The Last Town

by Blake Crouch

  He and Hecter covered the last thirty feet through Maggie’s yard.

  Up the steps, onto the covered porch.

  Jerked open the screen door.

  Abbies screaming.

  Converging.

  Hecter beginning to lose his grip.

  Ethan turned the doorknob, put his shoulder into the door, and rushed inside.

  “Lock the door!” Ethan yelled as Hecter stumbled inside. “Stand halfway up the staircase and shoot the shit out of anything that gets in.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Car keys.”

  Ethan doubled up the stairs.

  Screams audible through the walls.

  At the top he turned right and raced toward the closed door at the end of the hall.

  Smashed through without slowing.

  Yellow walls, white crown molding.

  Soft curtains, drawn.

  A terrycloth robe draped over the back of a chair.

  A big, pillowy bed, neatly made.

  Stack of Jane Austen novels and an incense burner on the bedside table.

  The cold air still redolent of fragrant smoke.

  Maggie’s haven.

  Ethan hurried to the bedside table, pulled open the drawer.

  Downstairs, the sound of glass breaking.

  Wood splintering.

  Snarling.

  Hecter yelled something as Ethan shoved his arm toward the back of the drawer, felt his fingers graze the keys.

  A shotgun blast followed.

  Abbies screaming.

  Hecter shouting, “Oh God!”

  Shuck-shuck as he racked another slug.

  Boom.

  Shuck-shuck.

  The spent shell falling down the stairs.

  Ethan jammed Maggie’s keys into the front pocket of his jeans and started down the hallway.

  Hecter screamed.

  No more shots.

  The smooth soles of Ethan’s boots slid across the hardwood floor as he reached the top of the stairs and tried to arrest his forward momentum.

  Blood.

  Everywhere.

  Three abbies on Hecter, one tearing at his right leg, another ripping the biceps out of his arm, a third chewing its way through the fascia into his stomach.

  Hecter shrieking, pounding his free hand into the skull of the abby who was gutting him.

  Ethan raised the shotgun.

  The first slug decapitated the abby burrowing into Hecter’s stomach, and he shot the second one as it looked up snarling, but the third had a head start and it was airborne, talons out, seconds from crashing into Ethan by the time he got the Mossberg pumped and fired.

  It tumbled back down the staircase and crashed into two abbies that had just torn through the front door.

  Ethan racked a shell and steadied himself at the top of the staircase, trying to process his next move, fighting panic, the inescapable thought that it was all coming off the rails right now. His left arm was so tender from the Mossberg’s recoil it was agony just pulling the stock snug against his shoulder.

  The two abbies crawled out from under the dead abby and started for him, and Ethan shot them both down as they climbed.

  The house was hazy with gun smoke and for a moment the only sound was the pneumatic hiss as the femoral artery in Hecter’s leg jetted arcs of red at the front door.

  The stairs looked treacherous, soaked in blood.

  Hecter was groaning and shaking as he held his intestines in his hands in some kind of horrified wonder.

  He was bleeding out mercifully fast, shock-white, with a cold sweat matting down his hair, giving his face a corpse-like sheen that foretold what was coming.

  He stared up at Ethan with a look only a dying soldier can give the one the bullet missed.

  Fear.

  Disbelief.

  Please-God-tell-me-this-isn’t-happening.

  The front door had been torn off its hinges, and through the opening, Ethan watched more abbies stream into the yard.

  They would eat Hecter while he took his last breaths.

  Ethan pulled his pistol, clicked off the safety.

  No idea if it were true, but he said, “You’re going someplace better.”

  Hecter just stared.

  I should’ve let you go find the keys.

  Ethan shot the pianist between his eyes. As the monsters flooded in through the front door, he was already running down the hall away from Maggie’s bedroom.

  He took the second doorway on his right.

  Quietly shut it after him and flicked a lock that didn’t stand a chance of stopping anything.

  There was a claw-foot tub under a window of frosted glass.

  As he moved toward it, he could hear the abbies through the door.

  Eating.

  Ethan set the shotgun on the pedestal sink, stepped into the bathtub.

  He flipped the hasp on the window.

  Raised it two feet off the sill.

  Tight squeeze.

  He climbed up onto the lip of the bathtub and looked out the window into a small backyard, fenced and empty.

  The staircase creaked, the abbies coming.

  Out in the hall, there was a great collision, like something had crashed at full speed into one of the doors.

  Ethan stepped back down into the bathroom and grabbed the shotgun.

  An abby screamed on the other side of the door.

  Something slammed into the bathroom door.

  The wood started to split down the middle.

  Ethan racked a shell and shot a slug through the center of the door, heard something thunk into the wall on the other side.

  There was now a slug-size hole in the door, and a puddle of blood leaking underneath it, beginning to spread across the checkered tile.

  Ethan climbed up onto the rim of the bathtub.

  He dropped the shotgun on the roof and squeezed through the window as another abby smashed into the door behind him.

  Kneeling under the window frame, Ethan fed eight shells into the tube and then draped the strap over his shoulder.

  The abby was still trying to beat down the bathroom door.

  Ethan closed the window and sidestepped carefully down to the edge of the roof.

  It dropped twelve feet to the backyard.

  He got down on his hands and knees and lowered himself over the edge, clutching the gutter until he’d managed to extend himself fully and reduce the drop to five feet.

  He hit the ground hard and let his legs buckle to absorb the impact, rolled, and quickly regained his feet.

  Through the panes of glass in the back door, he could see things running inside the house.

  Ethan jogged around the brick patio, his muscles, his bones, every square inch of real estate on his body caught in a trajectory of increasing agony.

  The fence was built of weathered one-by-sixes, five feet high, with a gate that led out into the side yard.

  He peered over the top—no abbies that he could see.

  Threw the latch and tugged the gate open just enough to slide through.

  Up on the second floor, he heard glass explode.

  He jogged alongside the house and slowed as he reached the front yard.

  For the moment—empty.

  He stared at the two cars parked along the curb in front of Maggie’s house.

  An old CJ-5 Jeep with a soft top.

  A white Buick station wagon that looked prehistoric.

  He dug the keys out of his pocket.

  Three on the ring.

  All blank.

  Somewhere above him, he heard a scrape that might have been talons dragging across the tin roof.

  He sprinted out into the yard.

 
Halfway to the curb, he looked back just in time to see an abby leap down off the roof over the porch.

  It hit the ground and charged.

  Ethan stopped at the sidewalk, spun, raised the shotgun, and fired a slug through its sternum.

  Inside the house, screams rose up.

  The station wagon was the closest.

  Fifty-fifty chance of being Maggie’s car.

  Ethan pulled open the passenger-side door, dove in, and shut it behind him.

  Climbing in behind the steering wheel, he jammed the first key into the ignition.

  Nothing.

  “Come on.”

  Key number two.

  It slid in nicely.

  But it wouldn’t turn.

  An abby exploded out the front door of Maggie’s house.

  Number three.

  Four abbies appeared behind the first—as two of them rushed out onto the grass to their dying friend, the last of the three keys failed to even enter the keyhole.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Ethan ducked down in the seat and crammed himself against the floorboard.

  He couldn’t see a thing, but he could hear the abbies in the yard.

  They’re going to look in and see you and then what? Go right now.

  Reaching up, he grasped the door handle and quietly tugged.

  The door creaked open.

  He slithered out onto the pavement, staying low against the car, hidden from the view of the house.

  No abbies in the street.

  He rose up until he could just see through the windows.

  Counted six of them in the front yard, and through the open door he could see two more eating what was left of Hecter.

  The Jeep was parked a few feet up from the station wagon’s bumper.

  He grabbed the shotgun out of the front seat and crawled across the pavement.

  Risking visibility for several seconds, he passed between the Buick and the Jeep, but they didn’t see him.

  Ethan stood, stared through the plastic windows of the soft-top.

  Some of the abbies had gone back inside.

  One was still crouched over the carcass of the abby Ethan had just shot, whimpering.

  The driver-side door was unlocked.

  Ethan climbed in, set the shotgun between the seats.

  He got the first key in as an abby screamed.

  They’d seen him.

  They were moving his way.

  He turned the key.

  Nope.

  Started fumbling for the second key and then realized there wasn’t time. He grabbed the shotgun and jumped down out of the Jeep, ran into the middle of the road.

  Five were already running at him.

  No misses or you die.

  He shot the one out in front, and then the two to the left, backpedaling in the street as the last pair closed in.

  It took three rounds to bring down the fourth.

  Only one to drop the fifth as it drew within ten feet.

  Three more abbies ran out of the house. In his peripheral vision, he noted movement in the streets all around him—swarms of abbies coming from every direction.

  A growl behind him turned his head.

  Two abbies darting straight at him on all fours like a pair of missiles—a large female and a smaller abby that couldn’t have weighed more than seventy-five pounds.

  He aimed at the smaller one.

  Bull’s-eye.

  It went rolling across the pavement.

  Its creamy-eyed mother skidded to a stop and crouched over her fallen young.

  Let out a long, tragic howl.

  Ethan ejected the spent shell.

  Aimed.

  The mother looked at him and there was no mistaking the intelligent, burning hate that narrowed her eyes.

  She came up on her hind legs, ran at him.

  Screeching.

  Click.

  Empty.

  He dropped the shotgun and drew his pistol as he backed toward the Jeep, brought the mother down with two .50 cal rounds through her throat.

  They were everywhere.

  He made his move toward the Jeep.

  A seven-foot-tall abby leapt onto the hood.

  Ethan accidently put another two rounds—double tap muscle memory—through its upper torso.

  He reached the driver-side door as an abby appeared around the back of the Jeep.

  Ethan dropped it with a head shot at point-blank range, a half second before the abby got a talon through his windpipe.

  He climbed in.

  Couldn’t remember which key he’d tried last time and just shoved in the first one he could get between his fingers.

  An abby appeared behind the plastic window on the passenger side.

  A talon sliced through and a long, muscled arm reached inside.

  Ethan lifted the Desert Eagle from his lap and shot it in the face as it tried to climb into the Jeep.

  The key wouldn’t turn.

  As he fumbled with the next one, a terrifying thought crossed his mind—what if Maggie’s car was actually parked across the street? Or up the curb a little ways? It’s not like she ever had to drive it.

  Then I will be eaten alive in this Jeep.

  A slashing behind Ethan.

  He glanced back as a black talon tore through the plastic rear window.

  The view through the old, dirty plastic was blurry, but he could see enough of the monster to draw a bead.

  He shot through the window.

  Blood spattered across the plastic and the pistol’s slide locked back.

  Empty.

  With only one magazine, it would take him a minimum of thirty seconds to dig out the box of .50 cal rounds, reload it—

  Wait.

  No.

  He hadn’t brought extra ammo for the Desert Eagle.

  Only the Mossberg.

  The abbies were closing in. He could see a dozen of them through the windshield and hear more heading toward him from Maggie’s house.

  He grasped the second key, thinking, How strange that whether I live or die comes down to whether or not this key will turn.

  It went into the ignition.

  He jammed his foot down hard into the clutch.

  Please.

  The engine turned over several times—

  And sputtered to life.

  The gurgling noise of it was life.

  Ethan popped the emergency brake and wobbled the gearshift, which operated a three-speed manual transmission.

  He shifted into reverse, then gunned the gas.

  The Jeep lurched back and crashed into the station wagon, pinning a screaming abby to the bumper. Ethan shifted into first, cranked the wheel, floored the pedal.

  Out into the street.

  Abbies everywhere.

  If he’d been driving something substantial he wouldn’t have hesitated to plow right through them, but the Jeep was compact, with a narrow wheelbase that made it prone to rolling over.

  He doubted it could sustain a head-on collision with even a modest-size bull.

  It felt so good to accelerate.

  He took a sudden left turn to miss an abby, the Jeep leaning over on two wheels.

  Brought it back down, four coming straight at him, undaunted, no signs of deviating from their kamikaze course.

  He turned hard, drove over the curb, plowed through a picket fence at thirty miles per hour, through the front yard of a corner lot, and punched through the fence again on the other side, the Jeep taking a thunderous jarring as it came back off the curve and hit the road, tires squealing as he straightened out the steering wheel.

  The road ahead was clear.

  Rpm maxed.

  Eth
an shifted into second.

  Whatever was under the hood of this thing had some meat on its bones.

  Ethan glanced in the side mirror.

  A swarm of abbies, thirty or forty strong, was chasing him down the middle of the street, their screeches audible even over the roar of the eight-cylinder engine.

  He hit sixty blasting through the next block.

  Passed a toddler park where a dozen baby abbies were feeding on a pile of bodies in the grass.

  Must have been forty or fifty bodies. One of the doomed groups.

  Sixth Avenue was coming to an abrupt end.

  The forest of towering pines looming in the distance.

  Ethan dropped a gear.

  He’d outrun the abbies by a quarter mile at least.

  At Thirteenth Street, he took a hard right turn and punched the pedal again.

  He drove alongside the woods for a block, and then past the hospital.

  Ethan dropped one more gear, took a slow left turn onto the main drag out of town.

  Floored it.

  Wayward Pines dwindled away in the rearview mirror.

  He drove past the goodbye sign, wondering if anyone had made it this far into the woods when the mayhem had ensued.

  As if in answer to his question, he passed an Oldsmobile parked on the side of the road. Nearly every shard of glass had been busted out, the exterior covered in dents and scratches. Someone had tried to flee to the outskirts of town, only to have a group of abbies find them.

  At the Sharp Curve Ahead sign, he veered off the road into the forest.

  Kept his speed up in the trees.

  The boulders appeared in the distance.

  He had a pocketful of shotgun shells and no shotgun.

  A devastating pistol with no rounds left.

  Not exactly the ideal setup for what he was about to do.

  The large outcropping that masked the entrance to the superstructure loomed a hundred yards ahead.

  Ethan shifted into second, tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

  Fifty yards.

  He had the pedal down against the floorboard, the heat of the overworked engine coming through the vents.

  At twenty-five yards, he braced himself.

  The speedometer holding steady.

  He was driving at forty miles per hour into a wall of rock.

  THERESA BURKE