Date: 2013-10-29 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: When Karen Lindley’s daughter is snatched from her swing set, Karen discovers that her town—Wayward Pines—is not the place she thought it was. In response, the distressed mother, who grew up a Quaker and has never seen a gun, steals weapons from the sheriff’s office and tools from a local hardware store. Frantically racing to rescue her stolen daughter, she is surprised to discover she knows how to expertly handle these dangerous, heavy tools. And it suddenly occurs to Karen that not only has her town changed, she has no idea who she is either!

WAYWARD PINES

THE WIDOW LINDLEY

WAYWARD PINES

THE WIDOW LINDLEY

F. Paul Wilson

Kindle Worlds

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2013 by F. Paul Wilson.

This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program. All characters, scenes, events, themes, plots, and related elements of the Wayward Pines remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Blake Crouch, its affiliates, or licensors.

For more information on the Kindle Worlds publishing program: www.amazon.com/kindleworlds

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

All Rights Reserved.

Published by Kindle Worlds

Las Vegas, NV 89140

Digital ISBN: 9781477867648

CONTENTS

START READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The morning Karla Lindley’s daughter disappeared started off pretty much like any other.

“Look at you,” Karla said as she finished braiding Joanna’s hair.

Her little girl wore a light blue, long-sleeved cotton dress and pink sneakers. Joanna was a real girly girl who insisted on wearing a dress every day. She hated jeans and shorts. In a way this was good. When she was misbehaving, which wasn’t often, Karla didn’t have to threaten her with physical punishment. The threat of—horror!—having to wear pants was enough to guarantee compliance.

“Can I go on the swing?” Joanna said in her squeaky voice.

“It’s awful early, and you just had breakfast.”

“Please, Mommy, pleeeeease?”

She never seemed to tire of that swing, though in all fairness it hadn’t been up that long. Barely two months. Jonathan had assembled it just before he—

Don’t go there.

“Oh, all right. You put on your vest while I put the kettle on.”

She hefted the kettle—at least half full and still warm from her first cup. She set the flame to high and took Joanna’s little hand in hers.

Trees surrounded the backyard on all three sides, oaks and maples up front, all in full fall colors, backed by an impenetrable wall of the town’s ever-present eponymous pines.

She went to lift Joanna onto the swing seat but the little girl pushed her hands away.

“I can do it!”

Karla smiled. “My, my. Such independence.”

Truth was, Joanna was right. She’d be turning four next month and was quite capable of hauling her skinny little butt onto the seat. More evidence that her baby girl was growing up. Despite the inevitability, Karla hated to admit that her baby wasn’t a baby anymore and would need her less and less as the years went on.

She also hated to admit that she needed to be needed.

She’d missed the cut-off date for school this year, but next fall she’d be off to pre-K. That was the rule in Pines: mandatory education from four to fifteen. God, she was going to miss her.

She watched her little strawberry-blond darling wiggle onto one of the pair of flat board seats—she always chose the one closer to the house—and start leaning backward and forward as she pumped her legs to start moving. Soon she was giggling as she soared back and forth, up and down. Was anything better than the sound of a child having fun?

Where would I be without you, Joanna?

Karla had a pretty good idea: a lonely basket case.

Joanna was all she had. Jonathan had insisted on a house at the edge of town. As a result they had no neighbors and very few friends. No friends, really. Just their family unit of three.

Now down to two.

From inside came the high-pitched whistle of the kettle starting to boil on the stove.

“Be right back,” Karla called.

“Where you going?”

“Coffee. Back in a flash.”

Inside, she turned off the heat. While she waited for the kettle to stop whistling, she spooned coarsely ground coffee into the French press. When the rolling boil had eased, she poured the steaming water over the coffee, stirred the mix, then left it to brew for a couple of minutes.

In the old days—“old” being five years ago before she’d ended up in Wayward Pines—she’d owned a Keurig machine where all she had to do was pop in a K-Cup of whatever blend she fancied at the moment and have a steaming cup in less than a minute. Then she’d carry it to the computer to check her email.

She sighed. No Keurig machines or K-Cups in Pines. No Internet either. Not even television. The soaring mountain peaks cut off the signals, they said. But how did they block satellites?

She shrugged. No matter. She liked her coffee paint-stripping strong, and a French press brewed far more potent joe than any K-Cup could manage. And they all were probably better off without TV and the Internet anyway.

All…that used to mean three, but now it meant two.

She shook it off. She wasn’t going to think about Jonathan now. Not just yet.

She looked at the cut-out paper snowflakes festooning the kitchen. Joanna’s work. One a day, every day, since last winter.

Karla placed the screened plunger atop the carafe and pushed it down, pressing the grounds against the bottom, squeezing the last bit of caffeiney goodness out of them. This was why she used a coarse grind—too fine and the grounds seeped through the mesh. She poured the supernate into her cup, added a teaspoon of honey, a dollop of light cream fresh from the town dairy, and she was ready.

She returned to the backyard where two empty swing seats swayed in the breeze.

“Jo? Joanna?”

No answer.

“Jo? Where are you? Are you hiding?”

Hiding wasn’t Joanna’s thing—or at least it hadn’t been. Maybe this was a new game.

“Okaaay. I’m gonna fiiiind you.” She took a deep gulp of her coffee before setting it on the back steps. “Ready or not, here I come.”

Trying to put herself in the mind of a four-year-old, Karla looked around and asked, Where would I hide?

The thick trunks of the trees rimming the property looked good. Karla began walking the perimeter.

“Am I cold? Am I getting warmer? Am I—?”

Her throat locked when she saw the broken branches. She froze and stared.

“J-Joanna?”

Karla tried to tell herself that Joanna had done this, that she’d pushed her way into the underbrush to hide, but it was too thick for a four-year-old to penetrate on the simple whim of hiding from her mother.

“Joanna!” A scream now.

Frantic, she pushed her way into the break and came upon a small area of flattened brush. Flies buzzed around a pile of fresh stool.

Had something hidden here? Watching? Waiting for its chance?

She saw paw prints in the moist soil—oblong, each crowned with a line of punctures. Claws?

“Jesus God!”

A wolf? A bear? She knew nothing of animal tracks, but what else could make those punctures but claws, talons.

“Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God-oh-God!”

Frantic graduated to terrified as she pushed past the flattened brush and deeper into the woods. The undergrowth thinned and disappeared as the trees, mostly pines now, thickened. The forest floor became a cushiony bed of browned needles that stretched away in every direction. They didn’t appear disturbed. The only good thing—if anything could be good about this—was that she hadn’t seen a drop of blood anywhere.

Karla skidded to a halt, screaming her daughter’s name. And then she stopped and listened—for anything.

Please make a sound, Joanna. Please!

Nothing. Nothing moving and no sound but the breeze rustling through the branches above.

Why wasn’t Joanna calling, crying, screaming? Why hadn’t she made a sound in the backyard? Karla would have heard her—even the slightest squeak of alarm would have returned her to the backyard at lightning speed.

All her instincts pushed her to run now, run blindly in search of her daughter, but another voice told her she couldn’t do this alone. She was going to need help.

Reluctantly accepting the hard reality of that fact, she forced herself to turn and race back to the house. She burst into the kitchen, grabbed the phone, and hit 9-1-1. No special emergency services in Wayward Pines, just—

“Sheriff’s office, Belinda speaking.”

“This is Karla Lindley!” she said, breathless from panic rather than exertion. “It’s taken my little girl!”

The voice jumped an octave. “Who? What?”

“I don’t know! Some animal! A bear or a wolf—I don’t know! It’s taken my baby into the woods behind my house! Tell the sheriff to get up a search party! I’m going after it!”

“Wait! You shouldn’t—”

Karla slammed the receiver down and ran back toward the door.

Wait. She couldn’t go after whatever it was with her bare hands. She needed a weapon. And she knew just where to find one.

She dashed upstairs to the master bedroom—the one she used to share with Jonathan—and went straight to his closet. She had to rise on tiptoe to reach the metal lockbox. She dragged it down and—of course—it was locked, and—also of course—she didn’t know where he’d kept the key.

She ran back downstairs to the rear closet. Jonathan’s toolbox sat on the floor, tucked in a rear corner. With shaking hands she pulled out a screwdriver and a hammer. She placed the flat head against the lock. A couple of sharp blows drove it back into the box and the lid popped open, revealing Jonathan’s silvery gun.

Tiny scintillating lights lit the rim of her vision as she stared at it. She’d known he had it, but she had never seen it before. He’d take it into the woods to practice but always kept it out of sight in his backpack, even in the house. The words .357 MAG – 8 TIMES ran along the barrel, engraved in the steel. She grabbed the wooden handle and felt a strange tingle run through her. Jonathan had never shown her how to shoot, but how difficult could it be? Point and pull the trigger. But first she needed to find something that deserved shooting.

A sob burst free. She prayed Joanna was still alive.

She leaped to her feet and then stopped. The gun—was it loaded? She turned it around and looked at the front of the wheelie thing that held the bullets and saw metallic domes in the exposed slots. She would assume that meant the answer was yes.

She ran for the back door.

Joanna couldn’t fight the monster anymore. She’d kicked and punched and screamed into the dirty stinky hand clamped over her mouth. Sometimes it slipped over her nose and she couldn’t breathe at all. She felt weak and sick, and kicking, slapping, and scratching didn’t help anyway. She was so scared she’d wet herself. She hoped Mommy wouldn’t be mad.

She’d been swinging on her swing, waiting for Mommy to come back, when all of a sudden the stinky hand went over her mouth and she was pulled into the air. She’d screamed but she could barely hear herself, so Mommy probably hadn’t heard a thing. Next thing she knew she was pressed against dirty stinky skin as the monster carried her away from her home, straight through the bushes and into the woods.

Even though she hadn’t got a look at it, she knew this was a monster. Not like the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are. Mommy and Daddy had read it to her many times, though Mommy hadn’t read it since Daddy went away. Those monsters were ugly but they were clean and furry and soft looking. This monster was hard and smooth, and what she could see of its skin through the caked dirt looked like smudgy glass. And so stinky she almost threw up her breakfast.

The monster wasn’t running but still it moved so fast with its feet barely touching the ground, or at least that’s the way it seemed.

Where was it taking her? Somehow she didn’t think it was going to crown her king of the Wild Things.

“Where’s the search party?” Karla said as she reached Sheriff Burke.

She’d been leaning against a tree trunk, sobbing with fear and frustration when she’d spotted his black Stetson cowboy hat a hundred yards downhill. He wore brown pants and a darker brown jacket with a Wayward Pines Sheriff patch on the sleeve. A brass star was pinned to his red and blue flannel shirt. She’d run to meet him.

He’d been on the job only a week or so by now. No one knew what had happened to his predecessor, Sheriff Pope. He’d gone off somewhere and not come back. Burke didn’t radiate aggressive authority like Pope. More like cool competence.

He shrugged the shotgun off his shoulder and pointed it at the ground as she stopped before him.

“You’re looking at it.”

“Wh-what?” She couldn’t believe it. “But we need to canvas the whole area!”

“Probably not the best way. More people mean more noise, and more noise means the more warning it gets.”

She felt her throat start to close but forced the words through. “Do…do you think there’s a chance?”

“Have you seen any blood?”

Now her throat was completely locked. She could only shake her head.

“Okay. At least we’ve got that.” He was staring at the gun in her hand. “Where’d you get the revolver?”

She managed a breath. “Jonathan.”

“And he is…?”

Of course. He hadn’t been here long enough to know.

“My husband.”

“Okay. How’d he get it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know how to use it?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know the first thing about guns.”

He sighed. “Look, Mrs. Lindley—”

“Please—Karla.”

“Okay. But only if you call me Ethan. I’m still not used to ‘sheriff’ as my first name. But listen, Karla: It’s probably best all around if you go back and let me handle this.”

“No! No way! That wolf or bear or whatever it is has my Joanna and I’m not leaving her. I can’t go back to that empty house and just sit on my hands while somebody else looks for her. I can’t and I won’t!”

“But you said yourself you don’t know a thing about that weapon you’re carrying. You’re just as likely to shoot me or yourself as something that needs shooting. Why don’t you just—”

“No justs, sheriff! I’m here till we find her!”

He looked frustrated. Finally he shrugged and moved past her, heading uphill. “Okay. Let’s start looking.”

She had to work to keep up with his long strides.

“Looking for what? What could have taken her? I know it wasn’t human.”

“You’re completely sure?”

“I saw prints where it must have been hiding in the bushes. Not shoe prints, not human feet—definitely some sort of animal. But what kind of bear or wolf waits to attack like that?”

Sheriff Burke’s expression was about as readable as the rocks poking up through the fallen pine needles. “I know next to nothing about animals.”

“But do we have wolves and bears in Pines?”

“I can’t imagine not having them, although I haven’t heard reports of either.”

She stopped walking. “Hey. How did you find me? I could have gone any direction from the house. I headed north for a while, then turned east.”

He kept walking. “You have a compass?”

“No.”

“Then how could you tell your direction?”

“The mossy side of the trunk is north. Everyone knows that.”

“No, everyone should know that, but hardly everyone does. How do you? Camping? Hunting?”

Come to think of it, how did she know that?

“None of the above. But you’re not answering my question: How’d you find me so fast?”

“I went to your house, saw the break in the brush, and followed your tracks.”

“What tracks?”

“You scuffed up a lot of pine needles as you ran. You were a cinch to track, and I’m hardly Daniel Boone.”

She looked back at her trail. Yeah, it was kind of obvious.

She caught up to him again. “But I don’t know if I chose the right direction. I mean, every once in a while I’ll see roughed up needles and so I go that way, but for all I know, a squirrel could have disturbed them.” She felt another sob building. “Isn’t this hopeless? I mean, there’s just two of us.”

“It’s a lot of territory, I know—”

“Can’t we get the state police or a helicopter or—?”

“I put a call in but they can’t get here for a while.”

“Couldn’t we cover more ground if we split up and—?”

“No!” He fairly barked the word. His voice was calmer when he continued. “The last thing I want is for you to find yourself facing some wild animal alone. We’ll move quickly, keeping a good pace to cover as much ground as possible.”

Another sob broke free. God, she hated being such a cry baby—it helped nothing—but she felt so useless.

“We have to find her! And soon! She’s got to be terrified!”

“Tell me about her,” he said.

Why did he want to know? Oh, maybe to distract her from the hopelessness. She didn’t see how that would help, but…

“Her name’s Joanna and she’s almost four and she’s afraid of snow.”

“What?” he said through a laugh.

“I know, I know. Pines is not the place to be afraid of snow.” God, did it ever snow here. “But snowflakes terrify her. She’s fine playing in the snow once it’s done falling and all on the ground, but the falling flakes freak her out. She thinks they’ll cover the house and we’ll never get out.”

“Where’d she get that idea?”

“I don’t know. It does get pretty deep at times. She’s got a little bit of an OCD thing going for her, and I think she watched it drifting halfway up the windows during that big storm last winter and extrapolated that it might go on piling up and up until the house was covered.”

“I’m sure she’ll grow out of it.”

“I think she already has. I told her that no two snowflakes are alike and showed her how to make them from a piece of paper. You know how you fold and refold a sheet into a wedge and then cut into the edges? I showed her a couple of times, gave her a pair of blunt-nosed scissors, and let her have at it. She makes at least one new snowflake a day and tries to make each one different. She’s fascinated by the process and by how she can’t tell exactly how each one is going to look until she unfolds it.”

“You must have quite a collection.”

Karla smiled at the image of their first floor. “They’re everywhere—and I do mean everywhere. But I don’t mind. She feels she’s in control of the flakes now. This winter she’ll…” Karla pressed a hand over her mouth. “If she’s here for winter.”

“She will be,” he said, swinging the pump-action shotgun up onto his shoulder.

As she stared at the weapon, she experienced those same flashing pinpoints on the perimeter of her vision.

The words seemed to pop out of her mouth. “How old is that twelve-gauge anyway?” As he looked at her, she added, “I mean, it’s a Winchester ninety-seven, right? Must be—”

She stopped. This was weird.

He was staring at her. “I thought you didn’t know anything about guns.”

“I don’t.”

“Then how—?”

“I have no idea. Oh, that’s scary.”

“Did your father own guns? Was he a hunter?”

“No way. My folks are Quakers—farmers back in Pennsylvania.”

“Pennsylvania, huh? Where?”

“Eastern. In Amish country near a place called Bird-in-Hand. Heard of it?”

He smiled. “Sure. Drove through there once. Can’t forget a name like that.”

“It’s nice, but there isn’t much ‘there’ there, if you know what I mean.

“I do. You a Quaker?”

“Not so much. I drifted away.”

He hefted the shotgun. “But about…?”

“Guns? Like I said: no idea. My father owns a lot of acreage back there but won’t allow hunting anywhere on our land. Won’t allow a gun on the property, let alone in the house. I have no idea where all that came from…I mean, I was going to ask you if you were loaded with double-ought, and I don’t even know what that means.”

“It’s heavy shot, and yes, I’m loaded with double-ought.”

“Dear Lord, how did I even know to ask?”

He was giving her a funny look. “Good question.”

She looked down at the revolver she gripped. A heavy thing. She saw Smith & Wesson Springfield, MA engraved near the trigger. She knew of no reason why it should feel so comfortable in her hand. For some reason she now knew the wooden grips were walnut, the wheelie thing was the cylinder, and the slots were chambers.

How did she know? This was Jonathan’s…the gun he kept hidden from her.

“Maybe you picked up something from your husband,” Ethan said.

She shook her head. “No. I knew he had it, but he never talked about it, never even let me see it.”

“Where is he, by the way? I’d have expected him to—”

“He killed himself two months ago.”

The brief stutter in his step told her she’d taken him by surprise.

He said, “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know. How…?”

“…did he do it?” Karla finished his sentence and then explained, “Hung himself.” The coward.

“Did you find him?”

“He did it out here in the woods. A couple of miles to the west of here, I’m told. A hiker came upon him.”

“Did he leave a note?”

“Nope. Just walked out one Saturday morning. I thought he was going out to shoot. He never came back. I couldn’t believe he’d do that to himself…to us. Still can’t.”

“You’re not thinking foul play, are you?”

“Why not? He never gave a hint that he was depressed. But Sheriff Pope checked it out and said there was no sign of anyone else involved. He told me Jonathan fastened a twelve-foot rope to a thick branch about twenty feet off the ground”—for some reason those numbers had stuck her head—“stood on the branch, and jumped. He said nobody could arrange that. Jonathan had to do it himself. Still…to tie a rope around your neck and choke yourself to death…?”

Ethan sighed. “Do you really want to talk about this?”

“I was in such shock when it happened, I never had a chance…but I’ve had a lot of time to think since, and I just don’t see…”

“He didn’t choke to death.”

“What? How do you know? You weren’t even here.”

“A fall like that snaps the neck like a twig. You can be pretty sure he died in an instant.”

Karla shuddered. “How awful.” She hefted the pistol. “He had this. You’d think he’d…”

“Maybe for your sake. Blowing the back of your head off makes things messy for the survivors.”

“How considerate.” She couldn’t keep the acid from her tone.

“Don’t minimize it. How did he look at the wake? All in one piece and like he could have been lying there asleep, I’ll bet.”

Yes. She remembered, but barely…all such a blur.

“You think that makes up for deserting your wife and little girl?”

“I think I don’t want to be discussing this.”

“You’re right, you’re right. Sorry,” Ethan apologized.

God, how did she get off on that? Joanna was all that mattered now.

Where are you, honey? Please be all right.

And just then a high-pitched scream echoed through the trees.

She gripped the sheriff’s arm. “Joanna! That’s Joanna!”

He was turning in a slow circle. “I heard. But where—?”

Somewhere an animal screeched, followed by another scream just like the first. They seemed to come from everywhere—left, right, uphill, downhill…

“Goddamn these trees!” he said. “They deflect sound all over the place.”

“Which way do we go?” she cried.

“Uphill!” He started running.

She followed, shouting, “We need to split up!”

“No! We don’t know what we’re dealing with. But the good thing is that we now know she’s still alive. Hold onto that.”

Karla did—clutching it for dear life, like an overboard sailor clinging to a tiny bit of flotsam.

The stinky monster still had its stinky hand over Joanna’s mouth. They hadn’t stopped moving since it pulled her off the swing. Uphill, always uphill. She saw trees flying by to the side. And now, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shelf of rock ahead.

As they got closer, the monster made a squawking noise like a big ugly bird. Another squawk came from ahead. As the thing carried her toward the rock shelf, another monster came out from the shadows beneath it. When Joanna saw it, she screamed into the stinky hand and started fighting to get free.

The baldheaded thing rushing from under the shelf had whitish eyes with black centers; its no-lip mouth was crammed with sharp yellow teeth. Joanna thought she could see a heart beating in the chest between what looked like two boobies. Mommy had those but these were smaller and ugly and caked with dirt. The lady monster’s fingers ended in long black claws that were reaching for her.

The first monster held her out toward the second. Her mouth finally free, Joanna took a deep breath and screamed as loud as she could.

But she wasn’t free for long. The lady monster grabbed her and pressed her against her chest, against one of her stinky boobies. Milk squirted from it, smearing Joanna’s face.

The lady monster pushed her back. Holding her at arms’ length, she hissed in Joanna’s face. Her breath was more than Joanna could stand—she threw up. The lady monster bared her teeth and shrieked as she shook Joanna. Joanna screamed again.

With another bared-teeth hiss, the lady monster slashed her black talons at her.

“Maybe we should’ve gone the other way,” Karla said.

It had been forty-five minutes or more and she hadn’t seen a sign of anyone or anything, and they’d heard not another peep from Joanna.

“We already went the other way,” Ethan said. “Remember?”

Right. Karla’s mind was a shambles. They’d run a long way to the…west? East? North? The trees and the clouds hid the sun, and she hadn’t been paying attention to the moss, so she was completely disoriented. Whichever way they’d gone, when they’d found nothing they turned and circled back.

“She’s got to be somewhere!”

“We’ll find—” His arm shot out to the side as he skidded to a halt.

She ran into it. “What?”

“Shhh!” He pointed.

Up ahead, a flat outcropping of gray stone jutted from the hillside like a cantilever roof. Something had churned up the forest floor before it.

Ethan checked the breech of his shotgun, then whispered, “Stay here.”

Karla nodded, but as soon as he started forward, she raised her pistol and followed. As they neared the outcropping, she noticed a carrion stench. She wanted to say something but kept mum. No telling what was hiding in the shadows beneath that overhang.

But when she saw a big bone, coated with dried blood and buzzing with flies, she lost it.

“Oh, God!” she cried. “That can’t be—!”

Ethan jumped but kept the shotgun pointed toward the shadows. Without turning, he spoke in a low voice.

“Look at the size of that bone. No way it’s human.”

She had to admit he was right. It looked like the thigh bone of some big animal.

“But what—?”

“The dairy reported a cow or two missing the other day. I’m betting that’s what’s left of it.”

“God, the stink!”

“Check out the prints,” he said, pointing to the ground.

Oblong depressions pointing every which way in the dirt, all with sharp talon holes.

“The same as by my house!”

“One set’s about an inch longer than the other. That means two of them. Shit.” That last word came freighted with a ton of unease.

“Two of what?”

He didn’t answer, just stared ahead.

They’d stopped maybe fifteen feet from the outcrop and Karla still couldn’t see anything in the shadows beneath it. What sunlight there was came in at an angle that offered no help.

“Do you think that’s a cave?” she said.

“I hope not. I don’t know of any caves up here, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

He pulled a black flashlight from his belt, turned it on, and held it atop his shotgun. As he aimed it into the shadows, waving the gun and the beam back and forth, the circle of light picked up two little pink objects.

Joanna’s sneakers?

“Oh, no! Oh, dear God!”

She rushed forward.

Ethan cried, “No!” but with his hands full of flashlight and shotgun, he couldn’t stop her.

She dropped to her knees when she reached them. The pistol slipped from her fingers. Joanna’s little pink sneakers, stained with blood. She heard Ethan approaching behind her.

“What’ve you got?”

She couldn’t speak. Her throat had locked. All she could do was hold up the sneakers. And just a foot away, her quilted vest—slashed and bloody, with the down billowing out.

Ethan kept the shotgun and flashlight moving back and forth in the shadows. Joanna could see where the ground rose to meet the rock at the rear. Not a cave, just an overhang. The beam swept past something light blue deep in the left corner and darted back to it.

Oh, no! Joanna’s dress!

Karla scrabbled on her hands and knees into the shadows under the outcrop. That was Joanna’s dress and that was her in it, lying on her side, facing the rocky wall, but she was still, so still.

“Joanna? Jo? Are you all right?”

She saw the massive bloodstains soaked into the blue cotton as she neared.

“Joanna!”

She reached her, grabbed her, turned her over and—

Screamed.

Not Joanna! Some horrid, hairless little monstrosity, only half Joanna’s size, with translucent skin and blank milky eyes and a gaping mouth that showed toothless gums.

She hurled the dead thing away, toward Ethan. It rolled to his feet.

“What is that thing?” she screamed. “And what’s it doing in Joanna’s dress?”

Ethan said nothing. He showed only mild shock as he glanced at the dead creature, then returned his wary attention to their surroundings.

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“What?” She couldn’t believe her ears. “What about Joanna?”

“We’re not going to find her.”

“We are!”

“Look at that dress, Karla. It’s shredded. And the blood…”

“No, please.” She was shaking her head. “Please…”

“And worse, there’s two of them.”

“You keep saying that, but two of what?”

He rose on tiptoe. “Hold on a minute.”

As he hurried off to the left and out of sight, Karla scrambled from under the overhang.

“Where are you?” she called, then spotted him above her, standing on the outcrop. “What are you—?”

She saw his sick, horrified expression.

“Aw, Christ,” he said in a strangled voice. “Aw—”

He turned and vomited.

Karla stood frozen for an instant, then she was on the move, adrenaline-fueled panic driving her around and up and onto the outcrop. Its upper surface was abuzz with flies and littered with bones of all sizes. She saw a cow’s head, and another, and something else…something the size of a soccer ball, decorated with strawberry blond pigtails.

She took a step forward but her knees wouldn’t support her. The world went blank.…

After hurrying the two hundred yards from the highway, Ethan waited for the faux rock face to lift. He ducked in as soon as he could fit. Marcus, his usual escort, waited for him in the topless Wrangler. Ethan swung into the passenger seat and they began the winding trip along fluorescent-lit tunnels bored through the heart of the mountain. Through a million-square-foot cavern. Past the suspension units to stop at the elevators. Using his swipe card, Marcus took him up. After an ear-popping ride, the doors opened onto the spacious, sumptuous quarters of the billionaire-genius master of Wayward Pines, David Pilcher. Marcus escorted him to a huge office lined with books and some two hundred TV screens that monitored the doings of the entire town.

After only a week as sheriff, Ethan didn’t expect his own swipe card yet, but he found being escorted every step of the way galling. And then he experienced his usual mix of admiration and revulsion as he saw the man himself.

Short and bald, with small dark eyes, David Pilcher didn’t look like a god, but he functioned as one. He wielded the power of life and death over the inhabitants of Pines. To his credit, he preferred life—most of the time. After all, with less than a thousand human beings left in the world, he didn’t have many to spare.

“What the hell’s going on, Pilcher?” Ethan said, tossing his Stetson on a chair. “How did a pair of abbies get past the defenses—a mating pair with a cub, no less?”

“We’re looking into it.” His usual smug tone was missing.

“Looking into it? You should have spotted them and taken them out before they reached town.”

“Only one of them reached town—and the Lindley house is on the outskirts.”

“You’re going to split hairs with me? Have you taken them out yet?”

Pilcher sighed. “We can’t find them.”

“What? First they somehow get past a zillion volts of electricity and the snipers, and now you can’t find them?”

“They’re not dumb animals—your run-in with them not too long ago should have impressed that on you. How’s the Lindley woman doing, by the way?”

“In the hospital under observation. Completely out of it.”

“Pam stopped in on her. Says it’s extreme post-traumatic stress.”

Pam…what irony that Pilcher’s pet psychopath posed as one of the town’s guardians of mental health.

“Extreme barely touches it. Those abbies ate her little girl.”

Ethan tried to imagine his own mental state if his son Ben were snatched away and he’d given chase only to discover that the boy been devoured and all that was left was his head.

“A shame.”

“Your fault, Pilcher.”

He looked shocked. “Mine?”

When Belinda told him about the call, the first thing Ethan had suspected was an abby. He’d phoned Pilcher and requested a team be sent out to intercept it.

“You refused to send a team.”

“Too risky. They might be seen. We both thought it was a single abby, and I figured the child was already dead. Admit it—you did too.”

Well, yes, he had, but that didn’t change things.

“All you had to do was trace her chip—”

She doesn’t have one.”

“You told me everybody in Pines had one.”

“Every adult. Before age four or five there’s not enough soft tissue in the thigh to hide a tracking chip. As soon as she would have started school, she’d have been implanted.”

“All right, even without the chip we could have given her the benefit of the doubt. If we had, she might still be alive.”

Pilcher gave a dismissive wave. “Wishful thinking. Don’t torture yourself with what-ifs.” He flashed a sardonic smile. “Look on the bright side: You’re set to be quite the hero.”

“Am I now?”

“The new sheriff carries that poor unconscious woman all the way back to town. My, my, my. The Pines proletariat will eat that up.”

“At least it was downhill. That helped a lot.”

Ethan rubbed his biceps—they were killing him.

“Not to mention bringing along her daughter’s head wrapped in your sheriff’s jacket. Not to worry about that—we’ll get you a new one ASAP.”

Ethan gave him a hard stare. “Are you finding something amusing about this?”

“Not at all,” he said, the smile fading. “The loss of a child is always tragic—especially a female.”

Ethan shook his head. “Is that what you’re thinking about—all Joanna’s lost breeding years? That’s what everything boils down to for you, isn’t it: Be fruitful and multiply.”

“If the species known as Homo sapiens is to avoid extinction, yes. We had better be goddamn fruitful as all hell and multiply like rabbits!”

Ethan couldn’t argue the extinction part. With fewer than a thousand real people left and hundreds of millions of hungry predators wandering around beyond the fence, the odds against surviving as a species were huge. So while he agreed with Pilcher’s end, he still had big issues with his means.

But all that aside, couldn’t Pilcher also view Joanna’s death as a personal tragedy—a mother losing her child, a child losing her future?

Time to shift the subject.

“Karla had a gun, you know.”

Firearms weren’t allowed in Wayward Pines. If someone was going to kill somebody else, they had to do it with kitchen knives or garden tools.

“I know.”

“You do? How?”

“I watched you stow it in the gun cabinet in your office.”

Shit. He doubted he’d ever get used to Pilcher’s ubiquitous spy cams.

The boss man added, “I didn’t get a good look at it, though.”

“An eight-shot Smith and Wesson three-fifty-seven Mag. Her husband’s.”

“How do you know it was his?”

“She told me.”

“And you believe her?”

Typical David Pilcher attitude: Always assume the worst.

“I’ve no reason to doubt her.” He remembered something. “Then again…”

“What?”

“She said she didn’t know anything about guns but recognized my shotgun as a Winchester ninety-seven. But …” He shook his head. “She seemed too upset about her little girl to lie.”

“Don’t be too sure of that. Lie enough about something and it becomes the truth.”

“You should know.”

Pilcher didn’t acknowledge the remark, which was okay with Ethan. It had been a cheap shot.

“No matter whose it was, where’d either of them get a gun?”

“Good question. Damn good question. We’re looking into it.”

“I read their files before coming up here.” Pilcher had a file on everyone in Pines. “She’s a Quaker farm girl from Pennsy, born Karla Williamson, with no opportunities to learn about guns. But Jonathan Lindley did a stint in the Iowa National Guard.”

“I like him as the gun owner.”

“Any new info on why he hung himself?”

Pilcher shrugged. “One of the malcontents who couldn’t adapt. We’ve had our share, as you’re well aware. Some kill themselves, some try to run…” He smiled. “Some become sheriff.”

If it weren’t for Ben and Theresa, Ethan could see himself blowing his brainstem out the back of his skull—or at least giving it serious consideration. But his wife and son were more important that the miasma of existential despair that hung over Wayward Pines.

He knew its secrets: That its entire population had been placed in suspended animation for eighteen hundred years. That the human genome had decayed to the point where the Homo sapiens of his time had become the vicious degenerate creatures who had stolen and eaten Joanna Lindley this morning. Creatures Pilcher and his people inside the mountain called aberrations—abbies for short. That during the eighteen hundred years the humans had been suspended the imperturbable planet Earth had absorbed and recycled all the toxins they’d left behind and reclaimed all the cities.

The past hadn’t simply passed—it had been obliterated. And the future? For the individuals of Wayward Pines, the future was simply another day like today. So all anyone here had was the present. The moment.

Thus the Pines mantra that everyone knew by heart:

Yesterday is history.
Tomorrow is a mystery.
Today is a gift.
That’s why it’s called the present.
Work hard, be happy, and enjoy your life in Wayward Pines!

But without a decent birth rate, the future would stop being a mystery and there’d be no more “gifts” of today.

That was the long-term problem. He shook it off and returned to the here and now.

“What are you doing about those two abbies? And let’s hope there are only two.”

“I’ve got a couple of teams out hunting them,” Pilcher explained.

“Now you send them.” You cold son of a bitch.

“And what do we say about Joanna?”

“A bear got her.”

“Karla saw the baby aberration.”

Pilcher raised an eyebrow. “She didn’t see living, breathing abbies. She found her daughter’s bloody dress and imagined something in it. The Lindleys had virtually no friends while Jonathan was alive and she’s made no new ones since his death. So whom is she going to tell? And if she does go rambling on about it, the explanation will be that her PTSD has made her delusional. The unspeakable tragedy of finding her daughter’s head has unhinged her. Pam will see to it that she comes around eventually.”

“Pam’s preferred solution to any problem person seems to be torture and death.”

“Karla Lindley has been docile and compliant all along,” Pilcher explained. “There’s no reason to believe she will change.”

“But if she does?”

Pilcher’s expression was grim. “She won’t.”

Karla feigned unconsciousness while the nurse adjusted her sheets and blanket. As soon as she was gone, leaving a nightlight glowing by the door, Karla sat up. The first thing she did was find the wall clock which read 4:32.

Where had the time gone? The last thing she remembered was—

No…no…you can’t go there. Not now. Not yet…

She’d been awake just long enough to realize she was in a hospital room, in a patient bed, when the nurse had come in. She hadn’t wanted to speak to anyone so she’d played possum.

She examined her body. An IV ran into her left arm. She could find no cardiac monitor leads attached to her chest. Good. She pulled the IV out of her vein and slapped the tape back over it, then tied the tubing in a knot.

She was dressed in an open-back hospital gown and nothing else, so she padded to the closet to see if her clothes were there. She found her jacket on a hanger and her sneakers on the floor. Next to them sat a white plastic bag with a red drawstring. She pulled out her underwear, jeans, shirt, socks, and sweatshirt. Stuffing her underwear back in the bag, she pulled on the rest.

She started for the door but stopped as she recalled that all hospitals had cameras in the halls. She went instead to the window. A near-full moon was slipping behind the peaks to the west. She was on the second floor and she saw the fans of the HVAC complex whirling on the roof one level below. She raised the sash, kicked out the screen, and slid through legs first on her belly. She hung by her fingertips, then let go, landing on her feet in a crouch on the roof below.

She lowered herself from the HVAC roof the same way. And then she was running for the center of town. She had things to do and not a lot of time to do them.

“What couldn’t you tell me over the phone?” Ethan said as he stormed into Pilcher’s office, his second time here in six hours.

The call had come at five-thirty a.m. Pam, dressed in running tights and a parka, had been waiting outside in a Jeep. She took him straight into the mountain where she led him to Pilcher’s apartment.

From behind his desk Pilcher pointed to the bank of two hundred plus monitors on the wall. “Because you need to see this firsthand.”

“A runner?”

“Karla Lindley.”

He hadn’t expected that.

“But she’s in the hospital.”

“That’s what we thought.”

Pam said. “She was a basket case when I last saw her. Totally unresponsive.”

Pilcher gave her an annoyed look. “And that’s why we didn’t have anyone on duty outside her room all night.”

“She was practically catatonic.”

Ethan couldn’t help enjoying Pam’s defensiveness. She was very possibly the most perfectly sociopathic personality he’d ever met.

Pilcher pointed a remote. “We’ll start with the hospital room.”

A screen in the lower-left corner of the bank flickered to the interior of a semi-dark room. The images fast forwarded double-time through Karla pulling her clothes from the closet, stripping off the hospital gown, and getting dressed.

Pam smirked as Karla stuffed her underwear back in the bag. “She’s going commando. Not a bad bod for someone who doesn’t exercise.”

Ethan agreed but said nothing. He knew that if Pam followed any religion, it was the god and goddess of aerobics and weight training.

They watched her climb out the window. The angle shifted to the outside where they observed her dropping from the window to make a soft, graceful, double-foot landing on the roof below. Another angle showed her repeating the process to the ground.

“She moves like a gymnast,” Ethan said, unable to keep the admiration from his tone.

Pilcher nodded. “So we’ve noticed.”

“But there’s nothing in her file about any involvement in gymnastics,” Pam said. “Ever.”

“Video-wise, we lose her after that,” Pilcher said, “but we can track her path.”

Weather had eroded the town’s outdoor video cams over the years, so visual coverage had become spotty in places. But the indoor cams remained fully functional, and the tracking chip implanted in every left thigh allowed Pilcher to know the whereabouts of every single resident at any moment.

The screen lit with an aerial view of Wayward Pines that showed a red line tracing a winding trail behind the downtown stores.

“There’s no clear path there,” Pam said. “Which means she’s hopping fences left and right.”

“Are we talking some parkour action here?” Ethan said.

Pam simply shrugged. If she thought so, she wasn’t saying so.

“Where’s she going?” Ethan asked.

“Here.” Pilcher stabbed his remote toward the bank and punched a button.

A screen lit with the interior of a store Ethan new well.

“Main Hardware?”

They watched her grab a short-handle shovel, half a dozen knives, a hatchet, butane lighters, a couple of fistfuls of protein bars, two six-packs of water, and beef jerky, shoving them all into a duffel bag.

“What the hell?”

Pam’s smile had a nasty twist. “If you like this one, you’ll love the next.”

The screen shifted to another interior with a view of Karla, duffel over her shoulder, passing a familiar looking desk.

“Hey, that’s Belinda’s desk!”

Karla was in the sheriff’s office. She looked around and then walked up to the gun cabinet. A few sharp blows with the hatchet popped the doors. He watched her search inside and come up with the .357 Smith & Wesson. After tucking that into her belt, she grabbed a shotgun—the 12-gauge autoload.

“See that?” Pam said. “She went straight for the Benelli M4. Didn’t even hesitate.”

“Almost as if she recognized it,” Ethan said, full of wonder.

“Almost?” Pilcher said. “Watch.”

She pulled a box of double-ought shells from the cabinet, then a box of one-ounce Brenneke slugs. Looking like she’d done it a thousand times before, she loaded the Benelli with alternating shells.

“She’s loading a highway-patrol cocktail,” Pam said. “The double-ought for whoever’s in the car, the hardball for the engine block.” She nodded with unabashed admiration. “The widow Lindley knows her shit.”

With the Benelli loaded, she added extra boxes of shells to the duffel, along with a supply of .357 Mags, slung the Benelli over her shoulder, and headed for the door. The frame froze as she reached it.

Ethan shook his head. “I know you can’t watch every cam feed all the time, but I can’t believe nobody picked her up at least once in real time.”

“Oh, we did,” Pilcher said. “We spotted her in your office.”

“And you didn’t stop her?”

He smiled. “First off, she’s loaded for bear—or should I say, abby?—and appears to know her way around weaponry. For obvious reasons I want to avoid a firefight in downtown at all costs, and I don’t want to put any of our people at risk when it’s not necessary.”

“Not necessary? But—”

“She’s not a danger to the public, Ethan.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We know where she’s going, and we know why. So do you.”

Yeah, Ethan guessed he did.

“I assume then that you haven’t tracked down those two abbies?”

“Two teams couldn’t find a trace of them,” Pilcher said.

“And so you’re going to let her go after them?”

“Those abbies are a smart couple. If they see four humans approaching, they’ll hide. But a woman alone in the woods…will they be able to resist?”

“You’re using her as bait,” Ethan said and thought to himself, Why am I not surprised?

“I think it’s pretty obvious that she’s using herself as bait. The abbies will come at her expecting to face a lamb. From what I’ve just seen, I think they’ll find a wolverine.”

“What if they kill her?”

“There’s a decent chance of that, of course, but I doubt they’ll get away unscathed.”

“And then we’ll have our guys finish them off,” Pam said.

Ethan stared at the blurry face of the woman frozen on the screen.

“Who is she?”

“The million-dollar question,” Pilcher said. “I hope she survives, because I want to find out.”

“I thought you backgrounded everyone before you put them into suspension,” said Ethan.

“We did—thoroughly. Everything said she’s the Quaker farmer’s daughter from Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania. But obviously she’s a lot more.”

Pam was nodding. “Those weren’t farm-girl moves. What we just saw shows a high level of training. She could have been a field agent in one of the intelligence agencies, or black ops, or maybe Special Forces.” She turned to Ethan and gave him a smile as warm as a great white’s. “But I could take her.”

“Never mind that,” Pilcher said. “She could have been given a false identity—a damn good one, let me tell you—and hidden away for security reasons.”

Something about that wasn’t sitting right.

“Could she have had her identity erased?” Ethan asked.

Pilcher frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s all gut feeling…nah. Forget it.”

“No,” Pilcher said. “Go ahead. I appreciate gut feelings. I had one about you. That’s why you’re sheriff.”

“All right. Here goes: I have this gut feeling that she hasn’t been hiding this other self; I get a sense she doesn’t even know about her other self—or at least didn’t know until she woke up in the hospital.”

“Some sort of mind wipe?” Pam said. She looked at Pilcher. “Is that possible?”

He nodded. “Techniques of varying efficacy were in various stages of development before we all said good-bye.”

Ethan kept following the trail he’d started. “Old identity erased from her mind and from the databanks as well; a new identity created. But why? If she posed a risk, wouldn’t people with that kind of power just kill her?”

“Absolutely,” Pilcher said. “‘Disappear her,’ in the lingua franca.”

Pam snapped her fingers. “A sleeper! Maybe she was supposed to hide in plain sight until activated, like that movie…” Her fingers snapped furiously. “What was it called?”

“The Manchurian Candidate?”

She jabbed her finger at Ethan like a clue-giver in charades. “That’s it!”

“Well, even if it’s true,” Pilcher said, “it’s all irrelevant now. That whole bullshit world is gone.”

Ethan looked at the screens that watched Wayward Pines 24-7.

Replaced by a new bullshit world.

He said, “Whoever she is, and however skilled she is, she’s going to need some help.”

“Stay out of it, Ethan. The more people out there, the less tempting she’ll be.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”

Ethan had failed Karla Lindley—or whoever she was—with her daughter. He wasn’t about to let her face two abbies on her own.

Pilcher was staring at him. “Why don’t I believe you?”

“Because I’m lying.”

He finally cracked a smile. “Okay. Go ahead. But let Pam outfit you with a few things before you go.”

“How much can I tell her?”

His eyebrows rose. “Karla? Tell her whatever she needs to know to get the job done. Tell her everything, if you have time.”

“Everything?”

He shrugged. “It’s not going to matter, is it.”

“Don’t come any closer, sheriff,” Karla called from where she sat, far back under the outcrop, deep in the shadows.

The sheriff stopped, looking in her general direction. The sinking sun was in his eyes, but even if it weren’t, no way could he see her. She’d been too wound up earlier to gauge him. He seemed about her age with rugged good looks and an easygoing manner. Before today she’d glimpsed him only once, on a trip to the grocer. Now he held his old Winchester cradled in the crook of his left arm, his right hand around the grip of the stock, his index finger straight, resting outside the trigger guard. He had a backpack strapped to his shoulders.

The small campfire she’d built smoldered between them.

“I came to help,” he called.

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious.”

“Like you helped me save Joanna?”

It seemed that Joanna had been dead a long time—a lifetime ago. The pain remained, a burning knife through her heart, but it had been eclipsed by rage.

“I’m sorry about that. I did what I could. I think you know that. Look, can I approach?”

“Are you alone?”

“To the best of my knowledge.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Maybe someone followed me. If so, I don’t know about it.”

“Why would anyone follow you?”

“You never know.”

She thought about that. In the context of what she’d started to suspect about this town, it wasn’t so far off.

Still, he was the sheriff. The masthead of officialdom in Wayward Pines. He had to be in on the secrets, whatever they were.

All right, she thought. Let’s try a little test.

“Okay, come on up.” As he took a step forward, she added, “But leave that Winchester back there.”

He stopped. If he agreed, then something was definitely fishy. No one would want to be unarmed with whatever killed Joanna still roaming about. But if he had backup watching, it wouldn’t make any difference to him.

He shook his head. “I don’t think I’d be comfortable with that.”

Okay. He passed.

“All right, bring it with you, but not that way.”

“What way?”

“The way you’re coming. That’ll only get you in trouble. A couple of yards to your left there—see that double row of sticks winding this way? Follow that.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You’ll be one very unhappy camper.”

He shrugged, moved to his left, and followed the sticks. When he reached the fire, he stopped and placed the butt of his shotgun’s stock on the ground. A sign of peace.

He cupped a hand to his lips. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

Karla moved from the shadows in a crouch, straightening as she reached daylight. She kept the Benelli aimed at his gut.

“Welcome to my humble abode, Sheriff Burke.”

“What happened to ‘Ethan’?”

Good question. Something was very wrong with Wayward Pines, and he seemed to be part of it. How could he not be? But then he had helped as best he could yesterday. She’d call a truce for now, but she’d be watching.

“Okay. Pull up a chair, Ethan.”

They both sat crosslegged on the ground, keeping the fire between them. She added a few more twigs. They smoked before they caught.

“That’s going to attract attention,” he said.

“One can only hope.”

He looked back along the path he had come. “Why would I have been an unhappy camper?”

“Punji sticks,” she said.

His eyebrows shot up under the brim of his black Stetson. “You know about punji sticks?”

“I do indeed.”

“How?”

“Ain’t got a fucking clue,” Karla replied.

And that was the god’s honest truth.

He seemed to be digesting that as his gaze roamed the area. “Where’s the, um, dress?”

Karla fought the tightening of her throat. Rather than risk speaking, she simply pointed to the fire. She’d watched it burn until it and its obscene bloodstains were ash.

He nodded. “And the thing that was in it?”

Now she could speak. She pointed downhill. “Dropkicked it over there somewhere.” She locked eyes with him. “What was that thing?”

“What makes you think I know?”

She sighed. “Aren’t we beyond games here? You hardly flinched when you saw it. You know what it is…or was. Not a bear cub, not a wolf cub, and sure as shit not human. Share.”

He paused as his expression became bleak, then, “You’re two-thirds correct.”

She thought about that a sec, then figured it out.

“Human? That was a human baby? No fucking way!”

“Yes, fucking way. That was one of our great-great…” He shook his head. “Add forty or fifty greats and you’re looking at the future of humanity.”

This was not computing.

“But…but…Jesus, Ethan, that can’t be unless we’re not in the twenty-first century anymore.”

“We’re not.”

“Okay.” Humor him. His train has gone off the tracks. “What fucking year is this?”

“Thirty-nine something.”

“What?”

“Yeah. The fortieth century.”

This was totally crazy. “I didn’t think they allowed LSD in Wayward Pines.”

She thought that would have earned her a smile at the very least, but his expression remained grim. And then he told her a story that stretched credulity beyond anything a drug trip could conjure.

And yet…she believed it.

“I’ve always sensed this was all artificial, but I thought I was dead and this was some sort of hell until…until…”

“Until what?”

“Until Joanna. Birthing her was real—all too real, if you want to know the truth. But once I held her in my arms, I knew what love was, what connection was. I’d never felt that before.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

Ethan stared at the fire. “I have a son. I never felt him kick in my belly, but I know that connection.”

“But where do we…we as in Homo sapiens…where do we go from here?”

His bleak expression became even bleaker. “Nowhere. It used to be about evolution of the species, but for us it’s become survival of the species.”

“For real? You’re telling me there’s nothing out there but death? Nothing?”

“Afraid so.”

“Jesus! Why is this being kept secret from us? If I’d known, I never would have brought a child into this fucking world!” She leaned toward him, feeling her lips draw back over her teeth. “You! You’ve known about this all along! Why haven’t you—?”

“I’ve known about it for a week or so. I’m not in charge. I have no power.”

“You’re the sheriff, for fuck’s sake!”

Listen to me Karla thought, Like every third word out of my mouth is fuck.

Where had she learned to talk like that? She never did in her everyday life.

But this wasn’t everyday life.

“I’m just a puppet,” Ethan explained.

His expression telegraphed how much he hated to have to say that, to have to be that.

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Because, if we’re going to survive and kill these things, you need to know what we’re facing. We have to eliminate them, and you can never speak of what you’ve seen here.”

“Bullshit! I’ll tell the fucking world!”

“Which means the whopping six hundred plus people in Wayward Pines. And what will that get you?”

“The truth will set you free!”

“It will do nothing of the sort.” His eyes bored into hers. “But it will exponentially increase the suicide rate.”

Jonathan…had he learned the truth? Was that why…?

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Shit. Think about it, Karla: If you realized that every loved one you had ever known—all family and friends except for whatever few you have here—were now dust; that just about every book that had ever enthralled you was now termite turds; that every wondrous city you had ever visited was now in ruins and overrun by vines; that every great iconic painting—the Mona Lisa, Starry Night, Monet’s lilies, whatever—had rotted to powder; that every profession was obsolete, every ambition an empty dream…what would you do?”

“I’d…I’d do what Jonathan did.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d think about Joanna first,”

Yes…yes, of course she would.

“Okay, I’d want to do what Jonathan did…but now that I no longer have…” She couldn’t finish…Joanna to worry about …

“I’m with you. I’ve been privy to this awhile and…on the surface it may look like living, but it’s not, it’s…it’s existing.”

“Well, obviously, the people holding the strings assume that Homo sapiens is worth preserving. Are we?”

He shook his head. “I look at my son and the knee-jerk reaction is an emphatic yes. But preserved for what?”

“Yes…what?” Karla’s smile felt bitter. “So, what’s left to talk about? China’s threat to the economy? Worldwide Islamic jihad? Megabanks controlling the economy? Obamacare? The Tea Party? Occupy Whatever? Looking at it from this perspective, it was all bullshit, wasn’t it?”

Ethan smiled. “Like totally, dude.”

Karla shook her head. “What were we so worried about? Jesus! What were we thinking?”

“We had a future, then. We had possibilities. Knowing that you don’t changes everything.”

She laughed—a harsh, nasty sound. “These aberrations, these…”

“Abbies.”

“Abbies…fuck, sound’s like a little girl’s name. Anyway, maybe these abbies aren’t so degenerate. Sounds to me like they’ve solved all of humanity’s problems.”

“What?”

“No more racism, no more feuding religions, no more gay bashing, no more cross burning, no more serial killers, no more date rape, no more prisons, no more wars.”

Ethan countered with, “Also no more music, no more art, no more new books, no love, no kindness, no empathy. They’re the human equivalent of sharks: kill, eat, and make little abbies.”

“I probably knew a few humans like that back before my abduction. But I don’t remember.”

“Meaning?”

“I know I’m not Karla Lindley, née Williamson.”

She’d expected a reaction from the sheriff, but he didn’t even blink. Obviously he’d come to the same conclusion.

“Who are you then?”

“I don’t know.”

He frowned. “To quote somebody: ‘Aren’t we beyond games here?’”

“No game, I swear. I truly don’t know.” She hefted the Benelli. “I could lay out a cloth and field strip this right here. But you know what? I shouldn’t even know what the fuck the term ‘field strip’ means.” She bit her lip. “And I don’t know where I learned to swear like this.” She pounded her fist on the ground. “Shit-shit-shit!”

“What do you remember?” Ethan asked.

“I remember being a sales rep for Schelling Pharma. I stopped in Wayward Pines for lunch on my way to a conference in Portland. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a hospital bed and they were telling me I’d had a seizure and that Pines would be my home from now on. But now I’m pretty sure that salesperson wasn’t the real me.”

“Maybe you really are Karla Lindley, née Williamson, and a part of your life has been erased.”

“Who would do that?” asked Karla.

“Some long-extinct, super-secret government agency—”

“Yeah, right.”

“—or maybe you yourself.”

“Me?”

“Maybe there are things you don’t want to remember,” Ethan offered.

Now that was creepy. What could she have done that was so abhorrent she’d wiped clean a whole section of her past?

She didn’t want to go there.

“How about you? Who were you”—she couldn’t resist a wicked grin—“or who do you think you were before Wayward Pines?”

His mouth took a sardonic twist. “Very funny. Secret Service.”

“No shit! Guarding the president and all?”

“We’re a branch of the Treasury Department. We do other things besides bodyguard service.”

“Secret Service…always thought that was such a corny name. Then I realized the initials are SS.”

“Don’t go thinking you’re the first to point that out.”

She liked this Ethan Burke. He didn’t seem to belong in the sheriff job. He struck her as more the kind to be leading a revolution against the powers that be than enforcing their rules.

“Can I ask you something?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“How the fuck did you become sheriff?”

“Long story.”

“We’ve got nothing but time.”

Ethan heard the abby before he saw it.

Decade upon decade of falling pine needles had left a deep soft carpet on the forest floor. But the pines also continually dropped small branches that disappeared among the needles. To walk the carpet was to snap the twigs hidden below. No choice.

They’d spent the remainder of the fading daylight hunting for dry, deadfall wood. Karla kept watch with her Benelli while Ethan gathered the small dry branches.

The Karla of today was definitely not the same woman he had come here with just yesterday. And yet, in many ways, she was. The timid soul looking for her lost child had given way to this case-hardened Valkyrie. He’d decided that he liked them both, in different ways, for different reasons. But the Valkyrie was also a little scary. He knew he’d much rather have her with him than against him.

In some ways she bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Pam. But he sensed a core of decency, and even integrity, in Karla that was totally absent in Pam. He felt he could trust Karla to have his back, whereas he’d be afraid to turn his back on Pam.

When dark had fallen they’d taken turns at watch—shotguns ready, fire burning bright.

Ethan nudged Karla. She snapped upright and looked as if she were about to speak when he pressed a finger over her lips and leaned into her ear.

“Something out there,” he said in the tiniest whisper he could manage.

“Abby?” she whispered into his.

He shrugged. They’d know soon enough.

The fire had burned low. Flames still flickered in the embers but shed little light. The outcrop limited their visual field to about 120 degrees, but keeping to the rear of the space beneath offered them the tactical advantage of protection from rear or flanking attack. The only way for an abby or anything else to reach them was a direct frontal assault.

Karla sat to his right, shotgun ready. They’d agreed earlier that each would take the responsibility of covering half the field. If something charged from the left, Ethan would take it while Karla stayed focused on the right, and vice versa. This would prevent them from falling victim to a diversion.

He had the flashlight tucked lens-first inside his shirt for easy access. Despite the cold, his palms grew sweaty on the Winchester. This was where the rubber met the road. Kill or be killed. He didn’t know how coordinated these two abbies might be—and he prayed they still numbered only two. Christ, if they’d added others…

No sense in borrowing trouble. Plenty of that to go around as it was. They weren’t dealing with animals acting on pure instinct here. Abbies were degenerate humans but still had good-size brains. As predatory carnivores, they hunted in packs—not too long ago he’d been the intended prey of a small pack—and he had no doubt this mating pair had plenty of experience hunting together. They probably had some well-practiced strategies of attack.

Then, a little to the left, another twig crack—no, multiple simultaneous cracks, followed by a screech. Not a signal, not a battle cry… this sounded like pain.

“Got him!” Karla cried, raising her shotgun but keeping it aimed right as agreed.

Ethan listened to the thrashing and snarls and grunts, trying to locate the source in the darkness. He wanted to pull out the flashlight for a better view but dared not let go of his weapon.

After ten or fifteen seconds the sounds faded.

Karla said, “Well, I guess we can figure one of them’s down—not down-down but limping and gimping.”

“But which one, do you think? I’ve been assuming a mating pair. The male or the female?”

“I don’t see that it matters,” Karla went on, “If they’re a pair, they’ll stick together, which means the hurt one’s going to slow them both down. By the way, did you see any glowing eyes out there?”

“No, why?”

“Most animals have reflective eyes. I’d have thought the firelight—”

“They’re not animals, remember?” Ethan explained. “They’re us. Or rather, what we’ll become.”

“Oh. Right. Haven’t quite got my head around that yet.”

She shifted to a crouch and began to move toward the opening.

“You’re not thinking of going after it?”

A bitter laugh. “In the dark?” Karla grabbed some of the spare twigs and tossed them onto the fire. “I may have a huge blank spot in my past, but it didn’t leave me stupid. But at first light, we’re on the hunt. Big time.”

Light arrived long before the sun could clear the mountaintops. They came out from beneath the outcrop into the glow of a cold, crystalline blue sky.

Karla grabbed a four-foot branch and Ethan followed her along the safe path marked by the double sticks. He was checking out the needle carpet to their left when he spotted a scuffed-up area.

“I see it.”

He hurried over and stopped before a small pit, two feet across and almost as deep. It had been hidden with a rough mesh of twigs covered by pine needles. Two slim, wickedly sharp stakes jutted up from the bottom.

“I put three punji sticks in each,” she said, poking through the fallen twigs with her branch. “It must have gimped off with the one that went into its foot.”

“Probably through its foot.” Ethan leaned closer. “What’s that stuff on the points?”

“Abby shit.”

He straightened. “Where’d you get that?”

“They’re not fastidious sorts, it seems.” Karla dropped the stick and held her Benelli at ready as she kept watch on their perimeter. “They left piles all around. Just helped myself.”

“So not only is it now lame, but it’s soon going to develop a rip-roaring infection. Nasty,” Ethan said sounding impressed.

“But effective. I wish I could take credit, but the Viet Cong invented the punji stick and that’s the way they used to do it.”

I wish I could take credit…

Really? What sort of person wished they’d dreamed up something like a punji stick? Whatever did they do to you, Karla Williamson?

“Where’d you learn that?” Ethan asked.

“Again, haven’t a clue. But unless abbies know about antibiotics or have the most amazing immune systems in the known universe, our visitor last night is eventually going to develop septicemia, go into shock, and die in a day or two. That is, if we don’t catch up with them first.”

Ethan scanned the ground and spotted drying blood near the edge of the pit, and more farther away.

“That may not prove so hard. I think it’s left us a trail.”

Karla took a look. “Indeed it has. But that can be a two-edged sword.”

“How so?”

“You become so intent following the trail that you drop your guard as to what’s going on around you. That’s when you get hit from the rear,” Karla expounded.

Ethan shook his head in wonder.

“What?” she said.

“Whoever trained you was pretty damn thorough.”

Karla met his gaze. “Maybe I trained myself. Maybe I learned the hard way.”

“Whatever. Point well taken. Good thing there’s two of us,” Ethan noted, “You want to lead?”

“You take point. I’ll follow. You watch the ground, I’ll be watching everything but.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Ethan found the bloody punji stick about ten feet from the pit.

“Looks like it pulled the stick out here.”

The trail led east, weaving among the thick trunks of the pines. As they traveled, the blood splotches shrank to drops, and the drops became fewer and farther apart. Eventually they petered out completely in a thick stand of old trees.

“Where to from here?” Ethan said. “I’m guessing it would have kept heading east.”

Karla didn’t answer. He turned and saw her staring wide-eyed at his hat as she pulled the .357 from her belt.

“Is something—?”

The Benelli fell from her hand as she dropped to one knee and began firing into the air. He heard a blood-freezing screech above him as something heavy and foul-smelling landed on his shoulders, driving him head first into the ground.

Ethan awoke spitting dirt and pine needles and blood. It took him a second to realize that he wasn’t lying on his face, but sitting upright with his back against a tree trunk.

And another second to realize that his wrists were cuffed behind him around that tree.

What the—?

“Karla? Karla! What do you think you’re doing, Karla?”

No reply, no sign of her.

Then he saw the dead abby. A male, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds, lay on its side, facing him, its eyes open, staring, their pale irises shrunken by the death-widened pupils. Its mouth was open too, displaying its double rows of yellow-brown teeth. The usually translucent skin had grown opaque in death. Ethan’s Stetson lay flattened under one of its legs. Blood coated the top of its right foot. Looked like the punji stick had pierced all the way through. Ethan’s shotgun lay on the abby’s far side, a dozen feet away.

His gaze was drawn to the center of the thing’s chest where someone had decorated it with a tight grouping of five oozing holes. Ethan could imagine what its flip side looked like—what was left of it. Five Magnum rounds going through the chest like that would blow the heart, most of the lungs and a good chunk of the thoracic spine out the back, leaving a gaping cavity.

Okay: one down, one to go.

It must have been hiding in the tree. He didn’t know what tipped Karla off, but she’d gone into a modified Weaver stance on one knee and blown the thing to hell.

He looked at the tight grouping. Under pressure, with a monster the likes of which she had never seen dropping from the sky, she put five shots into the center of its chest before it reached him.

Pardon me, but holy fucking shit.

Somebody had trained her really well.

And it dawned on him then why he was cuffed to this tree.

Bait.

Karla wasn’t just cool, she was cold. Maybe not so different from Pam. Hardly a comforting thought.

How long had he been out? How long had she been dangling him here?

He struggled with the manacles, but they were locked tight around his wrists. He gave up and looked around for her. She had to be hiding somewhere. What good was bait if you weren’t around to act when your prey pounced on it?

Pounced…

Shit!

“Karla, please! I know you’re grieving…” Insane with grief? Was that it? Had Joanna’s death pushed her over some emotional cliff? “But there’s got to be another way. You can’t really—”

He cut off, realizing that calling out in a distressed voice probably wasn’t the best way to avoid being pounced upon.

He struggled to his feet. The pine forest shifted around him and he thought for a second he was going to hurl. Concussion symptoms. And his back and shoulders were killing him where the abby had landed.

When his stomach and vision had settled themselves into some semblance of normalcy, he shuffled around the trunk in a slow circle. No sign of anyone or anything. Above, the sun seemed to have reached noon height. Great. Lunch time. And Karla had put him on the menu.

How long was she going to leave him out here? Until night? Into the night? Christ, he’d freeze.

He started to call out again, but bit it back. He could have sworn he saw movement in a clump of pine needles to his right. As he stared, it moved again.

“Karla?”

The thing that burst from the pile of needles was not Karla, but a smaller version of the dead abby on the ground behind him. Mouth open, black talons extended, it accelerated toward him at a furious rate.

“Karlaaaaa!”

A shot cracked from his left and the rushing abby screamed and twisted in the air. It slid to a thrashing halt not ten feet from Ethan. With a howl of rage it rose to its knees, bleeding from its abdomen, but a second shot took it down before it could regain its feet.

As it writhed in agony, clutching its belly, Karla appeared from behind a particularly thick trunk and ambled over. The Smith & Wesson dangled from her hand. She stopped and stared at the abby for a heartbeat or two.

“I figured she wouldn’t be far away, but hiding right there all along.” She shook her head. “How about that?”

“You bitch!” Ethan said. “You—”

“Oh, calm down.” She tucked the pistol into her belt and pulled a key from her pocket as she stepped behind him. “I wasn’t going to let her get to you.”

“You might have missed! That ever occur to you?”

“As a matter of fact…no.”

Behind him, the cuff dropped from his right wrist. Karla stepped back around to his side and held out the key. “Think you can handle the left one?”

He couldn’t help it. He lost control and took a swing at her.

Next thing he knew he was airborne, then he landed on his back. Hard.

She stood over him while he got his wind back. “Okay. Fair enough. I had that coming. But you get only one. Try it again and I hurt you. Okay?”

When Ethan nodded, she held out her hand and helped him up.

“How did you know it was up there?” he said as he brushed himself off.

“The abby?”

“No, the blue jay that landed on me.”

Karla looked around at the writhing female. “They’re not dummies, that’s for sure. The male was supposed to knock us down and then the female was to charge in and help him finish us off. Good plan.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Oh, that. I noticed you had a drop of bright red blood on your hat. I figured it could come from only one place.”

She walked back to the big trunk and retrieved the Benelli, then started walking downhill.

He looked at the moaning abby. Supposedly nothing hurt worse than being gut shot. And it could take days to die.

“Hey,” he said. “You left some unfinished business.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You can’t leave her like this.”

She didn’t look back. “Watch me.”

“You wouldn’t leave the meanest, dumbest animal to die from a gut shot.”

“This is different. Those guts have been digesting my Joanna.”

Ethan walked over and grabbed his fallen Winchester. “I’ll do it then. She’s a mother who lost her baby. It made her a little crazy. Crazy enough to think she could replace it with a human child. Make any sense to you?”

Karla stopped walking and stood there. Finally she turned and walked back, pulling out the .357 as she approached.

“You know something?” she said, looking him in the eye. “You suck. You really suck.”

She raised her pistol and put a bullet between the momma abby’s eyes.

That made eight. Her last round.

As Ethan’s fingers closed around the metallic object in his pocket, Karla began to cry. The sobs took him by surprise. She’d been acting like such a hard case.

“What…what’s wrong?”

She looked at the sky. “They’re both dead but I don’t feel any better. Not one fucking bit better. I thought I’d have some sort of… of…”

“Closure?”

“Yeah, whatever that means. But I still miss my baby so much! I can’t even bury her! My child was eaten!”

“You’ll feel better soon.”

She screamed at the flawless sky. “I’ll never feel better!”

Ethan pulled the taser from his pocket, jammed it against the back of her neck, and hit the trigger.

She dropped and lay twitching at his feet.

“Yes, you will,” he said as he handcuffed her. “Trust me.”

He pulled out the handheld radio Pam had given him—along with the taser—and called in.

“How long will you have to keep her in there?” Ethan said, staring at Karla’s peaceful face through the viewplate of the suspension chamber.

“Not too long,” Pilcher said. “Just long enough to reset her memory to the day she stopped for lunch in town.”

Ethan had learned this was a side effect of resuspension: all events after the last reanimation disappeared from memory. Pilcher had told him that he’d had an extremely difficult integration and had been put back under a number of times. Ethan had to take his word for it—he couldn’t remember a damn thing about those times.

“She won’t remember having a husband or a daughter?”

Pam shook her head. “She’ll be an SWF—single whitebread female who used to be a drug rep.”

“We’ll put her back in the same house,” Pilcher said. That will make it easier for her because her subconscious will find it vaguely familiar. Plus, it’s on the edge of town, which will limit her contacts for a while. She never had many friends, so there aren’t many people who know about her daughter.”

“Everybody knows about her dead husband, though,” Pam said.

“True. She can go back to being the widow Lindley again. And you can guide her through reintegration.”

Pam looked at Ethan. “She told you nothing of her past?”

He shrugged. “She told me what she knew. Her conscious memories are gone, but all her skill sets remained.”

“I could have taken her,” Pam said and started to turn away.

“Dream on, girl,” Ethan told her. “She’d have kicked your ass and used your scalp to mop up your blood.”

She gave him the finger over her shoulder as she walked away.

Ethan was enjoying the sight when Pilcher said, “What bothers me is that we still have no idea who she was.”

Ethan turned to him. “I don’t think we ever will.”

The air smelled of coming snow.

Karla Lindley wandered her new backyard. She found four depressions in the dead grass. The previous owners must have had a swing set or jungle gym here.

She ambled back inside. She felt oddly at home here. Fully furnished with a look and feel she found comforting. She had so many questions about her new circumstances in this town, but not about this house. Everything seemed to be right where she’d have put it.

The only obvious thing missing was a television. She’d have to ask Pam about that. Pam had told her the only dumb question was the one you didn’t ask.

Karla yawned. Sleepy. She didn’t believe in naps, but why not? Nothing else had claim of her time at the moment.

She sat in the recliner but heard a soft crunch as she leaned it back. Reaching down, her fingertips brushed some paper. She pulled it out. An origami snowflake.

Out of nowhere, a monumental tsunami of grief and loss engulfed her and she began to cry—abysmal, wracking sobs from the deepest part of her, and she had no idea why.

end

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

F. PAUL WILSON is the award-winning, bestselling author of fifty-plus books and nearly one hundred short stories spanning science fiction, horror, adventure, medical thrillers, and virtually everything between. His novels regularly appear on the New York Times Bestsellers List. In 1983 Paramount rendered his novel The Keep into a visually striking but otherwise incomprehensible movie with screenplay and direction by Michael Mann.

The Tomb has spent 20 years in development hell at Beacon Films (“Air Force One,” “Thirteen Days,” etc.) as “Repairman Jack.” The plan is to make Repairman Jack a franchise character. Godot might arrive sooner.

Over nine million copies of his books are in print in the United States and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media. His latest thrillers, Cold City and Dark City star his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack. He recently wrote The Proteus Cure with Tracy L. Carbone. Paul resides at the Jersey Shore and can be found on the Web at www.repairmanjack.com.