The Becoming (9 page)

“Not without Anna,” Ethan said stubbornly. He moved the keys out of Cade’s reach. Cade growled under her breath and rolled her eyes. She snagged his wrist and pulled his arm back to her. Then she started to pry his fingers apart. Ethan fought against her painful grip on his wrist, but he couldn’t withstand her attack for long. Cade smirked with triumph as she wrested the keys from Ethan and looped them around her own finger.

“Ethan Bennett, get in the fucking car before I kick your damned ass,” Cade ordered. She pointed at the car door. “And you
know
I can do it, too. We’ve been down
that
road before.” She grabbed a fistful of Ethan’s jacket and shoved him inside the Jeep. She slammed the door once he was in the seat and gave the door a kick with the toe of her boot for good measure. “Fucking men,” she muttered. She circled to the driver’s-side door and climbed in.

“What about Anna?” Ethan demanded as Cade slid into the seat and grabbed for her seatbelt. Cade turned her head and stared at Ethan coldly for a long moment. She had to be cold about it, had to be focused on what she was doing, because Ethan wasn’t going to like the one option she was about to give him. Getting emotional alongside him would only make their situation worse.

“What about her?” Cade asked shortly. “We can’t stay here and hope she walks out of that building. Look at it, Ethan!” She pointed through the windshield. The building still crackled and burned almost merrily against the nearly black night sky, the cheerfulness of the blaze like a slap in the face. “She’s not going to come out of it!”

“We’re not leaving without her!” Ethan exploded. He turned in his seat to glare at Cade. Cade stood her ground and glared right back at him as she gripped the steering wheel with one hand. Her knuckles turned white with the strength of her grasp as she struggled against the urge to punch Ethan in the head.

“Ethan,” Lisa said quietly from the back seat. Her voice was reluctant enough to make Cade turn her attention to Lisa in the rearview mirror. She wondered what the woman could possibly have to say. Lisa’s face was drawn from the effort of keeping her wound from bleeding. Cade wrapped her own free hand around the gear-shift and pressed her foot on the brake as she prepared to change gears. “Ethan, I think Anna is dead,” Lisa finally said.

Cade drove the SUV well out of the city before she bothered to pull over to consult a map. She eased the vehicle off into the grass at the side of the road and pushed the gear-shift into park. She turned to look back at Lisa. The woman lay slumped sideways across both seats, her eyes closed. Earlier, Cade had stopped the car just outside of the city limits to help Lisa bandage her shoulder and give her painkillers from a bottle of Advil in the console. She figured that sleep was good for Lisa at that point. The woman was shaken up from what she’d experienced at the hospital; Cade didn’t begrudge her whatever rest she could get.

Cade leaned across Ethan and hit the switch on the front of the glove box with her thumb. The box’s door fell open and banged the man in the passenger seat across his knees. Ethan didn’t react to the impact; he just continued to stare out the side window despondently. Cade rolled her eyes again and snatched the map book from the glove box. She flipped it open to the T section.

“You know, you’re not the only person who’s lost someone tonight,” Cade said softly, her accent thick with emotion. She didn’t bother to look at Ethan. Instead, her eyes skimmed the map of Tennessee as she looked for the SUV’s general location.

“I know,” Ethan said simply. He continued to stare out the window as Cade trailed her finger over the paper. She found their location and studied it carefully, looking at all of the surrounding roads and trying to decide on their next move. “We should get off this road,” Ethan added. He finally tore his eyes from the window and looked at Cade for just a moment.

“Yeah, I think so too,” Cade agreed. She set the book on her thigh and took his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “We’re going to be okay, right?” she asked as she laced their fingers together.

“I sincerely hope so.”

Cade swallowed and closed her eyes as a surge of emotion welled up and nearly choked her. The only thing she could think of was Josie and Anna and Andrew, and it was almost too much for her to handle. But Cade had to stop thinking about it, because that would do nothing but distract her from the task of getting the three of them out of the city and to Ethan’s mother’s house. Cade took several deep breaths and squeezed the steering wheel with both hands. She pushed everything to the back of her mind with a mighty shove and buried it all there deeply, where it wouldn’t suddenly surface at an inconvenient time.

Cade opened her blue eyes and dropped her gaze back to the map book in her lap. She mentally centered herself the same way she used to when she was assigned a task in her time in the IDF. It was all about focusing herself and keeping her mind on the task at hand and not letting anything distract her from it. She passed the map to Ethan and asked, “So what do you think?” It was a poor attempt to draw Ethan away from his sadness, to distract him. Thankfully, it worked.

Ethan bowed his head and looked over the map thoughtfully. Cade could practically see gears turning in Ethan’s head as he studied the paper. “How about here?” he asked. He pointed to one of the highways crossing the state. “I think we should stick with highways instead of interstates to avoid traffic.”

Cade leaned across the seats to look at the route to which Ethan pointed. “That’s a long drive. I hope you’re ready to help out,” Cade said. She checked the rearview and side mirrors before she shifted the car back into drive and eased out onto the road once more. “Is Lisa okay back there?”

Ethan twisted around in his seat to look. He reached back and pressed his fingers gently against Lisa’s cheek, holding them there for a moment. “Yeah, she’s breathing, if that’s what you mean,” he answered. “She’s running a bit of a fever, though.” Ethan sighed with exhaustion and rubbed his face once he’d pulled his arm back into the front seat. “She could probably use the sleep. Hell,
I
could use the sleep.”

Cade tilted the rearview mirror down for a moment to get a better look at the sleeping woman. “You don’t think she’s getting an infection or something from that injury of hers, do you?”

“I’m not sure. It might be too soon for infection to be showing, you know?” He unbuckled his seatbelt. “Pull over again. Let me get in the back.” Cade let out an annoyed sigh before she eased the Jeep back onto the shoulder. Ethan was out the passenger door and into the back seat within seconds. Cade started to drive again as Ethan woke Lisa and steadied her. He pushed the shoulder of her scrubs aside and gently probed at her wound through the bandage.

“Maybe we should find a doctor,” Cade suggested. Ethan removed the bandage she and Lisa had taped over the wound earlier. Even as Lisa looked on the verge of drifting off again, Ethan peeled the gauze back from the wound; the bandage stuck sickly to the injury. Ethan let out a shocked gasp as it finally pulled fully away from the wound.

“Fuck, I think you’re right,” Ethan said. His trembling voice made Cade nervous. “I think maybe you need to take a look at this.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the closest thing we’ve got to a doctor right now.”

Cade slowed the Jeep down and adjusted the rearview mirror once again to see Lisa’s shoulder. Her foot slipped off the gas as she caught a glimpse of the wound. She quickly shifted her foot to the brake to slow down even more as she gaped at what she saw.

“There’s no way that’s possible,” Cade said. She hated the way her voice shook as she spoke. She grimaced and tried to steady it. What she saw made that exceptionally difficult. “Ethan, it looks like it’s …
festering
.”

“I know,” Ethan said quietly.

“But … that’s not possible,” Cade added with a short shake of her head. “I mean, so soon after the injury? It should take
days
to get that bad. Maybe even weeks!”

“I know,” Ethan repeated.

The wound looked like none Cade had ever seen before, and she’d seen a lot of injuries in her life. It looked like an actual bite wound from a human. In a rapid succession of glances in the rearview mirror, Cade could see the indentations and punctures from teeth that were the perfect size for an adult human being. The wound didn’t look fresh, like it had thirty minutes earlier. Instead, it was steadily beginning to blacken; the skin around the wound had become inflamed, strange red streaks radiating out from it into the uninjured tissue nearby.

Cade sucked in a deep, steadying breath and looked out the windshield once more, attempting to keep her attention on the road ahead of them. “What do we do, Eth?” she asked. “That’s definitely bad enough to need a doctor. There’s no way I can handle that on my own. She’s going to need drugs and shots and stuff for it before it kills her. Do we find her a doctor in the next town, or should we continue on to Gadsden and try to find her one there?”

Ethan covered Lisa’s wound with fresh gauze before he spoke again. “I think we should take her by a doctor or an ER in the next city,” he decided. “Especially since she looks like she keeps dropping in and out on us. I’m not even sure she’s totally conscious at the moment. Give me the map, let me take a look.” He leaned between the seats and held his arm out for the book. Cade found it on the passenger seat and passed it back to him. Ethan stayed between the front and back seats as he looked at the map. “Think she can hold out until Holly Springs, Mississippi?”

Cade tried to get another glimpse of Lisa in the mirror, but Ethan’s concerned face blocked her view. “I hope so. Is she definitely running a fever?”

Ethan sat back again and touched Lisa’s forehead and cheek in turn with his wrist before he nodded. “Yeah, she’s burning up. It’s got to be over a hundred.”

Cade swore under her breath and pressed down harder on the gas pedal. “I’ll try to hurry,” she said as the dark scenery flew by. “The sooner we can get her some help, the better.”

Thirty minutes passed without further comment on Lisa’s condition, though Cade constantly glanced in the rearview mirror to make sure the other woman was still alive. Cade didn’t know why she was so afraid she’d find the woman dead; perhaps it was the way Lisa seemed to be falling in and out of consciousness, bordering on sleep one moment and blinking half-awake the next. Perhaps it was the nature of Lisa’s injury, the way it seemed to be rotting out, eating into her skin and sliding into her bloodstream. Cade had no idea how long it would take for something like that to kill a person, especially at the speed it seemed to be spreading.

Ethan had moved back to the front passenger seat to help Cade navigate once they’d settled on a temporary destination. They listened to the police scanner, trying to find out anything they could about the situation in Memphis. Cade was surprised to discover that the outbreak of rioting wasn’t confined to just Memphis and Atlanta. On the radio, stations reported similar outbreaks of riots, fires, and murders in cities like Birmingham, New Orleans, Mobile, and Biloxi. The interstates were jammed with vehicles as the populations of those cities tried in vain to flee the chaos. It seemed as if, in one single night, the entire world had gone to hell.

Ethan changed the station to check for updates from other DJs every few minutes. After what seemed like the millionth time he’d twisted the dial on the radio, Cade let out an exasperated sigh. “Eth, you’re driving me nuts with the constant station changing.”

Ethan threw the map book on the floorboard in frustration and let go of the radio’s tuner. “
Fuck,
” he snapped. “What the hell is going on? I can barely keep up with all this shit.”

“It’s not just around here,” Cade said. “It sounds like it’s almost everywhere. Like it’s … I don’t know.” Cade rubbed her eyes with the heel of a hand and sighed. She dropped her hand as a thought occurred to her. “You don’t think that that virus has something to do with it, do you?” Cade vaguely remembered asking Ethan the question two nights before when they were on the phone, but in the hectic events that had followed the phone call, Cade had forgotten until this moment that she’d never gotten more than an “I don’t know” from him.

“Virus?” Ethan repeated vacantly as he turned his eyes back onto the map. “What virus?”

“The illness that was going around Atlanta,” Cade clarified. “You remember? The one you were asking me about that was in the newspaper. The one the hospitals are having so many problems treating.”

Ethan sat quiet in thought for a moment before he acknowledged, “It sort of makes sense. But at the same time, it doesn’t. I mean, what kind of virus would make people act like
that?
” Ethan jabbed his finger in the direction of the in-dash radio. Cade couldn’t help but agree with him.

“I’ve never heard of one,” Cade admitted. She glanced at him again. “I don’t think a virus like that exists.”

“But
something
exists,” Ethan pointed out. He looked out the window. “
Something
is making these people crazy.
Something
is causing all these riots and murders. And I don’t think that that
something
is anything that’s been seen before.”

“I don’t think it is either,” Cade said. She looked in the rearview mirror to check on Lisa and saw, to her surprise, that the other woman was sitting up in the back seat, her dark eyes watching Cade with a steady gaze. “Hey, Lisa. You feel any better?”