I kicked toward the surface, broke through, gasping, coughing, salt burning the cuts on my hands and the raw skin on my ankle.
Behind me, the security guard toppled over the wall. It fell the way they all fell—graceless, limp, a sack of dead weight obeying physics without comprehension. It hit the water with a heavy splash and immediately began to sink, arms thrashing in slow, useless circles. Its mouth opened and closed beneath the surface—biting water, biting nothing—and then the current pulled it under.
Three more followed it over the edge. Then two more. They dropped like lemmings, each one hitting the water and flailing for a few pathetic seconds before the ocean dragged them down. One of them surfaced briefly—a woman, her face half-gone, one eye socket empty and streaming dark fluid into the saltwater—and her remaining eye found me. Locked on. Her mouth opened in a silent, underwater scream.
Then she sank.
The rest of the dead reached the wall and stopped. They lined the edge—thirty, forty, fifty of them—standing shoulder to shoulder, swaying, staring out at the water with empty white eyes. Some of them reached. Some of them snapped their jaws. But they didn’t jump. Without the momentum of a chase to carry them over, they just stood and watched and waited with that horrible, infinite patience.
I turned away from them and swam.
Every stroke sent fire through my palms where the rust hadshredded them. My ankle throbbed with each kick, a deep, nauseating pulse that radiated up my calf. Saltwater flooded the cuts and turned the pain sharp and electric. I swam anyway, eyes locked on the shape of theMarinergrowing larger ahead of me.
Sloane was visible on the stern now.
Sloane, gripping the railing, her hair plastered to her face, her mouth moving—shouting something I couldn’t hear over the wind and the water and the blood pounding in my ears.
Jeff beside her, already pulling a rope into a coil.
Ethan at the helm, holding the boat steady against the current.
Fifty yards.
Forty.
Thirty.
The rope hit the water six feet from my head. I grabbed it with both torn hands and held on—and the pain that shot through my palms nearly made me let go. But I didn’t. I wrapped the rope around my wrist once, twice, and held on while Jeff hauled me through the water toward the stern.
Hands grabbed me. Sloane’s first—her fingers closing around my forearm and pulling with a strength that surprised me, then Jeff’s, hooking under my shoulders, dragged me over the gunwale and onto the deck like a landed fish.
I collapsed on my back on the wet fiberglass, chest heaving, staring up at the gray sky.
Every part of me hurt.
My hands bled freely onto the deck. My ankle pulsed. The cuts and scrapes from the pipe and the pavement burned with saltwater, the taste of the dead still in my mouth—that chemical sweetness lingering in the back of my throat fromthe thing that had fallen past me on the wall.
But I could breathe.
I could breathe, and the sky moved above me, and the boat rocked beneath me, and somewhere nearby Sloane’s voice cut through the fog—
“Callan.Callan.Look at me.”
I turned my head.
She kneeled beside me on the deck, soaking wet, shaking, tears streaming down her face. Her hands hovered over me—afraid to touch, afraid not to—until they finally settled on either side of my face and held on like I might disappear.
Her tears fell warm against my salt-chilled skin as she whispered, “You’re here.” She cupped my face like something precious, her thumbs tracing my cheekbones. “You’re really here.” Her lips found mine, desperate, then moved across my face.
I reached up with one bloody hand and covered hers, our fingers intertwining despite the pain.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice a broken whisper that belonged only to her. “I’m here.”
Behind us, the aquarium shrank against the shoreline, the dead still lining the break wall—dark silhouettes growing smaller, their hunger fading into memory.
Ahead of us, the open ocean stretched like possibility itself.
Jeff’s voice came from the helm, gentle enough not to intrude on our moment.