Chapter 9 #2
Then they turned toward us.
All four at the same time, heads swiveling with that same odd, mechanical precision I’d seen in the woman, coordinated in a way that made the skin on the back of my neck crawl.
They looked like her. All of them—off and disfigured in the same ways.
Blood-soaked faces, hands, clothes so saturated they’d gone black.
One of them, a man, dragged his left leg behind him with each step, his foot twisted completely backward at the ankle, toes pointing the wrong direction, the bone visibly tenting the skin on the front of his shin.
It didn’t slow him down. He just dragged it, scraping across the pavement with that same sickening rhythm.
Another—a woman, maybe; it was hard to tell—had its jaw hanging open, not slack but dislocated. It hung too low, stretching the skin of its cheeks into a grotesque, elongated gape that exposed the full length of its teeth and the dark cavity of its throat beyond them.
The third was missing an arm—gone from just below the shoulder, the stump ragged and wet, shredded muscle and the white jut of snapped bone visible even from this distance.
The fourth was the smallest. I didn’t want to look at the fourth.
I made myself look anyway. A teenager, no more than sixteen.
Half its scalp peeled back, hanging down over one ear like a wet rag, exposing the curve of the skull beneath—white bone streaked with red.
He was smiling. Not really—his face was frozen, muscles pulling his lips back from his teeth—but in the headlights, it looked like a smile.
They were looking right at us.
“Fuck,” I whispered. The word was barely a vibration in my throat. “Callan… what the fuck are they?”
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.
“Get ready to move!” Callan shouted, his voice hoarse, raw. “As soon as I stop, we’re going back inside!”
My heart dropped.
Back inside.
Back into the sealed building we’d just locked down, with its emergency generators, its reinforced doors, and its concrete walls.
We were trapped.
The realization hit me, settling into my chest.
The truck skidded to a stop beside the employee door, tires squealing. The headlights splashed against the concrete wall, throwing everything into harsh white relief.
In the side mirror, all four of them appeared. The teenager leading, that horrible grin splitting his face, his legs pumping as he sprinted across the lot toward us. Behind him, the others followed.
Behind them, in the far reaches of the lot, I saw something else that made my blood run cold.
The woman. The one we’d driven over.
She was moving. A dark shape on the pavement, pulling itself forward on its arms, dragging what was left of its lower half behind it, leaving a wide, dark smear in its wake. Still coming.
Callan threw the truck into park and killed the engine. The sudden silence was deafening. He grabbed his keys, looked at me once—hard, direct, no room for anything but what came next—and said a single word.
“Now.”