The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (48 page)

“Holy shit, you’re still alive!” he
exclaimed, wrapping his arms around first Cade and then Brandt in
bone-crushing embraces.

“You can’t possibly have expected anything
else,” Cade commented, patting him on the arm. She stepped back,
closer to Brandt, like she was seeking refuge from the man’s
extremely enthusiastic hugs.

“I shouldn’t have,” Isaac acknowledged. He
looked Brandt up and down and opened his mouth to say something,
but the thin wail of a baby’s cry interrupted him. Brandt’s head
snapped up, zeroing in on the sound, and he pushed past Isaac to
enter the house.

The noise was coming from somewhere upstairs.
Brandt charged up the stairs, taking them two at a time, barely
noticing that Cade was right behind him. He stopped at the head of
the stairs, listening, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound,
and picked the door near the end of the hall. He rushed to it,
pushing the door open, and stopped short inside the door. Derek
Rivers stood by the window, an infant nestled against his shoulder,
rubbing her back, gently patting to soothe her.

“Oh my God,” Brandt said. He stared with wide
eyes at the tiny baby against the doctor’s shoulder.

Derek turned at the sound of his voice, and a
big grin spread across his face. “You’re back.”

“Yeah. I’m back.” Brandt stepped forward to
meet his daughter for the first time.

II.

Ethan stood in the front yard of a ramshackle
house he’d never been to before that day, listening to the rotors
of the helicopter that had dropped him off there as they slowly
wound up. He stared down at a two by six pile of dirt that he’d
both dug up and replaced. The temperature was warmer than he had
expected, the air humid and heavy, and his skin was already soaked
with sweat, which had prompted him to discard his jacket not long
into his project. He pushed his hair back from his forehead and
wished for the fifth time since he’d gotten there that he’d taken
the time to shave off his facial hair; the heat and sweat were
making his face itch.

Kimberly stood beside him, leaning against
her shovel, the blade buried in the dirt. She looked as
uncomfortable in this heat as he felt. The moment she’d set foot
off the helicopter, she’d started pulling her blonde hair into a
high ponytail to get it off her neck. Her shirt was damp with
sweat, and she wore a pair of large-framed sunglasses that made her
look a bit bug-like.

Sadie knelt nearby, studying the surrounding
landscape like it was the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen.
Her expression was blank, like it had been since she’d lost her
twin brother, and her jaw was clenched. Ethan still had no idea why
she’d asked to come with him and Kimberly on his self-imposed
mission. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to stay in Eden with people she
didn’t know. With Cade and Brandt headed back to Hollywood, South
Carolina, to meet up with Derek, Isaac, and their newborn child,
there hadn’t been anyone else she knew in Eden to keep her
there.

“You okay?” Kimberly asked, raising her voice
to be heard over the sound of the helicopter crew’s pre-flight
check off.

Ethan set his shovel on the ground, motioning
with his head toward the dilapidated house they stood near. “Yeah,
I’m okay,” he said. “I’m going in there for a few minutes.” He
didn’t wait for Kimberly’s acknowledgment; he started walking
forward, his shoes crunching on the mostly dead grass that covered
the house’s front lawn.

The house would have been dilapidated even
before it had been abandoned at the onset of the outbreak. The
humidity and the weather hadn’t helped. The front porch, a
hand-built wooden affair that looked at least twenty years old,
sagged in the middle, like the entire thing would fall in with a
wrong step. The steps weren’t in much better condition, and the
wooden railing had broken away and lay on the ground alongside the
steps.

“
My family didn’t have very much
money,”
he remembered her saying.
“Mama was lucky to get my
dad to pay his child support on time.”

He ascended the steps carefully and went to
the front door. It hung open, dangling by a single hinge, the glass
that was once set in it broken and littering the porch. His tennis
shoes crunched on the glass as he stepped inside.

The interior was dark, so he took out his
flashlight, but he didn’t bother pulling a weapon. If there were
any infected in here, they wouldn’t pose a threat to him. He shone
the flashlight beam around the entryway, and the first thing he saw
was a body laying on the bottom few steps of the staircase leading
to the second level. It was face down, one arm stretched up the
stairs. The body was desiccated, and it looked like it had once
been a woman.

“
I shot her at the bottom of the stairs. I
didn’t have a choice. She just wouldn’t stop. And she’d already
killed Maddie…”

Ethan paused there for a long moment, bowing
his head respectfully, then stepped past the stairs to the
kitchen.

“
Jason died in the kitchen. He was trying
to hold the back door, trying to keep them from getting in. He
couldn’t do it by himself. He wasn’t strong enough.”

The vague remains of what might have once
been a man were smeared across the cracked, torn vinyl tiles that
covered the kitchen. There were random bits littering the floor,
and a long-dried, dark brown streak ran from near the back door to
the floor beside the four-seater dining table tucked into a corner
of the kitchen. Once again, Ethan paused there, then stepped away
and turned back the way he’d come.

The stairs looked daunting. The weather had
taken its toll on the steps, warping the wood and bending it up at
the corners. He stepped around the body at the foot of the stairs
and ascended to the second floor, searching for the last bit of the
puzzle that was supposed to flesh out the story.

“
I ran upstairs and got my dad’s shotgun,
and I fought my way out of the house and into the woods behind the
house…”

Ethan found the bedroom near the end of the
hall, just before the master bedroom. It was the room of a
rebellious young adult, almost stereotypically so, with band
posters papering the walls. The bed was unmade, clothes littered
the floor, and the desk held a large, bulky desktop computer that
looked like it’d seen better days, covered with stickers
advertising bands and tattoo parlors and even a couple of
nightclubs. He stepped away from the desk and turned his head,
looking toward the closet.

A small form lay slumped inside the closet,
lying on its back. Ethan stepped forward and shone the flashlight
into the closet, crouching to examine the body inside.

“
She killed them both. And she was coming
after me.”

Ethan had never been able to get a real read
on her story. It’d always changed, shifting from one version to the
next. When he’d been a police officer, a story like that would have
rung alarm bells in his head. He supposed that it had done that
very thing on a subconscious level. Otherwise, why would he be
there, falling into his investigative habits?

There were footsteps on the floor in the
hall, hesitant ones, and he knew it was Kimberly. She stepped into
the room behind him and stopped several feet away. He could feel
her eyes on him. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“She lied,” Ethan said. He rested his elbows
against his thighs.

“Who?”

“She lied about what happened here.” He
looked up at Kimberly, a sick surge in his gut. “Her mother didn’t
kill her sister. And her sister doesn’t appear to have been
infected.”

“What are you getting at?” Kimberly
asked.

Ethan stood and slipped past her, heading
back toward the stairs. Fortunately, Kimberly didn’t pursue the
line of questioning, didn’t speak again until they were back out in
the front yard. “What now?”

“Now you and Sadie get on that helicopter and
go back to Eden,” Ethan said.

“I think you’re missing part of the equation
there,” Kimberly said. “There are three of us.”

“I’m not going back with you.”

“
What?”
Kimberly cried, and Ethan saw
the stunned expression in her eyes, like he’d slapped her. “You
can’t… I mean… why?”

“I don’t belong there, Kim,” Ethan said. He
sat down on one of the rickety porch steps. “I’m infected. I’m a
walking biohazard. I might not be infectious—that we know of—but
I’ll always pose a threat to the part of the world that’s
uninfected. I can’t expose people to the risk that I might somehow
one day start another outbreak. It’s better if I’m here, on this
side of the wall. Here, I can do what I can to eradicate the
infected and locate survivors for evacuation.” He motioned to the
large backpack that he’d left on the ground near the grave he’d dug
earlier. “The military even gave me a solar-powered radio to
contact them with whenever I find people.”

“That’s something you can’t do by yourself,”
Kimberly said. “I’m staying with you.”

“Kim, please,” he protested, but she leaned
down and pressed her lips to his, silencing any opposition he might
have had. He cupped her face in his hands and caressed her cheeks
with his thumbs as she moved her mouth against his.

“Shut up,” she said when she pulled away from
him. “Don’t argue. I’m staying. I’m not going back. There’s nothing
for me there. Everything I want is here.” She pressed a hand
against his chest, right over his heart.

Ethan heaved a sigh. “Fine,” he muttered.
“I’m not going to talk you out of it anyway, am I?”

“Damn right,” Kimberly agreed.

Someone behind her cleared their throat, and
Ethan looked past her to see Sadie standing nearby, looking
determined. “I had every intention of sneaking out of here the
minute your backs were turned and going off on my own,” she said.
“Because, like you guys, I don’t have anything left for me in Eden.
But if you’re going to be staying…do you mind if I stick around
with you?”

Ethan couldn’t help it. He laughed. “You’ve
got to be kidding me,” he commented. “Of all the people I know, I
bring the two with me that have absolutely nothing left for them in
civilization. It’s like my subconscious was trying to sabotage my
attempts to run off by myself.”

“I take it that’s a yes then?” Sadie
asked.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s a yes,” Ethan said with
another laugh. He stood and crossed the yard, picking up the heavy
backpack that was loaded full of his immediate essentials, and
started toward the helicopter. “Come on, let’s let the helicopter
crew know that they’re not going to have any passengers for the
trip back to Eden.”

“And then?” Kimberly asked as she and Sadie
scrambled to keep up with him.

Ethan glanced at her and smiled widely. “I
think I promised you that I’d try to save the world.”

Writing a novel is hard, hard work. Writing a
series is even more so. Finishing this series has been
so
difficult for me. I started writing the first book in 2009, back
when I was still working in retail. Since then, when I first
envisioned this as a single volume, it’s ballooned into five books
and several novellas, all exploring this weird little infected
world I created all those years ago. And in my personal life,
things have changed as equally drastically: I left retail to start
a job in EMS, I started writing an entirely new series, and I
experienced the most traumatic event of my life thus far with the
loss of my father, the last of which embedded itself into the
narrative of this book in ways I never expected.

I’m not going to lie: it’s heartbreaking
leaving this world. I’ve spent so much time with these characters
that I don’t want to give them up. At the same time, however, I
can’t help but admit some measure of relief. I’ve spent so much
time immersed in this world that I’m ready to explore some other
worlds and new characters. That said, it’s not
totally
the
end. There’s still a book of novellas to be released in the form of
an expanded edition of
The Becoming: Origins
. So I hope
you’re looking forward to reading those stories.

I suppose this is also the point where I take
a few moments to offer up some thank yous. There are a lot of
people to thank, so if I leave anyone out, I apologize, but know
that it’s most certainly not intentional!

First, I’d like to take a few moments to
thank my parents. They’ve supported me all throughout the writing
of this series, and even though my dad is no longer here, I know
that he’d be proud of me for what I’ve accomplished. I also have to
thank my older sister Amanda and my younger sister Stephanie for
all their support and encouragement.

Many, many thanks to Michael and the crew at
Permuted Press for giving me the opportunity to continue this
series beyond the third book.

A big thank you to Felicia A. Sullivan for
the hard work she put in editing this book to make it readable.

I also would like to thank all the folks that
have given me encouragement and have been beta readers for me over
the course of this series. I don’t dare list them all by name,
because I’m
terrified
I’ll forget someone, but you all know
who you are.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Kevin
Michaluk, the Chief Media Officer of Mobile Nations. If it weren’t
for his innocent little question, I’d never have gotten this far
writing this series (and he wouldn’t have a fictitious zombie virus
named after him)!

Of course, I can’t
not
thank Hannah
Gordon, my agent, for taking the time to negotiate the deal that
made these last couple of books possible.

And lastly, but most certainly not least:
READERS! Thank you for buying these books, reading them, reviewing
them, spreading the word about them, and offering up your opinions
and encouragements. An author is nothing without readers to read
the books, and I couldn’t ask for a better group of readers!