The boat had barely cleared the flooded intersection when Killian cut the motor.
"Wait," he said, voice low.
Everyone went still. The rain had eased to a fine mist, visibility better than it had been most of the day, and in that improved quiet, Penelope heard it too — a slow, deliberate disturbance in the water somewhere off the boat's port side, distinct from the constant, chaotic churn the storm itself produced.
"Something's moving," Ben said, already reaching for his crowbar.
"Zombie?" Kai asked, scanning the dark water.
"Doesn't move like one," Killian said. "Too controlled. Too smooth."
The ripple came again, closer this time, cutting a clean, purposeful line through the debris-choked water maybe twenty feet from the boat's hull. Whatever was making it stayed beneath the surface, betraying nothing except the wake it left behind — no splash, no thrashing, just a long, fluid displacement that suggested something built for water rather than merely caught in it.
