Or what was left of him.
Up close, there was no pretending otherwise. His staff badge still dangled from the lanyard, swinging gently as he swayed. I’d seen that badge a hundred times—clipped to his shirt while he loitered at the break room table during lunch. It looked so ordinary hanging there, yet so out of place in everything else.
His face was half torn open, his skin peeled back along one cheek, exposing dark muscle and the white flash of teeth where they shouldn’t have been visible. One eye hung half-shut, the iris milky and vacant. Dried blood had crusted down his chin and across his shirt, stiff and nearly black.
His hands were worse. Fingers worn down to raw bone in places—whether from clawing at doors or at people, I didn’t want to think about.
He must have stumbled against the keypad outside and rushed it just right, wandered in.
He never made it home on Wednesday.
Jason twitched. A sharp, involuntary jerk of the shoulders, like a dog catching a scent.
My breath—he’d heard my breath.
His head snapped sideways. Too fast. Way too fast. The kind of movement that had nothing human left in it. That clouded eye found me.
For one horrible second, he simply stoodthere, mouth slack, staring at me, his jaw stretched open and wet.
“Shit.”
Jason lurched toward the walkway railing, dragging one foot behind him—the ankle bent completely sideways, bone jutting through the sock, scraping against the metal floor with each step. Blood smeared behind him in thick, dark streaks, along with something stringy and wet that I didn’t want to identify.
“Jason,” I said automatically.
Pointless. I knew it was pointless.
The thing wearing his face slammed into the railing so hard the entire walkway shuddered, and both arms shot through the bars, fingers grasping, twitching, reaching for me—two of them on his left hand were gone entirely, torn off at the knuckle, leaving ragged stumps of white bone poking through blackened flesh. The remaining fingers opened and closed with a desperate hunger, tendons sliding visibly beneath split skin.
The full force of the odor hit me, a smell that gets into your sinuses and stays there—like meat left in a hot car for a week. My stomach heaved, and bile burned at the back of my throat.
His jaw snapped open and shut, teeth snapping together so hard that one of his front teeth shattered, a piece of it spinning off into the dark. He didn’t notice, didn’t flinch, simply kept snapping, over and over. Strings of dark saliva and old blood stretched between his lips with each bite, thick and ropy.
And his throat—God, his throat.
Someone had torn into the side of his neck at some point. A chunk of muscle was missing, leaving a ragged crater ofdried tissue and exposed windpipe. I could see the cartilage flexing every time he snarled. Every time that broken scream pushed out of him, air whistled through with a thin, reedy sound that made my skin crawl.
I lifted the speargun slowly, lining the tip up with his head.
His remaining eye—that milky orb—tracked the movement. His snarling pitched higher, hungrier. The fingers grasped at nothing, and I could hear his nails scraping the metal bars with a sound that set every nerve in my body on edge.
“Sorry, man,” I whispered.
He threw himself forward, the railing groaning under the impact, his ruined face pressing through the bars so hard the skin on his forehead split open against the metal.
I pulled the trigger.
The compressed bands snapped with a vicious thwack, and the spear punctured his skull slightly above the left eye socket. A split second of resistance—I felt the bone give—and the tip burst through the back of his head in a spray that painted the tank glass behind him: dark, clotted blood, gray matter, fragments of skull shooting through the air like shrapnel.
A piece of something wet and warm hit my cheek.
His body seized, every muscle at once, rigid fingers splayed wide. His jaw wrenched open in one last broken gasp, and a thick rope of black blood poured from his mouth, splattering across the walkway between us, the light in his remaining eye just… left, as if someone had flipped a switch behind it.
Gone.
I yanked the spear free before his weight could drag it down. The shaft slid out with a wet, sucking sound—andbroughtthingswith it.Soft things.Dark thingsthat clung to the metal and dripped off in slow, heavy globs. A sound came out of my throat that I didn’t recognize. Not a scream. Not a gag. Something between the two.
Jason crumpled.