"We can speak freely here," Marlon said, settling back into his seat.
I looked around, taking the place in properly for the first ti since we’d stepped inside.
"It’s a kebab restaurant," I said.
"It is," he nodded.
Of all the places to hold a private conversation in the middle of an apocalypse, a kebab joint hadn’t exactly topped my list of predictions. But honestly? It worked. The windows were thick with gri, which ant nobody was seeing in from the street. The booths were deep and cushioned — the old kind, with padded vinyl seating that had gone a little soft with age but was still more comfortable than anything I’d sat on in weeks. The place slled faintly of old spices and sothing that might have been cooking oil once upon a ti, back when that sort of thing still happened.
We’d taken the corner booth, the big one near the back. Cindy and Daisy had slid in beside without discussion, which ant I was effectively pinned against the wall with both of them taking up most of the available space. Not that I was complaining. Across the table, Marlon had settled in with Maribel beside him, relaxed and unhurried, like this was a eting he’d been expecting for a while. Molly hadn’t sat down at all. She was leaning against the long counter near the back, arms folded, watching everything with those calm eyes of hers. And Rico was seated on the table behind.
"You don’t need to worry about ears out here," Marlon said, glancing briefly toward the front. "Nobody from the park cos this far in unless I send them. Anything you say in this room stays in this room."
"Good," I said. "Because I’ve got things to say and I’d rather only say them once."
I leaned forward slightly, resting my forearms on the table, and looked at him straight.
"Secrets, yeah, I do have so. But I don’t think I’m the only one sitting at this table with things they haven’t said out loud yet." I held his gaze. "Callighan wants you dead. Not just out of his way, dead, specifically. That’s the driving force behind every attack he’s been running against your people maybe. So before we talk alliances, before we talk anything, I need you to tell what’s between you two."
The question landed and sat there.
Marlon didn’t flinch. He didn’t look away. But sothing shifted just slightly behind his eyes, not guilt exactly,.
"Where did you hear that?" He asked.
"Does it matter?" I said. "Is it true?"
He looked for a mont longer. Then sothing in his expression settled, like a decision had been made.
"There is sothing," he admitted. "And you’re right that you should know it before we go any further." He leaned back into the cushion, one arm resting along the top of the booth, and let out a slow breath. "It’s not a short story."
"We’ve got ti," I said.
He nodded once. Then he began.
"I t Callighan ten years ago. I was working as a senior supervisor at the Abscond Inlet State Marina, it was a civilian posting, a managent role overseeing daily operations, staff scheduling, maintenance, that sort of thing. I was in my last stretch before retirent, and honestly, it felt like the right kind of transition. Still on the water, still doing sothing that mattered, but without the weight of active duty on my shoulders anymore. A chance to ease out slow instead of just stopping one day and having nothing." He paused. "The role ca with ntoring responsibilities. New staff, junior hires, people learning the ropes. I trained a lot of them over the years. Callighan was one of them."
"How old was he?" Cindy asked curiously.
"Mid-twenties. Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five when he first ca in. Young. Eager. And honestly—" Marlon almost smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes — "clumsy as hell. The kind of clumsy where you wondered how he’d made it this far. Dropped things, miscalculated distances, got turned around on routes he’d walked a dozen tis. The other staff gave him a hard ti for it. Not cruelly, mostly...just the kind of ribbing that happens when soone keeps making the sa obvious mistakes."
"But he stuck with it?" Maribel asked. She’d shifted forward in her seat without realizing it, elbows on the table.
"I didn’t know you didn’t know the details of this," I said, glancing at her.
She shrugged one shoulder. "I knew they had a history. I never heard the full version."
Marlon continued, unbothered by the interruption. "He stuck with it. That was the thing about Callighan, the clumsiness was on the surface, but underneath it, the boy absorbed everything. Every correction, every lesson, every piece of instruction I gave him. He rembered it and he applied it and then he ca back for more. After two years under , he’d gone from soone who couldn’t file a basic report without three errors to soone who was running his own sections competently and earning real respect from the staff around him." Marlon’s jaw tightened slightly. "He had this quality, a kind of natural magnetism, I suppose you’d call it. When he spoke, people listened. When he moved toward sothing, others followed without quite knowing why. I saw it early. Real leadership potential, not the loud kind that announces itself, but the quiet kind that just... pulls."
He paused, and for a mont the only sound was the distant creak of the building settling and the faint moan of wind threading through the gaps in the boarded windows.
"So I invested in him more than I did the others," Marlon said. "I gave him more ti, more access, more responsibility. I pushed him further and faster than the standard progression because I believed he could handle it. And he delivered every single ti." A short, humorless sound escaped him, not quite a laugh. "Looking back now, I should have been paying closer attention. He was almost too consistent. Too clean. Too perfectly on the right side of every line. But I wanted to believe in him, so I didn’t ask the questions I should have been asking."
"What changed?" I said.
Marlon’s expression hardened.
"Small things at first. The small things you notice but talk yourself out of because individually they an nothing." He counted them off slowly, like he’d rehearsed this list in his head before. "Fuel logs that didn’t match usage patterns, not by a lot, just enough to be slightly off if you were really looking. Boat registrations filed at unusual hours, late night or early morning, tis when foot traffic was low and oversight was minimal. And security cara footage with these occasional gaps, short ones, twenty minutes here, forty minutes there during late-night shifts that Callighan had specifically volunteered to cover."
The table was quiet.
"Volunteered," I repeated.
"Volunteered," Marlon confird. "Enthusiastically. Always a good reason for it — covering for soone, picking up extra hours, showing initiative. On the surface, every explanation was perfectly reasonable. But when I started laying them out side by side in my head, the pattern was too good to be coincidence." He looked down at his hands for a mont. "I wanted to be wrong. I want you to understand that. I had put real ti and real belief into this man. The idea that he was playing , playing all of us from the beginning was not sothing I could accept easily. So I watched. I kept my face neutral in front of him, kept giving him access, kept acting like nothing had changed. And I watched."
He looked up.
"After three months of quiet surveillance," Marlon said, "I had enough to know exactly what I was dealing with. Callighan was running an illegal smuggling operation through Absecon Inlet. Had been for a while, long enough that the infrastructure was solid, well-hidden, and genuinely difficult to untangle. He’d been using his position at the marina, and my trust specifically, to provide access. Boats moving through at night. Cargo that never appeared on any official manifest." His voice stayed level but sothing underneath it had gone cold. "Drugs. Weapons. And on at least two occasions...people."
Cindy sat back slightly. "That’s... completely different from the person you just described," she said. "The clumsy guy trying his hardest, learning everything you taught him, earning people’s respect, that’s not the sa person at all."
"No," Marlon agreed quietly. "It isn’t."
Yeah. The gap between those two versions of Callighan was sothing I was still trying to wrap my head around.
"He really played you, didn’t he," Molly said from the counter. She wasn’t being cruel about it, it ca out almost like admiration.
Marlon’s expression darkened.
"I confronted him," he said. "Waited until after hours, when the marina was empty and there was nobody around to perform for. I had everything laid out, the logs, the footage, the docuntation trail, all of it. When I put it in front of him, he didn’t even try to deny it. Not imdiately." Marlon’s eyes had gone sowhere distant, replaying the mory. "He looked at the evidence for a long mont and then he just... started talking. Told I didn’t understand. That he’d been drowning. His mother’s dical bills had piled up to sothing unmanageable. His brother had a legal situation that needed fees he couldn’t cover through legitimate ans. He said the system didn’t care about people like him. Like us."
He paused a bit.
"And honestly, he wasn’t entirely wrong about that. The system does grind people like him into nothing and keep walking. I knew that. I’d seen it. But knowing that doesn’t make what he built in the shadows any less criminal, or any less dangerous to the people caught in the path of it. People died because of what moved through those boats. I was certain of that even if I couldn’t put nas to them."
"What did he do after that?" I asked. I’d leaned forward without noticing. So had everyone else at the table, even Molly had shifted her weight off the counter slightly.
Marlon’s expression went complicated in a way that was hard to read.
"He begged ," he said simply.
Nobody spoke.
"He said he would stop. All of it, imdiately, completely, no conditions. He said I had been like a father to him. That what I’d given him over those years, the ti, the belief, the investnt ant more to him than anything else in his life, and that he would rather lose everything than lose my respect." He shook his head slowly. "And I want to be honest with all of you. I stood there in that office and a part of , a real part wanted to believe him."
The silence stretched. None of us rushed it.
"I went ho that night and I didn’t sleep," Marlon continued. "I lay there until morning thinking about it from every angle I could. Redemption. What it ans. Whether it’s real. Whether a person can do what Callighan did and still co back from it and be soone worth trusting again." He looked down at the table surface for a mont. "I had cared about that boy. Genuinely. That doesn’t just disappear because you find out the truth. If anything it makes it harder."
He looked up.
"But I was a marine before I was anything else. And a marine doesn’t bury evidence because it’s uncomfortable. People had suffered because of what he’d organized. People I’d never et. Whatever debt I felt I owed to Callighan couldn’t outweigh what was owed to them." His voice had gone flat and firm in the way of soone reading from a code they’d written a long ti ago and never deviated from. "So the next morning I filed a complete report to the federal authorities. Every piece of evidence I’d collected over three months, docunted and submitted."
"Within a week," he said, "Callighan was in handcuffs."
"Wait," Cindy said, sitting up. "Why didn’t he just run? He had money, connections, an entire network of people. He could have disappeared."
The corner of Marlon’s mouth shifted, not quite a smile.
"Because I told him I wouldn’t file the report," he said. "I looked him in the eye and I told him I needed more ti to think. That I hadn’t decided yet. He believed ."
Molly let out a short sound of amusent. "How cruel."
"Cruel?" Marlon’s hand ca down flat on the table, not violent, but sharp, with a crack that made Daisy jump. "He spent two years using my trust as a tool. I gave him one week of the sa. That’s not cruelty."
Nobody argued with that.
"Then what happened?" Cindy pressed, because at this point she was fully invested and not pretending otherwise.
Marlon scoffed, and for the first ti a thread of sothing raw ca through the controlled delivery. "He received a fifteen-year sentence. Federal. Airtight case, given everything I’d handed over." His expression curdled slightly. "And then the world ended. The outbreak hit while he was still inside, and in all the chaos of prisons falling apart and containnt failing and everyone scrambling just to survive the first weeks, he got out. Walked right back into the world."
He looked at directly.
"And the first place he ca," Marlon said, "was here."
"To destroy your life," I said slowly, working through it.
Marlon let out a long breath. "I let him in too far, that was my mistake. He wasn’t just a subordinate to or a project I was proud of. He ca to my ho. Ate at my table. Sumr grew up knowing him, called him uncle, looked forward to his visits, trusted him the way kids trust adults they see as safe." Sothing crossed his face that was harder to look at than the rest of it. "I had no son. Callighan was the closest thing I had to one. And I burned it down because I had to."
The quiet that followed that was a different kind than before.
I turned it over in my head. The sentence, the escape, the beeline back to Atlantic City. One thing still wasn’t sitting right.
"Wanting to destroy your community, wanting to make your life difficult, I can follow that logic," I said. "But you said he wants you specifically dead. That’s personal in a way that goes past revenge for a prison sentence."
Marlon was silent for a mont.
"His mother took her own life," he said. "Shortly after he was incarcerated."
The temperature in the room seed to drop a degree.
"I had thought at first that he’d been exaggerating about her illness to make feel guilty. Manipulating one last ti. But she was genuinely sick. She had been for a while." He rubbed a hand slowly across his jaw. "When he went to prison, she couldn’t carry it. Couldn’t reconcile who she believed her son was with what he’d turned out to be. And she ended it."
"So he blas you," Maribel said quietly. "For her death."
"Yes."
"That’s—" I stopped, reorganized my thoughts. "That’s wrong. You didn’t put him in that position. He did. She died because of choices he made, not because you reported them."
"That’s exactly right," Cindy said, and her voice had lost its usual lightness. "He set every single thing in motion. The debt, the smuggling, the arrests, all of it, that was him. His mother couldn’t live with what he’d beco, and that’s on him. Not you."
Marlon looked at her for a mont, sothing unreadable moving behind his eyes.
"Logic doesn’t have much purchase in grief," he said simply. "Especially when the grief is wrapped around rage. He needed soone to bla who wasn’t himself. And I was the one who pulled the trigger, even if he loaded the gun."
"Are you feeling guilty about it?" I asked him.
It was a blunt question. Maybe too blunt. But we were past the point of dancing around things.
Marlon was quiet for a mont, his eyes fixed sowhere on the middle distance between us.
"Guilty about Callighan?" he said finally. "No. Not even slightly. He made his choices with full knowledge of what they were. He used , he used people he’d never even t, and he built sothing ugly with his own two hands. I don’t carry guilt for that. His mother is a different matter."
He said the last part quietly.
"You couldn’t have done anything for her, Marlon," Molly said from behind the counter.
"Perhaps," he said. "But that doesn’t stop the feeling. And now everyone around is paying the price for what happened between us. People who had nothing to do with any of it. People who just needed sowhere safe to land."
"You’re also the reason all of us found sowhere safe to land." Rico’s voice ca from the table just behind ours, he’d been so quiet I’d half forgotten he was there. He was leaning forward now, forearms on the table, looking at Marlon. "Three months, Marlon. Three months since this whole thing fell apart, and most of us are still here. Still breathing. That’s not luck. That’s you."
Marlon looked at him but didn’t respond to that.
"When he first arrived with his group," Marlon said, redirecting, "the very first thing he did was to tell to hand myself over, and he’d let everyone else go. Walk away, leave the whole community standing, no further violence."
"He said that?" Cindy said.
Marlon nodded. "Offered it clearly. for everyone."
The table was quiet for a beat.
"And we told him no." Molly’s smile had returned, small and certain. "That was our choice to make, not yours. Every single one of us made it. And honestly, who believes a word that man says? Hand over our leader and just trust he keeps his end of the deal?" She shook her head. "We’d have been leaderless and still under attack within a week."
"You can’t trust anything that cos out of his mouth," Maribel said, her voice harder than usual. Her hand had drifted up while she spoke, fingers closing around the necklace she always wore, a shark tooth on a simple cord, worn smooth from handling. I’d noticed it before but never said anything. She was turning it between her fingers now without seeming to realize she was doing it.
"Sothing happened with you too?" I asked, the question coming out before I’d thought it through.
Maribel’s hand stilled on the necklace. Her expression shifted in a way that was quick and involuntary, a small flinch, sothing tightening behind the eyes and I felt the question land wrong the mont it left my mouth.
"Sorry," I said. "You don’t have to—"
"Now." Marlon’s voice ca in cleanly, redirecting the room without making a scene of it. He looked at with those sharp eyes. "You’ve heard everything between and Callighan. All of it. So it’s your turn." He folded his hands on the table. "Tell exactly what you want from this alliance, and what you’re planning to do about him."
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