46. No Dead Is My Favorite New Thing -Finn
Forty Six
No Dead Is My Favorite New Thing -Finn
Under the trailer, time ceased to exist. It stretched and folded, losing all meaning as my muscles cramped one by one.
I counted breaths, lost count, started again, and lost count again. The dull pull in my left calf escalated into a biting pain, preventing me from straightening my toes without tearing deeper.
The sounds outside shifted, diminishing but not disappearing.
Dragging footsteps drifted further, growing fainter.
The shuffle of dead feet on gravel receded from an immediate threat to a distant, almost manageable presence.
The wet, choking sounds thinned, replaced by distance and wind cutting between the trailer skirting and the soft, steady slap of water.
I waited, forcing myself to. Digging my fingers into the dirt, I held my position, ordering every screaming nerve to shut up and sit still. The line between life and death depended on patience—on remaining motionless until I knew, not just hoped.
Slow. Slow. The ground isn’t going anywhere.
Finally, I shifted slowly. Every joint was a negotiation, every muscle a complaint. The returning blood to my legs felt like frozen needles.
“Alright, buddy,” I whispered to the carrier, my voice barely audible above my own breathing. “We’re making a break for it.”
Doc Fluffbutt blinked up at me through the mesh, pupils wide, ears pressed flat, but silent—still silent, holding on to the deep-wired instinct that had kept him quiet through the worst of it.
“Stay quiet,” I added, shifting onto my elbows and pulling myself forward. “If I get you out of this, you’ll get all the fish you can eat. Deal?”
He didn’t argue.
Good cat.
I moved on my forearms, slowly, pulling the carrier beside me. My own breathing sounded enormous in the dead air beneath the metal—each exhale a broadcast, each scrape of fabric against dirt a transmission.
Reaching the gap, I stopped, pressing my face close to the opening, one cheek in the dirt, and listened. I let the sounds of the outside world filter in, sorting them into categories: threat, distance, direction.
A couple of them still wandered nearby. I heard the uneven shuffle of feet dragging through gravel, the occasional bump of a body colliding aimlessly with something solid—the car, a post—without slowing or reacting.
Drifting. The restless, mindless patrol of things with nowhere to go and no capacity to stop moving.
But not close.
Not pressed against the skirting, with their faces in the dirt and their hands reaching.
Now or never.
I slid my fingers under the loose piece of skirting and lifted, slow, steady, controlling the movement with everything I had. The metal shifted upward, its edge dragging against the frame with a soft, sawtooth scrape that cut through the quiet like a blade across glass.
Too loud.
Way too loud.
I froze, holding the skirting motionless. I didn’t breathe.
One second. Two. Five.
Nothing rushed me. No footsteps quickened. No hands clawed through the gap.
I didn’t wait for a second chance.
I slipped through the opening in one fluid motion, shoulder screaming, the carrier clutched against my chest. I rolled onto my knees in the gravel outside, staying low, pressing myself against the car. The air hit my face, and I almost gasped at the difference.
I moved fast but with control, keeping low, one hand locked on the carrier handle and the other bracing against the car’s body as I edged along the passenger side.
My eyes swept the lot in quick, practiced arcs—checking corners, checking gaps between vehicles, checking the spaces between buildings where shadows pooled thick enough to hide anything.
Two of them shuffled along the far edge of the lot, maybe sixty yards away, moving in that slow, directionless drift that meant they hadn’t locked onto anything.
Another stood motionless near an overturned dumpster, its head tilted at an angle as if the neck bones had broken, swaying slightly in the wind like a loose signpost. None of them turned my way.
“Almost there,” I breathed, the words ghosting between my teeth.
I reached the passenger door, fingers fumbling for the handle—slick with blood, dirt, and sweat, my grip shot to hell, hands trembling so badly I almost couldn’t close them—and eased it open with a slow, measured pull.
The hinge creaked.
A short, sharp, metallic groan that split the silence like a gunshot.
I winced.
Still nothing. The two in the distance kept drifting. The one by the dumpster kept swaying.
I shoved the carrier onto the passenger seat, then climbed in right after it, pulling myself across the console and into the driver’s seat in one continuous motion, keeping my profile below the windows until I settled behind the wheel.
Key.
Key.
My right hand shook so violently it took three attempts to slide the key into the ignition, the metal scraping against the housing, my fingers slipping on the tacky, dark blood from the cut the skirting had carved across my palm.
I turned the key.
The engine roared to life—loud, aggressive, obscenely loud in the dead-world silence. The sound filled the lot and pressed outward against the tree line, against the empty storefronts, against everything, as if the world had forgotten what noise was and didn’t know what to do with it.
Too loud.
It didn’t matter now.
Through the windshield, I saw them react—heads snapping up, bodies pivoting, that horrible instant transition from aimless drift to hunting mode.
The one by the dumpster straightened its broken neck and lurched forward.
The two at the edge of the lot turned in unison and broke into that lurching, stumbling run that covered more ground than it had any right to.
“Hold on,” I muttered, threw it into drive, and buried the accelerator into the floor.
The car lurched forward, tires spinning on loose gravel for a heart-stopping half-second before they bit, caught, and the vehicle surged ahead with enough force to shove me back into the seat.
I didn’t slow down. I didn’t check mirrors. I didn’t think.
Bodies hit the front of the car.
The first one caught the bumper and folded. The impact shuddered through the steering column. Something crunched—loud, final—and the body rolled up the hood and over the roof with a heavy, tumbling thud-thud-thud. I tracked it by sound alone, my eyes never leaving the road ahead.
A second one came from the left—fast, faster than I expected, slamming into the driver’s side door with enough force to dent the panel inward and send a spiderweb of cracks racing across the window.
Its face slammed against the glass for a grotesque instant—a smear of peeling skin, an empty socket, and a dark streak of fluid left behind as the car’s momentum tore it loose and flung it away.
I didn’t stop. I didn’t slow. I didn’t even flinch.
“Not today,” I growled through clenched teeth, blood from my palm smearing across the leather as I wrenched the wheel.
I punched through the lot, gravel and debris spraying behind me in a rooster tail. The car bucked and shuddered over whatever I hit—bodies—the undercarriage scraping and banging with every impact.
Then—open road.
Asphalt stretching ahead.
I didn’t ease off the gas until the marina had disappeared in the rearview mirror.
My hands were still locked on the wheel, joints aching from gripping too hard. My chest kept hitching as if it hadn’t yet gotten the message that the worst was over; my whole body running about three seconds behind my brain.
The cat let out a small, offended sound from the passenger seat—a short, clipped mrrp that carried all the indignation and moral outrage of a creature who had endured an experience far beneath his dignity and intended to make his displeasure known.
“Yeah, you too,” I said, not looking over. “Welcome to the worst road trip ever.”
I drove. I didn’t stop. I didn’t look back. I didn’t let myself think about how close it had come, how many hands had been on me, how many teeth had snapped shut in the space where my skin used to be half a second earlier.
* * *
The next marina sat twelve miles up the coast—a smaller outfit, barely a marina at all, more of a municipal boat launch with a parking lot, a fuel dock, and a harbormaster’s office the size of a garden shed.
When I pulled in, easing the car down the access road with my foot hovering over the brake and my eyes sweeping every shadow, every doorway, every gap between structures—
My stomach dropped.
Empty.
The parking lot sat vacant, save for a handful of abandoned vehicles baking in the sun. The docks stretched out over the water in long, weathered fingers of gray wood, with rusted cleats and frayed rope ends tied to nothing.
Water.
No boats.
Not a single hull was tied off—not a skiff, not a dinghy, not so much as a goddamn paddleboard. Every slip was empty.
“Shit.”
I slowly killed the engine, letting the car roll to a stop. I sat with my hands on the wheel, staring out at the water through a windshield streaked with dark fluid and cracked from the impact of something that used to be a person.
No movement anywhere. No shuffling. No dragging feet. No wet, rattling breathing from around corners.
No dead.
No people.
No anything.
Just empty.
“That’s good,” I muttered, scanning the treeline, the buildings, and the road behind me in the mirrors. “No dead is good. No dead is great. No dead is my new favorite thing.”
It didn’t help me. Not even a little.
I walked to the end of the dock, the carrier in one hand, my other hand resting near the knife at my belt. Nothing out there. Just gray-blue chop, a hard horizon, and no boats on any of it.
Roughly twenty miles.
Twenty miles of open ocean between me and the island. Between me and Libby. Between me and the only place in this rotting, collapsing world I could still call home. Between me and my bed, my walls, my doors that locked, the sound of a voice that didn’t gurgle and choke and snap its teeth at me.
I ground my teeth until the muscles in my temples ached.
“Of course,” I muttered. “Dead end. Ask for help once in your life and the line just rings.”
I turned back from the water, scanning the lot again—parking spaces, vehicles, the harbormaster’s shed with its door hanging open, the access road, the treeline—and then my eyes landed on it and stopped.
A Jeep.
It was parked off to the side, half-hidden behind the shed, tucked into a spot that suggested the owner had pulled in planning to stay for a few hours and head home by dinner.
Something sat strapped to the roof rack, secured with bungee cords and ratchet straps that had faded in the sun but still held.
I walked closer. Stopped. Stared.
And a laugh came out of me—short, sharp, and completely empty.
“A kayak,” I said aloud. “Of course it’s a kayak.”
A single, beat-up sea kayak, sun-bleached from red to a patchy, anemic pink, strapped to the roof of a dead man’s Jeep. A paddle lay beside it, secured with a single bungee cord, the blade chipped and scratched but intact.
“Fuck me,” I muttered.
I looked down at the carrier.
Doc Fluffbutt stared back, his face pressed against the grate. His expression communicated—with remarkable clarity for a creature without the capacity for language—that he found these circumstances entirely unacceptable and held me personally responsible for all of them.
“Alright,” I said, meeting his gaze with a level stare. “How do you feel about a kayak?”
He blinked. Once. Slowly.
Unhelpful.
“That’s what I thought.”
I rubbed a hand over my face, smearing dirt and dried blood across my forehead, and turned back to look at the water.
It stretched out, gray and heavy, farther than I could see.
Its surface was broken into small, repeating chops that would be bigger once you were in them—cold enough to kill you in twenty minutes if you were lucky. Probably less.
“Twenty miles,” I said under my breath. “That’s all. Twenty miles in a commandeered kayak with a cat in the middle of the apocalypse. No big deal.”
Could I do it? Physically, mechanically, could I cover twenty miles of open ocean in a sea kayak with a busted shoulder, no sleep, and nothing in my stomach but adrenaline and the lingering taste of rot?
Yeah.
The military made sure of that years ago. Long distances under worse conditions. No sleep. No food. No complaints. My body knew how to suffer and keep moving. That particular skill set had never gone to waste, and it wouldn’t start now.
Did I want to?
Hell no, I do not.
But on the other side of all that water—past the waves and the current and the miles and miles of nothing—
Libby.
Everything that mattered. Everything I’d built.
I exhaled steadily through my teeth, letting the air leave my lungs in one long, controlled stream, and reached up to start working the bungee cords loose from the kayak.
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s do something stupid.”
The cat meowed from inside the carrier—a single, flat sound, then silence.
“Yeah,” I said, pulling the first strap free. “I know, buddy. I know.”