Free The Becoming: Ground Zero by Permuted Press, Jessica Meigs Page B

snatched the map book from Nikola’s grasp, using the edge of the blade to pry up the staples in the middle of the book. Nikola gave Cade a dirty look that made Remy laugh, but Cade ignored it and pulled the map free. She flipped farther back to the G section as the conversation continued.
    “Yeah, basically,” Nikola said. She grabbed the Alabama map, waiting until Cade pried the state of Georgia out and passed it to her before she laid both maps out side by side. Nikola smoothed them out and hunched over them, grabbing a scrap of paper and starting to do what appeared to be complicated measurements and calculations with her fingers. After a few minutes of silence, during which Remy watched attentively and impatiently, hoping to actually pick up something useful from Nikola’s messy scrawl, the teenager straightened and announced, “It’s about two hundred miles from here to Atlanta.”
    “That’s a long way,” Remy said. She rested her hands on the edge of the table and squinted at the maps. Her eyes darted over the papers as she tried to decipher all the different routes and options laid out before them. The map was a colorful, tangled mess, and Remy had no idea where to start. “We’ll be traveling to Atlanta on our bikes, right? How long will that take?”
    “I’m not sure,” Nikola admitted, looking to Cade, Brandt, and Ethan in turn for guidance. Remy shook her head and snagged Nikola’s paper to figure out the problem, but Brandt spoke up before she could put pencil to paper.
    “About twenty hours, maybe,” Brandt said, his tone subdued. He sat on the edge of the table, plucking the knife from Cade’s hands and beginning to tap the flat of the blade rhythmically against his knuckles. He didn’t look at the rest of them. “That assumes we’ll ride nonstop, which we can’t physically do. And it would keep us out on the road longer than I’m comfortable with.”
    Remy shook her head again, slowly and thoughtfully. Even as Brandt spoke, she mentally put the pieces together. “We need another way to travel,” she theorized. “There is no way I, for one, can handle riding two hundred miles on a fucking bike.”
    “Bikes,” Avi repeated. Remy looked up at the blonde across from her and raised an eyebrow. She’d figured the woman was an airhead, but she never guessed that Avi was deaf too. “You mean, like, motorcycles? Or …?”
    “No, I mean bikes. You know, like, the kind you pedal,” Remy corrected. She smirked and looked away from Avi, back to the maps. It was a smart-assed answer, but Remy didn’t care; Avi’s question had been incredibly stupid, in her opinion. She was starting to agree with Ethan’s assessment of Avi’s mental state. Remy traced her finger along one of the interstates running east from Alabama to Georgia and hummed thoughtfully. The map began to look clearer, not quite the page full of scribbles it was before. Remy could see specific roads and highways and all the possibilities open to them.
    “So what do you suggest?” Ethan asked. He sank into a chair and pulled a thin notebook and pencil out of the bag hanging on the back of it. He jotted notes into the notebook as he waited on Remy’s response, not looking at her.
    “We should take a truck or something,” Remy said slowly. She twisted a lock of her hair around her fingers and snuck a peek at Ethan. She remembered the night before, when she went to him, when she tried to convince him to go with her and Avi, and when things escalated into physicality. Yet again. Her breath caught in her throat; she swallowed the sensation down and beat the thoughts back into their dark little corner. It wasn’t time to dwell on Ethan and the way he’d touched her. She cleared her throat. “We could put two or three of us in the truck and the rest following in another vehicle,” Remy suggested. “The bikes we can load up into the back of the truck for when we have to ditch the vehicles. At the very least, we can cut out a