The Becoming (Book 4): Under Siege Read online

  Dominic’s actions bought Remy enough time to reload and get into position. Now, her gunfire joined his bladed attacks. She shot three in the head in quick succession, leaving two still standing. One came at Remy while the other headed for Dominic. Almost in unison, Dominic struck out with his knife and brought the number to one, and Remy adjusted her aim and squeezed the trigger.

  The last of that group of infected collapsed into the grass.

  “You okay?” he asked her, panting.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s finish this and save those two people.”

  Dominic nodded, returned to the truck, and retrieved his rifle from the bed. He worked methodically, choosing each target and killing with the utmost care, not wanting to injure the two survivors who ducked and darted, weaving between the infected, shotgun firing and machete swinging. Once all of the infected in the immediate vicinity were down, thanks to their combined efforts, Dominic rose from his kneeling position in the back of the pickup truck and lifted a hand to the two survivors in greeting.

  A shotgun blast took out the truck’s windshield, and Dominic dropped down into the bed for cover, falling into a pile of old trash and dead leaves.

  “Drop the shotgun, now!” he heard Remy yell out. “Or so help me God, I’ll blow your head off right here and now!” There was a pause, and then Remy called out, “Dom, you okay? You didn’t get hit, did you?”

  Dominic held up a hand to signal his okayness, then sat up cautiously, using his rifle to pull himself out of the pile of garbage he’d landed in. He peered over the edge of the truck. “Is it safe to get up, or am I going to meet with the business end of a shotgun again?”

  “You’re okay,” Remy said. “If either of these bozos goes for a weapon again, I’m seriously putting a bullet between their eyes.”

  Dominic blew out a breath and hauled himself to his feet. He got his first real look and the two survivors they’d saved.

  They were young, by the looks of it, a male and a female, maybe in their late teens or early twenties. Even from a distance, Dominic could see that they were related. Both had the same dark hair and pale skin, and they were skinny, as if they hadn’t had enough to eat in quite a while. Slowly, the girl lowered her rifle, but in the other hand, she carried a machete. The two came toward Dominic, stopping when they reached the other side of his truck. Both had the same blue eyes. The girl, tall and lanky, moved to stand protectively in front of the boy, her eyes hard as she stared at Dominic over the roof of the truck. She lowered the rifle to the pavement at her feet but continued to grip the machete. Two more guns were strapped to her sides in thigh holsters.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. Her voice was heavily accented, similar to Brandt’s, obviously Georgian. “Where did you come from?”

  “I should probably ask you the same question,” Dominic retorted. He kept his voice as pleasant as possible, not wanting to alarm either of them, despite the fact that one of them had shot at him. He couldn’t blame them for that, though. They’d just been fighting a rather large group of infected when he’d popped up. “My name is Dominic.” He glanced toward Remy, noticing that she was still taking partial cover behind a vehicle near the side of the road. “That over there is Remy. We come from a community of survivors not far from here. We were heading into town to get supplies—”

  “You can’t go that way,” the girl said.

  “Why not?” Remy snapped, her voice hard and irritable with leftover adrenaline. Dominic shot her another glance. Her stance had tensed, her fingers flexing against the grip of the pistol.

  “Remy,” he warned. He left it at that and waited for her to relax her stance and her grip on the pistol. Then he nodded toward the girl. “What’s going on in town that we can’t go that way anymore?”

  “There’s a flood of zombies coming this way,” the girl said.

  Dominic was only slightly amused by her use of “zombies.”

  “Hundreds of them,” she continued. “Too many to count.”

  Alarm rose in Dominic’s gut. It felt like a siren was going off in his head. Remy had an equally alarmed look on her face, like she was about to vomit. Dominic abandoned his perch in the bed of the truck and climbed over the side, dropping to the pavement.

  “Something’s stirred them up,” the girl explained. “They’re flocking like birds all over the place. We’re looking for a place called Woodside. A man we met said we could get help there.”

  “That’s where we’re from,” Remy said. “We can take you there.”

  Dominic looked the survivors over, getting only a partial look at the boy, who was still behind his sister. He looked again at the shotgun at the girl’s feet, the machete in her hand, and the pistols on her belt, one at each hip, like an Old West gunslinger. She wore a black Kevlar vest covered with pockets that bulged with supplies. A knife was strapped to her belt behind one of the holsters, and a sheath for the machete was on her back. Dominic moved to get a better look at the boy. He was outfitted with his own pistols strapped to his belt and thigh. Three sheathed knives lined the belt along his back. He held a baseball bat in his left hand and an identical machete in his right. The boy and girl looked almost para-military, like they’d been fighting a war against the infected single-handedly; judging by the fresh blood on them and the lingering stains that marred their jeans, Dominic wouldn’t have been surprised.

  “What are your names?” Dominic finally asked.

  “I’m Sadie O’Dell,” the girl said. “This is my twin brother, Jude.”

  Dominic looked past the two and studied the highway. Save for the bodies that littered it, it was empty for as far as the eye could see. The cars that had once packed the highway had been pushed to either side, cluttering the shoulders, crushing the tall grass. Some had even been stacked on top of each other. “You two been out in this mess long?” he asked.

  “All year,” Sadie said. She gave him a critical look and narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

  Dominic slung the rifle over his shoulder, settling it against his back, and nodded toward the highway. “Show me,” he said. “Take me to these zombies. I need to see them for myself.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea, Dom?” Remy’s voice came from his right. “Could be dangerous.”

  He looked at her and saw a mischievous glimmer in her eyes, coupled with excitement. “Yeah, like you’ve ever objected to playing with anything dangerous,” Dominic commented. He nodded toward Sadie. “Come on, show us. And while we head that way, you can tell me what the hell happened to this highway.”

  “And afterwards?” Sadie prompted.

  “Afterwards, we’ll take you to Woodside,” Remy said. “We just need to gather as much information as we can before we take this back to Brandt.”

  Sadie stared at Remy and Dominic for a moment, as if she were trying to read their intentions. Then she nodded shortly and turned away from them, beckoning with the hand that held the machete. “Follow me,” she said. “We’ve got to be quick about this. I want to get to cover before nightfall.”

  Chapter 9

  Ethan was still staring at Derek, his fingers digging into the arms of his chair, as he tried to wrap his mind around what Derek meant by saying he’d shot him up with the virus. The thought was enough to give him nightmares. He watched, eyes locked on Derek’s hand, as the doctor curled his fingers around the vial, concealing it from view. “You wanna maybe elaborate on that, Doc?” Ethan asked. “Because I’m seriously not understanding what the hell you mean.”

  Derek rubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “This will take a recap of the history of Michaluk and what I’ve deduced about it in my little lab since we moved here, so please bear with me.”

  Derek pushed up from the coffee table and joined Brandt near the head of the room where he could see them all clearly. Brandt stepped aside and sat on the arm of the couch beside Cade.

  “I’ve already gone over the how-it-came-to-be story earlier this year, when I explained that Brandt wa
s infected and how,” Derek began. “Since then, I’ve made some new discoveries and begun to come to a better understanding of how the virus might work. That’s what I’ll share with you today.”

  “What sorts of new discoveries?” Ethan asked.

  “Lots of new discoveries,” Derek said; a note of excitement edged into his voice. He flipped a few pages in his notebook and held it where they could all see it.

  Ethan leaned forward for a better look, silently wishing he had his long-lost reading glasses. It appeared to be a hand-drawn diagram of some sort of cell.

  “Let me give you a really basic rundown of what I’ve discovered. You’ll never believe how exciting it is,” Derek said.

  Isaac raised an eyebrow and gave his half-brother a strange look. “I’m not sure ‘exciting’ is the word I would personally use.”

  Derek ignored him and continued, sounding like a kid in a candy store. “The Michaluk Virus isn’t a virus in the traditional sense. It’s a megavirus. It’s so big I can actually see it under my microscope, and—”

  “Wait, slow down, Doc,” Cade interrupted. “We’re not all college-educated epidemiologists. What the hell is a megavirus?”

  “It’s almost like a parasite, but not quite,” Derek clarified. “It’s complex. Most regular viruses are dependent upon the host body they occupy. They hijack cells for their own purpose. In the case of megaviruses—or the megavirus, since there’s only one official megavirus—it has its own cellular structure. It was only recently discovered because, until a few years ago, it was mistaken for a bacterium.”

  “That’s all fine and great, Derek,” Brandt said. “But what does that have to do with Michaluk?”

  “Because I think Michaluk is a new megavirus,” Derek explained. “I think when those bastards created this in the lab, they modeled Michaluk after the megavirus.”

  “Basically, the Michaluk megavirus is like a parasite,” Kimberly spoke up. “Once introduced into a person’s body, it attacks the Central Nervous System, gets into the brain, and takes over cells for its own purposes. It shuts down cells it doesn’t need and takes over the areas that control motor skills and the brain stem. A virus’s goal is to spread, which is why, I think, Michaluk victims are so violent. The virus is trying to spread further by forcing those already infected with it to attack other people.”

  There was a long silence as everyone processed Kimberly’s explanation. Kimberly, for her part, sat quietly, gripping Ethan’s hand in hers, and he held on in return, almost tightly enough to hurt her.

  Brandt cleared his throat and gave Dr. Rivers a pointed look. The doctor fumbled with his notebook before he flipped through pages. Ethan wondered just how good of a professor the man was if he couldn’t explain things to them with confidence, but then he reconsidered: he doubted Derek’s students glared at him in quite the same way Brandt was currently glaring, something that would have unnerved anyone.

  “When we were doing testing of what became Michaluk in the CDC’s labs, we were given two variants of the pathogen to work with, designated 228C and 228E. They were the two most promising of the pathogens available to us. There were three test groups, A, B, and C. A was the control group, and B and C were test groups who got the pathogens. You already know this.

  “228C was given to group B, which was Alicia’s group, and 228E was given to group C, which was Brandt’s. Even though both pathogens showed good results in lab settings, for most of the subjects…well, it didn’t. Out of the ten subjects in group B, only Alicia coped well with it, and in group C, Brandt. What made them different from everyone else—and this is just my theory—is the pathogen may have modified itself and adapted to their physiologies. Of course, because it was two different—though similar—pathogens, it did that in different ways. As we saw earlier this year, with Alicia, it…well…”

  “It fucked up her head,” Ethan supplied, seeing no need to be polite about it.

  “Not quite how I’d have put it, but it’s rather accurate,” Derek acknowledged. “The pathogen caused bouts of psychosis and irrationality and at times animalistically aggressive behavior. She was prone to attacking them, and she often tried to bite them like an animal would. And it was through her and her interaction with Kevin Michaluk that we ended up with the first wild strain of the virus, because we didn’t know it, but 228C had mutated and become contagious. I’ll call the mutated form of 228C the Day Strain for simplicity’s sake from here on out. Mr. Michaluk had a cold when Alicia attacked him. During the attack, she spat in his face, and he was exposed to the Day Strain through the mucous membranes of either his eyes or nose. I’m uncertain which, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter.

  “Obviously, 228C was highly adaptive, and when it encountered the common cold virus that Kevin carried with him at the time, it attached itself to those viral particles, twisting them to its benefit. And that is how the Michaluk Strain was born.”

  “But Michaluk didn’t stay airborne,” Ethan pointed out.

  “And thank God for that,” Cade muttered. “If it had, we’d all be dead already.”

  “You’re right,” Derek acknowledged. “It only stayed airborne long enough to penetrate a variety of host defenses, to get started on its spread. Then it ditched the cold virus, likely because it had served its purpose, and because the cold virus wasn’t long-lived enough. From then on, it became transmitted by fluid only.”

  “Okay, so?” Isaac prompted.

  Brandt spoke up. “So when the airborne characteristics were dropped by the Michaluk Strain, it just became the Day Strain again, right, Doc?”

  “Not exactly,” Derek replied. “It kept some of the characteristics and, as such, is different enough to be considered a separate strain, one that’s more contagious. And that’s how we get to the Evans Strain.

  “The strain that Brandt is infected with isn’t contagious. It also appears to be the strongest and most resilient of the three strains. If you introduce the Day or Michaluk Strains into its territory, it activates and wipes them out. Then it goes dormant again until such time as it’s needed. It’s essentially a helper virus, which was what it was intended for all along. Mind you, he’s still infected, but he’s not contagious. The fact that he can sleep with Cade and Cade not feel ill effects tells me that much.”

  “Would you please get to a point, preferably sometime today?” Brandt groaned, rubbing his temples with his thumb and middle finger.

  “I’m getting there,” Derek said, the excitement in his voice sliding into a plea. “I promise.” He paused, as if recollecting his thoughts, and then turned to face Ethan. “When you were initially infected, Ethan, you contracted the Michaluk Strain of the virus. The treatment I’d developed at the Westin to combat that strain and that I gave you and Remy and others like you was developed with the Day Strain as the base. It’s why you were still infectious while you were giving yourself daily injections. The Day Strain, while stronger than the Michaluk Strain, couldn’t completely dominate it. It’s like you were a cancer patient on the cusp of remission, and then you stopped taking your chemotherapy.”

  “Basically, we were fighting a poison with another poison,” Kimberly interjected.

  “The Day Strain is the least permanent of the viral strains,” Derek added. “It’s why there was only one person infected with the Day Strain—Alicia—which is why I think it’s an endangered strain. Anyway, when the medications from the injections wore off you, the Day Strain failed, and the Michaluk Strain came back full force and took over.”

  “So what does the Evans Strain do?” Ethan asked.

  He nodded to Ethan but addressed Brandt and Cade. “When you two brought Ethan to me and asked me to try to do something for him, I spent two months pumping him full of meds while I tried to figure out how to pull the pathogen in Brandt’s blood out of it so I could deconstruct it, so I could figure out what was so different about it. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the proper equipment. That room down in the basement isn’t a true lab. I did my be
st, but nothing worked, and believe me, I tried every trick I knew and a few I wasn’t aware I knew.” He sighed. “I got desperate. I didn’t want to break the news to you that we would have to kill Ethan. We couldn’t keep up what we were doing. He was already getting more violent. The animal meat we were feeding him wasn’t doing a lick of good and wasn’t eradicating his hunger for human flesh. Which was when I gave up and injected Brandt’s blood directly into Ethan’s bloodstream. And that’s how I discovered that the Evans Strain can wipe out the Michaluk Strain.” He folded his arms over his chest. “And that it can replace the Michaluk Strain with itself.”

  “Which means?” Ethan prodded. “Break it down for me, please?”

  “As far as I can tell, if you were to be bitten by one of the infected today, you wouldn’t get infected,” Derek said. “You may feel ill for a day or two while the Evans Strain fights it off, but ultimately, it’d win out against the intruder, and you’d come out of it uninfected by the more dangerous strains.”

  Ethan seemed to be considering all this. Everyone in the room stared at Brandt as if he were a museum exhibit as he held Cade’s hand.

  “It’s a vaccine,” Ethan said. “You’ve found a vaccine against the Michaluk Virus. You could conceivably give it to everyone here and it’d keep them from getting infected.”