* * *
They set down in a large clearing surrounded by towering oaks in full autumn color, the rotors stirring the grass in long wavelengths that expanded out from the helicopter in concentric circles.
Ethan gazed across the field while the engines powered down.
Jenkins said, “Would you join me for a little hike, Ethan?”
Pam reached over, unbuckled his lap belt and shoulder harness.
“Cuffs too?” she asked.
Jenkins looked at Ethan. “You’ll behave?”
“Sure.”
Ethan leaned forward so Pam could access the keyhole.
The bracelets popped open.
He stretched his arms out and massaged his wrists.
Jenkins looked at Pope, opened his hand, said, “You bring something for me like I asked?”
The sheriff filled it with a stainless-steel revolver that looked beefy enough to have been bored out for .357 Magnum cartridges.
Jenkins looked dubious.
“I’ve seen you shoot,” Pope said. “You’ll be fine. Anywhere near the heart, or better yet a head shot, and you’re golden.”
Pope reached back behind his seat and came up with an AK-47 outfitted with a hundred-round drum. Ethan watched him switch the mode from safety to three-round burst.
Jenkins pulled off his headset. Then he swept aside the curtain between the passenger cabin and the cockpit, said to the pilot, “We’ll be on channel four, and you’ll hear from us if we need to leave in a hurry.”
“I’ll keep my finger on the engine start.”
“You radio at the first sign of trouble.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Arnie left you a gun?”
“Two, in fact.”
“We won’t be long.”
Jenkins opened the cabin door and climbed out.
After Pope and Pam, Ethan followed, stepping down onto the skid and then into the soft, waist-high grass. He caught up with Jenkins, and the four of them moved quickly across the field, Pope out in front with the assault rifle, Pam bringing up the rear.
It was late in the day—a crisp, golden afternoon.
Everyone seemed twitchy and nervous, like they were out on a patrol.
Ethan said, “Ever since I came to Wayward Pines, you’ve done nothing but fuck with me. What are we doing out here in the goddamned wilderness? I want to know right now.”
They entered the woods, slogging their way through a riot of underbrush.
The noise of birds getting louder.
“But Ethan, this isn’t the wilderness.”
Ethan glimpsed something barely visible through the trees, realized he’d initially missed it because of all the vegetation. He quickened his pace, now clawing his way through the bushes and saplings that comprised the forest understory, Jenkins following closely behind.
When Ethan arrived at the base of it, he stopped and looked up.
For a moment, he didn’t understand exactly what he was staring at. Down low, the beams were wrapped in several feet of dead and living vines, the brown and the green camouflaging the shape of the structure, blending it so seamlessly into the color of the forest that if you looked at it askance, it disappeared.
Higher up, the color of the steel beams showed through—rust so deep it verged on red. Centuries of oxidation. Three oak trees had grown up right through the heart of it, twisting and turning as they climbed, some of the branches even providing support for the girders. Only the framework of the lower six floors still stood—the corroded skeleton of a building. A handful of beams near the top had bent over and curled like ringlets of auburn-colored hair, but most of the steelwork had long ago collapsed into the center to be subsumed by the forest floor.
The sound of birds coming from the ruin was tremendous. Like an avian high-rise. Nests everywhere Ethan looked.
“Remember when you told me you wanted to be transferred to a hospital in Boise?” Jenkins asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ve brought you to Boise. Right into the center of town.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re looking at the U.S. Bank building. Tallest skyscraper in Idaho. That’s where the Secret Service’s Boise field office is located, right? Up on seventeen?”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“I know this looks like a forest floor, but we’re actually standing in the middle of Capitol Boulevard. The state capitol is just a third of a mile through those trees, although to find any trace of it, you’d have to dig.”
“What is this? Some kind of trick?”
“I told you.”
Ethan grabbed the man by his collar and pulled Jenkins in close. “Start making sense.”
“You were put into suspended animation. You saw the units—”
“For how long?”
“Ethan—”
“How. Long.”
Jenkins gave a slight pause, Ethan realizing there was something in him that almost didn’t want to hear the answer.
“One thousand eight hundred fourteen years...”
Ethan let go of Jenkins’s shirt.
“...five months...”
He staggered back.
“...and eleven days.”
Looked at the ruin.
Looked at the sky.
“You should get off your feet,” Jenkins said. “Let’s sit.” As Ethan eased down into a bed of ferns, Jenkins glanced up at Pope and Pam. “You guys give us a minute, all right? But don’t go far.”
They walked off.
Jenkins sat down across from Ethan.
“Your mind is racing,” he said. “Will you try not to think for a minute and just listen to me?”
It had rained here recently—Ethan could feel the dampness of the ground through the pair of brown fatigues they’d dressed him in.
“Let me ask you something,” Jenkins said. “When you think of the greatest breakthrough discovery in history, what comes to mind?”
Ethan shrugged.
“Come on, humor me.”
“Space travel, theory of relativity, I don’t—”
“No. The greatest discovery in the history of mankind was learning how man would become extinct.”
“As a species?”
“Precisely. In 1971, a young geneticist named David Pilcher made a startling discovery. Keep in mind this was before RNA splicing, before DNA polymorphism. He realized the human genome, which is essentially the entirety of our heredity information, which programs cell growth, was changing, becoming corrupted.”
“By what?”
“By what?” Jenkins laughed. “By everything. By what we’d already done to the earth, and by all that we would do in the coming centuries. Mammal extinction. Deforestation. Loss of polar sea ice. Ozone. Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Acid rain. Ocean dead zones. Overfishing. Offshore oil drilling. Wars. The creation of a billion gasoline-burning automobiles. The nuclear disasters—Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. The two-thousand-plus intentional nuclear bomb detonations in the name of weapons testing. Toxic waste dumping. Exxon-Valdez. BP’s Gulf oil spill. All the poisons we put into our food and water every day.
“Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.
“But this man, Pilcher—he saw what was coming. Maybe not specifically, but in broad strokes. Saw that, over successive generations, because of the substantial environmental changes we were bringing to bear, there was the potential for tachytelic anagenesis. To put it in terms you might understand—rapid, macroevolutionary change. What am I saying? From human to something other in thirty generations. To put it in Biblical terms, Pilcher believed a flood was coming, so he decided to build an ark. Are you following me?”
“Not at all.”
“Pilcher thought if he could preserve a number of pure humans before the corruption reached critical mass, they could, in effect, sit out the evolutionary changes that would lead to the destruction of human civilization and our species. But to achieve this, it would require a robust suspended animation technology.
“He set up a lab and dropped his billions into R&D. Nailed it by 1979 and started work fabricating a thousand suspension units. Meanwhile, Pilcher had been looking for a small town to house his cargo, and when he stumbled across Wayward Pines, he knew it was perfect. Secluded. Defendable ground. Closed in by those high mountain walls. Tough to access. Tough to leave. He bought up all the residential and commercial property and started construction on a bunker complex deep in the surrounding mountains. It was a massive project. Took twenty-two years to finish.”
“How did the supplies keep all of this time?” Ethan asked. “Wood and food couldn’t have lasted nearly two thousand years.”
“Until the crew reanimated, the warehouse cavern, the dormitories and surveillance center—literally every square inch of that complex—existed in a vacuum. It wasn’t perfect, and we did lose some material, but enough survived to rebuild the Wayward Pines infrastructure, which time and the elements had completely erased. But the cave system we utilized contained minimal moisture content in the air, and since we were able to kill off ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all bacteria, it turned out to be almost as efficient as suspension itself.”
“So the town is completely self-sufficient?”
“Yes, it functions like an Amish village or a preindustrial society. And as you saw, we have vast stores of staples that we do package and truck into town.”
“I saw cows. Did you create suspension chambers for livestock as well?”
“No, we just put some embryos in stasis. Then used artificial wombs.”
“There was no such thing in 2012.”
“But there was in 2030.”
“Where’s Pilcher now?”
Jenkins grinned.
Ethan said, “You?”
“Your colleagues, Kate Hewson and Bill Evans—when they disappeared in Wayward Pines, they were trying to find me. Some of my business dealings had fallen onto the Secret Service radar. That’s why you’re sitting here right now.”
“You kidnapped federal agents? Locked them away?”
“Yes.”
“And many others...”
“Aside from my handpicked and extravagantly compensated crew, I didn’t think I’d get much in the way of volunteers for an endeavor of this nature.”
“So you abducted people who came to Wayward Pines.”
“Some came to town and I took them there. Others, I sought out.”
“How many?”
“Six hundred and fifty were conscripted over the course of fifty years.”
“You’re a psychopath.”
Pilcher seemed to consider the accusation, his cool, dark eyes intense and thoughtful. It was the first time Ethan had really looked into the man’s face, and he realized the shaved head and good skin belied Pilcher’s age. The man must have been in his early sixties. Possibly older. Ethan had up until this moment written off his utterly precise, controlled manner of speaking as a gimmick, a shrink’s ruse, but now he saw it for what it was—clear evidence of an immense intellect. It struck him that he was sitting out here under a canopy of oak trees with the sharpest mind he’d ever encountered. Something both thrilling and terrifying in that.
Pilcher finally said, “I don’t see it quite that way.”
“No? How then?”
“More like...the savior of our species.”
“You stole people from their families.”
“You still don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
“What Wayward Pines is. Ethan...it’s the last town on earth. A living time capsule for our way of life. For the American Dream. The residents, the crew, me, you...we’re all that’s left of the species Homo sapiens.”
“And you know this how?”
“I’ve sent out a handful of reconnaissance teams over the years. Those who made it back reported the most hostile conditions imaginable. Without the protection and infrastructure of a place like Wayward Pines, no one could survive. Since my crew came out of suspension fourteen years ago, we’ve had a radio beacon continuously transmitting a distress call on every known emergency frequency. I even made the decision to broadcast the coordinates of Pines on the remote chance there were other humans out there. No one’s shown up on our doorstep. No one’s ever made contact. I said this is Boise, but it’s not. There is no Boise, no Idaho, no America. Names no longer mean a thing.”
“How did it all end?”
“We’ll never know, will we? I went to sleep shortly after you so I could still have twenty-five years in Wayward Pines postsuspension. And after 2032, we were all sleeping in the mountain. But if I had to guess? By 2300, I estimated we’d see major abnormalities cropping up. And with diversity being the raw material of evolution, by 2500, we could’ve been classified as a completely different species. Each generation getting closer and closer to something that could thrive in this toxic world. Something less and less human.
“You can imagine the social and economic ramifications. An entire civilization built for humanity crumbling. I’m guessing there were genocides. Maybe the end came over forty terrible years. Maybe it took a thousand. Maybe a full-scale nuclear war wiped out billions in the span of a month. I’m sure many thought it was end times. But we’ll never have that piece of knowledge. All we know is what’s out there now.”
“And what is that?”
“Aberrations. We call them abbies. Those translucent-skinned creatures that nearly killed you in the canyon. Since coming out of suspension, I’ve traveled only three times by helicopter, including today. It’s quite risky. Farthest we got was Seattle. Or where Seattle used to be. We had to haul fuel. Barely made it back. Extrapolating from what I saw, there must be hundreds of millions of those creatures just on this continent alone. They’re predators, of course, and if their population is as healthy as I’m projecting, this would point to a burgeoning deer or other ruminant population. It’s even possible that some descendant of the bison is once again roaming the plains in large numbers.
“Because we can’t leave the valley to conduct research, we have only a small sample from which to gauge which species survived the last two thousand years unscathed. Birds seem to have come through unaffected. Some insects. But then you’ll realize something’s missing. For instance, there are no crickets. No lightning bugs. And in fourteen years, I haven’t seen a single bee.”
“What are these abbies?”
“It’s easy to think of them as mutants or aberrations, but our name for them truly is a misnomer. Nature doesn’t see things through the prism of good or bad. It rewards efficiency. That’s the beautiful simplicity of evolution. It matches design to environment. In trashing our world, we forced our own transformation into a descendant species from Homo sapiens that adapted, through natural selection, to survive the destruction of human civilization. Line our DNA sequences up side by side, and only seven million letters are different—that’s about half of a percent.”
“Jesus.”
“From a logistical standpoint, abbies are hugely problematic. They’re far more intelligent than the great apes and exponentially more aggressive. We’ve captured a handful over the years. Studied them. Tried to establish communication, but it’s all failed. Their speed and strength is more in line with your average Neanderthal man. At sixty pounds, they’re lethal, and some of them grow to two hundred. You were lucky to survive.”
“That’s why you’ve built fences around Wayward Pines.”
“It’s sobering when you realize we aren’t at the top of the food chain anymore. Occasionally, an abby will get through, but we keep the outskirts of town on motion sensors and the entire valley under sniper surveillance, day and night.”
“Then why didn’t you just—”
“Take you out?” Jenkins smiled. “At first, I wanted the people to do it. Once you reached the canyon, we knew a pack of abbies was in the area. You were unarmed. Why waste ammo?”
“But the residents...they don’t know about any of this?”
“No.”
“What do they think?”
“They woke up here after an accident just like you did—reinjured, of course, in the appropriate places. Through our integration program, they come to understand there’s no leaving. And we have rules and consequences to minimize the complications that arise when someone from 1984 lives next door to someone from 2015. For the residents to thrive, to reproduce, they can’t know they’re all that’s left. They have to live like the world is still out there.”
“But it’s not. So what’s the point of the lie? When you bring them out of suspension, why not just tell them, ‘Congratulations! You’re the sole survivors!’”
“We did that very thing with the first group. We’d just finished rebuilding the town, and we brought everyone down to the church and said, ‘Look, here’s the deal.’ Told them everything.”
“And?”
“Within two years, thirty-five percent had committed suicide. Another twenty percent left town and were slaughtered. Nobody married. No one got pregnant. I lost ninety-three people, Ethan. I cannot—no—humanity cannot afford losses on that scale. Not when our species is this endangered, down to our last eight hundred and eleven souls. I’m not saying our method is perfect, but in all these years, and after trying almost everything, it’s proven the most effective system for growing our population that we’ve landed on.”
“But they always wonder, right? About what’s out there? About where they really are?”
“Some do, but we’re an adaptable species. Through conditioning, like good humans, most come to accept their environment, as long as it isn’t completely devoid of hope.”
“I don’t believe they accept that the world is still out there, when you won’t let them see it.”
“You believe in God, Ethan?”
“No.”
“Many did. Adopted moral codes. Created religions. Murdered in the names of gods they’d never seen or heard. You believe in the universe?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, so you’ve been to space. Seen those distant galaxies firsthand?”
“Point taken.”
“Wayward Pines is just a shrunken world. A small town never left. Fear and faith in the unknown still apply, just on a smaller scale. The boundaries of the world you came from were space and God. In Pines, the boundaries are the cliff walls that protect the town, and the mysterious presence in the mountains, aka me.”
“You’re not a real psychiatrist.”
“No formal training, but I play one back in town. I find it helpful to gain the trust of the residents. Stay in touch with the mood of the town. Encourage people in their struggles, their doubts.”
“You had the people murder Beverly.”
“Yes.”
“And Agent Evans.”
“He forced my hand.”
“You’d have had them murder me.”
“But you escaped. Proved yourself even more adept than I first thought.”
“You’ve created a culture of violence.”
“That’s nothing new. Look, when violence becomes the norm, people adapt to the norm. No different than the gladiator games or throwing Christians to the lions or public hangings in the old West. An atmosphere of self-policing isn’t a bad thing.”
“But these people aren’t really free.”
“Freedom is such a twenty-first-century construct. You’re going to sit here and tell me that individual freedom is more vital than the survival of our species?”
“They could decide that for themselves. There’d be dignity in it at least. Isn’t that what makes us human?”
“It’s not their decision to make.”
“Oh, it’s yours?”
“Dignity is a beautiful concept, but what if they made the wrong choice? Like that first group. If there’s no species left to even perpetuate such an ideal, what’s the point?”
“Why haven’t you killed me?”
Pilcher smiled, as if glad that Ethan had finally broached the subject. He cocked his head. “You hear that?”
“What?”
“Silence.”
The birds had gone quiet.
Pilcher pushed against his legs and struggled onto his feet.
Ethan stood too.
The woods had become suddenly still.
Pilcher pulled the gun out of his waistband.
He unclipped his walkie-talkie, brought it to his mouth.
“Pope, come back, over.”
“Yep, over.”
“Where are you, over?”
“Two hundred meters north. Everything all right, over?”
“I’m getting the feeling it’s time we ran for the hills, over.”
“Copy that. On our way. Over and out.”
Pilcher started toward the clearing.
In the distance behind them, Ethan could hear the ruckus of branches snapping and dead leaves crunching as Pope and Pam headed back their way.
“It was a big deal, Ethan, for me to fly you a hundred and thirty miles down here to the Boise ruins. I hope you appreciate the gesture. We’ve had our handful of problem residents over the years, but no one like you. What do you think I value most?”
“No idea.”
Ethan glimpsed the meadow through the oaks.
Red leaves drifted lazily down from the branches above.
“Control. There’s an underground contingent in Pines who presents a fa?ade of compliance. But secretly, they want to take over. Call it...an insurgency. A rebellion. They want to break free, to pull back the curtain, to change how things are done. You understand that would mean the end of Pines. The end of us.”
They came out of the trees, the helicopter a hundred yards away, its bronze paint job gleaming in the late-afternoon sun.
A part of Ethan thinking, What a perfect autumn day.
“What do you want from me?” Ethan asked.
“I want you to help me. You have a rare skill set.”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re implying I have no choice in the matter?”
“Of course you do.”
A breeze lapped at Ethan’s face, the meadow grasses bending toward the ground.
They reached the helicopter and Pilcher pulled open the door, let Ethan climb in first.
When they were seated and facing each other, Pilcher said, “All you’ve wanted to do since you woke up in Pines is leave. I’m giving you that opportunity, plus a bonus. Right now. Look behind you.”
Ethan glanced over his seat into the cargo hold, pushed back the curtain.
His eyes became wet.
It had been right there the whole time—a brutal fragment of knowledge he hadn’t allowed himself to even acknowledge. If what Pilcher said was true, then he would never see his family again. They’d be nothing more than ancient bones.
And now, here they were—Theresa and Ben unconscious and strapped to a pair of stretchers with a black duffel bag between them.
His boy did not look like a boy.
“After I put you into suspension, I looked you up, Ethan. I thought you had real potential. So I went to your family.”
Ethan wiped his eyes. “How long have they been in Pines?”
“Five years.”
“My son...he’s—”
“He’s twelve now. They both integrated well. I thought it would be better to have them stable and settled before attempting to bring you in.”
Ethan didn’t bother to mask the rage behind his voice, his words coming like a growl. “Why did you wait so long?”
“I didn’t. Ethan, this is our third attempt with you.”
“How is that possible?”
“One of the effects of suspension is retrograde amnesia. Each time you reanimate, your mind resets to just before your first suspension. In your case—the car wreck. Although, I suspect some memories linger. Maybe they emerge in dreams.”
“I’ve tried to escape before?”
“First time, you made it across the river, nearly got yourself killed by the abbies. We intervened, saved you. Second time, we made sure you discovered your family, thinking that might help. But you tried to escape with them. Nearly got all of you killed.”
“So this time you went after my mind?”
“We thought if we could induce psychosis, maybe we’d have a chance. Shot you full of some powerful antipsychotics.”
“My headaches.”
“We even tried to use your history of torture against you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have your military file. Your report from what happened to you in Fallujah. We tried to tap into that during Pope’s interrogation.”
“You’re...sick.”
“I never expected you to actually break into the bunker. We were going to just let the abbies have you. But when I saw you standing in suspension, something occurred to me. You’re stubborn. A fighter to the end. You were never going to accept the reality of Wayward Pines. I realized I needed to quit fighting you. That instead of a liability, you might actually be an asset.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me about all of this?”
“Because I didn’t know what you would do with the knowledge, Ethan. Suicide? Escape? Try to make it on your own? But I realize now that you’re one of the rarities.”
“What do you mean?”
“The people in town, for the most part, can’t handle the truth of what’s out there. But you...you can’t handle the lie. The not knowing. You’re the first resident I’ve ever shared any of this with. Of course, it’s crushed your family to see the difficulty you’ve had.”
Ethan turned back around and glared at Pilcher. “Why did you bring them here?”
“I’m giving you a choice, Ethan. They know nothing about the world outside of Pines. But you do. Say the word, and I’ll leave you here in this field with your family. There’s a duffel bag packed with food and supplies, even a few weapons. You’re a man who wants things on his terms, and I respect that. If that’s what’s most important to you, have at it. You can reign in hell here on the outside, or serve in heaven, back in Pines. Your choice. But if you come back to Pines, if you want that safety and support for your family, for yourself, it’s on my terms. And my terms, Ethan, come with severe penalties. If you fail me, if you betray me, I will make you watch while I take your son and—”
The sudden noise cut Pilcher off. At first, Ethan thought someone had fired up a jackhammer out in the forest, but then the fear hit him right between the eyes.
It was the tat-tat-tat of the AK.
Pam’s voice exploded over the radio. “Start the chopper! They’re coming!”
Pilcher glanced into the cockpit. “Get us out of here,” he said.
“Working on it, boss.”
Ethan heard the turbines of the BK117 starting up, the thunderous boom of Pam’s shotgun. He moved over to the window, staring back toward the woods as the gunfire grew louder.
Already, it was too noisy inside the helicopter to talk, so he tugged on his headset and motioned for Pilcher to do the same.
“What do you want me to do?” Ethan asked.
“Help me run Pines. From the inside. It’ll be a helluva job, but you were made for it.”
“Isn’t that what Pope’s doing?”
Ethan saw movement in the trees as the turbines began to whine, the cabin vibrating as the RPMs increased.
Pope and Pam broke out of the forest, backpedaling into the clearing.
Three abbies leaped out of the trees and Pope cut two of them down with a long burst of full auto while Pam put a pair of slugs through the third one’s chest.
Ethan lunged to the other side of the cabin and looked out the window.
“Pilcher.”
“What?”
“Give me your gun.”
“Why?”
Ethan tapped the glass, motioning to a pack of abbies emerging on the far side of the field—at least four of them, all barreling toward Pam and Pope at a fast, low sprint that utilized all four appendages.
“You with me, Ethan?”
“They’re going to be killed.”
“Are you with me?”
Ethan nodded.
Pilcher slapped the .357 into his hand.
Ethan ripped off his headset and shouted into the cockpit, “How long?”
“Thirty seconds!”
Ethan cranked open the door and jumped down into the grass.
The noise and the wind from the rotors screaming in his ear.
Pope and Pam were fifty yards away and still backing toward the chopper while laying down a torrent of suppressing fire.
They’d killed a dozen of them already—pale bodies strewn across the grass—and still more were coming.
More than Ethan could count.
He ran in the opposite direction.
Twenty yards past the copter, he stopped and planted his feet shoulder-width apart.
Stared at the revolver in his hand—a double-action Ruger with a six-shot cylinder.
He raised it.
Sighted down the barrel.
Five of them charging at full speed.
He thumbed back the hammer as frantic machine-gun and twelve-gauge fire roared over the turbines.
The abbies were thirty feet away, Ethan thinking, Anytime you want to start shooting, that might be a good idea. And no double taps. You need single-fire kill shots.
He drew a bead on the one in the center, and as it came up into the crest of its stride, squeezed off a round that sheered away the top of its head in a fountain of gore.
At least he was shooting hollow points.
The other four kept coming, unfazed.
Twenty feet away.
He dropped the two on the left—one shot apiece through the face.
Hit the fourth one in the throat.
The last abby inside of ten feet now.
Close enough to smell it.
Ethan fired as it jumped, the bullet only grazing its leg, Ethan adjusting his aim as the abby rocketed toward him.
Pulled back the hammer, pulled the trigger as the monster hit, teeth bared, its scream at this proximity louder than the turbines.
The bullet went through its teeth and tore out of the back of its skull in a spray of bone and brain as it crashed into Ethan.
He didn’t move.
Stunned.
His head jogged so hard that flashes of light were detonating everywhere he looked, and his hearing was jumbled—muffled and slowed down so that he could pick out all the individual pieces of sound that built the symphony of chaos around him.
Shotgun blasts.
The AK.
The spinning rotors.
The screams of the abbies.
Telling himself, Get up, get up, get up.
Ethan heaved the dead weight of the abby off his chest and sat up. Tried to look across the field, but his vision was stuck on blurry. He blinked hard several times and shook his head, the world slowly crystallizing like someone turning the focus knobs on a pair of binoculars.
Dear God.
There must have been fifty of them already in the clearing.
Dozens more breaking out of the trees with every passing second.
All moving toward the helicopter in the center of the field.
Ethan struggled up onto his feet, listing left in the wake of the hit, his center of balance annihilated.
He stumbled toward the helicopter.
Pam was already inside.
Pope standing several feet out from the skid, trying to hold the abbies off. He had shouldered the rifle and was taking precision shots now, Ethan figuring he must be down to the final rounds of his magazine.
Ethan patted him on the shoulder as he stepped onto the skid, screamed in his ear, “Let’s go!”
Pilcher opened the door and Ethan scrambled up into the cabin.
He buckled himself in, glanced out the window.
An army of abbies flooded across the field.
Hundreds of them.
Ten seconds from the chopper and closing in like a mongrel horde.
As he put on his headset, Pilcher pulled the cabin door closed, locked it, said, “Let’s go, Roger.”
“What about the sheriff?”
“Pope’s staying.”
Through his window, Ethan saw Arnold throw down his AK and try to open the door, struggling with the handle but it wouldn’t turn.
Pope stared through the glass at Pilcher, a beat of confusion flashing through the lawman’s eyes, followed quickly by recognition.
Then fear.
Pope screamed something that never had a chance of being heard.
“Why?” Ethan said.
Pilcher didn’t avert his eyes from Pope. “He wants to rule.”
Pope beat his fists against the window, blood smearing across the glass.
“Not to rush you or anything, Roger, but we’re all going to die if you don’t get us out of here.”
Ethan felt the skids pivot and go airborne.
He said, “You can’t just leave him.”
Ethan watched as the chopper lifted off the ground, the sheriff hooking his left arm around the skid, fighting to hang on.
“It’s done,” Pilcher said, “and you’re my new sheriff. Welcome aboard.”
A mob of abbies swarmed under Pope, jumping, clawing, but he’d established a decent grip on the skid and his feet dangled just out of reach.
Pilcher said, “Roger, take us down a foot or two if you wouldn’t mind.”
The chopper descended awkwardly—Ethan could tell the pilot hadn’t flown in years—lowering Pope back down into the madness on the ground.
When the first abby grabbed hold of Pope’s leg, the tail of the chopper ducked earthward under the weight.
Another one latched onto his other leg, and for a horrifying second, Ethan thought they would drag the chopper to the ground.
Roger overcorrected, climbing fast to a twenty-foot hover above the field.
Ethan stared down into Pope’s wild eyes.
The man’s grip on the skid had deteriorated to a single handhold, his knuckles blanching under the strain, three abbies clinging to his legs.
He met Ethan’s eyes.
Screamed something that was drowned out by the roar of the turbines.
Pope let go, fell for half a second, and then vanished under a feeding frenzy.
Ethan looked away.
Pilcher was staring at him.
Staring through him.
The helicopter banked sharply and screamed north toward the mountains.