Clawing.
Pulling.
Tearing.
A hand snagged my sleeve and wrenched sideways, fabric ripping apart like paper. Another caught my shoulder—right on the wound, and the pain was so total and immediate that my arm stopped working, just dropped, and my knees almost buckled.
“Get off—!”
I twisted, shoved, kicked—boots slamming into kneecaps that shattered like brittle sticks, into ribs that caved and splintered beneath the impact, into stomachs that gave way too easily, too soft, the tissue beneath already half-liquefied. My boot went through one of them—straight into its midsection—and came back out trailing something dark and ropy. I stomped down on a hand that had grabbed my ankle, ground my heel until the fingers snapped one by one, and the thing still didn’t pull away, still kept gripping with the broken stumps.
It slowed them for a second.
Not enough.
They pressed in tighter, bodies stacking against each other, climbing over those I’d knocked down, shoving forward with a mindless, mechanical persistence. It had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with hunger—pure, empty, bottomless hunger.
The weight was too much.
My back hit metal—a car door—and the impact knocked the remaining air from my lungs. I shoved against the bodies in front of me, but they didn’t move. I pushed sideways and hit more of them. I turned, and there they stood, shoulder to shoulder, a wall of ruined flesh, grinding teeth, and grasping hands.
No room to move.
No room to fight.
No room to breathe.
Just them. All around me. Closing in. The circle tightening.
I looked up—over them, past them, through the gaps between their lurching heads—
And I saw her.
Libby.
She stood on the boat, both hands gripping the rail, her whole body leaned forward as if she might throw herself overthe side. It seemed the only thing keeping her on that deck was some last, desperate thread of self-preservation warring against everything else inside her.
Her face—
God.
The fear in it was raw and open, the truth of watching someone you cared about die and knowing you couldn’t do a single thing to stop it.
Her mouth moved. She might have screamed my name. I couldn’t hear it over the snarling and the wet, choking sounds pressing in from every side, but I saw it—the shape of the word on her lips, the way her face crumbled around it.
And something gave way inside me. Not dramatically, not all at once—just the quiet collapse of whatever I’d been telling myself about not caring, about staying detached, about treating this as just another day at the end of everything.
So this is it.
The thought cut through the noise, the pain, and the stench with an almost surgical clarity.
No panic. No bargaining. No grand revelation.
Just… done.
I tried to say something. Tried to push words past my teeth and send them across the water to her—something that mattered, something she could carry with her, something that meant I’m sorry and keep going… I wanted to scream I love you.
But there wasn’t time.
