A hundred yards. Ninety. Eighty.
A body lunged from behind a pickup truck—close, too close. A massive thing in a torn security uniform, its gut split open by someold wound, a gray loop of intestine swinging from the gap like a pendulum. It grabbed my shirt.
Fingers locked into the fabric at my shoulder, the grip clamped down with a strength that living muscle didn’t have the ability to produce—the rigor of dead tendons contracting without the brain to tell them to stop.
I felt the fabric tear.
I twisted hard, pivoting on my bad ankle, and the shirt ripped free. The thing stumbled, still clutching a scrap of cotton, and I was gone—three steps ahead before it recovered.
Seventy yards.
Another one stepped into my path. An old man. Bald. Naked from the waist up. His chest cavity had been opened, and the ribs jutted outward at obscene angles, framing the dark, empty hollow where his organs had been. Something had eaten him from the inside.
I hurdled his reaching arms and felt dead fingers graze the back of my calf.
Close. Too close.
Sixty yards.
The moaning crescendoed behind me—a wall of sound, dozens of ruined throats producing a noise that sounded less like individual voices and more like the building itself crying out.
Fifty yards.
I could see the break wall now. The concrete barrier, three feet high, separating the parking lot from the rocky drop to the marina’s water. Beyond it, the ocean spread gray and open. And somewhere out there—I couldn’t see it yet but I could hear it—the rumble of theMariner’sengine.
Forty yards.
My ankle buckled. I stumbled, caught myself with one bloody hand on the hood of a car, pushed off, and kept going. Blood smeared across the white paint in a long red streak.
Thirty yards.
The fastest of them closed to five feet behind me, the sound of a chest compressing and expanding without purpose, without life. Only reflex. Simply the body remembering something the brain had forgotten.
Twenty yards.
The water became visible beyond the wall now. Gray-green. Choppy. TheMarinerout there somewhere, engine growling.
Ten.
The security guard lunged.
I felt its hand brush my shoulder, fingers hooked then slipped from my collar.
Five yards.
I hit the edge of the break wall at a dead sprint and didn’t think. Didn’t calculate. Didn’t slow down.
I planted my good foot on the top of the concrete barrier and launched myself into the air.
For one suspended, weightless second, the world went silent.
No moaning. No shuffling. No wet sound of dead things dragging themselves across pavement.
Just wind. Just the gray sky above me and the gray water below and the space between them where nothing could touch me.
Then gravity remembered I existed.
I hit the ocean—and the cold swallowed me whole. It drovethe air from my lungs and replaced every thought in my head with one bright, primal signal:swim.