Ethan turned and addressed the rest of the group. “I need everybody to move back to the far wall. We’re not out of the woods yet. Keep quiet.”

Everyone began to migrate away from the stage and the bar, grouping near the sofas against the rear wall of the cavern.

Ethan said to Kate, “We’re going to stay right here, in front of this door. Anything that gets through dies. Where’s the bag of ammo?”

A young man who worked at the dairy said, “I’ve got it right here.”

Ethan took it from him and dropped it on the floor. He knelt over it, and said, “I need some light please.”

Maggie held the torch over his head.

He rifled through ammunition, grabbed a box of two-and-three-quarter-inch Winchester slugs for himself, and then handed out backup ammo to everyone else.

Moving twenty feet back from the pine-log door, Ethan ghost-loaded the Mossberg as an unsettling hush fell upon the cavern.

Maggie and another man stood behind the shooters with torches.

Kate stood next to Ethan with a shotgun of her own, and he could hear her struggling not to break down.

Then suddenly—movement out in the passage.

Kate drew in a sharp breath, wiped her eyes.

Ethan could feel a fight coming. He glanced back, tried to find his family amid the crowd, but they had withdrawn into the shadows. He had come to terms with the possibility of his own death. There was no coming to terms with seeing an abby tear into his only son or disembowel his wife. There would be no going forward after that. Whether he lived or not, he would not survive.

If the abbies got through that door, and there were more than ten of them, everyone in the cavern would die horrible deaths.

He’d expected a scream but instead came the sound of talons clicking on the stone floor of the passage.

Something scraped across the logs on the other side of the door, and then it began to scratch around the metal handle.

IV

PILCHER

The town of Wayward Pines lay in ruin—buildings turned upside down, cars scattered, roads cracked in two. Even the hospital was destroyed, the top three floors sheared off. Ethan’s house in particular had seen the worst of it—crushed to pieces, the aspen trees in the backyard snapped in half and shoved through the windows.

This architectural miniature of Wayward Pines had been commissioned by David Pilcher in 2010, and he’d spared no expense for the elaborate model, whose price tag came in at $35,000. For two thousand years, it had stood under glass as the centerpiece of his office, a tribute not only to the town itself, but his own boundless ambition.

It had taken him fifteen seconds to destroy it.

Now he sat on a leather sofa, watching the wall of monitors as the real town came apart at the seams.

He’d killed power to the entire valley, but the surveillance cameras ran on batteries, and most were night vision–enabled. The screens showed what the cameras saw, and the cameras were in every room of every home. In every business. In bushes. Hidden in streetlamps. They triggered off the microchips embedded in every resident of Wayward Pines, and, my, were they popping tonight.

Almost every monitor lit up.

On one screen: an abby chasing a woman up a flight of stairs.

On another: three abbies ripping a man apart in the middle of a kitchen.

—A mob of people running for their lives down the middle of Main Street, overtaken by abbies in front of the candy store.

—An abby devouring Belinda Moran in her recliner.

—Families sprinting down hallways.

—Parents trying to shield children against a horror they were incapable of stopping.

So many frames of suffering, terror, and despair.

Pilcher took a drink from a bottle of scotch—this one from 1925—and tried to think about how to feel about this. There was precedent of course. When God’s children rebelled, God laid down a righteous beating.

A soft voice, the one he’d long since learned to ignore, whispered through the gale-force madness in his head, Do you really believe you’re their God?

Does God provide?

Check.

Does God protect?

Check.

Does God create?

Check.

Conclusion?

Fucking A.

The search for meaning was the cornerstone of human disquiet, and Pilcher had removed that impediment. He’d given the four hundred sixty-one souls in that valley an existence beyond their wildest fantasies. Given them life and purpose, shelter and comfort. For no other reason than he had chosen them, they were the most important members of their species since h. sapiens had begun to walk the savannahs of East Africa two hundred thousand years ago.

They had brought this reckoning to bear. They had demanded full knowledge, knowledge they were ill-equipped to stomach. And when faced with the truth from Ethan Burke, they had revolted against their creator.

Still, watching their deaths on the monitors wounded him.

He had treasured their lives. This project meant nothing without people.

But still—fuck them. Let the abbies have them all.

He had a couple hundred people still in suspension. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d started over, and his people in the mountain would support him through it all, unquestioningly, and with pure and total devotion. They were his army of angels.

Pilcher stood, unstable on his feet. He moved over to his desk, weaving. No one else in the superstructure knew what was happening in the valley. He’d instructed Ted Upshaw to close surveillance for the night. The reveal of what he’d done would have to be finessed.

Pilcher collapsed into his chair, lifted the phone, and dialed up dear old Ted.

PAM

She reached the fence in the dead of night. The hole Ethan Burke had dug out of the back of her left thigh radiated pain all through her leg and even up into her torso. The sheriff had cut out her microchip and left her stranded on the wild side of the fence, and up until this moment, she’d been obsessed with questioning why. Now, that curiosity was replaced as she stared up at the fence and wondered, What the hell?

It was silent.

No electricity humming through its veins.

Stupid thing to do, but she couldn’t resist. Reaching out, she grabbed hold of the thick steel cable. Barbs bit into her palm but that was it. No jolt. There was something strangely illicit, erotic even, about touching the wire.

She let go, invigorated and wet.

Limping alongside the fence, she wondered if Burke had done this. A massive swarm of abbies had raced past her two hours ago. She’d watched them running north toward Wayward Pines from forty feet up a pine tree.