The Last Town

by Blake Crouch

  “If this is the end, I’m glad I know the truth.”

  “You’re not scared?”

  “I’m terrified.”

  Bob opened his door.

  “Where are you going?” Barbara asked.

  The interior dome light burned his eyes.

  “I need a moment alone.”

  “I’m not getting out of this car.”

  “That’s kind of the point, darling.”

  ETHAN

  As they closed in on their group, Ethan registered the growing disconnect between what he’d seen above ground and the fact that his people were still alive down here in the tunnel. It reminded him of the sickening, random way that fate and chance figured into battle—if you had stepped left instead of right, the bullet would have gone through your eye instead of your friend’s. If Kate had led their group to a different tunnel entrance, it could’ve been Ethan and his family being slaughtered on Main Street. He was having an impossible time putting Megan Fisher out of his mind. He’d seen enough death and destruction in Iraq to know that it would be poor Megan who would haunt his dreams for many nights to come. Knew he would always wonder—what if he’d risked everything and gone outside? What if he’d killed her attacker? Saved her? Carried her back to the tunnel? He would play that scene over and over until it bulked up with the perfection of a fantasy. Anything to replace the image of that woman under the abby in the middle of the road. There were still moments from the war he carried and would always carry—incomprehensible agony and suffering.

  This trumped them all.

  They reached the end of the line just as the group was turning up a new tunnel.

  Ethan thinking, One quarter of humanity was just wiped out.

  He looked down the line of his people, saw the back of Theresa’s head in the low light.

  The need to be close to her and Ben was overwhelming.

  Megan in the street.

  Stop.

  Megan screaming.

  Stop.

  Megan—

  A single, piercing howl blasted through the tunnel.

  Maggie and Hecter stopped.

  Ethan raised his shotgun.

  The torch began to shake violently in Maggie’s hand.

  Ethan glanced back.

  The line had stalled—everyone had heard, everyone craning their necks, straining to stare down into the darkness of the tunnel.

  Ethan said to everyone, “Keep the line moving. Don’t stop no matter what. Just go.”

  They went on.

  After fifty feet, Maggie said, “I think I hear something.”

  “What?” Hecter asked.

  “It’s like . . . splashing. Someone walking through the water.”

  “That’s just our group.”

  She shook her head and pointed into the darkness. “It’s coming from that direction.”

  Ethan said, “Hold up. Let everybody get ahead of us.”

  As the end of the line pulled away, Ethan squinted into the darkness. Now he heard it too, and it wasn’t walking.

  It was running.

  His mouth went dry and he was suddenly aware of his heart banging madly against his chest.

  “It’s time to point your gun, Hecter,” Ethan said.

  “Something’s coming?”

  “Something’s coming.”

  Maggie took a few steps back.

  Ethan said, “I know you’re scared, but you’re our light, Maggie. No matter what you see coming down that tunnel, stand your ground. If you run, we all die. Understand?”

  The splashing was getting louder, closer.

  “Maggie? Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” she whimpered.

  Ethan pumped the shotgun.

  “Hecter, is your safety off?”

  “It is.”

  Ethan glanced back, tried to spot Theresa and Ben in the crowd, but they were too far away and the light was shit.

  Ethan tugged the black synthetic stock into his shoulder and stared down the barrel. The sights were a self-luminous tritium unit that popped nicely in the dark—three soft green dots.

  Ethan said, “You’re shooting slugs, not buckshot.”

  “So there’s no spread?”

  “Exactly. Be accurate.”

  “What if I run out?”

  “Cross that bridge when—”

  It came out of the dark at a full sprint, barreling low on all fours at an astonishing rate of speed.

  Greyhound fast.

  Ethan aimed.

  Hecter fired.

  Muzzle flash electrifying the tunnel and wrecking Ethan’s vision for a millisecond.

  When Ethan could see again, the abby was still coming, twenty feet and two seconds away.

  Maggie hyperventilating, “OhGodohGodohGodohGodoh—”

  Ethan fired, the stock jerking back into his shoulder, the report of the shotgun in this confined space like a cannon going off.

  The abby tumbled to a stop three feet from Ethan’s boots, a large chunk of skull blown out of the back of its head.

  Hecter said, “Wow.”

  His voice sounded muffled against the ringing in Ethan’s ears.

  They began to jog up the tunnel, chasing the end of the line, which was now just a point of firelight in the distance. As Ethan’s hearing returned, he picked out new howls echoing through the tunnel.

  “Faster,” Ethan said.

  He could hear the abbies’ footfalls in the stream, closing in behind them.

  Kept glancing back into the dark, kept seeing nothing.

  And they were running, Maggie out in front, Ethan and Hecter abreast, elbows grazing every few strides.

  They crossed a junction.

  Through the tunnel to their right came screaming, shrieking, wailing—

  HAROLD BALLINGER

  The people at the back shouted first.

  Screams in the darkness.

  Human.

  Inhuman.

  “—Run, run, run, run, run, run—”

  “—Oh God they’re here—”

  “—Help me—”

  “—No no no noooo—”

  A great surge pushing through the line, people falling in the water.

  More cries for help.

  Then agony.

  Everything unraveling so goddamned fast.

  Harold spun around to go back, but there was nothing to go back to. All the torches had been extinguished. Only darkness and screaming—an explosion of noise ricocheting off the walls of the culvert—and all he could think was that this must be what hell sounded like.

  He heard gunshots in an adjacent tunnel.

  Kate?

  Tiffany Golden screamed his name. Shouting at him, at everyone to come on. Hurry. Don’t just stand there.

  She was thirty feet up the tunnel and clutching their group’s last torch.

  People shoved past Harold.

  Someone’s shoulder butted him back into the wall of crumbling concrete.

  The screams of the dying were getting closer.

  Harold started running, sandwiched between two women, their elbows punching into his side as they raced ahead of him toward the diminishing firelight.

  He didn’t think they had that much farther to go. Three, four hundred yards at the most before the tunnel opened into the woods.

  If they could make it outside, even half of them—

  The torch in the distance vanished with a shout.

  Instantaneous dark.

  The screams tripling in volume.

  Harold could taste the panic in the air.

  Some of it his own.

  He was knocked down in the stream of water, feet trampling over his legs, then his body. Tried to get up, got knocked do
wn again, people scrambling over him like an obstacle, someone stepping on his head.

  Rolling out of the way, he climbed back onto his feet.

  Something streaked past him in the dark.

  It reeked of decay.

  Several feet away, a man begged for help over the sound of bone and cartilage crunching.

  Harold’s nerve flattened under a veil of crushing disbelief.

  He should go.

  Just run.

  The poor bastard beside him went quiet, and now there was only the sound of the monster devouring its kill.

  How could this possibly be happening?

  Fetid breath hit his face.

  Inches away, a low growl began.

  Harold said, “Don’t do this.”

  His throat felt suddenly hot. His chest turned wet and warm. He could still breathe, and he felt no pain, but there was so much blood jetting out of his neck.

  Already he felt light-headed.

  Harold sank down in the freezing stream as the beast opened his stomach with a swipe.

  There was only a distant, blunted pain as the abby began to eat.

  All around him were the moans and cries of the dying, the scared.

  People still rushed past him in the dark, fighting to get to safety.

  He didn’t make a sound.

  Didn’t fight back.

  Paralyzed by shock, blood loss, trauma, fear.

  He couldn’t believe this was happening to him.

  The thing ate him with the intensity of a creature that hadn’t fed in days, its rear talons pinning him down by his legs, front talons nailing Harold’s arms to the concrete.

  And still no pain to speak of.

  He was one of the lucky ones, he figured.

  He’d be dead before the real pain hit.

  ETHAN

  —Pure human suffering and terror.

  Chaos.

  Ethan shouted, “Don’t stop! Keep going!”

  Thinking, Had another group been run down in an adjacent tunnel?

  Unimaginable.

  To be overtaken down here.

  People climbing over one another to escape as the monsters reached them.

  Torches dropped.

  Extinguished in the stream.

  Devoured in the dark.

  Up ahead, the torchlight in Ethan’s group had disappeared.

  Ethan said, panting, “Where’d they go?”

  “I don’t know,” Hecter said. “The light just vanished.”

  The water under Ethan’s boots was rushing now and they were moving into a cold, steady breeze.

  They emerged from the tunnel onto a rocky streambed, and for a moment, the sound of the abbies was replaced by the roar of white water, close but invisible in the dark.

  Ethan stared up the hillside, saw the torches trailing up into a forest.

  He pointed them out to Hecter and Maggie, and said, “Follow the lights.”

  “You’re staying?” Hecter asked.

  “I’ll be along.”

  The shrieks of the abbies cut through the crush of the falls.

  “Go!” Ethan said.

  Hecter and Maggie headed off into the trees.

  Ethan racked a fresh shell into the tube and climbed several feet up the bank to a flat perch. His eyes were slowly adjusting. He could discern the silhouettes of trees and even the cascade in the distance, the black water starlit against the sky where it arced over a ledge several hundred feet above.

  Ethan’s quads burned from sprinting through the tunnel, and despite the cold, his undershirt was soaked with sweat.

  An abby exploded out of the tunnel and stopped in the streambed.

  Took in its new surroundings.

  Looked at Ethan.

  Here we go.

  Its head twitched to the side.

  When the slug hit the abby’s center mass, it fell back into the stream.

  Two more abbies ripped out of the tunnel.

  One rushed to its fallen comrade and let out a low, pulsing cry.

  The other made a beeline for Ethan, scrabbling up the rocky bank on all fours.

  Ethan racked a new shell, shot a slug through its teeth.

  When it fell, the other one was right behind it, and two more were already out of the tunnel.

  Ethan pumped and fired.

  The other two were coming and still more screams rising up behind them.

  He took the first one down with a gut shot but missed the head of its partner.

  Racked another shell.

  Fired at point-blank range and hit just below the neck.

  Blood sprayed in Ethan’s eyes.

  He wiped his face as another abby joined the party.

  Ethan pumped, aimed, squeezed the trigger.

  Click.

  Shit.

  The abby heard the noise.

  It lunged.

  Ethan threw down the empty shotgun, drew his Desert Eagle, and put a round through its heart.

  Gun smoke clouded the air, Ethan’s heart hammered away, and there were screams still coming up the tunnel.

  Go, go, go!

  He holstered the pistol, grabbed the shotgun, and climbed away from the stream, clawing his way through rocks and dirt until he reached the trees, sweat pouring into his eyes with a salty burn.

  There were lights in the distance.

  Screams behind him.

  He slung the shotgun over his shoulder and ran.

  After a minute, the sound of the abbies changed.

  They were outside now.

  Many of them.

  He didn’t look back.

  Kept going.

  Kept climbing.

  III

  ADAM TOBIAS HASSLER

  HASSLER EXPEDITION

  NORTHWEST WYOMING

  678 DAYS AGO

  Brightly colored algae rims the bank, and jets of mineral water bubble where they surface up from the molten underworld below. The smell of sulfur and other minerals is strong.

  Hassler strips naked in the falling snow and covers his clothes and gear under the stinking duster. Hustling through the grass, he glides into the pool and groans with pleasure.

  Out in the center, it is deep and clear and sky blue.

  He finds a spot near the shore a foot and a half deep and stretches out on a long, smooth rock that boasts a natural incline.

  Pure, unabashed pleasure.

  As if it was made for this very thing.

  He reclines in the hundred-and-four-degree pool, the snow pouring down, letting his eyes close for little bursts of euphoria that remind him of what it felt like to be human. To live in a civilized world of convenience and comfort. Where the probability of death didn’t shadow every moment.

  But the knowledge of where he is, of who he is, of why he is here is never far. A tense voice—the one that has kept him alive for the last eight hundred and something days in the wild—whispers that it was foolish to stop for a soak in this pool. Indulgent and reckless. This isn’t a spa. A swarm of abbies could appear at any time.

  He’s normally vigilant to a fault, but this pool is nothing short of a gift, and he knows the memory of his time here will sustain him for weeks to come. Besides, the map and compass are useless in the midst of a blizzard. He’s socked in until the weather passes.

  He shuts his eyes again, feels the snowflakes alighting on his lashes.

  Off in the distance, he hears a sound, like water shooting out of the blowhole of a whale—one of the smaller geysers erupting.

  His own smile surprises him.

  He first saw this place in the faded color photos of the “XYZ” Encyclopedia Britannica volume in his parents’ basement—a 1960s crowd watching from the boardwalk as Old Faithful spew
ed boiling mineral water.

  He’s dreamed of coming here since he was a boy. Just never imagined that his first visit to Yellowstone would be in conditions such as these.

  Two thousand years in the future, and the world gone all to hell.

  Hassler grabs a handful of gravel and begins to abrade the dirt and filth that has accumulated on his skin like body armor. In the middle of the pool, where the deep water covers his head, he submerges himself completely.

  Clean for the first time in months, he climbs out of the pool and sits in the frosted grass to let his body cool.

  Steam lifts off his shoulders.

  He feels woozy from the heat.

  Across the meadow, evergreens stand ghost-like, almost invisible through the steam and the snow.

  And then—

  Something he wrote off as a shrub begins to crawl.

  Hassler’s heart stops.

  He straightens and squints.

  Can’t pinpoint how far away it is, but certainly inside of a hundred yards. Easy to mistake for a man crawling on all fours at this distance, except there are no men in the world anymore. At least not beyond the electrified, razor-wired fence that surrounds the town of Wayward Pines.

  Well, actually, there is one.

  Him.

  The figure draws closer.

  No.

  Figures.

  Three of them.

  You idiot.

  He’s naked, and his best means of defense—a .357—is tucked away in the pocket of his duster on the far side of the pool.

  But not even his Smith & Wesson offers much comfort against three abbies at close range in snowstorm visibility. If he were prepared, if he had spotted them farther out, he might have dropped one or two with his Winchester. Put a bullet through the last one’s skull point-blank with the revolver.

  This line of thought is pointless.

  They’re coming toward the pool.

  Hassler eases soundlessly back into the water, all the way up to his neck. He can scarcely see them now through the steam, prays that lack of visibility cuts both ways.

  As the abbies close in, Hassler lowers himself to his eyes.

  It is a mature female and two lankier adolescents, each of whom clock in around one twenty—easily lethal. He’s seen smaller ones than this bring down full-grown bison.

  The female is the size of them both combined.