Wayward, page 29
“And you’re looking at me like you don’t know what to do.”
“Any ideas, partner?”
“Can’t you reason with Pilcher? Call him up? Change his mind?”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Then we should get everyone back inside. There are no windows. Just one exit on either side of the stage. Double doors leading in. We’ll barricade ourselves in the theater.”
“And then what? What if we’re under siege for days? No food. No heat. No water. And there’s no amount of barricading that would keep the abbies out indefinitely. You understand what would happen if just one of those things got in?”
“Then what, Ethan? What do you propose?”
“I don’t know, but they’re coming, and we can’t just send people back to their homes.”
“Some have already gone.”
“I told you to keep everyone here.”
“I tried.”
“How many?”
“Fifty, sixty.”
“Jesus.”
“Ethan, we’ll get through this.”
“You don’t understand what’s coming. When I escaped several weeks ago, I was attacked by one of them. A small one. I came this close to getting ripped apart.”
“So what are you saying? This is a death sentence? We’re all going to die and that’s just how it goes?”
Ethan saw Theresa and Ben moving toward him.
He said, “If I can get into the superstructure, if I can show the people inside who the man they serve really is, then we might have a chance.”
“So go. Go right now.”
“I’m not leaving my family. Not like this. Not without a real plan.”
Theresa reached him.
They embraced.
She kissed him in front of Kate.
Kissed him showily, he thought.
“What did you find?” Theresa asked.
“Nothing good.”
“Wait,” Kate said.
“What?”
“We need to be somewhere safe while you break into the superstructure.”
“Right.”
“Somewhere protected. Defendable. And already stockpiled with provisions.”
“Exactly.”
She smiled. “I might actually know of a place like that.”
* * *
Ethan stood on the Bronco’s roof, bullhorn in hand.
“We’re splitting into four groups of around a hundred each. Harold Ballinger will lead the first. Kate Ballinger, the second. Dave and Anne Engler the third and fourth. There isn’t time to explain everything, but please believe me when I say we are all in imminent danger.”
Someone shouted, “I have a question!”
They were answered with a single, distant scream.
The crowd had been murmuring.
Everyone went suddenly silent.
The sound had come from south of town—a fragile, malignant wail.
Nothing that could be explained or described, because you didn’t just hear it.
You felt its meaning.
And its meaning was this: death is coming.
* * *
Brad Fisher sat awkwardly in the destroyed front passenger seat of Ethan’s Bronco, clutching the handle on the door as Ethan sped through town.
Brad said, “We were in the theater. You were talking. Then I looked over and she was gone.”
Ethan was trying to get ahead of his own thoughts, his own fear, fighting to see an endgame that didn’t involve mass casualties.
But the man was crying.
Ethan said, “She probably feared for her life, considering what she was doing with the children. Figured people would see her as a traitor.” He looked over at Brad. “How do you feel about Megan?”
This seemed to throw the man, to catch him off guard.
“I don’t know. I never really felt like I knew her or that she knew me. But we lived together. We slept in the same bed. Sometimes we slept together.”
“Sounds like a lot of real marriages. Did you love her?”
Brad sighed. “It’s complicated.”
The high beams fired across the dark sheriff’s station.
Ethan steered over the curb and took the Bronco right up the sidewalk, tires straddling the pavement. He brought it to a stop a few feet from the entrance. Climbed out, clicked on a flashlight as he and Brad reached the double doors.
Ethan unlocked them, propped one open.
“What are we grabbing?” Brad asked as they ran through the lobby and turned down the corridor to Ethan’s office.
“Everything.”
Brad manned the flashlight as Ethan pulled guns out of the cabinet and matched up the ammunition.
He set a Mossberg 930 on the desk and pushed in eight slugs.
Fed thirty rounds into the magazine of a Bushmaster AR-15.
Topped off the mag for his Desert Eagle.
There were more shotguns.
Hunting rifles.
Glocks.
A sig.
A .357 S&W.
The tranq gun he’d used earlier in the day.
He got two more handguns loaded but it was all costing too much time.
It took seven trips to haul the firearms and ammo-laden rucksack out to the Bronco.
Each time Ethan walked back outside with an armload, he heard new screams to the south of town.
Louder.
Closer.
Brad was shoving the bag of ammo through the busted back window as Ethan jumped in behind the wheel.
He checked his watch.
They’d burned seventeen minutes.
“Let’s go!” Ethan said.
Brad yanked the door open and climbed onto the broken seat.
Headlights blazed through the glass doors into the lobby.
Ethan glanced in the rearview mirror. Through the reddish glow of the taillights, a pale form streaked past.
He shifted into reverse.
They shot down the sidewalk and Ethan’s head hit the ceiling as the tires launched off the curb and slammed the suspension down onto the pavement.
He braked hard, brought it to a dead stop in the middle of the road, shifted into drive.
Something struck the passenger side door and a screech shook the interior of the Bronco.
Brad’s legs disappeared through the empty window frame.
He screamed.
Ethan couldn’t see the blood in the dark, but he could smell it—a strong, sudden waft of rust in the air.
He pulled his pistol, but the screams had gone silent.
All he could hear was the fading scrape of Brad’s shoes dragging across the pavement.
Ethan grabbed the flashlight, which Brad had dropped between the seats.
Shined it out into the street.
The beam struck the abby.
It was crouched on its hind legs over Brad, its face buried in his throat.
Ravenous.
Tearing.
It looked up, mouth blood-dark, and hissed at the light with the venomous warning of a wolf protecting its kill.
A little ways beyond it, the light showed more pale figures coming down the middle of the street.
Just fucking go. He’s gone.
Ethan punched the gas.
In the rearview mirror, a dozen abbies were scuttling toward the car on all fours. The one out in front came up alongside his door. It leapt at Ethan’s window, would’ve come through, but the Bronco accelerated just enough that it missed, hit the side of the car instead, and bounced off.
Ethan watched it tumble across the street and forced the pedal into the floorboard with everything he had.
When he looked back through the windshield, a small abby stood twenty feet ahead of the grille, frozen in the headlights, teeth bared.
He braced.
At contact, the bumper blasted the abby straight back thirty feet. He ran it over and dragged it for half a block, the Bronco jarring so violently he could barely keep his grip on the steering wheel.
The undercarriage spit it out.
Ethan sped north.
The rearview mirror showed a dark, empty street.
He breathed again…
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Blake Crouch, Wayward
