Behind me, through the barricaded door, something hit the corridor wall hard enough to rattle the monitors on their mounts, a sound I hadn’t heard before—a low, gurgling snarl, wet and thick, like vocal cords working through a throat full of fluid.
Close. Very close.
The pipe won.
I grabbed the window frame and hauled myself halfway out, boots scraping against the concrete wall as I shifted my weight onto the narrow exterior ledge. Wind whipped across my face from the open ocean beyond the marina, strong enough to make my eyes water.
The pipe looked even thinner from out here, way more rust than at first glance, and several of the upper bracketshad already pulled partially free, the concrete around them crumbling.
I swallowed hard.
“Alright,” I muttered. “Let’s not die doing something stupid.”
I pushed the rest of the way through the window, pressing my back against the exterior wall, boots balanced on a ledge no wider than my heel. Sixty feet of nothing below me. Wind pulling at my clothes. The distant sound of theMariner’sengine somewhere out on the water—proof that they’d made it, proof that this mattered.
My fingers reached sideways.
Stretching.
Stretching—
They wrapped around the cold metal of the drainage pipe.
“Got you.”
I swung my weight over. One leg braced against the wall. Both hands on the pipe. The metal groaned—a low, shuddering complaint that I heard more than I wanted to—but held.
“Please hold…”
I started down.
Hand under hand. Boot finding each bracket, testing it, weighing it slowly before committing. The pipe shuddered and shifted with every movement, rust flaking off beneath my palms in orange powder that the wind carried away. My shoulders and forearms burned as sweat ran down mytemples. Fuck, I needed to work out more.
Twenty feet down.
Thirty.
The brackets held. Barely. Each one I passed groaned a little louder than the last, the bolts working loose in crumbling concrete that hadn’t been maintained in years. One bracket—the fourth from the top—pulled free entirely as my boot left it. I heard it clatter off the wall above, bouncing twice before hitting the pavement with a distantping.
I froze. Pressed my forehead against the pipe. Breathed.
Then kept going.
Forty feet down.
That’s when the window above me darkened.
I looked up.
A face stared down at me from the control room window, or what had been a face.
The thing that leaned through the opening wore the remnants of a maintenance uniform—a navy blue polo, name tag still clipped to the chest.DEREK, it read. But Derek’s jaw hung at an angle that no living skull could produce, dislocated and dangling, connected by a thin strip of gray muscle on one side. His tongue—blackened, swollen to twice its normal size—lolled out of the gap and hung against his chin, dripping a thick rope of dark fluid down the side of the building.
His eyes found me.
Milky, clouded, but locked on.
Derek lunged through the window, simply threw his upper body through the opening with the mindless, mechanical hunger that drove all of them. His torso cleared the frame,and then gravity took over. His hips caught the ledge for one second—legs kicking uselessly inside the control room—and he tipped forward and fell.