He grasped the second key, thinking, How strange that whether I live or die comes down to whether or not this key will turn.

It went into the ignition.

He jammed his foot down hard into the clutch.

Please.

The engine turned over several times—

And sputtered to life.

The gurgling noise of it was life.

Ethan popped the emergency brake and wobbled the gearshift, which operated a three-speed manual transmission.

He shifted into reverse, then gunned the gas.

The Jeep lurched back and crashed into the station wagon, pinning a screaming abby to the bumper. Ethan shifted into first, cranked the wheel, floored the pedal.

Out into the street.

Abbies everywhere.

If he’d been driving something substantial he wouldn’t have hesitated to plow right through them, but the Jeep was compact, with a narrow wheelbase that made it prone to rolling over.

He doubted it could sustain a head-on collision with even a modest-size bull.

It felt so good to accelerate.

He took a sudden left turn to miss an abby, the Jeep leaning over on two wheels.

Brought it back down, four coming straight at him, undaunted, no signs of deviating from their kamikaze course.

He turned hard, drove over the curb, plowed through a picket fence at thirty miles per hour, through the front yard of a corner lot, and punched through the fence again on the other side, the Jeep taking a thunderous jarring as it came back off the curve and hit the road, tires squealing as he straightened out the steering wheel.

The road ahead was clear.

Rpm maxed.

Ethan shifted into second.

Whatever was under the hood of this thing had some meat on its bones.

Ethan glanced in the side mirror.

A swarm of abbies, thirty or forty strong, was chasing him down the middle of the street, their screeches audible even over the roar of the eight-cylinder engine.

He hit sixty blasting through the next block.

Passed a toddler park where a dozen baby abbies were feeding on a pile of bodies in the grass.

Must have been forty or fifty bodies. One of the doomed groups.

Sixth Avenue was coming to an abrupt end.

The forest of towering pines looming in the distance.

Ethan dropped a gear.

He’d outrun the abbies by a quarter mile at least.

At Thirteenth Street, he took a hard right turn and punched the pedal again.

He drove alongside the woods for a block, and then past the hospital.

Ethan dropped one more gear, took a slow left turn onto the main drag out of town.

Floored it.

Wayward Pines dwindled away in the rearview mirror.

He drove past the goodbye sign, wondering if anyone had made it this far into the woods when the mayhem had ensued.