“Jason was showing it to everyone,” she continued. “On his phone.”
Jason. The kid who worked in the gift shop. Probably no older than nineteen.
I frowned slightly. “What kind of video?”
She swallowed hard.
“I told him it had to be fake,” she said, ignoring the question somewhat. “Staged. Or edited. I don’t know.”
Her eyes lifted to mine.
“I don’t think it was fake, Callan.”
The words hung heavily between us—heavier than they should have been, because I already understood what she was going to say.
My stomach tightened.
“What did you see?”
She took a shaky breath.
“There was this woman. She looked like…like that one outside.”
Her voice cracked slightly.
“Walking through the street. Off. Jerking. Like her body didn’t belong to her anymore. People were screaming. Running.”
My chest tightened.
“They shot her,” she whispered.
The words hung in the air.
“In the head. And she just… dropped. Like a puppet with its strings cut.”
Her fingers curled tighter.
I didn’t speak. Couldn’t. My mouth became dry, and my mind started connecting things: the woman on the road, the way she moved, the way she didn’t stop, Sadie’s voice on the phone—panicked and breaking apart—the sirens we’d heard earlier that had gone silent too fast.
“The streets seemed to be filled with them,” Sloane said. “People running. Cars abandoned. Sirens everywhere. I think it was somewhere in Asia. I couldn’t read the signs, but…”
She trailed off.
“It looked exactly like this,” she finished.
Silence settled between us, heavier than before.
My mind flashed back to Sadie’s voice.
They’re trying to get in.
Something about a bite.
A cold sensation crept down my spine and stayed there.
“They said virus,” Sloane added quietly. “Jason thought it had to be some kind of virus.”
Virus.