The Last Town (The Wayward Pines Trilogy 3) (12 page)

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.

Ethan 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

She was in Seattle, their old home in Queen Anne—her family in the backyard on one of those perfect summer evenings when you could see everything. Rainier. The Puget Sound and the Olympics across the water. Lake Union and the skyline. Everything cool and green and the water shimmering as the sun fell. All that suffering through the chill, gray days of endless drizzle was rewarded with nights like this. The city almost too beautiful to take.

Ethan stood by the grill, cooking salmon filets on planks of wine-soaked cedar. Ben strummed an acoustic guitar in a hammock. She was
there
. Everything so vibrant, the dream verging toward lucidity. She even questioned the reality as she moved to her husband and placed her hands on his shoulders, but she could smell the fish cooking, could actually
feel
the sunlight hit her eyes, and the good bourbon she was drinking was a pleasant lethargy in her legs.

She said, “I think those look ready,” and then the world began to shake and even though her eyes were already open, she somehow opened them again to find Ben shaking her awake.

She sat up from the cold rock floor of the cavern, her bearings lost. For a moment, she had no idea where she was. People were running past her toward a heavy log door that now stood wide open.

The dream was fading fast, the real world rushing back in like a pounding hangover. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d dreamed of her life before, and the timing now seemed especially cruel.

She looked at Ben and said, “Why is the door open?”

“We have to leave, Mom.”

“Why?”

“The abbies are coming back. One of the watchers saw a swarm of them scaling the cliffs.”

That jerked her back into full consciousness.

“How many?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why’s everyone leaving the cavern?”

“They don’t think the doors can handle another attack. Come on.” He took hold of her hands and pulled her up onto her feet.

They moved toward the open door, panic intensifying in the cavern, people bunching closer as they neared the exit, elbows jabbing into ribs, skin brushing hard against skin. Theresa reached down and grabbed Ben’s hand, pulling him in front of her.

They pushed their way through the threshold of the massive door.

The tunnel echoed with voices, everyone fighting to reach the daylight at the opening.

Theresa and Ben emerged under a midday sky so blue it looked fake. She stepped right to the edge of the cliff and took a stomach-swimming glance straight down.

Said, “Oh Jesus.”

At least twenty abbies had begun to scale the cliff.

Another fifty were gathering at the base, three hundred feet below.

More still coming out of the forest.

Ben moved toward the edge, but she held him back. “Don’t even think about it.”

What had started as chaos inside the cavern was escalating toward hysteria out in the open. People had seen what was coming. Some had fled back into the tunnel. Others were trying to climb higher up the mountain. A few had become frozen with fear, sitting down against the rock, trying to tune the world right out.

Those whom Ethan had armed were getting into positions along the uppermost ledge, trying to take aim on the abbies that were already climbing the wall.

Theresa watched one woman drop her rifle.

Saw a man lose his footing and fall screaming into the forest.

The first gunshot rang out from the ledge.

“Mom, what do we do?”

Theresa hated the terror she saw building in Ben’s eyes. She glanced back at the rocky path leading into the cavern.

“Should we have stayed inside?” Ben asked.

“And prayed the door held? No.”

To the right of the cave opening, a narrow ledge extended around the mountain. From this distance, Theresa couldn’t tell if it was navigable, but it was something.

“Come on.” She grabbed Ben’s arm and hustled him back up the path toward the tunnel as more gunshots broke out behind them.

“I thought you said—”

“We aren’t going back into the cavern, Ben.”

When they reached the opening to the tunnel, Theresa got her first good look at the ledge. It couldn’t have been wider than a foot. There were no planks, no cables. It looked right on the edge of plausible.

She faced her son as people streaked past them, heading back into the tunnel.

Somewhere in the forest below, an abby shrieked.

“We have to follow this ledge,” she said.

Ben stared at the slim, natural path across the cliff face, and said, “That looks scary.”

“Would you rather be trapped in that cavern when fifty abbies break the door down?”

“What about everyone else?”

“My job is to protect you. You ready?”

He gave a quick, unconvincing nod.

Theresa felt her stomach clench. She stepped out onto the ledge and pressed her chest against the wall, her palms trailing across the rock. Taking small, shuffling steps, she clutched handholds where she could find them. After five feet, she looked back at Ben.

“See how I did that?”

“Yeah.”

“Your turn.”

Hard as it had been leaving the safety of that wide path into the mountain, it was infinitely more excruciating to watch her son step out onto the ledge. The very first thing he did was look down.

“No, don’t do that, honey. Look at me.”

Ben looked up. “It’s a lot scarier in the daylight.”

“Just focus on taking safe steps, and keep your hands on the wall like I am. Sometimes there will be places to grab.”

Ben started toward her, step by step.

“You’re doing great, honey.”

He reached her.

They went on.

After twenty feet, the exposure opened up wide beneath them, a four-hundred-foot drop straight down to the forest floor. So vertical, if you fell you wouldn’t bounce off anything until you hit the ground.

“How we doing, buddy?” Theresa asked.

“Okay.”

“Are you looking down?”

“No.”

Theresa glanced back. He was.

“Goddammit, Ben.”

“I can’t help it,” he said. “It makes my stomach feel weird and tingly.”

She wanted to reach out, take his hand, hold him tight.

“We need to keep moving,” she said.

Theresa couldn’t be certain, but the path seemed to be narrowing. Her left foot, which she kept perpendicular to the ledge and pointed into the mountain, was hanging off the edge by an inch or two.

As they arrived at a bend in the mountain, a flurry of gunfire exploded back toward the cavern. Theresa and Ben both looked. Several dozen people were retreating up the path into the tunnel with a speed and intensity that suggested they were fleeing for their lives. The scream of an abby, and another, and another broke out as those pale, translucent monsters climbed off the side of the cliff wall. When they got their talons on level ground, the abbies rushed on all fours up the path toward the tunnel.

“What if they see us?” Ben asked.

“Don’t move,” Theresa whispered. “Not even a muscle.”

When the last of the abbies—she counted forty-four—had disappeared into the tunnel, Theresa said, “Let’s go.”

As they moved around the bend, a deep, thumping sound spilled out of the tunnel.

“What is that?” Ben asked.

“The abbies. They’re beating on the door to the cavern.”

Theresa hugged the cliff and stepped around the corner onto a six-inch ledge, her heart in her throat.

Suddenly, a great chorus of screams rose up inside the tunnel.