The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (43 page)

Cade wrenched her elbow out of his grip. “You
three, go,” she ordered. “I’m not stopping.”

She slung her rifle onto her shoulder,
grasped the iron railing alongside her, and vaulted over it to drop
to another walkway ten feet below. She landed with a clang that
reverberated off the surrounding wall, and she heard the man that
had confronted them shouting about a breach above ground level.

Another clang brought her around to her
right, and she rapidly retrieved her rifle and aimed it at the
perceived threat. She was greeted by the sight of Sadie, who
crouched a few feet away from her, where she’d landed when she’d
completed her own jump.

“I’ve got the other two headed back the way
we came,” Sadie said, straightening, unfazed by the rifle pointed
at her. “They’re going to find another way in.”

“Good,” Cade said. She wouldn’t admit, even
to herself, that she was relieved she’d have backup on this…even if
it came in the form of an eighteen-year-old girl with zero training
beyond what her Special Forces father had given her. “Come on,” she
urged, “before someone gets the wise idea to start shooting at us.”
As if on cue, a bullet pocked into the concrete behind her, mere
inches from her head. She swore and shoved Sadie ahead of her,
scanning the complex for cover as they fled down the walkway. It
was a tangle of walkways, metal staircases, and scaffolds, with
nothing solid enough to take cover behind. They would have to keep
moving quickly and inventively and hope their luck stayed with
them.

Back towards
the Eden Facility was the
last
place Ethan had any desire to
go, but that was where he was headed, moving at a brisk jog, hoping
that he, Lindsey, Brandt, and Kimberly would be able to help stem
the tide of infected before they got too far into the city of Eden
and its uninfected populace. He had no idea if they would be fired
on the moment they were spotted by any of the military personnel
that were entrenched at the facility. The thought of Kimberly
bleeding out on the ground made him almost physically ill. He
shoved the thought aside; he didn’t have time to dwell on the
terrible consequences that might come to pass due to their
actions.

At some point during their dash down the
street, Brandt had fallen back, taking up the rear, and Kimberly
had joined Ethan at the front of the pack. Her blonde hair was a
rumpled, dirty mess, and the scrubs she was still wearing were
filthy, but she was the most
alive
thing he’d seen in
months. He itched to take her hand, to pull her into his arms and
drag her off someplace nice and quiet to hide from all the terrible
shit they were going to be facing. That, however, wasn’t an option.
Maybe after all this was over, they could get away for a while and
get to know each other better than they already did, without the
looming specter of the infected hanging over them.

“Ethan, your left!” Lindsey called out, and
he looked in the indicated direction to see two infected coming
their way. He intercepted, putting them down with quick jabs of his
knife to the bases of their skulls, then rejoined the other three,
who’d slowed to a stop nearby.

“Can I just say it’s disturbing how easy you
make that look?” Kimberly remarked when he caught up with them.

“It’s a talent,” Ethan said. “What’s the hold
up?”

“Lindsey said there’s an entrance not far
from here where we can get into the facility without having to go
directly to the gates,” Brandt reported. “She thinks we should go
in through there.”

“Is it safe?” Ethan asked.

“Is
anything
safe anymore?” Lindsey
countered, and Ethan agreed with her statement. “It’s the best we
can do, which is about all I can say. It’s either that or walk
right into the mess at the gate, and I think that we should come at
it from the side so we can have the chance to assess what we’re
stumbling into.”

“She has a point,” Brandt said.

“I’m not arguing it,” Ethan replied. He
looked at Lindsey. “You okay to lead?”

“It’s not like I have a choice,” Lindsey
said. Without further discussion, she moved to the front of the
group. Ethan and Kimberly fell back to keep an eye on her as she
started forward again, leading them toward the entrance.

“You doing okay?” he asked Kimberly once the
four of them were on the move again.

“As well as can be expected, considering
we’re about to walk into something that will probably end up
killing us,” she said. Despite her words, she sounded upbeat.
“Other than all that unpleasant mess, I think I’m okay.”

“Any regrets?”

Kimberly didn’t answer right away. She seemed
to be thinking the question over as she darted forward and took
down an infected woman that was staggering toward Lindsey from her
right. “Us,” she said simply when she rejoined him, wiping down her
knife with a scrap of fabric.

“Us?” Ethan repeated, surprised at her
answer.

“Yeah, us,” Kimberly repeated. Ethan spotted
another infected and killed it with disturbing effortlessness. Once
he was back alongside her, she continued. “I regret that we didn’t
figure out any of this,” she waved her hand back and forth in the
space between them, “sooner. So much lost time, you know?”

“Maybe if we both make it out of this, we can
work on making up for some of that lost time,” Ethan suggested,
irrationally afraid that he was about to get a rejection.

Kimberly’s grin lit up her entire face, and
her eyes met his. “I think I’d really like that.”

Ethan reached across the gap between them
with his empty right hand and grasped her left hand tightly,
squeezing it gently before letting go and forcing himself to
refocus on the task at hand. He wasn’t going to get the opportunity
to spend more time with her in a situation that wasn’t immediately
life threatening if he didn’t make sure they actually survived it
first.

They soon reached the security gates that
admitted people to the employees’ parking lot. The booth at the
entrance was empty, and Ethan assumed that the guards that had once
been in there had abandoned their posts, headed further into the
facility to help deal with whatever problems had arisen after the
explosion. The gates were closed and chained shut, but climbing
over them posed no real difficulty. Ethan scaled the chain links to
the top and draped the stolen lab coat over the barbed wire at the
top, then slung himself over the top and dropped to the pavement.
He landed in a crouch to absorb the impact and lifted his pistol,
holding it so he could deal with any oncoming, uninfected threats
to his friends while they climbed over the fencing to join him.

“This is the same lot Jacob brought me and
Kimberly through when he was getting us out of here, isn’t it?”
Ethan asked, recognizing a few of the cars parked around the
lot.

“It is,” Lindsey said. She was breathless
from her climb over the fence when she dropped down beside him, but
she seemed exhilarated at the same time. “It’s also the same lot I
brought Brandt through when I got him out of here.”

“What about inside?” Brandt asked as he
joined them, helping Kimberly down from the fence. “What did the
explosion do to the interior?”

“There’s debris everywhere,” Ethan said. “Lot
of ceiling tiles fell, and some of the walls are cracked. For the
most part, though, the facility’s intact. Granted, we weren’t that
close to the epicenter of the explosion, so it could be worse
closer to where it happened.”

“I can guarantee that,” Brandt said with
confidence, and his tone reminded Ethan of the fact that the former
Marine was a demolitions expert when he was in the military. Or, as
he often liked to put it, he was a specialist “in blowing shit up.”
“If I knew what happened with the explosion, if it was sabotage or
if it was just shitty luck, maybe what sort of demolitions material
was used if it
was
sabotage, then I could have a better idea
of what to expect.”

“What about the infected?” Lindsey asked.
“What do you think we can expect there?”

“A metric shit-ton of them,” Brandt said.
“And all of them want to eat us.”

“Except maybe Ethan,” Kimberly said with a
slight smile in his direction.

“How do you do that, anyway?” Lindsey asked,
looking at him. He felt like squirming under her scrutiny as she
looked him up and down, resisting the urge to stuff his hands into
his pockets, which he didn’t even have. “It’s like they barely
notice you’re there. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“It has to do with the vaccine,” Ethan said.
He looked across the parking lot, searching for the door that would
lead into the facility. “Look, we can discuss my apparent
superpower later, yeah? I don’t think this parking lot is the best
time or place for it.”

“Definitely to be continued,” Lindsey said.
The look in her eyes was predatory, like the scientist in her was
anxious to get her hands on him and turn him into a lab experiment.
He knew she wouldn’t actually do it. If there was anyone who was
science-inclined that would be the last person to experiment on
him, it would be her.

The four of them started across the parking
lot, Lindsey taking the lead again so she could let them into the
building. The lot was oddly abandoned, none of the Eden Facility’s
employees anywhere in sight. Ethan thought that was weird. After an
explosion like that, shouldn’t people have been flocking out of the
building, like middle-schoolers during a fire drill? “Where is
everyone?” he asked. “Shouldn’t there be evacuees out here?”

“Not necessarily,” Lindsey said. “The
facility has a lot of shelter-in-place policies. People close to
the actual detonation would be evacuated. Everyone else would be
ordered to shelter in place. We’re far enough away from the gates
that the people who normally park in this lot would have stayed
where they were.”

“What are the chances they’ve realized we’re
missing?” he asked, motioning to Kimberly to include her in the
question.

“Slim to none, depending on how hung up they
are with what’s going on at the gates,” Lindsey said. “Why?”

“Maybe I should ask what the chances are that
we’d be able to get a friend out of the holding cells you guys have
here,” Ethan said.

Lindsey’s eyes narrowed. “What friend?”

“His name is Chris,” Kimberly said. “We met
him on the road. He was brought here with us, and we haven’t seen
him since.”

“Chris…Chris…” Lindsey mused. “I think I
checked out a Chris before they put him in quarantine. If he’s
still there, we might be able to try to get to him, but only if
they put him where they usually put the quarantined folks.”

“He’s not a priority,” Brandt spoke up. “Our
priority is getting to the other side of this wall so we can start
the search for Cade.”

“This guy was pretty skilled, well trained,”
Ethan said. “If we can get to him, then it would help to have
another set of trained hands with us while we search for her.”

“Yeah, true, but he’s not a priority,” Brandt
repeated.

Lindsey had stopped in front of the door set
into the facility’s back wall, and she punched a four-digit code
into a keypad mounted on the wall beside the door. There was a soft
beep and a
chunk
like the door’s lock was disengaging. When
she pulled on the door, it didn’t open. “What the hell?” Lindsey
muttered. She punched her code in and tried the door again. It
still wouldn’t open. “Something’s wrong with the door. Maybe the
security system has it disabled.”

“Move,” Brandt ordered, nudging everyone away
from the door. He was holding a crowbar, and he jammed one end into
the crack of the door at the doorjamb. He wedged it in deeper and
grasped it in two hands, then pushed. His biceps bulged and his
face flushed red, his body shaking with the effort to pry the door
open. With one last hard shove, the door popped open with a
protesting squeal, and Lindsey pulled on the door handle, swinging
it open so they could enter.

“I knew having the brawn around was a good
idea,” Lindsey joked, patting him on the shoulder as she entered
the building. Ethan stepped in behind her, followed by Kimberly,
with Brandt taking up the rear. Ethan felt a compulsion to lift his
pistol when he stepped into the darkened interior of the Eden
Facility again but fought against the impulse. He had to stay calm,
no matter how much this place made his hackles rise.

There was noise down one of the halls to his
right, echoes of shouting with the not exactly indistinct sounds of
gunfire. He drew in a breath, telling his nerves to keep steady,
that now wasn’t the time for them to get jumpy. “What are the
chances the infected that
have
gotten in would have gotten
this far by now?” he asked Lindsey, not knowing how much the
hallways twisted and turned and if they would pose enough of a
challenge to the infected to slow them down.

“I don’t know,” Lindsey admitted. “I guess it
depends on how extensive the damage was. At this point, I’d assume
that we should go with ‘pretty damn far’ and be pleasantly
surprised when they’re not as far along as we thought they’d
be.”

“Let’s go with that,” Ethan agreed. “You know
your way around here. Lead the way, would you? I don’t relish the
idea of getting lost in a place like this.”

Leaving Sadie
behind was the
last
thing Jude wanted to do, but he didn’t
have much choice in the matter. She’d practically dove over the
railing to a platform below before he could make any sign of
protest, and then Keith’s hand wrapped around his forearm and
pulled, tugging him down the walkway back the way they’d come. They
would have to find another route down to the ground level and
figure out how to meet up with his sister and Cade somewhere down
there.