I swung; the hook caught its shoulder and sank into it above the collarbone. I heard the point scrape bone as dark fluid oozed from the wound, running down the thing’s chest in slow rivulets. Its arm went slack on that side, but it kept coming, mouth open, teeth exposed and cracked. I twisted the hook and yanked sideways, ripping a chunk of shoulder free in a spray of black gore. The corpse lost its footing and pitched off the dock, hitting the water face-first.
“Nice,” Jeff said.
But the noise had already done its work; moans echoed from deeper inside the marina. A chorus, the soundmultiplied until it seemed to come from everywhere.
Shapes appeared between the rows, stumbling out from behind cabin cruisers and sailboats.
Five, then six, and more behind them.
“Half a tank!” Callan called.
I glanced back; I could see sweat running down his face, his arms working the crank in steady, brutal rotations. Every time his body shifted, his injured ankle took weight, and I could see it in the way his face contorted — a flash of agony he swallowed down before the next turn.
CLANK. CLANK. CLANK.
I turned back and shifted my stance, scanning the gaps between boats; that’s when one of them appeared directly in front of me, not from a distance down the dock, but right there.
It must have been in the cockpit, or slumped below the gunwale, because I didn’t see it until it already had both feet on the dock, and its hand grabbed my jacket and yanked it.
“Shit—!”
The thing slammed into me with a force that didn’t match its rotting frame. My boots skidded on the wet planks, and my back hit a piling hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. The gaff hook twisted in my grip, useless at this range.
Its face pushed toward mine; the skin around its mouth had peeled back to the gums, exposing every tooth—some broken, some missing, the rest stained dark. Its jaw worked open and shut with a horrible wet click inches from my face. Strands of something—saliva or decay or both—hung from its lips, and it looked like something out of a Halloween horror flick. Only this was real.
The smell hit me: rotting meat. The stench of decompositionwas so advanced that the body should have collapsed under its own weight and liquefied.
I shoved against its chest, and my hand sank into the softened flesh above its sternum, my fingers breaking through fabric and skin into something cold and yielding underneath. I gagged and pushed harder, but its dead weight kept grinding me into the piling.
“SLOANE!”
Callan’s voice ripped across the dock behind me, raw with something beyond fear. I jammed the wooden shaft of the gaff hook sideways into the thing’s mouth, bracing it between us. Its teeth scraped and bit against the wood, gouging deep marks into the handle. Its clouded eyes stared past me at nothing; its hands clawed at my jacket, pulling.
Its face pushed closer.
Jeff appeared beside me.
“Hold still!”
He swung the hook overhand like an axe.
The steel point punched through the back of the corpse’s skull with a sound like a boot going through a rotten pumpkin. The tip burst out through the thing’s left eye socket in a spray of dark matter—brain and bone and fluid that splattered hot across my head and neck. The body went rigid for one instant.
Then it collapsed, folding against me before Jeff grabbed the handle and wrenched it sideways. The corpse slid off the hook and crumpled onto the dock, a pool of near-black blood spreading slowly from the shattered skull.
I staggered back, chest heaving.
“You good?” Jeff asked.
I wiped the gore from my neck with a shaking hand.
“Yeah.”
Behind us, the pump kept whining. Callan hadn’t stopped, but I heard the strain in his breathing now, the grunt of effort with every turn.
“Almost there!” he yelled, his voice cracking.
More of the dead spilled onto the docks, from everywhere now. A wall of gray, ruined bodies closing the distance with terrible persistence.