The morning of the Collapse, the Atlantic had been a sheet of hammered silver.
Elias stood on the edge of the Savannah pier, the wood beneath his sneakers vibrating with the rhythmic thrum of the tourist crowds. It was unseasonably hot for May—a wet, sticky heat that made the air feel heavy, like a damp wool blanket. He was seventeen, and his biggest concern was a girl named Maya who worked the ticket booth at the Ferris wheel and whether his father would let him borrow the truck for the weekend.
"Focus, Elias," his father, Thomas, grunted. He was kneeling on the deck of the Mariner's Ghost, the family's old trawler. He was wrestling with a frayed winch cable, his hands slick with grease. "The sea doesn't care about your weekend plans. She cares if your gear is tight."
Elias sighed, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Dad, the radio says the mainland is under quarantine anyway. There's nowhere to drive the truck to."
Thomas stopped. He looked up, his eyes narrowing. The news had been a slow drip of dread for weeks. A flu in the north. A riot in the Midwest. A strange blood disorder in the cities. People were calling it the 'Red Vein' because of the way it mapped itself under the skin, but in Savannah, life had felt insulated. The salt air felt like a shield.
"The radio says a lot of things," Thomas muttered, returning to the cable. "Most of it's lies to keep people from screaming. Just help me with this bolt."
Then, the screaming started.
It didn't come from the water. It came from the boardwalk.
Elias turned, squinting against the glare of the morning sun. At first, it looked like a typical summer scuffle. A man in a bright Hawaiian shirt was wrestling with a woman near the "Ocean's Edge" ice cream parlor. But they weren't fighting. The man was clamped onto her shoulder, his head jerking with a frantic, mechanical violence.
"Hey!" someone shouted. "Get him off her!"
A police officer began to run toward them, his boots echoing on the planks. But before he reached them, the woman in the sundress didn't fall. She didn't faint. She arched her back, her spine snapping with a sickening pop that Elias could hear even from thirty yards away. When she stood up, her sundress was stained a dark, wet crimson. Her eyes, once blue, had become two weeping pits of dark, pressurized blood.
She didn't scream. She lunged.
She hit the police officer with the force of a freight train. Within seconds, the boardwalk was a chaotic swirl of color and violence. The Red Vein wasn't a slow progression; it was an explosion. It was as if a switch had been flipped in the human brain, turning off the soul and turning on a desperate, predatory hunger.
"Elias! Get on the boat! Now!" Thomas roared, dropping the wrench.
"But Mom—she's at the market!" Elias stammered, his legs feeling like lead.
"I'm right here!"
Sarah, Elias's mother, came sprinting down the pier. She had dropped her bags; broken eggs and shattered glass trailed behind her. Her face was white, her chest heaving. Behind her, the crowd was no longer a crowd. It was a wave. A mass of twitching, red-eyed shadows that moved with an unnatural, jagged speed. They didn't run like athletes; they ran like machines with broken governors, their limbs flailing but their direction absolute.
"Cast off!" Thomas yelled to Miller, who was already in the bridge, the engine of the Mariner's Ghost coughing to life with a cloud of black diesel smoke.
The pier was a nightmare of sound. The screech of wood splintering, the roar of the boat engines, and the wet, rhythmic thumping of the infected hitting the water. They didn't care about drowning. They jumped into the surf, their arms thrashing as they tried to reach the retreating hulls.
Elias grabbed the railing as the boat lurched away from the dock. He saw a man—a neighbor he had known for years—reach out for the ladder. The man's skin was translucent, his veins glowing a hot, angry orange-red. He wasn't reaching for help. He was snapping his teeth at the air, his fingers clawing grooves into the rusted metal.
"Push him off!" Miller screamed from the window.
Elias looked at the man's eyes. There was nothing left in them. No fear, no pain, just a terrifying, singular intent. Elias kicked out, his boot connecting with the man's chest. The neighbor fell back into the churning wake, disappearing beneath the foam.
As the Mariner's Ghost headed for the open sea, Elias looked back at Savannah. The city was already beginning to bleed. Thick plumes of black smoke rose into the sky, and the boardwalk was covered in a carpet of red.
"We can't go back," Sarah whispered, clutching Elias's arm. Her hands were shaking so hard she could barely hold on. "Thomas, we can't ever go back."
Thomas didn't answer. He stood at the stern, his eyes fixed on the receding shoreline. He watched until the screams were drowned out by the sound of the waves. He watched until the burning city was nothing more than a smudge of orange on the horizon.
"The salt," Thomas finally said, his voice hollow. "The scientists said the salt kills it. We stay in the blue. We stay in the deep. As long as there's salt in the air, we're the only things left alive."
Elias looked down at the water. It was clear, deep, and seemingly infinite. At that moment, it felt like a sanctuary. He didn't know that the ocean wasn't a wall; it was a highway. And he didn't know that three years later, the very water he was praying to would start to turn red.
The land was gone. The era of the sea had begun.