Chapter 20
Twenty
Callan
“Stay here,” I told Sloane quietly.
She was already standing near the door to the director’s office, eyes wide but steady.
“Lock it behind me.”
Her mouth opened like she wanted to argue, but she noticed the look on my face and stopped herself. Slowly, she nodded.
“Callan… be careful.”
I gave a short nod and reached beside the door, grabbing the speargun I’d pulled from storage the night before. The metal shaft was cold and heavier than I remembered. I checked the tension line without thinking—muscle memory from years of dive work kicking in.
I hoped to God my aim was still good, because if it wasn’t, this might go sideways fast.
I stepped into the hallway and pulled the office door shut behind me. A quiet click told me Sloane had locked it.
Good.
The aquarium was eerie in the early light. Long corridors of glass and water curved away from me in both directions, and the spiral walkway winding down around the central tank disappeared into the shadows below.
Somewhere down there, something had made that noise.
I tightened my grip on the speargun and started moving.
Please. Be only one. Please don’t let there be more.
I crept to the edge of the spiral walkway and leaned over the railing, scanning the levels beneath me.
At first—nothing. Simply the massive central tank, that towering cylinder of blue water stretching from the bottom floor to the ceiling above. Smaller habitat tanks branched off each level, holding their separate little worlds.
There.
Three levels down.
My stomach dropped.
A figure stood pressed against the glass of the central tank, forehead resting on the surface. Completely still. Almost peaceful, the way it leaned there, like it was watching the fish move.
I didn’t breathe.
I waited, eyes sweeping the surrounding shadows, looking for more.
Nothing.
Only one.
I started down the walkway, each step slow and deliberate, weight on the balls of my feet, keeping the metal from ringing out through the open space.
The odor reached me two levels up—rot. Thick and sour, it coated the back of my throat. The thing shifted against the glass, its shoulder dragging with a faint squeak.
And then I saw the lanyard, bright blue, hanging from its neck.
“Jason…” I whispered before I could stop myself.
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 stood there, 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 of dried 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—and brought things with it.
Soft things. Dark things that 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.
His head hit the metal walkway with a hollow clang, and the impact split the ruined skull wide open along the entry wound.
It split apart like rotten fruit. I saw the inside of his head for one terrible, endless second—dark red and glistening, caved in where the spear had landed, the brain matter already discolored and dead, threaded through with something black and web-like that I’d never seen in any anatomy diagram.
Blood ran between the grated floor and dripped to the level below in slow, heavy drops. The sound they made hitting the concrete underneath was the only noise in the building.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
I stood there breathing hard, the speargun still raised, staring at what was left of him.
My cheek was wet. I wiped it with the back of my hand, and my fingers came away dark.
His blood was on my face.
We don’t know how it spreads.
The captain’s words hit me like ice water. My whole body went cold. I scrubbed at my cheek frantically, dragging my sleeve across the skin until it burned, but I could still feel it.
Stop. Stop it. You don’t know. You don’t know if that’s how it works.
But I didn’t know that it wasn’t.
My hands were shaking so badly now that the speargun rattled. I crouched and wiped the shaft against Jason’s shirt, trying to get the worst of it off. The fabric was already so saturated with old blood and fluids that it barely made a difference.
I stepped around the body carefully, pressing against the far railing to keep as much distance as possible from the spreading pool beneath his head. It was wider now and creeping toward the edges of the walkway. The dripping below had become a steady, thin stream.
Every few steps, I stopped and listened, waiting for another snarl. Another shuffle of feet on metal.
The building stayed quiet, save for the generators and water.
I worked my way through the rest of the aquarium with the speargun up, checking every corner, every shadow, every doorway.
My eyes burned from not blinking. Every dark shape made my heart lurch—a mop bucket against a wall, a wet suit hanging from a hook, the silhouette of a trash can at the end of a corridor.
Each one stopped me dead for a horrible, breathless second before my brain caught up.
The spiral walkway groaned softly under my boots as I descended the last level, and every groan sounded like one of them moving in the dark.
When I reached the staff hallway, my pulse was hammering.
The door Jason must have come through sat at the far end of the corridor. The hallway stretched out in front of me, long and narrow and dim, and I couldn’t clearly see the last ten feet of it.
Anything might be standing down there.
Anything might be pressed against that door, waiting.
I made myself keep walking. One foot in front of the other. Speargun raised. The blood on my cheek had dried now, tight and itching, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The door materialized out of the dimness.
Shut.
The indicator light glowed a steady red.