“What are you doing?” Maggie called out. There were tears in her voice, but Ethan kept climbing, until his head bumped against the hatch. He clung to the top rung of the ladder, the trapdoor lit by the firelight, the flame warm near his face.
Maggie and Hecter were still calling out to him.
He eased the trapdoor open.
Compared to the tunnel, the starlit town was bright as day.
The noise that had drawn him up the ladder was screaming.
Human screaming.
And what he saw, he didn’t know how to process.
How do you make sense of people running down the middle of a street that could’ve been the cover of a Saturday Evening Post, chased by a horde of monsters, pale white, translucent in the night, some sprinting upright, others moving on all fours with a bounding gait like wolves?
You process it piecemeal.
A string of indelible images.
Shrieks from the nearest house as an abby plows through the front window.
Three abbies running down one of the officers of the fête, who stops to face them at the last moment and swings his machete too early, just missing the nose of the lead abby as the other two tackle him to the ground.
Thirty yards away, an abby pulling out loops of intestine and shoveling them into its jaws as the man pinned beneath its talons makes the last noise—awful, desperate screaming—he will ever make.
In the middle of Main Street, a large abby on top of Megan Fisher, violating her.
A dozen bodies already scattered across Main, most lying absolutely still in puddles of their own insides, two barely crawling, three being eaten alive.
Like a horrific game, no one running in any particular direction.
Ethan had the urge to go above ground and help. Save someone. Just one person. Kill just one of those monsters.
But it would be death.
He didn’t even have his shotgun.
This group—one quarter of Wayward Pines—had been ambushed en route to their trapdoor.
No weapons save a few machetes. But would it really matter if they’d all been armed? Would it matter for Ethan’s group if the abbies discovered the tunnels?
A terrifying thought.
Think about your family.
They’re below you right now.
They need you.
They need you alive.
“Ethan!” Maggie shouted. “Come on!”
Above ground, a man shot past, running as hard as Ethan had ever seen someone run, the speed and sheer energy output only attainable by someone in fear of an impending, unthinkable death.
The abby chasing him was on all fours and closing fast, and as the man glanced back, Ethan recognized him as Jim Turner, the town dentist.
A second abby collided with Jim at full speed, the man’s neck snapping from the brute force of the impact.
The questions were inescapable—what if Ethan hadn’t made this revelation to the town? What if he’d let them kill Kate and Harold, go on with things the way they’d always been? These people would certainly not be dying right now.
Ethan carefully lowered the trapdoor and descended.
Maggie was hysterical below him, Hecter trying to comfort her.
Ethan reached the bottom, traded back the torch for the gun, and said, “Let’s go.”
They moved quickly up the tunnel, the rest of their group out of sight.
“What was happening up there?” Maggie asked.
Ethan said, “One of the other groups didn’t make it underground in time.”
Hecter said, “We have to help them.”
“There is no helping them.”
“What does that mean?” Maggie asked.
Ethan glimpsed a shimmer of torchlight in the distance and quickened his pace.
He said, “We need to focus on getting our people to safety. Nothing else.”
“Were people dying?” Maggie asked.
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I imagine all of them eventually.”
THE RICHARDSONS
Bob Richardson slid in behind the wheel of his 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera and cranked the engine as his wife, Barbara, piled into the front passenger seat beside him.
“This is the stupidest idea,” she said.
He put the car into gear and eased out into the dark street.
“What’s yours?” he asked. “Wait inside the house for those things to break in?”
“Your lights aren’t on,” Barbara said.
“That’s intentional, darling.”
“You don’t think they can hear our engine?”
“Will you shut up and let me drive please?”
“Of course. This’ll be the shortest trip ever taken on account of there being no roads out of town.”
Bob turned onto First Avenue.
He wasn’t about to admit it verbally, or by action (which would mean using the lights), but it was pretty dark. Arguably too dark to drive without headlights.
It had been months since he’d been behind the wheel, and he felt rusty.
They passed the sheriff’s station.
With their windows rolled up, the screams emanating from town barely intruded into the tense silence inside the car.
Soon, they reached the outskirts.
Through his window, Bob could see movement in the pasture.
“They’re out there,” Barbara said.
“I know it.”
She reached across his lap and hit the lights. Twin beams shot out across the grassland. Eviscerated cows littered the pasture by the dozens, each one surrounded by a cluster of monsters in the throes of gorging themselves.
“Goddammit, Barbara!”
They all looked up from their kills, bloody mouths glistening in the high beams.
Bob floored the accelerator.
They blew past the goodbye sign—a perfect 1950s family, smiling and waving.
WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED YOUR VISIT TO WAYWARD PINES! DON’T BE A STRANGER! COME BACK SOON!
The road entered the forest.
Bob downgraded the high beams to corner lamps, the fog lights just bright enough to keep him straddling the double yellow.
Mist swept across the road between the narrow corridor of pines.
Bob kept glancing in the rearview mirror, but all he could see was a tiny swath of scrolling pavement lit red by the taillights.