“They’re free.”
For a few seconds I stood there, forehead resting against the cool metal of the console, staring at the monitor as the boat disappeared down the channel and Frank’s dark shape sank beneath the surface; reality came back like a slap.
“Fuck.”
Now what?
I turned slowly and looked around the control room.
Small. Concrete walls. Banks of old monitors humming with static. No other doors. Only the one entrance—the heavy steel door I’d barricaded with a filing cabinet and two chairs stacked against the handle.
Beyond that door, the building belonged to them.
The sounds reverberated into the room. Not simply the moaning anymore—but themmoving. The shuffle of dozens of feet across the tile. The wet drag of something heavy being pulled along a wall. And closer now, on this level, a rhythmic thumping that I recognized with sick certainty as a body throwing itself against a door somewhere down the corridor.
I ran a hand through my hair, pacing once across the cramped space.
Think.
Think.
My eyes landed on the small, reinforced window set into the back wall.
I leaned closer.
The window had a latch.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I flipped it open. The window creaked outward on stiff hinges, and fresh salt air rushed into the room—cold, clean, carrying the odor of ocean and diesel.
Hope surged through my chest for one bright second.
Then I leaned out.
And looked down.
“Ah… shit.”
Sixty feet, at least. The ground below—cracked pavement, a strip of weedy gravel, and the marina fence—looked small enough to be a photograph. No fire escape. No awning.No convenient pile of anything soft. Only concrete and a long, fatal drop.
I leaned farther out, scanning the wall.
That’s when I saw it.
The drainage pipe.
A thick, rust-streaked pipe running straight down the side of the building from the roofline to the ground. Heavy gauge. Industrial. Bolted to the concrete with metal brackets every six feet or so.
About three feet to the right of the window.
My brain started calculating immediately.
Three feet sideways. Sixty feet down. One rusty pipe that might be fifty years old and might hold my weight or might rip free from the wall the second I grabbed it.
I stared at it for a long moment and laughed quietly to myself.
“Well… that’s a gamble.”