Chapter 28 #2
We sprinted for the boat. My bare feet slapped on the wet concrete. Behind us, in the quarantine pool, more shapes surfaced—five, six, seven of them now, churning the water, dragging themselves toward the dock edge with slow, relentless purpose.
“Other line!” I yelled as we hit the deck.
Jeff pulled it off and kicked it into the water.
“GO!”
Ethan shoved the throttle forward.
The Mariner surged ahead, prop churning white water behind us as we pulled away from the mooring and into the narrow marina channel. Concrete walls slid past on both sides. The engine noise bounced and amplified in the tight space until the whole world shook with it.
I looked back.
The first dead thing pulled itself over the edge of the dock and collapsed onto the concrete where we’d been standing three seconds earlier. It lay there twitching, water pouring off its ruined body, and slowly began to rise.
“Straight through!” Jeff called from behind Ethan, one hand braced on the console, blood still streaming down the side of his face.
The tide gate loomed ahead. Massive steel frame. Narrow clearance. TheMarinerbarreled toward it; we shot through.
Steel scraped fiberglass on the starboard side with a shriek that set my teeth on edge, but we cleared it. Open water spread ahead of us—gray and choppy and infinite.
The moment we passed the gate, a deep mechanical whoosh echoed behind us—so powerful it shook the air and sent a pressure wave across the water that lifted our stern.
I turned.
The quarantine tank hatch had opened.
A massive surge of water exploded out from the aquarium channel—a white-capped torrent that carried everything in its path.
Debris. Foam. The dead things that had been in the pool tumbled through the rush like rag dolls, broken and spinning, swept out into the marina current where the ocean would take them.
And riding that surge, ahead of all of it—
Something large.
Frank.
The old turtle glided through the churning water beside us, his scarred shell cutting the waves with the same unhurried calm he’d carried for a hundred years.
The chaos behind him—the rushing water, the tumbling bodies, the screaming metal of a building coming apart—none of it touched him.
He moved through it all the way he’d always moved: slow, deliberate, on his own terms.
For a long, impossible moment he stayed alongside the Mariner—close enough to touch—his dark, ancient eye catching the light as he passed.
Free.
Then he dipped beneath the surface and vanished into deeper water, gone without ceremony, gone the way old things go—quietly, completely, leaving only the ripple of memories behind.
My eyes burned, but not from saltwater.
Callan kept his promise.
Then the thought hit me so hard my knees almost buckled.
“Callan,” I breathed.
I whipped around toward the aquarium building.
At first—nothing. The massive structure sat against the pale morning sky, windows dark, several of them shattered now.
The parking lot sprawled in front of it, and even from this distance I could see them—dozens of the dead, milling between cars, stumbling across open pavement, drawn toward the building by the sounds of everything we’d just done.
Then movement. High up.
“There!” I shouted, pointing.
A figure on the side of the building, sliding down one of the large exterior drain pipes—fast, reckless, boots scraping metal, sparks kicking off the brackets. The pipe groaned under the weight and pulled away from the wall at the top, bolts popping free.
Callan.
He dropped the last eight feet and hit the ground hard outside the fence surrounding the marina; he staggered.
For one horrible second, he didn’t move.
Then he pushed himself upright and started running.
Behind him, the parking lot erupted.
They came from everywhere: between cars, the broken garage entrance, from around the corner of the building where they’d been standing in that awful, vacant stillness until the noise gave them direction.
They poured across the pavement—a lurching, staggering wave of gray skin and reaching hands.
Dozens, if not more. The entire parking lot seemed to shift and converge toward one point—
Toward him.
“Jesus…” Jeff said.
Callan sprinted across the open ground toward the long breakwater that separated the public marina from the aquarium’s private dock. He ran with everything he had—head down, arms driving, every stride devouring pavement. Fast. He stumbled and fell for a second, then he was moving again.
But they closed behind him, faster than they should have.
The ones nearest to his path lunged—one of them catching the back of his shirt, fingers hooking the fabric.
Callan twisted without breaking stride; the shirt tore, and he pulled free.
Another reached from between two parked cars—he hurdled its outstretched arm and kept going.
“Stop the boat!” I screamed.
The three of us stood at the stern and watched.
He reached the break wall. Behind him, the dead closed to ten feet. Five. I could see their faces now—ruined, slack, driven by nothing but hunger and proximity. The fastest one—a massive thing in a torn security uniform—reached for his shoulder.
Callan hit the edge of the wall at a dead sprint and launched himself into the air.
His body arced against the gray sky—arms forward, legs driving behind him—suspended for one impossible, breathless second between the concrete and the ocean.
Then he knifed into the water and vanished.
The security guard couldn’t stop. Its momentum carried it over the edge, arms still reaching, and it pitched headfirst into the ocean with a heavy, meaty splash.
Three more followed—tumbling off the break wall in a cascade of flailing limbs and dead weight, hitting the water in ugly, graceless impacts.
They didn’t swim.
They thrashed, arms churning the surface uselessly, heads bobbing once, twice—mouths still working, still biting at nothing—and then the current took them, dragged them down. The ocean swallowed them without hesitation, pulling them under one by one until the surface appeared still.
More of the dead reached the wall’s edge and stopped. They stood there—swaying, staring out at the water with those empty white eyes, arms hanging at their sides. They wouldn’t jump unless momentum carried them. They just… stood and watched and waited.
“Swimming’s not really their thing,” Jeff said quietly.
The water near the break wall churned and settled.
Five seconds passed. Ten.
Nothing.
My hands gripped the stern railing so hard that the metal cut into my palms.
Come up.
Come up, come up, come up—
Callan’s head broke the surface.