Kayla slumped in the front seat of her dad's police cruiser, a chocolate milkshake numbing her fingers. Please don't let him see me. Please don't let him see me.

She peeked as much as she dared over the dash and there he was, sitting on a fire hydrant with his head slumped between his shoulders. Justin Heard.

She watched her dad, snapping his fingers in Justin's face. The police radio kept spitting static, the voice of some lady barely crackling through, but it was enough noise to make it impossible to hear what her dad was saying. She could just imagine the lecture. Friends who want you to drink are not your friends. Like Justin Heard was just a victim, trying hard to fit in with the cool kids. But the truth of it was, Justin Heard was one of the cool kids. The cool kid. The king of Point Chester Public. If him and the rest of the grade eleven caf boys were drinking outside Betty's Burger Shack, it was because Justin Heard said they should.

When Kayla and her dad pulled up, the boys were all standing out front downing forties, smoking and laughing. Until they caught sight of her father's car. The Sheriff's car. Then they ran. Kayla's dad managed to snatch Justin from the group, which was why he found himself in the middle of a make better choices speech.

Kayla's heart spring-boarded to her throat as Justin's eyes met hers.

She ducked.

Mortifying.

Kayla Girard was no idiot. She knew what a guy like Justin Heard thought of Sheriff Girard's egghead daughter. Loser. Brainiac. Goody-goody. She got that. And seeing Kayla out for late-night milkshakes with her dad wouldn't help Justin's opinion.

But it was too late. He'd seen her.

There was a click as the cruiser door opened and a thunk as Justin Heard plunked down in the backseat.

Kayla stayed where she was, crouched low below the dashboard. She could smell him. Cigarettes and beer.

Her dad opened the front door. "We're just gonna give Mr. Heard a lift home. Alright, sweetie?"

Slowly, Kayla slid back up to a normal human sitting position. Please don't call me sweetie.

"Justin," said her dad, "you've met my daughter Kayla, haven't you?"

Of course they'd met. They'd been in the same class since junior kindergarten.

Kayla watched as Justin's big brown eyes caught hers in the rear view mirror. His lips were pursed tight, his jaw set. "Hey," he grumbled. Maybe the first word he'd said to her since junior kindergarten.

"Hi." Kayla focused on the dashboard, her fingernails digging into her seat. This. Is. THE worst.

The radio spat more static, and then a voice came through. "Sheriff Girard, Dom's been trying to get a hold of you."

Her dad grabbed the radio. "Yeah, go ahead, Trudy."

"Dom's out on Highway 3. Got a bunch of sharks laying out on the road."

Kayla looked sideways at her dad.

"Sharks?"

"That's what he said. Eight of 'em."

Justin looked up from the window. "Did she say sharks?"

"Alright, I'll look into it." Her dad's forehead got those three wavy wrinkles it always got when he didn't want to do something. He looked over his shoulder. Betty's Burger Shack was on Highway 3. They were close.

"You're going to drop Justin off first, right?" said Kayla, near panic. Justin lived around the block from the Girard's - centre of town. She had a sick feeling she knew what her dad would say next.

"It'll be faster this way," said the Sheriff, pulling out of the parking lot. "You mind a quick detour, Justin?"

Justin shrugged.

Kayla sighed and let her head drop against her window. Would this night never end? All she wanted was to go home and wash the chlorine off her body. She was exhausted from swim practice. But since her dad showed up over an hour late to pick her up, he offered a Betty's shake to make it up to her. Now, feeling Justin Heard behind her like an exam deadline, she wished to God she hadn't agreed to the shake.

They drove along Highway 3 in silence. She could be thankful for that. At least her dad wasn't awkwardly trying to make conversation. Kayla watched the moonlight dance off the choppy ocean waves as they drove along the shore. Justin Heard used to swim too. They took lessons together all the way up to high school. He was on the swim team in grade nine. He quit mid season. Her eyes flicked to the rear view mirror and she could see him, staring out at the sea. Does he miss it?

"Oh shit!" Sheriff Girard slammed on the breaks suddenly, and Kayla lurched forward, the seatbelt cutting into her collarbone.

When she looked up, there was something in the cruiser's headlights. Something big. And black.

"Would you look at that," said her dad, climbing out of the car. "Wait here."

Kayla could see the lights of another cruiser parked further up the road beside an abandoned eighteen-wheeler.

"Holy shit, it is a shark."

Kayla jumped back as Justin Heard pressed himself against the grilled partition.

"Where'd it come from?" he said.

How was Kayla supposed to know? The ocean, obviously. But still, it was a long way from the beach to the highway. Justin wasn't talking to her anyway, just talking out loud, as far as Kayla was concerned because he didn't wait for her answer. He was digging around in his pockets.

"What are you doing?" she said, surprised to hear herself speak. That was the second thing she'd said to Justin Heard since kindergarten.

He pulled out his phone and held it up to the grill. Kayla ducked out of the way. "You're taking pictures?!"

"Yeah, I'm taking pictures," he said. "It's a fuckin' shark."

"You can't take pictures," she said as the phone snapped in her ear. "This is a police investigation."

He rolled his eyes. "Right, top secret stuff. So top secret Sheriff Girard brings his little princess and one of the local screw ups to witness the whole thing."

Kayla stared at him, stunned. He just vomited little princess and screw up like it was something he said all the time. Maybe it was, how could Kayla know? Sure, she'd guessed what his opinion of her was already. But she was surprised to hear him call himself a screw up so casually. Like it was just a fact.

If she'd been quiet, Justin hadn't noticed. He was focused on his phone. "Ah, this picture looks like shit." He tried to open the door but this was a police cruiser. The back doors were always locked. He patted the grill. "Here, come on, let me out."

"What?"

"Let me out, I want to get a good picture."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, why?" He looked at her like she'd just asked him if she could eat his head. "There's a shark in the middle of the highway. Why wouldn't I want a picture?"

Kayla watched her father, standing with Officer Richard over by the other cruiser. "My dad said to wait here."

Justin let out an obnoxious pfft and rolled his eyes. There was something about the way he did it. The loudness of it maybe. He was drunk.

He sulked in the backseat, a sour look on his face. And suddenly Kayla felt embarrassed. She looked back at her father, The Sheriff, and felt the goody-goody image seeping down into her bones. And it bothered her.

Clenching her teeth, Kayla climbed out and opened the door for Justin. He sat there, staring at her in disbelief. That bothered Kayla more.

"What?" she said, a little more angrily than she meant to. Was it so hard for him to believe that she'd disobey her dad? So completely unfathomable?

A half-grin spread across the right-hand side of his face. Kayla felt a twinge in her stomach.

Justin climbed out and the two of them approached the dead shark. They stopped and Kayla couldn't believe what she was looking at. There were more sharks. She hadn't been able to see properly from inside the cruiser, but she could see them all now. Lined up along the road, between her and where the other cruiser and truck were parked. They smelled like old fish and mouldy bread. Kayla gagged.

The smell didn't seem to bother Justin Heard. "Oh man, this is gonna be a siiiiiiick pic." He crouched down on the ground, right by the creature's head, and snapped away. "This could be the kind of thing that goes viral, you know?"

Kayla covered her nose and mouth and surveyed the long, smooth side of the dead shark in front of them. There were lesions -- green and brown and purple -- oozing in patches along the white underbelly.

"Think he was sick?"

Justin was looking at her, waiting for an answer. And it made her uncomfortable. When was the last time Justin Heard had looked at her at all? He motioned to one of the sores by the shark's mouth. "Think that means it had some kind of infection or something?"

Kayla shrugged. It sure didn't look healthy.

Justin stood up and took a couple of steps towards her. She hated how aware of herself he made her. How aware of him he made her. Every time he moved she felt like running away and hiding. He stared out at the other bodies lying across the road. "I thought she said there were eight?"

"Eight?" asked Kayla.

"Yeah, the chick on the radio. She said there were eight sharks."

Justin was right. Trudy had said eight. But from where Kayla was standing, she only counted six.

Her dad and Officer Richard were climbing over the guardrail, heading down toward the beach.

Justin started making his way to the other cruiser.

"What are you doing?" Kayla hissed.

Justin shrugged. "I wanna know what they were looking at."

This was a bad idea. She shouldn't have let him out of the car.

Kayla hurried after Justin, afraid he was about to do something stupid. Given his history, he probably was. They passed the dead, gaping mouths of each giant fish, and they were all oozing from the same type of lesions as the first. Some kind of outbreak? Was there something in the water?

He stopped, standing in the headlights of the other cruiser. He was staring at the truck. "Where's the truck driver?"

"Who cares?" Kayla hissed. "Can we please go back to the car before you get me in trouble?"

"There's a truck; there's gotta be a driver, right?"

Kayla growled into her sleeves, hating that he wasn't even listening to her, hating that even through the summer fresh detergent she could still smell the rotting sharks, hating that she got a stupid milkshake instead of just going home. She kicked at the ground and saw dark drops fly up from her foot and land on the headlights.

She stepped back and looked down at her feet.

It was blood.

Justin turned and saw what she was staring at. "Oh shit."

A lot of blood. Even in the dark, she knew it was. It had a blackness to it that just couldn't be mistaken for anything else.

And there was more. A trail of it, dragging out along the beach where the Sheriff and Officer Richard had followed it all the way to the water's edge.

Justin's voice was barely a whisper. "The trucker?"

She looked at the black smear across the toes of her sneaker. Whoever it was, the amount of blood on the road left no doubt.

They were dead.