The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege (37 page)

“Where do you think they came from?” Ethan
asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s a military base
nearby that’s still operational,” Kimberly suggested. The tone of
her voice was light, almost excited.

He glanced at her and saw that her eyes were
bright and wide as she stared up at the sky. “You know what that
means, don’t you?”

“What?”

“It means we stand a pretty damn good chance
of locating someone to take these samples to.” She patted her
backpack to emphasize her point, and her grin widened. “And that
means we stand a good chance of getting it into their hands or at
least getting directions on where to take it and, maybe, having a
vaccine developed. Or maybe even a cure.”

“One can only hope,” Ethan muttered, and
that was when the sound of gunfire met his ears, loud and
continuous, as if a major battle were being fought nearby. He
stiffened and looked back at the sky, as if it would tell him
something about where the noise was coming from. Though he could at
least ascertain that it wasn’t coming from anything in his or
Kimberly’s immediate vicinity, he still grabbed her bicep and
hauled her back into the trees, pushing her behind a trunk and
slouching alongside her.

“Who is shooting what?” Kimberly asked,
twisting to look around the tree.

“I don’t know, but it sounds like it might
be large caliber weapons,” Ethan answered. He closed his eyes,
hoping that that would help him focus more fully on the direction
the sound was coming from. “And it sounds as if it might be coming
from…that way.” He pointed.

Kimberly gasped.

“That’s back in the direction of Woodside,”
she murmured.

“Oh God,” Ethan whispered, pushing himself
away from the tree as if he were going to race back toward the
community. He took two steps in that direction before Kimberly
grabbed his wrist.

“Where are you going?” she demanded.

“We have to go help them, Kim!” he
exclaimed. “I don’t know what’s going on, but we can’t just bail!
If that gunfire is coming from Woodside, then they might be in
serious trouble!”

“No, we’ve got to keep going,” Kimberly
said, and Ethan whirled on her in anger.

“You can’t
seriously
expect me to
just abandon my friends—”

“That’s exactly what I expect you to do,
because that’s what you agreed to do,” Kimberly interrupted. “You
agreed to help me on this task, no matter what, and we can’t afford
to get delayed by going back. The samples will only keep for so
long, and we don’t have a moment to waste. I’m sorry, Eth. I know
you want to go back to help them. I do too. I can’t stand the idea
of any of them getting killed. But we’ve got a chance to save the
rest of humanity, and we can’t afford to let it go to waste because
we turned back when we should have continued going forward.”

Ethan stared at her for a second, grinding
his teeth together, his anger almost too much to deny. Finally, he
spun away from her and snarled out, “
Fuck
.” She was right,
and he knew she was right, but that didn’t make him feel any better
about turning his back on the rest of his friends. He sent up a
silent prayer to anyone above who might be listening, asking them
to protect his friends and see them safely out of whatever was
going on back at the community. Then he ran his hands through his
hair, pushing it back from his face.

“Okay,” he said, and he was surprised to
discover that his voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat and
dropped his hands to his sides. “Okay. You’re right. I hate to
admit it, but you’re right. We need to get these samples out of
here. There’s entirely too much at stake right now to do
otherwise.”

Kimberly folded the map she still held and
stuck it into the waistband of her jeans, then took his hand and
gave it a comforting squeeze. It helped, but only a little. It
didn’t do anything to get rid of the sick, heavy feeling in his
gut. “They’re going to be fine, Eth,” Kimberly was saying. “They’re
tough. They’re fighters. They can out-run and out-kill just about
anything. Besides, they might even have the military over there
helping them.”

Ethan didn’t reply to that. He just closed
his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and
middle finger, shaking his head slowly. “If you say so, Kim,” he
murmured.

When Brandt regained consciousness, he was
disoriented and partially blinded by the lights above him. The
fluorescents, set into the tiled ceiling, sent stabs of pain
through his head, and he squinted, trying to reduce the brightness.
He started to assess what the hell had happened and where he was.
The lights made it almost impossible; he couldn’t think with the
ache in his head. He started to lift a hand to shade his eyes and
was surprised when his arm jerked to a stop only a few inches above
the mattress. A few more experimental tugs told him that his hands
were restrained. A few tugs of his legs suggested the same. He
craned his neck to the side, almost enough for it to be painful,
and saw that he had padded straps wrapped around his wrists, and
the ends of them were fastened to the metal rails on either side of
his bed.

“What the hell?” he whispered, keeping his
voice so low that it was almost inaudible.

A quick scan of his surroundings showed that
he was in some sort of hospital room, and the bed he was lying on
was one of those metal contraptions with rails, a too-thin
mattress, and an almost paper-flat pillow. Several machines were
hooked to him, including a heart monitor, which let out steady
beeps in time with his heart. He frowned at the sight of it and
rolled his head further to the side. He caught sight of the door
and froze.

There was a heavily armed soldier standing
guard at the door, his M4 rifle held at the ready, staring at him
almost unblinkingly. Brandt stared back, unsure if he should even
speak to the man watching him. Knowing his luck, the man would
swing that rifle around and put a bullet in his head the moment he
opened his mouth.

Thoughts of bullets brought the events he’d
witnessed just before being taken from Woodside crashing back. He
remembered the sight of the AH-60L DAP helicopters firing into the
houses inside the community. His stomach tried to revolt as he
thought about it, and he fought to swallow down the bile that was
trying to push itself up into his throat. Once it had settled
enough that he could speak without fear of vomiting, he turned his
eyes back to the soldier and asked hoarsely, “Where is my
wife?”

The soldier stared at him for a second
longer, then turned and slipped out the door, shutting it behind
him. Brandt frowned and turned his attention back to his
restraints, pulling and straining against them, trying to wiggle at
least one of his hands out of the strap so he could unfasten
himself. But it was no use. He still felt sick and weak from his
fever and his bout of unconsciousness, and he couldn’t get enough
leverage to pull anything free. But he couldn’t just give up, not
without knowing what had happened to Cade and the others.

His right hand had just begun to slip free
of its restraint when the hospital room’s door swung back open.
Three lab-coated doctors and two soldiers entered, all looking like
they meant business, and Brandt rapidly assessed them with his
eyes. The two soldiers were men, obviously the brawn of the group,
who looked so much alike that they could have been mistaken for
brothers, save for their different last names: one’s uniform was
labeled “Hutcherson,” and the other’s said, “Bayer.” They would
probably be his biggest threat if he found himself having to resort
to an escape attempt.

He turned his attention to the doctors in
the room instead. Two of them were men. One was a gray-haired,
pot-bellied white man who was clearly eating well despite the
apocalypse. The second male doctor was a young, somewhat skinny
black man who was listening to the other doctor’s chatter intently;
Brandt strained his ears, trying to make out what was being said,
but the voices were too low. Giving up on them, he turned his gaze
to the lone woman in the room, and his heart caught in his
throat.

He could have sworn that he was looking at
his wife. A woman who looked so strikingly like Cade that she could
have been Cade stood just behind the two male doctors. She watched
him with clinical detachment. Her eyes were the same icy blue, her
hair the same dark brown, her skin tone the same olive-like
complexion. He had to force his eyes away from her so he could
re-assess the rest of the room for changes, but his gaze kept
returning to her. He kept wondering how someone could be so much a
doppelganger for Cade.

“Where am I?” he finally ventured to ask,
and the two male doctors quieted and turned to him with the same
detachment that the woman had had.

The white doctor stepped closer, clipboard
in hand, looking like the pompous jackass that Brandt had expected.
“What is your name?” he asked, and Brandt scowled.

“I want to know where my wife is, damn it,”
Brandt replied. “
Where is Cade?
”

Just at the periphery of his hearing, he
heard the female doctor let out a surprised gasp.

“Your name, sir,” the doctor repeated, pen
poised over the clipboard in anticipation of his answer.

“Brandt—Michael Brandt Evans,” Brandt said
in frustration. “Where is everyone from Woodside?”

“Are you currently experiencing any pain?”
the doctor prompted.

“Who
are
you people?” Brandt
asked.

The doctor looked unaffected by his
reticence. “Are you currently experiencing any pain?” he
repeated.

“Yeah, in my ass,” Brandt snapped, and he
heard the female doctor let out a little giggle.

“Are you feeling any nausea, fever,
delirium? Any confusion or abnormal thoughts?”

“I’m experiencing plenty of confusion, doc,”
Brandt said. “Because
nobody’s answering my fucking
questions!
” His voice reverberated off the tile and the
concrete walls, and the doctors flinched at the sound.

Finally, the gray-haired doctor sighed and
beckoned to the two soldiers. “He seems fine. Secure him and take
him to his cell. I’ll let the major know that he’s conscious and
available for questioning.”

The two soldiers saluted and moved toward
the bed. His restraints were unfastened, but before he could make a
move, he was hauled into a sitting position, and his hands were
cuffed behind his back. “Off the bed, please,” Hutcherson said.

Bayer let the side rail down so Brandt could
get up.

“Would someone
please
answer my
questions?” Brandt asked. “Where
am
I?”

The female doctor seemed to take pity on
him, because she stepped forward and held up a hand to signal for
the soldiers to wait. “You’re in CDC medical facilities that have
been established in conjunction with the United States military,”
she explained, in an accent remarkably similar to Cade’s, only
thicker.

Relieved that he was finally getting some of
his questions answered, he asked, “So where are these
facilities?”

“I can’t give you an exact location,” the
woman said apologetically, “but I can tell you we’re near Bowling
Green, Kentucky.”

“Kentucky?” Brandt repeated. “What the hell
am I doing in Kentucky? And what happened to the rest of the people
from my community? And why was I taken into custody?”

The black doctor cleared his throat and said
quietly, “We don’t know anything about anyone else or any
community. You were the only person brought in. As for why, we
don’t know. That’s something that you’ll have to ask the
major.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” the gray-haired
doctor said. “Get him moving to his cell. We don’t have all
day.”

Before Brandt could protest, he was hauled
off the bed to his feet and steered toward the hospital room’s
door. It expelled him out into a hallway that was empty save for
him and the two soldiers. But not for long; seconds later, he heard
the click of high heels against the tiles as someone hurried to
catch up with them. He glanced over his shoulder to see the
dark-haired woman walking at a brisk pace, following them through
the winding halls of the facility and down multiple flights of
stairs until they reached a bona fide prison cell with a solid
steel door and a single slot to, presumably, slide food through.
Bayer opened the door and swung it wide, indicating that Brandt
should step inside.

“Excuse me,” the female doctor said, moving
to intercept. “I need to take his vitals before you lock the cell,
please.” She swept her hand toward the cell and addressed Brandt.
“If you’d please sit on the edge of the bed?” And to the soldiers,
“And if you’d wait at the door for me, it will only take a
second.”

Brandt obeyed, partially out of curiosity.
He sat on the edge of the bed and watched as she placed a bag onto
the absurdly thin mattress beside him. She opened it, pulled out a
stethoscope, and plugged it into her ears. Then she leaned over and
pressed the cup to his chest.

“Don’t react. Just listen,” she whispered as
she pretended to examine his lungs. “Deep breath,” she said
loudly.

He obeyed.

She continued in the same hushed voice as
before. “Things aren’t what they seem here. Don’t tell them
anything.”

He schooled his features into impassivity as
she moved the stethoscope’s cup to his upper back and added, “As
for your community, I’m not sure it exists anymore.”

It took everything in Brandt to not respond,
to not react in the slightest to her statement, but he did manage
to whisper, “What makes you think that?”

“I overheard Major Bradford talking,” she
said. “I don’t know what everything he said meant, but he mentioned
a MOAB, and I
know
what that is.”