“What are you doing?” Maggie called out. There were tears in her voice, but Ethan kept climbing, until his head bumped against the hatch. He clung to the top rung of the ladder, the trapdoor lit by the firelight, the flame warm near his face.

Maggie and Hecter were still calling out to him.

He eased the trapdoor open.

Compared to the tunnel, the starlit town was bright as day.

The noise that had drawn him up the ladder was screaming.

Human screaming.

And what he saw, he didn’t know how to process.

How do you make sense of people running down the middle of a street that could’ve been the cover of a Saturday Evening Post, chased by a horde of monsters, pale white, translucent in the night, some sprinting upright, others moving on all fours with a bounding gait like wolves?

You process it piecemeal.

A string of indelible images.

Shrieks from the nearest house as an abby plows through the front window.

Three abbies running down one of the officers of the fête, who stops to face them at the last moment and swings his machete too early, just missing the nose of the lead abby as the other two tackle him to the ground.

Thirty yards away, an abby pulling out loops of intestine and shoveling them into its jaws as the man pinned beneath its talons makes the last noise—awful, desperate screaming—he will ever make.

In the middle of Main Street, a large abby on top of Megan Fisher, violating her.

A dozen bodies already scattered across Main, most lying absolutely still in puddles of their own insides, two barely crawling, three being eaten alive.

Like a horrific game, no one running in any particular direction.

Ethan had the urge to go above ground and help. Save someone. Just one person. Kill just one of those monsters.

But it would be death.

He didn’t even have his shotgun.

This group—one quarter of Wayward Pines—had been ambushed en route to their trapdoor.

No weapons save a few machetes. But would it really matter if they’d all been armed? Would it matter for Ethan’s group if the abbies discovered the tunnels?

A terrifying thought.

Think about your family.

They’re below you right now.

They need you.

They need you alive.

“Ethan!” Maggie shouted. “Come on!”

Above ground, a man shot past, running as hard as Ethan had ever seen someone run, the speed and sheer energy output only attainable by someone in fear of an impending, unthinkable death.

The abby chasing him was on all fours and closing fast, and as the man glanced back, Ethan recognized him as Jim Turner, the town dentist.

A second abby collided with Jim at full speed, the man’s neck snapping from the brute force of the impact.