by Blake Crouch
“I’ve always wondered why they did that,” Hecter said.
“Because roads are never completely empty in normal towns,” Ethan said. “Just another ploy to make Wayward Pines feel real. Where’s your place, Maggie?”
“Eighth Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.”
“That’s only six blocks away. Where are the keys?”
“Bedside table drawer.”
“You’re sure.”
“Hundred percent.”
Ethan peeked around the corner of the house, saw bodies in the distance in the street, but no abbies.
“Let’s sit for a minute,” he said. “Catch our breath.”
They all sat against the rotting boards of the house.
Ethan said, “Maggie, Hecter, no military experience, right?”
Headshakes.
“I was a Black Hawk pilot. Saw some insane combat in Fallujah. We have six blocks to cover across very hostile territory, and there’s a right way to move in these situations to minimize exposure. From our current position, we can only see the surrounding block, but when we get across the street, our perspective will change. We’ll have new information. Even though we have six blocks to contend with, we’re going to look at that distance incrementally. Maggie and I will cross the street first and secure a position. I’ll evaluate the area from our new vantage point, and when I give the sign, Kate and Hecter will join us. Make sense?”
Nods.
“I want to say one last thing about how we’re going to move. It’s called a tactical column. We’ll keep close together as we run, but the pace should be controlled enough for you to stay alert. If the coast is clear, the temptation will be to focus on areas in the distance to see what’s coming, but that’s a mistake. If we see abbies coming from a hundred, two hundred yards out, there’s time for us to react. Worst thing that can happen is a surprise ambush. One of these things coming out of a bush, around a corner, and then you don’t even have time to raise your weapon. So watch your danger areas. That’s top priority. If you pass a bush and you can’t see what’s behind it, you cover that bush. Got it?”
Maggie’s shotgun had begun to tremble in her grasp.
Ethan touched her hand. “You’re going to do fine,” he said.
She turned away suddenly and threw up in the grass.
Kate patted her back, and whispered, “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay to be scared. It’s right to be scared. It’ll make you sharp.”
Ethan considered how utterly unprepared this woman was. Maggie had never been exposed to anything approaching this level of horror and pressure and yet she was slugging her way through it.
Maggie wiped her mouth and took a few deep breaths.
“You okay?” Ethan asked.
“I can’t do it. I thought I could but—”
“I know you can.”
“No, I should just go back.”
“We need you, Maggie. The people in the cavern need you.”
She nodded.
“You’ll be with me,” Ethan said, “and we’ll take it one step at a time.”
“Okay.”
“You can do this.”
“I just need a moment.”
He’d seen this in war. Combat paralysis. When the total horror of the violence and the constant threat of death overwhelmed a soldier. In his time in Iraq, the nightmare scenario was a sniper’s bullet or an IED. But even on the worst days in the streets of Fallujah, there wasn’t anything that wanted to eat you alive.
He gave Maggie a hand up.
“You ready?” he asked.
“I think so.”
He pointed across the street. “We’re going to cross to that house on the corner. Don’t think about anything else.”
“Okay.”
“You’re going to see some bodies in the street. Just want to warn you. Ignore them. Don’t even look at them.”
“Danger areas.” She tried to smile.
“You got it. Now stay close.”
Ethan picked up his shotgun.
Butterflies in his stomach.
That old, familiar fear.
Five steps out from the side of the house, the bodies in the street were in full view. And you couldn’t not look at them. He counted seven people, two of them children, literally ripped apart.
Maggie was keeping up.
He could hear her footsteps a few feet behind his.
They hit the street, nothing but the sound of their footfalls on the pavement.
Their panting.
Up and down First Avenue—nothing.
It was so quiet.
They crossed into the yard and accelerated the last few steps to the two-story Victorian.
Crouched down under a window.
Ethan glanced around the corner.
Made another scan up and down First.
All clear.
He looked back at Kate and Hecter and raised his right arm.
They came to their feet and started jogging, Kate out in front and moving with confidence, like she knew what she was doing, Hecter a few uncomfortable paces back. Ethan could tell the moment they saw the bodies. Hecter’s face fell and Kate’s jaw set and they couldn’t tear their eyes away.
Ethan looked at Maggie, and said, “You did great.”
Then all four of them were together again.
Ethan said, “Street’s empty. I don’t know why it’s so quiet, but let’s take advantage. All four of us this time. We’ll head out into the street and go right down the middle of it.”
“Why?” Hecter asked. “Isn’t it safer to stay near the houses, not so out in the open?”
“Corners are not our friends,” Ethan said.
He gave Hecter and Kate a minute to catch their breath.
Then he stood.
“What’s the next destination?” Kate asked.
“There’s a green Victorian two blocks down on the other side of the street. A row of juniper shrubs along the front. We’ll get behind those. Everyone ready?”
“Want me last in line?” Kate asked.
“Yes. Cover everything on our right and glance back every so often to make sure we aren’t getting flanked.”
It was a deceptively peaceful morning on Eighth Street.
They jogged down the middle of the road, quaint Victorians on either side and all those white picket fences bright and perfect in the early sun. Ethan’s stomach ached with hunger. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten.
He switched between studying the houses on their left and the road ahead.
The side yards unnerved him more than anything. Those narrow canyons between houses that led into backyards he couldn’t see.
They reached the first intersection.
So strange. He’d expected the town to be thick with abbies. Wondered if they’d left. Raided town for a night and gone back out into the wild the way they’d come—through Pilcher’s gate. That would simplify things if he could get control of the fence and just shut them back out.
The green Victorian was close now, two houses down.
He picked up the pace and veered toward the front yard.
Suddenly Kate was running beside him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, breathless.
“Faster,” she gasped. “Just run.”
Ethan jumped the curb, sprinted through the grass.
Glanced back—nothing.
They reached the junipers.
Scrambled through the branches.
Ducked down in the shadow between the bushes and the house.
Everybody out of breath.
Ethan said, “Kate, what happened?”
“I saw one.”
“Where?”
“Inside one of the houses on the street.”
“Inside?”
“It was just standing at a window, looking out.”
“You think it saw us?”
“I don’t know.”
Ethan rose up slowly on his knees, peeked through the branches.
“Get down!” Kate whispered.
“I have to check. Which house was it?”
“Brown one with yellow trim. Swing on the front porch. Two gnomes in the yard.”
He saw it.
Saw the screen door swinging closed, heard the distant slap of the wood smacking the frame.
But he didn’t see the abby.
Ethan lowered himself back behind the bushes.
“It’s outside,” he said. “The screen door just closed. I don’t know where it is.”
“It could be coming around the house,” Kate said. “Sneaking up along the side. How smart are these things?”
“Scary.”
“Do you know how they hunt? How finely tuned their senses are?”
“No idea.”
Maggie said, “I hear something.”
Everyone hushed.
It was a clicking, scraping sound.
Ethan straightened just enough to peek through the branches again.
The abby was moving upright on the sidewalk toward the house.
The clicking was its talons on the concrete.
A large bull.
Two hundred fifty pounds at least.
It had fed recently. Ethan could barely see the pulsing of its massive heart through the dried blood and viscera that clung to its chest like a bib.
At the foot of the porch, it stopped.
Turned its head.
Ethan ducked.
Held his finger to his lips and leaned over so he could whisper in Kate’s ear.
“It’s at the porch, twenty feet away. We may have to engage.”
She nodded.
He got onto his knees, raised the shotgun, and poked his head above the juniper.
Did you rack a shell into the tube?
Of course I racked a shell into the tube. I ghost-loaded this gun last night.
The abby was gone, but the smell of it was potent.
Close.
It shot up screaming on the other side of the bush, teeth bared, eyes like wet, black stones.
The blast was deafening, and despite the size of the thing, the slug punched it back into the grass. It went down on its back with a sucking chest wound, dark blood bubbling out like a geyser across the translucent skin.
Kate was already on her feet.
Hecter and Maggie frozen behind the bush.
Ethan said, “We have to move.”
He clawed his way out.
The abby was still alive, moaning and trying to plug the quarter-size hole, watching in disbelief as it bled out.
It reached for Ethan as he moved past, a talon catching on the hem of his jeans, tearing easily through the denim.
Kate was right behind him, Hecter and Maggie slower in coming.
“Move!” he yelled.
They ran into the street.
Sweat beaded on Ethan’s forehead, streaming down into his eyes with a saltwater sting.
They crossed the next intersection.
Nothing was coming.
Ethan looked back over his shoulder down Eighth.
Maggie and Hecter were running their hearts out, arms pumping, and nothing behind them as far as he could see.
The school took up the entire next block on Ethan’s right.
Playground equipment standing lonely behind a chain-link fence.
Seesaws. Swing sets. Slides. Merry-go-rounds.
A tetherball pole.
A basketball hoop.
The red brick of the school beyond.
Maggie said, “Oh my God.”
Ethan looked back.
She had stopped in the middle of the street and was staring at the school.
He ran back to her.
“We have to keep going.”
She pointed.
A door in the side of the building swung open and a man was standing in the threshold waving one arm.
Maggie said, “What do we do?”
What do we do?
One of those decisions that could decide everything.
Ethan scaled the four-foot fence and raced across the schoolyard, passing a sandbox and monkey bars in the shadow of a giant cottonwood whose yellow leaves had plastered the pavement.
The man holding open the door was Spitz, the Wayward Pines postman, an inventive position for a town that had zero need for the mail. Yet still, he’d walked the streets several days a week, stuffing mailboxes with fake junk mail, bullshit tax notices, and the like. He was a brawny, extravagantly bearded man, larger through the waist than one might think for someone who lived on his feet. Presently, he stood in a shredded black T-shirt and kilt—his fête costume—with his left arm wrapped in a piece of bloody fabric. He wore a nasty slice across his cheek and a piece of flesh had been gouged out of his right leg.
He said, “Hi, Sheriff,” as Ethan arrived. “Didn’t expect to see you.”
“Back at you, Spitz. You look like shit.”
“Just a flesh wound.” The man grinned. “We thought the other groups were wiped out.”
“Ours made it through the tunnels, up to the cavern.”
“How many of you?”
“Ninety-six.”
“I got eighty-three down in the basement of the school.”
Kate asked, “Harold?”
Spitz shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
Hecter said, “We thought everyone else had been killed.”
“We were attacked on the way to the tunnels. Lost about thirty down by the river. Brutal. As you can see, I got in a little scuffle with one of those sons of bitches. Took five men to drag it off and if one of them hadn’t had a machete it would’ve killed us all. I heard the gunshot a minute ago. It’s what drew me outside.”
“One came after us a little ways up the block,” Ethan said. “We thought maybe they’d all gone back into the woods.”
“Oh no. Town’s still crawling with them. I’ve been making house raids within sprinting distance. There’s people still hiding in their homes. I rescued Gracie and Jessica Turner just before dawn. Jim had nailed them into a closet. He isn’t with your group, is he?”
“I saw him last night,” Ethan said. “He didn’t make it.”
“That’s too bad.”
“How are your people?” Maggie asked.
“Three died from their wounds overnight. Two are in pretty rough shape. Probably won’t last the day. A bunch of us are scraped all to hell. Everyone’s freaked out. No food, just a little water from the fountains. We had a teacher in our group and if he hadn’t said to come here, we’d all be dead. No question in my mind. It was war last night.”
“How secure is the basement?” Ethan asked.
“Could be worse. We’re locked in behind two doors in a music classroom. No windows. Only one way in and out. We’ve built barricades. I’m not saying it’s impenetrable, but we’re hanging in.”
A scream erupted several blocks away.
“Better get your asses inside,” Spitz said. “Sounds like whatever you killed had a buddy.”
Ethan looked at Kate, back at Spitz.
“I’m headed for the mountain,” he said. “For Pilcher.”
Maggie said, “If there are injured people, I may be able to help. I was in school to become a nurse back in my old life.”
“We’d love to have you,” Spitz said.
A second scream answered the first.
Ethan said, “Do you guys have any weapons?”
“One machete.”
Shi
t. He’d have to leave them with someone who could shoot. This group of people needed some form of protection beyond a big knife.
“Kate, you stay with them too,” he said.
“You need me.”
“Yes, but if we both go and get killed, then what? At least this way, you’re the backup plan if I don’t make it back. And meanwhile, you can protect these people.”
Hecter said, like he hadn’t quite fully committed to the idea, “Well, Ethan, I guess it’s just you and me then.”
“Will I be seeing you again, Sheriff?” Spitz asked.
“Here’s hoping.” Ethan grabbed Maggie’s hand, and said, “Bedside table drawer?”
“Yeah, go upstairs, turn right when you come off the staircase, it’s the door at the end of the hall.”
“Your house locked?”
“No.”
“Which one is it?”
“Pink with white trim. Wreath on the front door.”
Maggie and Spitz headed into the school.
Ethan started to turn away but Kate grabbed him, her hands cold on the back of his neck. She pulled him toward her and kept pulling until their lips touched, and then she was kissing him and he was letting it happen.
She said, “Be careful,” and disappeared through the door.
Ethan looked at Hecter.
The abbies were howling.
“Two blocks,” Ethan said. “We can make it.”
They ran through the schoolyard, between picnic tables, into an open playing field, heading straight for the fence.
Ethan glanced back, saw movement in the street behind them—pale forms on all fours.
With the shotgun slung across his shoulder, he put two hands on the fence and leapt over the top, hit the ground running on the other side.
Streaked into an intersection.
Right—clear.
Left—four abbies en route, still several blocks away.
Halfway down the block, an abby broke through the glass of a front window and charged Ethan.
“Keep running!” he screamed at Hecter, then stopped, squared up, and racked a fresh shell.
Hecter blitzed by and Ethan put the monster down with a head shot.
He chased after Hecter, and as they reached the last intersection before Maggie’s house, it occurred to him that he never asked what her car looked like. There were loads of them on this block, and two parked on the curb in front of Maggie’s place.
Abbies appeared straight ahead, coming toward them from Main Street, one block away, and Ethan looked back just in time to see a half dozen round the corner two blocks back near the school.