Jessica Meigs - The Becoming (6 page)

“AED?” Jonathan suggested.

“And O2,” Theo added. He grabbed the pediatric bag and emptied its contents onto the floor before stuffing two full portable oxygen tanks into it. At the dubious look on Jonathan’s face, he added, “Don’t worry. I’ll carry it.”

Jonathan nodded, grabbing the AED and slinging the strap over his shoulder. After a moment’s pause, Theo scooped up the intubation kit and added it to the two bags he was going to carry. “I just hope you don’t add anything else,” Jonathan admitted, reaching for the back door of the ambulance. He paused, his hand resting on the handle, and looked back at him. “Look, before we step out, I’ve got to ask this,” he started. “I have to know how far you’re willing to go. How far you’re
capable
of going. I’ve got to know that I can rely on you in something like this.”

“Something like what?” Theo asked impatiently. He was itching to get moving, itching to set out and find his brother, and Jonathan’s talk was doing nothing but slowing him down from setting out on his self-imposed mission.

“Just…listen for a minute,” Jonathan said, not sounding the slightest bit impatient with Theo. He fell silent, and they both listened to the sporadic gunfire outside, the shouts and screams from the people beyond. “It sounds bad out there,” he said. “Really bad. A war zone, like I said. I’ve been in one of those before, but you haven’t. I need to know, Theo. Would you kill someone if you had to? Are you
capable
of killing someone? Don’t answer right away. Just…think about it for a moment.”

And so Theo did. He stood there, his fingers clutching the straps of one of bags he’d packed, staring at Jonathan through the darkness in the back of the ambulance, listening to the chaos outside. His heart pounded erratically in his chest, and the smallest tendril of adrenaline began to creep up his spine. Could he kill someone?
Would
he? It was a hard question. Theo had always been the type of person who helped other people, not hurt them. He was in the emergency-medicine profession to do that very thing. But now he was being asked to contemplate something that very much went against his nature, and he wasn’t sure what to say.

Theo shifted his eyes away from his driver and down to the floor, staring emptily at the dead patient lying on the stretcher in a haphazard heap. He thought about Gray, about the promise he’d made in his heart the minute he’d been old enough to understand his duties as an older brother. He had always assured both himself and Gray that he’d protect him, that he’d keep the bullies and the other people who would do awful things to him at bay, that he would, in fact, do everything in his power to make sure Gray was always safe from harm. Especially after their parents had died. Theo would do
anything
for Gray. He’d even kill for him, if that was what it took. There was no doubt in his mind about that.

Theo tore his eyes from the body and lifted them back onto Jonathan. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely, his voice low in the otherwise quiet ambulance. “Yeah, I’d kill if I needed to. If it meant protecting my brother, I’d do it.”

“That’s good to hear,” Jonathan acknowledged. “Because there’s a chance you might actually have to.” He tugged on the door’s latch and pushed his foot against the door. It fell open, hitting the pavement beyond with a scrape and a thud. Jonathan went to work on the second door. “Once I get us in the clear, I’ll take some of that off your shoulders,” he promised. “And then we can start running.” He managed to swing the door open and locked it into place, then looked back at Theo. “Let’s go,” he said, taking a slow, cautious step out of the truck.

There was a loud pop. Jonathan jerked to the side and collapsed, lying halfway on the bottom door. Theo stumbled backward, his mind reeling, as his eyes registered the sight of the bullet hole in the side of Jonathan’s head.

Chapter 7

Gray paced impatiently back and forth alongside the pool table on which April’s body lay, the fingers of his left hand curled so tightly around his cell phone that his knuckles hurt. He ignored the pain, ignored the throbbing in his skull and the deep ache in his chest as he struggled to catch his breath. It felt like adrenaline had snatched the air from his lungs in the time since he’d called Theo, and he fought to not dial his brother’s number again. He had said he was coming. Bothering him by redialing his number over and over wouldn’t get him there any faster. It was already too late for Gray’s immediate need, anyway.

April had died five minutes before, shortly after Gray had placed his initial call to Theo. She’d bled out, her blood pouring from her wound and spilling across the green felt of the pool table, soaking through the towels Jack had kept pressed against the wound. No one had managed to get through on the emergency line in the interim. There hadn’t been much they could do for her. She’d died, and they hadn’t been able to stop it.

Gray ran both hands back through his hair, ignoring the sticky blood still staining them. He paced to the end of the table and then turned sharply on his heel to go back the other way. He managed to avoid looking at April’s body, lying on the table, cool and pale. He didn’t want to think about what had happened to her. He didn’t want to think about how her hair looked, tangled and disheveled, spread under and around her head like a dark halo. He couldn’t wrap his mind around any of it, so he simply shut it out. His chest still felt tight. He knew he needed to sit down, needed to take it easy and force himself to calm down before he worked himself into an asthma attack. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. His nerves wouldn’t let him.

“Gray, please, sit,” Jack begged from somewhere behind him. “There’s enough going on without you driving me crazy walking all over the place.”

Gray ignored him, though he abandoned his pacing to move toward the front doors. The shooting had begun outside not long after Gray, Jack, and the bouncer—Brendon was his name, Gray had learned—had brought April inside after they’d managed to disable their two attackers. It seemed like an absolute nightmare had broken out beyond the doors, and in light of the violence outside, Brendon had thought it prudent to barricade the doors, to keep the shooters and any other people who might have wished to do them harm out of the bar. None of them had any idea what was going on out there. Gray had more than once considered calling Theo back to ask him, but considering Theo hadn’t mentioned anything when he
did
call him, Gray suspected that Theo didn’t know either. It seemed like the entire world had collapsed around them in just a short hour. Gray had no idea how to even begin to cope with it.

“Gray, please,” Jack said again. He sounded exhausted. Gray paused and turned on his heel to look at the older man. “Just sit, okay? You’re driving me nuts. Besides, we need to figure out what we’re going to do.”

“Do?” Gray repeated. “We’re going to call the fucking cops, Jack. That’s all we
can
do.”

“We need to get out of here,” Jack replied. “It sounds bad out there. Really bad. I don’t think we should stick around in here that much long—”

“We
call the police,
” Gray said again, more emphatically than before, raising his voice as he glared at Jack. “We can’t just leave. There’s a
dead body
in here! April’s dead! The cops need to—”

“We can’t call the police, Gray,” Jack interrupted. “We can’t get through!”

“But we can’t just leave her here!” Gray protested. He sank into a chair, slowly, leaning over to rest his elbows against his thighs. He didn’t look at Jack, directing his next words to the floorboards beneath him. “I can’t leave her here. I can’t just…I don’t know.”

“The police aren’t going to come,” Brendon spoke up. “There’s a lot going on out there right now. I don’t think they’d have a few minutes to come out and investigate the attack on you guys when they have people running around with guns out there. It’d be total backburner stuff, especially since she’s already dead.”

“And what the hell
is
going on out there?” Gray demanded. He stood, taking a few brisk steps toward one of the windows to peer out into the darkness beyond. The parking lot was poorly lit, but he could just make out several people running down the street and could hear the pop of a gun firing. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Never even
heard
of anything like this. Do you think it’s a riot or something? Maybe some sort of uprising against the government or something like that?”

“If it was an uprising against the government, it’d make more sense if it was up in Jackson,” Jack mused. He moved to join Gray, and they stood staring into the darkness for several long moments of silence.

“Zombies,” Gray murmured as the thought occurred to him.

Jack gave him a startled look. “What?”

“It’s zombies,” Gray said. “It’s got to be. I mean, hell, that guy bit April. He
bit
her. Think about it, Jack. That’s what zombies do, right? They bite people. They, like, eat them and shit.”

“Gray…is the lack of oxygen from your asthma starting to affect your brain?” Jack asked. “There’s no such thing as zombies.”

“But how do you
know
that?” Gray persisted. “Those two guys who attacked me and April, they’ve got all the hallmarks of a fucking Romero film. They were trying to bite me, they
did
bite April, and they stank to high heaven, like a damned corpse or something. Maybe there’s been some sort of lab accident somewhere or something, and a bunch of dead people are going around trying to, I don’t know, eat the living or whatever it is that zombies do.”

Jack stared at him for a moment, the look in his eyes clearly incredulous. “Gray, I do believe you’ve finally cracked.”

“I have not!”

Jack shook his head and leaned against the wall beside the window, crossing his arms over his chest. “Okay then, genius. Where are all the zombie hordes like you see in the movies? There’s supposed to be massive crowds of them out there, right?”

Gray shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe?”

Jack sighed. “You know what I think? I think it’s just a bunch of people rioting, and you’ve been watching
way
too many horror movies.”

Gray huffed out a breath and crossed his own arms, squinting as he noticed movement in the shadows near the edge of the parking lot. “So you still think we should leave?” he asked, trying to ignore the veiled insult to his intelligence that Jack had dropped on him. “You still think we should ditch out of here? Where would we go?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure your brother would appreciate it if I got you home,” Jack started. “I know how he is. I have no doubt he’s in a panic right now trying to get over here to make sure you’re okay.”

“Yeah, probably,” Gray acknowledged. He wasn’t going to admit that, deep inside, he was in a fair amount of panic himself, stressing over whether Theo was okay. Being out in the town with things the way they were, even inside an ambulance, had to be incredibly dangerous. Theo was all he had; he didn’t want to risk losing him. “My car is right outside,” Gray started to say. “Maybe we could—” A loud thud at the front doors cut him off, and he and Jack were both brought around by the sound. “What was that?”

“Sounded like someone at the door,” Jack murmured.

“Or some
thing,
” Gray added grimly. He ignored the look Jack gave him in favor of stepping away from the window, edging toward the door. Another thud echoed through the room, and Brendon and Smitty both circled around the counter to join the two of them as they backed toward the center of the room.

“Think we should check?” Jack asked quietly.

“No,” Gray replied. “No, I don’t think so. I think it’d be better if we just pretended like nobody was in here. I mean, there’s a reason we barricaded the doors, right?”

“I think I agree with him,” Brendon spoke up. “We should just stay inside, keep our mouths shut, and let them just go away.”

The thudding at the door became more insistent, sounding more like fists—several fists—beating on it in a discordant rhythm that sent chills up Gray’s spine. He gripped his cell phone tighter, gliding his thumb over the keypad, searching for the “send call” button. Smitty walked briskly to the door, moving beside it to peer out the window nearby, trying to make out what was outside.

“Anybody got a flashlight?” Smitty asked, his hushed voice sounding even louder than it should have in the otherwise empty bar. When nobody stepped forward to offer him one, he motioned to Brendon. “Get me the one behind the bar. It’s over near the shotgun.”

“You’ve got a shotgun, and you didn’t mention it?” Jack asked. “You know we could probably use that, right?”

“Nobody uses my shotgun but me,” Smitty said sternly. He glanced at Brendon. “Bring the shotgun too while you’re at it. Kid’s got a point. We might need it.”

Brendon started for the bar as Smitty squinted into the darkness again. A hand slammed against the glass, and the man staggered back from the window, stumbling over a stool and almost falling. Jack rushed forward to catch him, helping him stay on his feet. The beating outside the doors became more insistent, more frantic, and it was accompanied by the sound of shouting. No, not shouting, Gray realized. It was
growling
. It was animalistic snarling and groaning and moaning. The sounds sent chills up his spine, and the thought of zombies suddenly no longer seemed quite so absurd. He bit back the nausea welling in his throat, even as the front doors were shoved inward. The tables and chairs blocking the door scraped against the floorboards as they gave a few inches under the onslaught from the other side of the door. Gray took a few steps back, closer to the table where April’s body lay. He turned on his heel, intending to search out something to use as a weapon, and that was when his eyes landed on the pool table.

April’s body was gone.

“April?” Gray called out, scanning the darkness in the corners of the bar. He looked back over his shoulder to Jack, who was giving him a quizzical look. “April’s gone!”

“Gone? What the fuck do you mean, April’s gone?” Jack demanded, taking a couple of steps toward him.