“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 doorhanging 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.
