Chapter 138: The Marina

Chapter 138: Chapter 138: The Marina

The truck’s wipers couldn’t keep pace with the rain.

Killian had them on the highest setting they went, and still the windshield blurred faster than the blades could clear it, the headlights carving two weak, useless cones through a downpour so thick it turned every streetlight into a smeared halo and swallowed anything more than thirty feet ahead entirely. The road itself was still passable — slick, running with shallow sheets of water along the gutters, but passable — though the sheer volume of rain made every intersection feel like driving blind.

"This is worse than I thought it’d be," Kai said from the back seat, voice pitched to carry over the drumming on the roof. "And I’d already thought it’d be bad."

"It’s going to get worse before it gets better," Erik said, watching water stream off an awning ahead in a solid, unbroken curtain. "This isn’t even the flooding yet. This is just the start of it."

Penelope kept her eyes on the storefronts sliding past — dark, mostly, windows fogged with condensation or shattered outright, the particular details of who had survived this street and who hadn’t lost somewhere in the sheeting water and poor visibility.

Then she saw movement, and her stomach dropped.

A woman stood beneath a bus shelter ahead, soaked through despite the flimsy roof, both arms raised toward the truck as it approached, mouth open in a scream that the rain swallowed before it ever reached them.

"Killian—"

"I see her." He slowed, not stopping, eyes scanning the buildings around her for whatever she was running from. "She’s alone. No visible threat behind her."

The woman’s face came into view as they passed — desperate, soaked through, mouthing something none of them could hear through the glass and the storm. Her eyes tracked the truck the entire time it passed her, disbelief curdling into something raw and furious in the half-second before she vanished into the downpour behind them.

Nobody said anything for several seconds.

Penelope twisted in her seat anyway, unable to help herself, watching the woman recede into the gray wall of rain, still standing there with her arms raised even though the truck had clearly, obviously moved past her.

"Why is she just standing there," she said, quieter than she meant to.

"Maybe there’s nowhere else she thinks is safer," Erik said. "Maybe she’s been standing under that shelter for an hour already, waiting for someone, anyone, to stop." His voice stayed level, but something underneath it had gone tight. "It doesn’t matter why, Penny. We can’t."

"I know that."

"I know you know that." He didn’t look back at her. "I’m saying it anyway because it doesn’t get easier to hear just because it’s already true."

A few blocks further, a group of maybe eight or nine people were fighting in the middle of the flooded street — not against the dead, but against each other, shoving and grabbing at something Penelope couldn’t make out through the rain, voices raised in an argument too fractured by thunder to follow.

"What’s happening there," Ben asked, leaning toward the window.

"Doesn’t matter," Killian said, already steering wide around them. "Could be supplies. Could be shelter. Could be nothing worth the risk of finding out."

As they passed, one of the figures broke away from the group entirely, sprinting toward the truck, arms waving, and behind him three others gave chase — not the shambling, mindless pursuit of the infected, but something faster, angrier, unmistakably human.

"They’re not zombies," Kai said, watching through the back window as the group receded. "They’re chasing him."

Nobody answered. The truck kept moving, and the man’s shouting cut off abruptly somewhere behind them, swallowed by distance and rain, and none of them would ever know what happened to him.

By the time they reached the next intersection, Penelope had stopped looking at the windows at all, staring instead at her own hands folded tight in her lap, jaw clenched hard enough to ache.

"I keep thinking there’s a version of tonight where we stop," Ben said suddenly, voice cracking slightly. "Where we help even one of them. Just one."

"And then the next one asks the same thing," Erik said, not unkindly, though the words landed hard anyway. "And we say no to them, because we already used our one exception tonight. How do we explain that to whoever we turn away next?"

Ben didn’t answer. He turned his face back toward the window, and Penelope watched his reflection in the glass, watched him mouth something silent and pained before falling quiet again.

She understood the logic. She’d understood it since the first night, since Killian had first laid it out flat and unarguable in a hallway three floors below their own — we’re not saviors, we’re survivors — and every day since had only proven him right, over and over, in ways that never stopped costing something to accept.

Understanding it and being able to live inside it without flinching were two very different things.

Somewhere off to their left, a scream cut through the storm — sharp, close, then abruptly gone. Nobody in the truck asked what caused it. Nobody wanted the answer confirmed.

The marina finally came into view through the downpour — a low, wide building set back from a stretch of docks, the water at the shoreline visibly higher than it should have been, though the streets around the building itself remained clear enough to drive.

Killian pulled the truck as close to the entrance as he could manage. "This is our stop."

They moved fast once they were out, sprinting through the rain toward the sporting goods entrance, driving nearly sideways now, hard enough to sting exposed skin. Kai reached the door first, testing it, finding it locked, and Erik didn’t hesitate — one clean strike shattered the reinforced glass panel beside the frame, and they were inside a heartbeat later, dripping, breathing hard, weapons already up.

The interior was dark except for a single emergency light flickering somewhere near the back.

A growl rose from somewhere near the kayak racks.

"Left," Killian said immediately, already moving.

A shape lurched between two rows of shelving, and it wasn’t alone — a second one emerged from behind a display of life jackets a half-second later, drawn by the sound of the shattered glass. Then a third, stumbling out from the fishing aisle, water-warped and slow but relentless.

"Three," Kai said, already moving to intercept the nearest.

Penelope’s katana found the first cleanly, dropping it before it closed half the distance, muscle memory taking over the part of her mind still stuck on the man’s cut-off scream from the street outside. Kai’s flames caught the second, brighter and steadier than they’d have any right to expect given how soaked everything in the store already was, the fire licking up its sleeve until it collapsed.

The third proved harder — Ben’s earth spike missed its mark in the poor light, and the creature lunged past him before Erik’s lightning caught it mid-stride, dropping it hard into a display of tackle boxes that clattered and scattered across the floor.

"Clear," Erik said, chest heaving slightly, eyes already sweeping for more.

Nothing answered him. The store settled back into silence apart from the storm hammering the roof above them.

They swept the rest of it in the same tight, wordless formation, clearing aisles of camping gear and fishing supplies before finally reaching the section they’d actually come for — inflatable boats still in their boxes, coiled rope, waterproof duffel bags, racks of heavy rain gear still sealed in plastic.

"Jackpot," Kai said, though his voice carried none of its usual satisfaction, still visibly shaken by everything they’d passed on the drive over.

Penelope began sweeping supplies into her space without pausing to catalogue them individually — boats, waders, coiled rope, whatever her hands found — moving fast, mechanical, needing the motion more than she needed to think about anything the motion was distracting her from.

Outside, through the shattered storefront glass, the rain kept falling — relentless, deafening against the roof, thunder rolling steady overhead, lightning briefly outlining the street in stark white — and somewhere out there, beyond the reach of anything they could do tonight, the city kept losing pieces of itself that none of them would ever be able to count.