The Becoming (28 page)

“You okay?” Ethan asked. He helped Nikola to her feet, grasping her hand and pulling her up.

“Yeah. She didn’t bite me, thank God,” Nikola breathed. She wasted no time in retrieving her baseball bat. She gripped it in both hands and glared at the girl. “You need to shoot her,” she declared.

“What? She’s dead,” Ethan protested. Truth be told, he was reluctant to even consider desecrating the girl’s body further than it already had been. He might have been able to shoot infected out on the street like it was nothing, but this was
Josie
. “She’s not—”

“Did she
look
dead to you?” Nikola snapped. “Shoot her!” Her gaze was still locked onto the small girl’s body, and she took a step back as her eyes widened. “Ethan, she’s getting back up,” she said shakily.

Ethan turned to look for himself. As he watched, Josie stirred and maneuvered her thin arms underneath herself, pushing up off the floor and slowly regaining her feet. “Jesus,” Ethan breathed. Cade’s bedroom was past Josie. Ethan couldn’t see them managing to get past Josie and keep her at bay as they collected supplies and carried them out of there. Not with the manic, hungry look in the girl’s once-brown eyes.

Nikola was right, and Ethan knew it. He was going to have to put Josie down. He should have done it the month before, when he’d shot Andrew. He was going to have to do it before Josie hurt them or anyone else. The little girl didn’t deserve to linger like that.

“Ethan,” Nikola warned. She ducked behind him, taking shelter behind his body. Her baseball bat nudged him in the small of his back, but he ignored the sensation as he lifted his gun. Josie had gained her feet again, and she started toward them once more. Ethan took a careful step back, goading Nikola back a step or two, and then he aimed for Josie’s head. He squeezed the trigger.

Josie’s body fell to the floor with a heavy thud. Ethan closed his eyes, looking away as a surge of pain rocked through his chest. Ethan’s hand shook as he remained in the center of the hallway, shielding Nikola protectively. After a long silence, Nikola pushed gently against his arm, and he finally lowered the weapon.

“Thanks,” Nikola said softly. She glanced to the body on the floor and cleared her throat. “What exactly are we in here to get? Because whatever it is, I think we’re going to have to hurry and get it. That noise is going to attract a bunch of them here, and I don’t think we can kill them all.”

Ethan hesitated, staring blankly at the small heap of person on the floor. His palms sweated, grossly damp against the grip of his gun. He mechanically holstered the weapon before he wiped his palms down the thighs of his jeans. He looked at Nikola in silence. He had to hold it together, at the very least for her. Falling apart from the horror of having to shoot Josie wouldn’t do either of them any good. He was responsible for Nikola; he was the only one willing and able to protect the skinny, dirty teenager standing with him, trying valiantly to block his view of the little girl’s partially decomposed body.

Ethan blinked and straightened, squaring his shoulders. Partially decomposed? He nudged Nikola aside, pressing his hand to her shoulder as he pushed her against the wall. As much as it pained him to do so, Ethan went to the small corpse on the floor and nudged her with his shoe. She didn’t move, so he knelt down and rolled her onto her back.

Ethan took care not to look at Josie’s face. The thought alone was unbearable; he was sure that actually doing so would make him lose it. Instead, he focused on her wounds, the ones she’d sustained the month prior at the hands of Cade’s boyfriend, Andrew. A horrible thought began to form in his mind.

Ethan was no doctor, but in his line of work, he’d witnessed quite a few crime scenes involving violent deaths. And in that time, he’d quickly learned that there were certain types of injuries from which a person could not recover. While the resiliency of the human body sometimes astounded him, there were situations in which a person was toast without question. As his brain worked feverishly to disassociate the body in front of him from the little girl whom he had known, Ethan was forced to acknowledge that the injuries Josie had suffered were ones from which she shouldn’t have been able to recover. Especially not with the extreme loss of blood that she had experienced. Which meant…

“Jesus Christ,” Ethan breathed.

Nikola heard the fear in his voice and stepped forward. “What? What is it?”

“They come back,” Ethan said. He looked up at her, his green eyes wide. “They come back after they’re dead.”

Nikola gaped at him like a fish. Her mouth opened and closed several times before she stammered out, “What … wait,
what?
That’s not even … I mean, is that
possible?
When you’re dead, you’re dead.” She paused, her eyes on Ethan, and swallowed hard before she asked uncertainly, “Right?”

“Honestly? I don’t even know anymore,” Ethan admitted. He stood and wiped his hands on his thighs again, keeping his eyes on Nikola. “One month ago, this little girl was dead. But no more than thirty minutes after she died, she and that man there,” he nodded toward Andrew’s body at the head of the stairs, “attacked me and Cade.”

“What did you do?” Nikola asked. She watched Ethan intently in the dark hallway.

“I shot him. In the head,” Ethan explained haltingly. “But I couldn’t … I just couldn’t shoot Josie. So I just left her. I didn’t think…”

Nikola shook her head and moved toward him. “What are we in here for?” she asked. It was an obvious attempt to distract him, but Ethan welcomed it.

Ethan shook himself from the grief welling up inside him and moved toward Cade’s bedroom. “This is Cade’s house,” he explained. “She has a thing for collecting knives and guns and all sorts of fun yet deadly things.”

“And you’re thinking maybe we can get a few more guns to protect ourselves with?” Nikola suggested as she followed him.

“Exactly. Assuming no one has been in here since we left, there should at least be some ammunition for my gun,” Ethan confirmed. He stepped into Cade’s bedroom and looked around thoughtfully. A crash sounded downstairs, echoing up to meet them. “Shit. We’ve got to go faster. We’re about to have some company,” Ethan said. He dropped to the floor and slid halfway under the bed. To his relief, several empty handguns were wedged into the slats on the underside of the bed, presumably where Cade had stuffed them before Josie’s visit the month before. He grabbed them and slid out from beneath the bed.

“Closet,” Ethan said to Nikola as he emerged from under the bed. The teenager gave him a confused look. “There’s a safe inside. Combination 22-33-22.” She darted to the closet door and opened it, letting out a surprised gasp.

“I wasn’t expecting
this,
” Nikola said as she beheld the tall gun safe inside. “I figured it’d be one of those little box safe deals.” She spun the combination dial as Ethan went to the dresser and pulled open the large bottom drawer.

“Cade has all sorts of goodies hidden around here,” Ethan said as he dug boxes of ammunition out of the drawer. “Unfortunately, we don’t have time to hunt for it all, and I doubt we could carry it all anyway,” he added regretfully. He tore into a box of bullets for the handguns. He opened his shoulder bag and started to shake the bullets directly into the bag.

Nikola pulled the safe’s door open with both hands. “Yeah, but she’s got the awesomest shotguns
ever
in here,” she gushed.

“Don’t touch them,” Ethan warned. He added some shotgun shells to his bag. “I don’t want you messing with any of the guns in here. You could get hurt.”

“Yeah, and I could get my face munched on by one of those things out there,” Nikola pointed out. She went to the door and stepped halfway into the hall to look out. “They’re definitely in the house. What’s the plan to get out of here, anyway?”

Ethan went to the gun safe and pulled out one of the shotguns. He looked it over before he opened it to see if it was loaded. Of course it wasn’t; Cade didn’t keep loaded weapons in her house unless she had been by herself for a while and had been having a particularly interesting bout of paranoia or nightmares. Ethan grabbed another box of shotgun shells from the dresser drawer and dumped the heavy box onto the dresser top. He started to load the shotgun, sliding the shells into place, as he watched the doorway.

“We’ll shoot our way out if we have to,” Ethan finally said. He snapped the shotgun closed and chambered a round. The ominous noise drew Nikola’s attention, and she swallowed hard. “I prefer doing this a little more sneakily, to be honest. We need to get out of the house as quickly as possible.”

Nikola averted her eyes to look past him. He followed her gaze to the window. “Window?” she suggested. “We can maybe walk along the roof and climb down the big tree at the corner of the house.”

“It’s a thought, but I don’t know what it looks like out there,” Ethan admitted. He paused long enough to take a shoulder strap from the safe and fasten it to the shotgun. He slung the weapon over his shoulder and went to the window, unlocking it and pushing it up. It looked large enough for him to fit through, and he nodded to Nikola as he put one leg out over the sill. “Stay here, close to the window, okay? I’m going to step out and see what the situation is out here.”

Nikola nodded, her eyes wide with nervousness as she hefted her aluminum baseball bat and moved closer to the window. Ethan gave her a reassuring smile before he slipped out onto the roof. His head barely cleared the window frame, and he grabbed the frame in one hand to keep from falling as he gained his footing on the sloped roof.

A cold wind blew across the trees and roof, a product of the slowly darkening day. Evening was falling swiftly, and the darkness was only going to make their attempt at evacuation that much more perilous. Ethan forced out a slow breath to steady his nerves before he eased away from the window. He crouched low to the roof as he made his way to the edge, keeping a hand pressed firmly to the rough shingles beneath him. His tenuous grip on the roof wouldn’t save him if he slipped and fell. He pressed his lips together as the thought occurred to him and dropped to his knees. He leaned to look over the edge of the roof at the ground below, both hands gripping the metal rain gutter lining the edge of the roof as he checked the yard around the house.

To Ethan’s surprise, the front yard was virtually empty. There was activity around the back of the house, but the yard was quiet and still. He supposed most of the infected had already made their way inside or around the back to the patio doors, which would have been the path of least resistance. Ethan edged to the side of the house and looked around the base of the tree at the corner. Nothing was there either. Ethan was leery about going all the way around the house and leaving Nikola virtually defenseless in Cade’s bedroom, so instead he stuck to the areas they would need right away.

Ethan eased onto his feet to look down the street. His motorcycle lay half a block away, resting on its side in the middle of the street. The failing sunlight glinted dully off its red finish. It was the best bet he and Nikola had to get out of there, he thought as he went back to the window. He knelt and beckoned to Nikola.

“It’s clear on the front and the side of the house where the tree is,” Ethan murmured to her. He kept his voice low out of an abundance of caution. “I think we’re going to go with your plan to get out of the house. How do you feel about motorcycles?”

Nikola sucked in a soft breath. “I’ve never been on one,” she admitted. “My dad would have killed me if I’d even tried it.”

“Well, you’re going to have to learn real fast how to ride on the back of one, because I want my bike,” Ethan said with a small smirk. He offered Nikola his hand. “Come on, get out here with me. We’ve got a tree to climb down, and we’re going to have to do it quietly.”

Nikola put a cautious hand in Ethan’s, carefully climbing out onto the roof with his help. Ethan left her there for a moment to duck back into the bedroom. He grabbed another shotgun and a large hunting knife off the dresser. He figured it was better to have extra firepower in case they needed it. Then he joined Nikola on the roof once more. Together, they stepped off the roof and into the tree’s branches to climb down to the ground below.

Cade groaned painfully as she opened her eyes. She stared up at the RV’s kitchenette, which was now on the ceiling above her. A heavy weight rested half on top of her. She blinked and focused on it, and she discovered that it was Brandt, lying protectively over her. He made a face as he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He looked down at her for a moment as if assessing her level of consciousness, and then he stood. Glass crunched loudly under his boots.

“Everybody okay?” Brandt called out as he retrieved Cade’s rifle. Cade scrambled to her knees and winced as a sharp pain shot through her right hand. A large shard of glass from the broken dishes had embedded itself into her palm. She swore under her breath, letting out a string of colorful curse words as she pulled the wedge of glass carefully from her flesh.

“Yeah, I think so,” Cade muttered as she gained her feet. She clenched her hand and winced at the fresh wave of pain that rippled through the wound.

“I think your friend got knocked out or something,” Remy called weakly from the front of the RV. Cade accepted her rifle from Brandt and slung it over her shoulder where it belonged.

“Shit,” Brandt muttered. He rubbed at the side of his head and climbed toward the front of the RV. His boots crunched over shattered glass with every step. Brandt reached the front of the RV quickly enough and hefted Theo up off of Remy. He shifted the paramedic’s unconscious form toward Cade, who caught Theo under the arm and slung his arm over her shoulder. “You need a hand?” Brandt offered to Remy. He didn’t bother to wait for the young woman’s reply; instead, he wrapped his free arm around her waist and lifted her easily from the driver’s seat.