Chapter 12
Twelve
Callan
The roof comprised a mess of angles and levels.
Nothing about it was flat or simple. The building appeared elegant from the outside—sweeping curves of glass and steel, the kind of architecture that won awards and looked beautiful in brochures—but up here, it was haphazard: sloped maintenance platforms, ventilation units ticking in their housings, narrow metal walkways with railings slick from last night’s rain.
And glass.
So. Much. Glass.
I stepped out first, my boots scraping against the metal grating, and scanned the immediate area. Empty. Quiet. Nothing was moving except the wind.
Sloane emerged from the hatch, hesitant, pulling herself up and through with movements slower than usual. Her eyes swept the rooftop before the rest of her body had even cleared the opening, scanning every angle, every shadow.
She looked smaller up here, in the open, with nothing but sky above her and the wind pulling at her hair and clothes.
I stayed close.
We didn’t speak as we crossed the walkway toward the edge.
The wind, steady and cold, pushed against us in gusts that smelled like salt and burnt wood.
To our right, the Atlantic stretched out toward the horizon.
Calm. Blue. Unchanged.
The water moved the way it always moved—slow, steady swells rolling in from the deep, waves breaking white and gentle along the shoreline. Rhythmic. Patient. As if nothing had happened, like the world wasn’t tearing itself apart a few hundred yards inland.
It looked like any other morning.
But when we turned toward the city—
Everything fell apart.
Smoke. For miles.
Thick black columns rising from dozens of points across the skyline, merging into a dark, spreading haze that smeared across the sky and blotted out the sun in patches.
Entire buildings burned, flames visible even from this distance, orange and yellow clawing through shattered windows, consuming floors, consuming rooftops, consuming everything inside with no one left to put it out.
Sirens wailed faintly somewhere in the
distance, but fewer than before—definitely fewer than should be in this type of situation.
And the roads.
Jesus Christ.
The roads.
Cars littered everywhere, stopped at odd angles, doors hanging open, some smashed into each other, some driven up onto sidewalks and into storefronts. A city bus sat jackknifed across an intersection three blocks away, its windshield shattered inward.
And between the cars—on the pavement, on the sidewalks, in the gutters, on the median strips—
Bodies.
Everywhere.
Some lay completely still, sprawled face down on the asphalt, crumpled against curbs, hanging half out of car doors as if they’d been trying to run and hadn’t made it.
A man in a white shirt lay on his back in the middle of the street with his arms out to his sides, his torso dark and wet with something I couldn’t see from up here.
Others moved.
Slow. Unsteady. Aimless.
They wandered without direction, without purpose. Some alone, drifting along sidewalks in halting, uneven steps. Some in small, loose clusters, moving vaguely together but not coordinated, not communicating, drawn to the same patch of ground for reasons unknown.
Like the woman from last night.
The same unnatural, broken movement. The same grotesque way they carried themselves, like a body still functioning, but whatever had been driving it—whatever had made it human—was gone.
At my side, Sloane stilled.
“Oh my God,” she gasped.
Her voice barely carried.
We stood there, frozen. Both of us were trying to take in the scale of what we were looking at and failing; it made little sense. It didn’t fit inside any frame of reference either of us had.
Not isolated.
This wasn’t a neighborhood, a district, a contained event with a perimeter and emergency responders and someone in charge.
This was everywhere.
As far as I could see in every direction that wasn’t ocean, the city was burning and full of the dead and the things that used to be living.
Movement caught my eye across the street at a gas station with a mini-mart attached—bright signage now dark, the pumps standing idle.
The front doors burst open.
A woman stumbled out. Young, maybe mid-twenties.
Dark hair. She was moving fast, panicked, her body pitched forward with the desperate, graceless momentum of someone running on pure adrenaline.
She looked over her shoulder as she cleared the door.
Even from way up here, the emotions on her face were visible.
Terror.
She ran.
She made it about thirty feet.
One of them came through the door after her.
Fast.
Not the slow, shuffling things wandering the streets. This one moved. It covered the distance between the door and the woman in seconds. Its legs moved in a jerky, violent sprint that looked strange—as if the joints didn’t bend quite right, but the thing didn’t care, kept driving forward.
It hit her from behind.
The impact was hard enough that her feet left the ground. She went down face-first into the pavement, the thing on top of her.
She screamed.
The sound pierced the morning quiet, raw and ragged, full of fear. So pure it sounded like something being torn out of her, something fundamental that would never go back in.
She fought. Kicked. Twisted underneath it. Her hands clawed at the pavement, at its face, at anything. Her legs thrashed, fighting with everything she had.
It wasn’t enough, would never be enough.
More of them appeared.
Drawn by the sound, they were coming from between cars, from around corners, from doorways that had looked empty five seconds ago. Three. Four. Then too many to count, moving toward her with that horrible speed, converging on the sound of her screaming.
They fell on her.
All of them at once.
Her screams changed, became higher, broke apart into something wet and choking. Her arm reached up between the bodies pressing down on her, fingers splayed, grasping at nothing. Her legs still kicked, still moved.
Then they didn’t; the arm dropped, and the sounds stopped.
They hunched over her, pressed against her, pulling and tearing at something not clear from this distance.
The wet sounds carried on the wind.
Sloane grabbed my arm, her fingers digging into me hard enough to make me jerk. She was trembling—not dramatically, not visibly unless you were right next to her.
Neither of us spoke.
There was nothing to say. We simply stood there on the roof of the aquarium, the wind pulling at us, the sun trying to break through the smoke and failing, and we watched the world die a little more below us.
* * *
Once we were back inside, the silence between us remained.
The hatch closed behind us with a dull metallic thud that echoed down through the shaft and into the building below. It sealed off the sky. The smoke. The sounds, but it didn’t seal off what we’d seen.
Our footsteps echoed through the upper hallway as we made our way back down toward the director’s office. The aquarium swooshed around us, steady and indifferent.
Everything was still doing exactly what it had been built to do.
Everything except the part that involved people.
I reached the office first and stepped inside, moving straight for the desk phone. I picked up the receiver and pressed it to my ear.
Nothing.
No dial tone. No static. No beep of a connection trying to find somewhere to go.
“Dead,” I said quietly.
I set the receiver back in its cradle. It clicked softly, feeling final in a way I wasn’t ready for.
Behind me, Sloane didn’t respond.
I turned.
She’d walked over to the couch along the far wall and sat down, simply dropped onto it as if her legs had decided they were done and she had had no say in the matter. Her hands rested loosely in her lap, palms up, fingers slightly curled. Her shoulders had fallen forward, and her head hung low.
Her eyes were open, but they weren’t looking at anything.
Not the floor. Not the wall. Not me.
Nothing.
Dazed. Empty. Gone somewhere inside herself that I couldn’t reach from here.
Shock.
I knew that look.
I’d seen it before. A long time ago, in a different life.
I was eighteen when I enlisted. Stupid and restless, I had something to prove in ways I didn’t understand yet, and I thought the Marines would give me something I couldn’t name—purpose, direction, anything to fill the space inside me that never felt settled, no matter what I did.
Four years of heat and sand and noise and waiting and not sleeping and learning, in precise and brutal detail, exactly how fragile the human body was, how quickly it could come apart, and how little it took.
I’d seen men get that look after firefights, IEDs, after watching something happen to someone next to them that their brains refused to process. Their eyes would go dead. They’d sit down somewhere and simply… stop. Like the mind had hit a wall it couldn’t climb over.
It wasn’t weakness, more like overload, as if the system protected itself the only way it knew how.
I walked over slowly, not crowding her.
“Sloane,” I said.
Gently, quieter than I usually spoke to her. Quieter than I’d ever honestly spoken to her.
Her eyes shifted to me, sluggish, as if the signal had to travel a long way to reach her, and by the time it arrived, it had lost most of its strength.
She looked at me, but it was as if she were looking through me.
“They’re everywhere,” she whispered.
Her voice was empty.
I didn’t answer because there was nothing I had the ability to say that would make it better, nothing that would make it less true, and I would not stand here and lie to her. Not about this.
“They just…” She swallowed hard. Her throat worked visibly, and her eyes dropped to her hands in her lap. “They just tore her apart.”
Her voice broke on the last word—no dramatic sobbing, just simple disintegration.
I stood there, didn’t touch her, didn’t fix it.
Some things can’t be fixed. You just have to stand next to them and wait it out.
Her hands trembled again. I watched as she looked down at them as if they belonged to someone else, as if she was a bystander to her own body rebelling against her.
I crossed the room, pulling the director’s chair with me, swiveling it around as I sat down across from her. I leaned forward on my knees so I was closer to her level, closer to where she was.
“You’re in shock,” I said.
She gave a small, bitter laugh—short and sharp and completely without humor.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Fair enough.
Finally, she looked at me, fully. Not the glazed, distant stare from before.
“What do we do?” she asked.
Not challenging me the way she had a hundred times before across conference tables and in hallways, and over email chains that went on for days.
Just asking, as if she trusted me to have an answer.
That scared me more than anything I’d seen on that roof.
I exhaled slowly, rubbed my hands together, thought about it the way I’d been trained to think about it—not the big picture, not the why, not the how. Just the next step, and the one after that.
“We’ll stay here,” I said. “For now.”
She frowned faintly.
“Here?”
“We’ve got food, water. The cafeteria supply room is stocked for a full week of visitors—that’s enough for two people for a long time. We have generators and reinforced doors designed to hold in case of hurricane evacuation. We know this place; this is the safest place for us right now.”
I paused.
She studied my face. Her eyes moved across it slowly, searching for something—certainty, perhaps, confidence—some sign that I actually believed what I was saying and wasn’t just holding it together for her benefit.
“Do you really think we can survive this?” she asked quietly.
I held her gaze, didn’t flinch.
“I think,” I said carefully, “this is the best place we’ve got.”
It wasn’t a yes. She knew that. I knew that. But it was honest, and right now honest was the only thing I had to give her.
Her shoulders sagged, just a slow release, simply nothing left to fuel it. She leaned back into the couch, her head tipping against the cushion, her eyes lifting to the ceiling.
She stared up at it for a long time.
The ventilation system blew faintly and softly above us. Somewhere deeper in the building, a pump cycled on, ran for thirty seconds, and cycled off again.
After a long moment, she said it.
Quietly, almost to herself, as if she were testing whether she could say the words out loud and survive them.
“I don’t think Peter made it.”
The words hung in the air between us.
I didn’t tell her that she didn’t know that. Didn’t say perhaps he got out, or maybe he found somewhere safe, or any of the things people say when they want to make someone feel better.
I’d seen what was out there; she’d seen what was out there.
We both knew.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Two words. Not enough. Not nearly enough. But they were real, and I meant them.
She closed her eyes, her chin dipped slightly, breath hitched once—a small, involuntary sound, barely audible—and then again.
Her lips pressed together hard, and her jaw tightened, and I watched her try to hold it in.
The way she’d held things in for the entire six years I’d known her, keeping herself locked down tight, never letting anyone see the real Sloane.
Fuck, I honestly didn’t even know she had a boyfriend.
Her face crumpled; there was no sobbing, no wailing, no sound at all, just her finally giving up the fight, tears spilling from beneath closed lids and running down her cheeks in steady, silent streams.
I sat there. I didn’t move. I didn’t look away.
I just stayed.