“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, sm
earing 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.”