Pines

  His legs were free.

  He threw his right one over the side of the railing, stretching and straining to reach the wall, but he was three inches short.

  Ethan lay back on the gurney, taking a cold, hard look for the first time at how well and truly fucked he was—drugged, chained up, and on the verge of being wheeled into an operating room where they were going to do God knows what to him.

  He had to admit that the last time he’d woken in the hospital and spoken to Dr. Jenkins he’d run through a patch of self-doubt, wondering, fearing that maybe he had suffered some injury that had impacted him neurologically.

  Skewed his perception of people and space and time.

  Because nothing in Wayward Pines made sense.

  But these past few moments—Nurse Pam’s sociopathic behavior, their refusal to heed his objections to surgery—had confirmed it: there was nothing wrong with him beyond the fact that people in this town meant him harm.

  He’d already experienced plenty of fear, homesickness, and hopelessness since arriving in Wayward Pines, but now he bottomed out into complete despair.

  For all he knew, death waited for him on the other side of those doors.

  Never see Theresa again. Never see his son.

  Just the possibility of it was enough to bring tears to his eyes, because he’d failed them. Failed them both in so many ways.

  His physical absence. His emotional absence.

  He’d brushed up against this level of horror and regret only one other time in his life—Aashif and the Golan slum.

  Lingchi.

  Now the fear was beginning to fully consume him, dull his ability to process information and properly react.

  Or maybe it was the drug finally breaking past the blood/brain barrier and taking control.

  Thinking, God, don’t crack up now. Must stay in control.

  He heard the grating screech of the elevator doors opening ten feet behind him, followed by the approach of soft, quick footsteps.

  Ethan tried to crane his neck to see who was coming, but by the time he did the gurney was already in motion, someone rolling him back toward the elevator.

  He stared up into a beautiful, familiar face, the prominent cheekbones igniting his recognition. In his current state, it took him five seconds to place her as the missing bartender from the pub.

  She pushed him into the elevator car, working to fit the gurney inside.

  She punched one of the buttons.

  Her face was drawn and pale, and she wore a navy poncho that dripped water onto the floor.

  “Come on, come on.” She kept driving her finger into the lighted B.

  “I know you,” Ethan said, but he still couldn’t recall her name.

  “Beverly.” She smiled but it was riddled with nerves. “Never got that big tip you promised. Jesus, you look terrible.”

  The doors started to close—another long, groaning screech worse than nails on a chalkboard.

  “What’s happening to me?” he asked as the pulleys strained to lower the car.

  “They’re trying to break your mind.”

  “Why?”

  She lifted the poncho and pulled a handcuff key from the back pocket of her jeans.

  Her fingers trembling.

  It took her three attempts to finally get the key into the lock.

  “Why?” Ethan asked again.

  “We’ll talk when we’re safe.”

  The bracelet popped open.

  Ethan sat up, grabbed the key out of her hand, and started on the other one.

  The elevator descended at a crawl between the fourth and third floor.

  “If it stops and someone gets on, we fight. You understand?” she asked.

  Ethan nodded.

  “No matter what happens, you cannot let them take you back into that operating room.”

  The second bracelet sprung open and Ethan climbed down off the gurney.

  Felt reasonably stable on his feet, no sign of the drug’s effect.

  “Are you gonna be OK to run?”

  “They just drugged me. I won’t be able to cover much ground.”

  “Shit.”

  A bell above the elevator doors dinged.

  Third floor.

  It kept descending.

  “When?” Beverly asked.

  “Five minutes ago. But it was a muscular injection, not intravenous.”

  “What was the drug?”

  “I don’t know, but I heard them say I’d be unconscious within ten minutes. Well...more like eight or nine now.”

  The car reached the lobby, still dropping.

  Beverly said, “When the doors open, we’re heading left, all the way down the corridor. There’s a door at the end that will put us out on the street.”

  The elevator shuddered to a stop.

  For a long moment, the doors didn’t move.

  Ethan shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, ready to explode out into the corridor if there were people waiting for them, adrenaline flooding his system with that electrified alertness he always got just before a mission as the rotors spun up.

  The doors creaked open an inch, froze for ten seconds, and then slowly screeched open the rest of the way.

  “Wait,” Beverly whispered. She stepped over the threshold and peeked out. “Clear.”

  Ethan followed her out into a long, empty corridor.

  Checkered linoleum tile ran for at least a hundred and fifty feet to some doors at the far end, everything spotless and quietly gleaming under the harsh fluorescent light.

  A door slam in the distance stopped them in their tracks.

  Footsteps became audible, though it was impossible to determine how many people were coming.

  “They’re heading down the stairwell,” Beverly whispered. “Come on.”

  She turned and ran in the opposite direction, Ethan following, trying to dampen the slap of his bare feet on the linoleum and grunting against the jarring agony of what he could only assume were bruised ribs.

  They came to a vacant nurses’ station as a door behind them toward the far end of the corridor banged open.

  Beverly accelerated, turning and sprinting down one of the intersecting corridors, Ethan fighting to keep up, venturing a quick glance over his shoulder as he ran, but he was around the corner too soon to see anything.

  This wing was empty and shorter by half.

  Midway down, Beverly stopped and opened a door on the left-hand side.

  Tried to usher Ethan through, but he shook his head, leaned in, and whispered into Beverly’s ear instead.

  She nodded and rushed into the room, pulling the door closed after her.

  Ethan walked to the door on the opposite side of the hall.

  The handle turned. He slipped inside.

  It was empty, draped in darkness, and, by what little light streamed in from the corridor, appeared to have the same layout as the room they’d kept him in up on the fourth floor.

  He shut the door as quietly as he could manage and turned into the bathroom.

  Groped in the dark until his finger found the switch.

  Flicked the light.

  There was a hand towel hanging from a rack beside the shower. He grabbed it, wrapped it around his hand, and faced the mirror.

  Cocked his arm back.

  You have thirty seconds, maybe less.

  But his reflection derailed him.

  Oh God. He’d known it was bad, but Pope had beaten the shit out of him—his upper lip twice the size, his nose giant and bruised like a rotted strawberry, a gash across his right cheek closed with what must have been twenty stitches, and his eyes...

  A miracle that he could see at all. They were black and purple and encased in folds of swollen skin like he was in the throes of a near-fatal allergic reaction.

  No time to dwell on it.

  He punched the lower right corner of the mirror and held his towel-wrapped fist against the broken glass so it didn’t all fall out at once.

&nbsp
; He’d struck a perfect blow—minimal damage, large fractures. He quickly picked the pieces away with his free hand, laid them out on the sink, and chose the largest of the bunch.

  Then he unwrapped his right hand, hit the lights, and felt his way back out into the bedroom.

  There was nothing to see but a razor-thin line of light beneath the door.

  Edging forward, he pressed his ear against it.

  The sound was faint, but he could hear the distant noise of doors opening and closing.

  They were checking every room, and the slams sounded far enough away that he thought they were probably still in the main corridor.

  Hoped he wasn’t wrong about that.

  He wondered if the elevator doors were still open. If they saw the car down here, no doubt they’d surmise he’d fled to the basement. He and Beverly should have sent the elevator back to four, but there was no way to fix their oversight now.

  Reaching down, he found the doorknob and grasped it.

  As he turned it slowly, he tried to steady his breathing, to drive his BPMs back down into a range that didn’t make him feel on the verge of fainting.

  When the latch had cleared its housing, Ethan gave the gentlest tug.

  The door swung in two inches, the hinges mercifully silent.

  A long triangle of light fell across the checkered linoleum under his bare feet.

  The sounds of the door slams were louder.

  He held the mirror shard and slid it between the open door and the jamb, inching it farther and farther, millimeter by millimeter, until it showed a reflection of the corridor behind him.

  Empty.

  Another door swung closed.

  Between the slams, there was the impact of rubber-soled shoes on the floor and nothing else. One of the fluorescent bulbs nearby was malfunctioning, flickering intermittently and throwing the corridor into alternating bursts of darkness and light.

  The shadow preceded the person—a faint darkening across the floor in the vicinity of the nurses’ station—and then Nurse Pam strolled into view.

  She stopped at the intersection of the four corridors and stood absolutely still, holding something in her right hand that Ethan couldn’t identify from this distance, although one end of it cast off shimmers of reflected light.

  Thirty seconds elapsed, and then she turned and started down Ethan’s corridor, walking carefully, purposefully, in short, controlled strides and with a smile that seemed too wide to fit across her face.

  After several steps, she stopped, brought her knees together, and knelt down to inspect something on the linoleum. With her free hand, she wiped a finger across the floor and held it up, Ethan realizing with a jolt of anxiety what it was, how the nurse had known which corridor to take.

  Water from Beverly’s raincoat.

  And it was going to lead her straight to the door across the hall. To Beverly.

  Nurse Pam stood up.

  Slowly, she began to walk, studying the linoleum as she crossed the tiles.

  Ethan saw that the object in her hand was a syringe and needle.

  “Mr. Burke?”

  He hadn’t expected her to speak, and the sound of her bright, malignant voice echoing down the empty corridors of the hospital put a sliver of ice in the small of his back.

  “I know you’re near. I know you can hear me.”

  She was getting too close for comfort, Ethan fearing that any second now, she’d spot the mirror in his hand.

  Ethan drew the shard of glass back into the room and eased the door closed with even greater care and precision.

  “Since you’re my new favorite patient,” the nurse continued, “I’m going to make you a special deal.”

  Ethan noted something at the base of his skull—a warmth beginning to stretch down the length of his spine, through the bones of his arms and legs, points of heat radiating into the tips of his fingers and toes.

  He could also feel it behind his eyes.

  The drug was starting to take effect.

  “Be a good sport, come out right now, and I’ll give you a present.”

  He couldn’t hear her footsteps, but her voice was getting progressively louder as she moved deeper into the corridor.

  “The present, Mr. Burke, is anesthesia for your surgery. I hope you understand that if it hasn’t hit you already, the drug I gave you ten minutes ago will be rendering you unconscious any moment now. And if I have to spend an hour searching every room to find you, that’s going to make me very, very angry. And you don’t want to see me very, very angry, because do you know what will happen? When we finally find you, we won’t roll you into surgery right away. We’ll let the current drug that’s in your system wear off. You’ll wake up on the operating table. No straps, no handcuffs, but you won’t be able to move. This is because I’ll have injected you with a monster dose of Suxamethonium, which is a paralytic drug. Have you ever wondered what surgery feels like? Well, Mr. Burke, you’ll get your own private show.”

  The way her voice carried, Ethan knew she was standing in the middle of the corridor now, less than four feet away from him on the other side of the door.

  “The only movement you’ll be capable of performing is blinking. You won’t even be able to scream as you feel the cutting and sawing and drilling. Our fingers inside you. The surgery will take hours, and you will be alive, awake, and fully alert for every agonizing second of it. It’s the stuff of horror fiction.”

  Ethan put his hand on the doorknob, the flush of the drug lifting now, enveloping his brain, flooding into the tips of his ears. He wondered how much more of this he could stand before his legs gave out.

  Turn it slowly, Ethan. Turn it so, so slowly.

  Tightening his grip on the doorknob, he waited for Nurse Pam to speak again, and when she finally did, he began to turn.

  “I know you can hear my voice, Mr. Burke. I’m standing just outside the room where you’re hiding. Are you in the shower? Under the bed? Perhaps standing behind the door, hoping I’ll walk blindly past?”

  She laughed.

  The latch cleared.

  He fully believed she was standing with her back to him, facing Beverly’s room, but if she wasn’t?

  “You have ten seconds to come out, and then my generous offer of anesthesia will expire. Ten...”

  He edged the door back.

  “Nine...”

  Three inches.

  “Eight...”

  Six inches.

  He could see into the corridor again, and the first thing he spotted was the splash of auburn hair down Nurse Pam’s back.

  She stood straight ahead of him.

  “Seven...”

  Facing Beverly’s door.

  “Six...”

  The needle gripped like a knife in her right hand.

  “Five...”

  He kept tugging the door back, letting it glide silently on the hinges.

  “Four...”

  Stopped it before it banged into the wall, now standing in the threshold.

  “Three...”

  He studied the floor to make sure he wasn’t throwing a shadow, but even if he had been, that flickering fluorescent bulb would have masked it.

  “Two, and one, and now I’m angry. Very, very angry.” The nurse lifted something out of her pocket, said, “I’m down in the basement, west wing, pretty sure he’s here. I’ll wait until you arrive, over.”

  A walkie-talkie belched static and a male voice answered, “Copy that, on our way.”

  The drug was hitting Ethan hard now, his knees softening, his sight beginning to come off the rails in bursts of blurriness and double vision.

  More people would be here momentarily.

  He needed to do this now.

  Telling himself go, go, go, but he wasn’t sure if he even had the strength or presence of mind.

  He backed several steps into the room to lengthen his runway, took a long, deep breath, and went for it.

  Seven paces covered in two seconds.

&
nbsp; Collided into the nurse’s back at full speed, driving her across the corridor and slamming her face-first into the concrete wall.

  It was a hard, devastating hit that had taken her completely off guard, and so the speed and accuracy of her reaction surprised him, her right arm swinging back, the needle stabbing him through the side.

  Deep, penetrating, blinding pain.

  He stumbled back, listing, unsteady on his feet.

  The nurse spun around, blood sheeting down the right side of her face where it had met with the concrete, the needle cocked back, and charged him.

  He could have defended himself if he’d been able to see worth a damn, but his eyesight was lagging, drawing images out across his field of vision like an ecstasy trip.

  She lunged and he tried to parry back but misjudged the distance, the needle spearing him through the left shoulder.

  The pain when she jerked it back out nearly brought him to his knees.

  The nurse caught him with a perfectly placed front kick to the solar plexus, and the sheer force behind it punched him back into the wall and drove the breath out of his lungs. He’d never hit a woman in his life, but as Pam moved in for more, he couldn’t shake the thought that it would feel so satisfying to connect his right elbow with this bitch’s jaw.

  His eyes locked on the needle in her hand, thinking, No more of that, please God.

  Brought his arms up to defend his face, but they felt like boulders.

  Sluggish and cumbersome.

  The nurse said, “Bet you’re wishing you’d just come out when I asked nicely, huh?”

  He lashed out at half speed with a wide-arcing hook that she easily ducked, firing back with a lightning-fast jab that rebroke his nose.

  “You want the needle again?” she asked, and he would’ve charged, tried to get her on the floor, pin her underneath his weight, but proximity, considering the needle and his diminished senses, seemed like a bad idea.

  Pam laughed, said, “I can tell you’re fading. You know, this is actually kind of fun.”

  Ethan struggled to slide away against the wall, shuffling his feet to get out of range, but she tracked his movement, staying in front of him and aligned for another strike.

  “Let’s play a little game,” she said. “I poke you with the needle, and you try to stop me.”

  She lunged, but there was no pain.