Pines (26 page)

Twenty feet up the crack, seventy above the canyon floor, his thighs burning.

Couldn’t tell how much farther he had to go to reach that piece of metal that had gotten him into the shit to begin with. On the other hand, if he’d been down in the canyon when those things had shown up, they’d be eating him right now. So maybe in retrospect that shimmering metal that prompted this ballsy climb had actually prolonged, if not saved, his life.

The monster reached the third ledge and, without a moment’s hesitation to rest or consider its next move, leaped off the narrow shelf of rock.

A single talon at the end of its left arm caught on a square millimeter of surface just inside the opening to the crack, and in a feat of brute strength, it pulled itself up with one arm and squeezed into the chute.

Ethan locked eyes with the monster as it began to climb on foot- and handholds so insignificant Ethan had disregarded them, traveling at least twice as fast as Ethan could manage.

Nothing to do but keep climbing.

He struggled up another five feet.

Ten.

The monster twenty-five feet away and close enough that Ethan could see the pink pounding of its massive heart, obscured through its skin as if tucked behind thick, frosted glass.

Ten more feet and then the crack appeared to lead out onto flat, vertical, horrifying wall.

The handholds near the top looked good, Ethan realizing that if he kept chimneying that thing was going to reach him before he made it out.

He switched to hand-over-hand climbing, racing up the last ten feet.

Just before the top, one of the holds broke loose and he nearly lost his balance.

Caught himself before he fell.

He could feel the wind streaming across the opening to the chute.

Glimpsed something catching sunlight straight above.

Froze.

Looked down.

He’d almost blown the chance to save himself.

With the monster fifteen feet away and two more trailing close behind it in the chute, Ethan reached down, the loose handhold that had nearly killed him just within reach.

He tore the chunk of rock from its housing, hoisted it over his head.

It was a handful, even bigger than he’d thought—two pounds of quartz-laced granite.

He wedged himself between the rock, took aim, and let it fly.

It struck the creature dead center of its face just as it was reaching for a new handhold.

Its grip failed.

It plunged down the chute.

Talons scraping rock.

Its velocity too great to self-arrest.

It hit the one beneath it at a high enough rate of speed to knock it from its perch, the pair crashing as one into the third, and then all three screaming for two long seconds as they shot out of the bottom of the chute, bounced off the third ledge, and accelerated toward the rocks below where they slammed aground in a tangle of badly bent appendages and broken skulls.

Ethan emerged out of the chute squinting against the flash of brilliance now just a few feet above his head.

He was at least a hundred feet above the canyon floor, and his stomach churned. From his new vantage point, he could now see that the opposite wall climbed another five or six hundred feet to a razor ridge, which in itself looked impassable.

If his wall did the same, he might as well jump off now, because he didn’t have it in him to climb another hundred feet, much less five.

The two remaining creatures on the wall snapped him out of the despair. Instead of following the others up the chute, they had climbed around, one on each side—slower going, but they were still alive and now thirty feet below Ethan.

He reached up and grabbed a ledge under the shiny metal, got both elbows onto the widest shelf of rock he’d seen, and hauled himself up, face-to-face with a steel vent protruding several inches out of the rock. It was square, approximately twenty-four inches across, the blades of a fan spinning counterclockwise directly behind it.

Talons clicked on the rock below.

Ethan gripped the sides of the vent, pulled.

It didn’t budge—it had been welded to the duct.

He stood up on the ledge and ran his hands over the surface of the wall until he came to what he was after—a large, twenty-pound wedge of granite that looked poised to fall.

He lifted it and smashed it down on top of the vent where it joined the duct.

The alloy disintegrated, the upper left-hand edge of the vent popping loose.

The creatures were ten feet below him now, so close he could smell the decay of their last kill wafting off them like some savage cologne.

He raised the rock again, brought it down in a crushing blow to the right-hand corner.

The vent snapped free and clanged down the cliff, bouncing off the rock and nearly striking one of the creatures on its descent.

All that stood between Ethan and the darkness of a ventilation shaft were the spinning blades of the air intake.

He rammed the rock into them and brought their revolutions to a halt.

Three hard blows completely detached the unit from its mount, Ethan reaching in, grabbing it by the blades, and slinging it over the cliff.

He picked up the rock, held it high, and dropped it on the closest creature as its talons reached for the ledge.

It fell screeching.

Its partner watched until it hit the ground, and then looked back at Ethan.

Ethan smiled, said, “You’re next.”

The thing studied him, its head tilting like it could understand or at least wanted to. It clung to the rock just below the ledge, within easy reach, Ethan waiting for it to make its move, but it held position.

Ethan spun around, searching the cliff wall within reach for another loose rock and coming up empty.

When he turned back, the monster was still perched on the wall.

Settling in.

Ethan wondered if he should climb on until he came across another sizeable rock.

Bad idea. You’d have to down-climb to get back to this ledge.

Ethan crouched, unlaced his left boot. Pulled it off, and then did the same with his right.

He held it—not nearly the heft of a rock, but perhaps it could do the job. Grasping it by the heel, he made a dramatic show of cocking back his arm as he stared down into the monster’s milky eyes.

“You know what’s coming, don’t you?”

Ethan feigned a throw.

It didn’t flinch and come off the rock as he’d hoped, just pressed in closer to the wall.

The next time wasn’t a fake, but Ethan threw so hard the boot sailed over the creature’s head and took an uninterrupted fall into the canyon.

He lifted the other boot, took aim, threw.

Direct hit to the face.

The boot bounced off and tumbled away as the creature, still clinging to the wall, looked up at Ethan and hissed.

A visage of murderous intent.

“How long can you hold on, you think?” Ethan asked. “You must be getting tired.” He reached down, pretending to offer a hand. “I’ll help you the rest of the way. You just have to trust.” The way it watched him was unnerving—a definite intelligence all the more frightening because he couldn’t know how deep it went.

Ethan sat on the rock.

“I’ll be right here,” he said. “Until you fall.”

He watched its heart beating.

He watched it blinking.

“You are one ugly motherfucker.” Ethan chuckled. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist. It’s from a movie. Seriously, what the hell are you?”

Fifteen minutes crept by.

Late afternoon now.

The sun beginning to drop, the floor of the canyon already in darkness.

It was cold up here on the rock.

A few clouds streaming overhead, but they were inconsequential and swallowed up in all that crystal blue like afterthoughts.

The five talons on the creature’s left arm began to quiver, rattling against the microscopic handhold, and something in its eyes had changed. Still plenty of rage, but now an added element—fear?

Its head swiveled, surveying all the rock within reach.

Ethan had already made the same inspection and arrived at the same conclusion.

“Yeah, this is it, pal. This ledge. My ledge. Your only option.”

A tremor moved through its right leg, and Ethan had opened his mouth to suggest the creature just let go when it leaped from its footholds, elevating three feet and simultaneously swiping its right claw in a wide, flat arc.

It would have torn his face open, but he ducked—talons grazing the top of his head—and then Ethan rose up on both legs, ready to kick this thing off the cliff.

But he didn’t need to.

It had never had a chance of reaching the ledge in its weakened state—had merely taken one last shot at bringing Ethan down with it.

The fall apparently came as no surprise, because it didn’t make a sound and it didn’t flail its arms or legs.

Just stared up at Ethan as it plummeted toward the sunless floor of the canyon, body as motionless as if in the midst of a high dive.

Fully resigned, maybe even at peace, with its fate.

Yesterday, she hadn’t left her room.

Hadn’t even left her bed.

She had prepared for his death.

Had known it was coming.

But watching the sun rise on a world without Ethan had nearly killed her regardless. Somehow, the light had made it real. The people out on morning walks. Even the chattering magpies in the side-yard birdfeeder. It was the continuance of things that crushed her already broken heart. The gears of the world turning on while she lived with his absence like a black tumor in her chest, the grief so potent she could barely bring herself to breathe.

Today, she had ventured outside, now sitting listless in the soft grass of her backyard in a patch of sunshine. She’d been staring up at the surrounding mountain walls for hours, watching the light move across them and trying not to think about a single thing.

The sound of approaching footsteps broke her reverie.

She looked back.

Pilcher was coming toward her.

During her time in Wayward Pines, she’d seen the man around town on numerous occasions, but they’d never spoken—she’d been warned about that from the beginning. Not a word exchanged since that rainy night five years ago in Seattle, when he’d shown up on her doorstep with the most outlandish proposition.

Pilcher sat down beside her in the grass.

He took off his glasses, set them on his leg, said, “I’m told you missed your harvest day at the co-op.”

“I haven’t left my house in two days.”

“And what’s that supposed to accomplish?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But I can’t take people looking at me. We can’t talk about him, of course, but I’d see the pity in their eyes. Or worse, they’d ignore me. Act like nothing happened. Like he never existed. I haven’t even told my son that his father’s dead. I don’t know how to begin.”

It would be evening soon.

The sky was free of clouds.

The row of aspen saplings that separated her backyard from her neighbor’s had turned to gold overnight, the coin-shaped leaves twittering in the breeze. She could hear the wooden wind chimes clanging on the back porch beside the door. It was moments like this—the visual perfection underscored with a reality she could never know—that she feared would one day drive her to insanity.

“You’ve done well here,” Pilcher said. “The difficulties with Ethan were the last thing I ever wanted. I hope you believe that.”

She looked at Pilcher, stared straight into his black eyes.

“I don’t know what I believe,” she said.

“Your son’s inside?”

“Yes, why?”

“I want you to go in and get him. I have a car parked out front.”

“Where are you taking us?”

He shook his head.

“Are you going to hurt Benjamin?”

Pilcher struggled onto his feet.

He stared down at her.

“If I wanted to hurt you, Theresa, I would take you and your son in the middle of the night, and no one would ever hear from you again. But you already know this. Now go get him. I’ll meet you out front in two minutes.”

Ethan stared into the air duct.

The fit was going to be tight, maybe impossible with the hoodie.

He pulled out of the sleeves and tugged it off and tossed it over the ledge, gooseflesh rising on his bare arms. Figured his feet would be responsible for most of the propulsion and decided to come out of his socks as well so he wouldn’t slide.

He got his head through the opening.

At first, his shoulders wouldn’t fit, but after a minute of wriggling, he finally maneuvered himself halfway inside, arms splayed out ahead, feet struggling to push him the rest of the way, the thin metal freezing against his toes.

When he was completely inside the air duct, a wave of panic swept over him. He felt like he couldn’t breathe, his shoulders squeezed between the two walls, and the realization dawning on him that moving backward was now impossible. At least not without popping both shoulders out of socket.

His only method of movement was the paltry momentum his toes could stir up, and they had no reverse gears.

He inched forward, literally, sliding along the surface of the duct.

Still bleeding.

Muscles in revolt in the wake of the climb and his nerves frayed.

In the distance—nothing but absolute darkness, the tunnel reverberating with the echo of his shuffling.

Except for when he stopped.

Then a perfect silence set in, interrupted only by random
bangs
that gave his heart a start—the expanding
and contracting of the metal in response to temperature fluctuations.

Five minutes in, Ethan tried to glance back toward the opening, something in him craving just one last glimpse of light—that smallest consolation—but he couldn’t crane his neck far enough back to see.

* * *

He crawled and crawled and crawled.

Closed in on all sides in complete darkness.

At some point, maybe thirty minutes in, maybe five hours, maybe a day...he had to stop.

His toes cramped from the strain.

He slumped across the metal.