novelraw Chapter 116: Acting Like Bait
Chapter 116: Acting Like Bait
"Dey smell us?" Alexei asked. He had backed up with the rest, but he leaned as far forward as he could without betraying the rule, eyes bright, trying to smile himself into courage. "Or see us?"
"Both," Zubair said. "More of one than the other."
The water shifted color in the near distance. Something big moved with power, not the thrash of debris but a line cut with intent. A dorsal fin knifed the surface and sank again. The room tightened by instinct alone.
A shadow came closer—sleek and heavy, but not curious.
"Great white," Elias said before he could stop the taxonomy. He sounded like he hated himself for having the word ready.
The shark crossed the boulevard-turned-channel, its body a roll of muscle under water as it turned to the glass by the surge’s backwash. A zombie turned toward it. Then another one.
Sera’s mouth tightened.
It should have passed.
That was what sea-rules said: implied, not written.
Nothing messed with a Great white shark other than orcas.
But apparently, the dead didn’t play by those rules.
One of them sculled to meet the shark and reached out with both arms. The shark swerved as if to clip and stun, but the dead thing held on.
Fingers hooked into gill slits with a terrible competence born of nothing but need. Blood gyred into the water in a ribbon, red thickening the green. The shark thrashed, white belly flashing like a broken light. Two more of the undead closed in, one biting where the jaw met the pectoral, another one hammering blindly on the body.
The window took the strobing violence and made it a piece of art that you couldn’t look away from.
Lachlan swore. The word was small for what it tried to carry.
"They hunt anything," Elias said hoarsely.
"They hunt everything," Sera corrected with a shrug.
The shark rolled and rolled and then stopped rolling. It hung a moment in a clutter of bubbles and the red that was now black, then sank with its attackers still attached, the current taking the whole tangle sideways along the street.
"Back," Zubair repeated softly, as if the glass had heard the lesson and might take offense.
A second wave climbed the tower, shorter but faster, throwing a room’s worth of chairs, a door torn from somewhere, a street sign that read LEFT LANE MUST TURN. A body hit the window shoulder-first and the laminate crazed again, a fresh white spiderweb fanning from the new point. But the window was still strong, still bonded, but uglier.
Sera turned from that pane and walked the line of glass with her hands behind her back, counting the cracks and reading each one as if it were a small map of pressure and time.
None had run between panes. None had feathered into a line that meant that it would fall apart soon. The tower spoke through the metal ribs and floorplates: stressed, awake, alive.
"Spread apart," she said. "If a pane goes, it won’t be because we were leaning on it."
They moved into the space without being told twice—Zubair to the stairwell door to add another wedge, Lachlan to the kitchen alcove to find anything to brace, Elias to the far corner where another wall of glass faced inland so he could triangulate tide against city. Alexei lingered in the wide, bright room like he’d been invited to a museum opening on the end of the world.
He pointed with his chin. "Look...train car again."
The train car had drifted around a block and now lodged diagonally between two buildings where a narrow cross-street funneled the flow.
Another surge pushed and the car slid, lost its purchase, and sailed on. People could live through that. People could live through the most absurd things. Chances were, though, that they wouldn’t.
"Zombies in the water means less on land," Lachlan said to fill the silence, to give the room a mercy it didn’t ask for.
"Means they can come up from below," Zubair countered, not cruel, only refusing the lie.
Another face pressed to the glass near Sera’s knee, as if it had made a decision about where the heat inside would concentrate.
It was ruined and somehow still itself—a life that had narrowed to this distance, this barrier, this ache. It opened its mouth and bit the glass, teeth clicking, leaving a soft smear. Sera looked down, met its eyes, and did nothing.
The creature in her lifted its head and went still. The zombie on the other side of the glass opened its eyes wide before taking off back into the darkness.
The tower flexed. A barge far out in the harbor lurched and turned toward the city like a drunk changing his mind, the tug that had once owned it nowhere, the ropes already given up. It rode a ridge of black that wasn’t a wave so much as a decision the water had made. When it ground against the quay, there was no sound for them to hear, only a change in the water’s grammar.
"It’s still not done," Elias grunted, and he didn’t mean the barge.
"No," Sera agreed.
He rubbed a thumb along the edge of the window mullion, then tucked his hands behind his back, mirroring her without meaning to. "You planned for this penthouse because of height and lines of sight."
"I planned for this penthouse because there’s only one door," she said. "And everything that matters is above it."
He absorbed that and nodded once. Not quite agreement so much as acceptance.
A new surge ran up the face of the tower and turned the penthouse into the tank again. Three zombies struck the glass together, their palms drumming in a rhythm that found a harmonic in the metal.
Sera felt the beat in her ribs. One slid downward, leaving a wobbling trail of bubbles; another stuck briefly, mouth working; the third simply watched her through the thickness as if patient.
The laminate’s white fractures didn’t grow. She watched them not grow until her eyes watered. She turned away.
"The windows are still holding," she said softly to herself.
"For now," Zubair said from the stairwell, as predictably as a rite. Sera rolled her eyes at his statement.
She had no idea how long the tsunami was going to hit them before the ice came, but right now, she need all the reassurance that she could get.
Alexei drifted to the opposite wall of glass where the city climbed away from the harbor. Inland wasn’t safety—just distance—but the view there lied prettier. Trees stood like smudges in the black, rooftops wore silver like frost, and the streets were empty of water for whole blocks before the next crease of geography said otherwise.
He pressed his fingertips lightly to the pane, then remembered and pulled them back, guilty as a kid. "So," he said. "We are fish. Tank is big."
"Then stop acting like bait," Sera said.