The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (9 page)

“I hope so,” Cade said quietly, breaking her
gaze from his and shifting it to Olivia, “because I’m worried that
no one else will.”

“Remy has it too,” Dominic said confidently.
His mention of her reminded Cade of what he’d told her and Derek
seven days before.

“Were you serious about what Remy did?” she
asked. “About her shooting herself up with the cure?”

“Of course I was serious,” Dominic said. “You
think I’m going to make something like that up?”

Cade shrugged. “I don’t know. People have
made up stranger things.”

Dominic circled around behind her, leaning
over her shoulder to look at Olivia. “She’s beautiful, you know,”
he said. “Looks like a perfect cross between the two of you.”

“You’re changing the subject,” Cade
replied.

Dominic stepped away, going to the window,
and Cade twisted on the end of the bed to watch him. He stared out
at the ground below, and when he spoke, he talked to the glass in
front of him.

“I’m not making it up,” he said. “I was there
when she did it. I helped her.”

“You
what
?”

“I knew you were going to get pissed about
that,” Dominic said.

“You bet your ass I was going to get pissed
about it,” Cade snapped. “What the hell did you do?”

“I…helped her inject herself with the cure,”
he said. At least he had the decency to look ashamed of himself. If
he hadn’t, Cade would have been tempted to smack him. “Look, Cade,
I
had
to, okay? You know there’s only so much of the
suppression medication that Derek was giving her left, and we were
bound to run out before he got off his ass and did what he needed
to do. She was desperate, and considering the circumstances we were
in, with the infected banging at the walls and about two seconds
away from getting in, it wasn’t like we could shut her up in a room
until we cured her like we did Ethan.”

Cade grimaced. “I want to argue with you
so
bad,” she said, “but I can’t, because you make too much
damn sense.”

Dominic shrugged. “Yeah, the sense-making
doesn’t happen very often, so when it does, relish it.” He stepped
away from the window then, turning to face Cade with a grave
expression. He leaned back against the window frame, studying her.
She studied him right back, waiting for him to voice whatever was
on his mind. “Have you finished packing yet?”

Cade motioned to the backpack propped against
the wall by the bed. “Yeah, about as well as it’s going to happen,”
she said. “I gave Sadie the duffel bag with my spare ammo and
weapons in it. I figured she should take the time to clean it all
and get familiar with it.” She paused, brushing her fingers over
Olivia’s sparse, curly, dark hair. “Do you think I’m doing the
right thing?”

“Do you feel like you are?”

“I like to think so, but…” Cade chewed on her
bottom lip, trying to figure out the best way to phrase what was on
her mind. “I don’t have a problem with going myself. I can handle
anything that comes at me. I’m just worried that I’m dragging
everyone else into something they might not actually be willing to
do. Maybe they feel obligated to help and don’t really want
to.”

“What do you think Brandt would do?”

Cade shrugged and stood, moving around the
bed to lay Olivia near the center of the mattress where she
wouldn’t have to worry about the infant managing to wiggle herself
off the bed. “I think, considering there’s a baby involved, Brandt
wouldn’t come after me,” she admitted. “He would see Olivia as the
priority over me, because she can’t defend herself. But I can’t do
it,” Cade said. “I feel like…like I owe him. He risked
everything
to come after me in Atlanta. I wouldn’t be
standing here if it wasn’t for him.”

“No, you’d just be standing somewhere else,”
Dominic commented. “Look, Cade, I don’t presume to speak for all of
us, but me? I’m going with you because I have a hell of a lot to
make up for, both to you and to the people who died in Woodside.
That and I have a lot of respect for you and for Brandt. The least
I can do is go with you and help you find him. I think Rem is going
out of a sense of loyalty and friendship, and that’s not something
you should spit on.”

“What about the others who are going?” Cade
asked. She was thinking about Sadie and Jude, who were so young and
so willing to risk their lives to help her, and Keith, who was
always so levelheaded and mellow. They didn’t seem like the types
to want to help someone they didn’t know well.

“I’m sure they have their reasons, and I’m
not going to presume to know what those reasons are,” he said.
“However, we’re here, and we’re willing to help. I know you don’t
like asking for help, but we’re at a point that you don’t have to
ask. We’d offer anyway.”

Cade tried to swallow the lump in her throat.
“Thanks, Dominic. I think I really needed to hear that.”

Dominic smiled reassuringly and straightened.
“Keith and Jude have gotten together all the weapons that we’re
taking with us, and they’ve sorted out some that they’re going to
leave here for Derek and Isaac. The vast majority of the medical
supplies are staying here too, since Olivia will be here. Remy and
I decided to leave most of the food here for those staying behind,
since we figure they’ll need it more than us.”

“We can always hunt down some more while
we’re on the road,” Cade said.

“Now we’re at the point where I need to know
if there’s anything you have to handle before we leave,” Dominic
said.

“Nothing I can’t do myself,” Cade said. She
hesitated, then stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him in
a tight hug. “Thank you,” she whispered, hoping her voice had as
much gratitude in it as she felt. She wasn’t much of a hugging
person, and she hoped he realized what it had taken for her to be
willing to hug him like this. He returned the hug gently,
surprised, afraid to hurt her if he squeezed too hard.

“You’re welcome,” he said warmly.

“For the
record, I think this is a
terrible
idea,” Lindsey Alton
said. She stood in front of Major Bradford’s desk with her arms
folded over her chest. She adjusted her grip on the folder tucked
underneath her arm and did her best to not glare at the officer. “I
don’t know if he’s mentally stable or not, and you’re basically
asking me if it’s okay to deliver him the biggest shock of his
life.”

“He can handle it,” Bradford said with a
dismissive wave.

“We don’t
know
that,” Lindsey
protested. “Not for certain. The last thing we need to create in
this facility is a security risk.”

“What do you think he’s going to do, Dr.
Alton?” Bradford asked. “Grab a gun and start shooting up the
place?”

“He could,” Lindsey acknowledged. “He could
lay all the blame for his prior living situation squarely on this
facility’s shoulders and—”

“And we’re following orders from a much
higher ranking person than I am,” Bradford interrupted.

“Somehow, I don’t think Evans would consider
that to be an acceptable excuse.”

“We need to show this to him so maybe he’ll
cooperate with us. Is it your opinion that we should hold off on
showing him this because he might get pissed off?” Bradford asked.
She nodded. “Is that a personal opinion or a medical one?”

“Both,” Lindsey answered.

Bradford looked away from her, turning his
attention to the paperwork in front of him. Near the corner of the
desk, Lindsey spotted an acquisitions form for glassware for the
labs that she’d filled out and submitted for approval nearly two
weeks before. It was, of course, unsigned. The man clearly didn’t
give a shit about the work she and her lab partner did every
day.

“I’ll keep your professional and personal
opinions in mind when I make my final decision,” he said. His tone,
however, suggested that he’d already made that decision, and it was
the opposite of what Lindsey was encouraging.

She squeezed her hands into fists, digging
her fingernails into her palms and clenching her teeth, anger
flaring up in her.

“Major Bradford, this is
not
a good
idea,” she tried again. “We still haven’t managed to get a complete
history of what he’s been through. He has injuries that make it
clear he’s been attacked by the infected at some point in the very
recent past, and that’s only on a physical level. We don’t know
what sort of scars he has mentally. We don’t know what sort of
triggers this is going to activate—”

“I said I would keep your opinions in mind,”
Bradford retorted, turning his eyes from his paperwork and back
onto her. “You’re dismissed, Dr. Alton. I’m sure you have plenty of
work to do.”

It took everything in Lindsey not to growl
out her frustration. She turned away from the major’s desk and
stormed out the door, not slamming it shut like she wanted to but
shutting it hard enough that she hoped her displeasure came across
loud and clear. She strode down the carpeted hallway until it
transitioned to white tiles, heading toward the labs that she spent
most of her time working in. A figure clad in the bulky, Level
4-style biochemical suit that had become a regular part of their
working lives was visible through the glass wall at one of the
workstations lining the hazmat room, hunched over a microscope,
looking through the eyepieces with a clinical eye. She bypassed her
office space and stepped into the outer room to don her own biochem
protection suit. The figure looked up from the microscope, saw her,
and held up a hand to motion for her to wait. She set the suit down
and moved to her desk, sitting down to page through the thin folder
on Michael Evans while she waited for her coworker to go through
decontamination.

Her emotions on her sleeve, she jerked the
cover of the paper folder open and nearly ripped it in two. Her
hands shaking, she set the folder on her knees and clenched her
hands again, trying to still them. She had to get a handle on
herself. She let things get to her much too easily. But she
couldn’t help it, not this time. The very presence of the man who’d
been sitting in the cell right down the hall for the past week was
a promise of a possibility of finding her sister and her daughter,
both of whom had been lost to her and presumed dead when the viral
outbreak had begun. That one utterance of his, when he’d looked
wildly at her and said her sister’s name, clearly confused,
mistaking her for her sister, had been a shot of hope to her heart.
She couldn’t let that chance slide through her fingers, not if she
expected to be reunited with her lost family.

The decon room’s door banged open, and Jacob
Howser walked into the office, his hair still damp from the
decontamination shower. He finished buttoning his dress shirt
one-handed, pressing the buttons on the keypad beside the door to
shut the decon room’s shower door behind him.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked. “I
thought your shift was over.”

“I hung around because I wanted to talk to
Major Bradford,” Lindsey said.

“Yeah? How did talking to that monumental
jackass go?” Jacob asked. He went to the mini-fridge under one of
the desks and opened it, taking out two Diet Cokes. He handed one
to Lindsey and returned to her desk, resting his hip against the
edge of it. She cracked the can open and took a swallow of the
liquid before she spoke. It was cold and soothing on her parched
throat.

“It went about as well as you would expect a
meeting with Major Jackass would go,” Lindsey replied. “He’s
already gotten what he wants into his head, and he won’t entertain
any ideas or objections, no matter how logical they happen to be.
He still thinks that showing Lieutenant Evans the Wall will shock
him into spilling everything he knows.”

“And you think it won’t,” Jacob
commented.

Lindsey shook her head. “I think it will
break him, but I don’t think it will be in the way Major Bradford
hopes.”

“What do you think is going to happen when we
tell him?” Jacob asked, clearly curious.

“Whatever it is, it won’t be anything good,”
Lindsey said. She took another swallow of Diet Coke and set the
cold can down on her desk, well away from any important paperwork.
“Which is why I would
really
like to hold off on the big
reveal until Evans is evaluated psychologically.”

“And let me guess, you want to be the one to
evaluate him,” Jacob said with a knowing look in his eyes.

“Well, I
am
the only person in the
facility with any training in psychological evaluation,” Lindsey
said, feeling an odd mixture of pride and defensiveness over her
university minor in psychology. “Even if we only get a basic
evaluation of where he is mentally, it still should be enough to
determine if it’s safe to show him the Wall.” She gave him her best
doe-eyed look, hoping to play on his sensibilities and his
attraction to her, a poorly kept secret around the labs. He saw the
look and groaned.

“You want me to pull rank and see if I can
get you in to talk to him, don’t you?”

“Would you? Please?” Lindsey begged. Jacob
had been in the facility longer than she had, nearly since day one,
and had far more pull with the higher ups than she did. If anyone
could get her permission to have a chat with Evans, maybe even a
private chat, away from cameras and guards watching and listening
and recording his every word, it would be Jacob Howser.

Jacob sighed and scrubbed a hand through his
damp brown hair. “You owe me dinner if I succeed,” he said. It was
a standard request from him whenever he did her a favor, and she
had no problem granting it. It was a routine they’d been through
many times before. She gave him a dazzling smile and sat up
straighter, the promise of possibly meeting with Evans enough to
bring her to a higher level of attention.

“If you actually get me permission, I’ll even
let you pick the restaurant,” Lindsey said. “Seriously, you have
no
idea how much this means to me.”