Chapter 9
Nine
Sloane
“Sloane.”
The quietness of Callan’s voice made it more of a feeling than something I could hear. A vibration against my temple where his jaw was pressed close.
It wasn’t his usual voice. Not irritated.
This was something else entirely, controlled. The kind of calm that only exists when someone is holding themselves together by force.
“When I say move,” his breath warm against my ear, “I’m going to open my truck door. And I need you to move like your fucking life depends on it.”
He paused.
“Because it might.”
My throat closed, and the moisture in my mouth evaporated. I tried to swallow. I tried to speak. My eyes were locked on the woman as she staggered closer, that horrible dragging gait eating up the distance between us in uneven lurches.
Forty feet.
Thirty-five.
Her movements kept changing—sudden bursts of speed that made my heart seize, and that awful dragging slowness, like her body was fighting itself.
Thirty feet.
More of her was visible now. Details I didn’t want.
The skin on her forearms appeared torn—not cut, but torn, like something had peeled it back in ragged strips that hung loose and swung when she moved.
Underneath was dark, wet. I could see the white gleam of something that might have been tendon.
Her jaw hung slightly open, slack, and even from this distance, the lower half of her face appeared misshapen.
Too much of it was exposed—teeth visible where there shouldn’t have been teeth, the flesh of her left cheek hanging in a flap that swayed with each jerking step.
Twenty-five feet.
“Understand?” Callan breathed.
“Yes,” I whispered.
My voice is almost nothing, a thread of sound that barely made it past my lips.
Twenty feet.
Callan’s thumb found the unlock button on his key fob. I sensed his arm tense against me. I sensed him draw one long, slow breath.
The truck chirped.
Loud. So fucking loud. The sound bounced off the concrete walls of the aquarium behind us and ricocheted across the empty lot like a gunshot.
The woman’s head snapped toward us.
Immediate. Direct. Her whole body pivoted, that broken neck wrenching her face in our direction with a wet snap I heard from twenty feet away.
She saw us. The slack, aimless quality vanished. Her body went taut. Her fingers curled. Her jaw stretched wider, and a sound came out of her—low, guttural, building from somewhere deep in her ruined chest.
My stomach dropped so fast I thought I’d be sick.
Callan moved.
He shoved off the truck, off me, creating space in one violent motion. His hand hit the unlock button again, and he wrenched the driver’s door open so hard the hinges screamed.
“MOVE!”
I didn’t think. Thought had left the building, and what remained was animal—pure, electric, screaming survival instinct that launched me off the side of the truck and through the open door.
I dove across the seat, my hands slipping on worn leather, my knee cracking against the center console.
I scrambled, clawing myself toward the passenger side, making room.
Callan threw himself in behind me. The truck rocked with his weight. He grabbed the door and slammed it shut so hard the entire frame shuddered, and my ears rang.
Keys in the ignition. One turn. The engine caught and roared to life beneath us, vibrating through the seat, through my bones.
And that’s when she ran.
Not stumbled. Not lurched. Not dragged.
Ran.
Faster than anything moving like that should have been able to move. The broken gait replaced by something fluid and horrifying, her legs pumping, her arms swinging, her head still wrenched at that impossible angle as she closed the distance in seconds.
A sound tore from her throat—raw, guttural, inhuman. Not a scream or a moan, but something between the two that vibrated at a frequency I felt in my soul, in the base of my spine, in the primitive part of my brain that knew now what it meant to be prey.
She hit the hood of the truck at full speed.
The impact rocked the vehicle forward. Metal buckled under her hands—actually buckled, denting inward—and I screamed. She was right there, right there on the other side of the windshield.
Her fingers splayed across the hood, nails—some of them missing, torn out at the root, the nail beds raw and oozing—scraping against metal with a shriek that cut through my scream, through the engine, through everything.
She dragged herself forward, pulling her body up onto the hood with a strength that didn’t belong in that broken frame.
Her face pressed toward the windshield, and it was fully visible for the first time.
The left side just gone. Not damaged, but gone.
The cheek had been ripped away, exposing the full row of her teeth from front to back, the gums dark and bloody, the jaw muscles visible and working as her mouth opened and closed.
One eye was intact, wide and white-rimmed, and locked directly on me.
The other was an empty socket, dark and empty and leaking something thick down what remained of her face.
Her mouth opened wider, and she slammed her forehead into the windshield.
The glass cracked.
Her face hit the windshield again.
The crack spiderwebbed outward, a jagged starburst spreading across the glass, and blood—thick, dark—smeared where her skin met the surface.
She pressed into it, grinding her ruined face against the fracture as if she were trying to push through by force alone.
Her mouth yawned open, and her teeth snapped down against the glass with a sound like stones cracking together.
Once. Twice. Again. Each bite leaving a wet, red print on the windshield.
Her one eye found me through the blood and the cracks.
It didn’t blink.
“Fuck!” Callan snarled.
His hand slammed the gearshift into reverse. The engine screamed, a roar that matched the one still emanating from the thing on the hood. The tires spun, caught, and the truck lurched backward so hard my head snapped against the headrest.
Her body slid. Her fingers scrambled for purchase.
The ones that were gone left wet, red trails where the exposed nail beds dragged across the paint.
She held on. The truck was moving, and she was holding on, her body flattened against the hood, legs trailing behind her, that horrible mouth still working, biting at nothing.
“Get off!” The words ripped out of me before I knew I was screaming. My voice didn’t sound like mine—too high, too thin. Panic had stripped it down to something barely human. “Get off!”
She didn’t react to my voice. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t even turn toward the sound. But her fingers tightened, knuckles white beneath the blood, and she started pulling herself forward again, dragging her body up the hood toward the cracked windshield—toward us.
With each exhale, a fine mist of red sprayed from her open mouth and speckled the glass.
Callan jerked the wheel hard to the left.
The truck swung violently, tires shrieking against asphalt, and the momentum did what speed had yet to.
Her body shifted sideways; her left hand lost its grip, fingers peeling away from the metal.
She scrambled, that one remaining hand clawing desperately at the hood, leaving a long, curved streak of blood as she slid.
Her body hit the pavement, and I heard it—not just the thud of impact but the sound of bone meeting asphalt. The sound was wet and hard at the same time, and it went through me.
Callan didn’t stop.
The engine roared, and the truck shot forward toward the lot entrance.
I was shaking. My whole body. Hands, arms—everything. Could still hear that wet, rattling sound even though we were moving, even though she was behind us, even though—
I looked in the side mirror.
I shouldn’t have.
She was already getting up.
Her body jerked upright in a series of sharp, mechanical movements—spine snapping straight, legs folding beneath her, hands pressing flat against the ground.
Her left arm bent at an angle that meant it was broken, the forearm bowing outward where no joint existed.
She put weight on it anyway. I watched the bone shift beneath the skin, a visible bulge pressing outward, and she pushed herself to her feet, as if pain didn’t exist for her.
She stood in the middle of the lot, blood-soaked, broken, her head still wrenched to one side.
She appeared to be looking at us.
Then she started running.
* * *
I collapsed back into the seat, my chest heaving. The seatbelt cut into my collarbone where I’d been thrown against it, and I didn’t care. We were moving, and she was behind us, and we were away from her, away from whatever the fuck that thing had been.
My hands trembled violently in my lap. I watched them shake. My fingers kept spasming, curling and uncurling as if they belonged to someone else. The truck roared beneath us, and I held onto that sensation because it was real. It was normal and real.
For a second, I let myself believe we were safe.
Then Callan’s foot came off the gas.
The truck began to slow down.
No.
No, no, no.
I looked up.
The entrance to the lot was blocked.
A car lay flipped on its side across the exit, its undercarriage exposed and dripping fluid—oil, coolant, something darker—onto the pavement.
One of its doors hung open at an angle that meant the hinges had been ripped apart, not bent.
Broken glass covered the road in a wide, glittering spray that caught our headlights and threw them back in sharp little points of light.
Beyond the glass, drag marks were visible—long, dark smears leading away from the driver’s side window.
Whoever had been inside that car had been pulled out.
And around it—
Movement.
Three.
No.
Four.
Four figures standing in the wash of our headlights. Their bodies were still at first, almost frozen, caught mid-motion as if someone had pressed pause. Their shadows stretched long and black across the pavement behind them.