The Last Town (The Wayward Pines Trilogy 3) (5 page)

THE RICHARDSONS

Bob Richardson slid in behind the wheel of his 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera and cranked the engine as his wife, Barbara, piled into the front passenger seat beside him.

“This is the stupidest idea,” she said.

He put the car into gear and eased out into the dark street.

“What’s yours?” he asked. “Wait inside the house for those things to break in?”

“Your lights aren’t on,” Barbara said.

“That’s intentional, darling.”

“You don’t think they can hear our engine?”

“Will you shut up and let me drive please?”

“Of course. This’ll be the shortest trip ever taken on account of there being no roads out of town.”

Bob turned onto First Avenue.

He wasn’t about to admit it verbally, or by action (which would mean using the lights), but it was pretty dark. Arguably too dark to drive without headlights.

It had been months since he’d been behind the wheel, and he felt rusty.

They passed the sheriff’s station.

With their windows rolled up, the screams emanating from town barely intruded into the tense silence inside the car.

Soon, they reached the outskirts.

Through his window, Bob could see movement in the pasture.

“They’re out there,” Barbara said.

“I know it.”

She reached across his lap and hit the lights. Twin beams shot out across the grassland. Eviscerated cows littered the pasture by the dozens, each one surrounded by a cluster of monsters in the throes of gorging themselves.

“Goddammit, Barbara!”

They all looked up from their kills, bloody mouths glistening in the high beams.

Bob floored the accelerator.

They blew past the goodbye sign—a perfect 1950s family, smiling and waving.

WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED YOUR VISIT TO WAYWARD PINES! DON’T BE A STRANGER! COME BACK SOON!

The road entered the forest.

Bob downgraded the high beams to corner lamps, the fog lights just bright enough to keep him straddling the double yellow.

Mist swept across the road between the narrow corridor of pines.

Bob kept glancing in the rearview mirror, but all he could see was a tiny swath of scrolling pavement lit red by the taillights.

“Go faster!” Barbara said.

“I can’t. There’s a hairpin turn coming up.”

She climbed between the seats into the back and sat on her knees, staring through the window.

“Anything?” Bob asked.

“No. What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know, but at least we aren’t in town, in the midst of everything. Maybe we could just pull off into a quiet place in the trees?” he suggested. “Ride this out?”

“What if there’s no end to it?” she asked.

The question hung between them like a black cloud.

The road out of town began to curve and Bob steered into it, keeping their speed under twenty miles per hour.

Barbara was crying in the backseat.

“I wish he hadn’t told us,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Sheriff Burke. This is all happening because he told us the truth.”

“You’re probably right.”

“I’m not saying I loved it here, but you know what?” Barbara sniveled. “I didn’t worry about bills. I didn’t worry about our mortgage. You and I got to run a bakery.”

“You had gotten used to the way of things.”

“Exactly.”

“But we couldn’t talk about our past,” Bob said. “We never saw our friends or family. We were forced to marry.”

“That didn’t turn out so bad,” she said.

Bob held his tongue as he drove through the heart of the curve.

The road out of town became the road into town.

He eased off the gas as they passed the welcome sign.

Wayward Pines lay straight ahead, enveloped in darkness.

He let the car roll to a stop and killed the engine.

“We just wait here?” Barbara asked.

“For now.”

“Shouldn’t we keep moving?”

“There’s barely any gas left.”

She climbed back into the front seat.

She said, “People are dying out there. Right now.”

“I know.”

“That goddamned sheriff.”

“I’m glad he did it.”

“What?”

“I said I’m glad.”

“No, I heard you the first time. I mean, why? Our neighbors are being slaughtered, Bob.”

“We were slaves.”

“How are you enjoying your new freedom?”

“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 down 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.