Wayward Pines: The Widow Lindley (Kindle Worlds Novella) (7 page)

His gaze was drawn to the center of the thing’s chest where
someone had decorated it with a tight grouping of five oozing holes. Ethan
could imagine what its flip side looked like—what was left of it. Five Magnum
rounds going through the chest like that would blow the heart, most of the
lungs and a good chunk of the thoracic spine out the back, leaving a gaping
cavity.

Okay: one down, one to go.

It must have been hiding in the tree. He didn’t know what
tipped Karla off, but she’d gone into a modified Weaver stance on one knee and
blown the thing to hell.

He looked at the tight grouping. Under pressure, with a
monster the likes of which she had never seen dropping from the sky, she put
five shots into the center of its chest before it reached him.

Pardon me, but holy fucking shit.

Somebody had trained her
really
well.

And it dawned on him then why he was cuffed to this tree.

Bait.

Karla wasn’t just cool, she was cold. Maybe not so different
from Pam. Hardly a comforting thought.

How long had he been out? How long had she been dangling him
here?

He struggled with the manacles, but they were locked tight
around his wrists. He gave up and looked around for her. She had to be hiding
somewhere. What good was bait if you weren’t around to act when your prey
pounced on it?

Pounced…

Shit!

“Karla, please! I know you’re grieving…” Insane with
grief? Was that it? Had Joanna’s death pushed her over some emotional cliff? “But
there’s got to be another way. You can’t really—”

He cut off, realizing that calling out in a distressed voice
probably wasn’t the best way to avoid being pounced upon.

He struggled to his feet. The pine forest shifted around him
and he thought for a second he was going to hurl. Concussion symptoms. And his
back and shoulders were killing him where the abby had landed.

When his stomach and vision had settled themselves into some
semblance of normalcy, he shuffled around the trunk in a slow circle. No sign
of anyone or anything. Above, the sun seemed to have reached noon height. Great.
Lunch time. And Karla had put him on the menu.

How long was she going to leave him out here? Until night?
Into
the night? Christ, he’d freeze.

He started to call out again, but bit it back. He could have
sworn he saw movement in a clump of pine needles to his right. As he stared, it
moved again.

“Karla?”

The thing that burst from the pile of needles was not Karla,
but a smaller version of the dead abby on the ground behind him. Mouth open,
black talons extended, it accelerated toward him at a furious rate.

“Karlaaaaa!”

A shot cracked from his left and the rushing abby screamed
and twisted in the air. It slid to a thrashing halt not ten feet from Ethan. With
a howl of rage it rose to its knees, bleeding from its abdomen, but a second
shot took it down before it could regain its feet.

As it writhed in agony, clutching its belly, Karla appeared
from behind a particularly thick trunk and ambled over. The Smith & Wesson
dangled from her hand. She stopped and stared at the abby for a heartbeat or
two.

“I figured she wouldn’t be far away, but hiding right there
all along.” She shook her head. “How about that?”

“You bitch!” Ethan said. “You—”

“Oh, calm down.” She tucked the pistol into her belt and
pulled a key from her pocket as she stepped behind him. “I wasn’t going to let
her get to you.”

“You might have missed! That ever occur to you?”

“As a matter of fact…no.”

Behind him, the cuff dropped from his right wrist. Karla
stepped back around to his side and held out the key. “Think you can handle the
left one?”

He couldn’t help it. He lost control and took a swing at
her.

Next thing he knew he was airborne, then he landed on his
back. Hard.

She stood over him while he got his wind back. “Okay. Fair
enough. I had that coming. But you get only one. Try it again and I hurt you. Okay?”

When Ethan nodded, she held out her hand and helped him up.

“How did you know it was up there?” he said as he brushed
himself off.

“The abby?”

“No, the blue jay that landed on me.”

Karla looked around at the writhing female. “They’re not
dummies, that’s for sure. The male was supposed to knock us down and then the
female was to charge in and help him finish us off. Good plan.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Oh, that. I noticed you had a drop of bright red blood on
your hat. I figured it could come from only one place.”

She walked back to the big trunk and retrieved the Benelli,
then started walking downhill.

He looked at the moaning abby. Supposedly nothing hurt worse
than being gut shot. And it could take days to die.

“Hey,” he said. “You left some unfinished business.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You can’t leave her like this.”

She didn’t look back. “Watch me.”

“You wouldn’t leave the meanest, dumbest animal to die from
a gut shot.”

“This is different. Those guts have been digesting my
Joanna.”

Ethan walked over and grabbed his fallen Winchester. “I’ll
do it then. She’s a mother who lost her baby. It made her a little crazy. Crazy
enough to think she could replace it with a human child. Make any sense to you?”

Karla stopped walking and stood there. Finally she turned
and walked back, pulling out the .357 as she approached.

“You know something?” she said, looking him in the eye. “You
suck. You really suck.”

She raised her pistol and put a bullet between the momma
abby’s eyes.

That made eight. Her last round.

As Ethan’s fingers closed around the metallic object in his
pocket, Karla began to cry. The sobs took him by surprise. She’d been acting
like such a hard case.

“What…what’s wrong?”

She looked at the sky. “They’re both dead but I don’t feel
any better. Not one fucking bit better. I thought I’d have some sort of…
of…”

“Closure?”

“Yeah, whatever that means. But I still miss my baby so
much! I can’t even
bury
her! My child was
eaten
!”

“You’ll feel better soon.”

She screamed at the flawless sky. “I’ll
never
feel
better!”

Ethan pulled the taser from his pocket, jammed it against
the back of her neck, and hit the trigger.

She dropped and lay twitching at his feet.

“Yes, you will,” he said as he handcuffed her. “Trust me.”

He pulled out the handheld radio Pam had given him—along
with the taser—and called in.

“How long will you have to keep her in there?” Ethan said,
staring at Karla’s peaceful face through the viewplate of the suspension
chamber.

“Not too long,” Pilcher said. “Just long enough to reset her
memory to the day she stopped for lunch in town.”

Ethan had learned this was a side effect of resuspension:
all events after the last reanimation disappeared from memory. Pilcher had told
him that he’d had an extremely difficult integration and had been put back
under a number of times. Ethan had to take his word for it—he couldn’t remember
a damn thing about those times.

“She won’t remember having a husband or a daughter?”

Pam shook her head. “She’ll be an SWF—single whitebread
female who used to be a drug rep.”

“We’ll put her back in
the same house,” Pilcher said. That will make it easier for her because her
subconscious will find it vaguely familiar. Plus, it’s on the edge of town,
which will limit her contacts for a while. She never had many friends, so there
aren’t many people who know about her daughter.”

“Everybody knows about her dead husband, though,” Pam said.

“True. She can go back to being the widow Lindley again. And
you can guide her through reintegration.”

Pam looked at Ethan. “She told you nothing of her past?”

He shrugged. “She told me what she knew. Her conscious
memories are gone, but all her skill sets remained.”

“I could have taken her,” Pam said and started to turn away.

“Dream on, girl,” Ethan
told her. “She’d have kicked your ass and used your scalp to mop up your blood.”

She gave him the finger
over her shoulder as she walked away.

Ethan was enjoying the
sight when Pilcher said, “What bothers me is that we still have no idea who she
was.”

Ethan turned to him. “I
don’t think we ever will.”

The air smelled of coming
snow.

Karla Lindley wandered
her new backyard. She found four depressions in the dead grass. The previous
owners must have had a swing set or jungle gym here.

She ambled back inside. She
felt oddly at home here. Fully furnished with a look and feel she found
comforting. She had so many questions about her new circumstances in this town,
but not about this house. Everything seemed to be right where she’d have put
it.

The only obvious thing
missing was a television. She’d have to ask Pam about that. Pam had told her
the only dumb question was the one you didn’t ask.

Karla yawned. Sleepy. She
didn’t believe in naps, but why not? Nothing else had claim of her time at the
moment.

She sat in the recliner
but heard a soft crunch as she leaned it back. Reaching down, her fingertips
brushed some paper. She pulled it out. An origami snowflake.

Out of nowhere, a
monumental tsunami of grief and loss engulfed her and she began to cry—abysmal,
wracking sobs from the deepest part of her, and she had no idea why.

end

F. PAUL WILSON is the award-winning, bestselling author of fifty-plus books and nearly one hundred short stories spanning science fiction, horror, adventure, medical thrillers, and virtually everything between. His novels regularly appear on the
New York Times
Bestsellers List. In 1983 Paramount rendered his novel
The Keep
into a visually striking but otherwise incomprehensible movie with screenplay and direction by Michael Mann.

The Tomb
has spent 20 years in development hell at Beacon Films (“Air Force One,” “Thirteen Days,” etc.) as “Repairman Jack.” The plan is to make Repairman Jack a franchise character. Godot might arrive sooner.

Over nine million copies of his books are in print in the United States and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media. His latest thrillers,
Cold City
and
Dark
City
star his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack. He recently wrote
The Proteus Cure
with Tracy L. Carbone. Paul
resides at the Jersey Shore and can be found on the Web at
www.repairmanjack.com
.