Chapter 20 #2
I stared at it for a long time. My breathing slowly steadied.
The door would have stayed open for several seconds. That was how these magnetic locks worked—I knew because I’d programmed them. Five seconds of clearance before the auto-lock engaged.
Five seconds.
Long enough for Jason to drag himself through on that destroyed ankle.
I turned slowly and stared back down the dark hallway behind me. The shadows at the far end were thick and unmoving.
Nothing there.
I stood up, tightened my grip on the spear until my knuckles ached, and started back toward the office.
* * *
I made my way back up the spiral walkway two steps at a time, the speargun still tight in my hands. Adrenaline coursed through me like a current that wouldn’t shut off. Every sound snapped my head around, eyes searching the shadows behind me.
Nothing followed.
I didn’t slow down until I was standing outside the director’s office door.
I knocked twice.
“Sloane, it’s me.”
A pause, just long enough for my mind to go somewhere terrible.
Then the lock clicked.
The door cracked open and her face appeared, eyes scanning me from head to toe in one fast sweep—my hands, the speargun, my face. Whatever she saw there made the color drain from her cheeks.
“Callan…”
Her gaze lingered on the dark smear still drying on my cheek, on the wet stains on my sleeve.
“What happened?”
“It was Jason.”
She blinked.
For a moment, the name didn’t seem to register, as if I’d said it in a language she didn’t speak.
Then it hit.
“Jason?” She leaned past me, looking down the empty hallway. “Where is he? Is he okay?”
I swallowed hard. The words felt like swallowing glass.
“Jason was one of those things, Sloane.”
Her face changed. I watched it happen in real time—confusion shifting into shock. Her lips parted, but nothing came out.
“I think he stumbled against the keypad outside,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could. “Triggered the door. Wandered in.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. My hand was still shaking.
“He never made it home Wednesday.”
She stared at me, trying to reconcile the Jason she knew—the one who always burned his lunch in the break room microwave, who talked too loud on the phone, who left passive-aggressive notes about the coffee pot—with what I was telling her.
“Is he…” she started quietly.
“He’s dead.”
I hesitated.
“Again.”
The word hung in the air between us.
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds, then she asked the last question I expected.
“What about the body?”
I blinked.
The practicality of it caught me so off guard that a short, raw laugh escaped before I pushed it down.
Not because anything was funny, because honestly, nothing was.
But because we were standing in the doorway of a director’s office discussing the disposal of a coworker I’d just put a spear through, and she’d jumped straight to logistics.
“Shit,” I said. “I hadn’t gotten that far.”
I leaned back against the wall and stared at the ceiling, thinking, obviously leaving him on the walkway wasn’t an option. The smell was already unbearable, and in this heat, it would only get worse. And if there was even the smallest chance that whatever this was spread through decomposition—
“We could put him in one of the tanks,” I said slowly.
Her eyes went wide.
“The sharks?”
“No,” I said immediately. “Absolutely not. We do notneed zombie sharks.”
The thought alone made something in my gut twist sideways. Infected great whites circling the central tank. I shoved the image away before it could take root.
Sloane crossed her arms, still pale, still rattled, but I could see her forcing herself to think through it.
“There has to be somewhere we can—”
“The piranha exhibit.”
She stopped.
“Thepiranhas?”
I nodded. “They’ll strip a carcass to bone faster than anything else in this building. And that tank’s self-contained—separate filtration, no cross-contamination with the main system.”
She stared at me for a long moment.
“That is genuinely horrifying, Callan.”
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“But it solves the problem.”
For a second, she just looked at me. Then—despite everything, the fear or the fact we were standing in the wreckage of everything we’d known forty-eight hours ago—a small laugh broke out of her.
“We’re discussing feeding our coworker to piranhas.”
“Welcome to Friday,” I muttered.
The laugh faded as fast as it came. Reality settled back over her face.
“You’re sure he’s dead?” she asked quietly. “Completely?”
I nodded.
“Spear through the skull.”
She winced, but didn’t look away.
“Right.”
Silence again, longer this time.
Then she took a breath and squared her shoulders. Something visible in her eyes, not acceptance, exactly.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go deal with it.”
I grabbed the spear and pushed off the wall.
“Stay behind me.”
She gave me a flat look.
“He’s already dead, Callan.”
“Yeah,” I said, pulling the door open and checking the hallway before stepping through.
“I’m just not one hundred percent certain he’s the only one that got in.”