“He’s going to make it,” I whispered, my voice cracking down the middle. “He’s—”
Hope is the worst kind of liar. It doesn’t ease in. It floods you with light so fast you forget what the dark felt like—and then it’s gone, leaving you with nothing between you and what comes next.
They hit him like a wave.
Dozens. They poured from between the boats and from behind the dumpsters, drawn by the simple, terrible sound of life in a dead world. He’d barely made three steps. The first ones reached him, their hands grabbing at his arms, his jacket, his legs. Gray fingers with blackened nails hooked into his coat, holding on with the mindless grip of things that had forgottenhow to let go. Bodies slammed into him from every angle. I heard his boots scrape gravel as the impact drove him sideways into the car, denting the door. The carrier swung wildly in his grip.
He fought. God, he fought.
His free arm swung hard, connecting with the jaw of the closest one—a woman, or something that had been a woman once, her mouth grotesque in its oddity. The impact sent her crumbling to the ground. He drove his shoulder into the next one, a man in a shredded marina uniform with the name tag still pinned to his chest, still readable if you were close enough. He shoved him back hard enough to buy himself two feet of clearance between his body and the car door. He kept trying to break free of the knot of them forming around the vehicle. His hand kept the carrier lifted high above the grasping fingers, protecting it, protecting that stupid, terrified cat inside it even now, even as his own body became the thing he sacrificed to keep moving.
But more came.
They crawled over the ones he knocked down, pouring around both sides of the car like water finding the path of least resistance, filling every gap he created. A hand caught the back of his collar. Another seized his belt. I saw him twist hard, wrenching sideways, still swinging, still fighting, the carrier clutched against his ribs now as he tried to make himself smaller, tried to create a direction to move in where there weren’t bodies blocking the way.
And then more of them flooded into the parking lot.
More came from the treeline. The ones already surrounding the car pressed tighter. The gaps closed.
I lost him in pieces. First his legs. Then his torso. Then his arm—the one still swinging, still refusing—was gone.
The last thing I saw before the horde blocked my view entirely—his hand. Raised above the crowd. Still gripping the carrier. Still holding it up where they couldn’t reach.
Then, even that disappeared.
“FINN!” The scream ripped from me, somewhere primal and raw that I didn’t know existed.
I lunged forward, my legs carrying me before my mind caught up, every nerve in my body pulling me toward him like a wire wound too tight and finally snapping. The parking lot stretched between the dock and the car, thirty feet, maybe forty, and I couldn’t see him anymore but I could still hear the sounds—the scuffling, the thuds, something crashing against metal—and he could still be fighting, he could still be standing, I could close that distance. I could reach him. I could—
But Fiona’s arm locked around my waist from behind, iron-hard, hauling me backward so fast my feet left the deck. The air knocked out of my lungs and the parking lot lurched away from me and I screamed again, clawing at her forearm, feeling skin gather under my nails, not caring, because somewhere in that mass of bodies he might be alive, fighting his way out, looking for us through the chaos if I could just get to him, if she would just let me go—
“No!” she shouted, and her voice broke. “No, Libby—”
“I have to—!” My voice broke before the sentence could finish, the words dissolving into something that wasn’t language anymore. “He’s—Fiona, he’s—he could still be.”
The mass had closed over him the way ice closes over a hole. Smooth. Final. Indifferent to the fact that a person had just been there, that a person I had kissed and argued with and fallen asleep next to had just been standing in that exact spot, alive, with his arm raised. I kept pulling against her, anyway. I couldn’t stop.
And then, through the smallest break in the horde—a gap no wider than a breath—I saw him.
His eyes.
They found mine. Just for a second. In them, I saw no fear, no pleading—only a stillness I knew. It was the same look he’d given me once before a storm, a quiet transfer of responsibility. He’d known this was a possibility from the moment Lily screamed. He went anyway. It wasn’t a plea in his eyes; it was a command: I chose this. Don’t you dare make it mean nothing.
The gap closed. The bodies pressed together. And he disappeared behind them, swallowed whole, the way a wake closes over itself and leaves no sign a boat ever passed through.
Just—
Gone.
“NO!” I heard myself scream it, and then again, and the second time it didn’t sound like a word anymore. It sounded like something dying. My throat burned. I kept screaming anyway, because stopping meant it was over, and it couldn’t be over, it couldn’t—
Lily’s scream came a half-second after mine—higher, thinner, wrong in a way I felt in my back teeth. Her knees gave out, and she went with them, sliding down the side of the boat. Her sobs didn’t sound like hers. They sounded like a much smaller child’s—one who hadn’t learned yet that some things don’t come back.
Fiona didn’t look back. Not when my screaming turned to begging, not when Lily’s cries hit a pitch that should have shattered bone. She just kept working, making sure the boat slid out to sea.
The marina was still visible behind us. The dock’s edge swarmed with bodies, some pitching off into the shallows without slowing, and beyond them the parking lot moved like a single living thing. I kept searching for it. His jacket. His armwas above the crowd. Anything still rising, still fighting. I found nothing I recognized. Just the swarm, unbroken, closing over the place where the car had been.
I found nothing. Just the swarm. Just the endless, faceless, unbroken swarm pressing against itself in every direction, and nothing rising above it, nothing breaking free of it, nothing human left visible in the space where the car sat buried under bodies.
