The Becoming: Ground Zero (17 page)

“Oh stuff it, Remy,” Brandt said. He went straight to Cade, as Remy predicted he would. Ethan too brushed past Remy, much to her surprise. He went to Nikola and took the young girl’s face in his hands, studying her intently.

“Are you okay?” Ethan asked Nikola softly, leaning back to look the teenager over for injuries.

“Yeah, I think so,” Nikola answered. Ethan frowned, and Remy squinted at the girl. The teenager was starting to shake and look a bit sick. Despite her concern over Nikola, though, Remy’s pissed-off levels were quickly rising, and she gritted her teeth.

“Great job, Remy. Absolutely fantastic. I’m so glad to see you’re still alive and breathing,” Remy muttered. She lowered her knife and fought to keep herself from glaring at Ethan’s back. She had no idea why she even cared about trying to impress him, but every time she did something crazy and he didn’t acknowledge it, she felt like smacking him really hard across the back of the head. Violent, she knew, but it would make her feel better.

Instead, Remy wrestled down the urge, as she always did, and decided to take the irritation out on the infected thing lying at her feet.

Remy looked down at the man thoughtfully, ignoring his crushed skull as she took in the rest of him. He wore khaki pants and a dark blue shirt; his nametag, still hanging precariously from his collar, pronounced him as having once been Daniel. Remy frowned as he lay there twitching. She’d obviously damaged his nervous system. Remy marched over to Avi and took the machete from her. She looked the blade over, trying to see if anything was functionally wrong with it, but she didn’t see anything.

“You know, next time, you should try
using
the damn thing,” Remy said smartly, pointing the tip of the blade in Avi’s face. Then Remy marched back to the infected man with the machete in hand, raising it and swinging it down directly onto his neck as hard as she could. It took several strokes, but Remy finally managed to decapitate the man as the others looked on, the expressions on their faces ranging from impressed to horrified.

“I think it’s about time we got out of here,” Ethan said uneasily. He stood in front of Nikola, seemingly shielding her from the sight of Remy hacking the man’s head off. His right hand gripped Brandt’s forearm, holding him back; Brandt looked ready to step forward and stop Remy. “Everybody, go back where you were, grab your supplies, and bring them to the front doors as quickly as you can,” Ethan instructed. “We’ve got to get everything into the van and get the hell out of here.”

Remy made a face at Ethan and kicked the dead man as she walked past him toward the electronic complex’s exit. “It was just one,” Remy said in disgust. “You act like we just got attacked by an entire horde.”

“Remy,” Ethan said simply. She immediately felt cowed by his tone of voice, and her shoulders slumped.

“Sorry,” Remy said meekly. She shook her head and moved toward sporting goods. “Cade, come help me get this ammo, yeah?” she suggested, feeling the burning need to get away from the others quickly. The older woman pulled away from Brandt’s interrogation about her health and headed to Remy.

Cade took Remy’s elbow and practically dragged her to their previous location. “What the
hell
were you thinking?” Cade snapped as soon as they were out of earshot of the rest of the group.

“I was thinking I could go help Nikki,” Remy said defensively. She jerked her arm out of Cade’s grasp.

“You could have gotten yourself killed!” Cade hissed. She circled back around the sales counter and grabbed a screwdriver, jabbed it viciously into the lock on the ammunition case, and started to work at it furiously. “You’re not stupid, Remy! Stop acting like it!”

“Well, somebody had to get back there and help them!” Remy snapped back at her. She glared as she shoved the shopping cart behind the counter and fought the urge to ram the cart into the ladder on which Cade stood. “That Avi bitch was just fucking standing there! And Nikola isn’t going to be able to kill anything with that damned baseball bat! Why haven’t you taught her how to shoot a gun by now?”

“Because she’s too young!”

“She’s not too fucking young to get killed by one of those damned things!” Remy pointed out. She slammed the palm of her hand against the cart in frustration. “You have
got
to do something for her
before
we get to Atlanta and not a minute later! She’s going to get slaughtered in there if you don’t!”

Cade’s ice-blue eyes turned on Remy, and the younger woman froze as she saw the angry, cold look on Cade’s face. “Remy Angellette, you may
think
I don’t know what I’m doing, but I have a much better ability than you do to judge who should and shouldn’t have a gun in their hands. And neither Nikola nor Avi should have one. Neither of them is capable of handling anything a gun can do. They’d end up shooting themselves or one of us if we turned them loose with one. What
I
am more concerned with is how the infected knew to go after
them
instead of any of the rest of
us
. We were just as close as they were, and he could have easily come after us instead. So why did he go after
them?
”

Remy fell silent. A sinking feeling dropped into her stomach. Cade wrestled the case open and grabbed boxes of ammunition, handing them down to Remy. “How did he know?” Remy asked softly.

“I don’t know, but it can’t be good. I’m going to talk to Ethan about it later, see what he thinks. If the infected are getting smarter, if they’re starting to strategize … then we have a real problem.”

By the time Brandt and Ethan made it back to the van, dragging two carts of food and water behind them, the others were already waiting for them. Remy sat in the open sliding door of the van, her head in her hands. Cade stood beside her, wearing a pair of latex gloves and cleaning the blood off of Avi’s machete. Nikola was already in the passenger seat, curled up with her head resting back against the seat. Gray stood next to her open window, talking to her and rubbing her arm gently. Theo and Avi were nowhere to be seen; Ethan guessed they were both inside the van already.

“Everybody okay?” Ethan called on approach. “Nobody hurt?”

“Yeah, we’re all fine,” Cade said. Remy lifted her head, and the two women exchanged an unreadable look. Cade moved closer to Ethan and said softly, “I need to talk to you and Brandt.”

“Can it wait?” Ethan asked, pointedly looking at the lot around them. Cade looked uncertainly at him. “I don’t like the idea of hanging around this place any longer than necessary.”

Brandt hauled the cart of water to the back of the van and flung the doors open. Ethan moved to help him, scooping a gallon from the cart and sliding it into the van.

“I’ll give you guys a hand,” Cade offered immediately. She grabbed two gallon jugs for herself and moved to push them inside.

Ethan waited until she’d put them down before he said, “This must be really urgent.”

“It is.” Cade paused as the two men loaded a few bags of food into the van. “Remy and I think the infected are getting smarter.”

“Getting smarter?” Ethan repeated. Brandt grabbed a case of water and bumped into Ethan as he slipped past to set it in the van. Ethan ignored him, focusing on Cade instead. “What do you mean?”

“I’m just speculating,” Cade said quickly. “I’m wondering, though. How did the infected man know to go after Avi and Nikki? They’re the weakest links, right? Makes you wonder if he’d even have attacked if, say, Nikola had been with me and Avi with Remy.”

“Interesting,” Brandt said thoughtfully. “Back when the big fight happened in Atlanta, there were a lot of casualties on their end, but after a few hours, it was like the whole mess of them adapted or something. They started to get harder and harder to fight, until they managed to push back, take out the men working the heavier arms, and overwhelm the rest.”

“They could just be noticing patterns,” Ethan suggested doubtfully.

“But we weren’t in there long enough to establish a pattern,” Cade pointed out.

Ethan shook his head. “I don’t know what happened back there, except for Nikola and Avi getting attacked and Remy playing Xena Warrior Princess.” He dumped the last of the food in the van and slammed the doors shut. “Get in. I want to get out of here before we run into any more trouble.”

Darkness fell earlier than Cade was used to. It was like a heavy blanket being draped over the top of the van, and Cade blinked as it seemed to come on suddenly. She knelt on the back seat, watching out the windows with her rifle in hand. As twilight settled, Cade couldn’t help but wish she still had the lovely night-vision goggles she used to use when she was in the IDF.

The van was mostly quiet. It moved rather slowly, so Cade had plenty of time not only to study the landscape outside the van, but also to think about a certain man inside it. She could hear someone snoring nearby; she thought it might have been Theo, but she wasn’t sure. And she was
not
going to turn around to check. Mainly because she knew Brandt was somewhere behind her, and she knew that he was likely staring at her. After his revelation to her back at the safe house, after his confession that he’d follow her anywhere, Cade had been somewhat reluctant to meet his gaze or to find herself in a situation that involved sitting alone with him. She knew it would do nothing but stir up the uncertainties and feelings that she’d experienced almost as long as she’d known him.

Cade scanned the trees to her left. The grass at the sides of the roads had grown wild with no one left to care for it, and Cade could occasionally spot a pair of glittering eyes watching from the foliage. Deer, most likely. In Alabama, they seemed to be as plentiful as cockroaches. Cade sincerely hoped they didn’t hit one. She’d seen what they could do to a car, and it wasn’t something she wanted to experience firsthand.

Cade shook her thoughts free from the deer and lifted her rifle’s scope to squint through it into the darkness. A throat cleared behind her. It took her a moment to realize it was Ethan attempting to quietly get her attention. Cade twisted around and nudged Theo awake. He lay sprawled in the seat in front of her; he sat up and wiped at his mouth, shaking his head sleepily. Cade smirked before she nodded to Ethan to go ahead.

“I think we need to pull over,” Ethan announced, slowing the van. His attention was focused on the road, as it should have been, and his voice was muffled as he faced away from the rest of them.

“It’s not going to be very comfortable with all eight of us trying to sleep in the van,” Remy pointed out. Cade nodded in agreement. Tonight, she wasn’t too game to sleep on top of someone else, either literally or figuratively.

“What do you propose, then?” Ethan asked.

“I think we should find a place to hole up for the night,” Cade answered. “Especially since it looks like it wants to rain out there. Where exactly are we?”

There was a pause as Nikola shuffled through the maps on her lap. She turned on the light above her visor and leaned over them. “It looks like we’re near a town called Weogufka,” she said, pronouncing the town’s name slowly and awkwardly. “It looks pretty small, if I had to guess. Close to Sylacauga.”

“Any word on how Sylacauga fared during the outbreak?” Gray asked.

“I never heard either way,” Cade admitted. “But I can’t imagine it was any better than Montgomery or any of the other cities like that.”

Ethan glanced at Cade in the rearview mirror. “We’ll see if we can find a motel and secure a couple of rooms. We can stay the rest of the evening and night there and set out once the sun comes up.”

“That sounds perfect,” Remy said. She stretched languidly. “This seat is beginning to chafe my ass.”

Ethan raised an eyebrow, and Cade smirked. She was sure Ethan was doing nothing but thinking about Remy and her ass now.

Cade looked at the rest of the group as Ethan took his foot off the brake. He let the van roll forward a few feet and watched the rest of them intently. “Brandt?” Cade said questioningly, her own eyebrows rising as she realized the man had yet to say a word.

“Yeah?” Brandt said, turning to look at Cade. He still held her duffel bag in his lap, and she smiled slightly.

“You okay with that?”

“Do I really have a choice?” he said. A touch of despondency in his voice made Cade frown deeply.

Remy opened her mouth to speak, but Cade punched her between the shoulder blades just hard enough to warn her off saying anything.

“I guess not,” Cade conceded. “Kind of outvoted there, big guy.”

Brandt glanced at Cade and shrugged before turning his attention back to the bag in front of him. Cade wondered what in the world he was looking at inside her bag, but she wasn’t going to push the question. There were more important things to do, like plan out just how they would infiltrate a motel and barricade themselves inside.

The motel the group chose was a rundown Super 8 just off the highway near Weogufka. It was obvious—to Remy, at least—that no one had been there in quite some time. Several of the windows that weren’t boarded over were shattered, and amidst the trash in the parking lot were six cars in various stages of disrepair. The vehicles’ windows were broken, likely by thieves looking to steal whatever they thought was still valuable. Remy confirmed her suspicion when she eased out of the van and peered inside the dirty windows of one of the cars. The stereo had been ripped out, only a few sliced cables hanging out of the space the electronic equipment once occupied. Remy wondered what good a car stereo would do for anyone now; it might make a decent weapon to hit people with, come to think of it, but it definitely wouldn’t stop one of the infected from ripping one’s face off.