Stay inside?
Go?
On the other side of the door, he heard something scrape.
Leaned into the peephole.
There were no streetlamps working, but he could actually see outside, the pavement and the picket fences and the cars just faintly illuminated by residual starlight.
Three of those things were crawling up the flagstones that led from the picket fence to the front door.
He’d caught glimpses of them streaking down the street from his second-floor bedroom window, but he hadn’t yet seen one up close.
None of them were larger than he was, but their muscle tone was extraordinary.
They looked—
Like humanity wrapped in the trappings of a monster.
Equipped with talons instead of fingers, teeth designed for cutting and tearing, and they brandished arms that seemed too long in proportion to the rest of their body. Longer even than their legs.
He said under his breath, like a prayer, “What the hell are you?”
They reached the porch.
Fear suddenly wore him like a glove.
He backed away from the door, moving through the dark again, between the sofa and the coffee table, and then into the kitchen, where the starlight filtered through the window over the sink just sufficiently to brighten the linoleum and light the way.
Jim set the hammer on the counter and took the back-door key off the nail beside the door.
Something crashed into the front door as he worked the key into the lock.
A wood-splintering, lock-rattling collision.
He turned the key, the dead bolt retracting.
Ripped open the back door as the front door punched open.
The steps leading up to the second floor, to the bedroom, to the closet where his girls were in hiding would be the first thing those monsters saw.
Jim walked several steps back into the kitchen, and said, “Hey, guys? Over here!”
An eardrum-riving shriek filled the house.
He couldn’t see a thing, but he heard those creatures slamming through tables and chairs as they came for him. He tore back through the kitchen, shutting the door after him and launching down the single step into his perfect square of grass.
Past the doghouse.
Toward the fence.
Glass broke behind him.
As he reached the gate that opened into the alley, he glanced back, saw one of those things climbing through the kitchen window as the other two flung themselves into the back door.
He flipped open the hasp and dug his shoulder into the gate.
ETHAN
The shrieks of the abbies were less than a block away as Ethan lowered himself through the opening, grabbed hold of the handle on the underside of the trapdoor, and pulled it closed above him.
The tunnel swelled with the reverberating noise of a hundred voices down below, loud enough to drown out the abbies.
He searched, but there was no lock on this side of the hatch, no method of securing it against the world above.
Ethan descended the ladder, twenty-five rungs down to the floor of a tunnel brimming with the firelight of a dozen torches.
It was a six-by-six culvert of crumbling concrete, broken by roots and vines, and a couple thousand years old. It ran beneath the town, and, aside from the cemetery, it represented the last original construction leftover from twenty-first-century Wayward Pines.
It felt cold and dank and ancient.
People stood single file, their backs against the walls like schoolchildren assembled for some terrifying drill. Tense. Expectant. Shivering. Some wide-eyed, others blank-faced, as if in complete denial of what was happening.
Ethan jogged up the tunnel to Kate.
“Everybody in?” she asked.
“Yeah. Lead the way. Hecter and I will bring up the rear.”
As Ethan moved back down the line, he held his finger to his lips, urging silence.
When he passed his wife and son, he caught Theresa’s eye and winked, squeezing her hand as he hurried by.
They had already begun to move as he neared the end.
He pulled the last torchbearer out of line. She tended bar at the Biergarten on weekends. Maggie something.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
She was young, scared.
Ethan said, “Just hold your light. It’s Maggie, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Ethan.”
“I know.”
“Let’s go.”
The group moved slowly enough as a whole for Ethan, Hecter, and Maggie to backpedal without fear of falling. The torchlight flickered across the crumbling concrete, illuminating an empty stretch of tunnel forty feet behind them, the walls fringed with light, the center space disturbingly black.
There was the sound of footsteps in water, a few hushed voices, and little else.
As they traveled, Ethan’s mind wandered to Theresa and Ben. They were only fifty feet away, but he didn’t like being any distance from them under these conditions.
They came to a junction.
Maggie’s torch momentarily illuminated the intersecting tunnels.
For a split second, Ethan thought he heard screams echoing down through the dark, but they were lost to the sound of his group’s passage.
“Are we doing okay?” Maggie asked.
A tremor in her voice.
“Yes,” Ethan said. “We’ll be safe soon.”
“I’m cold.”
Her costume for the fête was a bikini under a raincoat, and fur-lined boots.
Ethan said, “We’ll have a fire where we’re going.”
“I’m scared.”
“You’re doing great, Maggie.”
Two junctions later, they hung a right into a new tunnel.
As they passed an old iron ladder that climbed into darkness, Ethan stopped.
“What’s that sound?” Hecter asked.
Ethan looked at Maggie. “Let me have your torch.”
“Why?”
He grabbed it and handed her his shotgun.
Climbed with one hand on the rungs, one hand gripping the torch.
After ten steps, Hecter’s voice reached up from below.
“Ethan, not to complain, but I can’t see a thing down here.”
“I’ll be back in one minute.”