked them on
the corner of the desk and straightened, taking the backpack Cade
offered him and stuffing them into it. Once he was done, he offered
the pack to Kimberly, and she shrugged it on.

“What now?” Bradford asked.

“Now for that helicopter,” Brandt said.

“Helicop
ters
,” Ethan spoke up,
emphasizing the plural. “Wherever you’re going, I’m not going with
you.” He looked down at the body in his arms and, at their curious
gazes, explained, “I have a stop I have to make first.”

I.

The
whomp-whomp
of the helicopter
rotors above Brandt’s head was soothing, a familiar sound that
stirred up memories from his time in the military, the camaraderie
he’d shared with his fellow soldiers. Those were times he
occasionally missed, because life had been so uncomplicated then.
Sure, he’d had to deal with getting shot at and with the horrible,
gritty feeling of sand making its way into his uniform on a
constant basis, but it hadn’t been anything he couldn’t deal
with.

His life now, though, he wasn’t too sure
about. He was immune to the Michaluk Virus, one of the greatest
viral threats to ever attack humanity. And not only that, he was
the carrier for what could in essence become a vaccine or a cure
for the very same virus. He rubbed at his forearm, fingering the
edge of the medical tape that held one of the fresh bandages over
his wounds. Lindsey had changed the dirty bandages out before he
and Cade had boarded the helicopter, and the tape was tugging at
his arm hair, reminding him of the wounds there and on his shoulder
every time he felt the sharp pain of the tugs. Thoughts of his
wounds reminded him of
how
he’d gotten them and the sheer
terror and desperation he’d felt when he’d been under attack.

It wasn’t something he wanted to experience
again.

Lindsey had stayed behind at the Eden
Facility, and the last time he’d seen her, she’d been at the desk
of an office she’d commandeered, poring over the research that
Derek Rivers had compiled, assisted by Chris Meiner, who they’d
found still in his quarantine cell, alone and probably forgotten,
and Jacob Howser. Brandt hoped that Lindsey and Chris would figure
out how to use it, maybe do something to cure all this mess.
Perhaps Lindsey could solve the puzzle so no one else had to go
through what he dealt with on a daily basis.

Cleanup from the detonation in the wall was
still ongoing in Eden. Methodical sweeps were being conducted,
searching for any infected that had managed to get through to the
other side, systematic searches of the city and the surrounding
areas that they were predicting would take weeks yet. As soon as he
got back to Eden, he had every intention of joining in on that
search, if only because he felt some partial responsibility for
what had happened.

“You okay?” Cade’s voice, accented and tinny,
filtered through the speakers on his headset, startling him out of
his reverie of worry and stress. The headset she wore looked
comically large on her head. He shook his head, then nodded, then
shrugged.

“I haven’t decided yet,” he said, adjusting
the mike on the headset.

“What’s on your mind?” she asked, taking his
hand. He twisted his hand around to lace their fingers together,
his grip tight enough to blanch the blood out of his fingertips.
Cade wasn’t fazed by the pain she must have felt at the force of
his grasp.

“What if they’re not there anymore?” Brandt
asked. “What if something happened and they had to bail?”

“Then they’d have left a note telling us
where they went,” Cade replied.

“What if they didn’t have time to leave a
note?”

“Then we’ll look for them,” Cade said. “We’ll
tear the entire country apart to find them if we need to.”

“I’m glad you’re more confident than I am
right now,” Brandt said. “Things like this never work out for
me.”

“It worked out for you when you came looking
for me,” Cade pointed out, and at that, he smiled. She leaned over
and rested her head against his bicep, then sat up straight again.
“It’s going to be fine, Brandt. I promise.”

“I hope so.”

“We’re touching down in two minutes,” the
pilot announced over the headsets.

“This is it, Brandt,” Cade said with a huge
grin. “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

The touchdown was bumpy, maybe because it had
been so long since Brandt had been in a helicopter—well, while
conscious, that was. He barely waited for the soldier in the back
of the helicopter to open the doors before he threw his headset off
and dropped to the pavement. He drew the pistol holstered on his
hip, partially out of reflex but mostly because he knew the sound
of a helicopter would attract a lot of unwanted attention to their
location. The rotors slowed and the motor started to wind down.
Cade joined him, lifting her rifle, surveying the scene around
them.

“See anything?” Cade asked.

Brandt examined every nook and cranny his
eyes would allow him to see into and shook his head. “Not a thing,”
he reported. He looked back to the pilot and the soldier that had
come with them. “You guys okay to stay here?”

“We’ll be fine,” the soldier assured him.

“Lead the way, would you?” Brandt said to
Cade. “I don’t know where I’m going.”

The house was a modest two-story affair, a
suburban-style family home before the Michaluk Virus tore up the
southeast that was showing signs of wear and tear, probably beyond
its years. There were no vehicles in front of the house, but he
could make out tire tracks that had torn up a bit of grass leading
toward the back of the house. The windows on the first floor were
barricaded, and everything looked still and undisturbed.

“Back door,” Cade said. She started ahead of
him, cutting across the yard, following the tire tracks in the
grass. Brandt stuck close to her, noting the odd appearance of an
ambulance parked in the backyard—where the hell had
that
come from?—and followed her up the back deck stairs to the door.
She rapped on it, several sharp knocks that Brandt was sure carried
across the entire yard, then the sound of locks being unfastened
reached their ears. The door flew open, and Isaac Wright stood in
the doorframe, a look of pure joy on his face.