Chapter 29
Twenty Nine
Callan
“Come on… come on…” I muttered under my breath.
My hand wrapped tight around the quarantine tank lever in the control room. The metal sat cold against my fingers, trembling from adrenaline and the pounding of the dead behind me.
I had no idea how the hell I’d get out of here, but that didn’t matter.
Frank and Sloane were getting out if it killed me.
The monitors mounted along the wall flickered with grainy black-and-white camera feeds from around the aquarium.
Most showed empty hallways—or what should have been empty hallways.
Camera 2 caught three of them stumbling through the gift shop, knocking over shelves of stuffed animals and souvenir cups like drunk shoppers.
Camera 4 showed the main corridor outside the jellyfish exhibit packed with bodies—shoulder to shoulder, swaying, bumping into each other, filling the hallway from wall to wall.
But Camera 6—the quarantine holding pool outside—showed the SS Mariner.
Moving.
“Thank fuck,” I breathed.
I watched as the boat pulled away from the dock and lined up with the marina channel. The kid had the throttle forward before Jeff even had both feet on deck.
Smart kid.
The moment the boat cleared the tide gate, I yanked the lever.
A deep mechanical clang echoed somewhere far below—so heavy it vibrated up through the floor. The quarantine hatch released. On the monitor, the water surged, a white-capped torrent flooding through the channel, carrying everything with it.
And riding the front of that surge—
Frank.
The old turtle glided out through the opening with the kind of calm that made the surrounding chaos look ridiculous.
I sagged against the control panel and let out a long, shaking breath.
“They’re free.”
For a few seconds I stood there, forehead resting against the cool metal of the console, staring at the monitor as the boat disappeared down the channel and Frank’s dark shape sank beneath the surface; reality came back like a slap.
“Fuck.”
Now what?
I turned slowly and looked around the control room.
Small. Concrete walls. Banks of old monitors humming with static. No other doors. Only the one entrance—the heavy steel door I’d barricaded with a filing cabinet and two chairs stacked against the handle.
Beyond that door, the building belonged to them.
The sounds reverberated into the room. Not simply the moaning anymore—but them moving.
The shuffle of dozens of feet across the tile.
The wet drag of something heavy being pulled along a wall.
And closer now, on this level, a rhythmic thumping that I recognized with sick certainty as a body throwing itself against a door somewhere down the corridor.
I ran a hand through my hair, pacing once across the cramped space.
Think.
Think.
My eyes landed on the small, reinforced window set into the back wall.
I leaned closer.
The window had a latch.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I flipped it open. The window creaked outward on stiff hinges, and fresh salt air rushed into the room—cold, clean, carrying the odor of ocean and diesel.
Hope surged through my chest for one bright second.
Then I leaned out.
And looked down.
“Ah… shit.”
Sixty feet, at least. The ground below—cracked pavement, a strip of weedy gravel, and the marina fence—looked small enough to be a photograph. No fire escape. No awning. No convenient pile of anything soft. Only concrete and a long, fatal drop.
I leaned farther out, scanning the wall.
That’s when I saw it.
The drainage pipe.
A thick, rust-streaked pipe running straight down the side of the building from the roofline to the ground. Heavy gauge. Industrial. Bolted to the concrete with metal brackets every six feet or so.
About three feet to the right of the window.
My brain started calculating immediately.
Three feet sideways. Sixty feet down. One rusty pipe that might be fifty years old and might hold my weight or might rip free from the wall the second I grabbed it.
I stared at it for a long moment and laughed quietly to myself.
“Well… that’s a gamble.”
Behind me, through the barricaded door, something hit the corridor wall hard enough to rattle the monitors on their mounts, a sound I hadn’t heard before—a low, gurgling snarl, wet and thick, like vocal cords working through a throat full of fluid.
Close. Very close.
The pipe won.
I grabbed the window frame and hauled myself halfway out, boots scraping against the concrete wall as I shifted my weight onto the narrow exterior ledge. Wind whipped across my face from the open ocean beyond the marina, strong enough to make my eyes water.
The pipe looked even thinner from out here, way more rust than at first glance, and several of the upper brackets had already pulled partially free, the concrete around them crumbling.
I swallowed hard.
“Alright,” I muttered. “Let’s not die doing something stupid.”
I pushed the rest of the way through the window, pressing my back against the exterior wall, boots balanced on a ledge no wider than my heel.
Sixty feet of nothing below me. Wind pulling at my clothes.
The distant sound of the Mariner’s engine somewhere out on the water—proof that they’d made it, proof that this mattered.
My fingers reached sideways.
Stretching.
Stretching—
They wrapped around the cold metal of the drainage pipe.
“Got you.”
I swung my weight over. One leg braced against the wall. Both hands on the pipe. The metal groaned—a low, shuddering complaint that I heard more than I wanted to—but held.
“Please hold…”
I started down.
Hand under hand. Boot finding each bracket, testing it, weighing it slowly before committing.
The pipe shuddered and shifted with every movement, rust flaking off beneath my palms in orange powder that the wind carried away.
My shoulders and forearms burned as sweat ran down my temples. Fuck, I needed to work out more.
Twenty feet down.
Thirty.
The brackets held. Barely. Each one I passed groaned a little louder than the last, the bolts working loose in crumbling concrete that hadn’t been maintained in years.
One bracket—the fourth from the top—pulled free entirely as my boot left it.
I heard it clatter off the wall above, bouncing twice before hitting the pavement with a distant ping.
I froze. Pressed my forehead against the pipe. Breathed.
Then kept going.
Forty feet down.
That’s when the window above me darkened.
I looked up.
A face stared down at me from the control room window, or what had been a face.
The thing that leaned through the opening wore the remnants of a maintenance uniform—a navy blue polo, name tag still clipped to the chest. DEREK, it read.
But Derek’s jaw hung at an angle that no living skull could produce, dislocated and dangling, connected by a thin strip of gray muscle on one side.
His tongue—blackened, swollen to twice its normal size—lolled out of the gap and hung against his chin, dripping a thick rope of dark fluid down the side of the building.
His eyes found me.
Milky, clouded, but locked on.
Derek lunged through the window, simply threw his upper body through the opening with the mindless, mechanical hunger that drove all of them.
His torso cleared the frame, and then gravity took over.
His hips caught the ledge for one second—legs kicking uselessly inside the control room—and he tipped forward and fell.
He dropped past me close enough that I caught the smell—rotting meat and something chemical, and wrong—that coated the back of my throat. His body tumbled in silence, arms still reaching, until he hit the pavement sixty feet below with a sound I’d never forget.
Wet. Heavy. Final.
Like a garbage bag full of wet blankets dropped from a roof.
He didn’t splatter—not exactly. But he came apart.
The impact split him open from sternum to pelvis, and everything inside him—dark, jellied, no longer recognizable as organs—spread across the pavement in a slick black pool.
His legs bent backward at the knees. One arm separated at the shoulder and landed three feet from the rest of him, fingers still twitching, still grasping at nothing.
And horrifically—his head turned.
His neck, compressed and shattered by the fall, somehow still functioned enough to rotate his head a few degrees to the left. One milky eye rolled upward. Found me on the pipe above him.
His jaw worked. Open. Shut.
Still hungry.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.
I didn’t look at him again. I moved faster now—too fast, hands slipping on rust, boots skidding off brackets. Another bracket ripped free beneath my foot, and I dropped three feet before catching the next one, the impact nearly tearing my arms from their sockets.
The pipe screamed.
A long, metallic shriek ran up the entire length of it as the upper bolts gave way. The pipe separated from the wall by two inches at the top—it became three—tilting outward with my weight on it like a slow-motion nightmare.
I slid.
Controlled at first. Then not. My hands burned as rust and metal chewed through my palms. The ground rushed up. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.
The pipe tore free from the wall completely—the top half peeling away from the concrete in a cascade of broken bolts and masonry dust—and I rode it down like a collapsing ladder.
I hit the ground hard.
My legs took the impact and buckled. I rolled—shoulder, hip, concrete tearing through my shirt and the skin beneath—and came to a stop on my back, staring up at the sky, lungs empty and every nerve in my body firing white.
For two seconds I couldn’t move, but I heard them.
Close, as I turned my head.
The parking lot.