“It’s already evening. It’ll be dark long before we’re ready to go. We’ll head into town at first light.”

“Tomorrow?”

“We aren’t equipped to do battle at night.”

“You think the unarmed people in that valley are? You think my wife and son—”

“We’d be slaughtered in the dark, and you know it. All that would happen is we’d lose the only chance we have of saving those people.”

“Goddammit!”

“You think I don’t want to scream into town right now, guns blazing?”

Ethan moved toward the tunnel.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Alan called after him.

“To find my family.”

“You go out there at night, the only thing that’s going to happen is you’ll get eaten. There’s hundreds of those things out there.”

Two steps into the tunnel, Ethan stopped.

“I can only imagine how you feel,” Alan said. “If it were my family out there, you wouldn’t be able to hold me back. But you’re smarter than I am, Ethan. And certainly you understand that your death tonight on some suicide mission isn’t going to save your family or anyone else’s.”

Damn.

He was right.

Ethan turned, blew out a hard, frustrated sigh.

He said, “So the residents of Wayward Pines get to spend another night in the dark, in the cold, with no food, no water, sharing that valley with a swarm of abbies.”

Alan came toward him.

Ethan could hear, far down the tunnel, more gunshots.

Alan said, “Hopefully, those who survived the initial invasion have found safe places to hole up. Where’s your family?”

“I left them in a cave, behind a locked door, halfway up a mountain.”

“So they’re safe then.”

“I have no way of knowing that. There’s a group in the school,” Ethan said. “Down in the basement. Eighty, ninety people. What if we just—”

“Too. Risky. And you know it.”

Ethan nodded. “What about the gate in the fence? Is it still wide open? Another thousand or thirty thousand abbies could just stroll right into our valley if they wanted?”

“I had the lead technician look into that. He says we can’t turn on the fence from inside the superstructure.”

“Why?”

“Apparently, Pilcher sabotaged the internal system. Only way to power the fence back up and close the gate is through the manual override.”

“And let me guess . . .”

“It’s at the fence. Wouldn’t be fun if it were easy, right?”

“I say we send someone,” Ethan said. “Right now.”

“There’s a secret exit on the south side of the mountain. It’s only a quarter mile from there to the fence.”

“Send that technician and a couple of guards.”