Chapter 208: What the Dots Show

Chapter 208: Chapter 208: What the Dots Show

The knock on the gate came early, before most of the family had finished breakfast, and Kai was the one who answered it, still holding a half-eaten piece of toast.

"Morning," he said, around the bite, finding David and his two boys waiting on the other side. "This an emergency, or a before-nine-a.m.-social-call kind of knock?"

"Neither, exactly," David said. "We wanted to ask you something. In person, since it felt rude to shout it through a gate."

"Go ahead."

"Our boat’s gone," David said. "Lost it two weeks back, trying to get past a horde that decided the water looked interesting. We’ve been borrowing rides off neighbors since, which works until it doesn’t. We wanted to ask if we could borrow one of yours. Just for today. We know your family’s got more than one since the sporting goods run."

Kai considered it, chewing thoughtfully. "What’s the run?"

"Pharmacy, two blocks out. The one that’s somehow still mostly untouched. We’re hoping to clear what’s left before someone else gets the same idea."

"And in exchange," Jason added, before Kai could ask, "we’ll split whatever we find. Twenty percent to your family, off the top, no argument. Feels fair, given it’s your boat doing the actual work."

Kai raised an eyebrow, genuinely impressed. "You rehearsed that."

"A little," Jason admitted.

"I like it anyway." Kai disappeared from the doorway for a moment and returned with the second boat already folded down to its compact storage size, tucking it under one arm. "Keep your twenty percent. Consider the boat a thank-you for everything Jason’s done keeping half this building out of trouble the last few weeks. That’s worth more than a cut of pharmacy stock."

"You don’t have to do that," David said.

"I know. I’m doing it anyway. That’s generally how friendships work." Kai handed the boat over, then paused, glancing between the three of them with a flicker of something more serious beneath the easy tone. "Careful with her. She patches fine, but she doesn’t like being dropped. Learned that the hard way with the first one."

"Noted," David said.

"Flare if things go wrong?"

"Got it." Ethan patted his jacket.

"And don’t go past the second bridge."

"We’re not going past the second bridge," Jason said, in the exact tone of someone who had heard this instruction four times already.

"I know, I know, I just like saying it. Makes me feel responsible." Kai clapped Ethan on the shoulder, then looked at Jason a beat longer than the others. "You good? Serious face is already on and we haven’t even left the doorway."

"I’m fine," Jason said. "Just getting a read on things before we head down. Habit now."

"Good habit to have." Kai stepped back and sealed the gate behind them. "See you three for dinner. Bring back something worth bragging about."

"No promises," David said, already turning toward the stairwell, the folded boat tucked under his own arm now.

They made their way down through the building together, floor after floor of locked doors and hushed voices, until the stairwell gave way to the exterior fire escape, rusted and groaning faintly under their combined weight as they descended past the sixth floor and down toward the water lapping steadily against the lowest intact landing.

David unfolded the boat at the bottom, the rubber hull inflating with a slow hiss, and they loaded in together, Ethan taking the oars first while Jason settled into the bow, already closing his eyes out of habit even before they’d fully pushed off.

"Feels strange," David said, once they’d cleared the building and started down the flooded avenue, studying the drowned storefronts sliding past. "I used to walk this exact block every day. There was a coffee place on the corner there." He nodded toward a collapsed awning, barely visible above the waterline. "Overpriced. I complained about it constantly. I’d give anything for a cup of their terrible coffee right now."

"You never told me that," Ethan said.

"Didn’t seem important before. Feels different now, somehow. Like I should have appreciated it more while it was just an ordinary, overpriced inconvenience."

Jason kept his eyes mostly closed as they went, monitoring the drift of distant dots the way he’d trained himself to do, a quiet, steady background hum beneath the conversation. Most of what he caught was unremarkable — a handful of residents still holding out in a half-flooded building two streets over, a stray dog picking its way along a rooftop, nothing requiring comment.

They were most of the way to the pharmacy, gliding along a flooded avenue lined with dead streetlights, when Jason went still in the bow.

"Stop paddling."

Ethan stopped instantly, the oar dripping in his hands. "What is it?" 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

Jason closed his eyes fully now, focus sharpening. Sparse dots drifted across his sense of the block, most of the surviving population having long since moved to higher, drier floors, but there — off to the left, gathered in the shell of a half-submerged storefront — six of them, tight together, unmoving in a way that ordinary people rarely managed for long.

"Six," he said. "Left side, in that building with the caved-in awning. They’re not walking around. They’re just sitting there. Waiting."

"Waiting for what?" David asked, already easing the boat’s angle away without needing to be told twice, old caution sharpening every motion.

"Us, maybe. There’s nothing else out here to wait for."

"Could be nothing," Ethan offered, though his voice carried little real conviction. "Could be people just hiding out, same as that building back there."

"Could be," Jason agreed. "But hiding people move eventually. Shift their weight, check on each other, something. These haven’t moved at all since I found them. That’s not hiding. That’s waiting."

David’s jaw tightened. "Which way’s clear?"

Jason turned his focus wider, scanning the grid of drowned streets the way he’d taught himself to do these past weeks, holding the whole picture at once instead of one street at a time. "Straight ahead’s clean for two blocks. Then it splits. Left goes past them, don’t. Right adds time but there’s nothing on it. No dots at all until the pharmacy."

"Right it is," David said, correcting their course, oars biting into the water with quiet, controlled strokes.

They kept low and rowed instead of risking the motor, and for a moment it seemed to work — the distance between the boat and the storefront widening steadily, the six dots staying exactly where they’d been, patient and still.

Then, without warning, one of them moved.

"They’re up," Jason said sharply. "Two of them. Moving fast, cutting across to intercept."

"They can’t have seen us," Ethan said. "We’re too far, and we went the other way."

"They heard the oars." David’s jaw tightened, already correcting course again, pulling harder. "Sound carries over water. We were too careful about the motor and not careful enough about everything else."

The boat surged forward, and behind them, rising out of the wreckage of the storefront with the loose, hungry gait Jason had learned to recognize instantly, four more shapes emerged, not waiting anymore, not hiding. They weren’t infected. Two carried lengths of pipe. One dragged something long and metal that scraped against the flooded pavement with a sound that carried far too clearly across the water.

"They’re not zombies," Ethan said, voice tight. "That’s people."

"I know," David said, and didn’t stop rowing.

"Left bank," Jason said, urgent now, eyes still shut, tracking every shifting dot with frantic precision. "There’s a gap in the buildings, maybe forty feet, if we can reach it before they cut the angle—"

The first shot cracked out from somewhere near the storefront, and the water beside the boat kicked up in a small, startled spray.

"Down!" David shouted, and all three of them dropped as low as the boat allowed, the little vessel rocking hard.

"They’ve got a gun," Ethan said, disbelieving.

"Then we go faster," David said, grim, and drove the oars into the water with everything he had left, the boat surging forward while the six pursuers closed in from two directions at once, and Jason kept both eyes shut, holding the whole desperate shape of it steady in his mind, watching the gap between hope and disaster shrink with every stroke.

A/N: Sorry, I am not sure why the Chapters weren’t being uploaded.