He didn’t look at me. His eyes stayed locked on the figures, his jaw clenched so tight that the muscle ticking beneath his skin was visible in the dim car interior.
“I have no fucking clue.”
His voice was steady, but there was a hesitation in it—thin, barely there—but there. I heard it because I was looking for it. Because if Callan broke, I would shatter.
The truck idled. The engine growled low and constant. The headlights held the four figures in their beams, and nobody moved.
Then they did.
Slow at first, a jerky, stuttering walk. One step. Two. The man with the backward foot. The woman with the hanging jaw. The one-armed thing still pumping blood onto the asphalt with every beat of its heart. The teenager with the peeled scalp and the death-grin.
Coming toward us fast.
Their bodies shifted gears the way the woman’s had—that sudden, horrible transition from broken stumbling to predatory speed. The teenager being the fastest. He broke into almost a sprint, too coordinated for someone with half their skull exposed.
Callan just sat there.
For one horrifying second, I thought he’d frozen. That it had finally been too much. That his brain had done what mine was doing—shutting down, refusing to process any more of this.
His hands gripped the steering wheel. His breathing laden, each exhale controlled, forced. His eyes flicked to me.
Just for a second.
Long enough for me to see the bleak, rapid calculation of a man measuring options and finding almost none.
Then back to the windshield.
Then, to the rearview mirror—the aquarium behind us, massive and dark.
Then forward again.
I saw the decision made in his eyes.
“Hold the fuck on,”
Before I could respond—before I could ask or argue—he slammed the gearshift into reverse. The engine screamed. The truck rocketed backward with a force that threw me forward against the seatbelt, the strap locking hard across my chest, forcing the air out of me. The aquarium rushed toward us in the rearview mirror.
“Callan—”
The woman. The first one. The one we’d knocked off the hood.
She was almost right behind us. In the red wash of the taillights, I could see her clearly. She’d positioned herself directly in our path.
She turned just in time to face us.
Her mouth opened.
The truck hit her.
The thud reverberated through the frame. A sound that was part splatter and part crunch, something soft giving way under something hard. Her body slammed against the tailgate, followed by a horrible, grinding lurch as the truck bounced and the rear tires rose and fell over what had once been a person.
I screamed. The sound ripped out of me. I pressed my hands against the dashboard and squeezed my eyes shut, but I could still feel it—the uneven, terrible rocking of the truck as it rolled over her.
Callan didn’t stop.
He jerked the wheel hard. The truck bounced violently over the curb, the suspension bottoming out, and my head slammed back against the headrest. Pain flared white and sharp behind my eyes.
The truck surged forward again. Callan had it in drive before the rear wheels had fully cleared the curb, the transmission grinding in protest, and we were charging across the narrow service lane toward the employee entrance. The building loomed ahead, gray concrete filling the windshield.