The Last Town

“If I’d known he’d kill the power to the fence—”

“Don’t go there, Ethan. You can’t play that game. You did what you believed was right. You saved Kate and Harold. Showed us all what our lives are really worth.”

“I wonder,” Ethan said, “how long that sentiment is going to last once people start dying.”

The high beams fired across the dark sheriff’s station. Ethan steered over the curb and took the Bronco right up the sidewalk. He brought it to a stop a few feet from the entrance and climbed out, clicking on a flashlight as he and Brad reached the double doors. Ethan unlocked them, propped one open.

“What are we grabbing?” Brad asked as they ran through the lobby and turned down the corridor to Ethan’s office.

“Anything that shoots.”

Brad ma

He set a Mossberg 930 on the desk and pushed in eight slugs.

Fed thirty rounds into the magazine of a Bushmaster AR-15.

Topped off the mag for his Desert Eagle.

There were more shotguns.

Hunting rifles.

Glocks.

A sig.

A .357 Smith & Wesson.

He got two more handguns loaded, but it was all costing too much time.

KATE HEWSON BALLINGER

She grabbed hold of Harold’s arm. Her husband was taking his group to an entrance a few blocks south, and she was leading hers to the north end of town.

She threw her arms around his neck, kissed him long and deep.

“I love you,” she said.

He gri

“Katie, if something happens—”

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“What?”

“Just get your ass to the cliff.”

Several blocks away, something howled. As she moved toward the crowd of people waiting to follow her to safety, she glanced back and blew Harold a kiss.

He snatched it out of the air.

JENNIFER

In her bedroom, Je

Once in bed, she drank her chamomile tea and watched the candlelight dance across the ceiling.

The tea went down warm.

This had been her routine going on three years now, and she thought it had been wise not to break it tonight. When your world falls apart, cling to the familiar.

She thought of all the other residents of Wayward Pines.

They’d be going through some version of this.

Questioning all they’d been told.

Coming to terms with how grievously they’d been wronged.

What would tomorrow bring?

The window beside her bed was cracked, a stream of chill night air trickling in. She kept her room cold by choice, loving the feel of sleeping in a freezing room under a mountain of blankets.

Through the glass, it was absolutely dark.

The crickets had gone silent.

She set her mug of tea on the bedside table and pulled the blankets up over her legs. There was only a half inch left of the candle on her dresser, and she didn’t really want to be in total darkness just yet.

Let it burn out on its own.

She shut her eyes.

Felt like she was falling.

So many thoughts, so much fear pressing in.

A tangible weight.

Just sleep.

She thought of Teddy. This last year, she’d found herself remembering his smell, his tone of voice, what his hands had felt like on her body, far clearer than her memory of his face.

She was forgetting what he looked like.

Somewhere out in the darkness, a man began to scream.

Je

She’d never heard screaming like this.

Horror and disbelief and incomprehensible agony all compressed into a single outburst that seemed to go on and on and on.

This was the sound of someone being killed.

Had they gone ahead with Kate and Harold’s execution anyway?

The screaming stopped like a spigot had been turned off.

Je

She was on her feet, standing on the cold hardwood floor.

She went to the window, raised it several inches higher.

Cold flooded in.

Someone shouted inside a house nearby.

A door slammed.

Somebody sprinted through the alley.

Another scream echoed through the valley, but this one was different. It was the same sound that monster had made inside the sheriff’s Bronco.

A god-awful, inhuman shriek.

Other screams answered as a strong, pungent smell—like rotten musk—pushed into the bedroom, riding on the breeze.

A low, throaty growl started down in her garden.

Je

She stumbled back, and as she sat down on the mattress, something came through the living-room window downstairs.

Je

The candle flame on the dresser winked out.

She let out a gasp.

The room was pitch black, her hand invisible in front of her face.

She jumped to her feet and staggered toward the bedroom door, banged her knee on a hope chest at the foot of the bed, but managed to stay on her feet.

She reached the door.

Heard the steps creaking as something came up the staircase.

Je

It clicked into the housing.

Whatever had broken into her house was now out in the hallway, the floorboards groaning under its weight.

More noise downstairs.

Clicks and screeches filling the house.

She got down on her hands and knees and crawled across the floor as the footsteps outside her door drew closer. Flattening herself, she squeezed under the bed, her heart pounding against the dusty hardwood floor.

She could hear more of them climbing the stairs.

The door to her bedroom exploded off the hinges.

The footsteps of whatever entered her bedroom made a clicking sound on the hardwood. Like claws.

Or talons.

She smelled it, stronger than ever, a potpourri of dead things—rot and blood and an otherworldly stench beyond her understanding.

She didn’t make a sound.

By the side of the bed, the floorboards cracked, as if with the weight of something kneeling down.

She held her breath.

Something hard and smooth grazed her arm.

She screamed and pulled back.

Her shoulder suddenly felt cold.

She put her hand to it.

It came away wet. She’d been cut by something.

Whispered, “Please God . . .”

There were others in the room now.

Oh, Teddy. She just wanted to see his face. One last time. If this was really the end.

The bed lifted, one of the legs scraping across her side as it crashed into the wall.

In total darkness, she couldn’t move, paralyzed with fear. Her shoulder bled profusely but she couldn’t feel a thing, her body gone numb, mechanical, as the fight-or-flight response kicked in.

They were near her now, standing over her, their alien respirations fast and shallow, like panting dogs.

She put her head between her knees in the brace position.

Two weeks before they’d come on their fateful trip to Wayward Pines, she and Teddy had spent a Saturday at Riverfront Park in Spokane. Thrown a picnic blanket down in the grass and stayed until dusk, reading their books and watching the white water spill over the falls.

And for a second, she captured his face. Not straight on, but from the side. Late sunlight fringing what hair he had left, glinting off the wire-rimmed glasses. He was watching the sun go down over the falls. Content. In the moment. And she had been too.