Marcus “Mac” Cole moved before his brain had time to calculate the odds.
He didn’t wait to see if the creature had eyes behind that liquid silver mask. He didn’t wait to see what those black-tipped laminate fingers felt like when they sank into warm meat. In thirty-two years of driving the Route 04 night bus through New Marrow’s worst waterfront slums, Mac had seen plenty of things that didn’t look human try to force their way past the folding door.
Drifters with eyes like greasy dimes. Men whose coats were pinned shut with barbed wire. Things that stepped out of the marsh fog at three in the morning and tried to pay their fare with dead leaves.
You never debated them. You never asked for their transfer slip.
You slammed the door and locked the air brake.
“Get inside!” Mac roared, grabbing Julian by the collar of his canvas coat and hurling him bodily through the open brass frame of Lift #00.
Julian crashed onto the perforated steel floor of the cab, tumbling between Dr. Corvo’s boots and Elena’s knees. Behind him, the entire Loss Prevention Lobby was coming apart in a roaring vortex of seawater, pulverized plaster, and thousands of shattered green fluorescent tubes that popped under the water like submerged light bulbs.
