by Blake Crouch
Several blocks away, something howled. As she moved toward the crowd of people waiting to follow her to safety, she glanced back and blew Harold a kiss.
He snatched it out of the air.
JENNIFER
In her bedroom, Jennifer set the candle on the dresser and stripped out of the costume she’d worn to the fête—a black trench coat over red long underwear, topped off with a homemade pair of devil’s horns. Her nightgown waited for her, hanging on the back of the door.
Once in bed, she drank her chamomile tea and watched the candlelight dance across the ceiling.
The tea went down warm.
This had been her routine going on three years now, and she thought it had been wise not to break it tonight. When your world falls apart, cling to the familiar.
She thought of all the other residents of Wayward Pines.
They’d be going through some version of this.
Questioning all they’d been told.
Coming to terms with how grievously they’d been wronged.
What would tomorrow bring?
The window beside her bed was cracked, a stream of chill night air trickling in. She kept her room cold by choice, loving the feel of sleeping in a freezing room under a mountain of blankets.
Through the glass, it was absolutely dark.
The crickets had gone silent.
She set her mug of tea on the bedside table and pulled the blankets up over her legs. There was only a half inch left of the candle on her dresser, and she didn’t really want to be in total darkness just yet.
Let it burn out on its own.
She shut her eyes.
Felt like she was falling.
So many thoughts, so much fear pressing in.
A tangible weight.
Just sleep.
She thought of Teddy. This last year, she’d found herself remembering his smell, his tone of voice, what his hands had felt like on her body, far clearer than her memory of his face.
She was forgetting what he looked like.
Somewhere out in the darkness, a man began to scream.
Jennifer straightened.
She’d never heard screaming like this.
Horror and disbelief and incomprehensible agony all compressed into a single outburst that seemed to go on and on and on.
This was the sound of someone being killed.
Had they gone ahead with Kate and Harold’s execution anyway?
The screaming stopped like a spigot had been turned off.
Jennifer looked down.
She was on her feet, standing on the cold hardwood floor.
She went to the window, raised it several inches higher.
Cold flooded in.
Someone shouted inside a house nearby.
A door slammed.
Somebody sprinted through the alley.
Another scream echoed through the valley, but this one was different. It was the same sound that monster had made inside the sheriff’s Bronco.
A god-awful, inhuman shriek.
Other screams answered as a strong, pungent smell—like rotten musk—pushed into the bedroom, riding on the breeze.
A low, throaty growl started down in her garden.
Jennifer closed her window and threw the lock.
She stumbled back, and as she sat down on the mattress, something came through the living-room window downstairs.
Jennifer jerked her head toward the door.
The candle flame on the dresser winked out.
She let out a gasp.
The room was pitch black, her hand invisible in front of her face.
She jumped to her feet and staggered toward the bedroom door, banged her knee on a hope chest at the foot of the bed, but managed to stay on her feet.
She reached the door.
Heard the steps creaking as something came up the staircase.
Jennifer eased the door shut and felt around for the lock.
It clicked into the housing.
Whatever had broken into her house was now out in the hallway, the floorboards groaning under its weight.
More noise downstairs.
Clicks and screeches filling the house.
She got down on her hands and knees and crawled across the floor as the footsteps outside her door drew closer. Flattening herself, she squeezed under the bed, her heart pounding against the dusty hardwood floor.
She could hear more of them climbing the stairs.
The door to her bedroom exploded off the hinges.
The footsteps of whatever entered her bedroom made a clicking sound on the hardwood. Like claws.
Or talons.
She smelled it, stronger than ever, a potpourri of dead things—rot and blood and an otherworldly stench beyond her understanding.
She didn’t make a sound.
By the side of the bed, the floorboards cracked, as if with the weight of something kneeling down.
She held her breath.
Something hard and smooth grazed her arm.
She screamed and pulled back.
Her shoulder suddenly felt cold.
She put her hand to it.
It came away wet. She’d been cut by something.
Whispered, “Please God . . .”
There were others in the room now.
Oh, Teddy. She just wanted to see his face. One last time. If this was really the end.
The bed lifted, one of the legs scraping across her side as it crashed into the wall.
In total darkness, she couldn’t move, paralyzed with fear. Her shoulder bled profusely but she couldn’t feel a thing, her body gone numb, mechanical, as the fight-or-flight response kicked in.
They were near her now, standing over her, their alien respirations fast and shallow, like panting dogs.
She put her head between her knees in the brace position.
Two weeks before they’d come on their fateful trip to Wayward Pines, she and Teddy had spent a Saturday at Riverfront Park in Spokane. Thrown a picnic blanket down in the grass and stayed until dusk, reading their books and watching the white water spill over the falls.
And for a second, she captured his face. Not straight on, but from the side. Late sunlight fringing what hair he had left, glinting off the wire-rimmed glasses. He was watching the sun go down over the falls. Content. In the moment. And she had been too.
Teddy.
He turned to look at her.
Smiling.
As the end came.
ETHAN
Brad was shoving the ammo-laden rucksack through the busted back window as Ethan jumped in behind the wheel.
He checked his watch.
They’d burned eleven minutes.
“Let’s go!” Ethan said.
Brad yanked the door open and climbed onto the broken seat.
Headlights blazed through the glass doors into the lobby of the sheriff’s station.
Ethan glanced in the rearview mirror. Through the reddish glow of the taillights, a pale form streaked past.
He shifted into reverse.
They backed down the sidewalk and Ethan’s head hit the ceiling as the tires launched off the curb.
Ethan braked hard, brought it to a dead stop in the middle of the road, and shifted into drive.
Something struck the passenger-side door, Brad screamed, and by the time Ethan looked over, Brad’s legs were already sliding through the empty window frame.
Ethan couldn’t see the blood in the dark, but he could smell it—a strong, sudden waft of rust in the air.
He pulled his pistol.
The screams had gone silent.
All he could hear was the fading scrape of Brad’s shoes dragging across the pavement.
Ethan grabbed t
he flashlight, which Brad had dropped between the seats.
Shined it out into the street.
Oh my God.
The beam struck an abby.
It was crouched on its hind legs over Brad, its face buried in his throat.
It looked up, mouth blood-dark, and hissed at the light with the venomous warning of a wolf protecting its kill.
Behind it, the light showed more pale figures coming down the middle of the street.
Ethan punched the gas.
In the rearview mirror, a dozen abbies chased the car on all fours. The one out in front came up alongside his door. It leapt at Ethan’s window, just missed, hit the side of the car instead, and bounced off.
Ethan watched it tumble across the street as he forced the pedal to the floor.
When he looked back through the windshield, a small abby stood twenty feet ahead of the grille, frozen in the headlights, teeth bared.
Ethan braced.
At contact, the bumper blasted the abby straight back thirty feet. He ran it over and dragged it for half a block, the Bronco jarring so violently he could barely keep his grip on the steering wheel.
The undercarriage finally spit it out.
Ethan raced north.
The rearview mirror showed a dark, empty street.
He breathed again.
Near the north end of town, Ethan turned west, headed several blocks toward Main until the headlights swiped across a line of people in the street, faces lit by a handful of torches.
He steered the Bronco over the curb.
Left the keys in the ignition so the lights would keep burning.
He went around to the back of the Bronco, lowered the tailgate, and grabbed one of the three loaded shotguns.
Kate was standing beside an open trapdoor behind a bench, its underside constructed of one-by-four planks and rusted hinges, the top camouflaged with dirt and grass. She and another man were lowering people, one by one, underground.
Their eyes met as he approached.
He shoved a shotgun into her hands and looked back at the crowd—still twenty-five or thirty left to go.
“They need to be underground five minutes ago,” Ethan said.
“Going as fast as we can.”
“Where are Ben and Theresa?”
“Already down below.”
“The abbies are here, Kate.”
He saw the question in her eyes before she asked, “Where’s Brad?”
“They got him, and I’m telling you, we have a couple minutes tops and then it’s all over.”
The crowd was moving with the efficiency of an evacuation—orderly, no one talking, a hushed intensity in the air.
Screams—human and inhuman—were erupting across the town with greater frequency.
Ethan turned to the crowd.
He said, “I have a carful of weapons. If you ever owned firearms in your prior life, if you have any experience or comfort level whatsoever, come with me.”
Ten people stepped out of line and followed Ethan over to the back of the Bronco.
Hecter Gaither, the town pianist, stood among them. He was tall and lanky, salt-and-pepper hair with whitewashed wings. Fragile, almost regal features. For the fête, he’d dressed up like a murderous fairy.
Ethan asked, “What’d you shoot in your past life, Hecter?”
“I used to go duck hunting with my father every Christmas morning.”
Ethan handed him a Mossberg.
“I loaded this up with twelve-gauge slugs. It’s going to kick a bit more than the bird-shot rounds you’re used to.”
Hecter held it by the stock—so strange to see those soft, dexterous hands clutching a tactical shotgun.
Ethan said, “You and I will go down last. I’ll be right there with you.” He turned his attention back to the arsenal. “I’ve got a few revolvers and a handful of semiauto pistols left. Who wants what?”
II
PILCHER
WAYWARD PINES
TWELVE YEARS AGO
It’s morning.
An autumn day.
They didn’t make skies this blue in his life before. You can look straight up into purple. The air so clear and clean it suggests a hyperreality, the colors blindingly intense.
Pilcher walks down the road into town. It was paved two weeks ago, and it still reeks of tar.
He passes the new billboard where a worker is painting the “e” in “Paradise.” When completed, the phrase will read, “Welcome to Wayward Pines Where Paradise is Home.”
Pilcher says, “Good morning! Good work!”
“Thank you, sir!”
The town has a long way yet to go, but the valley is beginning to look almost civilized. The forest has been mostly felled, save for a handful of trees left standing to line the streets and shade front yards.
A concrete truck rumbles past.
In the distance, new houses stand in various stages of completion. The residences were prefabricated prior to suspension. With all the foundations laid, the work seems to be accelerating, the town growing faster each day as homes begin to take shape.
The school is nearly finished.
The bottom three floors of the hospital framed.
Pilcher arrives at the graded, unpaved corner of what will one day be Eighth and Main.
The valley hums with the distant whine of saws and the pressurized bursts of nails shooting into studs.
The buildings that will soon line Main Street are fully framed, their yellow pine boards bright in the early sun.
Arnold Pope drives up in a topless Jeep Wrangler.
Pilcher’s right-hand man climbs out of the Jeep and struts over.
“Come down to see the progress?” Pope asks.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?”
“We’re actually ahead of schedule. If all goes well, we’ll have a hundred seventy homes completed before the snow flies, and the exteriors of all the buildings. Which means we’ll be able to continue working on the interiors through the winter.”
“So when may I schedule the formal ribbon cutting?”
“Next spring.”
Pilcher smiles, imagining it—a warm day in May and the valley popping with blossoms and the baby greens and yellows of new leaves.
A fresh start. Humanity’s blank slate.
“Have you considered how you’ll explain all of this to the first residents?”
They walk down the middle of the street, Pilcher eyeing the scaffolding fronting the building that will become the opera house.
“I imagine there will be some shock and disbelief at the outset, but once they understand what I’ve given them the chance to be a part of?”
“They’ll fall on the ground thanking you,” Pope says.
Pilcher smiles.
A flatbed truck carrying a load of raw lumber rumbles past.
“Can you fathom being given this opportunity?” Pilcher muses. “In the world we came from, our existence was so easy. And so full of discontent because it was so easy. How do you find meaning when you’re one of seven billion? When food, clothing, everything you need is just one Walmart away? When we numb our minds to sleep on all manner of screens and HD entertainment, the meaning of life, of our existence and purpose, becomes lost.”
“And what is that?” Pope asks.
“What is what?”
“Our purpose.”
“To perpetuate our species of course. To reign over this planet. And we will again. Not in your or my lifetime, but we will. The people I bring out of suspension to populate my town won’t have Facebook or iPhones, iPads, Twitter, next-day delivery. They’ll interact like our species used to. Face-to-face. And they’ll live knowing they’re the last of humanity, that outside our fence are a billion monsters that want to devour them. With that
knowledge, they’ll abide in a full understanding that in the face of these enormous stakes, their lives have taken on incomprehensible worth. And isn’t that all we want in the end? To feel useful? Of value?”
Pilcher smiles as his town—his dream—comes to life before his eyes.
He says, “This place is going to be our Eden.”
THE TURNERS
Jim Turner kissed his eight-year-old daughter on the forehead and wiped away the tears that were streaming out of her eyes.
She said, “But I want you to stay with us.”
“I have to go secure the house.”
“I’m scared.”
“Mommy’s staying with you.”
“Why are people screaming outside?”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
“Is it because of those monsters? We learned about them in school. Mr. Pilcher protects us from them.”
“I don’t know what they are, Jessica, but I have to go make sure you and Mommy are safe, okay?”
The little girl nodded.
“I love you, sweetheart.”
“I love you too, Daddy.”
He stood, put his hands on his wife’s face. Couldn’t see her in the darkness, but he could feel her lips trembling, the wetness of tears running over them.
He said, “You have water, food, a flashlight.” He tried to make a joke out of it. “Even a pot to piss in.”
She grabbed his neck, put her lips to his ear.
“Don’t do this.”
“There’s no other way and you know it.”
“The basement—”
“It won’t work. The boards are too long to go across the door.” He heard their neighbors, the Millers, dying in their home across the street. “When it comes time to get out—”
“You’ll break us out.”
“I want nothing more. But if I’m not here to do it, use the crowbar. You’ll have to wedge it into the jamb.”
“We should’ve stayed with the others.”
“I know, but we didn’t, and now we’re doing the best we can. No matter what you hear in this bedroom, you stay in this closet, and you don’t make a sound. Cover her ears if—”
“Don’t say that.”
“If what, Daddy?”