Frank.
The old turtle glided through the churning water beside us, his scarred shell cutting the waves with the same unhurried calm he’d carried for a hundred years. The chaos behind him—the rushing water, the tumbling bodies, the screaming metal of a building coming apart—none of it touched him. He moved through it all the way he’d always moved: slow, deliberate, on his own terms.
For a long, impossible moment he stayed alongside theMariner—close enough to touch—his dark, ancient eye catching the light as he passed.
Free.
Then he dipped beneath the surface and vanished into deeper water, gone without ceremony, gone the way old things go—quietly, completely, leaving only the ripple of memories behind.
My eyes burned, but not from saltwater.
Callan kept his promise.
Then the thought hit me so hard my knees almost buckled.
“Callan,” I breathed.
I whipped around toward the aquarium building.
At first—nothing. The massive structure sat against the pale morning sky, windows dark, several of them shattered now. The parking lot sprawled in front of it, and even from this distance I could see them—dozens of the dead, milling between cars, stumbling across open pavement, drawn toward the building by the sounds of everything we’d just done.
Then movement. High up.
“There!” I shouted, pointing.
A figure on the side of the building, sliding down one ofthe large exterior drain pipes—fast, reckless, boots scraping metal, sparks kicking off the brackets. The pipe groaned under the weight and pulled away from the wall at the top, bolts popping free.
Callan.
He dropped the last eight feet and hit the ground hard outside the fence surrounding the marina; he staggered.
For one horrible second, he didn’t move.
Then he pushed himself upright and started running.
Behind him, the parking lot erupted.
They came from everywhere: between cars, the broken garage entrance, from around the corner of the building where they’d been standing in that awful, vacant stillness until the noise gave them direction. They poured across the pavement—a lurching, staggering wave of gray skin and reaching hands. Dozens, if not more. The entire parking lot seemed to shift and converge toward one point—
Toward him.
“Jesus…” Jeff said.
Callan sprinted across the open ground toward the long breakwater that separated the public marina from the aquarium’s private dock. He ran with everything he had—head down, arms driving, every stride devouring pavement. Fast. He stumbled and fell for a second, then he was moving again.
But they closed behind him, faster than they should have. The ones nearest to his path lunged—one of them catching the back of his shirt, fingers hooking the fabric. Callan twisted without breaking stride; the shirt tore, and he pulled free. Another reached from between two parked cars—he hurdled its outstretched arm and kept going.
“Stop the boat!” I screamed.
The three of us stood at the stern and watched.
He reached the break wall. Behind him, the dead closed to ten feet. Five. I could see their faces now—ruined, slack, driven by nothing but hunger and proximity. The fastest one—a massive thing in a torn security uniform—reached for his shoulder.
Callan hit the edge of the wall at a dead sprint and launched himself into the air.
His body arced against the gray sky—arms forward, legs driving behind him—suspended for one impossible, breathless second between the concrete and the ocean.
Then he knifed into the water and vanished.