by Blake Crouch
“Oh God, don’t say that.”
“I love you, my girls. Now I have to shut this door.”
“No, Daddy!”
“Quiet, Jess,” he whispered.
Jim Turner kissed his wife.
He kissed his daughter.
Then he shut them into the bedroom closet on the second floor of their lavender-colored Victorian.
His toolbox was already open on the floor.
He flicked on his flashlight and chose a suitable two-by-four from the pieces of scrap lumber he’d carried in from the shed—remnants of a doghouse he’d built last summer.
Those warm afternoons working in the backyard . . .
Mrs. Miller’s screaming jettisoned the memory into oblivion.
“No-no-no-no-no-no-no! Oh Goooooooddddd!”
Jessica was crying in the closet, Gracie struggling to comfort her.
Jim grabbed a hammer. He started nails on each end of the board. Screws would have been preferable but there was no time. He held the pine board across the doorframe and drove the nails into the studs.
His mind wouldn’t stop.
He kept replaying what the sheriff had said, but he couldn’t wrap his head around it.
How could this be all that was left of humanity?
By the time he had four boards nailed across the doorframe, the Millers had gone quiet across the street.
He dropped the hammer, wiped his brow.
Dripping with sweat.
Kneeling down, he put his lips to the closet door.
“Jessica? Gracie?”
“I can hear you,” his wife said.
“You’re nailed in,” Jim said. “Now I have to go find a place to hide.”
“Please be safe.”
He put his hand on the door.
“I love you both so much.”
Gracie said something back but he couldn’t hear the words. Too muffled. Too faint. Too ruined by tears.
Rising to his feet, he grabbed the flashlight and the hammer—the nearest thing to a weapon in his toolbox.
At the bedroom door, he turned the lock and closed it gently behind him.
The hallway was dark.
The last half hour had been so filled with shouting and shrieks that the silence struck him wrong, like a lie.
Where will you hide?
How will you survive?
He stopped at the top of the staircase. He was tempted to use the light, but feared it might draw attention.
With a hand on the bannister for a guide, he went slowly down the creaking steps. The living room stood in impenetrable shadow. Jim moved to the front door. He’d locked the dead bolt, but he had a feeling that didn’t matter. From what he’d seen, these things were running through the windows.
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 dista
nce 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.”
“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.
<
br /> “Go faster!” Barbara said.
“I can’t. There’s a hairpin turn coming up.”
She climbed between the seats into the back and sat on her knees, staring through the window.
“Anything?” Bob asked.
“No. What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know, but at least we aren’t in town, in the midst of everything. Maybe we could just pull off into a quiet place in the trees?” he suggested. “Ride this out?”
“What if there’s no end to it?” she asked.
The question hung between them like a black cloud.
The road out of town began to curve and Bob steered into it, keeping their speed under twenty miles per hour.
Barbara was crying in the backseat.
“I wish he hadn’t told us,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Sheriff Burke. This is all happening because he told us the truth.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I’m not saying I loved it here, but you know what?” Barbara sniveled. “I didn’t worry about bills. I didn’t worry about our mortgage. You and I got to run a bakery.”
“You had gotten used to the way of things.”
“Exactly.”
“But we couldn’t talk about our past,” Bob said. “We never saw our friends or family. We were forced to marry.”
“That didn’t turn out so bad,” she said.
Bob held his tongue as he drove through the heart of the curve.
The road out of town became the road into town.
He eased off the gas as they passed the welcome sign.
Wayward Pines lay straight ahead, enveloped in darkness.
He let the car roll to a stop and killed the engine.
“We just wait here?” Barbara asked.
“For now.”
“Shouldn’t we keep moving?”
“There’s barely any gas left.”
She climbed back into the front seat.
She said, “People are dying out there. Right now.”
“I know.”
“That goddamned sheriff.”
“I’m glad he did it.”
“What?”
“I said I’m glad.”
“No, I heard you the first time. I mean, why? Our neighbors are being slaughtered, Bob.”
“We were slaves.”
“How are you enjoying your new freedom?”
