Pines (22 page)

He ripped around the corner.

Blessed darkness.

Kept to the sidewalk, hauling ass under the pitch-black shade of the pines.

The next street stood empty as well, and a quick glance over his shoulder confirmed only a handful of pursuing lights, still a good twenty seconds back if he had to guess.

Ethan dropped another block west and then barreled south.

The street terminated.

He’d come to the edge of town.

Stopped in the middle of the road, bent over with his hands on his knees, gasping for air.

People were coming, both behind him and now from the west.

Figured he could run two blocks uphill back to Main, but that seemed unwise.

Get moving. You’re squandering your cushion of distance.

Straight on, a Victorian mansion backed up against the surrounding forest.

Yes.

His legs burned as he pushed on, crossing the street, bolting alongside the house.

Three strides before he reached the pines, the voice of a child shouted, “He’s going into the woods!”

Ethan looked back.

Twenty or thirty people swung around the corner of the mansion, flashlights blazing, running toward him as one, and for a moment, Ethan wondered why their proportions seemed all wrong.

Legs too short, heads too big, lights held much closer to the ground.

Children.

It’s because they’re all children.

He rushed into the trees, gulping air perfumed with the bittersweet fragrance of wet pine.

It had been hard enough to see in town, but inside the forest, it was impossible.

He had to flick on the flashlight, let its wobbly beam steer him between trees, over rotten logs, saplings and low-hanging branches whipping at his face.

The children entered the wood on his heels, footsteps crushing wet leaves, snapping fallen branches. He had a vague idea of where the river might be, thinking if he kept moving right, he couldn’t miss it, but already he felt disoriented, his sense of direction unraveling like a poorly tied knot.

A girl screamed, “I see him!”

Ethan glanced back, just a quick turn of the head, but his timing couldn’t have been worse—he crossed through a patch of deadfall, his feet entangling in a mass of twisted
branches and roots that slammed him to the ground, stripping the flashlight and machete from his hands.

Footsteps all around him.

Approaching from every side.

Ethan struggling to pick himself up, but a vine had ensnared his right ankle, and it took him five seconds to rip free.

The flashlight had gone dark when he’d fallen, and he couldn’t see it or the machete or anything. He ran his hands across the ground, desperate to find them, but all he grasped were roots and vines.

He clambered to his feet, blindly fighting his way through the deadfall as the lights and the voices closed in.

Without a flashlight, he was hamstrung.

Reduced to jogging with hands outstretched—his only defense against plowing into a tree.

Frantic beams of light crisscrossed in front of him, giving fleeting glimpses of the terrain ahead—a pine forest choking to death on underbrush, long overdue for a cleansing fire.

Children’s laughter—carefree, giddy, maniacal—filled the woods.

A nightmare version of some game from his youth.

Ethan stumbled out into what he figured for a field or meadow—not that he could see a damn thing, but the rain now hammered him with greater intensity, as if he were no longer protected under the forest’s umbrella.

Up ahead, he thought he heard the rush of the river, but then lost it to the sound of hard breathing coming up behind him.

Something crashed into his back—not a particularly jarring blow, but enough to unbalance him for the next.

And the next...

And the next...

And the next...

And the next and then Ethan hit the ground, face jammed in mud, everything drowned out by the laughter of the children, a full-body assault coming from every side, every angle—superficial punches that didn’t stand a chance of hurting him, the sting of shallow cuts, the occasional and far more disconcerting heft of blunt objects striking his head, and all of it, with every passing second, increasing in frequency, like he was being attacked by a school of piranhas.

Something stabbed into his side.

He cried out.

They mocked him.

Another stab—oceanic pain.

His face flushed with rage, and he jerked his left arm out of someone’s grasp, and then his right.

Got his palms on the ground.

Pushed himself up.

Something hard—a rock or a log—thudded into the back of his head hard enough to jog his fillings.

His arms gave out.

Face-first back in the mud.

More laughter.

Someone said, “Hit him in the head!”

But he pushed up again, screaming this time, and it must have taken the children by surprise, because for a split second the blows stopped coming.

It was all the time he needed.

Ethan got his feet underneath him and forced himself up, took a swing at the first face he saw—a tall boy of twelve or thirteen—and knocked him out cold.

“Get back,” he seethed.

There was enough light that for the first time he could actually see what he was dealing with—two dozen children from seven to fifteen years of age encircled him, most holding flashlights and a variety of makeshift weapons—sticks,
rocks, steak knives, one with a broom handle with the mop end broken off leaving a jagged splinter of wood.

They looked as if they’d dressed up for Halloween—a ragtag assembly of homemade costumes pieced together from their parents’ wardrobes.

Ethan was almost grateful he’d lost the machete, because he would’ve hacked these little shits into pieces.

There was an opening off to Ethan’s left—a weak link in the circle he might have charged through over two children who stood no taller than his waist.

But then what?

They’d give chase, run him to death in these woods like an injured deer.

Turning slowly, he locked eyes with the most intimidating of the bunch, a post-pubescent, blond-haired boy armed with a tube sock stretched to the max, its pocket weighted with an ominous-looking sphere—perhaps a baseball or a globe of solid glass. The teen wore a suit that must have belonged to his father—several sizes too large, the sleeves hanging down to his fingertips.

Ethan roared, approaching the boy with his right arm cocked back, and he would’ve hit him but the kid backpedaled, tripped, fell, and then ran off into the woods the moment he regained his feet, shouting in full voice that they’d found him.

Half the children, upon seeing their leader turn tail and flee, followed suit.

Those who didn’t, Ethan charged, feeling a bit like an elk trying to scatter a pack of predatory coyotes, but eventually he chased off all but one, the children screaming as they vanished into the pines as if the devil was after them.

The boy who stayed behind watched Ethan through the rain.

He might have been the youngest of the bunch—seven, eight at most.

He’d dressed up like a cowboy—red-and-white hat, boots, string tie, and a Western-style button-down.

He held a flashlight and a rock and stood there with no expression at all.

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” Ethan asked.

The boy shook his head, water dripping off the brim of his hat. He looked up at Ethan, and as the flashlight beam illuminated the freckles on his face, Ethan could see that he’d lied. He was afraid, his bottom lip trembling uncontrollably. It was the bravest face the boy could muster, and Ethan couldn’t help but admire him, wondering what had prompted him to make this stand.

“You should quit running, Mr. Burke.”

“How do you know my name?”

“You could have a beautiful life here, and you don’t even see it.”

“What is this place?”

“Just a town,” the boy said.

Adult voices rang out, a new squadron of flashlights twinkling in the pines like emerging stars.

“Where’s your home?” Ethan asked.

The boy tilted his head, puzzled at the question.

“What do you mean?”

“Where’d you live before Wayward Pines?”

“I’ve always lived here.”

“You’ve never left this town?” Ethan asked.

“You can’t leave,” the boy said.

“Why?”

“You just can’t.”

“I don’t accept that.”

“That’s why you’re going to die.” The boy suddenly screamed, “He’s over here! Hurry!”

Lights broke out of the pines into the meadow.

Ethan ran, crashing into the forest on the other side, not even bothering to shield his face or glance back at his pursuers, thrashing through the darkness, losing all sense of time and direction, struggling to keep his head against the chord of absolute panic that threatened to drop him to his knees, curl him up in the fetal position, and finally break his mind.

Because of the fear.

Because of the pain.

Because none of this made a goddamned inkling of sense.

It wasn’t the sound of the river that stopped him but the smell.

A sudden sweetness in the air.

The terrain dropped away and he scrambled down a muddy bank into frigid, raging water, the river pouring into his boots like liquid steel.

Despite the freezing shock of it, he refused to falter, just kept staggering in, away from the bank, deeper and deeper into the current.

The water reached his waist, Ethan gasping as it chilled him to the core, the current fierce, desperate to drag him downstream.

He took slow, careful steps, the stones on the bed shifting under his weight and tumbling slowly downriver.

Between each step, he braced himself, leaning into the force of the water.

Midway across, it rose to his chest.

The current swept him off his feet.

Driving Ethan downstream.

In the near darkness, he had no idea what boulders jutted out of the channel, just knew that slamming into one could kill him.

He struggled across the current using a hard, deliberate sidestroke.

His arms worked fine, but with his waterlogged boots he couldn’t kick with any efficiency or power.

Their weight pulled him under more than they propelled him.

After a frenzied minute, his muscles on the brink of mutiny, he felt the soles of his boots graze the bottom.

Standing, he leaned into the current, the water level dropping back to his waist.

A dozen more steps brought it down to his knees, and then he jogged the rest of the way out of the river, collapsing on the bank.

Rolled onto his side, breathless, spent, shivering.

He stared back across the channel.

Everywhere, new beams of light appeared.

He could hear people shouting, thought it was possible they were calling his name, but from this distance, the crushing noise of the whitewater destroyed any chance of hearing them distinctly.

Ethan wanted to move, knew he had to, but he couldn’t make himself scramble back onto his feet. Just needed another minute to lie there and breathe.

There were more lights on the opposite shore now than he could count, the highest concentration thirty yards upriver at his point of entry, but more and more, people seemed to be venturing north and south of where he’d gone in, light beams sweeping out over the current in a dozen places.

He rolled over onto his knees.

Hands shaking with cold like he’d been afflicted with palsy.

He began to crawl, fingers groping through wet sand.

Just that minute of lying motionless had stiffened his joints.

When he came to the next large rock, he reached up, got a handhold, and pulled himself onto his feet.

His boots sloshed with water.

There must have been a hundred people across the river, and still more lights appearing on the bank every second. Most beams reached only the midpoint, but a handful carried the potency to shoot all the way across to Ethan’s side, their compact tubes of light clearly visible with the rain falling through them.

Ethan scrambled away from the water, hoping to put more distance between himself and the lights, but after ten feet, he reached a sheer wall of rock.

He moved alongside it as the voices of several hundred people overpowered the crush of whitewater.

A light struck the cliff ten feet ahead.

Ethan ducked behind a boulder and peeked around the side as the beam traversed the cliff behind him.

A waterfall of light poured down from the shore into the current. From where Ethan crouched, he saw a few people wading knee-deep in the river, searching, but no one was attempting to swim across.

He’d started to step out from behind the boulder when a voice, amplified through a megaphone, blared across the river.

“Ethan, come back to us, and all will be forgiven.”

He’d have known it anywhere—the deep, guttural boom of Sheriff Pope’s voice, ricocheting off the cliffs, back into the pine forest behind the crowd.

“You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Actually, I know exactly what I’m doing.

With no lights striking the rock anywhere in his general vicinity, Ethan struggled back onto his feet, stumbling south beside the cliff.

“If you come back, we won’t hurt you.”

Yeah. Be right over.

“You have my word on that.”

Ethan wished he had a bullhorn of his own.

Other voices were shouting his name across the river.

“Ethan, please!”

“You don’t understand what you’re doing!”

“Come back!”

Pope continued to call out to him as well, but Ethan pushed on into pitch-black rain.

The farther he moved away from the crowd, the more impossible it became to see.

Ethan limping now in slow, shuffling steps, his only directional anchor the noise of the river on his left.

Behind—fading voices, shrinking points of light.

His body had cranked out the last available adrenaline, and he could feel a world-class crash coming on.

Total system shutdown.

But he couldn’t stop. Not yet.

The urge to curl up in the sand beside the river and sleep was almost overpowering, but those people might decide to cross.