The security guard couldn’t stop. Its momentum carried it over the edge, arms still reaching, and it pitched headfirst into the ocean with a heavy, meaty splash. Three more followed—tumbling off the break wall in a cascade of flailing limbs and dead weight, hitting the water in ugly, graceless impacts.
They didn’t swim.
They thrashed, arms churning the surface uselessly, heads bobbing once, twice—mouths still working, still biting at nothing—and then the current took them, dragged them down. The ocean swallowed them without hesitation, pulling them under one by one until the surface appeared still.
More of the dead reached the wall’s edge and stopped. They stood there—swaying, staring out at the water with those empty white eyes, arms hanging at their sides. They wouldn’t jump unless momentum carried them. They just… stood and watched and waited.
“Swimming’s not really their thing,” Jeff saidquietly.
The water near the break wall churned and settled.
Five seconds passed. Ten.
Nothing.
My hands gripped the stern railing so hard that the metal cut into my palms.
Come up.
Come up, come up, come up—
Callan’s head broke the surface.
Twenty Nine
Callan
“Come on… come on…” I muttered under my breath.
My hand wrapped tight around the quarantine tank lever in the control room. The metal sat cold against my fingers, trembling from adrenaline and the pounding of the dead behind me.
I had no idea how the hell I’d get out of here, but that didn’t matter.
Frank and Sloane were getting out if it killed me.
The monitors mounted along the wall flickered with grainy black-and-white camera feeds from around the aquarium. Most showed empty hallways—or what should have been empty hallways. Camera 2 caught three of them stumbling through the gift shop, knocking over shelves of stuffed animals and souvenir cups like drunk shoppers. Camera 4 showed the main corridor outside the jellyfish exhibit packed with bodies—shoulder to shoulder, swaying,bumping into each other, filling the hallway from wall to wall.
But Camera 6—the quarantine holding pool outside—showed theSS Mariner.
Moving.
“Thank fuck,” I breathed.
I watched as the boat pulled away from the dock and lined up with the marina channel. The kid had the throttle forward before Jeff even had both feet on deck.
Smart kid.
The moment the boat cleared the tide gate, I yanked the lever.
A deep mechanical clang echoed somewhere far below—so heavy it vibrated up through the floor. The quarantine hatch released. On the monitor, the water surged, a white-capped torrent flooding through the channel, carrying everything with it.
And riding the front of that surge—
Frank.
The old turtle glided out through the opening with the kind of calm that made the surrounding chaos look ridiculous.
I sagged against the control panel and let out a long, shaking breath.