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 He glanced back, tried to find his family amid the crowd, but they had withdrawn into the shadows.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

IV

PILCHER

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.