The Becoming (16 page)

No matter how much Brandt squinted into the distance, he couldn’t see a thing.

“I think if you actually saw anything, it was probably just one of the infected,” Brandt said. He let out a sigh, his shoulders sagging. He dumped his notebook onto the roof beside him before he slid down the slope to grab his pen, careful to keep his body firmly on the roof. The last thing he wanted was to fall the two stories to the hard ground below. Brandt hissed through his teeth as one of his knuckles scraped roughly against the shingles. He stopped halfway down the roof to study his injured knuckle as Cade continued.

“I don’t know, Brandt.” Cade’s voice was heavy with doubt. Brandt looked up from his knuckle; she frowned as she kept her eyes on the street below. “I could have sworn that whoever I saw was running.”

Brandt couldn’t help the smirk that spread across his face, no matter how hard he fought it. He scooped up his pen and crawled back up to his spot beside her. “Yeah, I hear the infected can run too, you know,” he pointed out. He laughed and picked up his ragged spiral notebook, resting it on one of his knees and smoothing a hand over its battered cover. “Relax, okay?” he said. “Nothing is going to happen around here. And if something
does
happen, it’s not like the infected can get up onto the roof.”

Cade let out a sigh and shook her hair back from her face. She whipped out her ever-present hair elastic—Brandt still wondered where she kept those things—and started to pull her dark locks back into a tight ponytail. Brandt gave her a sidelong glance. The style into which she twisted her hair made her face appear hard, her jaw strong and more angled than before. Brandt realized, as his eyes traced her features, that Cade’s own eyes were locked onto a distant point on the street. He jammed his pen into the spirals of his notebook before he twisted to look at her full-on.

“There’s nothing down there, Cade,” Brandt said firmly. He snapped his fingers in front of her face, trying to bring her attention away from the street and onto him. “Nothing at all,” he repeated. “If there was, I’m pretty sure we would know it by now.”

A slow know-it-all smirk spread across Cade’s face as Brandt finished speaking. She gently elbowed him and stood up on the roof. “Oh, there’s nothing down there?” she asked. “Then what’s that?” Cade pointed down the street again. Brandt followed her gesture reluctantly, wholly convinced he wouldn’t see anything of significance down there.

Brandt was proven wrong as he saw two figures running down the street. One hunched under the weight of a large bag on his back, supporting the other man with one arm even as he stumbled along beside him. They were too far away for Brandt to make out any finer details. He stood up beside Cade and grabbed her rifle from the roof, aiming it in the direction of the two figures below.

Cade grabbed at Brandt’s arm as he aimed the rifle. She yanked it hard and nearly dragged the weapon out of his grip. “Brandt!” she protested, her voice horrified.

“I’m not going to fucking shoot them,” Brandt snapped as he wrested the rifle away from Cade. He rolled his eyes and studied the two figures through the scope mounted on the rifle, squinting through the tube. He watched their movements, the way they walked and gestured and helped each other along.

It was two men, as far as Brandt’s scope-assisted eyesight could discern. The brunette one appeared to be younger and was dressed in jeans and a mid-length dark coat; the older one was blond and had on some sort of dark uniform with patches on the sleeves. A dark blue canvas bag was slung over his shoulders, resting across his back. The way it bulged coupled with the way the man was bent over indicated that it was quite heavy. Brandt was honestly surprised that the man could run under the weighty load. Brandt squinted and tried to make out further details of the man’s clothes, such as the yellow words printed on one of his patches or maybe the specifics of the insignia, but the two men were too far away, and the letters were too indistinct from this distance.

“They don’t have Michaluk,” Brandt concluded. “We should get them inside. There might be infected nearby.”

“Are you sure?” Cade demanded. She took the rifle from his hands and gave him an offended look, as if she were disgusted that he had dared to lay hands on her precious weapon. Brandt had a mental image of her stroking the rifle lovingly, like someone would a dog, complete with the sweet crooning of “
Who’s
a good boy?” He bit back a snigger as she continued. “What if you’re wrong and
they
are infected?”

“Well, that’s what the rifle is for, isn’t it?” Brandt suggested. He started to climb the steep slope of the roof. He slipped in through the window, narrowly avoiding whacking his head on the frame, and then leaned out to help Cade inside. “All I know is that neither of them appears to be infected,” Brandt continued. He grasped her hand and assisted her inside. “And I cannot in good conscience leave them out there to fend for themselves when we have the ability to help them.”

Cade hesitated and looked back at the street through the window. The two men were starting to come into view, and Brandt could begin to see more details without the aid of the rifle scope. “Damn, Alton, you must have the eyes of a hawk,” he commented as he realized that she’d spotted them from a great distance without the help of binoculars or a scope. He was, in a word, impressed. “Come on, let’s get downstairs and get them in the house.”

Without another word, Brandt headed through the dark bedroom he and Cade had entered and stepped into the equally dim hallway. He debated taking out the flashlight he kept in his jacket pocket, but he’d become familiar enough with the house that he thought he could make it to the front door well enough without it. As he descended the stairs, his boots thudding heavily on each step on the way down, Brandt heard Ethan in the living room near the front of the house. Ethan was doing exactly what Brandt had left him doing earlier in the morning: pacing restlessly back and forth in front of the unlit fireplace. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he grumbled to himself, though the words were drowned out by the sound of creaking floorboards and Brandt’s hurried footsteps.

Ethan jerked his head up as Brandt darted into the room and snatched the steel crowbar from the coffee table. “What are you doing?” Ethan demanded. The only answer was the sound of Cade running down the stairs. Ethan’s expression was a perfect picture of bewilderment as he shifted his eyes from Brandt to Cade, directing his next question to her instead. “What’s going on?”

“There are people outside,” Cade explained. She reached the bottom of the stairs and circled around to the living room. Brandt strode to the front door and started to pry away the boards with which they had reinforced it. The boards came away with a loud creak of nails tearing from wood as Cade continued, raising her voice over the noise. “We’re trying to get them inside.”

“What?” Something in Ethan’s tone made Brandt pause in his work. He half-turned away from the door to look at the other man. Ethan’s voice was hard and cold, and he crossed his arms as he glared at them both. “Absolutely
not
. You’re not opening that door,” he said with a firm shake of his head.

As Ethan spoke, Brandt ground his teeth together in frustration. He wordlessly turned his back to the man, attacking the boards again as Cade debated with Ethan. It was better to let Cade handle the verbal part of the argument; if Ethan pushed the matter with him, Brandt might not have been able to resist the urge to turn around and hit the man across the jaw with the crowbar.

It was never a good thing for Brandt to get pissed off when he had a potentially deadly weapon in his hands. Things never turned out very well.

“Ethan, we can’t leave them out there!” Cade protested as Brandt ripped a board from the doorframe viciously. He glanced back again and saw Cade sling her rifle’s strap over her shoulder, resting the weapon against her back. He wondered if she too was trying to resist the urge to inflict bodily harm on Ethan. “It’s not right!” she continued. “They need help, and we can give it to them!”

“What kind of help can we offer them, Cade?” Ethan demanded. He started across the living room toward the woman, and Brandt felt a pang of irrational nervousness at the thought of Ethan going at Cade. “
None
. We’re not in control of anything here! Our supplies are limited. We’re barely hanging on as it is. It’s just too fucking dangerous to open that door!”

“Ethan Bennett, I can
not
believe you’re suggesting that we leave people out there when we can offer them shelter and survival!” Cade snapped back. “If we leave them to die, we’re just as bad as those fucking infected
things
out there!”

A silence fell between them as Cade spoke those words. It was a heavy silence, and Brandt could feel the weight of it resting on his shoulders. The final board came free from the doorframe, effectively removing the only major barricade keeping any infected out of their safe house. Brandt dropped the board onto the floor and unlocked the deadbolt. He grabbed the doorknob with one hand and held the crowbar in the other to serve as a weapon before he looked over his shoulder at the two friends. They stood less than a foot away from each other, Ethan’s arms still crossed and Cade’s hands on her hips, their eyes locked like lasers onto each other’s faces and their expressions set in hard determination and anger.

“Debate is over,” Brandt said simply, interrupting their staring match. “Is either one of you going to give me some backup, or am I going to have to handle this alone?”

The question was enough to drag them both away from their tense scowls. Cade pulled her rifle from over her shoulder with a quick shake of her head. “I’ve got it, since Ethan’s being a jerk about this,” she snapped as she strode to the door. She gave Brandt a small smile, despite her obvious annoyance. “I’ll stand guard on the porch while you go get ‘em. You run faster than I do.”

“Oh, is that the only reason for me to be saddled with the harder job?” Brandt joked. He hefted the crowbar and made his way out to the porch, the woman close behind him, and scanned their surroundings. Brandt didn’t see any immediate dangers, but that didn’t mean they were safe, not by a long shot.

“Yes,” Cade answered with a little laugh. “Go get ‘em, tiger.” She gave him a playful punch on his bicep as she spoke, and Brandt couldn’t resist giving her a grin. She looked more relaxed and less angry than she had when she’d faced off with Ethan, and Brandt was grateful. The last thing he wanted to deal with was an angry Cade.

The porch steps creaked under his boots as only old wooden steps could, sending a chill down his spine and making his back tense. The sound made him think of ghosts and haunted houses. As if he needed anything else to creep him out nowadays. He looked around the dead street as he crossed the yard, and the frown he wore deepened considerably. He couldn’t see the two men he and Cade had spotted from the roof. He was going to have to go out into the street itself to find them, and he did not relish the idea.

Brandt glanced back at Cade for reassurance. It was a bit comforting to see the skilled woman standing at attention on the porch, her icy blue eyes on the street, constantly scanning for dangers. Still, her presence didn’t do much to reduce the sense of exposure that settled on Brandt’s skin as he moved out into the center of the street. There was movement far in the distance to his right, and he wondered if it was a massing of infected several blocks away. The idea didn’t help his nerves.

The two men were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they had found shelter in a nearby house in the span of time it had taken Brandt to get the front door open. Or perhaps they’d been grabbed by an infected person while Brandt had pried at the boards nailed to the doorframe.

“Brandt!” Cade called softly. Brandt turned to look at her, and she pointed to his left. He looked in the direction she indicated, and there were the two men, still limping away as fast as their obvious exhaustion would allow. In the time it had taken them to get outside the safe house, the men had made it half a block down and into the yard of one of the houses across the street.

Without any further thought, Brandt darted after them. He jogged to catch up as he called out just loudly enough to get their attention. “Hey! Hey, stop!”

The two men halted in mid-step, and the older, bulkier of the two let go of the thinner one to turn and point an old revolver right in Brandt’s face. He stood protectively between Brandt and the smaller man. Brandt immediately stopped short and held up both hands defensively. The crowbar dangled, useless, by the hook over the fingers of one hand.

“Who are you? What do you want?” the blond man demanded. His grip on the revolver was so tight his knuckles had paled, but Brandt barely noticed; his attention was focused squarely on the barrel of the gun. Its opening yawned at him.

“I am
so
tired of having guns pointed at me,” Brandt remarked as casually as he could. He forced his gaze away from the barrel and looked back behind him, though the training that had been hammered into his head over the years screamed at him that he shouldn’t take his eyes off of the dangers in front of him. He tried to ignore the little voice. “Look, I have a hideout over there,” Brandt said. He pointed to the house in question. Cade was just visible on the porch, her rifle in her hands, and Brandt knew that she must be tense and worried as she watched the exchange on the street. “Me and two of my friends. We’re trying to offer you some shelter.”

“Why? What’s in it for you?” the man asked. His voice was hard, and he had a steely glint in his blue eyes. Brandt glanced at the gun again. The barrel shook noticeably. This man wasn’t a killer; Brandt doubted that he would squeeze the trigger. Brandt focused his eyes past the gun and took in the full sight of the man for the first time in their encounter. The man’s outfit was, indeed, a type of uniform. He wore a dark button-up uniform shirt and dark pants, and sturdy boots adorned his feet. A gold nameplate on the right side of his chest labeled him as “Carter.” Brandt’s eyes lit onto the patches on his sleeves, finally able to get a good look at them, and a slow smile spread across his face.