Ground Zero Page 33
“Hey, welcome back,” he said in a hushed tone.
“Hi,” Cade whispered back. Her voice was faint and cracked, but she sounded as coherent as her eyes suggested. He moved his fingers to her cheeks, feeling her damp skin for fever.
“You’ve been out for a while,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“Like shit,” she mumbled. She attempted to clear her throat and failed miserably. “Where are we?”
“Little town near the Atlantic coast,” he answered. He stood and grabbed a shopping bag from the nightstand, digging through it for an unopened bottle of water. “We’re somewhere outside Charleston. It’s the same little town Ethan and I planned to bring all of you to if we didn’t get the help we needed in Atlanta. He had the maps when…well, when he stayed behind. So I had to work off my memory on which blocks we’d planned to check for a safe house. Did the best I could with the little I remembered.”
As Brandt turned back to her with a freshly opened bottle of water, he caught a glimpse of apprehension in Cade’s eyes. He eased onto the edge of the bed and helped her sit up, waiting until he’d helped her drink from the bottle before he prompted, “What’s on your mind?”
Cade hesitated and ran her fingers lightly over the outside of the bottle. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Brandt pressed his lips together and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, he is,” he confirmed. “I’m so sorry, babe.”
She looked away from him and closed her eyes. “I just had this weird feeling, like maybe it was part of a bad dream. I wanted to be sure.” When her eyes opened and met his again, they were surprisingly calm. The thought of her suppressing her grief over Ethan like she’d done for her niece disturbed him. He’d always believed the dead should be mourned, and Cade was refusing to do so. That could lead to nothing but trouble. She cleared her throat and took another slow sip of water. “How bad is it?”
Brandt removed his boots before he replied. He spent the time evaluating Cade’s question, debating different answers, trying to settle on the best way to report the group’s situation. There was no good way to do it, he acknowledged. All the news he had to offer was bad. But in the end, all he could do was give it; attempting to sanitize his report would earn him an epic ass-kicking from her at the soonest available opportunity once she figured out he’d done so.
“We thought you weren’t going to make it,” he started. He kept his voice almost monotonous in an effort to keep his emotions in check. “You were so fucking sick, and we just…we weren’t sure if we were even dealing with it correctly. We muddled our way through it, and Gray did everything he remembered Theo telling him about wound care, and I tried to remember everything I learned in basic training. But you kept getting sicker and sicker. Gray and I went out on a couple of supply runs, but we stopped when I got nervous about your condition. I didn’t want to not be here if you weren’t going to pull through.” He didn’t look at her as he spoke, feeling vulnerable at the admission.
When he did look at her again, though, he was surprised to see a smile on her face. She sipped again from her water bottle and carefully twisted the cap back on. “Well, as you can see, I did pull through. You’re stuck with me, Brandt. Get used to it.”
Brandt chuckled and examined Cade again. She looked weak and skinny, pale and exhausted, despite the long rest she’d had over the past three weeks. Regardless, he gave her a smile and said, though he didn’t believe a word of it, “Well, I can see you’ll pop right back to your old self pretty quick.” He glanced at the open bedroom door, debating going to find Gray, in case the other man needed to do anything health-related to her. Then he shook his head and slid closer to Cade. He didn’t think Gray’s presence was necessary right now. “Do you need anything?” he offered. “I can get whatever you want.”
“Yeah, I need to know how everybody is,” Cade said. She twisted her fingers into the sheets draped over her. “How’s Remy? Is she okay? What about Gray? How are they handling all this shit?”
A flash of Remy’s tearful near-collapse on the roof flitted through his mind. “Honestly, they’re not,” he admitted. He chose not to mention too many specifics. It felt too personal, something to keep between him and Remy. But he couldn’t deny that she wasn’t doing well. He slowly shook his head, a motion that earned him a curious look. “Remy…she pretty much lives on the roof. She says she’s keeping watch, but I think it’s more that she doesn’t want to be around the rest of us. And then there’s Gray. He’s…well, he’s Gray. Keeps to himself, only leaves his room for watch, to check on you, or to go out for supplies. We don’t see him very much otherwise.”
Cade glanced at the sheets as if she could see the wound in her side through the layers of fabric. “Gray’s been doing this?” she asked in surprise.
“Well, I helped,” he said lamely. She laughed, though she grimaced halfway through. He touched her shoulder, concerned. “Hey, are you okay?”
Cade sucked in a slow, steadying breath. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just sore is all. Wasn’t really expecting that to hurt.”
Brandt rested his hand loosely on top of hers, tracing his thumb over the soft skin covering her knuckles as he let out a wide yawn. He rubbed his eyes, squinting myopically at her, and she grinned at him. “I hate to ask, but I’ve been sleeping in a chair for about three weeks, and—”
“A chair?” Cade repeated. “Your poor back.”
“Exactly.” He hesitated and glanced at the open door again, more out of an abundance of nervousness than anything else, and wondered if he should get up to close it. “Do you mind if I sleep up here tonight? I don’t want to accidentally smack you in the side or whatever, but I really can’t take sleeping in that chair again.”
Cade’s grin widened, and she shuffled sideways to make room for him. “You know, you didn’t have to ask,” she pointed out after she’d settled against the pillows once more.
“I know, but with my luck, you’d wake up in the middle of the night and freak out and punch me,” Brandt said with a chuckle. He eased back onto the bed with a low groan, feeling his tired muscles relaxing painfully.
“With your luck? I still might.”
* * *
Alicia stepped into the dim hallway and let the door fall closed behind her with a soft click, her flashlight beam playing over the empty hallway as she smoothed her free hand over her winkled clothes. She tried to finger-comb her tangled hair before giving up and moving to the stairwell door. Dominic Jackson would be waiting for her just inside the stairwell. She always met him there after her lengthy interrogation sessions with Ethan Bennett.
And once again, Dominic didn’t disappoint. As Alicia pushed the door open and stepped onto the landing, the tall, dark-skinned man stood from his spot on the stairs leading to the seventeenth floor, switching on his own flashlight and shining it in her direction, careful not to shine it directly in her face. She eased the door shut behind her and turned her own flashlight off, and he gave her a questioning look. “So, how’d it go?”
“Like normal,” she reported, a wry smile crossing her face. “He still doesn’t remember where the group was headed.” She shoved both hands into her pockets. “I just don’t get it. out of all the infected people we’ve dealt with, why is he the only one we’ve seen with memory loss?”
“Do you think he’s lying?” Dominic suggested. “Or faking it?” They began to descend the stairs together, walking in stride with each other out of unconscious habit.
“I don’t think so,” she admitted. “He genuinely doesn’t remember. You can tell by how frustrated he gets. He knows they made plans, but he doesn’t remember what those plans were.” She walked with Dominic down another couple of flights before she added, “I learned more about this Cade woman he referenced last week.”
Dominic looked intrigued. “And what did you find out?”
“She’s of Israeli descent, former IDF,” Alicia said. She contemplated the information she’d learned. “She’s a sniper.”
“A sniper,” Domi
nic repeated. “She could be useful. Not many of those around anymore. Is she any good?”
“One of the best, as far as I understand,” she said. “Ethan’s description of her skills was impressive, even taking bias into consideration.” She ran a hand through her knotted hair and added, “There’s some question as to whether she’s still alive, though. Remember how, last month, Daniels followed the other four as far as Centennial Olympic Park and said that one of them was carried most of the way?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I remember. What happened to her?”
Alicia looked at him, her expression grim in the bluish light from the flashlight. “Ethan says she was shot.”
“Shot? But Kyle’s orders were to only take down Avi,” he said.
“No, Kyle’s orders were to take down Avi and leave Evans unharmed. I didn’t care what he did about the others,” she corrected. “I didn’t understand their potential value at the time. Regardless, Ethan says she won’t join us, not willingly.”
“What makes him say that?” Dominic asked. A hint of curiosity tinged his words.
“He says Cade is absolutely loyal and devoted to the other members of the group and that as long as they need her, she won’t leave them,” Alicia explained. She stopped on the eighth-floor landing and caught Dominic’s arm, forcing him to a halt, her expression serious. “Also, Ethan says she and Evans are lovers.”
“Lovers?” Dominic’s curiosity gave way to incredulousness. “How is that even…? I mean, he’s infected!”
“I know,” Alicia said. “It’s all there in black and white in Dr. Rivers’ files. But they’re definitely lovers. Ethan’s absolutely certain of it.”
“And she’s not infected? At all?”
Alicia shook her head. “She’s not,” she confirmed. “I think if she’d shown symptoms, it would have been significant enough for him to mention.”
Dominic dislodged his arm and started down the next flight of stairs. Alicia moved to join him. “Maybe you should just ask him,” he suggested.
“And risk ruining the illusion?” Alicia smirked. “Please. He’s not even aware he’s being interrogated. I want to keep it that way. It makes him trust me, and that makes him more likely to tell me things I might not get out of him in a straight-up grilling.”
Dominic opened the door to the sixth floor, motioning for her to step into the hallway beyond with a grand sweep of his arm. “I just never knew so much deviousness could hide behind such a pretty face.”
She laughed. “The pretty ones are usually the most devious,” she pointed out. As she stepped into the hallway that led toward the sixth-floor lobby and the Overlook beyond it, a young woman approached them at a run. She clutched a large, crumpled paper, and her short blond hair flopped into her face.
“Alicia, we’ve got it!” she said breathlessly. She jammed the paper into Alicia’s hands, crushing it in her palms. Alicia raised an eyebrow and looked at the paper the woman had given her.
“What is this, Kimberly?” she asked. She tried in vain to smooth the paper out as Dominic looked over her shoulder. It was a map of Georgia, she realized, scribbled over with multiple handwritings that made it difficult to read. At the edge of the map was a sliver of South Carolina, with a small town circled and several blocks of it shaded in.
“You remember when you guys brought Mr. Bennett in and he had that bag with all the blood on it with him?” Kimberly said. “We’ve spent the past three weeks sterilizing the bag to hell and back just so we could find out what he was carrying at the time of the attack.”
Alicia didn’t need to ask why they’d had to sterilize the bag: Dr. Rivers and his assistant Kimberly—the very woman who stood before her—were uninfected. They were also the most important people in the building, because they were tasked with developing a cure for the virus. As such, they couldn’t risk getting infected.
“We’ve found all kinds of stuff in his bag, but this? This is a goldmine of information,” Kimberly explained. “It’s a map of Georgia and parts of South Carolina.”
“Yeah, I gathered that.”
“With Mr. Bennett’s group’s routes marked out on it,” Kimberly continued. “Including,” she tapped her finger dramatically on the map Alicia still grasped in her hands, “their alternate plan for what to do if they couldn’t get help in Atlanta. Which, if I recall, is something you guys were interested in knowing.”
Alicia slowly raised her head to look at Kimberly before she shifted her eyes to Dominic. He looked back at her, his dark eyes wide with surprise. “So this means…?”
“It means we know where Evans is,” Dominic said, his voice just as stunned as hers.
Acknowledgments
A long decade ago, I started writing a little book series that was jokingly described as “The Walking Dead meets The Breakfast Club.” While I don’t know if I totally agree with that descriptor, I do have to say that I clearly hit on something, judging by the response the first book got when it was first released. And, of course, a second book had to follow.
That’s the book you’ve just finished reading.
Most of my acknowledgments that I felt needed to be mentioned were discussed in the acknowledgments of book one, and while they won’t be repeated here, it goes without saying that they still hold true for the entirety of this series.
But I did want to take a moment to especially thank my family. Over the years, after seeing so many horror stories from authors about how unsupportive their families are when it comes to their writing careers, I have to admit to having never experienced that. My family has been so amazingly supportive, so wonderful about my little hobby that’s turned into something more, cheering me on, encouraging me, bragging about my books to people who will listen…the support has been incredible. So to my dad (who I miss more than words can say), to my mom, to my older sister Amanda, and to my younger sister Stephanie…thank you. Thank you so much.
And lastly, to all my readers, past, present, and future, as always: thank you.
About the Author
Jessica Meigs is the author of The Becoming, a post-apocalyptic thriller series that follows a group of people trying to survive a massive viral outbreak in the southeastern United States. After gaining notoriety for having written the series on a variety of BlackBerry smartphones, she self-published two novellas that now make up part of the first book in the series. In April 2011, she accepted a deal with Permuted Press to publish The Becoming as a series of novels. The first of the series, entitled The Becoming, was released in November 2011, and was named one of Barnes & Noble’s Best Zombie Fiction Releases of the Decade by reviewer Paul Goat Allen.
In 2019, Jessica began self-publishing again, this time exploring a new universe with The Unnaturals Series, in which a group of government-employed agents discover that the wheels of the Biblical apocalypse are in motion…and they’re the only ones who can stop it.
Jessica lives in semi-obscurity in Demopolis, Alabama. When she’s not writing, she works full time as an editor, copyeditor, and proofreader. She can be found on a variety of social media platforms and on her website at www.jessicameigs.com.
If you are an author interested in exploring Jessica’s editorial services, you can check out her editing website at www.editsbyjessica.com.
Also by Jessica Meigs
The Becoming Series
The Becoming
Ground Zero
Revelations
Under Siege
Redemption
Origins
Bloodlines *
* * *
The Unnaturals Series
Nightfall
The Unnaturals
Hellforged
Wicked Creatures
Reapers *
* * *
* coming soon
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