Chapter 7
Seven
Callan
Alittle silver car whipped into the spot beside me, too fast, tires crunching over loose gravel.
I didn’t even have to look.
Sloane.
I groaned under my breath, dragging a hand down my face.
She cut the engine and sat there for a second, her hands resting on the steering wheel as if she were bracing herself.
Which irritated me immediately.
I couldn’t even tell you why she bugged me so much. She inexplicably did.
She was intelligent, smarter than most of the people who worked here. Driven. Educated in a way that came with degrees and research papers and a confidence that didn’t need permission.
Striking in appearance.
Not in any traditional sense—more like being drawn to something you ought to avoid. Her hair a dark red. Not the fake, bottled kind, but deeper. Richer. It caught the light like rust and fire and curled slightly at the ends, usually escaping whatever half-hearted attempt she made to contain it.
Her eyes a spectacular light green. Sharp. Observant. The kind that saw too much.
And the freckles.
Jesus.
They scattered across her nose and cheeks as if they’d been placed there with divine purpose to drive men insane.
She was small, barely five feet tall. My six-foot-two frame seemed more apparent next to hers.
And I understood exactly how much it bothered her.
Every time I stood at my full height near her, I could practically sense the irritation radiating off her skin.
I saw it in the way her jaw tightened when I corrected her, the way her shoulders stiffened when I walked into a room, the way she looked at me as if she was unsure whether she wanted to punch me or prove me wrong.
I exploited it deliberately, knowing it was wrong, doing it anyway.
Because the truth would have cut too deep—that she made the ground beneath me unstable.
She opened her car door and stepped out. The cool morning air caught her hair immediately, lifting a few loose strands around her face. She adjusted her bag on her shoulder, her movements efficient, controlled.
She kept her eyes forward, refusing to acknowledge me.
Fine by me.
I opened my own door, boots hitting the pavement.
She glanced up.
Our eyes met.
There it appeared again—that slight narrowing, the almost imperceptible tightening at the corners of her mouth.
“Morning,” she said, the word clipped short.
“Morning,” I replied, my voice rougher than I intended.
A familiar tension coiled between us. We stood there, locked in our usual standoff of silence. Some days I wondered if either of us remembered how this started or why we kept it going.
* * *
As the day dragged on, the anxiety from the morning didn’t fade. It tightened, settled into my chest, and stayed there, pressing against it.
At first, it was small things.
Phones buzzing more than usual. Staff stepping away to answer calls and coming back different—rigid shoulders, darting eyes, voices a little too controlled.
One of the volunteers left mid-shift without saying goodbye, merely grabbed her bag and walked out.
I watched her go, her breathing shallow and fast, and she didn’t look back.
Nobody said anything.
That part bothered me. Nobody said anything, but everybody knew something.
Even the aquarium seemed off. The tank’s blue-green glow seemed too bright, almost feverish. Fish darted in tighter circles than usual, their movements jerky and quick.
Around mid-afternoon, my phone rang.
Sadie.
I stared at her name on the screen. My jaw tightened. We hadn’t spoken since yesterday morning, since the fight.
I considered letting it go to voicemail.
But—some low, distressing feeling I couldn’t name—made me answer.
“What?” I said flatly.
All I heard was screaming.
Not yelling, but full, raw panic, the kind that strips a voice down to something animal.
“Callan!” she sobbed. “They’re trying to get in!”
I straightened immediately. My whole body became rigid.
“What? Who’s trying to get in?”
Her words tumbled over each other, broken apart by gasps and sobs.
“I don’t—these people outside—oh God, they’re not stopping, one just—” A sound tore out of her that didn’t sound human. “He’s tearing at her throat. With his teeth. There’s so much blood—Callan, they’re trying to break through the glass—”
My stomach dropped. Everything dropped. The sounds of the aquarium, the glow of the tanks, the normalcy of the afternoon—all of it fell away and left me standing cold and off.
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. My voice came out harder than I meant it to, louder. “Sadie, slow down.”
Then a crash on her end. Glass breaking. Not a window cracking—glass exploding, followed by the sound of something heavy hitting the floor.
She screamed again, this time much worse. This time there were other voices behind hers.
“They’re coming inside—Callan, they’re coming inside—”
My grip on the phone became so tight that my hand shook.
“Sadie, listen to me,” already moving, already turning toward the hallway, though I didn’t know where I thought I was going. “Lock yourself in a room. Lock the door. Do it now.”
“I—I can’t—I—”
The line went dead.
I stood there, phone pressed to my ear, hearing silence.
I called her back.
It rang and rang and rang.
But nobody picked up.
* * *
Call failed.
My thumb hit redial. My fingers slick with sweat, the phone almost slipped before I caught it and pressed it harder against my ear.
Busy signal.
I tried again, cursing under my breath.
Busy.
Again.
Busy.
My heartbeat erratic—too fast, skipping, tripping over itself. I was aware of the sound of my own blood in my ears. Sweat gathered at my hairline and ran down my temples. The phone slipped again. I caught it, knuckles white, and stood there with my thumb hovering over redial.
This wasn’t Sadie being dramatic.
This wasn’t one of her games.
Something had gone wrong, genuinely wrong, and I was standing in the back hallway of an aquarium holding a phone that wouldn’t connect, and I couldn’t do a single goddamn thing about it.
“Callan.”
I jerked my head up.
Sloane stood in the doorway, her body rigid, one hand gripping the frame so hard her knuckles had gone white. Her eyes moved fast—my face, the phone in my hand, my face again.
I realized I’d backed myself against the wall without knowing it, my shoulders pressed flat against the concrete, every muscle in my body wound so tight it hurt.
My hands were shaking. Not a tremor, shaking, violent enough that I could see it, and I knew she noticed too.
I crushed the phone in my fist until the case groaned.
“The director wants us in his office,” she said, quiet, barely above a whisper. Her jaw clenched so tight that the words had to fight their way out.
She didn’t ask me what was wrong. She didn’t ask who I’d been calling. She stood there, holding the doorframe, waiting.
I nodded once.
I followed her down the corridor. Neither of us spoke. Our footsteps echoed off the tile—hers quick and precise, mine harsh and uneven. My mind still on Sadie’s voice, the glass breaking, the screaming that wasn’t hers.
Jason was already standing in the office when we walked in.
The director stood behind his desk—standing, not sitting. His face appeared pale. The steady, measured calm he usually carried—the thing that made him good at his job, the reason none of us ever worried when he was in charge—was gone. Just gone.
He looked ten years older than he had this morning. The lines across his forehead had deepened, his shoulders drawn forward, rounded, as if the weight of whatever he knew was physically pressing him down.
“We need to shut down the aquarium,” he said, every word deliberate, careful, spaced apart, as though saying them too quickly might make them more real. “Immediately.”
The knot in my stomach pulled tighter. “What’s going on?”
He looked at me. His eyes moved to the window behind him and held there for a second too long before coming back.
“See for yourself,” he said quietly.
The room fell still. I sensed Sloane go rigid beside me. Jason stopped shifting.
I crossed the room, each step heavier than the last. The office was maybe fifteen feet wide, but it seemed much longer.
My fingers touched the cold metal of the blinds.
I pulled them aside.
Outside, the world had come apart.
Cars appeared stopped at weird angles across the road, some with doors still hanging open, engines still running. A minivan had jumped the curb and sat with its front end buried in a bus stop bench. Broken glass glittered across the asphalt.
People running. Some had their mouths open—screaming, probably, though I couldn’t hear them through the glass.
Others ran with their heads down, not looking, just moving, simply trying to get away.
A woman in a business suit sprinting barefoot across the median, one heel still in her hand, the other gone.
In the center of the road, a figure moved strangely.
That was the only way to describe it. He moved strange.
His head jerked to one side, quickly shifting to the other, in sharp, stuttering snaps that no conscious person would make.
His arms hung loose, but his fingers twitched and curled.
He walked, but it wasn’t walking—more like lurching, staggering, his legs bending at angles that looked like they hurt, like something inhabited his body and hadn’t figured out how it worked yet.
Someone running past clipped his shoulder, stumbled, kept going, didn’t look back.
The figure turned toward the contact. Slowly. His head tilted. Then he started moving after them, faster than before.
I watched a man try to get back into his car.
He appeared to be fumbling with his keys, dropping them and picking them up.
His hands likely trembled so intensely that he was unable to insert the key into the lock.
Behind him, two more of those figures rounded the corner of a building.
They were coated in a dark, damp substance.
One of them had its mouth open, and I observed, even from this distance, even through the glass, that its teeth were red.
The man got the door open. Got inside. I don’t know if he drove away. I stopped watching.
In the distance, sirens wailed. Not one or two. Dozens. Layered on top of each other, overlapping, rising and falling out of sync until it became one continuous, churning sound that didn’t stop. It just kept building.
Smoke rose from somewhere to the east. A thick black column of it, climbing straight up into the pale sky.
I sensed it then.
That same feeling from this morning. That heaviness. That weird feeling that had been sitting in my chest all day, pressing down, waiting.
But it wasn’t small anymore.
It filled every part of me; I let the blinds fall closed.
I turned back slowly.
“What the hell is happening?”
The director swallowed. I watched his throat work. His hands were flat on the desk, and I realized it was because they were shaking and he didn’t want us to see.
“The government issued an emergency alert,” he said. His voice was steady, but it cost him. I detected the effort behind every word. “Shelter in place. Effective immediately.”
The words sat in the room. Nobody moved.
Jason shifted beside me. The sound of him breathing too fast through his nose.
“They want everyone off the streets,” the director continued. He paused. Swallowed again. “Everyone home.”
Home.
Sadie.
The phone call. The glass breaking. The screaming. Her voice cutting out mid-sentence.
My chest tightened so hard that I struggled to draw breath for a second. I pressed my fist against my chest without thinking, as if the act would push the feelings back down.
“I need someone to stay behind,” the director said. He looked at me, then at Sloane, then back at me. “Secure the building. Make sure the animals are stable. Check the filtration systems and the backup generators. Then you leave. You lock everything down and you get out.”
“I’ll stay,” I said immediately.
Of course I would. This place was my responsibility. These animals were my responsibility. And the faster I finished, the faster I could get to Sadie.
If there was still something to get to.
I killed that thought before it finished.
Before the director responded, Sloane spoke.
“I’ll stay, too.”
I looked at her.
She met my eyes. Steady. No wavering. But underneath it—the tightness in her face, the tension running through her jaw, the way she was holding herself very still because if she didn’t, she might break.
She was scared. She was scared, and she was staying anyway.
“That way we can both get home faster,” she said.
Home, the way she said it—quiet, careful, like the word itself was fragile—made me wonder if she was thinking the same thing I was. About whoever was waiting for her on the other side of this. Or wasn’t.
The director nodded. Quick. Relieved in a way that made me feel worse, because it meant he understood how bad this was and he wanted out of this building as fast as possible.
“Good. Do it fast.”
Jason looked between us, his face pale, his eyes too wide.
“What about me?” he asked. His voice cracked on the last word.
“Go home, Jason,” I said.
He didn’t argue. He didn’t say goodbye. He just turned and left, his footsteps quickening down the hallway until I heard the stairwell door bang open and slam shut behind him.
The director gathered his keys, his phone, and a jacket from the back of his chair. He stopped at the door and looked at us one more time. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something—important, or reassuring—but nothing came out. He just nodded. Then he was gone.
The office fell silent.
The sirens outside kept going. Muffled through the walls, but constant. Relentless.
It was just the two of us now.
Me and Sloane.
Standing in a quiet room while the world outside tore itself apart.