“Come on!” Theresa wheeled around and bolted through the lobby.

The farther they moved away from the entrance, the darker it got.

Crossing the threshold, she turned the corner into Ethan’s office, saw the gun cabinet wide open, ammunition spilled across the floor, several rifles left behind on the desk.

The bottom cabinets of the gun case were open too.

She reached inside, pulled out a large pistol, pointed it at the wall, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. The safety was on or it wasn’t loaded or both.

“Hurry, Mom!”

She grabbed a revolver out of the case but it was empty, and she didn’t even know how to break the cylinder open to load it assuming she could even match up the right ammo. From where she crouched by the gun case, there were at least half a dozen different sizes of cartridges scattered across the floor beneath her feet.

“Mom, what are you doing?” Ben asked.

This wasn’t going to work. They were out of time, and despite being married to a Secret Service agent, she didn’t know the first thing about firearms.

“New plan,” she said.

“What?”

She jerked open Ethan’s desk. It had to be there. His first week on the job, Ethan had given her a tour of this place, including locking her into the single jail cell as he swung the key on his finger by the carabiner it was attached to, smirking as he drawled, “Unless you can think of some way to bribe the sheriff, looks like you’re spending a night in lockup, Mrs. Burke.”

She’d seen him return that key to this middle desk drawer, and now she reached all the way to the back, fingers desperately searching.

There.

She felt the carabiner, pulled the key out, and rushed around the desk to Ben.

“What are we doing?” he asked.

“Just follow me!”

They tore back down the hallway.

An abby screamed outside.

“They’re here, Mom!”

As they crossed the lobby, Theresa glanced toward the entrance, saw the pair of abbies running up the walkway lined with baby pine trees, seconds away from entering.

She shouted, “Faster, Ben!”

They turned down another dark hallway.

At the far end, Theresa saw the black bars of Wayward Pines’s only jail cell.

First time she’d seen it, it had reminded her of the cells in The Andy Griffith Show. Something almost quaint about those vertical bars. The single bed and the desk inside. The kind of place where the Saturday-night drunks had a standing reservation.

Now, the cell looked like a life raft.

The hallway opened up at the end, the fading evening light slanting in through a high window.

Theresa slammed hard into the cell bars as the abbies crashed through the glass doors into the station.

She clutched the key, worked it into the lock.

Talons clicked down the dark hallway behind them.

One of the abbies shrieked.