The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege (15 page)

“You’ve got to keep a level head, Remy.”
Dominic looked her over appraisingly. “You still want me to train
you, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” Remy said without
hesitation.

“Then you’re going to have to trust me,”
Dominic said. He approached her, and their eyes met. “And trusting
me entails you actually
trusting
me, and not just with
teaching you and having your back.”

Remy blew out a breath and ran a hand
through her dark hair, scraping the long strands back from her face
before replying. “It was…him,” she said. Her voice trembled, and
she wiped the back of her hand over her eyes, even though she
wasn’t crying. “It’s just…I don’t know. Seeing him…rattled me.”

“Understandably,” Dominic acknowledged. He
grasped her arms in his hands, trying to make her look at him, but
she wrenched free. “What?”

“Don’t touch me,” she said, her words coming
out more bitterly than she’d intended for them to.

Dominic brushed off her rejection, seemingly
unaffected. She imagined that not much bothered him; he’d probably
had every scrap of real emotion trained right out of him when he’d
been accepted into the DIA, if not before.

She desperately wished she could be like
him: cold and distant. The idea suited her.

“Don’t let him have that power over you,
Remy,” Dominic said.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Remy muttered.
“You aren’t the one he tried to kill.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Dominic said. “But you can
either come with me and do something proactive, or you can stay at
the medical house and wallow in self-pity. Your choice, but I won’t
extend the invitation again if you decide to go with the second
option.”

Remy could feel a nerve in her cheek
twitching, and she gritted her teeth to keep herself calm. “I’ll go
with the first choice. Of course.”

“Of course,” Dominic repeated. He offered
her a hand, and when she glanced at it but didn’t take it, he
dropped it and started in the opposite direction of the medical
house. “Come on. You can stay at my house for lockdown.”

“I need my medicine,” Remy pointed out. “And
I need to clean myself up. Why don’t you go ahead and I’ll meet you
there?”

Dominic nodded. “Yeah, okay. I can do
that.”

Remy bolted into the medical house, taking
the stairs two at a time to her bedroom. She dropped her backpack
and weapons on the bed and took a few minutes to clean herself up
before gathering the spare weapons she’d hidden around her bedroom:
the pistol in the slats under the bed, the magazines taped to the
bottom of the dresser, the knives on the back of the bed’s
headboard, and more. She gathered the last of her personal
belongings before heading to the door. She had no intention of ever
returning to the medical house. She didn’t care what Dr. Rivers
said.

After picking the lock on Derek’s room, she
found the prefilled auto-injectors he gave her each day. The
medicine inside the twelve injectors sloshed as she stuffed them
into the increasingly heavy bag on her back. She hurried out of the
room, pulling the door shut behind her so Dr. Rivers wouldn’t
immediately realize she’d been there, and headed for the
stairs.

Remy made it halfway down when she heard
footsteps and voices below. The words were indecipherable, but it
was obvious who was downstairs: Dr. Rivers, Kimberly, and Ethan.
She eased her way back upstairs and ducked into her bedroom. With a
click, the door closed behind her, and she swore under her
breath.

Unable to go out the front door, Remy
resorted to her second-favorite exit: the window by the bed. She
threw it open and slipped onto the porch’s roof. A rose-covered
trellis was attached to the side, and she half-crawled, half-slid
to it, scrambling down silently. Once her boots hit the grass, she
paused to make sure no one had seen her swift exit.

Suddenly, the front door banged open. Remy
pressed back into the shadows against the house, her fingers
grasping the hilt of her bolo knife instinctively. But it was only
Dr. Rivers and Kimberly, supporting Ethan between them.

The three stood on the porch, bickering. She
watched as Kimberly and the doctor helped Ethan onto the edge of a
deck chair. “I’m not sure you really
realize
what you’re
asking her to do,” Ethan was saying. Remy peered between the rose
vines and through the diamond-shaped gaps in the trellis to get a
better look at Ethan. She’d seen him at the gate but had been too
angry to
really
look at him.

His hair was lanky and dirty, and he was in
need of a bath; his arms were skinnier than she remembered and
still covered in scars from the attack he’d endured months
before—not that she’d expected the scars to magically disappear.
But otherwise, he looked healthy for someone who’d suffered for
months under the throes of Michaluk. His appearance didn’t ease her
mind about being infected herself.

She focused on what the three were
saying.

“Look, Ethan, I understand you have some
reservations over the idea,” Derek said.

“Some
reservations?
” Ethan repeated.
“That’s like saying there’s only a few infected outside the gates.
I wouldn’t wish what you’re proposing on my worst enemy.”

“And why is that?” Kimberly asked. Her voice
was gentle, and she laid a hand against his forearm.

Remy wrinkled her nose and fought not to
throw something at the woman.

“Because you don’t understand it any more
than I do,” Ethan said. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I
don’t know why I—” He broke off and shook his head, resting his
face in his hands, his elbows propped on his thighs.

“Is this about the rabbit?” Derek asked.

What about a rabbit?
Remy
wondered.

The doctor took his ever-present white lab
coat off and draped it over the porch railing. Remy still wondered
why he wore it; she supposed it was a prestige thing.

“Let’s not bring the rabbit up, please,”
Ethan said, his voice muffled. “It’s fucking disturbing.”

“Why do you find it disturbing?” Derek
asked. He leaned against the porch railing beside his coat and
folded his arms over his chest.

“What, you don’t?”

“I don’t understand it yet.”

“Precisely,” Ethan bit out.

“But we’re aiming to,” Kimberly spoke up.
“We’re going to study this thing and figure out what it’s done to
you so we can have a full understanding of the side effects.”

“You don’t even understand it and yet you’re
wanting to let Remy turn into one of them and shoot her up with
it?” Ethan said. “That is
so
fucked up.”

“Well, what do you
expect
me to do?”
Derek asked, and for the first time, Remy heard a note of anger in
his voice. “The medicine is running out. I have enough for a week
and a half, maybe a little more, but it’s not enough to last until
the end of the month for sure. She’s going to turn, one way or the
other, Ethan. And I’d personally rather it be sooner than later so
we can control it and deal with it accordingly.”

Remy scowled. She’d heard all this
before.

When she focused again, Kimberly was
kneeling beside Ethan’s chair and speaking to him in a low voice
that Remy couldn’t hear. She frowned and leaned closer to the
trellis.

Then Ethan spoke up.

“Look, I don’t want to discuss this right
now,” he said. “It’s just…I’m tired. Maybe I got out of bed too
soon.”

“Yeah, we need to keep you from pushing
yourself too hard,” Derek agreed. He took one of Ethan’s arms and
helped him from the chair. Kimberly took the other. “Let’s get you
back in and back to bed, okay?”

“Not here,” Ethan said. “In the main house.
I’m staying in Kim—”

He broke off, and Remy gritted her teeth.
She watched as Woodside’s two medical personnel led Ethan down the
porch steps and across the side yard to the main house. She waited
for the door to shut and then made her move.

Derek had left his white coat draped over
the porch railing. Remy kept her head low and slunk to the coat,
slipping her hand into one pocket and then the next, searching for
anything useful. When her fingers encountered a cool glass vial,
she pulled it free and pocketed it before heading to Dominic’s.

Kimberly could feel a headache coming on. She
scrunched her eyes shut, trying to shut out the sound of the
infected hammering on the wall. Sometimes they were quiet, like
before when she’d been on the porch with Ethan and Derek, perhaps
lulled into silence by the lack of anything human in view. But
sometimes, maybe after catching sight of the guards on the
platforms, they fairly hummed in unison. It rattled in her head,
sending her brain scrambling for solace. Cade sat at the other end
of the dining table that Kimberly was slouched at, her head in her
hands. She appeared to be trying to do the same thing Kimberly
was—drown them out somehow. Brandt paced back and forth across the
kitchen, checking his watch and glancing toward the boarded-up
window over the sink, as if he could see through the wood. Kimberly
didn’t know where Ethan was, but she wished he was with them. The
thought felt traitorous; for the millionth time, she had to remind
herself that she wasn’t supposed to like him, not after Avi’s
death. Despite her silent reminder, the heated kiss they’d shared
on the porch that afternoon came back to her mind. It was a kiss
that she would have given an arm to experience again. She scowled
and shook her head, as if the motion could erase the memory.

“Is there
anything
we can do about
that fucking
noise?
” Kimberly snapped, her voice breaking
the semi-silence of the room. “It’s driving me insane.”

“Sure,” Brandt said, turning in front of the
fridge to make another pass to the stove. “We can go out there and
shoot them all. Of course, that would be a waste of bullets, and
that’s beside the fact we don’t have enough to do the job.”

“Your problem is all psychological anyway,”
Cade said. Her voice sounded hollow, toneless, and she didn’t look
up from the tabletop. “It’s like war drums. Armies beat on them to
unnerve their enemies, because the repetitiveness drives them
crazy.”

“Well, it’s certainly driving
me
crazy,” Kimberly admitted. “Though I doubt they’re doing it as some
sort of orchestrated strategy.”

“I don’t know,” Brandt said.

Kimberly frowned and wondered if he was
being facetious.

“They’ve shown some limited ability to
strategize before,” Brandt continued. “Well, the ones that aren’t
already dead, anyway.”

Definitely not being facetious,
Kimberly thought with a grimace.

“We can’t discount anything when it comes to
the infected,” Brandt added. “For all we know, they’ve evolved in
the time we’ve been avoiding them.”

Kimberly agreed with Brandt
wholeheartedly—now was definitely
not
the time to lie down
on the job or get lax about security, not with the infected
literally at their doorstep. “Is there anything I can do?” Kimberly
asked. “I hate just sitting here. It makes me feel useless.”

Brandt didn’t look at her, and he resumed
his pacing. She figured if he kept it up, he’d wear a hole in the
floor. “You could go check on Derek, see if he needs any help,” he
said. “I’m sure he could use help organizing and packing away the
important things in case we need to get out of here fast.”

Kimberly sighed and nodded, pushing herself
up from the chair. It hadn’t been the answer she was looking for,
but she had to acknowledge that Brandt had a point: out of
everyone, she was probably the one most knowledgeable of Derek’s
working habits and filing systems. She made her way out of the
kitchen, surreptitiously scanning her path for signs of Ethan’s
whereabouts, but she gave up when she reached the basement door.
She could hear Derek slamming something beyond the door, so she
opened it and peered inside.

The brightness of artificial lighting, so
rare in the post-infected age, made her eyes water, and she rubbed
at them as she slipped inside. The main house’s basement was the
only place in Woodside that had been allowed to use the lone
generator the missing supply crew had scraped up shortly after
their arrival, since it was generally accepted that Derek was doing
important work. She used to come downstairs a lot, especially while
Ethan had still been sick, trying to give Derek whatever assistance
he needed while he searched for a solution to Ethan’s illness.

Ever since Ethan had been cured, though, she
hadn’t been down much, mainly because every time she’d stopped by,
Derek acted as if she was only in the way.

She wasn’t going to lie: that hurt.

Kimberly pulled the basement door shut
behind her and started down the stairs to the makeshift lab below.
With every step she took, she could make out a little more of the
woodworking benches that had been commandeered from someone’s
garage, littered with papers and light microscopes and other bits
of equipment that had been liberated from a medical lab and a vet’s
office. When she’d descended the stairs enough to catch sight of
the entire room, a frown crossed her face. She spotted Derek
slumped on a rickety metal stool at one of the two workbenches. His
head was in his hands, his shoulders hunched, the perfect picture
of despondency. Kimberly hurried down the last few steps and went
to him, circling the workbench so she could try to see his face.
She couldn’t, so instead, she reached across the workbench and
grasped his shoulder, squeezing it gently.

“Are you okay?” Kimberly asked, keeping her
voice low. “You don’t look so good.”

“I’ve lost one,” the doctor said. His words
were barely audible, and Kimberly had to lean closer to hear him
better. “I’ve lost one, and I have no idea where to look to find
it.”