He dropped past me close enough that I caught the smell—rotting meat and something chemical, and wrong—that coated the back of my throat. His body tumbled in silence, arms still reaching, until he hit the pavement sixty feet below with a sound I’d never forget.
Wet. Heavy. Final.
Like a garbage bag full of wet blankets dropped from a roof.
He didn’t splatter—not exactly. But hecame apart. The impact split him open from sternum to pelvis, and everything inside him—dark, jellied, no longer recognizable as organs—spread across the pavement in a slick black pool. His legs bent backward at the knees. One arm separated at the shoulder and landed three feet from the rest of him, fingers still twitching, still grasping at nothing.
And horrifically—his head turned.
His neck, compressed and shattered by the fall, somehow still functioned enough to rotate his head a few degrees to the left. One milky eye rolled upward. Found me on the pipe above him.
His jaw worked. Open. Shut.
Still hungry.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.
I didn’t look at him again. I moved faster now—too fast, hands slipping on rust, boots skidding off brackets. Another bracket ripped free beneath my foot, and I dropped three feet before catching the next one, the impact nearly tearing my arms from their sockets.
The pipe screamed.
A long, metallic shriek ran up the entire length of it as the upper bolts gave way. The pipe separated from the wall by two inches at the top—it became three—tilting outward with my weight on it like a slow-motion nightmare.
I slid.
Controlled at first. Then not. My hands burned as rust and metal chewed through my palms. The ground rushed up. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.
The pipe tore free from the wall completely—the top half peeling away from the concrete in a cascade of broken bolts and masonry dust—and I rode it down like a collapsing ladder.
I hit the ground hard.
My legs took the impact and buckled. I rolled—shoulder, hip, concrete tearing through my shirt and the skin beneath—and came to a stop on my back, staring up at the sky, lungs empty and every nerve in my body firing white.
For two seconds I couldn’t move, but I heard them.
Close, as I turned my head.
The parking lot.
Twenty feet away, a corpse dragged itself between two cars. A woman—or what had been a woman. She wore a sundress, once yellow, now brown and stiff with dried blood. Everything below her rib cage was gone. Simply gone—torn away, leaving a ragged cavity that dragged behind her across the pavement, a glistening trail of dark fluid and tangled intestines marking her path like a snail’s track. She pulled herself forward with both arms, fingernails shredded to nothing, the bones of her fingertips scraping asphalt with a sound like chalk on a blackboard.
Her head lifted, and she saw me.
Her mouth opened—no sound, only that horrible silent gape—and she started crawling faster.
I rolled to my feet. Pain exploded through my right ankle—sprained, possibly worse—but I shoved it down and started running.
Or trying to run. The ankle screamed with every step, turning my sprint into a lurching, desperate hobble. I moved because behind the crawling woman, more of them appeared.
From between cars, behind the dumpsters along the building’s edge. From the shattered glass doors of the main entrance, stepping through the broken frames in a slow, endless procession—each one more ruined than the last.
A man in a business suit, his throat torn out so completely that his head bobbed on his shoulders with every step, connected by nothing but the spine. A teenager in a Red Sox jersey, one arm missing at the elbow, the stump still leaking a slow drip of black fluid. A child—God, achild—no older than seven or eight, still wearing a backpack, face gray and slack except for the teeth, which snapped open and shut with rapid, mechanical precision like a wind-up toy.
I didn’t count them. They came from everywhere, drawn by the sound of the pipe collapsing, by the smell of living blood—my blood, dripping from my torn palms and leaving a trail across the pavement behind me.
I ran.
The break wall—that’s all I needed—get to the break wall, Callan, get to the water; get to Sloane.