The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege (27 page)

The last person on his list was Isaac
Wright. He hadn’t seen the man since the meeting they’d had
earlier. Isaac was likely upstairs. He hadn’t decided what he was
going to do with him yet; it probably involved figuratively
shackling him to Cade and giving him orders to ensure she survived
anything that came her way.

Sure, Cade could survive anything that came
her way on her own, but
he
would feel better if he knew
Isaac was there to back her up in the event that he wasn’t.

Decisions made, Brandt stepped out onto the
front porch and turned his attention to the gates, studying them as
well as he could in the low light. What he saw made his heart
sink.

“That gate is
not
going to last much
longer,” he murmured, taking a few steps toward it so he could get
a better look. It was leaning inward, bowing precariously under the
weight of the infected on the other side, and he started
recalculating their survival chances as he reassessed how long they
had until the infected got in.

Not long enough, clearly.

As he stared at the gates, willing them to
stand upright under the onslaught of infected, they wobbled,
wavering under the pressure. Brandt’s heart jumped up from his
knees to his throat. “Son of a bitch,” he choked out as everything
he stood to lose flooded his mind: Cade, their unborn child,
safety, security, his
life
, the lives of everyone! He
stuffed his heart back down where it belonged and bucked up his
courage and determination. It was time for plan B, his fallback
should the community find itself in the situation it was in now.
With one last glance toward the gates and another at the main
house, he started jogging toward the courtyard near the center of
Woodside, aiming for the military Humvee parked there.

Several months before, when they’d run into
trouble in Atlanta and Ethan had stayed behind to die so they could
live and Cade had lain bleeding in his arms from a gunshot wound,
Brandt had taken the few of them that were still alive through the
dangerous streets of downtown Atlanta to the Tabernacle on Luckie
Street. During the outbreak in Atlanta, the military had
commandeered the former church-turned-concert-venue to use as a
staging post and command center, and he’d thought he could use the
radio to get in touch with someone in charge that could fly them
out. He hadn’t succeeded—his pleas for help to Major Bradford were
refused, with the excuse that it was “too risky”—so he’d stolen a
Humvee and had gotten them out of Atlanta himself. That raced
through his mind as he opened the driver’s door and climbed in,
settling into the seat before hitting the aux switch to power on
the Humvee’s battery, watching as the dash lights came to life.

The radio was mounted into the transmission
hump, a contraption that looked deceptively easy to use to the
untrained eye.
Thank God I’m not an amateur,
he thought as
he switched it on and picked up the mic. He weighed it in his hand
for a moment, debating the futility of trying to summon help, since
it hadn’t worked last time he’d tried.

But no, he couldn’t
not
try, not with
what was outside the community, not with what was about to be
inside
the community. Not with his pregnant wife’s life in
imminent danger. And so, resolved, he started clicking through each
channel, testing them, calling out for someone,
anyone
to
answer him.

Brandt was nearly through all of the
channels and starting to feel despair when he got a hit.

Just after his tentative call-out of,
“Hello? Is anybody there?” a man’s voice broke through the static,
clipped and authoritative.

“This is a secured channel. Identify
yourself.”

“Oh thank Heaven, we’ve got a chance,”
Brandt said, and then he clicked the button and spoke into the
microphone. “This is Lieutenant Michael Evans, United States Marine
Corps,” he started. “I’m putting out a mayday call and am
requesting assistance.”

The pause that followed was long. And Brandt
worried that whoever was on the other end had decided not to bother
with him. His heart thumped harder in his chest, and he looked
through the windshield, squinting in the moonlight at the front
gates, trying to see how bad things were getting. Bad enough: the
gates leaned even further over than before. Then the voice came
back on, and he blew out a breath he hadn’t realized he was
holding.

“What is your SITREP, Lieutenant Evans?”

Brandt’s brain snapped into business mode,
and he started to explain. “I’m currently holed up in a gated
community with approximately fifty survivors, men, women, and
children, some elderly. We’re under siege from the infected. There
are at least a thousand of them outside our walls, and they’re
dangerously close to getting in. I’m requesting assistance, either
brute force or evacuation to a safer location.”

There was another pause, longer than the one
before. Brandt tried to imagine what was happening on the other end
of the radio. He pictured a man dressed in BDU’s, sitting at a
radio, and surrounded by a beehive of military activity. He
imagined a nameless base somewhere, a couple of officers hovering
behind him as they debated on whether or not it was worth it to
assist them.

“Please, please, please,” Brandt whispered,
watching the gate more intently as it swayed. A loud crack
shattered the air, and Brandt tensed as a slab of wood near the
middle split, broke, and fell free. Infected arms thrust through
the newly created gap as the wood gave way.

But then the voice came back on the radio,
and his attention returned to the microphone in his hands.

“Lieutenant Evans, I’ve been asked to find
out your location,” the man said. “Please tell us where you are,
and be as detailed as possible.”

“Oh thank God,” Brandt said, and then he
pressed the button and began to explain where they were, even as he
toggled the beacon built into the radio, figuring it wouldn’t hurt
to have double the location information. “We’re in a gated
subdivision called Woodside, about two miles to the southwest of
downtown Hollywood, South Carolina,” he said. “There are fifty-two
of us at last count, but a group went missing this morning, so it’s
less now.” He decided to drop his ace in the hole, sure that it
would prompt the military into a rescue. “You should also know we
have a CDC doctor here with us, and…and there might be a cure for
the virus too.”

The silence on the other end of the radio
was oppressive, and his eyes gravitated toward the gates again as
he waited for their answer. A horrible squealing noise, like metal
grinding against metal, had begun to emanate from the gate, and it
sagged even further, far enough that he could see some of the
infected climbing the steep slope, their dirtied, bloodied hands
hooking over the top as they dragged themselves up, up, up,
climbing over and on top of each other in their eagerness to get
inside. He realized his breath was coming in short, painful gasps,
and he forced himself to breathe slower before he hyperventilated
like an idiot.

“Lieutenant Evans, I’ve been told to inform
you that help will be on the way soon,” the man’s voice said over
the radio. “Just sit tight. Extraction is en route to your
location.”

“Copy,” Brandt said, but the word felt
hollow. He had the sinking certainty that the military wouldn’t
make it in time. Because, even as the man on the radio finished
speaking, the gates let out a loud squeal of protest under the
growing weight of the infected. Then the gate crashed fully to the
ground in a tangle of metal and wood and bodies.

As they flooded inside, Brandt realized that
he was entirely too far away from the main house—and Cade. There
was no way he could outrun the horde pouring into Woodside.

There was no way to get to her before they
tore him apart.

Jude was still awake when a loud crash sounded
outside the house, drawing him into a sitting position in a single,
quick movement. He looked, wide-eyed, toward the window on the
other side of the room, staring at it as if he expected the source
to reveal itself without investigation. Then he rolled sideways
until he nearly fell off the bed, bending his legs and planting his
feet on the floor. He straightened and went to the window, pushing
it open and leaning out into the cooler night air. He had to see
what the noise was all about.

What he saw nearly made his heart stop.

“Shit,” Jude mouthed, pushing away from the
window so quickly he nearly hit his head on the underside of the
frame. He dashed across the bedroom, literally running across his
bed, and staggering to a stop beside his sister’s twin bed. Sadie
was asleep, lying on her side with her left hand tucked underneath
her pillow, her right hand resting against the hilt of the sheathed
machete that was beside her. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her
roughly awake.

Sadie opened her eyes with a start and a
flail, swinging her fists wildly at the intruder. Jude, used to the
way his sister reacted when awakened unexpectedly, ducked her
swing, shook her again, and immediately began to sign.

“
The gates are down. The infected are in
the community.
” His hands moved with the same urgency that sent
his heart racing in his chest.

Sadie blinked tiredly and rubbed at her face
before giving him a confused, cloudy look. “What?”

“
The gates are down,
” Jude signed
again, his movements jerky and impatient. “
What do we
do?
”

“Are you serious?” Sadie asked, her eyes
widening much like his when he’d heard the sound of the gates
crashing to the ground.

“
No, I just thought it would be a great
joke to play on you,
” Jude signed, rolling his eyes. “
Of
course I’m serious. They’re coming in now, and you’re wasting time.
We need to go warn everyone else.
” He didn’t wait for Sadie’s
response; he turned on his heel and ran from the room.

Judging by the noise and chaos going on in
the hallway and adjacent bedrooms—the doors to which had been
thrown wide open—everyone else already knew that the gates had
collapsed.

He heard Cade speaking urgently in one of
the rooms near the end of the hall. He heard Isaac’s voice too.
Incredibly, they were arguing about something, but he wasn’t going
to stop and investigate. No, his sights were on something else
entirely.

Jude hurried downstairs to the first floor.
He wanted to check the front door and make sure it was secure. He
was halfway across the entryway when a voice said from the shadows
to his right, “Fancy finding you down here.”

Jude’s nerves nearly jumped out of his skin,
and he had the pistol from his thigh holster out and aimed at the
shadows before he’d even realized he’d done it.

“Hold your fire, kid. It’s just me.”

Jude felt his shoulders relax as Keith
stepped into the meager light, his own pistol in hand but not
aimed. “I’d ask what you’re doing down here, but it’s obvious,”
Keith said, moving closer to him and giving him a small, friendly
smile. “I’ve already checked the doors down here, but you’re
welcome to double-check. It couldn’t hurt.”

Jude nodded and moved to the front door,
checking to make sure all the locks were secured. He was surprised
at the number of deadbolts that were on the door, and he figured
that Brandt or one of his friends had added the extras as a
precaution when they’d moved in. Assured of the front door’s
relative safety, he checked the back door, noticing that Keith
followed him as he walked through the house. He paused in the
kitchen, digging into his ever-present backpack to pull free his
notepad and pen, and then he wrote, “
Any particular reason
you’re following me?
”

“Not really,” Keith admitted. “Company, I
guess. Everybody else is upstairs. I figured I’d stay down here and
keep an eye on things, but it can be lonely work when nobody else
volunteers for the job.”

“
Everybody upstairs is making too much
noise,
” Jude added. “
We need to get them to shut the hell
up. They need to be quiet so they don’t draw any attention to the
fact we’re in here.
”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Keith said. “We should
go tell them that. I don’t know about you, but it’d be great if we
could, say, survive the night.” He started for the stairs, and Jude
followed, already writing his note to whoever would listen to him.
But when he reached the second floor, he realized he didn’t need
it. Sadie was already in the bedroom telling Cade and Isaac that
the noise needed to be cranked down to only the necessary. Both of
them looked less than pleased to be getting a lecture from a
teenager.

“The girl’s right,” Keith spoke up as he
entered the room and heard what they were talking about. “And so is
her brother. He was just telling me the same thing. We all need to
shut the fuck up, and we need to do it right now.”

“That’s my
husband
out there,” Cade
hissed, jabbing her finger at the window, her face a mask of fury.
“He needs backup, and I’m not going to sit by and not do something
to help him!”

“
Well getting yourself and the rest of us
killed because you can’t shut up isn’t going to help him at
all,
” Jude signed, forgetting in his irritation that Sadie was
the only person in the room who could understand him. “
We need
to come up with a plan before we do anything else.
” When
everyone but Sadie stared at him like he’d been speaking Greek, he
blew out an exasperated breath and stormed out of the room.

Let Sadie handle all that shit,
he
thought. He didn’t have time to stand there and write everything
out, and he was too impatient to wait for Sadie to interpret for
him to a bunch of adults who probably wouldn’t listen to a word he
had to say—or sign—anyway.