Pines (24 page)

He ran his hands along his face, thinking how it didn’t feel like anything that belonged to him. The skin was
swollen, split in places, and his nose, broken twice in the last twenty-four hours, felt excruciatingly tender. His cheeks were rippled with shallow cuts from branches whipping his face as he’d sprinted through the forest, and a lump had risen on the back of his head, courtesy of one of those rock-wielding children.

Nothing, however, rivaled the blinding ache of his leg muscles, which he’d pushed far beyond their breaking point.

He wondered if he even had the strength to walk.

* * *

By midmorning, with his clothes sufficiently dry, Ethan dressed, laced up his still-damp boots, and lowered himself over the alcove’s ledge, down to the base of the cliff.

The descent to the river gave him a brutal taste of what the rest of the day held in store, and by the time he reached the bank, his muscles screamed.

No choice but to rest, closing his eyes and letting the sunlight pour onto his face like warm water. At this elevation, it was wonderfully concentrated.

There was the smell of the dried pine needles baking in the sun.

The sweet cold water.

The bright sound of the river tumbling down through the canyon.

The clatter of stones shifting under the current.

The piercing blue of the sky.

To be warm again lifted his spirits, and to be in the wilderness, despite everything, spoke to something buried deep in the pit of his soul.

Last night, he’d been too tired to do anything but lie motionless on the stone.

Now, his hunger returned.

He fished the carrots and squashed bread loaf out of his pockets.

* * *

Back on his feet, he scavenged until he found a pine branch in the nearby grove and broke off one end so that its length suited him for a walking stick. Spent several minutes stretching, trying to work the debilitating soreness out of his muscles, but it was a losing battle.

He finally struck off up the canyon at a pace he thought he could maintain, but after ten minutes, the trauma of yesterday’s exertion forced him to slow down.

A half mile felt like five.

With every step, he was relying more and more on his walking stick for support, clinging to it like a lifeline, like his only decent leg.

* * *

By early afternoon, the nature of the canyon had begun to change, the river narrowing until it could only be called a stream, pines shrinking, growing fewer and farther between, and those he encountered were stunted and gnarled, dwarfed victims of punishing winters.

He was having to stop frequently, now resting more than he was walking, and constantly out of breath, his lungs burning with oxygen deprivation the higher he climbed.

* * *

Near dusk, he lay sprawled across a lichen-covered rock beside what was left of the river—a six-foot-wide, fast-moving current that babbled over a bed of colorful stones.

It had been four or five hours since he’d left the alcove, and already the sun was sliding behind the canyon wall on the other side of the stream.

When it disappeared, the temperature plummeted.

He lay there watching the color drain from the sky, curled up against the coming chill, and the grim realization setting in that he wasn’t going to be getting back up.

Turning over onto his side, he tugged the hood over his face.

Shut his eyes.

He was cold, but his clothes were dry, and he was trying to sort through a swarm of thoughts and competing emotions, the exhaustion pushing him toward the edge of delirium, and then suddenly he felt the sun beating down on his hood.

He opened his eyes, sat up.

He was still on that rock beside the stream, only now it was morning, the sun just peeking over the canyon wall at his back.

I slept all night.

He dragged himself over to the stream and drank, the water so cold it made his head ache.

He had a carrot and a few bites of bread, and then struggled onto his feet and took a leak. He felt surprisingly better, the pain in his legs less all-consuming. Almost manageable.

He grabbed his walking stick.

* * *

The canyon walls closed in and the stream dwindled into a trickle before finally disappearing altogether into the spring from which it sourced.

In the absence of running water, the silence was blaring.

Nothing but the clink of rocks under his boots.

The lonely croak of a bird passing overhead.

His own panting.

The walls on either side of him were becoming steeper, and there were no more trees or even shrubs.

Just shattered rock and lichen and sky.

* * *

By midday, Ethan had abandoned his walking stick, reduced now to moving on all fours over the steepest terrain yet. As he worked his way around a bend in the canyon, a new sound crept in over the constant noise of shifting rocks. He leaned against a boulder the size of a compact car, trying to hone in on the noise over his own ragged breathing.

There it was.

Man-made.

Steady.

A low-decibel hum.

Curiosity pulled him forward, Ethan climbing quickly until he’d cleared the corner, the hum becoming more prominent with every step, his anticipation spiking.

When he finally saw it, a stab of exhilaration coursed through him.

The canyon continued its steep ascent for another mile or two, the cliff walls topped with jagged spires and serrated ridges, an unforgiving cruelty to the landscape that looked almost alien.

Fifty feet upslope, Ethan stared straight at the source of the hum—a twenty-foot-high fence crowned with coils of razor wire that spanned sixty feet across the breadth of the canyon at its most tapered point. Signage on the fence advised:

HIGH VOLTAGE
RISK OF DEATH

and

RETURN TO WAYWARD PINES
BEYOND THIS POINT YOU WILL DIE

Ethan stopped five feet from the barricade and made a thorough inspection—the fence was constructed of square panels of wire, the side of each square approximately four inches long. In proximity, the hum was even more ominous, giving the fence an authentic, not-to-be-fucked-with vibe.

Ethan caught the scent of rot in the vicinity, and it took him only a moment to spot the origin. A large rodent—probably a marmot—had made the mistake of trying to crawl through one of the squares adjacent to the ground. Looked like it had been microwaved between the wires for eight hours. Charred pitch black. Some poor bird, apparently thinking it had stumbled upon a hassle-free meal, had erred in judgment, attempted to help itself to the critter’s remains, and suffered the same fate.

Ethan glanced up at the canyon walls.

They were sheer, but the handholds, particularly on the right side, looked feasible for someone who was both motivated and had the nerves to handle a little exposure.

Ethan trucked over to the wall and began to climb.

It wasn’t the best rock, and some of the holds felt rotten in his grip, but they were plentiful and spaced closely enough that he didn’t have to put his weight on any one for more than several seconds.

Soon, he was twenty-five feet off the ground, a weightless, tingling sensation in his gut as the electrified razor wire hummed just several feet beneath the soles of his boots.

He traversed a ledge on solid rock, carefully sidestepping as he crossed to the forbidden side of the fence. The height rattled him, but even more, the reality of what he’d just done—this illicit boundary crossing.

A nagging premonition in the back of his mind whispered he’d just willingly placed himself in terrible danger.

* * *

Ethan safely reached the canyon floor and went on, the hum of the electrified fence growing softer as his system kicked into an intensified and disconcerting state of alertness. Same thing had happened to him in Iraq—a heightened level of sensory intake always seemed to hit him in the ramp-up to missions that ultimately went to shit. His palms would start sweating, his pulse rate would accelerate, his sense of hearing, smell, taste, everything ratcheted into overdrive. He’d never told anyone, but when he lost the Black Hawk in Fallujah, he’d known the RPG was coming five seconds before it exploded.

It was lonely country up here beyond the fence, the rock all fractured and lightning-blasted.

Empty sky.

The absence of clouds only underscoring the mood of absolute desolation.

After his time in Wayward Pines, it felt surreal to be this alone again, so far removed from other people. But in the back of his mind, a new worry had begun to eat at him. The canyon appeared to climb another thousand feet to a high, wind-ripped ridge. If his strength held, he might reach it by dusk. Spend another long, cold night trying to sleep on shattered rock. But then what? He would soon be out of food, and though water still bloated his stomach from the last drink he’d taken before the stream vanished, the
exertion he was putting his body through would bleed him dry again in no time.

But even more than the looming threat of hunger and thirst, he feared what lay beyond that distant ridge at the top of the drainage.

Miles and miles of wilderness, if he had to guess, and though he still retained a modicum of survival training from his military days, when it came down to it, he was beat to shit and tired as hell. The prospect of walking out of these mountains and back into civilization struck him as beyond daunting.

And yet, what choice did he have?

Return to Wayward Pines?

He’d rather freeze to death alone out here than ever set foot in that place again.

Ethan made his way through a section of the canyon clogged with massive boulders, carefully hopping from one to the next. He could hear water running underneath him again, but the stream was invisible, unreachable, hidden down in the black space beneath the dogpile of boulders.

High on the left-hand wall of the canyon, something threw a sharp glint of sunlight.

Ethan stopped and cupped his hand over his eyes and squinted toward the blinding glimmer. From where he stood in the belly of the canyon, all he could see was a square, metal surface a good ways up the wall, its proportions too perfect, too exact, to be anything but man-made.

He jumped to the next boulder, now moving with greater speed, greater intensity, and constantly glancing up at the wall as he went along, but the nature of that reflective surface remained elusive.

On ahead, the canyon looked more reasonable, the boulders downsized into traversable terrain.

He was considering whether he could make the climb to that piece of metal when the crackle of falling rock disrupted his thoughts.

For a terrifying instant, Ethan imagined a landslide heading his way, a thousand tons of rock raining down off the wall, crushing him to death.

But the sound had originated behind him, not above, Ethan turning, glancing back the way he’d come, figuring it was just a boulder he’d moved across and dislodged several minutes ago, now finally shifting in his wake.

Still, there was something eerie about registering a sound other than his own labored breathing or the movement of rocks in his immediate vicinity. He’d grown so accustomed to the stillness of this isolated drainage.

He could see down-canyon for a long ways, his eyes initially fixing on the electrified fence a quarter mile back, but then on movement much closer, inside a hundred yards. At first he thought it must be one of those marmots, but it was scrambling with a weightless, feline agility, almost too quickly from rock to rock, and as he squinted to bring it into focus, Ethan saw that it didn’t have fur at all. It looked albino, covered with pale, milky skin.

Ethan instinctively backpedaled as he realized he’d grossly underestimated its size. It wasn’t moving over small rocks. It was moving through that field of giant boulders Ethan had just emerged from, which meant it was actually closer in size to a human being and traveling at an intimidating speed, barely even stopping between leaps.

Ethan tripped over a rock and jumped back onto his feet, his respirations revving.

The thing near enough that he could hear it breathing—panting—its claws clicking on the stone each time it landed on a new boulder, each leap bringing it closer to Ethan, just
fifty yards away now and a sick heat beginning to ferment in Ethan’s stomach.

This is what he’d seen night before last from that alcove above the river.

This is what he’d dreamt about.

But what the hell was it?

How could such a thing exist?

He started up the canyon as fast as he’d dared to move all day, glancing back every other step.

The thing leaped off the last of the large boulders and came down with the grace of a ballerina, now scuttling on all fours, low to the ground like a wild boar, the grating noise of its panting getting louder as it closed the distance between them at such an alarming rate Ethan arrived instantly at the conclusion that there was no point in trying to outrun it.

He stopped and turned to face what was coming, torn between trying to process what was happening and simply preparing himself to survive.

Twenty yards away now, and the nearer it got, the less Ethan liked what he saw.

It was short-torsoed.

Long legs and longer arms, each tipped with a row of black talons.

Hundred and ten, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds.

Sinewy.

Wiry.

And above all, humanoid, its skin in the sunlight as translucent as a baby mouse’s—mapped with a network of blue veins and purple arteries and even its heart faintly visible as a pinkish throb just right of center mass.

At ten yards, Ethan braced himself, the creature’s small head lowering for the charge, snarling as strings of bloody saliva dangled from the corners of its lipless mouth, creamy eyes hard-focused on its target.

Ethan caught a whiff of its stench two seconds before impact—fetid, decayed flesh spiced with rotted blood.

It screamed—a strangely human-sounding cry—as it launched, Ethan trying to sidestep at the last possible instant, but it had anticipated this, throwing one of its four-foot arms and hooking Ethan around the waist, talons easily penetrating the thick fabric of the hoodie and piercing into Ethan’s side.